Authors: Holly Chamberlin
Last Summer (10 page)
Well, at least the entire Patterson family hadn’t turned their backs on Petey. Just the night before her mother had told her that Mr. Patterson had asked if it was okay for him to take Petey miniature golfing, like he used to do before everything had gone wrong. Mike Patterson had admitted that his wife was totally against the idea, but he had urged Frannie to consider allowing him back into Petey’s life.
For her part, Meg felt grateful to Mr. Patterson. Her mother said she was worried about angering Jane and causing trouble between the Pattersons, which might, somehow, hurt Petey. Meg thought her mom was being too cautious. Petey needed someone like Mr. Patterson, especially when his actual father was such a jerk. Not that she would ever say anything bad about their father in front of Petey. He liked his dad. He wasn’t old enough to realize what kind of person Mr. Giroux really was. Meg, for one, didn’t look forward to the day when Petey saw the grim reality of his father. She had been able to handle that grim reality when it had hit her in the face, but she was tough. Her mother had always told her that. She was strong. Well, Meg wasn’t 100 percent sure she believed that about herself. Either her mother was lying or there was some truth to her opinion, somewhere.
With nothing else to occupy her time except uncomfortable thoughts, Meg found herself listening in to the conversation between the two women just to her right. Well, it was kind of hard not to listen in. They were talking really loudly about an outing they were planning together, a day at the outlet stores in Kittery with lunch at the Weathervane after.
It’s weird,
Meg thought.
Those women could be adult versions of Rosie and me.
One was blond and tall, and the other was brunette and kind of short. The blonde was wearing low-key preppy stuff, knee-length shorts, a polo shirt, and sneakers, and the brunette was wearing more stylish stuff, a really pretty flower-printed chiffon blouse, white jeans, and high-heeled sandals. Meg frowned and moved her bike out of range of their chattering. There would be no more shopping trips for Rosie Patterson and Meg Giroux.
It’s weird,
Meg thought.
Those women could be adult versions of Rosie and me.
One was blond and tall, and the other was brunette and kind of short. The blonde was wearing low-key preppy stuff, knee-length shorts, a polo shirt, and sneakers, and the brunette was wearing more stylish stuff, a really pretty flower-printed chiffon blouse, white jeans, and high-heeled sandals. Meg frowned and moved her bike out of range of their chattering. There would be no more shopping trips for Rosie Patterson and Meg Giroux.
For the first time since she had apologized to Rosie, Meg realized that she felt a little bit angry with her. Maybe she had no right to be angry with Rosie, but she was. She had said she was sorry, and she was truly sorry. So why couldn’t Rosie forgive her? Why wouldn’t she? Even just a little bit, if only for Petey’s sake?
If it was the other way around, she thought, if Rosie had told a secret about her, she would have forgiven Rosie by now. At least, she was pretty sure she would have. And it just didn’t seem fair of Mrs. Patterson to have gone to her mom and—
“Hi, Meg!”
Petey came racing out of the church’s recreation room door, clutching something in his left hand. Like his big sister he wore glasses, but his eyesight was way worse, so his glasses had those awful thick lenses that made his eyes look like they were two fish swimming in two ponds. But even with that distortion, there was no denying that Petey was a really cute kid. His smile was what Meg’s mother called infectious; it made you smile back even when you weren’t in a smiling mood. His hair was much lighter than Meg’s and he still had some of what her mother called baby fat. Other kids his age liked him, which pleased Meg. If anyone ever said or did anything mean to Petey, she thought she would go berserk. And she would probably wind up in jail for it. Then there would be two members of the Giroux family with a criminal record, Meg and her dad. She wasn’t entirely clear on his criminal past, but she had found out that he had been caught stealing cigarettes from a convenience store once. Her mother had blurted that bit of information after a particularly infuriating phone conversation with him. “You might as well know,” Mrs. Giroux had said when she had calmed down. “Better to learn the truth at home than on the street.” And by “street,” Meg had figured her mother meant one of Yorktide’s busybodies, like Mrs. Abbott.
“Hey, Petey,” Meg said as her brother came to a skidding stop in front of her. “What’s up?”
“Look what I made for Mom.” He held out a small square box made of Popsicle sticks and decorated with yellow glitter. Meg hadn’t thought people still used Popsicle sticks for crafts. Glitter, she thought, would never go away. “That’s really nice,” she told her brother. “I bet Mom will love it.”
Petey nodded. “It’s for her treasures.”
