Juno's Daughters Read Free Page B

go to Dale and Peg’s. Why don’t you and Phoenix go to our house until then?”
    â€œYeah,” said Lilly, avoiding her mother’s eyes. “I’ll catch up with you guys at the party.”
    â€œI can’t go,” said Phoenix. Her pert features composed themselves into an expression of utter despair. “We’re spending the night in Anacortes.”
    â€œTonight?” asked Frankie and Lilly in unison.
    Frankie reached for Jenny’s bag. “Your mom must not know that Dale and Peg’s potluck is tonight.” She fished around for the cell phone, her hand emerging like a diver with a pearl, her fingers already punching in the familiar numbers.
    Phoenix shook her head. “She won’t care. She has a doctor’s appointment.”
    â€œIn the evening?” asked Jenny, and then wished she hadn’t.
    Phoenix’s mom, Theresa, was in her early forties, like Jenny. She was also a single mother. As members of the year-round community, particularly those who didn’t have much extra money, they had often relied on each other to pick the girls up from school and had traded tips on where to find kids’ clothes cheap.
    Many of the people who visited the islands or bought summer houses there were rich in a way that Jenny had rarely even imagined when growing up with her sister, Sue, in Sacramento. Sue lived in Marin County, California, now and would not be out of place among the people who rented slips in Roche Harbor for the yachts they named Twenty One or Golden Girl or Megabite . On visits to Marin, Jenny felt the distance between herself and her sister acutely.
    It helped that on the island there were bald eagles but no high-end shopping malls. She walked over the hill to Roche Harbor and enjoyed standing on the pier and watching the boats chug in to their slips, even though she knew she’d never possess one herself. The tanned couples on board owned the boats, she thought at such times, but they didn’t own the sight of them bobbing on the water or the light reflecting off the sails. And she would walk back over the hill content.
    That peace of mind had seemed to elude Theresa, especially lately. She’d grown incrementally more tense these past months as Phoenix inched toward adulthood. Groceries had always been expensive, but now they were “highway robbery.” Clients at the home day-care center she ran on the south side of the island were nosy and small-minded. The tourists were a pain in the neck. She never mentioned the eagles.
    Jenny looked at Frankie and Phoenix, standing with their slender bodies tilted toward each other like saplings, their arms pressed together in a jumble of faded fabric, pale skin, and alpaca bracelets, and she could see what the two of them with their four bright eyes couldn’t: It was only a matter of time before Theresa left for the mainland. Phoenix would be going with her, whether she wanted to or not.
    Standing behind Frankie and Phoenix, Lilly was also clearly planning her escape. She mouthed the words, “Just ten dollars?” over Frankie’s head.
    Jenny took her cell phone from Frankie and dropped it into her bag. She then extracted the money for her older daughter, who snapped it up and blew them all a kiss on her way out.
    Jenny watched Lilly go. She had had a fully-formed woman’s body for years now, and seeing her in shorts and a tank top, Jenny felt a mix of recognition and nostalgia for her younger self. She could remember the power of that youthful beauty, the way it got her backstage at concerts, invited to Florence by a sculptor who had received a summer fellowship there, and attracted, with mixed results, the attention of the kind of man Monroe had been when she met him: a brooding lead guitar player for a semisuccessful Seattle band. Lilly exasperated her and worried her in equal measure, but the worries were based in a deep sense of familiarity. She could easily see her