Summer of '69(68)

“Kate, please,” Angus says.

Kate tries to recall if Angus has ever used her Christian name before. He’s ten years older than Blair so he might feel like a contemporary of Kate’s, though he most certainly isn’t one, and they aren’t fond enough of each other for him to call her Mother. He should be addressing her as Mrs. Levin, but to correct him now would only keep him here longer.

“My next step is calling the police,” Kate says. Anyone who knows Katie Nichols Foley Levin would realize there’s absolutely no chance of her bringing lights and sirens into a family matter. But Angus Whalen doesn’t know Kate, and so he backs up to the street, holding his palms up.

“All right, all right, I’m going,” Angus says. “Just please tell Blair I came to see her.”

Kate nods, a gesture that could mean almost anything. She waits outside until Angus heads down Fair, turns onto Main, and disappears.





Summertime Blues (Reprise)



Her grandmother’s necklace is gone. Every time Jessie says these words in her mind, she feels a wave of nausea. Twice, she has actually vomited, though she hasn’t eaten much in the days since the necklace went missing. Her mother asks each morning if she’s feeling okay. She looks peaked, Kate says. And then to Blair she says, sotto voce, “It’s probably puberty. Before long, Jessie will be a woman!”

To which Blair responds, “Poor Jessie.”

Neither of them has any idea about the predicament Jessie is in. The gold-knot necklace with the diamond is gone. Jessie lost it.

The only person who knows about it is Pick. The instant Jessie made the gut-wrenching discovery, she started to shake and cry, and her hopes for her first romantic interlude changed into something else entirely.

“What’s wrong?” Pick asked. “Jessie, what is it?”

She was back to being Jessie, not Jess. She was a child who had been entrusted with something valuable—indeed, something priceless—and she had lost it. She tried to explain to Pick between sobs, but she had to be quiet because the last thing she wanted to do was alert Mr. Crimmins. Mr. Crimmins, most certainly, would go straight to Exalta.

“My grandmother’s necklace…I wore it to dinner and now it’s gone,” Jessie says.

“Oh jeez,” Pick had said, but it was clear from his tone that he didn’t understand the situation. He was a boy. Boys didn’t care about jewelry or about sentimentality, even though Jessie went on to explain that her maternal grandfather, Penn Nichols, long dead, had given that necklace to Exalta for their first wedding anniversary, in 1919. The necklace was valuable too, gold with a diamond. This, Pick had an easier time grasping, and so they got down on their hands and knees and searched every inch of the floor of Little Fair.

Then they sneaked outside and checked the flagstone walk and the strip of grass between the houses. Pick had pulled a flashlight out of the utility drawer in the kitchen but the batteries were nearly dead; the light was watery and barely any help at all. They checked the deck, and then, once inside All’s Fair, they ran their hands across the linoleum of the kitchen floor; they came away with toast crumbs, dried tomato seeds, and cereal flakes, but no necklace. They moved out into the hallway and that was when they heard footsteps on the stairs. Pick grabbed Jessie by the hand and pulled her through the half-size door to the buttery, the cramped closet where Kirby had been punished so many years earlier. The buttery was dark and smelled like damp brick and mold but it was a decent hiding place; no one would think to look for a person in there. They crouched down side by side, by necessity their bodies pressing together. Pick squeezed Jessie’s hand, but she was too nervous to enjoy any thrill. She could tell by the weight and the pace of the footsteps that the person awake was Exalta. A moment later, they heard low voices in the kitchen, one of them a man’s, so it must have been Mr. Crimmins. Jessie was trembling. Pick slid an arm around her back and maybe tried to kiss her but he ended up burying his nose under her jaw.

“Turn your face,” he said. So it was true, he was trying to kiss her—but at that moment, the footsteps came back their way and Jessie froze and couldn’t help thinking of Anne Frank hiding in the attic of the skinny house in Amsterdam and how frightened she must have been with the constant threat of the Nazis.

Exalta went back up the stairs. Pick and Jessie stayed quiet and still for a few minutes after all noises in the house had subsided, and then Jessie pushed the door to the buttery open and stepped out, and Pick followed.

Wordlessly, they went back to Little Fair, and when they’d climbed the stairs, Jessie said, “There are leftovers. Help yourself.”

“You’re going to bed?” Pick asked. “Don’t you want to go out on the deck and eat?”

She shook her head. There was a lump in her throat that would make it impossible to swallow. She wanted to curl up in a ball and die quietly of anxiety. It could have been, should have been, the best night of her young life, the night of her first kiss, but it was ruined. She didn’t deserve happiness.

Even so, she managed a weak smile. “I’ll look for the necklace again in the morning. I’ll retrace my steps all the way back to the Mad Hatter if I have to.”

“Good idea,” Pick said, but his mouth was full. He was already into the scampi.



Jessie slept fitfully, waking up for good when the sun rose at five thirty. She had fallen asleep in her dress, which she took off and kicked to the back of her closet. She would never, ever wear it again. She put on shorts and a T-shirt and her Keds and hurried down the stairs and out the door and through the side gate to the alley.