A Day in June

by Marisa Labozzetta

  Annie Chalis is on his tail about the invitations that need to be sent out two months before the wedding, with an additional month needed to place and receive an order, more if she needs to design something herself. Fran Costantino says at this rate Ryan will have to pick from one of the gowns Fran already has in stock and that will most likely need a ton of altering, because it’s too late to put in for a different size.

  “I’m not coming up with any unique wedding bands at this late date,” Raphael O’Leary says. “Do they think they’re the only ones getting married in June?”

  While Eric was looking forward to spreading word of a successful Brackton Is for Brides Contest on Facebook, aside from commercial benefits, he’s not a great fan of the social media, does not care if someone spent their Saturday fixing a leak in their toilet or baking a pizza from scratch. The over-the-top perfunctory compliments about photos of girlfriends and babies and selfies are the worst: so cute, just adorable, gorgeous couple, lookin’good. No one ever responds with: Really? Are you serious? Who cares?

  Still, once again against his better judgment, if he has any, he sent a request to friend Ryan in an effort to learn more about her, to peruse her photo albums and see what she’s up to, because he is interested in how she spends her free time, and, more important, what Jason looks like and how their relationship is revealed in their pictures together. Jason is not on Facebook or Linked-In or Twitter or any other social media, and is not even included in Ryan’s thumbnail photo. In fact, Eric cannot find any info on or image of Jason McDermott except for several obviously impossible suspects with the same name.

  Another Chamber meeting is coming up and Eric has no news for the vendors about the selections that Ryan said she had to pass by Jason. He should have listened to reason; he made a poor choice in insisting on this couple. At least he and Michael have set up their Fantasy Baseball teams. Right now that seems like a consolation achievement to him. Soon the entire town will see him for what he is: a foolish young man with little direction, one with misguided ideas—like his father.

  He did manage to get the vendors listed in the Vermont Wedding Resource Guide Book for Brides. Brackton is there in black and white under every category: historic Vermont church weddings; cakes; banquet and reception sites; beauty and spa services; florists; photographers and video; music and entertainment; bridal attire and formal wear; even bartending and transportation.

  Brackton is there along with Middlebury and Burlington and Bennington and Killington, the contest revealed to every chamber of commerce, that is either laughing at the idea or has become insanely jealous they didn’t think of it first. Brackton and all its vendors interspersed with photos of couples holding hands and kissing; grooms bending over brides tilted in backbends kissing; couples dancing and kissing; exiting churches and kissing; and standing by covered bridges kissing. If they aren’t kissing, they display ear-to-ear grins and perfect sets of teeth that have no doubt been whitened, and in some cases even straightened, for the occasion. And without fail the words beauty and perfect and idyllic appeared somewhere in the ad: the beauty of the idyllic rolling hills of Vermont; the perfect place for the perfect time; the perfect day.

  He’s starting to believe what everyone else beyond the Green Mountain State holds fast to: What else was there in the cold northern state after the ski season ends? He knows what visitors think when they take in the welcome sign with the words unhurried, unspoiled, unforgettable. Unlivable, they mutter. It’s what must have turned off Ryan and her friend, and now she’s putting them off, not knowing how to back out. In all fairness, he wasn’t the one who had seen to it that the Vermont Convention Bureau included the Brackton resources; it was Danni who had taken charge of that. He’s been spending more time with his mother these days, ever since he came home from a photo shoot in the woods for his double exposure project and saw the same look on her face she had worn the day she told him his father had been beaten up.

  Eric was eight at the time. Nothing like it had ever happened in Brackton, at least not in years recent enough for anyone to remember. His father was a trial attorney who had represented a rape victim and won, but the judge opted for a light sentence—sixty days—for the prominent citizen’s son, citing the defendant’s low level of intelligence and inability to receive counseling until having served time. Soon after, René Boulanger ran for state representative on the platform of revamping sexual assault laws by adding amendments that would clarify what constituted the offense and, in turn, allocate appropriate sentences (which in most cases would be heavier).

