Keepsake (50 page)
"No! I am not done here yet! I have plans, lots of them! I've thought about this for months, for years, but I never had the courage to stand up to Dad. You know how he is—was," Corinne said, her voice catching in her throat.
"Yes. We do. That's why we left," Laura said softly. "Snack got sick of the strap, and I got sick of the tirades. Neither of us had your strength, Rin."
She leaned over to rub her sister's back, spinning slow circles of comfort between
her shoulder blades. When Cor
inne was six and Laura was eight, it used to do the trick. But that was then.
"Laura, we can
do
this," her sister said, shrugging off the show of sympathy. "You have an artist's eye; look how you fixed up that wreck of a house that you bought in
Portland
. For gosh sakes, when you were done, it was featured in
Renovation Magazine
! And so was the garden you created—from nothing, I might add. Think of the marketing angle for us; you're famous now!"
"That's so ridiculous," Laura said, embarrassed. "One little article—"
"In a national magazine! It just flew off the shelves around here. And I forgot to tell you, but there was a copy in Dr. Burton's office, and someone tore out the pages for a souvenir. That's how impressed they were."
A wave of irritation washed over Laura. "I cannot believe you persist in going to that quack," she snapped.
"But
... we've always gone to Dr. Burton," Corinne said, taken aback.
True enough. Which was why, when she was thirteen, Laura made a vow never to get sick enough to need medical attention. She'd kept that vow. The next time she saw a physician was when she was eighteen, living on the West Coast, and in
urgent
need of her first supply of birth-control pills.
Corinne said, "Anyway, you're changing the subject. This isn't about my doctor, Laura, it's about my doctor's magazine.
You were in it."
"Yeah, yeah, I'm a real celebrity," Laura said tiredly.
"Plus,
you know all about computers. You can streamline our accounting system and get us computerized at last."
"But that's not what I do!" Laura said, exasperated. She had tried so many times to explain her career. She tried again. "I'm a systems programmer. I don't decide what a system is going to do, I just decide how it's going to do it," she said.
"But it's all still computers, isn't it?" Corinne asked naively.
Sighing, Laura said, "My clients are
big
companies, with very special needs. I generally work as part of a team of ten to twenty people. My expertise is in the communications part: how to make two computers in the same system talk to one another. I implement the program, make sure it runs successfully, and leave."
She got the usual blank look from Corinne.
"I don't do flowers. Okay?"
"Gawd. How can you stand that job?" Snack asked, opening one eye. "I'd sooner cut my throat."
"It's challenging, satisfying work—and it happens to pay well," Laura shot back. "It's clean. It's prestigious. And I get to pick and choose my contracts."
"Had your fill of down and dirty, have you?" Snack asked, yawning. He nestled his cheek on his arm,
ready for bed.
"Yes, as a matter of fact," Laura said. "If I'm feeling nostalgic for backbreaking labor, I go out in my garden and weed."
Ignoring the crack, Corinne turned to her brother, reaching across the table to cup her hands over his. Snack didn't bother to raise his head, but she pleaded her case anyway.
"And
you've
worked at every odd job there is. You know how to do everything, Snack! You can spruce up the store, and then the greenhouses, and maybe build us a checkout shed for the spring rush. As for this house, it just needs a coat of paint for now, that's all. Not even! Just paint the front, and maybe the west side—just the parts that show from the nursery!"
Snack's answer was a sleepy moan. "Is
that
all?"
"Okay, skip the greenhouses, then," Corinne said, rolling with it. "That's not as urgent, now that the cold weather's over. They're too far gone, anyway. Maybe—maybe just knock down the one by the road! Bulldoze it, that's what you can do! And relocate that giant compost pile that's next to it. It's so in the wrong place."
Snack's head came up. "Bulldoze the greenhouse! Move the compost! What the hell are you talking about?"
