It was late morning, and aside from the crash of waves it was dead quiet, and June could not think, could not sit, could not seem to breathe as deeply as a body needed to keep from passing out. She’d hardly slept, her neck in a knot, her shoulders, too, and she wondered if Jameson had lain awake as she had. Every time she’d drifted off, she dreamed of being barefoot on craggy rocks, and she woke clutching her feet, searching for open wounds.
She’d been watching him sweep the front porch, carry handfuls of his things to his truck, coil up electrical cords and store them in the shed. He made a brief phone call from the backyard, but his voice was low and curt and she couldn’t make out what he said, but he didn’t seem happy, whatever it was.
She went through the motions of showering and getting dressed, to temper the anxious hum beneath her skin. It did nothing to calm her. She wandered into the living room dressed like a person who had someplace to be. She fought that off by going stiff in the middle of the rug, as if in protest against the drink she imagined having, the dark pub booth she imagined settling into. She was a stock-still statue erected as a symbol of silent battle, while at once counting all the reasons she could step forward and have just one, just today, to move her beyond the feelings taking over, feelings that had nothing to do with needing a drink.
She gathered two of Grandmam’s teacups and matching saucers, the sugar bowl and creamer, set them on a tray, and took them out back, where she arranged the settings across from each other on the patio table. One for Mum, one for me, as she used to say.
How long had it been since she had drawn on her number one comfort? She had forgotten so many things while drinking. Faces, names, entire days and weeks unrecognizably smeared.
She returned to the kitchen for her Polaroid camera. The silver trim on the cups and saucers would glow on the instant film. The chemicals and filtered light would give the illusion of an image that was decades old.
And then, the strangest thing. She startled in the patio doorway.
Raccoons, a mother and three kits, were climbing onto the table, grabbing hold of the tea set. They leapt around like a band of mischievous, costumed children. The smallest snatched a teacup with his tiny paws and looked at June and then the cup he was holding, as if he were waiting to be served.
June rushed forward and the raccoons dropped the cups and saucers onto the table. When they scampered away they sent the tea things flying, crashing to the ground.
She roared with a fury she didn’t know she possessed. She whipped what remained of a saucer in their direction, but they were already free of her, the smallest one trailing, looking back at June, as if he did not understand her or anything that was happening here, and then he, like the others, disappeared in the thicket of trees.
The dishes could not be replaced. June would be plucking shards from the grass for weeks. She would need to wear shoes out here.
Then laughter coming from her grandparents’ yard. For a fractured second she didn’t understand how that could be, how anyone could be over there, and the sound haunted her, frightened and confused her.
Then she turned to see Jameson, braced forward with his hands on his knees, laughing.
“You saw that?” she called.
Jameson straightened up and nodded.
“Bleedin’ hell,” June said.
Jameson came toward her, smiling. “Bold little bastards.”
June shook her head. She lifted her hair off her neck and wiped the sweat away, her hand there suddenly recalling the way his shirt collar had wrapped around her last night.
Jameson was looking in the direction the raccoons had gone. “Weird,” he said.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” she said.
Broken cups and saucers lay across the table and on the ground.
“I didn’t mean to intrude. Looks like you were expecting company.”
June felt the heat in her face. A child planning a tea party with an imaginary mum. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll just be needing the broom.”
She grabbed her flip-flops and the broom and dustpan, and she twisted her hair atop her head for the heat. When she returned, Jameson was right where she’d left him, watching her now as she swept the slivers from the patio. “I was going to get some shots with my camera. I wasn’t expecting company. Certainly not raccoons.”
“How long have you had that camera?”
“My father gave it to me when I was seven.”
Jameson looked at her closely.
“Would you like some lemonade?” she asked, and stood upright with the dustpan full of shards in one hand, the broom like a staff in the other.
Jameson shrugged. “Thank you. The roofers are late.” He glanced behind him at the bungalow. “I want to have a word with them before I head out.”
“What time do you leave?”
“She should—Sarah Anne—should be here anytime.”
“Well, then. I’ll bring extra glasses for her and the boy—what’s his name?”
“Ernest.”
“Ernest.” June smiled to one side, gave a soft nod.
“Can I help you with anything?” Jameson asked as June stepped toward the house. Her mind flashed on all they had said to each other, their hands clutching, and after lightly touching as they walked together to her front door, where Jameson stepped back as if embarrassed by his behavior, and abruptly said good night. He was smiling now, different, as if he’d awakened in a fine mood. His wife was on her way. Maybe that was it. He hadn’t seen her in weeks.
