Chapter 22
Then
iris
‘Everybody lies,’ Iris said.
‘Not Finn,’ Amy said. ‘Not to me.’
Iris had long since got used to her sister’s casual possessiveness; Amy had appropriated her nephew with the same careless ease she’d once adopted as she helped herself to Iris’s clothes and make-up, as if primogeniture gave her a lifetime of first dibs.
Iris appreciated Amy’s affection for Finn.
But her sister’s attitude still rankled.
‘The only reason he’s not telling you the truth is because you’re the head of school,’ Iris said, wondering as she did so why she was trying to make Amy feel better. ‘Of course he’s not going to admit to skipping lessons to score weed.’
‘Finn doesn’t do weed.’
‘They all do weed,’ Iris said, irritated.
Amy hefted a stack of outdoor chairs into the trailer that Dwight, the janitor, had backed up near the playing fields. ‘We’d better get moving,’ she said, glancing up at the darkening sky. ‘That storm’s coming in hard.’
‘You must have a thousand more important things you should be doing,’ Iris said, picking up another chair. ‘Why don’t you have maintenance do this?’
‘They’re busy taking down the bleachers,’ Amy said.
‘You really think that’s necessary?’
‘It’s a big storm. Didn’t you see the footage of Hurricane Carla on INN yesterday? It hit the Florida Keys as a category five, and it was still a cat-three storm when it made landfall again in South Carolina.’
‘Yes, but it won’t be a hurricane when it gets here.’
‘Doesn’t need to be. Remember Irene?’
Iris pushed her hair out of her eyes with the inside of her wrist. She was hot and tired, and the impending storm was affecting the atmospheric pressure, giving her a headache.
She’d promised to drive Finn to a swim meet an hour and forty-five minutes away in New Hampshire after school today, and had actually been looking forward to watching him compete.
More importantly, she’d been counting on the long drive there and back to have a real conversation with her son.
She didn’t get much alone time with him these days, and there was something about being in the quiet confessional of a car that enabled Finn to open up in a way he rarely did anymore.
Something was going on with their kids, and she needed Finn to come clean and tell her what it was. He hadn’t been himself for days. She had the feeling he’d come close to confiding in her a couple of times, and she’d hoped this afternoon would provide the opening he needed.
But then Amy had insisted all the staff stay after school to batten down the hatches, and Finn had driven to the swim meet on his own.
‘You think you’ll have to cancel prom?’ she asked suddenly, as the thought occurred to her. ‘Being out on the lake would—’
‘The storm will have passed by then,’ Amy said firmly. ‘The worst of it’ll be tonight and tomorrow morning. Saturday should be fine.’
Iris bit her tongue. In 2011, storm Irene had washed out five hundred miles of road and destroyed more than two hundred bridges, even though it’d officially been downgraded from hurricane status by the time it hit Vermont.
Some towns had been cut off for weeks, and the National Guard had had to helicopter in emergency boxes of food and medicine.
Iris knew Mac was taking precautions down at the marina, doing what he could to protect his boats, including the Lady of Champlain.
But if Carla was even half as bad as Irene, all sorts of debris would end up in the lake.
It’d be far too risky to take a boat out onto the water, and they’d have no choice except to cancel prom.
But she wasn’t going to upset Amy again by saying so.
They spent the next ten minutes loading up the trailer with stacks of chairs and other outdoor furniture: benches, awnings, picnic tables. Dwight would come by later to drive it all into the school’s storage sheds.
Iris’s phone pinged with a text just as they slammed the trailer footbed into place.
It was a photo of Rose in Maggie’s bedroom.
Her daughter was wearing a pale pink chiffon dress with thin spaghetti straps, delicately pleated over the bust and then falling in an empire line sweep to her feet.
It was perfect: pretty and charming and grown-up without being sexy.
Iris tapped back a heart.
Perfect! Where did u find it?
Thrifted it at Plato’s Closet
Not too babyish?
No it’s gorgeous, Rosie
Looks vintage ??
U can borrow my pink heart necklace if you like?
Rlly? That’s so nice of you, mooma!
Iris smiled at the affectionate nickname.
It’d been a while since Rose had used it.
She loved the beautiful young woman her daughter was becoming, but she couldn’t help missing the little girl she’d lost. The child who’d crept into her bed in the morning before it was light, fitting her warm little body to the curve of Iris’s back.
She sighed at the thought of the sweet children she’d once had, and was about to put her phone away when it pinged again with another text from Rose.
u have to tell ur mom asap
Iris stared at her phone, confused. You have to tell your mom? Tell Helen what? About the dress?
And then another text, almost immediately:
sorry never mind
Rose must have sent her a text meant for someone else – easy enough to do when you were juggling several conversations at the same time. Iris had once texted a snippy comment about another teacher at school to the teacher by mistake. That’d made for an interesting Monday morning.
She frowned uneasily as she put her phone away.
u have to tell ur mom asap
Who had Rose been texting?