I stood at the top of the stairs and stared down at the man. He was wearing headphones—not cute little ear buds, but honking recording-studio size padded, noise-canceling ear muffs—over his shaggy, shoulder-length black hair. His beard was unkempt, and he was clothed head to toe in shades of black or dark gray, despite the heat. My grandparents had hired a badass wannabe rocker to do their yard work.
As he rounded the tree in the middle of the yard, his gaze met mine, and I became fiercely aware that I hadn’t showered in over twenty-four hours and I was wearing tiny sleep shorts and a T-shirt with no bra. I longed for my sunglasses, which helped so much in the aloof sneer department, but I settled for a tight frown.
“Let’s go inside, David,” I said. “Did you put the plane away?”
He slid from the chaise longue and studied his feet. “The plane flew on the roof.”
“You’re telling me that was Jamie Presswood mowing your lawn?” I balked.
Duffy handed me a crusty, fishy-smelling skillet. She’d half-suggested, half-informed me after dinner that I’d be helping her wash the dishes. “The one and only.”
Jamie Presswood was Winston and Duffy’s next-door neighbor’s son and my one-time childhood friend. He was a year younger than me, and during the summers I’d spent in Salsburg when I was seven and eight, he became the closest friend I’d ever had—the sibling I’d always yearned for. When I’d returned as a sixteen-year-old and we’d gone to the same high school for a year, I’d been embarrassed by his freshman status and quickly ditched him for the company of the cool kids. I hadn’t heard or seen much of him since I’d met Patrick and moved out on my own.
“He still lives at home?” I asked, before realizing what a total hypocrite I sounded like.
Duffy stooped to put a mixing bowl in the cupboard. “He’s been back for a few months now,” she said. “After he graduated, he went away for a couple of years. Somewhere out west, I think. Kansas or Nebraska. But it must not have worked out. Personally, I don’t know why anyone would ever want to leave, but of course that’s just my opinion.” She playfully wiggled her eyebrows and smiled at me.
I groaned and continued to scrub the bottom of the pan. “And you’re paying him to mow your lawn, why?”
“Winston set it all up. I think he’s trying to do him a good turn and help him get the word out about the landscaping business he’s trying to start. But you know Salsburg—it’s going to be a tough market to crack. And I don’t know what he expects to do the other six months of the year, but he’ll figure it out, I guess.”
In Salsburg, everybody took meticulous care of their own yards and gardens, if they had them, that is, and the rest was farmland. Coupled with the fact that most residents’ idea of landscaping was a discarded tractor tire planted with petunias or a smattering of gazing balls on pedestals, I agreed with Duffy that Jamie’s plan did not seem like a very bright business venture.
“Jamie Presswood,” I repeated, rinsing the skillet. His name conjured up simpler times: ferris wheels and sparklers, picnics by the river, Neapolitan ice cream.
“Now, Anna. He’s not the same boy you were best buddies with. You know I’m not one to gossip, but he’s been through some struggles in his life since you knew him. Some of them inflicted by the world, but others inflicted by himself. Winston wouldn’t take no for an answer, but I’m not entirely happy having him around, especially now that you and David are here. If you cross paths with him again, and you’re bound to, living right next door, you don’t have to be rude to him or anything, but I’d encourage you to keep your distance.”
From Jamie? The boy who had cried when he realized he’d killed his fireflies by neglecting to punch holes in the jar’s lid? The teenager who’d single-handedly organized a Thanksgiving food drive at the high school?
“Really? I find that hard to believe,” I said. “No offense, Duffy, but I’m perfectly capable of forming my own judgments about people.”
She swiped the washcloth from me and began scrubbing down the kitchen table, sweeping crumbs into the palm of her hand. I could hear the solemn tones of news anchors coming from the living room where Winston was watching TV and David was settled in with his remote-controlled dinosaur and a bowl of mint chocolate-chip ice cream.
She flicked the crumbs into the garbage can and rinsed and wrung out the washcloth. “Like you did with Patrick?”
Her words landed like a swift punch to my kidneys. I inhaled sharply. “That was really low. Kimberly-low. What, are you stealing pages from her playbook now?”
