“I’ll make it worth it.” Sophie raised an eyebrow at her boyfriend.
“You can’t fool me with your empty promises, foul temptress.”
“What a touching sentiment at Christmastime.”
The front door slid open and Simon Hale blew inside. A few seconds behind him, Deirdre appeared, carrying armfuls of shopping bags. Max stood up quickly.
“You missed dinner,” Max said shortly to his father.
Simon swivelled around to look at him before he checked his watch. “Shouldn’t you be headed to Halifax? Aren’t you going to Florida with your mother?”
“No,” Max said, “I told you. She’s just going with Michael.”
“Oh.” Simon fidgeted. “You know Deirdre and I aren’t going to be here tonight or tomorrow.”
“I know.”
Charlotte pushed herself back into the cushions a bit harder. She was waiting for Simon’s Come with us, dear son, but the silence hung in the air.
“I didn’t think you would be with us for Christmas,” Simon clarified.
“Well, I won’t be, apparently,” Max said cooly.
Sophie scurried to his side and slipped her hand inside his. “You can come home with me. My parents love you.”
Charlotte watched him smile at Sophie and she was reminded for a second that they were, sometimes, good to each other. Simon frowned at the couple.
Deirdre, thankfully, broke the quiet that followed. “So, what do you kids have planned for this evening?” she asked.
Charlotte guessed that referring to them as kids was supposed to be a joke, because Deirdre was maybe a few years older than Sean.
“Well, Deirdre,” Max said, fiddling with the zipper on his sweater, “I was thinking we’d sit around and make friendship bracelets while we sip cocoa and watch It’s A Wonderful Life. Then we’ll be in bed by eight thirty as we await the imminent arrival of Mr. Claus.”
Deirdre pressed her lips together in a thin line. “How adorable.”
Deirdre Hale was probably one of the most perfect-looking people Charlotte had ever seen in real life. Her glossy blonde hair looked like she had it blown out once a week and her nails were always perfectly manicured, which was impressive in a town with no nail salon. She was almost as tall as Simon when she stood beside him, though that could have been her designer heels. According to Max, Deirdre had been working as a hotel receptionist and met Simon when he’d gone to Halifax for some work thing last summer. They’d been engaged by Christmas and had a spring wedding.
“There’s food in the fridge. Hope none of you starve,” she said.
Max smiled widely at her and sat down beside Charlotte. “Thanks, Mom.”
Deirdre turned away from her stepson and looked toward Sean expectantly. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”
“This is my brother, Sean,” Charlotte said.
“He was at the wedding,” Simon put in. Simon and their dad had been friends.
Deirdre’s lip curled back to reveal her perfect teeth. “Ah, yes.”
“Hey.” Sean waved from the sofa.
Simon cleared his throat. “Anyway, Max, we’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.”
Max saluted.
“Simon’s being so romantic,” Deirdre told them. “He put so much planning—” Max’s eyebrows shot up at the word “—into this. We’re staying at the hotel where we met.” Deirdre wiggled her fingers—and the enormous engagement/wedding ring combo—at them.
“The hotel where she was a receptionist, or the one where my dad hired an escort?” Max asked quietly. Charlotte smacked him in the leg. Deirdre took no notice.
“Well, we can agree the Hale men know what they’re doing,” Sophie sighed, throwing herself onto Max’s lap. Max laughed and kissed Sophie’s cheek. Sean looked away.
They all said their polite goodbyes, then Deirdre and Simon left as quickly as they’d come. Max brushed some hair back from Sophie’s shoulders as they listened to the sound of the car fade.
“Finally,” Max said, straightening up and placing Sophie on her feet. “Time to crack the liquor cabinet.”
“Charlie? Charlie, come on.”
Her eyes snapped open, her surroundings forming slowly around her. She was curled up in an armchair, the wood stove was still crackling quietly as the end credits of The Vow (Sophie won) rolled on the TV. Sean stood over her, holding both their coats.
“Hi,” she murmured sleepily.
