A Month at the Shore Read online

  Snorting, she added, "I think it was all just a little too gothic for Max."

  "But it happened before we were even born!"

  "Did that ever matter to any of our classmates? No. They just assumed that we shared our uncle's gene for stupidity. Max did too, I guess."

  "Oh, come on. You're a systems programmer. How can you be stupid? It's not even possible," Corinne said, bowled over by Laura's admission.

  "Obviously I must have the gene," Laura said, suddenly bitter. "Otherwise, why would I have tried to be honest with Max before we got married? How stupid was that?"

  The irony of it was that she had become a systems programmer precisely to show the world how smart she could be, and that's how she had met Max.

  And that's how she had ended up suffering new humiliation: because Max had told everyone on the project the whole lurid, stupid story of Uncle Norbert. Thank God it had happened near the end of a job that Laura was able to finish and leave. Thank God at least for that.

  Corinne had that teary look in her eyes; she was a bottomless well of sympathy, overflowing at the least provocation.

  Laura put her hands up, palms forward, in a gesture of rejection. "Nope. No tears. I'll get through it fine; I'm just about there, in fact," she said defiantly. "Max was a jerk. I'm lucky to be out of it."

  "He is a jerk; you are lucky," Corinne agreed. "So! Where were we? Oh. Clothes. I'll lend you workclothes of mine to wear. We know they won't be tight," she said with a wry grin.

  Corinne Shore was five feet ten and heavily built. Neither of the sisters had ever been exactly slim, but there was something super-solid about Corinne. On the nursery grounds, she carried her size with an easy grace suitable to hauling big root balls around. When she was in her natural element, her smile was quick, her carriage straight, and her stride, long and sure. She was Wonder Woman.

  But once she left her four-acre world, her confidence collapsed. Her shoulders drooped, her head hung forward. She became overly intrigued by her shoes. Often she mumbled. And she was forever clearing her throat.

  It had always been obvious to Laura that when her sister was out in public, she became ashamed of her size and tried her best to shrink in place. Her classmates had picked up on Corinne's hunched-over manner; they used to tease her mercilessly about it.

  But right now Corinne was on her home turf, surrounded by people she loved and cooking a meal for them. She was beaming.

  "I know I shouldn't be so happy just months after the ... the funeral," she confessed as she turned the bacon. "And a huge part of me isn't. It's just that—"

  "It's all right, Rin," said Laura, stroking her sister's cheek as she passed. "We're all weird mixes of relief and sadness right now."

  Only the proportions differed. Laura changed the subject. "Is our brother—ha-ha—up?"

  Corinne rolled her blue eyes. "I knocked. Gently. I didn't want to make him grumpy his first day on the job."

  "Oh, good. Then I'll be able to."

  Still sipping her coffee, Laura ascended the stairs past the landing window, almost opaque now with dust and dirt, and treaded down a runner worn through in places to the floorboards. The condition of the house was utterly dismaying to her, although it had been going downhill for her whole life. Now that she thought about it, the house hadn't been painted her whole life.

  The shabby interior had been cleaner when her mother was alive, of course; meek, submissive Alice had always carried all of her energy and dreams in a plastic bucket with a soapy sponge.

  Laura wondered what had become of the money she used to send her mother for buying something nice for the house—a carpet, new drapes, a television set. Anything to make her life brighter, a little more cheerful. A little more bearable.

  Sunk into the damn business, obviously. A bottomless hole if ever there was one.

  After her mother died, Laura continued to send money, but to Corinne—who undoubtedly handed it right over to their father, just as their mother had done. But Oliver Shore had been gone for half a year, and there was nothing new in the house that Laura could see. Where had the money gone?

  Into the bottomless hole, of course.

  She paused at the door of Snack's room, knocked robustly, and stepped inside. Her brother was sleeping on his stomach in a tangle of sheet, his tattooed arm dangling over the side of the single bed, his toes looped over the edge of the mattress.

  She clutched his ankle and shook it, but not too hard. "Hey. Time to go to school."

