June (19 page)

Cassie couldn’t bear to look at that smug face a second longer. “Well?” she asked Tate.

Tate sighed. “My sister, Elda, is coming.”

Jack’s oldest: Elda Montgomery. Except she had a different last name now, Cassie remembered. Elda, whom Cassie’s father had crushed on as a young man. Every time Cassie thought of the woman, she felt a softness for her, a softness she was holding because her father couldn’t hold it anymore.

“She asked me to send the plane,” Nick added.

Tate pursed her lips, then acquiesced as Nick’s nostrils flared. “I know, you’re right, it’s how Margaret would handle it. By all means, send the plane.”

Nick smiled genuinely to himself, and then at Cassie. The warmth in his victory warmed her too, in spite of herself. Then she remembered that Elda was only a few years older than her father; she would have been little more than a toddler around the time of Jack and June’s supposed dalliance.

“And what does Elda know?” she asked. “Does she remember anything? Did she say something about my grandmother?”

Tate shook her head dismissively. “But she fancies herself the family historian. She did all this research when she wrote her book.” She pronounced the words
research
and
book
like they were poison.

“I think she will be helpful,” Nick said quietly.

His phone rang. He checked it and visibly blanched. “It’s him.”

Tate answered—“Max”—and strode from the room and up the master staircase. Cassie went mushy at the thought of
the
Max Hall on the other end of that line. She was surprised at Nick’s face; he looked worse than he had the day he’d rung her doorbell.

“I’m not ‘refusing to relinquish my DNA,’ ” she said, air-quoting him back to himself. “Well, I am, but you don’t have to say it like that. It sounds mean.”

He blinked back at her in surprise. “I’m sorry.”

“You should be.” The wind was knocked out of her sails by the apology, so before he could walk away from her, she made her way toward the stairs herself, trying to remember what the house had sounded like when no one else was in it.

Cassie escaped to the backyard in a pair of Jim’s paint-splattered overalls. The land was tangled with vines and choked with weeds. What had once been lawn was now a jungle of wildflowers and tasseled grasses, which Cassie personally thought looked okay, although, from the state of her neighbors’ lawns, she could tell she was in the minority. More than seventeen years before, when June made the move down to Columbus to care for Cassie, June (and, when he’d been spry, Arthur) must have needed help maintaining such a vast lot—three acres, with the house plopped right in the middle. But if Cassie’s memory was any indication, the old woman had done much of the gardening herself. Cassie could clearly recall June’s tidy, small canvas gloves gripping a hand rake, and the set of her petite back as she hunched over a flower bed that needed weeding. Under June’s watch, the exterior of Two Oaks had always matched the interior: everything in its place.

But it was more than just being diligent and skilled that had made Cassie admire her grandmother’s gardening. As a girl, June had supposedly loved to paint—in fact, Cassie believed the fading still lifes now hanging in the foyer had been hers—and it was that word,
love,
not taken lightly, that recalled June to Cassie whenever she spent time in this garden. Cassie could remember the old woman’s delight over a new bud, her slender finger gingerly scooping up a beetle to wonder at its coloring. Once, they’d fallen into a fit of giggles over a squirrel’s stuffed cheeks; they were in the side yard, and Cassie flopped onto her back and watched June’s laughter braid with hers into the summer sky. It was the same rare burst of possibility as when June turned on Chopin piano concertos and they danced around the living room.

In contrast, the garden was now a wild mess. But it took more than one season for a tended plot to grow feral, didn’t it? The flower beds sprouted unusual outcroppings, while whole other swaths of the garden seemed to have gone dormant. Cassie wished she’d been paying more attention during what she’d seen as the obligatory biannual trips she’d taken to St. Jude over the past seven years; she’d always just assumed that June’s green thumb was keeping the place in shape, but, now that Mrs. Weaver and Mrs. Deitz had implied June wasn’t even in St. Jude most of the time, Cassie had been seized by a kind of paranoid guilt. Where on earth had June been? Why hadn’t Cassie seen evidence that she was spending time elsewhere? The state of the garden would have been a helpful clue. Instead, Cassie had spent those visits whispering to Jim on her cell phone, or scrolling through Facebook for the latest from New York, where her “real life” was.

