June (5 page)

She felt that dangerous switch flip inside her chest, the switch that turned her small and afraid.

Nick saw what her father’s name did to her, she could tell that by the careful way he watched her. But he went on. “And then there’s the matter of your father’s first name. According to the Social Security Administration, Adelbert hasn’t even been in the top thousand male names since 1932.”

“So?”

“So,” he said gently, “Adelbert was Jack’s real name, before he changed it for Hollywood. Adelbert Michaels.”

“What do you want then?” She clenched her jaw. “Obviously you want something.” What she wanted was to leave, but this was her house now.

He nodded, as though grateful to have finally gotten to this part of things. “Tate’s going to contest her father’s will. The good news is she believes, as you do, that Jack Montgomery was not your grandfather.”

Somewhere outside, a dog began to bark, sharp and insistent. Had this been any other day, Cassie would have investigated, creeping out onto the porch or leaning her forehead against the front parlor window. Instead, she sat back in her chair and crossed her arms, like a teenager with a bad attitude. “How is that good news?”

His eyes skipped nervously over the parlors again, really just two halves of the same giant room. In the shakiness of his gaze, Cassie noticed the crumbling ceiling, the water-stained wall above the fireplace, the open wiring where there had once been a light switch and from which, only two weeks before, she’d seen sparks shoot. “Well, if you cooperate with Tate, she’s prepared to pay you a million dollars.”

“Cooperate?”

“We’ll fly back to L.A. tonight in her private jet—it’s waiting at the airfield. A physician will take your DNA sample. A few swabs of the cheek, and he’ll analyze it in his state-of-the-art facility. If you’re a match, well then, obviously you’ll inherit the thirty-seven million as Jack specified. But if not, you’ll fly home a million dollars richer, and Tate will pay all the legal fees to straighten this mess out.”

“Why not just swab my cheek and take it to her yourself?”

“We want to do this right.” Crossed
t
’s, dotted
i
’s; Cassie supposed she should expect nothing less of Hollywood royalty.

“And if I don’t cooperate?” Cassie knew enough about death and what came after it to avoid a whole other family’s drama, especially that of the most famous family in the world. But then—$37 million. Not to mention the matter of June’s and Jack’s names, clasped together. The dream people had certainly expressed an interest in that union, and this fact itched at Cassie, whether it meant she was going crazy or not.

The skin between Nick’s eyes wrinkled, giving him a worried frown. His fingers nervously edged his smartphone. “Your father went by El, right?”

She nodded, wondering what that had to do with anything.

“I like that.” He coughed nervously. “El, uh, he had a drinking problem, huh?”

“What?” She was too shocked to say anything else.

“Your art show,” he said, as though it was her fault this had come up. “The
Times
mentioned your bravery in their review of your installation piece. The Jack Daniel’s bottle on the car floor—they really loved that.”

“Are you kidding me?” She felt disgusted, raw, exposed, and incapable of sputtering out anything but utter disbelief at Nick’s gall.

He turned red-faced and apologetic in the wake of her reaction. “It’s just that his addiction, well, it points to a certain weakness, you understand? I’m sure you can imagine how well connected Tate is. She’ll go to the ends of the earth to prove her case if she can’t just settle it with a DNA sample from you. Even, you know, even trying to prove that your father, or who knows who else, could have, I don’t know, tried to coerce Mr. Montgomery into, well…” His hands were open in logical supplication; why wouldn’t she just agree? “Cassie, please consider how many resources Tate is willing to devote to this cause.” He leaned forward as if offering a helpful tip. “Ask yourself if you’re financially prepared if and when she goes after you.”

“Goes after me?” Cassie was seeing red.

Nick scrabbled together his things and stood, knee jolting the snack tray and nearly sending the remaining nibbles flying. He swallowed, as if he didn’t want to say the words he was about to. “This is a nice house. I’d be sad to see you lose it.”

“Okay.” A great, roaring power from within pushed Cassie to her feet. “It’s time for you to leave.” As though she’d asked for this, or had any interest in fighting with rich ladies over some stranger’s money. She pointed toward the front door with a shaking hand, imagining what the anger looked like as it licked off of her. “Get out.”

Nick was already in the foyer, chandelier chattering with the reverberations of his footsteps.

The heavy door protested as he pulled it open. The front porch groaned under his step. She cursed her earlier daydream of it trapping him out there forever; what she wanted, more than anything, was for this stranger to just be gone.

“If my DNA is so goddamn important to Tate Montgomery, then tell her to come get it herself,” she growled. And she slammed the front door in his face, noticing, in the split second before she shut him out, that Nick looked both relieved and appreciative, not at all what she was expecting.

