The Meryl Streep Movie Club

by Mia March

  Isabel sighed with remembrance. “Fourteen is such a tough age. And I know what you mean about losing feeling. I was with Edward for so long that even though I’d started to lose feeling for him, I repressed it, stomped it down, anything to avoid it. And even when he betrayed me in little ways—and some big ways—I still looked the other way, trying so hard to fight my way back to him.”

  “Until he made that impossible.” Griffin took her arm and wrapped it around his. Her entire body tingled. “Like my ex.”

  A coffee shop was open late for the holiday weekend, so they stopped in for iced coffees to go and walked down to the harbor to the footbridge. They stood in the center of the bridge under a crescent moon and so few stars that Isabel could count them. Seven. Seven lucky twinkles.

  Griffin sipped his coffee. “When I let Alexa know I was going out for a bit, just for a walk down to the harbor, she said, ‘Alone?’ When I mentioned that you were joining me, she slammed a pillow over her head.”

  “It has to be rough on a girl her age, dealing with all that. Her mother remarrying, her father dating. Even if it’s just a walk.”

  “I told her it was just a walk, and I got a ‘Right. Just a walk.’”

  They looked at each other then, and he took her hand. Goose bumps skittered up Isabel’s spine, her neck. A group was coming up the bridge, so he wrapped her arm around his arm again and they headed to the far end of the bridge and watched the midnight excursion boats.

  “I’m glad I met you, Isabel. Even if meeting someone was the last thing I expected when I booked a room at the Three Captains’.”

  “I’m glad I met you too, Griffin.” She wanted to stop and kiss him under the seven stars. She wanted to ask him a million questions. “Speaking of the Three Captains’, you said you stayed there before?”

  “The three of us—me, Alexa, and Emmy, when my ex first left. I needed to get us out of that house—it just suddenly changed on us, you know? So I booked us a room at the Three Captains’ because of the name, and because I thought the girls would like the house and the gardens, and we stayed for a weekend. Emmy was too young to understand what was going on, but Alexa was a mess. She spent a lot of time in that Alone Closet. Your aunt said it was okay. But I don’t think she remembers us.”

  “She’s preoccupied. She’s been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. It’s why I’m here. Why we’re all here.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that. I’m glad I’m helping then in my own way, by training Happy as the official Three Captains’ Inn dog.”

  Isabel smiled and they looked at each other long enough that Griffin leaned over and kissed her.

  For a second, she felt herself pulled into it, aware of his soft, strong lips, the Ivory scent and broad chest, the strange maleness of him. But then the very strangeness of him, of this man she hadn’t known a week and a half ago, took over and she stepped back.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This feels… stranger than I thought. It was barely two weeks ago that I found out about the affair. And I really was blindsided. I mean, I knew we were having problems, that there was a big issue between us, but I never thought he—” She clamped her mouth shut and sighed. “I’m not supposed to be talking about this, am I?”

  “No supposed-to’s. No rules. And I know how you feel. Exactly.”

  She started to cry and he pulled her into a hug. They stood like that at the end of the bridge until a group of teenagers passed them and a boy shouted, “Get a room.” Giggles and footsteps later, she and Griffin both laughed.

  “I actually have a room,” he said, “but I’m sharing it with an angry fourteen-year-old and a snoring three-year-old.”

  “And I’m sharing with my sister and my cousin.”

  “Probably a good thing,” he said, his dark eyes on her.

  “Yeah,” she whispered. And they walked back, hand in hand.

  CHAPTER 11

  June

  How did I get here? June wondered at six o’clock in the morning on Labor Day as she sat behind the wheel of her trusty Subaru, which had somehow become Marley Mathers’s getaway car—just in case. Marley sat squirming in the passenger seat, staring at the windows above Boothbay Flowers, where her former high school sweetheart, a baseball star whom June remembered as particularly good-looking, and current off and on summer fling (now off), lived. Apparently, they’d had a huge argument weeks ago and Marley announced it was over between them, and Kip (short for Christopher, June learned last night) began dating someone else immediately. He lived in Boothbay year-round, coaching varsity and recreational programs. The former flames had hooked up early in the summer, but like old times, Kip wasn’t interested in dating only Marley.

  And now she was about to tell him she was ten weeks pregnant with his child. Six a.m. didn’t seem like the best time, but when was? Marley had called him last night and said she had something important to talk to him about, and before his workout was his only free time. Marley had explained all this to June when she called late last night, in tears, asking for advice. How did Charlie’s father take the news? she wanted to know. How did June tell him?

  And so over a glass of wine at midnight in the parlor, June told Marley the very short story. Despite June’s lack of experience in sharing the news with the father of her baby, Marley asked if she’d come with her to tell Kip, to just be there, before and after. June wondered what it would have been like to have found John when she discovered she was pregnant. If she’d told him and he’d taken off on her, she’d have been alone in New York City with that kind of rejection, that kind of abandonment. She might not know Marley Mathers well, but she’d be her getaway person.

  “Okay,” Marley said, reaching for the car-door handle for the third time in the past five minutes. “I’m going.”

  “I’ll be here,” June said.

