June (25 page)

Two Oaks had forgotten how petty and selfish humans are. Perhaps the balm to its decrepitude was not as easy as it had once believed, simply securing people to inhabit it. Under Cassie’s watch, a hole had broken through the roof, a hole that hadn’t been there before. Tate had damaged one of the master bedroom’s door hinges when she slammed it. And Hank’s solvents had turned from efficient to offensive; Two Oaks didn’t especially want to be rid of the layer of grime on the dining room table, practically all that was left of June and Lemon and Adelbert.

It wasn’t that Two Oaks wanted them out. It only wanted the humans to care about the state of its need. The festering gash atop its roof might be an opportunity. Perhaps it could utilize that emergency—and others like it—to demonstrate its true state of crisis, and galvanize the humans, and win repair.

Tate and Elda’s vicious argument was met, then, with a jostling of the termites from the base of Two Oaks’s foundation. When Cassie locked herself into the office with the stack of bills and forced herself, finally, to look at them—thus releasing great swaths of anxiety into the floor and walls and ceiling—the house responded with rusty water, unbidden, from the taps. And the phone call Tate received midafternoon, which kept Nick shut into Tate’s bedroom for hours as she wrung her hands and begged him to fix it, resulted in an epic toilet backup that even Hank’s industrious plunging couldn’t repair.

They reconvened for roasted salmon and asparagus, but ate at arm’s length at the mahogany table, barely making small talk from their separate corners. After dinner, Tate didn’t give any of her father’s boxes a glance, instead calling Nick to her. Nick cast Cassie a disappointed glance but followed Tate nonetheless. Cassie remembered how powerful she’d felt in the upstairs hall, commanding them to do her bidding, and wondered what had gone wrong in the intervening hours. Elda yawned theatrically. Hank started clearing.

The plumber came after dark. Cassie couldn’t imagine what that cost; she was letting Tate pay. Tate and Elda hid in their respective rooms, but Cassie had the feeling that even had they been twirling through the foyer in ball gowns, the man wouldn’t have noticed; he didn’t seem a popular culture type. He emerged from the upstairs bathroom with a grim prognosis. “I fixed it best I could, but these are old pipes. You’re going to need an overhaul.” Hank paid him in cash. Cassie felt relieved Nick was locked in with Tate; she knew he’d remind her about the roof.

Cassie spent the evening with Elda and a bottle of Jack. The more she drank, the less she cared about being left out of Nick and Tate’s confidence, and the question of Jack and June’s affair, and the house falling to pieces around her. Elda had good stories and she sure knew how to pose. Cassie shot off two rolls of film even though the light was terrible, because she knew, from the way Elda lit up her tall tales, that her charisma would illuminate the pictures. There was that time Elda rode a white stallion into Studio 54. And that other time she and Jack had played a fabulous practical joke on Candice Bergen’s family (it involved two pigs set loose at Bella Vista, the family compound; the pigs were painted with the numbers “one” and “three”). The time she’d gotten high in the bathroom of the Concorde and woken up wearing a clown costume in Istanbul, with no memory of how she’d gotten there. But when Cassie asked casually, from behind the lens, if Elda could remember anything about the summer Jack had spent in St. Jude, the older woman shrugged and equivocated, and the optimistic sheen that had spread over them, as darkness smudged the windows, dulled.

At the westernmost border of the eastern time zone, St. Jude stayed light until ten on a midsummer’s night. Cassie waited until darkness to brush her teeth, feeling a dull headache throb into the spot where her buzz had so recently been. The moon was bright and a breeze tickled in the window as she tried to feel where, exactly, Nick was in the house at that moment, as though Two Oaks was an extension of her body, with nerve endings and cilia, and she could feel the weight and movement of him inside her. Then she did her best to pretend that wasn’t what she was doing, because the thought of feeling him inside her—just the phrase of it—almost made her want to pass out in a desperate, embarrassing way.

She was shuffling back across the wide upper hallway toward her bedroom when, suddenly, Tate’s door opened. “Can I talk to you?” Tate looked left and right like a spy; it was endearing to see how eager she was to get Cassie alone.

But once Cassie was inside Tate’s inner sanctum, the woman busied herself in front of the marble sink. The number of serums and oils in tiny white bottles and jars was dizzying. Each had a specific and vital part to play in Tate’s bedtime regimen. She was wearing white loungewear—cotton and silk, draped and billowing. Her hair, even after a long day, fell just so around her shoulders. Her toes were perfect little pebbles lined up on the wood floor, her wrists slender and long, her earlobes the size of a gentle peck on the cheek.

The movie star had been respectful of June’s belongings. None of the old woman’s knickknacks had been moved; the Jackson Pollock postcard—blank, Cassie’d checked—was still propped on the mantelpiece, beside a framed black-and-white photograph of a young June with a bundled baby—Cassie assumed it was her dad—in her arms. Next to that sat a snapshot of a six-year-old Cassie between her parents, all three of them grinning, which Cassie could hardly bear to look at. She allowed her eyes to skim over it now. Did her young father have Jack Montgomery’s nose? His eyebrows? His mouth? All she could see was her dad, the dad she missed.

June’s modest belongings had accommodated the much larger collection Tate had brought from home: two dozen framed snapshots of a French bulldog standing in front of international monuments, including the Lincoln Memorial, the Eiffel Tower, and an Egyptian pyramid. Cassie picked up one taken in front of the Taj Mahal, realizing the frame was, in fact, silver, instead of the silverish metal of the frames regular folks bought at T.J. Maxx.

“Not one of them is Photoshopped.” Tate’s clean finger tapped at the glass. “That’s my Benny boy. I bring him everywhere.”

