The Late Bloomers' Club

by Louise Miller

  “She mentioned something about making a movie?”

  “It’s called Side Work. It’s for a film festival. I have no idea what it’s about.”

  Elliot nodded. “Freckles has been seen several times now, by a sugarhouse on the inn’s property.”

  “Erika mentioned it. I guess she ordered some sort of trap but it is back-ordered.”

  Elliot tapped a couple of small stones with his toe. “I’ve seen him over there myself.”

  “How did he look?”

  “Good, actually. He’s definitely eating. Coat looks shiny.” He hesitated. “I’ve been working on a way to get closer to him, but I could use some help. Next evening you’re free, would you want to come out and see?”

  “To the sugarhouse?”

  “He usually comes around sometime between late afternoon and dusk.”

  I laughed. “You’ve been watching him, haven’t you?”

  Elliot smiled. “That’s my favorite time of day so I like to be outside then. Best time to see night birds. They’re more active then.”

  “I’m free tomorrow.”

  He looked pleased. “Sun sets at seven thirty these days. Want to meet me at the inn around six? That will give us enough time to get set up.”

  I had no idea what he meant by getting set up, but I was too distracted by the fact that my pulse had doubled to care. “Yes. Okay.”

  Two young women, both wearing overalls and red Keds, walked by, clutching scripts.

  I looked down at my own overalls.

  “I’d better get over to the auditions.”

  “I’m headed to the hardware store. Are the auditions in that direction?”

  “They’re at the Guthrie Playhouse.” I waved my hand up the street, toward the Guthrie Hammer and Nail. The playhouse was just a couple of doors down.

  Elliot held out his arm. “In case you feel dizzy.”

  I hesitated for a moment. If my failing to hang twinkle lights led to gossip, what would happen if I walked arm in arm with the representative of the big-box store? I looked up at his ear tips. Bright red. I took his arm anyway.

  * * *

  I could hear Kit’s voice while still outside under the awning of the Guthrie Playhouse. The door had been propped open. Inside, someone had written Side Work—Callbacks Upstairs on a piece of poster board and propped it up on an easel. I walked up the grand curved staircase, the banister shiny from the oil of a hundred years of theater lovers’ hands. Each step was rounded at the edges, soft with wear. At the top, in front of the main doors to the theater, a young woman sat behind a card table with a list and red pen.

  “You must be here for the role of Cora. Name?” she asked. I didn’t recognize her. Maybe one of the White cousins?

  “Nora Huckleberry, I’m Kit’s sister, I’m—”

  “I don’t see your name,” she said, biting on the pen cap. “Open auditions are closed, I’m afraid. These are for—”

  “I’m just here to see Kit,” I said, pushing aside the thick velvet curtain that was hanging in front of the doorway.

  Onstage there were two women. One was wearing a bright patterned minidress, the other overalls, a black long-sleeve T-shirt, and a pair of red Keds. I looked down at my own feet as it hit me.

  “You’re not going to the contra dance in a skirt that short,” the woman in the overalls said.

  “It’s not that short.” The minidress wearer stuck her legs out one at a time. “It’s barely above the knee.”

  The other girl tucked her hands into the bib of her overalls. “But when you twirl, it’s going to be around your waist. Do you want—”

  “Every old farmer seeing you in your underwear?” I mumbled to myself, in unison with the actress. The argument with Kit was as clear in my memory as if it had happened last week.

  I rushed down the steps to the front of the theater in the darkness, looking for Max and Kit. I found them in the third row center, leaning back with clipboards on their laps, legs propped up on the seats in front of them.

  “Kit,” I whispered, squatting down in the aisle, at the beginning of their row.

  “Hey, Nora.” Max smiled up at me and patted the seat beside him. He motioned to the two actresses on the stage. “This is the last pair before we break.”

  “And what about your side work?” The overalls actress held up a half-empty sugar shaker. “The other waitresses have been complaining, Kate.”

