by Lesley Kagen
Every Now and Then
A Novel
LESLEY KAGEN
For Casey and Riley, Charlie and Hadley. Forever and always.
Acknowledgments
Massive thanks to my editor, Chelsey Emmelhainz. Her guidance helped me to see the story in a different light, and I’m so very grateful. My hat goes off to the rest of the talented team at Crooked Lane as well, especially publisher, Matt Martz and Melissa Rechter and Madeline Rathle.
When I submitted the manuscript to my agent, Mark Gottlieb, he got back to me in record time to tell me that he loved it and was sure he could find a good home for it. He has proven to be a man of his word and I’m very grateful for his belief in me. Many thanks as well to the rest of the stellar team at Trident Media Group, especially Nicole Robson.
To my friends who bit the bullet and read early drafts of the story—Megan, Fran, Susie, Nancy, and a legion of others who took time out of their busy lives to give me feedback—thank you. And to the authors who offered such kind words about the story—hugs and a million thanks.
You’d think writing a novel would get easier over time, but during the three years it took me to get the story down, I wanted to throw in the towel many times, and if my dear friend and writer extraordinaire—Beth Hoffman—didn’t call me the most hilarious names and encourage me to stick to it, I suspect I would have. I deeply value her wisdom, grace, and patience. (Thank you, my little lilac bud.)
I’d also like to give a shout-out to my small Wisconsin town that bears an uncanny resemblance to Summit. We have an old-fashioned theater that has been known to show movies to kids for free and shop owners set out bowls of water for dogs on strolls. The creek that runs through town gives us a place to think and fish, and you will almost always find an artist painting a watercolor on its banks. Great food, too!
The first graders at Thorson Elementary School make me feel like I’m the best thing next to sliced bread, and our newly formed Comedy Club comprised of fourth graders makes me laugh my head off. They give me hope for the future.
I will remain forever grateful to the indie booksellers who gave me my first break. A special tip of my hat to the wonderful Jill Miner from Saturn Booksellers, and Daniel Goldin from Boswell Books.
My daughter, Casey, is my inspiration, best friend, first reader, and I can always count on her to give it to me straight. My boy, Riley, who I miss and love with my every breath still makes us laugh and always will. And my g-babies, Charlie and Hadley, who are so full of love and kindness and empathy that I reckon they were sent to us from the stars.
And lastly, thank you, dear reader. Without your support throughout the years, I wouldn’t be sitting here this morning as the sun comes up over the barn, drinking tea in my pajamas with my little dog, Gracie, trying to come up with words that won’t begin to express my appreciation. Your kind emails and posts on social media, showing up to listen to me rattle on at bookstore and library events, and always giving me the fancy chair at your book club meetings has led me to believe that at least a couple of you like my stories, and I’d be grateful as hell if you’d continue to do so.
Prologue
The girls didn’t blame me at the time and all these years later they still don’t, but I’ve never quite forgiven myself for instigating what happened during the summer the three of us were eleven. And I never forget.
Of course, not everyone in town has as many years under their belts as I do. Whenever the summer of ’60 comes up in conversation, someone not old enough to know better is bound to pipe in, “Time to let bygones be bygones. Water under the bridge. What’s done is done.” But there’s going to come a time when they, too, will understand that the border between now and then is much more like a cobweb than a brick wall and when the past comes to haunt it doesn’t ask our permission to do so.
Memory is a shallow grave and it doesn’t take much to resurrect the feel of his hands squeezing the life out of me, the sound of Frankie’s leg snapping in two, and Viv’s scream. A warm breeze ruffling oak boughs on a moonless night or the late train rumbling down the tracks or a dog barking two streets over can be all it takes to bring back the long-ago summer evil paid a visit to our small town and took our young lives as we knew them as a souvenir.
Chapter One
God only knows why my best friends and I loved getting the hell scared of out of us every Saturday afternoon at the Rivoli Theatre or the Starlight Drive-In after the sun went down, but we spent most of our childhood covered in goose bumps and jumping halfway out of our skins.
