June (42 page)

Lindie carried the tray out to the porch and set it down in the small space where her father had once kept his rocking chair. The view hadn’t changed since she was a girl; you can’t say that about most places. Lawns, white porches as far as the eye could see, Two Oaks looming to their right, although the lawn could have done with a good mowing, but Lindie wasn’t about to start there.

“You knew my grandmother.” It wasn’t a question.

Lindie poured the sweet yellow drink and cracked open a wax paper tube of Ritz. “In fact, your grandmother was my very best friend in the whole world.”

“How come I’ve never met you then?” More than a trace of surliness. “Or even heard of you.”

Lindie didn’t mention the weekend Cassie’s father had driven Cassie up from Columbus and Lindie happened to be in from Chicago. Cassie was all pigtails and giggles, too busy with
One Fish Two Fish
to note that funny old woman in the corner who wore her clothes like a man. Nor did Lindie mention the dozens of nights she and June had sat together on the sagging Two Oaks porch, fretting about Cassie’s apartment and the middle-aged artist she seemed to be falling for, the dark street she lived on, the challenges of being an artist in today’s financial climate.

Instead Lindie said, “June was a private person.”

Cassie huffed in annoyed confirmation. Her foot was jiggling the whole porch. Lindie wanted to place her hand on the girl’s knee, but they weren’t there yet. “I found your letters,” Cassie said. But she handed Lindie only one.

What surprised Lindie about that letter, the one Nick had shown Cassie, wasn’t that she’d been bold enough to write it all those decades ago, on a windy, fall Chicago night, or that Cassie had smoked it out, but that June had kept it. Lindie’d always assumed June had destroyed the only piece of paper on which either of them had ever written about the worst night of their lives. And yet, all these years, Lindie had also kept a letter from those days—Artie’s letter—as a reminder to stick to her own business. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been surprised June had done the same.

“So you know Jack Montgomery was your grandfather?” No reason to beat around the bush.

Cassie looked at Lindie then, really looked at her for the first time. “Tell me everything.”

Lindie began where it had ended: “I killed someone.” Cassie was not expecting that, or any of the story that followed.

Lindie thought about Clyde Danvers often. She understood why June feared the ghost of what they’d done, and didn’t ever want to talk or think about it; once June had made her choice, she couldn’t—wouldn’t—look back. June never wanted to talk about that night; she hated whenever Lindie brought it up. June was private, yes, and superstitious, but, more than that, the ins and outs of her passion with and for Jack had become entangled with Clyde’s murder in an irrevocable way.

Over the years, Clyde had become a different animal in Lindie’s eyes. His sacrifice was a sin she carried with her, every second of every day, the reason she could never be truly intimate with anyone—not even beloved Isabel. It was why she had decided not to become a mother. She had murdered a man, a particular man, with her bare hands, and not a soul could know about it. Strangely, Clyde Danvers became—or the knowledge of what she’d done to him became—like an old friend, the familiar shadow Lindie would often meet on her long nights of the soul. There was something to be gained by committing your worst crime before you were old enough to drive; it put all your subsequent foibles in perspective.

Lindie looped her tale back to the beginning, glass sweating in her hand as she filled Cassie in on Clyde Danvers and Eben Shaw and Jack Montgomery and June Danvers and Diane DeSoto and Alan Shields and
Erie Canal
and Ripvogle and Thomas and Apatha and Lemon Gray Neely himself. It seemed quite pressing, after keeping the whole sordid tale bottled up all those years, to pour it into Cassie, every last drop.

Cassie gulped and sipped and repoured; the lemonade was Apatha’s recipe. As Lindie wove her tale of woe and passion, betrayal, redemption, blackmail, and revenge, the girl placed the Ritz crackers on her tongue and closed her mouth onto them whole, crunching them down. Lindie was glad she’d thought of snacks. Once she started talking, nothing could stop her. She felt lighter, remembering herself as a child: her blind spots, daring, and love.

When Lindie got to the night of the murder, Cassie leaned forward in her seat, gripped by the shock of it, and Lindie tried not to smile; it was pleasing to know it was as good a tale as she’d always believed it to be. She told Cassie about June standing with her forehead against her own, as day broke over the morning when June would ignore Jack, and Lindie would go to sleep with Clyde’s blood on her hands. That’s when Lindie came back into her old self—her furrowed hands, wrinkled knees, and bony wrists. She realized the sun had moved and the air had turned humid, that her back ached, that her throat was raw.

“But they didn’t catch you?” Cassie asked.

“They didn’t believe he was murdered,” Lindie said, just as bewildered now as she’d felt all those years before, when the act itself had slipped off her back. By and large, the St. Judians had believed what the police told them: Clyde had last been seen putting back a few at the Thursday night cast party. Presumably at some point he’d driven west, and parked near Mr. Neely’s old camp. He’d wandered off the main road and gotten lost only a few steps from the lake. He’d tripped on a rock. Rotten luck to land facedown on a large boulder, rotten luck indeed, rotten luck to not be found until after the weekend, when a summer’s rain had washed away most of the blood and what was left of him sent up a stink that poor fisherman who found him couldn’t ignore.

