A Charmed Place (56 page)

"Here's the number one reason why your plan is doomed, Rinnie: the hours," she mumbled as she filled a mug for herself.

Her appallingly cheerful sister laughed and said, "I know. They suck. But you'll fall back into it; it's like riding a bike." She eyed Laura's workclothes and said, "Is that what you're wearing? Skin-tight jeans and a white linen shirt?"

"They're all I have," Laura said, yawning. "When I packed my carry-on, I wasn't exactly planning to dig ditches."

"You look great, by the way," Corinne said, a little glumly. "I'd give anything to fit into those jeans. What are they, size eight?"

Laura laughed. "Get real. Size ten. A very generous ten."

"I keep forgetting what an hourglass figure you have," her sister said, sighing. "And you've lost weight besides?"

"Yeah. After Max dumped me, I—yeah. I lost some weight," Laura admitted. "That's when I bought these jeans—which was a total waste of money," she added wryly, "because as soon as I get done moping over Max, I plan to put those pounds right back on. And that's a promise."

Instantly Corinne was all sympathy. "Is it definitely over, then? There's
no
hope?" she asked as she laid out oversized plates for the oversized breakfast to come.

"Hope? How can there be hope?" Laura had wanted to get in and out of Chepaquit without going into details of the breakup, but now that she was committed to staying a month
...

Better to get it over with.

"The fact is, I told Max about Uncle Norbert."

"Oh, no. You didn't," Corinne groaned. "You didn't go into any details, did you?"

Laura shrugged. "Max asked how he got caught. I told him that after Uncle Norbert strangled Aunt Mary, he left her body in bed and went off on a camping trip, trying to make it look as if someone broke in and killed her—even though he and Aunt Mary lived in a mobile home a few feet from our house. Even though he hadn't said boo about any trip to Mom and Dad before he took off. Even though he was arrested still wearing the shirt missing the button that Aunt Mary pulled off in the struggle."

Snorting, she
added
, "I think it was all just a little too gothic for Max."

"But it happened before we were even born!"

"Did that ever matter to any of our classmates? No. They just assumed that we shared our uncle's gene for stupidity. Max did too, I guess."

"Oh, come on. You're a systems programmer. How can you be stupid? It's not even possible," Corinne said, bowled over by Laura's admission.

"Obviously I must have the gene," Laura said, suddenly bitter. "Otherwise, why would I have tried to be honest with Max before we got married? How stupid was
t
hat
?"

The irony of it was that she had become a systems programmer precisely to show the world how smart she could be, and that's how she had met Max.

And that's how she had ended up suffering new humiliation: because Max had told everyone on the project the whole lurid, stupid story of Uncle Norbert. Thank God it had happened near the end of a job that Laura was able to finish and leave. Thank God at least for that.

Corinne had that teary look in her eyes; she was a bottomless well of sympathy, overflowing at the least provocation.

Laura put her hands up, palms forward, in a gesture of rejection. "Nope. No tears. I'll get through it fine; I'm just about there, in fact," she said defiantly. "Max was a jerk. I'm lucky to be out of it."

"He
is
a jerk; you
are
lucky," Corinne agreed. "So! Where were we? Oh. Clothes. I'll lend you workclothes of mine to wear. We know
they
won't be tight," she said with a wry grin.

Corinne
Shore
was five feet ten and heavily built. Neither of the sisters had ever been exactly slim, but there was something super-solid about Corinne. On the nursery grounds, she carried her size with an easy grace suitable to hauling big root balls around. When she was in her natural element, her smile was quick, her carriage straight, and her stride, long and sure. She was Wonder Woman.

But once she left her four-acre world, her confidence collapsed. Her shoulders drooped, her head hung forward. She became overly intrigued by her shoes. Often she mumbled. And she was forever clearing her throat.

It had always been obvious to Laura that when her sister was out in public, she became ashamed of her size and tried her best to shrink in place. Her classmates had picked up on Corinne's hunched-over manner; they used to tease her mercilessly about it.

But right now Corinne was on her home turf, surrounded by people she loved and cooking a meal for them. She was beaming.

"I know I shouldn't be so happy just months after the
... the funeral," she confessed as she turned the bacon. "And a huge part of me isn't. It's just that—"

"It's all right, Rin," said Laura, stroking her sister's cheek as she passed. "We're all weird mixes of relief and sadness right now."

Only the proportions differed. Laura changed the subject. "Is our brother—ha-ha—up?"

Corinne rolled her blue eyes. "I knocked. Gently. I didn't want to make him grumpy his first day on the job."

"Oh, good. Then I'll be able to."

Still sipping her coffee, Laura ascended the stairs past the landing window, almost opaque now with dust and dirt, and treaded down a runner worn through in places to the floorboards. The condition of the house was utterly dismaying to her, although it had been going downhill for her whole life. Now that she thought about it, the house hadn't been painted her whole life.

The shabby interior had been cleaner when her mother was alive, of course; meek, submissive
Alice
had always carried all of her energy and dreams in a plastic bucket with a soapy sponge.

Laura wondered what had become of the money she used to send her mother for buying something nice for the house—a carpet, new drapes, a television set. Anything to make her life brighter, a little more cheerful. A little more bearable.

Sunk into the damn business, obviously.
A bottomless hole if ever there was one.

After her mother died, Laura continued to send money, but to Corinne—who undoubtedly handed it right over to their father, just as their mother had done. But
Oliver
Shore
had been gone for half a year, and there was nothing new in the house that Laura could see. Where had the money gone?

Into the bottomless hole, of course
.

