That Summer Place: Island Time / Old Things / Private Paradise
That Summer Place: Island Time / Old Things / Private Paradise
Susan Wiggs
Debbie Macomber
Jill Barnett
Perfect for fans of Maeve Binchy' - CandisIt's nothing special on the surface, merely a rambling old Victorian summerhouse on a secluded island, where the sky is blue and the water is clear.Yet after a month at the Rainshadow Lodge, people begin to change–and fall in love. How else can you account for what happens to the most mismatched, unlikely couples? There's Beth, who's stuck sharing the lodge with a complete stranger–and a difficult one at that.And Mitch, a workaholic on a deadline who has to depend on free-spirited Rosie, who functions on "island time." Not to mention Catherine, who's falling in love with Michael, the lodge's handyman–for the second time!
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHORS
DEBBIE MACOMBER
“Popular romance writer Macomber has a gift for evoking the emotions that are at the heart of the genre’s popularity.”
—Publishers Weekly
“One of Macomber’s great strengths is her insight into human behavior—both admirable and ignoble.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
SUSAN WIGGS
Wiggs writes “a flawless story touched by real emotions.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Susan Wiggs is a superb storyteller.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
JILL BARNETT
“Barnett has a rare knack for humor. Her characters are joyously fresh and her style is a delight to read—a ray of summer sun.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Five Gold Stars! This is one delightfully funny read with witty, witty dialogue.”
—Heartland Critiques on Surrender a Dream
That Summer Place
Old Things
Jill Barnett
Private Paradise
Debbie Macomber
Island Time
Susan Wiggs
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Also by Susan Wiggs
The Lakeshore Chronicles SUMMER AT WILLOW LAKE THE WINTER LODGE DOCKSIDE AT WILLOW LAKE SNOWFALL AT WILLOW LAKE FIRESIDE LAKESHORE CHRISTMAS The Tudor Rose Trilogy AT THE KING’S COMMAND THE MAIDEN’S HAND AT THE QUEEN’S SUMMONS Contemporary HOME BEFORE DARK THE OCEAN BETWEEN US SUMMER BY THE SEA TABLE FOR FIVE LAKESIDE COTTAGE JUST BREATHE All available in eBook.
CONTENTS
Old Things
Jill Barnett
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
Private Paradise
Debbie Macomber
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Island Time
Susan Wiggs
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Old Things
Jill Barnett
Dear Reader,
Have you ever visited a place you’ve never been to before and found that you felt as if you were home? That’s what happened to me the first time I came to the Pacific Northwest. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I stepped off a ferry and found a paradise.
A few months later I’d bought a house overlooking a lovely harbor where the eagles fly and the sailboats drift by, where there is a sense of utter peace and quiet. Although I was born and raised on the West Coast, for me, my small chunk of this wonderful island is the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived.
Writing about an area that has captured my heart so completely has been very special for me. Oh, I’ve written about islands before. I’ve set four books on small islands and have even joked that I must have been an island in a past life. But this is my first contemporary work of fiction, and it’s set in a place where I live.
I feel so fortunate to have the opportunity to write for a collection with two fabulous and talented Northwest writers, who are now my good friends. Both Susan and Debbie welcomed me here with open arms and graciousness.
So I hope, as you read the stories, you will see a little of what we get to see every day—trees so lush and tall they can block out the sunshine, water so still you are afraid to breathe, and sunrises so perfect you think you must have dreamed them.
Enjoy!
Jill Barnett
c/o Rowe Enterprises
P.O. Box 8166
Fremont, CA 94536
To the readers who wanted an older couple,
particularly to Barbara,
who wrote and sent me one of the
funniest poems I’ve ever read.
One
San Francisco, 1997
Catherine Wardwell Winslow spent a week last winter at a time management seminar where the experts stood up on a big stage and told her that Wednesday was the slowest day of the work week.
They lied.
Catherine rested her chin in her hand and stared at her phone. It was a Wednesday, barely nine in the morning, and already four of the five phone lines were frantically blinking. She didn’t know which one to answer first. So she didn’t answer any of them.
Her life would be so much easier if she were one of those robots you see in the cartoons, the kind with slot machine eyes, a ball-bearing nose, and those spindly metal arms and slinky legs that jerk with every movement.
Like Rosie the Robot in The Jetsons.
But Catherine wasn’t in a space-age home that looked like the Space Needle. She was in her San Francisco office on the third floor of a restored Victorian. The building was just one of many candy-colored, gabled houses on a steep and narrow street that now held offices for dentists, attorneys and other professionals.
The last line buzzed obnoxiously and began to blink like the others. She groaned and closed her eyes to escape. Her imagination took over. In her mind’s eye she was Catherine the Robot rolling around her office on feet made of rollers that looked like brass sofa balls. She jammed report folders under her robot arms with the clawlike hands of a carnival toy machine, then she spun around her messy office, grabbing files and reports, adding up cost sheets and filing.
But the more paperwork she handled, the larger the piles on her desk grew. So the faster she rolled, here and there.
Hectic. Hectic. Hectic.
The desk phone suddenly morphed into an old fashioned black switchboard. The switchboard was filled with little glowing golden dots that blinked and buzzed and only stopped if she stuck one of a hundred black spiderlike plug cords into them. No matter how fast she plugged in the cords, the telephone lines kept flashing away like those warning lights at railroad crossings.
Warning overload! Warning! Warning!
Then…
Pow!
She suddenly blew up in a cloud of springs, bolts and flying nuts.
“Are you all right?”
Catherine sat upright in her desk chair, startled. She blinked. Myrtle Martin, her secretary of fifteen years, was standing in the doorway, staring at her.
“I’m fine.” Catherine quickly looked down, embarrassed. She busied herself by shuffling the papers all over her desk.
Myrtle gave Catherine’s desk a pointed look, then shifted her gaze to the blinking lines. “You aren’t answering the phone.”
“I know.” Catherine spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling with an already neat stack of the papers. She felt as if she had just blown up, like her nuts and bolts were scattered from here to kingdom come.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for my nuts,” Catherine muttered.
“You divorced your nuts eight years ago,” Myrtle said without a beat, then closed the connecting door.
Catherine shook her head and bit back a smile. She picked up a handful of papers and tapped them on the desk until their corners were neatly aligned.
Myrtle was staring at her.
She glanced up trying to look calm and collected and in complete control, as if nothing was out of the ordinary.
Her secretary just stood there with her rigid back pressed against the door jamb, a knowing look on her face.
It was impossible to ignore her. Impossible because Myrtle Martin had a new hair color. Orange. Blindingly bright orange.
Catherine never knew a hair color could actually hurt your eyes. For just one instant she had the sudden urge to whip out her sunglasses.
Back in January Myrtle had dyed her hair jet black, painted a mole on her cheek and drawn on thickly-arched, Night-of-the-Iguana eyebrows, then wore animal prints and huge faux diamonds. At the time she was dating a Welshman named Richard.
Myrtle walked toward her with one of her “you-need-me-to-tell-you-exactly-what-you-need-to-do” looks. She had been gone for two weeks and the office looked as if she’d been gone for a year.
Catherine braced herself for a lecture, but instead Myrtle just hitched her hip on the desk corner, picked up the phone, and began pressing buttons. “Ms. Winslow is unavailable today.”
Poof! Line one was gone.
“Ms. Winslow is in a meeting and cannot be disturbed.”
Line two gone.
“Ms. Winslow will get back to you as soon as possible.”
Line three gone.
Line four got the same treatment.
She punched line five. “Yes? Uh-huh. That’s right. Who? Oh, hi! Yes, I’m just fine. Uh-huh. Uh-huh…I changed it last night.” Myrtle smiled and patted her French twist. “Red Flambeaux. Yes, it’s very vibrant. I like color, too. Catherine? Yes, she’s right here.” Myrtle studied Catherine for a long moment. “She’s wearing a suit…of course. Black,” she added as if she were describing cockroaches.
Catherine glanced down at her tailored black suit and frowned. She liked this outfit; it fit her mood.
“What’s she doing?” Myrtle repeated, then gave Catherine a wicked smile. “Your daughter is looking for her nuts.”
Catherine snatched the phone out of Myrtle’s hand and glared at her.
Ignoring her, Myrtle just sank into a chair opposite the desk and began rifling through the papers on Catherine’s desk.
“Hi, Mom. Myrtle was just being funny. No, I don’t need any almonds. Yes, I’m sure.”
Catherine paused, listening to her mom because she was her mom. There were some things you never outgrew.
Finally she took a long breath and said, “I know almond oil is good for the skin.” She covered the mouthpiece and made shooting noises and gestures at Myrtle while her mother listed all the reasons nuts—almonds in particular—were good for her.
Five minutes later, when her eyes were glazed over and she now knew the complete history of the almond, she said, “Yes, I heard the whole thing. Every word, Mom.” She took a deep breath and spoke rapidly to sneak a few words in, “I have to go now. Have a good trip, okay? No, I don’t want any smoked almonds.”
She winced and rubbed a hand over her pounding forehead. “I remember they were Dad’s favorite. I love you, too. I promise I won’t forget to tell the girls.” She paused and added more softly, “Almonds make me cry, too, Mom.”
She sighed. “You don’t have anything to worry about. They give out pretzels on planes nowadays.” She paused and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know why.” She stared down at her desk blotter. “I know Dad hated pretzels.
“No!” She jerked upright in her chair. “Don’t cancel your flight!” She looked up at Myrtle, panicking. She ran a hand through her hair in frustration, then said more calmly, “Please, Mom. You need to go. This trip will be good for you.”
There was a long, drawn out pause. Catherine sat still, holding her breath while she listened to the silence on the other end. Then her mother agreed.
Catherine exhaled and sagged back against her chair. “Yes, it would be difficult to cancel now. You’ll have a good time. And the girls will miss you, too. Bye, Mom.” She hung up the phone and gave Myrtle a look that should have cooked her.
Myrtle leaned forward and slapped some money on the desk. “Ten bucks says a case of almonds arrives before the week is out.”
Catherine opened her desk drawer and threw out a wadded-up bill. “Twenty says it arrives tomorrow morning.” She paused, then added pointedly, “About the same time you get your pink slip.”
“You? Fire me?” Myrtle just ignored her. “Anyone else would bore you to death. Besides which, you need me.”
“I also needed hard labor to give birth.”
Myrtle burst out laughing.
Firing Myrtle was a ludicrous threat, since they both knew Catherine would be lost without her. Just one look at the cluttered office was proof enough.
Over the years she and Myrtle had become more than business associates; they had become friends. Catherine’s daughters called Myrtle Martin “Aunt Mickie.” It was Myrtle Martin who’d kept Catherine laughing through each difficult day after her husband, Tom, had walked away from her, and even more heart-wrenchingly, walked away from his young daughters because they caused too many complications in his life. Myrtle was the first person Catherine called when her ex-husband died two years after the divorce, and just six months ago, when her father was killed suddenly in an accident.
While Myrtle set about cleaning the office and filing papers, Catherine shoved away from her desk and stood. She crossed the room and opened the door to her small bath, where she dumped out an old cup of coffee, then rested both palms flat on the edges of the pedestal sink. She leaned into the mirror and wondered if that was really her face staring back.
She looked like her mother. And her grandmother. Blonde hair, brown eyes. Just like theirs except she had a dash of freckles across her nose that had never faded, even though her skin hadn’t been exposed to the sun for years. They just stayed there, reminders of a summer when she had been badly burned.
She heard Myrtle mumbling out in the office and stepped into the doorway. “Are you talking to me?”
“Yes.” Myrtle looked over her shoulder at Catherine. “I was saying that you’re the one who needs a trip to the Greek Isles.”
