First Frost Page 5

  “I lost track of time, exploring your lovely neighborhood,” Russell said. “There’s one house that’s quite extraordinary. The yellow one with the turret, on the small hill.”

  “The Waverley house,” Andrew said, waving his hands dismissively. “It was the first house built in the neighborhood. The Pendland Street Inn here, our Ainsley family home, was built by my great-grandfather, a mere seven years later. Our house still has all its original—”

  “Waverley,” Russell interrupted, before Andrew could hit his stride. “The name sounds familiar.”

  Andrew frowned. “Yes, well, they’re an odd bunch. They keep to themselves.” The phone rang and Andrew leaned forward with a small, involuntary grunt to pick it up.

  Russell saw Anne catch his attention as she pointed toward the kitchen. She picked up the last of the plates and teacups and he followed her through the dark, doilyed dining room to the small kitchen. There was a nice oak butcher block island in the center, littered with crusts and flour, where Anne had obviously prepared the tea sweets and savories that afternoon.

  His stomach grumbled. Though Anne had made sure he’d had extra large portions of scrambled eggs, bacon, and berries that morning, it was the last time he’d eaten today.

  The large breakfast was a direct result of last night. When he thought everyone had gone to sleep in the inn, he’d crept downstairs, having automatically memorized where the creaks were on the staircase and along the old floorboards. He’d entered the kitchen for food, only to find Anne there, puffing on a cigarette in the dark, standing next to a window she’d cracked open to let the smoke out.

  She’d reached over and turned on the light when he’d entered.

  Because things like that could happen—and he always considered every possibility—he’d taken care to cover his old, torn pajamas with his heavy silk paisley robe, which had a gold rope sash with tassels on the ends. It made him look elegant and old-fashioned. He’d used the robe in his act as the Great Banditi, after the original Banditi had met his demise under mysterious circumstances. Perhaps he’d had too much to drink and hit his head on a rock in that field in northwest Arkansas. Or perhaps the rock had been wielded by an unknown assailant. The original Banditi had had many enemies on the carnival circuit. Russell had been one of many young boys he’d taken to his trailer on moonless nights, to do things no one would speak of.

  After Russell had walked into the kitchen last night, Anne had fed him a snack of salad, cheese, and beer. In exchange, he had regaled her with the story of the time he’d watched the sausage and pepper stand explode at the carnival when he was a boy. The smell of fried sausage had brought every feral cat and stray dog in the city to the midway. There had been hundreds of them, so many it had been like wading through sand. The city hadn’t known what to do. Russell told Anne that he’d had the genius idea to fence in the midway and turn it into a pet sanctuary. To this very day, he said, children of all ages still visited the sanctuary to throw sticks for the dogs and let the cats sit on their laps.

  The story wasn’t true, of course. Well, part of it was true. He had watched the sausage and pepper stand explode, but it had been his fault for spilling the grease when he’d tried to steal a sausage.

  Anne hadn’t seemed to care if it was true or not.

  He got the feeling she’d given up on expecting the truth a long time ago.

  That afternoon, when Russell followed her to the kitchen, Anne smiled as she set the pink, hand-painted teacups and plates into the sink. “I saved you some sandwiches and tea cakes,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans and reaching under the butcher block to produce a plate covered with a white cloth napkin. “Otherwise, Andrew eats all the leftovers.” She removed the napkin with the flourish of a skilled magician’s assistant. There were several triangles of crustless sandwiches and a few small scones and petit fours on the plate. Anne was, if nothing else, fairly competent in the kitchen.

  “Thank you, Anne,” he said as he took the plate, giving her a slight bow, like it was a gift of some great importance.

  She liked that. “Come with me,” she said, opening the kitchen door, which had lace curtains on it. She led him outside and around the house, away from the windows, to a small corner alcove formed by the heat pump and a nearby rose trellis. There were two cheap plastic picnic chairs there. “Until the sun goes down, it’s still warm enough to find some peace outside. Andrew never finds me here.”

