Joe Burke's Last Stand Part 25

"Yes, I suppose," she said. She straightened on the couch and pushed the question to the back of her mind to deal with later.

"He was lucky to have you for so many years," Joe said. This was easier for him to offer than for Brendan who had had every nuance and tension between his parents pressed on him since birth.

"Thank you, Joe. Now--we must talk about the will." She walked to a writing table that stood in a bow window and returned with checks in her hand. "The estate goes to me with the exception of ten thousand dollars to each of you and ten thousand to Kate." She gave Joe two checks and handed the other to Brendan. "This is coming out of the insurance which I'm supposed to get next week, so if you will hold these until the first of the month . . . " She smiled. "There's a stipulation. The money must be spent within one year on something that makes you feel good."

"That shouldn't be hard," Brendan said.

"Thank you," Joe said. "I really wasn't expecting . . . " The money in the family had always been Ann's, although his father's paintings had begun to sell in recent years.

"Additionally, Joe, you are to have this drawing of your mother." She pointed to a framed drawing that was propped up on the writing table.

"And first choice of any painting in the barn."

"That's very nice," Joe said.

"Your father always said you should have this drawing. It was one of his favorite pieces from the early years."

"I'll take it with me."

"How long are you going to be staying?" she asked.

"I thought I'd take off the day after tomorrow. I just wanted to see you and Brendan and . . . "

"I'll be here all week," Brendan said, "if anything needs doing."

"We're not going to have a ceremony. He didn't want one," Ann said. She looked down at the floor for a moment and then raised her head. "I'm going to bake something, if you boys will excuse me. Friends are going to start coming by; I want to have something to offer them."

"Chocolate chips?" asked Brendan. She left without answering and they finished their wine in silence.

"Might as well pick a painting," Joe said.

Brendan came with him to the barn. When they were inside, Brendan said, "The old goat!" Joe spotted his father's special stash of Laphroaig and reached for it.

"To the old goat," he said and took a healthy swallow. He pa.s.sed the bottle to Brendan. "You're all right, Brendan."

Brendan drank and cleared his throat. "Yowsir!"

Joe searched through paintings, mostly oils, and chose a small one, unframed, that had been done earlier that year--a spring scene of the woods at the edge of the field behind the barn. The leaves were just out, and his father had captured the delicate early green, chartreuse, that is gone in a week. The young leaves were modestly and unashamedly tender. There was nice work with interarching birches among the other trees and in the meeting of the woods and the field, but the light on the leaves was the main act.

"A good one," Brendan said.

"Not too big, easy to mail."

"I'll bet you could carry it on the plane, if you packed it," Brendan said. They rummaged around and found a shipping box just large enough for the painting and the drawing.

"Good idea," Joe said. "Now I even have the money to frame it. How are you doing these days, by the way?"

"Not bad. I'm teaching a course at a community college. Of course, the bay area is expensive. Wheeler's making the big bucks. It's a full time job just keeping him out of trouble, making sure he eats right, and so on." Brendan grinned. "I can't imagine what the house is going to be like when I get back. Wheeler hasn't put anything away since he was born. He just picks things up and carries them to different places."

"Creative chaos," Joe said.

"Great, until you need the garlic press."

"I'm with you," Joe said. "I hate looking for things. Wheeler is an excellent fellow, though." He pictured Wheeler, very tall, hawk nosed, wearing gla.s.ses, bent over an architectural drawing, the top of his head seeming to glow.

"Oh, I couldn't survive without him," Brendan said, taking another swallow of Laphroaig. "He was a hard man, our father. Maybe you didn't know, not having lived with him and all."

"I suppose so," Joe said. "Did he give you a hard time when you, umm, came out?"

"No," Brendan said, "he was fine about that. 'Whatever works,' he said.

It was the art thing--that any other way of life was less worthy.

Helping in the community, working with people, he couldn't see that as important. It wouldn't have been, for him, I guess." Brendan shrugged.

"I can draw, you know. But I never got off on it." Joe reached out and patted him on the back, not knowing what to say.

They went into the house, and Joe packed the drawing with the oil painting. He put the box on the back seat of the rental car and stopped to pick a few strawberries from the patch of everbearing plants by the end of the barn.

"I love those strawberry plants," he said to Ann in the kitchen.

"October and they're still working."

"Your father loved them, too."

Joe prowled around the bookshelves and found an Arthur W. Upfield mystery that he hadn't read. "Great stuff," he said later, as they ate a light dinner of soup and salad. "Off to yet another corner of Australia while Napoleon Bonaparte gets his man."

"The keen senses of the aboriginal combined with the rational faculties of the white man," Brendan said.

_Death of a Lake_ is the one I remember," Ann said. "Year after year, the lake shrinking, the birds, the fish . . . " She shuddered.

"More wine, mother?"

"Yes, a little."

The next day pa.s.sed quietly. Brendan split and Joe stacked a large pile of firewood. Ann went shopping. They took naps. Brendan and Joe went out for dinner to the "Fisherman's Friend."

"Now that's a haddock plate!" Joe said.

"Finest kind," Brendan agreed. "La Nouvelle Cuisine has not reached Stonington." They had coffee and mammoth pieces of pie.

"Ann seems to be taking it pretty well," Joe said.

"She's a trooper," Brendan said. "What was your mother like? You know, I grew up with that drawing. Whenever I saw you, I always felt the similarity."

Joe leaned back in his chair, surprised. "Well, she wasn't a trooper.

She was talented, I guess."

"Do you think of her often?"

"Hardly ever--not very good memories."

"Like?"