June (26 page)

Cassie obliged, because of course she couldn’t resist capturing this golden goddess on film, at her most vulnerable, broken on a bed, tearstained and messy. She got her camera. Back behind Tate’s closed door, she shot off a whole roll, easy. Then Tate thanked her in her imperial way and Cassie knew she was done. Out Tate’s window, the clouds closed over the moon.

Tate’s chin dipped, so she was looking up at Cassie with those liquid eyes. “You really mean I can stay?”

Cassie nodded. “Even after we do the DNA test. Whatever it shows.”

Tate put her hand over her heart, like a prima ballerina moved by a standing ovation. “Thank you.”

Cassie wanted to hug her but the urge felt a touch needy, and Tate wasn’t making any move toward it, so she just said, “Good night,” and made her way for the door.

“One more favor?” Tate asked, as Cassie’s hand alighted on the doorknob.

“Sure.”

“Try not to distract Nick?” Cassie made every effort not to betray emotion at the mention of his name. “I need him focused right now. I’m the one paying him. I know it’s purely physical for you guys—he’s made that clear to me—so if that’s all you want, awesome; sex can really center a man. Just don’t get too attached.” Tate shrugged and offered an adorable smile. “Keep it up as long as it’s fun!”

Cassie’s limbs had grown numb, her mouth like cotton. Nick had told Tate their attraction was purely physical? And clearly that wasn’t all he’d told her; he was sharing all sorts of intimate details. She felt betrayed, undone, but all she could muster was a chipper “Of course.”

“Thanks, sweetie. I love how honest we can be with each other.”

“Yeah,” Cassie said, opening the door, “me too.”

“And let me know how I can repay the favor,” Tate said, her voice carrying out into the hallway. “Elda’s such a bitch sometimes, and I know Hank’s impossible. This is your home. If you want them gone, just say the word.”

“No,” Cassie said automatically, turning back to glimpse Tate on her grandmother’s bed. “No, of course they should stay.” She closed the door and listened for signs of life, but the rest of the house had bedded down.

Cassie bumped into Hank in the hallway the next morning, or maybe it wasn’t an accident after all. Hank was superperky, of course, and dressed like Fitness Barbie, and she just wanted to go over a list of improvements for Two Oaks.

“Improvements?” Cassie croaked.

“The plumbing, the oven, the ant infestation in the dining room.” Her nose wrinkled. “And Nick said the roof needs repair.”

Cassie felt a wave of exasperation. She’d hardly slept, going over and over her conversation with Tate the night before; she really didn’t have much patience for Hank’s OCD. She held out her hand for the list, which was sixteen items long. Hank had cross-referenced it, with multiple price quotes from different service providers. The damn thing was color-coded.

“I can take care of this,” Cassie mumbled. It was too early in the morning to do anything but lie.

“Oh.” Hank shook her head quickly, the way one might rattle a toaster on the fritz. “Oh. No—Tate asked me to do it. Then you don’t have to worry! She’ll pay! We don’t want this to turn into a construction zone, but we do want to make it livable!”

“It’s livable. I live here,” Cassie growled, crumpling the list into her pajama pocket.

Hank offered a panicked smile, eyed Cassie’s pocket, apparently decided it would be impossible to steal the list back, and darted toward the back hall.

Cassie harrumphed into the bathroom, ignoring the half-closed door until she discovered Nick flossing.

He was just about the last person she wanted to see. “You floss in the morning?” she asked grumpily, to hide the way her stomach lurched at the sight of how achingly cute he looked caught off guard; his hair was tousled, and he was wearing a plaid pajama set she couldn’t help wondering if his mom had picked out.

“You don’t floss in the morning?” he asked.

She sidled up beside him and squeezed toothpaste onto her toothbrush. “I don’t floss. Period.”

He raised his eyebrows in the mirror but didn’t say anything.

“God,” she said, “Hank’s on a crazy rampage to get everything fixed.”

He kept flossing.

“I mean, I get it, the place is a little funky, but it’s a hundred-and-twenty-year-old house. There are going to be quirks.”

Nick cleared his throat.

“What?”

He caught her expression in the mirror and shook his head.

“What?” she pressed.

“I’m concerned about that roof. A big rainstorm and you could have some serious water damage.”

She started to brush her teeth with more vehemence than usual, but it felt good and it kept her from being mean. This was what drove her crazy about these people—thinking they knew better. From his expression, she knew he had no idea he was out of line.

