The Good Luck Girls of Shipwreck Lane

by Kelly Harms

  I stumble backward. Nothing makes sense—least of all that I was thinking to drop my panties on Janey’s travertine tiles. All of a sudden I can feel how drunk I am, and I want nothing more than to stumble upstairs and lie down and close my eyes. “Janey, I really am sorry,” I say, exhaustion telegraphing through my voice.

  “It just happened,” J.J. pipes in. “We didn’t mean to…”

  But his words fall on deaf ears. Janey has switched herself off again. Her eyes have gone cold and her whole posture is defeated. In the silence it hits me. Noah’s not upstairs. He’s gone. All that food wasn’t leftovers—it was never served. The date was a flop.

  Automatically I move to her and touch her arm, but she pulls away from me. Who can blame her, considering I am all covered in sex germs? I’m such an idiot—in my drunken lust I’ve only made a bad situation much worse.

  “What happened?” I ask her, but she doesn’t seem to hear. She is staring at the floor. “What happened with you and Noah?” I say again, louder this time, almost shouting, and she tilts her face to me and I see the heartbreak written all over it.

  She looks at me carefully, unsure. I want to hold my arms out to her and let her collapse on me, but I feel disgusting, filthy, and I’m sure she sees me in that exact same way. “He left,” she says at last, her voice still shaky from the anger and sadness. “He didn’t even eat anything. He just got up and left in the middle of the soup—” She stops herself suddenly and steps away from me.

  “What?” I ask, but she is walking to the counter where I was leaning just a minute ago. She is kneeling by the counter and looking down at something I can’t see behind her body. “What is it?” I ask again.

  She stands up slowly, and I see that her whole body is vibrating with fury. “Get out of my house,” she says, low and hard, and with utter seriousness.

  I know I should turn and run, but I’m too stupid to move. “What?” I say, dizzy and confused. “Why?”

  She steps to the side and points down. Behind her, on the floor where I must have accidentally knocked it when J.J. and I were … well, doing what we were doing, is the red dessert pot I had protected so carefully from J.J.’s spoon an hour ago. The red enamel of the pot is cracked in a thousand places, shattered all over the dark tiles. Around it, like the splattered brains of a suicide jumper, are the contents of the pot: custard in lumps and those big bright cherries, looking limp and useless now all over the floor, no longer the stars of a perfect showstopper. Just ruined red clumps in a yellow pool of goo.

  One of the cherries has been smashed—the unmistakable tread of J.J.’s work boots crisscrossing its mangled carcass. I wish ardently to switch places with that cherry now.

  “I’m tired of you screwing up my life,” Janey says, crying, and I know why she’s saying this. She was perfectly happy living her quiet life before I came along. I came here, and got in her way, and never shut up, and pushed her and pushed her, and now she’s heartbroken and miserable. I know all at once this is true: she would be happy if it wasn’t for me.

  I start to cry too. It all makes me so incredibly tired. I’m tired of making such stupid decisions, day in and day out, and ruining all the good things in my life.

  “It’s time for you to go,” Janey says, but I stand there, mute, wishing I wasn’t such an idiot, wishing I wasn’t so drunk, wishing, mostly, that I had never come to Maine in the first place.

  When I don’t move, she gets angrier. “I mean it. Get out of my house,” she says, pointing again to the mess where her perfect dessert lies ruined, and then the door. “Just get out.”

  I look down at the floor. There is nothing I can say, so I take J.J.’s hand and pull him toward the kitchen door. “Come on,” I say to him quietly, for all the fight to stay has gone out of me in a cold bath of pity and shame. It’s time for me to let Janey have her life back, to let J.J. go, to move on from here and find a new set of lies to tell and lives to screw up. “It’s time for me to go.”

  JANEY

  “As in cooking, so in life: We muddle through as best we can…”

  —NIGELLA LAWSON, Nigella Express

  That night is awful.

  * * *

  I go upstairs and lie down on the top of my still-made bed, which is too empty now with only me in it. Why did the designers put such a big bed in here? It’s not even the master bedroom. I stretch both arms out to try to fill up the space and lie there feeling foolish and wishing I could sleep.