  He didn't answer. His breathing was deep, just shy of a snore. She shook a little harder. "Hey. Up."

  After a pause, she heard a muffled "Go to hell."

  "You haven't noticed? We're already there." She waved her mug of coffee under his nose and said, "There's more where this came from."

  "Go to hell."

  She straightened up and regarded her brother, behaving so much like the baby of the family that he was. "Oh, for Pete's sake, Snack. One month. You've just finished doing more time than that!"

  It was a sharp little poke, but Laura was determined that, co-owner or not, Snack was going to give the job his all.

  He rolled sleepily onto his back. He opened one eye and regarded his sister.

  "I did not steal the car. I took it for a ride. Haven't you ever wanted to take a Corvette for a ride?"

  "Wouldn't it have been easier to walk into a showroom and ask?"

  He gave her a wry look from under half-lowered lids. "Well, unlike you, big sister, I haven't acquired that aura of success that would make a salesman take me seriously."

  "Good point," she said briskly, annoyed by that taunting gaze. "So I'll give you a couple of tips. A haircut would help. So would a shirt that actually had sleeves. Tank tops won't cut it in the real world." She regarded the skull and crossbones tattooed on his pale arm with obvious distaste.

  Snack registered the look and returned it with a disingenuous one. "What? You don't appreciate fine art? Here, watch the eye sockets move when I flex my biceps." He curled his lanky arm across his chest like a sleepy bodybuilder.

  Laura said, "Very nice."

  "It has a—how would you say?—kinetic quality, don't you think?" he asked.

  " 'Kinetic'? Have you been playing with alphabet blocks again?"

  "Ooh ... mean," he said with cheerful relish.

  "Thank you. I try."

  Impulsively, he grinned and said, "Just like old times, hey?"

  That was the hell of Snack Shore: he was smart, articulate, self-taught—and still enjoyed nothing better than acting like an aborigine being dragged kicking and screaming out of the forest. He used to do it out of self-defense, because most of Chepaquit treated not just him, but all of them, like inbred bumpkins. They were kin of stupid Uncle Norbert, after all.

  But Snack wasn't a kid anymore, and his act was getting stale. Laura said wearily, "Just get dressed and come downstairs, would you?"

  "I will do that. Now leave, I pray you, and let me conduct my toilette in peace."

  ****

  Snack's toilette must have been pretty basic. He showed up at the table unshaven, unkempt, and uncombed. Laura caught a whiff of heavily applied deodorant: camouflage, barely.

  "No shower?" she inquired sweetly.

  "Why bother?" he said, tugging Corinne's ponytail in greeting as he passed. He pulled out a chair. "I'll just sweat, anyway. I can catch a shower later."

  "Three eggs or four, Snack?"

  "Four, please. I'm not called Snack for nothing. Any coffee left?"

  "I'm way ahead of you," said Corinne, setting a mug in front of him. "Black and strong and French with a touch of chicory, just the way you like it."

  "Your servant, mademoiselle," he said, dropping a kiss on the inside of her wrist.

  Corinne giggled and whacked him lightly across the shoulder. "I've missed you, dope," she confessed, and she began expertly cracking eggs into an ancient cast-iron pan.

  He was the Snack of old: charming, amusing; bilingual. He'd spent an enti
re summer on the canals of France as the improbable result of a cultural exchange program—a flukey, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that their timid mother had insisted he seize. Laura and Corinne had been forced to fill in for him at the nursery for the entire summer. Amazingly to her, Laura resented it still; her command of conversational French had come from a Berlitz tape.

  He took a pack of unfiltered cigarettes from his T-shirt pocket and began knocking one loose. So French. So irritating.

  "Do you have to smoke at the table?" she asked.

  He took out a Bic and lit up. "Mm-hmm. Why do you ask?"

  "I'm allergic."

  "Since when?"

  "Since I waitressed at a bar for six years while I put myself through school."

  Snack rolled his eyes. "Open a window."

  "Play nice, you two," Corinne interrupted with a nervous smile. "Or it's going to be a long month. Snack, please put that out."

