June (16 page)

“June had nothing to do with the movie whatsoever,” Mrs. Weaver said. “I don’t know if she thought she was better than it or what. If you don’t mind my saying, she was a bit…prissy.” Mrs. Deitz made a tutting noise, and Mrs. Weaver said, “I’m sorry, Annette, but they’re asking, and I’m going to tell the truth.” She sighed, gathered herself, and turned back to Cassie. “June was real pretty, you know.” There it was again, that “rull.” “But she’d come from a rich family up in Lima, and she held her nose in the air when she first moved to St. Jude. That kind of thing just didn’t impress us here. And then, well, she went and got engaged to Arthur Danvers, and she made sure we all knew it. As if we were desperate for Arthur Danvers. Which we were not.”

“Your grandfather was a very nice man,” Mrs. Deitz interjected, frowning apologetically.

“June became much more bearable after the wedding. It was a simple affair, very small. Not even a reception, if I remember. I think it was good for her to be humbled.” Mrs. Weaver mused on her own profundity for a moment, then nodded with definite force. “And then she had the baby—your father—and became just as common as the rest of us.”

“And your father!” Mrs. Deitz said, clapping her hands together in delight. “What a nice little boy he was.”

Cassie did her best to avoid the bruise that had formed at the center of her chest.

“June’s friend Lindie helped with the movie,” Mrs. Weaver mentioned, as the thought occurred to her.

“Do you think Lindie was a lesbian?” Mrs. Deitz asked. They’d obviously had many such speculative conversations.

“She did like to dress like a boy.”

“If she’d been born nowadays maybe she’d be transgender.” Mrs. Deitz was clearly pleased she’d remembered the word.

Mrs. Weaver shrugged dismissively.

Mrs. Deitz went on, nodding at her victory. “I read an article about transgender youth. They’re at risk.”

“Well, Lindie seemed just fine nosing into everyone’s business, that’s all I know for sure.” Mrs. Weaver leaned forward, pointing to Nick’s phone, so he took down what he could. “She moved to Chicago the same summer as
Erie Canal
. With her father. It was just the two of them. Her mother had run out years before. A redhead. There was talk she was a prostitute.”

“Janet!” Mrs. Deitz clutched her pearls again. Mrs. Weaver smiled saucily and delicately picked up another Ritz.

“Anything else?” Nick asked.

The old women sighed in unison. They mentioned a few tidbits about the parts they’d played—both had been extras in the election scene, and could recall in impeccable detail the swish of their taffeta dresses—but that was all they had.

“But you’re going to talk to Henry Abernathy?” Mrs. Deitz asked as they walked toward the front door.

“Yes,” Nick said, checking his phone, “we’re going over there this afternoon.”

“He’ll know much more than we do.” Mrs. Deitz reached for the doorknob. “He had bad lungs as a child, so his mother told him history could be his sport. It’s been his hobby ever since. He knows every single thing about this town. He’s quite something.”

“He’s quite single,” Mrs. Weaver said, and Mrs. Deitz turned the color of strawberry ice cream.

“Ask him if he has any pictures of the party Jack and Diane threw at Two Oaks,” Mrs. Deitz said, ushering them onto the front porch.

“They threw a party?” Cassie asked.

“Close to the end of the film production, so it must have been the end of June. It was a big event—everyone in town went. Albert took me. We danced the fox-trot to a live orchestra, set up under a big tent right there on the lawn. Your great-great-great-uncle Lemon was sick by then, and quite old. But when they opened up the house for that one night”—she clapped her hands in delight at the memory—“oh, it was a grand affair indeed.”

“I wore emerald chiffon,” Mrs. Weaver said, batting her eyelashes, swept up in her friend’s romantic description.

Nick shook their hands, and Cassie was about to do the same when Mrs. Deitz gently touched her arm.

“And may I just say”—the small woman looked apprehensive now, and as she hung her head at a familiar angle, Cassie knew exactly what was coming—“I’m so sorry about your parents. We were all just so sad when it happened.”

Cassie had learned it was rude to cover your ears when people said such things. She pasted on a sympathetic smile, because that’s what people wanted when they brought up your orphanhood. “You were a lucky girl to survive that,” the old woman said, as the other nodded along gravely with wide, hungry eyes.

Even a year before, Cassie would have shocked them with a gruesome tidbit—the severed hand, maybe, or the sound of the Jaws of Life gnawing through the twisted wreck above her. Instead she simply said, “Thank you.”

