Juno's Daughters (35 page)

“The delivery man.”

Jenny rushed toward the door. “Do you mean to say you left him out there all this time? Lilly, you're impossible!”

Lilly called, “Too light winning makes the prize light.”

Jenny burst out into the bright sun of midday, trying and failing to keep the grin off her face. Imagine Lilly quoting Prospero. Even Lilly had by now, it seemed, read the play.

Andre had climbed out of the bed of the truck and was now leaning against it. He was wearing black jeans, a Ramones T-shirt, and dark sunglasses, which he took off the moment he saw Jenny.

Jenny was in his arms in seconds. He kissed her forehead and her ear and then, after bumping his nose against her jaw, her lips.

“How was I supposed to know that was you calling? Why didn't you leave a message?”

He lifted her chin to look at her eyes. “I couldn't stop thinking that if it hadn't been for the whole thing with you and me, and me bringing Ariel over and all that, then Frankie might not have . . .”

“Stop it.” She kissed him again. “Stop it, you stupid man. You stupid, beautiful man.” She slipped her hand under the Ramones T-shirt and ran it up over his chest. For two days she had eaten only the scone at Monroe's and half a plate of eggs at the diner before leaving Seattle. And two bites of rice the night before. His skin was damp on the back of his neck. She slid her hand across it and shivered. She hadn't been hungry. Until now.

It wasn't until she heard David's ax fall on the wood that she realized that he was still there. She flushed and took a step back.

Turning away from Andre, she called out to him, “David, do you want some eggs?”

He did not look up but stared grimly at his work.

Thump.
“No.”
Split
. “Thank.”
Thump.
“You.”

Jenny cooked eggs for everyone but David, who did not come back in the house to say good-bye before heading down the road to home. She would call him later, she resolved, to make amends.

Lilly lifted a chunk of scrambled eggs with two fingers and tipped her head before dropping it into her mouth. She looked like a trainer at SeaWorld feeding a porpoise. Before Jenny could scold her, Lilly turned to Andre and asked, “So how long are you planning to hang around?”

“I have to go back on Monday.” He tilted his chair so that the two front legs were in the air and stared back at her. “I guess I could ask you the same thing.”

Lilly frowned. She seemed nonplussed by the fact that her question had not rattled him. “Well, I'm leaving as soon as I possibly can.”

“Lilly!” Jenny's head whipped around to face the door to Frankie's room.

Frankie stood in her doorway in full wolf regalia. They gray fabric of the suit was flimsy enough, but the layers of yarn gave her weight and bulk. She said, “It's okay. I know Lilly is not going to stay here forever.”

Jenny patted the seat next to Elliot. “Come eat.” She wondered if Frankie would be able to fit a forkful of omelet through the mouth hole. Well, she guessed they would all find out.

Lilly moved her fork around on her empty plate, thinking. When she looked up the expression on her face was dead serious and her attention was focused squarely on Andre. “If you break my mother's heart, I'll kick your butt.”

“For heaven's sake.” Jenny barely kept herself from dropping the spatula.

“Whoa,” said Elliot. May sat next to him looking thrilled.

Andre nodded toward the arm that held Lilly's fork. It was brown and more cut than usual from a summer of lifting twenty-five-pound bags of potting soil and holding a sail against the winds off San Francisco Bay. He said, “I think you could do it, too.”

“Damn straight,” said Lilly. She looked enormously pleased.

J
enny stood up from her loom just in time to see Dale sauntering into the room with a paper sack filled with popcorn and a copy of
Love's Labour's Lost
peeking out of his leather shoulder bag. David stood behind him, wiping his hands on his jeans.

Fall had arrived. Mushrooms had begun sprouting up through decomposing logs and in piles of fir needles and amid the ferns on Jakle's Lagoon trail. Cone lovers, flat tops, and redbelts worked in their dark corners to reclaim the undergrowth for food and fuel. The rental cottages were empty and the nights were growing long, so that when Dale arrived each evening to read aloud, dark had long since settled around the cabin.

“I'll get bowls,” said Frankie.

Jenny began clearing the dinner dishes from the table where she had left them. “No Peg?”

“She said to go on without her. She's got a headache.”

David quipped, “No Shakespeare tonight, dear, I've got a headache.”

Dale raised his eyebrows. “Is that a wisecrack? From Mr. Travers? Could he be getting a little frisky these days?”

Jenny pulled out a chair. “Leave him alone and sit down.”

The scent of popcorn mingled with the smell of leftover rice. Jenny poured wine into her glass and got one each for Dale and David.