Catherine closed the adjoining door and crossed the office. “What I really need is to hire someone efficient while you’re out on vacation.” Catherine sat down.
Myrtle turned around. “At least I take vacations.”
“I take vacations.”
“When?”
Catherine raised her chin. “I took the girls to Disneyland.”
“They were two and six.”
Catherine’s daughters were now eleven and fifteen. “I went to New Orleans, remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Good.”
“Reagan was president.”
“He was not.”
“Well…” Myrtle gave her hand a dramatic wave and slapped a file drawer closed. “It must have been Bush. I know it was one of those good ol’ Republican boys.”
Catherine glanced down at the paperwork on her desk. She had so much to do. “I can’t get away right now….” She let the last word fade out when she realized that Myrtle was silently mouthing the very same words.
Catherine stared at her, half in surprise and half in shame. Even to her own ears it sounded like something she’d said a dozen times. Nothing but the same old excuse.
She closed her eyes for a second, feeling as if she’d been hit with a huge anvil, one painted with the words Bad Mother. She ran a hand over her eyes. She could still see Aly and Dana’s eager young faces as they’d stood outside Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
Once upon a time they had been awestruck by Goofy, Mickey and the other Disney characters. Only last week Aly had hung a Hanson poster over her prized Beauty and the Beast print, and Dana had come home from a sleepover with a third hole pierced high in her ear.
Catherine sagged back in her chair and gave her secretary a direct look. “Has it really been that long?”
“It’s been a few years since you went away with just Aly and Dana.”
Her daughters’ last vacations had been with their grandparents or a random week each year at summer camp. Catherine was hit hard by a working mother’s guilt.
It had always sounded so perfect when her parents chose to take the girls some place special. And those trips always seemed to coincide with Catherine’s important presentations. Now, in retrospect, she felt selfish.
When she was growing up, her parents had spent almost every summer in Washington, in a wonderful Victorian clapboard house on a small San Juan island. Those summers had been easy and free, a time past when the air was clean, the sky was blue, and you woke up to the aching call of the gulls or the soft sound of rain on the roof. A place where your schedule was dictated only by the rise of the sun or the moon.
On Spruce Island, when she was seven, she had learned the names of all the stars and constellations, because there was no television to teach her that stars were merely people made by Hollywood.
On dark summer nights at the water’s edge, she had roasted her first marshmallow and heard her first ghost story around the golden flames of a beach fire. And on that same island, on a chilly Northwest morning she caught her first fish—a six inch bottom-sucker that her father didn’t make her throw back in spite of the game laws.
It was there where she had learned to swim, to sail, and to kiss, for it was on Spruce Island during a bittersweet summer in the Sixties—the days when she used Yardley soap, dressed like Jean Shrimpton, and ironed her long hair straight—that she had found her first love.
With Michael.
She felt that old wistful feeling you have when you remember something that might have been. His image was bittersweet as it formed in her mind, and she wondered if he really had been that tall, intense young man she remembered.
Michael Packard had been twenty years old, incredibly mature and mysterious to a seventeen year old late bloomer who’d had a crush on him since she was eleven.
At twenty he’d had a man’s strength and a man’s gentleness, qualities she had seen in her father, but never in any of the young men she knew. The boys in her hometown craved fast cars and even faster girls. They drank Colt 45 malt liquor, carried hard-packs of Marlboros in their madras-shirt pockets, and cruised the streets in shiny cars with loud engines and big tires.
But Michael was so different from those boys. Even today, some thirty years later, she could still remember things about him: his voice saying her name, his long tanned legs stretched out on the small sloop they’d sailed in the cove, his wonderful hands and the way they could haul up a boat anchor, carve her initials in a piece of wood, or just as easily wipe a tear from her cheek.
That June she had fallen hard for him, fallen hard for the dark-haired young man with a deep, quiet voice that sounded as if it came from his soul. He had a poet’s eyes, the kind of eyes she had seen in black-and-white photos of Laurence Ferlinghetti and Bob Dylan, eyes that could look right through you, especially if you were only seventeen. His hungry looks made her dreamy young heart melt like the cocoa butter they slathered over their suntanned skin. And he gave her long, hot kisses that could have burned the fog off Puget Sound.
“Good God…Whatever are you thinking about?”
Catherine straightened a little and stared at Myrtle. “Nothing. Why?”
“You look as if you just got lucky with George Clooney.”
Catherine laughed and shook her head. “I was remembering a summer from a long, long time ago.”
“It must have been one hot summer.”
It was hot, she thought, so hot that all her youthful dreams had burned right up. She glanced up and gave Myrtle a wry look. “It couldn’t have been too hot. I was only seventeen.”
Myrtle held up her hand and began to count off. “Cleopatra, Lolita—”
“Well, now I’m forty-seven,” Catherine said, cutting Myrtle off before she got going. She didn’t want to talk about things from a long time ago. She wanted to keep them locked away in that secret part of her heart, the place where her daydreams began and a lifetime of what-ifs were hidden away.
“I’m fifty-five,” Myrtle said. “And that doesn’t stop me.”
“Nothing stops you.”
“I know.” Myrtle grinned.
“Looking for someone or trying to start a relationship is too much hard work. I don’t have time, especially now when I have the biggest presentation of my career less than a month away.”
“Letni Corporation?”
Catherine nodded.
“I thought they weren’t ready to talk seriously until September.”
“So did I, but I got a call just before you came in. They want the presentation meeting scheduled for the first Tuesday in July.”
Now Myrtle appeared to be stunned silent, looking as surprised as Catherine had been this morning when she’d heard from Letni.
Catherine tried not to smile when she said, “John Turner’s been fired.”
Myrtle did smile, one of those wicked cat-in-the-cream kind of smiles.
“With Turner gone we actually have a chance to beat out Westlake for the first time.” Catherine could hear the excitement in her voice. “The company needs a big account. This is the chance we’ve waited for.”
The largest computer chip manufacturer in the world, Letni was expanding into two states, moving from the high tax locations of California to better locations in Washington and Arizona. Thousands of employees would be moving over the company’s ten-year plan.
Her heart raced a little at the thought that this deal could really happen. “The relocation accounts alone could keep us in the black for the next ten years.”
The desk phone buzzed and began to flash yellow.
Myrtle glanced down at the phone at the same time as Catherine.
Within seconds four more lines lit up.
Catherine closed her eyes and leaned back against her chair with a sigh of disgust.
Myrtle crossed the room and opened the door. “I’ll take care of those lines. For the rest of the day, I promise I’ll only put through the most urgent calls.”
Catherine gave her a weak smile as the door snapped closed, then sat there feeling lost and preoccupied and confused, as if she didn’t know where to start. After a stretch of seconds where the only sound was the wall clock ticking away, she grabbed a pile of research files, put on her bifocals, and opened the first file folder.
The words grew foggy and a handsome face from her youth flashed across her mind. For one rare and tender moment, just before she began to read, she wondered what had ever happened to Michael Packard.
Two
He stood at the end of a long dock. The breeze off the water whipped through his hair the same way it had thirty years before. He was fifty now, and though his hair was still dark, there were streaks of gray near his temples, ears, and just above his brow. Each and every one of those gray hairs had been earned over two decades of international flight miles.
His eyes were ice blue, and those who were foolish enough to have crossed him over the years could tell you that there was a sharp and coldly decisive mind behind those eyes, the mind and strength of a man who could put you in your place with a single hard look.
Deep in the corners of those cool eyes were laugh lines that his few close friends saw often. But those same lines also showed anyone who shook his hand for the first time that he’d lived, long enough to know exactly how to get what he wanted.
His stride was easy and loose, the gait of someone comfortable with the power he possessed. The old dock creaked every so often, as if the wood protested him walking on it. He headed for the boathouse, which stood at the end of the dock and was more gray and weathered than he was.
The boathouse had been there a long time. It had been there the first day he’d stepped foot on Spruce Island, when he was thirteen and orphaned and angry at a world where parents could be sitting around the breakfast table one morning and die in a car crash that same night.
His first day on the island he had walked past the old boathouse with his pride on his sleeve and a chip on his shoulder. He was on his way to meet a grandfather he’d only heard of the few times his father had talked about his past.
At thirteen Michael had thought the island was just some backward hayseed place stuck out in the tulles. To him his grandfather was a stranger who lived in a strange place, someone he didn’t know, yet who had the power to control his life. The island seemed like Alcatraz. And Michael had been scared.
But now, standing on the dock, he was older and wiser. World-weary. He didn’t have any of those feelings he’d had when he was young. Now he could feel the freedom of the island. He saw the rarity of this place that had never been coldly dissected by freeways.
It was lush and green, surrounded by silver glassy water instead of silver-glassed high-rise buildings. Fir, cedar, maple and hemlock towered along the jagged ridges that rose from the center of the island, and even along the sheer cliffs and quiet inlets where birds wheeled in the clean air.
He didn’t move for a minute, but stared out at the sharp blue sky above Cutters Cove where a large dark bird floated overhead. He did a sudden double-take. The bird had a majestic white head. With one hand, he shielded his eyes from the sun and stood there watching the eagle fly.
When the bird was out of sight, he shoved his hands back in his pockets and took a deep breath of cool, damp mid-morning air. The things that had been plaguing his mind suddenly fell into perspective in a way that was humbling and strangely welcome.
He had no idea how long he stood there, and it didn’t matter because there was no plane to catch. No meeting to get to. No stockholders to appease. No do-or-die deal to close. Here he could just…be.
When he finally did move, it was slowly and with purpose. He opened the boathouse door, which creaked loudly and scared away the black crows perched on the old shingled roof. He ducked down and stepped inside.
The late afternoon sun slipped though the panes of rustic time- and weather-frosted windows and cast shafts of milky light on the floor in a checkered pattern that looked like an oversized circuit board. Spiderwebs drifted in the light. He could smell the metallic and wet scent of algae that always grew on the wood in the Northwest.
He stepped over a few teak oars and tossed aside an old orange life vest that water, air, and the seasons had turned hard as concrete. He took a few more steps and ran his hand over the old boards along the windows. He leaned closer, squinting at the wood siding because he’d left his glasses in the cabin sitting next to his cell phone, electronic daytimer and briefcase.
He ran his hand over the old cedar boards carefully and more tentatively than any of his business associates would have thought possible. He was certain they thought he never did anything tentatively.
Yet his hands moved with care, the same way he’d wiped away her tears almost thirty years before. He stopped suddenly, his hand freezing in one splintered spot.
There, in the boards, were the ragged letters: M P + C W.
Summer, 1960
The first time he’d ever seen her he was fourteen and she was eleven. He was on an errand for his grandfather, walking down the gravel path that cut from his grandfather’s cabin, through the forest, and on to the old summer place.
She was hanging upside-down from an old pine tree, her skinned knees hooked over a low thick branch. She was swinging back and forth, so her long blond braids dangled like Tarzan’s jungle ropes. The whole time she hummed “Alley Oop” while she blew the biggest pink bubble he’d ever seen.
He didn’t know you could hum and blow bubble gum at the same time. As he walked past her, there was a loud pop!
“Who are you?” She swung up so she was straddling the branch with one leg, while the other dangled down. Her palms propped up her body and she stared down at him.
Needles and pine dust fell all over him and scowling he wiped off his face and head. On the same level as his nose was a pair of red canvas shoes with no shoelaces and the word Keds on the scuffed rubber tips. He slowly looked upward along her gangly freckled legs and scabbed-over knees to her small indignant face, which looked like a troll doll.
“I asked you who you were,” she repeated as if she were the queen of the island.
