Her grandmother’s words from the night of her art opening danced through her mind: “What have you done, Cassandra? That was for us. That was our business, and not for the world to know.” Wasn’t that what she’d say about all this too?
“Hey, take a picture of me,” Elda said, breaking into Cassie’s thoughts.
“Why?” Cassie asked, but she was already calculating the aperture and focus and angle.
Elda grinned. “Because I want you to be able to remember the moment I told you something that knocked your socks off.”
Cassie took the picture, not because she believed Elda—it was the kind of thing Elda said all the time—but to move things along.
“I remember your father,” Elda said. She said it so smoothly that it took a moment to register.
“Wait—what?” Cassie dropped the camera into her lap.
“I met him. Adelbert. When we were little.”
“You met my father?”
“He was two. I was seven. Your grandmother drove him out to Los Angeles. I didn’t know it was them for sure until I saw that picture on Tate’s mantel.”
Cassie was crouched forward now, desperate to know everything. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”
Elda topped off their glasses. “You weren’t ready to hear it. And Tate—you know Tate. She would have stolen it for herself, and then it wouldn’t have been ours anymore. She can’t help that, by the way. It’s just how she is.” She patted Cassie. “I knew I’d have a chance to tell you.”
“That’s why you came to St. Jude, isn’t it?”
Elda smiled triumphantly.
“So tell me!”
“I don’t remember much; I was only a kid, after all. I just remember that it was my weekend with Dad. Diane was somewhere else. She was usually somewhere else; they didn’t like each other even then. Anyway, Dad said he wanted me to meet a couple special friends.” She smiled wryly. “Wildly inappropriate, of course, but that was him at his best. We drove out to the Santa Monica Pier. June and your father were waiting on the beach. Dad swung him up into the air and carried him on his hip to the boardwalk. I remember being jealous. Your father had these big, fat cheeks—I pinched one until he cried, because he was adorable and, well, because I was jealous.” The memory cracked her up. “We went on the rides. A photographer grabbed a couple pictures of the four of us together, and Dad yelled at him first, then paid him for the roll of film. It was a lot easier in those days to keep what you wanted out of the press.”
She was looking off into the middle distance, toward the Victorian with the nosy neighbor. It was a beautiful profile. Cassie snapped the picture.
“We watched the sunset from the beach. Your father fell asleep in Dad’s arms, and I remember thinking I was in the way, keeping Dad and this woman who was his friend from saying what they wanted to say. But maybe that’s why he brought me along.”
They sat in silence. The rattlesnakes had died down, nothing new to see. The sun was a press of hope upon Cassie’s back. “How did you know he was your brother?”
“The way Dad looked at him.” Elda’s voice dripped with envy. “He called him ‘my boy.’ Your grandmother shushed him. Also, he had my father’s secret name, the one he’d given up before he became my father. I remember thinking you only name a kid Adelbert if that’s what they call his daddy.” She chuckled then, and Cassie had to laugh too.
Elda looked up at Two Oaks and whistled. “For an empty house, sure is full of a lot of people.”
The thought of Elda getting on an airplane made Cassie pour another drink. The edges of the day had softened, but they’d still be there tomorrow, sharp as ever, waiting for her alone.
Lindie hardly slept after returning from Columbus, but she was due on set at first light. In the darkness of the kitchen, she fumbled for the sugar bowl. In an instant, she sensed a form, a man, standing just on the other side of the cabinets. She screamed. She switched on the light. It was only her father.
“We’re moving,” he said.
“Good one,” Lindie cracked. Heart still pounding, she opened the icebox, searching for leftover rice.
“Chicago sounds good, don’t you think?” The sorrow in Eben’s voice made her check him again. He was unshaven, unsteady on his feet. He moved his head from the shadows. There was a bruise around his eye, and a cut above it.
“Daddy, what happened?” Lindie’s heart sank at the sight of him. Without the particulars, she already knew—Clyde.