“Well, I think June did right, moving down to Columbus so you could stay in your home,” Mrs. Deitz said, as though Mrs. Weaver didn’t. “I know we all missed her, but it was the best thing not to make you move to St. Jude, where everything would have been new.”

“We only wish she’d made an effort once you were off to college, at least on the house,” Mrs. Weaver interjected. “We thought she’d stay put in St. Jude once you were off, or at least that’s what she told us she had planned. But Two Oaks has fallen into such disrepair. It’s an eyesore, is what it is.” Her voice dripped with recrimination. Cassie told herself to take deep breaths and bite her tongue.

Mrs. Deitz was incensed. “She took her job as guardian very seriously is all, Janet, and who’s to blame her that she cared about her own granddaughter more than some old house?” To Cassie, she said, “You must have loved all those visits she took to New York.”

“Visits?” Cassie asked.

“The last few years. All those visits to New York City! Why, she was hardly in St. Jude at all.”

“Personally, I can’t stand the place,” Mrs. Weaver quipped. “There’s at least seven reasons I could never live in that city, and three through six are the people.”

New York? Loved it? There’d only been that one trip, last summer. The disaster, the last time Cassie had seen June, if you weren’t counting the hospital. “I think you must be confused.”

Mrs. Weaver and Mrs. Deitz exchanged a quick glance. Then Mrs. Deitz frowned. “Must be our mistake.” She snuck a nervous peek at Mrs. Weaver before adding, “Your grandpa Arthur was already sick when your parents passed. Plenty of people think June should have stayed to nurse him through the end. But I think what she did was saintly.”

Mrs. Weaver’s eye roll made her feelings known on that subject. She squared herself to Cassie and added, “Now you’re living there, can we expect you to mow?”

Cassie had a sudden urge to throttle the cream puff.

“You know what?” Nick said, putting his hand on Cassie’s lower back and flashing both ladies a smile. “We really must be going. Thank you both so much.”

Next thing Cassie knew, Nick was backing them down the driveway. His sleeves were rolled up over his elbows; his hands were sure on the wheel. The old women waved from the front porch, set side by side like a pair of salt and pepper shakers. That should have been Cassie’s picture; she could see it now. But she didn’t, couldn’t, take it. Somehow Nick knew not to say a word for miles.

They still had an hour and a half before they were due at Henry Abernathy’s. Cassie didn’t want to go home. Nick didn’t say as much, but she could tell he liked the idea of an hour out of Tate’s purview, so she suggested they stop by the DQ, just up the road on the other side of St. Jude.

“DQ?”

Cassie laughed, incredulous. “Dairy Queen. Are you human?”

He laughed at himself then too. “I’m from California.”

“You don’t have Dairy Queen in California?”

“We do,” he said, as they passed Hair Priorities, Clancy’s Tables N’ Tubs, and Buckeye Storage, “but we don’t nickname it.”

It was an old-fashioned Dairy Queen, really just a shack, where boys ditched their bikes, and girls giggled against the counter, and families jammed themselves around the two red picnic tables that overlooked the Paris Drycleaners, with the saddest white cutout of the Eiffel Tower Cassie’d ever seen. Nick wanted to take their burgers and fries to go—“Wouldn’t it be nicer to sit in Montgomery Square?”—but Cassie insisted the only reason to endure the DQ food was to line your stomach for ice cream. He insisted he didn’t want any ice cream, really. She replied that if he tried to eat raw almonds for dessert, she was going to scream. After they licked the salt from their fingers, she carried their red tray up to the garbage can and ordered them each a soft serve dipped in chocolate. The chocolate hardened like a shell within the minute. She showed him how to eat from the top down, so as not to overcrack the chocolate—with occasional licks across the sides, of course, to get rid of any errant drips—and she could tell, from the way his eyes rolled back in his head as he chewed, that he hadn’t tasted something so good in a long time.

They drove the three minutes back to Montgomery Square. Out of the car, Cassie watched Nick’s eyes skirt across the library and the fire station, squat brick buildings made for the ages. They strolled toward the old canal. The deep trench was empty, save for the thick sludge at the bottom. Cassie wondered the names of the men who’d first dug it out.

“How do you know so much about history, architecture, that kind of stuff?” she asked, turning to Nick. “You seem really into it.”

“My mom,” Nick said. “She’s a production designer. She, uh, she’s the one who’s hired to decide how a movie should look.”

