June (31 page)

Home from Illy’s, Cassie was surprised to discover Tate and Elda seated side by side in the dining room, sifting through the three big boxes of Jack’s papers. The sisters’ pursed mouths were a matched set. Tate’s diamond flashed an occasional beam of sunlight. Cassie leaned her head against the doorframe and watched them passing documents and pictures back and forth, laughing and nodding and mmm-hmmming in the secret language of family. She clicked off a picture before they noticed her.

“Well, hello, stranger,” Elda said, tipping her reading glasses off her nose.

“We were worried,” Tate added.

“We weren’t that worried. Not like Nick was worried.” Elda wriggled her eyebrows suggestively.

“All right, all right.” Cassie’s hands shushed her as she stepped into the room. “You need help? I could be a third set of eyes.”

“Well of course you could,” Elda said in an indulgent auntie voice, standing to clear the seat beside her of its papers.

The Vitamix started up in the kitchen—they hadn’t been back five minutes and Hank was already prepping dinner. It seemed to Cassie that she and Hank had come to a détente; the milk shake had sealed it. Cassie was still unsure of whether they’d had a fight, and the orphan comment smarted a bit, but Cassie had a thick skin, and she felt for Hank, she really did. It was kind of gratifying to learn the girl was a wreck under that shiny façade.

Tate explained that they’d gone through half of Jack’s personal papers and hadn’t turned up a single mention of June. She’d even called Jack’s biographer, author of
Jack Montgomery: A Man of Experience,
who’d interviewed Jack and Tate five years before. It was clear she adored the title, and the fact that her father had an authorized biographer, and the fact that she, herself, would someday have one too. Tate was kind of a nerd, an adorable side she never showed the public.

The biographer didn’t have much to offer except that
Erie Canal
was a stepping-stone in Jack Montgomery’s storied career, and was personally significant because it had fueled Jack and Diane’s legendary romance. Diane had famously told the press, “If it weren’t for that charming little town, I’d never have fallen for Prince Charming.” Tate proudly read the quote back to them, enunciating every syllable.

“Let’s not waste more time on chitchat.” Elda was clearly annoyed.

“Nick’s upstairs going through the papers Hank dug up on her search through the house,” Tate added, “but he isn’t finding much, not even in that huge stack of letters from that girl named Lindie. It was mostly a lot of ‘How are things with you, how is married life, what exciting news about the baby?’ ” Tate said in a flat voice. Cassie could see she was pleased nothing was getting in the way of her parents’ mythical love story.

“You sure you wouldn’t rather go work with Nick, Cassie?” Elda asked.

“You don’t want me?”

“Of course we want you. Not like Nick wants you, but…”

Cassie had learned it was best to let Elda’s comments die. She picked a piece of paper off the top of the stack before her—it was a contract of some sort—and thumbed through it until Elda deemed her too boring to tease.

As the afternoon passed, they settled into a rhythmic symbiosis, like working with another photographer in the darkroom. Tate would lift a pile of papers from the open box, place them at the center of the wide table, and each of them would draw and discard, as though they were children playing with a giant deck of cards. No one spoke, but the smells of Hank’s productivity in the next room buoyed them, as did the veggies and kombucha she brought in halfway through the afternoon. Cassie felt genuinely grateful, and Hank looked her right in the eye and smiled, which felt like something good.

They stretched, they drank espresso, they left for the bathroom but came right back. The soft summer light drifted across the dining room. Cassie’s eyes limned the brown tapestried walls and their Arcadian scenes, their goatherds and Roman ruins, and she thought of June, of what June would want her to do. The truth was, they weren’t finding anything irregular at all; if her father was Jack’s son, June and Jack had both done a very good job of hiding it. The possibility of the easy answer the DNA test would provide—yes or no—was starting to sound appealing, but Cassie didn’t know if she could pull the plug on all this familying just yet. She liked it.

Nick poked his head in and confirmed he’d found nothing of note in the Two Oaks papers. He smiled at her, and she felt a flood of pleasure. No matter what happened, she didn’t need to worry; what they shared wasn’t going to disappear.

Dinner swept in precisely at seven, as though delivered by elves: amaranth and salmon and haricots verts. They slid the papers to one end of the table, and settled in at the other. There was a fantastic bottle of Barolo and then another and another. They lit tall pillars in a massive silver candelabra that Cassie had never seen polished before. Nick sat beside Cassie. She could feel his hand inches from hers along the shared sides of their plates. The tap of his foot resonated across the floorboard and up through her heel. Elda and Tate were easy on each other, talking not of Hollywood or their father but of Elda’s four sons in Houston, where she spent most of the year, of their car dealerships and children and wives.

