A Day in June Read online

  A DAY IN JUNE

  GUERNICA WORLD EDITIONS 13

  A DAY IN JUNE

  Marisa Labozzetta

  TORONTO—BUFFALO—LANCASTER (U.K.)

  2019

  Copyright © 2019, Marisa Labozzetta and Guernica Editions Inc.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Michael Mirolla, editor

  Cover design: Allen Jomoc, Jr.

  Interior layout: Jill Ronsley, suneditwrite.com

  Guernica Editions Inc.

  1569 Heritage Way, Oakville, (ON), Canada L6M 2Z7

  2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, N.Y. 14150-6000 U.S.A.

  www.guernicaeditions.com

  Distributors:

  University of Toronto Press Distribution,

  5201 Dufferin Street, Toronto (ON), Canada M3H 5T8

  Gazelle Book Services, White Cross Mills

  High Town, Lancaster LA1 4XS U.K.

  First edition.

  Printed in Canada.

  Legal Deposit—First Quarter

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2018956497

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Labozzetta, Marisa, author

  A day in June / Marisa Labozzetta.

  (Guernica world editions ; 13 )

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77183-382-0 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-383-7 (EPUB).--

  ISBN 978-1-77183-384-4 (Kindle)

  I. Title. II. Series: Guernica world editions ; 13

  PS3562.A2356D39 2019

  813’.54

  C2018-905156-6

  C2018-905157-4

  To my grandmothers:

  Francesca Maglio Medori

  and

  Grazia Cotroneo Labozzetta

  2013

  Chapter 1

  Monday, September 24

  When I was four years old, I was a flower girl in a lavish wedding. In a floor-length lilac organdy dress with a satin bow that also went to the ground, I reluctantly walked down the aisle dropping rose petals from a white wicker basket. My mother asked: “Why the pout?” I told her I wanted to be the bride. Getting married meant nothing more to me than being the star surrounded by all my playmates in the ultimate game of dress-up; it meant eating lots of chocolate cake with fluffy white icing and pink heart-shaped candies. My sour expression ruined what would otherwise have been perfect photos of a perfect wedding, and I have always regretted that. So I would like a do-over.

  What was impossible for me to imagine at such an early age was the most important component of a wedding—love. As an adult, however, I’m fortunate to have come to understand that this is the easiest part of a wedding to fulfill, for I have found my soul mate in life. But I still want my wedding to be beautiful and have my guests love being there as much as I’ll love getting married, and that’s where the natural beauty of Vermont comes into play. What could be more fun than gathering not just in a hall for a few hours, but in a town where all the residents have opened their hearts to us for an entire weekend and labored to create our dream wedding? In a way, I hold Brackton up as a model and inspiration for my marriage. (I have researched your history.) I want it to last and triumph through adversity, to maintain a sense of grace and charm through the years it weathers, and to be a source of happiness for all those who come in contact with it.

  I don’t have a funny story for which you asked that would make you laugh, or one with a twist of fate to make you cry, but I can tell you that Jason and I have more love, more heart, and more strength than many couples today. And we will appreciate the gift of this wedding more than I can express in 500 words. The engagement ring I wear on my finger is the same one that my fiancé’s grandfather gave his wife 60 years ago. It symbolizes love everlasting and I am proud to be a part of this cycle of life and love. A dream wedding is not necessary, but it would be an amazing way to honor not only our love, but the love of everyone who has helped us get where we are today.

  Brackton certainly fulfills the requirement for something old; being the recipients of your first wedding contest will be something new; loaning us your town will be something borrowed; and leaving after a magical time will make us very blue.

  Thank you for considering us.