She spat.

“Is something wrong?” he garbled, flossing at his molars, hands wedged up inside his mouth.

“I have to pee,” she blurted.

“Sure.” He went toward the door.

“And just because Max is leaving Tate, and she doesn’t have any place to stay, doesn’t mean I have to change everything for you people. This is still my house, you know.”

He closed the bathroom door and whispered, “How do you know about Max and Tate?”

She narrowed her eyes. “She told me.”

Then he was pacing, running his hands through his hair. “You can’t tell anyone.”

“Who am I going to tell?” she cried. Apparently he didn’t care a lick about anything but Tate’s marital crisis, because he just opened the door and started out.

“Where are you going?” Cassie was just getting started.

But he looked at her, and frowned. “You have to pee.” And then he closed the door and left her alone.

So Cassie escaped. For one harebrained moment, she considered climbing out the bathroom window, onto the top of the overhang above the driveway, and down one of the columns that held it up. But she was a grown woman. And this was her house. This was her life, dammit, and she could go anywhere she wanted. She got dressed and made it out the front door without any of them noticing, which didn’t exactly feel like the victory she’d expected it to. She didn’t leave a note, but she did take a picture of her house from the outside, and decided to title it “Filled with Lunatics.”

On her way past the house across the side lawn, she noticed her elderly neighbor peeking from between the blinds. Cassie lifted her camera and snapped away. Her stomach growled, but Illy’s wouldn’t be open until lunch. She rummaged in her canvas shoulder bag. She came up with half a squashed Snickers, which would have to do for now.

Cassie took the bridge over the sludgy canal that cut through Montgomery Square, then walked under the graffiti-covered rotunda where teenagers liked to smoke and outswear each other on the deadly slow St. Judian afternoons. Chip bags tossed like tumbleweed across the patchy grass. Cassie counted crumpled cans of beer to avoid thinking about the last time she’d been there, with Nick. She snapped shots of the old fire station and Memorial High, then doubled back through to the western edge of the square, having settled on a destination.

The elderly librarian was seated alone behind a counter, her nose in a Kate Atkinson novel. Linoleum counters surrounded her on three sides, stacked with hardcovers swathed in those plastic sleeves Cassie knew would crinkle under her touch. The woman wore a blue cardigan, and with good reason—the AC was humming a Freon tune in time to the flicker of a fluorescent bulb.

She looked so shocked when she noticed Cassie standing there that she nearly fell off her seat. She clutched the keys hanging around her neck with her knobbed knuckles and declared, “You must be Cassandra Danvers.”

“You recognize me?”

“You only look just like your grandmother June.”

“You think?” The library was deserted, save for an old man making photocopies over by the drinking fountain; Cassie wanted to wave to him and shout, “She thinks I look just like my grandmother!” She was flushed with a sudden longing for June’s physical self—for her cold, small hands, and the silver hair at her temples, for the dry rasp of her lips when she kissed you.

“I’m Betty.” The woman’s hand nestled gently into Cassie’s like a little creature. “I hate that cancer. Your grandma was a real special lady.”

Cassie felt proud and sad at once, and wondered why she’d been hiding out, which suddenly seemed an obvious thing to wonder about. Why hadn’t she sought the company of a woman like this, who’d counted June as her friend? It seemed so much more humane than the isolation chamber she’d shut herself in for months. She felt as though she was breathing again, painful as it was to notice the empty spot June had left behind.

“Last time I saw your grandma was last summer, just before she was set to visit you in New York. She picked up a couple extra travel guides: for Southeast Asia, Taipei, Shanghai.” Betty watched Cassie carefully as she mentioned those three places, as if Cassie might betray some fabulous secret.

“She did?”

The woman offered an energetic grin. “Well, I’ve got my theories.”

“Please, illuminate me,” Cassie said. “You have no idea how badly I want to hear your theories.”

Betty’s head tick-tocked as she put her thoughts in order. “Your grandma sure could keep a confidence. But I got some Frangelico into her a few years ago and she told me about these frescoes she’d seen a few months back in a Florentine monastery, frescoes by the actual Fra Angelico, she just went on and on describing them to me, and I said, ‘June,’ I said, ‘you were in Italy a few months back?’ and she looked shocked and set down the drink and excused herself right then.”

