First Impressions Read online

  Eden looked out at the lawn in front of her. The house sat in a little oasis of greenery, surrounded on three sides by acre upon acre of farmers’ fields. On the fourth side was a wide, deep creek, probably where the original owners moored their ships. On the right side of the house was what looked to be a vegetable garden, with flowers mixed in with the peas. To the back was what could be an orchard. It was all as messy as the interior. Taking a breath, Eden smelled the air. Fresh air, shade trees, fresh fruits and vegetables. In an instant, she made a decision. She was going to do the best job of cataloging that anyone had ever done, so that Mrs. Farrington would let her stay for the next several years. And Eden was going to raise her child here in this idyllic spot.

  Smiling, she went back into the house.

  “Can you cook?” Mrs. Farrington’s voice came from somewhere in the back of the house.

  “Not at all,” Eden called back, feeling quite happy.

  “That’s something else you’ll have to learn,” came the voice.

  Smiling, Eden went in search of the kitchen. She was willing to bet there were cookbooks somewhere in the house. “Probably Martha Washington’s original cookbook,” she said as she made her way through the stacks of furniture to find the kitchen. Turning the corner, she gasped. The kitchen was a huge room with lots and lots of cabinets—and every one of them was so full of papers that the doors wouldn’t close. On one countertop was a foot square that held a few dishes, a skillet, and a pot. Eden had an idea that was all the cookware that Mrs. Farrington used.

  Now, leaning against her bedroom door, Eden smiled in memory. Yes, that was all the cookware that Mrs. Farrington had used, but later Eden found whole sets of dishes hidden away inside the cabinets. Her daughter’s first years were spent in that wonderful old house. Her baby dishes had been from the 1920s, and her silverware had been real, with English hallmarks.

  It was the silverware that sparked the “clearing of the wealth” as Mrs. Farrington called it. Casually, Eden had remarked that the silver must be worth a fortune. “Then we have to hide it!” Mrs. Farrington had said quickly, her voice almost panicky. At first Eden had stiffened with pride. Did Mrs. Farrington think she was a thief? She calmed when she realized that if Mrs. Farrington had thought she was a thief she wouldn’t be telling her, Eden, to do the hiding. It wasn’t until Henry from the newspaper office came to visit that Eden understood.

  “He’s out,” Henry had said. Mrs. Farrington turned pale and sat down. Seeing her sit made Eden worry, because Mrs. Farrington never sat down.

  “I knew it was close, but I thought I’d have more time,” Mrs. Farrington whispered.

  After Henry left, Eden didn’t ask any questions, but Mrs. Farrington told her. She had one child, “a son so worthless he shouldn’t be allowed to live” is how she stated it. Eden didn’t ask questions, but she assumed that “out” meant out of jail. For the next three weeks, the two women hid things. Anything that was valuable, they hid. They pried up floorboards and shoved in silver teapots. They cut a hole behind the lath and plaster and dropped spoons down into the walls. They buried plastic boxes of things in the garden. Young Melissa, a year old by then, loved the game, and they caught her just as she was shoving Mrs. Farrington’s reading glasses into a mouse hole in the baseboard.

  But Alester Farrington didn’t show up then. He didn’t show up until Melissa was five—and that’s when Eden found out why he’d been locked up. He was a pedophile. But she didn’t know it that first night.

  The night her son returned home, Mrs. Farrington woke Eden, whispering in a way that made her sound like a crazy person. “They told me he’d changed. They said there was no more danger.” Puzzled, Eden had allowed Mrs. Farrington to pull her into the next room, Melissa’s room. In the dark, silhouetted by the night-light, Alester Farrington was standing over the child’s bed. Just standing there and watching Melissa sleep. In an instant, Eden understood everything. Mrs. Farrington told her son to get out of the room, and for a moment Eden thought he was going to strike his mother, but he didn’t. He smiled at Eden in a way that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Quietly, he left the room.

  Eden didn’t need to be told what she had to do. She looked at Mrs. Farrington, and there were tears in the old woman’s eyes, but she nodded, then shoved Eden toward her bedroom. Eden jammed clothes into a suitcase, grabbed some boxes, and left with her daughter in the middle of the night. She’d had no contact with either of the Farringtons since that night twenty-two years ago.

