The Meryl Streep Movie Club

by Mia March

  “It’s for the end-of-camp celebration that all the parents get to go to,” Charlie said. “We’re making a huge tree, like ten people tall, and we’re putting our own family trees on it. Do you know what a family tree is, Mommy?” He pulled out a piece of green paper from his folder.

  “I do, Charlie,” she said, looking over the paper with the outline of a tree and branches. There were ovals for names. Great-grandparents. Grandparents. Parents. You. Siblings. Fill in names and in the space below, write three adjectives (words that describe) your parents and grandparents.

  Oh, Charlie, she thought, her heart breaking. She could easily fill in one side. The Nash side. Even though there would be D for “deceased” where Charlie’s maternal grandparents and great-uncle should be. It was the other side, starting with father and up, she had no clue about. She knew Charlie’s father’s name, of course—thank God she knew at least that. And three adjectives? The best she could do was tall, dark, and green-eyed. Because everything else she thought would describe him—from two dates, anyway—had been blown to bits. All that was left of John Smith was a face she’d never forget, a face she saw in Charlie’s every day.

  “Mommy, can we talk in the other room for a minute?” Charlie asked, his face half-crumpled, half-rigid as he tried not to cry in front of his friend.

  “Parker, we’ll be right back, okay?” June said. “Help yourself to a cheese stick and apple juice.”

  They went into Charlie’s tiny room, recently done up in Harry Potter. Charlie took his magic wand off his desk, his eyes teary. “Mommy, why don’t I have a dad like everyone else?”

  She sat down on his bed, pulled him onto her lap, and wrapped her arms around him. They’d talked about this many times, but when he needed it repeated, she repeated it. “You do have a dad, Charlie, but he’s not in our lives. He didn’t know that I was pregnant with you, and he moved away before I could tell him. And even though I looked for him, I couldn’t find him.” She hugged Charlie for a moment and rested her cheek on his fine hair. “If he knew about you, Charlie, if he knew you, he would be with us. He would love you. I know that in my heart.”

  “But how am I going to fill out the tree?” Charlie asked.

  June’s heart squeezed inside her chest. She knew this day would come, when what she said wouldn’t be enough. She had to do something, had to find out something. Charlie deserved to know who his father was—more than a name and two dates’ worth of scanty information. “Sweets, listen to me. I’m going to try to get some information about him for the tree, okay? And about his parents and grandparents too.”

  Charlie brightened the way kids so easily did. “Okay.”

  She had no idea how she’d track down John Smith after all these years, especially when her search back then had been so fruitless. But she had to. Maybe Isabel or Edward knew someone, a lawyer or a private investigator. Isabel never went anywhere without Edward, so June was sure she’d see him at the inn for her aunt Lolly’s big announcement tomorrow night.

  Maybe she’s selling the place, June thought with mixed feelings. She’d spent the saddest time of her life at the Three Captains’ Inn, but there had been some good times too. Lolly had told her to bring Charlie, of course, and Boothbay Harbor in August was heaven for a kid. Still, for June the inn would always be where she’d had to go when she lost her parents—and then, in a way, her sister. Coupled with how she’d felt as a scared, pregnant twenty-one-year-old, stared at by former classmates home for the summer, Boothbay Harbor hardly felt like “home.”

  No, June was not looking forward to tomorrow night at all. She needed to make a life plan, needed time and space to think. She wouldn’t get that at the Three Captains’ Inn. Or in Boothbay Harbor, no matter how beautiful and serene it was. At least she could pop in on Henry at the bookstore. He’d love to see Charlie.

  She was grateful for the hug her sweet boy gave her before he ran back into the living room to his friend, his frown so easily turned upside down.

  CHAPTER 3

  Kat Weller

  With white buttercream icing in the pastry bag, Kat squeezed out six serif initials—L for Lolly, I for Isabel, E for Edward, J for June, C for Charlie, and K for Kat—along the edges of the German chocolate cake she’d baked for that night’s family dinner. German chocolate, with its gooey caramel, sweet coconut, and crunchy pecan filling, was her little cousin Charlie’s favorite. It had been too long since she’d seen the adorable seven-year-old. Too long since she’d seen his mother, June, and her sister, Isabel—Kat’s first cousins. Not that they were close or ever had been. But even before Kat had become a baker by trade, she’d made an initial cake for every family dinner at the inn. Her way of… trying, she supposed.

