First Frost

by Sarah Addison Allen

  Tyler gestured behind her. “I’m just waiting for Henry to start his truck. Do you think anything’s wrong? He was talking about winterizing his truck. I had no idea what he was talking about. Maybe he did it wrong.”

  Claire looked over to Henry’s king cab. The windows were beginning to steam and a faint purple glow was emanating from inside. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Wait,” Tyler said. “Are they doing what I think they’re doing?”

  “Voyeur,” Claire teased, getting in the car. “Stop looking.”

  Tyler got behind the wheel and grinned at her. “We could give them a run for their money.”

  “And risk getting caught by one of your students? I don’t think so. Stop it,” she said, when he reached for her. “Let’s go home.”

  He thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Home. Okay.” He started the car. “But I have plans for home now.”

  “Oh no,” Claire said with a smile. “Plans.”

  The road leading off campus was lined with hickory trees, their leaves so bright yellow they shone like fire, as if the road were lined with giant torches. Claire rested her head back as Tyler drove, his hand on her knee. Houses in town were decorated in full Halloween regalia, some more elaborate than others. Jack-o’-lanterns flickered on porches, and red and yellow leaves swirled. This wasn’t her favorite time of year, but it certainly was gorgeous. Autumn felt like the whole world was browned and roasted until it was so tender it was about to fall away from the bone.

  Stop feeling so anxious, she told herself. It was just this time of year making her feel this way, making her have these doubts. First frost was almost here. If she could make it until then without a big drama, she felt sure everything would be okay, everything would fall into place and feel right again.

  Tyler turned down Pendland Street with its winding curves, uneven sidewalks and sloped yards, which suddenly made Claire remember her grandmother Mary walking her and Sydney to school on this street on autumn mornings. Mary had become anxious in her old age, and she hated being away from the house for long. She’d hold the girls’ hands tightly and calm herself by telling them what she would make for first frost that year—pork tenderloins with nasturtiums, dill potatoes, pumpkin bread, chicory coffee. And the cupcakes, of course, with all different frostings, because what was first frost without frosting? Claire had loved it all, but Sydney had only listened when their grandmother talked of frosting. Caramel, rosewater-pistachio, chocolate almond.

  Claire settled back in her seat, starting to relax a little from the wine that evening. She began to wonder, if she had the time, what she would make for first frost this year. Fig and pepper bread, because she’d been thinking about it. (Of course she was fig. Sydney was definitely pepper.) And pumpkin lasagna, maybe with flowers pressed into the fresh pasta before she cooked it. And—

  She sat up straight when she saw him again, out of nowhere. The old man on the sidewalk. And not just his gray suit this time. She saw his skin and his eyes and the tiny smile on his lips. He was standing near the corner, his hands in his pockets, like he was on a summertime stroll.

  Tyler drove right by him.

  “Wait. Did you see that?” she asked.

  “See what?” Tyler asked.

  Claire looked behind her and he was gone, as if he hadn’t been there at all.

  But if that was the case, how could he leave behind that scent, like a smoky bar, now coming through the car vents?

  * * *

  When Tyler parked in front of their house, his wife got out quickly. She stood on the sidewalk and looked down the street from where they’d come.

  Tyler got out and locked the car with the remote, then he walked over to Claire, who was silhouetted by the light from the street lamp, her curves like a map that took him to a different place every time he consulted it. He put his arms around her from behind and bent to rest his chin on her shoulder. Her arms were cold, so he rubbed them.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  She stepped away and turned to him. “Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Why don’t you go inside and check on Mariah and Bay? I think I’ll take a quick walk around the neighborhood.”

  One side of his mouth lifted into a half smile, confused. “At this time of night? In those heels?”

  “I’ll just be a minute.”

  He took off his blazer and put it around her shoulders. “I’ll go with you, for protection. That Edward is a slippery one. He might have escaped and is now on the prowl.”

