sticking that in recycling, please?” she asked.
I took the can and held it on my lap next to the letter. “Have fun at work,” I said.
“Thanks.” She bounced down the porch steps with an ease known only to the young.
“Shannon?” I called as she walked down our sidewalk.
“What?” She didn’t bother to turn around.
“If you talk to Nana, don’t say anything about this to her.” It was an unwritten rule in my family never to talk to my mother about the summer of ’62.
“I won’t,” she said, lifting her arm in a wave.
I stood up then, letter and Coke can in my hands, and walked into the house to call my sister.
CHAPTER 3
Lucy
My cell phone rang as I got out of my car in the McDonald’s parking lot in Garwood. Seeing on the caller ID display that it was Julie, I answered it. “Hi, sis,” had barely left my lips when she launched into the conversation she’d had with Ethan Chapman’s daughter. I leaned against the car, listening, trying unsuccessfully to conjure up a cohesive image of Ethan and Ned Chapman. Ned barely existed in my memory, and Ethan was twelve and blurry around the edges. I didn’t like his daughter’s reason for showing up on Julie’s doorstep one bit.
“You know what, Julie?” I said when she’d told me everything.
“What?”
“I grant you, the whole thing is unsettling,” I said, “But I think Ethan Chapman’s daughter should solve the mystery on her own. Leave you out of it. You don’t need this.”
“That’s what Shannon said.”
“I have a very smart niece,” I said.
Julie didn’t respond.
“What are you thinking?” I reached into my shoulder bag for my sunglasses and slipped them on. Who knew how long I’d be standing out here talking with her? I couldn’t walk into McDonald’s while having this conversation: Our mother was in there.
“If George Lewis didn’t do it,” Julie said, “I can’t just sit back and let the world think he did.”
“Yes, you can,” I said, although my zeal for justice was normally, if anything, stronger than Julie’s. “Let Ethan’s daughter take the letter to the police, then. As long as she does it, I don’t see why you have to be involved at all.” I was surprised at how upset I felt. My creative, sensitive sister was already clinging to the edge with Shannon—Isabel’s double—getting ready to go away to college. I didn’t want anything to add to her stress and I was annoyed with Abby Chapman for dragging her into something she really had no need to be part of.
“That’s just it,” Julie said. “I don’t think she’ll do anything about it without his okay. I have to talk to him. I’m in a bind.”
I could tell she’d already made up her mind. “Okay,” I relented. “If you have to, you have to.”
A group of kids walked past me, their laughter loud in my ear.
“Where are you?” Julie asked.
“I’m in the McDonald’s parking lot.”
“Don’t tell Mom about this.”
“Do you think I’m crazy?” I couldn’t believe she thought I needed the warning.
“And I got some other good news today.” Julie’s voice was tinged with sarcasm.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Shannon wants to live with Glen for the summer.”
“Ah,” I said. Shannon had spoken with me about that possibility. She always ran things past me before she laid them on Julie. She told me things she wouldn’t breathe to another adult. I was the person who’d taken her to get birth control pills when she was fifteen; Julie would kill me if she knew. This year, with Shannon the age Isabel had been when she died, Julie seemed to snap, tightening her grip on her daughter just when she should have been loosening it. So, I’d told Shannon that while it would be hard on her mother to have her live with Glen for the summer, I thought it was a good idea. It might help Julie get used to letting her go.
My lack of surprise at Julie’s announcement made her suspicious.
“Did you know?” she asked.
“She’d told me she was considering it,” I admitted.
There was a brief silence on the line. “I wish you’d told me,” she said.
“It wasn’t a sure thing, and I thought it should come from her.” I felt guilty. “It might be good for both of you, Julie.”
Two men in their mid-thirties walked past me in the parking lot, not even glancing in my direction. I was approaching fifty, the age of invisibility for a woman, and I was more fascinated than distressed by the phenomenon. It seemed to have happened overnight. Four or five years ago, even though I’d worn my silver-streaked hair the same way I did now—in a long French braid down my back, with thick, straight bangs over my forehead—I’d still been able to turn heads. My skin was nearly as smooth and clear as it had been then, and I wore the same type of clothes, mainly long crinkly skirts and knit tank tops. Nevertheless, men my age and younger now looked right through me. Maybe I was giving off the scent of decay. I didn’t mind. I was taking a long, possibly permanent, break from dating.
“She seems…distant or something,” Julie was saying in my ear, and I turned my attention back to the phone call. “She’s changing. Have you noticed? I think she’s putting on weight and she doesn’t go out anymore. I’m worried about her.”
Julie was right. Shannon did seem more withdrawn lately, more reserved in our conversations, and she didn’t call as often. I hadn’t noticed the physical change in her until Saturday, when I saw her walk across the stage to get her diploma. There was a heaviness about her, more in her spirit than her body, but I made light of it to relieve Julie’s anxiety. “She’s just having a growth spurt,” I said. “And as for the social life, you used to worry when she did go out. You need to be more careful what you wish for.”
Julie sighed. “I know.”
We wrapped up the conversation and I slipped my phone into my shoulder bag as I walked across the parking lot and into the restaurant. It was full of kids, Garwood’s summer-school students, who were different from the kids I taught at Plainfield High School. Garwood’s students were from mostly white, middle-class families, while Plainfield’s public school population was ethnically diverse and economically challenged. I taught ESL—English as a Second Language—because I relished being surrounded by all those kids whose varied skin colors and languages were overshadowed by their universal yearning to belong.
I spotted my mother at the opposite end of the restaurant. She was standing next to a table in her red-and-white uniform, holding a couple of trays in her hands, talking with a young woman and her two little kids. So many of my friends my age had to