  After a few hours I give up. There is too much shame and disappointment inside me to ever sleep again. I pick up my favorite Nigella Lawson book from the nightstand, but she is too cheery as she advocates the use of infused vinegars and tuna packed in oil. I put the book back down again on the bedside table and scooch to the edge of the bed where my legs can dangle over. I’m still dressed, still in my blue trapeze dress that felt so sexy and carefree this afternoon. Now it is too much fabric under my arms, too much movement around my legs. I stand up and spin around and feel the dress go out like a parachute, and then fall back into me. When I stop spinning I am facing the slightly ajar door of my bedroom, and I see a pair of eyes peering in.

  “Baby,” says Aunt Midge, when she sees me seeing her. “Oh baby.” She pads into my bedroom in her frilly pink housedress and ridiculous fuzzy Einstein slippers and wraps her arms around me tight. “I heard everything. I’m so sorry.”

  I start to cry right away. “Noah left, and then I kicked Nean out,” I say.

  “I know, honey, I know.”

  I grow too warm in her arms and wriggle away. “I’m okay,” I tell her, because what else should I say?

  But she is ignoring me, moving toward the bed, where she pulls back the covers invitingly and piles the pillows up high. She sits down on my side of the bed and leans back and pats the side opposite. “Come here and cry on my bony old shoulder.”

  I sit down on the bed, rigid, afraid that if I let my body relax, the big tantrum I sucked inside earlier will flow right back out of me. But Aunt Midge is on to me; she tugs on my arm to pull me around and at the same time rubs my back like I’m a colicky baby. The sensation is so comforting I know it won’t be long until I’m sobbing in earnest.

  “I’m sorry, Janey,” she says, still patting my back. “I put so much pressure on you, and I egged Nean on to do the same.” I curl up on the bed and rest my head on the pillow right next to her, so she can stroke my hair like she did when my mother died. “I wanted you to find someone—I didn’t want you to be alone. But you don’t have to look anymore if you don’t want to. I won’t bring it up ever again.”

  I let myself cry now in earnest. “It’s not your fault, Aunt Midge,” I whine to the ceiling. “And it’s not Nean’s either. It was me who wanted him. I let myself get so carried away…” My voice drifts off in a miserable wail.

  Aunt Midge sits up straighter and looks down at me, lying there like a wet mop. “Listen to me, Janey Brown,” she says, after she’s let me sob for a little while. “If you want him—if you love him—you can have him, do you understand?

  I nod a little, because I know it is the only way Aunt Midge will go back to stroking my hair, and because she can’t know how wrong she is. She wasn’t there—she didn’t see how he looked at me.

  She jerks her hand away. “Don’t you humor me just because I’m an old woman,” she says, as sternly as she can.

  I shake my head. “I’m sorry, but—”

  “Sorry is as sorry does,” she tells me, a saying that makes no more sense this time than it has any of the other thousands of times she’s said it to me in our thirty-five years together. But it does stop me from crying a little, just trying to puzzle it out.

  “There. That’s better,” she says with a sweet little smile. “Nothing like the wisdom of your wise great-aunt Midge to make you feel better.”

  I nod solemnly and let my face relax. Her self-aggrandizing silliness never fails to cheer me up, and she knows it.

  “There are things you learn in ei
ghty-eight years,” she tells me in her queenly way. “Things that make life a little easier.” She pauses, searching her memory, and I wait for her wisdom. “Like, for example…” I watch her reach for the right words. “Like, you can’t always get what you want.”

  “Aunt Midge, that’s a Rolling Stones lyric.” As well she knows.

  “I think I actually said it first. What else did I say? Oh yes: if you try sometimes, you just might find…”—she breaks into full voice—“you get what you neeeeeed!” She is, needless to say, also air guitaring.

