Nina. I see Emma and Julietta around town, but I don’t think I’ve seen Nina, well, probably since I’ve seen you. Your grandfather’s funeral, right?”
Eight years. Had it really been so long?
“I suppose so,” she said. Eight years since she’d seen Gram and Emma in the flesh. She had nephews she’d never met. Cyberworld made staying in touch so easy. Video-chatting, instant messaging, texting. Nina lived in Manhattan. They met now and again for dinner or a show. Julietta had come down to Cape May a few times to help out with the bakery. But Gram…?
Tears again. She hated them, fell victim to them more often than she could count and they never did her any good. Ever.
“Hey, it’s all right.”
“No. It’s not. But thanks.”
Charlie fell silent.
Johanna blew her nose on the now-shredded and soggy tissue he’d given her for all the good it did. Covertly wiping her fingers on the inside of her coat pocket, she hoped his kindness held out and he’d pretend not to notice. “Town sure has changed a lot.” She cleared the frog in her throat. “I never thought it would happen.”
“It’s all because of the expansion up at the ski slope. Slopes, now. Five different trails. Remember how rinky-dink it was? Bonfire in an old garbage can? Bales of hay as stops at the bottom of the hill?”
“And the tow rope that shredded our gloves.” Johanna laughed. “I vaguely remember one of my sisters telling me about the changes.”
Charlie paused at the red blinking light at the edge of town. “Now it’s the Berkshire Lodge with ski lifts and instructors and a lodge where you can buy a seven-dollar hot cocoa. Tourists love it. After the expansion, the whole town started to surge. Remember the lake?”
How could I ever forget? “Yes.”
“It’s a country club now, one most residents in Bitterly can’t afford to join. Pisses me off I can’t bring my kids to swim there.”
He drove out of town and into the farmland where the house Johanna and her sisters grew up in straddled the county line. Snow-humped fields and white woods preserved the country feel of her childhood, even while quaint road signs boasting names like Country Farm Lane and Flirtation Street indicated new developments set back from the road. There had been nothing out here when she and Nina first arrived at the house on County Line Road. She’d been just shy of four, and now remembered little of the children’s home in Massachusetts, or adjusting to the doting grandparents she came quickly to love. But Johanna remembered New Hampshire. Mommy. Daddy. When there were so few memories to hold on to, it wasn’t hard to hold them tight.
“Don’t go into the driveway,” she said as he was about to do so. “It doesn’t look like it’s been shoveled.”
“My truck can make it.”
“No.” She grasped his arm, gave it a friendly squeeze. The windows in the house were dark, all but the one around back. The square of light on the snow peeked around the corner, a crooked finger beckoning. She imagined her sisters gathered at the table in the kitchen. Drinking tea. Or wine. Trying not to speak unkindly of their errant sister who missed Gram’s funeral.
“Thank you, Charlie.” Johanna looked for the door handle. “I don’t know what I’d have done if you didn’t show up.”
Charlie reached across her, flicked the perfectly integrated handle she wouldn’t have found in a thousand years of trying. The door swung open, letting the cold swirl in.
“Lucky for me I did.”
“For you?”
He smiled. “You’d have come and gone before I ever knew you were in town. I’m glad I got to see you, Jo.”
“Same…same here.” Johanna stepped out into knee-deep snow. “I’ll be in town a few days. Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Kind of hard to avoid it, in Bitterly. Get inside before you freeze again.”
Johanna scooped up a handful of snow and tossed it at him before slamming the door. He laughed and waved and pulled away. The light was still on in the interior of his truck, alighting on his hair like sunshine on a copper kettle. She watched until the curve in the road took his taillights from sight.
“It really is good to see you, Charlie,” she said to the falling snow. Whether she was pushing him into the lake or he was chasing her with a dobsonfly, they’d been friends first. Johanna turned aside those thoughts, and to the house instead.
Home.
The word sent disparate shivers into her core. White with black shutters and a red door. The farmhouse porch, empty now but for the ring of firewood between the front windows, usually boasted a number of rocking chairs and porch swings. She and her sisters never complained about summer assigned reading. Afternoons spent on the porch, Gram’s lemonade popsicles melting down their fingers, was one of their joys of summer.
Wrapping her scarf more closely around her neck, Johanna trudged down the driveway and around to the back of the house. She hugged the wall, peeking through the window from the shadows, her heart hammering. There they were, just as she imagined them, sitting around the table as they had so many times during those years they all lived happily there.
Nina, a Wagner dream of Valkyries—blond and bold and brutal, her hands wrapped around a teacup as if she would crush it, or hold it together.
Emmaline, who, like Johanna, had inherited dark curls and cocoa-brown eyes from their mother and, unlike Johanna, was spared her frenzy.
And Julietta.
Johanna’s brimming eyes overflowed.
Awkward even when sitting still, as blond as Nina without any of her beauty, Julietta was a sprite straight out of a fairy story, all arms and legs and ears. Thick glasses accentuated the enormity of her pale eyes. Perpetually childlike, ridiculously brilliant, Julietta was the one. And they all loved her best.
Johanna wiped her eyes with her scarf, her nose with the back of her hand. She gave up trying to pretend she hadn’t been crying, hadn’t been frantic and furious and ready to succumb to the madness always looming like tomorrow’s shadows. Stumbling to the back door that would be open because the lock had broken when she was fourteen and never been fixed, Johanna Coco went home.
* * * *
The truck slid to a stop at the bottom of the hill. Charlie rested his head to the steering wheel. He breathed deeply, inhaling the aromas of pizza and Johanna. Memory sparked. Summer after junior year. Her body pressed to his. The music, and the crowd, and the sand beneath their feet. She had turned and smiled that earth-shattering smile when he slipped his arms around her waist, pulled her against him so she wouldn’t get crushed by the head-bangers moshing outside of the mosh pit. Charlie remembered her leaning into him, her hands holding him in place, the sweetness of her perfume ignited by sweat, and the seemingly inconsequential moment of contact that changed his world.
Headlights approached. He lifted his head. A plow-truck going up the hill stopped. Charlie rolled down his window as the other driver did the same.
“You stuck, Charlie?” Dan Greene, best pal