The vibrant scent of Ivory filled the room. It was the first day of June; finally, June! Lindie had planned to get to Center Square before breakfast and sniff out the movie shoot. Today she’d finally see if
Erie Canal
was really coming to town. But even for Lindie, it was early; the light filling the room was rosy and low. Already June was primping. Lindie burrowed back into the creamy pillowcase, warming to the idea that June had changed her mind and would, in fact, be coming along to the extras casting. The prospect of putting on that horrible strawberry dress was much more pleasant if June would be by Lindie’s side. Together, they’d comb the rats out of her hair, and June would invite Lindie down for breakfast in the grand Two Oaks dining room. The doughy promise of Apatha’s biscuits filled the air.

Lindie dozed again, and in that drowse of morning, the big house loved her. It had always loved this little girl who, in turn, loved its creator, Lemon Gray Neely. Before June and her mother moved in, Lindie had spent countless childhood hours helping Apatha wash Uncle Lem’s hands with a knit cloth, or skating across the ballroom floor with soft rags tied to her feet. It loved the tangy stain of brass polish on her father’s fingertips almost as much as she did.

Lindie was a child who needed Two Oaks; that made her easy to love too. Her mother, Lorraine, had left Lindie and Lindie’s father, Eben (and St. Jude entirely), two years after Eben returned from the war, when Lindie was seven. In the ensuing years, Apatha—who kept Two Oaks shipshape, no small feat—had become Lindie’s new mother, especially indispensable on those days when Eben needed to balance the books for Uncle Lem’s vast business holdings. So sweet were the memories of the little girl gathered onto Apatha’s lap in the yeasty kitchen, that though she had grown, and the roost was now ruled by June’s mother, Cheryl Ann, Two Oaks still considered Lindie to be its own.

It was in business school in Columbus that Eben had met Lorraine. Eldest son of the original caretakers of Two Oaks—Mr. and Mrs. Loftus Shaw—scrawny little Eben had had a shrewdness with numbers that impressed Uncle Lem. The great man admired the way the boy divided ten cookies evenly among sixteen children, how he estimated the number of apples in a bushel just by looking at the top of the crate. When it came time for a high school graduation gift, Loftus and Ellen were shocked and delighted to receive a large check in Eben’s name, accompanied by an enthusiastic acceptance letter to business school in Columbus. The old man had arranged it.

Eben didn’t talk much about his parents, but Lindie knew they’d been hardworking folk whose trade was more like Apatha’s (sweeping, baking, dusting, waxing) than like his own. Two Oaks remembered its original, lovely caretakers—how they sometimes held hands over the kitchen table, how the sour stink of Ellen’s boiled cabbage would fill the whole downstairs, and the awful day when she fell from the ladder while dusting the foyer light fixture. And though the son of these good, simple folk had become a man of numbers, land, and oil, he’d never forgotten where he’d come from. In the days before Cheryl Ann, he and Lindie spent hours on the Two Oaks front porch, tending to the small and necessary tasks Apatha couldn’t get to. Sundays, Eben would fiddle with the shrieking doorbell with a Phillips screwdriver, his ledger and fountain pen forgotten on the porch floor, while Apatha read aloud from
Huckleberry Finn
. Beside Uncle Lem on the porch swing, Lindie watched the old man’s wrinkled lips putter along with Mark Twain’s sentences. Eventually, he would doze off, and, dappled in sweet summer light, Lindie would imagine Jim and Huck on their raft as her father unscrewed a porch bulb atop a ladder, and bumblebees mumbled lazily across the afternoon.

After lunch, little Lindie would help Apatha put up the wash, and the wet, white linens would flap in the sun. In the evenings, Apatha would bring out her darning gourd and repair their socks, or knit cotton dishrags while Lindie lay, chin propped up, in front of the great radio console in the foyer and listened to
The Lone Ranger
followed by
The Grand Ole Opry
. Sometimes at night they’d put an old Strauss waltz onto the Victrola that Lemon and his long-dead wife, Mae, had received as a wedding gift many years before, and the whole house would bloom with the tinny pace of one-two-three one-two-three.

Lindie’s drowsy mind mingled with the household’s lulling memories of that sweet time, now gone, until she heard a sound that alarmed her. It came from June’s side of the room. It was a sound Lindie remembered from Lorraine’s days, one she hadn’t heard often, but enough to recognize, the sound of a woman getting ready to go out, not to the market or the corner, not to school, as she’d heard June do on plenty of cold winter mornings (the scratch of wool, the slip of buttons), but to impress: the adult swish of ironed cotton as it drops down over a nylon slip.

