Hawthorn Woods Read online

  Then Francine’s gaze found a small chalkboard stuck to the freezer door.

  milk

  peanut butter

  I’m sorry

  me too

  good luck today!

  love you

  love you more

  raisins

  The mundane minutiae of a shopping list layered with apology and forgiveness was just one of many signs of Ellie and Pete’s still-breathing relationship, providing constant contrast to Francine’s own failed attempt at love.

  Now it seemed she might be failing in her attempt at recovery too, given the events of the previous night.

  The cheer building at the end of Pete’s speech had strangled awkwardly, save for a woman on the other side of the patio who had been oblivious to the drink throw, and continued to clap loudly.

  Francine had stood there, dripping, not understanding what had just happened.

  She’d never met the woman with the pixie cut before. Hadn’t met her husband either. Hadn’t done anything to anyone that night except shake hands and smile.

  The voice that cut the silence had been loud and diet-Southern.

  “Excuse you, Magdalena!” Laura Jean had thundered. “You apologize right this minute!”

  Pixie Cut had muttered something in Russian and stormed off into the night, leaving her excessively muscled husband to stumble through an apology to Francine before hurrying after his wife.

  And while the cranberry vodka had washed off easily enough (and tasted pretty good, to be honest), the effect had definitely lingered. Lovers quarreled and siblings squabbled, but such a random, ugly action from a complete stranger had left Francine disturbed. Neither Ellie nor Laura Jean had had anything bad to say about Magdalena beforehand. So, why?

  Francine’s fragile belief that the future held anything good wavered.

  “Aunt Francine?”

  She jumped, feet actually leaving the ground, before she turned to find her seven-year-old nephew sitting at the kitchen table behind a box of Lucky Charms.

  “Charlie!” she gasped. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  An awed smile crept onto the boy’s face.

  “Shit, I shouldn’t have said that. Or that,” she quickly added. “Don’t tell your mom, okay?”

  He pretended to zip his still-smiling mouth.

  Francine poured the available coffee into a mug and joined him at the table, careful not to bang her head on the low-hanging Tiffany lamp.

  Unlike her and Ellie, Francine and her nephew actually looked related, sharing dark blue eyes, a surplus of freckles, and copious amounts of messy brown hair.

  “Are you hangovered?” Charlie asked, through a mouthful of Lucky Charms.

  Francine snorted. “I’m hungover,” she corrected, and used the steaming mug of coffee to down twice the recommended amount of aspirin. “Did you say goodbye to your mom and dad this morning?”

  Charlie nodded. “They said if I give you any trouble, it’s no allowance, no dessert, and no TV for the rest of the summer.”

  “Yikes. Well, I’ve never taken care of a kid before, so how about this?” She held out a pinky. “You be cool for me, I’ll be cool for you. We’ll help each other out. That way, your parents will come home and find you in one piece, and we can have some fun along the way. Deal?”

  Charlie hooked her pinky with his own. “Deal.” He spooned a final bite of cereal into his mouth and ran for the back door. “’Kay, bye!”

  “Hey! Hold up, mister. What’s the agenda for the day?”

  “What’s agenda mean?”

  “It means, what are you going to do all day? And don’t give me any substitute teacher runaround. I’m sure you’re allowed to play with fireworks and smoke cigars, but just know, aunts have special powers that let them smell nephew lies a mile away.”

  Charlie jittered with anticipation in the doorframe, an inch from total freedom. “I go out to play after breakfast, then I come back for lunch, then I leave again, then I come back when it’s dark.”

  “Okay. I’ll make you a sandwich and leave it in the fridge in case I go for a walk or something. And it’s milk with lunch, not pop. Capeesh, Bubba?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I dunno. You’re just supposed to say capeesh back.”

  “Capeesh.”

  “Okay, just go before you explo––”

  Charlie darted across the backyard.