  Claire laughed at his reference to Mrs. Kranowski’s elderly terrier, who only prowled a few feet into his yard every day, long enough to do his business. Then he skittered back inside, where he stood at the window and barked at birds and bugs and the occasional threatening leaf.

  Claire held the lapels of his blazer together, then looked back down the sidewalk. “No, you’re right. It’s too late. Too cold,” she said, turning to walk up the steps to the house.

  Tyler watched her navigate the concrete steps slowly in her heels, her hips swaying. All the lights in the house were out except the porch light, which appeared to flutter in happiness as Claire approached. If lights could actually feel happiness, that is.

  Tyler had grown up in a manner similar to Claire’s. His parents were potters and potheads who still ran an artists’ colony in Connecticut. Their version of reality wasn’t based on anything anyone else considered normal, either. His parents fed him kale sandwiches, let him draw on their Volkswagen, often walked around nude but dressed him in ridiculous things like T-shirts that read POTTERS DO IT ON WHEELS for school pictures.

  A lot of it was embarrassing to remember, but Claire often reminded him of the better parts of his childhood, back when everything seemed possible. He wouldn’t exactly say he’d lost his ability to believe now, but his role with Claire was to be the rational one. He laughed out loud, there on the sidewalk, when he thought of that. He was spacey and forgetful and, before he’d met Claire, he’d traveled restlessly, chasing happiness like it was something he secretly believed couldn’t be caught. He’d taken a teaching position here in Bascom, North Carolina, because, like every decision he’d made up until meeting quiet Claire that night she’d catered an Orion art department party, he thought this was only the next step. He thought he would soon be on his way to someplace different, as distracted and easily led as a cat following a fly. He loved that, within their relationship, he was the grounded one. He loved that she made him something he never thought he’d been capable of being. Someone who stayed.

  Tyler snapped out of it, realizing he’d been staring into space. He saw that Claire had reached the front porch. He loped up the steps to catch her. But she crossed the threshold and the door closed just as he reached it. He turned the knob, but it was locked. He took out his key and tried it, but the door still wouldn’t open. He wasn’t surprised. It had done this for years.

  He knocked on the door and called, “Claire, I can’t get in!”

  He heard the tick of her heels on the hardwood floor as she walked back to the door and opened it. She smiled at him. “If you ask it nicely, it will open for you. All you have to do is talk to it.”

  “Mmm–hmm,” he said, putting his arms around her and backing her up. He closed the door with his foot as he kissed her. “So you say.”

  He could no more talk to the door than accept the apple-throwing tree. He’d once even developed an elaborate system of strings and bells in the garden as an experiment. As long as the warning system was up, no apples were thrown in the garden, which he took as proof that the tree wasn’t really doing anything. He knew Claire wanted him to believe her explanation instead of trying to make sense of it. But, whether she knew it or not, she needed someone who believed in her, not everything else in this crazy house.

  Claire stepped away from him after a few kisses. “Go on upstairs. Check on the girls. I’ll be there shortly.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To the
kitchen,” she said. “I have some catching up to do.”

  Her dark eyes were tired. When he held her, he could feel the tension she was holding in her back muscles. The air around her was cool lately, as if she were creating a vacuum with her unhappiness. His wife would tell him what was wrong in time. He’d learned that long ago. He shook his head and took her hand.

  “Not tonight,” he said, leading her up the staircase. “Plans. I have plans.”

  4

  At that moment, across town, old Evanelle Franklin suddenly woke up. She stared into the darkness of her room, trying to grasp at what she’d been dreaming about. The steady whir of her oxygen machine was like white noise now. It used to bother her, that machine. Just its existence used to make her angry, angry that her body, which had been steady and reliable and treated well for over eight decades, had suddenly decided to fail two years ago. She’d been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and, without the oxygen, her lungs felt like they’d been zapped by one of those shrinking machines in the sci-fi movies she liked to watch with her companion Fred. With the oxygen, she felt okay, though the tube that sat at her nose and looped around her ears was damn uncomfortable and chapped the skin at her nostrils. She had to have oxygen all the time now, even when she went out. Fred carried the portable oxygen container for her when she had to leave the house. It looked like a big, unwieldy purse. Fred would put the strap over his shoulder and say, “It’s medical chic.” Gay men were a lot of fun.