Dale settled into the chair with the play resting on his substantial belly and began to read. He happily took all the parts and was good with the voices, particularly that of Don Adriano de Armado, the heavily accented Spanish swordsman. To Berowne, noble companion to the king who has banished all the women, he gave a debonair affect, and to Costard, the clown, a lisp.

“
Costard
. O Lord, sir, they would know whether the three Worthies shall come in or no.

Berowne
. What, are there but three?

Costard
. No, sir, but it is vara fine, for every one pursents three.

Berowne
. And three times thrice is nine.

Costard
. Not so, sir, under correction, sir, I hope it is not so. You cannot beg us, sir, I can assure you, sir, we know what we know. I hope, sir, three times thrice, sir—

Berowne
. Is not nine.

Costard
. Under correction, sir, we know whereuntil it doth amount.

Berowne
. By Jove, I always took three threes for nine.

Costard
. Oh Lord, sir, it were a pity you should get your living by reck'ning, sir.”

Frankie laughed. She had a bowl of popcorn on her lap and her bare feet were on an empty chair. “He's funny, Costard. That would be a good role for Trinculo. I mean Andre.”

Dale's eyes met Jenny's across the table and he smiled. “It might indeed.”

“Moth is a nice part,” said David, looking from Dale to Jenny and back again.

“Well, who knows,” said Dale dryly, “With your sudden gift for comedy you might be a good fit.”

“Keep reading,” said Frankie. “Please.”

“What my lady doth command,” said Dale, pulling at his beard with his fingers and bending his head to the book.

“But only for a little while longer,” said Jenny, glancing at the kitchen clock. “It's a school night and Frankie needs to go to bed.”

Dale tilted his head toward David and gave Jenny a hang-dog look. “Just like the king in our story, you would deprive us of the company of women?”

Frankie sat up straight and put her feet on the floor. Unlike Lilly, her feelings were all played out clearly on the canvas of her face. They could see her thinking,
Women? Does that mean me?

Dale leaned forward and touched her cheek. “For where is any author in the world teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?”

Frankie blushed.

David started a kindling fire in the woodstove. Dale read until Costard appeared as Pompey in the play within the play and then he tucked his book in his bag and kissed Jenny good-night. David made a move to linger, suddenly needing to haul more logs for the fire, but Jenny pushed him out into the night soon after.

Jenny watched Frankie getting ready for bed through the open door of the bathroom. Frankie brushed her hair slowly, her eyes roaming her own reflection in the glass. Jenny suspected that she was searching for whatever it was that Dale had seen. To Jenny, as indeed to any adult, it was obvious that Frankie was perfectly poised on the edge of womanhood. Jenny pulled herself out of her chair. However many chances she might have had that she hadn't acted upon, this felt like the one chance she had left with Frankie. A window was closing. It might already be too late.

She padded to the bathroom and leaned against the doorjamb. “Your father used to hit me, you know. When you and Lilly were small.”

Frankie turned and searched her mother's face with troubled eyes.

“A lot?” she asked.

“Enough.”

“Were you scared?”

Jenny steadied her breath. Mothering her two girls had always had a tightrope quality, but this felt like a wire strung between skyscrapers. With each arm reaching out in a different direction, she was stretched as far as she could go, one hundred stories above the street.

She said, “I didn't have any money and I had two little girls to take care of.” She tried to reconcile her memories with the long lean shape of her daughter's body. “You were just a tiny baby.”

Frankie frowned. “If you didn't have me, you might have run away earlier.”

Jenny shook her head. Reading for the first time how Prospero had described being cast away with his child, she had shuddered. She had known all too well what it was like to
cry to the sea that roar'd to us
. But however lost she had been, she had not been alone. Like Prospero, who in telling the tale to Miranda had declared,
Thou wast that did preserve me
, she had carried her own deliverance in her arms. She wiped her eyes. How could a sixteenth-century writer have known so much? How was it possible that he could have seen inside a woman's heart?

“If I didn't have you, I might not have run away at all,” she said. “You and your sister gave me the courage to leave when I did.” She looked straight into Frankie's eyes. “Wanting to keep you safe is what saved me. That is the one thing that I'm sure of.”

A log burned through in the woodstove and collapsed into itself with a muffled thud.

Frankie turned back to her reflection in the mirror. Her bruises had faded and her skin was once again as pale as fine sand against her dark brows. She murmured, “
When love speaks, the voice of all the gods makes heaven drowsy with the harmony
.”

Jenny tried to place the line. Was it Prospero, she asked herself? Ariel? She watched the brush travel through her daughter's shining hair and it struck her suddenly that it wasn't
The Tempest
at all, but
Love's Labour's Lost
that she was quoting. Frankie had moved on.