Jan Burke: Liar

“Do you think she’d mind?” he asked.

“My mother?”

“Yes.”

I smiled. “No, she wouldn’t mind. She was always generous.”

He carefully pulled three of the roses from the vase on my mother’s grave.

I tried to tell myself, on the way home, that my father was past feeling any slights from Barbara, that even when he was alive, he had an understanding of her habit of distancing herself from him, an understanding I could never share.

“You going to see your aunt Mary?” Frank asked.

“You want to come along if I do?”

“Of course. Wouldn’t miss it.”

I looked at the muddy spots on his knees. “Frank?”

“Hmm.”

“Thanks.”

He smiled, looking more content than he had in many days.

“No, not one of the Kellys,” Aunt Mary said when I called her. “But some things should be discussed face-to-face, not over the phone. Besides, I’ve baked an apple pie and I don’t want to sit here and eat it all by myself. Frank likes apple pie, doesn’t he? Of course he does. Come over to my house after you’ve had your supper. See you then.”

She hung up before I could accept or refuse the invitation or confirm that yes, Frank liked apple pie.

We pulled into the driveway of her small Craftsman-style home, parking behind her red ‘68 Mustang convertible. Aunt Mary is the original owner of both the car and the house.

Her house is small but it sits on a large lot. Her garden was in bloom, and although it was too dark to see the honeysuckle and roses and jasmine, we savored the combination of their sweet and spicy fragrances as we walked to the front door. I glanced at my watch before knocking. It was nine o’clock. For some people just over eighty years old, it might have been a little late to begin an evening’s visit, but Mary has always been a night owl. As far as Mary’s circadian rhythms were concerned, we had arrived at the equivalent of four o’clock in the afternoon.

When she answered our knock, a different fragrance greeted us, that of hot apple pie. “Come on in, come on in,” she said, taking an apron off.

Despite the fact that she loves to bake, she has always been slender.

That night she was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt and running shoes. Her hair was in a single neat, thick gray braid, and she was wearing her favorite jewelry-a squash-blossom necklace and turquoise-and-silver earrings.

She carelessly set the apron aside and gave me a big hug as I walked in. Frank got a hug, too, but she held on to him as she stepped back and looked him over. She made a clucking noise and said, “Irene, you are starving my favorite nephew.”

“No, she’s not-” he began, but she interrupted.

“Pie will be ready in about fifteen minutes,” she said. “Have a seat in here. Too hot in the kitchen.”

“I thought you said the pie was already made,” I said.

“Well, maybe I did, but what I meant to say was that if you’d come over, I’d make one.”

“But you must have had the ingredients on hand,” I persisted.

“Yes, Miss Smarty, I did. And since I know how that mind of yours works, yes, I knew that sooner or later you would be coming by, and if you were-well, now, I couldn’t have you bring this big fellow and not offer him anything to eat, now could I? Have a seat, I said.”

We sat.

“Going to extremes, aren’t you?” I said.

“What? Making an apple pie?”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“No wonder you’re off your feed, Frank. Pushy and uppity, isn’t she? Here I am, offering my hospitality, and she wants to proceed at her pace, do things her way.”

“Can’t imagine where she gets that from,” Frank said.

She looked taken aback for a moment, then laughed. “Ah, you should come to see me more often, you two. Can I get either one of you something to drink?”

With that she took charge again, and warned off, I bided my time. She focused her attentions on Frank, asking him about his plans for his summer garden, which took the two of them into a rather detailed discussion of planting methods for vegetable gardens. Apparently, there would be no talk of cemeteries until she was good and ready to bring the subject up. I knew her well enough not to try to coax it out of her. If Mary had decided that we owed her three or four visits before she would tell me who was buried next to my mother, that’s how long I’d have to wait.

As it turned out, she only held off telling me until after Frank had polished off two pieces of apple pie with double scoops of vanilla ice cream on them. She wasn’t stingy with my serving, but my patience was wearing thin, and after the day I’d had, my appetite wasn’t up to par. She noticed.

“No need to pout,” she said. “He’s my favorite nephew because you’re my favorite niece.”

I didn’t try to hide my skepticism.

“My favorite in California,” she amended. Since most of her other nephews and nieces live in Ireland, and only another handful live in other states, this was not the signal honor it may seem.

“Mr. Grady tells me you refer to your only other California niece as ‘Prissy Pants,”“ I said, ”so forgive me if I fail to feel puffed up with flattery.“

“Well, she is a Prissy Pants. And I’m damned tired of her disrespect to her father’s memory.”

“Is anyone buried in that new grave? Or did you just have Mr. Grady and his friends hack up the ground to upset Barbara?”

“Of course someone is buried there. And when I tell you who it is, you’ll be ashamed of yourself for even suggesting such a thing.”

I waited.

“You don’t even have a guess, do you?” she said.

“Tell me something, Aunt Mary. If you go to that cemetery often enough to be on a buddy-buddy basis with the groundskeeper-”

“Mr. Grady is a member of my parish-”

“I’ll bet none of the other members of the parish get benches and trees near their dearly beloveds’ final resting places.”

“Hmph.”

“If you’re there so often,” I went on, “why haven’t you cleaned my father’s side of the stone?”

“Ha! You think I haven’t? You think there was seven years’ worth of bird crap on that stone when you got there today?”

That hurt, but I said, “It does rain once in a while.”

“Rain!” She rose to her feet. “Rain! Oh, my poor nephew Patrick, with nobody to remember him but these two-”

“Mary,” Frank said, quietly but firmly.

She sat down and crossed her arms over her chest. She sighed. “You’re right, Frank. I’m going about this all wrong. All wrong. Irene, I apologize.”

“Me, too,” I said. “On more than one count. You’re right, Mary, I should go out there more often-”

Mary waved a hand in dismissal. “I know why you don’t, and it’s all okay by me, Irene. I need your help, and I should have just asked. I guess I just wondered how long it would take your sister to get curious about that grave.”

“Not long. You said you need my help-does it have something to do with the grave?”

“Yes. Do you remember your cousin Travis?”

I frowned, then shook my head. “If I’ve met a Travis Kelly-”

“Not Kelly. Maguire.”

My eyes widened. “You mean-”

“Yes,” she said. “Your mother’s nephew.”

“He died?” I asked, shocked. The last time I had seen Travis, he was an infant.

“No, his mother died.”

“His mother? Not…”

She nodded. “Your mother’s sister, Briana.”

It was a name I had not heard in over a dozen years. Still, I could feel my face turning red when she mentioned it.

Frank straightened in his chair, his interest piqued.

“I buried her next to your mother,” Aunt Mary said. “I was trying to right a wrong. Your father was a good man-please understand, I’m not denying that on most counts he was a very good man, Irene. But he was wrong to treat Briana the way he did. The least the Kelly family could provide her was a place to rest her bones.”