The Princesses of Iowa

by M. Molly Backes

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She laughed. “It’s just a stoplight, sweetheart.”

  I slouched in my seat. “It would have been nice to know, that’s all.”

  The light turned green and we rolled forward, heading down Main Street. The houses were a familiar assortment of one-story ranches, small square boxes, cute bungalows, and nice big Victorians, but my eyes were peeled for any other changes my mother had failed to mention: new siding on this house, a stump on that corner where there used to be a tall oak tree. When we finally pulled into our own driveway, I stiffened. “You painted the front door.”

  “Don’t you love it? I know red is such a bold choice, but Stella said it would improve our curb appeal, and as usual she was right!”

  “I think it sucks.” I got out of the car and slammed the door behind me, leaving my bags in the trunk for my mother to deal with.

  I felt more human after a much-needed nap, shower, and luxuriously long primping session in preparation for the Austins’ barbeque. I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice in one day: the first time Jake saw me would be perfect. The sounds of my mother and sister yelling at each other floated upstairs, and I listened idly as I pumiced my feet. While I was gone, Miranda had gotten her driver’s license, cashed in four years of babysitting money for a beater Honda, dyed her hair burgundy, and changed her name to “Mirror.” I’d left behind a gangly, geeky freshman and came back to find an angry alternateen.

  The yelling seemed to wear itself out with a few last slammed doors, and I gave myself a final appraisal in the mirror. My hair was darker than it had been in years, thanks to a summer away from my colorist, but it was kind of working. I pursed my lips thoughtfully. I might pull off the Audrey transformation thing yet.

  My mother seemed relieved to see me looking more like myself. “Isn’t that so much better, honey?”

  “I love my shower,” I said. “I love my bed and my closet and my window, but mostly I love my shower.”

  My sister stood in the corner, scowling. “What’s so great about it?”

  “Water pressure is a beautiful thing, Miranda, my dear. In Paris —”

  “My name is Mirror.” Her voice was a shard of glass. “Can I go now? I’m picking up Jeremy, and the movie starts at six.”

  “You know, honey,” my mother said, ignoring her, “if you’d just take a little rejuvenating spritzer on the plane with you, like I suggested, your skin wouldn’t look so sallow after traveling.”

  I felt my shoulders sag. “I know that, Mother. But I didn’t have —”

  “Can I go?” my sister asked, interrupting me again. We had been on the same team as kids, us against Mom, until about middle school, when all the things our mother had nagged us about over the years — stand up straight, you don’t want to look cheap; don’t frown, you’ll get wrinkles; brush your hair, it looks like a rat’s nest; no more cookies, you don’t want to get fat; smile, you never know who might be falling in love with you! — suddenly made sense to me. Seemed important. I wanted in on my mother’s secrets. The triangle shifted its balance and I allied myself with our mother, leaving Miranda out in the distance, the lonely isosceles angle.

  My mother sighed. “Fine. But I want you home by ten. And please say goodbye to Daddy before you go.”

  Miranda gave me a superior look. “Have fun at the Austin Freakshow.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. I hadn’t seen Jake since June. It was stupid, but I was nervous to see him again. What if things were weird? What if I didn’t live up to his memory of me? Had I embarrassed myself in the letters I’d sent him? I’d filled up an entire notebook with letters to him and to Lacey, but I’d gotten only postcards and short notes in reply. But that was because they were busy — normal people didn’t have time to write long letters anymore, not unless you were stuck all by yourself without a cell phone or email in a country where you didn’t even speak the language.

  “Like you don’t know,” my sister said. “Stella can’t even move her face from all the botulism she gets injected in it —”

  “It’s called Botox,” my mother interrupted. “And it’s not cheap.”

  I had a brief pang of jealousy that Miranda had seen Jake all summer. Of course my mother would have dragged her over to the Austins’ when Stella needed help with the latest wedding. Not that I imagined they were suddenly best friends — I doubted they’d even talked — but she got to be in the same room with him while I would have killed just to be in the same country.