  “Side work. Side work! Don’t you know there are more important things in the world than whether there is the same amount of Equal and Splenda packets on the tables? Don’t you see? Ever since Mom died you’ve—”

  “Kit,” I said again.

  “Shhhhh.” Kit waved a hand in my direction but kept her attention on the actors on the stage. “This is the emotional center of the scene.”

  “This is—you can’t do this!” I said louder than I meant to.

  The women on the stage stopped mid scene. “Should we keep going?”

  Kit looked over at Max.

  “That was great, really great, ladies. Let’s take five, then we’ll pick it up when Cora picks up the sugar shaker.”

  Max stood and turned to the back of the room. “Paul, will you raise the houselights just a notch?”

  The soft lights of the auditorium came on. Max gave a double thumbs-up.

  “Kit,” I said as calmly as I could muster, “you never mentioned when you said you were making a movie that you were making a movie about me.”

  Kit rolled her eyes. “It’s not about you, Nora. Everything’s not about you.”

  I felt my face flush. Kit, who cried when she didn’t receive a gift on my twelfth birthday. Kit, who refused to fill in when the flu hit the staff and I had a fever of 101 degrees, because she was in the middle of recording a demo with her goth band. Kit, who insisted on performing an interpretive dance at Dad’s funeral to “fully express her grief,” accusing me of making everything about me.

  I shoved my hands into the bib of my overalls, remembered that that was what the actress had done onstage, yanked them out, and shoved them into my pockets. “I am not making this about me. There is no making this about me—this is about me.”

  “It is about a pair of sisters,” Max offered calmly. “And it’s true, the deepest well we have to draw from as artists is our own experience.”

  “Draw from your own experience, then. Just leave me out of it.”

  “It’s not about us. It’s fiction. It’s not even in the past, or the present. It’s postapocalyptic!” Kit climbed over her seat and into an empty row and walked toward me.

  “It’s postapocalyptic, with contra dancing?” I may have yelled this.

  Max threw his arm around both of our shoulders. “Nora, it’s a really beautiful story, trust me. And Kit, now that I’ve met Nora, I can see that you did a little more than ‘borrow a few details’ from her. We can make edits, yes?”

  Kit and I glowered at each other. If it weren’t for Max, I was pretty sure this argument would have been bigger than the one we had when Kit was fifteen and ran away to live on a commune.

  “We can make edits,” Kit relented.

  Max swatted Kit’s butt with a packet of papers. “Give Nora a copy of the script.”

  Kit reached into her bag and pulled out a rumpled pile of papers and handed them to me.

  “Think you could have it back to us by tomorrow night, Nora?” Max asked. He nodded toward the stage. “I think we found our stars. It would be great if we could start filming by the end of next week.”

  I took the wad of papers out of Kit’s hands and patted them into a tidy pile. “I’ll do it right now. Let me see if your stage manager will lend me her red pen.”

  * * *

  The bright yellow of the Sugar Maple Inn glowed in the coppery evening light. The inn stood in a clearing high
on the mountain, and from the driveway you could see the lush green of the valley below. The day’s warmth was quickly being displaced by the cool air rolling off the mountain. Margaret had planted sunflowers along the side of the barn, and their heads hung heavy with seeds. A pair of downy woodpeckers hopped from plant to plant, the splash of red on the back of their necks flashy against their plump black-and-white bodies.

  Elliot hadn’t mentioned where we should meet, so I let myself into the inn through the main door. Sarah, the front-of-the-house manager, was breaking down a tea service in the sitting room.

  “Hey, Nora,” Sarah said warmly. “Just seeing you makes me crave Charlie’s blueberry pancakes.”

  I laughed. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “You should.” Sarah looked over her shoulder. “Alfred is a whiz at savory food, but he can’t manage a pancake to save his life. Burnt every time. It’s why we don’t serve hot brunch.”

  I couldn’t wait to share this intel with Charlie.

