S Is for Silence

up there. Daisy took me by yesterday afternoon so I could see. Too bad about the fire.”
    “We’re lucky they caught it when they did or the house would be gone. We’ve got a deputy patrolling now to keep the riffraff out. My brother hates the place.”
    “Daisy says you hope to buy him out.”
    “If I can get him to agree. He’s being his usual bullheaded self, but I think he’ll knuckle under in the end. His wife’s on my team. She’s got no interest in being saddled with a house like that. I love it, but talk about a white elephant.”
    “The land must be worth a fortune.”
    “You ought to see our tax bill. The tricky thing is there’s a move afoot to rezone. The rumor around town is that the old packing plant has been sold and the buildings will be demolished. That property butts right up against ours, so I’ve had developers wooing me all year, trying to get the jump on it before word leaks out. I’d love to hang on, but we’d net ourselves a bundle if we sell out to them.” She reached under the bar and pulled out a roll of paper, secured with a rubber band. “You want to see what they have in mind?”
    I took off the rubber band and opened the large furl of heavyweight paper. What I was looking at was a watercolor mockup, showing the grand entrance to a walled community called the Tanner Estates. There were two big stone pillars leading into the development, with lush lawns on both sides of a winding drive. A few rooftops were visible in the distance, the houses widely spaced and nestled among mature trees. To the left, Tannie’s house was beautifully rendered, restored to its original state, thanks to the artist’s skill. “Geez, what I saw this afternoon didn’t look anything like this. Where are all the big nasty oil tanks and barbed-wire fences?”
    “I guess if you have bucks enough, you can make it look any way you please. I can’t believe the county will approve the plans, but Steve says that’s all the more reason to sell while we can.”
    “That makes no sense. If the rezoning’s approved, the value of the land would go up, which is reason to hang on.”
    “Try telling that to him. He wants out from under.”
    I released the edges of the paper and it rolled itself up of its own accord. “Was that where you grew up?”
    Tannie shook her head. “It belonged to my grandparents, Hairl and Mary Clare. Mom and Steve and I lived there while Pop was away at war. When he joined the army in 1942, my mother moved back into the house. She didn’t have job skills to speak of and Pop couldn’t support us on his military pay.”
    “Did you say your grandfather’s name was ‘Hairl’?”
    She smiled. “His name should have been Harold, but my great-grandmother couldn’t spell so that’s what she wrote on his birth certificate. My mother was named for both her parents—Hairl and Mary Clare—so she became ‘Mary Hairl.’ Thank god the linking names stopped there or no telling what I would have been called.”
    “Where’d ‘Tannie’ come from?”
    “It’s actually ‘Tanner’—my mother’s maiden name.”
    “I like it. It suits you.”
    “Thanks. I’m fond of it myself. Anyway, Hairl and Mary Clare lived in the house from 1912, when it was built, until 1948, when she had a stroke and went into a nursing home. Granddaddy bought a duplex in Santa Maria to be close to her.”
    “You guys stayed in the house?”
    “My mother couldn’t manage on her own so we moved into the other side of his duplex. That way, she could make sure he was taking care of himself. He ate all his meals with us.”
    “Big change for you.”
    “And a tough one, too. I missed living in the country. I didn’t have any friends, but I was free to roam. We had dogs and barn cats. It was idyllic from my perspective, but as she pointed out, the new place was closer to town, which meant I could walk or ride my bike to school. I finally got used to the idea. Once Pop came out of the army, he went through a series of jobs, the last of them at Union Sugar. He’d always loved farming—not that he ever made a dime—but after the war his heart wasn’t in it and he couldn’t handle the work. Mom would have pitched in if we’d had the chance to move back. Even after my grandmother died, I held on to that hope, though I can see now the chances were getting dimmer with every passing year. Granddaddy would have left the house to my mother, but she died before he did.”
    “How old was