The kids are home waiting for their dinner.”
“What are you doing way out here?”
Charlie thumbed over his shoulder. “I just dropped Johanna Coco off. I found her in the cemetery.”
“At this hour?”
“You know those Coco girls.”
“I sure do. Too bad she didn’t make it to the funeral.”
“She tried. This damn snow—”
“Don’t you be cursing my livelihood. This damn snow is taking my sister’s kids to the beach this summer. Kind of ironic, huh?”
Their laughter faded into the night. Charlie felt suddenly drained. Tight as he and Dan had always been, he didn’t have the words to express his sudden chaos of thoughts. Tapping the side of his truck, he waved and let up on the break.
“Right. See you, Dan.”
“See you, Charlie.”
The scrape of Dan’s plow on the road vanished as Charlie’s window went up, trapping the scent of pizza lingering. Johanna’s, like the woman herself, did not. Wild as the Coco girls had always been, Johanna was the wildest. She left after high school and seldom returned. For Charlie, that had been a good thing. He glommed every bit of news, every shred of gossip over the years. Her travels. Her pie-in-the-sky business ventures. Lover after temporary lover she brought home to Bitterly, never the same guy two visits running. Seeing her was always hard, harder when he and Gina stopped getting along. Last time, when she returned to Bitterly for her grandfather’s funeral, the twins were newborns, Charlotte, Will, and Caleb were still in elementary school and he was still married, happily-enough. That was eight years ago, and now none of those things were true. Johanna was home, for however long, and Charlie was not going to let her escape Bitterly without hearing the words he tried to tell her that summer night on the beach and hadn’t stopped thinking since.
* * * *
Johanna woke, blinking away the bright sunlight streaming through lace curtains. Not the cluttered bedroom above the bakery, the one that always smelled of baking and the sea, it was yellow. White bookshelves. A desk under the window, and a Nirvana poster on the closet door. Her nose was cold but her body, warm under downy blankets. A heavy, scraping sounded somewhere outside. She pushed up onto her elbows.
Bitterly.
Home.
Her old room, bed, even the comforter.
Gram was dead.
“Farts.”
Johanna flopped back into the pillow. The reunion with her sisters had been tearful, and comforting. Wrapped in their arms, she laughed at her fury, at the thought that they’d abandon her at the train station because they were collectively angry.
“Last we heard, you didn’t think you were going to make it,” Nina had said, thumbing tears from Johanna’s cheeks. “After the burial, we all went out for pizza and didn’t see you’d called until we were there. Charlie McCallan offered to go find you and bring you home.”
“And here you are.” Julietta had thrown her arms around her. “Oh, Jo! I’m so sorry. After all you went through to get here, you didn’t even get pizza.”
They talked long into the night. And they cried, none harder than Johanna. Emma and Julietta still lived in Bitterly and Nina made certain she returned home for every holiday. Only Johanna stayed away with a million excuses and none of them good enough to justify an eight-year absence.
The aromas of coffee and bacon crept into her room. More snow in the night kept Emma with them instead of going home to her husband and boys. It would be she doing up breakfast the way Gram always did. Johanna pulled back the covers and swung her legs out of bed. The nasty scraping sound outside continued. She looked out the window to see a plow clearing the driveway. Someone was shoveling the front walk. A shock of red hair had her throwing open the window to shout, “Good morning, Charlie.”
The young man who looked up was not Charlie for all he looked like him. Exactly, in fact, like the kid she used to know. Her heart caught in her throat for the memories pelting. This room. That boy. But it wasn’t Charlie, and everything was different now.
“Hey,” he called back. “You looking for my dad?”
“I suppose I am.”
“He’s in the truck. Will’s doing the back walk. I got this one. You’ll be shoveled clear in no time.”
“And you are?”
“Caleb. Which sister are you?”
“Johanna.”
“The one who lives at the beach. Cool.”
“It’s far from cool, I assure you. Cape May is full of old people and tourists.”
He laughed and waved and Johanna closed the window. If she could find the ingredients in the pantry, she’d make the boys her famous hot chocolate. She pulled on the thick robe perpetually hanging on the back of her door, wrapped it tight and followed her nose to breakfast.
Faded school photos lined the hallway painted the same yellow as her bedroom. Gram had let them each choose her own colors when Emma and Julietta came to them in the big farmhouse in Bitterly. Nina, a cool and sophisticated thirteen-year-old, chose blue with white trim. Emmaline, only six, wanted mauve and olive green. Head still bandaged and arm in a sling, Julietta’s four-year-old love of purple and orange had been indulged. But Johanna, eleven and confused as to why they were decorating rooms when Mommy had once again vanished and Daddy was dead and now she had two little sisters as well as a big one, chose the soft, buttercream yellow.
“You?” Poppy had asked. “My wild Johanna? Not red or crazy-girl pink?”
He took her into his wiry arms, right there in the paint shop, when she started to cry. “It reminds me,” she whispered against his neck. Of the house in New Hampshire, the one that burned. It reminded her of them.
He bought three gallons of the buttercream yellow.
“What? It was on sale. Half price,” he told Gram when she scolded. He painted her room first, then the hallway. Last, because there was enough left over, he painted the room he shared with Gram.
“It reminds me too.”
It was their secret. One of many. She suspected he had them with her sisters too, those half-truths more story than anything real, like Weiner-schnitzel, the little man who lived in his pocket, whose voice only she could hear.
Johanna stopped outside Gram’s bedroom door, pressed her hand to the wood panel. She let her hand slide to the knob, felt the cool metal, let it go before any more memories got loose. Instead she hurried down the stairs, her feet thumping like when she was a kid late for school. Already there were her sisters, lined up at the counter like pretty maids in a row, sipping coffee. At the table sat Nina’s husband, ridiculously gorgeous despite his dark hair sticking up in spikes, and the stubble of a man who needed more than one shave a day. Johanna stopped short of sliding across the polished wood floor into the kitchen the way she used to, but only because she wasn’t wearing the proper socks.
