Hard Truth

1

Callen, Pennsylvania

August 2005

The two-lane road meandered languidly through a countryside alive with the colors of late summer. The sun was still uncomfortably hot at four in the afternoon, hot enough that the jacket Lorna Stiles had worn when she set out that morning from Woodboro-forty miles south of Pittsburgh -had long since been removed and tossed into the backseat. At some point while traveling the Pennsylvania Turnpike, it had slid onto the floor behind the driver’s seat, but Lorna had failed to notice. There’d been plenty to think about during the drive east across the state, to her hometown of Callen. A soiled jacket was the least of her worries.

Change had been slow to come in this southernmost tip of eastern Pennsylvania, where Amish and Mennonite farms were interspersed with pricey new housing developments. The one gas station in town was now pump-your-own and was attached to a convenience store, but the stores in the little strip mall on the corner still remained closed on Sundays. While the facades remained the same, the once ramshackle old house on the opposite corner-boarded up as little as three years ago-now housed a day spa and a boutique, while its counterpart across the street had been spiffed up and turned into apartments, with the first floor converted into a bakery and coffee shop. And most noticeably, a housing development was growing in a field where corn once grew a half mile from the intersection that served as the center of town.

A sign of the times. Lorna sighed, and wondered how many other farmers had been approached by developers who wielded huge sums of cash, much more than the farms were pulling in from crops these days. Hadn’t her own mother sold off thirty acres of their land sixteen months ago to pay her medical bills?

A horn sounded behind her, urging her to make up her mind. Turn or go straight.

Lorna went straight, then pulled to the side of the road, waving the impatient driver behind her to go on his merry way. She sat for a moment and read the names on the mailboxes: Hammond, Taylor, Keeler. All names she knew well.

Veronica Hammond had been best friends with Lorna’s grandmother, Alice Palmer, and would be in her eighties now. Corrie Taylor had been one of Lorna’s field hockey teammates, and Mike Keeler had been her first love. His brother, Fritz, had taught her how to drive a pickup. Over the past month, she’d received a card or letter from each of the families, following the death of her mother.

Mrs. Hammond, in particular, had written a touching note, remembering Lorna’s mother as a young girl. “She was a lovely child, your mother was. I can still see her chasing the baby rabbits in your grandmother’s garden, holding out lettuce leaves, hoping to entice them closer. How disappointed Mary Beth would be when they ran from her-she’d only wanted to play. She was certainly Alice ’s pride and joy…”

Making a mental note to pay a visit to the Hammond home before she left Callen for good, Lorna checked her mirrors for traffic before pulling out onto the road again. She drove another three-quarters of a mile, then slowed, her turn signal clicking away as she made a right into the wide drive.

The red brick house she’d grown up in never changed, for all of its one hundred fifty-plus years. The door was painted dark green, the shutters black. The magnolia tree she’d climbed as a child still stood in the backyard, though a lightning strike two years ago had resulted in an ugly split down the middle. Her mother would have had the tree taken down had her focus not been on other things. Like putting up a fierce fight against the disease that, in the end, took her in spite of her bravado and her most valiant efforts.

Lorna parked under the magnolia and looked through the open windows to the fields beyond the barn, which long ago had been painted white but now was weathered to a pale gray. The parcel of land her mother had sold to the developer sat at the far end of the property, so the new homes would not be visible from the farmhouse, except from the second or third floors. She wondered how many homes were being built on the land where several generations of Palmer farmers had planted every spring and harvested every fall. Maybe tomorrow she’d take a walk across the back field and see just what was what.

Her last correspondence from anyone in Callen who’d mentioned the development was a short note from Gene Enderle, who graduated from the local regional high school a few years before Lorna. He’d written her hoping she could do something to override her mother’s decision to sell the land, citing everything from concern for the wetlands to the potential for overcrowding and too many cars clogging the local roads. Lorna had called him after receiving his note, a call that had left her with the distinct impression that Gene just didn’t like change in general, and change in and around Callen in particular. Some people didn’t, but she’d been surprised to find that sort of resistance in someone so young.

Lorna was well aware that if circumstances had been different, none of the Palmer farm would have been sold. If her father hadn’t died of that heart attack eighteen years ago, for example, leaving her mother to raise and educate three kids alone. As it was, with her mother’s expenses already in excess of her insurance to the tune of one hundred thirty thousand dollars, the family really hadn’t had much choice. It was sell off some land, or her mother went without the radiation and chemotherapy her doctors had recommended.

