Secrets at Silver Ash Manor

Chapter 4 ~ Lois Shepherd

Shep pulled into her driveway and walked to the mailbox. She was standing there, hand on her mail in the box, when she felt a tingle race up her spine. She looked around. The brushy street curved along the creek and she didn't see a soul. It was almost dark, but she noticed Viola Pritchard's curtain twitch across the street. Shep shook her head as she took her mail and headed up the drive. Viola had been spying on the neighborhood since Shep had moved in, so nothing odd there.

No, the only strange occurence in Shep's regimented life was the resurgence of Aspen into her world. Shep had been feeling the tingles at her mailbox more and more ever since Aspen began writing to her.

Shep got into her house and closed the door behind her.

Maybe she should write back to Aspen.

October 6, 1989

Palo Alto

Oh Aspen,

Leave it to you to focus on one acorn instead of on the whole tree. You had twins on your own and what do you focus on? Rhyming their names. Good Lord, spring of freshman year it was so obvious how very distracted by details you could get. When Watergate busted wide open and we managed to get ourselves invited to some apartment of senior girls so we could all gather round their TV, all you cared about were your damn eyelashes! Haldeman and Ehrlichman had resigned and all you cared about was that you hadn't curled your lashes and there were senior boys there! Like you even needed curled lashes. Man, politics was such an aphrodisiac when we were in college! Not so much these days. I haven't gotten laid on a political high since the hostages were freed in '81.

Why the hell am I talking about sex so much? I swear, the tiniest drop of communication with you and I feel 19 again. And I feel like I can forget, for a little bit, all that has happened. I don't have anyone yelling at me to make lunch, taking me out of my reverie. But there, I just took myself out. Shit. I'll write more later.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Aspen, are you cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs? I think you must be. You have two kids and you just lost your means of financial support and getting a job is ON YOUR TO-DO LIST?!?! How is it not the very first thing you did? Don't you have the sense to be scared shitless?

There I go again. Sorry. I should just shut up. After all, you're getting it done. Your kids are in second grade. So, I guess it's not so bad, looking at just one acorn at a time. Better than focusing on the possibility of tree blight. Or a lightning strike. Or the ax man.

You good to your kids? I mean, do you like them?

You know what I remember most about when I was a kid? Laughing with my Mom. Being happy with my Mom. We would find worms in the dirt by the front stoop. I remember making Jell-O molds together in the kitchen. I thought Jell-O molds were the most amazing thing ever. Oh, how we would wait for the latest Agatha Christie and splurge on a copy for each of us! (And we wouldn't tell my dad about the extravagance.) We would read the book at the same time to see who could figure it out first – usually neither of us did. But I will say I had that asshole in Endless Night pegged from the get-go.

I'm pretty good at that – pegging asshole guys from the get-go. Like your Houlihan.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I was happy when I was a kid because being with my Mom was out of this world. So, just be totally awesome for Stormy and Normy – be happy to see them – and you will be leaps and bounds ahead of, well, almost everyone else.

You will be leaps and bounds ahead of Mida and her mom. Mida gave an entire fresh, bright decade to caring for her mom. And she and her mom didn't even get along! Mida did it mostly out of guilt – her mom was a genius at laying on the guilt. But then Mida met me and I never had the heart to tell her what true guilt feels like. And I'm glad I didn't. Mida was a maestro at living in the moment, and I'm not such a monster that I would destroy something so rare and precious. Not again. When Mida left Ninth Street, she never looked back. She would only live in the here and now.

She was nothing like my dad, who got stuck in one moment in time. Just like me. Same moment. My dad loved my Mom – but not like me. There was something dark and selfish about his love.

Wow. I thought I'd be able to tell you all this. Ha! I used to tell you that you never stuck with anything. But here I am ... backing away. It's been three months since I got your last letter. After everything that's happened in the past few years, I got your first letter and it was like ... it was like I was still here. Like there's something salvageable. Re-connecting with you gave me something to feel to tell me I'm real. But where's my follow-through?

You know, it's funny that your letter has a coffee ring on it. I remember how you hated the stuff in college. That's something else I used to do with my Mom – drink milky, sugary coffee, ever since I was a little kid – it was so good! My dad used to say, "What are you letting her drink that for? It'll stunt her growth." When my mom told me what stunt meant – other than "stunt" like Western movie stunts – I would just shout back to my dad, "I want to be small!"

Now I drink flavored coffee – I got this amazing hazelnut coffee. Last Christmas, I got some special Christmas coffee, and it made me look around to see if maybe there were other flavored coffees. God, just the smell of it sends me to a moment of forgetting everything.

Anyway, I never went home because I didn't live there anymore. Not since I killed my mother.

Shep

P.S. I'm sending you some flavored coffee beans and a grinder to grind the beans.

P.P.S. There are some leaves here, and now they're fading in the California desiccation. But they are not like the leaves back home that would burst into a kaleidoscope of color after the summer was over. As we get older, and closer to the end, will we become brilliant in a medley of color? Or will we just fade?