She reached for a cloth to wet, but Eben brushed it aside. There was a wild look in his eye that she hadn’t seen there since the days after Lorraine left. Lindie had forgotten all about this hollowness. Now that it was back in the room, she wanted to wrap her arms around her daddy, but he grabbed her wrists instead. “I promised we’d be gone by the holiday. Gives us five days to pack the house.”
She wrested her arms back. “Daddy, you’re scaring me.”
“He says he’ll let us go with no trouble.”
“Who, Daddy?”
“Ripvogle’s out.” Eben slurred the contractor’s name. So he was a little drunk, an encouraging revelation. Maybe their lot would improve with the light of day. “Clyde lost money. A lot of money. He blames me. Says I went to the governor and tattled. Says he’s going to kill me unless we leave.”
“Daddy, Uncle Clyde’s your best friend.”
“He’s not your uncle anymore.”
Lindie’s mind was a tangle of everything she knew: Clyde’s anger, his threats, how he’d grabbed her at the party, how he’d told Ripvogle he was planning to tear down Two Oaks, what he knew about Thomas’s parents. He was capable of such destruction.
Her voice trembled as she asked, “But you didn’t go to the governor, did you, Daddy? You didn’t tell on Clyde?” Clyde Danvers held nothing so high as his reputation; she hoped her father hadn’t dared to tarnish that.
But questions made Eben angry. “Go pack your room.” He swayed against the kitchen cabinets. Maybe Apatha had been right; maybe it was a more personal reason—Lorraine—that two grown men were fighting like little boys. Lindie couldn’t bring herself to ask.
“I have to work today, Daddy.”
“No more sneaking out,” he boomed. “We pack this house now.”
“Okay,” she said, placating him. “Okay, Daddy.” She started to grasp what he was proposing: leaving everything they knew. Fleeing like criminals. Making a new life in an enormous city full of strangers. The thought of it fluttered inside her like a robin with a broken wing.
“We have until Sunday, when he burns this whole thing to the ground,” he mumbled. Was he speaking literally? Lindie took him under one arm and helped him into the dining room. There, on the table, sat her father’s ledgers, which were usually locked up in Lemon’s safe in the office at Two Oaks. She was surprised to see them splayed open in the daylight; Eben usually kept such careful track of them. He wobbled against her. She supported him into their small front room, depositing him in the rocking chair. She covered him with the ratty blanket that had been there forever. Everything in the room seemed wrong, as though she was seeing it through a pane of mottled glass. Even her father had been transformed. She rubbed his head as if he was a pet dog; he was snoring in five minutes flat.
—
They were filming on a bridge over the canal, north of town. Lindie raced toward set on her bicycle. Her stomach growled. They were already setting up a shot. She dumped the Schwinn at the side of the road and ran toward the encampment of trailers and the crew, brightly lit by the sun. The sky was open and blue; it would be a beautiful day. But she already knew something was wrong, just by the awkward way Ricky looked at her, then away.
Casey stepped into her path.
“Sorry I’m late.” She ducked her head and kicked her foot in an “aw shucks” gesture that usually worked.
But Casey wasn’t biting. “You’re done,” he said, in his superior voice.
“I’m late, I know, but—”
&nb
sp; He shook his head one definitive time. “You’re fired.”
Lindie had seen plenty of other folks show up late to set, and she was about to argue just that when he said, “For future reference, this is what happens when you don’t come to work.”
“I’m here,” she shouted impudently.
His lip curled. “Yesterday.”
“But yesterday, Diane—I mean, Miss DeSoto—she spoke to you.” Lindie was sputtering. “You told her I could take the day off work.”
He came as close to laughing as he ever would. “She did no such thing. In fact”—and here he stepped forward so that only Lindie could hear him—“she shared some concerns about you this morning. She fears you’ve grown…attached.”
Fury filled Lindie as she understood how well Diane had played her. “That’s a lie. She’s a liar.”
Casey dismissed her with a grimace. “You have ten minutes before I call the police.”