“I’m looking for a Mr. Wardwell.”
“Oh.” She blew another bubble, sucked in and popped it in an obnoxious way, then asked, “Why are ya lookin’ for him?”
“None of your business, Squirt.” Michael turned his back on her and started to walk down the gravel path that led toward the old house.
She jumped out of the tree and appeared beside him. “My name’s not Squirt. It’s Catherine.”
He grunted some response and kept walking.
“Hey! What’s your name?” she called out after him.
“It’s Mr. Packard,” he said to annoy her.
“You’re not Mr. Packard,” she said, skipping alongside of him. “Mr. Packard is taller and older and he has gray hair and a dog named King Crab.”
Michael ignored her.
“And he’s not a grump. Like you.”
He stopped and looked down her.
Her expression dared him to ignore her again.
“He’s my grandfather,” he told her and started walking away again.
She kept up with him, not saying anything, but he could feel her studying him. He looked at her finally. All he saw was an expressive face and a pair of frowning brown eyes that were the same color as root beer.
They were on the narrowest section of the sea cliff trail where it paralleled the water. He slowed his steps. “Watch it there, Squirt.” He grabbed her arm. “There’s a cliff on that side of the path. Fall down it and you’ll land in the water. Really cold water.”
She frowned down at his hand gripping her arm, then wriggled free with a stubborn independence and looked up at him. She stared for the longest time. “We come here every summer. I’ve never seen you here before.”
He wasn’t going to tell some kid why he had to live here.
But she wouldn’t shut up. “Where’d you come from anyway?”
“The stork dropped me down the chimney.”
“Funny.” She called him a dork under her breath.
He almost laughed then.
When he said nothing she piped up, “I’m not a baby, you know.”
He snorted and walked on.
“I know all about things like why the ocean is blue.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I know how planes fly and why engines need oil—” She paused as if she were waiting for him to make her prove it.
After a moment she announced, “And I know all about sex.”
He stopped and looked down at her. Then he did laugh. Loud and long, because she was so silly.
She planted her hands on her boyish hips, raised her chin, and said, “I do.”
He just shook his head and moved farther down the path. He could hear her running after him.
“Go ahead. Ask me something.”
“No.”
“But I know…” Her voice suddenly changed to a scream.
Michael turned.
One instant she was wobbling on the edge of the path, and before he could reach out, she tumbled down the hillside toward the water, hollering all the way.
Michael swore under his breath and went after her, sliding down the steep hillside feet-first.
She was still screaming. Below him he saw her hit the water. Rock and dirt and mud tumbled down ahead of him. The whole time he was watching for her silly head to pop up out of the glassy surface.
It didn’t.
He panicked and shoved off the hill in a half-dive. He hit the water just a foot away from where she’d sank. He dove down deeper.
The water was deep here and icy cold. She was frantic, kicking out and waving her arms like someone who couldn’t swim.
He clamped his arm around her wiggling, scrawny body and pushed upward. She stopped kicking and he felt her small hands tightly grip his forearm as they rose through the water.
Their heads broke the surface and he heard her gasp for breath. He swam through the water, pulling her with him to a rocky beach. He crawled onshore with her hanging limply under one arm.
Once they were safely on the gravel beach she stiffened and rolled away from him. She just lay there. She had her face buried in her folded arms, and her back rose with each gasp for breath. He knew she was going to be all right when she began to cough.
He sat up, resting his arms on his knees, and watched her. After a minute he could see one brown eye peeking out from her arms. He shook his head and gave her a stern look. “You need to watch where you walk, Squirt.”
She buried her head deeper in her arms and muttered something.
“What did you say?”
She scowled over at him. “I said I fell on purpose.” Her chin jutted out like a mule he’d seen once. “I wanted to see how cold the water was.”
They both knew she was lying.
She was too proud to admit she’d slipped and fallen in.
He stood, then looked down at her wet face staring up at him with a look that dared him to argue with her. He could have called her bluff. But he didn’t. Pride was something he understood. He turned away and started to walk toward the cove just beyond the rocky beach.
Behind him he heard her mumble that she wasn’t some squirty kid, that she was Catherine Wardwell and she did know all about sex.
He stopped and turned back around. “Hey, Squirt.”
She was standing now, looking right at him.
“If I were you, I’d stop trying to learn ‘all about sex’ and just learn how to swim.”
Three
Summer, 1963
The Wardwells were coming back to Spruce Island. For the past three years they had returned every June, and each year Catherine Wardwell spent most of the month bugging him. He’d discovered she had an annoying habit of popping up at the worst possible moment, like when he was in the woods drinking the beers he’d found in a boat his grandfather had loaned to some sportmen. Or when he was making out with a girl named Kristy behind the old well house near the cove where her parents had moored their boat.
It was June again, and like Dylan had sung, the times they were-a-changing. The Coca-Cola Company made a major move in packaging, from bottle containers to aluminum cans. The Beach Boys hit number one on the pop charts, and Dr. Strangelove or Why I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb opened in theaters with My Fair Lady.
But for Michael, June was hell month. Catherine Wardwell was back.
She was fourteen now, and she wore something called Erase for lipstick; it made her look too pale. She’d cut her hair short like some Seventeen magazine cover model. She looked pudgy and awkward and silly, as if she were trying too hard to be older.
He told her she wore too much makeup and looked half-dead. She told him his oxford shirt was buttoned too high and made him look like a geek.
It didn’t take long for her to get in his hair again. During that first week he woke up one morning and caught her peeking in the cabin window. He slipped outside and turned the hose on her.
The second week she stole a pack of cigarettes from him and had broken them all in two. He hadn’t cared much about smoking, just carried them to be cool, but to spite her he smoked all the stubs and blew the smoke in her face. She was so pig-headed she stood there and refused to run away.
But the worst incident was the afternoon he’d found a letter his dad had written to his grandfather on the day he was born, a letter that was filled with a father’s pride and dreams, things that only reminded Michael of the family he had lost.
No one had ever seen him cry; his pride would not let him show that he hurt.
But she saw him cry that day, when he was seventeen and sitting on a rock in a deserted section of the island. He thought he was alone when he sat there and sobbed in his knees.
That day she had walked right up to him and picked up the letter.
He cursed at her and tried to grab it away from her, but he could only see blurred images through his wet eyes.
She quickly stuffed it in her bra and ran away.
He didn’t have the energy to chase after her, so he just stared off into the distance, trying hard to picture his dad’s face and seeing nothing but the shadow of a tall man.
In a few minutes she came back, walking quietly.
From her tentative steps and her somber manner he could tell she’d read the letter.
She sat down next to him and handed him the crumpled paper.
He didn’t take it. Didn’t look at her. He only wanted to be left alone.
She began to smooth the paper against a rock, a lame effort to try to flatten it back to the way it had been.
It was a stupid thing to do. Like not having his dad anymore would hurt less if the letter weren’t creased.
She stopped after a minute and said nothing. Time passed in awkward and tense seconds that seemed to last an hour, one of those moments where you want to run away and hide from everything.
But she just sat there right next to him, so close that he could feel the warmth from her where their shoulders almost touched. She folded her hands in her lap and hung her head. Then she did the one thing he’d never expected.
She cried with him.
Summer, 1966
For the first time since 1963, the Wardwells had come back to the island. It was the same day he got his draft notice.
Dear Mr. Packard,
Greetings from the President of the United States…
There was no doubt the letter would change his future. The draft situation had newspapers and television stations full of protests and debates where activists argued against war, declaring the draft was archaic and unfair. Claiming you couldn’t buy beer, but you could die for your country. You couldn’t vote for the president of the United States, but you had to kill if he ordered you to.
Some who got the same letter went off to war. Some ran to Canada. But Michael just read the notice and set it down. He didn’t know how he felt about any of it. To him war seemed so far away, farther away than Vietnam. He went off into the woods to work so he wouldn’t have to think.
He hadn’t known the Wardwells were back this year. They hadn’t been back for two years so there was no reason to expect them. The moment Michael saw her leave the old house and walk down the beach toward the dock, he forgot all about the draft notice.
He was hidden in a group of cedar and maple trees that circled the cove. He was cutting wood from a tree that had fallen during the winter when he heard the hinges squeak and a screen door slam. He cast a quick glance toward the old Victorian rental house where a girl in a bright pink bikini came down the front porch steps and crossed the lawn.
He leaned a shoulder against a tree and just watched her. She had a body that was better than last month’s centerfold.
Then he recognized her face.
Gone was the pudgy and awkward blonde teen who wore too much makeup and followed him everywhere. She was taller now, a good three inches, and her shape blew him away. He remembered a poster he’d seen in Seattle, one of a soaking wet Ursula Andress dressed in a wet skin-colored bikini, her hair slicked back and her face and body guaranteed to make a man wake up in one helluva sweat.
He shook his head in disbelief. Gawky little Catherine Wardwell—the pest who knew all about sex, spied on him through windows, and had seen him cry—could have put the sexy Ursula to shame.
He felt a stab of something earthy and carnal go clear through the center of him. The ax slipped from his hand and hit the ground with a dull thud. He swore under his breath and shifted slightly.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. And he didn’t want to.
Her hair was lighter, longer and straighter; it brushed her shoulders as she walked down to the end of the dock where a red and blue nautical beach towel lay spread out and a transistor radio with a tall silver antenna played the Lovin’ Spoonful.
He leaned against the tree and crossed his arms, then blew out a breath slowly, kind of a half whistle of amazement that a girl could be put together that way.
She bent over and tossed something on the towel.
He groaned and closed his eyes. He heard the music throbbing through the air with the same beat that his heart pounded. He opened his eyes because he couldn’t hide any longer. He had to see her.
She was standing with her toes curled over the edge of the dock, her stance stiff and straight, her arms raised high, ready to dive.
He shoved off from the tree and moved down toward her. This year things had changed; he was following her.
She dove in.
When she hit the water, his breath caught and held as if he had to hold his own breath along with her. He walked faster, down the dock toward the water. But when he reached the towel, he stopped. He stood there staring at the rings of water she left behind, while the music from the radio blared out over the cove.
Her head broke through the surface, sleek and golden and wet. He bent and flicked down the volume on the radio, then he straightened and waited until she turned in the water.
She froze the instant she saw him. “Michael?”
Her voice was older and throaty. It made him think of things like smooth soft skin. Hot deep kisses. And Trojans.
He took two steps to the edge of the dock and squatted down, resting a hand on his thigh. He just looked at her and enjoyed the view. The air grew hotter and tighter and felt heavy.
She swam toward him.
He reached out a hand to her. “Hi, Squirt.”
She put her hand in his and he straightened, pulling her up with him while he watched the water run down her body.
She stood close to him, so close that all he had to do was lean forward and their bodies would touch. Chest to chest. Hip to hip. Mouth to mouth. He had a strange and laughable vision of them touching and steam suddenly fogging up the air around them.
She was five foot ten or so. No longer a little squirt. But it didn’t matter because she still had to look up at him. He was six foot two.
She slid her hand from his grip, turned away and grabbed the towel. She used it to cover herself while she awkwardly pretended to dry off.
He hadn’t moved, only watched her. He said nothing until she finally glanced up at him. He gave her a long look she’d have to be blind not to understand.
She got it. Her face flushed and she looked down quickly, rubbing the hell out of her legs so she missed the grin he had to bite to hide. She straightened then, still holding the towel. She raised her chin a little, defiant and challenging, the Catherine he remembered.
A moment passed. A minute maybe two. Neither said anything. They just stood on the dock and looked at each other under the warm and unpredictable sunshine. He felt like a thirsty man staring at an icy cold beer.