“Not to St. Jude.” Cassie settled the picture back into its spot, wondering if Tate really lugged these everywhere—that seemed more like Hank’s handiwork.

“Well, we didn’t exactly know we’d be staying so long. Anyway, he’s safe with Daddy.” Cassie watched Tate’s eyes trail over the last picture atop the mantel, a snapshot of Benny the bulldog between Tate and Max in front of the Great Wall of China. The humans were wearing baseball caps and sweatshirts, trying to look like a normal couple, but the effect, with their perfect skin and glowing smiles, was that of gods playing at mortality.

Cassie pointed her chin toward Max. “What’s he like?” She figured she deserved a bit of gossip, if only getting to see how Tate would react.

Tate considered the question evenly. “He works harder than anyone I know. You know, Aloysius started in his dad’s garage in Burbank.” She smiled brightly. “Oh! Funny story—did you know that was the name of Daddy’s character in
Erie Canal
?”

Cassie shook her head.

“Well, Max didn’t exactly name the band after him, I mean, Max loved what the name evoked—manliness, America—but I also happen to know the band wasn’t officially called Aloysius until he met me.” She beamed. “Anyway, Max came from practically nothing and worked his way up and now he’s the lead singer of the most famous band in the world.”

“Yes, but what’s he like?”

Tate flopped down onto the bed. “Smart. Funny. Sexy. Kind.” She hesitated over that last word, and sucked in a raggedy breath. Then her face melted into something real and sad. “When he wants to be, he is very, very kind.”

Cassie thought she’d seen Tate cry on that first day she’d come to Two Oaks—really cry—but in the face of what was happening before her, she wasn’t so sure. This was something else entirely. This was being ravaged by an onslaught of sobs, turning ugly, making sounds you wouldn’t ever want another soul to hear. Watching immaculate Tate dissolve into this devastation was like witnessing a statue crack open to discover a slimy creature writhing inside. It wasn’t that it felt satisfying, exactly, just that Cassie couldn’t help but feel triumphant that she’d finally gotten to something true.

She found herself muttering unhelpful clichés: “It’s okay. Just let it out.” Tate’s tangible sorrow didn’t feel this honest in any of the movies in which people she supposedly loved had died of cancer or had left her on the tarmac and gone back to their wives, which meant she was a much better actor than even Cassie had known; she had, apparently, made up a palatable version of sorrow that seemed real and yet had nothing on this. This anguish, the actual kind, went fathoms deep.

Cassie had started to wonder if she should leave Tate alone when Tate rasped three words. She was huddled on the bed by then, and Cassie had to lean over her red, wet face to understand. Tate repeated the three words—“He left me”—and then dissolved again.

Cassie warmed a washcloth. How had it come to be that she, of all people in the whole entire world, was being confided in by Tate Montgomery, America’s Sweetheart, about the end of her marriage? It was not a scenario Cassie would have believed even five days before, and, yet, here Tate was, letting Cassie mop her brow, drinking from the proffered glass of water, thanking Cassie once she’d gathered herself together. Cassie felt infinite in her own kindness, proud in the way she had on the day Tate had first wept—or seemed to weep—over the loss of her parents’ love story.

“I’m sorry,” Tate mumbled with her stringy mouth. She dabbed at her reddened eyes and pulled herself up against the headboard. “It’s so embarrassing.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Cassie said, spreading out across the bed. Tate tossed her a pillow. “I mean, it is a big deal, obviously. I’m so sorry to hear you and Max are separating. You can cry. You should cry.”

Tate balled the tissue and nodded as her tears welled up. “I don’t have anywhere to go. Isn’t that stupid? He’s in the house in Malibu so I can’t go to L.A. The apartment in New York is under construction. And if I check into a hotel, the paparazzi will smell it all over me. Oh god, what am I going to do?”

Cassie let Tate sob again for a bit, then said, “You’ll stay here.”

Tate covered her face with her hands and shook her head vehemently; she was still wearing her giant diamond. “You’re too nice.”

“I’m not very nice.”

This made Tate laugh and cry at the same time.

“Anyway, we’re family, right?” Cassie said. “Hank might have to turn the volume down on the quinoa/yoga thing though.”

“Oh god,” Tate cackled. “She’s the worst. Most of the time I want to wring her little neck.”

Cassie felt momentary pity for Hank. But she also knew slamming the girl would bring Tate closer. “Doesn’t it hurt her face to smile that much?”

“She smiles like that because I treat her like gold. She worked for some real bitches before she came to me. I said, ‘You don’t have to kiss my ass, honey, but it’ll get you a raise.’ Isn’t that horrible? Most days I want to kick in her teeth, but if she wasn’t so damn perky I’d fire her.” Tate shook her head and muttered, “It’s her job to pretend I shit rainbows, and I know it, and I still believe her when she says I do.”

Cassie wondered if Hank was in her bedroom right next door, and how much their voices were carrying. Ah well, if Cassie knew her at all, she’d bet Hank would smile and say, “It’s my job to take Tate’s abuse!” And then she’d rah or cheer or something.

“Can I ask you a favor?” Tate asked.

“Tate, as far as I’m concerned, you can stay as long as you need.”

“Oh, thanks,” Tate said, as though they’d already gotten past that point. “Could you take my picture?”

“Sure,” Cassie said, confused. She’d already taken Tate’s picture a dozen times over the last few days. But then she realized what Tate was asking. “What, now?”

Tate smiled ruefully. “I know it sounds crazy. I just don’t have any pictures of what he does to me. I want to remember, so that when he begs me to come back, I can look at this night and see how destroyed I am. Anyway, I trust you. I need to trust a photographer to give her something real.”