A Charmed Place (53 page)

"No," Laura said quickly. "We'll leave it here. A tow truck can come for it in the morning. It's not exactly blocking traffic."

Them towing Snack. It was all Laura needed: a decrepit truck towing a decrepit car through the middle of town on a Saturday night. She could hear the old snickers so clearly. Oh, how she hated being back!

Snack took his duffelbag out of the Subaru's trunk and tossed it in the back of the pickup, and then he squeezed into the front seat next to Laura. It was predictably tight, and Snack was ripe from his long drive.

"Just like old times, huh?" he said, tugging at Laura's blunt-cut hair. "Remember how Dad used to throw us all in the back of the truck for cranberry harvest?"

The word "cranberry" sent Laura hurtling back in time. For a year or two at the end, when money was especially hard to come by, their father had dragged them off to the cranberry bogs like migrant workers, and that's exactly what they had looked like as they rode in the back of the truck in plain view of everyone in Chepaquit.
Oliver
Shore
was the sole surviving heir to a fourth-generation nursery, and yet he ran it so badly that he'd had to farm out his own children.

Driving out to the bogs hadn't been too unbearable, because few people were up and around at that early hour; but coming back, they had felt painfully on display. They were teenagers, after all; the experience was excruciating. Laura used to pull her baseball cap as far down over her eyes as she could, not because she thought she was disguising herself, but because at least then she couldn't see who was laughing at her.

Often they'd miss school; she hated that even more. Snack, of course, was happy to skip, and even Corinne was relieved—she'd always been shy—but Laura had wanted desperately to make something of herself, and the cranberry bogs were not the place to do that.

"I do remember Octobers here," Laura said quietly. "All too well."

She much preferred her Octobers in
Portland
, where her garden was a feature on the annual fall tour in her neighborhood, and where afterward she held an open house for the other entrants, treating them to various coffees as well as desserts, none of them baked by her.

"Hey, isn't that the old Sumner place?" Snack said, peering through the deepening dusk. "Holy shit, I hardly recognize it. Who lives there now? The fricking governor?"

"Oh, some trust-fund baby bought it," Corinne explained. "He's playing at being a gentleman farmer. He has sheep."

Whereas the Sumners
used to have
pigs. Even so, the Sumner girls had never occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder. That position had been reserved exclusively for the Shore kids.

Laura scarcely glanced at the shingled, gabled farmhouse, now trimmed in pristine white and surrounded by a fenced-in, gently rolling field. She didn't need a walkthrough to know that the kitchen was filled with Sub-Zero appliances and that the new wing held a master bedroom with a walk-in closet the size of an Olympic pool. The same kind of gentrification was going on back in
Portland
. Bigger, better, more: it was the mantra of the new millennium.

"I wonder what became of the Sumner girls," Laura said, only vaguely curious. She was far more curious about what had become of Sylvia, the bright, shining star who had suddenly appeared in their evening sky, and then not long afterward had orbited out of all of their lives. Sylvia, who had been everything that Laura was not: sexy, confident, beautiful, and most of all, free as a butterfly to go wherever she wanted and do whatever she wanted.

"Jean Sumner got married and lives in
Indiana
; I think she's pretty happy there," Corinne said in a home-town, gossipy way. "Jan, I'm not sure about. I think she's moved to
Maine
."

Snack said, "So who's still around? Besides you, I mean."

"Lots of people," Corinne argued, sounding defensive. "Two of the Bosenfield kids still live nearby, and so does Nonni Pritchard. And Kendall Barclay, naturally, because of his bank. Will has a practice in
Chatham
. And, let me see, who else? Oh—Leon Borkowski!"

"Porky Borky?" said Snack fondly. "
He's
still around?"

"He lives with his mother over the liquor store."

"Gee-eez."

Every name felt like a pinprick to Laura, and two of them were red-hot needles. Which was why coming back to Chepaquit was always a hundred times more painful than leaving it had been.

She remembered vividly the day she moved out. By then the dazzling Sylvia had been gone for nearly a year. Laura had had all that time to reflect on what exciting and dramatic lives people like Sylvia led, and to contrast it with how empty and limited her own life was.

By six
p
.
m
. on her eighteenth birthday, Laura was packed and ready to run. After a final, bitter fight with her father, she hadn't even stayed for cake, breaking her mother's heart. It was her single regret.

That, and leaving Corinne. Corinne had been too loyal to their parents and to the family business to leave. Well, that phase of her life was behind her now. As soon as she sold the nursery, Corinne
too
would be free to follow her heart's desire. She had paid her dues, with interest. As sole heir, she was going to enjoy her well-deserved reward. No one was more pleased about that than Laura.

She glanced at her sister and let her gaze settle into a thoughtful study of her profile. Corinne might be thirty-two, but hard work and the sun had taken their toll: even in the near-dark, Laura could see thin lines branching from the corners of her sister's green eyes, and a deepening of the line that ran from her nose to the full, well-shaped mouth that presided over a strong, resolute chin.

Was she alluring? It was hard to say. She was Corinne. Laura knew her too well and loved her too much to know how someone seeing her for the first time would respond.

She was Corinne: sweet and loyal and loving and therefore, in Laura's eyes, achingly desirable. For Laura, it was as simple as that. Why couldn't some man, somewhere, see what she saw?

Because men were jerks. Men were all the same. Jerks.

"What? Why are you staring at me?" Corinne asked, cocking her head before turning her attention back to the road.

"I like what the sun has done to your hair," Laura improvised. "Women pay big bucks for that highlighted effect."