She dropped the act and returned his look, then whispered his name in that raspy grown-up voice he felt go all the way through him. “Michael.”
Just Michael.
And he was lost.
Time seemed to pass quickly after that. On days when it rained that misty rain that sometimes clouded the islands, they walked on the beach together, not minding the moodiness of the weather. The sunsets grew later and later as summer crept into the Northwest, and they fell in love.
They swam in the cove where the water was shallow and warm enough to enjoy. He taught her to sail. The first time a heavy summer rain hit, they moored and took shelter inside the sailboat’s small cabin, laughing at the foolish weather and eating a lunch of egg-salad sandwiches and barbecued potato chips she’d brought along.
The flavor of salt and barbecue spices lingered on her lips. Years later he could still not eat barbecued potato chips without thinking of that day, where a six-foot by six-foot sailboat cabin was too small and things quickly grew intense, so much so that they ended up moored to an old buoy and necking for most of the afternoon.
After that day, whenever they took the boat out he silently prayed for rain. Finally, rain or not, they spent afternoons in the cabin of his boat, where things got hot and heavy, where they would steam up the small mirror above the hard bunk and leave the sloop with their lips swollen and their bodies tense with need.
Michael learned the true meaning of wanting a woman that month. He learned the dark side of sex: the forbidden guilt and hunger that was teenage love. He would lie awake at night so hard from the mere thought of her that he couldn’t sleep. And when she would look at him in that way she had, as if he knew the answers to all the questions in the world, he felt real and alive, as if he could take on the world just for her. He learned that when you were young, nothing else mattered but the girl you loved.
One day he oiled the hinges on the old screen door because it gave him an excuse to be near her. She slipped out of the old house for the first time that night and met him walking in the woods where he pinned her against a tree and kissed the hell out of her, unhooked her bra and felt her up.
All he had to do was touch Catherine and both of them burned up. But they didn’t just touch and kiss and steam up the glass. Sometimes they would sit, hidden by those big old gray rocks near the cove, and watch the night drift by them.
And they would talk. About her hometown. About the war. About the poetry she loved. About the music he loved. About how Bob Dylan and Paul Simon were both poets and musicians. They talked about life and death and dreams.
She taught him the names of the stars because she said when he touched her and kissed her she always felt as if he took her clear up to those stars.
He didn’t care that she was seventeen and he was almost twenty. He didn’t care that the world thought he was a man who was ready to go to war, while she had one more year of high school and was jailbait.
He didn’t care because when he kissed Catherine Wardwell, nothing else in the whole goddamned screwed-up world mattered. Until the night they couldn’t stop and went all the way, the same night he’d carved their initials in the wood.
The same night her father caught them in the boathouse.
Four
San Francisco, 1997
Catherine slipped off her glasses and sagged back in her chair, staring out at the pink Victorian across the street from her office. It was four o’clock and almost every ten minutes there had been an urgent call.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and saw stars. When her vision cleared, she was looking at her desktop, where a cluster of silver-framed images of her daughters Alyson and Dana were grinning back at her.
In a frame with delicate ballet shoes decorating the corners was a photograph of Dana, her oldest daughter, dressed in a pink tutu, her blonde hair scraped back off her small heart-shaped face. She had been six then and had no front teeth. Her gummy smile looked almost too big for her face. There was another shot next to it of her sitting on Santa’s knee, her eyes turned up to him in complete awe. And the last photo was taken only a few months ago when Dana went to the Sadie Hawkins dance.
She turned to Alyson’s pictures. There was her second-grade photo taken the day after she’d tried to cut her own bangs; she looked like she’d had a fight with a lawnmower. Every time Catherine saw that photo she smiled.
There was no picture of Aly on Santa’s knee. Aly had always preferred animals to humans. She had liked Disney’s Robin Hood better than Sleeping Beauty. She wouldn’t go near Santa because when she was three the older kids at her preschool had told her there was no such thing as Santa Claus. After that day, Santa meant nothing to her.
Now the Easter Bunny, well, that was different. Those kids hadn’t said anything about the Easter Bunny. So instead of a Santa photo, there was one of Aly sitting on top of the Easter Bunny’s furry knee, her hands cupping his pink fuzzy cheeks while she demanded to know how he got around to all the houses in the world and managed to hide all those eggs in only one night. One of Aly’s typical questions—the kind that were hard to answer.
Catherine glanced back at the stack of report folders in a jagged pile on her desk, then up at the smiling images of her daughters. She picked up the phone, punched in a series of numbers and got Seattle information.
Fifteen minutes later she had rented the same quaint Victorian house in the same cove on the same secluded San Juan island where she’d spent so many summers.
This June, she vowed, would be different for her girls.
It was different. Her girls didn’t want to go.
Dana had to turn down a free ticket to a rock concert at Great America and Aly was going to miss a birthday party at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. Aly had eventually accepted Catherine’s decision to go to the island, especially after Catherine had bribed her by letting her bring along her cat Harold. But fifteen year old Dana was still scowling at the world. Nothing worked with her. If there had been a high school course in sulking, Dana would have aced the class.
Over an hour ago they had left the ferry at Orcas, purchased their supplies and loaded everything into a boat run by Blakely Charters. Until January, when daily ferry service would start to Spruce Island, the charter company made two runs a week. Sundays and Thursdays. Other than by seaplane, hiring a boat was the only way to get to the more remote and secluded islands of the San Juans.
It was late and the sun was sliding down the horizon; it turned the cotton clouds in the western sky gold, purple and red. Catherine leaned over the bow of the boat and pointed west. “Girls! Quick! Look at that sky!”
She had forgotten how gorgeous the sunsets were here. The color. The sheer beauty of nature. No one could possibly visit this part of the world and not believe in the perfect hand of God.
She turned toward her silent daughters to share their first sight of a Northwest summer sunset, and her heart sank.
Dana sat with her back to her, staring out at the water like a prisoner heading for death row. In her lap was an open copy of Stephen King’s Green Mile series. Without looking at Catherine, she blinked once, then buried her nose back in the book.
Dana’s sulking hurt Catherine. She didn’t want to let on that Dana had gotten to her, so she looked away. Aly had on a set of headphones. She was head-bopping to some song that shrieked through the headphone earpieces.
Catherine reached over, picked up the empty CD case, and read the name.
Alanis Morrisette.
She felt as if she were a hundred years old. She hated that music. Then she remembered how much her dad had disliked her Bob Dylan albums. She asked herself the question she always asked when she was dealing with the girls.
Will it matter in five years?
Dana’s sulking wouldn’t matter and hopefully some other hot young singer would be Aly’s favorite—if she still had her hearing.
The generation gap between her and her daughters felt as if it were as wide as the Grand Canyon. But she did know one thing—her relationship with her daughters would matter in five years.
She wanted her girls back, not these two young people she didn’t know anymore. She desperately wanted what few memories they could make this month, something special for them to look back on the same way she looked back on the island and those summers from her childhood.
She thought of this trip as a fresh start; she needed to be a mother again.
Catherine reached across and snatched the book out of Dana’s hands. “You can read this later.” She tucked it inside her duffel bag, then she punched the off button on Aly’s CD player and gestured for her to take off the headphones.
Both girls gaped at her.
She pointed ahead of them. “That’s Spruce Island,” she told them in a classic mother’s tone that demanded their attention—now.
Against the horizon the island was a camel-shaped lump of rocks and trees and natural coastline that grew larger the closer they got.
“I loved that island when I was your age. My favorite memories are there and it’s important to me that we spend time together so you can see what a wonderful place it is.”
They continued to look at her, then turned in unison to look at the island ahead of them.
“There are no houses,” Dana said in a voice that implied it was the very ends of the earth.
“There are summer houses, a few cabins and a village on the other side of the island. You can’t see them on this side. It’s more isolated. The island has always been a place where people go to get away.” She paused, then added, “Like us.”
They turned back around. From the looks on their faces you’d think she had just spoken Greek.
“The first houses were summer homes built late in the nineteenth century. Those hills are parkland and there are hiking trails.”
Dana frowned at her. “You hate hiking. You said you’d rather chew on foil than traipse up some mountain.”
“Yeah,” Aly said, siding with her sister. “You said smart people leave mountain climbing to the goats.”
Catherine realized she would never have to worry about losing her memory. She had her daughters to remind her of every single thing she had ever said.
“Fine. Forget about hiking. As I was saying, the house is on a cove on the western side of the island. There’s a private dock and a mooring. The rental agent said the owners still keep a sailboat. We’re free to use it. There are supposed to be bikes, too. When we used to come here there was a handyman’s cabin on a nearby inlet and a small harbor where boats from the mainland could moor. Other than that the island is pretty isolated.”
Twenty minutes later they stood at the end of a gray weathered dock, their bags and supplies stacked like building blocks and Harold whining in his cat carrier. There was nothing before them but silvery water. Catherine watched the boat turn around in a wide swath and head back for the mainland.
For just one moment she looked around her and was a little scared. It was secluded, and they were three women alone.
She raised a hand to her forehead and scanned the island. The large house was partially hidden by cedar and maple trees, but Catherine could see the sharp roofline. The old shingles were green with algae and moss, the way everything grew green in the dampness of the islands.
She took a deep breath, bent down, picked up a duffel and two plastic bags of groceries, then she marched bravely down the dock toward the rocky beach. Over her shoulder she called out, “Grab something and let’s go, girls. It’s getting dark.”
Five
It wasn’t dark enough.
Not to hide what time and weather had done to the old house. It was painted the same color yellow with the same white trim. Catherine walked toward the house and the closer she got the more she realized that the house looked the same because it was probably the same coat of paint as in 1966. It certainly looked about thirty years old.
Behind her she heard Dana’s shoes crunching on the gravel. A second later she heard a gasp.
“Mo-ther!”
“What?” Catherine snapped and turned around. She wasn’t ready for a confrontation.
“What are those?” With her horrified expression, Dana stood pointing at the ground. Next to her Aly clutched the cat carrier to her chest the way one holds a child after a close call.
Catherine looked at the ground. “They’re slugs.”
“Ugh!” Both girls shivered and stepped back.
“Oh God! I stepped on one!” Dana dropped her backpack and jumped around, shrieking.
It was the most life she’d shown since Catherine told the girls about the trip and she’d given her best Mother-you are-going-to-ruin-my-life act.
“Get it off! Get it off!”
“Stop hopping all over the place. You’ll step on another one.”
Dana froze.
“Just wipe your shoe off on the grass.”
Dana moaned, then hobbled over to a patch of wet grass and made a big to-do about wiping off her shoe.
Aly had shifted her cat carrier and was scanning the ground. “Do they travel with a mate?”
“I have no idea. They’re just like the snails we have at home only without the shells.” Catherine quickly checked the ground for slugs, then set down her bags. She had for gotten about those huge slugs that slithered all over the place whenever it rained.
“This place is awful,” Dana muttered from behind her.
“It’s not awful. It’s rustic and quaint,” Catherine told her, trying to keep her voice light but not feeling light at all.
Dana snorted.
“Follow me.” She could hear the girls whispering behind her and Harold began to whine. She didn’t really blame them. She had a bad feeling about this. She opened the screen door and held it with her shoulder while she pulled the rental envelope with the key out of her pocket and unlocked the front door.
Please, she thought, please let the inside be better than the outside.
Better was a relative term.
The inside wasn’t the Four Seasons. Catherine looked around the room. It was clean and neat and furnished in an odd mishmash of styles. There was an eastlake style sofa upholstered in a brown and red western print with bronco-riding cowboys, red and black lariats, and a smattering of green horseshoes. There were throw pillows scattered across it—one was yellow gingham, one was needlepoint bulldogs, and the other was black and white and shaped like a soccer ball. A Blackwatch plaid stadium blanket with the Mariners emblem embroidered in the corner was thrown over the edge of a brown recliner. Next to it was a white French provincial chair that looked exactly like one her grandmother had in front of her bedroom dressing table.
