Last Summer

by Holly Chamberlin

  Frannie waved to a man in a battered old pickup truck passing her in the opposing lane. Mr. Picken, both hands on the steering wheel, raised a finger in acknowledgment. He and his wife were good sorts, solid people and members of a local Lutheran congregation. They had raised six children on a farmer’s earnings, no easy feat no matter what was going on with the larger economy. And all six of those children, boys and girls, had grown up to become as solid and self-reliant as their parents. Only two had moved out of state, which was also a bit of a miracle. One of those lived in a Boston suburb and worked in town as the manager of the women’s department in a high-end department store and another was career military, stationed somewhere in the South.

  Mrs. Egan, Frannie thought, should have taken parenting lessons from Burt and Betty Picken. Mackenzie’s mother hadn’t exactly been a model parent. Frannie remembered the time when both Meg and Mackenzie had been in Girl Scouts. The troop leaders had planned a camping trip and each girl was assigned an item of food to contribute to the evening meal. Mackenzie was supposed to bring the hot dogs. Patty Egan had sent her daughter empty-handed and otherwise ill prepared. One of the leaders had given up her sleeping bag for the girl. Another had driven back to the closest town and managed to scare up a few packages of frozen hamburger patties, which, it turned out, were gray and tasteless. At least half of the campers and all of the leaders refused to eat them. After that disastrous weekend, Meg decided being a Girl Scout wasn’t fun after all. That was the end of her scouting career.

  Mr. Egan was by all accounts a nice enough guy, Frannie thought, if a bit socially inept. He had a local reputation as a brainiac—that was Peter’s term for Bob Egan; anyone with a higher education made him feel uneasy and intimidated—as he had gone to Harvard for graduate school and now taught economics at Barnes College.

  Yes, the Egans had seemed an odd, mismatched couple, Patty Egan more interested in shopping and tanning salons than in sharing her husband’s academic concerns. It was a mystery to Frannie why they had gotten together in the first place. It was probably a mystery to all the residents of Yorktide, one of many they would never solve.

  Like why the levelheaded Frances Donaldson had married the delinquent Peter Giroux. Frannie sighed. Well, at least the entire Giroux family hadn’t fallen apart as a result of the divorce. Not like what had happened with the Egans. When Mackenzie’s mother had run off with that guy from Augusta a few years back, things had gotten bad, and fast, for her hapless husband and young kids. It was a small town, and everyone knew everyone else’s business or thought they did. It wasn’t an atmosphere a person like Bob Egan could handle, especially not when he found himself the focus of the gossip. Aside from the time he spent at the college, he had become almost a recluse. He let his membership in the country club where he had occasionally played golf lapse and even stopped going to Mass on Sunday. Frannie felt bad for Bob Egan, but she didn’t know him well enough to offer a shoulder to cry on. Besides, she simply didn’t have the time or the energy to take on another dependent. She figured that Father William had reached out to him. At least, she hoped that he had.

  Mackenzie’s older brother, Bobby—Peter’s apt nickname for him was Booby—had gone really wild after his mother’s defection. He had dropped out of school, gotten himself picked up by the local police a few times for minor infractions of the law, and, rumor had it, gotten an underage girl from a neighboring town pregnant.

  Somehow, except for a few minor infractions, Mackenzie had managed to stay out of trouble, which was probably, Frannie thought, due to cunning and intelligence. Mackenzie was not a dumb girl. In fact, since first grade she had always been one of the best students, and sometimes, in spite of the occasional antics, even a teacher’s pet. No doubt if her grades were poor, teachers and administration would take more critical notice of her, but as it was, Mackenzie presented as pretty self-sufficient and so was largely left on her own.

