Page 13 of The Hampton Beach Café 4
As she tidied up their plates and removed the pile of tattered paper strands, Frances realized that Kennedy had left the stack of pictures behind. There was a pang of alarm as she caught sight of them––something was unnerving about the smiling seventeen-year-old Kennedy holding her flowers.
Frances picked up the photos and stared for a moment before pulling out her cell phone and unlocking the screen. She had taken a picture of the old photograph of her and Alex that they had found in her mom’s photo album and set it as her background.
Now as she placed the phone down next to the old photograph, she stared at her sixteen-year-old self next to the seventeen-year-old Kennedy.
“Ma’am? We really need this table,” a thick southern accent interrupted her racing thoughts.
“Oh,” she said, standing. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right, don’t be worrying about it now,” the young man said. “You look like you seen a ghost––that your sister there?”
With a start, Frances looked up at him. He was pointing to the photograph of Kennedy.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” Frances asked.
“No, ma’am, I’m on month nine of twelve hitchhiking across these fine United States before I gotta go home and go to college––my dad was really strict about the twelve months.”
She smiled and nodded as she gathered up the stack of photos and headed outside. Her breathing was getting more and more ragged, her heart racing faster with every step she took. The more she looked, the more she couldn't deny it…That Kennedy looked remarkably similar to her own teenage self.
The same bright eyes and wide smile on her lips.
“No, no way,” she said out loud, but as she looked at the photograph of Kennedy, she couldn't help but feel a sense of unease.
SEVEN
Frances sat cross-legged on her bed and glanced at the glowing screen over her phone at nearly one o'clock in the morning. The stack of her mom's diaries that she and Alex had found on their trip to Salem was spread out in front of her. The leather-bound books were in pretty good shape, but the cheap cardboard notebooks were worn and faded, the pages yellowed with age. The heavy clothbound tome in her hands was somewhere in between, and she had noticed a pattern. When her mom had started a notebook with an entry filled with determination or a lead, she had chosen a much nicer notebook to write in than when she was feeling down or angry. Frances traced her fingers over the now familiar handwriting, feeling a mix of curiosity and sadness.
She had always known that her mom kept diaries, even as a kid, but when she found these, the strange urge to read them had butted up against her innate feeling that it was wrong. It felt like a violation of privacy, but Frances couldn't resist now. She had to know more about her mom's life after her dad left…her attempts at finding the man. Frances flipped through the pages, scanning the entries for any mention of him and pausing whenever her mom had sketched or taped in something from her trips. Her favorite so far was a bus ticket to Illinois on a trip that had been completely fruitless but had resulted in her mom befriending a woman called Brenda.
Most of the journal entries were about her mom's day-to-day life: work, a few friends, including Brenda, who had come out to see her in Salem a few months after they’d met.
“Nearly found him in California,” read one entry. “But when I got there, he had already left a few months ago…the guy didn’t know where he was heading, just that he was alone.”
Frances felt a pang of sadness for her mom. She couldn't imagine what it must have been like to spend years searching for someone who didn't want to be found. She wondered how much of her mom's life had been consumed by this search. Scanning the diaries strewn around her bed, she realized that she knew—decades.
Frances sighed and leaned back against the headboard of her bed, closing her eyes. She didn't want to think about her dad—or her mom's wasted years—anymore. She wanted to focus on her own life, on building a future that didn't depend on anyone else…was she becoming dependent on Alex, Lucinda, and Vincent? Now Hayley too…she’d been so helpful in the café lately, but surely she would be taking off again soon?
So, why didn’t she just let it drop? Pack these diaries, the weird blank letters, and the old photographs away and forget about it? Ignore the gnawing feeling in her stomach every time she thought about Kennedy and returning those photos…
As she closed the diary and set it aside, Frances remembered a package on her nightstand. It was from a friend back in LA, a home decorating enthusiast who she hadn't heard from in a while. She tore open the box and scanned the contents—a clear acrylic plastic box holding what appeared to be a tiny tanning bed, a folded letter, and a mesh bag full of tiny soaps.
Unfolding the letter, she scanned the words on the letter—she talked about her new job, her new boyfriend, and of course, her new venture. A phone sanitizer that wasn’t bulky or ugly and would fit right in with your chic modern home.
Frances picked up the thing and stared at it. It really did look like a miniature tanning bed—and she couldn’t imagine anything that would fit in with Café Bruno less. With a shrug, she disentangled it from its over-engineered packaging and plugged it in. An eerie blueish glow emanated from it, and she squinted as she placed her phone inside, and the little white number started counting down from sixty.
She rolled her eyes. How had she even gotten the Hampton Beach address? Frances reached for the packaging and sighed—of course, Lucinda had organized a mail forwarding service.
A yawn pulled at the back of her throat, and she looked at the little contraption where she had placed it on the bed next to the stack of blank letters from her father. The more she found out about him, the less she cared why he’d sent them to her…
Disbelief mixed with confusion made her tired mind swim—the letters were glowing.
Snatching the closest one up, she roughly took out the pages from inside the envelope and stared.
Nothing.
She really needed to go to sleep.
Letting the letter drop onto the bedspread, she moved to stand and start clearing the bed so she could sleep—she had to be up in less than five hours, after all.
