by Gwen Florio
No railroad ran through Chateau, but if it had, this would be the other side of the tracks. Commerce Street formed the dividing line, businesses shielding the tidy middle-class homes to the north, while the homes of the poor crowded to the curb of the busy street’s south side, much to the chagrin of town fathers who in public spoke in vague and hopeful terms of beautification, while in private they decried the eyesores in Jimtown, as Chateau’s black neighborhood had been known before such terms became politically incorrect.
Commerce Street divided white from black as surely as a wall, the races mingling by day in schools and workplaces and retreating to their own neighborhoods at night, and woe betide the real estate agent who tried to sell a house in one side of town to someone from the other. As Penelope might have said, it just wasn’t done.
Little in that regard appeared to have changed during the decades of Nora’s absence, although the years she’d been gone had brought differences aplenty to the center of town. New shops proliferated, clearly aimed at the tourists taking detours to and from the beaches of Maryland and Delaware, as well as the old standbys from her childhood. Hard by the gift-shop windows displaying the region’s waterfowl winging their way across T-shirts, mugs and kitchen towels were outdoors stores already showing stacks of decoys designed to lure those same waterfowl to legions of hunters who in a few short weeks would flock to the area as surely as the migrating geese.
Betty’s Beauty Parlor now styled itself a salon, with a new name, Waves, in allusion to the beaches not an hour away. Nora wondered what had happened to Betty. Then forgot all about her when, like a mirage, a sign rose before her eyes, a single word – espresso – promising the only thing she demanded of life at this moment.
She pulled the truck to the curb and jogged up the sidewalk, trying to temper her expectations. Chateau was still a small town. She feared espresso of the variety that spewed from the automated machines in convenience stores. But once inside, she contemplated her choice with hopeful surprise. Lattes, cortados, shots in the dark. Whole milk, two percent, skim. Soy, oat, coconut. Options long grown familiar in Denver, but astonishing here in Chateau where, throughout her childhood, coffee – offered at friends’ houses, never her own – meant a cup of Nescafé pale with powdered creamer and sludgy with sugar.
Inside, the shop was nearly full, and a line waited at the counter, another reason for optimism. The man in front of her turned to inspect the offerings in a pastry case. Something about him – the slightly stooped stance of a tall man who’d spent his life trying to fit himself to those around him, the nose whose bump and sideways swerve bore testimony to an old break – seemed familiar.
As if sensing her gaze, he turned and caught her eye. His brow wrinkled and she saw him making the same calculation she’d just made. She took a guess.
‘Em?’
‘Nora?’
A grin cracked his face. They’d been high school classmates, where they’d always hovered on the edges of each other’s orbit. Emerson Crothers played basketball – given his height of six feet and three inches, he’d had no choice – and Nora had been a clarinetist in the band, so they’d ridden the same yellow school buses to games and tournaments. Afterward, there’d been parties at the Beach, the grand name given to a patch of sandy earth along the river where in the spring of their senior year they’d found themselves seated together on a piece of driftwood and, during a beery conversation about something that had seemed profound at the time – whatever had it been? – he’d tried to kiss her. She’d ducked away and they’d spent the brief remainder of their time in high school avoiding one another.
He placed his order – black coffee and a slice of Smith Island cake – and asked the cashier to put Nora’s oat milk latte on his bill.
They stepped aside to await their orders and went through the obligatory it’s-been-years and how-have-you-been conversation.
‘What are you doing these days, Em?’ She figured he’d been teaching somewhere, a few classes to justify a full-time salary in exchange for coaching a team a few months a year. She had a vague recollection of hearing something to that effect, probably from her mother.
He laughed. ‘Brace yourself. Real estate.’
‘You’re kidding. Here?’ Chateau had always been considered a backwater when they were growing up, so much so that kids from larger schools made fun of them at games: ‘Hey, farmer. Where’s your overalls? Be sure and scrape the cowshit off your sneakers before you set foot on the floor.’