“You think she’d really been in Italy?” June had never, not once, mentioned Italy to Cassie, especially not in the past few years. Maybe she’d been losing it.

“Well, why not?” Betty said. “She was gone so much, and she always said she was visiting you in New York City…” She leaned forward. “Only she wasn’t always in New York, was she? Seemed like an awful lot of visits to me.”

Cassie felt, suddenly, like crying. She shook her head, which was what she could manage.

“Oh, honey, I didn’t mean to make you blue. I only wanted to say I admired her. She was a role model, living on her own like that in that big old house, traveling places, taking care of you.” She reached for Cassie’s hand, and Cassie tried to focus on the friendly squeeze she offered. “You were her pride and joy, you know that? She was so impressed that you followed your dreams. I think if she’d lived in a different time, maybe she would have pursued art like you.”

This woman was really going to make Cassie lose it.

“Oh, I’ve gone and made you sad. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you for so long, and now I’ve gone and made you sad.”

“You’ve been looking forward to seeing me?”

Betty looked torn, as though she wanted to say something important but didn’t quite know how. “It’s only—my husband, Bob, he was the first responder for your accident.” Cassie couldn’t keep the lump in her throat any longer. She felt a sob choke up through her. She felt tears stream down her cheeks. She was messy and unhinged, and reminded of why she wasn’t allowed to leave the house. “Oh, please don’t cry,” Betty tutted. “I only mentioned it because I wanted you to know how dear you are to us. We think of you as a little bit ours, even though I know that sounds funny. Like you’re a miracle we got to witness.”

“Well, jeez, Betty,” Cassie said, wiping at her face with her sleeve, “this is not what I expected at the library.”

Betty laughed lightly. The old man gathered up his stack of pink copies and tucked them under his bare, liver-spotted arm. He waved good-bye, and the glass door coughed shut behind him.

“And what exactly were you expecting at the library?” Betty asked in her best librarian voice.

Cassie explained about
Erie Canal,
and June 1955. “Do you remember it?” she asked.

Betty pulled the cord of keys off her neck and pressed the warm brass into Cassie’s palm. “I’m afraid not. I didn’t live here yet—I hadn’t met Bob. But Bob’s father fancied himself something of a photographer! I’ll bet you’d be interested in his shots. Only trouble is they’re in a storage unit up in Lima. I’ll see if I can get Bob to dig them up, and we’ll have you over for tuna casserole. In the meantime”—she shifted her attention from Cassie to the far corner of the library, where a glassed-in room was locked and dark; the door had
ARCHIVES
painted across it in golden letters—“you should try in there. Lock is a little sticky.”

“Okay if I take your picture first?” Cassie asked. It was.

The three hours Cassie spent in the St. Jude archives gave her a great appreciation for Mr. Abernathy’s diligence, curiosity, and detective work. With Betty’s help she got the microfiche up and running. Hunched over the machine, scanning the archives of the
St. Jude
Caller
and the
Columbus Dispatch
for the months of May, June, and July 1955, Cassie gaped at the St. Jude she found—a veritable boomtown. The photos were crowded with people trooping up Main Street and playing in Montgomery Square on a daily basis (which was called, yes, Center Square back in those days). She even found a picture of Two Oaks, which she spent a solid ten minutes examining; though she couldn’t place her finger on why, the house looked proud, and she wondered if she shouldn’t take Tate up on her offer to pay for repairs.

As for any pictures of Jack and June together, well, that was a pipe dream, but there were plenty of shots of the handsome man himself, surrounded by onlookers and costumed extras. There was always the chance that June was in those crowd shots. But, even with a magnifier, Cassie couldn’t pick out her grandmother from the hundreds of tiny smudged faces. Anyway, it wouldn’t prove anything to find June there—apparently everyone in town had shown up to watch.

The headlines were ecstatic:
HOLLYWOOD COMES TO OHIO! JACK MONTGOMERY—WHAT A GENT!
and
ROMANCE BLOOMS IN ST. JUDE
, accompanying a picture of Jack Montgomery and tall, leggy “up-and-comer Diane DeSoto.”

“Betty?” Cassie poked her head out of the archive room and nearly killed the old woman for the second time that day. She certainly hadn’t shouted, and there was no one else in the place, but Betty clambered down from her chair, lifted the gate separating librarians from the rest of the world, and shuffled across the pile carpet in her sensible brown shoes until she was two steps away.