June

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  She told him Casey had fired her.

  “Casey’s under a lot of pressure,” Jack said. “That disappearing trick Diane pulled on Monday set us even further back than we were. They’ve been slashing and rewriting left and right. The crew’s about to mutiny.”

  “Don’t you want to say good-bye to June?” she snapped.

  He really considered the question. “I want her to come to Hollywood,” he replied. “I want her to be my wife.”

  “So why’d you leave her in that restaurant and drive back home with Diane?” It took all she had not to slap the back of his head.

  He dropped that big old head into his hands. Was he crying? His breath was jagged. She gave him a few minutes, tipping the open box of Rice Krispies into her hand and crunching it dry. Leaning back onto the rear legs of the kitchen chair, Lindie realized that she might even be enjoying herself. There was a strange sweetness to standing on the brink of disaster.

  Then Jack spoke. “I got Diane into…trouble. A couple months back.”

  Lindie had heard Apatha say this word, trouble, in this same way once, when Apatha didn’t think she was paying attention. Apatha had been talking about a girl in the next town who’d gotten pregnant out of wedlock.

  So that was why Diane was such a wreck.

  “She decided not to have the baby,” he said. “I wanted her to.” His voice didn’t swell with conviction, so Lindie assumed this was one of those things you only claim to have wanted in retrospect. “She wanted to be a star. Couldn’t let something real get in the way of…” He looked up then and saw Lindie, remembering that she was just a child. He swallowed his words. He poured himself a whiskey. He leaned back against the kitchen counter. “It tore her up.”

  Grief washed over his face, but he drank it down. “I have to get her to California. When she’s back on solid ground, I’ll cut her loose.”

  Was he really expecting to step onto an airplane with Diane on one arm and June on the other? Lindie could hardly stand to be in that tight little box of a room with him anymore. “Is there a party tomorrow night, after you wrap?”

  “If we wrap,” he mused. “If.”

  “Fine.” His self-pity was not her concern. “If you wrap. Will there be a party?”

  He turned the glass in his hands, watching the tawny liquid spread up around the inside of the glass.

  “Make sure there is,” she instructed. “Make sure Diane is entertained, or she’ll follow you. She knows about Idlewyld, Jack. Find your way out to us. June and I will be there.”

  —

  She waited until the next morning to ring the Two Oaks doorbell. June’s curtains had been drawn since the night they returned from Columbus. June didn’t even know Lindie was moving. She certainly didn’t know that Clyde had threatened Eben, or that Lindie had been fired from the film set. Plus, June was supposed to marry Artie on Sunday. As Lindie mounted the steps to the Two Oaks porch, she realized that, if Clyde had his way, this might be the last time she ever stood there.

  If Apatha was surprised to see Lindie on the porch like a regular guest, she didn’t show it. She smiled wide and quick, and Lindie felt blindsided by affection.

  “You’ve been growing.”

  Lindie tried not to feel proud. She’d put on a pair of her father’s old pants that had turned up in the packing, and found a belt to hold up the waistband. She knew she didn’t look like much, but Apatha’s face told her she looked like something.

  “June here?” She already knew the answer.

  “Come on in.”

  “Who’s that at the door?” Cheryl Ann bellowed down the stairs.

  Lindie ran past Apatha, pecking her sweet old cheek, and thrilling at the expression on Cheryl Ann’s face from the landing.

  “Isn’t she getting married on Sunday?” Lindie asked as she passed Cheryl Ann. “Seems you’d want her out of bed.”

  Cheryl Ann sputtered and gaped, but she let Lindie by.

  Lindie knocked once on June’s door, out of duty, but she knew June wouldn’t answer. She turned the doorknob and went on in. It was darker than a tomb in there, but she could just make out the lump of June at the center of her bed.

  Lindie said June’s name. June moved, but barely.

  “You can’t let him leave without saying good-bye.” It was hot in the room; the windows were closed.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “But you have to.” Lindie softened herself. “I’ll be waiting at eleven.”

  If June thought she was crazy, she didn’t say so, which was good, since Lindie needed her. This was no longer about June and Jack. This was the only solution Lindie had.

