The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (39 page)

“Jesse has an apartment?” Fiona asked Ira.

“Why, yes.”

Maggie measured in baking powder, salt, and pepper.

“An apartment away from here?”

“Up on Calvert Street.”

Fiona thought that over.

Maggie said, “Here’s something I always wanted to ask you, Fiona!” Her voice had somehow taken on that chirpy tone again. “Remember just a few months after you left?” she asked. “When Jesse phoned you and said you’d phoned him first and you said you hadn’t? Well, had you, or hadn’t you? Was it you who phoned our house and I said, ‘Fiona?’ and you hung up?”

“Oh, goodness …” Fiona said vaguely.

“I mean it had to be, or why else would the person hang up when I said your name?”

“I really don’t recollect,” Fiona said, and then she reached for her purse and rose. Walking in an airy, aimless way, as if she hardly noticed she was leaving, she wandered out of the kitchen, calling, “Leroy? Where’d you get to?”

“See there?” Maggie told Ira.

“Hmm?”

“It was her. I knew it all along.”

“She didn’t say it was.”

“Oh, Ira, you are so obtuse sometimes,” she said.

She closed the brown paper bag and shook it, mixing the seasonings. You can’t have things both ways, she should have told Fiona. You can’t laugh at him for staying the same and also object when he changes. Why, of course he had moved! Did Fiona imagine he had sat here waiting for her all these years?

And yet Maggie knew how she felt, somehow. You have this picture of a person; you have him tucked away in your mind in this certain fixed position.

She looked again at the band photo on the table. They had all been so enthusiastic once, she thought. So much energy had been invested. She remembered those early rehearsals in Lorimer’s parents’ garage, and the months and months when they’d been thrilled to perform for free, even, and the night that Jesse had come home triumphantly waving a ten-dollar bill—his share of their first paycheck.

“Is that Daisy?” Ira asked.

“What?”

“I thought I heard the front door.”

“Oh!” Maggie said. “Maybe it’s Jesse.”

“Don’t count on it,” he told her.

But only Jesse would sling the door back against the bookcase that way. Maggie dusted off her hands. “Jesse?” she called.

“Here I am.”

She hurried out to the hall, and Ira followed more slowly. Jesse stood just inside the door. He was looking toward the living room, where Leroy was poised like some startled small animal with her hands pressed together in front of her and one foot drawn up behind her. Jesse said, “Well, hi.”

“Hi,” Leroy said.

“How’re you doing?”

“I’m okay.”

He looked over at Maggie. Maggie said, “Hasn’t she grown?”

His long black eyes returned to Leroy.

Now Maggie moved toward him, willing him further into the house. (He always seemed on the verge of leaving.) She took his arm and said, “I’m frying up some chicken; it’ll be a few more minutes. You two can sit in here and get acquainted.”

But he had never been easily led. He was wearing a knitted jersey, and beneath the thin cloth she felt his resistance—the steely muscle above his elbow. His boots remained rooted to the floor. He was going to take his own sweet time at this.

“So what’re you listening to?” he asked Leroy.

“Oh, just some record.”

“You a Dead fan?”

“Dead? Um, sure.”

“You want some better album, then,” he said. “This one here is too popular with the masses.”

“Oh, yeah, well,” she said. “I was just thinking that myself.”

He glanced at Maggie again. He was holding his face in a way that caused his chin to lengthen, just as Ira always did when he was trying to keep back a smile.

“She’s athletic too,” Maggie told him. “Brought along her baseball glove.”

“That so?” he asked Leroy.

She nodded. The toe of her raised foot pointed daintily downward, ballet style.

Then something clattered upstairs and Fiona called, “Maggie, where—?”

She arrived on the landing. They all looked up at her.

“Oh,” she said.

And she began to descend the stairs very smoothly and
quietly, with one hand trailing along the banister. The only sound was the slapping of her sandals against her bare heels.

Jesse said, “Good to see you, Fiona.”

She reached the hall and looked up at him. “It’s good to see you too,” she said.

“Done something new to your hair, haven’t you?”

She lifted a hand, with her eyes still on his face, and touched the ends of her hair. “Oh! Maybe so,” she told him.

Maggie said, “Well, I guess I’d better get back to—”

And Ira said, “Need help in the kitchen, Maggie?”

“Yes, please!” she sang out happily.

Fiona told Jesse, “I was just upstairs hunting my soapbox.”