The radiated ants from Them! sounded an awful lot like cicadas. And after we saw The Fly, the three of us strained to hear one calling, “Help me … please, help me.” The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, whose main character was a doctor—like my father—who discovered his neighbors were being systematically replaced by soulless alien duplicates grown in pods scattered around his small town—like ours—had the girls and I spying into our neighbors’ windows for weeks to ascertain whether any of them had been similarly afflicted. But it was The Tingler that almost did us in. Unbeknownst to us, the owner of the theatre had fastened a vibrating device called the Percepto! beneath the seats, and when he activated it at just the right time, it felt like that alien parasite had crawled off the silver screen and into our little spines and we ran out of the emergency door screaming and swatting at each other’s backs.
But while every day back then might’ve felt like an anything-can-happen day, to the best of my recollection, which, if I do so say myself, remains remarkably sharp for a gal on the dusky side of her sixties, our lives were pretty ho-hum. Except for the arrival of a reclusive widow who most of the kids in town believed to be a practitioner of the dark arts, juvenile delinquents who admired one another’s muscles in Founder’s Woods, and the occasional escapee of Broadhurst Mental Institution, nothing much out of the ordinary occurred in Summit, Wisconsin—a town deemed so unremarkable at the time that a popular travel brochure left the “Points of Interest” section blank—until the record-breaking heat showed up.
Box fans began flying out of Mike Hansen’s hardware store so fast he’d begun talking about retirement up North. Husbands returned home with five o’clock shadows to drink bottled beer that wouldn’t hold a chill while their wives prepared cold cuts instead of the usual meat and potatoes. For kids seeking relief from the heat, there was the creek and a community pool, backyard sprinklers, and ice cream at newly air-conditioned Whitcomb’s Drugstore, but only if you were lucky enough to nab one of the seats at the fountain counter before some other sweaty pint-size Lutheran or Catholic did.
Of course, I know now that heat wave was a harbinger of the horror to come, but we had no hint of it when that summer started up. Other than getting released from St. Thomas Aquinas School a week earlier than usual because the soaring temperature had made the nuns and the classrooms uninhabitable, the first day of our three months of freedom began the same way all the rest of them had.
Frances “Frankie” Maniachi, Vivian “Viv” Cleary, and I—Elizabeth “Biz” Buchanan—spent the morning playing four-square and jumping double Dutch over at Grand Park. When the church bells clanged twelve, the two of them waded into the creek to catch bloodsuckers and continue their bickering, and I rode home only semi-hoping that upon my return I wouldn’t find that one of them had drowned the other.
* * *
There were quicker ways back to Honeywell Street, but I took the long way that afternoon. I wanted to pass by the cemetery where my mother had been laid to rest.
I never got the chance to know her, but my father remained devoted to her. He never took off his wedding ring, and he kept a picture of her in the pocket watch that he checked often, as if he was lost in time and was using her
face as a compass. With my tawny, straight hair, light blue eyes, and the slight gap between my front teeth, I was the spitting image of her, and a day didn’t go by that I wished I weren’t.
When Aunt Jane May found me crying into my pillow late one night, I’d broken down and confessed, “I bet every single time he looks at me he wishes I died instead.”
“Hogwash,” she’d said with a dismissive shake of her head.
“Then how come he barely talks to me?”
Her eyes grew shiny, but she scolded back the tears. She wasn’t against showing emotion, but she could be penurious with it. “Your father is the strong, silent type, is all. And if you repeat this I’ll deny sayin’ it, but I suspect he feels real bad about not being able to save Gus’s life and depriving you of a mother.” She slapped her thighs and got up off the side of my bed. “Ya want to know more—come to me. Now say your prayers and go to sleep.”
