Summer People (25 page)

Winnie didn’t know what to do with her hands. Putting them in the back pockets of her jean shorts seemed too casual, too teenagerly. She decided it would be more reverent to clasp them in front of her.

“Nope, nope, nope.”

A very small part of Winnie held out hope that this was all a hoax, a mistake, even a lie concocted by the Ronan family. How Winnie would relish telling Garrett he was wrong. If there were no record of the marriage here, then she would never believe it was true.

“Here it is!” Melon said brightly. “Eyler and Ronan. Oh.” Her forehead crinkled. “David Ronan? Your mother was married to David Ronan?” She put a hand up. “Don’t answer that. It is
none
of my business.” She handed the card to Winnie. “It’s fifty cents for a Xerox copy, and a certified copy costs five dollars and takes three business days.”

Winnie pulled a dollar out of her pocket. Thank God she thought to bring money! “Just one copy, please.”

“My pleasure.” Melon took the dollar bill from Winnie, and removed fifty cents from her desk drawer. Five seconds at the copier and a bright flash of light later, Melon handed Winnie the change and the proof of her mother’s betrayal. Melon smiled again, in an intimate way, and Winnie felt her face turn red. Melon obviously knew David Ronan, and now the news of his secret first marriage would leak out. But, really, what did Winnie care?

When she gazed down at the marriage certificate, the first thing she noticed was the word “Divorced,” stamped in large black letters across the top. Winnie scanned the paper, line by line. Bride’s name:
Elizabeth Celia Eyler
; Bride’s D.O.B.:
May 2, 1958
; Groom’s name:
David Arthur Ronan
; Groom’s D.O.B:
September 18, 1957
; Date of marriage:
August 16, 1979
; Officiant:
Judge Leon Macy
; Witnesses:
Kenneth Edwards, James Seamus, Kelly Wilcox.
The marriage certificate was all signed, sealed, and official-looking. It was real. Winnie felt like she might vomit up her Cheerios right into Melon’s typewriter. She pressed the paper to her chest, whispered, “Thank you,” and ran from the building.

She sat outside on a park bench with her head between her knees. Okay, this was really bad. This was—not the worst—but the second-to-worst. Her mother and David all signed, sealed, and official on a card in the Town Building where anyone could look, where anybody could get a copy for only fifty cents! Well, she and Garrett had been betrayed, that was all there was to it. Winnie tried to imagine what her father would do if he were still alive and he’d found out this sickening news. She tried to imagine him getting angry, except he didn’t get angry at Beth. He would probably say he was disappointed—not because Beth had been married before, but because she chose to conceal it. Deeper down, he might be sad and maybe even a little jealous. Arch, though, had a way of understanding and then forgiving other people’s flaws—Constance Tyler’s, for example. Arch might even say it wasn’t any of their business—but that thought evaporated immediately. Beth was his wife, their mother! This was their business!

Winnie climbed on her bike. She would go home and lay low until nightfall, when she and Garrett would inflict their revenge. What they planned to do would break their mother’s heart, but Winnie no longer cared. She had a copy of the marriage certificate in her pocket, made official by a younger version of her mother’s signature. Now it was Beth’s turn to learn what it felt like to be shut out, to be excluded from life’s most important knowledge.

Beth was out for a run when Winnie got home. Winnie wrote a note and left it on the kitchen table. “Don’t feel well! Please do not disturb!!!—W.” But of course Beth knocked on her door as soon as she got home. Winnie had anticipated this very situation and moved her small dresser in front of the door as a blockade.

“Winnie,” Beth said gently. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

“Period!” Winnie spat out. How she loathed even the sound of her mother’s voice!

“Did you take any Midol?” Beth asked. “Can I make you some chamomile tea?”

“Go away!” This in the most venomous voice Winnie could muster.

“You’re not acting like yourself,” Beth said. “Are you sure there’s nothing else wrong?”

“
I
am a self-respecting woman,” Winnie said. Her point being that the woman on the other side of the door could not be described as such. The bigger point being that her own mother, who heretofore had been a paragon of virtue, was now someone else entirely.

Beth tried the door and found herself stymied by the dresser. Winnie couldn’t help smiling with self-satisfaction. There was something about a house with no locking doors—everyone felt justified to barge in on everyone else. But not this time.

“Winnie, what have you done?”

“I said, ‘go away!’ ”

Silence. Then, “Fine, fine, fine. If that’s the way you want it. I’ll be out on the deck eating lunch. Let me know if you need anything.”

When her mother was safely down the stairs, Winnie whispered, “Liar.”

Later, there was a distinctive knock on the door. A Marcus knock.

“Hey,” he said. “Open up.”

For him—yes. But only him. Winnie didn’t even want to see Garrett until later. Winnie shoved the dresser aside and it scraped some green paint off the floor.
Oh, well!
Winnie didn’t care; it was her mother’s house. She’d finally stopped feeling guilty about breaking the valuable lamp. She couldn’t be bothered anymore about her mother’s heirlooms.

She opened the door to find Marcus holding out a plate: a BLT on toasted Portuguese bread with a handful of Cape Cod chips. Winnie’s stomach reared up. She hadn’t realized she was hungry.

“Your mother told me to tell you that these are Bartlett tomatoes,” he said. “Also, she didn’t put on too much mayonnaise.”

“Mom made the sandwich?” Winnie asked dejectedly. She’d entertained a brief fantasy that Marcus made it.

“Yep.”

“I’m not eating it.”

Marcus walked past Winnie into the room and sat on the bed. Winnie closed the door behind him and slid the dresser against it.