  After a minute, Marley did finally get out and walk to the door between the flower shop entrance and the paint-your-own-pottery shop. With her hand on the doorknob, she turned for one last commiserating smile, then disappeared inside.

  June had no idea what Kip was going to say, how he’d react, but she envied Marley the access to him. At least Kip would know. Please be ecstatic, June prayed. Grab her into your arms, swing her around in celebration, tell her you were meant to be together and now you’d be a family. She wanted it for Marley; she wanted it for herself. It didn’t have to be a fantasy, and Marley could prove it right now.

  Not five minutes later, Marley came running out, crying, and shouted at June to drive, to get her away from there.

  June’s envy was replaced by dread.

  Over breakfast at the inn, which Isabel kindly made and served in the kitchen, Marley told June about her dream response from Kip, a proposal, and his real response, which was his saying “What?” over and over as though one broken condom wasn’t enough to result in a pregnancy. He’d been in shock and said he needed to think and couldn’t damned well do it with her standing there looking at him like that. So she’d run out.

  Jesus. June’s stomach churned at the thought of John’s reaction being similar. Seven years ago and now.

  When Charlie came into the kitchen in his Spider-Man pajamas and rumpled hair, flinging himself into June’s lap for a hug, Marley’s expression changed.

  “Oh my God,” Marley said, her eyes full of something like shining wonder.

  “Yeah,” June whispered. “No matter what, this is what you get.”

  Marley bit her lip and touched her hand to her stomach, and June knew her new friend would be okay.

  The guy standing in the Local Maine Interest aisle, holding Off the Beaten Path: Coastal Maine, looked so much like John Smith that June gasped at the sight of him until she realized, a second later, a heartbeat later, that it wasn’t him. He was tall and lanky with that same shock of dark, straight hair against fair skin—and he was no ol
der than twenty-one. Which reminded June just how much she was living in the past. A pretty young woman with two hardcovers from the New Fiction table joined him, and June felt a pang so sharp in her heart that she’d had to sit down on her director’s chair behind the checkout desk and take a breath.

  She missed love. She missed arms wrapped around her. She missed sex. She had to accept that John Smith wasn’t going to walk in the doors of Books Brothers, wasn’t going to appear on the cobblestone path of the Three Captains’ Inn, wasn’t going to track her down after seven years and say he’d never stopped thinking about her.

  He had stopped. After two nights. She needed to let him go, even as she looked for him for Charlie. That was the key here. She was finding him for Charlie, not herself. Marley’s experience that morning hit that home for June more than anything else. And these past few weeks of drifting off to sleep with fantasies and dreams of something that wasn’t going to happen were doing a number on her, setting her up for a letdown that would crush her again, and she had no time or energy to be crushed. Especially by her own stupidity.

  Let him go, she told herself for the seventieth time.

  She glanced at the big pirate-ship clock on the children’s wall: 9:45 p.m. Fifteen minutes till closing. For Labor Day weekend, Books Brothers had extended hours, 8 a.m. until 10 p.m., to take advantage of those heading out to the beach and in need of a book and those walking off dinner or coming off the excursion boats and happy to come in and browse—and buy a book or three or four. She’d been up so late last night talking to Marley and then up so early this morning on their mission, but she felt energized, as though Marley’s… epiphany at the sight of Charlie reiterated—reinforced—for June just how much she had to be grateful for. She’d barely had time to think about anything other than the store today: hand-selling, helping customers, working the register, arranging her special displays. The shop had been packed all weekend, and now that it was Monday night, the unofficial end of summer and the tourist season, she was looking forward to the celebratory clink of champagne on Henry’s boat at closing time.

  Right before locking up, June called Kat to check in on Charlie; she and Oliver had taken him to a clambake and fireworks celebration, and he fell asleep clutching his lobster-shaped horn blower. She loved how surrounded Charlie was by family. She found herself smiling as she and Bean headed down the pier to the houseboat—more so when Henry handed them each a glass of champagne and a thank-you bonus check that would more than pay for Charlie’s two hours of aftercare at school for the year. They clinked and sipped their champagne and ate Henry’s specially good homemade salsa on blue-corn tortilla chips, Van Morrison singing low from the ancient stereo system.

  Five minutes later, Bean’s boyfriend came to pick her up, and again June was struck by how much she wanted that for herself. Someone to come pick her up. Someone there for her. Someone to love her, care about her. She’d been on her own for so long that she’d grown used to handling everything—despair and joy, a leaky faucet, putting her child to bed every night, the occasional mouse. She wanted someone to lean on. To love. To make love to.

  “I couldn’t have done half the business we did this weekend without you, June,” Henry said, leaning against the galley kitchen’s counter. “The way you hand-sell books is really something. And people can tell you mean what you say, that you really loved a book, that you’re passionate about a subject or the author’s voice.”

  She liked the compliment. “One of the bonuses of spending Saturday nights alone is all the good books I have time to read.”

  He put down his full champagne flute and cracked open a beer, more his style. She watched him, watched him raise the bottle at her in a toast, watched him take a drink, tip back his head so that his slightly long, chestnut-brown hair, tinged with gold, brushed his neck. He was so good-looking. So lone-wolf. So… sexy. But when she imagined kissing Henry Books, he morphed into a pale twenty-one-year-old with dark hair and green eyes.

