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1. Snowy

   IS STAGE FRIGHT ever conquered? Inhale, Snowy told herself as she sat in a front-row folding chair in the Midhurst Library’s meeting room wearing one of her poetry-reading outfits, pink blazer over a pink shell, black pants, black flats, black shoulder bag on the floor beside her, on her lap a copy of Selected Poems by Henrietta Snow and a printout of her notes and her glasses case containing her reading glasses.
    Exhale.
    At the lectern stood Clary Mitford, the library director, a very nice woman maybe sixty years old (ten years younger than Snowy!), whom Snowy had met for the first time this Thursday evening, April 2, 2009, after an e-mail correspondence accepting Clary’s invitation to do a reading here and then postponing it because of a March snowstorm. Midhurst was a town downstate, a two-hour drive from Snowy’s Woodcombe home. Clary (a Clarissa nickname, Clary had explained) wore her graying hair in what used to be called a pageboy and perhaps still was; her outfit of a white cardigan over a navy-and-white polka-dotted dress looked classic, but Snowy had been charmed to see that on her feet were pink sneakers with aqua shoelaces.
    Clary was obviously nearing the end of introducing the evening’s speaker. Snowy hadn’t dared glance around to make a guess at a final total of how many people had come in, but the room felt full. Inhale; exhale. Oh, the agony of listening to an introduction, of hearing one’s life and work summed up!
    “. . . now please welcome Henrietta Snow Forbes,” concluded Clary.
    Clapping! Applause was always a surprise. And so was hearing her married name, though in June she and Tom would be married a year.
    Legs shaky, Snowy stood up. Stage fright engulfed her, the old fears from her years of agoraphobia dazed her, and she swore a silent vow that she would never accept another poetry-reading invitation anywhere ever again, a vow she made each time she did a reading. Her legs held her upright. The library’s meeting room didn’t have the Victorian dark-wood warmth of the main library; this addition must have been built in the 1950s because it featured a Nifty Fifties blond décor, which now seemed a blond blur. She walked to the lectern, trying to stand as straight as she could, knowing that people were pitying—or disgusted by?—her curved back, the damn scoliosis.
    Clary went to sit in the chair Snowy had vacated.
“Thank you,” Snowy said. Her voice sounded weak. Evidently no microphone was deemed necessary for this room. She surveyed the good turnout, maybe twenty-five wonderful people who had given up their evening to listen to her inadequate poems. She said more strongly, “Thank you for coming here,” but her hands trembled as she arranged the notes and book on the lectern’s shelf and put on her rimless silver glasses. “I’ll start at the beginning, with ‘Sweetland,’ the title poem from my first collection—”
The door to the meeting room opened, and a woman entered.
    Snowy continued quickly, so the latecomer wouldn’t be embarrassed by interrupting her, “—which was inspired by my summer job in high school, waitressing at a Gunthwaite restaurant named Sweetland—”
   “Mocha frappes!” the woman said.
    Snowy focused. Joanne? Had her fevered mind conjured up this figment from those high-school days?
The pretty woman’s salt-and-pepper hair was cut in a thick bob, and she wore a slightly citified spring-green coat, tightly belted to emphasize a svelte waistline. She waved.     “Hi, Snowy!”
    It really was Joanne Carter Forbes Andrews. Not seen in years.
    Joanne said, with her self-assured Queen of the Junior Prom poise, “Hi, everybody, sorry I’m late. A friend used to say that a favorite excuse in Scotland for arriving late is ‘sheep in the road.’ Well, what slowed me down was a backhoe going  five miles an hour for miles, and why in the world would a backhoe still be on the road at seven p.m.?”
    Amused mumblings from the audience. That “friend” to whom Joanne was referring was of course Tom. Tom Forbes, Joanne’s ex-husband. Joanne scooted into an empty chair in the last row and continued, unbuttoning the coat, “I’m an old friend of Snowy’s, and I certainly do remember the Sweetland restaurant. Mocha frappes were my favorite.”
    More amusement.
    Joanne and her second husband, Victor, lived in Nashua, a city near Midhurst. It had never occurred to Snowy that Joanne might notice the poetry-reading announcement that Clary had put in the Manchester and Nashua newspapers.
    Snowy mustered more strength. “Hi, Joanne. Welcome.” The room jiggled, swam, then held still again. “I did happen to mention mocha frappes in this poem—”
    “I know, I read it!” Joanne slipped off the coat. Underneath she wore a gold-colored sweater, as if she were still complementing her glossy brown hair of yore. “And you used your waitressing shorthand!”
    “Um, yes.” Snowy glanced at her notes to collect her thoughts. Was she experiencing a form of heckling? But Joanne’s enthusiasm sounded genuine. The notes prompted her to make her usual little joke about this poem, so she said, “That shorthand gave me a chance to find rhymes for ‘cof’ instead of ‘coffee’ and ‘Eng. muf’ instead of ‘English muffin’ and such. A challenge!”
    Laughter. This line almost always got a laugh, but like the applause it was a surprise, and sometimes she felt she understood why stand-up comedians became hooked on audience-laughter. She smiled at everybody, Joanne included, and continued, “As I was saying, I’ll read ‘Sweetland.’”