  Kat glanced at the clock and took off her flour-dusted, icing-smeared apron and tossed it in the wicker hamper. She had just under an hour until her cousins were due to arrive.

  You okay? Oliver had texted twenty minutes ago. I know you’re worried about tonight. Call when you can. O

  He was right. She was worried. Her mother had summoned her nieces home. Years ago, when Isabel hadn’t come for Christmas one year because no one had specifically invited her, Lolly had muttered, “Oh, for God’s sake,” and said from then on, the family would spend Thanksgiving and Christmas together, no matter what, no invitation would be issued, it was simply to be understood. And so every Thanksgiving and Christmas, Isabel and Edward would arrive from Connecticut in their black Mercedes, and June and Charlie would come from Portland in June’s ancient forest-green Subaru Outback, and Kat would make her arrival by staircase, as she already lived at the inn. Always had.

  But never had Lolly Weller called Kat’s cousins home for any other reason. Her mother had mentioned it so casually that morning as she’d cracked eggs for the guests’ breakfast. “Oh, Kat, you might want to make one of your initial cakes for tonight. The girls are coming for dinner. I asked them to come home for an announcement.”

  Bombshell. An announcement? Lolly Weller, with her long, graying braid, crab-dotted L.L. Bean flip-flops, and brown gauze skirt, wasn’t the formal type. If she had something to say, which she rarely did, she tended to say it, no “song and dance” as she called making a big to-do out of something.

  She’s selling the inn… she’s getting married… she’s moving to Tahiti… Kat had tried to guess what her mother could possibly have to announce that would warrant calling “the girls” home when “the girls” both hated Boothbay Harbor and didn’t much like each other, either. Or Kat. As Kat had gathered sunglasses from between sofa cushions and maps left in the breakfast room, and one iPhone from under a towel on a chaise longue and dropped them in the Lost and Found basket, then readied the Bluebird Room for today’s new guests, she’d tried to imagine what her mother could be up to. Kat didn’t think Lolly would ever sell the Three Captains’ Inn, for any reason. Running off to Vegas with a sudden fiancé was out since her mother hadn’t had a beau since Kat’s father had died fifteen years ago. And forget moving to Tahiti or Canada. Lolly Weller had never left Boothbay Harbor, Maine—not even for her honeymoon.

  Kat had tried to get something out of Pearl, her mother’s elderly “helper,” who came over a few times a week to fold bedding and towels and water the plants, by mentioning how surprised Kat was that her cousins were coming for dinner that night. When it wasn’t Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. Just an ordinary Friday in August.

  But all she got out of Pearl was “Isn’t that lovely, dear. Perhaps we’ll see you three gals for Movie Night tonight. Lolly said we’re watching The Bridges of Madison County. Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood.”

  Kat had let out the deep breath she’d been holding all day. If Lolly hadn’t canceled her weekly Movie Night at the inn, the announcement couldn’t be so earth-shattering. Then again, the happiest Kat had ever seen her quiet, somber mother was when she was watching movies in the parlor with the guests an
d Pearl. Kat’s mother wouldn’t cancel her movie club for any reason.

  The oven timer dinged, and Kat checked on the lemon custard cupcakes she’d baked for Movie Night. They were done—and smelled divine. She took the trays from the oven and placed them on the cooling rack in front of the window, glancing out at the harbor in the distance. The Three Captains’ Inn wasn’t in the center of Boothbay Harbor, where the most popular hotels were, but rooms were always booked at the robin’s-egg-blue Victorian on Harbor Hill Road, two long, twisty streets up from the harbor, but on a hill so that you could see the hustle and bustle in the summer, the long piers and myriad docks, the whale-watching boats and majestic sails, and shop after shop, restaurant after restaurant, without being right in the frantic middle of it. Inside, with its fishing-boat decor—ship wheels and buoys and nets—the Three Captains’ Inn wasn’t modern like some of the other area hotels, but guests seemed to love the place. They called it real New England with a real Maine proprietor who rarely smiled or made cheery small talk, but whose rooms were cozy and whose breakfasts were incredible. Kat’s mother and father had inherited the Three Captains’ Inn from Kat’s mother’s family (three sea-captain brothers had built it in the early 1800s), so generation after generation had grown up in the bed-and-breakfast.

