He could hear a radio going off somewhere in the back of the house. Betty reached down to scoop up an enormous gray cat and turned back to Jake. “Give me a sec,” she said, and went down the hall. He was trying to take it all in, greedily recording details. There was a wide wooden staircase ascending from a very grand central hallway that had been painted a fairly stomach-churning pink. To his right, a large parlor visible through an open door, and to his left, an even more formal living room through an open archway. The dimensions and the details—dentil crown molding, high baseboards—were a highly intentional display of wealth, but Betty and Sylvia had pretty much bludgeoned any trace of grandeur to death with folksy signs: ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE … AND A CAT! and CRAZY CAT LADY lined the wall up the stairs, and visible above the parlor mantelpiece was LOVE IS LOVE). There was also a cacophony of too-bright area rugs, all but obliterating the wooden floorboards, and everywhere Jake looked, too much of everything: tables covered with knickknacks and vases of flowers too healthy and bright to be real, and so many chairs pulled into a circle it looked as if a group was expected, or had recently left. He tried to imagine his former student here: descending this staircase, following Betty’s steps into the kitchen he assumed was at the end of the hall. He couldn’t do it. The women had placed a kitsch-encrusted barrier between whatever had been here before and what was here now.
Betty returned, without the cat but with a stout dark woman in a batik headscarf. “Sylvia, my partner,” she said.
“Oh my god,” said Sylvia. “I can’t believe this. A famous author.”
“Famous author is an oxymoron,” said Jake. It was his go-to assertion of personal modesty.
“Oh my god,” said Sylvia again.
“Your house is just beautiful. Inside and out. How long have you been here?”
“Just a couple of years,” said Betty. “It was so run-down when we moved in, you wouldn’t believe it. We had to replace every damn thing.”
“Some of them twice,” said Sylvia. “Come on back, have some coffee.”
The kitchen had its own complement of signage: SYLVIA’S KITCHEN (SEASONED WITH LOVE) over the stove, HAPPINESS IS HOMEMADE above the table, which was itself covered with a bright blue cat-festooned glazed cloth. “Do you like hazelnut? It’s all we drink.”
Jake, who loathed all flavored coffees, attested that he did.
“Sylvie, where’s that library book?”
“I haven’t seen it,” said Sylvia. “Cream?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
She brought him the mug. It was white with a black line drawing of a cat on it, and the words “Feline Good.”
“There’s donuts,” said Betty. “That’s where I was coming from. You know Jones’ Donuts in town?”
“Well, no,” he said. “I don’t know the town at all. I was really just driving through. I wasn’t expecting all this Vermont hospitality!”
“I have to admit,” said Sylvia, who came bearing a plate of oversized glazed donuts, “I sneaked a look at Google on my phone. You’re obviously who you said you are. If not I’d be out back calling the troopers. In case you thought we’re all hospitality and no common sense.”
“Oh.” Jake nodded. “Good.” He was relieved he hadn’t lied, out in the car. He was relieved that his recent proclivity for lying hadn’t fully replaced a default instinct to tell the truth.
“I can’t believe this place used to be run-down. You could never tell that, now!”
“I know, right? But trust me, the whole first year we were spackling and painting, peeling off old wallpaper. There hadn’t been any serious upkeep in years. Which shouldn’t have surprised us. People actually died in this house because of bad maintenance.”
“No maintenance,” Betty said. She had returned, bringing her own coffee.
“What do you mean? Like a fire?”
“No. Carbon monoxide leak. From the oil furnace.”
“Really!”
The enormous gray cat had trailed Betty into the kitchen. Now he leapt into her lap and settled himself down.
“Does that weird you out?” She looked at Jake. “House this old, it stands to reason people have died in it. Home births, home deaths. Just how things were done back then.”
“Doesn’t weird me out.” He tried a sip of his coffee. It was vile.
“I don’t like to say this,” said Betty, “but your old student died here, too. Upstairs in one of the bedrooms.”
Jake nodded solemnly.
“Hey, so I have to ask,” said Betty, “what was it like, meeting Oprah?”
He told them about Oprah. They were big Oprah fans.
“Are they gonna make a movie out of your book?”
He talked about that, too. Only then could he try to bring the conversation back to Evan Parker, though even as he did he wasn’t sure it was worth the effort. These two might live in the Parker house, but so what? It wasn’t as if they’d ever met him.
“So my old student grew up here,” he finally said.
“That family was in this house from the time it was built. They owned the quarry. You probably passed the quarry, driving here.”
“I think I did.” He nodded. “Must have been a wealthy family.”