  Francine downed a handful of the colorful marshmallow cereal, wincing at the sugar as she watched her nephew race toward the willow tree in the middle of the block, laughing in easy joy as he went. She could remember the feeling well: a buoyant pull that made running more natural than stopping. It was one of the many marvelous sensations that hadn’t quite survived her trip to adulthood.

  What did she have instead?

  Little anchors. Little anchors called regret, and loss, and almost. They were light when she picked them up one by one, but then came the day she’d picked up so many she couldn’t shake them off, and she was left longing for what she once was: a child in summer, weightless and full of hope.

  ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶

  At least fifty Precious Moments figurines lined the shelves of a long bookcase in the guest room, a.k.a. Francine’s room for the next two weeks. The porcelain children, which Francine had always found a little creepy, shared shelf space with Pete’s antique clock collection, a hobby so boring even stamp collectors made fun of it. The clocks mercifully didn’t chime on the hour, but their softly ticking second hands gave the room a just-tolerable white noise.

  Francine peeled away the blanket she’d collapsed onto the night before, revealing the orange-and-yellow, butterfly-patterned sheets beneath like a pair of embarrassing underwear. Ellie had a penchant for buying wacky bed sheets to show how fun and spontaneous she was. Being married to an antique clock collector did funny things to a person.

  Upending her suitcase, Francine spilled her clothes and few material possessions out onto the bed at about the same speed with which they’d been packed. If anyone in Hawthorn Woods needed to know how to flee the West Coast in a hurry, she would be only too happy to enlighten them.

  1) Ask the landlord of your shag-carpeted and stucco-ceilinged apartment to hold your mail. Try not to be offended when he asks for your name and unit number, even though you gave him a Christmas card last year.

  2) At no point should you cry, as it only serves to slow things down.

  3) Strongly demand, reasonably ask, then desperately beg for an immediate two weeks off from your busy job, putting you on thin ice with the boss.

  4) Sell your expendable possessions in a beyond-depressing yard sale that quantifies your existence into a specific monetary value. Hint: It’s less than you think.

  5) Use your yard sale profits to buy the best San Francisco to Chicago flight money can buy, or at least the best flight you can buy. Turns out three connections make for the cheapest option, so you’re off on an involuntary tour of the contiguous United States.

  6) Do not let the fact that you are alone and carrying nearly your entire life in a single suitcase trick you into violating Rule # 2.

  7) Board your first flight and immediately violate Rule # 2, drawing the doting concern of the Swahili-only, elderly lady in the window seat next to you.

  8) Don’t spend the next three connecting flights calculating how behind you are in the race of life and how you have absolutely no idea how to fix what needs to be fixed, including how to politely wake the Kenyan grandmother snoring on your shoulder.

  Francine examined her worldly possessions scattered unceremoniously across Ellie’s butterfly sheets: a worryingly-thin wallet, a tangle of cheap necklaces, half a box of dollar store tampons, half a roll of Lifesavers (mostly pineapple-flavor), an essential army of bobby pins, an issue of Vogue, her favorite scissors and comb from the salon, a bright yellow Nancy Drew hardcover, a VHS tape labeled with a tiny skull and crossbones, and a stack of papers bound by a red rubber band.


  Francine picked up the papers. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory: an exhaustively thorough, hundreds-of-questions-long personality test. Ben had given her the pages a few weeks after they split because he was just so damn thoughtful (after they’d split, anyway). Francine refused to fill the papers out, but also refused to throw them out, leaving the neat rows of true and false boxes forever unchecked. She did, however, answer the occasional question in her head, and perused a few for fun.

  I like to read newspaper articles on crime.

  True.

  I believe that women ought to have as much sexual freedom as men.

  Oh, you betcha.

  People say insulting and vulgar things about me.

  Pixie Cut might have a few choice words.

  If I could live my life over again, I would not change much.

  False, false, a thousand times false.

  In Francine’s mind, living without regret was nothing more than the ultimate coping mechanism, one that dictated a person was supposed to learn from mistakes and move in a direction that was exclusively and unrelentingly forward. Because people ended up together if they were meant to, and there were plenty of fish in the sea, and blah, blah, blah.