  Now, Eden walked to the bedroom window and looked out at the wet street lined with overflowing garbage cans. She could hear the loud music from the bar across the street; a man was peeing into the gutter. She closed the curtain. Sometimes she wondered how she had ended up in New York City. She who loved trees and bird-song. She used to read gardening books as though they were novels. She used to memorize principles of eighteenth-century gardening. Eden knew that the happiest time in her life had been those years with Mrs. Farrington. The people in town had thought Mrs. Farrington was an eccentric old woman, but all Eden had really known were her parents, whose great delight in life was meting out punishment. Compared to them, Mrs. Farrington was the sweetest, kindest—

  Turning, Eden looked at her tiny room. She’d given the master bedroom in the apartment to her daughter and her new husband, thinking that they were going to be there only a few weeks. But the months had turned into years, and she’d had to put up with the man her daughter had chosen to love, a pompous man who coped with his inability to get ahead in the world by putting other people down. And his favorite punching bag seemed to be his mother-in-law. Stuart compensated for his failings by assuming an air of superiority, as if he were of a better class than Eden. He never said the words out loud, but still they hung in the air. Melissa made excuses for him, saying that he was on the verge of being promoted to partner, that they were going to live in a penthouse on Park Avenue. Melissa seemed to believe that when Stuart got the promotion that he’d been up for for four years he’d have an overnight personality change. He’d stop looking down his arrogant nose at people and would become the sweet, loving man she knew he really was.

  Eden didn’t want to disillusion her daughter, so she was determined to keep her nose out of it. There had been times when she’d tried to talk to her, but Melissa had a talent for hearing only what she wanted to hear. It was difficult for Eden to do, but she was going to have to let her child find out about life on her own. Was that like letting a child ride a motorcycle without a helmet, so he’d learn that he could get hurt?

  Sighing, Eden went into her bathroom and stood there, looking at herself in the mirror. She had been told many times that she looked good “for her age,” but she was still forty-five years old, and for a moment, a wave of self-pity ran through her. Since that night so long ago when she’d seen Mrs. Farrington’s son looking down at Melissa asleep in her bed, Eden wondered if she’d had a moment to call her own. She’d had to raise her daughter alone. Most of the time she’d been too busy to think about herself, but there had been quiet evenings when she’d wondered how her life would have been different if she hadn’t had a child so young. She’d had a couple of serious relationships, but in the end had chickened out on getting married. She’d always been too afraid of turning her life, and that of her daughter, over to a man.

  When Melissa entered college on a partial scholarship, so had Eden. No scholarship, but she’d enrolled anyway. Eden had graduated with a degree in American history, with a minor in English lit. Melissa, giggling, had said that her degree in child development was actually an M.R.S. degree. As Eden got to know Stuart, she thought that a real diploma would have been much better.

  After college, Melissa had taken a menial job in a law office in New York just to be near Stuart, telling her mother that if she “played her cards right” she was sure that Stuart would ask her to marry him. He did. After a year in the big city, Melissa had begged and pleaded with Eden to move to New York, get
a job, and live near them. Since Eden had just broken up with a man and wanted to get away from him, she agreed. Within a week of arriving in New York, she got a job at a major publishing house. By what she called luck, and the publisher called “divine inspiration,” she found a book in the pile of unagented manuscripts that had been turned down by six houses. With her heart pounding, Eden recommended that it be published. It was, and it spent thirty-two weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. In gratitude, the author requested that Eden be his editor. By the end of her second year she’d been promoted to senior editor. By the third year she was handling some very big names in the publishing world. But by that time, Melissa and Stuart were married and living with her, and she’d learned not to tell anyone when good things happened with her job. She didn’t want to see the anger and jealousy on Stuart’s thin face.

  As Eden looked in the mirror, she could see herself as she was when she first met Mrs. Farrington. So young, so inexperienced in the world. Eden had never been anywhere, done anything. Her parents…The less said about them, the better. Eden had tried to contact them three times after Melissa was born, but each time she’d been rebuffed. She went to her father’s funeral, but her mother had told her to get out.

