My mother pressed her hand to her lips. Dolly wiped her eye.
“I do have rights,” my mother said then in a very calm voice. “We all do. We have rights, you and I, for some of the same reasons. Because of marital property, for one. Because of family feeling, and there are different reasons, too.” Her voice was lulling, smooth, so quiet. “For instance, for my part, the chunk of money that came to me at my parents’ death, most of it has gone into the farm. You might not know that. I’m guessing you don’t.” My mother pulled her thin graying hair into a ponytail with one hand and held it there. “I didn’t mind the contribution, but don’t tell me I know nothing, or have no rights, or that I’ve just been sitting around. Please don’t do that.”
Money was involved? My heart was doing its pricking, my hands cold. The buzz in the ears. Dolly was the stunned one now, staring at my mother. She looked as if a poison dart had pierced her breast; she looked that stricken. My mother, though, seemed not to notice the wild hurt expression shaping up, the little gimlet shine of Dolly’s narrowed eyes and the bit-by-bit collapse of the doughy face.
“I never wanted,” my mother went on—
Stop! I wanted to scream.
“—it to cause bad feeling, our putting cash into the operation, Jim and I.”
SHUT UP!
“I only say so now because it’s my sitting around over here that has made some of the capital improvements possible.”
My mother let go of the ponytail. Time, it seemed, skipped a beat or two, a stillness in the room, no tick of the heart. Did Nellie Lombard have any idea what she’d done? What you’d know instantly if you’d been in the audience? The hands on the clock then moved, the filter in the aquarium remembered to purr. A child shouted on the playground. Did she have a clue that Mrs. Lombard and Mrs. Lombard could never be jolly or even cordial again? The friendship over now that my mother had laid out what had been a fine secret charitable thing, now that she had declared herself the martyr. Dolly was reduced, her pride smashed. For once in Mrs. Sherwood Lombard’s life she was unable to say even one word.
But my mother wasn’t done yet. She felt the need to say more. Of course she did, because in her blackhearted way she’d been dying to speak about the money, to rub it in, ever since she’d given up her treasured chunk. “I know that May Hill has completed the transfer,” she said, “that the land contract is legal, and that we have to accept it. I know she didn’t consult us, which is too bad, but it’s over. I so wish, Dolly, that you’d understand that May Hill has saved us. For the time being. Saved the farm for now. We need Philip. Surely you do know that.”
Then Dolly did something I couldn’t believe even though it was happening before my eyes. She picked up a book on the counter and threw it as far as she could across the room toward the stacks. That’s how she made her exit, back to the hedgerow path.
My disks were forgotten, the cloth having fallen to my feet.
“My God,” my mother said, staring at the door.
I got up from my chair in the nook, walked out onto the floor, across the carpet, past the magazine rack, a short distance to the book, a thick Elizabeth George mystery. It was a heavy book to have thrown so far. I didn’t want to touch it, to pick it up. The book Dolly had thrown.
Nellie was pressing her fingers into her eye sockets. “Oh God,” she moaned, “I’m such an idiot.”
As much as it was true I almost for just a second felt sorry for her, that she herself had to know it and say it. It would have been better on my end if I’d been able to point out that fact to her. I kept looking at the book and thinking of Dolly’s soft drooping face, the openmouthed frown. How pretty she’d looked at her entrance. My mother started to talk in her hokey, preternaturally calm tone. Whatever she was stumbling around saying, though, she wasn’t anywhere near the root of the matter. Because, the thing is, I knew precisely what she’d done. Be still, Mrs. Lombard, so I can tell you. The following, in case she didn’t realize, had occurred: My mother in the showdown had won. She had pulled up the prizewinning fact. She’d obliterated her opponent. Good for her in the moment. Score for the librarian. Congratulations.
But now in the aftermath? Now and forever? She maybe was coming to see it, the error slowly revealing itself. Oh no. She should have let Dolly think Dolly herself was the winner. A trick so simple. Let Dolly, who did not have the advantages, who had not gone to college, who did not have any spare family money, let her at least have the satisfaction of prevailing at the library.
I no longer wanted to be in the nook. My feet were moving toward the door. It was cold outside and I’d left my coat behind but I didn’t care.