  Evanelle sat up and moved her legs off the bed. She had to give something to someone. Every once in a while she would get this overwhelming itch that could only be scratched by giving someone a plum or a coffee grinder or a book on animal husbandry. She had no idea why she had to give these things, and she had no idea why the recipients needed them, but they always did, whether they liked it or not.

  That was her Waverley gift.

  There’d been times when she wished it had been different, that her special gift could have been more pretty, or at the very least she could have made a living by it. But she’d long ago accepted that this was what she was supposed to do—she was supposed to give people she knew, and sometimes people she didn’t know, people she met on the street, a strange gift. She couldn’t change who she was, and she no longer wanted to, even if she could. She knew that who you are is a stone set deep inside you. You can spend all your life trying to dig that stone out, or you can build around it. Your choice.

  Sitting there in bed, she thought about what it was she was supposed to give. A spatula. Good. She had one of those. No need to go out and buy one. Now, who did she have to give it to? She thought about it, then shook her head. No, that was silly. But the name kept coming back.

  Her cousin Mary Waverley.

  Who had died twenty years ago.

  Huh. That was a new one.

  Evanelle hoisted herself out of bed and put on her slippers. The home oxygen machine was located in her bedroom. It was squat and square, like a dopey monster just sitting there, humming to itself. There was an extremely long oxygen tube attached to it so that Evanelle could walk around the house. She had to roll up the tubing like a rope and loosen it as she walked, leaving a trail. Fred told her that her hide-and-seek days were over.

  She gathered up the long, clear tubing and shuffled out of her room to the kitchen.

  Once there, she rooted around in her green-painted cabinets until she finally found an old spatula, the sturdy kind with an old wooden handle. It had been years since she’d used it. Come to think of it, her cousin Mary was the one who had given it to her.

  She heard Fred’s footsteps on the attic steps. He had a nice apartment up there. He could afford his own place, but he liked it here. He didn’t like being alone. He’d moved in with her after he’d broken up with his boyfriend years ago, spending months renovating her attic—in a way, renovating his life, too. It was an odd little relationship they had but, Evanelle had to admit, she liked having him around. But as much as she needed him, she thought he needed her more.

  She didn’t know how much time she had left on this earth, a thought that didn’t bother her as much as it did fifty years ago. She knew a lot more people on the other side now. Even though it sure took a long time to get Mary’s granddaughters on the right path, Claire and Sydney had each other now, had their husbands. It was Fred that she worried about the most. What was he going to do when she left him?

  He turned on the kitchen light. He was in a pair of old plaid pajamas, the kind you wore for comfort, not style. She’d given him a pair of silk pajamas, monogrammed on the pocket and everything, for Christmas last year, but he never wore them. He was too set in his ways, Evanelle thought, and told him so often. He was only in his sixties, with a nice square face and sharp eyes, too young to be hanging out with an old lady all the time. He hadn’t dated anyone in years. Maybe he just forgot how. She was going to have to help him along a little.

  “Sleepwalking or midnight baking?” he asked with a smile, leaning against the doorjamb and crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Neither. I woke up and needed to give my dead cousin Mary a spatula.” She held up the spatula and Fred’s brows rose. It sounded crazy, even for her. She laughed. “Oh, don’t look at me that way. I know it’s crazy. I probably have to give it to Claire. I was having a dream about Mary when I woke up. Wires probably just got crossed.”

  “Do you have to give it to her tonight?” Fred asked, because sometimes her Waverley gift worked that way; she had to give something to someone immediately. Which was pretty inconvenient for someone with a plastic hose connected to her nose. Going out took planning these days.

  Evanelle reached under the sink for one of the hundreds of paper bags she’d collected from the grocery store, because you never know when you’ll need a good paper bag. She put the spatula inside, then set it on the counter. “No. I’ll give it to her when I see her next,” she said, already out of breath.

