June's Bar

Chapter 1: The Register

The register was a 1987 National, brass-colored and heavy as a cinder block, and it had outlived Cal Purnell by exactly eleven minutes.

Kathy found him behind it at 4:47 on a Wednesday afternoon, slumped against the beer cooler with one hand still resting on the counter as if he'd been making change. His reading glasses had slid down his nose. The ticket spike beside him held three lunch tabs. The overhead fan turned its slow, indifferent circles.

She did not scream. Kathy Purnell was forty-six years old and had not screamed since she was nine, the night her mother walked out of the house and into the Chesapeake Bay and never came back. What she did was kneel on the rubber floor mat, press two fingers to her father's neck, and count to thirty. Then she called 911. Then she locked the front door and flipped the sign to CLOSED and stood with both hands flat on the bar, breathing through her mouth, while the ambulance lights swept red and white across the oyster shells embedded in the parking lot.

The paramedics were kind. They used words like "massive" and "instantaneous" and "no suffering," and Kathy nodded at each one as though she were approving a delivery order. She signed papers. She answered questions. She watched them wheel her father out through the kitchen because the front door was too narrow for the gurney, and she noticed that someone had left the walk-in cooler open again and the temperature light was blinking amber.

She closed the cooler. She wiped down the bar. She emptied the register—$214.38, a slow day—and locked the cash in the floor safe the way Cal had taught her when she was twelve.

Then she sat in the fourth booth from the door, the one with the torn vinyl seat that Cal had been meaning to repair for six years, and she called her sisters.

Laura answered on the second ring. She was between shifts at the hospital in Baltimore, and Kathy could hear the particular hush of a break room—vending machine hum, someone's sneakers on linoleum.

"It's Dad," Kathy said.

"What happened?"

"Stroke. At the bar. He's gone, Laura."

The silence that followed was not empty. Kathy could hear her sister processing, sorting the information into the clinical categories that Laura used to organize the world. Vitals. Timeline. Next steps.

"When?"

"About an hour ago. I found him behind the register."

"Was he—did he—"

"They said it was fast."

Another silence, and then Laura's voice came back steadier, the nurse voice, the one that could tell a new mother her baby wasn't breathing and still sound like someone you'd trust with your life.

"I'll drive down tonight. Do you need me to call Shelly?"

"I'll call Shelly. Can you try Abby?"

"Abby's phone was disconnected last month."

"Try anyway."

Kathy hung up and stared at the phone in her hand. The screen showed a photo of the bar's front porch at sunset, the wooden sign reading PURNELL'S in letters Cal had painted himself, the P slightly larger than the other letters because he'd started too big and been too stubborn to sand it down and begin again.

She called Shelly.

Shelly answered from what sounded like a highway. "I can't really talk, Kath, I'm driving—"

"Dad died."

A beat. Then: "Oh. Oh, God."

"Stroke. This afternoon."

"I'm—where are you? Are you at the bar?"

"I'm at the bar."

"Are you alone?"

"I'm at the bar," Kathy said again, because the answer to both questions was the same.

Shelly said she'd come. She was in Philadelphia, three hours away, maybe four with traffic. She'd pack a bag. She'd be there by midnight.

Kathy set the phone down and looked around the room. The bar was fifty-two years old. Her grandparents had opened it in 1972, serving steamed crabs and draft beer to watermen and summer people. Cal had taken it over in 1985, the year he married June, and he'd added the oyster bar—a long zinc counter with twelve stools and a chalkboard menu that listed whatever the boats brought in that morning.

The walls were paneled in knotty pine gone dark with decades of fryer grease. The ceiling was pressed tin, painted white sometime during the Clinton administration and not since. There were seven booths along the window wall, a pool table in the back room that listed to the left, and a jukebox that played only if you hit it on the right side at a specific angle Cal had demonstrated to every new employee like a sacred rite.

It smelled like Old Bay and lemon and the particular mineral tang of the Chesapeake, which crept in through the foundation and never entirely left.

It smelled like home, which was the problem.

Kathy had never left this place. Not for college, not for a man, not for any of the reasons people leave small towns on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She'd graduated from the regional high school, started working the bar full-time at eighteen, and taken over the books when Cal's eyes got bad. She'd watched her sisters leave one by one—Laura to nursing school, Shelly to art school, Abby to a series of increasingly alarming situations that the family referred to, with characteristic understatement, as "Abby's adventures."

And Kathy had stayed. She'd stayed through the slow seasons when they couldn't make payroll, through the hurricanes that flooded the parking lot, through the health inspections and the liquor license renewals and the night a drunk waterman drove his truck through the front porch and Kathy had stood in the rain with a flashlight directing traffic around the wreckage while Cal called the insurance company.