  She wrangled the rubber band back around the papers and chucked them under the bed. The empty scoring page landed face up, showing the abbreviated categories of D, Hy, Pd, Pa, Pt, Sc. A personality type wouldn’t tell her anything. The MMPI was just a Cosmo quiz wearing fancy pants, one she should have left it in California with the rest of her mistakes.

  This was bad.

  Hawthorn Woods wasn’t supposed to be a place for recursive thought and self-judgment. It was supposed to be Francine’s last-ditch, Hail Mary, damned-if-I-don’t shot at becoming her once-vibrant self again.

  She picked up the Nancy Drew hardcover from the bed.

  She’d read the fictional teen investigator’s mysteries for as long as she could remember, even walking around as a kid herself with a magnifying glass. Later she’d entertained the girls in the salon by tracking down stolen combs or guessing customers’ professions. A keen ability to read people was one of Francine’s best qualities, something she enjoyed and prided herself on. At least before the skill had become a casualty in Ben’s careless exit.

  She studied her beloved heroine on the cover. Nancy was resolute and brave, and in no universe would she come undone just because someone stopped rolling her toothpaste tube, or a nasty neighbor felt like throwing a drink on her.

  And right then and there, Francine rewrote her own prescription, from one of relaxation to one of investigation. Out with cucumber slices on eyes and cocktails before five, and in with flashlights and following clues wherever they led.

  Francine Haddix and the Airborne Vodka? The title needed some work, but the reason behind Magdalena’s drink throw was definitely a mystery. And even though the offense was a little pedestrian, something in the woman’s eyes, a glint of hate or fear, had spoken to something much deeper than a tipsy misunderstanding.

  But to follow the yet-to-be-found clues, Francine would need a lay of the land and a detailed who’s-who. She needed a tour guide. Someone honest, but gossipy, and definitely on her side.

  She had just the person in mind.

  Chapter 3

  I gossip a little at times.

  [ x ] TRUE [ ] FALSE

  “I am so glad you called,” Laura Jean said, stepping out her front door. “I apologize for not offering a proper welcome tour myself.”

  Francine shrugged casually as the two of them started down the driveway. “I figured I should know who lives where, given the surprise at the party.”

  “I have been dying to talk to you about that. Should’ve dumped my beer right on Magdalena’s head. Mutually assured destruction and all that.”

  Francine laughed and pulled a pack of Camel 100’s from her yellow shorts. “Okay if I walk n’ smoke?”

  “Walk n’ smoke. I like that.”

  “That’s what Ben used to call it.”

  “What’s-his-name,” Laura Jean corrected. “And please, I’m not some pearl-clutching housewife. Smoke your damn cigarette. And how is it this hot out already?” She put on a big pair of sunglasses, long ponytail swishing as they walked. “Okay, tour time. The block is basically a rectangle, and Mark and I are at the bottom right corner.”

  She pointed behind them at the tidy red-brick split-level with a Notre Dame flag waving beside the garage.

  “Did you guys go to Notre Dame?”

  “Us?” Laura Jean laughed. “Hell no, we’d never get in. We’ve got twin girls there, going into their sophomore year. They decided to stay on campus for the summer, Mom’s heart be damned. Hawthorn Woods is apparently a bit too sleepy for girls their age. I’m still adjusting to the empty nest, so if you start to feel like my pet project, it’s probably because you are.”

  A woman driving by in a boxy white minivan made little attempt to hide a curious stare at Francine.

  “I was kinda hoping people would’ve forgotten about last night’s little incident,” Francine said.

  “Some people around here have nothing better to do than mow the lawn and fantasize about their children’s potential. Oh God, I think I just described Mark and me. Anyway, do not take last night personally. I know they say a full moon makes people squirrelly, but Jee-sus. Okay, back to the tour. As you may know, we are now passing your lovely sister’s house. I miss her already. Pete’s a good one, too. Bit of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it personality, but that makes him a good foil for your hummingbird sis.”

