The Good Luck Girls of Shipwreck Lane

by Kelly Harms

  “We are, believe me!” she tells him. He hams it up, turning around and moving through a variety of Mr. Universe poses, adding exaggerated grunts for effect.

  Nean starts applauding wildly. Aunt Midge has dissolved into a fit of giggles. “Stop, stop! I’m an old lady! I can’t take the excitement!”

  At this J.J. kneels in front of Aunt Midge’s lounge chair gallantly. “Since when does forty-five count as old?” he asks, and then takes her hand and plants a kiss on her knuckles. Aunt Midge swoons. I roll my eyes but I am grinning too.

  “And now, fair ladies, I must take my leave of you.” He doffs an imaginary hat and then backs away in a low bow. When he’s gotten about ten feet, he stops, and says, “See you later, Nean?”

  “Um,” she stammers. “Okay.”

  And then he’s back to the lawn mower leaving us all dazzled in his wake.

  “Wow,” I say. “Good luck staying just friends with him.”

  Nean nods. “I’m in trouble,” she says, and then crams another frittata in her mouth.

  NEAN

  “Bread is the most forgiving of foods.”

  —LYNNE ROSSETTO KASPER, The Splendid Table

  It’s not long before J.J. is visiting us every day, coming up with some gardening task or other that requires him to wander by right when I’m sitting on the porch reading a book or taking a load of compost out for Janey. I’m pretty sure he’s in love with me, which is nice, but kind of derails my “just friends” thing. J.J. doesn’t seem like the type of guy to hang around forever waiting for some girl to see what is right in front of her. Which is good, because guys like that are weenies. J.J. is much more no-nonsense. In the last week he has told me about four times that he doesn’t have a girlfriend. He has also taken me out swimming twice and driven me into town once to see the new comic book movie, a subject on which he is the utmost authority. He is also incredibly honest, and I feel terrible whenever he asks me any personal questions because I’m so full of shit these days I don’t know which side is up. I can tell that eventually he’ll get sick of me avoiding his attempts to get closer and move along, but until then I will try to enjoy what we have. Which is nothing. But still.

  Janey and Aunt Midge think I’m keeping J.J. at arm’s length because I’m afraid of men after what happened with Geoff, and I’m not about to disavow them of that notion. I know the only thing that’s keeping me here is the completely bogus threat that I’d be unjustly thrown in the slammer if they turned me away, and I don’t care. I love it here. Janey is a spaz, but she makes the best food you’ve ever tasted, day in and day out. It’s like living above a five-star restaurant and never having to pay your tab. And seriously, I am turning into the best baker ever. I’m some kind of idiot savant with bread—I just lay my hands on it and somehow it gets better every day. I am making two kinds a day now—two fluffy white loaves with a nice hard crust at the request of the shelter’s guests, and two with flaxseed and all kinds of whatnot for extra nutrition, that makes for an awesome sandwich. I can do rolls too, and I’m working on submarine loaves, though they are still too dense and chewy. And I found out that if you pour hot water into the oven when you put the bread in you get an impressive display of steam in a big whoosh, and it makes the crust awesome and crackly. J.J. was in the kitchen when I did that one day, and I swear I actually saw his heart melt a little. I’m pretty sure he salivates every time he sees me now, like one of Pavlov’s dogs.

  Right now my plan is to keep rocking the bread and chauffeuring Aunt Midge around, try not to piss off Janey too much (it’s just so damn tempting though), and then hopefully, after enough time passes, they will forget the reason they let me stay in the first place and I will just become a permanent fixture around here, like Aunt Midge, only spryer. Weeks will pass and I won’t have to pretend to be on the lam anymore and the whole lie can just melt away in the sands of time. Maybe I will find a way to earn some actual money and save up for a car, and then I can get a full-time job and start paying some rent here—I’m sure that would win over Janey once and for all. I could even work at a bakery—there’s one in Damariscotta, I know, with beautiful displays of cupcakes out front and lists of dozens of different kinds of breads available. How cool would it be if I knew how to make all of them? Especially the chocolate sourdough loaf. That sounds amazing. I bet that would keep J.J. around a little longer.

