Little Broken Things

by Nicole Baart

  Almost enough to make her forgive him. But not forget. Never forget.

  “How are your cherry tomatoes?” Liz said, and bit back the memories with a decisive snap. She didn’t have time for melancholy. Settling the flowers in a basket by her feet, she grabbed the handle and started making her way around the side of her grand two-story home. A cluster of hydrangea bushes crouched in the shade.

  “Perfect.” Macy hurried to follow.

  “The heirlooms?”

  “My Hawaiian currants are ripe and so are the black cherries. I have a few yellow pears, but they’re still rather green.”

  “I’ll stop by for them tomorrow morning.” Liz didn’t ask; she didn’t have to.

  “Want me to post the party on Facebook?”

  Liz couldn’t stop her nose from crinkling. She knew that nothing betrayed her age so much as her inherent dislike for all things technological, but she was finding that she didn’t really care. Some things weren’t worth getting her panties in a bunch over. “Sure,” she said. “Go ahead.”

  Macy laughed, enjoying Liz’s obvious discomfort. “You’d love it,” she proclaimed for the umpteenth time. “Get yourself a tablet and figure it out. I’ll help you! It’s so fun to see everyone’s pictures. Never mind the ridiculous status updates.”

  “Not interested.” Snip. A bloom the size and color of a honeydew fell into Liz’s outstretched palm.

  “You should be. Amelia posts all sorts of stuff.”

  “Of course she does,” Liz said before she could censor herself. At least she didn’t roll her eyes. She didn’t need Macy wondering about the state of her familial relations. Before Macy could formulate a theory, Liz added, “Amelia is a lovely girl.”

  “In every way,” Macy agreed.

  Was she being tart? For once, Liz couldn’t tell.

  They parted ways shortly after that. Macy headed back across the cul-de-sac to her creamy brown colonial with the wide front porch and the four hand-carved rockers. She would curl up in the sunroom with her tablet and write God only knew what on Facebook and maybe Twitter. Such an appropriate name for shrill little birdies chirping away. Liz was sure that there were others, too. Sites with names she didn’t recognize and that would make Macy feel superior to announce. But Liz was determined not to care. Tomorrow wasn’t about Macy or resurrecting a Key Lake tradition. It was about Quinn. About reclaiming something good and innocent and real. Liz had to focus on that.

  A shelf in the basement contained Liz’s flower arranging supplies, and she carefully selected a glazed clay urn in a dreamy, midnight blue. It was heavy, the sort of object she would have marked with a Post-it note and left for Jack to carry up the stairs. But she was her own woman now, self-sufficient in a way that she didn’t know she could be back when her kids began to grow up. She had practically been a child bride, though twenty wasn’t so out of the ordinary when she’d said “I do.” Several years later she started having children of her own. And now. Who was she now? A wife, former. A mother, still. And yet.

  If nothing else, she was strong enough to carry the urn.

  Liz plastered it to her chest, wet foam blocks, flower wire, and a roll of green tape tucked inside. She shuffled up the stairs one at a time, straining against the weight even as she relished the tight knot of her muscles, her body performing a task that made her feel powerful. Alive. Guilty, because she was here and Jack was not. Guilty, because a part of her was glad that the roles were not reversed.

  Maybe she was going through some sort of late midlife crisis.

  “Buy a new car,” she huffed at her reflection in the hall mirror. “Have some work done. Take a lover.”

  The last one surprised her. A new car was always on the table and Jack had joked on more than one occasion that he’d happily underwrite a boob job. Of course, he didn’t say it like that. Jack wasn’t crass. But Liz knew that his carefully timed comments and fleeting glances at her less-than-perky barely C cups were wistful. She’d be a liar if she said she hadn’t entertained the thought herself. But, a lover?

  Liz laughed.

  She was more interested in Quinn’s love life than her own.

  There was newspaper on the kitchen table, spread out and ready for the heavy urn and the rough bottom that might scratch the hand-scraped hardwood. Liz hefted the container onto an article about one local woman’s exquisite quilts and set to work. She soaked the wet foam in water from her rain barrel and trimmed the stalks of delphinium. Stripping the stems of leaves, she placed them one by one into the foam, enjoying the sharp snitch of sound as each flower found its place. Even before it was finished, the centerpiece was artful, gorgeous. The sort of arrangement that could be featured on the cover of a decorating magazine. Sometimes Liz wondered if she could still do that sort of thing. Mark the world in some way more significant than the thin and fleeting likeness of herself in her children.

