The Mulberry Tree

“I—” I began, intending to make a sarcastic remark, but then I glanced into the mirror over the big dresser across from the bed in the guest room in Phillip’s house. I had, of course, noticed that I’d lost some weight. Not eating for weeks on end will do that. But I hadn’t noticed how much I’d lost. My chins were gone. I had cheekbones.

I looked back at Phillip. “Amazing, isn’t it? All those diet programs that Jimmie paid for for me, and all he had to do was die and bingo! I’m finally slim.”

Phillip frowned again. “Lillian, I’ve waited until now to talk to you. I’ve tried to give you some time to come to terms with James’s death and his will.”

He started on another lecture about my stupidity in not telling either him or Jimmie that I’d been seventeen when we married. “He would have given you a huge wedding. He would have loved doing that for you,” Phillip had said the day after he found out. “It would have been so much better than the elopement you had the first time.”

But I’d heard that lecture before and didn’t want to hear it again, so I cut him off. “You want me to disappear?”

“Actually, it was Carol’s idea. She said that as things stand now, the rest of your life is going to be one long press interview. People are going to hound you forever to tell them about your life with Jimmie. Unless—”

“Unless what?” I asked.

Phillip’s thin face lit up, and for a moment I saw the “little fox” that Jimmie had always said the man was. “Do you remember when I told you that I’d tried to talk James out of writing his will as he did?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “I did persuade him not to put the farmhouse in the will. I said that if he was so afraid of what his sister would do, then she’d probably try to take the farm too. At that time I hadn’t seen the place, and I thought it was—”

“Was what?” I asked.

“Valuable,” he said softly, looking down at the floor for a moment, then back up at me. “Look, Lillian, I know the farmhouse isn’t much, but it must have meant something to James, or he wouldn’t have kept it all these years.”

“Why did he buy it in the first place?”

“That’s just it, he didn’t buy it. I think he’s always owned it.”

“People have to buy things,” I said, confused. “People just don’t give real estate away, at least not while they’re alive.” It was then that understanding began to hit me. “You mean you think that Jimmie might have inherited this farm?”

For the first time, I felt some interest spark inside me. All three of them, Atlanta, Ray, and Jimmie, were maddeningly secretive about their childhood. When questioned, Ray evaded and changed the subject. Atlanta and Jimmie out-and-out lied. They would say they were born in South Dakota one day, and in Louisiana the next. I knew for a fact that Jimmie had given me four different names for his mother. I’d even secretly read all six of the biographies that had been written about him, but the authors had had no better luck than I had in finding out anything about the first sixteen years of James Manville’s life.

“I don’t know for sure,?

? Phillip said, “but I do know that James didn’t buy the place since I’ve known him.”

At that statement, all I could do was blink. Jimmie and Phillip had been together from the beginning.

“When I said that Atlanta and Ray might try to take the farm away from you, all I can tell you is that James turned white, as though he were afraid of something.”

“Jimmie afraid?” I said, unable to grasp that concept.

“He said, ‘You’re right, Phil, so I’m going to give the place to you, then when the time comes, I want you to sign it over to Lil. And I want you to give her this from me.’ ”

That was when Phillip handed me the note written by Jimmie. It was in a sealed envelope, so Phillip hadn’t read it. He’d kept it and the deed to the farm in Virginia in his home safe, awaiting the day when he’d turn them both over to me.

After I read the note, I folded it and put it back into the envelope. I didn’t cry; I’d cried so much over the last six weeks that I didn’t seem to have any more liquid inside me. I reached for the deed to the farm, but Phillip pulled it back.

“If I make this out to Lillian Manville, then register the property transfer, within twenty-four hours, you’ll have reporters—and lawyers—on your doorstep. But—” he said, drawing out what he wanted to say as though I were a child he was enticing to be good.

I didn’t take the bait, but just stared at him.

“All right,” he said at last. “What Carol and I thought was that maybe you should change your identity. You’ve lost so much weight that you don’t look like James Manville’s fat little wife anymore.”

That remark made me narrow my eyes at him. I did not want to hear what he and the rest of Jimmie’s staff had sniggered behind his back. I guess I’d not spent all those years near Jimmie for nothing, because I could see Phillip beginning to wither under my gaze.

“All right,” he said again, then let out his pent-up breath. “It’s up to you, but I’ve already done a lot of the work, such as get you new documents of identification. I needed to use James’s connections while they still remembered him. Sorry to be so blunt, but people forget fast. Now, it’s up to you to accept it.”

He handed me a passport, and I opened it. There was no photo inside, but there was a name. “Bailey James,” I read aloud, then looked up at Phillip.

“It was Carol’s idea. She took your maiden name and James’s first name and— You don’t like it.”

The problem was that I did like the idea. A new name; maybe a new life.