A Month at the Shore (2 page)

The very thought was laughable.

Snack stopped at the end of the winding lane, got out of the car, and began climbing the rest of the way with long-legged strides. A cigarette dangled from his lips; he pitched it over a headstone and smiled at his sisters sheepishly.

"Brakes went
out
," he explained when he got near. "Just over the line in
Jersey
. I had to tip a mechanic thirty extra bucks, all I had, to work late. So I'm starving, incidentally. And I blew it anyway—didn't I, big sister?" he added with an edgy and yet good-natured smile at Laura. "I know, I know: thirty-one, and what a mess. Go on. Say it. I'm waiting."

Same old Snack.

Laura said nothing.

He laughed and took in the sweep of Nantucket Sound that lay before them and, with a wink at Corinne, said, "Great view. Dad picked a good spot. Morning sun, sheltered from the wind—not bad. Not bad at all. Ever notice that about graveyards in these old towns? They're always on primo real estate. Yep. Every single one I've ever—"

Suddenly Corinne threw her arms around Snack and began to cry. Taken aback, Snack murmured comforting words without making whole sentences out of them, patting her back as he spoke. Over her shoulder he cocked his head at his older sister, a half-smile of query on his lips: were
they
friends, or were they not?

Laura brushed a few grains of sand from the silk skirt of her dark gray ensemble and then let her glance drift from it to her brother's greasy jeans and denim jacket. "I see you dressed for the occasion?"

A corner of Snack's thin, finely drawn lips lifted a little higher, and he shrugged. "Dad wouldn't have recognized me any way else."

Laura made a dismissive sound and said, "The fog will be rolling in soon. We'd better get back to the house. Come on, Rinnie. Snack can follow us in his car."

Corinne withdrew from her brother's embrace and wiped her eyes with outstretched fingers. "No, wait. Snack needs to say
... hello, and I guess goodbye. We'll wait for you by your car," she said to him in gentle command.

She linked her arm through Laura's and led her away, giving their younger brother a quiet moment in which to pay his respects, whatever they happened to be.

Corinne walked down the grassy knoll without looking back, but Laura had no such compunctions. She glanced over her shoulder to see Snack standing at the foot of their father's grave, its new headstone obscured under bunches of flowers from the family nursery. Snack's head was bowed, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans.

Despite her desire not to care, Laura found herself wondering what was going through Snack's head. Was he really reflecting, or was he just faking it? Was he feeling what she had felt earlier in that same spot—confusion, and a horrible, wrenching emptiness? Or was he simply wondering what Corinne, a wonderful cook, had whipped up for them for supper?

With Snack, it was always hard to tell.

After a moment, he bobbed his head and then turned and hurried to catch up with his siblings. Even in the fading light, Laura could see that his thin, boyish face was pale. His voice was subdued as he said, "I could damn well use a drink about now."

"What else is new?" Laura murmured from the other side of Corinne.

Her brother snapped, "Not your attitude, that's for sure."

"There's nothing wrong with my—"

"Stop! Both of you—stop. Think where you are."

Embarrassed by the reprimand, Laura said stiffly, "She's right, Snack. Truce." She held out her hand and shook her brother's firmly when he accepted her offer.

Corinne, presiding over the handshake, sounded relieved. "Good. This has to be a team effort if my plan's going to be a success."

"Success? I'm not used to the sound of that word," Snack quipped.

"What're you talking about?" Laura asked. "What plan?"

Corinne pulled out a rubber band from the pocket of her skirt and began binding her long, sun-streaked hair in a ponytail. With a sweet and gentle smile, she said, "I'm going to make you both an offer you can't refuse."

Snack was all ears. "Oh? Whaddya got?"

"Follow me. You'll see."

Corinne climbed into the nursery's pickup truck, a blue Chevy that was older than Snack's Subaru but not quite as rusted, and Laura climbed in beside her.

"What're you up to, Corinne?" she demanded to know. "Whatever it is, it had better be quick. I leave tomorrow."

Corinne merely smiled. "You'll see."

They were about to pull out when they were halted by the sound of Snack yelling after them to hold it.

Laura groaned. "Now what?"

They climbed back out of the truck. Snack was standing beside the Subaru. "It won't start," he announced in that half-smug, half-defiant voice that they knew so well. "If I had to guess, I'd say it's the solenoid, but who knows? I think the old girl took a look around and thought, 'What the hell, this is as good a place as any to die.' "

"Do you want us to tow you?" Corinne asked.

"No," Laura said quickly. "We'll leave it here. A tow truck can come for it in the morning. It's not exactly blocking traffic."

Them towing Snack. It was all Laura needed: a decrepit truck towing a decrepit car through the middle of town on a Saturday night. She could hear the old snickers so clearly. Oh, how she hated being back!

Snack took his duffelbag out of the Subaru's trunk and tossed it in the back of the pickup, and then he squeezed into the front seat next to Laura. It was predictably tight, and Snack was ripe from his long drive.

"Just like old times, huh?" he said, tugging at Laura's blunt-cut hair. "Remember how Dad used to throw us all in the back of the truck for cranberry harvest?"

The word "cranberry" sent Laura hurtling back in time. For a year or two at the end, when money was especially hard to come by, their father had dragged them off to the cranberry bogs like migrant workers, and that's exactly what they had looked like as they rode in the back of the truck in plain view of everyone in Chepaquit.
Oliver
Shore
was the sole surviving heir to a fourth-generation nursery, and yet he ran it so badly that he'd had to farm out his own children.

