Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

Jane tore up the note, slipped the check into the pile of bills, and got up off the couch, determined to accomplish something before Carey got here. She would need the address book in her office for the thank-you notes. A few of the people Carey had invited were reachable only through his secretary’s computer, but almost everybody else was in her old book. She had known him for so long that their friends were nearly all shared. Most of Jane’s relatives lived on the roads along Tonawanda Creek—Sandy Hill Road, Sky Road, a few on Judge Road. She could have sent all of those notes in care of the reservation, but the older ladies would not have approved. She set the floppy old leather book by the door and went upstairs.

She took a few favorite outfits and laid them carefully on the bed, then heard the front door open and close. “Carey?” she called. “I’m upstairs.”

Jake’s voice called, “Are you decent?”

Jane laughed. “No, Jake. But I’m married now, so I can be as indecent as I want.”

“I mean am I invited up?”

“If you can make it up the stairs.”

Jake came along the hallway toward her room. “It was a near thing, but I rested frequently and phoned my doctor for advice on the landing. Where is that quack, anyway?”

“He’ll be here in a few minutes. He’s helping me move a few things, so I thought we’d need both cars. Now that I look at it, I don’t think we will.”

“I wanted to tell you that I had a good time at the wedding.”

“That’s because your daughters came. Thanks for giving me away, though, Jake. There was never a man who looked as relieved to get rid of anybody as you did. Everybody make it to the airport on time?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Jake. “The kids will make it to their final exams and the husbands will be at work Monday morning to keep my girls wearing the latest fashions and a bit too broad in the beam to fit them. The reception reminded me of when your parents got married. All the food and everything, a lot of the same faces, too, but of course we’re all a bit the worse for wear.”

Jane selected some of her shoes and set them in a cardboard box. “Last night wasn’t really a reception. It was another wedding. In the old days you just asked the two clan mothers if it was okay, and then everybody had a feast.”

“I wish your parents could have seen it. God, I remember your mother in her white gown. She was probably the most beautiful woman I ever saw, close up. You’re a pleasant-looking female citizen from a thousand yards out on a cloudy evening. But she could knock a rooster off a full henhouse with a veil over her face. She could have been an actress.”

“She was an actress,” said Jane. “She made herself up.”

Jake was silent for a moment. Little Janie had gotten those arctic-blue eyes from her mother, but that penchant for saying the unexpected, like dumping a bushel of apples in your lap to show you what the bottom ones looked like, that came from Henry Whitefield without any dilution. He backed away from that part of it. “She was a wonderful woman.”

He had never figured out how much Jane could have known about her mother’s past. She had somehow found herself at the age of nineteen in New York City without visible means of support. No, that was exactly the wrong term. Spectacular, sure-fire means of support were still visible on her, well into her forties. Jake had never heard anything specific about how she had spent the years from one to nineteen, or even what part of the country she had started in. Maybe that was the deepest secret of all, and maybe his wife, Margaret, had heard all of that from her too, and found it too ordinary to repeat to her husband.

But she had spent the next few years downstate in the company of a succession of men who were accustomed to having their pictures taken twice—head-on and in profile. Maybe she had not made a choice. Women had a way of dancing with the man who asked, and a lot of the natural-selection business that determined who was first in line, or even who considered himself worthy, got settled among the men themselves.

Jane smiled. “She was a very smart woman. She had figured out that your life is pretty much what you decide it is. She picked the right person to be and spent the rest of her life being that person as hard as she could.”

It was true. Whatever had happened to Jane’s mother in the first years of her life, it had taught her something she never forgot. Whatever decisions she needed to make were all behind her before Jake had met her. Henry had a wife and Jane had a mother who could have come out of the television shows of the time—house neat and clean, something hot bubbling on the stove, and her looking fresh and crisp and reassuring.

Jake watched her daughter bustling around in the same house, and he unexpectedly had a vision of the future. It wasn’t a vision he could take credit for. It was more like a prophecy that he had merely overheard. She was busy inventing Mrs. Carey McKinnon, the way her mother had invented Mrs. Henry Whitefield. He guessed the perfect wife wouldn’t act the same these days as she had thirty years ago.

On that score alone, he expected that watching Jane over the next year or two would provide a supplement to his education. And Jane wasn’t the same woman as her mother. Henry had made sure she got raised in the old Seneca way, where you didn’t waste much breath telling kids what to do, so their self-reliance didn’t get stifled. God knew the Whitefields had gotten a whopping return on that investment.

And Janie had a different order of determination entirely. She had consciously chosen to do something with the first part of her life that was more than heroic, because if you saved somebody’s life once, that was bravery. When you did it a hundred times, that was pure stubbornness. If she had now chosen to be somebody else, the perfect wife, then letting your feet get in her path on her way to it would be a good way to lose a foot. This new person, this Jane McKinnon, was not going to be somebody you faced down eye-to-eye.

He heard the sound of Carey McKinnon’s tread on the front porch and looked down at him through Jane’s window. Henry would have been pleased. Jake could see Carey’s head beginning to shine through the thin, sandy hair, so he was no kid anymore. Jake hoped he had enough sense by now to understand the nature of the gift he had been given, but he supposed he probably didn’t. It often seemed to Jake that wisdom had settled on his own head like a wreath from heaven some time around age sixty, after it was too late to do him much good and was more of an irritation than a pleasure. He said, “Well, I’ve got to move on, or the damned dandelions will get a foothold on my lawn again and I’ll spend the whole summer on my knees digging them out with a knife.”

“Good. I thought you were just hanging around to get free medical advice.”

“Not me. I want mine duly recorded in an office in front of witnesses so I can sue for malpractice. See you, Mrs. McKinnon.”

“See you, Jake.”

Jake met Carey carrying boxes up the stairs. “Take good care of her,” said Jake. “I’ll tell you why at your fiftieth anniversary, if you’re not senile by then.”

“Better write it down, Jake. Don Herbick keeps calling me from his mortuary to ask about your health. I say, ‘Not yet, Don. But keep the motor tuned up.’ ”

“I suspected you probably worked closely with an undertaker, Dr. McKinnon. But I won’t desert you now that you’ve got a wife to support.”

“It’s always good to have your unqualified endorsement, Jake. I could hardly ask for anybody more unqualified.”

“It’s a pleasure to serve.” He walked out and closed the door.

Carey set the empty boxes on the floor and put his arm around Jane. “He’s right about you. When I walked in, I could hardly believe it. You actually married me.”