Ginny climbed the porch steps behind me. “Nancy, this is Megan, Mrs. Barnes’s granddaughter.”
Nancy’s response was to turn her back and retreat into the house. I glanced questioningly at my mother’s friend.
“Nancy comes in three times a week to cook and clean for your grandmother,” Ginny informed me in a low voice.
“Is she always this friendly?”
“ ’Fraid so.”
Without stepping inside, I peered down the long, unlit center hall. Nancy stopped at a door near the foot of the stairway, knocked, then entered. When she returned to us, she spoke to Ginny. “Mrs. Barnes wants to know how much she owes you for bringing the girl and whether you’d accept a check.”
A look of surprise flickered across Ginny’s face. “Please tell her it was my pleasure.”
“Thanks for picking me up, Ginny,” I said, slightly embarrassed.
“Sure thing. You know where to find me.” She squeezed my hand and left.
Score one for Grandma, I thought as I lugged my bags inside the house: I hadn’t even met her and already she’d made me feel like an inconvenience.
Nancy, having emerged a second time from the room by the stairs, fixed me with her eyes, then pointed a thumb over her shoulder. I figured it was a signal for me to go in. There was no chance to ask, since the housekeeper exited quickly through a door at the back of the hall.
I stood by the front door, considering my options. What would happen if I simply waited here? Who would give in first, me or Helen Scarborough Barnes?
I decided to take my time studying the center hall, which ran from the front door of the house to a smaller door under the main stairs, its wide plank floor covered with islands of rugs. I had never been in a hall large enough to contain sofas, side chairs, and tables. Heavy wood doors led into four rooms, two on each side. The broad staircase rose toward the back of the house, turned and climbed several steps against the back wall, then disappeared as it turned again toward the front. A grandfather clock ticked on the stairway landing: 4:25.
“Megan.”
The voice was low and firm, used to being obeyed. I took a deep breath and walked down the hall, stopping inside the frame of the door. The room was a library, its dark walls lined with shelves of books. It smelled of leather and old fireplace ashes. I liked it immediately; I wish I could say the same for the white-haired woman who sat stiff-backed behind a desk.
She rose slowly, surprising me with her height. I was three inches taller than my mother, and so was she. Helen Scarborough Barnes observed me so closely I felt as if she were counting the threads in my clothes, adding up them and everything else she saw to see if I passed. Fine. I could study her, too, and decide whether she passed as a grandmother.
She had pale skin and high cheekbones. Her hair, pulled back in a French twist, and tiny drop earrings gave her a kind of elegance despite the fact she was wearing slacks. I met her light blue eyes as steadily as I could.
“You may sit down,” she said.
“I’d like to stand, if you don’t mind. I’ve been sitting all day.”
There was a slight pause, then she nodded and seated herself. “Just don’t pace.”
I felt an incredible urge to pace but kept it in check.
“How is your mother doing?” she asked.
“Good-well,” I corrected my grammar. “Did you know she finished her master’s degree? Last month she started a new job. She’s at the same school, but as a reading specialist.
She loves the kids. She’s terrific with them.”
I knew I was chattering.
“And your brothers?”
“They’re great. Pete, who’s twelve, is into music. Dave’s ten and lives for sports.”
“And your trip here?”
“My father’s doing great, too,” I said, though she hadn’t asked about him. “He was honored by the Sonoran Desert Museum for his work with mammals.”
“Please answer only the questions I ask,” Grandmother told me.
“Just filling in the details,” I responded cheerfully, though we both knew otherwise. I wasn’t about to let Dad be cut out of the family.
“How was your trip here?”
“Fine.”
She waited a moment, perhaps to see if I’d fill in the details. I didn’t.
“I had expected you to come here in the summer, Megan.”
“As Mom explained to you, I go to a year-round school and had already committed myself to working at a camp for my three-week summer break. October was the next free time.”
“What is your parentage?”
The sudden question took me aback. I stared at her for a long moment. “My mother is Carolyn Barnes, my father, Kent Tilby,” I said, as if that were news.
“You know what I mean, girl.”
I pressed my lips together.
“Your coloring is. . unusual,” she observed.
I decided not to reply. I have straight black hair, which I keep shoulder length, gray eyes, and skin that refuses to tan. In the bronze land of Arizona, I stand out like a white mushroom, but I didn’t think that was the point of her comment.
Correctly deducing that she wasn’t going to get any information about my birth parents, Helen Barnes rose from her chair. “1 will show you your room.”
I followed her into the hall, fuming. I don’t know what I had hoped for from her. An effort to get to know me, a conversation that lasted longer than three minutes and revealed some interest in me, other than genetic? Some shyness or awkwardness that told me that she, too, had intense feelings about this first meeting? There was no such sign. Her eyes could have iced over the Gulf of Mexico.
“You will see the downstairs first,” she said.
I nodded. Apparently, “Would you like to?” wasn’t part of her vocabulary.
She showed me the three other rooms that opened off the center hall. Like the library, each had a high ceiling and corner fireplace, but their walls were painted in bolder colors: peacock blue in the front parlor, bright mustard in the music room. The dining room, which was at the back of the main house and across the hall from the library, was blood red. All of the rooms had paintings with heavy gilt frames; the theme in the gory-colored dining room was animals and hunting. I hoped we ate in the kitchen.
“When was this house built?” I asked, abruptly turning away from an impaled deer.
“In 1720,” my grandmother answered, “by a family named Winchester.”