Summer at the Shore Leave Cafe

Everheart Books Edition

Copyright © 2012 Abbie Williams

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This edition is published by arrangement with Abbie Williams.

everheartbooks.com

First electronic edition created and distributed by Everheart Books, a division of Central Avenue Marketing Ltd.

Summer at the Shore Leave Cafe

ISBN 978-1-926760-92-6

Published in Canada with international distribution.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover Design: Meghan Tobin-O'Drowsky

Photography: Copyright & Courtesy of iStockPhoto: emyerson

To everyone who has ever had a summer romance.

Summer at the Shore Leave Cafe

We are a family of women.

In my childhood and early teens, there was the dual force of our grandmother Louisa Davis (with her denim overhauls rolled to mid-calf, long white braid tucked under a battered, wide-brimmed straw hat), and Great-Aunt Minnie Davis, her older sister (who fastidiously kept her own long hair dyed its original shade of corn-silk blonde until the day she died). Both women contentedly smoked homegrown tobacco plucked from the sprawling garden behind Shore Leave; kept their nails trimmed short; could catch, clean and delectably prepare any fish that shimmered beneath the silver-blue surface of Flickertail Lake; in general disdained the company of men; and were adamant about the giving of advice. Though Gran was married for a time, long enough to produce both Aunt Ellen and my mother Joan, my grandfather reeled in his fishing line, snapped the clips on his tackle box and hiked out of Landon before Mom was quite a year old. At that time, in the late 1940s, Gran and Great-Aunt Minnie's own mother Myrtle Jean was still living and, according to every version of the story I've ever been told, agreed that Gran was better off without the thick-skulled son of a bitch anyhow. His name? Lost to time, no doubt; though probably Mom would know if I'd asked. I haven't yet, though I do know my own father's (Mick) despite the fact that he too made an early and entirely voluntary departure the summer I was eight months old and Mom was carrying Jillian.

Jilly was born when I was one year and one day old, in August of 1968; I cannot recall a time without the knowledge of her. People forever asked if we were twins, to which we sometimes replied yes, then laughed about it later, wondering if we could get away with the pranks that real twins were able to pull; we certainly resembled each other, with fair freckled skin, light straight hair and wide mouths--the image of our mother. Jilly however had eyes for which I was jealous, very direct and intensely blue, the color at the bottom of a candle flame, framed in lashes too dark for a blonde. It was a parting gift from the father we never knew. I inherited my own eyes from Gran and Mom: middling hazel with the pale lashes Jilly should have had. My oldest and youngest daughters have my eyes, but my middle girl opened hers a few minutes after birth and stared up at me with the eyes of my sister and my long-gone father, true indigo. Jilly always joked that the stork brought me Tish by mistake; Jilly is the only one of us to have produced a son, and likewise is the only one of us whose man was lost accidentally.

I left Landon, home, the August after high school and followed my simultaneous boyfriend of three years and husband of two weeks, Jackson Gordon, to the teeming wilds of Chicago. Trouble was I was already pregnant, a discovery made three weeks after senior prom in April of 1985, and so for me Chicago's nightlife consisted of carrying a screaming infant through our tiny one-bedroom apartment, snow hurtling against the rattle-trap windows while Jackie attended freshman year at Northwestern. Flash forward a decade and a half and his high-school educated home-making wife was two steps away from being a completely hollowed-out crazy woman who, after bearing three children and raising them virtually alone (not that my genes hadn't prepared me for it, really), discovered her husband screwing a lovely young colleague at an office Christmas party I had unexpectedly attended. I stormed in on them going at it on a desk, suspicions horrifically confirmed, so sickening I could have vomited there on the plushy taupe carpet. I wanted to kill him with my bare hands. My bare hands wrapped around a functional weapon, anyway. I scanned the room with a vengeance, hearing Gran and Great-Aunt Minnie in my head, egging me on, telling me to grab the weighty bronze sculpture of a cat near Jackie's elbow and smash it over his cheating skull. Trouble was I couldn't ruin that head, connected to the only man whose broad shoulders I used to grip with both hands, around whose slim hips my own legs used to wrap possessively, whose hair I had clutched in my hands like dark curling treasure. Jackie had straightened up, attempting to look as shameful and dignified as a man with designer slacks around his ankles and a pair of long gleaming legs around his waist can possibly contrive. He said, “Jo, I'm sorry, I am so sorry,” while I felt the earth shift beneath my feet like fresh spring mud and melting-hot blood flood my face with the heat of scorn. I had known all along, but like a fool I hadn't listened to my gut, Gran and Great-Aunt Minnie's most vehement advice.

