CHAPTER ONE

East Troy, 1981

Roberta was late.

Sherri waited for her friend outside of the family store on the town square, shivering, her stomach in knots, her ears tuned for the sound of approaching cars. Under her parka she wore her favorite Junior House outfit, which she’d purchased on clearance at Waal’s Department Store in Walworth, a burgundy velour skirt with a pink tie and a matching pink blouse. She’d loved it when she first bought it, but that morning she worried that her clothing made her look like a priss, and the heavy fabric felt stained from sadness because she’d worn it to her mother’s funeral the week before.

In her bag she carried a pair of narrow shoes with smart heels that she wore when she played the organ, and a red string bikini that wasn’t exactly stolen, but borrowed. She’d slipped it out of her friend Jeanne’s sister’s drawer and into the front pocket of her pants when nobody was looking, as inconspicuous as a wad of Kleenex. Claire was bustier than Sherri, and the fabric was stretched thin across the chest and rear, but where else could Sherri find a string bikini in January in the middle of Wisconsin?

She hated wearing a hood, but she pulled hers over her head because she was freezing, and she’d spent hours trying to tame her crazy, curly hair, deciding finally to pull it back into a ponytail the size of a small hedge. She checked her makeup for the hundredth time in her reflection in the store window. If Roberta didn’t arrive soon, the light mist of sleet would make her foundation and mascara run, and ruin the cerulean eyeshadow that she’d swabbed all the way to her eyebrows; she’d read in Tiger Beat magazine that light blue was the best color for hazel eyes like hers. Her lips were smeared with Cover Girl’s Shimmering Shell, an opalescent nude shade she thought was more sophisticated than coral or pink. She hoped the sparkles would make her look iridescent, like she’d emerged from a gauzy dream instead of a small town that was notable for its rich soil. It felt strange—wrong, even—to wear so much makeup in East Troy on a cold, gray Tuesday morning.

She could have waited inside, but the apartment she’d shared with her mother had grown claustrophobic. Sherri felt so drained from taking care of Muriel while also holding herself together that she had nothing more to give. She looked beyond her reflection into the abandoned wreckage of her late father’s watch repair shop below the family’s apartment and felt another pang of sorrow. Losing her mother was a body blow, and the loss of her father three years earlier still managed to shock her system with grief, like a cracked tooth exposed to cold.

Sherri’s father, Lane, had been a confirmed bachelor until he met Muriel. He was much older than her friends’ fathers, and he was also quieter and slower. Unlike the sturdy German and Eastern European farmers in the area, he was small and balding, with bushy white eyebrows and an Adam’s apple that pointed out of his neck like an elbow. He’d been better suited for intricate machines and the steady beat of time than the erratic natures of people. Sherri used to love working by his side while the chorus of clocks hanging on pegboard walls dinged and chimed behind them. He didn’t talk much, but he did love to read poems out loud to Sherri, especially the ones that made him sad, as if sadness were a form of pleasure for him. Rilke was his favorite: “Everything is far and long gone by,” he would say at the end of the day, and “harry the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.” By the time Sherri was twelve, she could dismantle, clean, and reassemble the whole movement on a watch and recite the first section of The Sonnets to Orpheus from memory.

The shop had been silent since his death. Between the slits in the shades, she could see the empty cash register yawning open, and boxes of yellowed paperwork and his remaining inventory of crowns, gaskets, rotors, hands, and wristbands gathering dust. The Chamber of Commerce was always after her mother to wash the porous cream city bricks and rent out the neglected storefront space, fearing it made the town of East Troy appear less prosperous—what a joke. They finally hung a FOR LEASE sign in the window and hadn’t had a single bite in over a year.

Sherri’s mother had suggested she open a “this and that” store in the space, selling stationery, pinecone wreaths, painted pots, and other useless stuff she referred to brightly as “bric-a-brac.” “People will come from all over,” she’d said, but Sherri had no desire to hawk useless junk, because she had other plans—plans that hinged on Roberta’s arrival.

She turned to face the square. There had been several fierce blizzards that winter, and the snow was piled so high around the perimeter that she could only see the American flag hanging like a frozen sheet on the pole beyond the squat, red brick bandstand. Part of her wished she were a kid again so that she could climb the snow bluffs and sled down the small berms on her mother’s vinyl placemats. She’d loved playing in the square until she’d overheard Roberta’s mom say that hooligans with nothing better to do hung out there. Sherri hadn’t wanted to be thought of as a bad kid, and she wasn’t, not with her mom to take care of. Unlike Roberta, she’d never had the luxury to misbehave. It was Roberta who ended up smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap wine at the picnic tables, Roberta who lost her virginity in the bandstand, Roberta whom their classmates thought of (respectfully) as a “bad kid.”