  “You here for dinner? Dining room is booked solid tonight, but I could get you a glass of wine if you’d like, and Alfred would be happy to make you something. I could serve you in here. Sit by the fire?”

  I couldn’t remember the last time I had been out to dinner someplace that had cloth napkins. It sounded heavenly. “I’d love to. I’m actually meeting one of your guests—Mr. Danforth?”

  “Elliot? He’s a sweetheart. Let me call up to his room.”

  I wandered into the sitting room, admiring the eclectic way that Margaret had decorated the place. The walls were jammed with old family photographs, landscape drawings of covered bridges and the area hills, watercolor studies of local birds and plants. The Sugar Maple felt homey, but still elegant. The scent of roasting chickens and browning garlic wafted in from the kitchen. My stomach growled.

  “Oh, good,” Elliot said from behind me. “I forgot to ask you to wear something neutral. That’s perfect.”

  I looked down to see what I was wearing, and wasn’t surprised to find I had thrown on black jeans and a gray long-sleeve T-shirt under a thin gray fleece vest. I had twisted a green scarf around my neck at the last minute, when I heard the temperature might drop into the forties. Kit seems to have inherited all of the fashion genes in the family. I loved to look at clothes from an artistic point of view, but when it came time to dress myself, function always came before form. I pulled the zip tab of my vest a little higher. “Good. Great. Ready for action.”

  I followed Elliot out the front door and around the building, letting him lead the way, even though I had been on hayrides and sleigh rides between the Sugar Maple and the McCracken farm every year since we were little and knew the area well.

  We walked into the little patch of crab apples. The trees were thick with fruit, and the ground beneath was verdant with green grass. Elliot pulled one of the stray apples and tossed it far back into the field. “For the deer,” he said, and kept walking.

  Past the crab apples and down a twisting path we came upon the sugarhouse. It looked like the Sugar Maple in miniature: a tiny yellow house with a wraparound porch with four rocking chairs, two adult-sized, two for small children, lined up in a row. I was surprised to see the lights were on.

  “Mrs. Hurley offered us the use of the house while we try to catch Freckles. She said the family doesn’t use it much outside of sugaring season. It’s nice to have someplace to coordinate.” Elliot pushed open the door and stood aside, inviting me in.

  Inside, the sugarhouse looked like a sweet playhouse for children. There were Lincoln Logs stacked up on the braided rug in front of a cozy-looking couch, and the bookcases were crammed with board games. Stuffed animals were piled onto a futon in one corner. The wall by the door was covered by a blown-up map of Guthrie. Red pushpins were pressed into the spot marking the inn, as well as the locations of the White Market, the diner, and Tom Carrigan’s dairy farm. There were a few yellow pins as well.

  “Is this a map of Freckles sightings?”

  Elliot nodded. “The red ones are known sightings, the yellow ones are reports from people who weren’t quite sure. Like here.” Elliot pointed to a pin stuck in one of the far edges of Guthrie, by the creemee stand over by Starlit Lake. “Someone reported they saw something with Freckles’s coloring moving over by the Dumpster behind the ice-cream place.” Elliot drew his finger across the map from the creemee stand down to the sugarhouse. “It strikes me as unlikely, given the distance and the fact that the only food there is the ends of ice-cream cones, but it’s worth noting.”

  I studied the map while Elliot gathered up whatever it was he thought we needed to capture Freckles, but really I was just admiring how thorough he was about all of this. I had entertained the thought that Elliot might be feigning interest in capturing Freckles to get on my good side, but no one would go to this much trouble if he wasn’t truly engaged. It said something about who he was, that he cared about Freckles’s welfare even though he had never even pet the dog once.

  “Come over here,” Elliot said from the row of windows that looked out onto a stand of maple trees. “Let me show you what I’ve been working on.”

  I joined him at the back of the cottage. I could see a red-painted canoe tipped upside down in the yard, about halfway between the house and the beginning of the carriage trail that wound through the sugar bush and up to the McCracken tree farm.