Jackie had been mine for so long, my connection to past, present and future. He was the father of my children, my husband and companion in this enormous gaping mouth of a city that had been our home since leaving Landon seventeen years before. I had lived with him in what amounted to a parade of ever-increasingly expensive and well-furnished properties; exactly as much time had passed in our lives here in Chicago as it had in Landon. It seemed to mean something. I had fled back out the door and taken a taxi home that night. Camille would be seventeen years old in three days, on December twenty-seventh, the baby I had carried on my shoulder and nursed to sleep in the dim multi-colored glow of our first Christmas tree, alone, as my husband hit happy hour with his college buddies. I had been eighteen then, smooth-skinned and with cracked nipples, my slippery hair tied back in a ragged braid most days, washing dishes by hand and trudging with at least three loads of laundry a day down to the basement of our apartment building while my baby shrieked.

I'd called Jilly the moment I was safe in my bedroom, a weekly ritual. She knew right away that something was up before I'd even spoken.

“I had a dream,” she said upon answering, hundreds of miles to the north of me, snug and warm in Mom's kitchen, the kitchen of our childhood with its scarred butcher block counters and white enamel farm-style sink, the solid maple table upon which a zillion meals had been eaten and homework completed. Jackie had once bent me over it on a hot summer night when we were sixteen, giggling and terrified of getting caught. I imagined Jilly sitting at her place, wool socks braced on the seat to the right--my old chair. She would have Mom's crocheted pine-tree-green afghan around her shoulders, the “Christmas blanket,” and a fire would be burning in the pot-belly of the stove. I imagined it all, correctly I knew, and was suddenly aching with homesickness, a kind I hadn't experienced in years. The ache swallowed some of the scathing anger that had kept me from tears all the way home and through the crowded house to my bedroom. Jilly demanded, “What did he do?”

A scab seemed to have formed on the back of my throat, obliterating words. Down two flights of stairs the girls and a bunch of their friends were laughing over “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” on television; the scent of popcorn and melted caramel drifted in the wake of their happiness.

“Jo, I know he did something. What is it?” Jilly's voice dropped a notch and she said softly, “Tell me.”

“What was your dream?” I asked, managing a deep breath, and it was her turn to sigh. I saw her right hand come up and cup her forehead, an age-old gesture of uncertainty.

“Jackie was a centaur,” she said, and I laughed, caught off guard. She heard that, and continued in a rush, “He was mounting a female horse. And then I woke up. He cheated on you, didn't he? Goddamn him. Gran knew, too. That bastard.” She was working herself up.

In the background I heard our mother call, “Jillian, is that your sister?”

“Jilly, shut up!” I squeaked. “Crap, now Mom's going to have to know, too. Fucking hell.” I only swore this much in the presence of my sister.

“Jo, I am so sorry. That piece of shit. I knew it.”

Anger was winning over again, pushing the hurt and sorrow back down my throat. I snapped, “I'm glad all of you knew and no one bothered to call me.” In my mind, I could hear my mother scolding:
You can't always blame the cheater. It takes two, you know
.

As if she could read my thoughts, Jilly retorted, “Jo. You could not have been blind to this possibility. That bastard.”

I was about to respond but Jilly muttered, “Crap,” and in the next moment my mother's actual voice was coming over the line. “Joelle, what is this about? Why is Jillian sitting here in the dark swearing at you?”

“Hi, Mom,” I hedged.

And then Aunt Ellen's voice was in the background, too, calling, “Joan, is that Joey? Hi, honey!”

“Oh for chrissake,” I groaned. But in our family no secrets were ever kept for long, try as we might. I surrendered.

