October Snow (9 page)

“I’m up for the same reason.”

“Get out. We should have stayed up all night and drank beer then.”

Jo laughed. “We’ll do plenty of that at the lake.”

“Hey,” she set her mug on the table, turning to face Jo, “let’s drive up there today.”

“Strafford? Why?”

“’Cause we
can
. Besides, has Grady called you back yet?”

“Not yet.” She considered it. “Kind of a rainy day…The lake will be deserted. Could be nice.”

“C’mon, Bim. You could show me the house.”

“And maybe find Grady.” She set her cup down with a thud. “Hit the shower.”

Max hurried out to the kitchen to refill her cup. “I’ll bring it back.”

“We’ll stop in Raymond for breakfast.”

“Let’s take the Daizer, too. I’ll call Sammy.”

“Yup. Go.”

They were in Raymond by ten, with Daisy staring out the back of Jo’s truck, panting and wagging, barking at everything she saw.

Liz had declined the invitation for Sam, saying she was still in bed, but Max wasn’t buying it.

“Just do
not
trust that woman, Jo.” She pointed ahead. “Turn right there.” As they pulled into the drive-through, she glared out the window, her lips pressed together. “She probably won’t even tell Sam that I called.”

“I know. We’ll find her when we get back.”

They ordered breakfast sandwiches and coffees, and waited in the line that was now six cars long. Max pulled out her phone. “Was hoping she’d call by now.”

Jo sighed. “Look, we’re worried. Maybe we should be. But we need this day. We’ve been so stressed for so long now, we need to get away from everything. Just for this day. Okay?”

Max was nodding, opening her phone. “Yeah, okay. You’re right. I’m just gonna send her a text, and then we’ll enjoy some breakfast.”

Jo sighed again. “Go ahead, call her. See if she picks up.”

“No, I don’t want to do that. Just a text.”

“Fine.”

They were the third car in line when Max finished. Jo was frowning, studying the car ahead of them, where a male voice was blaring a cuss-filled rant that was easily heard through the open windows. “What’s going on up there?” she mumbled, squinting through the windshield.

Jo gasped as a man’s hand flew off the steering wheel and swung to his right, a hard backhand. A child, invisible below the level of the seat, started crying–the high-pitched, sobbing screams that small children are able to produce without inhibition, with no worry for anything other than their own preservation.

Daisy sat bolt upright in the back, growling, looking anxiously through the front of the truck. The child was screaming even more loudly, and Jo was out of the car before Max could say anything.

“It’s always something,” she muttered as she opened her door to follow her. “It’s always
something
.” She ran back to shut the truck’s door, remembering that Daisy was in there, then jogged to the car where Jo was leaning on the passenger’s front window, saying something that Max couldn’t hear.

As she got to the car, Jo said, “He’s even got a baby in the back. Look.” Max saw an infant, no more than a few weeks old, laying unrestrained across the back seat.

“Oh, man…” Max went to the back of the car, pulling her lipstick from her pocket and writing the license plate number on her forearm.

“Hey! What the hell…?” The man in the car turned, yelling out the window at Max. “What are you doing?”

She came back around to Jo. “How’s the kid?” She looked in at the little girl, who was cupping her hand over her nose, still crying.

A young man who had been in the car behind Jo’s suddenly appeared. The cars behind him were honking their horns, unaware of what the holdup was.

He touched Max’s shoulder as she was talking to the little girl, trying to comfort her. “What happened?” He saw a stream of blood running down the child’s upper lip, and he handed her a napkin that he pulled from his jacket pocket. “Here you go, sweetheart. Let me look at that.” He gently pulled her hand away, scowling at what he saw.

Jo was going back and forth with the child’s father. “…I
saw
you hit her!” She was pressing 911 on her phone. “And I’m not dealing with you anymore. The cops can do that.”

“Look, bitch…”

Phone to her ear, Jo’s glare went icy. “That’s right,” she hissed. “I
am
a bitch. I haven’t survived idiots like you any other way.”

The little girl started to cry harder. “Jo,” Max nudged her, “settle down.”

The cars ahead of them had moved on, and the father threw his car into drive, yelling as he pulled away. “Kiss my ass, and
mind your own business
.” He took a hard right out of the lot, and was gone.

Jo glared after him. “You got the plate?”

“Yeah.” Max turned to look at the young man who had approached them. “Thanks for helping out.”

He nodded. “I’m a paramedic. Name’s MacIntyre. Danny.” He had a thick, almost caricature-like Mainer accent. He pointed to the lipstick Max was holding. “Want to write my number down? I have to get to work, I can’t wait for the cops. But tell them that it looks for all the world like that girl’s nose is broken.” He sighed. “Hell of a thing.”

“Going to get the truck out of the way. Move, Max.” Jo pulled the truck over to the side of the parking lot while Max took Danny MacIntyre’s number, and where he would be working that day. He waved as he drove off.

An hour later, they finished relaying the incident to the policemen who had gotten the call. They returned to the truck then, and Jo sat very still for a minute.

“Just want to relax a bit,” she said. Daisy was pawing at her from the back. Jo reached over the seat, patting her on the head.

“Hey, we never got our food.”

“Yeah. We should do that.” She rummaged around in her purse. “Darn it. Got a cigarette?”

Max laid her head against the rest, eyes closed, handing her purse over. “Never a dull moment.”

“They seemed more concerned that there were no car seats for the kids than for the four year old with the broken nose.”

“No, they didn’t.”

