Such Good People Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  To my family

  We need, in love, to practice only this:

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chatper 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Such Good People

  By Martha Whitmore Hickman

  Copyright 2018 by Martha Whitmore Hickman

  Cover Copyright 2018 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1996.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  To my family

  We need, in love, to practice only this:

  letting each other go.

  For holding on

  comes easily: we do not need to learn it.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE

  Acknowledgments

  This book has been a long time in the writing and I am indebted to many people: to the trustees and staffs of the Ossabaw Island Project, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ragdale Foundation for the inestimable gift of protected time; to teachers who became friends, particularly to Anne Rivers Siddons, who saw the earliest pages of this book and has believed in it ever since, and to John Gardner, who from the time I met him at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference until his death was mentor, advocate, and friend, and whose encouragement sustains me to this day; to my agent, Harvey Klinger, for vision and persistence in calling this book into publishable form; to my compatriots in the Tuesday-evening writers’ group—Rick, Alana, Madeena, K., Jim, Holly, Nancy, Squire, Mike, Alice, Phyllis, Linda, Sally, Catherine, Michael J., Michael S., Sallie, Ronna, Amy, Steve—for offering criticisms and sharing triumphs; and beyond all that to my sons—Peter, John, and Stephen—and their families for making the world a better place, and to my husband, Hoyt, for unfailing love and support through all our years together.

  “Why would we want adults? Surely you’re not thinking chaperones?” Annie queried her mother. She laid one hand on the blue Formica counter, as though bracing herself against a world suddenly bereft of reason. “What could chaperones keep us from doing that we couldn’t have done already?” Her dark hair swung forward and she reached up to tuck it behind her ears. She repeated her point. “What could chaperones keep us from doing that we couldn’t have done already—if we wanted to?”

  “Nothing.” Laura set her near-empty soda can in its puddle of moisture—the accompaniment of an after-school chat that had begun pleasantly enough. She turned slightly on the blue and chrome stool and her leg brushed the knee of Annie’s jeans. “But suppose something happened? You might need help. An adult’s judgment.”

  “We’re only going to the state campground. We’ll be ten miles from home. Gordon has a car.”

  “I know Gordon has a car.” The specter of Gordon’s car had pursued Laura ever since Gordon, six months older than Annie, had gotten his license, and an old Chevy to go with it—a mobile secret interior space for carrying her daughter off. With Annie’s permission, of course. “I just don’t like the idea. I’d feel better if you had an adult with you.”

  “I’m sure you’d let Bart or Philip go,” Annie persisted. “I bet they do all kinds of things you don’t even know about.”

  Laura smiled to herself. The thought of her two tall sons asking her permission to do almost anything seemed a bit ludicrous. “When you’re off at college, you can decide what’s right for you. Bart or Philip never went on overnight campouts without adult supervision when they lived at home.”

  Annie’s shoulders in the green cotton sweater rose and fell in a dramatic sigh. Her brown eyes narrowed and she leaned forward—a prosecuting attorney nailing a witness. “Surely you’re not concerned with what the neighbors would think!”

  Laura was silent for a moment, considering. “It’s not the neighbors. It’s me. I’m not”—she hesitated—“I’m not comfortable with the idea. I don’t like it.”

  Annie shook her head, as though unable to believe what she was hearing. “You can’t expect me to be stuck with your hang-ups.” She slid off the stool, her feet finding her shoes again, and swept past her mother. At the doorway, she paused. “I’ll ask Dad and see what he thinks.”

  “Mmmhmm,” Laura murmured. She heard the rise and fall of Annie’s voice on the phone. Probably calling Gordon to report her mother’s intransigence. The camping trip wasn’t for several weeks—something to celebrate the end of the school year. She and Trace would talk about it. He was less likely than she to oppose his daughter, whether out of conviction or to win Annie’s favor, she didn’t know. As for her, Annie’s favor hadn’t been in the slightest jeopardy—until lately. Now she felt sometimes as though they were all walking on thin ice.

  She pulled a cookbook from the shelf and began flipping through the pages for the risotto recipe. Frankly, she was tired of cooking. It had been all right when everyone was home and her life had been taken up with domesticity, but now that, at last, they’d made the sunroom into a studio for her, the drafting table and paintbrushes were calling.

  *

  A gust of wind banged the back door shut. “Hello!” It was Trace, home from the college. She looked at her watch—not quite four?

  Then she remembered—exam period. Still, it was unlike him to come home early.

