June (43 page)

“Of course she loved Arthur. Love doesn’t work like that, one or the other. Don’t you know that yet? She loved Arthur because Arthur was her husband. Because he was a good man who loved her back. She and Jack were two fires burning toward each other, consuming everything in sight. They’d have burned each other up if they’d tried to make a life together.”

Cassie considered that. “And you knew my dad was Jack’s son?”

“I could always see it in him, even when he was a little baby. Probably Arthur knew it too, but he never treated that boy any different. Arthur was a very good man.” Lindie left out how awful she’d been to him. Time enough for that.

They were quiet then, for a long space of time in which one of the neighbors walked by with his spaniels, and they listened to the steady buzz of someone’s lawn mower. It was getting toward evening now, and Lindie knew Cassie was hungry.

“Why didn’t she tell me?” Cassie’s question was steeped in anguish.

There was nothing to do but tell her the only part remaining. Maybe June would have seen it as a betrayal, but, as long as Lindie was being honest, she couldn’t keep the last delicious bit—the best bit—to herself.

The bundle of postcards was waiting inside the top of Eben’s secretary, back in the corner, where it belonged. Were June still alive, Lindie knew that she’d never, not in a million years, condone her showing these to Cassie. But Lindie wasn’t in the business of keeping the secrets of the dead anymore.

Out on the porch, as the evening began its gentle slide toward darkness, Lindie handed the stack to a baffled Cassie. The girl flipped through the two dozen shiny postcards—depicting Caribbean waters, the Roman Colosseum, the Ponte Vecchio—before turning over the first in the stack, of the Eiffel Tower, and discovering June’s familiar script filling the white space:

Dear Lindie—

Would you believe we dined alone at the top of this beautiful landmark last night? I have no idea how J. arranged it, but there we were with steak frites and a bottle of the most delicious red wine I’ve ever tasted. Today we’ve got a tour of Versailles, then on to the Netherlands on Monday. He says I won’t believe the tulips.

Xx,

J.

Cassie turned the card back over in her hand. Lindie smiled at her confusion, which she knew would soon turn to disbelief as Cassie read the next card, sent from Japan.

Dear Lindie—

We met the royal couple today. I felt dumb and tall, but J. looked dumber and taller. I kid. He says to tell you I ate raw octopus and that I even seemed to enjoy it. On to the countryside tomorrow! Thank you for watering my flowers, but truly, if they all die I’m not a bit concerned.

Xx,

J.

“But.” Cassie flipped the postcard over, then checked the postage again. “I don’t understand. This is from two years ago.”

Lindie smiled.

“Wait,” Cassie said, reading the next one. “You’re saying my grandmother was in Tulum a year ago?” Incredulity had crept in.

Lindie didn’t need to say anything, because Cassie kept reading, and, as she read, she began to understand. Shanghai, Turkey, St. Thomas. She dropped the cards onto her lap and slumped back into her chair. “She went with Jack?”

Lindie felt triumphant, as triumphant as if she’d gone too.

“But…how?”

“As far as I know, they only saw each other one time when Arthur was still alive. Arthur was down in Louisiana for the month, and June called and told me she’d told him she was going to visit me in Chicago. If he called, I should say she was sick with the flu and couldn’t come to the phone. I didn’t find out where she’d gone until afterward. She’d driven your father out west in three days. They spent two nights in a little hotel. She met Jack in Santa Monica for an evening at the beach, then turned around and drove on home.”

“Elda told me about this,” Cassie mumbled, nodding in dreamy recognition. “Why only once, though? Why take Dad to meet Jack, but never see him again until they were old?”

“You know men. Even though Jack was married to Diane, he apparently thought June coming all the way across the country meant she was considering leaving Arthur. According to June, he was ready to leave Diane right then, to move June in that very day. June realized she’d sent the wrong message. She’d just wanted to give him the chance to meet his son, but Jack wasn’t like her. Most of us aren’t. He couldn’t put what he felt into a box, couldn’t pretend he loved someone else, even if he’d married her.” Nothing nasty needed to be said about Diane; that woman had had her share of heartbreak. “So June made the decision not to see Jack again, not as long as their spouses were alive. Well, Diane died not so soon after that, and Jack never remarried, but he respected June’s wishes. He kept his distance, even from his own son. When Arthur started slowing down, I think June thought her chance with Jack might come soon, but then your parents had their accident. I can only imagine how heartbroken Jack was losing the chance to know his son. But if he blamed June, I never heard about it.”

