PART 5 — THE FENCE
There is a fence round it now.
Iron, square section, made by a man in Halverstead who does gates, paid for by a fund that Beulah Sankey’s church started and that got to eleven thousand dollars in about four months once the county paper ran it.
They found nine of the eleven markers. Three of them were whole. The rest are pieces and two of the pieces came out of the fill under that pool deck.
There is a low granite panel now with all eleven names on it, because Beulah Sankey has had all eleven names in a family bible since 1891 and has never once needed anybody to find them for her.
She has a key to a gate on a property she does not own, which is what an access easement is, and which she used for the first time in the April of last year at the age of eighty-one, and there is a photograph of that in the county paper that I have on my fridge.
Dash and Sloane sold and went. The house was on the market for fourteen months and went for about a hundred and eighty thousand under what they paid, and the family who bought it knew everything and bought it anyway, and they have been, by Beulah’s account, absolutely lovely about the gate.
My father has not been back to Pomeroy Lane. He has been invited twice and has not gone, and when I asked him why he said, “It’s not mine, love.”
He is fifty-eight and he still has one truck.
My husband employs your daughter. Think very carefully about how hard you want to push this.
She said that on a terrace, in front of thirty people with drinks in their hands, to a man in work trousers who had just spent nine days making her water clear for that party.
Thirty people heard it. Not one of them said anything, including a woman from the office who sat four desks from me.
And my father looked at that pool and smiled, and I thought he was giving in.
He was not being clever and he was not enjoying himself. I asked him later what he had actually been thinking in those five seconds and he told me, and it was not a good line.
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