  Just before midnight, June’s bottom pane flashed in the moonlight. Her dark, nimble form descended to the newly cut lawn, which was sweet and wet and filled with the thrush of crickets. When June was close enough to touch, Lindie saw that she was like a baby bird thrown from its nest—scared, needy, excitable, breath jumping. Lindie’s pack was heavy, straps digging into her shoulders. When June clambered aboard the Schwinn, Lindie missed feeling the length of June’s front against her back, but, then, she missed so much about June. She wouldn’t speak of Chicago. She wouldn’t mention being fired, or her conversation in the kitchen with Jack. No talk of Diane’s pregnancy. Just Lindie and June and the night.

  They biked out into country. June’s hands were warm. No matter what happened next, it would be their last night like this, out alone, two girls in the darkness. Lindie knew the plain truth, that June was only wrapped around her because Lindie was of use to her, and that was how their friendship would always work: Lindie pulling, June coming along. But that was okay with Lindie, because Lindie loved June. She closed her eyes and biked them down the center of the road, feeling June’s arms around her and loving the other girl’s impossibilities and cruelties, loving her strange, small self, which would not, could not, let herself have what she wanted, not without Lindie’s help, encouragement, and drive.

  They turned down the gravel road that led to the lakefront. Lindie ditched the Schwinn against the wide oak trunk. The night skittered with crickets and bullfrogs. Leaves scuttled. Their feet crunched the small rocks.

  A light glowed ahead. June led the way. They both knew Lindie would wait outside, although June didn’t know what Lindie had planned. At the house, near the spot where she usually eavesdropped, Lindie found her tree and leaned against it. She watched June slip past the little building and to the front of Idlewyld, and heard the door yawn open as June stepped inside.

  Out on the road, the nearly full moon had cast the world into an eerie almost-day, the same as it had on the night Lindie had first taken June out to Clyde’s development. But, at the lake, the clouds were quick moving, like hands across a face, obscuring one minute and gone the next. Those clouds were running for something, something out of sight.

  Thomas waited a few moments before whispering Lindie’s name.

  “It’s me.”

  Then he stepped out from behind the trees. “Do you have them?”

  Indeed. The straps from her bag had dug deeply into her shoulders. She let the pack thump to the ground as Thomas drew close. They were near the house; she figured once June and Jack were finished, she and Thomas could approach Jack with business of their own. Jack had to help them; whether Jack and June were saying good-bye forever or were spending their lives together didn’t change the fact that Thomas and Lindie had sacrificed an awful lot to organize this love affair.

  “How will he use them?” Thomas asked. He held up the bag, which contained the four heavy ledgers she’d swiped when Eben wasn’t looking. These large leather books held everything there was to know about Lemon’s money—his account numbers, the deeds to his land, how much money he was sitting on, what Apatha was due to inherit. Lindie knew Clyde couldn’t just walk into a bank with one of those things, pretending to be Lemon Gray Neely, and steal his money outright. But she figured there was something in there that Clyde would want to know, and that was her bar
gaining chip. She wouldn’t have to be the one to offer it to Clyde either, for presenting the ledgers would be Jack’s final act of goodwill before he left town, even if Jack didn’t know it yet. She’d even written Jack a speech to recite, but she was open to ad-libs: “Clyde, we must come to an agreement. In exchange for leaving Apatha, Mr. Neely, Thomas, June, Lindie, and her father, Eben, be, tonight I give you free and unfettered access to Mr. Neely’s private financial documents. Do with them what you will, and, come tomorrow, you’ll leave these good people alone. Handshake deal, that’s how gentlemen do it.”

  It wasn’t a perfect plan, and Lindie didn’t love knowing what Clyde might do with all that information. But he was going to make their lives a living hell if she didn’t do something, and this was her only bargaining chip.

  “We have to hope Clyde goes for it,” she said in a low voice, feeling the darkness at the edge of the water gather in around them.

  “Go for what?”

  In that moment, Lindie realized that she and Thomas were not alone. She recognized the voice—Clyde himself, and close at hand. He was behind them, mere feet away. The moon bathed his skin in ghostly white.

  “Uncle Clyde!” she yelped, wondering if she should shout for Jack. But no, she could play this out herself. This was Clyde, after all; he’d never truly harm her.