—
Lindie loped to her Schwinn. She could feel the eyes of Ricky and who knew how many other crew members on the back of her neck as they observed her humiliating retreat. She restrained herself from a backward glance; although she wanted, more than anything, to soak in the last of that glorious experience, she had her pride.
Almost back to town, she heard a motor purr up behind her. She waved it around, but it stayed right there, on her tail. Irritated, she pulled into the mass of clover and crabgrass at the edge of the road to let it by, but Thomas pulled the Olds up beside her. It was empty, save for him.
“You remember those secrets?” he asked, eyes darting to make sure they were alone in that large, flat country. “About my mother? And maybe who my daddy might be? About me and Louisiana?” She nodded solemnly.
His hands were jumpy on the wheel. “Clyde came to Two Oaks last night. He told Apatha he knows every bit of what we’re hiding, and if he doesn’t get what he rightly deserves, he’s going to ruin us.”
She’d underestimated Clyde. It didn’t matter that Apatha was Lemon’s wife; Clyde would make sure no one in town cared about that. Eben’s laws, Eben’s rules, Eben’s ledgers, none of them would matter if Clyde had scared Apatha off. Once Lemon died, Clyde would find a way to get what he wanted, no matter what he had to do to get it.
“What do you plan to do about it?”
“I plan to run,” he answered, just as plainly.
She couldn’t blame him, though she’d try to get him to stay. “Is Apatha really your mama?”
“By birth I guess,” he said, as if there was any other way. “My auntie raised me. I don’t suppose anyone but Apatha knows who my daddy is. She knew Lemon back then but they weren’t married yet. Then she headed up here for a life of luxury. My auntie only told me the truth when that girl down in Louisiana started telling people I’d been with her.” He raised his hands in innocence. “I never touched that girl, I swear. But it doesn’t matter. I had to get out. I came north. Asked Apatha to take me in. You would have thought I was a stray dog, not someone who’d grown inside her.”
Lindie knew what that felt like, how cold Apatha could be when you didn’t fit through the doorway she’d opened for you. “But why do you think she left you?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.” His scowl told her otherwise. “All I know is I’m leaving.”
“If you run, they’ll send the police after you. They’ll send you back to Louisiana.” Clyde had to be stopped, and she wasn’t sure she could do it alone. “Please,” she begged. “Just till the end of the week. We’ll work this out—I know we will. Think of Apatha.”
“I don’t owe her anything.”
“Just your life.”
“She’s living like a queen and she couldn’t share it?” Thomas’s agony filled the car, then spilled out over the clear morning. Lindie didn’t have an answer for why they’d left him in Louisiana, so she told him her mother had left too, in case it made him feel better. He sighed then, and shook his head, and told her he’d give her until Friday morning, but if anything happened before then, he was gone. He pulled a U-ie and headed back to set.
She biked the long way around to Elm Grove Cemetery. It was cool and quiet down there. A person could think. Lindie weeded graves and studied the baby headstones with morbid fascination: OUR DAUGHTER, LAMB OF GOD, BABY BOY LARSH. At least when someone died, you got a place to visit.
Round about lunchtime, she strolled down to Lemon’s personal mausoleum, built of yellow brick to match his mansion, with its own stained-glass window to boot. Through the intricate iron gate, she could see that the shelf that held Mae’s coffin had room for him on it too. She wondered if Apatha would get a spot.
Her stomach churned; she hadn’t eaten since the night before. Soon, she told herself, June would arrive. Any minute now, she’d be rounding the drive. She’d be carrying a basket full of Apatha’s biscuits. She’d sit beside Lindie and Lindie would tell her everything. June would have answers. They’d solve it, all of it, together: first do this, then that, on and on until everyone got to be happy.
It was a nice story. Lindie told it to herself for hours.