“And then, instead of getting to be with him, she was stuck with me,” Cassie said.

“Is that what you think?” Lindie took Cassie’s chin in her hand; it was the first time they’d touched, and their lonely bodies felt a gentle charge. Lindie turned Cassie’s solemn face to her. “She adored you. Losing your father was the biggest heartbreak of her life, but the gift of it was getting to raise you.”

Cassie frowned.

“I know. Believe me, I know. June was a tough customer. But she loved you. She wanted you to have what your father had—a normal life.”

“She deserved more than that.”

“Your grandmother was a patient woman. She believed if she and Jack were meant to have time together on this earth, then they would get it.”

Cassie mused on this. Lindie knew the depths of her frustration, because she’d felt it too, too many times to count. “The week after you went to college, after she was back in Two Oaks, she called me up. She said, ‘Oh, Lindie, it’s just so empty.’ I told her she should call Jack. Say he was on her mind. She acted like I’d lost my marbles.”

They laughed together at that vision of June.

“But before she could even get up the nerve, he called her, asked her out on a date. I suppose I might have had something to do with that. And I suppose time had changed him in the right ways. He was not a gentle man when we knew him, Cassie. He was angry. Impulsive. But in his old age, Jack Montgomery was no longer so quick to pick a fight. All those years waiting for June had taught him how to be right for her.” Lindie looked over at Cassie, hunched in the flaking wicker. She knew the poor girl was sad. She reached out and took her hand. “She got to live her life. Finally, after all those years, she got to live it.” She shrugged. “So she didn’t want to tell you about it. That’s too bad. But maybe that’s the only way she could enjoy it. Maybe it wasn’t about you or me or any of the rest of us. Maybe it was finally about her.”

Then each of their minds turned to the thought of those two lovely old faces smiling at each other over steak frites at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Lindie pushed away her regret. Cassie put off her self-pity. The girl and the old woman forgot themselves, just for the moment. They thought of Jack and June together, up there on that tower, looking out across the warm night, and it made them glad.

Cassie dreamed that night, a luscious Two Oaks dream, the kind she’d had before Tate arrived. The colors were bright, the sounds crisp, the touch of the house under her hands almost electric. Even as she was dreaming, she knew this would be the last dream of its kind, the last offering of this sort that Two Oaks—which was grateful for its healed roof, and eager to feel the joy Cassie had felt in the arms of that man who’d left and had not come back—would give her. When she collapsed into bed and sleep closed over her, the sadness rafting off of her was oceanic in its scope; it threatened to drown her. But when the house understood the source of her doubt, it knew how to cure what ailed her.

The blaze of a dream began with Cassie lifting out of her bed with a familiar rush of anticipation; the house was once again full of the St. Judians she’d come to know so well. They lined the hallway and the stairs. From the main floor rose a double helix of laughter. As before, the dream people slid apart to accommodate her passing.

She stepped down the stairs and the bodies parted. The stained-glass windows were lit up, speckling her in color as she found her way down. Every inch of her felt fully alive, as alive as she’d felt with Nick’s body against hers.

It was a bright day in the dream, but the foyer was dark as usual. Cassie had thought that might be where the delighted laughter was coming from, but no, the front door stood open, and she knew, now, that the porch was the origin of that luscious, irresistible sound.

A child, his giggle burbling back into the house, and a mother’s laugh too.

Cassie darted through the foyer now. She needed to see with her own eyes. The dream people pressed out of her way. At the lip of the door, she saw them, hundreds of them, St. Judians filling the sidewalk and the street, the cross street, the porches. All of them turned her direction, but not to see her. No, they were delighting in the sight of what Cassie could only hear. And so she stepped out onto the bright porch too, only it was the porch as it had once been—tiled and tidy—and there, to her right, at the center of it, she found them:

June and little Adelbert, a tangle of limbs. The boy’s head tipped back in the sunlight, thrashing with wild glee in his mother’s arms as her lips and hands tickled his small, perfect self. He laughed. Her laugh answered. If they knew anyone was watching them, they didn’t let on.

