The Grand Opening celebration at the car wash outside of town popped into my head, but I was pretty sure that’s not what she meant. She would’ve called that “showy” or “ostentatious.” Something religiously themed would be more up her alley.
“Are you saying that you want the girls and me to hold some kind of service for my mother tonight?” I asked. “Light candles and say prayers?”
“Lord, no,” she scoffed. “Gus wouldn’t like that.” She stilled her hands and gazed out the window above the kitchen sink with that faraway look she got sometimes when we talked about her sister. Like she was remembering her, or listening, for she was a great believer in life after death and communication beyond the grave. “What I want—no, what I expect—is for you three to keep this evening respectful, but full of promise. Less like a vigil … more like a baptism.”
This was a nice idea, one I believed the girls and I would’ve had no problem putting into practice, if she had brought it up before Frankie and Viv began to spiral out of control. Don’t get me wrong. The two of them had been born stubborn, so it wasn’t like I hadn’t been ripping a bone of contention out of their mouths before they beat each other to death with it for most of my life. But we were eleven years old, nearing twelve, that summer and coursing hormones and the soaring heat had turned their squabbling into heavyweight bouts that I was expected to get in the middle of, and I’d just about had it.
“But … how am I supposed to get the two of them to treat tonight auspicious when they won’t listen to a thing I say?” I whined. “You know how they are and it’s gotten worse. They won’t stop pickin’ at each other and they can’t agree on nothin’. Not what games to play, what movies to see, what books to read …” I threw my floury hands into the air. “I swear to God you’re gonna have to stick me in the mental institution if they keep this up.”
My aunt did not own a pair of kid gloves and loathed self-pity, but peach pie had been her sister’s favorite, and I suspected the smell of one already wafting out of the oven that afternoon reminded her of how the two of them had similarly tussled when they were girls our age. Because instead of admonishing me, she said, “You know what you girls need to do? You need to take turns coming up with adventures tonight. That’s what your mama and I did at the start of every summer. And you can’t just say what you want to do, you got to list it down on paper so you can keep track of what you’re takin’ on. Seeing your ideas in black and white will cut down on spats. Speaking of which”—she lowered her already deep voice that anchored the alto section in the church choir—“you tell Frances and Vivian that I don’t care how hot their blood is runnin’. They can spend the rest of the summer acting like she-cats, but I highly suggest they treat tonight with the dignity it deserves. If I suspect otherwise”—she raised her hand above her head and brought it down sharply on the pie dough three times. “Get my drift?”
Hard not to, and after I returned to Grand Park and broke up a screaming match between Frankie and Viv, I passed on Aunt Jane May’s “suggestion.”
Frankie didn’t give me any lip, but Viv spit a loogie and said, “She told ya she’s gonna paint our rears red if she finds out we didn’t treat tonight like a suspicious occasion?”
And then Frankie had to shove her and say, “Auspicious, numnuts,” and there was more tit-for-tatting until it came time to head home and devour the supper Aunt Jane May had set out on the screened porch so we wouldn’t miss hearing the first call of “Olly olly oxen free.”
As always, the game of kick the can with the neighbor kids lasted until the streetlights popped on, and after the girls and I shouted our battle cry, “All for one and one for all,” we raced back down Honeywell Street to commence what we’d been dreaming about all day. The first night we’d spend together in our summer home away from home, our inner sanctum and repository of secrets of all kinds. Our hideout.
Chapter Two
All the houses on Honeywell Street were worthy of admiration, of course, but they were nothing more than ladies-in-waiting to the crowned jewel of the neighborhood—the Buchanan homestead.
Our cobblestone driveway was lined with purple lilac bushes that filled early summer evenings with their heady perfume. A smattering of sugar maples, gasp-worthy oaks, and birches with trunks that peeled like sunburns dotted the front lawn, and the flower beds were always planted with whatever was blooming at the time.
The house was three stories of stone smothered in ivy up to its waist. The front porch was wide and a white swing hung from its rafters. The windows were paned and shuttered, and atop the shingled roof sat a wooden cupola that’d been built in the early 1800s by the founder of Summit—Percival James Buchanan.
Because my great-grandfather was a coffin maker, respect for the dead and expert carpentry skills had been passed down in our family for generations, so Doc—what my father insisted everyone call him, including me—had that bred into him. He couldn’t help but go above and beyond my mother’s deathbed wish to build for the daughter she’d never know a hideout like the one she and her sister had when they were growing up. He was a man of few words, my father, so he never told me as much, but I believed he picked the towering backyard oak to set it in—it’s uppermost branches seemed to tickle the underbelly of heaven—and painted it a bulls-eye red so my mother could see it from the Great Beyond and know that he’d kept his word.
Commiserate with the amount of pain he was in, Doc ended up building me the Taj Mahal of hideouts. A high roof and canvas shades above the two windows kept the girls and me dry when a storm blew in. Aunt Jane May had sewn feather-stuffed sleeping mats, and when we weren’t using them, they were kept in a corner next to a bookshelf brimming with comic books, mysteries, and a couple of dog-eared ladies’ magazine. Assorted board games were stacked alongside hula hoops, a jump rope, flashlights, and anything else the girls and I came across that we didn’t think we could live without. On the walls, eight-by-ten pictures of movie monsters that we’d begged off the owner of the Rivoli Theatre were made all the more spooky when the train lantern we’d found beside the railroad tracks threw shadows on their faces—if they had ones.
Of course, Frankie, Viv, and I didn’t believe in monsters anymore, but on the off chance one of them did materialize in the hideout, we were prepared. We weren’t too worried about the creature from the Black Lagoon sloshing out of Grand Creek and tracking us down, because with those flappy feet of his, we figured he’d have a hard time climbing the ten wooden steps that led up to the hideout. Zombies would be a cinch to evade because they moved like mosey was their fastest gear. A crucifix nailed to one of the walls served as both a plea to the Almighty to keep us safe and a deterrent to Count Dracula. There was also a cardboard “Keep Out” sign, but it wasn’t used to ward off unearthly monsters. When I couldn’t take another minute of Frankie’s and Viv’s behavior, I’d tell them to take a hike, hang the sign outside the door, and they wouldn’t be welcomed back until they had their tails between their legs.
Thankfully, it didn’t seem like I’d have to resort to such a drastic measure that first overnight, though, because it looked like the two of them had taken Aunt Jane May’s warning to mind their manners to heart.