She had stayed, and her father had died eleven feet from where she was sitting, and now she was alone in a bar that smelled like every day of her life.

She did not cry. She closed the cooler again—the seal was going—and she made a list.

---

The funeral was on Saturday, at the Methodist church where Cal had been a member for forty years without ever, as far as Kathy knew, developing any particular relationship with God. He went because the watermen went, and the watermen went because their wives made them, and the whole ecosystem of the Eastern Shore ran on these small, unexamined loyalties.

The church was full. Cal Purnell had been the kind of man people described as "solid," which on the Shore meant he paid his bills, didn't cheat at cards, and could be counted on to show up with a truck and a chain when your boat trailer got stuck in the mud. The watermen came in their khakis and dock shoes. The summer people sent flowers. The women from the auxiliary brought casseroles in quantities that suggested they expected the grief to last through winter.

Laura arrived Thursday night, alone. Paul, her husband, had a conference. Or a meeting. Or something that wasn't this. Laura didn't explain, and Kathy didn't ask. Laura was forty-four, tall and angular, with their mother's dark hair cut short and practical. She moved through the house above the bar with the efficiency of someone accustomed to emergencies—she made the bed in her old room, organized the casseroles by protein, and created a spreadsheet of tasks on her laptop that she printed out and taped to the refrigerator.

"You don't have to do all that," Kathy said.

"I know."

"I've been handling things."

"I know you have." Laura looked at her with the steady, assessing gaze she used on patients. "When did you last eat?"

"I'm fine."

"That's not what I asked."

Kathy ate a casserole. It was chicken and rice and cream of something, the universal language of Eastern Shore condolence.

Shelly arrived Friday morning in a paint-spattered Honda with a cracked windshield and two suitcases that looked like they'd been packed in a panic, which they had. Shelly was forty-one, the middle sister if you were counting from either end, which she'd always felt was her essential position in the family—the one nobody was counting from. She had their father's broad face and their mother's restlessness, and she wore it all on the surface, every emotion visible, every thought half-spoken.

"The house looks exactly the same," she said, standing in the kitchen doorway. "It's like a museum of 1994."

"Dad wasn't big on redecorating," Kathy said.

"The wallpaper in the bathroom is literally peeling off in sheets."

"I know."

"There's a water stain on my ceiling shaped like Florida."

"That's been there since Hurricane Isabel."

Shelly dropped her bags and hugged Kathy, hard, and Kathy allowed it for exactly four seconds before pulling away to check on the casseroles.

Abby did not arrive Friday. Or Friday night. Laura had managed to reach her through a friend of a friend—someone named Tina who worked at a recovery house in Salisbury—and Abby had said she'd come, but Abby's promises had the structural integrity of wet cardboard, and they all knew it.

Abby was thirty-seven, the baby, the accident, the one Cal had not planned for and had loved with a ferocity that baffled and wounded his other daughters in roughly equal measure. She had been the prettiest of them—June's eyes, June's mouth, June's way of making you feel like the only person in the room—and she had been destroying herself with methodical creativity since she was fifteen years old.

She was eight months sober. Or she had been eight months sober the last time anyone had confirmed it, which was six weeks ago. She was living—and this was the part that Kathy could not think about without her chest tightening—out of her car. A 2009 Corolla with a dent in the passenger door and all of Abby's possessions in the back seat, which was not many possessions because Abby had a talent for losing things, including apartments, jobs, and people who loved her.

Abby arrived at 6 a.m. on Saturday, the morning of the funeral, pulling into the oyster-shell lot in the Corolla with its check-engine light on and a Styrofoam cup of gas-station coffee in the holder. She looked thin. She looked tired. She looked, Kathy thought, like a woman who had driven through the night because she was afraid that if she stopped she wouldn't start again.

"Hey," Abby said.

"Hey."

They stood in the parking lot. The bay was flat and silver behind them. A heron stood one-legged in the shallows.

"I'm sorry I'm late," Abby said.

"You're here."

"I'm here."

Kathy looked at her youngest sister—the hollows under her eyes, the bitten nails, the careful way she held herself as if she might shatter—and she felt the thing she always felt about Abby, which was a love so tangled with fear and fury that she could never separate the strands.

"Come inside," Kathy said. "Laura made coffee. Real coffee."

The funeral was brief. The pastor said Cal was a man of few words, which was true, and that he'd loved his daughters, which was also true, and that he was with June now, which was a matter of considerable theological speculation given that June's body had never been found.

