A Place We Knew Well Read online

  A Place We Knew Well is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Susan Carol McCarthy

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division a Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  McCarthy, Susan Carol.

  A place we knew well: a novel / Susan McCarthy.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-0-8041-7654-5 (acid-free paper)

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-7655-2

  1. Families—United States—History—20th century—Fiction. 2. Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962—Fiction. 3. Life change events—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.C35P58 2015

  813'.6—dc23

  2014049123

  eBook ISBN 9780804176552

  www.bantamdell.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for eBook

  Cover design: Rachel Ake

  Cover photograph: © ILINA SIMEONOVA / Trevillion Images

  v4.1_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  10:47 a.m., Wednesday, March 11, 2009

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Susan Carol McCarthy

  About the Author

  As I wheel right into Dad’s driveway, a six-foot chain-link fence jumps up out of nowhere. I stomp on the brakes. My car heaves to a stop within inches of the padlocked gate.

  My hands, shoving the gearshift into park, switching off the ignition, are shaking. I rest my head against the wheel, my heart still skidding inside my chest. Stupid, stupid! I think, only now remembering Clem’s phone call two weeks ago. “DEP recommends it, Charlotte,” Dad’s attorney told me, asking my okay for the expense of the fence. “Plus, it’ll secure the property against vandals. Or vintage collectors looking for a five-finger discount.”

  But the sight of Dad’s station turned ENTRY RESTRICTED fortress, flanked by the tall fence lined with green sight-blocking screens, is still a shock.

  My entire life the busy corner of Princeton and the Trail was always wide open and welcoming, usually with Dad waving me in and striding out to hug me hello. Now, leaning over to retrieve the FedEx packet launched to the floor by my abrupt stop, I realize I’ve never felt so completely unwelcome here, or alone.

  After fishing out the keys—one marked GATE, the other marked STATION—I take a last look at Clement T. Grimes, Esquire’s extensive Property Inventory, then sidestep my way to the padlocked gate. “We already have inquiries from CVS and Walgreens,” Clem’s cover letter said, “and the Broker’s Open isn’t till Thursday.” This is the new Florida, I think, resentfully eyeing the Rite Aid across the street. Instead of a gas station, every busy intersection needs at least two competing drugstores.

  The shiny new Master Lock opens easily enough, but shoving the gate against a stubborn patch of weeds on the other side, I have just enough room to squeeze through.

  Oh, Dad, I sigh, dismayed by the view: the once gleaming white canopy and station front are desolate and dirt-streaked. The pumps and all the windows are dingy. I’m glad you’re not here to see how swiftly a lifetime of careful stewardship gives way to a few scant months of inattention.

  Left of the pumps, there’s an odd scattering of small dirt mounds. Suspecting gophers, I see instead they’re the geologist’s drill holes for the state’s mandated assessments of soil and groundwater, another in the seemingly endless number of hoops yet to be jumped.

  Moving quickly to the office door, I unlock it and stand still, relishing the lingering smells of petroleum, cigarettes, and strong coffee that, as long as I can remember, meant “Dad’s work.” The sight of his desk, the old cash register he refused to replace, and the small porcelain-on-tin sign on its back facing every customer who ever walked through the door tightens my throat. The desk and the register are empty, of course. Cal and Steve saw to that. Both service bays cleaned out as well.

  “The back room is a treasure chest,” Clem’s letter said. “Three different antiques dealers are salivating over the chance to sell whatever you don’t want of your father’s collection. You’re lucky he had the good sense to hang on to this stuff.”

  Flipping on the back room’s light, I have to laugh at the tin signs that line every available square foot of the walls and ceiling, most bearing the classic red-and-green Texaco star. I asked Dad once why he chose Texaco over the more popular Shell or Gulf Oil brands. “It was the star, Charlotte: same five-pointed star as on my air force uniform. To me, that star meant freedom…not just to fly and fight the enemy, but to come home, marry your mom, and build our American dream. Besides, I just couldn’t see myself running around with a seashell or an orange ball on my chest.”