  Russell sat down. Anne took the other chair, obviously a new addition to her hidey-hole. She apparently didn’t invite many people back here. Russell supposed he should feel honored. But one would need a heart for that.

  “I heard you asking about the Waverleys,” Anne said as she took a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from under an overturned flowerpot.

  “Yes,” Russell said simply.

  “Andrew doesn’t like to talk about them. He thinks their house gets too much attention. And Claire Waverley is sort of a local celebrity, especially since she got featured in a magazine. Andrew has been trying to do that for years. He’s always saying about them, ‘You can’t compete with strange. Strange always wins,’” Anne said, lighting a cigarette. “But I’ll tell you anything you want to know about them.” She paused to exhale a plume of smoke. “But first, tell me another one of your stories.”

  Russell sat back and popped a petit four into his mouth.

  It was a small price to pay.

  “I once saved an entire town from bankruptcy when I was twelve. It was in Nero, Nebraska, and I was walking along the carnival midway, minding my own business, when I saw the cops chasing a man carrying a huge bag of money. He’d just stolen it from the town bank, and it was all the money they had. Bills were flying out as he ran. Most people at the carnival darted around, trying to catch the money. But not me. I was eating cotton candy, but I dropped it in the dirt and ran to the shoot-the-bottle-booth. I grabbed the rifle. I knew the sight had been tampered with to keep people from winning the game, so I aimed high and shot the robber in the knee, sending him down. The town threw a parade in my honor, and the carnival owner made sure I had cotton candy every day for an entire year.”

  “That’s good,” Anne said with a smile, taking another puff of her cigarette. “I almost think you believe it.”

  “You wound me. Would I lie?”

  Anne snorted, and he smiled back at her.

  The real story was that one day Sir Walter Trott had chased one of his employees out of his trailer with a riding crop, after discovering he’d been stealing from him. The employee ran wild, pushing people out of the way and knocking things over as he fled. Russell had taken advantage of the distraction to steal dozens of funnels of cotton candy from one of the vendors. He’d sat behind the shoot-the-bottle-booth and ate them all. It had made him sick, but, to this day, he still considered it one of the best days of his childhood.

  He didn’t know why he didn’t just tell Anne the truth. There would have been no real harm to it.

  But, somehow, it’s the real stories that are hardest to tell.

  * * *

  Claire, Tyler, Sydney and Henry were the last to leave the campus gallery. The showing that night had been for the same art student who had won the honor of designing that year’s sculpture on the downtown green in Bascom, the one of the founder of Orion College’s half-buried head. All the student’s sculptures on display that night had the same theme: Horace J. Orion’s face hidden in a bouquet of flowers; Horace J. Orion’s hand emerging from a book; Horace J. Orion seemingly tangled in a long sweep of a lady’s hair—that one presumably referencing the fact that Orion had been a school for women when it had been founded.

  Horace J. Orion had been a man ahead of his time. He’d been an effeminate creature with a high voice and a close shave, and he’d moved to Bascom at the turn of the twentieth century with a mysterious man-friend he called, simply, “My love.” A champion of women’s rights, he’d used most of his family money to start a college for women in this smal
l North Carolina town in the middle of nowhere, a sanctuary for women around the world who wanted to learn. Years later, upon his death, it was discovered by an understandably startled undertaker that Horace J. Orion had actually been a woman, a one Ethel Cora Humphreys. Her family had been cruel, dyed-in-the-wool misogynists. She’d been determined that her family line would end with her, but first she would do all the good she could for her fellow women. And, as many student term papers would posit over the years, living as a man was the only way she could do it.

  After the lights in the campus gallery were turned out and poor Horace could finally get some rest, Claire, Tyler, Sydney and Henry walked across the old college campus with its brick towers and wall murals. It wasn’t a sports college, so students spent Friday nights at Orion on the quad with picnic baskets full of culinary students’ latest efforts, or mapping the stars with their college-issued telescopes.