‘I still can’t believe it myself. I quit teaching years ago. People from Washington are snapping up places here like mad. Call something a country estate, and they can’t throw money at me fast enough. You ever want to sell Quail House, you’ll be set for life. People ask me about it all the time. It’s the best place on the river.’
Sell Quail House? Unthinkable. Although she’d never given much thought to what would happen to it when Penelope died.
‘Not a chance. Penelope wouldn’t hear of it.’
He gave her a funny look. ‘She hasn’t …?’ He stopped. ‘Never mind.’
‘Besides,’ she said, when he didn’t explain further. ‘It’s got mice.’
‘They all do,’ he said. ‘Along with basements that flood whenever it rains, no closets whatsoever, and plumbing that’s like something out of the Dark Ages. But the people who buy them can swan around like lord and lady of the manor. They only live in them a few months out of the year anyway.’ Their coffee arrived. Em’s was in a paper to-go cup, while the towering slice of cake, its ten thin layers of yellow cake and chocolate icing too tall for a standard container, balanced on a paper plate within a covering of cling wrap. ‘Gotta run. I’ve got five showings today. This’ – he nodded at the cake – ‘should give me enough of a sugar fix to power me through. Good seeing you. How long are you staying?’
‘Not sure yet.’
‘Hope to see you around.’
She knew the local paper had run the wire stories about what had happened in Wyoming – ‘Chateau native in lurid kidnapping, murder case’ – but he hadn’t asked about it, a bit of tact that left her weak with gratitude.
She took her latte, regarding it with suspicion. The barista was, after all, closer to her own age than the hipsters she was used to, in their T-shirts sporting the names of bands she’d never heard of, and their full-sleeve tattoos in tropical colors. This woman wore a Peter Pan blouse printed with small sprigged flowers and lemon-yellow shorts that went to her knees. Nora tugged at the hem of her own Lycra shorts. She was proud of her thighs, lithe and corded from years of running, and in Denver – where physical fitness was practically mandated – people wandered in and out of stores and restaurants in athletic gear without a second thought. But she was starkly underdressed compared to nearly everyone else in the shop.
Still, the latte, when she steeled herself for a sip, was just right, the caffeine hitting her veins with a welcome jolt after twenty-four hours’ deprivation. She drained it embarrassingly quickly and went back for another, selecting as well a bag of ground beans, a plastic cone and filters thoughtfully stocked on a shelf beside Italian espresso machines that Nora could not imagine, no matter how hard she tried, in a single house in Chateau.
‘Nora Best!’
Nora’s heart slammed so hard against her ribs she put her hand to her chest, as though to contain a panicked bird fluttering to escape the bars of its cage. She’d been listening for that voice from the moment she’d driven into Chateau, the town so small, everybody congregating in the same places.
She’d figured the diner. The supermarket. Maybe even the hardware store. But the coffee shop was unfamiliar territory and she’d let her guard down, so when she turned, she wasn’t quite prepared, her smile still a little shaky, her gaze roaming hither and yon until she forced herself to look Alden Tydings directly in the eye.
Of course, she knew he still lived in Chateau; that and much more.
Who didn’t cyberstalk their first love?
‘Hey, Nora Best.’
‘Hey, yourself, Kyra Dexter.’
‘It’s Kyra Tydings now.’ Show of teeth.
Oh, for Chrissakes. As if she didn’t know. But Kyra wasn’t done, smiling even more broadly as she rattled on.
‘It’s been Kyra Tydings for – oh, honey, how many years has it been? Twenty-five and change? It seems like yesterday.’
Yesterday apparently a reference to the year she swooped in and scooped up Alden in what seemed like moments after Nora’s tearful departure for college, leaving Alden behind to work his family farm with an understanding they’d marry the day after her graduation.
The iPad on the counter beeped. Nora swiped her card, wishing she’d ordered her coffee to go. The barista frothed the milk, the machine’s shriek giving her a precious few moments to collect herself and pose the usual haven’t-seen-you-in-forever questions. ‘How have you been? And your kids? They must be nearly grown by now. What are you both doing these days?’