  A bell jangled above the swinging door to the kitchen. Her friend—client—Lizzie Hamm came in, her two-carat diamond ring glinting. “Hmm, that smells and looks amazing,” Lizzie said, smiling at the cake the way people always did at Kat’s creations, with their whimsical touches of tiny birds, shells, branches, or flowers that spelled out names or initials. Lizzie eyed the letters. “I can’t wait to hear what your mom’s big announcement is. Call me later to tell me, even if it’s late. Oh, hey,” she said, eyeing Kat. “You got your hair cut! It looks great shorter. And the bangs are hot.”

  Kat smiled. “Thanks. I needed a change.” That was for sure. She’d gotten three inches chopped off her bra-strap-length, light blond hair so that it barely brushed her shoulders. And she’d gotten bangs for the first time ever, a fringe that made her feel… different. A feeling she’d been after lately. And older than twenty-five, which wasn’t really that young.

  Lizzie put her giant purse on a chair. “I’m dying to see my sketches!”

  Kat led her to a little desk under another window that faced the huge backyard, where Lolly and Pearl were sitting at one of the picnic tables, playing what looked like poker and using small pieces of Kat’s blondies as chips. It made Kat smile—and forget for a moment that in hours, the inn would feel the way it used to when Kat was growing up. Claustrophobic. Angry.

  How had the four of them fit in this house, with guests coming and going through the halls and common rooms? When the Nash sisters had moved in, Lolly turned the big attic room, with its romantic balcony, formerly her and Kat’s father’s bedroom, into a bedroom for the three girls, and Lolly had taken over Kat’s little room across the hall. Sharing a bedroom with then thirteen-year-old June and sixteen-year-old Isabel had been an eye-opener for ten-year-old Kat. June and Isabel had been classic good-girl/bad-girl sisters, and between them Kat had turned out all right. Not too good and not too bad. Pretty much in the middle. On everything. Daring Isabel and smart June, with their strong personalities and loud lives, had made Kat go quiet, watching them from a short distance, yet unable to understand what she was seeing and hearing. Or feeling. Except for that bitter ache in her stomach reminding her that if it weren’t for Isabel and June’s parents, her father—her good, solid father who never drank, who never danced like a fool at family get-togethers, who never needed to borrow “a few bucks” until payday—would be alive. On the rare occasions Kat would be so overwhelmed by her cousins, by how they sucked the life out of a room, even kind June, she would scream at them, scream that she hated them, hated the sight of them, that she was sick of them, that it was their parents’ fault that she didn’t have a father, that they were stuck together.

  Then quietly June would say, “At least you have your mother,” before running away in tears. But the way Isabel, who’d always scared Kat, would stand there, unexpectedly staring at Kat with guilt, with sorrow, in her eyes, would make Kat feel worse.

  Fifteen years of avoiding one another, and now her cousins were coming for An Announcement that could be anything.

  Kat handed Lizzie the sketches and computer images she’d made for Lizzie’s wedding cake. Lizzie was getting married next May and having 120 people. And she thankfully asked Kat, who’d baked her way through her every sad, bad, and glad time the two of them had had since they’d met in middle school, to make her wedding cake. And, no, Lizzie wouldn’t hear of accepting the cake as a gift, which Kat extra-appreciated.

  More of this and she could open her own bakery: Kat’s Cakes & Confections, now just the name on her homemade label that graced her apricot-colored bakery boxes.

  “Oooh, maybe I’ll have one of those before I look at the sketches,” Lizzie said, eyeing the tray of lemon custard cupcakes. “I don’t care if I burst out of my gown. Gimme one.”

  Kat laughed. She loved her friend Lizzie. And wished she could be as sure about her own love life as Lizzie was about hers. Kat frosted one still-too-warm cupcake, and Lizzie inhaled it, then glanced down at the top sketch and gasped. “Oh, Kat, I don’t even have to look past this first one. It’s perfect.”

  Kat knew Lizzie would choose that one. Five-tiered in the shape of seashells, with delicate branches and baby’s breath encircling the bottom tier. Perfect for a wedding at her family’s summerhouse on Peaks Island.