  As the sisters walked ahead, Tyler and Henry lagged behind. The tall, lanky art professor and the shorter, muscular dairy farmer didn’t have much in common except their wives, but that was enough. Sometimes one big common bond is stronger than a dozen tiny ones. They frequently got together on their own, Henry meeting Tyler at the college for lunch, or Tyler stopping by the dairy after work. When Claire asked what they talked about, Tyler always said, “Man stuff.” She wanted to believe that meant electric shavers, athlete’s foot and maybe golf. But she was pretty sure “man stuff” meant “you and Sydney.”

  “Thanks for letting Bay stay over at your house tonight,” Sydney said, looping her arm through Claire’s as they walked.

  Sydney was sparkling tonight in a beaded navy dress that looked like something a tiny, pampered housewife would wear to a cocktail party in the 1960s. Her hair was in a French twist, and her blue wrap fell off one elbow and fluttered behind her. Claire’s hair was in a sleek bob, and she was wearing a red floral dress, one of Sydney’s, but it was a little too short and tight on her tall frame. Claire had long ago accepted that she would never have the fine bones and blue eyes most Waverley women had. She was tall and dark-eyed and curvy, genes probably donated by the father she would never know.

  “You know it’s no problem. I appreciate her baby-sitting Mariah tonight,” Claire said. It had been a much-needed night out, with wine and laughter, and yet Claire’s mind kept going back to the business she needed to take care of at home, the extraneous things that had nothing to do with making the hard candy itself: email to check, labels to print, boxes to unfold, orders to track.

  “I’m looking forward to spending some time alone with Henry,” Sydney said with a wink.

  Claire looked over her shoulder at their husbands following them. She wondered if Henry knew what Sydney had in store for him. Probably not. Sydney had been secretive lately.

  “Maybe tonight we’ll finally…” Sydney let the words trail off. Claire knew what she was going to say. It came and went in cycles, but never fully went away, Sydney’s desire to have more children. It had taken a while, probably five years of living back in Bascom, married to Henry, life going well, for Sydney finally to trust it, to realize she was back for good. And with that realization came the desire to make it more, more stable, more settled, more to keep her here, as if she were really afraid she might leave again and never come back this time, just like their mother had done.

  “Maybe tonight,” Claire agreed. “Love your red hair, by the way.”

  “Thank you. I can’t seem to help myself. I just look at it lately and it gets more red.”

  “You’re going to have to tell Henry what you’re doing,” Claire said in a low voice. “He’s going to figure out what the red hair and all these nights you’re spending alone together mean. And he’s going to be hurt that you didn’t come to him.” Secrets were in the nature of the Waverleys. The men they chose never expected to be totally enlightened. Claire’s husband Tyler’s way of dealing with this was to be unfailingly patient, in addition to his good-natured disbelief of anything odd. Henry was different, though. He’d been born in Bascom. And he was a Hopkins. All Hopkins men were born with old souls. It was his nature to be depended on.

  “I know. I will,” Sydney whispered back. Once they reached the parking lot, she changed the subject and said, “You’re not going to let Bay work for you tomorrow, are you? Saturdays should be spent doing something fun at her age.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll shoo her out of the kitchen,” Claire assured her, though she’d never understood why Sydney never wanted Bay to spend too much time at the Waverley house. But she didn’t question her. Motherhood is hard enough without judgment from others who don’t know the whole story. And the way the sisters mothered was as different as they were. Their own mother had abandoned them here, the names of their fathers long forgotten, to be taken care of by their agoraphobic grandmother, Mary. Claire and Sydney were, the both of them, forging new ground with their own children, having no firsthand knowledge of how to do it right. Just the fact that Sydney wanted to do it again made her seem so brave to Claire.

  “And the backyard,” Sydney added.

  “And the backyard.”

  Sydney shook her head. “I’ll bet you a million dollars she’s out there right now, with that tree.”

  “You’d win that bet.”

  “She’s doing okay, isn’t she?” Sydney asked.

  “I think she’s doing fine. Bay knows herself. She likes herself. She doesn’t care what other people think.”

  “But I want her to have a good time in high school.”

  “You want her to be popular,” Claire said. “She doesn’t want to be popular. She just wants to be herself.”

  “She doesn’t date, or go out with friends, or anything. Has she talked to you about anyone she likes?”