  But Mrs. Farrington saved me, Eden thought, smiling. It had been difficult after she left Mrs. Farrington’s house, but she and Melissa had had five whole years of warmth and love, so they made it. That house, which had taken her all those years to straighten up, was Eden’s “happy place.” When things got to be too much for her, from Melissa’s hateful third grade teacher, to Steve, a man Eden had almost married, to all the years of financial terror she’d lived through, Eden’s escape was to put herself back in that old house with Mrs. Farrington.

  Closing her eyes for a moment, Eden could remember every inch of the place, every floorboard, every stick of furniture. What was the house like now? she wondered. Had it changed much? The letter said that she’d inherited house and contents. Was there any furniture left, or had Mrs. Farrington’s son taken whatever they hadn’t been able to hide?

  Smiling, Eden remembered one day when they’d been burying a stack of plastic shoeboxes full of everything from old coins to children’s wooden toys—actually, she buried, and Mrs. Farrington directed. They feared that the items would rot before they could dig them up, but there wasn’t much choice. All the hiding space inside the house had been used. Mrs. Farrington leaned on her shovel handle and looked back at the house. “It ends with me.”

  At first Eden didn’t know what she meant.

  “Did you ever wonder how I kept the name Farrington? For centuries my family produced an eldest son, so the name stayed with us. But not my father. After being married for ten years he produced only one puny daughter, me. And don’t give me that women’s lib look. It was my father’s fault. My mother was a widow and had had three kids by her first husband. She was twenty-six years old and had already produced three healthy boys. But she married my father and didn’t conceive for ten years. When I was born I was so tiny they didn’t think I was going to live.”

  Mrs. Farrington looked across the fence that enclosed her beloved flower garden. “Maybe I should have died,” she said. “Maybe…”

  “So how did you keep the name?” Eden asked, not wanting her friend to dwell on sadness.

  “Married my cousin. He was a distant cousin, but he had the Farrington name. My mother begged me not to do it. She said that the strain of our family was already fragile and a cousin would further weaken it. But I didn’t listen. If I had—if I hadn’t been so enraptured with the Farrington legacy and hadn’t felt as though I had to carry on the name—I would have married one of those great strapping Granville boys. My! But they were good-looking. Born ten months apart, strong as field hands, and smart. But I didn’t listen to anyone.”

  “Haven’t changed much, have you?” Eden asked, straightening up. They had six more boxes to bury before sundown.

  “No. I’ve always done what I wanted to, when I wanted to do it. Spoiled. Always was. So I married a man who I thought was good enough for me, meaning I married another Farrington.” She pointed at the next place Eden was to dig. “I was a fool. The man I married was a weak, foppish coward.” She took a deep breath. “My husband was what you call today a bisexual.”

  Eden concentrated on the hole she was digging. Part of her wanted to tell Mrs. Farrington to stop remembering such dreadful things, but she knew that her friend had a point to make.

  “My husband was an awful man, truly awful, and the only child we had together turned out to be worse than he was.” She looked up at the sky again, her hands making fists so hard the knuckles turned white. “So I’m the last one. The Farringtons end with me.”

  “But your son could have children.”

  “No, he can’t. The last time I got him out of jail, I only did so if he got fixed. Like a horse that’s no good. The world doesn’t want his seed spread around.”

  “Oh,” Eden said, her head down, not knowing what to say. Vasectomy. As much as Mrs. Farrington cared about family, she had demanded that her only child be “fixed” so he could have no children.

  “But the good news is that I found out that I’m bisexual too.”

  Eden’s head came up as she looked at Mrs. Farrington in shock.

  “I had affairs with both of those beautiful Granville boys.”

  Eden laughed so hard she had to sit down on the ground and hold her stomach.