  He was driving home from stumping one night when he was forced off the road and out of his car, beaten badly about the head with a tire iron, and had both legs broken. He was never right again: walked with a limp, slurred his speech, and was unable to properly process thoughts. After months in Massachusetts General Hospital, he returned home but never resumed his law practice. He spent his remaining twelve years refinishing old furniture he sold, along with rusty tools and other farm collectibles, out of the barn behind the house. The motive for the attack was never established. A message regarding the prosecution of sex offenders? A robbery attempt? Nothing had been stolen; the perpetrators were never found. They were thought to have been outsiders, but put up to it by whom? In Eric’s eyes, everyone was suspect.

  That was Eric’s first lesson about what was and what appeared to be. Shock waves hit the county. How could something that only happened in congested inner cities happen in Brackton? And in this day and age? But, as his mother and his grandparents and other wise oldtimers knew, anything could happen anywhere, anytime. All that was required was animosity, fear, and a bully mentality.

  The incident sent Eric through a gamut of emotions. Fear that he would lose his father, who lay in a coma hooked up to machines in a hospital that seemed to be in another world. Anxiety about how he would relate to this new father if he returned home, this father who had fished, and played ball, and hiked, and biked with him. Anger when he did return and children laughed at him. Humiliation when adults pitied the father’s son. And anger toward the father who had brought this down on them. And then there was the young unmarried minister at the Southern Baptist church that his mother drove over an hour to attend every Sunday, who tried to take his Catholic father’s place as he mentored Eric while consoling Eric’s mother to the point that Eric feared he would lose his mother to the clergyman. What had Eric felt toward him? Hatred might not have been too strong a word.

  One evening while Eric’s father was still in the hospital, the reverend stayed for dinner and offered to help Eric with his homework. Eric shouted that he was not his father, left the table, and went up to his room, where he threw a baseball so hard and for so long against the wall that all the plaster fell away from the lath. And to make matters worse, it was the minister who insisted that Eric help him put up and paint the wallboard replacement. The reverend’s effort to have Marie Boulanger grow dependent on him was not lost on young Eric. Some, including his mother, might have seen the minister’s attentions simply as earnest attempts to perform his duties where his congregation was concerned, but children have a keen way of decoding behavior, can sense sexual attraction and cut straight to intent better than adults, who often prefer to make excuses or look the other way.

  During one of the cleric’s visits, a snowstorm began, yet he waited until conditions deteriorated before taking his leave. Surely the minister had listened to the weather report before setting out for Brackton. Marie suggested that he spend the night in the spare bedroom rather than drive back to Burlington in the blinding storm. Eric lay awake all that night, baseball bat at his side, listening for footsteps to his mother’s room, ready to leap out of bed and take action.

  When his father finally came home from rehab, the reverend was transferred to a small town on the coast of Maine. Marie, busy attending to her husband, didn’t seem to question the reason for the transfer or miss the minister’s presence. So like a grown-up Eric thought, she pret
ended to ignore his disappearance, believing it the product of coincidence. But Eric maintained that the move was initiated by the reverend himself, out of fear of Eric and a principled and intrepid though broken man who had returned home.

  Putting an end to the murmurs and looks, the overly solicitous attention, the obvious discomfort of others around his family became Eric’s mission. All he had had to do was get some titles hung in the high school gymnasium to free the townspeople of their unease and give them something positive to talk to Eric’s parents about, maybe even make them covetous. It’s what drove him to get decent grades, make it into the end zone, hit the ball over the fence, and earn a scholarship to some place far away. What it never succeeded in doing was erasing the fact of the incident and the subsequent years of his father’s pain. And Eric’s sense of having been abandoned by him.