Lindie sat up. June was standing before the mirror to the left of the window that, in the light of day, now overlooked Lindie’s humble bungalow just across the street, where Eben was still snoring, and the dishes remained unwashed. June wore a navy dress that brought out the dark ocean of her eyes. The fabric nipped in at her waist, making her hips seem even curvier than they already were. Her breasts pressed, high and round, against the bodice, as though begging to be set free. Her cheeks were rouged, her lips stained red, her long hair curled and tucked under.

“You can’t wear that.” Lindie’s disapproving tone masked the itchiness of her palms, the shallow lump of her heart as it fluttered far too fast. She wanted to cover June with a blanket. “The movie’s set right after the Civil War.”

In the mirror, June’s face grew solemn. This was the same face she’d made two summers before, the day she’d had to break the news that the robins had flown from their nest and she’d found one of the downy hatchlings with a broken neck just below it. But her voice stayed cheery. “Do me up?” Her dress was open in the back, showing the sweet press of her shoulder blades through her slip. Lindie could just make out the delicate outline of her white brassiere, and ached to lay her palms against those small winged plates, but she sat on her hands. If she didn’t fasten the dress, June wouldn’t be able to step outside; someone had to save her from flouncing around town looking like some Columbus doctor’s wife.

June turned, head tipped to the side, like Lindie was a disobedient child to be indulged. She came to Lindie, sat on the bed, and sighed. “I got a letter. From Artie. He comes back this morning.”

“But the mail hasn’t come yet.”

June held her breath, then let it out. “I got it yesterday.”

Lindie flung herself from the bed. They’d wasted a whole day. “You knew he was coming back and you didn’t tell me?” That was why June had been so evasive the night before.

Lindie swiped her dirty overalls up from the floor and stepped into them as if donning armor for battle. “We have to do something, June.” She hadn’t ever truly believed Artie Danvers would be back in time. He’d been gone for months, first in Louisiana, then Texas, then Mississippi—anywhere his brother, Clyde, had a business interest, anywhere but St. Jude. Sure, he’d been sending June postcards, but they were bland and unromantic—“Tried a chicken-fried steak,” “Went to a tractor pull”—and June couldn’t be serious that she was going to hitch herself to that wagon, not based on a couple of quiet strolls around Center Square before he’d abandoned her for more than half a year.

“You’ll have to slip out the window,” June said as Lindie untangled herself from the nightdress she’d borrowed. “Mother’s up.”

The gall, thought Lindie, the gall. Once she’d been welcomed through the Two Oaks front door, but now she had to climb out the window like some common thief, and only because of Cheryl Ann. Cheryl Ann, who had all but banished Eben and Lindie from the house. They weren’t even invited to Sunday dinner anymore! It ached Lindie’s center to remember what Two Oaks had once offered; she grasped the memory of listening to
Queen for a Day
and
The Romance of Helen Trent
on the parlor floor, poking her small fingers into the honeycombed holes of the radio console’s speaker. Well, fat chance she’d ever get to do that again.

It was obvious (to Lindie at least) that Cheryl Ann blamed Eben for her husband Marvin’s death. As though just because Marvin and Eben had served together in the war, Eben could be held responsible for Marvin’s reenlisting for Korea! Or for getting killed there! Or for secretly losing all his money to gambling! Cheryl Ann certainly didn’t blame Clyde Danvers, who’d also served with Eben and Marvin; in fact, she was marrying her daughter off to Clyde’s brother. It was no coincidence that the Danverses were the second-richest family in town. Cheryl Ann was a social-climbing snob, but Lindie tried to keep her opinions of June’s mother to herself.

She freed her head from the nightgown. She clipped the overalls over her shoulders with a huff, then spat in her hands and rubbed them across her hair, noticing, with deep satisfaction, how hard June tried not to shudder at the sight.

“You’re ruining your life, June,” she said sharply.

June’s face turned red, but, as usual, she didn’t take the bait. “The only thing I’m ruining,” she said evenly, lifting the empty plate that had held Apatha’s cookies, “is breakfast, if I miss it.”

Lindie stuck out her tongue. “Fine.”

June reached for the doorknob. “Fine.” She pulled open the door and headed out into the upstairs hall, where she was reduced to the sharp ticking of her heels down the wide oak stairway. Her sweet scent wafted back through the narrow gap as the door began to close.

Lindie was filled with regret. She suddenly remembered the strawberry dress, the plan for breakfast, the promise of Apatha’s biscuits. She rushed to the door brimming with apology. She caught only the briefest glimpse of the nut brown hallway, streaming with the buttery glow the stained-glass windows cast onto the main landing. But then the door fell shut. Lindie thought of June’s shoulder blades against the taut slip and kicked the bedpost until the pain in her toe matched what filled the rest of her.