  “— and Jake’s dad is always pulling weird macho head trips on Jake, challenging him to play H-O-R-S-E or whatever, putting him in headlocks, calling him a pussy if he doesn’t want to go hunting with him,” Miranda continued. “Major creepers.”

  “Whatever, Miranda. He’s just messing around.”

  She shrugged. “Okay. And I’m sure he’ll be just messing around when he ties some gay kid to the back of a truck and drags him down the highway.”

  “God! Exaggerate much?”

  “Miranda!” my mother snapped. “The Austins are good people. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

  My sister rolled her eyes. “Sorry, Mommie Dearest.” She spun lazily and headed up to her room, stomping each foot as she went.

  “Well!” My mother flashed me a brilliant smile. “Don’t mind her; she’s going through a difficult phase!” She reached up to untuck a strand of hair from behind my ear and style it casually around my face. “Anyway, it’s been hard for her, trying to follow in your footsteps. She looks up to you, Paige.”

  “She does?” I could smell my mother’s perfume, lemony and light, and I had a sudden impulse to hug her.

  “Of course she does.” She finished pulling at my hair and stepped back, scrutinizing her work. “It can’t be easy to follow her perfect older sister.”

  “I’m not perfect.”

  “You know what I mean.” She glanced in the hall mirror, which hung above a faux-antique, faux-French writing desk, straightening first the collar of her shirt and then the mirror itself. “Stand up straight, honey; slouching adds five pounds.”

  My mother timed our arrival at the party so we weren’t the first ones there, but we weren’t the last, either. The long driveway was lined with cars, like beads on a necklace, and we had to walk a ways to get up to the front door. My heart pounded with a mix of anticipation and nerves. Automatically, I glanced at his bedroom window, but it was empty. From the front, the house looked nearly abandoned, save for the catering truck parked near the garage on the side of the house. Everyone would be gathered around the pool in back.

  The Austins’ house was on a small hill overlooking a golf course. The neighborhood was shaped like a saucer, with the houses perched around the rim and the golf course in the sunken middle. The homes all had huge yards bordering the course, and Jake’s yard was the largest, dropping sharply down from the pool into a terraced retaining wall and then to a long, manicured green space that blended seamlessly into the fourteenth hole. Thick stands of trees on both sides blocked direct views of the neighbors, though on a nice day you could stand right at the edge of the terrace and peer around the curve of the course to see Lacey’s house up by the eleventh. Nikki lived in an older, slightly dumpier development near the front entrance of the course. My mother had been scheming to move us out to this neighborhood since she first started working for Stella Austin, but sometimes I suspected she secretly loved our strange, sprawling Victorian in town.

  Mrs. Austin greeted us at the door, kissing my mother on both cheeks and my father on the mouth. “Just give that to the bartender,” she told him, gesturing to the bottle of wine my mother had spent twenty minutes agonizing over in the store. “Paige!” She kissed me on both cheeks. “How was Paris? Did you make it to the spa I suggested?”

  “I didn’t really have . . .”

  But she had already turned to my mother. “Jacque, I’m so glad you followed my suggestion! Paige seems so mature no
w! And what girl wouldn’t kill to be an au pair for the summer?”

  My mother nodded. “Oh, I agree completely.” She turned to my father and mimicked Mrs. Austin’s tone. “Dear, why don’t you take that back to the bartender?”

  Mrs. Austin looked at me for a moment, appraising. “A summer in Paris,” she said at last. “Oh, to be young again!”

  “I know!” my mother agreed. “I would love to be an au pair! Free room and board, and the best part? You get to give the baby back at the end of the day!”

  Mrs. Austin laughed and waved toward the back of the house. “Everyone’s out by the pool, dear. Please remind Jake to reapply sunblock; I can’t have him peeling in the church directory pictures next week.”

  As if I were already gone, Mrs. Austin grabbed my mother by the arm and dragged her toward the kitchen. “Now, about the McIntyre wedding. . . .”