So she’s the one who’d told me that my parents met at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1947. Newly anointed Doctor of Medicine Lionel Dwight Buchanan and freshly minted teacher Augusta Elizabeth Mathews fell in love at first sight. Almost as if the two of them knew they’d live happily, but not ever after, they tied the knot just half a year later. And nine months to the day after they returned from their honeymoon, my father picked up his very pregnant wife’s older sister at the train station.
Jane May Mathews, a registered nurse by profession, had traveled from the family home in Louisiana to help care for the newlyweds’ bouncing bundle of joy for a few weeks, but when an infection claimed her younger sister’s life shortly after she gave birth to me, her visit turned out to be a permanent one. My mother’s funeral took place the same day I was baptized.
Aunt Jane May ruled our roost from that day on, and during the summer months when Frankie and Viv spent most of their time at our house, they fell under her jurisdiction as well. The kitchen was her command center and that’s where I found her after my ride back from Grand Park that afternoon. Like a sea captain christening a ship before sailing off on a grand adventure to an unknown land, baking peach pies was my aunt’s way of smashing a champagne bottle across the bow of summer, and I was expected to be her first mate.
“You’re late,” she said when I came through the squeaky, back screen door of the house. “Wash your hands.” After I did so and got situated on my kitchen stool, she launched into one of her lectures. “You girls are old enough now to keep in mind that the hideout isn’t just a place to cook up your wild schemes. It’s a memorial to your mother built with your father’s blood, sweat, and tears and it’s about time you treated it as such.” This had come out of the blue and when I didn’t respond quickly enough for her liking, she added, even more prickly, “At the very least, the first night you spend up the tree this summer should be treated like an auspicious occasion.”
The Grand Opening celebration at the car wash outside of town popped into my head, but I was pretty sure that’s not what she meant. She would’ve called that “showy” or “ostentatious.” Something religiously themed would be more up her alley.
“Are you saying that you want the girls and me to hold some kind of service for my mother tonight?” I asked. “Light candles and say prayers?”
“Lord, no,” she scoffed. “Gus wouldn’t like that.” She stilled her hands and gazed out the window above the kitchen sink with that faraway look she got sometimes when we talked about her sister. Like she was remembering her, or listening, for she was a great believer in life after death and communication beyond the grave. “What I want—no, what I expect—is for you three to keep this evening respectful, but full of promise. Less like a vigil … more like a baptism.”
This was a nice idea, one I believed the girls and I would’ve had no problem putting into practice, if she had brought it up before Frankie and Viv began to spiral out of control. Don’t get me wrong. The two of them had been born stubborn, so it wasn’t like I hadn’t been ripping a bone of contention out of their mouths before they beat each other to death with it for most of my life. But we were eleven years old, nearing twelve, that summer and coursing hormones and the soaring heat had turned their squabbling into heavyweight bouts that I was expected to get in the middle of, and I’d just about had it.
“But … how am I supposed to get the two of them to treat tonight auspicious when they won’t listen to a thing I say?” I whined. “You know how they are and it’s gotten worse. They won’t stop pickin’ at each other and they can’t agree on nothin’. Not what games to play, what movies to see, what books to read …” I threw my floury hands into the air. “I swear to God you’re gonna have to stick me in the mental institution if they keep this up.”
My aunt did not own a pair of kid gloves and loathed self-pity, but peach pie had been her sister’s favorite, and I suspected the smell of one already wafting out of the oven that afternoon reminded her of how the two of them had similarly tussled when they were girls our age. Because instead of admonishing me, she said, “You know what you girls need to do? You need to take turns coming up with adventures tonight. That’s what your mama and I did at the start of every summer. And you can’t just say what you want to do, you got to list it down on paper so you can keep track of what you’re takin’ on. Seeing your ideas in black and white will cut down on spats. Speaking of which”—she lowered her already deep voice that anchored the alto section in the church choir—“you tell Frances and Vivian that I don’t care how hot their blood is runnin’. They can spend the rest of the summer acting like she-cats, but I highly suggest they treat tonight with the dignity it deserves. If I suspect otherwise”—she raised her hand above her head and brought it down sharply on the pie dough three times. “Get my drift?”