“Anna! You know I don’t like you talking about your mom that way.” She sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs, her expression pained. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to throw that in your face. I know you didn’t know—that nobody, not even his own parents, knew at the time. It’s just a fitting example, is all. Sometimes we think we know a person, but we don’t really. People change, and sometimes it’s for the better, and sometimes it’s for the worse.”
I leaned against the sink, reluctant to sit down at the table with her. “Why are you talking in clichés all of a sudden? If there’s something you want me to know about Jamie, you should just tell me.”
Duffy stared straight ahead at the napkin holder and salt and pepper shakers, a Dutch boy and girl kissing. “You know I can’t abide gossip, especially spreading unverified rumors.”
She had once explained her process of “verifying” a rumor to me. As a hairdresser and the owner of the only beauty shop in town, all rumors went through her, and she viewed it as her duty to sift and winnow out the truth while squelching falsehoods in their tracks. Therefore, a rumor only became verified if at least three reliable sources, one of which needed to be an involved party with firsthand knowledge, corroborated it.
“So you say,” I muttered. Duffy delighted in her role as the hub in the rumor mill almost as much as she delighted in rereading and thus “solving” her Agatha Christie mysteries. “Unverified or not, you must believe it, if you’re warning me away from him.”
Duffy patted the chair next to her. “Mind you, I didn’t want to believe it. Jamie was such a lamb chop as a boy, taking you under his wing like that when you arrived here for the first time, alone and friendless, mad at your mom, mad at the world. He lifted your spirits and overlooked your…eccentricities. He really was a special kid, and I let Wendy know it. I permed her hair and trimmed his for free all that year.”
That wasn’t quite my remembering of the events, but I didn’t want to interrupt. I sat down.
“Vickie Eberhardt told me first, and you know she’s about as reliable as the Channel 8 weatherman, so I dismissed the rumor right off the bat. But then only a few days later, Joanne Gehring came in for an updo—it was her goddaughter’s wedding, and you should’ve seen how her hair turned out, it was just breathtaking; I did it all up in ringlets—and she said the exact same thing. And you know her son Marshall used to be good friends with Jamie in high school, and she said they’d been hanging out some since he’s been back. But the nail in the coffin was Laura Schiff.”
I furrowed my brow. “The waitress at Ruby’s Diner?”
“No, that’s her mother-in-law, Lorraine Schiff. Laura’s maiden name was Armentrout. I think she’s a couple years older than you. You might’ve crossed paths with her at the high school?”
I was starting to feel overwhelmed by the Old Testament style genealogy of all the relationships in Salsburg. “I really don’t remember. So, anyway, what did Laura tell you?”
“Well, Laura is the pharmacy tech at the drugstore, so strictly speaking, this is very confidential. Poor Wendy Presswood came down with MS a few years ago—that part’s not confidential; we had a church fundraiser for her to help pay her medical bills, poor thing—but since Jamie’s been back, he’s been picking up all her medications for her, and Laura said they’re refilling the painkillers twice as often. He even had them call and ask the doctor to write a new script for something stronger.” She raised her eyebrow
s in expectation, but when I didn’t say anything, she rushed on, “Now Vickie thinks he’s selling the drugs to other people, but Joanne was certain he’s taking them himself and is an addict. Can you imagine taking away medicine from your own sick mother?”
I put my elbows on the table and leaned in. “Maybe the drugs are for his mom. Maybe her MS is getting worse. Maybe she’s in terrible pain. Did you ever consider that?” My cheeks felt hot. I hadn’t known Wendy Presswood had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It seemed monumentally unfair. She was an incredibly kind woman, always plying me with Danish butter cookies whenever I came to her house, which admittedly, hadn’t been in several years.