  Before stepping through the familiar glass doors into the Austins’ backyard, I sweet-talked the bartender into a glass of pinot grigio, glancing around to be sure my father had already wandered off in search of Jake’s dad. One thing I could say about the Eastons: they taught me how to appreciate fine wine. I got only one good sip, though, before Nikki screamed my name and hurled herself through the open glass doors, crushing me in a hug and spilling the rest of my wine in the process.

  “Oh my God, Paige, how are you? When did you get back? Why didn’t you call us? Look at your hair! Did you get it cut in Paris?”

  “Hi, Nikki,” I gasped, untangling myself from her hold. “I literally just got home.”

  “How was Paris? Was it so amazing? You are so lucky; I wish my mom would send me to Paris! Did you get this skirt there? I love it! And you look so skinny, you bitch!” She hugged me again.

  I blinked. Nikki was the one who looked skinny, scary skinny. She must have lost fifteen pounds since I’d seen her last. Her legs weren’t much thicker than my forearms, and that they could hold her up seemed a miracle of physics. “You’ve lost weight. . . .” I ventured.

  She glanced down. “Whatever, I’m such a tub! I’m starting a new diet next week, though. I’ve been so busy all summer; things have been so crazy! I’ve been working super hard on this thing . . .”

  Behind her, Jake and Lacey appeared at the same time, coming around the corner from the side yard. His hand was on her back, but before I could even feel jealous, I realized why: she was walking with a cane. A cane! She leaned on it with every other step, like a World War II vet. My cheeks felt hot and the back of my throat cramped up. Why hadn’t anyone told me about the cane?

  They saw me at the same time. Jake crossed the flagstones in two strides and swung me up in a hug. I wrapped my arms around his neck, closed my eyes, and concentrated on the scent I’d been attempting to imagine all summer long. He was taller than I remembered, and thicker, and so much more real. When the scent of his skin threatened to overwhelm all my senses, I pulled back, looking at him, drinking in every cadence of texture and light in his face, every detail. My Jake. He smiled indulgently at my scrutiny.

  All summer I’d rehearsed what I would say to him when I finally saw him. I would say all the things that I couldn’t write in a letter, all the things that sounded cheesy on paper but that would sound just right with my voice in his ear, his hands around my waist. I would tell him how important he was to me and how hard it was to fall asleep at night without him on the other end of my phone, his breath growing steadier as he fell asleep with me, cradled in the palm of my hand. But now, confronted with the real Jake, I couldn’t think of a single sentence. “Hi,” I said finally.

  “Hi yourself.”

  Lacey reached us a moment later, leaning on the cane. If I was at a loss for words with Jake, I was utterly speechless when it came to Lacey. I wanted desperately to ask her what had happened. But I had a bad feeling that I already knew — and the fact that nobody had thought to mention this to me made me quake inside.

  With no other option, I went with the time-honored tradition of pretending nothing was wrong. “Lacey! It’s so good to see you!” I wrapped my arms around her gingerly. “I missed you so much!” She felt fragile in my arms, even more than skinny Nikki, as if her bones were made of something finer than the rest of ours.

  “Thanks.” She reached up and pulled at the tiny gold cross on her necklace, sliding it up and down the thin chain.

  “You look really great,” I said.

  “Yeah, right.” Her mouth tucked itself into a flower of disapproval, and I shrank a little inside. The look had been directed at others hundreds of times; at me, almost never.

  We were all quiet for a moment, staring just past one another, until Jake suggested we girls go sit by the pool and offered to bring us drinks. Lacey flashed him a grateful smile, brilliant in comparison to the frown I’d earned. Nikki clapped her hands. “Yay! Just like old times! Girl talk!” She skipped over to Lacey, wrapped a bony arm around Lacey’s waist, and managed to contain her bounciness all the way to the far end of the pool. Left alone, I squeezed my eyes shut and took two deep breaths before fixing a giant smile to my face and following them.

  My parents would be the last to leave the Austins’; my mother would be hostessing alongside Stella until the end. She was one of the primary planners for Jake’s mom’s business, Stella Austin Events. They did weddings and graduations and fiftieth anniversary parties and bar mitzvahs and any other event the residents of central Iowa could dream up for themselves. She’d been waiting for a promotion to partner for years, but something always came up that got in the way: an audit, a slow year, a bad wedding. “You know how the business world is,” she’d tell us over dinner, her eyes glistening in the light from the candles she lit. “The rat race and all. What really matters is the dreams I can help make come true.”

