Jill Churchill: A Farewell to Yarns

Jane tried to remember Chet and could only come up with a dim impression of an older man (not so old, really, probably only the age Jane was now) with a worried expression when Phyl‑ lis wasn't around and a euphoric one when she was. He must have really loved her all these years with an uncritical, unquestioning love. Proof of what love could do without a brain. But Chet wasn't a stupid man. You don't bu whole islands on the profits of stupidity. buy ever, if the relationship had been successful in the past, what made it stop working now? Jane was torn between curiosity and the fear that Phyllis was going to explain it all to her—at length.

And what did Chet think of Bobby? More important, what did he think of the way Phyllis knuckled under to the overgrown brat? Surely Chet wouldn't approve. Or did Chet automatically accept anything Phyllis did or wanted? The loathsome Bobby had to be at the heart of the trouble, but hadn't Phyllis said that it was Chet who dug up Bobby? What an odd marriage.

Bobby had wandered into the living room with Willard trailing him. Phyllis covered the mouthpiece of the phone and whispered to Jane, Is a Jag a fancy car?"

“Very fancy. Go for it, Phyllis," Jane said, hoping her old friend didn't hear the unwitting sarcasm in her voice. Thank God Shelley had wandered off to the guest bathroom and hadn't heard the exchange. She'd have probably grabbed Phyllis by the hair and beat her head against the wall. Or at least she'd have looked like she wanted to. Where had Phyllis, who didn't even know what Jaguars were, found a place that rented them? Phyllis's ways were mysterious indeed.

“They're bringing it over in a minute, darling," she called to Bobby when she hung up.

“Phyllis, I'm putting you in the guest room at the end of the hall upstairs. Bobby can take your bags up there," Jane said loudly enough that the boy would hear. She wondered if maybe the neighbors could hear, too. "Bobby'll have to sleep on the sofa bed in the basement."

“Oh, no. Let Bobby have the guest room. I'll be fine in the basement," Phyllis said.

Jane dug her heels in. "No. Impossible. Bobby, take your mother's things upstairs.”

Phyllis smiled. "I guess we mothers always think of the children first, don't we?”

Shelley, now back from the bathroom, made a noise somewhere between a snort of outrage and the beginning of a coughing spasm.

Jane was amazed that anyone could utter such a remark without choking on it. "I don't see why we should, Phyllis. Kids are much more resilient than we are. My Mike could sleep on a pile of rocks and not notice. Come on up, and I'll show you your room and the bathroom and everything." Hesitant to leave Shelley alone with Bobby for fear of what she might do to him without supervision, Jane reluctantly took Phyllis upstairs, all the while fighting the desire to apologize for the accommodations.

The "guest room" was really a sort of accidental cubbyhole she usually used for storing cartons (all of which were now "stored" in her own bedroom). It had a double bed, a chair, a tiny dressing table, and a closet the size you might find in a train compartment. Worse, Phyl‑ lis would have to share a bathroom with Jane's kids, a gruesome fate.

But Phyllis didn't find anything odd or inconvenient about the arrangement. She admired the pretty bedspread, commented favorably on the view of the field behind the house from the small single window, and complimented Jane on the felt Christmas banner hanging on the wall over the bed.

“Phyllis, I hate to be rude, but there's an errand Shelley and I have to do. I promised to help her take some things out of her car, and I don't want to stick her with the job. It'll only take fifteen minutes or so. Do you mind if I leave you here to unpack?"

“Of course not," Phyllis said, giving her a quick hug to emphasize her sincerity. "I don't want to be the least trouble to you."

“You're not trouble at all. I'm glad to have you here," Jane lied. And yet, it wasn't entirely a lie. If it hadn't been for Bobby, she'd be enjoying Phyllis's presence.

Five

Bobby was blitzing through television chan nels, trying to find something to suit his tastes when Jane came back down. Shelley was in the kitchen, pacing. "Bobby, I'm going to run an errand," Jane called. "When I get back, I'll make up your room in the basement. I'll only be gone a little while.”

He kept pushing the buttons on the remote control until he finally found MTV. Then he turned up the volume. If he'd been one of her children and ignored her, Jane would have snapped the set off, but he wasn't hers—thank God!

Shelley was out the door and had started the van before Jane could even climb in. They rode in silence, the magnitude of Jane's plight having overwhelmed them both. Once Jane whimpered a little, and Shelley patted her hand.

Shelley pulled into the curved, hedge-bordered drive of Fiona Howard's house. The construc‑ tion of this home in Jane and Shelley's neighborhood had caused something of a stir a few years earlier. A conflagration (started by a grease fire caused by a notoriously bad cook and taken as a sort of divine culinary retribution) had seriously damaged two adjoining homes as well. The central house, as well as the two neighboring ones, were purchased by a couple named Fiona and Albert Howard who, to everyone's surprise, made no attempt to repair the damaged homes to the side. Instead, they leveled both of them, as well as the middle one, and built a new house on the triple lot.

This was considered an extravagant thing to do, but surprise had turned to disappointment and a certain measure of animosity when, before construction was even completed, a visually impenetrable wall of hedges went in around the entire site. Worse, the owners were seldom around during the construction process, so there was almost no opportunity to get to know them or their floor plan. This thwarting of natural nosiness was considered very unfriendly.

The mystery of the Howards' apparent secretiveness was solved, however, a scant week before they moved in. The realtor let drop an historical reference that was picked up and picked apart. The elusive Mrs. Howard, it turned out, was the former wife of Richie Divine, the late rock star whose untimely death had shaken the country--or at least the female half of it—as badly as Elvis Presley's.

Know to keep a public profile so low as to be nearly invisible, Fiona Howard was an extremely unwilling celebrity, almost a legend in a slightly pejorative sense. This made the hedge practically acceptable. After a while neighbors started to take a certain pride in it. "Oh, that hedge?" they would say to visitors who were taken blocks out of their way to "happen" to drive past. "Why, that's the Howard estate—Richie Divine's widow, you know.”

It was Jane's first time behind the hedge.

“Jane, help me with these boxes," Shelley said, opening the side door of the minivan.

Jane got out and braced herself to lift a particularly large carton. She nearly threw it over her shoulder when she gave a mighty heave. "Dear Lord, is this empty?"

“No, it's those embroidered Santa pillows the Parslow sisters made."

“Oh dear—" Jane had seen the prototype pillow last summer and had been appalled. The rosy-cheeked Santa had looked like a lecherous old alcoholic. The stitching that was meant to give him a rosy nose looked like broken veins, and to make it worse, he was leering horribly.

As they reached the front door, it opened, and Fiona Howard came out to meet them. "Shelley, Jane," Fiona said warmly in a lovely upper-class English accent that made Jane feel she'd stepped into the middle of a Masterpiece Theater production. "I didn't hear you drive up. Here, let me help with those. I can call Albert to help us if you have anything heavy."