“It hasn’t changed at all,” Jo noticed.
“I know,” Autumn said warmly.
Familiarity made her vision sharpen, annotating every house they passed. Dr. Wiley’s navy-blue bungalow with a bright white ramp up to the door. The Nedelmans’ gnarled tree cut in a U around the low-slung power lines. The wall of spiky shrubs in front of the office that would soon be Birdy’s. The trout mailbox at the house with the missing shingles.
While many of the homes on the street had the same sharp roof and tall porch stairs, the red-and-white house that sat dead center was the only one with a picket fence. Weeds drooped between the white posts.
Ginger Jay had finally hammered one of her real-estate signs into the overgrown front lawn, her smiling face frozen under a threatening COMING SOON.
Jo paused, her head cocked toward the sign. “This is your dad’s new wife? She looks familiar.”
The porch stairs groaned under Autumn’s footsteps. “She didn’t use to have her picture on the signs. When we were in high school, she used—”
“Puppets!” Jo gasped, scampering up the stairs behind her. “The Chief is married to the Puppet Lady?!”
“Sandy Point’s own,” Autumn said. “He moved into her huge house in Waterfront Cove.”
Jo’s jaw dropped. “The Chief lives in the vacation houses? Tell me he’s wearing bougie boat shoes and driving a Subaru. No! A Prius.”
“He kept the truck and his boots, thank God, but he shaved off his mustache. His upper lip is so pale.”
Autumn patted her pockets for her keys and pulled them out by the Fire Station 75 key chain her mom accidentally ordered in bulk triplicate one Christmas.
For a second, between the turn of the key and the click of the latch, Autumn would always forget this wasn’t her home. The memory of it was a glowing beacon—the friendly noise of dogs and friends, the Chief in the kitchen, her mom’s perfume everywhere.
The reality was colder. While the Main Street house had the bones of Autumn’s favorite place—Kelly-green everything, family photos taken at the JCPenney in McMinnville, fish wallpaper in the bathroom—it had none of the warmth. Or electricity. No one wanted to pay the utilities on an abandoned house.
“Oh,” Jo said, the syllable loaded with surprise and disappointment.
“I know,” Autumn said, wrinkling her nose at the musty air. To the right, the living room was crowded with furniture—tables and piles of folding chairs—but no couches. The greige carpet was discolored where the curtainless windows let in too much light. Autumn toed aside a particularly thick dust bunny. “Mom and Dad both moved out when I was in LA. Dad first, obviously. Then Mom last year. They’ve been using the house for storage since.”
They continued past the stairs, into the dining room off the kitchen. The Kelly-green walls were dingy, the matching green piano dusty. The floor was crowded with storage tubs and half-packed boxes of dishes.
“Mom couldn’t take most of her entertaining stuff with her,” Autumn said. “Actually, Florencio carried the china hutch into and out of the condo when Mom forgot to measure the walls. It was a whole thing. But when I told her we were stopping by today, she told me to tell you to ‘grab whatever you want and welcome home and sorry about California.’” Her impression of Cindy Kelly was exaggeratedly simpering, bordering on drunk, but it made Jo laugh, so Autumn continued: “And remember! ‘If your dishes are jazzy, nobody remembers the food!’”
Throughout Autumn’s childhood, her mom had loved to entertain without a lick of knowledge in the kitchen. Instead of buying cookbooks or waiting for the Chief to be off shift, Cindy Kelly bought premade food and dumped it in ornate dishware. KFC out of crystal. Dips in ramekins. Entenmann’s on a cake stand. Juice in champagne glasses. Autumn couldn’t count how many times the all-green dining room table had been packed with friends or firefighters or the wrestling team eating chili out of a cabbage-shaped soup tureen.
Autumn peered into the nearest box. “Here are wineglasses! What else is on your list for the dinner party?”
“My mom said the shop already has silverware, plates, and water cups. But I’d love to get some of the covered casserole dishes. Especially the chicken dish—”
“Henrietta! Of course. That’s at my house. I make Henrietta Casserole all the time.” Technically anything served in Henrietta the chicken dish was Henrietta Casserole. The little-red-hen Dutch oven had been Florencio’s favorite when he was young, so it used to come out a lot when there were new fancy foods to try.