“The truck’s snowed in. You okay to walk home?”
She nodded a few times and pulled herself from the chair. They shouldn’t drive, anyway. Max had made good on his promise about the liquor cabinet. Sophie and Max were both asleep on the sofa.
Charlotte pulled on her coat. “Let’s go,” she whispered.
The night was dark and frigid in an icy, still way, but it had stopped snowing. Weaving their way across the yard, their footprints trailing behind, they eventually found the road. Snow plows weren’t common in River John. Charlotte walked a line directly where she guessed the middle to be, white splayed in all directions.
“Do you have the time?” she asked Sean.
Sean was lighting a cigarette. “Uh, one sec.” He checked the beat-up old wristwatch that used to belong to their dad. “One-twenty-three a.m.”
“Officially Christmas,” Charlotte said to no one in particular.
“Oh!” Sean said, pulling away his cigarette. “That reminds me. I have something for you.”
“We said no gifts—”
“It’s hardly a gift. I found it. Here.” Sean reached inside his coat and pulled out a small envelope. In messy handwriting it read, September 1998.
She took it, tearing it open with clumsy gloved hands. Inside were two things: a letter and a photo.
To: Romer baby, now Charlotte,
We’ve found out you’re a girl, and you have a name now. We’re naming you Charlotte, after my grandmother. Your great-grandmother. Sean’s very put-out that he won’t be having a little brother. Wants to call you Charlie, like Charlie Brown. I’m sure he’ll come around. That’s it for this letter, my love. See you in a few months!
Hell or high water,
Dad
Charlotte looked up. “Where’d you find this?”
“His room. Bedside table. Actually inside one of those big biographies.”
Charlotte smiled at the image spun by Sean’s words. She could see their dad, in a crappy plastic lawn chair that they kept for the beach, planted right down in the sand, the water coming in around his ankles as the tide came in. Their dad loved reading about people. Musicians, war generals, world-famous chefs, politicians. He was always reading and rattling off trivia to them about whoever he was learning about.
“Which one?” Charlotte wanted to know.
“Brian Wilson. Turns out, I think I need reading glasses.” Sean laughed quietly. “Thought I might find some in his drawer. There must be more letters, like the one Max found after he…but I haven’t found any.”
Charlotte folded up the letter with a shaky sigh. The photo enclosed with the letter was of her parents, her dad’s hand on her mom’s stomach. They both flashed a thumbs-up to the camera.
“I know it’s hard this time of year without him,” Sean said, “but I wanted you to have that so you’d know that, at some point, you had people looking after you who loved you, and knew what they were doing.”
Charlotte wiped hastily under her eyes and pulled him toward her. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d hugged him. “I still do.”
thirteen
It took Charlotte a few days after her confrontation with Nick before she felt ready to face the world again. When she finally pulled herself out of bed, she had come to a few conclusions. The first was that they really needed to soundproof the walls between her and Sean’s room. When she got home
last night, Sean had a girl over who worked at the salon next to the Home Depot—that’s how Sean had introduced her—and their bedroom tirades were not an ideal soundtrack for Charlotte to fall asleep to. Sean only ever had one real girlfriend, Abby, whom he dated in high school. Charlotte was in the ninth grade at the time, and she had liked Abby. Long story short: she liked Abby, her dad liked Abby, and Sean liked Abby, but Abby didn’t like River John. Abby was a year older and went off to Dalhousie, and Sean didn’t.
Anyway, soundproof the walls, or one of the Romers was moving out. And it wasn’t gonna be her. The second was that after being home for more than two weeks, she had accomplished next to nothing. She could feel the guilt and dread sloshing around inside of her. It was time for her to stop feeling sorry for herself and get her shit together—if she wasn’t going to be mending fences (after violently trashing them with a sledgehammer), then it was time to get a job and help Sean pay the mortgage.