Put in that context, no discussion had been necessary among Mary Beth’s children, other than how much land to sell off at any given time. Lorna’s younger sister, Andrea, married, the mother of two young children-she was now expecting her third-and living in Oklahoma, had left it all up to Lorna. Rob, the youngest and only boy, an aspiring actor who had left for Los Angeles the day he turned eighteen and had never come back, hadn’t bothered to respond to the several messages Lorna had left on his answering machine, which really hadn’t surprised her at all, though he’d had plenty to say about it when he came home for the small, private memorial. Once he found out how much the land could be worth, that is.

In the end, Lorna did what she felt was best for their mother. The money from the sale had given Mary Beth fifteen months of treatment in a fine hospital thirty minutes from Lorna’s house. Lorna wouldn’t have traded those fifteen months for all the Palmer land. In the end, her mother had lost the fight anyway, and the loss of a few acres was totally irrelevant, as far as Lorna was concerned.

She got out of the car, marveling at how quiet it was even for a Sunday afternoon in late summer. She inhaled deeply, recognizing the familiar smells of earth after a rain-wild roses and ripe grapes. A few daylilies were still in bloom along the fence that surrounded the field across the drive from the house, and Lorna wondered if someone had been tending them. When Lorna first moved Mary Beth to Woodboro, where Lorna’s home and business were located, she’d asked Gil Compton, a neighboring farmer, to keep an eye on the property and let her know when things needed to be done, and had offered to pay his son to mow the grass. Mr. Compton had kept the property as neat as Lorna’s father had, made sure the heating oil in the tank never ran out and the timer never failed to turn the lights on inside the house every night, but he refused every attempt she’d made to pay him for his troubles.

“No trouble at all, Lorna,” he’d insisted. “Your mother was a godsend when our oldest was in that car accident a few years back, driving my wife down to Wilmington three times a week to the hospital. If it weren’t for her, neither of us would have been there when Kevin died. Thanks to Mary Beth, at least Kim was with him at the end. So you just go on and do what you have to do for your mother, and don’t you give a second thought to what’s going on down here. I’ll take care of the farm as if it were my own.”

And he had, bless him. From looking at the farm, no one would ever guess it had been uninhabited for almost a year and a half.

Lorna stuffed her hands in her pockets and shuffled up to the front door. An old habit had her checking the mailbox, but of course it was empty. They’d been having mail forwarded to Lorna’s house ever since Mary Beth had moved in with her.

The key slid into the old lock and stuck in the same place it always had. She had to pull the doorknob toward her and hold it while she turned the key again. She pushed on the door and stepped inside, and immediately punched in the code to disarm the security system her mother had had installed six years ago. The foyer was dark, the afternoon sun having moved to the other side of the house, leaving the front in shadow. Lorna closed the door behind her and looked around.

Virtually nothing had changed since Lorna’s childhood. Her grandmother’s upright piano still stood along the back wall of the living room, a faded shawl of burgundy velvet tossed over its top. The dining room furniture was the same her grandparents had purchased as a wedding gift to each other. The old oriental carpets were worn in spots, but the colors hadn’t faded too much over time. The china cupboard was bare-Mary Beth had packed up its contents and had insisted on taking everything with her to Lorna’s-china, silver, and crystal that had been in the family for generations-just in case the burglar-alarm system failed.

The house was as dry and stuffy as a tomb. In spite of the heat and the high humidity, Lorna pushed open all the windows on the first floor. Out with the bad air, in with the good air-Lorna’s CPR instructor’s favorite chant, she recalled as she ran her fingers through the thick layer of dust on the hall table on her way back out to the car.

One of the barn cats came running toward her, and though it wasn’t one she recognized, she welcomed it, enough to offer entrance to the house, but the cat declined after Lorna’d scratched it behind the ears for a minute or two. She brought her bags in and dropped them all in the foyer, then went back to the car and returned with the staples she’d picked up at the new supermarket ten minutes down the road, and spent the next half hour putting things away and making iced tea. She wanted to sit on one of the old rocking chairs that used to line the front porch, but they’d been stored someplace, so she had to content herself with a seat on the front steps. Tomorrow she’d look for the rockers.

The air was heavy with moisture and the smell of steamy August. Nostalgia washed over her and she ached with the need to cry, but no tears came. She drank her tea and watched the occasional car pass by. When her stomach told her it was time for dinner, she went inside and settled on the rest of the sandwich she’d picked up at a deli earlier in the day. She had bought lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers from a Mennonite farm she’d passed on the way into Callen, but was too weary to make a salad. She poured another glass of iced tea and ate the sandwich standing up, looking out the kitchen window.