“Oh, Anna, I wish that were the truth. But Marshall Gehring told his mother that when Jamie was out west, he had—”
“Just stop. Stop. I don’t want to hear any more, Duffy.” I stood up quickly, nearly knocking an amateurish acrylic painting of Lake Michigan off the wall. I tried to straighten it, but it kept slouching to the right. “You’ve warned me. I got it. You did your duty, and now I really don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
I wondered what Edna Franklin and Vickie Eberhardt and Joanne Gehring and all the others said about me behind Duffy’s back. That I was a little slut who’d gotten knocked up and hadn’t even been able to trap the father into marrying me? That I was an unfit mother who fed her son crap for three meals a day? That I was a loser who couldn’t even hold down a stupid secretarial job? An ungrateful mooch who exploited the generosity of her grandparents who were much too nice for their own good? According to my grandmother’s standards, these rumors were probably all triple-verified and gold-stamped.
“You’re the one who brought him up and seemed so interested,” Duffy said mildly. She stood up too and wrapped her warm, steady hands around mine as we readjusted the painting together. “I painted this two years ago from a photograph of the lighthouse in Port Ambrose. I’ve been dying to get an artist’s perspective.”
“I’m not an artist.”
“Well, I think you are. You used to take all those classes and you’re certainly very talented. So what do you think?” Duffy fingered the grainy wooden frame.
The lake was both lumpy (in an effort to depict waves, I assumed) and dimensionless. The water was a monochromatic deep navy, and the sky looked like a solid wall of gray. You could see the pencil lines under the watery white paint where she’d first sketched the lighthouse. “A basement masterpiece,” Mr. Schneider, my high school art teacher, would’ve designated it.
“I knew it was a painting of Lake Michigan immediately,” I said. She nodded eagerly, so I continued, “And the proportions of the lighthouse seem very accurate.” I racked my brain for something else innocuous to say. “Maybe it would help to actually go to Port Ambrose and get a feel for the place and then try to paint it from memory, instead of a picture in a book?”
She sighed and sat back down. “That’s not practical. It’s much too far away.”
“Duffy, it’s half an hour away.” Standing behind her, I bent down and rested my chin on her rounded shoulder. She smelled like hair spray and oatmeal raisin cookies. “We could go together if you like, make a day trip of it with David. I could drive.”
Duffy patted my cheek twice, leaving it feeling slightly itchy. “That’s thoughtful of you, Anna, but you know I don’t like to leave our little paradise here. Salsburg has everything I need and plenty of scenic places to paint if I want to do it your way.”
No lakes or lighthouses though, I thought, but didn’t say. I straightened up and stretched my arms over my head. “Well, let me know if you change your mind. I’d better go get David ready for bed now. He probably needs a bath. Whenever he eats ice cream, he manages to get it in the weirdest places—in his ears, up his nose.”
Duffy smiled fondly, but she wasn’t the one who had to scrub the gunk off a bawling, squirming, complaining child.
I had one foot in the dining room before I remembered the other question on my mind. “Oh! I meant to ask you earlier. Are there any dogs in your neighborhood? Big ones? I thought I saw one in your backyard this morning.”
Duffy squinted in thought. “Let’s see. The Presswoods never had any pets, and Duane and Rose Dawes next door just have cats. Melody Yarbrough across the way has a yappy little dog, but I’m pretty sure it’s never without a leash. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone who has a big dog, and I don’t think anyone in the neighborhood would let their pet roam free with the highway only a couple of miles away.” She looked up at me in concern. “Was it bothering you and Davey? Did it seem like a stray?”
“I don’t really know,” I said, remembering the way the animal had been illuminated in the sun and then seemingly sucked into the shadows. Almost like an image from a movie projector. Except that it had seemed solid. I bit the inside of my cheek. “I think David was trying to play with it, but he didn’t want me to know.”
“Hmm. Well, let me know if you see it around here again, and we’ll try to get to the bottom of it. In the meantime, make sure Davey knows not to get too close to stray dogs—”
“He knows,” I interrupted.
“Alright, alright. Just a suggestion. I suppose it’s something you need to teach your little ones right off the bat when you’re raising them in the big city.”