  A gaggle of boys wearing toilet paper on their heads rode past on mismatched bikes, narrowly missing Francine as they mimed karate moves and shouted the names of Renaissance painters. Someone’s little sister tried to keep pace, complaining about having to be a news reporter.

  “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” Laura Jean explained. “Kids’ shows are so damn weird. But okay, this here’s Del Merlin.” She gestured at the house to the left of Ellie’s: a one-story ranch with gray siding. The open garage showed off a cherry red sports car, a true unicorn among the neighborhood’s uninspired stable of mostly brown and blue sedans. “Del’s basically married to that car. He’s well into his sixties, but if you’re willing to date up, he is widowed…”

  “Thanks, but I don’t think I’m desperate enough to date retirement age.”

  Yet, Francine added to herself, hoping she was joking. The first cigarette hissed in surrender as she put it out on the bottom of her shoe and pocketed the butt. She lit another and offered it, half in jest, to Laura Jean.

  “No, thank you. I haven’t smoked since high school, and don’t you go asking how long ago that was. I will say, though, my sister-in-law is a pack-a-day woman and she’s got skin like a cowboy boot. Ditto her personality.”

  “I’m pretty far from a pack a day, but it has picked up since the divorce.”

  “Since you brought it up,” Laura Jean said, “how about giving me something more to chew on?”

  “Something about my divorce?”

  “Yeah. If I don’t ask now, I’ll have to wait for another natural transition. That could be minutes from now.”

  “Hmm.” Francine dragged on her new Camel. “How to encapsulate the joy that was being married to Ben? First he was a stranger, then that cute guy who got his hair cut every other Thursday, then my boyfriend, fiancé, husband, ex-husband. Now he’s just a stranger again, but one who insists on a permanent place in my thoughts. Exes are weird like that, you know?”

  “God and the devil, packaged into one person.”

  “Bingo. I think Ben had fun at first, and he really did like me. But I don’t think I ever rose past the rank of accessory. I always used to shake my head when I heard about people getting divorced after less than a year. That was for teenagers or celebrities. Or teenage celebrities. Now it’s me.”

  “Best almost-year of his life, the son of a bitch,” Laura Jean grumbled supportively. She nodded toward an old man
playing fetch with a big white husky in the backyard of the next home. “Next up, we have Roland Gerber. He’s our resident expatriate from Switzerland, and that’s Ajax, his dog.”

  The house could have been the cover of a fairy tale book: a brown and white Tudor cottage nestled into an abundance of spruce trees, cardinals fluttering from one branch to the other like living Christmas ornaments.

  “I met Mr. Gerber,” Francine recalled. “Super nice.”

  “Sweet as pie. Him and the dog. Roland practically built the neighborhood back in the fifties. Eighty-two years old and still comes to all the parties, how do you like that? I hope I’m still moving that well at sixty.”

  Francine watched a blue jay swoop out of an oak overhead and soar between the modest split-level homes across the street, adding a nice brushstroke to the living Norman Rockwell painting. All around, garage doors and windows were open, letting in the warm air and sunshine. Children, already on their first popsicle of the day, sprinted across expansive gradients of green grass littered with the colorful plastic of Fisher-Price. Three pigtailed girls singing Madonna songs in the rear-facing backseat of a station wagon squealed as their father sprayed the window with a hose.

  Despite a rocky start, it was safe to say Hawthorn Woods held all the sentimental junk Francine had hoped to find during her stay, and even on her second cigarette she breathed a little easier.

  “I can’t get over how gorgeous this place is,” she said. “I keep waiting for the Keebler Elves to pop out of one of the trees and chuck a Fudge Stripe cookie at me.”

  “It’s cute, right? Oh hell.” Laura Jean looked ahead to the first house on the other side of the block. “I wish we didn’t have to go by this next one.”