  They didn’t want any part of her, anyway.

  It was a hard knot of feeling in the center of her chest. A tangle of emotion that had been pulled tight with time, stony and dense and silent. As cool and bittersweet as the spice of damp air in her grandmother’s root cellar. Liz blinked away sudden tears, furious at herself, at how ridiculous and sentimental and old she had become. She had done well by her children. There was nothing to be ashamed of.

  So why were they ashamed of her?

  No matter. She was still their mother and she would fix what she could fix. Whether they liked it or not.

  Maybe she should have done this years ago. Taken the bull by the horns, so to speak, and steered it in the right direction. As it was, she had no choice but to interfere now. And if things got messy? Well, it was true what they said about love and war. And whoever coined that particular phrase wasn’t a lover—she was a mother.

  When the arrangement was Better Homes and Gardens centerfold worthy, Liz grabbed her purse off the hook in the entryway and let herself out the door. She had been raised well, and she knew how to right a wrong. A good old-fashioned “I’m sorry” went a long way, but a gift certainly didn’t hurt. Liz knew just what to do.

  She cut another armload of delphiniums, a bouquet almost as impressive as the one that would soon adorn her banquet table. Wrapping the stems in newspaper that she dampened with the garden hose, she laid them carefully on the floor of her back seat. Then she was off to the liquor store, where she spent a good ten minutes reading wine labels. What was good? Jack Sr. had liked his whiskey expensive and his wine cheap, so Liz had never really learned to pick out a bottle of wine. She finally settled on a French Chenin Blanc with a label that looked like old sheet music. Pretty, even if the wine turned out not to be to Quinn’s liking.

  Sometimes Liz felt like she had spent her whole life keeping the peace. Settling disputes between her children, running interference between Jack and his daughters. Well, mostly Nora. And swallowing disappointment like bad medicine because what other choice did she have? To call out her husband—to name the lies they both knew he told—what good would that have done? It would have split up a family. Left her destitute, abandoned, alone. Nobody would have won. Least of all Liz.

  She was a good peacekeeper. Shush now, be content, let it go. Peacemaking—now that was a different thing altogether. That was bombs and battles, wars waged for the sake of starting over, from the scorched earth up, on something pure and worthy. Peacemaking meant casualties, and Liz was all too willing to fall on a sword of silence if it meant life could go on the way it always had.

  • • •

  The sun was slanting high overhead when Liz arrived at the A-frame for the second time that day. It was time to start thinking about supper, to maybe take a pound or two of ground beef out of the freezer to start thawing for burgers on the grill in just a couple hours. Beer thirty, Jack Sr. had called midafternoon in summer, and it struck Liz that maybe she and Quinn could resurrect an old tradition and open a bottle of wine on the dock.

  She knocked on the door this time. A quick, happy, four-note r
ap that sounded to her like, “Honey, I’m home!” Then she stepped back and waited with a smile on her face.

  “Mom?” Quinn opened the door slowly, peering through a crack less than six inches wide. “What are you doing here?”

  “Apologizing.” Liz thrust the flowers at her daughter so she had no choice but to swing the door wider. “I’m sorry I burst in on you today. Please forgive me. I brought wine.” Who could resist?

  Quinn hemmed and hawed, pausing with one hand loose on the door. It was obvious she was torn between wanting to hold a grudge and struggling to resist the lure of the flowers, the wine. The unvarnished “I’m sorry.” How rare were those? She just needed a little push.

  Liz took a confident step forward, handing Quinn the bouquet so that she had to accept it or let the gorgeous blossoms fall. As Quinn wrapped her arms around the flowers, the door swung wide and Liz eased herself in. She gave her daughter a soft, knowing smile. It’s okay, she said with her eyes. We can forgive each other. We can be close like this. Out loud she said, “The wine should be chilled, but if we stick it in the freezer for fifteen minutes or so it should be just perfect. What do you say? Shall we have a glass on the dock? It’s such a perfect night.”

  “I don’t know, Mom.”

