One Summer (14 page)

“Oh, that’s so exciting!” Dottie said. “You’re finally moving on from that terrible, unfortunate incident.”

“Sister!” This time it was Doris’ turn to criticize. “Talk about getting personal!”

“It’s all right.” Charity reached for the handle to the dressing room. Although she’d never enjoyed shopping, certainly not the way her mother did, trying on all those clothes suddenly seemed like a very good idea, if only to escape this conversation. “It’s not as if my calling off my wedding isn’t pretty much the worst-kept secret in town.”

“I never believed the groom-to-be was good enough for her,” Amanda revealed. “And he was certainly way too stuffy.”

“Really?” Both sisters leaned toward her mother, eyes as bright as those of curious birds.

“Well, if you’ll all excuse me.” Shooting her mother a stern, warning look, Charity snatched the hangers from the door and made her escape.

On the other side of the door, she could hear Amanda deftly moving the conversation back to a safe topic as she set the twins to finding the perfect jewelry.

Sighing, she decided to begin with the white jeans her mother had added to the mix. They fit perfectly. As usual, Amanda’s eye for fashion was unerring.

Although it was unlike anything she’d ever worn in Chicago, or here, Charity’s eye was drawn past the maze of colors to a white sleeveless shirt with tuxedo pleating in the front.

She tried it on. And immediately fell in love. Except for one thing …

She walked out of the dressing room to find all three women waiting expectantly.

“Oh, it’s perfect!” Dottie clapped her hands.

“A bit impractical, being all white,” Doris pointed out what Charity had already considered. “But at least it’s machine washable. And it does looks wonderful on you.”

“It shows off your arms,” Amanda said. “Which most women would kill to have. It’s also very summery, while keeping to your own tailored style.”

Until that moment, Charity hadn’t even realized she
had
a style.

“I feel a bit like a nurse,” she said. “From back when they wore white uniforms, sensible shoes, and perky caps.” She wasn’t old enough to remember those days, but she’d seen movies. Including
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
.

Terrific. She was going on her first date in nearly two years looking like Nurse Ratched.

“You just need color,” Amanda said.

“To brighten it up,” Dottie agreed.

“But not too much,” Doris cautioned.

Diving back into the baskets again, Amanda came up with a necklace made of silver chains studded with green and blue sea glass. And a wide, plastic, blue cuff bracelet. Dottie, returning to a rack in the window, retrieved the twin of the seashell cardigan, this time in sea blue.

Doris, going along with the flow, managed to put aside her own tastes and came up with a pair of flat silver sandals.

“Perfect,” they all said on happy sighs as they viewed the final result.

Charity couldn’t argue. She looked crisp and summery, and, she considered, like the kind of woman Gabriel St. James would appreciate. Although she barely knew him, from the way he was resisting disrupting his life with that poor stray dog, she suspected he wasn’t one to go for the ultrafeminine, high-maintenance type.

“It is nice.” She turned around in the three-way mirror, noticing what she hadn’t been able to see in the single wall-length one in the dressing room. There were silvery crystal designs on both back pockets of the jeans. “Though I’m not sure these crystals on my butt aren’t overkill.”

“Not overkill at all. Merely the payoff for all those squats you’ve obviously been doing,” her mother said.

“When you’re manhandling animals who don’t always want to go where you’d like them to, you have to stay in shape.”

“And isn’t it fortunate you have?” Dottie said. “Because those look fabulous on you.” She sighed and turned toward her sister. “Remember when we had bottoms like that?”

“Vaguely,” Doris said on a sigh of her own.

The way they were all looking at her, as if they’d placed all their own memories and romantic hopes on both her outfit and her upcoming date, made Charity decide the time had come to leave.

Unsurprisingly, her mother insisted on paying. Since Charity’s practice and her shelter costs ate up all her income, as well as digging into the small inheritance that had allowed her to buy the Victorian house in the first place, she wasn’t about to argue.

