“Rarely touch the stuff,” said Pammy, remembering why she didn’t call her oldest sister, remembering why they hadn’t seen each other since their father’s funeral five years earlier. “I’ll have a scotch, no water, on the rocks.”
“I’ll have the wine,” said Helen to Daniel. “There’s an open bottle in the fridge. You’ll find beer in there, too, if you’re interested.”
Charlotte walked onto the porch and then plopped down on the couch in the preferred sitting area and put her small, wedge sandal-shod feet on the wicker coffee table. She took a slender silver case from her white straw bag and carefully extracted a long cigarette, which she expertly placed between her full pink lips and lit within seconds with a sterling silver lighter. Tilting her head toward the ceiling and exhaling into the air above her, Charlotte then dropped her eyes to meet her sisters’. They had followed her to the porch and were sitting in the wicker chairs looking at her, like students watching their teacher. “So,” she said. “What’s up with you two?”
Before Helen or Pammy could speak, their mother called down from the top of the stairs. “Charlotte? Is that you?”
“Yes, Mother, it is,” answered Charlotte, rising from the couch. She inhaled deeply on her cigarette, then gave it to Daniel, who had just returned with their drinks. She glanced at the mirror above the couch and fluffed her already flawless hair with her hands. She turned. Helen guessed she was expecting to see Claire at the bottom of the steps, waiting with outstretched arms. But Claire was still making her way down, gripping the banister. Charlotte looked at Helen, who said, “Do you want help, Mom?”
“No, Helen. I have to do some things for myself.”
Charlotte walked to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. There, halfway down, stood Claire Gaines, bent over and looking, Charlotte thought, like fifteen instead of five years had passed since their last gathering. She was wearing a faded denim skirt, a white cotton blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and a jade green cardigan pulled over her shoulders. On her feet were Birkenstocks, sandals she had worn since the 1970s. For just a moment, they stared at each other, as if trying to remember what to say or how to act. Then Charlotte climbed the stairs, stood on the step below her mother, and put her hand on Claire’s boney elbow. “I’m not helping,” she said. “I’m simply available should you change your mind.”
Minutes later, they were all seated on the porch. Daniel, who was still standing, introduced himself to Claire and thanked her for what he called a lovely invitation.
“I’d put it in the command performance category myself,” said Charlotte. No one responded.
“I’ll just go unpack,” said Daniel. “I don’t feel settled until my clothes are in a drawer or closet, and I know you all have a lot to catch up on.” Charlotte blew a kiss to him as he ascended the stairs and then put her feet back up on the table in front of her. She ran her fingers through her hair and took a sip of her drink.
“He seems like a nice young man,” Claire began. Helen and Pammy sat back in their chairs and waited. Claire was not finished. “How old is he, Charlotte?”
“He’s twenty-seven, Mother,” she said, lighting a cigarette. Daniel had, apparently, extinguished and disposed of her other one.
“There’s no smoking in this house,” said Claire.
“Really? Why not? We’re on a porch.”
“Because I can’t and never could stand the smell of it. And it’s rude to smoke around nonsmokers. When you were fourteen you didn’t smoke in the house, so there’s no need now that you’re forty-seven.”
“Why is this ashtray sitting here then?” asked Charlotte, lifting a square-shaped, shallow tiled dish.
“Because you made it in the summer crafts program when you were eight and gave it to me for Mother’s Day.” Charlotte gave her mother a long look and then put the cigarette out in the ashtray. “Thank you,” said Claire. “So, tell me more about Daniel.”
“Well,” said Charlotte, taking her feet off the table and planting them firmly on the floor, as if she were going to stand, “he’s a student, working toward his master’s degree in philosophy. I met him at a winery, and we had the best time getting to know one another. That was”—Charlotte looked at the ceiling for a moment—“Christmas time, I guess, so we’ve been together for about six months. He’s a charming person with lovely manners, and I enjoy his company.”
“I enjoy the company of men twenty years my junior also, Charlotte, but I wouldn’t presume to sleep with them.”