Her mother’s treasures. Meg doubted that her mother had any real treasures, certainly nothing her ex-husband or her children had ever given her. She did wear a tiny gold cross on a chain; it had once belonged to her mother, but Meg didn’t think you should count a cross as a treasure. She thought of the Mother’s Day just passed. She’d had the hardest time finding the right card. Every card seemed to imply that Mom had done a fabulous job of raising her kids and that those kids were happy and well-adjusted. Those kids were certainly not in trouble for having betrayed a friend and destroyed the friendship between the mothers. The messages on those cards seemed like a sham and a lie. Or maybe it was that the messages on the cards made Meg’s relationship with her mother seem like a sham and a lie.
“Hey,” she said now, “you want to get some ice cream?”
Petey’s face assumed an expression of great seriousness. “I don’t have any money,” he said.
Meg laughed. “I do, silly. Come on. You can sit on my bike and I’ll wheel you. Just don’t take your hands off the handlebars, okay?”
So she would never get those cute sandals, she thought as she hoisted Petey onto the bike’s seat and carefully stowed his treasure box in her saddlebag. It wasn’t the end of the world.
11
F
rannie had some errands to run after work, errands that she couldn’t ask Meg to handle; Meg was too young to drive and the dry cleaners, for example, was too far away for Meg to get to easily on her bike. Not that Frannie often needed to go to the dry cleaners. It was just too damned expensive to get clothes cleaned outside the home. But certain items, like her one good summer suit and her winter comforter, couldn’t be tossed into the washing machine. Jane’s washing machine was bigger than hers and almost brand new. It could probably handle the comforter, but now there was no way Frannie could ask Jane for a favor.
rannie had some errands to run after work, errands that she couldn’t ask Meg to handle; Meg was too young to drive and the dry cleaners, for example, was too far away for Meg to get to easily on her bike. Not that Frannie often needed to go to the dry cleaners. It was just too damned expensive to get clothes cleaned outside the home. But certain items, like her one good summer suit and her winter comforter, couldn’t be tossed into the washing machine. Jane’s washing machine was bigger than hers and almost brand new. It could probably handle the comforter, but now there was no way Frannie could ask Jane for a favor.
Not so much longer now, Frannie thought as she pulled out of the parking lot behind the dry cleaners, before Meg would have her license. Somehow they would afford a decent enough car and she could rely on her daughter for more help with the chores than she could supply now.
As she drove along, past a fairly new housing development grandly calling itself Sea-mist Estates, Frannie tried to decide what she would make for dinner that evening. But a conversation she had had with Mike Patterson the day before pushed all thoughts of meat loaf and pasta out of her mind. Mike had called her from his office; Frannie had heard his assistant, Peggy, on another line in the background. He had asked how Petey was doing and said that he wanted her to consider letting him spend time with the boy again.
“I’ll be honest, Fran,” he had said. “Jane doesn’t want our families to have anything to do with each other right now.”
“I thought as much,” Frannie had replied. “Jane came over and told me to keep Meg away from Rosie.”
There was silence on the line for a moment and then, his voice tight, Mike had said, “I didn’t know that.”
Frannie had felt like a fool, though there was no way she could have known that Jane was holding something back from her husband. Before she could say something, anything, Mike went on.
“Whatever Jane feels about the girls is a separate issue. I’m concerned about Petey. And yes, Jane knows that but no, I haven’t told her I was going to call you today.”
Frannie had hesitated. Certainly, she agreed that her son did not deserve to suffer. In the past weeks Petey had asked, several times, when Mr. Patterson was going to take him miniature golfing again, and why Mr. Patterson hadn’t suggested they play Wiffle ball, now that it was summer and school was out. Frannie had been hard-pressed to come up with an answer that would make sense to her son. She suspected he didn’t really believe the excuse she had given him for Jane’s absence in his life, that she was super busy with work. But in the end she had told Petey the same thing about Mr. Patterson. It wasn’t technically a lie, but ...
“I think,” Mike had gone on, “there’s a chance the girls will work things out. But in the meantime, why should Petey suffer?”
By “the girls,” Frannie had wondered if Mike had meant only Meg and Rosie. She hadn’t asked Mike to clarify. In the end she had promised to think about his offer to pick up with Petey where he had left off weeks earlier. The fact that Jane was so adamantly against the notion was the real sticking point. If Frannie agreed to let Mike spend time with Petey, Jane’s anger against Frannie and even against Meg might strengthen. And things between Jane and Mike might suffer. The last thing Frannie wanted was to be responsible for damaging someone’s marriage, especially the marriage of two people for whom she had once cared so much. Who was she kidding? She still cared for Jane and Mike and wasn’t happy to see either of them acting behind the other’s back. That sort of thing could easily lead to trouble.
Frannie slowed for a light that had just turned red. She felt a twinge of anger against Meg as the cause of all the messiness. It was never pleasant to be angry with your own child, but she supposed it was inevitable. Your child was still a person, with free will and the ability to choose right from wrong. And sometimes, like every other person, she was bound to choose wrong. And you, as the parent, were bound to wonder if somehow you weren’t ultimately responsible for that wrong choice.