“Friends are kind of important to a successful dinner party,” Jo said, wringing her hands. “When we wrote the list, I’m sure we just meant the two of us eating mashed potatoes out of pretty bowls, but that wouldn’t read super well on camera. Do you think everyone will be okay with pictures? I don’t want them to feel like I tricked them into a photo shoot.”
“I’ll just add a note about pictures to the group thread!” Autumn said. She retrieved her phone in a flash. Visions of her friends being friends danced through her head like sitcom opening credits. Having a regular booth at Days for singalong night. Jo and Bianca and Autumn braiding each other’s hair at a sleepover. Birdy and Florencio dancing in a fountain.
“Wait!” Jo said, chewing on her bottom lip. “Is this too desperate looking? Like texting right after you get home from a date? They just left Frosty’s to deal with something, and we’re already planning next week.”
Autumn laughed. “Don’t be silly. You can talk to your friends whenever, Jo. People like to be thought of. It’s past time for us to have a group chat. The only way to make friends with people is to be friends with them. Trust me. Should we add Wren to the list? She would hate to be in a group thread, but I could grossly misuse our Slack chat for personal business.”
“No! No, I’ll invite her on my own,” Jo said. Her eyes wandered around the room. She squeezed between stacks of Christmas china to inspect a box. “Is this really a box of just buttons?”
“Oh yeah. Mom’s craft supplies are everywhere. Which is good news for the list! There’s buttloads of stuff for you to use here. One of the closets should have all the glitter you need for the glitter fight. And, last time I checked, Flo’s surfboard was in the garage. He refuses to come back here, as you may have noticed.” Autumn gestured to empty brother-shaped air beside her. “He’s been avoiding Dad for three-ish years now. Selling the house was Dad’s idea, and Ginger’s the one on the sign, so now he avoids the house, too. The thing is, the money would make sure Mom could stay in her condo, not just pay for the Chief’s boat—”
“He wants to sell the house for a boat?” Jo asked, sounding exactly like Florencio.
“I know, I know. It’s not great. But neither is a sad house that nobody uses! This place deserves to be more than just storage,” Autumn said, tucking her phone back into her pocket. “Now, do you want to go upstairs and rummage through Flo’s room like when we were kids?”
Jo’s eyes sparkled. “Um, yes, of course I do.”
Framed school photos of Florencio and gap-toothed Autumn watched as she and Jo thundered up the stairs. Flat cardboard boxes lined the upstairs hallway, waiting to be folded and filled. Both of Autumn’s parents had started and abandoned the project multiple times. Rather than face the magnitude of it, Chuck Kelly had ordered a bulk pickup and told the family to claim what they wanted by May 1. After that, the newbie firefighters would make a hundred bucks throwing all the Kelly family memories into a dumpster in the driveway.
Florencio’s room was the first off the stairs. The door, still papered with Get Out signs and caution tape, stood open. The walls were dark blue and white, except for the patch on the ceiling that was all Rihanna posters. The wall shelves were crowded with cobwebby plastic trophies and ribbons. The bed was made, as though her brother had just left for school, rather than moving out a decade ago to live with Melody, the girl he’d nearly married.
“I forgot about the sheer number of sports trophies. No wonder he dedicated his whole
life to coaching,” Jo said, craning her neck to see the tops of the shelves. “Can you recycle trophies?”
“He has more than enough room for them at his house,” Autumn said, brushing clean the spines of a row of Star Trek novels. “He has an empty second bedroom. And a mostly empty first bedroom. His ex was an interior designer. She sort of un-designed the house when she left.”
“Well, if he ever wants to wallpaper his ceiling with Rihanna again, he knows where to start.” Jo squinted at the ceiling. “How did he even get those up there?”
“Don’t be jealous,” Autumn teased. “I remember watching the ‘Umbrella’ video with you.”
Jo clutched her heart in a fake swoon. “Those legs! Did I want to be her? Did I want to have sex with her? Yes and yes. I’m not saying I wouldn’t make a Rihanna shrine. Just not on the ceiling. It’s less creepy in a frame. Or a Pinterest folder.”