Corinne backed off, drawing her pale brows together in a fit of second-guessing. "All right, maybe not; it was just a thought. I have other ideas, lots of them! Please. Snack, please," she begged. "Give me a month of your time to turn this place around. To turn our reputation around. Let's make the name Shore something to be proud of again. That's all I ask."
Snack dragged himself to his feet. "You're nuts," he said wearily. "I'm going to bed."
A look of dismay passed over Corinne's face. "No!" she said, grabbing his forearm. "You can't go to bed. We made a pact: no one sleeps until this is resolved, one way or the other."
"Watch me," he said, sloughing off her grip.
"Oh, Snack. Why did you have to drink all that beer?" Corinne said, more sad than angry. "Why do you always do that?"
An ironic grin, highlighted by a chipped front tooth, came and went on his lean, stubbled face. "Rinnie, dear sister. I do what I want. If I want to get fall-down drunk, that's my perrog
... prerga
... prerogative."
Laura decided that she'd better step in. She was all too aware of her brother's moods, which could turn on a dime from bemused to resentful. Although Snack seemed okay about being cut from their father's will, it was obvious that somewhere deep down inside, resentment still bubbled in him.
Laura sat back in her chair and said, "Snack, Rinnie already admits that she's crazy. The question is, just how crazy are
we
? Let's assume for the sake of argument that I'd be willing to throw a mon
th of my life into this broken-
down wreck of a business. Would you?" she asked him with a carefully offhand air.
Her brother's laugh was soft and incredulous. "What, kill myself for a lost cause like this? Do what you like, Laur
... but count me out."
It was his attitude to life
itself
:
count me out.
Without knowing why, Laura decided to call him on it.
"Snack, let me put it another way, because Corinne is far too polite to bring it up: it's Corinne—not me, not you—who stayed behind and made life a little more bearable for Mom. She did it for over a decade. She's asking us for a month."
"Rinnie didn't have to stay," Snack said sullenly. "No one was holding a gun to her head."
"But she did stay, didn't she? And we owe her, don't we?" Laura suggested quietly.
"I'm not saying I'm not grateful. I'm just saying—" He frowned again and rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture of frustration that he had inherited from his father. "What happens if we do manage to turn the business around?
I'm
not staying on, and neither are you. Once Rinnie has to pay for help to replace us, that's it: back down the toilet goes
Shore
Gardens
."
"That's Rinnie's problem, isn't it? We're just agreeing to grant her the favor she's asked, that's all. One month."
"Dammit, Laura! Where're you coming from, all of a sudden?"
All evening long, it had been the two of them against Corinne. But sweet Corin
n
e had stood up to their pounding, and an admiring Laura had just decided to switch sides. Snack had every right to feel double-crossed.
Laura pulled at one of the thin gold loops hooked through her earlobes. She said to her brother, "A month, Snack. How about it?"
His face flushed. He thre
w a longing glance at the worn-
down stairs that led to his old room and his lumpy bed. He
was tired and crabby and ready to pass out; Laura recognized the signs from their youth.
"Oh, all right," he snapped. "One fricking month. That's
it."
Corinne leapt from her chair and threw her arms around her brother in an enthusiastic hug. He grimaced and caught her wrists from behind his neck, breaking the circle of her embrace. "Now can I go to fricking sleep?"
"Yes, yes, anything, yes," said his overjoyed sister. She watched him go, virtually hopping up and down in place, and then she called out after him, "Snack!"
He turned around, sagging visibly. "Now what?"
"Win
or
lose, I'm making you and Laura co-owners."
"
Of—?"
"Everything. The business, the buildings, the land. Everything; just the way it should be. If I can't turn the business around and I'm forced to sell, then you get a third, and so does Laura."
"What!
Corinne!"
cried Laura, stunned by what she was hearing.
Bleary-eyed, Snack asked, "You serious?"
"Yessir!"
"Well
...
.
