The Good Luck Girls of Shipwreck Lane

by Kelly Harms

I walk past the flowerbeds that flank each side of the driveway and up to the small gate that leads to the pool. The sun is going to be hot today, I know. There’s not a cloud in the sky. It’s not exactly ideal hitchhiking weather. Maybe I should talk to Janey. Maybe she will understand. I groan, exhausted from turning this over in my head. I am no closer to making my decision than I was when we were back in J.J.’s kitchen eating pancakes. Only now there’s no more time. I have to decide now. Just as soon as I’ve talked it over with Aunt Midge.

  I push the gate open, and that’s when I see her. She is naked, as she is every morning during her swim, but she is not swimming. She is lying beside the pool, crumpled, utterly still. I run now, drop down to the grass next to her and shout her name, but she doesn’t see me. She isn’t breathing. I stop breathing too, for what feels like a very long time.

  “Aunt Midge!” I scream, pushing the last air out of my lungs. And then, because I know Aunt Midge is not going to answer back, I scream, “Janey!” I grab Aunt Midge under her arms; she is heavy like sand. I touch her neck for a heartbeat, I feel the air by her nose for movement; there is none. “Janey,” I cry, but now there is not much sound coming out of me. Now there is just crying and fear coming from every pore. “Janey!” I hear myself whisper.

  I feel myself gathering up Aunt Midge in my arms, holding the full weight of her body, trying to lift her to sitting somehow. Like if I can just sit her up, her eyes will pop open and she will talk to me. My tears feel hot and my head swims around in search of some reasonable thought. She was supposed to tell me what to do. Aunt Midge, wake up! I need you to tell me what to do!

  The glass door slides open, and Janey is there, wearing the same blue dress she had on yesterday, her eyes half closed and crusty. I look at her for just one long second, just so I know she knows what has happened, and then I turn back to Aunt Midge’s body in my arms. For the first time I realize her eyes are open. She is looking up at me.

  Then I feel Janey’s body next to mine, her arms around us both, hear her cries, see her shiny wet face. She touches Aunt Midge’s cooling cheek and then pinches her lips together in painful understanding, but she doesn’t let go of us. We stay there for a very long time, Janey hanging on to me, while I hang on to Aunt Midge. After a while I realize that Janey is talking softly over my cries.

  “It’s okay,” she’s saying, as she cradles me. “It’s going to be okay.”

  PART THREE

  Serve

  JANEY

  “Not all of our food history is set down in cookbooks.”

  —JAMES BEARD, James Beard’s American Cookery

  We sit like that for a very long time, me, Nean, Aunt Midge, all together one more time. Then J.J. shows up, and we come back to our senses, and stand up, and stretch our legs, and I am surprised at just how achy mine have become. J.J. tucks Nean under his arm and lets her cry on his shoulder, his broken expression and leaking tears hidden from her view, but not mine. I go back into the house, to call someone, someone who can come and declare my great-aunt Midge dead.

  Then we three sit on the leather sofas around the fireplace for a long time, waiting. Nobody says anything. Nobody cries either. I sit straight up on one end of the sofa and stare into space, thinking about nothing. Nothing at all. Nean curls up in a tight ball on the opposite side, her head on J.J.’s lap. If Aunt Midge were here, she would make fun of them for being so clingy. But she is outside, by the pool, and not coming back in.

  After who knows how long, a thought hits me, the first one I’ve had since I saw Aunt Midge was gone. A rational thought. So strange that I should be thinking so clearly.

  It’s all so strange.

  I ask J.J. to excuse us for a second, to go into the kitchen and have some coffee. When he’s gone, I sit down next to Nean and put my hand on her arm, to show her that I’m not angry anymore.

  “Nean, when the coroner gets here, you have to go upstairs. You can’t be down here, giving a statement.”

  Nean looks up at me for a moment, her face completely blank.

  “It could go into the system—your name, I mean—if you tell them you’re the one who found her. And then the police could find you.”

  She shakes her head at me, like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Then she squeezes her eyes closed tight. When they open again, she inhales deeply and says, “Janey, I have something to tell you.”

