Nicole Peeler - [Jane True 01]

CHAPTER ONE

I
eyeballed the freezer, trying to decide what to cook for dinner that night.
Such a decision was no mean feat, since a visiting stranger might assume that
Martha Stewart not only lived with us but was preparing for the apocalypse.
Frozen lasagnas, casseroles, pot pies, and the like filled our icebox nearly to
the brim. Finally deciding on fish chowder, I took out some haddock and
mussels. After a brief, internal struggle, I grabbed some salmon to make extra
soup to—you guessed it—freeze. Yeah, the stockpiling was more than a little
OCD, but it made me feel better. It also meant that when I actually had something
to do for the entire evening, I could leave my dad by himself without feeling
too guilty about it.

My dad wasn’t an invalid—not exactly. But he had a bad heart and needed
help taking care of things, especially with my mother gone. So I took up the
slack, which I was happy to do. It’s not like I had much else on my plate, what
with being the village pariah and all.

It’s amazing how being a pariah gives you ample amounts of free time.

After putting in the laundry and cleaning the downstairs bathroom, I
went upstairs to take a shower. I would have loved to walk around all day with
the sea salt on my skin, but not even in Rockabill was Eau de Brine an
acceptable perfume. Like many twentysomethings, I’d woken up early that day to
go exercise. Unlike most twenty-somethings, however, my morning exercise took
the form of an hour or so long swim in the freezing ocean. And in one of
America’s deadliest whirlpools. Which is why I am so careful to keep the
swimming on the DL. It might be a great cardio workout, but it probably would
get me burned at the stake. This is New England, after all.

As I got dressed in my work clothes—khaki chinos and a long-sleeved pink
polo-style shirt with
Read It and Weep
embroidered in navy blue over the
breast pocket—I heard my father emerge from his bedroom and clomp down the
stairs. His job in the morning was to make the coffee, so I took a moment to
apply a little mascara, blush, and some lip gloss, before brushing out my damp
black hair. I kept it cut in a much longer—and admittedly more unkempt—version
of Cleopatra’s style because I liked to hide my dark eyes under my long bangs.
Most recently, my nemesis, Stuart Gray, had referred to them as “demon eyes.”
They’re not as Marilyn Manson as that, thank you very much, but even I had to
admit to difficulty determining where my pupil ended and my iris began.

I went back downstairs to join my dad in the kitchen, and I felt that
pang in my heart that I get sometimes when I’m struck by how he’s changed. He’d
been a fisherman, but he’d had to retire about ten years ago, on disability,
when his heart condition worsened. Once a handsome, confident, and brawny man
whose presence filled any space he entered, his long illness and my mother’s
disappearance had diminished him in every possible way. He looked so small and
gray in his faded old bathrobe, his hands trembling from the anti-arrhythmics
he takes for his screwed-up heart, that it took every ounce of self-control I
had not to make him sit down and rest. Even if his body didn’t agree, he still
felt himself to be the man he had been, and I knew I already walked a thin line
between caring for him and treading on his dignity. So I put on my widest smile
and bustled into the kitchen, as if we were a father and daughter in some
sitcom set in the 1950s.

“Good morning, Daddy!” I beamed.

“Morning, honey. Want some coffee?” He asked me that question every
morning, even though the answer had been yes since I was fifteen.

“Sure, thanks. Did you sleep all right?”

“Oh, yes. And you? How was your morning?” My dad never asked me directly
about the swimming. It’s a question that lay under the auspices of the “don’t
ask, don’t tell” policy that ruled our household. For example, he didn’t ask me
about my swimming, I didn’t ask him about my mother. He didn’t ask me about
Jason, I didn’t ask him about my mother. He didn’t ask me whether or not I was
happy in Rockabill, I didn’t ask him about my mother…

“Oh, I slept fine, Dad. Thanks.” Of course I hadn’t, really, as I only
needed about four hours of sleep a night. But that’s another thing we never
talked about.

He asked me about my plans for the day, while I made us a breakfast of
scrambled eggs on whole wheat toast. I told him that I’d be working till six,
then I’d go to the grocery store on the way home. So, as usual for a Monday,
I’d take the car to work. We performed pretty much the exact same routine every
week, but it was nice of him to act like it was possible I might have new and
exciting plans. On Mondays, I didn’t have to worry about him eating lunch, as
Trevor McKinley picked him up to go play a few hours of cheeky lunchtime poker
with George Varga, Louis Finch, and Joe Covelli. They’re all natives of
Rockabill and friends since childhood, except for Joe, who moved here to Maine
about twenty years ago to open up our local garage. That’s how things were
around Rockabill. For the winter, when the tourists were mostly absent, the
town was populated by natives who grew up together and were more intimately
acquainted with each other’s dirty laundry than their own hampers. Some people
enjoyed that intimacy. But when you were more usually the object of the
whispers than the subject, intimacy had a tendency to feel like persecution.

We ate while we shared our local paper,
The Light House News
. But
because the paper mostly functioned as a vehicle for advertising things to
tourists, and the tourists were gone for the season, the pickings were scarce.
Yet we went through the motions anyway. For all of our sins, no one could say
that the True family wasn’t good at going through the motions. After breakfast,
I doled out my father’s copious pills and set them next to his orange juice. He
flashed me his charming smile, which was the only thing left unchanged after
the ravages to his health and his heart.

“Thank you, Jane,” he said. And I knew he meant it, despite the fact
that I’d set his pills down next to his orange juice every single morning for
the past twelve years.

I gulped down a knot in my throat, since I knew that no small share of
his worry and grief was due to me, and kissed him on the cheek. Then I bustled
around clearing away breakfast, and bustled around getting my stuff together,
and bustled out the door to get to work. In my experience, bustling is always a
great way to keep from crying.

Tracy Gregory, the owner of Read It and Weep, was already hard at work
when I walked in the front door. The Gregorys were an old fishing family from
Rockabill, and Tracy was their prodigal daughter. She had left to work in Los
Angeles, where she had apparently been a successful movie stylist. I say
apparently because she never told us the names of any of the movies she’d
worked on. She’d only moved back to Rockabill about five years ago to open Read
It and Weep, which was our local bookstore, café, and all-around tourist trap.
Since tourism replaced fishing as our major industry, Rockabill can just about
support an all-year-round enterprise like Read It and Weep. But other things,
like the nicer restaurant—rather unfortunately named The Pig Out Bar and
Grill—close for the winter.

“Hey girl,” she said, gruffly, as I locked the door behind me. We didn’t
open for another half hour.

“Hey Tracy. Grizelda back?”

Grizelda was Tracy’s girlfriend, and they’d caused quite a stir when
they first appeared in Rockabill together. Not only were they lesbians, but
they were as fabulously lesbionic as the inhabitants of a tiny village in Maine
could ever imagine. Tracy carried herself like a rugby player, and dressed like
one, too. But she had an easygoing charisma that got her through the initial
gender panic triggered by her reentry into Rockabill society.