" He looked uncharacteristically at a loss. "Whatever," he muttered awkwardly, and he turned and began ascending the stairs. "G'night."
e Sample
Chapter 3
As soon as Snack was out of earshot, Laura said to Corinne, "Are you crazy? Why did you say something like that?"
"Because it's true. I'd always planned on reinstating the two of you. It's only fair."
"Not me. Uh-uh, Rin. Count me out. I don't want any part of this. Do not write me back into
anything.
I refuse to accept. Helping you out for a month is one thing, but I've made my own way, and it would feel like—I don't know—wrong. That's all. Wrong. You're the one who stayed."
"Don't be silly. This will work, trust me. I've thought about it for a long time," Corinne said. She began gathering the empty beer cans for rinsing and recycling.
"Thought about it? You haven't thought about it at all!" Laura said, tagging after her. "For one thing, if you tell Snack he's going to get a third of
Shore
Gardens
whether it succeeds or not, do you really think he's going to try to make it work? Get real, will you? You'll be lucky if he doesn't hold an open house for interested developers every Sunday from one to three."
Laughing, Corinne said, "Bring me those dirty plates, would you? This
will
work," she
insisted.
"Snack will rise to the occasion. You'll see."
"Corinne. You are so naive." Feeling churlish for slamming her brother, Laura dropped the subject altogether for the moment. She had other concerns. "One month," she warned. "I can't do more. You have to realize that this is going to be very hard on—"
My career.
God, it sounded so mean-spirited, given Corinne's almost saintly generosity. Laura settled for saying, "I can do a month. I had planned to take a couple of weeks off anyway. The only thing is," she muttered as an afterthought, "I thought I was taking them off in
Hawaii
."
"With Max. I know," Corinne said, looking up from her soapsuds with a tragically sympathetic look.
"Oh, Corinne
... stop," Laura said, flushing with annoyance. "I will board that plane tomorrow if you're going to be wringing your hands over Max and me every time I turn around. It's over, and obviously it was no great loss."
"I know. It's just that you sounded so
... happy."
"Well, I was wrong. I just
thought
I was happy."
"Love is blind," Corinne agreed.
"Love is stupid! It has nothing to do with anything. The only thing that matters in life is what you make of yourself, not what someone else makes of you. And on that note, let's get back to your dream. You missed two payments, no more than that, right?" she asked her sister.
"Yes," Corinne said firmly. "I paid this month right on time. So I don't understand why I got a threatening notice yesterday."
"Don't worry; we'll take care of it. I'll write a check for the missing payments tomorrow."
"I'm so embarrassed about this, Laur. But you know you'll get the money back, don't you?"
"Never mind; it's not today's problem." Laura was back in business mode now, and on firmer terrain. Facts and figures, that's what she could count on. Everything else was just fluff. "When did Dad take out this loan from—who's the outfit?
Great
River
?"
"
Great
River
Finance.
" Corinne shrugged her strong shoulders as she dried her
hands on a ratty old dishtowel.
"I haven't looked at the books close enough to figure that out, yet. They're all just mishmash to me, anyway, especially the way Dad kept them."
"Yeah. I remember. Everything in shoeboxes."
"All I know is that there's a book of payment coupons from Great River Finance for this year. I'm not that worried, though, because Ken Barclay did say something about how if I found myself over my head, I shouldn't panic."
"Kendall Barclay! When did you talk to
him
about this?"
"Originally? A few months ago. I ran into him when I was in the drugstore, getting something for an awful cold I had. I was depr
essed and really out of it, and
to tell the truth
I didn't register half of what he said."
Kendall Barclay
.
Laura could picture the name so clearly, written in her
own
flowery handwriting on an envelope of thick pink paper, the very best she could find in the Chepaquit Pharmacy.
Dear
Kendall
, Thank you, thank you, thank you,
it began
. You're my knight in shining armor. You saved me, and
I'll never forget you for that.
She had rewritten the note at least three times, phrasing her gratitude more effusively each time. Kendall Barclay had been too skinny to look like a knight, and he'd ridden into the woods on a bike and not on a horse—but no one could deny the courage that he'd shown.