    Snowy proceeded to do so and went on through the other poems she’d chosen for tonight. There wasn’t a further peep out of Joanne. Snowy finished with one of her April poems, “Hesitation Waltz,” about winter and spring’s tantalizing dance in three-quarter time, and then she removed her glasses. At this signal, Clary stood up to start the question-and-answer session. Joanne remained silent.     As the Q-and-A ended, the fragrance of coffee seeped around the room. Hooray, it was over except for refreshments!
    When Snowy had arrived this evening, Clary and two Friends of the Midhurst Library had been setting up the refreshments table at the back of the room, and Snowy and Clary had had a good chat there, Snowy asking if Clary was a fan of the famous Mitford sisters because of her Mitford last name and agreeing that Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love was a favorite. Clary had said, “Whenever I open that book to the first page, to Uncle Matthew’s entrenching tool hanging over the chimney piece, I can’t help smiling.” Snowy had quoted, “‘An entrenching tool with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had hacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out.’” Smiling, Clary had said, “It’s Nancy Mitford’s writing that makes such a gruesome scene funny, isn’t it.”
    Now, Clary escorted her from the front of the room to the back, and Snowy wondered if she needed an entrenching tool for protection against Joanne, who was first in line at the table, pouring coffee from the Mr. Coffee into a Styrofoam cup. With her gold sweater, Joanne was wearing black jersey pants—eek! Weren’t they exactly the same Perfect Fit Pants from L.L.Bean that she herself was wearing?
    At this point in these evenings Snowy always yearned more than ever to be a member of the audience, not the speaker, so she could concentrate on devouring the treats instead of making small talk with people. Clary positioned Snowy to one side and asked, “Decaf or regular, and would you like a brownie, a lemon square, or a snickerdoodle?”
    Joanne, selecting a lemon square from the display and putting it on a paper plate, said, “Give Snowy lots! She’s famous for her appetite!”
    “Just coffee, please,” Snowy said. She never dared risk getting crumbs in the corners of her mouth. “Not decaf. Black.”
    “Yes,” Joanne agreed, “not decaf, you’ve got a long drive home.”
    Home to Tom, in the apartment over his North Country Coffins workshop where David, his and Joanne’s younger son, also worked. Joanne would be driving home to Victor in a house Snowy had tried to imagine from comments David and his wife, Lavender, had made: a split-level ranch house with a nice patio in the big backyard enjoyed by the grandchildren, Elizabeth and Lilac. Snowy said, “Um, thank you for coming, Joanne. You saw it in the newspaper?”
    “I did, and I thought about how long it’s been since our cheerleading days. And I couldn’t remember when we’d last seen each other. Maybe sometime when I was visiting David and Lavender and dropped in at your store?”
    “I can’t remember either.” Snowy didn’t tell her that it was actually on a mountaintop. That is, Snowy had seen Joanne; Joanne hadn’t seen her. On Labor Day weekend, 1995, fourteen years ago this September, after Tom and Joanne were divorced and before Joanne had married Victor, Snowy had climbed Mount Pascataquac to spend the afternoon with Tom while he worked as a fire warden in its fire tower. When she arrived on the summit she saw, on the doorstep of the fire-warden’s cabin, Joanne in Tom’s arms. Well, not quite; Joanne’s back was against his chest, his hands were on her shoulders, and she was facing the view. Snowy had spun around and fled down the mountain.
Later she realized that Tom probably had been directing Joanne’s gaze to Mount Daybreak, the mountain on which Libby, their daughter, had been struck by lightning. Killed.
Joanne stepped closer, making Snowy step backward, and lowered her voice. “I was having a chat on the phone the other day with Lavender, about the grandkids and all, and she mentioned your inheritance.”
    Oh, my God. Snowy almost spilled her coffee. So this was why Joanne had come to the reading: curiosity about the inheritance.
    “A cottage on a Maine island!” said Joanne. “It’s right on the ocean? It’s got a dock and everything?”
     A very rickety dock. “Um, yes.”
    “An inheritance out of the blue, Lavender told me. You and Tom rented that cottage last summer and then the owner died last month and left it to you both in her will and nobody knows why, including you two, and you don’t know what to do about it.”
    Ye gods, Snowy thought. Gossip!

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About This Book

OFF SHORE               
LATEST AND LAST SEQUEL TO
THE CHEERLEADER

      Fifty-one years ago THE CHEERLEADER by Ruth Doan MacDougall was published. It became a national best seller and a “favorite book” for its devoted readers.
Nancy Pearl, known as “the nation’s librarian,” has described THE CHEERLEADER as “a sensitive novel for grownups about what it was like to be a teenage girl in the 1950s: the discovery of boys and sex, and figuring out who you are and what you want to be.”
The readers kept asking, “What happened next?” to its main characters, Snowy (Henrietta Snow), Bev (Beverly Colby), and Puddles (Jean Pond). So eventually, after writing several stand-alone novels Ruth wrote a sequel, SNOWY. When readers continued to ask “What happened next?” Ruth realized she was writing a series, The Snowy Series.
       OFF SHORE is the seventh sequel. It picks up where LAZY  BEDS, the sixth sequel, left off in 2009, with Snowy stunned by the sudden inheritance of a cottage on the Maine coast.
       In 2009, Snowy, Bev, and Puddles—the triumvirate, age fifteen when readers first met them—turn seventy. What lies ahead in what’s left of their futures?

Foreword by Ann Norton Holbrook   

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