  “We have lots to talk about.” Liz gave a little wiggle of excitement. “I’m having a party! A big Sanford party. Remember how much fun we used to have? It’s tomorrow night and you just have to come. In fact, I was hoping you could help me …”

  Liz left the comment hang hopefully between them, but before Quinn could answer, there was the sound of a door opening and closing somewhere in the cabin. Then footsteps, fast as running, and suddenly, impossibly, there was a child standing in the hall. She was slight as a shadow and just as unassuming. A ghost, a whisper, a figment of Liz’s imagination.

  “I have to use the bathroom,” the girl said. She kept her head down but stole one furtive, repentant glance at Quinn. Her lips were pursed, her eyes wide in apology as if she knew that heeding nature’s call would undoubtedly get her in trouble. Then she hurried off toward the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

  “Mom,” Quinn started, the word sounding thick and uncooperative in her mouth, “that was my friend’s little girl …”

  But Liz wasn’t listening. She felt chiseled from marble, lips parted in shock. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, but as she stared at the closed bathroom door she managed to whisper, “Who is that little girl, Quinn?”

  “She’s—”

  Liz interrupted her before she could utter another word. “Don’t you dare lie to me. God knows I can’t stand to hear another lie.”

  QUINN

  QUINN TRIED TO TALK her mother into a cup of coffee or tea, one of Walker’s scones, anything. When none of those suggestions elicited a response, she reached for the bottle in Liz’s hands and said, “Here, let me uncork the wine.” Quinn had to wrest it away; Liz had an iron grip on the smooth glass.

  “I’m not thirsty,” Liz said. Her jaw was lifted, her eyes narrowed. Quinn knew the look well. It was power and authority, a call to obedience. When Quinn was a child, all Liz had to do was tilt her chin just so and her kids scrambled. But Quinn wasn’t a little girl anymore. She wasn’t sure how to respond to her mother like this.

  But whether she wanted it to or not, the truth spilled out. “We think she’s Nora’s,” Quinn said quickly. There was no point in pretending. Liz was sharp and inquisitive. Unexpectedly bright. She often knew things she couldn’t possibly know: who Quinn had secretly loved in tenth grade, where she hid the pack of cigarettes she once bought to feel rebellious, when Quinn snuck out of the house to meet up with friends on the beach.

  “Of course she is,” Liz said. “She’s the spitting image of your sister at that age. Minus the hair, of course. Who … ?” But she let the question hang heavy in the air between them. Who, indeed.

  Quinn realized that she was holding a wine bottle in one hand and an armful of flowers in the other. “Come on,” she said, motioning that her mother should follow. “I’ll put these in water and we’ll sort this out.”

  “I don’t think so.” Liz unzipped her purse and poked around inside for a few seconds before closing it without taking anything out. “I have to go.”

  “But—”

  “We’ll talk later,” Liz said decisively. And then she left without a backward glance.

  Quinn faltered in the entryway for a moment, flowers sagging in her arms, and felt a surge of annoyance. No, she was more than just annoyed. She was angry. Wasn’t this just like her mother? Liz was tough and demanding, quick to fix whatever surface-level problem cropped up. Messes and arguments and skinned knees were all treated with the same quiet calm. She was judicious in her prudent administration of palliative care, but she was no heart surgeon. Anything deep or hurtful, truly difficult or dirty, was ignored.

  “Fine,” Quinn muttered to herself. “I’ll handle it on my own.”

  But she grabbed her phone off the counter and texted her mother a single cryptic message: Don’t you dare tell a soul. I mean it. She hesitated, wondering how much to say. Enough to ensure Liz’s silence but not enough to unnerve her. Quinn finally settled on one last word: Please.

  There was no response.

  Nora had made it clear that no one was to know about Lucy, but her secret hadn’t lasted a day. Quinn might as well call JJ and fill him in on the family news, too. “Nora has a secret daughter. JJ, you’re an uncle!” Just the thought made her queasy. In Quinn’s mind, JJ was still the disinterested and slightly menacing teenager that she remembered from her youth. He had been arrogant and moody, convinced of his own importance and appeal. Who could resist Jack Sanford Jr.? Who would want to?

  JJ had always been a part of her personal landscape, but Quinn hadn’t given her older brother much thought until she had a sleepover her freshman year in high school. JJ had been a senior and would barely acknowledge her existence, but when he’d walked through the living room near midnight and found her curled up on the couch with a handful of girls, he had paused to lean in the doorway.