  Me neither, Dad. I lift the latch on his locker and pull open its narrow, green metal door. Inside, a spare green uniform, cleaned and pressed, hangs next to his work jacket. I pull out the jacket and bury my face in it, rewarded by the fragrant mix of oil and Old Spice. Oh, Dad, for a while anyway, your American dream went exactly as planned. But then, when it didn’t, you made the best of things better than any of us. I slip on the jacket and trace the red embroidery on front that says simply WES.

  I poke around in search of the item listed on the Inventory as “1 floor safe, locked, contents unknown.” After a few minutes, I spot the disk-shaped dust cover in the floor. Dropping to my knees, I lift the protective cover easily enough, but the combination dial atop the sunken cylindrical safe looks rusty and corroded. “We never used it,” Cal told me. Over the phone, Steve added, “Not for years, but even then it was always your dad’s private place.”

  I stare at it a moment, remembering the start of seventh grade, coming home completely baffled by the shiny new black-and-silver lock that was supposed to secure my gym locker. “All combination locks work essentially the same way, Kitten,” Dad explained, patient as ever. “It’s a simple three-step process; the only hard part is coming up with a combination of three numbers you won’t forget.”

  Silently invoking Dad’s okay, I take a deep breath and reach in and force the dial left, slowly and with some difficulty, to “0.” Hoping my hunch is right, I twist the dial left again, three times around, and stop at “8.” With no idea whether I’ve guessed correctly, I turn the dial right, one full rotation, then stop at “3.” Almost there, I twist the dial right again and return directly to “3.” Beneath my fingers, I feel the lock disengage but, after several pulls, the safe door remains barely cracked.

  I sit back on my heels. The concrete floor is cold and hard, and my knees aren’t what they used to be. Who but Dad would stick with the same lucky number for sixty-plus years? Eight-three-three was Mom’s factory ID number during the war. “Without it, without your mother,” he’d insisted, “I’d have probably gone back to farming, spent my life trailing the north end of a southbound mule.” I doubted that. But Dad never did.

  Determined to find out what, if anything, Da
d left behind in his “private place,” I lean in, grasp the edge of the door, and yank it hard to open it. I put my hand into the hole and grasp the only thing there—a small brown leather pouch, zippered closed on top, and embossed on the front with the vaguely familiar logo of The State Bank of College Park, gobbled up by SunBank when I banked there in the 1970s, and morphed sometime later into today’s SunTrust.

  Has this been in there since the ’60s? Or did Dad just hold on to it the way he held on to so many other things?

  The pouch feels empty, but, steeling myself against disappointment, I open it anyway to be sure. Inside, the small white paper napkin with the black Steak ’n Shake logo (“In sight, it must be right!”) makes me smile. How many nights over how many years did my high school friends and I cruise the scene at “The Steak”? Way too many to count. But removing it from the pouch, I spot the handwritten note on the back—IOU for 4 Cokes 4 me & the twirls. XO, C!—and am jolted backward in time. It was my senior year, late October 1962, when after cruising The Steak I drove my friends here to the station, ostensibly to raid Dad’s Coke cooler, but specifically to show off Emilio to them. I shake my head against a sudden flood of memories. Not going there. Not today anyway.

  Three things remain in the pouch. A white palm-sized rectangle turns out to be a business card from Bayshore Realty in Tampa. KATHARINE AYRES, LICENSED AGENT. Oh, Lord. No wonder he buried this here instead of at home, or in their safe-deposit box at the bank, where Mom might have found it. On the back, in loopy feminine handwriting, I read, Call me at the Cherry Plaza, with the phone number of what was once Orlando’s ritziest hotel. “Oh, Dad,” I sigh. For the first time, I feel that invading his “private place” is a mistake.