  “Hello!” He hurried in, dropped his books on the counter, gave her a quick kiss, and turned on the radio. “Hear about the storm?”


  “Storm?” Laura looked out the window. Dark clouds covered the sky. The young dogwood swayed sharply from the ground, its leaves upturned, silver, slapping against the air. “I guess it’s that time of year—spring storms in Tennessee. I hadn’t noticed. Annie and I were talking.”

  “It’s been on the news all the way home. A heavy storm front. Fifty-mile-an-hour winds.”

  “Hi, Dad.” Annie came into the kitchen. She’d taken out her contacts and her gold-framed glasses had slid down her nose, so she had to hold her head back slightly to look at him. “Dad, there’s this camping trip….”

  Trace fiddled with the radio dial. “What’s the matter with this thing?”

  “Dad?” Annie pushed her glasses back into place with her forefinger, leveled her gaze.

  “Listen.” Trace nodded toward the crackling sound of the radio. “There’s a big storm coming.”

  “Dad—for heaven’s sake. A little rain.”

  “It’s a heavy storm front. It’s been on the news all the way home.” He put his ear close to the dial. “All I’m getting is static,” he complained.

  Annie looked from him to her mother, then back again. “Well whoop-de-do,” she said, and with a withering look at her father, she left the room.

  A huge clap of thunder, and suddenly it was dark, at four in the afternoon. Another rush of sound, and the rain began, lashing down in sheets of water that plastered against the windows.

  “Good thing you got home,” Laura said. “This would be a mess to drive in.” Trace had given up on the radio and was standing close to the window, trying to peer through the wall of water.

  The refrigerator motor stopped, started again, stopped. Another rumble of thunder. Almost immediately, a flash of lightning illuminated the room. Then a sharp, shattering crash.

  Annie reappeared at the doorway. “Wow! That was a biggie.”

  “That one hit something.” Trace backed away from the window, moved toward the living room, Laura with him.

  “Come on in here, honey,” she called to Annie, still in the kitchen. “You don’t want to be near a window.”

  “I want to see the fireworks,” Annie called. Another clap of thunder, a flash of light, and she joined them in the living room, moved to the big picture window.

  “Don’t get too close,” Trace warned.

  “You’re a couple of chickens,” Annie said, but she stepped back to stand by her mother and watch the trees sway and bend. The slender maple tree—newly planted a year ago, after the mimosa finally died—angled over like an acrobatic dancer bending to the ground. Behind them, the light from the kitchen flickered on, off, then back on.

  For a minute, the storm was quiet, catching its breath. Then another loud crack. The house shook. Lightning flashed into the darkened room.

  At the bottom of the driveway, by the telephone pole, a huge fireball flared, hung thirty feet above the ground.

  “What’s that?” Annie whispered.

  They stared. No one spoke.

  Again, a crash of thunder. Lightning shimmered in the room. “Quick,” Laura said. “The small bathroom.”

  They hurried to it—an interior room, no windows—and closed the door, muting the sound. They huddled together in the small space, their knees pushing against the tan porcelain of the toilet bowl. It was Annie who lifted her arms to encircle them both, impulsively darting her head forward to kiss each of them on the cheek. “I love you,” she said. As though this could be it—a final farewell, victims of disaster, the house falling down around them.

  After a minute or two, Trace opened the door a crack, letting in the roar of wind and driving rain. A strange scraping sound came from the living room.

  “What on earth?” Laura said. The light in the bathroom went out. She felt Annie tremble against her shoulder.

  They stood in the almost darkness for a few minutes, not speaking, with only the narrow needle of half-light marking the crack of the door. Gradually, rumbling sounds replaced the crashes of thunder; the lightning preceded the thunder by several seconds.

  “Well!” Trace pushed the door open, disengaging himself from the others. “It’s letting up.”

  They stepped out into the hallway.

  There was still some daylight. They hurried to gather candles, matches, a flashlight.

  When the rain had all but stopped, Trace headed for the back door and the carport. “I’ll try the car radio and see if we can learn anything.”

  In ten minutes, he came back. “The storm is moving east. They’re calling it a tornado. I walked out to the street. That fireball was two power lines breaking—must have touched against each other going down. The church at the corner lost half its roof.” He stepped to the fireplace, stooped to peer up the chimney.

  It was then that Laura noticed the length of black chain in his hand. “What’s that?” she said.