  “Now?” I say, I don’t know why.

  “Yes, now. It has to be now. It should have been months ago. It’s about the police. No, it’s about me. It’s about how I’m a big fat liar.”

  I sort of knew this already, but it doesn’t seem pertinent. “Okay…”

  “I lied to you about killing my boyfriend. I didn’t kill him. I hit him in the head and knocked him out. With a coffee cup.”

  I stare at her.

  “Then I stole his car and made a run for it.”

  I still stare.

  “I just told you the whole story so you and Aunt Midge would let me stay.”

  I blink a little. “But Aunt Midge said…” My voice drifts off as I think back to exactly that conversation, to how Aunt Midge looked that day, to the sound of her voice. “I didn’t believe you. But then she said she checked you out online and saw your boyfriend’s name in the paper.”

  “She knew everything,” Nean says, shaking her head, and I can tell she’s thinking of Aunt Midge’s voice too. “I’m sure Geoff’s name was in the paper. For a DUI or something. She was doing one of her classic lies by omission. To protect me.”

  Well. That makes some kind of weird sense. “Huh,” I say. Somewhere inside I know I should be angry, but how can I find the will to be angry right now? It’s buried, way past numb, behind devastation, under a huge stack of heartbroken. “I guess that explains why no one ever came looking for you.” My head feels muddy as it tries to wade through all this new information.

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “And I guess you figured you couldn’t come clean even after we got to know you, because you thought I would kick you out.”

  “Sort of,” she says.

  “Which I guess makes sense, considering I did kick you out last night over something much, much less significant.”

  Nean looks at me a little apprehensively. “I guess so.”

  I shake my head. Hearts are like houses … “I shouldn’t have done that,” I say.

  “I shouldn’t have done … all the things I did either.”

  We sit there for a moment. “I’m glad you’re not a murderer, I guess,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she replies. “Me too.”

  I frown. “I think I would be really upset about this, if it wasn’t for Aunt Midge being dead.” How can she be dead?

  Nean says nothing. Her face is all crumpled.

  “I would have kicked you out, you’re right about that. I would have been furious.”

  She watches me carefully through wincing eyes.

  “But I can’t feel anything right now.”

  Nean swallows and lets her face relax and circles her arm around my shoulders. “You don’t have to feel anything right now,” she tells me. “You don’t have to decide if you’re mad or whatever. You get a rain check on hating me, okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say, and my voice cracks. “Okay.”

  “When you are ready to hate me, just give me some sort of signal,” she goes on, “like, change the locks or something.”

  Even through the numbness I know I will never get around to hating her. I don’t have the luxury anymore. Aunt Midge is gone. Nean is all I have left. Without her, I would have no one to cook for.

  * * *

  The coroner comes and goes. The guys from the funeral parlor show up and I sign ten thousand sheets of paper. Aunt Midge drives away in the back of a bright yellow pickup truck—apparently the hearse is doing a funeral in town today. I know she wouldn’t mind about the indignity. She’d be happy for the view of the sky, if she wasn’t all zipped up in that awful bag. Of cou
rse, she would prefer to be driving the truck herself, I’m sure.

  Nean notes the same thing as we watch her back down the driveway, but then adds that she’s probably not that much more dangerous driving dead than she was driving alive. She’s not wrong, I think as we return to the great room, flopping back onto the sofa, aimless, restless, at loose ends.

  I’m not sure how long we’ve been sitting there when suddenly Nean sits up perfectly straight, alert. “Did you hear that? Someone’s walking around outside.”

  “What? Who?” Before I can get hold of my thoughts, I find myself thinking, hoping: Noah.

  “Stay there. I’ll take care of it.” Nean disappears into the entryway for a moment, and then I hear, “What the hell?!”

  I find myself moving surprisingly fast, inventing any number of possibilities as I go. None of them involve a hugely fat man unloading thousands of dollars of camera equipment from his nondescript van.

  “What’s going on?” Nean asks me.

  “I have no idea,” I start to say, but stop myself mid-sentence. “Oh no. Not now. Not this.” My stomach clenches. I try to breathe but already feel faint.