  “I’ve seen Freckles several times just at the edge of the forest over there,” he said, pointing to the tree line. “The pastry chef at the inn has been leaving food out for him. See the bowls?” Elliot glanced over at me.

  I nodded.

  “Someone moved them from the porch to the yard, and he stopped eating from them. It took a week before Freckles would venture over to the bowls in the new location. He spooks easily. I didn’t want to risk moving the bowls once he started eating from them again,” Elliot continued. “But they were too far away from any cover for me to try to capture him with the net gun. Then I saw the canoe.”

  “Of course,” I said, nodding as if the canoe were an obvious solution. Really, I just didn’t want to interrupt him. I liked the slow way he unfolded a story, carefully as if it were a well-worn map of a place you loved that you didn’t want to tear. Like it was worth taking the time to do it right.

  “Every day for the past week I’ve moved the canoe a couple of inches toward the tree line. I’ve elevated it bit by bit as well. I think it’s in shooting distance now. And we can fit underneath it.”

  “So wait, we’re going to hide under the canoe?”

  Elliot beamed. “We’re going to hide under the canoe.” Elliot grabbed a backpack by the door. When he opened it, I spied the handle of the net gun, a flashlight, and some other supplies. He pulled out two pairs of binoculars and handed them both to me. “One is for night vision,” he said. “So, we are going to slowly, quietly make our way over to the canoe, and then wait. When you spot him, I’ll use the net gun to catch him. Deal?”

  I don’t know what I had imagined we would be doing, but sitting under a tiny upside-down boat hadn’t been it. Thank God I had brushed my teeth before I left the house. Was my breath okay? When was the last time I washed this fleece? “Deal,” I said, waving a pair of binoculars in each hand.

  We kept our bodies low and crept slowly to the back of the canoe. I watched as Elliot placed the backpack under the boat, lay on his stomach, and snaked his way underneath. I did the same with the binoculars. The inside of the canoe smelled like the deep woods, the cedar scent of the boat mingling with the tang of crushed blades of grass and the damp smell of the dirt underneath. And then, on top of that, was the smokiness of Elliot that lingered despite the fact that he was out of his business suit, wearing a pair of faded jeans and a soft-looking dark green chamois shirt from L. L. Bean. I only hoped that I didn’t smell like the Miss Guthrie.

  The canoe had been raised high enough that
we could lean on our forearms while lying underneath. Elliot balanced the net gun on a little tripod made of twigs while I uncapped the binoculars and focused them on the dog bowls by the maple trees. We both silently looked out at the tree line for what felt like hours. I grew conscious of the space under the boat. It was as if it were shrinking.

  “So how did you know Mrs. Johnson?” Elliot asked quietly.

  “She was my neighbor growing up.”

  “You lived on that little farm next door? That’s a beautiful spot. Why did you leave?”

  It felt like too long and sad and complicated a story to tell while lying underneath a boat. It was too small a space to explain about my mother wasting away while we all tried to pretend she would never die, or about my father who gave up on life after she passed. Never mind Sean and me.

  “We needed the money,” I said finally. I figured that was a story he must hear all the time.

  “I’m sorry. I could tell by the trees that were planted around the house that it was well loved.”

  This was the kindest response I could have imagined, and an unexpected one. “Do you still have family in Maine?” I asked, to move the conversation away from me.

  “We still have a little spot up by Acadia, but years can pass between visits. It’s pretty rough. It isn’t winterized or anything.” He looked a little embarrassed. “My parents moved down to Florida about ten years ago. Mom’s arthritis is bad—she can barely walk. It’s easier for them down there.”

  “I’ve never been to Florida. Do you like it?”

  Elliot shook his head. “Honestly? Not really. There are some beautiful places, sure, and some extraordinary birds . . .”

  “But?”

  “But there are a lot of gun shops and chain restaurants.”

  I poked his net gun. “I’m pretty sure this isn’t the only gun you own.”

  “These aren’t the kind of gun stores that specialize in hunting rifles,” Elliot said.