  But for now I’ve just got to keep him at arm’s length. There’s no way I could tell him the whopper I delivered unto Janey and Aunt Midge and let him believe I was some poor abuse victim turned violent—I feel guilty enough about that already. And I can’t tell him the truth either—that Geoff is alive and well and probably pushing some other girl around by now—because he’d think I was a terrible person for lying to my only friends.

  And he wouldn’t be wrong.

  Dammit, why don’t I ever think these things through? Now I’ve got a completely un-Geoff-like, cute, sweet, smart, thoughtful person panting after me and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. I’ve spent my whole life hoping a guy like J.J. would come along and rescue my sorry ass, and now when he does, I don’t want to be rescued anymore. I want to stay here, on the cove, for as long as humanly possible.

  And to do that, I’ve got to keep my stories straight.

  * * *

  It turns out, Janey’s got a few stories she’s been keeping close to her vest herself. The whole sordid tale comes out when I get Aunt Midge talking on one of our drives to the shelter. We’ve gotten into the habit of driving to the yarn store, parking in the lot, and then switching sides, so Aunt Midge can “keep her driving skills sharp.” I feel like sharp is not a word that will apply to her driving skills any time soon, but I love living dangerously. We switch seats and I watch, teeth gritted slightly, as she starts the car, backs out of the lot with little more than a cursory glance backward, and then realizes she needs to adjust the seat and does so while still trying to drive. The car veers dangerously toward a parked jeep and then jolts out of the way at the last minute. It’s all very exciting. I’m not sure I would let her do this if Janey hadn’t sprung for a car with dual airbags.

  We always talk a lot on these drives—Aunt Midge isn’t the sort of driver who can bear to put one hundred percent concentration on the road—and they have become one of my favorite parts of living here. She is hilarious, and though she looks like a grandma, she swears like a sailor and has a sex drive to match. She tells me about her husband and how he used to get down on the piano, playing slow torch songs that she would sing along to while gyrating all over the room until, as she put it, “they had to stop singing and start making music, if you know what I mean.” Foreplay has sure changed in the thirty years since he kicked the bucket. Since then she’s been with “a lot” of other guys, but she says her husband was the best she ever had. It’s sweet.

  I ask her if she’s met anyone new since she’s been in Maine, and she tells me she’s taking a sabbatical on men right now to “focus on her girls.” At first I think she’s talking about her breasts, but then she looks at me meaningfully, long enough for the car to drift off the road and give us both a good scare. When we’ve righted things I ask her, “Am I one of your girls?”

  “Of course, honey,” she says. “You and Janey are my main responsibilities right now.” And I feel like I’m going to cry. I must be getting my period to let something like that get to me so much. I don’t say anything while I try to collect myself and Aunt Midge starts whistling to herself in the silence. I recognize the tune from a musical we put on in middle school, when I was in the foster care system. “Little Girls” from Annie.

  Poor Miss Hannigan.

  “I hope we’re not too much of a handful,” I say at last.

  Aunt Midge shrugs. The wheel jerks left, and an oncoming pickup lays on the horn and swerves out of the way. “I’m up to the challenge. What are you going to do today while I’m off saving the world for our friends at the shelter?”

  The way she says this
makes me smile a little. I was a hop skip and a jump from living in that shelter a few weeks ago, and I like to think that even if I hadn’t told my terrible fib, Aunt Midge still would have found me there.

  “First the dress shop. Janey is a sewing fool. And then I’m going to the hardware store to look for some really super superglue,” I tell her.

  “Superglue? What for?”

  “Those broken tiles in the kitchen. I saved all the bits and pieces, and I think with some serious glue and maybe some matching grout I can pretty much make it look like it never happened.”

  “Like what never happened?” Aunt Midge asks, and suddenly I wish I hadn’t said anything. Janey and I have been bickering like jealous sisters since the day we met, but for some reason I feel guilty about ratting her out. Too late now.

