Page 7 of The Hampton Beach Café 2
Frances turned to him, and he was smirking, almost creepily, like their old place in Hampton Beach. The white clapboard wasn't a surprise, but the green handrails and the reclaimed lawn were both things her mother had copped a lot of flack for back when Frances was a kid. They didn't like her mom's hippy attitude, she remembered, though thinking of her mom as a hippy was still weird to her. She had instilled in Frances a deep love of the environment and the eagerness to fight for what was right, but a hippy? Nah.
“I don't like Luce walking off like that,” she commented, pulling her phone out and dialing.
A heavy buzz sounded from inside the truck. Still pressing her phone to her ear, Frances peered into the back seat and knit her brows together in confusion when she saw her own bright face smiling back at her. Lucinda's phone was in the back seat. She'd left it behind.
“Frances? You made good time!”
She heard her mom start down the porch steps, and she didn't want their visit to start off with a disparagement about manners, so Frances hung up the phone. She just hoped that Lucinda would realize and head back towards them....and that she didn’t get lost.
“Hey, mom!” she said, turning and hugging her mom tightly.
“Hey, Mrs. Lane,” Alex said a little sheepishly.
Her mom turned and stared up at him. It wasn't so much that he was tall, more than her mom was bite-sized.
“I changed it back to Price, but you just call me Linda. We're all far too grown up for Ms. Price.”
Frances was almost certain she saw Alex's cheeks flush a little, but he smiled all the same and held out his hand.
“Linda, it's great to see you,” he said.
Linda shook her head. “Always such an awkward child.”
Ignoring the hand, she leaned in and hugged Alex around his middle. Frances stiffed a laugh––it was just like her mom to insist they were grown-ups, call him a child, and then mother him.
***
The lunch they shared was tasty, but soon after, Alex had made his excuses. After all, his parents were in Salem, too, and he wanted to pop around for a visit.
It suited Frances just fine. Her mom was starting to get on her nerves by interrogating Alex about his life since high school. She'd learned a lot, but she didn't want to learn it that way––Alex had not looked comfortable.
Thankfully her mom wanted to go and do some pottering in the garden, so Frances took the opportunity to head up into the attic. Her mom really had been hoarding stuff, she realized as she peered into a box that seemed to contain about a hundred take-out menus. What had she been planning on doing with these?
The first box that really caught her eye, though, was a cardboard box painted blue. Her box of toys that she had packed away before leaving for college. Even then, she had known that her mom wouldn't stay in Hampton Beach long after she left, and she didn't want her mom packing up her childhood. There was something profoundly sad about that, she thought, but at least she had gotten to say goodbye to all those memories before her life took her off in a completely different direction.
The tape that closed the box along the seam where the top met in the middle was broken. Noticing this, Frances glanced over her shoulder. Had her mom looked through her stuff? It’s not like there was anything in there to find…was there? Frances cast her mind back. The only thing she had ever hidden from her mom was a packet of cigarettes that her friend Hayley had hastily shoved into her purse when Mrs. Lockwood had come across them at the foreshore. Frances wasn’t a smoker and never had been, but Hayley was dedicated to being the classic tough chick––even though she'd thrown up the one time she had tried smoking.
She probably shouldn’t have smiled, but remembering the earnest plea from Hayley not to tell anyone ever that she’d been sick wouldn’t have been out of place in a Hollywood movie. Pausing, she pulled out her phone and tapped Hayley’s name into her social media search bar. Two profiles popped up of who were women much too young to have gone to high school with Frances. Still, the third one down had an elegant profile picture in black and white. Frances saw her old friend was still dramatic as ever in a long black evening dress paired with a leather jacket. Should she reach out? What would she say?‘I remembered the time you forced me to cover for you having cigarettes, and so here I am stalking you after twenty years?’
Frances rolled her eyes at herself. You didn’t have to send introduction messages on social media anymore––maybe she was getting old after all.
Tapping the ‘add friend’ button decisively and shoving the phone back into her pocket, Frances almost pounced on the blue box.
At the very top was Bruno, a carved wooden basset hound she had found in a charity shop when she was eight years old. Other kids had stuffed animals or safety blankets, but Frances had Bruno. The little statue was no more than a foot high and depicted the dog sitting to attention, his long ears almost reaching his paws––one of which was lifted as if he was about to take a step. Looking up at her from the box, Frances felt tears prickle at her eyes––she had actually nearly taken him to college with her and spent several weeks regretting leaving him at home. She scooped him out and held him in her hands, his puppy dog eyes just as persuasive as the real deal, she reckoned, even if they were only painted on.
Something different, though, was a pillowcase folded neatly underneath Bruno––she hadn’t put that there. It might have been twenty years, but she knew for a fact that she had never owned a black and white checkered pillowcase as a child.
Carefully placing Bruno down next to her as she sat on the floor beside the box, she extracted the pillowcase. It was weighty, she noticed. Peering inside, she felt her stomach twinge.
Letters in colorful envelopes.
Envelopes with her name on the front.
Her name was on the front, and a ladybug sticker was in the top left corner. Her father had called her ladybug when she was little.
FIVE
She could feel her heart racing. These must have been from her father…and her mom had never shown her. Frances tried to leap to her feet, ready to stomp downstairs to confront her mom, but in her rush, she knocked Bruno. He teetered on his base, and she gasped, dropping the pillowcase full of letters to grab him instead. He was unlikely to break––he was wooden, not porcelain––but it didn’t matter to her. Her little wooden dog stared up at her, and anger dwindled. It had been her mom who bought her Bruno, despite her father’s mocking that it was a waste of money. Settling back into her cross-legged seat on the floor, she reached in and withdrew the first letter she touched.