Lindie took what Diane had taught her—the best way to break the rules is to look like you’re following them—and used it. Eben was serious about Chicago; she’d learned that the second she sulked in at sundown, when he threatened to throw her possessions in the trash. “We’re going, Linda Sue, with or without your things.” He’d already boxed up half the china cabinet. So fine, good, she could make it seem as if she planned to go. Into a cardboard box went the crumbling pinch pot she’d made for one of her mother’s birthdays. She balled up her collection of shoelaces and sorted out the clothes that no longer fit. It was strange, taking stock of her little St. Jude life. Had she done so only a few weeks prior, she would have turned up plenty of treasure. But even the cigar box under her bed seemed as though it belonged to someone else.
Meanwhile, she schemed. It came down to one thing: Clyde could be bought, which was lucky, since not everyone could. In fact, Lindie was now sure that the language of money was the only one Clyde spoke fluently. The downside was that she, personally, didn’t have any money to speak of, but her father held the purse strings of the richest man in town. If she couldn’t do something with that, she might as well burn her house down herself.
—
By sunset on Wednesday the twenty-ninth, Eben and Lindie had hardly spoken. But when he knocked on her door, she could see that fear was no longer his fuel. He looked like himself again.
It was hot in her room, the sun pressing like an iron through the roof above. Lindie was pulling pictures down from the wall above her bed; some she’d drawn, some were from movie magazines, from the days before she knew what movie stars were like in real life. Eben sat beside her on the crazy quilt Apatha had sewn. He handed her a cup of water. His hands were dry and cut up and he smelled of newspaper dust. “I want a better life for you,” he said, after she gulped the water down.
“I have a great life.”
“Hear me out.” His hand on her leg was gentle. “I saw how they talked to you at the party. Darlene and Gretchen and Ginny.”
Lindie filled with shame at the memory of those girls talking about her so meanly. She knew now that her tomboyishness would extend beyond this era of her life, that it was something essential, and not just a habit, but that didn’t erase how awful it felt to hear how much people hated her because of it. She thought of the horror at the department store, with Diane and the ladies oohing and aahing.
“Here, in St. Jude, I’ll never be anything but the son of Lemon’s handyman,” Eben said. “I’ll always be the man Lorraine left. And you’ll always be the girl who doesn’t act like a girl.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“No,” he said sharply. “You’re not understanding. The point is, this is who you are.” He sounded proud. “I don’t want you to change. I don’t want you to waste another minute of your life on those cruel children. Don’t you see, Linda Sue, in a city, it
’ll be different. No one will know us. No one will know about Lemon Gray Neely or Clyde Danvers or care that your mother left. We’ll just be us. Together.”
Put that way, it didn’t sound so bad. But she knew it wouldn’t be so simple.
“What about Apatha?” she asked.
“We have telephones. I’ll help her, you know that. But we also know Lemon’s not long for this world. She’s told me she’ll make her life elsewhere once he’s gone. Might as well get a head start.”
Lindie nodded, because that’s what he needed from her. He needed to believe she agreed with him. She looked right on the outside, but inside, her mind was busy, carving, sanding, detailing her plan. “Does it have to be so soon?” That was what she was supposed to say.
He patted her knee. “Say your good-byes.”
The only way to win the war was to seem to lose the battle.
Lindie biked out to the Three Oaks Estates late that night, before the last day of shooting. The air was muggy in her lungs. A halo ringed the moon. She didn’t care a whit if that old Diane DeSoto caught her; Eben and she were already as good as run out of town on a rail. She chucked rocks at Jack’s bedroom window, until he bumbled out the back door in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, his jet-black hair no longer coiffed but ruffled. He rubbed his eyes like a baby and let her into the kitchen. A fluorescent bulb buzzed above. The vinyl chair, one of dozens someone had purchased for the homes of the movie folks, stuck to the backs of Lindie’s weary legs.
Jack was grim at the mention of June. No, he hadn’t seen her. He’d tried to send word through Thomas, but Thomas had said he wasn’t in that game anymore. And where the heck had Lindie been?
June Page 32