Besides, her mother had always enjoyed giving her gifts. Charity had often thought it was her way of trying to make up for the unstable home life she’d provided her only child.

“Oh!” Dottie said as Doris ran the credit card. “I nearly forgot to give you one of these.” She held out a brightly colored paper flyer.

Charity read the announcement. “A clothing exchange?”

“We started it for prom. Since the economy’s been down, we invited all the girls at the high school to bring in their old dresses and did a swap. It was grand fun.”

“And, more important,” Doris said, “everyone went home with a new dress. For no cost.”

“What a lovely idea. Though it doesn’t seem as if it would help your business,” Amanda said.

“Oh, we’re part of the community now.” As so often happened, the twins didn’t seem to realize they’d spoken in unison. “What’s good for Shelter Bay is good for us.”

“We’ll get more business once the economy turns around,” Dottie said. “Meanwhile, we’re doing fine. And everyone had such a grand time, we’ve decided to extend the idea to the adults. We’re having a party next week.”

“Sedona Sullivan’s providing cupcakes for the refreshments,” Doris said. “Maureen Douchett’s bringing her sweet tea and Sofia’s giving away pots of herbs. You know how she’s always trying to get people to plant their own gardens.”

“That sounds like a nice evening,” Charity said, thinking that she doubted, except for the yellow dress she’d worn to the wedding, and this new outfit, she had a thing in her closet any woman in Shelter Bay would want to swap for.

“We were hoping you’d come,” Dottie said.

“Oh, I don’t—”

“We thought you could bring some of those kittens or puppies,” Doris said.

“In case there’s anyone left in town you haven’t talked into adopting one,” Dottie tacked on.

Charity laughed at that. Hadn’t the sisters adopted a pair of elderly Siamese cats? Unsurprisingly, Doris had chosen the brown chocolate point, while Dottie had gone for the lavender point.

And both Harold and Hayden had gone home from the shelter with older dogs—Harold with a taffy-colored cocker, Hayden with a graying Jack Russell terrier.

She might not have clothes to donate, but no way was she going to resist an opportunity to tell people about the importance of neutering their pets and invite those who might be thinking about getting a pet to come visit the special ones she had at her shelter. Dogs and cats who, in her view, weren’t victims to be pitied but heroes for surviving the odds.

“You’re on,” she said.

Johnny’s grandmother had told him that his mother, Crystal, had always been excitable and given to big dreams. But she hadn’t been flat-out crazy until her first baby girl—born three years before Johnny—had died of SIDS, which his grandmother had explained was short for
sudden infant death syndrome
.

According to the story as it had been told to him, after finding the baby lifeless in her little pink onesie, his mother had sunk into the depths of despair, crying and staying in bed and being so miserable that her husband, unable to take so much sorrow any longer, had run off with her best friend.

But even that hadn’t been enough to get her out of bed.

As his mother had related to his grandmother, she’d been crying buckets of tears into the pillow when a deep voice had spoken to her, rumbling like thunder in the dark. The voice, which his mother claimed to have belonged to God, explained that she was being used as a pawn in an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. And that although she’d be blessed with more children, she’d have to fight the demons to protect them. Which she’d done with a vengeance, even locking him in the closet whenever she left the house.

Later, his baby sister, Angel, had been locked in with him.

Although weeks, sometimes even months, might go by when life would be fairly normal, eventually she’d go off her meds again and other voices—belonging to saints and archangels—would warn her that her children were being hunted by evil people who were only waiting for her to drop her guard. During these times, she’d go without sleep for days, keeping him and Angel locked in whatever room they were living in at the time, pacing the floor, forgetting to bathe or eat, or feed her son and daughter. Which was when Johnny had begun teaching himself to cook.

Unfortunately, while she might have tried to protect her children against demons, Crystal was a great deal more lax about the men in her life. Although Johnny didn’t really believe in demon possession, he’d gotten an up-close and personal introduction to evil when he was nine. After bouncing around the country, including Phoenix, Las Vegas, freezing his butt off during an icy winter in Minnesota, back to West Virginia, then Texas, it seemed they might actually be settling down in Salem, Oregon, long enough for him to spend an entire year in one school, when his mama brought home Uncle Buck.