Gathering all the motivation she could, Charlotte dragged herself out of bed. God, she was still sore. She caught her reflection in the mirror. The bruises she’d expected from her run-in with Nick had appeared that first night, but they hadn’t gotten better. Now they snaked around her forearm in an angry black-blue and looked worse than ever. Charlotte grabbed her North Colchester High hoodie. The last thing she needed was Sean seeing her injuries. She didn’t really want to look at them, either.
She went out to the living room, twisting her hair into a huge bun on the top of her head as she went. Easing down gingerly onto the sofa, she picked the newspaper up off the table, the headline of the River John Gazette informing her that residents were angry about the new wind turbines being installed in town. She had asked Sean a million times to cancel their subscription to the local paper. They hardly ever read it and definitely couldn’t afford it. It mostly ended up as fuel for the wood stove. She was even fairly sure that Mrs. McGrady, the retired old lady who edited the paper, had somehow figured out how to upload the thing online. Go Mrs. McGrady.
Charlotte lay on her back and flipped to the classifieds.
“Sean!” she yelled. “Are you up?”
“What?” he called back from what sounded like the bathroom.
“I think I’m going to get a job,” she called. “Help you out with the money thing.”
Sean fired back some retort she couldn’t make out, but it sounded mostly like laughter or crying. On the plus side, a job would probably keep her distracted from drowning in anxiety about running into Nick again. She supposed it would be better not to mention the twenty thousand dollars Sean didn’t seem to want to talk about.
“Shut up,” she said, but didn’t think Sean could hear her.
They never really made up after their fight, but they weren’t still fighting, either. You could only stay mad at the person you lived with for so long. Like most things in their family that posed an issue, it was simply ignored until it went away.
It couldn’t be that hard, it was just a job. The problem was the town. There was nowhere to work. The jobs in the classifieds were things like yardwork or handyman stuff, which she wasn’t exactly qualified for. She couldn’t really become a barista at a trendy café like she might be able to in Halifax. Her options were pretty narrow. Basically the Chinese place, May’s, or the Quik Mart, or the dry cleaners. The Home Depot Sean worked at shared a parking lot with a hair salon. Maybe Sean’s mystery woman could help her get a job. She considered this for a second, until she remembered the time she tried to give Sophie auburn highlights from a box kit two summers ago. Sophie had to chop her hair short to hide it. So, probably not.
May’s Chinese could work, maybe. She didn’t really know anything about food service. Then again, she didn’t really know anything about anything in the want ads. How hard could it be to be a waitress? She realized it was probably sentiments like this that she’d regret later, when she was mopping up spaghetti thrown at her by an angry customer dissatisfied with her serving skills. Silly Charlotte, she scolded herself. They don’t sell spaghetti at May’s.
But she figured Chinese food would make just as big a mess.
The bell above the door tinkled brightly when Charlotte waltzed into the convenience store later that day.
Leo, as always, was hunched over the front counter, chewing on the straw of a huge blue slushie as he scanned a crossword puzzle.
“Miss Romer, how can I be of assistance today?”
Charlotte braced her hands against the counter. “I was wondering if you guys were hiring.”
Leo placed his pen on top of the newspaper. “I’d love to help you out, Charlotte, really. But there’s already, like, five guys who work here and there really only needs to be, like, one. Maybe two, to keep up the team-building skills.”
She sighed, resting her elbows on the glass. “I understand. I’m just trying to help Sean out with money.”
“Well, Charlotte.” Leo unfolded his paper. “It’s your lucky day. I just so happen to be an employment counsellor.”
“Employment counselling and convenience store clerking?” Charlotte raised an eyebrow. “Did you have to go to two separate schools for that?”
“Well, the convenience store was my undergrad. I had to go to grad school for the counselling thing.”
Charlotte laughed. “You headed anywhere in the fall?”
“Yep,” Leo announced proudly. “Saint Mary’s, for business.”
“That’s awesome! Really,” Charlotte said sincerely. “That’s what Sean wanted to do.”
“He didn’t go, though, right? I still see him around.”