After the service, they stood in a receiving line in the church fellowship hall while people said the things people say—"He was a good man" and "He's at peace now" and "You girls were his whole world"—and Kathy shook hands and accepted embraces and thought about the register, the $214.38, the blinking temperature light on the cooler, and the fact that she had no idea how she was going to keep the bar open without Cal, who had been, despite his age and his bad eyes and his refusal to learn the point-of-sale system she'd installed three years ago, the reason anyone came in.

They came for Cal. For his voice, his stories, his way of remembering what you drank and how you liked your oysters and the name of your boat and your dog and your dead uncle who'd worked the water back when there were still oysters worth working for.

They did not come for Kathy, who was competent and reliable and about as warm as the zinc counter.

She knew this about herself. It did not require pity.

---

On Monday morning, Hal Teel came to the house.

Hal was Cal's lawyer, which on the Eastern Shore meant he was also Cal's friend, his fishing companion, and the person who'd notarized every document Cal had signed for the last twenty years. He was fifty-eight, soft-spoken, with the careful manner of a man who spent his professional life delivering news that people didn't want to hear.

He sat at the kitchen table with a manila folder and a cup of Laura's coffee and looked at the four Purnell sisters as if he were about to perform surgery without anesthesia.

"Cal updated his will six months ago," Hal said. "He came to my office in January. He was very specific about what he wanted."

"Specific how?" Kathy asked.

Hal opened the folder. "The bar and the house pass to all four of you equally."

"Okay," Kathy said. This was expected. This was fine.

"But there's a condition."

The kitchen went quiet. Laura set down her coffee cup. Shelly stopped fidgeting with her rings. Abby, sitting on the counter by the window because there weren't enough chairs, went very still.

"The four of you have to operate the business together for one full year. Cal called it 'one salt year.' If you complete the year—all four of you, working the bar, living here—the property transfers to you free and clear. If you don't complete the year, for any reason, the bar and the house are sold and the proceeds go to a woman named Joyce Tawes."

The name landed in the room like a stone in still water.

"Who is Joyce Tawes?" Laura asked.

"I don't know," Hal said. "Cal didn't explain, and I didn't ask. He was my client. He was entitled to his privacy."

"You didn't ask?" Kathy's voice was flat and hard. "Our father left a conditional will naming a complete stranger as the alternative beneficiary and you didn't ask who she was?"

"Kathy—"

"I've been running that bar for twenty-three years. Twenty-three years, Hal. I did the books, I hired the staff, I mopped the floors when nobody else would. And he didn't leave it to me. He left it to all of us, with strings, and if we can't dance to his tune, some woman none of us has ever heard of gets everything."

"I understand your frustration—"

"You don't understand anything." Kathy stood up. Her chair scraped the linoleum. "I want to contest this."

"You can try. But Cal was competent when he signed it. I witnessed it myself. And contesting will take time and money you don't have, and during the contest the bar sits in probate and nobody operates it."

"So we're trapped."

Hal looked at her with something that might have been sympathy or might have been the professional discomfort of a man caught between his dead client's wishes and his dead client's angry daughter.

"You have a choice," he said. "You always have a choice."

After Hal left, the sisters sat in the kitchen and did not look at each other.

Laura spoke first, because Laura always spoke first when something needed to be organized. "We need to talk about whether we're going to do this."

"We can't do this," Kathy said. "A year? All four of us? In this house?"

"I have a job," Laura said. "I have a life in Baltimore."

"You have a husband you haven't mentioned once since you got here," Shelly said, and Laura's face did something complicated and closed.

"I have a gallery show in October," Shelly said, then stopped. "Actually, I don't. I got dropped. Two weeks ago. So that's—that's not a factor."

"Dropped?" Laura looked at her. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"Because Dad died, Laura. It didn't seem like the moment to discuss my professional humiliation."

They all looked at Abby.

Abby was still sitting on the counter, her legs dangling, her gas-station coffee long cold. She looked at each of her sisters in turn, and then she looked out the window at the bay, where the light was doing what it always did in September on the Eastern Shore—going gold and soft and impossibly gentle, as if the whole world were being forgiven for something.

"I don't have anywhere else to go," Abby said. "So I'm in."

It was not a rousing declaration. It was not a family rallying cry. It was the plain truth spoken by the sister who had the least to lose, which meant she was the only one who could afford to be honest.

Kathy looked at the ceiling. The water stain in the corner had grown since the last rain.

"One year," she said. "Three hundred and sixty-five days. And then I never have to share a bathroom with any of you again."

"Is that a yes?" Laura asked.

"That's a yes."

Shelly nodded. Laura nodded. And just like that, without ceremony or enthusiasm or anything resembling hope, the salt year began.

---

By the end of the first week, Kathy had done two things.

