Free How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life by Mameve Medwed Page A

curled around mine the way they always had. His eyes were soulful.
    I tried not to look at them. I pulled my hand away.
    “I’m so sorry,” he said.
    I nodded.
    “For everything.”
    Though a lump the size of a zeppelin was ballooning in my throat, I wouldn’t let myself cry. “Excuse me,” I said. “Professor Morelli wants to have a word.”
     
    Lavinia and I met outside our mothers’ apartment building on Remington Street. We each had keys. She was still living in the house in Concord though she was now divorced. She was working as a thinker for a think tank out near MIT. She wore a snappy suit, white silk blouse, medium-high heels. She carried a briefcase. I wore jeans and a sweatshirt that said go aggies go. It had been Clyde’s; I’d salvaged it from the Goodwill bag. I’d stuffed my wallet and keys into the kangaroo pocket of Clyde’s shirt. I looked at Lavinia. We were cleaning out a house, for God’s sake.
    We hugged each other. I smelled a perfume I couldn’t recognize. Something new, I figured. Trendy. Expensive. Sold in a bottle of cutting-edge design.
    “This will be tough,” she said.
    “I know.”
    “And sad.”
    I nodded.
    “But we’re in it together.” She squeezed my arm. “I’m so glad I have you.”
    “Me, too,” I managed to get out. “To have you, I mean.”
    We took the elevator to the fourth floor. Above the buttons someone had scrawled A hates B . Childish handwriting, but it seemed a sacrilege.
    “The building’s going to pot,” Lavinia said. “And at the rent they paid.” She adjusted a diamond stud. “These situations are stressful. Whole families have broken up over silly things like who gets Aunt Mabel’s blender and Uncle Horace’s baseball bat.”
    “But not us.”
    “Never us. We’re both such good friends. We’re both so reasonable.”
    And both distraught. The emptiness hit us the moment we opened the door. It wasn’t that anything had been taken away; it wasn’t that a single thing had been moved. No dust filmed the mahogany. No tarnish mottled the silver. No cobwebs laced the moldings, no Miss Havisham decay to underscore our emotional distress. Mrs. Leahy, the cleaning woman, had kept up her weekly ministrations all the time they were away, all the time after they’d died. And yet.
    “Oh God,” gasped Lavinia.
    “I know,” I said. We clasped hands, grateful for our deep enduring bond of sisterhood.
    Which didn’t last.
    Lavinia dragged out a dining room chair. She set her briefcase down on the table. She opened it. She pulled out a sheaf of papers neatly clipped, a thick notebook, a manila folder, some sheets of waxy paper dotted with red stickers, the kind that mark Sold on works of art at gallery openings and fund-raising benefits.
    “What’s that?” I asked.
    “I did a little research ahead of time.”
    “You did? What kind of research?”
    She smiled. Her old Lavinia cat-got-the-mouse smile. “You know me. Always prepared.”
    I sat down next to her. My knees trembled. Adrenaline pumped. I recognized the old fright-or-flight response. I was damned if I’d let her see I was concerned.
    But nothing got by Lavinia. “Don’t be concerned,” she said. “I did it for your benefit.”
    “Did what? For what benefit?”
    “I made a list of our mothers’ things. I called in an appraiser for the more valuable stuff.”
    “You what?” (I know, I know. Usually I’m more articulate.)
    She fanned some pages out in front of me. There were photographs of the very furniture that now surrounded us. Valuations listed underneath. And in the margins, notes written in Lavinia’s distinctive, unmistakable pinched hand.
    “Without telling me?”
    “As you know, Abby, I am a businesswoman. I’m used to taking charge. I’m organized, efficient. I have a job that demands those qualities. And you…” She turned toward me. Her eyes swept my for-cleaning-out-someone’s-apartment jeans and sweatshirt. She wrinkled her nose as if she smelled