"You can't even see my hair in this light," said Corinne, grinning.

"I see fine."

"You do not."

"Yes I do. And I'd forgotten how perfect your teeth are. Whereas I had to suffer through braces at thirty. What a birthday present to myself."

"Okay, enough girl talk," said Snack, cutting in. "
Rin
nie! What's that offer that we won't be able to refuse, hmm?"

Corinne said smugly, "Right in front of your nose, Snack."

The road had dipped and risen and taken its familiar bend, and now they were at the turnoff to the nursery. Even in the romance of dusk, the place looked as sad and forlorn as ever—a run-down collection of shops, sheds, greenhouses, and outbuildings, all of them presided over by a large farmhouse built on the highest point of the property. Nothing had been fixed or painted in decades, and—for a nursery—very little seemed to be either green or growing.

True, several tables sat haphazardly in front of the shop, but the few pots on top of them held nothing in bloom. It was early in the season for flowers
... but still. A solid display of spring perennials and bulbs would have gone a long way to attracting customers and distracting them from the woebegone state of the rest of the site. As it stood, no one but a longtime resident in the area would even know the place
was
a nursery: the carved and painted sign that once crowned an arch near the entrance was faded and unreadable, even in daylight.

SHORE
GARDENS
. A wonderful name for what was once (Laura had seen the photos) a delightfully charming and well-stocked garden center.

No more.

"Will ya look at that?" Snack said in a voice of wonder. "I used to think that it was the peeling paint that held the buildings together. But the paint's all gone and they're still standing. I guess it's by habit."

"Smartass," Corinne said, but with surprising good humor. Clearly she had something to say, and nothing was going to wreck her mood. "Everyone out," she commanded.

Snack and Laura climbed
down from the truck like high
school kids on a prison tour: whatever was ahead, they didn't look all that excited to learn about it.

Positioning Snack and Laura next to her on the wraparound porch of the house, Corinne threw her arms wide and said, "Okay. What do you see out there?"

Not the ocean, that was for sure. The porch faced away from it.

"I see ruins," Snack said candidly.

Laura didn't have the heart to agree out loud.

"Squint a little," Corinne ordered them. "You'll see a thriving business with not only annuals and perennials and shrubs and trees, but garden furniture and water fountains and bird feeders and decorative pottery and
... squint! You'll
see."

"Corinne. I have a one-thirty flight out of
Logan
tomorrow. Cut to the chase or I'm going to miss the damn plane," Laura said, more leery than ever. "Just tell us what you have in mind."

"Just this: I want you to spend a month at the Shore."

"One month. That's all I ask. I know it's a huge, huge favor. I know I'm asking you to hand over a chunk of your lives to me. But
... one month. That's all. I've never asked either of you for a favor before," Corinne added in an earnest, heartrending voice.

It was late, two in the morning. Snack and Laura were drooping over the kitchen table: Snack, because he was in his cups; Laura, because she'd spent the previous night crossing the country by plane. Only Corinne, who should have been sleepiest, was still wide awake—feverishly so.

Laura yawned and leaned her head back, trying to rub the cotton out of her eyes. It hurt to open them, hurt to think, hurt to argue. She longed for bed, the same bed that she'd been so glad to abandon fifteen years earlier. If only Corinne would stop holding them hostage!

She gazed wearily at her younger sister. "Rinnie,
why
are you so adamant about this? The nursery hasn't made any money for years. In fact, do you ever remember a good year? I don't.
Shore
Gardens
is a lost cause, believe me."

Her eyelids eased the rest of the way shut as she repeated her litany. "Too many bad decisions
... too little maintenance
... the overhead, the taxes. If Dad couldn't make it work with three generations of experience behind him," she added, opening her eyes with an effort, "what makes you think
you
can?"

Incredibly, Corinne was still more than willing to explain.

"Because I know what was missing!" she said with numbing enthusiasm. She slapped the table.
"You."
She slapped the table again.
"Snack."

"We never wanted to stay in the business. Ever," Laura said tiredly. "Everyone knew that—Dad, most of all."

"I know, I know; I was there for all the battles, and I have copies of all three wills: the old one, the new one, and the one Dad was willing to sign if only you'd come back."

Snack let out a harsh laugh and said, "I used my three versions to stoke a fire in a cabin I was living in. What'd you do with your set when you got 'em, Laur?"

"Filed them," Laura said briefly.

Corinne sighed and went on. "B
ut
after you both took off, I wasn't enough to hold up our end. The first four generations had a lot more family around to work the business. Our generation just had me."

"Hey
... don't go laying some guilt trip on me," Snack mumbled. "I paid the price." He folded his arms over the table and began a slow slide forward on it. "And it was a small price at that, to get out from under the old man's beatings."

"All I'm saying is that I didn't have the right stuff on my own, Snack. I'm good at some things, not at others."

Laura said grimly, "Or so you were told by Dad. Repeatedly, I'm sure."

"But it's the truth," said Corinne, ignoring the sarcasm. "For example, the water lines are a disaster because Dad didn't winterize anything a couple of years ago, and some of them burst. I don't know anything about plumbing, so now I'm hauling hoses everywhere. Watering takes forever. There's no pressure. The hoses leak." She said sheepishly, "That's just one thing off the top of my head. There's so much more."

"Like, who
cares?"
Snack said in a sleepy moan.

"But do you have any idea how many plants we've lost? We could have carpeted
the highway from here to Prov
incetown! Plus, we don't have a catalog, we don't have a computer, we don't do mail order, we're not high-end enough for the big spenders, we're not cheap enough for the Wal-Mart crowd
..."