Chapter 9 - The Eviction on Elm Street
Three weeks later, on a freezing, blustery Tuesday in late January, Samuel and I drove past the house on Elm Street.
We hadn't intended to stop. We were returning from the county recorder's office after filing the preliminary conservation easements for High Pines, but the road took us directly past the two-story colonial where Samuel had grown up.
A massive yellow moving truck was parked at the curb, its diesel engine idling with a rhythmic, heavy thrum. Two burly men in heavy canvas jackets were carrying a mahogany dining table down the front steps—the very table where we had sat on Christmas dinner when Gerald had put down his fork and demanded proof that Fiona was family.
Janice stood in the front yard, wrapped in a black puffer coat that was far too large for her, clutching a cardboard box filled with framed photographs.
She looked shrunken. Without her weekly salon appointments and the aura of suburban social supremacy she had cultivated for decades, she looked like an ordinary, bitter, aging woman watching her life get packed into cardboard.
Gerald’s Lexus was parked down the street, its engine running, but Gerald didn't get out. He sat behind the wheel, staring straight ahead through the windshield, refusing to look at his wife of thirty-five years.
Samuel slowed the SUV down as we approached the driveway.
"Do you want to speak to them?" I asked softly.
Samuel looked at his mother through the glass. Janice turned her head at that exact moment. Her eyes met his across the twenty feet of cold winter air.
For a second, I thought she might wave. I thought she might drop the box and run toward the car, begging her only son for forgiveness, for an allowance, for a crumb of the life she had thrown away.
Instead, her mouth curled into that familiar, bitter sneer—the same sneer she had worn when she told me that Fiona didn't look like a Holloway. She turned her back on us and marched toward the moving truck, shouting at the movers to be careful with her china.
Samuel didn't scowl. He didn't look angry. He simply exhaled a long, slow breath that misted against the windowpane, shifted the car into drive, and pressed the accelerator.
"No," Samuel said quietly. "I have nothing left to say to strangers."
May you like
We left them behind in the rearview mirror—two bitter people surrounded by cardboard boxes, dividing the ruins of a family they had burned down for money that was never theirs.
***