  And that was the problem, Frannie thought, frowning as a car driven by a ten-year-old boy (okay, maybe a seventeen-year-old boy) screeched onto the road in front of her. Kids needed supervision even when they were doing everything in their power to convince you otherwise. But how could you supervise a child in every single situation? Like with Meg. Frannie was a bit worried that because Rosie was no longer her friend, Meg would throw all common sense to the wind when school started again and become involved with Mackenzie and her cronies. There were plenty of other, much nicer girls Frannie would rather see her daughter hang out with, but she couldn’t be with Meg at school, guiding her social life, encouraging her to choose new friends wisely. Besides, though Meg wasn’t a particularly contrary kid (well, not always), no one her age liked to do what her mother suggested she do. If Frannie did interfere (that’s how Meg would see it), she would run the risk of totally alienating her daughter, and that couldn’t be good.

  Frannie slowed the car as the youthful driver ahead swerved a bit over the lane line. When Meg gets her license, she thought, I am reading her the riot act before she hits the road. And if she crashes the car, that’s it. I’m not buying her another car. She can walk or ride her bike everywhere until she’s saved up enough money to buy her own car.

  Mackenzie Egan would probably have her own car before long, Frannie mused. If she didn’t sucker her father out of his Mercedes. Yeah, it was a no-brainer to realize that it would be a bad idea for Meg to hang out with Mackenzie Egan. But Frannie honestly didn’t know if it would be a good idea for Meg to be friends with Rosie again. She thought about Jane’s unexpected visit the other day and how adamant she had been about the girls being kept apart. Jane was afraid for her child. Frannie could understand that. But it hurt her to know that Jane considered Meg a bad influence or a danger. Meg! True, she wasn’t always full of happiness and light—in fact, she pretty much grumbled about everything—but she was hardly a monster. Frannie wondered what Jane was saying to her daughter about Meg. She wondered if Jane was painting a portrait of a hopeless juvenile delinquent, someone Rosie was better off without.

  And let’s face it, Frannie thought, happy to play devil’s advocate for a moment, Rosie really put Meg in a terrible situation for all those months, swearing her to silence. In a way, she had made Meg complicit in the bullying from the start. Meg’s spilling Rosie’s secret was in some ways inevitable. Frannie didn’t want her daughter having to go through that sort of thing again, and she might, if Rosie hadn’t sufficiently learned how to stand up for herself. It was a puzzle. Frannie wished she knew what was best for her daughter, but she just didn’t. How could anyone really know? Kids didn’t come with operating instructions.

  “Talk about freakin’ operating instructions,” Frannie muttered. Her home printer was on the fritz and the manual might as well have been written in Sanskrit for all Frannie could make of it. Well, maybe a broken printer was to be expected; it was over ten years old and had seen some heavy-duty use. After Mike’s generous gesture, she supposed she could ask him to take a look at it. He had always been the Giroux family handyman and tech guy, even before her divorce from Peter. Peter’s skills were limited, and his energy and focus were minimal.

  Still, she didn’t want Mike to think she was taking advantage in any way. She supposed they could survive without a printer until her next paycheck or even until the one after that, especially now that school was out and Meg wouldn’t need to print out her book reports and other papers until the new semester began.

  The lousy teenaged driver turned off onto a side road and Frannie sighed with relief. She wasn’t a nervous driver but she was an alert one, and driving along behind an incompetent driver made her angry. Even if the kid wasn’t technically incompetent, he had been acting stupidly behind the wheel, probably sending a text or surfing the Internet instead of keeping his eyes on the road.

  Frannie frowned. Sometimes it seemed that 90 percent of the trouble in the world was caused by the Internet. A while back, before the whole episode with Rosie, she had begun to consider the pros and cons
of monitoring Meg’s being online. She had set time limits, of course, but she had stopped there. She did know for sure that Meg didn’t have a Facebook page or a Twitter or an e-mail account, and that was because Frannie had forbidden Meg to get involved with that sort of social media until she was older. (How old was yet to be determined.) But what websites Meg visited, well, that was a mystery. Frannie knew it was easy to check the history of Meg’s browsing, but she continually resisted the temptation. Still, with Petey being so young and impressionable, there was need for some vigilance.

