June Read online

  “It’s not a rat, is it?” Cassie asked coolly.

  Hank shrieked and dropped the wad into the garbage can. Cassie leaned over it and raised an eyebrow. It was a piece of rusted steel wool; she’d known that all along. “Nah, not big enough.”

  Tate tittered. Hank scowled. Cassie beamed.

  The espresso announced its arrival with a tapered tinkle. Hank attended to it, bringing the hot nectar to Cassie’s right hand as though there was nothing she’d rather do in the whole wide world. It wasn’t the worst thing to have a personal chef / housecleaner / errand girl at your beck and call, even if the food was mostly low-carb and practically vegan, and you risked permanent blindness from the wattage of her overused smile. Cassie thought of last night’s dinner—the red peppers stuffed with a mixture of quinoa and spices, the homemade baba ghanoush and hand-ground flaxseed crackers—and she smiled apologetically at Hank.

  Hank abruptly clapped her hands together. “Whole Foods delivered at six a.m.!”

  “I thought you went to Pantry Pride yesterday,” Cassie said, thinking of the many bags Hank had been unloading onto the kitchen table when Cassie and Nick had returned from Mr. Abernathy’s. There wasn’t a Whole Foods for at least a hundred miles; Cassie wondered about the cost of the delivery alone.

  “Pantry Pride is great for basics,” Hank said with her signature nose crinkle. “But it just doesn’t carry the kind of selection we’re used to. We needed specialty items—quinoa flour, baby kale, heritage grains. And of course we mostly eat organic.” Her pert little shoulders shuddered in a delighted shiver. “I can’t wait to make you my tofu loaf.” She practically skipped out to the pantry, and, just like that, Cassie was back to wanting her dead.

  Tate returned to the Deepak Chopra, pulling her glasses down to the bridge of her button nose. She looked mussed, morning-like, but nothing like a real person actually looks first thing. Cassie took a sip of the espresso and nearly fainted; she hadn’t tasted anything so good in months. She wondered how long her pride would win out over asking Hank to make her breakfast.

  Hank reemerged with two Whole Foods bags filled to the brim and disappeared for another load. June would be appalled to see Cassie sipping a hot beverage while Hank worked alone. So Cassie contritely followed Hank through the pantry and into the dining room.

  The morning light pressed rainbows through the clear, beveled glass that was set into the dining room’s back door. A dozen paper bags lined the mahogany table. Nick had been in there on the phone, but now he was leaving, heading into the foyer, without a glance back. Apparently he was avoiding her today.

  Cassie went to lift one of the bags.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Hank said.

  “I’m happy to help.”

  Hank shook her head, trying to take the bag Cassie was lifting. She reminded Cassie of a child grabbing for a toy. “It’s my job.” These people were obsessed.

  Cassie followed Hank back into the kitchen bearing a hard-won bag filled with more kale than she had eaten in the last ten years. She set it on the counter. The kitchen looked as it had before her parents’ accident, before the house had gotten lonely; spick-and-span in a country way that Cassie had never been able to achieve on her own. She opened the refrigerator, already, to her eyes, full, save for the bottom left crisper drawer, which held a Ziploc of film cartridges. She held them up and waved them at Hank, back with another load. “I’ll get these out of your way.”

  Just then, Hank tripped, spilling half her bag—plums, avocados, apples—across the kitchen floor. Cassie rushed to help her, but Tate sighed, wiggled her manicured toes in their flip-flops, and waved Cassie away. To Hank, she said, “We’ll get out of your hair so you can whip up those blueberry quinoa pancakes you promised.”

  “Ready in twenty!” Hank called from her hands and knees as they headed into the servant hallway and out to the foyer. Did Cassie imagine a touch of desperation in her voice?

  In the hallway, Tate turned to Cassie and rolled her eyes. “She can be so intense.” Cassie nodded in annoyed agreement, even though she wondered, Wasn’t Tate mostly the reason Hank was like that? The poor girl hadn’t meant to spill the produce on the floor. But then, it was Hank’s job; Hank herself had been eager to point that out.

  In the front parlor, Nick was off the phone. “Well, she said yes.” But he didn’t look particularly happy about the news.

  Tate replied crisply, “Damn right she said yes.”

  “Who said yes?” Cassie asked.

  Nick smiled at her, a brief, perfunctory smile, as though she was a stop sign or a pair of pants, something neutral and inorganic. She decided she was going to walk away from him first, as soon as she found out what they were talking about.

  Tate gestured to the couch, but Cassie crossed her arms and held her ground.

  “You said you wanted answers…” Tate began.

  “And Jack’s papers will definitely be here today,” Nick said, all business to Tate. “They apologized for the delay…”

  “But the truth is it sounds like you struck out with the older generation. And Hank and I went through the house yesterday and found very little. And the lawyers have already been through Daddy’s papers once. I don’t imagine we’ll find anything new…”

  “And given”—Nick cleared his throat—“that you’ve made it clear you refuse to relinquish your DNA until we’ve turned over every rock, and given that we, each of us, have lives that cannot be permanently put on hold”—everything about Nick that Cassie had found appealing seemed to disappear as he talked in this snippy, businessy voice; she had half a mind to slap his cheeks to try to rouse the real Nick in there, sputtering for breath—“well, I believe it best to cover our bases.”

  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 shrugge
d, 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.