  I give her a tiny smile—her rendition makes it impossible to keep up my melodrama. “Better,” she tells me when she sees. “But seriously, here is what you learn when you are eighty-eight years old.” Now she has a voice as solemn as I’ve ever heard from her. “You learn that houses—big old houses like this one especially—are just like hearts. They’re for putting as many people as you can inside.” She slides down a little lower under the covers and I can tell she’s going to keep me company in my room for the rest of the night, and my heart fills with gratitude for this. “Don’t forget that, okay, Janey?” she asks me, as she fluffs her pillow under her head.

  “Okay, Aunt Midge,” I tell her.

  “Now turn out that light so I can get my beauty sleep,” she says with a wave of the hand. Before I am even back in bed, she is fast asleep and snoring. Though I know I should stay up all night and feel miserable, I am not far behind.

  NEAN

  “I think of breakfast not as a way of starting fresh but as continuing what happened the night before.”

  —ROY FINAMORE, Tasty

  That night is awful.

  * * *

  J.J. leads me back to his truck, and then to his house where he fixes me a clean pillowcase while I stand waiting, speechless. He takes himself off into the TV room to crash on the couch. I pass out on his bed, under his polyester Snoopy comforter.

  * * *

  A few hours later I wake up, jolted awake by the return of sobriety. For a few moments I lie there confused, and then it all comes back to me: the kitchen, Janey, the Snoopy comforter. Then the rest: J.J., college, Noah, my promises to Aunt Midge, and the Big Lie that started it all. I feel nauseous, rich food and expensive wine plus shame giving me a leaden stomach. My mouth is too dry. I hoist myself out of bed to go for water.

  In the kitchen I find J.J. sitting at the kitchen table with the newspaper, working on the Jumble. He is clutching a Big Gulp of orange juice in one hand like it’s his only hope for survival.

  “Good morning,” I grunt, rustling in his mother’s cabinets for a water glass. “Parents still asleep?”

  “As far as I know. God, I feel awful,” he says, clutching at the back of his neck.

  “Me too,” I say, referring to my fight with Janey, not the hangover, which feels like a natural extension of my guilt.

  “What should we do?” J.J. asks me, apparently talking about the same thing. “Go over there and apologize?”

  I shake my head slowly. “I can’t go back there, J.J.,” I tell him. “And I’m not staying here, either. It’s time for me to move on.”

  He frowns and furrows his forehead. I can see the pounding headache in his eyes. “Move on? You sound like a drifter or something.”

  I sigh and sit down at the little wooden table next to him. “I am a drifter,” I say heavily, saddened by how perfectly the word fits me. “I came to Maine because I thought I had won Janey’s house in the sweepstakes. I broke in and squatted there illegally until she showed up. Then I told her an enormous lie so she would feel too guilty to kick me out and have been taking advantage of her generosity—and gullibility—ever since.”

  J.J. blinks at me several times, shocked. “Wow,” he says after a long silence.

  “Yeah,” I say glumly. “Wow.” I take a big swig of water, and I swear I can feel it coursing through me.

  “What did you tell her?” J.J. asks. Of course he would ask.

  “I told her I killed someone,” I say as nonchalantly as I can. Not that delivery matters at this point.

  J.J. reels at this, just as I knew he would. “And she believed you?”

  I smile just a little, a sad smile. “I know, right?”

  He shrugs. “Man.” He is quiet for a very long time, and I realize during this time that I am holding my breath. Even though I know it’s almost over between us, I can’t help wishing he will go on liking me now that he knows everything. A forgiving word from him could make this all so much better than it should be.

  “Well,” he says finally, standing up from the table. “Here is what we will do.” His voice is all business, and I don’t know if he’s furious with me or just thinks I’m worthless. Either way …

  “I’m going to make pancakes, and we’re going to eat them with a whole bunch of syrup and about eight cups of coffee. And then we are going to go over there and you’re going to tell Janey the whole truth—everything, not just the boiled-down version you told me, but the beginning, middle, and end. Well, not the end. We don’t know the end yet, do we? But we will soon. Either she’ll let you stay, or she won’t, and we’ll go from there.”