Lindie awoke to banging on her door. She moved through the house the way she had as a girl, forgetting herself in the dark. She half expected to open the door and see Diane DeSoto standing there.

But it was Cassie. Over her shoulder, Lindie could make out the first line of dawn. The girl was dressed haphazardly; tears were streaming down her face. At the sight of Lindie, she clasped her arms around the old woman; her musky breath filled the room.

“I dreamed about them,” she wept. It was hard to tell whether it was anguish or euphoria she felt. The room was dark, her mouth twisted. “You were right,” she said. “It was what she wanted. To have Adelbert, for herself.” At her own words, she began to cry harder. Lindie urged her to sit, but Cassie held her back at arm’s length; she had her own confession.

“My art show—in New York.” The words raced out of her. Lindie already knew all about the art show; she’d heard it from June’s perspective—how shocked June had been to see the death of her son—the worst event of her life (worse, even, than giving up Jack, worse than discovering Lindie had killed Clyde)—laid bare on the walls of that New York gallery. Strangers leered over every inch of it, dissecting the trajectory her daughter-in-law had taken through the windshield, the sound of the Jaws of Life blasting through overhead speakers, and, worst of all, worst of everything, not just her son’s—her dear Adelbert’s—lifeless form slumped over the steering wheel, but the bottle of whiskey at his feet. June had been angry then, had had to fight for breath. She couldn’t imagine that Cassandra could make such an ugly thing. She had to get out of there, and she’d pushed through the gawkers out onto the street, just to get air. But then Cassandra was upon her, and she was angry too, desperate for June’s approval, blind in the way of the young.

“And then I said the most terrible things to her,” June had told Lindie, hands shaking. “I suppose they were true because of what I was feeling at the time, but I could tell they stung her. And now she won’t return my phone calls, Lindie, and I’m feeling so tired lately, so dizzy; I fear we’ll never work it out.”

But Lindie didn’t tell any of that to Cassie, now weeping in her arms, lurching with her version of the story. A gurgle of agony rose through her when she recounted June’s striding out to the sidewalk, and of following her there. Lindie thought of a glass of water, a chair, a cool washcloth against the girl’s brow. But the best she could give her was herself.

“All I could think of was that it was my accident,” Cassie cried. “That I was the survivor. And it’s good to be honest, right? That’s what an artist does. I’d worked so hard, and people liked it. But she hated it. I knew she was going to hate it and I was right. She walked from piece to piece and she…” Cassie shook her head, renewed in her heartbreak. “It was the last time I really saw her, Lindie. Why didn’t she tell me she was sick?”

Lindie didn’t have an answer for that, not one that would satisfy the girl—“she was afraid” was never going to be a salve. Instead, she held Cassie as she sobbed, then tucked her into the bed in Eben’s room, a cup of warm milk on the bedside table.

Cassie mumbled as Lindie tiptoed from the room: “In my dream, she was happy. It was just her and her baby and it was the happiest I’ve ever seen her. The rest of us were watching, but she didn’t care. It was exactly the same thing as at the gallery, wasn’t it? She wasn’t like us. She didn’t need anyone else to witness how she felt. She only needed to feel it.”

As the muggy August passed, Cassie wanted to hear Lindie’s whole story again, right from the beginning. She had follow-up questions: What had Lindie done with her life in the intervening sixty years? (Professor of Gender Studies, Activist, Adventurer.) What had happened to Apatha, really? (Upon Lemon’s death, she’d taken her inheritance—every cent Lemon had made—and moved home to Louisiana, leaving Two Oaks to June and Arthur’s care, living out her days in the quiet luxury she deserved.) What had become of Thomas? (Lindie didn’t know; she’d never heard another word about, or from, him since the night he ran.)

It was some days later that Lindie finally asked about Nick. They’d taken to meeting out on the Two Oaks porch in the mornings and sitting together through the day, sifting and resifting through every grain of truth, but he had not been mentioned.

Cassie stammered at the mention of his name. “What about Nick?”

“Are you going to call him?”

“No.” She scowled again like that girl who’d shown up on Lindie’s porch. “No. No.” But they both knew she couldn’t deny the way he’d lit up her skin, how he’d made her feel as alive as her father’s laugh had in that sweet dream. Cassie’s mind returned to something elemental, to the vision of Nick approaching her on that first day on that very porch, the delicate turn of her name in his mouth, the sun lighting him up, the brief relief on his face at the sight of her. Maybe that did matter more than how things had ended.