I drifted into the living room, where the TV was still on and a lithe couple in matching red-sequined costumes was tangoing. Vivien Leigh, crouching under the coffee table, flicked her tail back and forth, as if she were hunting some invisible prey. Winston was asleep on the couch, his head back and mouth open; David was curled up on the opposite end, in deep conversation with his plastic dinosaur. “I want to play with him now…” he murmured to his toy, his little voice drifting out of earshot. “But I still like you…”
I pressed my pointer finger to my lips when David spotted me. “Bedtime,” I whispered.
He stood up on the couch, holding the remote control that activated the dinosaur’s roaring only inches away from his grandpa’s face, threatening to click it. “Will you tell me a story?” he countered. Four-year-old bargaining tactics were ruthless.
“Okay. But we need to get you cleaned up first. You’re like one big ice cream cone.” I pretended I was going to lick his face, and he giggled.
Storytelling was the one area of parenting I felt like I was doing right. In David’s infancy, I had babbled repurposed fairy tales to him whenever I cuddled or rocked him. Those early stories were thinly veiled accounts of my own life as I saw it: a princess who escaped the evil queen’s snare in order to be with her true love, a prince who had been transformed into a beast and hopefully one day would magically change back into a prince. I could’ve been reading my baby the phonebook for all he knew; the stories’ true purpose was to help me keep my sanity.
But as he grew up, he took an active interest in my stories and even started requesting characters and settings. His tastes skewed toward woodland creatures, space explorers, and pirates. My shining storytelling moment happened when David’s preschool asked me to visit for storytime, and instead of reading Dr. Seuss in a singsong voice like all of the other parents, I had invented a story on the spot about a muskrat named Glenn. The children had been rapt the entire fifteen minutes, and afterwards, the teacher had told me without a hint of sarcasm that I should write children’s books.
Though it was an almost nightly ritual David and I both cherished, it could be exhausting sometimes, especially when I was feeling uninspired like I had been for the past several months. David was also becoming a more critical listener, demanding reasonable explanations and tidy endings. “What about Wolfy?” he would ask, and I would try to devise something that would appeal to a four-year-old’s sense of logic. “Wolfy was taking a nap,” I’d reply. “Mona will come back for him when he wakes up and he’s nice and rested.” But sometimes all I wanted to say was, Because I am tired. Because it is time to go to sleep. Because I am a lazy mom. Because I am just a husk of my for
mer self.
David tried to wriggle out of my grasp as I scrubbed the stickiness off his face, neck, and hands with a washcloth. A full-fledged bath was definitely in order, but we were both too irritable and impatient to wait while the tub filled and then dig for his bath toys in our mess of still unpacked bags.
The evening installment of Mona, the space explorer, and her dog, Wolfy, was my least imaginative story yet. Usually Mona traveled to planets made entirely of food—peanut butter, for example—and after a few minutes of eating and enjoying the food, some sort of conflict arose—Wolfy’s mouth got stuck together, so he couldn’t warn Mona about a peanut butter bog up ahead. Luckily, a swim in the milk river saved the day. But tonight, I was having a hard time finding a conflict on Planet String Cheese. Even David looked bored.
My mind kept drifting to what Duffy had said about Jamie Presswood. As kids, we both never would have imagined that we’d return to Salsburg one day as hapless, stunted adults. I felt a certain kinship with the neighbor boy I hadn’t spared a second thought on in years. A kinship born out of pity, curiosity, and my own sense of humiliation. But maybe it was just because, for once, it was refreshing to be appalled by someone else’s life other than my own.
CHAPTER THREE
When I was seventeen years old, Patrick Gill entered my life like a missile fired from a rocket launcher. Whoosh! And suddenly my hair was on fire, my breast impaled, and my clothes flaking off my body into ashes.
It probably had something to do with the fact that I had just returned to Milwaukee after a ho-hum, “safe” year in Salsburg, and my mom had preemptively enrolled me in an all-girls Catholic school, even though we weren’t practicing Catholics. It probably also had something to do with the fact that Patrick was the most captivating creature I had ever seen. He had the dark, mournful features of an archangel, but bleached blond hair with one black stripe defiantly streaking across the back of his head at a diagonal. His lean ropy muscles were covered in elaborate black tattoos—a wild mustang, a hawk, a Chinese dragon, a panther, a Celtic cross.
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