She paused at the door of Snack's room, knocked robustly, and stepped inside. Her brother was sleeping on his stomach in a tangle of sheet, his tattooed arm dangling over the side of the single bed, his toes looped over the edge of the mattress.

She clutched his ankle and shook it, but not too hard. "Hey. Time to go to school."

He didn't answer. His breathing was deep, just shy of a snore. She shook a little harder. "Hey. Up."

Aft
er a pause, she heard a muffled
"Go to hell."

"You haven't noticed? We're already there." She waved her mug of coffee under his nose and said, "There's more where this came from."

"Go to hell."

She straightened up and regarded her brother, behaving so much like the baby of the family that he was. "Oh, for Pete's sake, Snack. One
month.
You've just finished doing more time than that!"

It was a sharp little poke, but Laura was determined that, co-owner or not, Snack was going to give the job his all.

He rolled sleepily onto his back. He opened one eye and regarded his sister.

"I did not steal the car. I took it for a ride. Haven't you ever wanted to take a Corvette for a ride?"

"Wouldn't it have been easier to walk into a showroom and
ask
?"

He gave her a wry look from under half-lowered lids. "Well, unlike you, big sister, I haven't acquired that aura of success that would make a salesman take me seriously."

"Good point," she said briskly, annoyed by that taunting gaze. "So I'll give you a couple of tips. A haircut would help. So would a shirt that actually had sleeves. Tank tops won't cut it in the real world." She regarded the skull and crossbones tattooed on his pale arm with obvious distaste.

Snack registered the look and returned it with a disingenuous one. "What? You don't appreciate fine art? Here, watch the eye sockets move when I flex my biceps." He curled his lanky arm across his chest like a sleepy bodybuilder.

Laura said, "Very nice."

"It has a—how would you say?—kinetic quality, don't you think?" he asked.

" 'Kinetic'? Have you been playing with alphabet blocks again?"

"Ooh
... mean," he said with cheerful relish.

"Thank you. I try."

Impulsively, he grinned and said, "Just like old times, hey?"

That was the hell of Snack Shore: he was smart, articulate, self-taught—and still enjoyed nothing better than acting like an aborigine being dragged kicking and screaming out of the forest. He used to do it out of self-defense, because most of Chepaquit treated not just him, but all of them, like inbred bumpkins. They were kin of stupid Uncle Norbert, after all.

But Snack wasn't a kid anymore, and his act was getting stale. Laura said wearily, "Just get dressed and come downstairs, would you?"

"I will do that. Now leave, I pray you, and let me conduct my
toilette
in peace."

****

Snack's
toilette
must have been pretty basic.
He
showed up at the table unshaven, unkempt, and uncombed. Laura caught a whiff of heavily applied deodorant: camouflage, barely.

"No shower?" she inquired sweetly.

"Why bother?" he said, tugging Corinne's ponytail in greeting as he passed. He pulled out a chair. "I'll just sweat, anyway. I can catch a shower later."

"Three eggs or four, Snack?"

"Four, please. I'm not called Snack for nothing. Any coffee left?"

"I'm way ahead of you," said Corinne, setting a mug in front of him. "Black and strong and French with a touch of chicory, just the way you like it."

"Your servant, mademoiselle," he said, dropping a kiss on the inside of her wrist.

Corinne giggled and whacked him lightly across the shoulder. "I've missed you, dope," she confessed, and she began expertly cracking eggs into an ancient cast-iron pan.

He was the Snack of old: charming, amusing; bilingual. He'd spent an entire summer on the canals of
France
as the improbable result of a cultural exchange program—a flukey, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that their timid mother had insisted he seize. Laura and Corinne had been forced to fill in for him at the nursery for the entire summer. Amazingly to her, Laura resented it still;
her
command of conversational French had come from a Berlitz tape.

He took a pack of unfiltered cigarettes from his T-shirt pocket and began knocking one loose. So French. So irritating.

"Do you
have
to smoke at the table?" she asked.

He took out a Bic and lit up. "Mm-hmm. Why do you ask?"

"I'm allergic."

"Since when?"

"Since I waitressed at a bar for six years while I put myself through school."

Snack rolled his eyes. "Open a window."

"Play nice, you two," Corinne interrupted with a nervous smile. "Or it's going to be a long month. Snack, please put that out."

Snack took a long drag, held it, and blew the smoke toward the ceiling fixture overhead. And then he stubbed the cigarette into the lid of the open jelly jar. He cocked one eyebrow at Laura. "Happy?"

"I've been happier," Laura said, waving away the smoke.

"You wouldn't know happy if you tripped and fell into a vat of it."

Bristling, Laura said, "It might interest you to know that I'm the picture of contentment back in
Portland
."

"You're wrong. It doesn't interest me at all."

"Stop! Stop it, both of you!"

Corinne was standing behind their mother's chair at one end of the table, balancing a plate of food in each hand. "Laura, you
know
Snack likes to tease. Why are you letting him get to you? Really, I'm just so surprised at you."

She slapped one plate down in front of Laura, a much fuller one in front of her brother, then said, "Have I forgotten—? Oh, right: ketchup for the hash browns." She took a bottle out from the fridge and handed it to her brother, then turned her attention back to Laura. "You okay?"

"I'm fine."

"Well
... good," Corinne said hesitantly. She fetched her own plate of overfried eggs and made a production of buttering her English muffin to cover the awkwardness of the moment.

Meanwhile, Laura was left to wonder why on earth she was so determined to bite off her brother's head. True, she'd been under a ridiculous amount of pressure in her job, and the assignment she'd just completed had been a brutal, nonstop grind. And, true, the downtime she had booked for Max and her in
Hawaii
had just been preempted by, oh, Max breaking off their engagement. And replaced by a month of slave labor.