Page 4 of The Fadeaway

By dinnertime, Ruby has located a list of passwords written on the back of an envelope and tucked into Patty’s top desk drawer. Some of them are as simple as Ruby&Patty1234 and others appear to be auto-generated complexities that require Ruby to hunt and peck for numbers and symbols to crack the gates and access her mother’s bank and retirement accounts. All told, Patty has plenty of money to her name, and it appears that her home—on a lovely, tree-lined street in tony Santa Barbara—has been paid in full since 1993.

Patty owns her car outright, a condo in Seattle that she rents out to a woman named Ellen at an overly fair price, and she’s been sending a check each month in the amount of $2,000 to a place called Fair Skies Village in Austin, Texas. There’s also what appears to be an annual disbursement of $10,000 to a school of some sort in New York City. None of this raises Ruby’s eyebrows in the sense that she feels her mother has been swindled, but she certainly wonders who and what Patty has been sending money to Austin and New York for.

Ruby takes off her reading glasses and turns on the lamp that sits on her mother’s desk. She puts her head into her handsand rubs her temples as she fends off a mild headache. It’s after six o’clock and she hasn’t paused to eat anything all day, but somehow the time has slipped away as she makes notes on a legal pad at her elbow. She’d known when she’d agreed to take on the job of handling her mother’s estate that there was a considerable amount of work tied to the process, but she hadn’t known exactly howmuchwork it would be, and this is suddenly starting to look like more than a three-day project.

Rather than heading back to her hotel this early (Ruby can’t bring herself to sleep in her mother’s house alone, even though she feels childish and ridiculous about it), so she heads to the kitchen to rifle through the drawer of takeout menus her mom has always kept. After a brief perusal, she settles on enchiladas and a Diet Coke from a local Mexican restaurant that delivers, and she opens a bottle of wine from the wine rack next to the refrigerator and pours a glass.

Back in the office, Ruby stands at the window, admiring a jade plant that Patty keeps on the windowsill. Its smooth, fat leaves turn toward the waning sunlight. On the bookshelf against one wall are rows and rows of books, ranging from memoirs and autobiographies to classics to popular fiction. Interspersed between novels are little framed photos and tchotchkes, and Ruby is drawn to one in particular: a ceramic elephant that has clearly been made by the hands of a child.

She picks it up, turning it over in her hands. Was this something that one of her girls had made for their grandmother in elementary school? Its trunk is painted hot pink, and the body is turquoise and lumpy. Ruby smiles at it as she looks at the underside of the belly. There, scratched into the ceramic, are the initials MR.Hmm. Not Athena or Harlow. MR?Ruby sets it down again and moves on to a small, square picture frame of a much younger Patty standing outside in a vineyard with a distinguished older man. The sun is setting behind them, andthey’re both holding glasses of sparkling, golden wine. Their smiles are wide, like they’ve been caught mid-laugh as they share a joke, and the man is leaning in to Patty, nearly pressing his cheek to hers. One of her many suitors? A fellow attorney at a work retreat? Ruby has no idea.

She crouches down to see the bottom shelf, which is lined with identical red boxes. Ruby slides one out and opens the lid. Inside are rows and rows of neatly opened envelopes, and as she thumbs through them, she sees that the return addresses are from everywhere: Toronto, London, Singapore, New Mexico, Washington D.C. (written in Ruby’s own hand), and Seattle. The postmarks are chronological. Ruby puts the lid back on and sets the box aside. After spending a good portion of the summer reading her late husband’s diaries and letters, she isn’t sure that she’s quite ready to delve into someone else’s correspondence and personal papers.

And yet…

She has to. Ruby sighs and pulls out a letter from the front of the box dated May 13, 1996. It’s from Seattle, and the name on the top left hand corner is Ellen Majors.Oh, Ellen! The Seattle renter, Ruby thinks, sliding the paper from the envelope and unfolding it as she sets her wine glass on one of the bookshelves.

Patty,

It’s May and I’m here in rainy Seattle, wandering downtown on a day with nothing else to do. There’s nothing like spring in the Pacific Northwest to remind you that you’ve chosen to live in the dampest, dreariest, most bone-chilling part of the country!

Ruby pauses here and sighs. She's momentarily hit by a wave of sadness, realizing that she's combing through the effects of yetanother person who is gone from her life. Is it even okay to be reading a letter meant for her mother?

She turns back to the handwritten words on the page.

Seeing you over Christmas was rejuvenating for my heart. I thought--at one point--that we might never speak again, and I just don't think I could bear that, Patty. I don't. We've known each other for most of our lives--first as friends, and then as more--and no matter what, you will remain near and dear to my heart until the end. The very end, beloved, cherished Patty.

Remember the time we both crawled out of our bedroom windows and took the bus to The Coliseum to see the Beatles thirty years ago because your mom convinced my mom that rock music would turn us into harlots and destroy any moral fiber we might have built up in our eighteen years of life? I still laugh at the memory of us standing at the bus stop, bumming cigarettes off of that guy in the leather jacket. How wholesome we were, Pat-Pat! Just think of Ruby at that age, wanting to see bands like--what was it that she was into a few years ago?--Nine Inch Nails? Our mothers would both roll over in their graves if they saw the musicians on MTV. John, Paul, Ringo, and George look like choirboys in contrast!

But I digress...once again, seeing you was wonderful, Patty. Laughing, reminiscing, talking like old times. I have a lot of regrets, but you don’t factor into any of them. I hope you'll visit again soon--

Yours,

Ellen

The letter drops to Ruby's lap and she looks up at the window and the sky, now the color of a bruised plum as night falls over Santa Barbara. The doorbell rings in the distance and she standsand brushes off her pants once more, setting Ellen's letter on the desk.

Dinner is eaten at the kitchen table as she FaceTimes Sunday Bond, her best friend and the former Second Lady.

"Are we dining together?" Sunday asks as she sits on the couch in her little house on Shipwreck Key. She's eating a bowl of popcorn and there's a glass of wine on the end table next to her. The room is dim but for the lamp on the table.

"Am I catching you at a bad time?" Ruby lifts the lid off the foil container and sets up her Mexican dinner on the table. It's six-thirty in California and nine-thirty in Florida, so she knows that this is well past Sunday's actual dinner time. "Do you mind if we chat while I eat? Or, wait--is Banks there?"

Ruby sits down with a thunk, reaching for a chip and dipping it into the container of salsa that came with her dinner.

"No, he's home tonight," Sunday says. She puts a few pieces of popcorn in her mouth and then talks around them casually. "We agreed that one night a week we'd stay apart for sure so that we could both catch up on our shows and have some quiet time." She scoops up another handful of popcorn. "I have a bunch of episodes ofThe Bachelorto watch, and he's watching some show about mining for gold in Alaska. Plus I think it's nice to have some time to ourselves. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all of that."

"Right, right," Ruby says, distracted. "So, hey. I think my mom might have had a lesbian love affair when she was younger."

Sunday's hand stops midway to her mouth and a kernel of popcorn falls on her chest. "Patty?" Her eyes are wide with disbelief.

"Yup."

"Why? What makes you think that?"

Ruby shrugs one shoulder as she forks up a bite of enchilada. She chews it with her elbows on the table and one foot tucked up underneath her. "I read a letter from her friend Ellen, and it just felt...extra friendly. It was the way she worded some things. I don't know."

Sunday nods. She narrows her eyes and looks past the phone screen at a spot in her living room. "Okay," she says. "And how do you feel about it?"

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