  I claimed jet lag around ten, angling for a ride home from Jake so we would have some time together at last. All evening he’d been solicitous to Lacey, offering to bring drinks and then a blanket from the house after the sun went down. He was a good guy, I told myself, and I was awful for wishing that he weren’t quite so devoted to poor, crippled Lacey. But I did.

  I’d hoped to use the ride home to talk to Jake, find out what he’d been up to over the summer — his letters had been vague — and get him to explain what, exactly, was wrong with Lacey, but I’d underestimated the impact his driving would have on me. It was the first time I’d ridden with anyone but my mom since last spring, and though I hadn’t anticipated it, I was scared. There were so many things that could go wrong: a moment’s distraction, a fraction of an inch in the wrong direction, a half pound of pressure on the accelerator instead of the brake. I didn’t breathe until he pulled his silver car into my dark driveway.

  We were quiet for a moment, and he reached forward to turn up the music. “I love this song.”

  Even through the wide windshield, the Iowa stars were sharply defined against the low black sky. The moon hung in a crescent above the neighbor’s garage. I took a breath. “Jake?”

  “Yeah?” He put his hand on my knee, rubbing his thumb against my bare skin. I shivered.

  “Is Lacey — I mean, is she okay? I mean, obviously not, but . . .”

  Jake’s thumb slowed against my leg. “Well,” he said. “She had a rough summer.”

  I sighed. “Who didn’t?”

  He shot me a look and I immediately felt like a jerk. “She was the last to get out of the hospital, and by then you were long gone. I think it was hard on her that you left without saying goodbye.”

  “I didn’t have a chance to! I —”

  “Okay, but it still hurt, babe.” He didn’t look at me, and I wondered if he was talking only about Lacey. “The fact that you got to go to Paris —”

  “Got? My mother dumped me on the Eastons so she could do damage control. I spent the whole summer working my ass off taking care of their disgusting baby. At least Lacey got to hang out by the pool.”

  “Paige, Lacey had to have, like, seven hours of surgery on h
er leg, and for a while they were worried that she might lose it. They didn’t even know if she would walk again! She was in physical therapy all summer.”

  Ugh, poor Lace. Why hadn’t anyone said anything in their letters?

  “Plus, she was grounded the whole summer. Her parents were really freaked out.”

  Nikki had been the one driving, but Lacey’s parents must have freaked out for the same reason my parents did: Thou shalt not mar thy parents’ reputations. “Well, at least she wasn’t bound, gagged, thrown in a trunk, and driven across state lines in the middle of the night.”

  He looked at me. “Bound and gagged?”

  “Basically.”

  I waited for Jake to laugh, or at least smile. He didn’t.

  “You know what I mean!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye to anyone! Not even you! I had to spend the whole summer with crazy people! You don’t even know how much I wished I could trade places with Lacey or Nikki or you or anyone!”

  He shrugged. “I know, babe, but all Lacey sees is that she got crippled and you got to go to Paris.”

  Crippled? Wasn’t that a little melodramatic? I bit my lip and looked out the window. It was my first night back, and I didn’t want to fight. Why were we talking about Lacey anyway? I wanted to talk about us. Or better, not talk. The tip of the crescent moon dipped behind the garage roof, and I wondered how long we’d been sitting here — and how long it would be until he kissed me. From the moment I’d settled myself into the plane bound for Paris, the only thing I’d wanted was to get back to Jake. Every night in Europe I dreamed that I was next to him, and every morning I kept my eyes closed an extra moment, trying to capture the feel of his fingers on my skin, the weight of his arm across my chest.

  Now here we were, alone under a blanket of dappled shadows created by the streetlights shining through the trees. Half turning in the plush seat, I looked at Jake’s face. Shadows fell across the hollows of his eyes and throat, but I could still see his smile. “Hi,” I said quietly.