Amy Frazier - Independence Day

He’d try to find a way to minimize her outburst, pull his family together in a semblance of greeting-card perfection and still make his speech in the village square with five minutes to spare for schmoozing.

Well, not today. Today spin control wasn’t going to cut it, not when the new and improved Chessie refused to be spun.

In the dining room, Chessie glanced out the window and saw her family in the yard, trotting in line toward the barn. Grim Father Goose and his irate goslings. They knew her well enough to anticipate her destination.

Working her way through the cluttered kitchen, she placed her empty coffee mug precariously on top of the mound of unwashed dishes in the sink and sighed. The dirty dish fairy wasn’t going to do the job this morning. Nope. She’d just wiped scullery duty from her priority list.

Steeling her will toward the revolution, she went out the kitchen door and through the furnace room. Oh, to get her hands in some therapeutic clay. As she opened the door into the barn’s lower level, three stern faces brought her up short.

“What’s all this about?” Nick asked, not without genuine concern.

Chessie moved toward the stairs leading to her studio and classroom. “I’ve chosen today to grant the three of you—and myself—emotional independence.” She brushed past them. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, the creative juices are flowing.”

“But it’s the Fourth of July,” Gabriella whined. “You’ll miss the parade and Daddy’s speech.”

“I’ll open the loft windows.” Their cottage was only one door removed from the village square. “I’ll hear the band and, with the PA system, Daddy’s speech.”

Isabel frowned. “But we won’t be together.”

Pausing, Chessie turned to her older daughter. “As cruel as it sounds, sweetie, we’re none of us joined at the hip. And I need to work.”

“Geez, Dad,” Gabriella groused, “she was sane at breakfast.”

Yes, she had been sane at breakfast.

It was after breakfast she’d needed to take fifteen minutes—fifteen minutes—for herself in her studio to sketch out the plans for the piece that had been buzzing inside her head for days now, the piece that might prove to be a significant advancement in a career that had never fully taken root because the family moved every couple years for Nick’s career.

But noooo…her own fifteen minutes were not to be.

Nick couldn’t find his red suspenders. Gabriella couldn’t find her favorite jean shorts. And Isabel couldn’t find her iPod. All three looked to Chessie to produce the missing items as if by magic. When she’d finally got into the bathroom to wash her face and run a brush through her hair, she’d been met by the avalanche of dirty laundry.

The proverbial straw.

She was expected to be a 24/7 concierge for everyone else, but wasn’t allowed fifteen uninterrupted minutes to be herself. Not someone’s wife. Not someone’s mother. Not someone’s maid. Herself. A concept she’d almost forgotten the meaning of.

She felt her face go red with frustration.

“Mom?” Isabel’s worried voice brought Chessie back to the barn and the present. “Are you all right?”

Nick glanced at his watch. Again with the watch. “Girls, for whatever reason, I think your mom needs some time alone. We can all meet up for the picnic later.” He leaned over and kissed Chessie on the forehead. A very chaste kiss, infuriating in its total lack of passion.

“Do your thing,” he murmured in a tone that bordered dangerously close to patronizing. “Get it all out of your system. Come to the parade later if you can make it. Either way, we’ll have fun this afternoon on the islands.” He delivered his lines with administrative deliberation. “I’m counting on you. As I always do.”

Poor Nick. He didn’t have a clue that the rules had changed this morning.

If his kiss hadn’t been so platonic and his tone so dismissive, Chessie might’ve limited her initial declaration to the shower of dirty laundry. But it seemed her family still needed a more public nudge.

FROM THE PODIUM in front of the flagpole, Nick looked out over the attentive crowd. As he spotted his daughters and the rest of the McCabe clan—his father, Penn, his sister Mariah, and his brothers Jonas, Brad, with Emily and their four children, and Sean, with Kit and Alexandra—he felt very proud. He’d delivered a worthy speech—brief, patriotic and stirring—and he’d delivered it from the heart. Despite Chessie’s unaccountable behavior earlier, he felt a real sense of hometown satisfaction.

“And in closing, I ask each and every one of you,” he concluded with conviction, “as you enjoy today’s activities, to count your blessings. There is no finer, freer place to live than Pritchard’s Neck, Maine.”

As the applause broke out around him, a flash of sunlight on metal captured his attention. Ever the principal, Nick worried that a brass player with the high-school band had gone AWOL for a smoke behind the library—until he saw Chessie in front of the library, adjusting a slapdash sandwich-board sign over her shoulders as she held aloft Nick’s battered junior-high-school trumpet. The sign secure, she put the instrument to her lips and delivered one short, sour blast.

The band leader glowered at his brass section.

Nick’s sense of hometown satisfaction sprang a leak.

It wasn’t at all unusual for Pritchard’s Neck residents and visitors to bring noisemakers to the Fourth of July parade and speech as part of the celebration and the local color. Chessie could toot her horn till the mackerel ran without raising an eyebrow. But the sign gave Nick pause.

In bold capital letters the board read, CHESSIE MCCABE ON STRIKE UNTIL HER NEEDS ARE MET. How many ways could that be taken? And how many people had noticed?

Nick felt the color drain from his face.

He heard a high-pitched, synchronized squeal from the front of the crowd. It appeared Gabriella and Isabel had just spotted their mother.

Damage control his middle name, Nick gave the band leader a curt nod. Quentin Landry, one of Nick’s high-school faculty, responded immediately by having his students play a rousing exit march.

Snapping photos as if in pursuit of a Pulitzer, the tourists who’d witnessed the literal airing of McCabe dirty laundry earlier crowded around a sweetly smiling Chessie. It would be just Nick’s luck if one of them worked for The New York Times Sunday magazine. His wife’s behavior—today’s behavior—certainly fit the eccentric mold outsiders often formed of Mainers, delighted in spreading in travel articles. But Nick—specifically, his career—couldn’t afford eccentricity.

Grinding his teeth, he made his way off the bunting-trimmed podium.

Gabriella and Isabel assailed him. “Dad—”

“I’ll take care of it.” He gave each daughter a quick hug. “You know your mom—always on the cutting edge.”

“But—”

“Go get the picnic hamper. We’ll all four be on our way in just a sec.” He could only hope.

The two girls stared at him.

“I promise,” he said, grimacing.

What had gotten into his wife? Because of her artistic nature, he expected her to be occasionally, creatively quirky. In private. She’d always been sensible in public. Supportive.

Fully intending to keep his private and his public lives separate, Nick pushed through the crowd around the library entrance. “Excuse me,” he said, grasping Chessie’s arm and propelling her through the doorway into the small book drop foyer. “Show’s over, folks.” The sandwich board banged him in the shins.

Closing the outer door with difficulty, he turned to Chessie. Heatstroke might be a reasonable explanation for her bizarre behavior this morning. But she beamed up at him, her hazel eyes clear and purposeful.