Juno's Daughters (9 page)

As girls, the best Jenny and Sue could muster was tolerance. At worst, they fought. In the pacifist, nuclear-power-no-thank-you days after leaving home Jenny preferred to pretend that the hair-pulling and shoving parts of their fights never happened. Sue, however, with her French-manicured fingernails and perfectly applied Estée Lauder makeup, was not above claiming over a glass of Chardonnay that she could still kick Jenny's butt if it came to it. Jenny beat the weft with the shuttle, drew it across the warp, and beat it again.

By lunchtime Jenny had sold two fifty-dollar hand-painted canoe paddles, new but made to look old by an island resident who claimed to have a sliver of Skagit in his otherwise German background, and a genuinely antique silver tea set. She popped a sign on the door and headed out to pick up some lunch. It was warm enough to walk down to the market in just her tank top. There was couscous salad on special, one of her favorites. She lingered at the counter deciding whether or not she wanted a roll. In the end she grabbed her carton without the roll but with a boysenberry soda sweating in her hand. The cashier offered her a bag, which she politely refused, and a fork, which she accepted. She turned toward the sun and headed straight through the door into Trinculo.

“Oh, shoot. Sorry. Did I . . .”

“No. Ooops. I . . .”

They looked into each other's eyes and laughed.

Trinculo was wearing khaki shorts with lots of pockets and a T-shirt that said,
Save the Drama for Your Mama
. Jenny looked at his shirt and then at his face.

“It's from a show I was in, it . . .”

She stepped out of his way. “Going shopping?”

He glanced at the carton and soda in her hand. “Can I join you for lunch? Or did you want to be alone?”

Jenny was often alone, but she rarely wanted to be. She uncapped her soda and took a swig. “I'll wait here.”

They walked down the hill toward the harbor and sat on a bench near the turnaround. The gulls started circling before they had even unwrapped their food.

Trinculo regarded his cheese sandwich. “I owe you an apology after the other night. It was so stupid to gobble up those brownies without thinking.” He looked up sheepishly. “Apparently, green toothpicks are the universal signal for
proceed at your own risk
.” He grimaced at the memory. “I'm here to play the fool, I know, but I hadn't planned to make a fool of myself before the rehearsals even started.”

Jenny touched the back of his hand. “If anyone should apologize, it's Lilly.”

“Lilly?” He looked momentarily perplexed.

Jenny scooped a bite of couscous into her mouth and waved her fork to signal lots of hair.

“Oh.
That
Lilly.” Trinculo's eyes widened. “The gorgeous girl with the dreads. Man, the word
TROUBLE
flashes in neon over her head. You people on this island have your hands full with Lilly, I imagine. People in
Seattle
would have their hands full with Lilly.”

Jenny swallowed. She allowed her eyes to follow a family with two little children exiting the ice cream store down by the ferry slip. The smaller child, a boy of about three, took a forceful lick of his ice cream and sent the ball rolling off the ledge of the cone to the pavement. She blinked her eyes shut before his look of outrage turned to tears.

“What? What did I say?”

Jenny found her throat was a bit parched and took another swig. She smiled her most understanding smile. “Lilly is my daughter. And she
is
a handful, truly.”

“She's your
daughter
?”

Trinculo brought both his hands up and pushed them through his hair in distress, smearing mayonnaise on one eyebrow. “I can't believe . . . Well, I should have known, really. I mean, you're both gorgeous and . . .” He looked at her in such panic that she couldn't help but burst out laughing. Still, she wondered if something more than the partial transfer of a temporary tattoo might have occurred that night.

“It wasn't,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “I mean, we didn't . . .”

Jenny held her finger to his lips. “Shhh. It's okay. I seem to recall that you were not completely of sound mind.”

Trinculo covered her hand with his. She gave it a gentle tug, but he resisted letting it go.

“I should tell you, however, that she's seventeen.”

“Oh, geez.” He dropped her hand and reeled back against the bench as if he had been staked through the heart.

Jenny pressed the plastic lid back on the top of her salad and eyed Trinculo with a thoughtful tilt of the head. Life as the mother of two teenage girls often seemed to call for the pantomime looks of slack-jawed surprise and elaborate double takes that he made so naturally. Too bad he was only on the island for the summer.

Jenny held the phone against her ear with her right shoulder and began braiding a chunk of the long black hair that fell forward into her face. She could picture the ring bouncing off the granite countertops and recessed lighting in her sister's kitchen and echoing through the large family room with its energy-efficient windows and view of Mount Tamalpais.

“Hello?” Sue finally answered.

Jenny sat up straight, letting her braid fall and unravel. “Hi. I hear you called.”

“I call all the time, Jen. Thank
you
for calling back.” Her tone was light and teasing, but her point was taken.

“Hey, thanks again for the laptop you sent Lilly for graduation. She really wanted her own computer.”

“Ed and I were very happy to do it. She's a bright girl, our Lilly.”

Jenny felt a rush of warmth hearing her sister describe her child as “our Lilly.” She pictured that good feeling as a deer trail she could follow in the conversation, one that would lead them both to friendly, neutral ground.