  THAT’S 493 WORDS. Perfect. Ryan Toscano takes a bite of her hummus-and-avocado sandwich. She is sitting on a bench in the Boston Public Garden during her lunch hour on an autumn day hot enough to rival one at summer’s peak. She clicks on Submit and forgets about Brackton and the prize of a free dream wedding for one hundred and twenty-five guests as easily as she forgets about what literary journals she submits her short stories to. What are her chances of winning? How many millions of people read the shrinking Boston Globe? In how many other newspapers has the contest been advertised? Besides, she has no sob story about a boyfriend who returned from a tour of military duty minus a leg, and all of her Pap smears come back negative. She has no comedy of errors about having fallen in love with a Rockefeller seeking independence from his burdening wealth by disguising himself as a shoe salesman at Macy’s. Or of a lost engagement ring having fallen into a wastebasket and been retrieved by a fiancé who spent hours sifting through a smelly landfill.

  She does have a job as a paralegal for New England Environmental Law Center that pays her rent and more. She has a roommate in Jamaica Plain (or JP, as it’s referred to) with whom she shares her funky but trendy apartment. What she no longer has is the fiancé who had a change of heart—not only about her but about the entire direction of his life—and entered a Jesuit seminary. At least she didn’t lose him to another woman but to God, who her Catholic grandmother always said takes the best for himself. She no longer has a diamond either, since she gave it back, leaving her ring finger as naked and unclaimed as her thumb.

  2014

  Chapter 2

  Saturday, January 11

  “OH MY GOD! They want to meet us!” Ryan puts down her mug of coffee and looks up from her phone.

  “Who wants to meet us?” Tiffany asks, scooping tofu-and-turkey-bacon scrambled eggs onto a dish. The plate is gray, with a large white crane pattern. It’s also chipped. She bought the set from the new Goodwill Store on Centre Street, where the Foot Locker used to be. Her parents offered her their old set of Limoges china—the one with the gold rim and delicate pink flowers—but Tiffany turned it down. Not to prove her independence: Her parents cover the rent for her two-bedroom semi-run-down triple-decker apartment and send her a monthly stipend while she searches for the perfect job. It was simply a matter of taste, something Tiffany’s parents embrace about her just as they do her lesbianism. Although it baffles them how such a beautiful and delicate-looking female with a heart-shaped face, whose hair color changes more frequently than the seasons and who loves makeup and expensive stiletto heels, doesn’t desire other lesbians as equally feminine—and rich.

  Ryan’s parents, on the other hand, can’t wrap their heads around someone turning down anything of value. That is the difference between those who have always had and those who are just beginning to; or, in Ryan’s father’s words: between those whose ancestors came on the Mayflower and those whose parents docked at Ellis Island.

  “They want to meet me and Jason. I won the contest!”

  “Sweet.” Tiffany sets the plate of eggs and a matching cereal bowl filled with a half grapefruit in front of Ryan, who sits at another one of Tiff’s finds: the colonial maple table set—so sixties and Cape Cod-ee with its turned-leg captain’s chairs that are scr
atched up big-time. Just like the ones in the small cottage in Falmouth where her family stayed when she was little. The kitchen set does go well with the red-brick vinyl flooring and the knotty-pine cabinets that, no matter how many times and with what cleaners Ryan scrubs them, are sticky. The white cotton café curtains trimmed in eyelet that Ryan’s mother gave her are crisp and stain-free at least, but Ryan can’t forget they used to hang in her parents’ bathroom (a thought she finds as revolting as the dead skin color of the kitchen walls). There’s a door leading to a fire escape where they barbecue on a hibachi in warm weather. The landing is filled with garbage bags that the upstairs tenants refused to take all the way down to the alley and that will now remain frozen in ice and snow until spring.

  “Mangia,” Tiffany, who is taking Italian classes at the Boston Language Institute, orders. Her parents rent a villa in Europe for a month each August; next year it’s Bellagio, on Lake Como. Tiff has sliced a strawberry, so that it fans out from its bright green leafy stem and placed it in the center of the grapefruit. Even in her stunned state, Ryan resents the fruit that has come from Central America and that cost an arm and a leg in the barren dead of New England winter.