Helen and Pammy made eye contact, but said nothing. Charlotte fell back on the couch, as if she had suffered a push to the chest. Recovering quickly, she looked directly and deliberately at Claire, isolating her sisters from the remark custom-made for their mother. “Who or what I fuck is none of your business.”
Helen drained the last sip of wine from her glass and stood. “Anyone need another drink?” she asked, holding out her empty glass to show the others that she was not simply looking for an excuse to leave the room.
“I’ll have another,” said Pammy, getting up. “Mother? Charlotte? Anything for you?”
Charlotte handed her empty glass to Pammy and nodded her head. Claire, who did not have a glass, asked Helen for white wine. Pammy and Helen walked into the kitchen and shut the swinging door behind them. “Unbelievable,” said Pammy. “I simply cannot believe what I heard in there. And she’s been here, what, fifteen minutes?”
“I don’t blame her,” said Helen, getting the wine out of the refrigerator. “I might not have used the word fuck, but Mother was clearly setting herself up. She knows Charlotte as well as we do. Charlotte has never taken any crap from anybody.”
“I would no more say fuck to Claire Gaines than do it in front of her,” said Pammy, pouring scotch into her glass. “But, I’ve never had the balls—and now the breasts—of our sister.”
“On the other hand,” said Helen, filling a glass with wine for her mother, “Charlotte asks for it. I don’t think you can show up at a family gathering with a Chippendales dancer as your date and expect silent respect from everyone. That may fly in San Francisco, but it’s not going to fly here. Just wait until Thomas arrives.”
“When will he be here? Saturday?” asked Pammy, pouring another drink for Charlotte.
“That’s the latest.” Helen re-corked the bottle and put it back in the fridge. “Ready?”
They walked back onto the porch with the drinks. Charlotte was sitting in the same position on the couch, and Claire had shifted just slightly in the chair. Both women looked through the same screen at the water. It was keenly obvious they had not spoken to each other. Helen gave her mother the wine, then sat in her seat and looked at her sister Charlotte. Charlotte looked back, and Helen raised her eyebrows, as if to say, Mom’s old and tired. Let it go.
Charlotte had always had a hard time letting it go, letting anything go. As a teenager, she had to get the last word in, always. It didn’t matter if she knew she’d be grounded, or if, on occasion as had happened, she’d get a slap across the face. She had no issue stunning relatives, neighbors, authority figures, anyone at all with her sharp wit, her acerbic tongue. In fact, Helen thought, Charlotte had liked putting adults off balance, letting them know that they were not as wise, not as together as they thought. She prided herself on her ability to come back at and from anything, a characteristic she inherited from her mother.
“The traffic was murder today,” said Charlotte, surprising everyone in the room with her small talk. “I’ve got to stop flying into New York.”
“Boston’s not much better,” said Helen, wanting to smooth over the bumpy beginning, the awkwardness. “You could try Providence next time.”
“There won’t be a next time,” said Claire to no one in particular.
CHAPTER 12
1973
Jimmy Stockton sat in the car Rick parked in front of the 7-Eleven on Thistle Street. Rick sat next to him, in the driver’s seat, again going over their plan. They had discussed it three or
four times that afternoon, and Jimmy had told Rick before going home for dinner how confident he felt about the job. Here, now, Jimmy was losing faith in the plan. He rubbed his sweaty hands on his jeans, but the moment he stopped, the perspiration resurfaced. He wiped them again, with the same unsatisfactory result, then stopped, sensing Rick’s disapproval. “You all right, man?”
“Oh yeah,” said Jimmy. “I’m cool.”
“I don’t need no chickenshit robbing this store with me.”
“I’m all set.” Jimmy decided against correcting Rick’s English, as Charlotte would have done had she been in the car. A double negative, she had taught them all that very afternoon, was just like a positive, in this case meaning Rick actually did want a chickenshit robbing the store with him. Rick had forbidden Charlotte to join them, an empty mandate since Charlotte told him she had no interest in tagging along. Jimmy could tell that she was smart. Plus she was the prettiest girl on the beach. When she smiled at him, when she paid him any kind of attention whatsoever, Jimmy felt strong enough to knock Rick to the ground, to claim Charlotte as his. Sometimes when Jimmy was in bed at night, if he squeezed his eyes closed tightly, he could picture her with one of her soft hands pressed gently against his chest as they sat in a secluded area of the beach while her other hand probed the fly of his jeans. His penis twitched.
