A Charmed Place

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Often they'd miss school; she hated that even more. Snack, of course, was happy to skip, and even Corinne was relieved—she'd always been shy—but Laura had wanted desperately to make something of herself, and the cranberry bogs were not the place to do that.

  "I do remember Octobers here," Laura said quietly. "All too well."

  She much preferred her Octobers in Portland, where her garden was a feature on the annual fall tour in her neighborhood, and where afterward she held an open house for the other entrants, treating them to various coffees as well as desserts, none of them baked by her.

  "Hey, isn't that the old Sumner place?" Snack said, peering through the deepening dusk. "Holy shit, I hardly recognize it. Who lives there now? The fricking governor?"

  "Oh, some trust-fund baby bought it," Corinne explained. "He's playing at being a gentleman farmer. He has sheep."

  Whereas the Sumners used to have pigs. Even so, the Sumner girls had never occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder. That position had been reserved exclusively for the Shore kids.

  Laura scarcely glanced at the shingled, gabled farmhouse, now trimmed in pristine white and surrounded by a fenced-in, gently rolling field. She didn't need a walkthrough to know that the kitchen was filled with Sub-Zero appliances and that the new wing held a master bedroom with a walk-in closet the size of an Olympic pool. The same kind of gentrification was going on back in Portland. Bigger, better, more: it was the mantra of the new millennium.

  "I wonder what became of the Sumner girls," Laura said, only vaguely curious. She was far more curious about what had become of Sylvia, the bright, shining star who had suddenly appeared in their evening sky, and then not long afterward had orbited out of all of their lives. Sylvia, who had been everything that Laura was not: sexy, confident, beautiful, and most of all, free as a butterfly to go wherever she wanted and do whatever she wanted.

  "Jean Sumner got married and lives in Indiana; I think she's pretty happy there," Corinne said in a home-town, gossipy way. "Jan, I'm not sure about. I think she's moved to Maine."

  Snack said, "So who's still around? Besides you, I mean."

  "Lots of people," Corinne argued, sounding defensive. "Two of the Bosenfield kids still live nearby, and so does Nonni Pritchard. And Kendall Barclay, naturally, because of his bank. Will has a practice in Chatham. And, let me see, who else? Oh—Leon Borkowski!"

  "Porky Borky?" said Snack fondly. "He's still around?"

  "He lives with his mother over the liquor store."

  "Gee-eez."

  Every name felt like a pinprick to Laura, and two of them were red-hot needles. Which was why coming back to Chepaquit was always a hundred times more painful than leaving it had been.

  She remembered vividly the day she moved out. By then the dazzling Sylvia had been gone for nearly a year. Laura had had all that time to reflect on what exciting and dramatic lives people like Sylvia led, and to contrast it with how empty and limited her own life was.

  By six p.m. on her eighteenth birthday, Laura was packed and ready to run. After a final, bitter fight with her father, she hadn't even stayed for cake, breaking her mother's heart. It was her single regret.

  That, and leaving Corinne. Corinne had been too loyal to their parents and to the family business to leave. Well, that phase of her life was behind her now. As soon as she sold the nursery, Corinne too would be free to follow her heart's desire. She had paid her dues, with interest. As sole heir, she was going to enjoy her well-deserved reward. No one was more pleased about that than Laura.

  She glanced at her sister and let her gaze settle into a thoughtful study of her profile. Corinne might be thirty-two, but hard work and the sun had taken their toll: even in the near-dark, Laura could see thin lines branching from the corners of her sister's green eyes, and a deepening of the line that ran from her nose to the full, well-shaped mouth that presided over a strong, resolute chin.

  Was she alluring? It was hard to say. She was Corinne. Laura knew her too well and loved her too much to know how someone seeing her for the first time would respond.

  She was Corinne: sweet and loyal and loving and therefore, in Laura's eyes, achingly desirable. For Laura, it was as simple as that. Why couldn't some man, somewhere, see what she saw?

  Because men were jerks. Men were all the same. Jerks.

  "What? Why are you staring at me?" Corinne asked, cocking her head before turning her attention back to the road.