  “What’s all this?” Clyde asked.

  Beside her, Thomas’s breath had grown rapid. “We don’t want any trouble.”

  Clyde’s teeth bared into an ugly grin. “Now why oh why would there be trouble?” Lindie didn’t like the play in his voice. She didn’t like how he was moving slowly toward them like a hungry animal, or that he had one hand on his belt, right where he holstered his pistol. It was time to play her hand.

  “I brought Neely’s ledgers,” she said, opening the bag in the moonlight. “I thought we could come to an arrangement. You get to look at them tonight, learn anything you want about his money and accounts. In exchange, my father and Thomas and I stay in St. Jude. You leave Apatha and Lemon in peace, and June doesn’t marry Artie.”

  “Well look at you!” Clyde said, voice tinged with something like pride. He’d seen Lindie grow. He’d raised her up. “Making deals. Making plans.”

  “I just want everyone to be happy,” she replied, which was the truth.

  “There’s only one problem,” Clyde replied, and Lindie discovered that what she’d heard as pride was actually disgust. “I’m not interested in those fancy ledgers.”

  “Everything you want to know about every acre of Mr. Neely’s land is in here,” she said, making her voice shiny with hope. “What he buys, what he trades, what he owns. Think what you could do with that.”

  “I don’t care,” Clyde said, and she heard, in that last word, care, that he’d been drinking. The wicked smell of whiskey belched out of him, and Lindie felt afraid.

  “Lindie,” Thomas said beside her. “Best we get home.”

  “And leave just as the party’s started?” Clyde asked.

  “There’s no party, Uncle Clyde.”

  “Well, I want to call it a party.” The moon flashed back over him, and Thomas and Lindie saw it at the same time—the small silver gun in Clyde’s hand.

  He pointed it toward Lindie. Terror enveloped her in its cold, slippery shell. The tang of urine filled her nostrils, and her legs flushed hot. Only after her bladder was empty did she realize she’d pissed herself.

  “Go on,” Clyde said, tipping his head toward the lakeside front of the house. “You two get out that direction so we can see each other.” Good, Lindie thought, we can make noise. June and Jack will come out and help. She gripped the bag of ledgers tightly as she felt the cold lip of the gun press into her side. Thomas led the way. Lindie followed with Clyde’s salty breath at her neck. Was he really pointing a gun at her?

  Lindie’s mind flashed with escape plans as her footsteps crackled the undergrowth. Her legs were wobbling. It was all she could do not to drop the ledgers. Her chance to cry out had passed. Though they were mere inches from the building where Jack and June were probably kissing, they seemed to be across the universe. The whole world was breath—Thomas’s, Clyde’s, Lindie’s—and the thump of her heart.

  They’d nearly reached the front of the house, when she remembered the rock. That first night Jack had been waiting for them, June had tripped. There were sizable rocks all along that path, big enough for a girl to stumble over, and maybe—she hoped—small enough to lift. She kicked her feet wide, hoping to feel one blocking her path. She had to find one soon; in a few steps, they’d be at the lakefront, where the land was clear.

  Her right leg swung wide and her toes slammed into something hard. There it was. She deliberately bashed her shin against the rock, hurtling herself over it and onto the ground. The ledgers thumped as she let them go. Clyde cursed. He pulled at her. He moved the gun to the back of her skull and pressed hard. She thought for sure that she was going to die, but her fingers knew their work, and, all the while, as he pressed that metal against her, they were scrabbling over the loosening stone, edging, lifting, desperately trying to pry it from the ground.

  Clyde cursed again. She looked up to see Thomas’s feet flashing off into the forest. Had he run for help? Or had he just run off? The ammonia smell of her piss washed up into her nostrils as she felt her luck turn. The rock was bigger than both hands, but she could lift it. The moon was going behind a cloud. If she could make it to her feet, she might have the advantage.

  “Get up,” he hissed.

  “Please, Uncle Clyde.”

  “Don’t call me that. You’re nothing to me. You’re the worthless product of a whore and the fool who thought he could tame her.”