“I’m going in, and I’m going to work fast. There’s no time for error here.”
“Yes,” said Jimmy, pushing Charlotte out of his mind. “We’ve gone over this.”
Rick looked at Jimmy one last time before he opened the door and got out of the car. Jimmy looked at his watch, which read 10:58. Jimmy followed Rick with his eyes to the plate-glass door. The lights inside shone through the glass, casting a pale yellow glow into the darkness outside. Rick walked into that light, and Jimmy caught a quick glimpse of his face; his forehead was beaded with sweat. Jimmy found comfort in this, even though he figured fearful robbers weren’t especially adept robbers. Although his mother had always told him that a certain amount of fear or reverence was a good thing. It makes you know you’re alive, she had said. Jimmy had no doubts about being alive. His heart was thumping against his clean white T-shirt, and the moisture from his hands had traveled to his armpits, forehead, and crotch. He had to urinate, even though Rick had parked the car on the side of the road leaving the beach less than fifteen minutes ago, so they both could pee in the bushes. Jimmy looked at Rick, hoping he would turn around and announce that the whole thing was a joke. He might laugh and say he needed to test Jimmy, to see if Jimmy was cool enough to hang with his gang. He might call it a rite of passage. But as soon as Rick pulled the door handle and disappeared inside, Jimmy knew it was no joke. He moved over to the driver’s seat and gripped the steering wheel.
Because he was not inside the store with Rick, Jimmy had no idea what was happening. Every second felt like a minute. Jimmy tried to imagine Rick checking the three aisles for customers. He tried to picture him, in the large felt cowboy hat Rick had purchased at the Bradlees for this purpose—he had decided a mask or stocking on his face would tip the clerk the moment she saw him—confronting the young woman behind the cash register with the unloaded gun he had taken from his father’s top bureau drawer. Would the clerk scream, or would she quietly put her hands over her head as Rick had predicted? Jimmy looked at his watch; it was 11:02. As instructed, Jimmy started the car Rick had taught him how to drive over the last couple days. He was just shifting the car into gear when Rick burst out the glass door and ran to the passenger side of the car. He yanked the door open, tossed the bag of money onto the seat between them, and threw himself in afterward. “Go!” he yelled, slamming the door behind him. Jimmy floored the accelerator. The rancid smell of rubber filled the air as Jimmy sped out of the 7-Eleven lot and onto Thistle Street. He slowed his pace, as they had practiced, once they rounded the corner onto Main Street. A mile down Main, he pulled Rick’s Oldsmobile behind the Finast food store on Elk Street, parked behind the Dumpsters, and turned off the engine. There, Rick had said, they would wait until the police had come and gone, and then they would drive home. In the huge, empty parking lot, Rick smoked a cigarette and then counted the money.
“Not bad, Jimmy boy,” he said, handing Jimmy a stack of tens. “You made yourself two hundred bucks.”
“Great,” said Jimmy, still reeling from the robbery.
“That chick was so scared in there,” Rick said with a laugh. “She had the cash out of the drawer before I finished asking her for it.”
“She’s no fool,” Jimmy said before he could think not to.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I just mean that I would do the same thing. There’s no sense getting dead over a few hundred bucks.”
“You would give up the money, just like that?”
“Hell yes,” said Jimmy. “It’s not her money anyway.”
“That’s gutless, man.”
“No, Rick. That’s smart.”
“Don’t talk to me about smart. Who masterminded this robbery?”
“You did, Rick.”
“And who just pulled it off without a hitch?”
“You did.”