Laura still couldn't
believe that she had
ever
been dumb enough to
think
that the son of Dr. Burton could have had a crush on someone like her. But that's what she had believed. When Will Burton asked her to go with him for a walk in the woods, she had pictured nothing
more daring than a romantic kiss and an embrace.
How naive. How dumb. How arrogant.
After the doctor's son and his buddies had assaulted her and beat up
Kendall
and then had fled like the bullying cowards they were, Laura had dropped to her knees beside her fallen hero: blood was trickling from his mouth, and one of his eyes was bruised and swelling. Tearing off a scrap of her already torn blouse, she had wiped away the blood from his chin.
"Are you all right,
Kendall
?" she'd asked stupidly.
How could he possibly have been all right?
But he had answered with a dazed, "Y-yuh, I'm all right."
And she had taken him at his word.
"Don't look at me," he had mumbled, averting his face. "Go home. Go
home,'"
he had repeated more fiercely. "They won't come back now."
He was the pampered son of a town scion; the other kids knew that, and the other kids despised him for it. He was picked on almost as much as the dirt-poor Shore kids, but for the opposite reason: because he was so rich.
Laura, probably more than anyone else, had understood the humiliation
Kendall
was feeling as he lay on the ground. She had wanted to respect his wishes, whatever they happened to be, so she'd stood up abruptly and run through the woods and made her way home. She'd been able to sneak past her father and change her shirt before he came in for supper and yelled at her for being late.
And the very next day, she had biked to the Chepaquit Pharmacy and had bought the heavy pink stationery.
And very shortly after that, Kendall Barclay had basically spit in her face.
Kendall Barclay
.
It must have been twenty years since she'd seen him.
She murmured to Corinne, "So tell me what he said in the drugstore that you do remember."
"Well
... he apologized for not being able to come to the funeral, I remember that. Wasn't that nice of him? Bankers don't have to do that. And he said we could talk anytime. That I should just phone and ask for him personally, and we would set up a time."
"A time to do what?"
"I guess, to talk about if I need a loan? I'm not really sure. But he knows what's in our account—nothing—so maybe he thought I'd be looking for another loan soon. Needless to say, I've been so busy that I never did get around to arranging an appointment. But when I ran into him in town at Sam's Market last week, he was just the same."
"I don't understand."
"Neither do I. But then he called yesterday and left a message on the machine! He asked if there was
anything
he could do. He sounded very kind, very concerned. I haven't had a chance to call him back yet."
"He's got an agenda," Laura said firmly. "It's obvious."
Corinne blinked. "I thought he was trying to be nice."
"You would. Don't you see what his game is? As you say, he knows you're broke. Now that Dad's gone, he sees his chance. He'll give you a loan, wait for you to default on it, and then put this place up for auction. Guess who'll buy it back? His bank. Well, don't lose a second's worth of sleep over him, Rinnie. I'll take care of Kendall Barclay."
"I haven't lost any sleep over him," Corinne said as she gathered table crumbs into the palm of her hand. "Why do you dislike him so much?" she added. "You've been this way about him ever since I can remember."
"He's a jerk. A ric
h, privileged, arrogant, money-
sucking jerk."
"Laura. Just because his family was rich and ours wasn't, that doesn't make him arrogant. Or money-sucking. Or a jerk. He couldn't help who his parents were."
"But he could help who
he
was. What kind of person
he
was."
"When did you even see him last? High school?"
"I
... don't remember," Laura said, sliding the chairs back under the table.
"Well, he turned out very nice."
"There you go again! Don't you get it? You may as well stick his business card in the box with the ones from those developers who keep coming around here. Because that's what he's after, you dope: your land."
"Why would he want our land? He has his own land."
