Page 73 of Deadly Little Scandals
“Do I have a choice?” I asked.
Lillian smiled. “I’m not going to ask you about those bangs,” she said, taking my arm and leading me to a nearby alcove in a way that would have suggested to any onlookers that she was interested in doing nothing more than showing me the art hanging on the wall there. “And I’m certainly not going to ask you what your cousin did to her hair.”
So Lillianhadseen Lily. Then why corner me?
“She’s not just my cousin,” I muttered under my breath. “And I think her hair looks good.”
My grandmother studied me for a moment. “Have I done something to upset you, Sawyer?”
“No.”
“You’ve been avoiding me.” The fact that Lillian hadn’t communicated that information through the use of a pleasant rhetorical question told me how much she was bothered by the observation.
She wasn’t wrong. I had been avoiding her—for the past two weeks.
“If this is about your mama…” Lillian started to say, but the look on my face seemed to bring her up short. “Or your aunt…” she modified. Then, taking in my expression, she paused. “Well, for heaven’s sakes, Sawyer, what is this about?”
I made a show of studying the painting in front of me. It was a landscape, and though it didn’t strike me as anything special, I had few doubts that the signature in the bottom right corner would have meant something to someone who knew art.
“I went to Two Arrows.”
I heard Lillian suck in a breath beside me. In public, that was the most that any revelation could cause her to do.
“Two Arrows is not a safe place for you to go.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected from Lillian, but that sentiment wasn’t it—though given the vibe I’d gotten from her sister and her gun-toting associates, maybe it should have been.
“You grew up there,” I pointed out. “And you turned out fine.”
“That, I believe, is a matter of some debate.”
I turned to look at Lillian. She hadn’t asked me if I’d met her sister. I knew her well enough to deeply suspect that she wasn’t going to.
“You named my mom after her,” I said. “Ellen, Eleanor—but both called Ellie.”
Lillian was quiet for a moment, and I flashed back to the two of us standing beside her husband’s grave, weeks before.
“She was the strong one, growing up,” Lillian said. To the outside observer, her expression wouldn’t have looked like it changed at all, but I felt a shift in her. I heard it in her voice. “There were days when she didn’t eat so I could.”
Lillian hadn’t said her sister’s name—not Ellen, not Ellie. She hadn’t commented on the fact that she’d named my mother after someone from whom she was estranged.
“Your sister went hungry for you,” I said, finding it hard to believe that there had ever been a time in my grandmother’s life when she hadn’t considered herself strong. “And you left town and never looked back.”
That got me another almost inaudible intake of air, subtler this time, more controlled.
“I would have brought her with me,” my grandmother said. “I tried. Did she tell you that?”
Ellen hadn’t, but she had said that she didn’t want anyone’s charity—least of all her twin’s. “She didn’t want to come with you,” I surmised.
“She didn’t want to want to, Sawyer. She always hated when I talked about leaving that town, and she hated it when I left. She hated your grandfather.Edward Alcott Taft.Even the sound of his name set her to gnashing her teeth. She hated who I was when I was with him. There are days I’m not sure what she resented more—that I left, or that I offered to pull her out.”
“She doesn’t hate Two Arrows,” I said.
Lillian hesitated. “She should.”
My grandmother had told me, more than once, that I didn’t know what it was really like to be poor. Having been to the town where she’d grown up, I wondered if poverty was the only reason that Lillian had wanted to leave.
I thought about Beth, the woman whose screams we’d heard. Audie’s birth mother. She was my second cousin. Given that our grandmothers were identical twins, genetically, she might as well have been a first cousin.