  “Which of you is Janine Brown?” the man asks, a humongous camera propped up on his shoulder. He’s wearing a gray sweatshirt and sweating profusely in the morning heat.

  “We both are,” I hear myself tell him. There’s a red light flashing on his camera. He’s filming already. I start to shake.

  “What now?” he says, glancing down at a clipboard he’s somehow attached to his pants. “I’m here for a Janine Brown and a Maureen Richardson.” He looks from Nean to me. “Which is which?”

  The mention of Aunt Midge seems to choke me. I try to speak but nothing comes out.

  Nean has no such problem. “I don’t know who the hell you are but you better turn that camera off right now, buddy,” she says. She’s down off the porch and headed toward him like a guard dog. I half expect her to growl.

  The man hesitates, but doesn’t turn off the camera. “Easy there,” he says slowly. “I’m just here to film for the Home Sweet Home Network. They were supposed to tell you I was coming. Won’t take long.”

  “This is not a good time,” Nean tells him. “You go on home now.”

  “No can do,” he says. “Gotta do it today or it won’t get done.”

  “Then it won’t get done,” Nean says. “Wait, are you still taping?”

  “Lady, I’m sorry, but I don’t take orders from you, whoever you are.” He looks her up and down. For a moment I see what he sees, the matted hair, the gaunt cheekbones, the slept-in clothes, the tear-streaked face. She is not the same mangy girl who I first met three months ago, but the shadows of that girl still remain. “I’m gonna have to talk to the person who actually lives in this house.”

  Without a moment’s hesitation I step out of the house. “You already are,” I hear myself tell him, in a voice clear as a bell.

  He looks from her to me. “You’re telling me she won this million-dollar pad? Doesn’t it have a shower?”

  I cross the porch and climb down the stairs, holding my back rigid, forcing my lungs full of air. “We both won it,” I tell him. “And we’re both telling you to go.”

  “You can tell me whatever you want,” he says with an unconcerned shrug. “I drove an hour out of my way. I’m doing this taping today.” He starts advancing on us again. The camera is still on.

  I set my jaw firm. “You want to do this taping today? Fine. Knock yourself out. You’ll want to avoid close-up shots of the garden, though. The coroner was just here removing our great-aunt’s dead body, you see, and I’m afraid he may have trampled some of the flowers.”

  The guy looks at me for a second. I watch as he digests what I just said, and his face turns the same pale gray of his sweatshirt. “Are you serious, lady?”

  “Does this seem like a joking matter?”

  “Christ,” he says, waving his free hand in front of him. “I’m so sorry. You should have just told me this wasn’t a good time.”

  I ignore that as best as I can. “Come on, Nean. He’s leaving now.” Sure enough, he’s scrambling into his van without another word.

  Nean climbs up the porch and stares at me in silence for a moment. We listen to the sound of the van starting up, backing away in a hurry.

  “Holy shit, Janey. You just told off a stranger.”

  Did I really? “I guess I did.”

  “You sounded just like Aunt Midge.”

  Despite everything, I smile. “So did you.”

  We both look at each other for a long moment.

  “She told me to take care of you,” Nean says. Her lower lip is shaking.

  “She told me to take care of you too,” I realize.

  Nean swallows hard. Neither of us says anything for a while. Probably because we are both trying so hard not to cry.

  Of course, it is Nean who breaks the silence. “Hey. What was Aunt Midge’s favorite food?” she asks me, out of nowhere.

  I shake my head. “I’m not sure,” I say, but when I think about it for a second it comes to me. “No, I do know. It was egg salad.” My voice is shaking now. “Egg salad. How annoying is that? I cooked everything for her, fancy roasts, elaborate fish dishes, homemade pastas. But every now and then I would catch her in the kitchen in her bathrobe with two eggs on the boil and a blob of store-bought mayo at the ready.” I sort of cough and laugh at the same time thinking of this, thinking of how she was pulling such a stunt just a couple of weeks ago when she thought I was out with Noah. When I caught her, she actually tried to hide the mayonnaise jar behind her back like she’d been caught stealing. How did she keep getting jarred mayo into the house without me knowing?