  “Sweet? How do you figure?” The initial surge of elation from winning the contest begins to sink like rancid meat into her gut.

  “Why’d you ever enter to begin with? Like you and Jason have been over for two years.”

  “Sixteen months.”

  “Almost time enough to give birth to two babies. More coffee?”

  Ryan shakes her head and picks a hair off of her plate.

  “Must be yours,” Tiffany says about the hair.

  “Nope. Yours,” Ryan says, holding up a long azure strand. “I just entered on an impulse. It was a fluke. A challenge. It was right after we won that case against the polluted salmon waters in Maine.”

  “You took two days off to sober up after that celebration,”

  “It made me melancholy.”

  “Six Dirty Martinis would.”

  “And a Mojito chaser, I was told.”

  “And it never crossed your mind you might win? You’re a good writer.”

  “Why would I think I’d win? All my stories get rejected. Maybe I was in denial. I thought he would have come around by now.”

  “If you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, you don’t know what you want—or need. And why the hell did he enter the seminary in the first place? No one becomes a priest anymore.”

  Tiffany jumps up to the sound of the toaster announcing two English muffin halves as done.

  “What do you know about priests? You’re Congregational—whatever that is.”

  “I may have majored in sociology but I minored in religion. Besides, it’s common knowledge that no one wants to buy into the celibacy thing anymore. Of course, there’ve always been priests who manage their way around that.”

  “Jason is not like that.”

  “No. Jason is more like Jesus Christ. Maybe he is Jesus Christ. Hail, Jason.” Tiffany solemnly puts her palms together and brings them to her bowed head. “I’m surprised they didn’t canonize him along with Mother Teresa.”

  “You have to be dead. So what do I do now?”

  “Just tell them the truth. I’m sure they have a runner-up who’ll be thrilled.”

  Tiffany lathers her muffin with strawberry jam and takes a bite. Ryan’s half remains dry on her plate, where it will be left to harden.

  Ryan hates that thought. Being runner-up to God was bad enough. All of her twenty-eight years she’s been second: on the bubble to make the all-star Lassie League softball team, then cut; three-tenths of a point from being the high school salutatorian; placed on the wait list to her first choice college, then denied; magna—not summa—cum laude when she graduated. She takes another sip of the coffee Tiffany prepared from freshly ground beans in a glass-and-chrome coffee press. Burnt. She hates French roast. How come coffee never tastes as good as it smells?

  “I can see the wheels spinning a mile a minute underneath that mop of copper coils. You’re not going to tell them the truth, are you, Ryan? Either way you’re screwed. It’s the curse,” Tiffany says, pointing a fork at Ryan.

  “What curse?”

  “The one you said your grandmother Toscano put on you when your parents didn’t name you after her.”

  “Old World nonsense. My father says my grandmother has no power; couldn’t even get herself arrested if she tried.”

  “My money’s on the curse.”

  “Holy shit! They want me to get acquainted with all of these when I visit,” Ryan says, opening up the attachment labeled “Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors.” “It’s like a football roster.”

  “Better print it out and carry it with you at all times. Memorize it in your spare moments. It’s the key to being poised and composed when you meet them.”

  “Ace Auto Repair? Burns Accounting? Baby’s Bar & Grill? Are they fucking kidding? Is that where we’re having the wedding? Look at this!” She hands the phone to Tiffany.

  “From your crimson cheeks, I’d say the only one kidding here is you.”