  It was complicated. Recently, she had read an article online about parents tracking their kids’ computer habits. The writer had used the term “benevolent monitoring,” which was what one woman had chosen to call her habit of checking up on her son’s Internet history. “Spying,” Frannie thought, was more accurate a term than “checking up on.”

  Was there really such a thing as “benevolent monitoring”? The term seemed a bit of an oxymoron, but viewed in the light of the concerned parent, maybe it made sense. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to keep tabs on your child’s every movement. What would come next, Frannie thought wryly, a collar and a leash?

  Yeah, it was complicated. She wanted her children to trust her. There was a fine line between overseeing and surveillance. Then again, you weren’t supposed to be your child’s friend before being her parent. That, Frannie believed. Still, she remembered how furious she had been when she discovered that her mother had been reading her diary. To a ten-year-old it had felt like the most horrible of betrayals, but her mother had justified her action by claiming that it was a parent’s right to know absolutely everything about her child. Privacy was for adults only. It was something they had earned, if only by becoming adults.

  After that, Frannie had stopped keeping a diary. For a while she missed writing in it every night, but what was the point when nothing you wrote down could be kept personal? You would be writing for an audience, not for yourself. As far as Frannie knew, Meg didn’t keep a journal. If she did it was a deep, dark secret, a secret her mother was not going to try to ferret out.

  Frannie’s stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and that had been on the run, a stale granola bar munched on the way to work. She had planned on eating lunch like a normal person, but a crisis had arisen when the computer system had crashed and she had had to summon the off-site IT guy. By the time he had shown up and got the system up and running again, it was already three o’clock and Frannie was facing a backlog of work. So the ham and cheese sandwich she had made for today would be eaten tomorrow. If someone in the office didn’t steal it. It had been known to happen, in spite of her name spelled out in big black letters on her reusable plastic lunch bag.

  Her stomach growled again, loudly. A slight detour would take her past a McDonald’s. She knew she shouldn’t spend the money on takeout when there was a pantry full of food at home, but the thought of cooking anything at all, even of pouring a bowl of cereal or boiling water for pasta, suddenly seemed more than she could handle. She was only thirty-eight, but right then she felt as if she were seventy-eight. An old seventy-eight, not the Jane Fonda kind of seventy-something. Who did women like that think they were, Helen Mirren and Raquel Welch and God knew who else, setting the bar so high for the rest of womankind, the ones who did their own housecleaning and had more to worry about than what to wear on the red carpet?

  So, Frannie thought, does being tired really give me an excuse to overspend my hard-earned money on fast food? Is purchasing a meal loaded with grease and fat and excessive calories a responsible solution to my feeling too worn out to cook a healthy dinner for my children?

  “Screw it,” Frannie said aloud. One meal of McDonald’s hamburgers wouldn’t kill anyone, and it wouldn’t send the Giroux family into the poorhouse. She would get fries, too, and there was some ice cream in the freezer at home. Her stomach growled mightily at the prospect. Jane Fonda be damned!

  12

  January 5, 2012

  Dear Diary,

  A terrible thing happened to me today.

  I still can’t really believe it. I still keep thinking that maybe I’m having an awful dream, a nightmare, and that I’ll wake up to find that nothing bad really happened after all.

  But I know I won’t.

  I was on my way to the library after school. I was walking up through the small parking lot on the east side of the library when I saw them, coming around the back of the building. There are no windows on that part of the building, so later I realized that no one inside the library could see what was happening. They must have planned it that way.

  Mackenzie and Courtney and Jill came up to me, kind of forcing me to stop. I don’t know where Stella was or why she wasn’t with them. It doesn’t matter. The three of them stood really close, too close. I took a step back and they took a step forward.

