Twenty-Seven
Clara and Bridie had talked about skipping school, their father seemed willing to let them do whatever they wanted, but Bridie was such a mess that Clara wanted to keep them on some kind of schedule until their mother returned.
She walked around in a daze, not quite believing what was happening to her.
To them. Her dad didn’t want to talk about anything.
Not the note. Not the reason for their mother’s departure or where she was or what she was doing.
Not the bewildering fact of Mr. Finnegan.
Mr. Finnegan! Their mother was with Mr. Finnegan.
Her father was tight-lipped, and she gave up trying to get anything out of him other than the banal cliché he insisted on spouting: everything will be fine, which was so blatantly untrue.
He acted as if their mother were off visiting a relative or friend and would reappear soon and they would all reconstitute as a family somehow.
Clara had a million questions and not a single soul to ask.
The one rule Sam insisted on was that she and Bridie weren’t to say a word to anyone about what was going on.
Not a word. And the only person she could have talked to about all of it was Dune, and he was gone, too.
The morning of the note, while Sam was upstairs explaining to a hysterical Bridie what had happened, Clara had pulled on her winter boots and run across the street holding her ski parka tight around her shorts and T-shirt.
It was freezing. The morning flurries had given way to a bright winter day.
Clara could smell the moisture in the air and the burning wood from the houses on the street that had stoked their fireplaces against the chill of the first true winter morning.
She pounded on the Finnegans’ front door, but nobody answered, and the house was dark and felt hollow.
She tried to peer through the glass panes flanking the doorway.
Nothing. Then she realized Dune must have left her a note in their hiding spot, the old galvanized steel milk box still sitting at the side of the garage even though hardly anyone had home delivery anymore, not since Finnegan’s bought out all the bigger dairy farmers, consolidated operations, and effectively put the smaller farms out of business.
But no. The milk box was empty. Clara was confused.
If the Finnegans had left town, why wouldn’t Dune at least call her?
Why hadn’t he run over when their family had presumably received a letter much like the one her mother had written to see how she was doing?
To commiserate. To talk down this extremely fucked-up thing their parents had done?
Clara trudged back into the house, where Bridie was standing in the kitchen in her nightgown looking utterly lost. She went straight to Bridie and took her in her arms and Bridie resumed sobbing.
The next morning, as they rummaged through the fridge for lunch supplies—ignoring the packed bags Nina had left for each school day she’d be gone—she asked Sam about taking Nina’s car to school.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking flummoxed for the first time since Nina had left.
Decisions about when the girls were allowed to do certain things was strictly Nina’s territory.
Clara pressed her advantage. “Dad,” she said, moving close to him and lowering her voice, “we can’t take the bus today.
We can’t. Bridie will lose it the minute she sees her friends.
If I can drive us, we have a way to leave early if she has a complete nervous breakdown.
” Sam reluctantly handed Clara the car keys with a series of safety warnings and a promise they’d come directly home after school.
“Do not,” she said, pointing her finger right in Bridie’s face as they were buckling their seat belts in Nina’s dirt brown Volvo, “tell anyone at school what’s going on.”
“What if Fern says something?”
“I’ll take care of Fern.” In truth, the only reason Clara wanted to go to school was to find out where Fern and Dune were hiding.
She would never forget the strangeness of the day, the feeling of being in a place that was completely familiar but didn’t offer any comfort.
She stood at her locker staring into the messy space until the bell rang for class.
She hid in the bathrooms during lunch because she couldn’t possibly sit at a lunch table with her friends discussing the holiday break or Christmas or a television show or sharing homework.
Everything had changed, but she was moving through an unchanged world, and it made her dizzy.
She needed to find Fern. Clara went to the principal’s office after first period to talk to the school secretary, Mrs. O’Neill, who liked Clara and who was also a terrible gossip if she trusted you.
One of her favorite expressions being You didn’t hear it from me, but—
“Hey, Mrs. O’Neill,” she said, “Fern Finnegan borrowed my history notes the other day and I need them to study for a test. Can you tell me what class she’s in next period so I can find her?”
“Fern’s not here, hon,” Mrs. O’Neill said.
“Oh,” Clara said, doing an excellent job of looking confused. “I hope she’s okay. I guess I’ll stop by her house after school.”
Mrs. O’Neill raised a brow. Clara stood wide-eyed. “Well. You didn’t hear it from me, but . . .” She walked closer to Clara and lowered her voice. “Family emergency. Out of town.”
“I didn’t tell anyone!” Bridie said to her when they got in the car at the end of the day, beaming with accomplishment.