Maggie hesitated.

“Soapbox?” Jesse asked.

“I tried your bureau drawer, but it’s empty. All I found was mothballs. Did you take my soapbox with you when you moved to your apartment?”

“What soapbox are you talking about?”

“My tortoiseshell soapbox! The one you kept.”

Jesse looked over at Maggie. Maggie said, “You remember her soapbox.”

“Well, no, I can’t say as I do,” Jesse said, and he grabbed hold of his forelock the way he always did when he was puzzled.

“You kept it after she left,” Maggie told him. “I saw you with it. There was a bar of soap inside, remember? That clear kind of soap you can see through.”

“
Oh
, yes,” Jesse said, letting go of his forelock.

“You remember it?”

“Sure.”

Maggie relaxed. She flashed a bracing smile at Leroy,
who had lowered her foot to the floor now and was looking uncertain.

“So where is it?” Fiona asked. “Where’s my soapbox, Jesse?”

“Well, uh, didn’t your sister take it?”

“No.”

“I thought she packed it up along with your other things.”

“No,” Fiona said. “You had it in your bureau.”

Jesse said, “Gosh, Fiona. In that case maybe it’s thrown out by now. But look, if it means so much to you, then I’d be glad to—”

“But you kept it, because it reminded you of me,” Fiona told him. “It smelled like me! You closed your eyes and held my soapbox to your nose.”

Jesse’s gaze swiveled to Maggie again. He said, “Ma? Is that what you told her?”

“You mean it’s not true?” Fiona asked him.

“You said I went around sniffing soapboxes, Ma?”

“You did!” Maggie said. Although she hated having to repeat it to his face. She had never meant to shame him. She turned to Ira (who was wearing exactly the shocked, reproachful expression she had expected) and said, “He kept it in his top drawer.”

“Your treasure drawer,” Fiona told Jesse. “Do you suppose I’d come all the way down here like any ordinary … groupie if your mother hadn’t told me that? I didn’t have to come! I was getting along just fine! But your mother says you hung on to my soapbox and wouldn’t let Crystal pack it, you closed your eyes and took this big whiff, you’ve kept it to this day, she said, you’ve never let it go, you sleep with it under your pillow at night.”

Maggie cried, “I never said—!”

“What do you think I am? Some kind of loser?” Jesse asked Fiona.

“Now, listen,” Ira said.

Everyone seemed glad to turn to him.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re talking about a plastic soapbox.”

“
My
plastic soapbox,” Fiona told him, “that Jesse sleeps every night with.”

“Well, there seems to be some mistake,” Ira said. “How would Maggie even know such a thing? Jesse has his own apartment now. All he sleeps with that
I’ve
ever heard of is an auto greeter.”

“A what?”

“Oh, never mind.”

“What’s an auto greeter?”

There was a pause. Then Ira said, “You know: the person who stands at the door when you go in to buy a car. She makes you give your name and address before she’ll call a salesman.”

“She? You mean a woman?”

“Right.”

“Jesse sleeps with a woman?”

“Right.”

Maggie said, “You just had to spoil things, Ira, didn’t you.”

“No,” Ira told her, “it’s the simple truth that’s spoiled things, Maggie, and the truth is, Jesse’s involved with somebody else now.”

“But that woman’s no one important! I mean they’re not engaged or married or anything! She’s no one he really cares about!”

She looked to Jesse to back her up, but he was studiously examining the toe of his left boot.

“Oh, Maggie, admit it,” Ira said. “This is the way
things
are
. This is how he’s going to be. He never was fit husband material! He passes from girlfriend to girlfriend and he can’t seem to hold the same job for longer than a few months; and every job he loses, it’s somebody else’s fault. The boss is a jerk, or the customers are jerks, or the other workers are—”

“Now, hold on,” Jesse began, while Maggie said, “Oh, why do you always, always exaggerate, Ira! He worked in the record shop a full year, have you forgotten that?”

“Everyone in Jesse’s acquaintance,” Ira finished calmly, “by some magical coincidence ends up being a jerk.”

Jesse turned and walked out of the house.

It made things more disturbing, somehow, that he didn’t slam the door but let it click shut very gently behind him.

Maggie said, “He’ll be back.” She was speaking to Fiona, but when Fiona didn’t respond (her face was almost wooden; she was staring after Jesse), she told Leroy instead. “You saw how glad he was to see you, didn’t you?”