The coffee table was a huge wooden piece with burned edges, something you see in a roadside stand next to the velvet paintings of Elvis. In the center of the table was a monkeypod bowl with a silver nut cracker and a chrome and black leather ashtray. The end tables weren’t end tables at all, but small dressers. One was painted aqua and the other canary yellow. The aqua dresser had a white milkglass lamp with a beige ruffled shade. The only other light in the room was a red and orange lava lamp.
“Who decorated this place?” Dana said with a disgusted voice.
“Dale Evans and Barbara Cartland,” Catherine said as she set down the bags.
“Who?”
“James Bond and the Monkees?”
“James Bond and the Monkees?” Aly repeated. “Was that a rock group in the olden days?”
“Hey, hey, we’re the mon-kees,” Catherine sang, bopping her head as she did the Pony across the linoleum in the kitchen.
Her daughters looked at each other and rolled their eyes. She sighed. Her children had their father’s sense of humor.
“Yes, the Monkees were a rock group and surely you know who James Bond is.”
“Oh yeah. I forgot. Pierce Brosnan, huh?”
“Sean Connery.”
“The old guy? Uh-uh,” Aly shook her head. “He was Indiana Jones’s dad.”
Catherine felt ancient.
Aly dropped the grocery bags on a rag rug and plopped down on the cowboy sofa. She switched on the lamp. “I love lava lamps.” She rested her chin in her hands and watched the lamp bubble.
Catherine watched her youngest daughter and was overcome with a sense of déjà vu. Aly was dressed in bell-bottomed jeans, a wide black belt, and a skinny turtleneck. She even had on a thick white headband and a flip hairdo like the Breck girl.
“Can we get one, Mom?”
“One what?”
“A lava lamp.”
Catherine hadn’t liked lava lamps back when they were new. To her they were in the same category as Chia pets and diet tablets that helped you lose ten pounds overnight.
Aly was staring at her through the liquid of the lamp.
“We’ll see.”
“Where’s the TV?” Dana looked at her and popped her gum.
Here it comes, Catherine thought. She opened the refrigerator and started putting things inside. When she had her head sufficiently hidden behind the door she said, “There is no TV.”
It took a few minutes before she could get a word in between their melodramatic protests. Aly was going to miss “Nick at Night” and Dana just plain hated the island and wanted to go home, where “it was normal.” And she wanted to go now.
“You need to give this place a chance. And even if I was willing to leave—which I’m not—there’s no boat until Thursday.”
Catherine crossed the room to the bookcase made of cinderblock and wood planks. “There’s a whole wall of books here.” She opened a huge cabinet. “Look in here. I see stacks of puzzles and games.”
Dana shifted her gaze to the cabinet. “Oh yea!” She clapped her hands like a baby. “Candyland and Chutes and Ladders.”
Catherine looked inside. “Don’t be smart. There are adult games in here, too. And puzzles are always fun. We used to do those at home.” She pulled out the top puzzle box. “Look at this one. It’s a thousand-piece puzzle of a pepperoni pizza. You both like pizza.”
Aly stood next to her and looked inside. She tilted her head sideways to read. “What’s this? Two thousand pieces.” She looked back at Catherine. “We’ve never done a puzzle with that many pieces. Have you?”
Catherine shook her head.
Aly read the puzzle label. “It says Classic Puzzle Series: Metal Rockers.”
Catherine pictured a photograph made up of sleek, chrome and black leather Brancusi rocking chairs cut up into thousands of tiny pieces all shaped like Mickey Mouse. She smiled. It would be the kind of puzzle that was almost impossible to do in less than three days. “Take it out, Aly, and let’s take a look.”
Aly held up the box and they stared down at the lid. A whole group of chalk-white faces framed with wild black hairdos stared back at them.
Catherine felt her smile fade.
“Cool!” Dana said, taking the box from her sister. “It’s Aerosmith and Kiss.” Both girls moved over to the sofa as if they were chasing concert tickets, sat down and dumped out a huge pile of tiny puzzle pieces on the coffee table.
Dana looked up impatiently. “Come on, Mom.”
“Let’s get comfortable first.” Catherine ran toward the downstairs bedroom. “Last one in their sweats has to make dinner!”
A few minutes later when she walked back into the room wearing old sweats, she found Dana already in her flannel pajamas and sprawled out on the sofa with Aly’s cat asleep on her stomach.
“No Aly?”
Dana shook her head. “She couldn’t find her boxers.”
Catherine grinned. “Good. I don’t have to cook.”
A minute later Aly came running down the stairs wearing a pair of white cotton boxers patterned with bright red lips and a cropped T-shirt that said Smile and Kiss Me. She looked at Dana, then at Catherine. “I’m last, huh?”
They nodded.
Aly was a trooper. She just shrugged, walked over to the sofa and scooped up her cat. “I know exactly what I’m fixing for dinner.”
“What?” Catherine asked.
She exchanged a sly look with Dana, then said, “It’s a surprise.”
Catherine didn’t care what she made as long as the girls were reasonably happy for now. She’d take this one moment at a time. She walked toward the coffee table, then started to sit opposite it on the floor.
“Sit here, Mom.” Aly tucked the cat onto her hip, shifted sides of the coffee table, then sank gracefully down to the rug. “You don’t want to sit on the floor. Remember that time you couldn’t get up?”
“I’d been skiing all day,” Catherine said defensively.
Her daughters exchanged a look that said, “Yeah. Sure.”
“I had.” Catherine sat down on the Dale Evans sofa.
Dana laughed, a refreshing sound, then in a falsetto voice she said, “Help! Help! I’ve fallen down and I can’t get up!”
Aly caught on and said, “We’ll order you one of those clapper things, Mom.”
“Funny. Real funny.” Catherine tried to look serious and failed. Both her girls were grinning at her. For the first time in the last few days she thought that perhaps her plan just might work. The three of them were talking together and joking with each other. The girls were laughing instead of ignoring her.
“I found a corner piece!” Aly said, hunched over the puzzle with Harold purring in her lap. She sat up, her pert little nose in the air. “I was first.”
A minute later, in the name of good old healthy female competition, they all lost themselves to the other one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.
Six
Michael was outside cutting wood when the air began to fill with the smell of rain. Daylight had faded away and the wind was picking up, so he went inside. He hung his jacket on the old iron coat-rack, next to where his grandfather’s tool belt still hung on the exact same hook as it had for almost forty years.
He’d kept that belt around long after his grandfather had died. The canvas was frayed, the edges were black with grease, and the leather was cracked. At first he’d told himself he kept it around because they didn’t make tool belts like they used to, with a slot for a flashlight and for tools.
Hell. Now they made tool belts out of space-age, NASA-developed weave that was stronger than canvas and leather could ever be.
The truth was, he’d kept it for sentimental reasons. And he still used it. Maybe he wore it because he was trying to recapture his past. Maybe he was just old and needed something from his youth to cling to.
He turned away, not really giving a damn why he wore the thing. He just did.
He crossed the room and started a fire, then went into the kitchen where he made some soup. He stood at the stove and ate right from the pan. He ate most of his meals that way, when he was home alone and too lazy to dirty a plate or to bother with sitting down at a table.
Unless there was a football game on TV, then he sat down in front of his big screen while he ate from the pan.
Single people had singular habits. He drank milk and orange juice from the carton while standing at the open refrigerator, his arm resting on the door. He dipped his toast in the jam jar. He didn’t pick up his socks or make his bed unless someone was going to join him in it. He usually left the cap off the toothpaste and squeezed the tube from the middle.
He knew himself pretty well, he thought as he crossed the room. He picked up the latest issue of Money magazine, then set down a glass of Jack Daniel’s on a small table and sat in an old comfortable chair in front of the older rock fireplace that blazed and crackled with a fire.
He propped his feet up on a tired leather ottoman and relaxed—something he couldn’t seem to do much of lately. At some point he had lost the ability to sleep on planes. Hell, sometimes he even lost the ability to sleep in a hotel room, and it didn’t seem to matter how exhausted he was.
At this moment, though, he wasn’t tired. But he knew he could easily fall asleep in the old chair if he just closed his eyes. There was a comfort in knowing he could do something easily, something that had until now eluded him.
He chose to sip his drink and look around him instead of escaping to sleep. He had a strong sense that he was where he belonged, in a place that seemed to fit him better than his sleek glass offices or his huge home.
He’d gotten so he only lived in three of the rooms in that enormous house on the water. Usually he came in through the garage, because when he walked in the front doors he felt as if he were walking into the Guggenheim.
Here he was surrounded by old things. He liked old things.
He took his glasses out of his flannel shirt pocket and slipped them on, then began to read the magazine. The Asian markets were on a downtrend and the Wall Street wizards expected the NASDAQ to drop. Some hotshot at Merrill Lynch predicted Letni stock to drop and profits to be down.
Michael had been reading about and hearing those rumors for over a year. But each quarter the company proved to be stronger than ever. This magazine issue was barely a week old, yet just yesterday, before he’d loaded the boat with supplies and motored to the island, Letni had released to the public the profit reports for the last quarter.
They were twice as high as he had expected.
He laughed and tossed the magazine into the fireplace, where it curled into dark flame that was as black as the magazine’s predictions. He watched it burn, then picked up his drink and mockingly raised his glass to the jackass who’d written the article.
Michael toasted him with two extremely crude words.
By eight o’clock Catherine and the girls had polished off six cans of cream soda, a can of cheese Pringles, a box of Wheat Thins and two containers of Allouette spread, five apples, a slab of Tillamook cheese and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s Wavy Gravy ice cream—Aly’s idea of dinner.
“One more piece and we’ll have the outside frame done.” Catherine stuck her spoon in the empty ice cream carton and scanned the table for a piece that had a flat edge.
Dana was chewing on a handful of smoked almonds—a gift from Catherine’s mother—and eyeing the small puzzle pieces with a determined look on her face. It seemed that Dana was driven to find that puzzle piece.
But not Aly. She had given up on the puzzle frame and was putting together Gene Simmons’s chalky face. Even upside-down Catherine could see that in the photograph his tongue was sticking out.
She suddenly wished they were putting together a picture of Bambi, Thumper and Flower. She sighed in that quiet, tired way, when you knew time had slipped past far too quickly, then went back to the puzzle.
A few minutes later she had an awful thought. “If this puzzle is missing any pieces I’m going to scream.”
Almost simultaneously she spotted the last outside end piece.
Aha!
She locked her eyes on it and casually set down the empty ice cream carton. Then she leaned forward and quickly reached across the table to snatch up the puzzle piece.
At that very same moment the lights went out.
It didn’t take Catherine long to remember that whenever a storm hit Spruce Island, the power went out. The sudden and complete island darkness could jar your memory quickly.
There were no streetlights here. Just the stars and the moon, and on some rainy nights, not even that.
What she saw in the darkness was the remembered image of her father cursing at the old generator behind the rental house. She could remember her mother holding an umbrella and scolding her dad for cursing, and how Catherine always got to hold the flashlight so her dad could see inside the generator while he cursed at it.
So she and the girls went outside, loaded with one big old metal flashlight and a huge Mary Poppins-sized umbrella. Dana whipped the flashlight back and forth across the ground. She was on slug patrol.
Aly carried the umbrella. Catherine stumbled on a rock and almost fell on her face; she couldn’t see because Dana, her slug-fearing daughter, had the flashlight shining near her own feet instead of the path that ran toward the north end of the yard.