May, 2003

Five long and shitty months later, I
was driving on I-94, angling into Wisconsin as the sun skimmed the surface of the sky towards dusk. The girls, released a good ten days early from their private schools at my rather desperate insistence, were chattering, alternately fighting over the radio station and coming up with new and inventive ways to entertain themselves with sights available through the car windows. For a spell they played the alphabet game, using billboards and license plates to earn points, then, as we entered dairy country, moved to Hey Cow, a ridiculously simple game that involved yelling the phrase to the bovines we passed in scores. The “winner” of the game was the girl at whom the most cows glanced. I was utterly grateful when they at last drifted to sleep, somewhere near the Twin Cities in Minnesota. At that point I was tempted to get a hotel, but we were getting so close to home that I couldn't bear not to get there tonight. Just two more hours…

The last mile hummed away at long last, and I took the final turn into Landon, whose population now totaled three-thousand seventy, plus four. We'd been here to visit of course, but there was something about the potential permanence of this trip that quickened my blood and sent pin prickles of emotion through my limbs. The girls were still blessedly asleep, but I murmured, “Here we are,” as the most deeply familiar street of my life rolled beneath the tires. The geography of a hometown, whether beloved or loathed, is nonetheless engraved on a person's soul. I drove slowly, both hands at the top of the steering wheel, leaning forward, the better to gaze at everything, hungry for the sights. The towering, ancient red pines at the south edge of town gave way to Fisherman's Street, Landon's main drag; at the northern-most end Flickertail Lake was visible from the moment the sun rose, its beach a brief walk and subsequent twelve-step descent from any downtown business. The beach itself curved like a clamshell, widening in an arch as it met the water of the lake a good twenty feet out.

To my right was Angler's Inn, the only hotel in town, with a Juliet balcony for each of the rooms on the second floor. Jilly and I had always called those “prostitute perches,” then laughed hysterically whenever a female guest had been standing upon one to admire our hometown. The boardwalks were quiet now at such a late hour, though the windows of Eddie's Bar, just across the street, glowed in welcome behind the Moosehead Beer light and a faded wooden shingle, painted by Eddie Sorenson decades ago, reading COME IN ALREADY. A handful of the vehicles that graced my childhood memories were waiting patiently at the curb, as familiar to me as their aging owners who were bellied up to the bar just now: there was the immaculate, lipstick red '76 Charger driven by Daniel “Dodge” Miller, who ran the filling station near Shore Leave and took care of the heavy work for Mom and Aunt Ellen; the once-blue, well-used '74 Ford pickup owned by my daughters' great-uncle, Nels Gordon (Jackie's only remaining relative in Landon, as his own folks had passed away before Camille was a teenager); Jim Olson's rimless, rusted-out Chevy Celebrity; our high-school shop teacher Del Christianson's pecan-brown, speed-boat sized LTD.

The last car I idled past was the newest of the bunch, Dodge's son Justin's sporty silver Dakota truck. Justin had graduated with Jackie and me, in 1985, and had been through a lengthy marriage to and a subsequent messy divorce from Aubrey Pritchard. Messy in that Aubrey, lovely Homecoming Queen of Jilly's class and Justin's long-time sweetheart, had cheated after Justin sustained a terrible injury working in his dad's garage. I didn't know the details of the divorce, because Jilly hadn't known. We only knew that Justin's face and neck had been badly burned all along the right side. It had happened at least five summers ago, but somehow I had not come across Justin since then; he was more Jackie's buddy than mine, a fellow high school football star and beer-chugger, also one of the best-looking guys any of us had ever seen. My stomach tightened with sympathy; I suppressed the perverse desire to make my way inside the warm, familiar space and see the damage for myself.

I realized that I had braked in front of Eddie's and was watching the door, while in the background my girls breathed with the soft sighs of exhaustion, both physical and emotional. After a moment though, perhaps wakened by the absence of movement, Camille, with Ruthann's head on her lap, stirred from the back seat and murmured, “Mom, are we there?”

I turned to look back at my oldest, whose head was tipped up just slightly from the pillow she'd braced against the window back in Illinois. My heart, as always, tightened with the ache of a love so strong it overrode any other in my world; no matter what, I would be strong for my girls. I would, goddammit.

“No, sweetie, not quite,” I whispered back, letting my bare foot ease off the brake. The car rolled smoothly forward, but it was enough that Tish, strapped into the passenger seat beside me, snorted and began rubbing her eyes.