  "I like what the sun has done to your hair," Laura improvised. "Women pay big bucks for that highlighted effect."

  "You can't even see my hair in this light," said Corinne, grinning.

  "I see fine."

  "You do not."

  "Yes I do. And I'd forgotten how perfect your teeth are. Whereas I had to suffer through braces at thirty. What a birthday present to myself."

  "Okay, enough girl talk," said Snack, cutting in. "Rinnie! What's that offer that we won't be able to refuse, hmm?"

  Corinne said smugly, "Right in front of your nose, Snack."

  The road had dipped and risen and taken its familiar bend, and now they were at the turnoff to the nursery. Even in the romance of dusk, the place looked as sad and forlorn as ever—a run-down collection of shops, sheds, greenhouses, and outbuildings, all of them presided over by a large farmhouse built on the highest point of the property. Nothing had been fixed or painted in decades, and—for a nursery—very little seemed to be either green or growing.

  True, several tables sat haphazardly in front of the shop, but the few pots on top of them held nothing in bloom. It was early in the season for flowers ... but still. A solid display of spring perennials and bulbs would have gone a long way to attracting customers and distracting them from the woebegone state of the rest of the site. As it stood, no one but a longtime resident in the area would even know the place was a nursery: the carved and painted sign that once crowned an arch near the entrance was faded and unreadable, even in daylight.

  SHORE GARDENS. A wonderful name for what was once (Laura had seen the photos) a delightfully charming and well-stocked garden center.

  No more.

  "Will ya look at that?" Snack said in a voice of wonder. "I used to think that it was the peeling paint that held the buildings together. But the paint's all gone and they're still standing. I guess it's by habit."

  "Smartass," Corinne said, but with surprising good humor. Clearly she had something to say, and nothing was going to wreck her mood. "Everyone out," she commanded.

  Snack and Laura climbed down from the truck like high school kids on a prison tour: whatever was ahead, they didn't look all that excited to learn about it.

  Positioning Snack and Laura next to her on the wraparound porch of the house, Corinne threw her arms wide and said, "Okay. What do you see out there?"

  Not the ocean, that was for sure. The porch faced away from it.

  "I see ruins," Snack said candidly.

  Laura didn't have the heart to agree out loud.

  "Squint a little," Corinne ordered them. "You'll see a thriving business with not only annuals and perennials and shrubs and trees, but garden furniture and water fountains and bird feeders and decorative pottery and ... squint! You'll see."

  "Corinne. I have a one-thirty flight out of Logan tomorrow. Cut to the chase or I'm going to miss the damn plane," Laura said, more leery than ever. "Just tell us what you have in mind."

  "Just this: I want you to spend a month at the Shore."

  A Month at the Shore Sample Chapter 2

  "One month. That's all I ask. I know it's a huge, huge favor. I know I'm asking you to hand over a chunk of your lives to me. But ... one month. That's all. I've never asked either of you for a favor before," Corinne added in an earnest, heartrending voice.

  It was late, two in the morning. Snack and Laura were drooping over the kitchen table: Snack, because he was in his cups; Laura, because she'd spent the previous night crossing the country by plane. Only Corinne, who should have been sleepiest, was
still wide awake—feverishly so.

  Laura yawned and leaned her head back, trying to rub the cotton out of her eyes. It hurt to open them, hurt to think, hurt to argue. She longed for bed, the same bed that she'd been so glad to abandon fifteen years earlier. If only Corinne would stop holding them hostage!

  She gazed wearily at her younger sister. "Rinnie, why are you so adamant about this? The nursery hasn't made any money for years. In fact, do you ever remember a good year? I don't. Shore Gardens is a lost cause, believe me."

  Her eyelids eased the rest of the way shut as she repeated her litany. "Too many bad decisions ... too little maintenance ... the overhead, the taxes. If Dad couldn't make it work with three generations of experience behind him," she added, opening her eyes with an effort, "what makes you think you can?"

  Incredibly, Corinne was still more than willing to explain.

  "Because I know what was missing!" she said with numbing enthusiasm. She slapped the table. "You." She slapped the table again. "Snack."