It was not quite Labor Day, the summer fat and lazy, but soon to hunker down in hibernation. They moved from lemonade to whiskey sours. They ate dinner together, which improved their respective lots somewhat; between Lindie’s popcorn and Cassie’s frozen pizzas, they had complete meals. Lindie nudged Cassie with elderly concern. When was she getting that furnace repaired? Why not just hire those nice young men who mowed the rest of the lawns on the block? Why not find herself a lawyer, and have him make some inquiries to the executor of Jack’s estate?

Cassie didn’t bristle as Lindie had feared she might. In fact, she listened to the old woman quite sensibly and, more often than not, did as she suggested. She started showering regularly. She hired a handyman. The mail was another matter; it had piled so high inside the Two Oaks front door that they took to coming in the side entrance.

Come September, the tabloids howled anew:
HANK TELLS ALL! TATE’S ASSISTANT TURNED REALITY STAR? TATE BETRAYED AGAIN!
Lindie picked them up at the checkout and brought them home; the two women pored over the news of Hank’s tell-all interview, in which she spilled about Tate’s unknown paternity and Tate and Max’s divorce, alleging that Tate had been the one to sleep with Margaret. None of it could be proven, of course, but it only confirmed what Cassie had suspected: that Hank had sold Cassie’s film to the tabloids, not to mention stolen that stupid picture of the dog to frame her.

“Isn’t that crazy?” Cassie said. “Why would she do that?”

“Because she was jealous.”

Cassie looked at her with mouth agape. “No way.” She held out her hands to take in her surroundings. “I’m an orphan who lives alone in the middle of nowhere. She is a chef yogini goddess who was the right hand of a movie star.”

“Exactly—she worked for Tate. But Tate and Nick and Elda love you.”

Cassie snorted derisively.

“And that’s why you should call him.”

“He should call me.”

“He probably has.”

No use arguing that point; Lindie had made Cassie unplug the landline if she wasn’t going to answer it anyway.

“I’ll bet he wrote you,” Lindie said, after they finished the popcorn.

“Oh? And how do you bet that?”

“Because Nick knows you aren’t a phone girl. And you don’t have e-mail. Short of carrier pigeon, a letter’s his only option.”

Cassie sniffed. She picked up the empty bowl of popcorn and took it inside. But when Lindie came by the next day, the pile that had accumulated in the foyer was gone.

Most of it was crap Cassie didn’t want. She piled the bills and legal-looking bits to one side, promising herself she’d tackle them the next day. The catalogs and junk mail went straight into the recycling bin. The personal mail, which was paltry indeed, consisted of two letters, both from Nick, written a few weeks apart. The first one had obviously been written long before Hank’s tell-all:

Cassie,

I’ve called a couple times. I’m not surprised you haven’t answered. I’ve been thinking of you; it sounds flat like that, small, but it’s a truth that’s so much bigger.

I wanted you to know T. found the picture of Benny in Hank’s things. You were absolutely right to suspect her of stealing it and more—once T. confronted her, Hank confessed to everything. She’s the one who leaked your pictures. She framed you. Needless to say, T. fired her. I’ve asked T. to be in touch with you herself, but will it surprise you that I suspect she won’t?

I doubt it’ll amount to much, but I hope you know how sorry I am. Please, if you want, please write or call—I’d love to hear your voice.

Nick

The second one was dated mid-August.

Cassie,

I keep thinking about what you said that first day we hung out in Montgomery Square. About if I ever felt like I was doing someone else’s dirty work. If I wanted my own life. Well, I do. So I quit. Suffice it to say things have gotten crazy, even crazier than they were when we were there. The day I quit, T. told me you think she should start telling the truth about herself to the world. I think she believed that suggestion would so horrify me, I’d beg to keep working. Instead, I realized you might be one of the wisest people I know, and I might be one of the dumbest. Call? Write?

Nick

Cassie read it aloud to Lindie in a hesitant tremolo, hand fluttering up against her throat. The light was orange across the front parlor as Lindie watched Cassie from Apatha’s yellow velvet couch. She recognized that gesture from the night she’d climbed to June’s window and told her Jack was waiting. Some things can be denied, but this was genetic imperative.