  “That scraping sound we heard?” he said, his voice muffled by the open fireplace, the angle of his lifted shoulder. “The storm sucked the damper from the chimney and dragged the pull chain with it.” He stood upright again. “The chain broke off on impact. The damper’s lying in the driveway.” He stooped again, lifted the end of the chain toward a spot on the blackened fireplace wall. “You can see right there—the pull chain’s anchor’s shorn clear off the chimney wall.”

  “My God,” Laura said, the image of air, chain, household—their lives—being sucked into some gigantic vacuum, tossed into the air and thrown to the ground.

  Annie stepped close to the fireplace to see. “Wow!” she said.

  “It was a close one,” Trace said, and the three of them looked at one another in the now-returning light of early evening—as though they had not seen one another for a long time.

  They lit the candles and improvised dinner—peanut butter sandwiches, cans of tomato juice, and fruit—avoiding opening refrigerator or freezer. When they sat down to eat, their usual gesture of joining hands for a moment of silence was anything but perfunctory.

  To Laura’s relief, Annie didn’t bring up the matter of the overnight campout—almost as though she, too, wanted to keep unmarred this time together. Instead, she talked on about school, about looking forward to the family vacation trip this summer.

  They would go first to Laura’s family’s reunion in Michigan. “It will be sad without Grandpa,” Annie said.

  “Yes, it will,” Laura agreed, her grief for her father a knot in her chest again. “But it’s important for Grandma—and the rest of us, too, that the family all be together.”

  They would go on from there to two weeks at a mountain resort in Colorado.

  “Have I ever been to Colorado?” Annie asked Trace.

  “No. A new state for you. A new place for all of us. Highly recommended by your travel guide.” He stood, bowed with a smile and a flourish of his hand, sat back down.

  “Do they have horseback riding?” Annie asked.

  “They do,” Trace said.

  Annie went on. “It’ll be great to have Bart and Philip with us again. I really miss them.”

  “I do, too,” Trace said. His oldest son’s coming graduation had made him sharply aware of the passage of time and, atypically, it had been he more than Laura who had pushed for the vacation in Colorado. “Quality time, before they all get away,” he’d said to her, half-joking.

  She looked at him oddly. “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”

  He winced. Why do you think I’m pushing for it? he thought. But he made no comment. It was soon after her father’s death, and of course she was upset about that. He missed Will—a gracious man, a steady presence in Laura’s sometimes-volatile family. He loved them, and looked forward to seeing them. And Laura was right: Her mother, her brother and sister, their families—they did need this time together after Will’s death. But sometimes the commotion of her family gatherings got to him. It was his urging that put the time in Colorado after the reunion, not before. By then he would need a rest.

  *
>
  They did the dishes by candlelight and when darkness settled in—their part of the city black except for lights of traveling cars and repair vehicles—they went to bed.

  “It was nice in that bathroom—cozy,” Laura said as she and Trace settled against their pillows. Trace moved toward her. “And since we’ve come to bed so early, we might as well make good use of the time.” His voice was light, his hand on her breast. “I mean, it’s a bit early to go to sleep, right?”

  “Right.” She turned, lifted an arm to circle his neck. “But not too fast, okay? A little pillow talk, maybe?”

  “Sure. Anything special?”

  “Just those moments with Annie—her reaching to us.”

  “Mmm. What about them?” His hand moved over the rise of her hip.

  She closed her eyes against tears, glad of the dark. “It’s just that…” she began. If he didn’t know, how could she tell him? Or maybe it was more her problem than his—this threat of estrangement from her daughter. Annie was sixteen, after all. She had thought they could negotiate these straits better than most. But so far, they weren’t doing awfully well.

  “You love me, don’t you?” she said softly—his face above hers now.

  “Believe me,” he said, and slipped inside her, and she wrapped her arms around him, tight.

  * * *

  In the morning, the power was still off. They learned from the car radio that school was canceled.

  Trace gathered books and papers.

  “You probably don’t have power at the college, either,” Laura remonstrated. “You could stay here with us.”

  “I’ll find something to do,” he said. “The power should come back soon.” He kissed them each in turn. “Have a good day.”

  Laura and Annie looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “He’d probably be reading going over Niagara Falls,” Annie said.

  *

  Soon after lunch, the refrigerator began to hum. Lights went on. It was a relief to have the power back, though, adjusting electric clocks, turning off lights, it had been, Laura thought, in some ways a welcome distraction from things that had been troubling her—her father’s death, the off-and-on tension with Annie, never knowing what her mood would be. Friend or foe? Confidante or recluse?