Leroy just gaped.

“He’s upset at what Ira said about him, is all,” Maggie told her. And then she said, “Ira, I will never forgive you for this.”

“Me!” Ira said.

Fiona said, “Stop it.”

They turned.

“Just stop, both of you,” she said. “I’m tired to death of it. I’m tired of Jesse Moran and I’m tired of the two of you, repeating your same dumb arguments and niggling and bickering, Ira forever so righteous and Maggie so willing to be wrong.”

“Why … Fiona?” Maggie said. Her feelings were hurt. Maybe it was silly of her, but she had always secretly
believed that outsiders regarded her marriage with envy. “We’re not bickering; we’re just discussing,” she said. “We’re compiling our two views of things.”

Fiona said, “Oh, forget it. I don’t know why I thought anything would be any different here.” And she stepped into the living room and hugged Leroy, whose eyes were wide and startled. She said, “There, there, honey,” and she buried her face in the crook of Leroy’s neck. Plainly, Fiona herself was the one who needed consoling.

Maggie glanced at Ira. She looked elsewhere.

“Soapbox?” Ira asked. “How could you invent such a story?”

She didn’t answer. (Anything she said might look like bickering.) Instead she walked away from him. She headed toward the kitchen in what she hoped was a dignified silence, but Ira followed, saying, “Look here, Maggie, you can’t keep engineering other people’s lives this way. Face facts! Wake up and smell the coffee!”

Ann Landers’s favorite expression: Wake up and smell the coffee. She hated it when he quoted Ann Landers. She went over to the counter and started dropping chicken parts into the paper bag.

“Soapbox!” Ira marveled to himself.

“You want peas with your chicken?” she asked. “Or green beans.”

But Ira said, “I’m going to go wash up.” And he left.

So here she was alone. Well! She brushed a tear from her lashes. She was in trouble with everybody in this house, and she deserved to be; as usual she had acted pushy and meddlesome. And yet it hadn’t seemed like meddling while she was doing it. She had simply felt as if the world were the tiniest bit out of focus, the colors not quite within the lines—something like a poorly printed newspaper ad—and if she made the smallest adjustment then everything would settle perfectly into place.

“Stupid!” she told herself, rattling the chicken parts in the bag. “Stupid old nosy-bones!” She slammed a skillet onto the stove and poured in too much oil. She twisted a knob savagely and then stood back and waited for the burner to heat. Now look: Droplets of oil were dotted across the front of her best dress, over the mound of her stomach. She was clumsy and fat-stomached and she didn’t even have the sense to wear an apron while she was cooking. Also she had paid way too much for this dress, sixty-four dollars at Hecht’s, which would scandalize Ira if he knew. How could she have been so greedy? She dabbed at her nose with the back of her hand. Took a deep breath. Well. Anyhow.

The oil wasn’t hot enough yet, but she started adding the chicken. Unfortunately, there was quite a lot of it. Too much, it appeared now. (Unless they could coax Jesse back before suppertime.) She had to push the pieces too close together in order to fit in the last few drumsticks.

Peas, or green beans? That still hadn’t been settled. She wiped her hands on a dishtowel and went out to the living room to check. “Leroy,” she said, “what would—?”

But the living room was empty. Leroy’s record had a worn sound now, as if it were playing for the second or third time. “Truckin’, got my chips cashed in …” an assortment of men sang doggedly. No one sat on the sofa or in either of the armchairs.

Maggie crossed the hallway to the front porch and called, “Leroy? Fiona?”

No answer. Four vacant rockers faced out toward the streetlight.

“Ira?”

“Upstairs,” he called, his voice muffled-sounding.

She turned away from the door. Fiona’s suitcase, thank goodness, still stood at the foot of the stairs; so she
couldn’t have gone far. “Ira, is Leroy with you?” Maggie called.

He appeared on the landing with a towel draped around his neck. Still drying his face, he looked down at her.

“I can’t find her,” she told him. “I can’t find either one of them.”

“Did you look on the porch?”

“Yes.”

He came downstairs, carrying the towel. “Well, maybe they went out back,” he said.

She followed him through the front door and around the side of the house. The night air was warm and humid. A gnat or mosquito whined in her ear and she waved it away. Who would want to be out here at this hour? Not Leroy or Fiona, evidently. The backyard, when they reached it, was a small, empty square of darkness.