  Snack took a long drag, held it, and blew the smoke toward the ceiling fixture overhead. And then he stubbed the cigarette into the lid of the open jelly jar. He cocked one eyebrow at Laura. "Happy?"

  "I've been happier," Laura said, waving away the smoke.

  "You wouldn't know happy if you tripped and fell into a vat of it."

  Bristling, Laura said, "It might interest you to know that I'm the picture of contentment back in Portland."

  "You're wrong. It doesn't interest me at all."

  "Stop! Stop it, both of you!"

  Corinne was standing behind their mother's chair at one end of the table, balancing a plate of food in each hand. "Laura, you know Snack likes to tease. Why are you letting him get to you? Really, I'm just so surprised at you."

  She slapped one plate down in front of Laura, a much fuller one in front of her brother, then said, "Have I forgotten—? Oh, right: ketchup for the hash browns." She took a bottle out from the fridge and handed it to her brother, then turned her attention back to Laura. "You okay?"

  "I'm fine."

  "Well ... good," Corinne said hesitantly. She fetched her own plate of overfried eggs and made a production of buttering her English muffin to cover the awkwardness of the moment.

  Meanwhile, Laura was left to wonder why on earth she was so determined to bite off her brother's head. True, she'd been under a ridiculous amount of pressure in her job, and the assignment she'd just completed had been a brutal, nonstop grind. And, true, the downtime she had booked for Max and her in Hawaii had just been preempted by, oh, Max breaking off their engagement. And replaced by a month of slave labor.

  In—as Snack would say—fricking Chepaquit.

  "I'm sorry," she said stiffly. "When I'm here, I guess I revert. Anyway, let's talk about something more productive, like today's work list."

  Because for God's sake—she was the most well-adjusted of the bunch!

  Snack, who had been watching her in uncharacteristic silence, turned from her to Corinne. "Where's the Deere, by the way? Please don't tell me Dad sold it."

  "No, no, it's in the garage. Something's wrong with it, though; it overheats. In fact, that's where Dad was, about to check it out, when he ... um ..."

  Tears began to roll down her cheeks, and she began biting her lip, trying to stop them. It sent Laura into a panic: the one thing she was not prepared to deal with was an uncontrolled outflow of emotion.

  She put down her fork. "Honey, don't," she said softly, reaching over to stroke her sister's hair. "This will sound heartless, but—we don't have the time. If we start traveling down the road you're going, we'll all become paralyzed with emotion, all kinds of emotion. If that's what you want, then ... fine. We can sit around and try to come to terms with what Dad's death means to each of us. It won't be pretty. But if you're serious about turning this place around, and if sales this spring are really off to such a miserable start—"

  "Then we have to get going," Corinne said through her sniffles. "I know." She blew her nose in her napkin and threw her shoulders back. "Everyone, eat. You'll need your strength."

  Chapter 5

  Laura's borrowed pants kept sliding down, and she considered going back to the house to change. But she was spending most of her time in the main greenhouse on her knees, groping under long tables for forgotten pots of perennials. Corinne's roomy, thick Levi's were a lot more suited to the task than her own clingy designer jeans.

  Baggy Levi's it would have to be. She snugged the makeshift rope belt a little more tightly around her waist and got back to work.

  The work list had chores enough for a year and a month, but its top two priorities were obvious: in order to try to survive, they had to have something to sell, and in order to have something to sell, they had to have a tractor to schlep it around in.

  So Snack was in the garage, tinkering with the overheating John Deere, and Corinne was in the greenhouse down by the shop, primping the annuals for the fast-approaching Founders Week sale.

  As for Laura, she had spent the morning crawling around in the oldest, most decrepit of the greenhouses, sorting out the perennials, most of which were dead. With so many glass panes broken or missing, all it had taken was one vicious cold spell to blast and then wither the more tender plants.

  "Of course, it would help if some of these things had labels," she muttered, pulling out pot after pot from under the bottom shelf of one of the nicked and worn tables.