The light turned green and Frannie continued on toward home. Yes, that was Bob Egan’s car parked outside the Simmons’ hardware store. It was unmistakable. No one else in the area drove an old Mercedes. And the vanity plates clinched the identification. MNYMAN. Money Man. Frannie suspected the car had been one of his wife’s ways to flaunt their relative wealth and that the license plate had been her idea of witty.
Well, if Mackenzie Egan took after one of her parents, it was clearly her mother. The girl was what Frannie’s ex-father-in-law used to call “a piece of work.” Frannie remembered an incident that had taken place back when Meg and Rosie were in second or third grade and Mackenzie in third or fourth. Mackenzie had shown up at school wearing a face full of makeup, everything from lipstick to mascara and blush. She was sent to the principal’s office to await the arrival of her mother. The word was that when Mrs. Egan saw her daughter she burst into peals of laughter and simply refused to accept that Mackenzie had done anything wrong. The principal, not amused, instructed Mrs. Egan to take her daughter home, remove the makeup, and return her for classes. Mrs. Egan had complied, but the very next day, Mackenzie showed up again in full war paint. Not once during the battle with the school authorities had Mackenzie so much as flinched. She had made her point. After that, her reputation as an “individual” was cemented. Frannie herself remembered feeling a bit of grudging respect for the girl.
Frannie waved to a man in a battered old pickup truck passing her in the opposing lane. Mr. Picken, both hands on the steering wheel, raised a finger in acknowledgment. He and his wife were good sorts, solid people and members of a local Lutheran congregation. They had raised six children on a farmer’s earnings, no easy feat no matter what was going on with the larger economy. And all six of those children, boys and girls, had grown up to become as solid and self-reliant as their parents. Only two had moved out of state, which was also a bit of a miracle. One of those lived in a Boston suburb and worked in town as the manager of the women’s department in a high-end department store and another was career military, stationed somewhere in the South.
Mrs. Egan, Frannie thought, should have taken parenting lessons from Burt and Betty Picken. Mackenzie’s mother hadn’t exactly been a model parent. Frannie remembered the time when both Meg and Mackenzie had been in Girl Scouts. The troop leaders had planned a camping trip and each girl was assigned an item of food to contribute to the evening meal. Mackenzie was supposed to bring the hot dogs. Patty Egan had sent her daughter empty-handed and otherwise ill prepared. One of the leaders had given up her sleeping bag for the girl. Another had driven back to the closest town and managed to scare up a few packages of frozen hamburger patties, which, it turned out, were gray and tasteless. At least half of the campers and all of the leaders refused to eat them. After that disastrous weekend, Meg decided being a Girl Scout wasn’t fun after all. That was the end of her scouting career.
Mr. Egan was by all accounts a nice enough guy, Frannie thought, if a bit socially inept. He had a local reputation as a brainiac—that was Peter’s term for Bob Egan; anyone with a higher education made him feel uneasy and intimidated—as he had gone to Harvard for graduate school and now taught economics at Barnes College.
Yes, the Egans had seemed an odd, mismatched couple, Patty Egan more interested in shopping and tanning salons than in sharing her husband’s academic concerns. It was a mystery to Frannie why they had gotten together in the first place. It was probably a mystery to all the residents of Yorktide, one of many they would never solve.
Like why the levelheaded Frances Donaldson had married the delinquent Peter Giroux. Frannie sighed. Well, at least the entire Giroux family hadn’t fallen apart as a result of the divorce. Not like what had happened with the Egans. When Mackenzie’s mother had run off with that guy from Augusta a few years back, things had gotten bad, and fast, for her hapless husband and young kids. It was a small town, and everyone knew everyone else’s business or thought they did. It wasn’t an atmosphere a person like Bob Egan could handle, especially not when he found himself the focus of the gossip. Aside from the time he spent at the college, he had become almost a recluse. He let his membership in the country club where he had occasionally played golf lapse and even stopped going to Mass on Sunday. Frannie felt bad for Bob Egan, but she didn’t know him well enough to offer a shoulder to cry on. Besides, she simply didn’t have the time or the energy to take on another dependent. She figured that Father William had reached out to him. At least, she hoped that he had.
Mackenzie’s older brother, Bobby—Peter’s apt nickname for him was Booby—had gone really wild after his mother’s defection. He had dropped out of school, gotten himself picked up by the local police a few times for minor infractions of the law, and, rumor had it, gotten an underage girl from a neighboring town pregnant.
