Always the Last to Know(27)

New York. Oh, New York. All the songs were true. I wanted to be in the hard, glittering city, with its harsh reflections and sharp-toothed skyline, its roar and breath, to meet new people, to not have my family history ambling beside me, to be the only one who defined me. I was eighteen. I ached for it the same way I ached for Noah, with the same molten red longing.

The fact that he had none of this desire baffled me. I thought we were supposed to want these things. Noah did not. He was utterly happy with the idea of waiting me out.

I didn’t hate Stoningham, but God, it was relentless in its familiarity. Every street, every inch of shoreline, every type of weather was something I’d lived over and over and over. The sameness was squeezing the life out of me.

We didn’t make any promises about the future . . . Each of us figured the other would see the light. Their light. I went off to New York, and the first thing I put up in my dorm room was a picture of Noah and me, our arms around each other on the town dock, both of us smiling. His curly hair whipped in the breeze, and my eyes looked more blue because of the sky and water behind us. Breaking up was not in my plans. Ever. We were meant to be. We could find a way where we were both happy and fulfilled. We were different from other high school couples. Our love, I was certain, would last forever.

I was wrong.





CHAPTER TEN





Barb


I never liked my name. I should’ve changed it when I was sixteen.

Barb. Barb Frost. Barbara Marie Johnson Frost. The most boring, unremarkable, midwestern name on every level. Oh, Frost was a fine last name, especially given that John was somehow related to Robert Frost. I’d been so excited by that when we first met. How thrilling, being related to the great poet! To have that gentle, insightful, famous blood running through your veins! Gosh!

“Well, I don’t know about that,” John had said, and maybe I should’ve taken more notice, because it was true. Turned out, there was nothing poetic about him.

At our wedding, his mother told me no one was quite sure how Robert Frost was connected to them . . . It was more of a rumor than anything that could be fact-checked at the time. Not that it mattered, but it seemed like John had been keeping that from me. Maybe related to Robert Frost is different from being related to Robert Frost. As for the name John, well, it was the most common name in the English-speaking world, wasn’t it? At least no one called him Jack. Jack Frost. Jeez Louise, that would’ve been horrible.

When I finally had a baby, I gave her the most poetic name in the world. Juliet Elizabeth Frost. A beautiful name for a beautiful girl. I only wanted one baby, I’d already decided; I had three sisters and three brothers, and it wasn’t the way they show it in books. I remember reading Cheaper by the Dozen and feeling so cheated. We Johnson kids were no happy gang of seven romping and singing and helping each other, heck no. My oldest brother, fifteen years my senior, barely knew I was alive, and Elaine, older by sixteen months, picked on me endlessly. I was the fifth child, lost in the middle blur. My father never got my name right on the first try, and my mother was exhausted and exasperated all the time. I shared a room with my sisters, and all our clothes were hand-me-downs from our wealthier cousins, first to Nancy, then Elaine, then to me, then to Tina, who at least had the honor of being the baby of the family.

Seven children in nineteen years. Russell, Nancy, Henry, Elaine, me, Arthur and Tina. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t comfortable, either. We didn’t go hungry, but that was because we had a small farm, and Dad could always slaughter a pig. No vacations except for one time when we piled into the gigantic station wagon and drove for ten hours to an aunt’s rented house on a lake, where there was one bathroom for thirteen people. We kids slept on the floors of various rooms and porches, trying to make friends with cousins we had never met. The mosquitoes were relentless, and the lake water was murky and brown. Tina was still wetting the bed at night, which became my responsibility somehow. Every other summer was unbroken, just a stream of long days and hard work, endless laundry and cooking, loading hay, feeding the pigs, weeding our vast garden, crushing grubs between our fingers with no relief from the prairie sun. I hated it.

I was a not-bad student, not that anyone noticed. Solid Bs, the occasional A. I blamed my name. Barbara Marie Johnson. She doesn’t sound much like a valedictorian, does she? Not someone who’d get a scholarship to St. Olaf or Columbia. My oldest brother went into the Army; Nancy went to secretarial school; Henry became a mechanic; Elaine got pregnant and married the summer after she graduated.

All I wanted was to get away. I took a few courses and became a legal secretary, then I applied for jobs up and down the East Coast. No way was I going to stay in Minnesota, no sir. When I got a job offer in Providence, Rhode Island, I took it sight unseen. I had just turned eighteen, since I’d skipped fourth grade, much to Elaine’s annoyance. Without much fanfare, I moved to Rhode Island, so small and charming and eclectic compared to Minnesota!

I loved Providence. It was busy and cultured, with the colleges and the restaurants and such. I told people my name was Barb, which sounded a little more energetic than Barbara. Barbie was out. I couldn’t go by my initials—B. M. or B. J. (A girlfriend told me what BJ stood for, and gosh, I was shocked.) Bobbi was too popular at the time. I tried BeBe, but it didn’t take. Barb was the best I could do.

The law firm that had hired me was large and paid well. I shared a cute apartment with two other girls, and buckled down at being a grown-up, learning to drink a gin and tonic (my family was dry in every sense), painting old furniture I got at garage sales. I learned to accessorize and shop at thrift stores for good-quality clothes and tried to look professional and a little sassy at work. Sometimes people teased me about my accent, which I didn’t even know I had, and I tried to tone it down.