  Chapter 3

  Wednesday, January 15

  Welcome to Brackton, Vermont

  Unrushed, Untainted, Unforgettable

  Population 1,732

  ERIC SLOWS DOWN as he nears the familiar sign and turns the bend where the Daffodil House appears from out of nowhere on his right, lit up like the Taj Mahal in the black of night. He stops short. The girl on the old two-wheeler stares into the headlights, her eyes wide and fixed like those of a scared rabbit. She’s older—midthirties—than the childlike posture she assumes on the bike. Instead of pedaling out of harm’s way, Bicycle Girl, as townies call her, cocks her head, unprotected from the single-digit temperature, to one side, red plaid scarf flapping around a brown leather bomber jacket, and continues to ride in circles on the snow-caked street. He waves as he maneuvers around her (he is late), drives a good half mile to the center of town, and pulls up to the one-room storefront where the Brackton Chamber of Commerce board of directors meetings—all town meetings—are held because the town hall across the way is in disrepair and has been closed for three decades.

  Tonight, the chair of the Friends of Brackton Town Hall is making a pitch to the Chamber to soldier up and fork out a hefty pledge to restore the Civil War-period handicapped-inaccessible building that could pass as a small replica of the Roman Forum or the Supreme Court, with its long flight of steps, row of stately columns, and handsome pediment, and which in its heyday hosted everything from vaudeville performers to spiritual meetings. But the merchants are tapped out, many claiming that another down year will do them in. That’s why all of their energy has been focused on the Brackton is for Brides Contest and the big wedding that will take place in June.

  The irritating screeching of rubber chair cups against the linoleum floor punctuates his late arrival as he takes his place at the banquet tables that form a U.

  “We started without you, Eric,” president Danni Pritchard says apologetically. The thirty-two-year-old owner of the ice cream shop that doubles as an antiques and collectibles store, and that in off-season serves breakfast and lunch, can’t conceal the blush that washes over her face whenever her former classmate, Eric, walks into a meeting.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Business as usual,” someone murmurs.

  Eric has a habit of being late. He really tries to be on time, but he can’t stand to waste a second, and so he undertakes some small task before leaving wherever he is at the moment, which turns into a bigger task and—voilà—he’s late to everything. Tonight, while he waited for the clock to register the exact number of minutes needed to make it to the meeting, he decided to change the battery in a smoke detector that goes off whenever his mother puts something in the oven. Exhausted after having prepared the food, she lies down, leaving the oven unattended. This evening the alarm was wailing on account of two overbaked apples wh
ose dripping butter and maple syrup had scorched the oven floor.

  “Eric?” she called from her room. Her voice was always soft, but the cancer has rendered it feeble.

  “Got it!” he yelled back, reassuring her that it wasn’t a fire, and then proceeded to change all the units.

  “Pick an anniversary date,” the volunteer fire chief had told him, “and change every one of them at the same time.”

  Tonight was as good an anniversary date as any, but it took him a while to find the batteries he’d bought and saved to celebrate the occasion. He’d done only half of the units when he had to abandon the project and leave for the meeting in a distracted mood, because once he started something, he hated to stop until it was finished.

  “Is your mother okay?” Danni asks.

  “My mother’s fine, thank you, Danni.” He doesn’t like her bringing up his mother in front of everyone.

  “You missed the Friends of Town Hall presentation,” Danni tells him, her eyebrows elevated just a bit in coy chastisement. “I’ll catch you up to speed afterwards.”

  Eyes roll. The owner of Ace Auto groans. He’s still wearing the grease-stained blue shirt with his name, Hank, and Ace Auto embroidered on the pocket, with matching encrusted fingernails that Eric’s mother likes to say he could grow potatoes in.

  “Here’s the list of the board of directors.” Danni passes out copies. “I sent you all an attachment in an email, but I wanted to save you the trouble of printing it out. I know I like to have a hard copy. It’s already been sent to our winning couple. It’s in alphabetical order, although I wasn’t sure if I should do it by business or proprietor.”

  “Waste of taxpayers’ money,” the most senior member grumbles, though he’s the reason everything has to be printed out in the first place—and in large type. He refuses to close his fix-it shop for small electrical appliances even though today patrons buy new irons and toasters when they break. He wouldn’t even know how to repair them, and stays afloat with a few clogged vacuum cleaner hoses and well constructed but outdated models owned by fellow octogenarians.