  Claire hesitated. She didn’t want to keep this from her sister, but it was Bay’s secret to tell, not hers. “She’s mentioned a boy once or twice. You’ll have to ask her about that.”

  “You’re never going to have this problem with Mariah when she turns fifteen,” Sydney said. “She’s so social. That child is your husband made over.”

  “I know.”

  “Ever get the feeling our daughters were switched at birth, six years apart?” Sydney joked. Meaning to Claire: Ever get the feeling your child isn’t anything like you?

  “All the time.” Mariah had no interest in cooking. Like Tyler, she didn’t seem to notice when doors opened on their own, or mysteriously stuck in their frames in the house. When she went out to play, it was always in the front yard, not the garden, though the tree loved her and seemed hurt by her inattention. It morosely threw apples at her bedroom window at night in the summer. And then there was this new best friend, Em. In a period of five days, Em had become everything to Mariah. Em told her what books to read and what games to play and to brush her teeth before going to bed and always to wear pink. It drove Claire crazy. In her mind, Em was a deranged ballerina-child who smelled like bubble gum and only ate McDonald’s Happy Meals.

  But it was all misdirected frustration, Claire knew. Because Claire didn’t have time to meet Em. She didn’t know anything about Em’s parents. But Tyler probably did. Over the past few months, Claire had been so busy with Waverley’s Candies that Tyler had taken over most of the parenting duties. Tyler knew all the particulars that Claire used to. Homework. PTA meetings. Ballet and gymnastics moms by name.

  Grandmother Mary had always had time for the day-to-day minutia of raising her granddaughters. She had memorized school schedules. She’d ordered notebooks and pencils and new shoes and sweaters when the sisters had outgrown their old ones, and the supplies had been delivered (back when downtown stores still delivered). She’d cooked and gardened and ran her back-door business and still made sure the girls were tended to.

  Claire had always assumed the reason Grandmother Mary hadn’t branched out, hadn’t made more money with her special food, was her painful introversion. Now, Claire wondered if Grandmother Mary hadn’t wanted the public
to know about her curious recipes because it wasn’t really about the recipes at all, it was about selling the mystique of the person who created them. She also wondered if maybe, just maybe, Grandmother Mary had taken into consideration the effect a growing business would have on her ability to care for her granddaughters, too.

  Which made Claire feel worse.

  And yet, how could she stop? She’d put so much effort into getting her name out there in the world, success making her like a crow collecting shiny things. There was so much to prove. Was it ever going to be enough? Giving up, especially now with all these doubts, would feel like conceding that her gift really was fiction, a belief contingent upon how well she sold it.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Sydney asked when they reached Henry’s truck in the parking lot and Claire had fallen silent.

  “Sorry. I’m fine.” Claire smiled. “You know what I thought of last night for the first time in ages? Fig and pepper bread. When I woke up this morning, I could have sworn I even smelled it.”

  Sydney took a deep breath, almost like she could smell it, too. “I loved fig and pepper bread. Grandmother Mary only made it on our birthdays. I remember she always said to us, ‘Figs are sweet and pepper is sharp. Just like the two of you.’ But she would never tell us which one of us was fig and which was pepper.”

  “I was obviously fig,” Claire said.

  “No way! I was fig. You were pepper.”

  Claire sighed. “I miss fig and pepper bread.”

  “You’re burned out on candy. You need a vacation.” Sydney hugged Claire then got in the truck with Henry. “See you later.”

  Tyler put his arm around Claire as they walked to his car, a few spaces away. When Tyler hesitated getting in the car, Claire looked up at him, his curly hair in need of a cut, his beloved Hawaiian shirt almost glowing in neon under his blazer.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, because sometimes he did that, just stopped and daydreamed. She loved that about him. Her own sense of focus never ceased to amaze him. She wasn’t magic to him. She never would be. What she cooked had never had an effect on him, either. Years ago, when they would argue, she would serve Tyler chive blossom stir-fry, because Grandmother Mary always said chive blossoms would assure that you would win any argument, but it never seemed to work on him.