When she finished, she went back outside, the local phone book under her arm. She thought of looking up some high school classmates, but decided against it after locating several names. She’d lost track of so many people over the years, she felt foolish just calling out of the blue.

Hi, I’m home for a while… No, don’t know how long, probably not too, though. I’m only here because my mother wanted her ashes divided between the family plot, her garden, and the pond on the other side of the woods.

In typical Mary Beth fashion, she had wanted to be everywhere.

“You want a third here, a third there…?” Lorna had asked. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not kidding.” Her mother had smiled weakly. “You can divide them up any way you want, doesn’t have to be in thirds. And if you want to keep some, you know, a tiny bit in a cute little box, that’s okay, too. I think in the cartons we brought from Callen there are a few of those Limoge boxes that Gran used to collect.”

“I’ll do the pond and the garden and the plot,” Lorna had replied, forcing herself to smile back, as if they were discussing nothing more important than what stores to stop at on their next shopping trip. “We’ll hold off on the Limoges.”

“It’s up to you, sweetheart.” Mary Beth had closed her eyes and added, as she nodded off, “But we used to have a porcelain box shaped like a fancy little shoe. I think that would be highly appropriate, don’t you?”

Lorna had smiled in spite of herself. Her mother’s love of shoes was legendary.

The phone rang, startling her. She went inside and picked up the kitchen extension, but by the time she got there, the caller had hung up.

“Probably a wrong number, anyway,” she muttered as she replaced the receiver.

She walked from room to room, wondering what to do with herself. The television she’d brought with her was in the back of her SUV, but there was nothing she felt like watching. She’d been debating whether to go to the expense of having the cable connected, since she wasn’t sure how long she’d be staying, but decided that was just one more decision to put off until tomorrow.

In the meantime, she’d bring in her laptop, check her email to make sure there was nothing from a client that needed to be handled immediately, and then she’d turn in early. She was tired from driving and from the emotional ordeal of coming home for the first time since her mother had moved in with her. So far she’d been okay-a little unsettled, but okay. She wasn’t sure how the rest of the night would play out, though. She’d never slept alone in this house that she and her siblings had long ago accepted as having unseen occupants.

“You still here, Uncle Will?” Lorna called from the front hall. “ ’Cause I’m going to be around for a while and I’d appreciate you letting me get some sleep, okay? I’ll mind my business if you mind yours…”

She was grinning as she went outside to bring in her computer and a few other items, the television included, just in case she was unable to sleep and needed an electronic diversion. The entire family had long recognized that her great-uncle Will Palmer had remained in the house since his passing in the 1940s. His was a benign if sometimes disconcerting spirit, and over the years they’d all come to accept his presence. Actually, for the most part, they ignored it. Though it had been such fun as a teenager to tell the stories about his sightings. Invitations to sleepovers at the Stiles’ house were prized by Lorna’s and Andrea’s friends-especially slumber parties where there was safety in numbers. There were those who even today would swear to having encountered Uncle Will in the upstairs hall or in one of the bedrooms, but whether such sightings had really taken place had not seemed to matter. Uncle Will’s ghost had found a place in local legend.

The phone started to ring again while Lorna was setting the television onto a kitchen counter, and she grabbed it on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“So how is it?” True to form, Lorna’s sister, Andrea, didn’t bother to identify herself, but jumped immediately into conversation. “What’s it like there?”

“Quiet.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“Still in the back of the car.”

“You haven’t scattered the ashes yet?”

“Christ, Andi, I’ve only been here a few hours.” Lorna was grateful that her sister couldn’t see her face at that moment. “Let me get unpacked, okay?”

“Well, I’d have thought that would have been the priority.”

Easy for you to say, since you’re there and I’m here.

“My priority was unlocking the front door, getting something to eat and something cold to drink. There’s no air-conditioning here, you might recall, and the temperature is-”

“Okay, okay, so you’ll take care of it tomorrow. I don’t know how you can stand having them just sit there. The whole idea makes my skin crawl. I wish she had wanted to be buried, like Dad did.”

“Well, she didn’t, so we have to respect that, don’t we?” Lorna replied tersely.

“I suppose.” Andrea sighed as if somehow she’d made a huge concession on Lorna’s behalf. “Where are you sleeping tonight?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Is Uncle Will still there?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been here long enough to find out.”

“Let me know if he prowls around tonight. He might not like anyone being in the house, now that he’s had it to himself all this time.”

“I doubt he’ll notice.”

“Are you all right there by yourself?”

“Sure. I’ll be fine.”

“Is there anything I can do for you while you’re there?”