  They all talked at the same time, saying that my hair was beautiful and asking if they could feel it. I thought that was really weird and a feeling in my stomach told me that something was very, very wrong, but I didn’t know how to say “no” or “go away and leave me alone” and then they were snatching my hat off my head. Jill held my shoulders and Courtney must have been hiding a pair of scissors in her coat pocket because I felt a hard tug and tried to break away but couldn’t. Mackenzie just stood there, watching. Her face was totally bland, like nothing terrible was happening. And then Jill let me go with a bit of a shove and Courtney held up my braid and laughed. Before I could even react—scream or cry or whatever—she dropped my braid and they all ran off.

  I don’t know how I got home. My hat was on the ground and I put it on and then put up my hood over it. Luckily, Mom was out when I got to the house. She had left a note saying she had gone to see one of her clients and would be back by four-thirty. Dad, I knew, wouldn’t be home until five-thirty, like usual. I ran upstairs and locked myself into the bathroom in the hallway. My heart was pounding like mad but I forced myself to look in the mirror. I started to cry then, the tears just pouring down my face. The ends of my hair were all jagged and uneven. The shortest pieces came down just below my ears and the longer ones came midway down my neck. It was a mess.

  It just occurred to me that I don’t know what happened to my braid. It could still be lying on the ground where Courtney dropped it. Or one of them could have taken it and I just didn’t notice.... I feel sick to my stomach thinking about it. I feel sad for my hair. That might not make sense, but it’s what I feel.

  What will someone think when they find it there in the parking lot?

  I lied to Mom when she got home. I’ve never lied to her, except for the time I told her I tripped outside school when I really hadn’t, I’d been pushed down. But I just couldn’t tell her what really happened. Then she would tell Dad and they would go to the principal and then everyone would know and I would be humiliated. She was kind of upset that I cut my own hair when she usually does it—that’s what I told her, that I thought I could do it myself—and she didn’t say anything while she was making everything even again. She says now that I have a “bob.” The whole time I was trying super hard not to cry and I think Mom was, too. When Dad got home he looked kind of shocked but told me that I looked “fashionable” and “stylish” now. I know he was just trying to be nice. I knew what he was really thinking was, “Where did my Rapunzel go?”

  The minute dinner (which I could barely eat) was over I told Mom and Dad I had a lot of homework, which wasn’t a lie, and I went right into my room. I’m not coming out again tonight, either. And I’m not going to school tomorrow. I can’t. I’ll pretend I have a headache.

  I wonder if Mom knows I was lying about my hair. But if she does, why doesn’t she come right out and tell me she knows? Maybe she just doesn’t care. She hasn’t even asked what I did with my braid. Wouldn’t she want to save it, like she’s saved clippings from my hair since I was a baby? She has them all in a box. Each clipping is tied with a different-colored silk ribbon w
ith a small tag identifying the year the clipping was taken. Meg thinks that’s weird. Her mother never saved any of her hair.

  I can’t believe I just wrote that, about Mom not caring. Of course she cares. It’s wrong of me to doubt that. It’s just that ... I don’t know what I’m saying right now. I’m so confused.

  One thing I do know. I’m not ever going to tell anyone what really happened, not even Meg. I just can’t. Anyway, Meg was really disappointed about not getting a suede jacket for Christmas. Ever since then she’s been sort of in a bad mood, so I don’t know why she would care about what happened to my hair. I don’t know why she would care about what happened to any part of me. Her life is so much harder than mine. At least my father lives with my mother and me.

  Rosie

  January 17, 2012

  Dear Diary,

  I didn’t go to school today again. I know I can’t take too many days off without Mom becoming suspicious or without my getting in trouble with the principal or the school board. But this morning I just felt so—I guess anxious is the word. I just couldn’t go to school. I told Mom I had a really bad headache, which wasn’t really lying because it turned out that I did get a headache around ten o’clock. Or maybe I got the headache as punishment for my having lied.

  Mostly Mom left me alone—she had two clients come by today—which was good because I wanted to be alone. I read ahead in almost all of my textbooks and it won’t be hard for me to do two days’ worth of homework tomorrow night. Luckily, schoolwork comes easy for me. It’s good that something does.