  The next thing Lindie knew, the rock was leading her hands in a beautiful arc through the air. That gun was nothing compared to her rock. The sky was dark, and Clyde was in love with his ugly words, so in love that he didn’t see the rock at his temple until it was already crunching there.

  The first hit surprised him. He cursed and fell to Lindie’s left, toward the house. It felt good to watch him fall. It felt good to hear the wind knocked out of him, to see how easily he faltered. It was self-defense, that blow, saving herself from Clyde’s gun and drunken logic. Leveling the playing field.

  The second hit was glorious. With his left hand, Clyde tried to block her, but the rock was already landing on his skull. That hit was for how he’d scared her. He collapsed on the ground.

  The third hit was the end. Back came Lindie’s arm. She adjusted herself over him, crouching low. She could just see him in the last bit of moonlight. He was gurgling now, trying to speak as he writhed in the grasses below her. But she didn’t stop herself. She was tired and angry and she wanted him dead. Why hadn’t she seen this was the real solution? It was so easy now that it was in front of her; there was no need to negotiate. All she had to do was drop a rock on his head.

  And that’s exactly what she did.

  When June entered Idlewyld, she found Jack—as she knew she would—standing in front of her self-portrait. It was the best thing she’d ever painted. It wasn’t pretty, no. It wasn’t something she thought anyone would want to hang on a wall—she certainly hoped Jack wouldn’t—but she’d known, as she worked the canvas on the nights she snuck Lindie’s bike out of the garage, that the painting was just plain good. Not because it was perfect, but because it was honest and flawed. The blemish on her chin. The wrinkles at the corners of her mouth that looked just like her mother’s. A bit of hair tangling against her long cheek, her narrow eyebrows, the funny turn of her ears where they slipped into the lobes. Looking at the painting was like looking in a mirror, if a mirror could show your insides, too, everything you loved and feared at once.

  He turned at the sight of her, and ran his hand from his mouth down over his chin. “It’s tremendous,” he said. His voice quavered. She saw that he was moved, maybe even amazed. It struck her then. Despite it all, he knew her. He’d known that giving her thi
s place to paint would bring her to herself the way nothing else could. That it would electrify and make her reckless. He was a cheater, probably, and a liar too, and he had already brought her toward the self she feared becoming, and he was standing there before her, waiting to be hers. She was supposed to marry another man in only three days’ time, and finally, at last, she didn’t care anymore. She pushed everyone else out of her mind—Artie, Lindie, her mother, Clyde, Diane—just pushed them all out and went to Jack.

  His hands received her delicately. His lips were warm, sweet. Even out behind the garage she’d been holding something back, but here, at Idlewyld, she was as honest as her painting. She wanted him. She would have him. Simple as that.

  He kissed her back, gently at first, then hard to match her frenzy. His hands trailed from her head down her spine and across the small of her back. She found the buttons at his chest and started to undo them. He pulled back and held her face in his hands. His eyes asked the question and she answered with another kiss.

  She heard something then: the cry of her name? Was it Lindie calling? She wondered, but forgot to care in the next breath when Jack, who had been fiddling open the buttons of her blouse, grazed his thumb across her bare nipple.

  It happened quickly after that. Shirt, blouse, pants, skirt, everything off, and he was hard under the only bit of cotton cloth between them, and she was wet for him, wetter than she knew was possible, and his fingers were dispensing with the last bit of modesty.

  They made a kiss-drenched exodus to the mattress at the corner of the room. He laid her down and stayed above her, his eyes everywhere. She could hardly believe how bold she felt, arching her back, putting her nipple into his mouth, opening her legs and then closing them, so he could see her unfolding. She laughed. She drew him down. His face grew solemn, and he kissed her once, sweetly, a question of a kiss, and she loved the feeling of his skin all along her skin, the heat of him, his want, and she answered his kiss, a yes of a kiss back, and then Jack’s warmth was slipping into her, and it felt at once that he was through and around her, a sharp tightness that gave way to something warm and aching. She couldn’t believe this feeling of him, as though he was everywhere at once. She savored the taste of him on her lips, treasured his concern and his longing, realized she had so much to learn about this strange and mostly enjoyable matter, which she now knew was what every married couple did in their bed, together.