Somehow, except for a few minor infractions, Mackenzie had managed to stay out of trouble, which was probably, Frannie thought, due to cunning and intelligence. Mackenzie was not a dumb girl. In fact, since first grade she had always been one of the best students, and sometimes, in spite of the occasional antics, even a teacher’s pet. No doubt if her grades were poor, teachers and administration would take more critical notice of her, but as it was, Mackenzie presented as pretty self-sufficient and so was largely left on her own.
And that was the problem, Frannie thought, frowning as a car driven by a ten-year-old boy (okay, maybe a seventeen-year-old boy) screeched onto the road in front of her. Kids needed supervision even when they were doing everything in their power to convince you otherwise. But how could you supervise a child in every single situation? Like with Meg. Frannie was a bit worried that because Rosie was no longer her friend, Meg would throw all common sense to the wind when school started again and become involved with Mackenzie and her cronies. There were plenty of other, much nicer girls Frannie would rather see her daughter hang out with, but she couldn’t be with Meg at school, guiding her social life, encouraging her to choose new friends wisely. Besides, though Meg wasn’t a particularly contrary kid (well, not always), no one her age liked to do what her mother suggested she do. If Frannie did interfere (that’s how Meg would see it), she would run the risk of totally alienating her daughter, and that couldn’t be good.
Frannie slowed the car as the youthful driver ahead swerved a bit over the lane line.
When Meg gets her license,
she thought,
I am reading her the riot act before she hits the road. And if she crashes the car, that’s it. I’m not buying her another car. She can walk or ride her bike everywhere until she’s saved up enough money to buy her own car.
When Meg gets her license,
she thought,
I am reading her the riot act before she hits the road. And if she crashes the car, that’s it. I’m not buying her another car. She can walk or ride her bike everywhere until she’s saved up enough money to buy her own car.
Mackenzie Egan would probably have her own car before long, Frannie mused. If she didn’t sucker her father out of his Mercedes. Yeah, it was a no-brainer to realize that it would be a bad idea for Meg to hang out with Mackenzie Egan. But Frannie honestly didn’t know if it would be a good idea for Meg to be friends with Rosie again. She thought about Jane’s unexpected visit the other day and how adamant she had been about the girls being kept apart. Jane was afraid for her child. Frannie could understand that. But it hurt her to know that Jane considered Meg a bad influence or a danger. Meg! True, she wasn’t always full of happiness and light—in fact, she pretty much grumbled about everything—but she was hardly a monster. Frannie wondered what Jane was saying to her daughter about Meg. She wondered if Jane was painting a portrait of a hopeless juvenile delinquent, someone Rosie was better off without.
And let’s face it,
Frannie thought, happy to play devil’s advocate for a moment,
Rosie really put Meg in a terrible situation for all those months, swearing her to silence.
In a way, she had made Meg complicit in the bullying from the start. Meg’s spilling Rosie’s secret was in some ways inevitable. Frannie didn’t want her daughter having to go through that sort of thing again, and she might, if Rosie hadn’t sufficiently learned how to stand up for herself. It was a puzzle. Frannie wished she knew what was best for her daughter, but she just didn’t. How could anyone really know? Kids didn’t come with operating instructions.
Frannie thought, happy to play devil’s advocate for a moment,
Rosie really put Meg in a terrible situation for all those months, swearing her to silence.
In a way, she had made Meg complicit in the bullying from the start. Meg’s spilling Rosie’s secret was in some ways inevitable. Frannie didn’t want her daughter having to go through that sort of thing again, and she might, if Rosie hadn’t sufficiently learned how to stand up for herself. It was a puzzle. Frannie wished she knew what was best for her daughter, but she just didn’t. How could anyone really know? Kids didn’t come with operating instructions.
“Talk about freakin’ operating instructions,” Frannie muttered. Her home printer was on the fritz and the manual might as well have been written in Sanskrit for all Frannie could make of it. Well, maybe a broken printer was to be expected; it was over ten years old and had seen some heavy-duty use. After Mike’s generous gesture, she supposed she could ask him to take a look at it. He had always been the Giroux family handyman and tech guy, even before her divorce from Peter. Peter’s skills were limited, and his energy and focus were minimal.
Still, she didn’t want Mike to think she was taking advantage in any way. She supposed they could survive without a printer until her next paycheck or even until the one after that, especially now that school was out and Meg wouldn’t need to print out her book reports and other papers until the new semester began.
The lousy teenaged driver turned off onto a side road and Frannie sighed with relief. She wasn’t a nervous driver but she was an alert one, and driving along behind an incompetent driver made her angry. Even if the kid wasn’t technically incompetent, he had been acting stupidly behind the wheel, probably sending a text or surfing the Internet instead of keeping his eyes on the road.
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