  "We never wanted to stay in the business. Ever," Laura said tiredly. "Everyone knew that—Dad, most of all."

  "I know, I know; I was there for all the battles, and I have copies of all three wills: the old one, the new one, and the one Dad was willing to sign if only you'd come back."

  Snack let out a harsh laugh and said, "I used my three versions to stoke a fire in a cabin I was living in. What'd you do with your set when you got 'em, Laur?"

  "Filed them," Laura said briefly.

  Corinne sighed and went on. "But after you both took off, I wasn't enough to hold up our end. The first four generations had a lot more family around to work the business. Our generation just had me."

  "Hey ... don't go laying some guilt trip on me," Snack mumbled. "I paid the price." He folded his arms over the table and began a slow slide forward on it. "And it was a small price at that, to get out from under the old man's beatings."

  "All I'm saying is that I didn't have the right stuff on my own, Snack. I'm good at some things, not at others."

  Laura said grimly, "Or so you were told by Dad. Repeatedly, I'm sure."

  "But it's the truth," said Corinne, ignoring the sarcasm. "For example, the water lines are a disaster because Dad didn't winterize anything a couple of years ago, and some of them burst. I don't know anything about plumbing, so now I'm hauling hoses everywhere. Watering takes forever. There's no pressure. The hoses leak." She said sheepishly, "That's just one thing off the top of my head. There's so much more."

  "Like, who cares?" Snack said in a sleepy moan.

  "But do you have any idea how many plants we've lost? We could have carpeted the highway from here to Provincetown! Plus, we don't have a catalog, we don't have a computer, we don't do mail order, we're not high-end enough for the big spenders, we're not cheap enough for the Wal-Mart crowd ..."

  Snack was letting his head come slowly down.

  "Don't go to sleep on me, Snack!"

  "I'm just resting," he muttered to his forearms.

  Laura's heart went out to her sister, but Corinne was tilting at windmills. For all of the reasons that she had just listed, the nursery was failing. Had failed. Laura had been shocked by the evidence that she saw all around her when she arrived that morning.

  It was over. Everything was over. Corinne should just sell the property and use the money to start up a nice business in a related field. A florist shop, maybe.

  Outside, the wind was picking up, adding its dispirited moan to the grumbling responses that they'd been giving to Corinne's dogged pleas for their help.

  Laura looped her forefingers through her straight brown hair, tucking it behind her ears. "Rinnie ... honey ... can't you hear it?" she asked with a sad smile and a nod at the open window. "That's the fat lady singing."

  "No! I am not done here yet! I have plans, lots of them! I've thought about this for months, for years, but I never had the courage to stand up to Dad. You know how he is—was," Corinne said, her voice catching in her throat.

  "Yes. We do. That's why we left," Laura said softly. "Snack got sick of the strap, and I got sick of the tirades. Neither of us had your strength, Rin."

  She leaned over to rub her sister's back, spinning slow circles of comfort between her shoulder blades. When Corinne was six and Laura was eight, it used to do the trick. But that was then.

  "Laura, we can do this," her sister said, shrugging off the show of sympathy. "You have an artist's eye; look how you fixed up that wreck of a house that you bought in Portland. For gosh sakes, when you were done, it was featured in Renovation Magazine! And so was the garden you created—from nothing, I might add. Think of the marketing angle for us; you're famous now!"

  "That's so ridiculous," Laura said, embarrassed. "One little article—"

  "In a national magazine! It just flew off the shelves around here. And I forgot to tell you, but there was a copy in Dr. Burton's office, and someone tore out the pages for a souvenir. That's how impressed they were."

  A wave of irritation washed over Laura. "I cannot believe you persist in going to that quack," she snapped.

  "But ... we've always gone to Dr. Burton," Corinne said, taken aback.

  True enough. Which was why, when she was thirteen, Laura made a vow never to get sick enough to need medical attention. She'd kept that vow. The next time she saw a physician was when she was eighteen, living on the West Coast, and in urgent need of her first supply of birth-control pills.

  Corinne said, "Anyway, you're changing the subject. This isn't about my doctor, Laura, it's about my doctor's magazine. You were in it."

