Juno's Daughters Read Free

near Cattle Point Road on San Juan Island. In retrospect, it was a very good thing, too. She shuddered to think of what might have become of her and her children had they settled in someplace seriously remote.
    Jenny looked at Frankie cooing over some china animal figurines and tried to imagine her changing so much in a few years that she would skip out of a job at Café Demeter to caravan to the Oregon Country Fair as her sister had done just the previous summer. She couldn’t picture it.
    In addition to the cap, Frankie wore cords with frayed hems and a Hello Kitty T-shirt that her sister had picked up for her at a secondhand store in Seattle. She had a spray of small pimples on her forehead and a bandage on her thumb where she had cut herself trying to saw a piece of driftwood in half.
    And she couldn’t remember her father at all. Thank God. Jenny remembered for the both of them. The clap of Monroe’s hand hitting the side of her face; strangely, she heard the sound before she felt the sting. The very last blow he’d landed had had such force behind it that it sent her reeling. She had been knocked to the floor and the baby had screamed in outrage at being clutched so tightly to her chest.
    Jenny’s best friend, Mary Ann, owned the store that she had worked in ever since she had arrived at her friend’s door with an infant sleeping in a sling and a kindergartener crying at her side. It had been thirteen years now, but Jenny would never stop being grateful.
    She could still remember the iron taste of her own blood in her mouth, from the times that Monroe had hit her in the face. It tasted like shame, her own blood. Though she knew now that it had been the start of a better life for them all, she could remember feeling so sorry for herself on that drizzly afternoon they fled to Mary Ann’s, and for her daughters. Especially Lilly, who had arrived with mud-splattered tights and only a small portion of the things she owned stuffed in her mother’s backpack. Frankie had conked out in the sling—walking always put her out—but Lilly wouldn’t drop off that night until midnight, and even then Jenny could remember the shuddering breaths she took in her sleep. Jenny had felt sorry for herself, and for her girls, and even for Monroe, who had hurt her.
    â€œDidn’t we have good times?” he had asked on the phone, pleading with her to come back.
    When she hadn’t answered immediately, he had listed them himself, describing each as if he held a happy snapshot of the event in his hands: camping on the Oregon coast, on tour with his band in Las Vegas, their wedding on the Russian River. He drew the pictures vividly in her mind, until she could almost taste the grapes they had swiped from a vineyard growing close to the road. The dusty burst of sunshine in your mouth. What he didn’t understand, though, was that, if you were afraid, the good times never really burrowed in. Fear was like a screen that kept them just out of reach.
    Jenny rubbed her biceps, which were suddenly covered with goose bumps, though the store was warm. She was slender enough to have been more than once mistaken for Lilly from the back, but she was stronger than she’d been before. Her legs could take her up Mount Constitution on a bike and she could use a chain saw to get rid of dead trees on her property, push a wheelbarrow loaded with cinderblocks for a garden wall, and if she ever needed to, run with four times the weight of baby Frankie in her arms.
    Frankie and Phoenix jostled each other on their way to Jenny and, having arrived, dipped their slender fingers into the jar of peppermints that Mary Ann kept on the table with the cash register. Jenny smiled at the way Frankie held the candy in her cheek like a squirrel.
    â€œWhere’s Lil?” Frankie rolled the mint in her mouth.
    Jenny glanced at the clock on the wall. “She’s coming by any minute. And then I think she said she