Inheritance

It was the day of her party. Serena curled onto her side like a girl. She remembered opening her eyes in the middle of the night to see the moon wavering—and a single persistent star, separated from its flock as if on purpose.

She patted for a tissue and bumped into a book on her bedside table. That stingy, high school–issued Flannery O'Connor she'd brought upstairs when she was picking up for the party. The glue was as dark as molasses and chipped like enamel so that the little volume was more a stack of Tarot cards than a paperback. The pages were the color of brown eggs, as if they'd freckle off on her. First thing you used to do, she thought, was hunt down the autograph of the previous Highland student to whom you were now indelibly lineaged, a name that might taint you or promote you or merely bring you closer to graduation.

The cover was carved in ballpoint where it had served as a hard surface for composing love notes. She could have taken a rubbing. That dread thing, Miss Scully, old maid of eleventh-grade English, balding, gray teeth precariously strung, turned and wrote the letters agmihtf on the blackboard. Like the days of the week on the plastic pillboxes that went skating across Serena's grandmother's kitchen counter. Grammalah had come up from the South when Serena started high school, setting up house in the same lovely suburb, pronouncing "Connecticut" with determined unfamiliarity till the very end, as if she were speaking Algonquian. Serena's family money was her money, although it would be years till she relinquished it. She held fast to her mannered drawl as well, and her outré wickedness. Everybody knew she was foundationally committed to her prejudices, but as Serena's mother said primly, you could still love her.

Serena could hear her own daughter, Bella's, full-throated, Could you? And if Serena could summon her wits after one of Bella's ambushes, she would accuse her daughter—gently!—of loving on condition.

Miss Scully's students were to put down on a clean sheet of binder paper what they thought the word "good" meant in the title of the story collection.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

Boys drummed their desks, girls tittered, except for those feminists who were practically writing in blood. Without a moment's hesitation Serena wrote on her loose-leaf: "Good for marriage."

Now she slid the relic into the drawer, where yesterday she'd stowed her grandmother's embroidered antimacassars. The skill and fancy in the intricate border of bluebells and violets, all the things that girls used to do, apparently. She'd re-drape them on the arms and necks of chairs and sofas after the party; they were prone to peel, hitch rides on people's sleeves and collars. William's death a decade ago—more—had made her a young, old-fashioned widow. Grammalah too, widowed before forty. Suddenly the morning sun, fresh out of a can, poured into her bedroom and everything—four-poster bed, long linen curtains, footed alarm clock, crumpled tissue—was lofted. Serena herself rose up for a moment—

But then the day landed, packed solid with duties. She had agreed months ago to host the benefit, aimed at a circuit of small-time multimillionaires, businessman burghers and prematurely paunchy sons of scions, heiresses who relished being pried like oysters, all of whom must be seduced, and pledged early, before they slipped out, selfish with alcohol and dinnered up with morsels.

The sun caught her eye, a decoy now in her full-length mirror. She looked with dismay at the orphaned outfits cast about her bedroom as if she were a teenager. Her face was smooth although she was almost fifty. The moon would have to be her sun, Grammalah used to say, fingering Serena's cheeks like Sea Island cotton, and indeed she had retained something of a moon-wax complexion, a maiden-like composure, and on more than one occasion she and Bella had been mistaken for sisters...