Seeking Carolina. Terri-Lynne Defino
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the house Johanna and her sisters grew up in straddled the county line. Snow-humped fields and white woods preserved the country feel of her childhood, even while quaint road signs boasting names like Country Farm Lane and Flirtation Street indicated new developments set back from the road. There had been nothing out here when she and Nina first arrived at the house on County Line Road. She’d been just shy of four, and now remembered little of the children’s home in Massachusetts, or adjusting to the doting grandparents she came quickly to love. But Johanna remembered New Hampshire. Mommy. Daddy. When there were so few memories to hold on to, it wasn’t hard to hold them tight.
“Don’t go into the driveway,” she said as he was about to do so. “It doesn’t look like it’s been shoveled.”
“My truck can make it.”
“No.” She grasped his arm, gave it a friendly squeeze. The windows in the house were dark, all but the one around back. The square of light on the snow peeked around the corner, a crooked finger beckoning. She imagined her sisters gathered at the table in the kitchen. Drinking tea. Or wine. Trying not to speak unkindly of their errant sister who missed Gram’s funeral.
“Thank you, Charlie.” Johanna looked for the door handle. “I don’t know what I’d have done if you didn’t show up.”
Charlie reached across her, flicked the perfectly integrated handle she wouldn’t have found in a thousand years of trying. The door swung open, letting the cold swirl in.
“Lucky for me I did.”
“For you?”
He smiled. “You’d have come and gone before I ever knew you were in town. I’m glad I got to see you, Jo.”
“Same…same here.” Johanna stepped out into knee-deep snow. “I’ll be in town a few days. Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Kind of hard to avoid it, in Bitterly. Get inside before you freeze again.”
Johanna scooped up a handful of snow and tossed it at him before slamming the door. He laughed and waved and pulled away. The light was still on in the interior of his truck, alighting on his hair like sunshine on a copper kettle. She watched until the curve in the road took his taillights from sight.
“It really is good to see you, Charlie,” she said to the falling snow. Whether she was pushing him into the lake or he was chasing her with a dobsonfly, they’d been friends first. Johanna turned aside those thoughts, and to the house instead.
Home.
The word sent disparate shivers into her core. White with black shutters and a red door. The farmhouse porch, empty now but for the ring of firewood between the front windows, usually boasted a number of rocking chairs and porch swings. She and her sisters never complained about summer assigned reading. Afternoons spent on the porch, Gram’s lemonade popsicles melting down their fingers, was one of their joys of summer.
Wrapping her scarf more closely around her neck, Johanna trudged down the driveway and around to the back of the house. She hugged the wall, peeking through the window from the shadows, her heart hammering. There they were, just as she imagined them, sitting around the table as they had so many times during those years they all lived happily there.
Nina, a Wagner dream of Valkyries—blond and bold and brutal, her hands wrapped around a teacup as if she would crush it, or hold it together.
Emmaline, who, like Johanna, had inherited dark curls and cocoa-brown eyes from their mother and, unlike Johanna, was spared her frenzy.
And Julietta.
Johanna’s brimming eyes overflowed.
Awkward even when sitting still, as blond as Nina without any of her beauty, Julietta was a sprite straight out of a fairy story, all arms and legs and ears. Thick glasses accentuated the enormity of her pale eyes. Perpetually childlike, ridiculously brilliant, Julietta was the one. And they all loved her best.
Johanna wiped her eyes with her scarf, her nose with the back of her hand. She gave up trying to pretend she hadn’t been crying, hadn’t been frantic and furious and ready to succumb to the madness always looming like tomorrow’s shadows. Stumbling to the back door that would be open because the lock had broken when she was fourteen and never been fixed, Johanna Coco went home.
* * * *
The truck slid to a stop at the bottom of the hill. Charlie rested his head to the steering wheel. He breathed deeply, inhaling the aromas of pizza and Johanna. Memory sparked. Summer after junior year. Her body pressed to his. The music, and the crowd, and the sand beneath their feet. She had turned and smiled that earth-shattering smile when he slipped his arms around her waist, pulled her against him so she wouldn’t get crushed by the head-bangers moshing outside of the mosh pit. Charlie remembered her leaning into him, her hands holding him in place, the sweetness of her perfume ignited by sweat, and the seemingly inconsequential moment of contact that changed his world.
Headlights approached. He lifted his head. A plow-truck going up the hill stopped. Charlie rolled down his window as the other driver did the same.
“You stuck, Charlie?” Dan Greene, best pal since childhood, leaned an elbow out his window. “Need a tow?”
“Nah, just taking a few minutes peace. The kids are home waiting for their dinner.”
“What are you doing way out here?”
Charlie thumbed over his shoulder. “I just dropped Johanna Coco off. I found her in the cemetery.”
“At this hour?”
“You know those Coco girls.”
“I sure do. Too bad she didn’t make it to the funeral.”
“She tried. This damn snow—”
“Don’t you be cursing my livelihood. This damn snow is taking my sister’s kids to the beach this summer. Kind of ironic, huh?”
Their laughter faded into the night. Charlie felt suddenly drained. Tight as he and Dan had always been, he didn’t have the words to express his sudden chaos of thoughts. Tapping the side of his truck, he waved and let up on the break.
“Right. See you, Dan.”
“See you, Charlie.”
The scrape of Dan’s plow on the road vanished as Charlie’s window went up, trapping the scent of pizza lingering. Johanna’s, like the woman herself, did not. Wild as the Coco girls had always been, Johanna was the wildest. She left after high school and seldom returned. For Charlie, that had been a good thing. He glommed every bit of news, every shred of gossip over the years. Her travels. Her pie-in-the-sky business ventures. Lover after temporary lover she brought home to Bitterly, never the same guy two visits running. Seeing her was always hard, harder when he and Gina stopped getting along. Last time, when she returned to Bitterly for her grandfather’s funeral, the twins were newborns, Charlotte, Will, and Caleb were still in elementary school and he was still married, happily-enough. That was eight years ago, and now none of those things were true. Johanna was home, for however long, and Charlie was not going to let her escape Bitterly without hearing the words he tried to tell her that summer night on the beach and hadn’t stopped thinking since.
* * * *
Johanna woke, blinking away the bright sunlight streaming through lace curtains. Not the cluttered bedroom above the bakery, the one that always smelled of baking and the sea, it was yellow. White bookshelves. A desk under the window, and a Nirvana poster on the closet door. Her nose was cold but her body, warm under downy blankets. A heavy, scraping sounded somewhere outside. She pushed up onto her elbows.
Bitterly.
Home.
Her old room, bed, even the comforter.
Gram was dead.
“Farts.”
Johanna flopped back into the pillow. The reunion with her sisters had been tearful, and comforting. Wrapped in