  "Yeah, yeah, I'm a real celebrity," Laura said tiredly.

  "Plus, you know all about computers. You can streamline our accounting system and get us computerized at last."

  "But that's not what I do!" Laura said, exasperated. She had tried so many times to explain her career. She tried again. "I'm a systems programmer. I don't decide what a system is going to do, I just decide how it's going to do it," she said.

  "But it's all still computers, isn't it?" Corinne asked naively.

  Sighing, Laura said, "My clients are big companies, with very special needs. I generally work as part of a team of ten to twenty people. My expertise is in the communications part: how to make two computers in the same system talk to one another. I implement the program, make sure it runs successfully, and leave."

  She got the usual blank look from Corinne.

  "I don't do flowers. Okay?"

  "Gawd. How can you stand that job?" Snack asked, opening one eye. "I'd sooner cut my throat."

  "It's challenging, satisfying work—and it happens to pay well," Laura shot back. "It's clean. It's prestigious. And I get to pick and choose my contracts."

  "Had your fill of down and dirty, have you?" Snack asked, yawning. He nestled his cheek on his arm, ready for bed.

  "Yes, as a matter of fact," Laura said. "If I'm feeling nostalgic for backbreaking labor, I go out in my garden and weed."

  Ignoring the crack, Corinne turned to her brother, reaching across the table to cup her hands over his. Snack didn't bother to raise his head, but she pleaded her case anyway.

  "And you've worked at every odd job there is. You know how to do everything, Snack! You can spruce up the store, and then the greenhouses, and maybe build us a checkout shed for the spring rush. As for this house, it just needs a coat of paint for now, that's all. Not even! Just paint the front, and maybe the west side—just the parts that show from the nursery!"

  Snack's answer was a sleepy moan. "Is that all?"

  "Okay, skip the greenhouses, then," Corinne said, rolling with it. "That's not as urgent, now that the cold weather's over. They're too far gone, anyway. Maybe—maybe just knock down the one by the road! Bulldoze it, that's what you can do! And relocate that giant compost pile that's next to it. It's so in the wrong place."

  Snack's head came up. "Bulldoze the greenhouse! Move the compost! What the hell are you talking about?"

  Corinne b
acked off, drawing her pale brows together in a fit of second-guessing. "All right, maybe not; it was just a thought. I have other ideas, lots of them! Please. Snack, please," she begged. "Give me a month of your time to turn this place around. To turn our reputation around. Let's make the name Shore something to be proud of again. That's all I ask."

  Snack dragged himself to his feet. "You're nuts," he said wearily. "I'm going to bed."

  A look of dismay passed over Corinne's face. "No!" she said, grabbing his forearm. "You can't go to bed. We made a pact: no one sleeps until this is resolved, one way or the other."

  "Watch me," he said, sloughing off her grip.

  "Oh, Snack. Why did you have to drink all that beer?" Corinne said, more sad than angry. "Why do you always do that?"

  An ironic grin, highlighted by a chipped front tooth, came and went on his lean, stubbled face. "Rinnie, dear sister. I do what I want. If I want to get fall-down drunk, that's my perrog ... prerga ... prerogative."

  Laura decided that she'd better step in. She was all too aware of her brother's moods, which could turn on a dime from bemused to resentful. Although Snack seemed okay about being cut from their father's will, it was obvious that somewhere deep down inside, resentment still bubbled in him.

  Laura sat back in her chair and said, "Snack, Rinnie already admits that she's crazy. The question is, just how crazy are we? Let's assume for the sake of argument that I'd be willing to throw a month of my life into this broken-down wreck of a business. Would you?" she asked him with a carefully offhand air.

  Her brother's laugh was soft and incredulous. "What, kill myself for a lost cause like this? Do what you like, Laur ... but count me out."

  It was his attitude to life itself: count me out. Without knowing why, Laura decided to call him on it.

  "Snack, let me put it another way, because Corinne is far too polite to bring it up: it's Corinne—not me, not you—who stayed behind and made life a little more bearable for Mom. She did it for over a decade. She's asking us for a month."