Hard not to, and after I returned to Grand Park and broke up a screaming match between Frankie and Viv, I passed on Aunt Jane May’s “suggestion.”
Frankie didn’t give me any lip, but Viv spit a loogie and said, “She told ya she’s gonna paint our rears red if she finds out we didn’t treat tonight like a suspicious occasion?”
And then Frankie had to shove her and say, “Auspicious, numnuts,” and there was more tit-for-tatting until it came time to head home and devour the supper Aunt Jane May had set out on the screened porch so we wouldn’t miss hearing the first call of “Olly olly oxen free.”
As always, the game of kick the can with the neighbor kids lasted until the streetlights popped on, and after the girls and I shouted our battle cry, “All for one and one for all,” we raced back down Honeywell Street to commence what we’d been dreaming about all day. The first night we’d spend together in our summer home away from home, our inner sanctum and repository of secrets of all kinds. Our hideout.
Chapter Two
All the houses on Honeywell Street were worthy of admiration, of course, but they were nothing more than ladies-in-waiting to the crowned jewel of the neighborhood—the Buchanan homestead.
Our cobblestone driveway was lined with purple lilac bushes that filled early summer evenings with their heady perfume. A smattering of sugar maples, gasp-worthy oaks, and birches with trunks that peeled like sunburns dotted the front lawn, and the flower beds were always planted with whatever was blooming at the time.
The house was three stories of stone smothered in ivy up to its waist. The front porch was wide and a white swing hung from its rafters. The windows were paned and shuttered, and atop the shingled roof sat a wooden cupola that’d been built in the early 1800s by the founder of Summit—Percival James Buchanan.
Because my great-grandfather was a coffin maker, respect for the dead and expert carpentry skills had been passed down in our family for generations, so Doc—what my father insisted everyone call him, including me—had that bred into him. He couldn’t help but go above and beyond my mother’s deathbed wish to build for the daughter she’d never know a hideout like the one she and her sister had when they were growing up. He was a man of few words, my father, so he never told me as m
uch, but I believed he picked the towering backyard oak to set it in—it’s uppermost branches seemed to tickle the underbelly of heaven—and painted it a bulls-eye red so my mother could see it from the Great Beyond and know that he’d kept his word.
Commiserate with the amount of pain he was in, Doc ended up building me the Taj Mahal of hideouts. A high roof and canvas shades above the two windows kept the girls and me dry when a storm blew in. Aunt Jane May had sewn feather-stuffed sleeping mats, and when we weren’t using them, they were kept in a corner next to a bookshelf brimming with comic books, mysteries, and a couple of dog-eared ladies’ magazine. Assorted board games were stacked alongside hula hoops, a jump rope, flashlights, and anything else the girls and I came across that we didn’t think we could live without. On the walls, eight-by-ten pictures of movie monsters that we’d begged off the owner of the Rivoli Theatre were made all the more spooky when the train lantern we’d found beside the railroad tracks threw shadows on their faces—if they had ones.
Of course, Frankie, Viv, and I didn’t believe in monsters anymore, but on the off chance one of them did materialize in the hideout, we were prepared. We weren’t too worried about the creature from the Black Lagoon sloshing out of Grand Creek and tracking us down, because with those flappy feet of his, we figured he’d have a hard time climbing the ten wooden steps that led up to the hideout. Zombies would be a cinch to evade because they moved like mosey was their fastest gear. A crucifix nailed to one of the walls served as both a plea to the Almighty to keep us safe and a deterrent to Count Dracula. There was also a cardboard “Keep Out” sign, but it wasn’t used to ward off unearthly monsters. When I couldn’t take another minute of Frankie’s and Viv’s behavior, I’d tell them to take a hike, hang the sign outside the door, and they wouldn’t be welcomed back until they had their tails between their legs.