  “You going to introduce me to your friends, Q?” One corner of his mouth twisted up in a half smile that Quinn all at once realized most girls would find sexy. She could feel the way her friends shifted on the couch, leaning toward JJ almost imperceptibly.

  “No,” she said. “Go away.”

  But somebody invited him to sit, and he did, right on the arm of their father’s favorite chair, where he distracted Quinn’s friends to the point of giddiness. She was so angry she could feel her blood begin to fizz.

  It took Liz wandering into the living room bleary-eyed and still cinching her robe to finally convince the girls it was time to retreat to Quinn’s bedroom. But sleeping bags on the floor and fingernail polish didn’t stop them from filtering in and out on their way to the bathroom, the kitchen. And when Quinn learned through the rumor mill several weeks later that Sarah had made out with some older guy, she wasn’t surprised to find out it was JJ.

  No, Quinn had never been close with her brother. And she wasn’t about to try to change that now.

  She placed her mother—and her brother—firmly out of her mind and tried to focus on caring for Lucy. It proved much more difficult than Quinn imagined it could be.

  It wasn’t just the screaming over breakfast. That had been terrifying enough, but Lucy refused to thaw even a little in spite of what Quinn hoped was her attentive warmth. It was no good. Lucy wouldn’t let Quinn touch her and tried more than once to leave the cabin when Quinn wasn’t looking.

  “No!” Quinn finally shouted when Lucy tried to wrench the front door open and escape for the third time. She stood in the doorframe, arms stretched wide to block the little girl from escape. “Stop it, Lucy! You’re stuck with me!”

  They both cried.

  But something seemed to break in Lucy. She slipped into quiet compliance—which Quinn decided was, in some ways, worse. Lucy’s deference was al
most creepy.

  They spent the rest of the day circling each other, wary, reluctant. Quinn didn’t want to admit it, but it crushed her a bit that she wasn’t able to break through the little girl’s steely defenses.

  It wasn’t for lack of trying. The cabin was equipped with a game cupboard, and Quinn’s first tactic involved Candy Land with a side of cheerful banter. Even when the board was set up and Queen Frostine was doing her sparkly best, Lucy remained unmoved. Maybe she was too old to enjoy Candy Land? Yahtzee was next, but the din of dice in the red plastic cup only gave Quinn a headache. When the games proved ineffective, she moved on to puzzles (a thousand pieces of a lake sunset—Quinn didn’t get very far), bubbles (they were favors leftover from an outdoor wedding), and finally, a dance party thanks to Spotify and the portable Jambox that projected “Uptown Funk” throughout the entire cabin.

  Lucy didn’t so much as crack a smile.

  “What do you want, Lucy?” Quinn asked as she powered off the Bluetooth speaker. The melody of horns and bass cut abruptly, and in the ensuing stillness the cabin seemed unnaturally quiet.

  Nothing.

  The little girl was sitting on the sofa, her back straight and ankles crossed primly. As Quinn watched, she smoothed her dirty dress over her knees and picked at a loose thread with an almost alarming intensity. She was, without a doubt, the most focused child Quinn had ever met. Preternaturally good at playing hard to get. Lucy was flat-out ignoring the woman in front of her—even though Quinn had done everything but swallow flaming swords while standing on her head.

  “I’d love to take you outside,” Quinn faltered, gazing longingly at the sun as it glinted off the water. They would make a little sand castle in the tiny beach beside the dock and then dip their toes in the water when the afternoon got too hot. Maybe Lucy didn’t know how to swim. Maybe Quinn could teach her.

  But that was an idle wish. Quinn couldn’t take Lucy outside. Not with the dozens of boats circling in and out of the bay. Small-town curiosity was a powerful force and Quinn knew exactly how it would go: a local would spot her with a pint-sized companion and cut the engine, tossing the dock line to her as they puttered through the water. “Now, Quinn, my girl. Who do we have here?” And she would have to talk and entertain, pull a couple of drinks out of the cooler that was conveniently hidden in the bench seat at the end of the dock. Snapple and straight-talk, that was how the fine folk of Key Lake liked to spend a summer afternoon. And when the sun began to set they traded in iced tea for Coors Light. Cans, of course, because they were safer than glass on the water.