“You’ll come for Thanksgiving,” Elda said to Tate. “It’s been too long since you came to Houston.” She paused. “You and Max.”

Private grief flickered over Tate’s face before she hardened against it. “I loathe Thanksgiving.” In the precise way she pronounced
loathe,
Cassie could tell that she was drunk.

“No one ‘loathes’ Thanksgiving,” Elda replied, air-quoting with her fork and knife.

“I do.” Hank had eaten her dinner quietly at the fringes, and now the rest of them looked at her in surprise. She wrinkled her nose. “I guess it’s fun if your family isn’t full of alcoholics.”

Nick chuckled. “I kind of hate it too.”

Elda groaned in exaggerated exasperation.

“I don’t know,” Nick said, “it was just my mom and me. We usually ended up ordering Chinese food.”

Elda pointed her fork at Cassie. “And you?”

Cassie started laughing, knowing how her honest response would be received. “I mean, my parents died when I was eight. I’m not in love with any holiday or, as I like to call them, ‘annual reminders of my orphanhood.’ ” She cracked a smile at Hank, who clearly appreciated her levity on the topic.

Elda’s head dropped back as she cackled. “You are the saddest group of pathetic losers I have ever met!” Every one of them cracked up.

“Well, that settles it,” she declared. “You’re all coming to Thanksgiving this year. We’ll get our hands on a copy of
Erie Canal
and watch it in the screening room. I don’t want to hear one protest. Every single one of you is coming, for the turkey and the stuffing, and the pleasure of fourteen brats running around your feet and football blaring and the goddamn pumpkin pie.”

Nick distributed the last bit of wine. He smiled shyly at Cassie. “That sounds lovely.”

Hank started clearing.

“Let us help you,” Cassie said, but Hank insisted she stay put, squeezing an arm around Cassie’s shoulder. It was a quick gesture of intimacy, and Cassie could feel Tate’s eyes on them, a jealous gaze that made Cassie tingle.

Once the table was cleared, Hank and Nick set to work on the dishes in the other room. Elda groaned as she stood. “Time for my beauty sleep.”

Tate offered her cheek up to her sister, yawning. “I’m wiped too.”

“I never knew you hated Thanksgiving.”

Tate shrugged.

“ ‘Loathe’ ”—Elda swayed above Tate—“has nothing to do with that horrible fight, though.” Cassie could tell she smelled blood.

Tate crossed her arms. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, come off it. I was home from New York. You were, what, nine? It was the November before she—”

“I’d like to go to bed,” Tate said, but she remained in her chair. Elda loomed over her.

“He comes home drunk. She’s high as a kite. They get into a screaming match over who was supposed to feed you dinner. She comes at him with a crystal vase and he calls her a psychopath.” Elda was clutching the back of Tate’s chair. “Admit it! Admit they were horrible. Admit they were horrible to me, and, God, to you, too, honey. What was your nickname? The Tub. Who does that to a little girl?”

Tears brimmed in Tate’s eyes. All Cassie could think of was how wrecked Tate had been the night before. Cassie didn’t think either of them could survive that again. “It’s been a long day,” Cassie heard herself say. “Let’s turn in.”

Elda and Tate both startled at the sound of her voice. Their faces wore the same tired, resigned expression. Elda tilted her head, then sighed and flapped a good-bye before stumbling out into the foyer.

Cassie gripped the stem of her wineglass and gulped the last traces of the red. Tate leaned over the candle stumps and blew them out. The black wicks sent trails of smoke up to the ceiling.

The rain started after ten, accompanied by the occasional rumble of thunder. Cassie was on her bed, going through the weekly letters June had sent her over the last four years. June hadn’t missed a week—except for when one of them was visiting the other—and all the envelopes bore the postmark “St. Jude.” Cassie reopened a few of them, trying not to be overwhelmed by the sadness her grandmother’s slanted script called forth. The letters were just as she remembered: accounts of small-town life, of the garden, of the books June had read. Cassie simply couldn’t reconcile their content with Betty’s supposition—or Mrs. Weaver’s or Mrs. Deitz’s—that June had spent the last years of her life gallivanting around the world.