The businesses around the square were slowly limping to life. Giles was serving breakfast, and the air smelled of sausage and their famous cinnamon rolls. The desk lamp in the window of Haskell’s Insurance glowed green, and on the other side of the square, probably in front of the tavern, she could hear someone shoveling snow and ice from the sidewalk.

Marshall’s department store on the corner wouldn’t open until nine o’clock, the same time her interview was supposed to start, which was in, what … twenty-five minutes? Sherri checked the time again on her art deco antique watch. Like the bathing suit, it wasn’t exactly stolen. An old lady from Whitewater had brought it in for repair and never picked it up. After a year or so, her father had told Sherri she could keep it. Sherri didn’t generally like old things, but she loved that watch. It had a delicate gold chain for a band and an elongated, angular bezel that suddenly reminded her of the shape of her mother’s coffin. It was 8:38, and it took twenty minutes to get to Lake Geneva. Sherri began to hope that Roberta had overslept so that she could avoid this fool’s errand, but just then Roberta veered off Highway 15 at breakneck speed and pulled up in her rusted-out Chevy Chevelle. She came to a loud stop and reached across to unlock the passenger door.

“Think we’ll get there in time?” Sherri asked before getting in.

“We’re fine.” Roberta threw her cigarette out the window. “Let’s go. It’s just down the road a piece. Traffic in Milwaukee was the shits. Should have only taken half an hour to get here.”

With her red blush, thick eyeliner, and blue mascara, Roberta looked like she was ready for a night on the town. They’d been best friends their whole lives, a friendship that felt predestined and sisterly because their mothers had delivered the girls on the same day. When they were younger, Roberta had buck teeth so severe that she needed to wear headgear to school, while Sherri had massive curls like Slinkies for hair, and a loud laugh.

The girls had been lost in their own private world. They’d wear their clothes inside out and their shoes on the wrong feet, and they’d walk backward down the hallways, their ponytails on their foreheads. When the kids looked at them funny, which they always did, Sherri and Roberta would say, “Didn’t you hear? It’s backwards day!” and squeal with laughter. They were boy crazy. In winter, they’d spend long afternoons in Roberta’s bedroom composing love notes that they’d never send to their latest romantic interests. In summer, they’d have picnics in the square, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinking milk out of Roberta’s dad’s empty whiskey bottle because they thought it made them look cool. They’d lie on their backs and stare at the sky, planning their weddings at Linden Terrace and picking names for their children. One summer, Sherri and Roberta both had a crush on Trent Eagan, the lifeguard, and they’d go to the deep end of the public swimming area at Booth Lake and practice the dead man’s float, holding their breath almost as long as the Japanese pearl divers they’d read about in Social Studies, trying to trick him into thinking they needed to be saved.

In middle school, Roberta’s brown hair was always greasy, parted down the center in permanent wilt, and her face bloomed with acne. “You have a great face for radio,” Jan Stone once told her, leaving Roberta in tears. But then, in high school, Roberta’s skin cleared up. She cut her hair and feathered it like Pat Benatar’s. And when her braces were removed, she emerged a regular butterfly with a perfect, toothy smile. She got a job in the kitchen at Camp Edwards and started dating Ian, a British guy who worked there. Everyone in East Troy listened to rock and roll because Alpine Valley, the outdoor music amphitheater, had opened when Sherri and Roberta were sophomores, and it transformed the town from a sleepy farming community into a place that was actually cool. Alpine was just down the road, drawing all the big acts to the area in the summer, from James Taylor to the Doobie Brothers. When the Grateful Dead played, the fans took over the whole town. They’d hang out in the square with their tie-dyed shirts and long braids, and use people’s hoses to shower in their yards. Most kids sold tickets to shows or worked as ushers, and come fall they’d return to school bragging about the famous musicians they’d met, showing off their autographed tickets and albums. Roberta had been the biggest rock-and-roll freak Sherri knew, especially for the Allman Brothers, but all that changed when Ian introduced her to British music that people in East Troy had never heard of, like Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Sex Pistols. She’d gone from being a first-class dork to one of the smokers that all the other girls were afraid to even walk past. She took up menthol cigarettes, sported a black leather bomber jacket that must have weighed as much as she did, and wrapped a Union Jack bandana around her wrist.

Roberta’s ascent to tough-girl popularity was hard for Sherri, who felt left behind. Sherri had always been pretty enough, but she was too socially awkward to get much attention for her looks, and her free time for the last three years had been spent taking care of her mother. Even though they both understood that Roberta couldn’t be seen with her anymore, Roberta watched out for her old friend, making sure nobody teased her or made her life too miserable. The kids stopped asking Sherri if she’d stuck her finger in a light socket to make her hair so wild and giving her a hard time for checking books out of the school library from the “Coping With” section with titles like Coping with Cliques and How to Be Your Own Best Friend.

Copyright © 2021 by Christina Clancy