  If even Henry Books couldn’t shut down John inside her, maybe she’d never be free. Her heart was still with a guy who hadn’t wanted it, who’d walked away. But who remained every moment in her son. How was she supposed to let him go?

  Henry put down the bottle and looked at her, those crinkled-at-the-corners, Clint Eastwood brown eyes intense on her. Help me let him go, she thought, looking back at him. Here we are, alone. Years of… unspoken attraction between us. Unless she was crazy. Unless he’d never looked at her that way. But something in his expression told her he was working out something, contemplating something. Grabbing her into a passionate kiss and carrying her to his bed?

  What are you thinking, Henry Books? That they could make love right here, right on this boat, right now?

  Or that she was just plain old June, same as she ever was, and he wasn’t the slightest bit attracted to her? She wished she knew. She wished she had the courage to get up off this stool she was half swiveling on and go up to him and kiss him right on the lips.

  “Oh, isn’t this fucking cozy.”

  June whirled around and there was Vanessa Gull. As usual, June had blocked out reality and forgotten The Girlfriend. For a moment June was so shocked that Vanessa was standing there that June couldn’t move. Vanessa stood glaring from June to Henry in her summer uniform of sundress and Chuck Taylors.

  “We’re just having a clink of the glass to a great holiday weekend of business,” June rushed to say.

  “Right,” Vanessa said, her dark eyes spitting mad. “Henry, why don’t you just admit it already. Save me the trouble of waiting a few more years for some kind of marriage proposal, not that I’m even sure I want to marry you anyway. Just say it, so we both know—so the three of us know. You’re in love with June and always have been.”

  June stared from Vanessa to Henry. What?

  Vanessa glared at her. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, quit the ‘Who, me?’ act, June. It might have worked when you were eighteen and knocked up or however old you were, but it’s boring now. Trust me. You’re past the ingenue stage.”

  June stared at Vanessa, and Vanessa stared at Henry.

  “I don’t like being pushed into corners, Vanessa” was what he finally said.

  Vanessa stuck her pointer finger at his chest. “And I don’t like having to compete with someone whether she’s in town or not. I’m sick of this, Henry. Consider yourself free. I’ve started seeing Beck Harglow anyway. He hasn’t been carrying a torch for someone else for years.” She picked up the champagne flute Bean had left behind and threw it against the wall next to where Henry stood. June watched it shatter to the ground. Then Vanessa turned and walked up the steps and a door slammed.

  “Go after her,” June said, unsure what had just happened. Beck Harglow—the ace mechanic whom everyone raved about—or not, Vanessa had been upset enough to throw stuff.

  “Not this time,” he said. “Except for the drama, she’s not wrong.”

  June glanced up at him, holding her breath.

  He looked at her, those Clint Eastwood eyes intense on hers. “I have always loved you, June.”

  She stiffened, froze, every cell in her body stopping.

  He came closer, stood in front of her, and tipped up her chin, then he kissed her, full on the mouth as she used to fantasize about when Charlie was tiny. He leaned back from her, his eyes on her. “I’ve wanted to do that forever. All weekend, all day, but forever. For years.”

  She was speechless, she realized. She wanted this. She’d always wanted this. But… now that someone—and not just someone, but Henry Books, the only other man she’d dreamed about—was offering her everything she claimed to miss, she couldn’t let go of finding John, of the possibilities there, no matter how slim. She carried this crazy notion that she’d find him and get the answers that had lulled her to sleep all these years, that he had been looking for her all this time too. Maybe she’d never e
ven told him her last name. They’d spent all of seven or eight hours together in total, a few of those hours under the hazy effect of beer and gin and tonics.

  He could be looking for me right now, she thought.

  “June?”

  “I—” She turned and sat down on the leather desk chair. “I’m—”

  “You’re waiting for someone else,” he said. “I know you are.”

  She felt tears prick her eyes. “Am I an idiot? Right now, while I’m so actively looking for him, for Charlie, I just keep thinking— I keep hoping. Maybe it’s stupid and pointless, but I can’t seem to help it.” I have always loved you…

  He leaned back against a post. “Who says it’s pointless and stupid? There are a lot of what-ifs you need to get answered, June. Right now, this is what you’re doing, where your head and heart are. That’s not pointless. You’re settling something. Maybe in time, depending on what happens, you’ll be free and clear.”

  She let out a deep breath, grateful that he understood. I love you too, Henry, she wanted to say. And she did. Even if she was scared of what she felt for him. “You’ve always understood me. You’re the only one who ever has. You make me feel okay.”

  He smiled. “Good.”

  She got up and picked up her champagne and took a sip. “You and Vanessa have been fighting and getting back together for years. Clearly there’s some very real passion between you two.”

  Between them too. That kiss, all of five seconds long, had made her knees turn to Jell-O.

  He shook his head. “I used to mistake drama for passion. And habit for something real. Vanessa and I haven’t had much of a real relationship in a very long time. And to be very honest, we both served some kind of purpose for the other.”