"Why does
anyone
want land, especially with sweeping views? Because they're not making any more of it. Don't you remember the time that Dad told us
Kendall
seemed to be hinting that he'd like to buy us out? You own a nice little piece of the
Cape
, Rinnie. You're just minutes from
Chatham
, but with a heck of a lot less danger of being washed into the ocean. Do the math. Kendall Barclay wants your land. Period."
Corinne tossed the paper-towel napkins into the rusted, grimy garbage can that w
as snugged up against the gold-
tone stove. "I thought he was just trying to be nice."
****
Tired as she was, Laura felt too uneasy and too melancholy to sleep. Disregarding the cold spring fog that had rolled in so predictably after the warm day, she propped her bedroom window open with a stick and pulled a chair up close so that she could better hear the plaintive moan of the whistle buoy offshore. She leaned her forearms on the sill and allowed herself to drift.
Laura had grown up to the sound of that buoy. She was able to picture the big red mark lifting and falling as it rolled on the ocean swell; it was part of the panoramic seascape that was visible from the hilltop nursery. When she was a teenager, it had seemed to he
r that the buoy's breath-over-a-
bottletop moan perfectly expressed how she felt about life in the village of Chepaquit.
Bleak.
It was impossible for Laura to call up wonderful childhood memories, as others did, of carefree days on the shore. There weren't any. The nursery was a full-time chore, day in and day out. There were always plants to water, seedlings to transplant, stock to move, orders to fill, plants to water and water and water.
Even in the dead of winter, even in the dog days of summer, the work was never done. Laura had no friends in school because she'd never had the time to participate in any activities. She and her brother and sister were always getting special dispensations, and the other kids naturally looked on them as the hardship case they were.
Of course, it hadn't helpe
d matters that their uncle Nor
bert had been sent to jail for killing his wife. Uncle? All she knew of him was that he was a man with a violent temper who'd strangled his wife one day after an argument over a burned supper: a dumb, stupid, overcooked roast. Even though the murder had happened before their time, they had all grown up with the horrible stigma. How could they not?
Shore
Gardens
had been co-owned by two Shore brothers, Oliver and Norbert.
Take away the murderer, and then there was one.
Take away Oliver, and now there was none.
The old generations had all passed on, leaving Laura, Snack, and Corinne to find their way as best they could.
Sitting at the window, looking out at gray nothing and shivering from the penetrating chill, Laura couldn't shake her sense of foreboding. Something about Chepaquit wasn't right. It was as though the village had been cast under an evil spell. People ran off, people died young, people were sent away.
In Laura's mind, the one chance to have the spell broken was lost when Sylvia left. Sylvia—bright, beautiful, independent Sylvia, who had breezed into town, made everyone love her, and then had breezed right out again, breaking Laura's heart. Until the day that Sylvia quit her job at the nursery, Laura had truly begun to have hope. She used to think,
If Sylvia likes Chepaquit, then so can I.
If Sylvia can impress people, then so can I.
If Sylvia can make work seem like fun, then so can I.
If Sylvia fears no one, then
... why should I?
It was the single, most exciting time of Laura's life, filled with potential. At last she'd had a role model to show her the possibilities.
But then one day Sylvia left as suddenly as she'd appeared, without a goodbye, without a word to Laura or to anyone else
... and the spell resumed. It truly was like a fairy tale. Life in the village became more oppressive than ever. The ones who stayed, died. First Laura's mother, and now her father. Neither had made it to sixty-five. Was that so much to expect?
I miss you, Mom,
came her sudden, fervent thought. She brushed away a sting of tears.
Today, right now, more than ever.
So, yes, Laura would grant Corinne her month. But Laura would not be able to lift the spell. Only Sylvia could do that. After the month, when they inevitably admitted to defeat, Corinne would have to sell the acreage—to Kendall Barclay and his crowd, in all likelihood—and Laura would whisk her sister off to wonderful
Portland
, with its impressive blend of high tech and high mountains.
Portland
, where the growing season lasted year round.
Portland
, where she and Corinne could grow old together instead of alone.