The more interesting things they remembered about Florencio’s room were gone—the shoe box with weed and condoms under the bed, the dresser candy stash, the gym bag where bottles of shoplifted liquor used to wait for the next jock party. The closet had golf clubs, moldy gym shoes, turn-of-the-century PlayStation controllers, and a Point High letterman jacket with Kelly embroidered on the breast.
“I would love to roll up to Days in this,” Jo said, rubbing the leather arm of the jacket between her thumb and forefinger. She checked the label. “Oh my God, who let him order an XL? This is peak short-guy vanity. Even with his jacked arms, Flo’s a medium.”
“And in high school, he was totally a small. All of those trophies are for lightweight champ,” Autumn said. “I’m sure Mom said he’d grow into it. She used to swear that Flo would get taller and I would get boobs. Obviously neither of those things is ever going to happen, but she still swears that we’re both just late bloomers.”
Autumn’s room had only an empty bed frame, a bookcase she didn’t have room for in her cottage, and her mother’s StairMaster.
“What happened to your Broadway posters?” Jo asked, examining the orange-painted walls. Autumn could picture exactly where Wicked, Sweet Charity, and Mamma Mia! had hung over her bed.
“They’re in my classroom!” Autumn said. “Well, my side of my classroom. The other half is Pat Markey’s. She does not like my Sweet Charity poster. She says Fosse is too sexual for high schoolers. I think she might be anti-dancing, like the dad in Footloose.”
“It’s so weird that our algebra teacher started directing the musical,” Jo observed.
“To be fair, it was weirder when our choir teacher also taught algebra,” Autumn said. “Sandy Point Unified School District gets real creative. My mom is teaching sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade science this year. It may drive her to finally retire. Pat, on the other hand, I think is only getting stronger over time.”
“So, sharing a classroom with her isn’t going great?”
Autumn had shared a room before—not on Main Street, unless Jo sleeping over for consecutive nights during summer vacation counted. In college, she’d lived in the dorms, then with three roomies off campus. In LA, she split an apartment with a group of struggling actors who worked at different Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf locations. All to say: she was no stranger to having a roommate.
Sharing a classroom with Pat was absolutely nothing like anything she had ever experienced before.
“First off, she still gets the class’s attention by ringing that tiny bell. I hear it even when she’s not ringing it now. And she starts every morning by singing the national anthem at the piano and expects everyone in our first-period classes to salute until she’s done.”
“What the fuck?” Jo laughed. “Have you considered taking a knee?”
“Of course I have!” Autumn said. “But she thinks she’s my boss because she doesn’t teach math anymore. When I got hired, she even made a new job title for herself: senior co-chair of the drama department.”
“The last time I invented a job title, I ended up making myself redundant and getting fired,” Jo said, folding her arms. “Maybe it’s time for her to redundant herself into early retirement.”
The ice cream in Autumn’s stomach protested. She didn’t want to be mean to Pat. In high school, Pat had given her so many of her fondest memories—standing beside her piano, singing “Over the Rainbow” for the first time, or clapping out the rhythm to the title song of Oklahoma! on the football field when the fire alarm interrupted rehearsal. Even at the beginning of this school year, she and Pat had a good time hammering out the cast list for Bugsy Malone together. “She’s been doing her best to keep the theater department afloat all by herself for years. I guess Mr. Hearn needed a lot of help, so she’s used to doing all the work.” It just didn’t seem like it was ever going to change. “She’s not letting me touch the Senior Showcase at all.” She grimaced, remembering Pat telling her that as a first-year teacher, Autumn just didn’t have “the experience or emotional connection to the seniors” needed to direct the end-of-the-year performance.
I’m the only person left in the department who has been with these kids since their freshman year, Pat told her. It really wouldn’t be fair for someone else to decide the best showcase for their talents.
“I started the school year with so many big ideas,” Autumn told Jo. “I even pre-choregraphed all the dances for the seniors over winter break, but Pat won’t let me put them in her show. So now my Broadway Club is learning A Chorus Line for their performance at the spring carnival because it’s the only place I don’t have Pat overruling all my decisions.”