Jo passed a lit cigarette to her. “That was all they really asked about.”

“That’s because you were very detailed about the rest.”

She considered that for a moment. “Maybe.”

“Think we’ll have to come back out here to testify?”

“Probably not. It’ll go to Family Court.” Jo rolled her eyes. “We used to call that ‘the place where justice goes to die.’”

Max looked over at her, eyebrows raised. “Who’s ‘we’?”

Jo sighed and busied herself with the zipper on Max’s purse.

“I’d like to hear about it sometime.”

She reached over and patted Max on the leg. “You will. We’ll have lots of time.” She smiled at her then, hoping to end the conversation there. Max looked doubtful. “No, really. You will.”

Max knew to let her off the hook. “Want to eat now?”

She wasn’t hungry anymore, but was grateful for the distraction. “Yeah. I’m starving.”

“Only about ten more miles.” Jo was at the same time excited and apprehensive. “You’re going to love it up here. Especially the house. It’s beautiful.”

Max reached to turn up the radio, joining in with the chorus of a soft-rock song. “I…can’t do that to
you
…no no no…”

“You can’t sing, either.”

“Then I won’t try out for ‘Lungs’, or whatever the hell that show is.”

The rain was clearing away, and the sun came out just as they crossed the town line. Max frowned. “Where are we? I haven’t been up this way in ages.”

“Center-city Strafford.”

Max looked around. There was a convenience store, a diner, two gas stations–one of which had a sign in the window,
Welcome Home Mark! Semper Fi!–
and a small grocery store, which apparently doubled as the local Post Office.

“Oh, yeah,” Max grinned wryly. “And the house is in the suburbs, I suppose.”

Jo made a hairpin turn onto a narrow dirt road, just beyond a small cluster of tidy ranch houses. On the right, the bank rose up beside them as they descended, until the main road disappeared. There were several small cottages on the left, camps that were used only from Memorial Day through Labor Day, owned mostly by Bostonians who came up on the weekends.

There was a small patch of saplings just ahead, in the center of where the road became a circle for cars to double back. Beyond the trees, at the top of the circle, a large, white New Englander appeared.

“Wow, Jo…Wow, that’s the house?”

She nodded, smiling. “Look behind it.”

The lake, Max thought, was an impossible shade of blue. There was a small patch of land about fifty yards out, like a tiny island, just visible from where Jo parked the truck.

“Are those
flowers
on that island?”

“Yeah. Local legend has it that some guy, decades ago, planted them there after his wife drowned just a few feet from the shore.” Jo pointed. “See the dwarf pine in the middle?”

Max nodded as she opened her door.

“They say no one at all planted that tree. It was just
there
, exactly a year after she died.”

“Are we trying to rent a haunted house?”

Jo laughed. “No. Well…All of the spirits here are friendly.”

“Terrific. I get to spend the summer with
friendly
ghosts.”

They walked around the house. A massive deck wrapped from the west side of the building all the way across the back. A small dock extended about fifteen feet into the lake, a canoe attached to the post.

“Jo, this is gonna cost a ton.”

“Yup.”

“Really…”

“My call, Bim. I need this. You do, too.”

Max was silent for a moment, studying Jo as she reached into her backpack and pulled out a small bag of corn chips.

Jo grinned at her. “Watch this.” She threw a few of the chips underhand, as high as she could, then looked around expectantly as they landed on the sandy area just before the dock. Within seconds, several seagulls descended from somewhere–Max had no idea from where–and scooped up the chips.

They laughed in unison, delighted by the raucous beauty of the gulls. Max thought she had never seen Jo like that, almost childlike in her excitement. For some reason that she couldn’t grasp, as she watched her she felt a sudden wave of something like regret–a sadness that she wanted very much to comprehend; then, an odd thought occurred to her: it wasn’t time yet.

“You’re right, Bim,” she said. “We need this.” She shook off the sudden pensiveness of the moment before. “Give me some chips, and then we’ll go find Grady Simpkins.”

Sam wandered into her mother’s kitchen, eyes lidded, stretching hard. As she bent for a few toe-touches, she noticed her mother sitting at the table in the breakfast nook with her coffee and a legal pad, making her daily to-do list.

“Morning, Mom.”

She didn’t answer, seemingly engrossed in her planning.

“Coffee fresh, Mom?”

Liz looked up, peering over her pink-rimmed reading glasses. “Goodness, Samantha. Noon?”

“You didn’t wake me up.”

Liz gave her a dismissive glance, then returned to her list.

Sam was checking her phone. “Huh. I thought the girls would have called by now.”

Liz didn’t look up. “I’m sure they’ll be in touch later. Jack called, though.”

Sam opened her phone, frowning, checking for his number. “When?”

“He called me around nine. He’d like to take you to dinner tonight.”

“He called
you
? Why?”

“He was being thoughtful. He didn’t want to wake you.” She pushed the pad aside, taking off her glasses and chewing on the stem as she studied Sam. “He’ll pick you up at seven.”

“Uh, I didn’t say I’d go, Mom.”

“You have to. He’s your husband.”

Sam rolled her eyes.

Liz sighed. “Samantha…”

“I don’t want to discuss this right now, Mom.”

“Well, we’re going to.” She pointed to the chair across from her.

Sam put her phone back on the counter, but didn’t move toward the table where Liz sat. She wondered if–no,
why
–it had always been this way, because she knew she would eventually sit; but then again, just a few moments of seeming defiance might reestablish something she hadn’t often felt. Something like a sense of independence, perhaps.