  Now, even thinking about it, she chuckled. Two days after that, she’d been in town and had seen one of the Granville “boys.” He was ninety if he was a day, but he still stood up straight and still had a twinkle in his eye. When Eden stopped him to say hello, he asked after Mrs. Farrington, and Eden couldn’t keep a straight face. “Why don’t you visit her?” she asked, then a devil got into her. “Maybe you two could have lunch under the old willow tree down by the river.” That’s where Mrs. Farrington said that she’d made love with both boys, separately and together.

  Mr. Granville laughed so hard that Eden began to fear for his heart. “Ah, Alice,” he said. “Alice, Alice, Alice. What beautiful days those were. Give her my love,” he said, then walked away, his shoulders back and his head up.

  Yes, those days with Mrs. Farrington were good ones. The best days. The happiest of her life. And now Mrs. Farrington was gone and had left Eden that old house. She wondered if any of the boxes they’d buried were still there. Or had that son of hers taken them all? While it was true that Eden had had no direct contact with Mrs. Farrington after she left, she had kept in touch for a few years through Gracey. They’d exchanged a few letters, and Gracey had never asked why Eden left—in a small town everyone knew about everyone else, so they knew what the son was guilty of. Gracey had written Eden of the sale of pieces of furniture that had been in the Farrington family for centuries. One letter said Alester Farrington had gone to a Realtor and said the old house was for sale, but Mrs. Farrington went right down after him and said it wasn’t. She owned the house, of course, so it wasn’t put up for sale. For a while everyone in town feared for Mrs. Farrington’s life, but her lawyer spread the word around town that if “anything” happened to Mrs. Farrington, the house would go to charity.

  Eden had felt bad when she’d read those letters, but there was nothing she could do. She had Melissa to take care of, and she couldn’t take her child back into that mess, not with Mrs. Farrington’s son there. Eden was so afraid of him that she wouldn’t even send a letter to Mrs. Farrington for fear her son would get her address.

  Gracey died when Melissa was eleven, and after that Eden lost contact with the town. Over time she just assumed that dear Mrs. Farrington had died and that Alester had finally got his hands on the lovely old house. Yet, somehow, Mrs. Farrington had outlived him.

  Eden looked down at the letter. It was short, stating only that Mrs. Farrington’s son had died “a number of years ago” and had left no issue, so Mrs. Farrington was willing the house and contents
to Eden Palmer. When Eden saw that the letter was signed by Mr. Braddon Granville, esquire, she smiled. The grandson of one of the “beautiful Granville boys.”

  Of course Eden couldn’t possibly keep the house. Too much to maintain. Maybe she’d will it to a historical society so they could lead tours through it. Yes, that was a good idea. In the 1700s there had been hundreds of plantations along the river, but the houses had been pulled down, burned down, and bulldozed over the centuries. Now there were few houses like Farrington Manor left. It was, for the most part, an untouched house. Yes, there were two bathrooms in the house, and electricity too—but the paneling remained untouched from the time the house was built in 1720.

  Or was it? Eden thought. Was the house the same now as it was those many years ago? What had been done to that beautiful old house in the past twenty-two years? Maybe she’d ask for some time off from work and go to North Carolina to see the house. Just see it, then fly right back to New York so she’d be here when Melissa had her baby. Heaven knew that Stuart wouldn’t be any good in the delivery room. He’d leave Melissa by herself to sweat and cry and…

  “If I weren’t there, maybe he would go into the delivery room,” Eden whispered aloud. Maybe if she wasn’t there, always between the two of them, maybe they’d make themselves into a family. Maybe if Stuart had to support his wife and child he’d get the courage to go to his boss and ask for that promotion.

  Eden sat down hard on the chair by her bed. The problem with being a single mother to an only child was that your lives got entwined with each other’s in a very deep way. Right now, she couldn’t believe what was going through her head. Leave Melissa? They’d been separated only once, and that was when Melissa went to New York to be near Stuart. During that year there had been endless phone calls, and Eden had flown to the city three times. Every extra penny she’d earned had gone to the airlines. Eden’s attachment to Melissa was what had ultimately caused her breakup with Steve. “She’s a grown woman,” Steve had shouted. “Let her live her own life!” “She will always be my baby,” Eden had answered. She’d returned his ring the next week.