  “The whole thing seems gross to me. I mean, mayonnaise is eggs. Why would you stir more eggs into it?” I shake my head again. Everything happening now seems so foggy. But that day seems so clear …

  “What did she put it on?” Nean asks. “I mean, what kind of bread?”

  I think back. “Anything. Pumpernickel, I know she liked that a lot.”

  Nean frowns. “I’m not sure I know how to make pumpernickel bread.”

  Now I understand why she is asking. “I do, at least vaguely,” I say. “You will be very good at it. Better than me.” This is true—she has developed such a gift for bread that I am starting to prefer her loaves to anything I can get at a bakery. “And she liked to eat the egg salad with potato chips,” I go on. “We can make potato chips.” We can cook up Aunt Midge’s entire life history. Maybe we can cook up just a tiny bit of her spirit.

  “What else did she like?” Nean asks, and then answers herself. “I know she was crazy about your pot pies.”

  “Oh yes. Chicken pot pies. I have been making those for her for years. Before we came here, to Maine, I would make a huge recipe and freeze little individual pies in ramekins so she could eat them on nights when I didn’t come over. One time she told me that mine were almost as good as the Stouffer’s ones. I wanted to smack her.”

  “She would have smacked you right back.”

  I nod. “I know.” I think about the little pies I would assemble for her, no bottom crust, but a big towering top of buttery puff pastry.

  “We could make the puff pastry lids ourselves,” I say, gaining momentum. “It would take hours. Hours upon hours.”

  “Perfect,” says Nean, nodding. “And what about seafood?”

  “Lobster, definitely. Lobster macaroni and cheese. She saw it on Paula Deen and wouldn’t shut up about it until I made it. I thought it was like eating money, but she loved it.”

  “Good,” says Nean, and I see that she has materialized a pen and paper, and is making a grocery list now. “Perfect. Fish, chicken … any favorite kind of red meat?”

  “Mmm,” I search my memory. “One time she made me buy a share in a cow. Cow-pooling, she called it. She bought half the cow, I bought the other half. It was ridiculous—a whole heifer for two women! I don’t know what she was thinking.”
I smile thinking of it and realize that the muscles on my face are aching from being bent into so many shapes.

  “We went to see the cow—she said she wanted to know what she was investing in—and of course she fell in love with it. Those big doe eyes. I told her she should never ever name something she was going to eat, but she didn’t listen. As a result, she lost her stomach for the whole enterprise, and in the end I gave most of the meat to the food bank.”

  “What did she name the cow?” Nean asks me, leaning in.

  I roll my eyes. “I can’t tell you. It’s too ridiculous.”

  “You have to tell me right now,” she says.

  She’s right, I do have to tell her. “Timberlake.”

  “Timberlake?”

  “Right.”

  “As in Justin?”

  “The very one. She said they were alike in that they were both delicious.”

  Nean shakes her head. “The dirty old bird.” The way she says it it’s clear it’s the highest compliment.

  “Wasn’t she just?”

  “Justin Timberlake could have done a lot worse, though,” she says on a sigh. I nod. A lone tear leaks out, the first in almost an hour.

  “Don’t cry,” Nean says, though she is crying too. “She was a happy old lady who lived a very long life. She wouldn’t want us to be sad right now.”

  I laugh over a sob. “Oh yes she would. She would want us to weep and gnash our teeth and carry on like we won’t be able to get through another day without her. Which maybe we can’t, being such a sorry pair of liars and outcasts.” I shake my head and then, when a thought hits me, I look back up at Nean. “And then she would want us to drink.”

  Nean grins back at me, her face bright through the tear marks running down her face. “Well, we should at least oblige her there. It’s almost ten o’clock. We can cook tipsy, right?”

  I nod. “I can cook in any state at all. I can cook through anything.” I know this for sure. And it hits me: I’ve done all this before.

  “Good.” Nean lifts her voice just a little notch and leans her head into the house. “J.J., I know you are eavesdropping so just get your ass out here.”