The first was practical: she'd called Gus Truitt, a retired state police detective who lived in Easton and did private investigation work for lawyers and insurance companies and, occasionally, for women who suspected their husbands were not actually going fishing on Saturdays. Gus was sixty-four, built like a fire hydrant, and possessed of the particular Maryland Shore combination of extreme politeness and absolute relentlessness.

"I need you to find someone," Kathy told him over the phone. "A woman named Joyce Tawes. That's T-A-W-E-S. I don't know where she lives. I don't know anything about her except that my father put her in his will."

"Any idea why?"

"None."

"This the kind of thing where I might find something you don't want to know?"

"Gus, my mother walked into the Chesapeake Bay thirty years ago and I've been serving oysters in the same building ever since. I'm not afraid of things I don't want to know."

Gus said he'd look into it.

The second thing Kathy did was less practical and more instinctive: she began watching her sisters.

Not watching in a suspicious way—or not only in a suspicious way—but watching the way you watch weather on the bay, looking for the signs that tell you what's coming. Because Kathy knew, with the certainty of the eldest child, that the next twelve months would not be survived on good intentions. They would be survived, if they were survived at all, on information. On knowing which sister was about to crack and in which direction.

Laura, she observed, called Paul every evening at nine o'clock, and the calls lasted exactly seven minutes, and Laura's voice during these calls had the brittle brightness of a woman reading from a script. She never said "I love you" at the end. She said "Okay, then" and hung up and went to the bathroom and ran the water for a long time.

Shelly unpacked her suitcases into the room she'd shared with Laura as a girl—twin beds, faded blue curtains, a bookshelf still holding their mother's paperback mysteries—and she did not paint. She'd brought supplies, canvases and brushes and the turpentine that made the whole upstairs smell like a hardware store, but the canvases stayed wrapped and the brushes stayed in their case and Shelly spent her days drifting through the bar like a ghost, picking things up and putting them down.

Abby was the most careful. She moved through the house with the exaggerated precision of someone walking on ice, aware that every eye was on her, that every trip to the bathroom was being timed, that every glass she picked up was being scrutinized for contents. She ate what Laura put in front of her. She went to bed early. She attended AA meetings in Cambridge, thirty minutes away, because she didn't want anyone in town to know.

Kathy saw all of this, and she filed it away, and she waited for Gus Truitt to call.

He called on a Thursday, twelve days after the funeral.

"Found her," Gus said. "Joyce Tawes. Lives in Wilmington, Delaware. Sixty-two years old. Retired schoolteacher. Widowed. No criminal record, no liens, no nothing. Clean as a whistle."

"Sixty-two," Kathy repeated.

"That's right."

Kathy did the math. If Joyce Tawes was sixty-two now, she'd been about thirty when June Purnell disappeared. A young woman. Old enough to be someone's sister.

"What's her maiden name?" Kathy asked.

"Hold on." She heard Gus shuffling papers. "Maiden name was Briley. Joyce Briley."

Briley. Kathy turned the name over in her mind. Her mother's maiden name had been Briley. June Briley, from somewhere on the Delaware coast. Cal had never talked about June's family. The girls had never asked, because when you're a child and your mother is dead—or missing, or gone—you learn not to ask questions whose answers might make the world worse.

"Gus," Kathy said. "My mother's maiden name was Briley."

A long pause. "Well," Gus said. "That's something."

"You have an address?"

"I do."

"Give it to me."

She drove to Wilmington on a Saturday morning, telling her sisters she was going to the restaurant supply store in Dover. It was a two-hour drive, north through flat farmland and over the canal and into the tidy brick neighborhoods of Wilmington's west side, where the rowhouses had flower boxes and the sidewalks were swept and the whole place looked like a life that someone had chosen carefully and maintained with discipline.

She found the address—a corner rowhouse with green shutters and a porch swing—and she parked across the street and turned off the engine and waited.

She didn't know what she was waiting for. She didn't know what she expected to find. She'd told herself she was just looking, just gathering information, just doing what she always did, which was managing the situation before the situation managed her.

At 11:15, a woman came around the corner carrying two canvas grocery bags. She was medium height, gray-haired, wearing a blue cardigan and walking shoes. She was sixty-two years old and she walked the way Kathy's mother had walked—not the face, not the build, but the walk, the particular forward lean and quick step of a woman who had places to be.

Kathy sat in her car and watched Joyce Tawes carry groceries up the steps and into the tidy rowhouse, and she felt something shift in her chest, some tectonic plate of understanding moving beneath the surface of everything she thought she knew.

She drove home. She told no one what she'd seen.

The salt year was twelve days old.