  To leave Brackton, just like the family of the victimized girl had done, became his mantra as a youth, win trophies and leave. But what good is any of it now that his mother’s cancer has metastasized, despite his having been faithful to his superstitions. And he can’t bear the thought of watching her wither away painfully, of others pitying them yet again.

  “There are ways, Mom. You don’t have to suffer,” he tells her. “We can help you ahead of time. You can help yourself.”

  “That’s a sin,” she responds, horrified at the thought of assisted suicide.

  The woman who had grown her own organic vegetables, lined an entire kitchen shelf with immune-system-boosting supplements, concocted her own chemical-free sunscreen, downed a forkful of brine-free fermented sauerkraut daily, never smoked and drank only green tea, and whose body was attacking her like a sadistic turncoat stands firm in her belief in the natural order of things and has refused even to sign a DNR directive or a living will. She tells him she prays every day for God to take her in His own time.

  “How is that any different, Mom? Asking God to kill you.”

  “Let Him do the dirty work,” she says. “It’s a violation of my free will to force yours or any doctor’s on me.”

  And once again he finds himself a figure looking for acceptance in a place where he finds pain. A place where he is held captive not only by his mother’s illness but the Michael factor, the solid voice of reason that knows what he wants out of life though it will never come without a fight. Maybe if Eric sits outside Michael’s window and watches him and Becca long enough, he’ll learn the secret. That’s what he really wants to do—observe them forever. He’s a voyeur. Shit. Still seeking the role model he lost years ago. His mother tried, but he never let her in the way he used to let his dad in. And to her credit, she understood this, because her love was greater than anything Eric had ever been capable of.

  She lived without a man. She became the town clerk who worked every day in an office next to that of the director of public works—the father of the young man who, twenty-three years ago, raped a minor. She is the only townsperson to whom Bicycle Girl, the daughter of Marie’s deceased friend, has ever gravitated, has made herself vulnerable, and sought refuge from, showing up unannounced at her whim for breakfast or dinner. People called Marie a saint; she maintained that saints were in heaven. Something—maybe faith—filled her will with steel, gave her a bottomless capacity to tolerate and pardon—to give.

  He didn’t see it as a child, but he sees it now. If she has a major fault, it’s that she never asks for anything. Eric used to think he was like her, never asking, but he’s the opposite. With every step he takes, every plan he makes, he asks, he pleads. He just isn’t ever quite sure what it is he’s demanding.

  His confusion propels him on with this new double-exposure project that gives his photos endless possibilities, that allows him to control people coming and going at the same time, to have bridges and trees right side up yet upside down, and always a convergence of the two, with photographer keeping them there. So easy with this camera that has a panoramic format: shoot a roll, reinsert the film, and shoot again on top of the first images. He is even willing to try it using the digital format with a multiple-exposure option. His mother thinks it’s brilliant. RISD thought it worthy. He’s come to believe he’s creating an exhibit depicting where he sees himself—stuck. But maybe if he sees everything simultaneously coming and going enough times, he’ll be able to figure out which direction leads to the way out.

  Breathing hard, he makes his way with the team back to Coach Lambert and the field, where he’ll enjoy not thinking of anything but baseball for the next two hours.

  Chapter 14

  Sunday, March 16

  The Holy Prostitute

  “Either she pays now or she’s out. She’s been here a full week!” Billy told Suzanne.

  “Maybe we should give her a little more time—”

  “What is it with you and this woman, Suzanne? What have you got going with her that you’re so concerned?”

  “I just feel sorry for her.”

  It was too late to persuade him. He was already climbing the stairs, his big feet skipping every other step. She strained to make sense out of the shouting she feared would wake the girls. Then Billy came back down with Daisy, in her nightgown, stomping behind him.

  “Call him,” Billy commanded, handing her his cell phone. Hers was dead.

  “Mother, put Daddy on. I don’t care if you’re walking out the door. Fuck your party! Put Daddy on! Daddy, I need money.” Her voice bordered on hysteria, and when her father hung up on her, she began slamming the phone against the wall. “He’s paying $500 a day for an institution, but he won’t even pay for a motel!”