She already knew those answers, too. Kyra was one of those aggressive stay-at-home moms, posting photo after photo of herself at soccer games or birthday parties with their three daughters, the one they’d had in the first year of marriage and, years later, twins. In each photo, Kyra’s smile testified both to expensive orthodontia and the excellence of her choices in life. Now, flush with recently acquired insight, Nora noted the clenched jaw and narrowed gaze of dissatisfaction and wondered if that’s how she herself had looked the last few years with Joe, subtly broadcasting her unhappiness to the world before she’d even admitted it to herself.
Compared to his wife, Alden’s presence on social media was rare unto vanishing. But Nora knew that, like every other area farmer, he’d taken a town job – in this case, on the police force – something that had allowed him to keep the farm going. But the farm, in his family for nearly two centuries, apparently remained his first priority. His own photos showed him perched high in the air-conditioned cab of a futuristic vehicle that bore zero resemblance to the tractor a third its size, where teenage Nora had bounced on his lap as he’d driven her up and down the rows, teaching her to steer in a precursor to driving a car. Teaching her other things, too. She remembered the way she’d traced the vee on his bare chest, where skin browned by the sun in those hours in the fields met the white that had been covered by his shirt, oddly erotic when revealed, then had let her fingers trail lower …
‘Oat milk latte for Nora!’
Saved by a latte. Nora reached for her coffee with relief, buying time by thanking the barista, who barely looked at Nora but stared at Kyra with a stricken expression.
‘Oh, Kyra,’ she said.
Kyra’s lips thinned in a grimace that maybe, viewed with a determined squint, could have been called a smile, though far short of the wattage she’d determinedly aimed at Nora.
‘Sandy, you and Nora remember each other, don’t you? Sandy was a couple of years behind us.’
Nora had no memory of Sandy. And she’d never have pegged her as younger. Maybe it was the demure clothing, or the blank defensive curtain of her expression. Whatever Sandy had expected of life these decades after graduation, it hadn’t included working a part-time, minimum-wage job in a coffee shop, every day serving her more successful schoolmates.
Now, though, her expression sharpened. ‘Of course I remember you.’ The avid light in her eyes told Nora the memory was recent. Sandy might not have remembered brushing past Nora in the halls of Chateau High, but for sure she’d seen the more recent stories, heard the talk.
Her husband, shot dead. Probably wishes she’d been the one who did it. And that business with the ax! Fingers flying through texts, voices lowered to whispers, savoring the piquancy of scandal.
‘Nice to see you again, Sandy. You make a mean latte.’ Nora took it and turned away, pointedly eyeing a counter across the room. Several of the seats were occupied by people working on their laptops – that dynamic, too, had caught up with Chateau – although nearly all of them had, in the way of small-town eateries and watering holes everywhere, abandoned the tasks at hand and turned to see the most recent arrivals. A single seat remained among a row of stools at a high counter. ‘I’m just going to grab that,’ she began, edging toward it.
But Alden and Kyra followed, hovering as she settled herself. Nora launched a new series of questions, hoping to forestall their own. ‘Tell me about your kids. The younger ones must be in high school now. Please tell me Mrs Prince isn’t still teaching home ec. That woman terrorized me with her white sauce. Mine always had lumps.’
‘Oh, it’s not home ec anymore. It’s domestic arts, and even the boys have to take it.’ Kyra, the authority on all things on the home and school front, took charge, exactly as Nora had hoped, although her eyes retained that strained look, as though focused on some separate, inner dialogue.
Nora sipped her latte, studying Alden over the rim of the bowl-size cup. He’d aged well, lean in jeans and a T-shirt conspicuously unadorned with brand name or any other message. Just a plain blue shirt, a color she’d always loved on him because it was the shade of his eyes. When she’d told him that, he’d started wearing blue more often, and she fought the crazy notion that he’d donned the shirt on this morning because he’d heard she was back in town and might run into her. His hair was shorter than when they’d been in high school, wavy dark strands shot through with gray, but still long enough to run her fingers through it, clutch it and pull him to her …
‘Are you all right?’ Alden made as though to pound her on the back as Nora choked on her latte.