Catherine stopped and turned around. “Dana.”
“Huh?”
“Keep the flashlight ahead of us so I don’t fall and kill myself.”
Dana never even looked up at her.
Huddled under the umbrella with Aly, Catherine tapped Dana on the arm. “I promise no slugs are going to suddenly leap up from the ground and latch on to your face like that monster did in Alien.”
“Oh, Mom.”
Catherine stopped in front of a small wooden garden shed with a trap door. “Ah, here it is. Voila!” She paused and waved her hand dramatically. “This, my girls, is a generator…I think. Hold the flashlight up, Dana.”
“Does it work?” Dana asked, glancing up for only one brief second before she turned her gaze back to the grass.
“I don’t know. It used to drive your grandpa nuts, though. I’d come out here with him and hold the flashlight. Like you are, Dana. Aim it here, sweetie. That’s right. I can still remember him banging on this metal thing when he couldn’t get it to work. He made so much noise you could have heard him hammering on it all the way across the island. He used to say a generator is like a mule. It needs a swift kick to get going.”
A few minutes later, the wind had picked up and the rain was coming down so hard it bounced back up from the ground. Over five times Catherine had read and followed the old instructions that were engraved on a metal plate attached to the lid, and still nothing happened.
“Who writes these things?” she muttered. “Probably the same people who write software manuals.”
She took the flashlight from Dana and banged the generator a good one.
The motor gave a half-hearted start, then suddenly died.
“Oh Mom! It almost started!” Dana reached for the flashlight. “Let me try.” She hit it a few times.
The generator started up with a loud coughing rev like a huge lawnmower.
She and the girls cheered, then she took the flashlight from Dana and turned to trudge back to the porch. The clouds slipped by steadily and the moon cracked through with bright silver light. The wind blew in sudden, whipping gusts and caught the umbrella; it slipped from Aly’s hands and tumbled across the yard like an shiny wet acrobat.
They chased after it, all of them yelling “I’ll get it! I’ll get it!” Dana made a grab for it at the same time as Aly. Both girls fell in the mud just as the umbrella danced away from their outstretched hands.
Catherine looked down at her muddy children and began to laugh. “First one to get the umbrella doesn’t have to do any dishes for a week!” She ran after the umbrella while her girls scrambled after her.
“You’re cheating, Mom! You had a head start!”
“That’s because I’m old!” she shouted over her shoulder as she ran in front of them.
It became a game, one of them reaching for the umbrella just as the wind snatched it away, leaving behind nothing but their laughter. They were so wet the umbrella wouldn’t have done them a bit of good, but it didn’t matter. Between the stubborn and wild Winslow women, one of them was going to get that blasted umbrella.
Soaking wet and shouting, Catherine was now the closest to it. She gave a triumphant holler and launched after it like a missile.
One moment she was standing, the next she slipped in the mud and skidded on her stomach across the wet grass, all to the sound of her daughters’ laughter being carried upward by that rascally wind.
Mud splashed up into her face and through her wet hair, but she didn’t care. She hadn’t had this much fun since she was ten and her dad had brought home a bright yellow Slip ‘n Slide he’d attached to the garden hose in the yard.
“Yahoo! I’ve got it!” She laughed and hooted, then scrambled up and chased the umbrella, until she realized she couldn’t run fast enough to catch it. So she dove toward the wet ground on purpose and just slid after it on her belly.
Right into a large pair of Wellington boots.
A man’s Wellington boots.
For a second she stared at the huge rubber tips, partially sunken in the new mud, then slowly raised her wet head to look up.
The moonlight was behind him and all she could see was a tall silhouette of a man holding the umbrella. He shined a flashlight in her face and held it there.
She squinted and held up her hand to block out the glare.
Without a word he turned the light away from her.
She stared up at him.
His features were blurred, so she swiped the mud and water from her face and slapped her wet hair out of her eyes. Just for good measure she pulled the flashlight out of her jacket and shone it upward, figuring she could either blind him or beat him with it if he meant them any harm.
The light shone on his face. Everything seemed to stop suddenly. The rain. The wind. Her heart. Her breath.
The whole world stopped.
She stared up at him and felt as if she were stepping into her most secret dreams. She whispered, “Michael?”
Seven
It took Michael a minute to realize just who he was looking at. Every emotion imaginable raced through him. Yet he didn’t react; he had spent too much time in Vietnam, where he’d learned to never be surprised, and had developed nerves of steel that served him in his business and his personal life.
Until this very moment.
This was a face he had seen only in his memory for the last thirty years.
She was covered in mud and soaking wet. Her hair was dark and stringy from the rain, her mouth open in stunned surprise.
But that face was still uniquely Catherine.
“Hi, Squirt.”
“Ohmygod…It is you.” She buried her head in her arms the way she had when she was eleven. It was as if she still thought her embarrassing moments would just go away if she didn’t look at him.
“How long have you been standing there?” she said into her arms.
“Long enough to be entertained.”
She took a deep breath. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Who are you?” A young girl stuck her wet and muddy face in front of him. It was almost exactly the same face he had seen hanging upside-down from a tree.
Michael felt as if he were in an episode of “Star Trek,” thrown back to a unique and significant time in his life just to teach him something.
The youngest girl looked exactly like Catherine did at eleven. Another Squirt.
For one brief moment—just a nanosecond of regret that had never hit him before—he was sorry he had never fathered a child.
While he stood there speechless and frozen in time, Catherine rolled over and sat up, resting her hands on her bent knees. She looked at the two girls. “This is Michael Packard, girls. An old friend.”
“There are no houses around here,” the older girl said after scanning the trees. She looked at him as if she expected him to grow horns. “Where’d you come from?”
He didn’t take his eyes off Catherine when he answered her. “The stork dropped me down the chimney.”
Catherine looked right into his eyes, half surprised and half amused. A moment later she began to laugh.
He could see she remembered that all those years ago he’d said those same words to her. A second later the older girl called him a weirdo under her breath, and Michael decided that time didn’t change people very much.
“He was teasing you, Dana,” Catherine said.
He stuck out a hand to help her up. “Here.”
She sat there for a second, her gaze wandering over him. She paused to look at the tool belt hanging on his hips. He wondered what she was thinking when she looked at him like that.
She looked down quickly as if to hide her thoughts, like she was embarrassed. She wiped her muddy hand off on her even muddier pants, then put it into his hand.
He started to pull her to her feet.
“Michael is the handyman on the island,” she told her daughters.
He had the sudden urge to drop her.
“Just like his grandfather was,” she added not looking at him and in a tone that was all too bright and cheery to be real.
Damn it if he didn’t just let go.
She plopped back down in the mud with a splat, and her daughters laughed.
“Sorry,” he said through a slightly tight jaw.
She looked up at him with a stunned expression.
He shrugged. “My hand slipped.” He stuck out his hand again.
“No, thanks. I can get up on my own.” She stood then with her back to him so he couldn’t see her face.
She thought he was a handyman. And from her voice he could tell she was disappointed.
He shouldn’t have let go of her. It was vindictive.
He looked away quickly because he thought he might smile. He took a deep breath, shoved his hands into his pockets, and with a straight face he turned back around.
The older girl was looking at him suspiciously. He waited a moment, then gave her the same speculative look she was giving him.
She stared at him longer than most. He wasn’t certain how to gauge that—as teenaged stubbornness or an innate strength of character he should respect.
She finally looked down and began to fiddle with her hand.
“These are my daughters. Dana and Aly.”
He nodded to them. Daughters meant there was a father. A husband. He glanced at her hand. No ring.
The rain changed meter and began to pound down in sheets. They all looked up for a second, then Catherine touched his shoulder. “Come on to the house!”
She half-ran, half-trudged toward the house with the girls running ahead of her.
At the crooked porch, she pried off her wet tennis shoes by stepping on her heel with one foot, then did the same with the other foot. Her daughters pulled off their shoes and rushed inside, while he sat on an old bench and pulled off his mud boots.
Catherine waited for him, watching him until he stood and she had to look up. She opened the old screen door, which creaked on its hinges the way it used to.
“Come on in,” she said in a rushed voice that was breathy and still too sexy for her own good.
He felt a little numb as he followed her inside and stood there while she took his wet jacket and hung it on a hook. They went into the big old living room where a red and yellow glow from an old lava lamp made the room seem warmer.
No husband on the sofa. No man’s jacket on the hook or boots on the porch. No man.
She walked a few feet into the room and stopped so suddenly it was as if she had hit an invisible wall.
He followed her gaze to the sofa where empty soda cans and boxes and ice cream cartons littered the sofa and floor. A low table was covered with a jigsaw puzzle.
She mumbled something that sounded like a swear word, then rushed over and began to scoop together the mess.
“Girls, help me here.” She jammed soda cans under her arms and he tried not to laugh.
“Don’t mess up the puzzle, Mom,” the youngest girl said as she bent down and picked up a spoon that had fallen on the rug next to a big gray cat that was sound asleep.
From the way Catherine darted all over the place snatching up empty food containers, he could see she was embarrassed.
Both girls stood there in front of him, soaking wet and staring at him as if they expected him to do something strange, like split and multiply.
He should just leave. Take his tool belt and go back to his cabin and forget Catherine was ever here.
Instead he squatted down and gave the cat a stroke on his back. “Hey, fella.”
“He likes you.”
Michael looked up at the kid called Aly and nodded. “You sound surprised.”
“He doesn’t usually let strangers touch him. His name is Harold.”
Harold rolled over on his side and began to purr loudly.
“What would you like to drink?” Catherine called out from the kitchen where she was stuffing trash into a bag under the sink. “I don’t have beer, but I have soft drinks and plenty of coffee.”
Michael sat down on the sofa and flinched. He reached behind him and pulled out an empty aluminum can.
Cream soda.
The youngest girl giggled and took it from him. He gave her a quick wink and said to Catherine, “Coffee’s fine.”
Catherine looked at her daughters and said, “Go upstairs and change out of those wet clothes, girls. I’m not sure which one of you is the muddiest.”
Dana gave him a look as if she were weighing whether he could be trusted to be left alone with her mom.
Aly jabbed her with an elbow. “Come on.”
They went upstairs together arguing over who looked the worst.
At the top of the landing Aly stuck her head out over the stair rail and looked down just as Catherine came out of the kitchen with a tray.
“We’re both wrong, Dana.”
Catherine stopped in front of the coffee table and looked up at her daughter, who was grinning down at her.
“Mother’s the muddiest!” she said, then disappeared after her sister.
He watched Catherine’s face as she looked down at herself for the first time. He could read her expression perfectly.
Again his first thought was that he should be a gentleman and leave. Instead he stood and took the tray from her. “Go get into some dry clothes.”
She nodded and muddy hair fell into her face and stuck to her lips. She looked at him rather helplessly, then raised her chin as if she wasn’t soaked and covered in mud and she walked toward the back bedroom.
Catherine Wardwell and her stubborn pride; it was still there after all these years.
He watched her, because she was Catherine and because he didn’t want to look away, even though he knew it would make her feel less conspicuous.
Just before she turned the corner of the hall, she flicked on the hall light and he caught the expression on her pale face. She looked like she wanted the ground to just open up and swallow her.
Catherine certainly had wanted the earth to open up and swallow her. The trouble was, she looked as if it already had and then spit her back out again.
She stood at the mirror in the bathroom and had trouble looking at herself without wincing. It was worse than she had imagined.
There was grass in her hair, which was glued to her head and plastered around her forehead and ears. Flecks of mud and slim green blades of grass were stuck to her cheeks and neck. Her sweatshirt was soaked and clung to her chest.