  She studied several one-gallon pots that held—what? Who knew? The delicate, pale green shoots sprouting in them were undoubtedly weeds that had taken seed there. She poked through the pots gingerly, looking for established roots or rhizomes of some sort, but she came up empty. Into the wheelbarrow they went, headed with the others for the compost pile.

  Cross off three more sales of something or other.

  She felt as if she were working in a parallel universe. Back in Portland, she liked nothing more than to escape for a couple of hours in her garden, a vibrant, thriving world of color and fragrance. A single dandelion had her pouncing. But this! The sense of neglect and decay was not only wide but deep. Laura could smell it, she could practically feel it in her bones as she crawled around on the dirt floor of the greenhouse, searching for living things.

  Could she have made the difference?

  It was a question she'd asked herself a dozen times since her arrival on the Cape the day before. Assuming that she had remained in Chepaquit and had thrown herself into Shore Gardens the way she'd immersed herself in her career as a software consultant—would the nursery now be as successful as her garden?

  Truthfully, she couldn't see how. Oliver Shore had been stubborn and tyrannical in the extreme, clinging to the old ways of doing business, ignoring the evidence all around him that some of those ways were obsolete. He had listened to no one's advice; in fact, he'd taken every suggestion as a personal affront. In his mind, "change" was a dirty word, and he'd been willing and able to wash out the mouth of anyone who dared use it in a sentence.

  Basically, Laura had had the choice of staying and having her tongue taste like Lava soap for the rest of her days, or of following her own star. She had no regrets.

  Almost no regrets, anyway. She had removed herself from a life of which her mother and her sister were a well-loved part, and nothing would give her those missing years back. That realization would hurt forever.

  But as for leaving the rest of Chepaquit behind? No. No regrets at all.

  She plunged through some sticky cobwebs and pulled out half a dozen more pots from their hiding places.

  Labels! Hooray! And growth!

  "Ah, nuts." The plants were penstemon, short-lived and a tender variety in any case. And forget about the cupid's dart. Goners for sure. The growth was simply more weeds.

  Discouraged, she sat back on her calves and calculated the absurd amount of time she was taking to salvage maybe twenty percent of the greenhouse's contents. Cost-effective, it wasn't.

  She was about to crawl on when she caught a glimpse of a small, glimmering object lying in the dirt behind whe
re the pots had been, a bracelet of some sort. She reached far under and pulled it out: it was a plain Timex wristwatch with an expandable and now rusted band. One of the band's pins had pulled out of the watch.

  She shook it for no real reason... maybe to see if it would work. Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin', isn't that how the ads used to go? But the second hand wasn't interested in waking up from what had to have been a pretty long nap, judging from the rust.

  Hers? Her sister's? They'd both owned Timexes in their days. It didn't look familiar, although it was definitely the kind of rugged watch, a man's watch, that either one of them would wear at work. It wasn't her mother's: Alice Shore had never cared to keep track of how fast her life was ticking out from under her.

  Laura knocked the timepiece against her thigh to free it of dirt and then tucked it in her pocket to show to Snack and Corinne. Getting to her feet a little stiffly, she stretched her now-aching back. With an effort, she began pushing the laden wheelbarrow through the greenhouse, emerging outside at a compost pile that was filled with years of the nursery's failures and becoming more mountainous with every trip. By the time she finished emptying all of the pots onto the side of the dirt mountain, it was noon.

  Thank God.

  In bright sunshine, she retraced the worn, familiar path from greenhouse to the main house. The pleasant warmth of the morning was less pleasant now, with a salty, sticky edge to it that was nothing like Portland's somehow more bearable dampness.

  Gonna be a hot one, she found herself thinking.

  Too hot, surely, for the neighbor she saw approaching the house carrying a large casserole in her hands and walking with halting steps.

  "Miss Widdich, let me," said Laura, rushing to help.

  "It's just that my cane is in the car," said the gray-haired spinster, turning carefully and nodding toward the big black Ford that she'd parked in front of the house. "So I'm a little unsteady on my pins."