She leaned away from the gesture. ‘Fine. Just swallowed wrong. So, the girls are about to graduate?’
Kyra’s eyes went big with overdone sympathy. ‘You never had kids? I’m so sorry.’ The light was back in her eyes now, an unsettling gleam, as though she’d put aside whatever thoughts had been distracting her and had squared herself to renew a battle against a foe she’d long ago vanquished.
Nora set down her coffee cup. It clattered against the saucer. Bullies came in all forms, she reminded herself, even lip-glossed and hair-sprayed, and the only way to deal with them was to push back, hard.
‘I’m not sorry. I suppose I think of my books as my children.’ Nora nearly gagged on the cliché, but subtlety had never been the way to go with Kyra. ‘I’m working on my second one now. The first sold so well they wanted more of the same.’ Which wasn’t even close to true, but two could play the stealth snark game, and Nora enjoyed the change in Kyra’s face as she remembered the title of that first book and its subject matter. Kyra didn’t know that after the first few weeks, daily sex had been anything but enjoyable, and neither did any of Nora’s friends back in Denver, who’d kept a much closer eye on their husbands whenever she was around, not realizing that after that exhausting year, sex was the last thing on Nora’s mind.
But with Alden, she’d never gotten tired of it. They’d been each other’s first and now, watching the play of emotion across Kyra’s face, Nora knew she knew it.
So Nora wondered at her drawn expression, the circles under her eyes. Still, Kyra may have dealt with her unwashed hair by pulling it back into a ponytail, but highlights hid any gray, and the arm she raised to brush a stray strand away from her face had more than a passing acquaintance with free weights. Kyra looked, Nora thought, as she herself had not a month earlier, before the events in Wyoming. Now Nora’s gray roots showed more prominent by the day, and her muscles felt rubbery after weeks out of their routine. She would, she vowed, go for a run as soon as she got home. Then, looking at the windows of the coffee shop, fogged where the humidity outside met glass cooled by the air conditioning within, readjusted her timeline. Evening, maybe. Or very early in the morning, given the way sunset calmed without really cooling the throbbing intensity of the day’s heat.
The coffee shop wasn’t just chilly; it was downright cold, something that had more to do with the atmosphere than the actual temperature. People had not turned back to their laptops and conversations but continued to stare openly as Nora and Kyra’s conversation rang out into a hard silence.
Jesus, thought Nora. How many years – decades – did it take to erase the dramas of high school? Because while the Alden–Nora break-up and subsequent Alden–Kyra pairing had briefly set tongues wagging, it was nothing compared to the too-soon pregnancies, arrests, drug overdoses and other strands in the warp and woof of faded small-town tapestry whose pattern repeated endlessly.
The bells hanging on the coffee shop door jingled as someone new entered, and Nora sighed in exasperated relief as attention swiveled his way. But the man walked directly to them. She braced herself for another introduction to someone she should have remembered. But he ignored her and laid a hand on Alden’s shoulder.
‘Hey, man.’ His face was lined, its expression funereal. ‘Thinking of you.’
Alden nodded and the man turned away. A woman at a nearby table rose and took his place.
‘Oh, honey,’ she said, wrapping Alden in a hug and a cloud of perfume. ‘You, too.’ She pulled Kyra into the circle they made. Tears welled in Kyra’s eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
Nora hovered to one side, not knowing what to say or do. The woman finally released Alden and Kyra, who turned back for a final hug before taking Alden’s hand. ‘Come on, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘It’s best we go home.’
They left without saying goodbye to Nora, who forced her expression into immobility, equal parts astonished and annoyed at the way high school rivalries held sway decades later. She perched on the stool she’d chosen and turned her attention to her latte, sipping it slowly, trying to see how much she could drink without replacing the floral pattern the barista swirled into the foam, relaxing only when the hum of conversation resumed around her. The person on the stool next to her got up to leave, tossing a folded copy of the morning newspaper on to the counter as he did.