  “The tile got hit. With a duck,” I say vaguely.

  Aunt Midge looks at me down her nose, and I watch the car weave again, so I grab the wheel to steady it. She lets me do the steering while she wiggles her finger at me. “A living duck?” she asks.

  “Nope. A dead one.”

  She revs the gas and the car accelerates suddenly, forcing me to grip the wheel even tighter. “In my experience,” she says, “ducks don’t fly as much when they’re dead.”

  “Whoa, Aunt Midge. We’re coming up to that stop sign you missed yesterday.”

  She turns her attention back to the road and takes the wheel, and I am relieved to see she intends to come to a full and complete stop this time. After looking both ways exaggeratedly, she starts up again and accelerates to her previous speed as though she’s drag racing.

  “Was the duck … used as a projectile?” she asks, keenly.

  “Perhaps,” I say, warily, keeping one eye on Aunt Midge and one eye on the road.

  “Were you on the pitching or receiving end of said projectile?” she asks.

  “Receiving end. But it missed me by a mile.”

  “Hm,” she says.

  I say nothing.

  “Janey’s not usually the type to hurl poultry,” she says, and I nod.

  “It did seem to be an anomaly, when it happened.”

  “Someone would’ve had to really upset her to make her do something like that.”

  Oh great, now I’m the one who’s going to get in trouble. “Someone would have,” I agree. We’re coming into town, and if I’m just obtuse enough, maybe I can get out of explaining what happened.

  “Why would anyone want to upset Janey that much?” Aunt Midge asks.

  “Surely that person didn’t do it intentionally,” I say. “Oh look, the turn’s coming up.”

  She signals and slams on the brakes simultaneously. We roll slowly up to the corner and take it at about two miles per hour.

  “So. After my errands I’ll just come back and read until you’re done,” I say, suddenly anxious to get her out of the car.

  “Fine.” She pulls into the parking lot of the shelter. “I’ll see you in a couple of hours.” She hands me ten bucks. “For the glue,” she says. “And the extra is for a paperback romance. Get one we’d both like.” As if I don’t know what she means, she adds, “You know, steamy.”

  “Aye aye,” I say, and wave her off, thinking the odds are good that she’ll forget this conversation by the time the lunch service is over and she’s holding a juicy bodice ripper in her lap.

  * * *

  But two hours later I’m loading the bouquet of brightly colored flowers Noah gave me to give Janey into the trunk of the car when Aunt Midge says, “About the duck.”

  I sigh and get into the driver’s seat. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the age where you start forgetting things?” I ask her when she’s buckled in on the passenger side.

  “I only forget things when it’s convenient,” she tells me. “What did you say to Janey to make her throw a duck at you?”

  “I can’t tell you,” I attempt.

  “Oh, you’ll tell me. Was it about Noah?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Listen, missy, this is my niece we’re talking about. You stop being coy.”

  I sigh. “I asked her why she wasn’t working it with Noah,”

  “Mmhmm…”

  “And she got upset at me for bringing it up, really upset. And I should have left it alone, but I was so curious. I mean, he seems nice, and he’s cute and everything, and Janey is single as far as I can tell…”

  “Sort of,” says Aunt Midge mysteriously.

  “You mean Ned?” I ask. She swivels around in her seat to look at me.

  “She told you about Ned?”

  “No, not really. I mean, when she was good and mad, his name slipped out. I think she meant to say Noah, but then she got so red in the face about it when I asked her who Ned was. She looked like a tomato. A killer tomato. That’s when she threw the duck.”

  “I see,” says Aunt Midge, and then she is quiet, contemplating for a moment. “So she didn’t explain who Ned was?”

  “Not really. Who was he?”

  Aunt Midge pauses dramatically and then announces, “He was her fiancé,” and, I’ll admit it, I gasp.

  “Seriously? She was engaged back in Iowa?”

  “A long time ago,” she says, her voice getting that same faraway quality she uses when she talks about her late husband or the endless pool. “They met in community college,” she began. “He was in technical school for engineering, and she was working on her teaching certificate.”