  The final two items in the pouch are a complete surprise. A small, suede drawstring sack, like a boy’s marble bag, with an old, oddly broken screw inside. What’s that about? I have no idea. And…Dad’s dog tags? I wonder, fishing out the metal ball chain looped with two modest metal tags. Like others of his generation, Dad was mum on his World War II experiences. All he would say was, “The real heroes are the ones who didn’t make it home.” Moving the tags out of my shadow into the light, however, I’m stunned to see not Dad’s name, but mine. And not only my name, but my birth date, my blood type, and our old address and phone number on Bryn Mawr. Obviously, a specially ordered item, but one I’ve never laid eyes on until now. Why was that?

  My brain swims with questions. And my heart hurts with the thought that these things—the napkin, the business card, the marble bag, and the dog tags—are related somehow. Remnants of the same time, the same week even—that singular week, my senior year in high school, when each of us, and all of it, fell apart. What was I thinking, coming here, doing this, now? An unsettling sense of trespass and regret overwhelms me. Are there places in a person’s heart, in the private remnants of his life, where no one, no matter how loved, should presume to go?

  Gently, I put everything back into Dad’s leather pouch and return it to the safe. Slowly, I close the lid, spin the lock, and secure the outer door in the floor. Struggling stiffly to my feet, I eye Dad’s stars on the ceiling as I switch off the light and leave. At the front door, I turn for one last look around, then, impulsively, step back to the register and pry off the tin sign that was always there, always Dad’s favorite. Tears blur the words. Though, of course, I know them by heart. “Good-bye, Dad,” I whisper as I lock the station door for the last time.

  Outside, the sky is darkened by clouds heavy with rain. I run to the gate, hugging Dad’s jacket against the chill wind. Outside the fence, I padlock the gate and make it to my car just as the first stinging splats of rain begin to fall. I set Dad’s small sign—YOU CAN TRUST YOUR CAR TO THE MAN WHO WEARS THE STAR!—on the seat beside me, a comfort and a consolation against the long, wet ride home.

  Wes Avery stood at the back of the Plymouth wagon holstering the nozzle on the silver Sky Chief pump. He noted the amount, spun the gas cap closed, then turned to scan the traffic in the busy intersection where Princeton crossed the Trail. Still no sign of the parts truck from Holler Chevrolet or the special-order camshaft he’d been promised “by noon, Wes…one at the latest.” He pictured dragster Jimmy Cope’s hopeful face, convinced the new Crower cam would drop his quarter-mile ET from the low 13s to the high 12s in tonight’s “Run What Ya Brung” race at the Big O Speedway. Hope springs eternal, Avery was thinking, but…no part, no start.

  Just then a sharp, shrill scream sent him quick-stepping to the wagon’s rider-side window.

  The baby had startled awake with the kind of heart-piercing shriek that scares the bejeezus out of new parents and jerks even experienced ones alert with a worried “Now what?”

  Behind the wheel Marjorie Cook lunged sideways, hands outstretched, spilling the contents of her open purse everywhere.

  Pelted by a pair of shiny lipsticks and the pointy end of a rat-tail comb, the baby yelped even louder and bucked herself perilously close to the edge of the bench seat. Seeing what was bound to happen next, Avery ducked his head and thrust in his arm. Just as the child fell, face-first, toward the floorboard, he grasped a wad of pink shirttail and hauled her back up to safety. She was really squalling now. Her little arms and legs flailed every which way, as he handed her gently over to her mother.

  Marjorie’s face, pale and frozen a moment ago, flushed blotchy red with relief. “Oh, Mr. A!” she said, eyes wide with what-if.

  In the backseat, three-year-old Tommy squinched up his face, stuck his fingers in his ears, and cried, “Mommmmy, make her stop!”

  Beside him J.J., his barely older brother, snapped, “Shaddup, wouldya,” and launched a swift kick at Tommy’s sneakered foot.

  As little Tommy dissolved into howling outrage, J.J. retreated to his corner and met his mother’s over-the-shoulder glare—“You boys!”—with an innocent shrug. “I didn’t do nuthin’,” he insisted.

