June (13 page)

“So how’s that fiancé?” Jack asked June, motioning to the collection of booze set out on a card table at the foot of someone’s driveway. June shook her head in a polite no. He opened her a Coke. They were in the middle of the road, surrounded by the crew and their guests. Everyone seemed to be moving together, amoeba-like, in the way of such events, which inevitably take on their own heartbeat and disappointments, although the night hadn’t gotten to that yet.

To Lindie, Jack said, “Rabbit Legs, I can’t, in good conscience, offer you any of this poison. But a Coke?” He pulled another one from the galvanized bucket. Together, they watched June’s lower lip curl under the rim of the sweating bottle she held. The cold, wet sugar left a vibrant shimmer on Lindie’s tongue. She felt giddy and sick at the sight of Jack’s eyes on June, his face an ache of hopeful hunger.

“Let’s not talk about my fiancé,” June said playfully. The cacophony of the party had changed: “Ain’t That a Shame” mingled with the sultry howl of a jazz trumpet, now layered atop Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer incongruously declaring it was cold outside. Each piece of music played out a front door of one of the pillbox houses that continued to the end of the road, where civilization once again met country. Lindie admired Clyde’s wherewithal to secure these tenants; she wondered if the studio was paying him, or if he supposed he could just tell potential buyers that Jack Montgomery had slept in their master bedroom and that would be enough to make up the difference.

Suzie, the makeup girl, waved to Lindie as she led a young man down the road. Only a few feet away, a grip, Andy Number One, was dancing very close to Luella Caywood, the pretty girl who worked the soda fountain at Schillinger’s Drug. Andy’s face was at Luella’s neck, and her arms were flung around him. He rocked against her in a way Lindie hadn’t quite gotten up the nerve to conjure, even in the privacy of her bedroom.

“These are your friends?” June asked flippantly. Lindie couldn’t tell which of them she was addressing. June sounded so nonchalant, and yet neither of them had ever seen anything like this before.

“My colleagues,” Jack replied.

“Lindie!”

She turned to find Ricky standing behind her, drink in hand. Beside him was another man, Sam, whom she recognized from Crafty. She turned back to introduce them to Jack and June, only to find that Jack and June were walking toward the house Jack had apparently claimed as his own. Lindie wondered for a shocked minute if they planned to go inside, but they stopped at the lip of the small concrete porch, each leaning against one of the columns that held up the tiny pediment above the entryway.

“That your friend?” Ricky asked, whistling.

Lindie shrugged.

“Lucky girl,” Sam said, eyeing Jack.

“I wouldn’t be so sure.” Ricky was frowning. He leaned closer toward Lindie. “Jack got mighty cozy with Diane DeSoto back in Los Angeles. I don’t think DeSoto likes competition.”

Lindie cracked up at the thought that June (even her beloved June) could be considered the rival for a goddess who graced movie magazines. “They’re just talking,” she said.

Ricky held up his hands and backed away. Then he clapped Sam on the shoulder and bid Lindie good-bye. Her eyes followed them as they headed back into the party. Why did it make her so lonely to notice that simple touch on the shoulder, the way Sam smiled at it, the way Ricky’s hand lingered there? Sam’s eyes danced over Ricky’s face, and Lindie felt a surge of hope, crushed, quickly, by the truth of how impossible, unimaginable, her unbridled mind could be.

She turned from them then, forcing herself to look elsewhere. Lindie made her way up the small concrete walkway toward Jack and June until she found herself between them, below them, knees scrunched up under her chin, a kid sister. She listened and let them forget her.

It was chitchat at first, the kind of small talk people have when they find themselves side by side in a railway car. He did a good job of leveling the playing field, speaking, at first, of himself as a regular Joe—how much he liked the burger down at Illy’s, how, when he’d been a little boy in Arkansas, he’d loved to catch fireflies on nights like this—did they have fireflies here in St. Jude? Then he told her about his little girl, Esmerelda, who was four years old, and the girl’s mother, Conchita, whom he’d met in Las Vegas but was now living in Houston, remarried to a man who owned a car dealership. “She didn’t love me, not the way I was made, but I don’t regret marrying her, not for a minute. I love our little girl. Best thing that ever happened to me.” The way he described it, divorce sounded not only normal but appealing. Lindie smiled, thinking of how horrified Cheryl Ann—and most of the adults in St. Jude, save Eben—would be to hear Jack talk like that.

When Jack asked June about herself, she skipped Artie altogether, quickly turning to her father’s death in a way that surprised and wounded Lindie; she’d believed herself to be the only person in which June would ever confide such matters.

“I miss him every day. I try to do right by him. I’d like to believe he’d be proud of me.”

“I bet up there in heaven he counts himself a lucky man,” Jack said. “To have a smart, beautiful daughter who honors him still—that’s a father’s dream.”

Up and down the road, crew members were kicking back on their front porches. Some were even necking, Lindie realized. She wanted, suddenly, to get away from whatever was blooming between Jack and June, but she also knew she couldn’t bear to miss it.

“Oh, we had the best times.” June’s voice warmed. “He loved to paint. He got me a little box of watercolors for my fifth birthday. We used to hike out to Lake St. Jude and spend hours just putting the world on paper.”

“Do you still paint?”

Lindie could almost hear June blushing in the darkness. “I try.”

“I’ll bet you more than try.”

“I’m not much good.”

“Hogwash!”

June laughed her delicate laugh, lacy and modest. “I only have my bedroom to paint in now, since Mumma won’t let me roam free anymore. I just keep painting the same five things over and over. They’re wretched.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute.” This guy was good.