  Fred pushed himself away from the doorjamb. “How about I make us some nice pumpkin spice coffee?”

  “You know, that’s exactly what I need,” she said as he helped her take a seat at the table in her small arts-and-crafts home. She and her husband had bought this house over sixty years ago. She missed him. He’d been a lot like Fred, only he’d liked women. And he’d loved her. Loved everything about her. “Every crooked pot has a lid,” he used to say. He didn’t care that she was weird. This had been a good house. Good memories. She was going to miss this place. She was going to miss her stuff. Then again, it would be a relief that in heaven she’d never have to give anyone anything. Everyone already had what they needed up there.

  Fred started tinkering with the coffeemaker, as comfortable in this place as she was. “You’re getting more and more like me every day, Fred.”

  Fred turned and looked at her like she had given him the best compliment anyone had ever given anyone in the history of all the world.

  He was a hoot.

  * * *

  The next morning, as Sydney unlocked the door to her salon, she saw Fred Walker, a square, tidy man in his sixties, doing the same at Fred’s Fine Foods, his small, touristy market down the street.

  “Hi, Fred!” she called, waving to him. “How’s Evanelle?”

  Fred turned, startled, and waved back. “Fine,” he said, looking distracted and lost in thought. “She’s fine.”

  Fred wasn’t much of a conversationalist.

  Sydney walked into the White Door Salon. The door was clear glass, but the previous owner thought “the White Door” sounded mysterious, like a door Alice might walk through to Wonderland. It’s what everyone knew the salon as, so Sydney didn’t change the name when she bought the place a few years ago.

  She turned on the lights. It still made her smile, this big open space with its comfortable couches and the stylish chandelier that looked like icicles hanging over the reception desk. Her first job after moving back to Bascom ten years ago was here. This place was a part of the thread that wo
ve her new life together. She had seven stylists, all but two younger than she was. She liked that. She liked how they dressed and how fearless they were in their style.

  Bay wasn’t interested in any of that kind of stuff. She liked her slouchy jeans and snarky T-shirts.

  After turning on the computer at the reception desk, Sydney made coffee and set out cookies that she persuaded Bay to make every week. Claire used to make them, but then she became a candyhead and didn’t have time anymore.

  Sydney had told Violet, her new receptionist, that part of her job was to get here before anyone else and do this, but Violet always had an excuse. No one knew why Sydney hired her. Sometimes even Sydney wondered.

  She went to her station and turned on her curling iron to style her hair, which was easier to do here than it was in the tiny bathroom in the farmhouse. She looked at herself in the mirror, then did a double take.

  There were more red highlights in her hair. She was sure of it. It was like they had crept in during the night. Henry had even commented on them this morning before he’d left. He’d called her fiery.

  Claire had told Sydney to tell Henry what she was doing. And she was probably right. Claire always gave good advice. She handled things in such a contained way. She made everyone around her calm, just by being near her. If it were a perfume and she could bottle it, she’d make millions. Forget candy.

  But Sydney knew what Henry would say if she told him why she was all over him lately. He would say that he didn’t care that they couldn’t have any more children. But Sydney knew better. His grandfather passed away not long after Sydney and Henry married, and Henry missed him intensely, a longing that was so strong it sometimes made the cows go quiet and gave their milk a strange strawberry sweetness. Henry’s grandfather had raised him, taught him everything he knew about being a good Hopkins man and the dairy business. Henry had spent his whole life wanting to grow up and be old like his grandfather. He needed a son, someone to teach. Henry had adopted Bay. There’d been no hesitation about it when they’d married. After that, Bay had followed him around wherever he went. Henry had loved it, Bay getting up early with him and helping at the dairy. But what Bay had been doing, what she was always doing, was making sure things were as they were supposed to be, that he was where he belonged. After a few months, she’d stopped getting up at oh-my-God-thirty with him.