“Eat,” she urges her parents, who move their soup spoons through their bowls but fail to raise them to their mouths. The goldfish crackers she sprinkled along the surface have bloated and sunk. This was how June and Cath had eaten tomato soup when they were little, putting so many goldfish in their bowls that you could barely see what they called the red sea. The trick was to eat them quickly, while they still had a little crunch and snap. She had thought it might comfort her parents, this unacknowledged callback to a simpler time. Because by the time Cath was eleven or twelve, it was clear she was not going to have an easy life. She wasn’t self-destructive, but she was destructive. Things broke around Cath. Things and people. Accidents, her parents always said. Cath had accidents.
But not everything was an accident. There had been a set of china, their paternal grandmother’s, in the attic. When June and Jim got engaged and set up a wedding registry, June told her mother that she was happy to take the family china. Her mother, looking embarrassed, confessed that Cath had broken most of it when she was a teenager, just gone up to the attic and flung plates and cups and serving dishes against the wall.
“You have to eat, Mom,” June says again. Her mother takes a tiny sip of soup, a larger sip from the Michelob Light at her place. She always seems to have a beer going when June comes by. But it’s just the one, as far as June can tell, nursed slowly through the afternoon and evening. She’s checked the recycling bins. Her mom is averaging one a day, no more than two.
Desperate to do anything, say anything that will rouse her parents from this dull, zombielike state, June offers, knowing it’s premature, “Jim has a lead. Into the, um, explosion. Someone—might be held accountable.”
To say that her parents brightened would be inaccurate, but their eyes focus on her, hopeful and curious. They want their daughter’s death to have meaning. There is no meaning in an accident. But if Jim is right, Cath’s death was still a kind of an accident, the consequence of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She won’t explain that to them just yet.
“That woman?” her mother asks.
“She’s—connected.” There will be time enough, assuming Jim is right, to tell them the full story. “But if his information is correct, it would have been someone else who actually did it.”
Since that woman—June, like her mother, prefers not to use her name—confided in Jim, he has been almost distressingly excited, talking about how much it will mean for his career if he can link Cath’s death to similar arson cases in Baltimore. It’s unseemly, that’s the word, how Jim is more focused on his future than on justice for Cath. June blames that woman. She does something to men. She took Cath’s boyfriend from her. She bewitched Mr. C into giving her preferential treatment over Cath, which makes no sense. Good Lord, Mr. C has known June and Cath since they were kids and he had the soft serve ice cream place on Main Street. And now that woman has Jim convinced that she can help him solve the mystery of Cath’s death. It’s not sexual, not exactly. She’s a pot simmering, full of promises—
Pot. June realizes she has left the electric burner on under the soup and she goes over, turns it off. She pours the uneaten portion into Tupperware, puts it in the fridge, notices all the Tupperware from her last couple of visits. The crisper drawer is full of rotting vegetables and the milk has gone bad. Dutiful daughter that she is, she begins throwing out what can’t be saved, rinsing the Tupperware, preparing the dishwasher to run. She boils water for a Nescafé for her drive home, then rummages in the cupboard for sugar. All she can find is the old china sugar bowl from the set that Cath destroyed, filled with sugar cubes. Can sugar go bad? She figures as long as there are no ants crawling in the bowl, it’s okay.
As she’s bolting her coffee over the kitchen sink, she sees what appears to be a flash of orange and black in the backyard sycamore. An oriole is a rare sight in these parts, especially this time of year, and it’s probably just a red-winged blackbird, its coloring distorted by the dusk.
Still, there’s no harm in saying, “Mom, I think I just saw a Baltimore oriole.”
Her mother doesn’t even bother to come to the window.
“Well, it’s gone now,” June says with staunch cheer. “But I swear I saw one.” She will give her mother binoculars for Christmas, she decides, or introduce her to a new hobby. Or they could find something to collect together, maybe those cute little Beanie Babies.
June leaves her parents in the den, watching Murder, She Wrote. She worries a little about them watching crime shows, but it was always their favorite program. Maybe it’s a good sign that they still want to visit Cabot Cove and follow J. B. Fletcher on her various trips. Murder in J. B. Fletcher’s world is almost gentle, bloodless. And there’s no follow-up, no future visits from J. B. Fletcher in which the bereaved are staring into space, indifferent to food, conversation, or even a possible Baltimore oriole sighting.
31
Adam is pulling roasted bones from the oven when it first occurs to him to wonder if Polly could be cheating on him. How has he gotten here, from chopping carrots and celery, to questioning her fidelity? He takes a second, traces his chain of thought back to its source: he is making stock and that’s one letter off from taking stock. Taking stock is taking inventory. At least, he assumes that’s where that usage started. But most people now use it as a term for checking in on their own lives. Where am I? What do I have? What do I lack?