“No need,” June said. “I’ll just be a moment.”
Inside, she gathered what she needed from the kitchen and returned with glasses full of ice and a pitcher of lemonade on a tray, and they sat facing each other at the table.
“I made that drive once,” June said. “That she’s—Sarah Anne—is making today. To the high desert. With my father. Though technically I returned with my grandfather. A long tale for another time.”
Jameson glanced at an imaginary watch on his wrist. “I’ve got time.”
June poured them each a drink and relaxed back in her chair. “My father wasn’t well,” she said, with such seriousness that it surprised her. “We took a road trip, as I mentioned. The first and last time we ever went anywhere. He was talking to me about my mother, which he rarely ever did. And he closed his eyes while driving. He did that. Closed his eyes often when he spoke, as if it were a terrible struggle. I don’t know, I was a child, but when the truck veered off, I have to say I wasn’t terrified at all.”
“Were you hurt?”
“My front teeth were knocked out.”
Jameson cupped his mouth.
“To be fair, they were already loose. Baby teeth.”
Jameson smiled faintly, and June wondered what he was thinking behind the faraway look on his face. She guessed his own children. “What were you, if you weren’t scared?” he asked.
June swallowed the tart lemonade. “I was a bit thrilled, to be honest. My first thought was that I was going to see my mother.”
“Oh.”
“Now look who’s being crude.”
Jameson shook his head.
A dreamy kind of quiet exhaustion settled in. They glanced toward the golf course, then the chickadees zipping for the feeder, the juncos hopping on the ground beneath it where June had sprinkled seeds just for them. Then June looked directly at Jameson and he at her. They were free to say what they liked to each other, she thought. He would soon be gone, and they would never see each other again, so what did it matter?
Jameson said, “That little kit up on the table with the cup. It was like he’d come for tea.”
June smiled.
Then he spoke of his children, haltingly, spoke of their love for each other and how it seemed to be not of this world. The words caught in his throat, but he said them anyway, said some part of him believed that they must be better off, having left a world where such a thing, the thing that happened to them, could be allowed to happen.
What she saw in his face, and in his shoulders and back, was relief.
“I was sent away to an awful place when I was their age,” June said.
She told him about the young girl who had needed her, had needed someone, anyone, to help her, while June did nothing, never even spoke of what had gone on in that place until she was grown.
Jameson started to speak, and June cut him off.
“Please, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not hear how I was just a child and didn’t know any better. I’ve heard it all before.”
“I was going to say that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”
“Oh. Oscar Wilde.”
“Yes,” he said. “And that your guilt must feel overwhelming, even now.”
June’s eyes welled up. “Yes,” she said. “It does.”
“I don’t think I can be a father to that boy,” Jameson said. “Sarah Anne needs him as much as she’s needed anything in her life, and the cruelest thing I could ever do is deny her the child, and the next cruelest thing is to go along with the adoption when it isn’t what I want.”
June nodded. “I understand how a person can get into a predicament like that.”
“How so?”
“When I was young, Granddad used to chop and stack the fire logs near the side door under the eave over there. By the time I was seven I was in charge of keeping the house warm, and my father sometimes surprised me by coming out of his bedroom to stand in front of the fireplace with the camp blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a shawl. He’d thank me even though he didn’t look at me. His eyes were closed as if it were the only way to absorb the heat, and I would stare at his lids and lashes, his cheeks prickled in whiskers, his reddish hair made lighter by the orange glow. My love for him caused a terrible ache.” June paused, caught her breath, feeling the very ache. “The space between me and my father was never going to be the center that held up the world. He didn’t want to be left with me. He didn’t want me from the start.”
“My God, June. What an awful burden to bear.”
“I’m not saying it would be the same for you or Ernest. I’m not saying—”
“I understand. I do. It’s perfectly all right. The thing is, no one else wants that boy either. But Sarah Anne does. Very much.”
“Of course,” June said, and wished she could take back what she’d told him.
Surely they were going to be interrupted any second. Surely this was all about to come to an end. Was this why June said what she said next?
She didn’t know. It seemed to come out of nowhere when she declared, “I never loved Niall the way he loved me, not really, though the truth of it has never come to me before now, never fully formed, not like this, not until this moment of recalling how things had been for my father.”
She had really said it out loud.
Jameson stared, his mouth slightly open.
“Mother of God,” June said. “Every drunk knows it’s better to purge when you’re feeling sick than to try and hold it in.”
Jameson was laughing, his head thrown back, when the first cars arrived.