“Well, then, I’m going to eat it,” Marcus said. He took a huge bite out of the corner and tomato seeds slipped down his chin.

“I’ll have half,” Winnie conceded. She was hungry and had no intention of going down for dinner. She and Marcus sat side-by-side on the bed eating the sandwich and all of the chips, using a couple of Kleenex as napkins.

When they finished, Marcus said, “You’ve been up here all day.”

“Yeah.”

“Girl stuff?”

Winnie sighed and lay back against her pillows. “Let me ask you something,” she said. “What if one of your parents did something really bad—”

“Like commit murder, you mean?”

Okay, she deserved that. She thought about how to start over.

“What if one of your parents kept a secret from you your whole life. Like, oh, I don’t know … like they flunked out of college or had a child out of wedlock. Would you be pissed?”

Marcus shifted on the bed and glanced up at the ceiling. Winnie followed his eyes—there was a light water stain and a tiny black spider. Without a word, Marcus stood up, collected the spider in a tissue, and let it go out the window. Winnie marveled. Any other guy would have squished the thing to death. When Marcus sat down again, his eyelids drooped. After two months together, Winnie knew what this meant: he was shutting her out!

“Wake up!” she said impatiently.

“What’s going on, Winnie?”

Winnie chewed her thumbnail. Garrett had sworn her to secrecy, but that wasn’t fair. After all,
Piper
knew about Beth and David. Winnie motioned for Marcus to come closer. He rolled his eyes—she was being silly—but he leaned in.

“What is it, Winnie?”

“Mom was married before,” Winnie said. “She was married to David.”

Marcus straightened.
Married
to David. Well.

Winnie studied Marcus’s face; she was interested to know how someone else would react. He seemed nonplussed, like he didn’t get it.

“When was this?”

“When she was twenty-one years old,” Winnie said. “They were married for two weeks. And she never told us.”

“How’d you find out?”

“Piper’s mother, Rosie, told her and Piper told Garrett. I checked it out this morning when I was in town. I made a copy of the marriage certificate.” She pulled it out of her pocket, unfolded it and presented it to him. “Here. This is it.”

That explained why she’d acted so strangely at breakfast. Marcus
knew
she wasn’t going into town for books. He looked over the marriage certificate. “Did you talk to your mom?” he asked.

“Hell, no. I’m never talking to her again.”

Marcus guffawed. “What, over
this
?”

“Yes, over this. She lied to us, Marcus.”

“Maybe she had her reasons. Maybe she was embarrassed.”

“That’s no excuse.”

“Why? You can’t tell me you’ve never kept a secret from your mother.”

Winnie thought for a minute. She couldn’t think of a single thing she had ever kept from anyone. “I don’t keep secrets.”

“Some people do,” Marcus said, thinking uneasily of the still-blank legal pad in his room. “It’s called privacy.”

“Privacy isn’t okay under these circumstances,” Winnie said. “Besides, there’s worse news.”

“What’s that?”

“She never told my dad,” Winnie whispered. In her mind, this was such a horrible fact that it couldn’t even be spoken aloud. Her dear, departed father deceived by the woman he loved.

Marcus set the marriage certificate down on the bed. Here was Beth’s secret, then—the one she kept from her whole family but almost told
him
on the Fourth of July.

“You need to talk to your mom, Winnie,” he said. “You need to work this out.”

“No way,” Winnie said. “Mom is going to pay.”

“Pay? What do you mean,
pay
? You’re being ridiculous.”

Winnie bristled at this. “Shut up! You don’t talk to your mother. I don’t see you ‘working things out’ with her! She’s sent you at least three letters that I know of, and you haven’t opened one of them.”

“First of all, my letters are none of your business,” Marcus said. “Secondly,
my
mother did something really bad. She
killed
a woman and a nine-year-old girl. She killed them inside our home with a knife from our kitchen. I have a reason to be angry.”

“I have a reason to be angry, too,” Winnie said. “This changes my whole life. I’ve been deceived, my brother has been deceived, and worst of all, my father! I feel like my whole life is a sham. Anyway, Garrett and I have planned some revenge.”

“Revenge?”
Marcus said. Winnie kicked herself mentally—she shouldn’t have said anything about the revenge. “You want revenge because your mother was married to David for two weeks twenty years ago? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” Marcus felt a wave of exhaustion roll over him. He closed his eyes and lay back on the bed.

“Don’t pretend like you’re falling asleep!” Winnie said. “You do that all the time when you don’t want to deal with reality.”

“Oh, do I?” Marcus asked, his eyes still closed.

“Yes, you do. Anyway, why are you taking Mom’s side? You’re my friend. You have to take my side. My side is the
right
side.”

Marcus stood up and studied the dresser in front of the door. “You’re crazy, you know that?” He moved the dresser with enormous ease and stepped out into the hallway. “You need to put your shit into perspective. You wouldn’t know a problem if one bit you in the ass.” He sounded truly pissed and Winnie groped for words to reel him back in, but then she told herself she didn’t care what he thought. Marcus was the person who was supposed to
understand
. Okay, maybe Beth wasn’t a murderer but that didn’t mean Winnie’s feelings weren’t hurt.

“You know what you are?” Winnie said. “You’re self-absorbed.”

“
I’m
self-absorbed?” Marcus said. “Sister, look in the mirror.”

“Fuck you,” Winnie flung out. “I wish I hadn’t told you.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me either,” Marcus said. “Because I used to respect you. I used to think you had a decent heart.”