Planted Seedling: Day 14

Word Count: 84,035

Summary of Events:

After watching the riotously funny Christmas Eve play Brandt invited Lark over for Christmas Day and ended up having an unfriendly encounter with Lark's maternal grandfather. Lark went over to the Remingtons' and spent a few rather tortured minutes in Brandt's messy bedroom — due to its condition — while Brandt freshened up before being ordered to leave by Mr. Remington when Brandt went to introduce her to the family. Brandt tried to goad an answer out of his dad, but was frustrated in all of his efforts and gave up when part of his Christmas gift was threatened. Lark's dad came home from working in the wood shop at his parents' place and told her what had caused the Szekely–Remington rift: Mr. Remington and Lark's mother had engaged in an affair . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

""We lived that way for a year, Manley making no move to marry her, despite their cohabitation," he said, regaining his voice somewhat. "Then, in her usual hurry, being as she wasn't very good at being on time, usually because she didn't leave soon enough, she pulled out to pass someone without checking and was absolutely obliterated by a semi."

A thought struck Lark, but she didn't voice it. The few times she'd visited her mother's grave she'd noticed that it said Harriette Kemsley. She'd never really thought of it as a clue to what had happened, but it'd been sitting in front of her all this time.

"After her death I was called to her lawyer's office," he continued, his composure regained. "Her lawyer asked me if Manley had contacted me, as she'd left a piece of land to you girls. A quarter. I said I hadn't been contacted, but I would contact Manley."

Lark shifted her jaw.

"I went to Manley and told him that she'd left a piece of land to you girls," he went on, his voice shaking again. "He told me they'd bought it together, but refused to show me the deed for the piece in particular — which I had the legal land description of. I told him her daughters needed something and tried to get him to show me the deed, but he refused to and nothing I could do would convince him."

Thinking of Mr. Remington's imposing figure, Lark could see how he wouldn't easily be moved.

"Finally he said he would liquidate her assets that he had — which had any monetary value — and in the end I got about a thousand dollars, being as her car had been totalled and thus was unable to be sold," he said. "The piece of land was worth over a quarter of a million dollars. I put the thousand dollars into a savings account, to which I added a percentage of my own pay and that's where the money from Phoebe's wedding came from, and you and Wren will both be allowed to get as much as she did for your weddings, the remainder will be divvied among you three either when I retire, or when everything else gets divided up when I die."

Lark didn't want to think about her dad being dead, and she didn't have to long, as other thoughts quickly overwhelmed it.

First there was the rather reviling thought that she'd met the man who'd destroyed her parents' marriage, and the somewhat heartbreaking thought that she was friends — to say the least — with his son, and the even more heartbreaking thought that her mother would've abandoned her father, much less her and her sisters, for another man.

Being a person who wanted to think the best of everyone, and had always thought her mother had been a good and nice person who'd died in an unfortunate accident, Lark felt shattered that her mother would've been so selfish."