“Mo-om,” she complained in a whisper. “My head hurts.”

“I'm sorry, honey,” I responded automatically, and sped up. “We'll be there shortly. Look, it's the lake.” I gestured out into the glimmering darkness as we made a left and angled around Flickertail, where a mile up the lake road, known locally as Flicker Trail, Shore Leave waited.

Tish roused herself and lowered her window, allowing the bluegrass scent of an early spring evening into the car. The smell of the lake, so deeply ingrained in my consciousness, as familiar to me as my children's skin, was musky and welcoming. I could hear it lapping the shore to our right as the tires crunched over gravel and the headlights illuminated walls of sharp spruce and towering oaks, lacy maples and dense grapevine, decked in new emerald leaves and smelling of childhood and remembered happiness. My thoughts curled around on Jackie for a moment; so often I had driven this road with him, tucked against his strong side, my hand caressing his leg, both of us laughing…

I squelched the memories with effort; it was like pressing on a bruise. No, more like cramming a couple of fingers into an open wound. I bit my lip hard and rolled my eyes, feeling the sleek wetness of tears on my eyeballs as I did so, glad that the darkness hid any evidence. I would not cry in front of my children anymore; I had promised myself, fiercely, before we left for Minnesota.

“What was that?” Camille asked from the backseat, her voice startled.

“A loon,” I told her, listening as it wailed again from somewhere out on the lake. It was a haunting, ululating cry, almost human in its emotional intensity. “Don't worry, that's just how they keep in contact with other loons on the lake.” The moment I said it, another responded, farther out.

“It gives me the shivers,” Camille added, and Tish cackled a laugh, twisting to give her big sister a skeptical look.

“It's awesome,” Tish told her. “You're such a chicken.”

Camille playfully kicked a bare foot at Tish, jostling twelve-year-old Ruthann, who made a sound of protest. “C'mon, you guys, knock it off,” she mumbled. “I'm sleeping.”

“And I'm carsick,” Tish chimed in, helpfully. I angled a gaze at her, and she scrunched down in her seat as if to visibly prove her claim. Tish, unlike her sisters, kept her thick curly hair cut short; the subsequent face-frame made her blue eyes appear even larger and more sincere. I knew her well enough to see through the manipulations, but people less familiar to her wiles were easily captivated by those eyes and the pointy pixie chin. Jackie especially, which was the reason our just-barely fifteen-year-old sported double-pierced ears.

“Here it is,” I said then as the gravel widened to the right and became the pitted blacktop lot of my family's business. Two vehicles were parked beneath the lone streetlight at this late hour: our longtime cook Rich Mayes' ancient, ramshackle Ford and a black truck I didn't recognize. Shore Leave stretched, long and narrow, in the direction of the lake, where a deck constructed of wide cedar planks, now the gray of ashes from years of sun and wet feet, wrapped around the two sides flanking the water. The café itself was painted with a fresh coat of white every other June; Jilly and her son Clint took care of that now. Long ago it had been mine and Jilly's task; the very first time I admired Jackie, truly caught sight of how good-looking he was, had been while painting the side of Shore Leave at age thirteen. He'd come in with his family for Sunday brunch, all those Junes ago…

I parked beside the unfamiliar truck and rolled my head slowly, first down and then back up, still hearing the highway in my mind, determined not to think again of Jackie for at least ten minutes. The Leinenkuegel, Moosehead, and Hamm's beer signs in the front window were glinting warm colors into the night; technically Shore Leave was still open, but it was a weeknight and most of the hard-core drinkers had retired to Eddie's. This early in the season, tourist traffic was light, but in less than three weeks that would change. From the direction of the boat landing, down the shore about twenty yards, came a yodeling cry, and I grinned in spite of myself.

“Mom, Aunt Ellen, everybody, THEY'RE HERE!” my little sister shrieked, and the girls began hooting in response, piling out of the car and running towards the sound. I climbed out more slowly, happy on the surface, where people could see. Fuck, it just sucked (there was no other way to put it) that I was coming home as the spurned woman, the jilted, separated wife, the girl who couldn't keep her husband in her own bed…I was gritting my teeth and stopped myself instantly. And then I was laughing as the girls and Jilly collided hard enough to send them into a heap on the grass at the edge of the parking lot. My mother's golden labs came barreling from down by the lake, barking at the top of their range. The girls were laughing and screaming as they piled on Jilly, wrestling to get closer to her as one of the dogs grabbed the rear of Tish's jean shorts and began tugging.

