The cranberry-walnut tart and cookies she’s bought at the farmers’ market, for instance, have a devious purpose: Hollis and Hank have been invited to tea, and March, although she’s no Judith Dale and wouldn’t dream of baking anything herself, still wants to impress her guests. She wants it to be possible for them to all sit down in the same room and, if nothing more, be civil to one another.
“Don’t have them over,” Gwen said when March approached her with the idea earlier in the day. “Hank’s none of your business, even if we do come from the same family.”
“There’s no reason to do this,” Hollis told March when she went ahead and invited them over for tea. “They’re kids. It doesn’t matter if we accept them—they’re going to do what they want—and I don’t give a damn if they accept us.”
Hollis isn’t pleased with the effects of Hank’s infatuation. Hank is even more dreamy and thoughtless than usual. He knocks over cups of coffee and steps on his own feet; he comes into the kitchen in the morning looking so rumpled and confused you’d think he was sleeping in a bale of hay. That little girl of March’s has him all caught up, and it’s truly pathetic to see.
“Idiot,” Hollis tells him, when Hank is late for school or when he’s forgotten his chores. “Take a good look at yourself.”
Hollis cannot understand how a person could give up so much control. He couldn’t do it; it’s simply not in his nature. The idea of being told what to do, or how to feel, turns him inside out. After all these years, the greatest pleasure he has ever known was paying off his debt to Alan Murray. Hollis still keeps the itemized bill of all that he owed the Murrays in his wallet, folded neatly into quarters. This is the invoice he was presented with on the day of Henry Murray’s funeral, and it charged for every day Hollis had lived with the family; the estimated cost of all meals had been tallied, along with books and clothing, even toothpaste. Each day he continued to live at Fox Hill raised Hollis’s debt, until it seemed he would never pay it off, and yet, he did.
All he had planned to do when he went away was earn enough to take March out of there, but the situation got complicated, as it always does when fast money is offered to someone who’s insatiable. The plan changed daily, in terms of exactly how much he would need. First it was enough for an apartment in another town, then in Boston; then it was a house he needed to present to her, a house bigger than the one where she grew up. Finally, it was the land they had surveyed on that day when they hid behind the stone wall. Nothing less would do.
Hollis didn’t even realize how much time had passed until he came back to town: The boys he’d gone to school with were men now, with wives and families. The linden trees planted around the town square the year he left, thin seedlings that needed to be propped up with posts, had become tall enough to cast shadows that covered the square entirely. If he had been able to buy the land surrounding Olive Tree Lake, he would now be the largest landowner in three counties. If anyone thinks this is meaningless, then he’s never had a banker call him sir; he’s never had one of the residents of town, who once helped tie a defenseless boy to a tree and leave him in the woods at dark, politely wish him a good day and move aside, quickly, to let his old hostage pass by.
Today, when he knocks on the door at Fox Hill—a silly formality, seeing that he owns the place—Hollis has nearly everything he’s ever wanted, but he’s in a foul mood anyway.
“Go ahead,” he tells Hank when March comes to the door. “Go in.”
Hank has dressed in his best clothes for the occasion, and he formally shakes March’s hand.
“You look so much like Alan,” March says.
Hank looks at her, confused, uncertain as to whether she’s greeted him with a compliment or a curse.
“He had your color hair,” March explains, suddenly nervous in the boy’s presence. “But you’re much taller,” she adds when she sees the worried look on Hank’s face.
“Oh.” Hank nods, grateful to March for granting him that dissimilar feature.
“What is this supposed to be?” Hollis asks.
Sister is standing guard in the hallway, emitting a low, throaty growl.
“It’s a West Highland terrier,” March says. “Judith’s.”
“Are you telling me it’s a dog?” Hollis says.
March laughs. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Well, then I have to believe it. Seeing how it comes from you.” He moves toward March, and the dog growls again. “What are you looking at?” Hollis asks the terrier, who is watching him warily and snarls when spoken to.