She stepped back and turned around. The muddy sweatpants were stuck to her butt, too. She continued to stare. Oh, why had she quit step-aerobics?
Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot!
She shoved back the shower curtain, turned on the shower and stripped off her clothes, then hopped inside. She soaped up, washed her hair and was out in about two minutes. She dried off, shrugged into a robe, brushed her teeth longer than necessary, then went into the bedroom.
She changed clothes seven times in under five minutes, until she finally decided her bra was the problem and put on a different one, then hiked the adjustment on the straps up a good inch. After that her green cotton sweater looked better.
She hopped around the room, shoving her legs into the pair of jeans that made them look the longest, then she laid down on the bed so she could zip them up.
She stood and jerked the sweater down over her butt and ran back to the bathroom, where she swiped on some deodorant, brushed her wet hair back and twisted it up, then stuck in a hair pick to hold it.
She slapped on some makeup. She didn’t need any blush; her face was too flushed already. She was nervous, so she put on more deodorant, then stood back and looked at herself.
He had been attracted to her once, when they were young. But what would he see when he looked at her now?
When she looked at herself she saw her outside changing, growing older, while inside she still felt young. Aging was a strange thing—made you feel like you were wearing a striped shirt and plaid pants. Mismatched. Because you never felt as old inside as you looked on the outside.
There were those days now when she went to put on her eye shadow and little lines of it caked at the corners of her eyes. She had to smudge the eye shadow into her skin with a Q-tip.
And there were those little vertical lines along her lips that her old lipstick had recently started bleeding into. She’d had to change types of lip liner and lipstick, something matte that wouldn’t seep in the age cracks that were just beginning to show on her lips.
She put one finger at each end of her mouth and pulled her lips back. Collagen? A peel?
Neither appealed to her.
Bad pun.
She stood there for a long time, gripping the sides of the sink with her hands, hesitant to go out of the bathroom. Scared. Deep down inside, she wanted to still be young for him.
She stared at herself in the mirror. A moment later she pulled her bra straps out of the neckline of her sweater and tightened them another half an inch, then she bent over and grabbed the bottom of her bra and wiggled so she filled the cups differently. Higher. Younger?
She looked at the result in the mirror, then tugged down on her sweater. That was better. She wished she had packed perfume. She lifted her arm. She smelled like Camay soap and baby powder-scented deodorant.
Better than smelling like a garden slug.
Her hand closed over the glass door knob. She took a deep breath and finally mustered the courage to leave the bathroom.
Eight
Michael knew the exact moment she stepped into the room. It should have frightened him that he could be so attuned to another person that her mere presence could distract him. With anyone else he would have fought that awareness with a vengeance. Because it was a control thing, and he was a man who needed to be in control.
His awareness of Catherine was different; it didn’t threaten him. It somehow felt right, as if the power between them, this thread of something that linked them together, was an innate part of him.
He glanced up at her from over the rim of a coffee mug. She stood framed in the hall doorway as if she were a painting that had just come alive.
She had been a knockout when she was a young woman. Fresh and tall and sleek. Now she was thirty years older, still beautiful, but added to her face was something better than youthful beauty.
She had character.
He had lived long enough to understand and respect that life did that to you, etched lines of experience on you that said to the world, “I’ve been there, done that, and lived through it.”
On Catherine all that living only made her sexier.
“Hi,” she said and walked calmly into the room, which suddenly felt smaller and warmer.
Aly and Dana had come back downstairs earlier and had been talking to him. Well, Aly had been talking to him. Dana was sitting on the sofa, pretending to work on the puzzle when she wasn’t eyeing him like he was the Antichrist.
Catherine came over to the sofa in that same old long-legged walk of hers that after all these years could still get him hot and tight.
She poured herself a cup of coffee.
Aly scooted over and patted the spot next to him. “Sit here, Mom.”
“No!” Dana said so suddenly Catherine looked up from her coffee with a startled expression.
The only sound for that split second was the rain on the roof, tapping tensely. It was the kind of constant monotonous warning sound that made you follow it with your hearing sharp and your breath held, waiting for the explosion.
Catherine cast a quick apologetic glance at him, then gave a small shrug.
So this wasn’t Dana’s normal behavior with men, he thought. It was him alone and not just any man that made her oldest daughter so protective.
Catherine sat down next to Dana at the opposite end of the sofa. She looked up at him. “We were doing a jigsaw puzzle before the power went out.”
He nodded. “So I see.”
She looked at Dana, who was hunched over the table. “What piece are you looking for?”
“Steve Tyler’s belly button,” she said without looking up.
Catherine looked at him as if she didn’t know what to say to that, which Michael knew was why Dana had said it. Shock value.
He reached out and picked up a puzzle piece and held it out to her. “Here, try this one.”
Dana looked at it, then up at him, then took the piece.
It fit.
He winked at Catherine, who looked as if she wanted to strangle Dana. He shook his head slightly. It didn’t matter. Catherine needed to ignore her daughter’s behavior. It would work better than letting her teenager trap her into getting angry, which was Dana’s objective, even if she didn’t consciously know it.
The tension in the room was so taut you couldn’t have broken through it with two hundred pounds of muscle and a timber ax.
Aly was quietly sitting cross-legged next to him. She had a huge book propped in her lap and seemed oblivious to what was going on with her sister.
Catherine looked at her and asked, “What are you reading?”
“An encyclopedia.”
“Oh.” Catherine frowned. “Why?”
“I was just curious about something.”
“What?”
“Those slug things.” She looked up and grinned. “Slugs are just like you, Mom. They don’t have a mate.”
Michael choked on his coffee and tried hard not to laugh.
He had his answer. There was no man.
Catherine just sat there numbly looking like Christmas in her bright green sweater and her even brighter red face.
“It says here that they are mollusks.”
He caught Catherine’s eye and told her exactly what he had been thinking. “Not only does Aly look just like you did at that age, she is you.”
Catherine sighed and gave him a weak smile. “I know.”
Aly groaned and slammed the book shut. “Everyone says that.” Then she stopped and looked back at her mother. “Not that you aren’t pretty, Mom. It’s just weird, you know?”
“I understand, kiddo. At eleven you want your own identity, not your mother’s. I felt the same way. So did Dana.”
“And at school everyone knows I’m Dana Winslow’s younger sister. Mr. Johnson, the science teacher, even calls me Dana sometimes.”
Dana looked up then. “Do you answer him?”
“I have to. If I don’t he thinks I’m not participating.” Aly got up and trounced over to the bookcase.
There was another lapse of awkward silence.
Catherine took a sip of coffee. “So. The island hasn’t changed much, has it?” She didn’t look at him.
He should tell her now, that he had changed, that he wasn’t a handyman. He watched her and found himself staring at her hair. If she looks at me, he thought, I will tell her the truth.
She stared into her coffee cup as if she were searching inside of it for something to say.
Aly plopped back down next to him. “Mom says there’s plenty to do here. Fishing and sailing and stuff.”
Before he could answer Dana asked, “Do you have a boat?”
Michael nodded. “Yes.”
The girl brightened suddenly. “Good, then you can take us back to the mainland.”
“Dana!” Catherine looked at him then, clearly mortified. “I’m sorry. She seems to have forgotten her manners.” She paused and took a deep breath, clearly exasperated. “Dana doesn’t like it here.”
“There’s nothing to do here.”
Michael was quiet. He looked away from Catherine and into Dana’s sharp eyes. “The engine’s not running right.”
Dana looked like she didn’t believe him. “What’s wrong with it?”
Catherine groaned and buried her face in a hand, shaking her head.
But he answered her daughter. “The plugs are bad and the points need to be replaced.” He stood up then. “I should leave.”
Catherine stood up after him and followed him to the door as if she wanted to say something but didn’t know what. He could feel Dana watching them intently and figured she would have been walking in between them if she thought she could have gotten away with it.
He took his jacket off the hook and put it on, then stepped out onto the porch, sat on the bench and pulled on his boots.
Catherine was leaning against the door jamb with her arms crossed, watching him. She had one of those wistful smiles he remembered, the kind she had just before he used to grab her and kiss the hell out of her.
“The rain’s stopped,” was all she said.
He stood and took two steps to stand near her. He looked down at her face. “I’ve got good timing.”
“I’m sorry about Dana.” She dropped her arms to her sides. “These teenage years aren’t easy.”
He nodded, thinking that she was a teenager the last time he’d seen her.
They stood there like that, not saying anything that mattered. It was as if they were both afraid to say what they were thinking.
He looked away. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Anytime.”
Neither of them spoke again for a long stretch of seconds. He felt like he was twenty again, standing on the same porch and wanting to touch her so badly he hurt with it. But knowing he couldn’t because her parents were right there on the other side of the door.
There were no parents this time; it was her children who were watching them, probably listening to them.
So he didn’t do what he wanted to. He turned and went down the steps and across the lawn. He heard the screen door slam shut.
“Michael?”
He turned around.
She was standing on the porch gripping the wooden railing in two hands and watching him. “I wrote you.
Several letters.” She waited, as if she wanted him to explain.
When he said nothing she added, “I never got any answer back from you.”
“I never got any letters, Catherine.” He turned then, and walked back into the woods.
Her father was shouting. They were in the boathouse, half-naked, their clothes askew, her hair tousled and her lips red and swollen. A foil Trojan wrapper was torn in two and carelessly thrown by their shoes.
Her father’s flashlight beam was shining on it.
Then the light went out. It was dark. So dark. He was in a VC prison camp, locked in a box with two other prisoners. He couldn’t move.
Something rattled the box. Opened it. Light pierced his eyes. His buddies rescued him. Suddenly they were half-dragging him through the jungle.
Go! Go….
Michael woke up fast and sat up in his bed in a cold sweat, panting like he’d been running from a sniper. Damn. He rubbed his face with his clammy hands. Those nightmares of Nam had stopped years ago.
Seeing Catherine tonight had brought it all back again—the scene with her father. Catherine and her mother disappearing from the island. Her father talking to his grandfather and to him.
He was not to call her. He couldn’t write to her. He was to disappear from Catherine’s life. Or he would go to jail for statutory rape.
Instead he’d gone into the Navy less than a week later and ended up in Special Forces, infiltrating into Laos or patrolling the Mekong Delta for weeks at a time. He’d been captured and spent three months in a dark box.
He drove his hand through his hair and took a few deep breaths, thinking for just a brief moment about a life he had left far behind him and never wanted to think of again, because it was like reliving hell.
He sat there for a minute, then threw back the damp sheet and pulled on his jeans. He shrugged into a jacket and shoes, grabbed a flashlight and left the cabin.
The moon had gone down and it was darker outside than his memory of the deepest jungle. There was silence, and a little rain, that misty kind that came on like soggy fog.
He walked down to the small dock where he moored his boat. He unsnapped the tarp and stepped inside, where he lifted the engine cover and shone the flashlight down into the engine compartment until he saw what he was looking for.
A few minutes later he was walking back down the dock and toward the cabin, the plugs and points jammed into his jeans pocket.
He went inside the cabin and headed straight to the refrigerator, took out a carton of juice and lifted it to his lips. He drank half of it, stuck it back inside without closing it, and took out a Mexican beer.
He grabbed something to eat from a cabinet and popped the cap off the beer as he crossed the room to sit down in front of the dwindling fire. He raised the beer bottle to his mouth, took a long drink and set the bottle down on the table next to him. The smooth flavor of the beer was on his tongue, but what he craved was egg-salad sandwiches.
There was nothing he could do about what he was feeling and wanting, so he did the only thing he could do—he ate a whole damn bag of barbecued potato chips.