Clara’d had what her mother called a rumbly tumbly belly since lunch, wondering if Nina might be back early, hoping they’d walk into the house and she would, what?
Be unpacking? Cooking? Apologizing? But when they pulled into the driveway the house was dark.
“She’s not home,” Bridie said, chin trembling.
“Stop being such a baby, Bridie!” Clara also wanted to cry but wouldn’t.
In the mess of the remainder of the week, Clara had forgotten Mr. Goodwin was posting the cast list for Godspell the day before Christmas break started.
Even though Clara could barely allow herself to think about what her mother was doing with Mr. Finnegan, she did realize that, intentionally or not, they’d planned the trip to end just as the holiday break began.
Starting Friday afternoon, school would be off for nearly a month. A small mercy.
On Friday morning, only one day before their mother had promised to return, they sped to the drive-through at McDonald’s to get Egg McMuffins and coffee.
The line was long, and they were running a little late.
They wolfed the food down in the car and raced into the school cafeteria minutes before the bell rang for first period.
“Clara! Clara!” Her friend Miranda was waving her down in the hallway. “You did it!”
“I did what?”
Miranda rushed up to Clara and hugged her.
“You’re John the Baptist!” Miranda was squealing and jumping up and down.
“I got ‘Day by Day’!” She started twirling in circles around Clara, singing and clapping.
Clara slowly approached the cast list posted on the bulletin board in the cafeteria, and there it was.
John the Baptist: Clara Larkin. Right beneath the outcome that only days before had been a dream and now was something entirely different—Jesus: Dune Finnegan.
“Larkin!” Somebody was yelling to her from a lunch table.
“Hey, Larkin!” She turned to find Missy Grunwald waving her over.
She and Missy were friends in grammar school but once they got to Good Counsel went their separate ways.
Missy was funny and loud and mean. She had no interest in Clara once she had a whole bunch of girls to pick from who were more like her. “Hi,” Clara said, suspicious.
“Congratulations on the play.”
“Thanks.” Missy was playing to the table, to her friends, who were all wearing school-mandated navy cardigans but had had them monogrammed at the fancy sweater shop in town in contrasting colors. One pink. One lilac. A few red and green. “And condolences, I guess.”
“Huh?” Clara squinted. Missy was up to something. She pushed a copy of the Democrat & Chronicle across the table. “Food Poisoning Scare at Finnegan’s Grocer,” the headline on page one read. Food poisoning? “What about it?” she snapped.
“Page seventeen,” Missy said. “Check out your mother’s wedding announcement.
” Two of the girls at the table laughed but wouldn’t look at Clara.
A few of the others looked down at their hands and had the decency to be embarrassed.
Clara felt the McDonald’s coffee rise in her gullet.
She swallowed hard. If she vomited in front of these girls, in the middle of the school cafeteria, she would have to move to a different state. Possibly another country.
She turned the pages slowly until she saw what they’d all read.
A small item in a column on the society pages: “A little bird tells me that as I type this, Finn Finnegan and his neighbor, Mrs. Samuel Larkin, who writes for a competing paper, are honeymooning in the Dominican Republic after leaving their respective spouses this week. We wish the newlyweds the best upon their return to the snowdrifts of our town.”
“Are you okay?” Missy said, not sounding the slightest bit concerned. “I can’t believe you’ve been coming to school. It’s crazy.”
“What’s crazy?” Clara said.
Missy laughed. “All of it! Your mother is a fast operator. Gotta bag the grocer when you can, right?” Someone tapped Clara’s elbow.
She turned, and Bridie was standing there looking like a ghost. Like someone had drained every ounce of blood from her body, and how had Clara not noticed the circles under Bridie’s eyes?
She hadn’t been sleeping. A rage so pure and cleansing rose in Clara that for the first time since their mother left, she felt a sense of purpose, almost elation.
“Missy?” Clara said. “Go fuck yourself.”
When they returned to their empty house and the dark kitchen, the dirty dishes in the sink, the garbage piling up in the corner, the funky odor of spoiled apples, something in Clara snapped into or out of place, she couldn’t tell.
How could the house smell completely different already?
It didn’t smell like her mother’s house anymore.
Like beef stew and marigolds from the yard and the cedar candle she liked to burn during the holidays and the Jean Naté After Bath Splash she used every morning.
It didn’t smell like care. It smelled like indifference.
She turned on all the lights. Told Bridie to hang her coat in the front hall. The beginning of Christmas break. No homework. No nothing. She started filling the sink with sudsy hot water. Cleared the counter of crumbs.
“What do we do now?” Bridie said, her lower lip resuming its daylong tremble.
“We cook.”