Buck had been a mean, red-faced man with a bulging gut, thick hairy arms, and big hands. Hands that could make you see stars or wield a belt that would leave Johnny’s butt with red marks for a day.

“Spare the rod, spoil the child” had been his excuse, though it didn’t take Johnny long to realize that Buck was just a bully with a mean streak, which was made even worse by his liking for whiskey.

When Buck started beating up on Crystal, Johnny had tried to stop him, only to end up with a broken arm for his efforts. On the way to the emergency room, his mother had instructed him to say he’d fallen off his bike, because if the doctor knew what had really happened, then he’d have to report it and the police would come and take Buck away.

“But that would be a
good
thing,” he’d said.

“People can be dangerous,” she’d answered, telling him nothing he hadn’t figured out for himself. “But sometimes, you’re better off with the devil you know. Besides, you know how hard it is for me to keep a job. Without Buck’s paycheck, we could end up living on the street. Or living out of this car again.”

Although his arm hurt like the dickens and he hated the idea of Buck’s big hands touching his mom, most of all Johnny hated living out of the car. With his wrinkled clothes always smelling like the take-out burgers and fries they were forced to live on, along with his hair and freckles, and being small for his age, he might as well go to school with a big red bull’s-eye on his back.

So he’d lied to the doctors and the nurses, even though he could tell one nurse didn’t believe him. But he’d stuck to his story and protected his mother in the only way he knew how.

A few weeks later, Buck had come home from the bar drunk and meaner than usual. It had been the worst night of Johnny’s life. A long, scary night that finally ended when a police SWAT sniper shot Buck dead.

But not before Buck had stabbed Crystal with his switchblade knife. Although his mother had survived the wound, she’d been committed, against her will, to the state mental hospital.

The lady from DHS sent Johnny and Angel to live with his grandmother, who’d finally left Nevada and moved to Oregon. She was living in a downtown Portland apartment, working as a waitress in a riverfront fish restaurant.

Looking back on it now, with the additional wisdom of his fifteen years, Johnny realized that his grandmother, who’d still been a young woman herself, wasn’t all that wild about having two kids dumped in her lap. Especially a redheaded boy who spent most of his time angry, and the rest getting in fights.

He’d been sitting in class, trying to figure out the complexities of long division, when one of the mothers who volunteered in the school office came into the class and handed a note to the teacher.

They exchanged a few words. Then, when the teacher’s gaze landed straight as an arrow on him, both women’s faces serious and sad at the same time, Johnny knew this wasn’t going to be good.

He left the classroom to a buzz of conversation. The kids were all wearing smirks. He’d seen that look before, too.

The hallway seemed a mile long as he walked down it with the pretty blond woman who smelled like flowers. As soon as he entered the principal’s office, he recognized the other woman sitting there immediately. She was the same one who’d come to the house after Buck had been shot. The one who’d taken Angel and him to his grandmother’s house, with only their clothes on their backs, in the middle of the night.

“I’m afraid your grandmother has turned you back in to Social Services.” The woman’s tone, while not unkind, was also brisk, as if she told kids stuff like this every day. Which Johnny figured she probably did. “She says you’re a problem child. That she can’t handle you.”

He looked over at the principal, Mrs. Ferguson, who had begun writing something that must have been really important because she wouldn’t meet his eye.

“Mrs. Ferguson says that you’ve been getting in fights.”

He speared an accusing look at the principal, who continued to write.

“It’s all in your records,” the social worker said in defense of the still-silent principal.

“Kids pick on me. So I fight back.”

“You gave”—she opened the manila folder she was holding—“Tyler Young a black eye. And broke his nose.”

When he’d felt the satisfying crunch of bone beneath his fist, Johnny had, for the first time, understood a little of what Buck must’ve felt. The big difference was Buck had been a bully.

While
he
was standing up to bullies.