“Ah.” She hesitated. “No. He didn’t go. But, um, are you excited?”
“Yeah. But more nervous, really.” He nodded. “Mostly about the roommate thing. What if they’re, like, a taxidermist or something? Or listen to country music?”
“Well, it will probably be one or the other.”
Leo shuddered. “I’d take the stuffed animals. How about you?”
“Probably the country music.”
“I mean about school.”
“Oh. Not this year. I’m gonna take some time off and try and make some money.” She paused. “I mean, maybe. If I find a job.” The reality of her zero prospects shook her for a second.
“Right you are. So!” Leo flipped a few pages through the paper. “Here. The classifieds.”
“I just went through them this morning,” Charlotte said. “It was pretty dire.”
“No, no, no,” Leo spun the front page toward her. “This is the Pictou Country Star. Much larger reach. The possibilities are endless, really. I steal this from the big Irving on my drive in every day. I’m sort of in a blood feud with the clerk who works there, it’s this whole thing.” He waved his hand. “Anyway. What are your credentials?”
Charlotte thought for a second. “Uh, babysitting? I can also make Kraft Dinner and am somewhat capable of answering the phone,” she told him, counting off on her fingers.
“Well, would you look at that. A listing for a childcare receptionist that requires experience in macaroni making.”
“Ha ha.” Charlotte tried to smile. It wasn’t looking good. How did people get jobs? Who applying for a first job had any experience other than mowing lawns or babysitting? Hi, I’m Charlotte Romer. I live with my brother who’s been to jail one and a half times but he’s super nice once you get to know him. I’m super nice too! Just don’t ask Sophie Thompson or pretty much anyone, just take my word for it. Please hire me.
A stellar resumé.
“The Shore Club is looking for someone to teach kayaking to kids,” Leo offered as he scanned the page.
She shook her head. “Someone would have to teach me to kayak first.”
Leo listed off nearly every potential job in the want ads. They all required experience or skills she didn’t have. The closest fit was a cashier at Sobeys in Pictou, bu
t that was nearly thirty minutes away.
“You could try next door.” Leo motioned with his head to the adjoining building.
She ran a hand through her hair. “That was my plan B. Thanks for all your help.”
In the almost non-existent walk between the Quik Mart and May’s, Charlotte tried to make herself the most job-interview ready she could. She’d dug out a three-quarter-length-sleeve shirt from the back of her closet this morning to hide the bruises. The shirt was one she’d had since the eighth grade, and she was lucky there was no junior-high–worthy slogan written across it. And at least it was clean.
She tied her hair back in a ponytail. If her hair was a clear reflection of the state of her life, she didn’t want the fine people of May’s Restaurant to think that her life was an unmanageable walking disaster (which it totally was) with a severe aversion to humidity.
The place was crowded. As basically the only social establishment in River John, the occupants ranged from elderly couples to families to teenagers sitting by themselves and pretending they were at a Starbucks.
At the front counter, Laurie Rossi was fighting a losing battle with a temperamental cash register that looked like it was from the mid-twentieth century. She and her husband had owned the restaurant for as long as Charlotte had known them.
Beside Laurie, a toddler sat on the counter kicking his legs. He noticed Charlotte before his mother did.
“Char, Char!” The tiny boy uncurled one finger from around the bottle he was clutching and pointed at her. Laurie looked up.
“Hi, Sebastian.” Charlotte smiled. She had babysat for the Rossis a few times before she’d left for Windsor. The Rossis oldest daughter was older than Charlotte, had finished school and wiggled out of River John. The rest of their kids were younger—Charlotte thought around junior high and elementary age. The Rossi kids were at the restaurant as often as their parents were, either helping out or wreaking havoc, twisting between booths and customers.
“Charlotte! It’s been quite a long time since you’ve been in here.” Laurie smiled kindly at her. She was always nice. She had been friends with Charlotte’s dad; they went to high school together. Laurie had brought Charlotte and Sean two casseroles after their dad died.
The Last Time I Saw Her Page 11