Free The Legacy of Eden by Nelle Davy Page B

conjecture and imagination. All I know is that my grandfather was a man who felt things deeply. He hated that about himself. He tried not to grow attached, but he was simply a man to whom burdens came easily, and every time he tried to shrug them off, the weight of his guilt would burden him all over again. So here is what I think happened.
    I think he was afraid. Afraid of who he was and what he wanted and what he didn’t want to be.
    I think he was tired of fighting for what he wanted, tired of fighting himself for wanting those things in the first place and tired of feeling guilty for all of the above.
    I think he wanted to settle. I think he wanted it all to stop. I think he knew that life had a will of its own and for the second time he was willing to be borne along by it. I think he reasoned that he was a man, not a boy this time, and he could deal with things better.
    I think he was sick of feeling like a failure.
    Piper cooked dinner for herself and Julia that evening. She made a chocolate pecan pie for dessert that Julia wolfed down in sullen self-pity. She put her niece to bed and checked on her father, before going to bed herself at around eleven. Cal still wasn’t home. The next morning she fixed breakfast, changed her father and gave him a sponge bath. She enlisted Julia’s help in the chores, but gave up after her niece kept crumpling to the floor in mock agony on account of her “bad leg.” She went to check on her eldest brother, but when she knocked on the door he didn’t answer and when she tried the handle, it was locked. She assumed he was still asleep.
    She went to bring Leo some lunch. He was down by the crops on the far side of the farm near the stream. When she gave it to him, he nodded in thanks before jerking his head to the left of her.
    “See that?” he asked.
    Piper turned. Against the well was the stone slab cover. Now broken, the pieces were splayed against the base of the well.
    “What happened?”
    Leo shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”
    This was before she discovered that Cal had gone to speak with their father. This was before she would check in on Walter at six to bring him supper, when she would find him, eyes gazing upward and unseeing, his mouth half-open with a fly crawling across his upper lip.
    This was before the funeral and the reading of the will, when things still made sense to her. But later on, after everything, she would recall this moment and wonder.
    Anne-Marie was in the kitchen when she heard that Walter Hathaway had died. She was peeling potatoes for a stew. She listened to her husband talk of the man’s heart failure and willed herself not to scream. She sliced the knife through the potato into her palm when he mentioned the funeral.
    “Good God, woman, what is the matter with you lately?” her husband asked as he pulled up her arm, down which a thin trail of blood was already pouring. “First your jaw, now this. Your head is in the clouds, Anne-Marie.”
    “I’m sorry,” she muttered.
    The night before the funeral Anne-Marie pressed her husband’s best black suit and a somber-looking navy dress with a high-buttoned neck that irritated her skin, and hung them both on the front of their wardrobes. Then when her husband was asleep she went downstairs, pulled aside the half pint of milk that she had left to curdle in the gap between the refrigerator and the wall and forced herself to drink it. She had learned the hard way in the past that feigning illness when your husband was a doctor was not a viable option.
    She was sick all night. The next morning Lou gave her a glass of water, some Pepto-Bismol to settle her stomach and went to the funeral alone. She slept most of the day and dreamed.
    It was after eight in the evening when her husband finally came home. She heard him wandering through the kitchen downstairs: she traced his movements by the opening and closing of doors. The way he hovered in the living room without a sound for a long moment told her that he