had her love of Ryan, she had her beautiful children, she had heart enough to love Mona and leave her alone, though Mona frightened the life out of her.
Life. Gifford dead. Not possible. Should have been Alicia. All a mix-up. Horse stopped at the wrong gate. Did Julien foresee this?
It was like just a moment ago—Laura Lee’s funeral. Think again about the library—dusty, neglected. Women talking in the other room.
Evelyn had taken little Gifford to the bookcase, and pushed the books aside. She’d drawn out the long string of pearls. “We’re taking this home now. I hid it thirty years ago, the day that Stella died here in the parlor. Carlotta never found it. And these, these are pictures of Stella and me too. I’m taking them too. Someday I will give these things to you and your sister.”
Gifford, leaning back on her heels, had looked at the long necklace in amazement.
It made Evelyn feel so good to have beaten Carlotta, to have kept the pearls when all else seemed lost. The necklace and the music box, her treasures.
“What do you mean, the love of another woman?” Gifford had asked her many nights after that, when they sat on the porch talking over the cheerful noise of the Avenue traffic.
“I mean the love of a woman, that’s what I mean, that I kissed her mouth, that I sucked her breasts, that I went down and put my tongue between her legs and tasted her taste, that I loved her, that I drowned in her!”
Gifford had been shocked and afraid. Had she married with her hair down? Very very likely. A horrid thing, a virgin girl. Though if anyone could make the best of such a thing, it had probably been Gifford.
Ah, this was Washington Avenue. It was. No doubt of it. And behold, the florist shop was still here, and that meant that Ancient Evelyn could go carefully up these few little steps and order the flowers herself for her precious girl.
“What did you do with my treasures?”
“Don’t tell those things to Mona!”
Ancient Evelyn stared in bafflement at the florist blossoms crowding against the glass, like flowers in prison, wondering where to send the flowers for Gifford. Gifford was the one who had died.
Oh, my darling…
She knew what flowers she wanted to send. She knew what flowers Gifford liked.
They wouldn’t bring her home for the wake. Of course not. Not the Metairie Mayfairs. They would never never do such a thing. Why, her body was probably already being painted in some refrigerated funeral home.
“Don’t try to put me on ice in such a place,” Evelyn had said after Deirdre’s funeral last year, when Mona stood describing the whole thing, how Rowan Mayfair had come from California to lean over the coffin and kiss her dead mother. How Carlotta had keeled over dead that very night into Deirdre’s rocker, like she wanted to be dead with Deirdre, leaving that poor Rowan Mayfair from California all alone in that spooky house.
“Oh, life, oh, time!” Mona had said, stretching out her thin pale arms, and swinging her long red hair to the left and the right. “It was worse than the death of Ophelia.”
“Probably not,” Ancient Evelyn had said. For Deirdre had lost her mind years before, and if this California doctor, Rowan Mayfair, had had any gumption at all, she would have come home long before now, demanding answers of those who drugged and hurt her mother. No good could come of that California girl, Ancient Evelyn knew, and that was why they’d never brought her up to Amelia Street, and Ancient Evelyn had therefore seen her only once, at the woman’s wedding, when she wasn’t a woman at all, but a sacrificial creature for the family, decked out in white with the emerald burning on her neck.
She’d gone to that wedding not because Rowan Mayfair, the designee of the legacy, was marrying a young man named Michael Curry in St. Mary’s church, but because Mona would be the flower girl, and it had made Mona happy for Ancient Evelyn to come, to sit in the pew and see, and nod as Mona passed.
So hard it had been to enter the house after all those years, and see it beautiful once more the way it had been in those times when she had been with Julien. To see the happiness of Dr. Rowan Mayfair and her innocent husband, Michael Curry. Like one of Mary Bern’s Irish boys, he was big and muscular,