  The bald-faced lie launched his brother onto him with fists flying.

  “Tommy, stop that…now,” Marjorie hissed.

  Avery shifted his gaze, backseat to front, wondering, What the heck happened? Only minutes ago, the baby girl was sound asleep, the boys drowsing in the back. A sleeping cherub, he’d thought, cleaning the windshield: same blond curls and pink cheeks as her mother, same fairy dust of freckles as both her big brothers. But now the pink cherub was flaming red, tiny lips calibrating a frightened cry into a furious screech.

  “It’s okay, Lissie, you’re okay…,” Marjorie was saying when, abruptly, they both heard what the baby’s sensitive ears must have picked up ahead of them: the high, keening squeal and thunderous rumble of massive turbojet intake roaring into view.

  Avery raised his head to watch the two B-52 bombers, monstrous eight-engine Stratoforts from Orlando’s SAC base, climb into standard three-ship cell formation. Their companion, a huge KC-135 Stratotanker, lumbered behind, refueling boom at the rear retracted like a scorpion’s stinger at rest.

  Odd time for takeoff, he thought, as the air, the very ground beneath his feet, trembled under the combined jet power passing overhead. And poor Marjorie, as the engines’ roar set off another round of pained howls inside the car.

  Avery slid a practiced eye, courtesy of the United States Army Air Forces, over the second bomber’s sleek silver fuselage to the manned quad-fifty turret at its tail. Catching the shadowy shape of the tail-gunner there, he raised a commiserating hand. Normally, the big birds of the Strategic Air Command left mid-evening, carrying their heavy bombs in long figure-eight patterns east over the Atlantic, past Gibraltar to a tight turnaround just short of the Soviet border then back, with the help of in-flight refueling, around sunset the following day. Leaving now meant a long, late-night flight home over black water—which always upped the ante on a potential SNAFU.

  “Ohhhhhh…,” Marjorie bristled, “I’d like to throttle the guy schedules a gol-durn exercise during naptime!” She’d wrestled the baby to her shoulder. “There, there, Lissie,” she
murmured, patting the plump cloth-diapered behind. She blew a damp strand of hair out of her face and looked over the scattered mess of her purse. “My wallet,” she said, frowning, “it’s here somewhere.”

  Avery nodded sympathy. “Look…” He chucked his chin toward the groceries in the back. “Your ice cream’s melting, and so’s that little cupcake. I’ll make a note. You drop by later, anytime tomorrow; we’ll settle up then.”

  Marjorie resisted, at first—“Oh no, I’ll just…”—but he waited while she worked out the logic: If she left right now and put the kids straight to bed, she’d have time to take in the groceries, repack her purse, maybe put in a load of laundry before they were up again clamoring for Adventures with Uncle Walt.

  He shot a wink at the two boys in the backseat, sullen and sulking in their respective corners. Some other day he’d tell them that smiling, mustachioed Walt Sickles—WDBO-TV’s popular Uncle Walt—lived just up the road in Lockhart and was a regular customer, same as them.

  Resolved, Marjorie fired the ignition. “Thank you,” she called over the baby’s blubbering. “You’re a peach!”

  Avery acknowledged the compliment with a modest show of both palms. He stepped back to wave her off, but his hand dropped midair at the shimmy in her left rear tire. He’d have to check that when she returned.

  “Ready?”

  Steve stood in the office doorway holding up their lunch pails. Avery nodded and, with another quick glance at the traffic, strode inside. On a small pad, he wrote Marjorie’s name and $5.58 gas debt—Marjorie Cook she was now, he reminded himself, not Franklin as she’d been in high school. He added Ck. Rr. Shimmy, then punched open the cash drawer and slipped the note into the twenties slot.

  Steve put their pails on the desk beside the chessboard he’d retrieved from the bottom drawer. As Avery took the swivel chair, long legs stretched out to the side, Steve sat down opposite on the station stool.