  Oh, J.J. “I’m up for the pancakes,” I tell him, as if anything in the world could stop him from his syrup fix, “but I’m not telling her anything. I’ve made her miserable enough. She deserves to be left alone now.”

  “She deserves to know the truth about you,” he replies, already stirring up pancake mix from a Bisquick box. “You are her best friend now, like it or not, and when your best friend gets her heart broken, you don’t ‘move on.’ You go back, with your tail between your legs, and you apologize for having sex in her kitchen, and then you tell her the truth so she has someone to talk to.”

  This is not phrased as a question, I notice.

  “Hmm,” I say, because in the end I will do as I please, and J.J. should understand that by now.

  “No hmm,” he snaps back, slamming the refrigerator door with more force than necessary. “Don’t blow me off. This is what is happening. This is what you have to do. Deal with it.”

  I don’t have to do anything, I think. “Well, I—”

  “Shut it,” he says with surprising menace, and I clap my mouth shut, cowed, a flash of Geoff coming across my mind and then vanishing just as fast. “Don’t say another word. Just sit there and think about what you’re going to say to Janey, do you understand?”

  I nod, stunned stupid. I’ve never seen J.J. insist on anything before. He is usually way too easygoing for that. He returns to making the pancakes with renewed vigor, and we are both silent while he melts butter on the big griddle built into the stove and starts pouring out circles of batter. Maybe I should consider what he’s saying, I think, after a while. Maybe Janey would forgive me. Maybe she really does need someone to talk to right now …

  No. That is just a way of justifying the whole thing to myself. An excuse to get everything off my chest and start new at Janey’s expense, like I’m one of those asshole cheating husbands who spill the beans ten years after the fact. That is the last thing she needs right now.

  In the tense silence J.J. serves us plates of pancakes stacked so high that I am reminded of last nights’ feeding frenzy and what followed it. My stomach clenches up. I manage to eat two bites before I give up and push my plate away, anxious from thinking of all of the possible reactions Janey would have if I told her the truth. Anger, that one’s for sure. Betrayal. Disappointment? Maybe not: she should not be expecting any better from me.

  When J.J. has finished all his pancakes and the rest of mine too, and the previously half-full bottle of syrup is sitting empty and sticky on the countertop waiting to be rinsed and recycled, he pushes back from the table and says, “Are you ready?” He sounds a little more gentle now. I know he can see how hard this will be, if I do it.

  Then he holds out his hand and takes mine and leads me to his truck. It is not quite 6:30 a.m., still too early for most people, but there is a decent chance that
Janey will be up soon—will she have to make the shelter bread in my place?—and a sure thing that Aunt Midge will be splashing away in the pool. So at least I will have a chance to say good-bye to her, no matter what.

  Because I haven’t decided for sure that I am going to talk to Janey, even though I don’t plan on letting that on to J.J., who is holding me captive to what he thinks is best. After he drops me off, how is he to know if I actually spill the beans or if I just lurk behind the house for a reasonable amount of time and then run for it like a coward?

  It is only that plan that makes it possible for me to get into the truck with him and let him drive me to Janey’s house. He turns into the driveway, but I stop him before we get to the tree line. “I’ll take it from here,” I tell him, as though my mind is made up. “It’s better if I do this alone.”

  J.J. nods, and puts the car in park. “I’ll wait here,” he says, pulling a book of Raymond Carver stories out of his glove compartment. “Good luck.”

  I hop out of the truck and crunch down the gravel driveway. With the sun coming up behind it, the house looks more beautiful than ever. Each shingle seems to glimmer. The front porch looks cool and inviting. The bright red front door promises so much. I see the large upstairs window that opens to Janey’s bedroom—the light doesn’t seem to be on, but the sun is so bright it’s impossible to tell if there’s any movement within.

  The hedgerow that J.J. keeps so perfectly straight and flat beckons me. I’ll just go around and say hi to Aunt Midge, I think, and then I’ll decide what to do. Maybe she’ll give me some clue about my chance of success. Maybe she’ll give me some words of wisdom.