Since the school district’s curriculum largely ignored musical theater, Autumn had created the Broadway Club as a creative outlet for herself and her small group of like-minded sophomores. When Pat cut all of Autumn’s choreography from the Senior Showcase—citing that it took up too much of their semester-long rehearsal period—the Broadway Club had been more than happy to learn all the dance numbers.
“Last year, they did Doctor Doolittle for the fall musical, and the kids say all Pat let them do was march. In circles. In lines. Just. Marching.”
“That sounds like a nightmare,” Jo said.
“Or like the part of Sound of Music where everyone’s a Nazi,” Autumn said. “Or the second act of The Producers, where everyone’s a Nazi. Or Cabaret. Wow, Broadway really tried to warn us about white supremacy for years.”
“While mostly centering white people, sure,” Jo said, wandering over to the window that overlooked the backyard. She peered down for a second before her attention whipped back to Autumn. “What the fuck is all that?”
Autumn joined her, pressing her nose to the glass.
“Oh. Right. Mom’s last dog, Lacy, ripped up all the grass,” she said, her breath fogging the view. “I haven’t been back there in a while. Dad covered the dead patches with decorative rocks.”
Below them, the backyard glinted white, as what had to be hundreds of pounds of pebbles stretched from porch to fence. There wasn’t a stitch of grass left.
“And they got rid of the doghouse,” Jo observed. She made a face at Autumn. “That complicates digging up the time capsule, huh?”
“We’ve got until May first to excavate the backyard,” Autumn said, clapping her on the shoulder. “That’s five whole weeks to build up your strength. By the time you get to the end of the list, you’ll have new keg-stand and surfing muscles!”
JO: We are officially on for a dinner party at Surf & Saucer this Friday night at 6pm. Pictures will be taken before dinner, so please don’t wear anything you don’t want seen by the internet.
AUTUMN: PUT ON YOUR SUNDAY CLOTHES, PEOPLE!
BIRDY: Does that mean I should or should not go buy a tuxedo T-shirt?
BIANCA: That hilariously implies you don’t already own a tuxedo T-shirt.
FLORENCIO: Need us to bring anything?
JO: Sure! I haven’t picked appetizers or drinks yet.
AUTUMN: Google Doc sign-up sheet incoming!
Three days into her gig
taking pictures of the Days menu, Jo was beginning to enjoy the crackle of terrestrial radio in the background. The guys in the kitchen spent the morning heating up the fryers and grooving to KDEP. The adult-contemporary channel was oddly saturated in 1D solo projects. Jo had no complaints.
Alfie Jay pushed his way out of the kitchen doors belly-first. With a serving tray hoisted expertly over his shoulder, he made his way over to the blinding light of Jo’s makeshift studio setup.
“Pour vous, Madam Photographer,” Alfie Jay announced in French about as authentic as a Fred Meyer baguette. He set the pan on the turquoise place mat that was serving as the new menu’s backdrop. “One Sheet Load of Totchos.”
To distinguish them from all the other local tater-tot nachos, Days served their tots on a half sheet pan. The stainless steel clashed with the gaudy gold—possibly real—Super Bowl ring Alfie wore.
“Jesus, Alfie, these portions are out of control,” Jo said, choosing a particularly loaded tot from the back of the pile. Queso and potato scorched the insides of her mouth. She exhaled steam. “But those are perfect. Could you bring me a side of jalapeño slices? I want to tweeze them around to fill visual gaps.”
Alfie doffed his Panama hat, briefly exposing a sweaty comb-over. “Oui, oui,” he said.
Jo wondered if he’d spoken this much faux-fancy French to Ginger Jay and if that was what had sent her running to Chief Chuck’s beefy arms.
“And another Perrier, please!” she called after him. It was an abuse of power—their agreement was for free food and drink while Jo worked and a lump sum for compiling the pictures onto a very basic website template at the end—but unlimited mineral water felt like a small taste of Silicon Valley here in the Point.
Although, come to think of it, her drink order could be why Alfie only spoke to her in garbled French. Apparently she was the only person in Sandy Point who didn’t pronounce the r at the end of Perrier.
The Throwback List Page 13