  “I’ll take them with me and show the wedding crew,” Lizzie said, sliding the sketches into her tote bag. “Okay, so tell me what’s going on with Oliver.” Lizzie loved Oliver, loved their “story,” and wanted them married off. Everyone did.

  Kat didn’t know what she wanted where Oliver was concerned. Their “story” had taken over. Sometimes she thought their “story,” which she could not think of without big honking quotes around it, was bigger than their feelings for each other.

  Born just two months apart twenty-five years ago, Katherine Weller and Oliver Tate had grown up next door to each other, their homes separated by a stand of evergreens in which Kat and Oliver, as kids, would sit and talk, even when it was snowing. They’d been inseparable from toddlerhood, delighting their parents. “We can’t wait to dance at your wedding!” they’d all say, making Kat and Oliver roll their eyes and run off. Kat remembered so clearly the moment Oliver had become everything to her: the cold New Year’s morning she was ten years old and her mother had told her and her cousins that there had been an accident, that her cousins’ parents, and Kat’s father, were gone. Kat had shaken her head and started screaming and gone running barefoot in the snow through the thicket of trees, the branches scraping her, and pounded on the door of Oliver’s house until Oliver’s mother had let her in. Oliver had given her a pair of his boots and a jacket and mittens, and they’d rushed out under the trees, and he sat there with her in the bitter cold and rocked her back and forth and cried with her, saying over and over, “I’m sorry, Kat.”

  In the days and weeks and months afterward, when she’d felt so crowded out by her cousins, by her mother’s grief, Kat had turned to Oliver even more. She had him. She was okay. Everything was okay. Oliver equaled okay.

  One of the last things her father had said to her, that New Year’s Eve she was ten years old, had been about Oliver. The first time he’d tucked her in that night he’d asked if she’d made any New Year’s resolutions, and she’d said she had only one, to make a girl best friend too. Kat’s only friend was Oliver, and Kat wasn’t close to her mother the way she was to her dad. She longed for a girl best friend, as so many of her classmates had. Her dad had nodded and said that was a fine resolution, but that Oliver was true-blue, and if you had only one friend and that friend was true-blue, you had everything.

  Oliver was tr
ue-blue. Was at five, when most boys were bratty. Was at ten, when most boys were horrid to girls. Was now at twenty-five, when most guys wanted to sleep with as many women as possible before settling down with the girl they’d practically been assigned to marry since birth.

  “We’re… dating,” Kat told Lizzie. “Spending time together, but I don’t know. Oliver is… my best friend. I think he should just stay that way.” Sometimes, Kat felt very differently about Oliver. But just when she thought they should be together, a funny feeling would come over her, the way it always had. She couldn’t put a name to it.

  “I know you’ve always been ambivalent about Oliver,” Lizzie said. “But he’s gold, Kat. Don’t let him get away because you’re scared.”

  “I’m not scared,” Kat insisted. “I’ve known Oliver my entire life. I’m not scared of him.”

  Or was she? She could still remember a singular moment, when she and Oliver had been thirteen, when everything had changed between them again—but this time in a way that separated them. One day, he was the same lanky Oliver, with his sandy-blond hair and dark blue eyes and dimple, and the next, she found herself staring at him. Differently. Thinking about what it would be like to kiss him. Her new feelings for him were the only thing she ever kept secret from him, and she was both terrified and exhilarated by that. At one of their first boy-girl parties on a Friday night, during spin the bottle, it was his turn, and when he spun that bottle, the opening landed right on her. She could remember the flush working its way along her body; she must have turned beet red. She wanted nothing more on earth than to kiss Oliver Tate.

  But at the same time, that funny feeling gripped her and she’d blurted out, “I can’t kiss you, Oliver. We’re, like, best friends.”

  He’d been watching her. Waiting to see what she’d do, she’d realized. And because she knew Oliver Tate, knew him the way she knew herself, she saw the flash of disappointment cross his face. She’d told him, in front of practically their entire eighth-grade class, that they were just friends. That she didn’t want to kiss him. And Veronica Miller, with her long red hair and beautiful green eyes, had said, “I’ll take the kiss for her, then,” and grabbed Oliver’s face. Veronica, who had so much of what Kat coveted, such as courage and the need for a real A-cup bra, had been just the first of Oliver’s many girlfriends through school and college, and Kat had never had to worry about kissing Oliver again. The subject of kissing Oliver Tate had never come up again.