“I hear Walter is doing great at Stanford,” said Jenny. “And Katie is applying where? Oberlin?”

“She hasn't decided yet. We're going to go look at a couple of schools this fall. She still has another year.”

“Right. She's a junior.”

Katie was on the plump side with unruly curls and a gravelly voice that made her sound like a woman with a two-pack-a-day habit. Sue and her family had visited Jenny one summer when Katie and Lilly were about eight. They had rented a vacation house on the east side of the island, and upon visiting Jenny and the girls in their cabin, Katie had tugged on her mother's shirt and whispered audibly in her ear, “Where's the rest of the house?”

Jenny had been embarrassed but oddly satisfied, too. Unlike Katie, her girls would never take a roof over their heads for granted.

Sue cleared her throat. “Lilly should really be in school this fall, Jenny. Don't you think?”

A motorcycle revved its engine near the back window of the shop and Jenny's mind followed its fading growl around the corner. “I don't think it's a bad idea for her to work for a year or so,” she said. “It might help her get a better sense of herself.”

“Oh, Jenny.” Sue sighed, and as she did she sounded exactly like their mother used to when Jenny was a teenager.
Oh, Jenny, don't you want to do something this afternoon besides listen to rock music? Oh, Jenny, that outfit makes you look like a foundling. Oh, Jenny, is a C in English really the best you can do?

What was left of lunch twisted in Jenny's stomach. She poked at her fingernails with an unbent paperclip and braced herself for the criticism to come.

“Of all people,” continued Sue, “you should know how hard it is to go back to school once you stop.”

No one in Jenny's family had approved of her dropping out of college after her sophomore year, and in spite of her promises she'd never gone back, just as they'd all predicted. Nor could she convincingly argue,
Well look at me, I've done all right
. Not as long as she bought her rice and beans in bulk and drove a truck that you could hear coming from half a mile away.

“This is a good place for my girls,” she said, as firmly as she could. “They have friends here. It's beautiful. It's clean.” She was unaccountably near tears and wondered if her sister could tell. “It's safe.”

“I know how important safety is to you, Jen,” said Sue in a gentle voice. “But think of Lilly. She's
seventeen years old
. She needs opportunities. Challenges. Ideas.”

“The College of Marin isn't exactly Harvard, from what I understand,” said Jenny. She sounded way too much like Lilly herself for her own peace of mind.

“Did she apply anywhere else?”

Neither of them spoke for a few moments after that. Of course Jenny had gone through the college brochures that Lilly had brought home during her junior and senior years, first with Lilly and then later, alone at the kitchen table late at night. She had even offered to help Lilly with an application or two, though in the end Lilly had not asked and Jenny had not followed up. The colleges that Lilly liked, with their tree-shaded quads and big brick student unions, were all so far away. And so very expensive.

The clock tapped against the quiet in the store, and outside the window, the wind rustled the trees. The inter-island ferry, chugging in from Shaw, let out a long, wavering blast of its horn.

“She'd stay with you, then?” asked Jenny at long last. “In your house?”

“Walter said she could have his room.”

Jenny ran her fingers through her hair. “I don't know, Sue. I think it might be too soon.”

“Too soon for you, maybe, but for Lilly . . .” As usual, Sue pushed just a little too far.

“Well, she's not going anywhere before July, that's for sure,” said Jenny. “We're all going to be in the Props to You version of
The Tempest
.”

“So I heard.” Sue's voice, too, had snapped back into its combative range. The deer trail had vanished and now, damn it all, they were in the thicket. “Lilly seems quite taken with one of the actors. A grown man, I gather.”

Jenny twisted a chunk of her hair around a finger and her gaze drifted out the window to the bench by the harbor.

Trinculo had walked her to the door of the shop after lunch. They stood there in the bright sun, smiling, each of them reluctant to say good-bye. With each of her most recent boyfriends, Jenny had felt warmth and desire, but at the end of the day she had still felt like, well, Jenny. Trinculo shifted from foot to foot with his hands in his pockets, and for a brief second, glimpsing herself through his eyes, she had almost been able to see Juno.

Jenny adjusted the phone at her ear. “Lilly's quite taken with everyone,” she said. The bell on the front door rang and Jenny nodded to Mary Ann, who was making her way to the back. “Look, I have to get going. We can talk about this later, okay?”

“Okay. Love you.”

“You, too.”

“Big sis?” asked Mary Ann. She slung her bag over the back of the chair and handed Jenny her alpaca shawl.

“That obvious?”

“Mmmm. Oh, hey, I think I saw Frankie down the street by the ferry landing.”

“With Phoenix?”

“By herself. I'm not sure, though. But I think it was her. See you later?”

Jenny walked down the hill toward the harbor until she saw her daughter pacing on the corner of A Street and Nichols. It wasn't just the fact that Frankie's hat was gone, or that she was running her fingers through her hair in the way that Jenny did when she was distressed or even that she was alone, as she so rarely had been all the years of her life. There had always been Phoenix by her side, or Lilly, or Jenny herself. It was the startling tautness in the way her body moved, a coiled-up anger and despair so at odds with the girl who filled the quills of scavenged eagle feathers with ink that made Jenny stop and stare.