She took a deep breath and settled onto the ground. She lifted the camera to her eye. Churning worms. Leaves rotting into the damp earth. The potent tang of manure rising into the nostrils. Azalea bushes the size of bears. She should have hired someone when she moved in. Just as she should have had the roof patched three months ago, when she’d noticed it growing soggy, or dealt with the boiler, or called whomever Hank had surely already called to deal with the bats flitting across the third floor come sundown.

“Refuse to relinquish your DNA”—she’d thought Nick mean to say it that way, but he was right. She was doing just that. And why? Why not just get it over with, find out a clear answer, one way or the other? She could save the house and garden without a second thought, and she’d finally get to be alone again. Maybe she should just let them swab her.

“Hey.”

Cassie squinted up into the halo of sun to see Nick standing with two of her grandmother’s crystal tumblers. They were tinkling with ice cubes she hadn’t made. She took a picture of him squinting down at her, then reached up for the glass.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I wanted to apologize.”

She’d meant what kind of drink it was. Nick had suit pants on, but he settled down beside her anyway, ending up closer than he’d probably intended. It took Cassie’s eyes a few seconds to adjust from the bright sun to the shade made by their proximity.

She held up the glass—its contents were red. A lemon slice bumped against the rim.

“Hibiscus tea,” he said, “sweetened with agave.” He took a sip. “Not so bad.”

The ice cubes banged against her front teeth. “I could go for a soft serve about now.”

He grinned.

She sighed. “Tate’s life is so…”

He waited for her to go on.

“There’s nothing ugly or unpleasant. Not one thing out of place, or uncomfortable, or—”

“You’d be surprised.”

She’d been so restrained, so coolly disinterested, but now she wanted to ask him everything—about Tate’s sex life and what Tate and Max were like together and what Tate’s house looked like and if she really was best friends with Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon and how much money she made on her last movie and if Tate had told him whether Tom Cruise actually was a good kisser.

But instead, Nick said, “I think all that perfection only makes dealing with reality harder. You should have seen her when she found out Jack had given everything to you.”

Cassie fell back onto the ground. She still couldn’t get her mind around a movie star leaving his entire fortune to her instead of his daughters. It was so messy, so unkind. How could he have done that to them?

“You’re right,” Nick said, after a minute. “I get mean. Mean and dismissive. It was rude to pick up the phone at Mr. Abernathy’s. I’ve called him to apologize.” He cleared his throat in his nervous habit as his fingers plucked a piece of grass. “And I’m sorry I made that comment about you not working. That was mean too. Not to mention none of my business.” He looked out now, across the garden; she followed his gaze. “But it’s more than that, I know. I was warned, before I took this job, that it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re doing the most important work in the world.” He laughed. “My mom hates it. She says she hates Tate, but I know that’s not it—she hates what working for Tate turns me into.”

“So why do it?” Cassie asked.

He picked up his glass from the dirt, drank deeply, then ran the back of his hand across his mouth. Cassie’s mouth watered as he lay down on the grass beside her. She became aware of every little blade of grass up against her back. She shaded her eyes to get a look at him. Up close, she could see each individual sprout of stubble on Nick’s cheeks and chin, the delicate creases in his plump lips.

“I like helping Tate,” Nick said, really considering her question. “She needs me. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying feeling needed.”

Cassie thought of his downcast expression when Tate had taken Max’s call up to her bedroom. How he’d paced Mr. Abernathy’s driveway on the call the day before, head cast down, hands gesturing in exasperation. How stressed he’d seemed on the day they met, when he’d been sent all alone to Ohio at Tate’s behest. How could she tell him that she wasn’t sure he did like it?

As if on cue, his phone rang again. He smiled and tried to ignore it, but she laughed and told him to answer already. He took it from his pocket and silenced it, throwing it onto the grass between them. In a few seconds, a missed call notice came up: Max.

“Something’s going on with Tate’s marriage, isn’t it?” Cassie asked, putting the pieces together just as the question slipped from her mouth. “Something you’re supposed to fix.”

He looked at her again, carefully, slate eyes meeting hers. “I’m probably not supposed to talk about that,” he said slowly. She could feel his eyes on her lips, on her eyes, and back again. It seemed, all at once, that neither of them much cared about the state of Tate and Max’s marriage.