“Joelle!” My mother was coming out of the front door, banging the screen we'd always been bitched at for banging, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. Aunt Ellen and Rich were in her wake, waving and calling, and I hurried forward and into Mom's warm bare arms, resisting the urge to burrow against her like a child seeking refuge. She hugged me hard and planted a kiss on my temple before turning me over to my auntie, whose plump freckled arms, so like Mom's, curled me tight and snug. Rich, who was the closest thing to a father I'd ever known, hugged me too, and ruffled my hair.

“Looks pretty, long like that,” he added, grinning so that his bushy white eyebrows drew nearly together over his kind brown eyes. He was as dear and solid as ever, and I felt a momentary flush of gratitude that these people, my foundation, were here and unchanging as the summer stars. In my teenage years, they'd been claustrophobic in their concerns, driving me out of my skin with constant advice and commentary; but now, seventeen years later I sought this place, my true home, to regroup. Or shoot myself. Or at least get talked out of shooting my children's father. Repeatedly.

“Hi, sweetie,” Aunt Ellen said, drawing me close against her side. “You look like you could use a drink.”

“Or a bar,” Mom added, meaning dessert.

“You want a sandwich, little one?” Rich asked, thumbing over his shoulder in the direction of his kitchen.

“Oh, no, not at the moment,” I told them, although a drink sounded fantastic. “But thanks.”

In the next moment my sister was bolting across the parking lot, shrieking with laughter as my kids and both dogs pursued her. I turned to catch her in a hug, and we rocked together for a moment before being attacked by the mob.

“Look at these beautiful girls,” Mom said, claiming her granddaughters for a round of hugs. “Camille, you look so grown-up, doesn't she, Ellen? Look at that face! And my Patricia, what have you done to your hair?”

Rich caught up Ruthann in a bear hug, and then bounced her on his arm. “Ain't you grown a bit since I saw you last,” he observed, and Ruthann, my baby, grinned shyly.

“Aunt Jilly, where's Clint?” Tish asked, peering around as though her cousin and best friend in Landon were hiding in the woods.

Jilly was small and deeply tanned, her own hair cropped as short as Tish's, white-blonde from both the long days outside and a healthy dose of Sun-In. She gave me a look I couldn't interpret (unheard of) and then caught Tish in a light headlock and knuckled her scalp. “Not here, punk. He must not care that you guys were coming.”

Tish ducked away good-naturedly and fastidiously smoothed her hair. “Whatever. Where is he?”

“Inside, sleeping, along with your great-gran,” Aunt Ellen answered. “He was tuckered out from the ball game today. He was waiting and waiting for you all to get here and ended up falling asleep on table three. Rich hauled him home to bed.”

The girls giggled. “What a baby,” Tish felt compelled to add. “It's not even barely midnight.”

“Time for these bones to head out, though,” Rich said, and pecked my cheek before taking his quiet leave. “Tell the grandson I'll see him tomorrow.”

“Will do, Rich,” Mom told him, as Aunt Ellen herded everyone inside.

“Night, Rich,” I added, before following Jilly up the porch steps. Mom was walking Rich to his car and the girls were already in the café, no doubt being plied with sweets and possibly booze by Aunt Ellen. I paused before entering and leaned over the porch rail, my gaze absorbing sights nearly as familiar to me as my own body. The lake, cloaked in warm, velvet May darkness, stretched back to Landon's main street, where the lamps were small golden dots in the blackness. In the other direction, to my left, Flickertail curved around a slender bend before opening into a much wider surface area, where jet-skis and motor boats whined from dawn until early evening, dragging skiers and wake boarders. The farthest shore, not visible from our porch, was similarly busy in the daylight, where fisherman tarried for hours upon end, drinking and bullshitting and doing what they loved. Though fully dark, I could see the edges of the trees that ringed the lake from memory; if I lifted my index finger I could trace the wavering line in the air. Jilly elbowed up beside me and for a moment I rested my head on her shoulder.