  Billy wrestled the phone out of her hand when she began to slam it repeatedly against the counter.

  “Don’t’ touch me!” she screamed.

  “He won’t hurt you,” Suzanne said, although witnessing the tension in his jaw, the anger in his eyes, she could not swear to it.

  “You don’t know what it’s like to be afraid. Do you know what fear is?”

  Suzanne nodded. “No you don’t. He came into my room and yelled at me while I was lying down. I was in a vulnerable position.” Her face was red, her body rigid and trembling. “All men want is to do you, then take off.”

  “I’m calling the Crisis Center,” Billy said.

  “They’ll put me away like they did in Dayton. You know why? They thought I was suicidal. You know why? Because I like the Grateful Dead.” She was crying. “I have my period. What should I do?”

  “I’ll give you something,” Suzanne said.

  “Thank you. You’re nice. You’re a woman. He’s mean.” She glared at Billy.

  “Oh, for Chrissake,” he moaned.

  “Men are jaded. Nuns are jaded too. So are monks. And lawyers. Shrinks. Nurses. They’re all jaded. My mother’s totally dependent on my father. You won’t ever be like that, will you?”

  Suzanne shook her head.

  “I hate having my period. Men don’t want to have anything to do with you when you have it.”

  When Billy had the Crisis Center on the line, he handed Daisy the phone.

  “I want to talk to a woman! I don’t care who you are. I want a woman!” She tapped her nails against the counter while she waited.

  SUZANNE IS WAY too tolerant of Billy. Ryan knows this, but she must find a way to keep this young couple together: they have two small children. Can there be a happy ending without comprising Suzanne? No matter how much Ryan wanted her parents to reconcile, she couldn’t help but feel that her mother had caved in too quickly, let her father off the hook without adequate suffering. When it came to her father, her mother—so combative in most situations—turned into putty.

  Ryan has spent the afternoon at the office, despite it being Sunday. She does this on occasion, finding the quiet workplace free of distractions and a good place to write. She has to stop now; she’s tired after having lost an hour of sleep to the arrival of Daylight Saving Time. The good news is that it will be light out when she descends the long flight of stairs at the law c
enter and steps out into street, then heads over to a co-worker’s house for a celebration of the impending vernal equinox. Yes, Daylight Saving promises that spring is around the corner. Soon buds will appear begrudgingly on trees and there will be no more snow. And if there happens to be, it will melt away in a day or so. Daylight Saving signals Easter is on the horizon.

  She can taste her father’s ricotta cheesecake made just the way his mother used to make it, and the pizza rustica—dough filled with layers of mozzarella and prosciutto and salami and chopped hard-boiled egg that they’ll eat for breakfast for as long as it lasts. She can smell the lamb roasting—slivers of garlic stuffed in pockets—and the lasagne bubbling in the oven of the hot kitchen. She wonders if she will ever be able to carry on the tradition the way her father has since his parents died. She will. She’ll make the little birds’ nests that her grandmother made for Ryan and her cousins—the sweet dough dusted with powdered sugar that held colorful dyed eggs. She’ll organize egg hunts for her children. And, of course, there will be church. Easter and Christmas were the two times a year her father, Ryan in hand, accompanied his parents to Mass at his childhood parish church in Brooklyn. His parents gone, he continues the ritual at a church on Long Island. The church is jammed—standing room only—with lit candles at the head of each aisle, baskets of lilies or giant pots of poinsettias depending on the holiday, incense, and glorious voices and piping organ music.

  The priests are overjoyed on these days, though their mood masks an underlying sadness, the knowing that come the following Sunday, three quarters of the pews will once again be empty. The archdiocese of Brooklyn recently closed Joe Toscano’s childhood church, and Joe was glad his mother wasn’t alive to see it.