“I don’t know what you could do from Oklahoma, Andi.”

“What do the new houses look like?” Andrea said, changing the subject abruptly.

“I haven’t seen them yet. I thought I’d walk across the field tomorrow and take a look.”

“I hope they’re not tacky boxes.”

“I doubt they are. The builder told Mom they’d be selling for a lot of money.”

“That’s good. How was the ride to Callen?”

“Long and hot. I’d forgotten how far a drive it is.”

“You figure out yet how long you’re going to stay?”

“I have no idea. Andi, we talked about all this. I don’t know what’s the best thing to do with the farm. I hate to sell it, but none of us wants to live here. You have your home and your family out there in Oklahoma, and Rob has his life in L.A. I have my business out in the western part of the state-”

“Which you can run from Callen. You do it from home, as it is. Why can’t you run it from Callen?”

“I can, and I will, for a while. But just because I don’t have a husband and family in Woodboro, or because I don’t have to go into an office every day, doesn’t mean I don’t have a life there. I have friends, I have a social life, and I’d appreciate it if you’d respect that.”

“I do respect that,” Andrea soothed. “I just meant that right now, you’re the logical one to deal with all this. Neither Rob nor I are in a position to take off for a few weeks. We’re lucky that your accounting business is such that you can work from anywhere.”

“Oh, the wonders of technology and computer systems that interface.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You said your computer hooks into your clients’, so you can travel back and forth. When was the last time you went into any of your clients’ offices?”

“I do an in-house audit twice a year for each client.”

“And you have how many clients?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Well, there you go, then. Your business is a success, you only have about a month and a half when you need to be on-site. The rest of the time, you can work from Callen.”

“I don’t plan on being here long enough to worry about it. You wouldn’t be having second thoughts about selling the farm, would you?”

Andrea’s hesitation spoke volumes.

“I just want what’s best for everyone,” she said. “Maybe we could keep the house and a few acres.”

“I thought we already agreed that it would be best for everyone if we sold the entire property.”

“I think we need to discuss it a little more.”

“If you were undecided, you should have said something before I drove across the state to get the ball rolling on the sale.”

“I simply think we shouldn’t be too hasty.”

“Andrea, I will stay here long enough to take care of our business and to carry out Mom’s last wishes. But I have a life in Woodboro, and I intend to return to it. This is a temporary stop for me. If you want to hold on to the farm, I suggest you and Jerry find a way to buy both my and Rob’s shares and move yourselves out here.”

“You know we’re not in a position to do that.”

“Well, neither am I.”

“But-”

“Enough, Andrea. I’m exhausted. I’m not going to continue this discussion anymore tonight.”

“Well, fine, Lorna. We’ll talk about it after you’ve had a few days to rest up from your trip. Maybe you’ll feel differently after being there. Let me know when you’ve put Mom to rest.”

Andrea hung up before Lorna could respond.

“And thanks for your support,” Lorna muttered as she dropped the receiver in its cradle.

What had gotten into Andrea, she wondered. Two weeks ago she thought selling the property was the best thing to do. She and Rob had both agreed that, with no one in the family interested in running the farm, the smart thing would be to sell it off, pay the taxes, and split the proceeds three ways, as Mom’s will had decreed they should do if and when they decided to sell. Why the sudden change of heart on Andrea’s part?

“Well, no change of heart for me,” Lorna said, reminding herself to call a Realtor tomorrow and make an appointment to have the property appraised. She had no idea what it was worth, but she suspected it would be quite substantial.

She started to lock the front door, then remembered the three urns in the back of the car. She went outside and lifted the box gently, carefully carrying it up the front steps and setting it down on the top of her grandmother’s piano. She didn’t know what to do with it overnight, though, so she locked the front door, turned out all but the hall lights, and carried the box holding her mother’s ashes up to the second floor. She placed it beside her mother’s favorite chair.

“Sorry, Mom. I don’t have much experience with this sort of thing.” Somehow, she knew her mother would be amused.

But when it came time to sleep, Lorna lay on her old bed in the room she’d shared with Andrea from the time they were little until Lorna had left for college. The pillow felt like a rock, the mattress like a bed of nails. After an hour of tossing and turning, she went down the hall in the dark to her mother’s room, and climbed into her mother’s bed.

You are ridiculous, she told herself. Thirty-four years old, and you’re curled up clutching your momma’s pillow.

But in spite of her best efforts to shame herself into returning to her own bed, somehow it felt right. Within minutes, Lorna was sound asleep, and if Uncle Will was on the prowl, he didn’t bother to disturb her.