  I blink at this. “No way. How did she expect to be a teacher? She gets hives every time she meets someone new.” And then thinks she can cover them up with long-sleeved shirts and oddly placed scarves.

  “She wasn’t always like that,” says Aunt Midge. “She’s always been shy, but functionally shy. There were times—when Ned was around—that she was downright social.”

  Again I blink at her in disbelief.

  “Just take my word for it,” she tells me. “They dated pretty casually at first, Ned and Janey. But then her mom—my niece—died, a few months after she met Ned, and the two of them formed a very tight bond after that. Ned never let her wallow too much—but he was always there for her, always ready with a shoulder when she needed it. He always had some fun way to pass the time, to get her mind off of her grief for a little while. Walks, camping, trips out to eat at the most unusual, off-the-beaten-path sort of places.”

  Aunt Midge sighs. “He loved to take her out on these bike rides, down to a little dive on the river trail that had the best pork tenderloins in all of Iowa. Great big dinner-plate-sized loins balanced on a tiny little bun, like fat men wearing bowler hats. Janey would come back from their bike rides with enough love inside her for the whole world over and tell me all about how she wanted to marry Ned and teach sixth grade and have three babies. I told her she should name them all after me just like that weird George Foreman Grill man.”

  “What happened?” I ask, hoping we’re not going to segue into kitchen appliances right when things are getting interesting.

  “After about six months, they moved in together, and then, another six months later, they went off on one of their bike rides and came back engaged to be married. I threw them a nice big engagement party with a cookbook theme, and everyone we’d ever met came and brought them all kinds of nice cards and all those books she keeps in the kitchen. After that, she was too busy to do much socializing, with all her studying and working waiting tables and then planning the wedding. But she had a few good friends lined up to be her bridesmaids, and she went to parties from time to time, and came over and cooked for my girlfriends when we had Scrabble nights. And Ned was so popular, he always had a friend at hand. He had such an easy way about him, and he came from a big close-knit family, wanted to take over the family dairy someday. In the end, they invited almost one hundred people to their wedding, on beautiful shimmery blue stationery with dark pink writing.”

  I think of the Janey I know standing in front of one hundred people taking her vows. She’d never make it, I know
for a fact. “So did they? Get married, I mean?”

  “No. Ned worked for a cell phone company, doing repairs on the towers and such, part-time to pay for school. There was an accident and he fell and died right away.” This hits me like a ton of bricks, but Aunt Midge is so matter-of-fact I try to lighten the mood.

  “No wonder Janey doesn’t go in for modern technology.”

  “Don’t be crass,” Aunt Midge snaps, and I recoil in shame.

  “Sorry. It’s awful. I don’t know why I’m making jokes.”

  “Because,” she says, “you care about Janey and it hurts to hear about this sad thing she went through.”

  I shrug. “Maybe you’re right,” I say.

  “Of course I am,” she says back. “Anyway,” she casts her imperious gaze on me. “Ned died just two weeks before the wedding. Janey was in charge of the funeral—his poor mother was in pieces—and then after all the mourners were gone, she moved into a little apartment not far from my house and just stopped answering her phone. She quit her student teaching and took a job as a seamstress at the bridal salon where she’d bought her dress—she still owed a lot of money for the wedding deposits and she needed to scrimp and save to pay them off by herself. She didn’t want to see anyone from before Ned died, or talk about him, or take any help. She just wanted to be on her own, and the girl has a very strong will, as you know.”

  I think of this and my heart hurts. And I feel angry—strong will or not, shouldn’t someone have been there to help take care of her? What about all Ned’s family and friends? They couldn’t have expected Aunt Midge to do it all alone.

  “What did you do?” I ask her.

  “Well.” She looks back to the road and squeezes her hands in her lap. “I wasn’t quite sure what to do,” she admits. “I should have put my foot down with her, but she was just so devastated and lost. I thought she needed her time and space to come around, and I tried to give it to her. It’s not a mistake I’ve made with her since.”