June remembered Lindie then, and nudged her with her foot. “Tell him.”

Then both sets of eyes were upon Lindie, as though she was suddenly the most important person in the world. But she didn’t know how to answer, whether to insult or lie, so she shrugged, and then they forgot her again.

“Do you have a favorite painter?”

“Papa did. He loved Jackson Pollock. Do you know his work? Papa came home from a trip to Columbus with a
Life
magazine tucked under his arm. I sat with him and he showed me how the man painted. All these photographs of this funny little bald man with these giant canvases covered in lines, splatters, like he’d just let the paint find its own way over the canvas. Really, we’d never seen anything like it—” June had been talking louder and louder, but she pulled her words back suddenly. In their place, her fingers wove and unplaited themselves.

Jack was quiet then too. Lindie looked up at him, wondering if something had distracted him from the conversation. But it was just the opposite: he was looking at June intently, and June, in turn, was gazing back. Jack’s voice returned, low and melodic across the warm night: “I’d never given much thought to Jackson Pollock, June. But I’ll tell you, you make me want to go out and buy a Jackson Pollock painting tomorrow.”

“Well, you can’t,” she said, starting to giggle. “They’re absurdly expensive, and enormous too, you’d need a giant house and bank account to match…” Her voice faded as she realized he had both.

“Do you still have that magazine? I’d love to—”

Jack’s voice cut off as a honking car, flashing its headlamps, dispersed the crowd on the road. There was laughter and some cursing, and the dance floor remade itself twenty feet down as the car pulled up in front of Jack’s. Jack stood upright and frowned. Lindie recognized the car at once: it was Uncle Clyde’s, the forest green four-door Oldsmobile he’d replaced with the Bel Air.

June, too, was now standing at attention and watching for who would emerge from her fiancé’s brother’s car. Lindie had half a mind right then to pull June into the bushes, to squirrel her out through the hedge and around into the backyard. But Uncle Clyde would understand they’d come for the adventure, and, anyway, were they committing any sins? Like Jack had said, a girl could come to a party.

Thomas, Apatha’s nephew, popped out from the driver’s side. He was dressed in a suit. He jogged around to the passenger door at the curb, opening it to reveal the leg of a lady—heeled, stockinged, and delicate in the ankle. A gloved hand emerged next, and Thomas supported it as the woman attached stepped out onto the newly poured sidewalk. It took Lindie a moment to recognize her; the woman was wrapped in a stole. But then she smiled as though Jack and June and Lindie had all been waiting for her to arrive, and a wave of starstruck reverie overtook Lindie: Diane DeSoto had leapt off the page of a magazine and into Lindie’s hometown.

The famous woman wore a black suit. Though the night was dark, it was clear she was ten times more well arranged than any other woman in St. Jude, and probably in Ohio. Her legs went on for miles, her waist spanned mere inches, and her hair was a blond, elegant shock in the moonlight. Once on her feet, she let go of Thomas’s hand, and he rushed to the trunk to unload suitcases and hatboxes as Clyde Danvers emerged from the other side of the car, rushing to offer his arm to the movie star. She wore him like he was a foregone conclusion. Clyde and Diane strode toward Jack’s house, Diane with a tight smile, Clyde with a broad and knowing grin, as though he’d caught Jack, June, and Lindie with their hands in the cookie jar.

“Throwing a bit of a party, I see.” Clyde chuckled when he was halfway up the lawn. To Lindie, he said, “I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised to see you here. But you”—he meant June—and then he whistled. Lindie caught a flash of the silver pistol that was always holstered at his side, and her stomach did a flip she couldn’t explain.

Jack stepped off the concrete porch toward Diane, who smiled icily as she passed herself into his arms. She put one gloved hand onto Jack’s broad chest and pecked his cheek. “Surprise, darling.”

Clyde took Jack’s hand and shook it as though they went back decades. “I’m your biggest fan, champ,” he declared. He was a broad man, one of the handsomest there was in St. Jude—his square jaw and faint limp a reminder of the war hero he’d once been. But, seeing him there beside Diane DeSoto and Jack Montgomery, Lindie thought him ugly for the first time in her life. She felt as though she was looking at one of those fun-house mirrors she’d seen at the Parish Festival the summer before; the whole world was askew.

“Miss DeSoto was able to fly in early,” Clyde, still shaking Jack’s hand, explained on Diane’s behalf. “But seeing’s how we’ve got no telephone lines out here yet, there was no way to let you all know. So I had good old Thomas drive down to pick her up in Columbus, and then they swung by to get me so I could be sure to bring her out myself.”

Diane turned to Thomas and said, “Thank you.”

Thomas nodded, but he was clearly as starstruck as Lindie. He busied himself with the woman’s things. Lindie wondered how he’d landed the job as driver, and, if it was Apatha, why she was helping him these days, and not her.

Clyde’s eyes were back on June. “So what are you doing all the way out here, girlie?” What was it about his tone that set Lindie so on edge? This was her uncle Clyde, the man who’d taught her how to ride a bike. She forced herself to smile at him.

“Lindie’s been working on the movie,” June blurted, taking Lindie’s hand. “She brought me out to meet some of her friends, and then Mr. Montgomery was kind enough to get us Coca-Colas.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell Mumma.” Clyde winked. To Lindie, he said, “Or grumpy old Pops, for that matter.” His grin spread wide as he turned toward Jack. “Important to celebrate. Course, we did have an agreement to keep the local girls out of it.” He cleared his throat. “But I suppose the ones already claimed aren’t doing any harm.” He rubbed his hands together. “Can’t wait to see Miss Watters here make an honest man out of my kid brother, Artie.”