“You’re damn right,” said Rick, lighting up another cigarette. They sat in silence while Rick smoked. As soon as he chucked the butt out his rolled-down window, he looked at his watch. “Let’s go check things out.” Just before getting out of the car, Rick removed his hat and stuffed it under the front seat. Money locked in the trunk, they walked through the parking lot until they reached the loading dock on Spruce Street. There, they hopped over the metal guardrails and walked down Spruce until they reached the hardware store. From the alley between the hardware store and the dry cleaners, they could see the 7-Eleven. Two police cars, lights flashing, were parked outside.
“What now?” asked Jimmy.
“We wait,” said Rick, leaning against the wall. “We wait.”
An hour later, Rick, back in the driver’s seat, dropped Jimmy off at his house. Enervated from the robbery, Jimmy walked through the unlocked front door, up the stairs to his room, and plopped down on his bed. He yanked off his sneakers and threw them on the floor. He pulled off his belt and his blue jeans with the ten dollar bills shoved into the back pocket and lay them on the end of the bed. Just when he was thinking about falling asleep, the shaking started, first in his arms and hands and then in his legs. He breathed in and out deeply, trying to calm himself, hoping they wouldn’t be caught and that Charlotte would be as impressed with him as she would be with Rick.
Helen and Pammy had just swum in from the raft when Charlotte walked down the cement steps to the beach. She was wearing her old, blue-jean cutoffs and a green and purple tie-dye shirt she had made the previous summer. What Helen and Pammy had not seen before were the diamond stud earrings in her rarely visible ears. Charlotte’s long hair, which was usually as much in her face as it was out of it, was today neatly tucked behind her bejeweled lobes. “Where’d you get those earrings?” asked Helen, as she dried herself with her beach towel.
“Rick gave them to me today. Aren’t they beautiful?”
“They’re gorgeous,” said Pammy. “Is it your anniversary or something?”
“No, he’s just trying to keep me on his arm,” said Charlotte, with a smile. “Steve Johanson asked me out again last week.”
“He must make tons of money at the gas station,” said Pammy.
“Not really,” said Charlotte, looking past Helen to see who was sunbathing on the raft. “He’s been saving for a while I guess.”
“Either that or he found a quick way to make a lot of money,” said Helen, softly.
“What do you mean?” Charlotte twisted her neck to look at her sister.
Helen looked at Pammy, who mouthed the word no. “Nothing,” said Helen. “I didn’t mean anything.”
Charlotte gave her sister a quizzical look, then shrugged. “I’m not asking,” she said. “No other girl on the beach has these
in her ears.”
“You’re right,” said Helen. “I haven’t seen earrings like that on anybody except Mrs. Cummings.”
“And she’s really rich,” said Pammy.
“Well, I feel rich today,” said Charlotte, walking away from her sisters to talk to Steve Johanson, who had just waved to her from his house atop the sea wall. “See you later.”
“I can’t believe you said that,” whispered Pammy as soon as Charlotte was several yards away.
“Why not?”
“Because I thought we agreed that hearing that stuff was our secret. If we tell, Charlotte will know that we spied on her, and she will be even meaner to us than she already is.”
“It is our secret,” said Helen. “That doesn’t mean I can’t hint around.”
“Charlotte’s not stupid.”
“She is for dating that stupid jerk Rick.”
“Nobody said he bought those earrings with stolen money,” said Pammy, tentatively.
“He robbed the store last night and she has the earrings today. What do you think?”
“I’m not thinking,” said Pammy, walking toward the steps. “Are you going to take a shower or not?”
“I’m coming,” said Helen, climbing the steps behind her sister. “He’s such a jerk. Why does Charlotte hang around with him?”
“You heard what she said. He buys her beer and is a good lay.”
“That’s so gross.”
“That’s because you’re a child.”
“Oh yeah, Miss Intercourse?” Pammy made a sour face. “That’s right,” said Helen. “You’re as grossed out as I am.”
“Kissing is nice.” Pammy and Helen crossed the street to their lawn.
“Sure,” said Helen. “If you like to swap spit.”
“Ew!” said Pammy. “That’s definitely gross.”
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