“Like she’s the one who says the curtains should be blue?”

“That the curtains should be just a shade lighter than royal blue, and that the house should be three stories high and have white clapboard siding, and that the ballroom should have chintz wallpaper, and that the winter snow should be two and a half feet deep. Every last detail, that’s my mom.”

“Wow, that’s a cool job.”

“Yeah, and it wasn’t easy for her to get there, either.” He picked up a pebble and chucked it into the canal, where it made a satisfying thwock. “Just about every other production designer at her level is a man. She had to work her way up, let things roll off her back, fight for what she wanted. She started as an art director—that’s the person who carries out the production designer’s vision. So she spent a lot of years doing what other people wanted. Now she finally gets to be the boss.” He looked proud.

“Anyway.” He picked up a handful of stones and lobbed them, one by one, into the canal. “It was just her and me, so I spent a lot of time hearing about trompe l’oeil and cathedral ceilings and the Spanish Inquisition and…If I hadn’t learned to like it, I would have lost my mind.”

“And that’s how you met Tate?”

“Yeah, my mom was doing a movie a few years back and needed an extra set of hands, so I helped out on set.”

“What movie?”

“Agnes.”
He said it with a soft
g,
like the French did—“An-yes”—and Cassie tried not to melt. It was one of her favorite movies, featuring Tate as an impoverished laundress in postwar Paris. The role had been a bit of a stretch, but Cassie thought Tate had been magnificent, especially in the scene when she learned that one of her three children—all presumed dead—had survived the occupation.

“That’s a great movie,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Oh, thanks.” He seemed suddenly shy. “I mean, I didn’t really have much to do with it. But you should tell Tate—I bet that would mean a lot.” They followed the canal diagonally across the square, through the shade and around overflowing garbage cans; this was where the teenagers came to drink on Friday nights. “Anyway, I was looking for work at the time, and Tate’s assistant, Margaret, noticed me, said they were looking for someone to join Tate’s team.”

“So how long have you been working for her?” He bristled under her scrutiny, and Cassie laughed. “Tell me to shut up whenever you want; I’m just curious.”

“No, I get it, it’s a strange job. Um…” He looked up, to the tops of the elm trees above them. “Five years? But I’ve only been doing this job for a couple of months.” He cleared his voice, suddenly uncomfortable. “Since Margaret left.”

“You’re, like, Tate’s head assistant now?”

“Something like that.”

“And you like it?”

“Of course. Hundred-and-thirty-hour workweeks, not remembering what time zone you’re in, never getting to have a private life—what’s not to love?” He was joking, of course, but Cassie wondered if the bravado didn’t hide some doubt.

So she pushed. “Do you ever feel like you’re living someone else’s life for them?” He frowned, but, before he could answer no, she elaborated. “I mean, like the sweaty towel thing—how she just gave it to you—do you ever feel like you’re, I don’t know, doing someone’s dirty work? I don’t mean it in a bad way, I’m really asking.”

His frown turned thoughtful. “I guess I just don’t see it that way. It’s like, here’s this tremendously famous, successful person. There aren’t enough hours in the day for her, on a basic level, to survive; she wouldn’t physically be able to eat and cook and read four scripts and exercise and go to a costume fitting, and all the hundreds of other things she’s expected to do in a day. She needs someone else to manage the nitty-gritty. She needs me. She needs Hank. She’s incredibly humble about it, actually.”

“Do you ever want your own life?”

“I like my life.” They’d crossed over into something less friendly. Cassie knew she should back off, but she couldn’t help it; she had the distinct feeling that it was Nick the assistant, not Nick the man, who’d threatened her with eviction two days before. He’d seemed so uncomfortable, regretful, so out of his element, and she couldn’t shake that relieved look he’d given her when she slammed the door in his face.

“And what’s the endgame?” she asked. Almost to the old high school, they’d nearly reached the end of the canal. “What do you want to do with your life?”

She saw, then, that she’d pushed too far. He turned toward her, his mouth set in a tight line. “Well, what’s your endgame? I mean, this seems like a pretty solid plan, hiding out in the middle of Ohio while your house falls down around you.”

She held up her hands in surrender. He kept his eyes on her for a minute, and then, together, they turned back toward the car, walking in silence until he said, in a calmer, kinder tone, “I don’t have an endgame.”

To which she could honestly reply, “I don’t either.”