Cassie felt a laugh bubble up inside her; it came out nervous, even dismissive. As soon as it escaped her, Nick looked away, and she wished that she could take it back. “Tell me about Jack.” She was eager to keep his attention. “What was he like?”

Nick pulled himself up onto one elbow and looked down at her. She tried to ignore the warm sensation pinging through her body as she imagined what it would be like to feel him on top of her.

“I only met him a couple times. He was nice enough, I guess.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

Nick shrugged, looking out over the yard. “Elda’s take is…more complicated.”

The memoir had been scandalous, but Cassie couldn’t remember the details. Nick’s phone beeped. Cassie tapped it. “You can call him back, you know. I really don’t mind.”

But, instead, he sat and rolled up his sleeves. He sank his hands into the brown earth. She’d assumed he’d be fussy about getting dirt under his nails, but he’d done this before. She joined him; they worked side by side for a good bit of time without saying a word.

Cassie felt her awareness expand as she focused on that one little patch of earth. A butterfly alighted on a tuft of grass only a few feet away. Bees bumbled by. And the sound of birdsong was everywhere, chirrups and shrieks and melodies—none of which she knew how to name. She could hear Nick’s breath beside her, and, when she held still, she noticed the thump in her right wrist as it pulsed with her heartbeat.

The cool dirt gave pleasingly under her grip. She grabbed a handful hard. “We weren’t close at the end.” She knew he had no idea what she was talking about. “My grandmother and me.”

His hands kept working the soil.

“I mean, we were close in the years right after my parents died, when I was a kid. She was my world. I clung to her, and she gave up everything she had—this house, her marriage, all her friends. Of course I didn’t appreciate any of it.”

“Be easy on yourself; you were eight.”

“Well, I should have appreciated it later on. But all through high school, I treated her…I don’t know. I just wanted to get out of there.”

“You mean you acted like a normal teenager?”

“And then I decided I couldn’t stand Ohio anymore,” she said, ignoring him. “I had to go to the biggest, best city in the world. Had to get away from my small-town grandmother. I just assumed she’d finally get to move back here, to St. Jude, so she must be happy as a clam, you know? Who cared if she didn’t approve of my life? If she hated my art. If she didn’t like my boyfriend. It was my prerogative to make my own choices! As far as I could tell, she’d never made any of her own; she’d only ever done what she was told. And now I find out she might have had some secret love affair with a movie star? Maybe even a child with him? That she lied to my father and me, my grandfather, too, about all of it?” She shook her head, tried to ignore the tears blurring her eyes.

“So what exactly are you upset about?” At first, Nick’s question sounded accusatory, judgmental, but she looked at his placid face, and realized he was really just asking.

She sighed. “Part of me wants to find out she had this great love with Jack Montgomery. Or even just a hot night, you know? Passion. Something fun. But it also scares me, because if I didn’t know this huge important thing about her, which was maybe the most important thing there was to know…”

He waited for her to finish, and when she didn’t he said, “Then you think you didn’t ever really know her?”

The few tears that had ambled down her cheeks had been precursors to the sobs that now wracked her body. “And then we had this huge fight last summer, and apparently she was sick, but she never told me, I didn’t find out about her tumor until after she was already in the hospital. I got on the first plane I could, but…”

“Lunchtime!” The sound of Hank’s voice, accompanied by a clanging bell, ricocheted off the back porch. Cassie wiped her cheeks with her shirt at once and hopped up, accidentally kicking over Nick’s tea as he, too, scrambled to his feet. They looked guilty. Meanwhile, the bell clanged maniacally in Hank’s hand. “I love this thing!” she called. “I found it in the pantry!”

“What’s for lunch?” Nick asked.

“Margaret’s cauliflower bisque.”

Cassie’s stomach rumbled with reluctant enthusiasm as Hank disappeared into the dining room.

Nick looked back at her once Hank was out of sight. “Maybe she kept it a secret to protect you,” he said. “Maybe she didn’t want you to ever feel this terrible, and she thought that keeping silent was the best way to make that happen.”

But Cassie needed this conversation to be over now; she’d dug too deeply, too quickly. She forced a smile. She made her voice light. “Everyone loves Margaret, huh?”