She heard a knock at the door and placed the letters aside. Nick lifted a finger to his lips as he entered, wearing the same pajamas he’d had on that morning, buttoned all the way up to his neck, despite the heat. She felt herself blush; she hadn’t expected him to be this forward, especially as he shut the door behind himself. But then she saw that he had something clasped in his right hand. He waved it at her triumphantly, but his voice lowered to a whisper. “I found something,” he declared, and he came to her on the bed and pressed the sixty-year-old paper into her hand.

It was a letter, postmarked from Chicago, November 1955, addressed to June Danvers. Cassie held it beside the bedside lamp as she slipped the single piece of onionskin out of its envelope.

Dear June,

You said I shouldn’t write about such matters. You said the past will stay in the past. But I think that more likely to be a wish than the truth. Please believe me when I say I’ve tried to forget. I know you made me promise never to speak of it again, but no matter how long I live, I will never forget that horrible night, and what you chose to give up for my freedom.

I cry for you. Every night, June. I miss you, that’s part of it. But I’m also crying for the life I made you choose. For your baby. For the fact he’ll never know the truth. You say there’s no reason to ask for forgiveness, but as long as I live, with every breath I take, I’ll be asking for it. You can burn this if you have to—I know how angry it’ll make you. But I had to tell you, June. I had to say I’m sorry.

Lindie

Thunder grumbled overhead as Cassie lifted her head from the page. “What does it mean?”

Nick’s eyes were wide. He flicked at the postmark. “November 1955. That’s not long after
Erie Canal
.”

She sat on the bed and reread the letter, picking out phrases and wondering at their meaning. “Are there any others like this?”

He shook his head. “That’s the strange part. There are dozens of letters from Lindie, starting a few months before this and lasting through the late sixties, all sent from this Chicago address. They’re the kind of letters you’d write home from camp—‘I saw this, I did this’—except for this one.”

“This is the address I used when I wrote Lindie.”

He nodded. “From the other letters it sounded like she moved there sometime in the summer of 1955.”

“I wonder if she left St. Jude because of whatever she’s talking about here.” The thunder was rolling closer; lightning flashes heralded its cry. “What do you think they did? ‘That horrible night.’ Why is she crying for June’s baby? What’s the truth he won’t know?”

Nick sat down beside her. “Maybe who his father is?”

He was much closer now. Cassie searched his eyes. “It really could have something to do with Jack.”

“It could.”

“Or it could just be, I don’t know, girl stuff. They snuck out one night. They raided the liquor cabinet.”

“ ‘I will never forget that horrible night, and what you chose to give up for my freedom.’ ” Cassie found herself watching Nick’s lips mouth the words. She couldn’t shake the memory of the kisses they’d shared in the ballroom. So he had told Tate this attraction was purely physical; maybe that could be enough.

When he got to the end she said, “Thank you for sharing this with me.”

He blushed, as though he’d finally realized they were sitting alone on her bed together.

“I won’t tell Tate you’re the one who found it.”

He waved the offer off, but she could also sense his relief.

She cleared her throat and glanced toward the door. “And you should probably go.” He looked startled, wounded, which surprised her. She elaborated. “So she doesn’t catch you in here.”

Lightning flashed open the darkness. A thunderbolt clapped. “I might not care if she does,” he said. Lightning again. In the moment between when it flashed and the thunder rolled closer, a jolt of pleasure danced over Nick’s face, as if he was seeing her for the first time. He put one hand up to Cassie’s head, cradling her cheek and her ear and her skull. She could hear her own pulse whooshing, as if she was a seashell. And then they were leaning toward each other, his lips on her lips, his chest on hers. And then they were lying down, and the kissing—oh, the sweet kissing—was slow and soft, as though each of them had been made just for it.

What came next was easy and fun. Their bodies were warm against each other as they pulled off their clothing—her shirt, his pants—and they laughed and whispered as they grew fearless. Then she could see all of him. Lightning flashed. Thunder growled. He lifted himself above her. He looked down over the wash of her nakedness as if she was a wonder. He touched the skin of her arms and thighs and belly, his eyes drowsing hungrily as if he’d never felt anything so soft. And when he was inside her, a part of herself relaxed, a part she hadn’t even known she’d been tensing.

Their clothes tangled on the floor and their limbs tangled in the bed. Cassie let herself laugh. She let herself kiss and laugh and hold him. She let herself be held.