(And if there were suspicious grumblings surrounding this trip-and-fall story, well, no one had any proof of it having happened any other way. Although it was mighty convenient that the movie folks were the last to have seen Clyde at their final wrap party out at the development, and that they had taken off for Los Angeles the very next day, out of St. Jude’s jurisdiction. Given how Clyde played poker, well, it wasn’t impossible to imagine he might have angered more than one of those rougher-looking grips, the men who looked like gamblers. And what about Thomas, the driver? He was last seen the same night as Clyde. And he’d been driving Clyde’s Olds for that whole month; he’d probably gotten tangled up in the same mess, whatever it was. Rumor had it there was even a warrant out for his arrest in Louisiana. No, no, some said, it went higher up. A conspiracy. Clyde had attacked Ripvogle at the party at Two Oaks. Ripvogle was powerful. He wouldn’t stand for any threats. He’d surely exacted his revenge.)

“We moved the next week,” Lindie said. “It didn’t matter that Clyde was gone; my father took his disappearance as an omen that our planned departure was necessary. I missed June’s wedding, which they postponed when Clyde went missing. Once his body was found, well, Arthur didn’t think they should proceed, but June insisted. It was a small family ceremony.”

“But why did she marry Artie?” Cassie’s scowl was gone. Her knees were pulled up to her chin.

“Because she chose him.”

“But she didn’t!” Cassie cried. “She only stayed in St. Jude because Diane was going to tell on you. And once they found Clyde’s body and the case was closed anyway, and you were in Chicago, June could have done whatever she wanted. She could have followed Jack to Los Angeles. She could have been with him.”

Cassie’s exasperation was as familiar as Lindie’s own breath. She told Cassie what she’d told herself a thousand times, knowing it would do little good. “That wasn’t June’s nature.”

Cassie narrowed her eyes.

“You don’t think I blame myself?” The world blurred, but Lindie ignored the mess her eyes were making. “She didn’t resent me. She never made me pay. She resigned herself to the life my actions forced on her.” Lindie lifted her hands in a gesture of resignation and nodded in agreement with Cassie’s frustration. “That made it so much worse.”

Cassie didn’t believe Lindie’s suffering, nor did she care for it. Lindie felt the need to make the girl understand.

“June is the first person I loved.” A rush of embarrassment overtook her, the likes of which she hadn’t felt in many years; lord knew, she’d found her tribe and identity soon after she left St. Jude and realized there were plenty of other people—women and men—like her. And yet that ancient shame hadn’t gone away, not after forty years of marriage to another woman, not when Lindie went back in time to remember that dull ache in her gut, looking up at that bedroom which had once contained the object of her desire.

“Your grandma didn’t love me back, not the way I loved her anyway. I suppose I always believed that, once she got married, she’d be done with me. She was older than I was, from a better family, so much more sophisticated. Given all that happened, and that I moved out of state, well, I just assumed she’d never want to see me again. But your grandmother…” A sob surprised her, but she forged on. “Your grandmother kept in touch. She never wanted to talk about what happened that night, but I could see she believed it had bound us together. All those decades we lived apart, not a month went by when I didn’t hear from her.”

Cassie opened her mouth to object, but Lindie kept going.

“She came to visit when your daddy was a little boy. She brought him along.” Cassie winced at this mention of her father. Lindie made a mental note to tell her all the stories she’d been saving up, about the constellation of summer freckles across that little boy’s nose, and the forehead cowlick that bloomed the front of his buzz cut in twenty different directions. How polite he’d been, his “thank you, ma’am”s, the warm breath tucked into Lindie’s neck when she’d carried him home from the movie theater.

“We were older then. I was in college. June was a wife and a mother. And I’d met someone. The first girl who could love me back.” Susan, black-eyed Susan, whose skin tasted of grass cuttings; Susan, with a starburst of moles across her downy back. “I knew I had to tell June I’d fallen in love. I had to tell her the person I loved was a woman. I remember I waited until twenty minutes before she had to leave for the bus home. I blurted it out.” Lindie swallowed in the memory of her fear. “You know what she said?”

“No.”

“She smiled her big, beautiful smile and said, ‘Lindie, love who you love.’ And then, oh, Cassie, I cried.” And she cried as she recounted it.

Cassie stiffened, unsatisfied. “Well, that’s just great that you got to love who you loved.”

Lindie chose not to remind the girl that being a woman who dressed like a man and loved women in the nineteen fifties and beyond was not exactly a walk in the park. Instead, she said, “And what if I told you I think she did too?”

Cassie eyed her skeptically.

“It took me a long time to realize what I’m about to tell you. I expect it’ll take you a long time to accept it, if you ever do. But I know she found her version of happiness, or true love, or whatever you want to call it.”

“That’s convenient.”

Lindie liked the girl’s doubt. “I mean your daddy, honey. You should have seen June with that boy. She loved Adelbert more than life itself. Once, we were out on the Two Oaks porch—he was riding his bike back and forth up that very sidewalk, Artie was out of town on business, and I said out loud how sorry I was. I was always apologizing in those days; I knew it drove her crazy, but I couldn’t help myself. Well, she stood right up and her hands turned into angry fists and she said, ‘Don’t you dare think I’ve had any less of a life for putting my boy at its center.’ She could get worked up, and her eyes were kind of flashing in that way she had. You remember.” Cassie nodded knowingly, laughing at the part of June they shared.

“June said, ‘If I’d raised him out in Hollywood, you think he’d be happy? I’ve seen that poor little Esmerelda, how they parade her around with ribbons and her sad smile. I don’t want that for my boy. I want this.’ ” Lindie gestured to the same yards June had. “I’d never seen it that way. I’d never thought that maybe, in saying good-bye to Jack, June had actually gotten the life she wanted.”

“But she didn’t love Arthur!”