Driving out to the bogs hadn't been too unbearable, because few people were up and around at that early hour; but coming back, they had felt painfully on display. They were teenagers, after all; the experience was excruciating. Laura used to pull her baseball cap as far down over her eyes as she could, not because she thought she was disguising herself, but because at least then she couldn't see who was laughing at her.

Often they'd miss school; she hated that even more. Snack, of course, was happy to skip, and even Corinne was relieved—she'd always been shy—but Laura had wanted desperately to make something of herself, and the cranberry bogs were not the place to do that.

"I do remember Octobers here," Laura said quietly. "All too well."

She much preferred her Octobers in
Portland
, where her garden was a feature on the annual fall tour in her neighborhood, and where afterward she held an open house for the other entrants, treating them to various coffees as well as desserts, none of them baked by her.

"Hey, isn't that the old Sumner place?" Snack said, peering through the deepening dusk. "Holy shit, I hardly recognize it. Who lives there now? The fricking governor?"

"Oh, some trust-fund baby bought it," Corinne explained. "He's playing at being a gentleman farmer. He has sheep."

Whereas the Sumners
used to have
pigs. Even so, the Sumner girls had never occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder. That position had been reserved exclusively for the Shore kids.

Laura scarcely glanced at the shingled, gabled farmhouse, now trimmed in pristine white and surrounded by a fenced-in, gently rolling field. She didn't need a walkthrough to know that the kitchen was filled with Sub-Zero appliances and that the new wing held a master bedroom with a walk-in closet the size of an Olympic pool. The same kind of gentrification was going on back in
Portland
. Bigger, better, more: it was the mantra of the new millennium.

"I wonder what became of the Sumner girls," Laura said, only vaguely curious. She was far more curious about what had become of Sylvia, the bright, shining star who had suddenly appeared in their evening sky, and then not long afterward had orbited out of all of their lives. Sylvia, who had been everything that Laura was not: sexy, confident, beautiful, and most of all, free as a butterfly to go wherever she wanted and do whatever she wanted.

"Jean Sumner got married and lives in
Indiana
; I think she's pretty happy there," Corinne said in a home-town, gossipy way. "Jan, I'm not sure about. I think she's moved to
Maine
."

Snack said, "So who's still around? Besides you, I mean."

"Lots of people," Corinne argued, sounding defensive. "Two of the Bosenfield kids still live nearby, and so does Nonni Pritchard. And Kendall Barclay, naturally, because of his bank. Will has a practice in
Chatham
. And, let me see, who else? Oh—Leon Borkowski!"

"Porky Borky?" said Snack fondly. "
He's
still around?"

"He lives with his mother over the liquor store."

"Gee-eez."

Every name felt like a pinprick to Laura, and two of them were red-hot needles. Which was why coming back to Chepaquit was always a hundred times more painful than leaving it had been.

She remembered vividly the day she moved out. By then the dazzling Sylvia had been gone for nearly a year. Laura had had all that time to reflect on what exciting and dramatic lives people like Sylvia led, and to contrast it with how empty and limited her own life was.

By six
p
.
m
. on her eighteenth birthday, Laura was packed and ready to run. After a final, bitter fight with her father, she hadn't even stayed for cake, breaking her mother's heart. It was her single regret.

That, and leaving Corinne. Corinne had been too loyal to their parents and to the family business to leave. Well, that phase of her life was behind her now. As soon as she sold the nursery, Corinne
too
would be free to follow her heart's desire. She had paid her dues, with interest. As sole heir, she was going to enjoy her well-deserved reward. No one was more pleased about that than Laura.

She glanced at her sister and let her gaze settle into a thoughtful study of her profile. Corinne might be thirty-two, but hard work and the sun had taken their toll: even in the near-dark, Laura could see thin lines branching from the corners of her sister's green eyes, and a deepening of the line that ran from her nose to the full, well-shaped mouth that presided over a strong, resolute chin.

Was she alluring? It was hard to say. She was Corinne. Laura knew her too well and loved her too much to know how someone seeing her for the first time would respond.

She was Corinne: sweet and loyal and loving and therefore, in Laura's eyes, achingly desirable. For Laura, it was as simple as that. Why couldn't some man, somewhere, see what she saw?

Because men were jerks. Men were all the same. Jerks.

"What? Why are you staring at me?" Corinne asked, cocking her head before turning her attention back to the road.

"I like what the sun has done to your hair," Laura improvised. "Women pay big bucks for that highlighted effect."

"You can't even see my hair in this light," said Corinne, grinning.

"I see fine."

"You do not."

"Yes I do. And I'd forgotten how perfect your teeth are. Whereas I had to suffer through braces at thirty. What a birthday present to myself."

"Okay, enough girl talk," said Snack, cutting in. "
Rin
nie! What's that offer that we won't be able to refuse, hmm?"

Corinne said smugly, "Right in front of your nose, Snack."

The road had dipped and risen and taken its familiar bend, and now they were at the turnoff to the nursery. Even in the romance of dusk, the place looked as sad and forlorn as ever—a run-down collection of shops, sheds, greenhouses, and outbuildings, all of them presided over by a large farmhouse built on the highest point of the property. Nothing had been fixed or painted in decades, and—for a nursery—very little seemed to be either green or growing.

True, several tables sat haphazardly in front of the shop, but the few pots on top of them held nothing in bloom. It was early in the season for flowers
... but still. A solid display of spring perennials and bulbs would have gone a long way to attracting customers and distracting them from the woebegone state of the rest of the site. As it stood, no one but a longtime resident in the area would even know the place
was
a nursery: the carved and painted sign that once crowned an arch near the entrance was faded and unreadable, even in daylight.

SHORE
GARDENS
. A wonderful name for what was once (Laura had seen the photos) a delightfully charming and well-stocked garden center.