Nine
At ten the next morning Catherine stood on Michael’s front porch, rocking on her feet, her hands clenched behind her back while she waited for him to answer her knock. She could hear his footsteps clumping toward the door, so she licked her lips, brushed her hair back, and took a deep breath before he opened it.
He stared at her from eyes that looked awake but tired.
“The toilet is plugged and the boiler pilot won’t light.”
He seemed startled, like he didn’t know why she was there. And he didn’t exactly look happy to see her.
“I tried to light the boiler pilot again and again and we used the plunger on the toilet. No matter what I tried I couldn’t get them to work.”
He didn’t say anything.
Perhaps she was speaking too fast. Her ex-husband used to chide her for babbling when she was nervous. And she was nervous. She tilted her head slightly and explained more slowly, “There’s no hot water in the house without the boiler.”
“I know what a boiler is, Catherine.”
What a grump.
He turned without another sarcastic word and took a tool belt off a hook near the door. Besides an annoyed look, he was wearing a plaid shirt and jeans that were worn almost white in spots and that time and wear had molded to his body. He might be a grump in the morning but he sure looked good for fifty.
What would he look like in a suit? Catherine was a sucker for a man in a suit. And if a man wore a tux, well, she got all weak-kneed. Heck, Bill Gates probably looked sexy in a tux.
Life was unfair. Here she had to hike up her bra straps and slather on alpha hydroxy creams with a trowel. Some days she had to lie down on the bed to zip up her pants. He was three years older, wearing a plain old pair of jeans, and he looked stronger and sexier than he had when he was twenty.
The faces of all the men who had aged so well flashed through her mind: Sean Connery, Nick Nolte, Robert Redford, James Garner, James Brolin, Michael Packard.
She watched him strap and buckle the tool belt low on his hips the way Paul Newman had strapped on his guns in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
It seemed like such an earthy, male thing—a man doing up his belt buckle; it was sexy and suggestive and made her mouth a little dry.
He stuck a pair of work gloves into his back pocket and turned back around. She quickly looked away.
“I need to find the toolbox. I’ll be right back.” He grabbed a key and walked past her.
She nodded without looking up, then decided to follow him. She didn’t suppose luck would be on her side and there would be a tux in the shed, but heck, he might undo the belt buckle again.
She smiled a wicked little smile as she crossed over to a small shed he had already unlocked.
Heaven be praised if he didn’t bend down to search through it. His jeans pulled tight over his thighs in a way that made her give thanks to Levi Strauss.
Then he knelt on one knee and leaned inside. If she stepped back just a foot or so she had a great shot of his backside. The work gloves stuck out of one back pocket and looked like fingers waving at her. It was almost as if they were calling to her, “Look here.”
“Here it is.” He stood up with a battered old red toolbox.
She quickly looked up at the sky. After a slight pause she said, “Nice day. No clouds.”
He followed her gaze upward, then frowned. “The radio said it was supposed to rain today.”
There was one thing different about this Michael Packard; he was no Mr. Sunshine in the morning.
She walked ahead of him on the gravel path between his place and hers. The silence just about drove her nuts.
Her mind was going a mile a minute, wondering what he was thinking, wondering if they could go the whole day without bringing up the past.
When they were about halfway there she braved the beast. “I wrote you five letters.”
“I never got any letters from you.”
She stopped, spun around and planted her hands on her hips. She looked him straight in the eye. “Are you saying I’m lying?”
“No. I’m saying I never got any letters.” He paused, looking squarely at her. His expression grew tighter. “What I did get was a promise from your father that he’d press charges of statutory rape if I tried to contact you.”
“Oh God. Michael…” She sagged back against a tree, staring at the ground. “Did he really do that?”
“Yes.”
“He was upset. I don’t think he would have sent you to jail.”
“Yes. He would have, Catherine.”
There was nothing between them but a lapse of tense silence.
She looked at him again. “Did you really think I could just walk away after that summer together and never have any contact with you again? Didn’t you know me better than that?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“How do you figure that?”
“You thought I would ignore your letters.”
“Give me a break, here,” she snapped. “I was seventeen.” She straightened and started to walk away.
He dropped the toolbox and touched her shoulder. “I know. And I was twenty, just drafted, and in love with a seventeen-year-old girl.”
She stopped, but she didn’t turn around. He had truly loved her then, all those years ago. Many times over the years she had wondered about that, if he had cared or if she had just wished he had.
His hand was still on her shoulder. She bit her lip because she thought she might do something silly like cry. “I’m sorry.” She took a deep breath and turned around.
His hand fell away.
“When time passes by and you can’t understand why something happened, I guess you make up excuses. You blame others.” She looked at him then. “I was hurt and scared. I blamed you. After a while, when I didn’t hear from you, I believed you were just lying to me about how you had felt so you could—” She stopped because she didn’t need to say anything more.
“Get into your pants?”
“Thank you for sugar-coating it so nicely.” She gave a laugh that wasn’t amused. “But you’re right. That was what I thought.”
He only stared at her, not saying anything.
So she did. “It’s stupid to stand here in the middle of the woods and argue over something that happened so long ago. We’re different people now. It’s 1997 not 1967.” She looked back up into those blue eyes of his and stuck out her hand. “How about a truce?”
His gaze dropped to her outstretched hand.
“Friends,” she said emphatically.
A moment later his hand closed over hers and she almost melted into the ground. It was like she was seventeen all over again. She stared at their hands so she could hide her eyes from him.
Just for good measure she gave his hand a firm shake.
When she looked up he was staring at her face not at their clasped hands.
He pulled her against him, clamped his free hand to the back of her head, and kissed her.
Oh God…She felt like Silly Putty. Her hand fell away from his and moved to his shoulder.
His other hand grabbed her and pulled her against him in one of those hot, eating kind of kisses you see in the movies, all wildness and heat, where an instant later they’ve unbuttoned half their clothes and they’re doing it against a wall.
His hands ran over her back, pressed her closer. There were tools pressed against her belly. A hammer, a flashlight, screwdriver—lots of long, hard things.
One second his tongue was deep inside her mouth.
The next…the damn idiot let her go.
She stood there seeing stars and trying to keep her balance.
“Friends.” He whacked her on the backside with one hand, picked up his toolbox and sauntered on down the path toward her place.
Ten
She caught him from behind, which surprised the hell out of him. The toolbox slipped from his hand and she shoved him back up against a tree with both hands.
“Catherine?”
One palm was flat against his chest; the other slid up to grip the back of his head.
“What the hell are you doing?”
A second later she was kissing him the way he’d just kissed her. Hard and fast and wild.
He bent his knees, hooked his arms under her butt and picked her up. Her hands drove through his hair, gripped his head and tilted it, then she thrust her small tongue into his mouth the same way he had done to her.
He pushed away from the tree, turned and pinned her against it, holding her there with his body so his hands were free. He slid one hand across her shoulder, pushed her sweater aside and tried to pull down her bra strap.
He couldn’t get his finger under it. Damn. It was so tight you’d think it was made of iron.
He slid both hands to her waist and up under her sweater to cup her from beneath. She moaned against his mouth and their tongues switched places.
God, but she tasted so good. She felt so good. Her nipples grew hard from his fingers and her breasts were heavy and soft and felt just about as good as a woman could feel.
He slid his hands around and grabbed the back of her bra to unhook it.
“Harold!”
They both froze.
“Ohmygod! It’s Aly!” Catherine wiggled out from between him and the tree trunk, jerking at her clothes and taking big gulps of air. She looked up at him. “Bend down. Quick!”
He did and she used her fingers to comb back his hair.
“Harrr-old!”
“Hurry!” she whispered, still straightening her clothes which looked fine. “Get your toolbox!”
When Aly came down the path a few seconds later, they were both walking casually with no signs of the passion that had burned between them just moments before. No outward signs.
“Mom!” Aly ran toward her mother with tears in her eyes. “Harold got out. I can’t find him anywhere.”
Catherine opened her arms and hugged her daughter to her. “Hey, sweetie, we’ll find him. He won’t go far. It’s Harold. Remember? He never strays far from where we are.”
“But this is a new place and remember when we moved that time and how the vet said animals can get lost because the smells are new and they get confused and can’t find their way back.”
Catherine pulled Aly away from her shoulder and held her head in two hands. “We’ll find him. I promise you.”
Aly sobbed.
“Tell you what. I’ll cook some bacon. That ought to bring him running back home.”
“You will?” Aly looked a little brighter.
“Of course I will.” Catherine wiped the long strips of blond hair out of her daughter’s eyes and smiled. “We’ll look for Harold while Michael fixes the plumbing. Okay?”
Aly nodded, then cast a quick glance at him. “Hi, Mr. Packard.”
“The island’s small,” he reassured her. “Your cat won’t go far.”
“Thanks.” She sniffed again.
He walked past them and stopped. He wiped a tear from Aly’s chin with one finger. “Don’t worry there, Little Squirt. We’ll find your cat.”
Then before she could say anything about what he’d called her, he walked on down the pathway.
“Little Squirt?” he heard her whisper to her mother.
“I’ll explain later,” Catherine said.
He didn’t look back but from behind him he could hear the two of them following at a slower pace, beating the ferns and woods and calling out for the cat.
He kept walking. He might make over a half a million dollars a year in salary and another mil in stock options, but hell, he had a toilet to fix.
He walked out of the woods and into the clearing near the house. Dana was walking from the front door along the crooked porch.
She turned the corner to the side of the house and froze.
A second later she screamed so loud it sounded as if she had cracked the sky.
He ran toward her.
Harold was back, proudly sitting on the porch. He had a two foot long garter snake hanging from his mouth.
Eleven
“Dana!” Catherine came running toward the house just as she saw Michael hop over the porch railing and put his arm around Dana. She was huddled into a frightened stance, looking too scared to move.
Aly was about to run past her toward the porch, so Catherine grabbed her arm. “Stop.”
“What’s going on?” Aly frowned at her.
“I don’t know, but don’t move.” Catherine looked up. “Michael?”
He was still talking to Dana, then he turned to her.
At that same moment Aly called out, “Is it Harold?” She already sounded like she was crying.
“It’s Harold and he’s fine so don’t start crying. He brought home a present.”
“Stay here,” Catherine ordered Aly and she walked to the porch. It had been years, but she could smell the snake before she got there. She stopped where she was and peered over the porch railing, then up at him. “I forgot how much those things stink.”
Aly was suddenly right next to her. “Oh, yuk! Harold! Get away from it!”
Catherine looked at her. “I told you to stay put.”
“Is it poisonous?” Aly asked.
“No.” Michael pulled his gloves out of his back pocket. “It’s only a garter snake.”
“Oh.” She watched it a second. “Why do they smell?”
“Oh, who cares!” Dana snapped from around the corner. “Just get rid of it! Hurry! Please!”
The whole time Harold just sat there with the black snake hanging out of his mouth. He was waiting for praise.
Michael put on the work gloves, then he squatted down in front of Harold, who immediately dropped the snake.
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Susan Wiggs
Debbie Macomber
Jill Barnett
Perfect for fans of Maeve Binchy' - CandisIt's nothing special on the surface, merely a rambling old Victorian summerhouse on a secluded island, where the sky is blue and the water is clear.Yet after a month at the Rainshadow Lodge, people begin to change–and fall in love. How else can you account for what happens to the most mismatched, unlikely couples? There's Beth, who's stuck sharing the lodge with a complete stranger–and a difficult one at that.And Mitch, a workaholic on a deadline who has to depend on free-spirited Rosie, who functions on "island time." Not to mention Catherine, who's falling in love with Michael, the lodge's handyman–for the second time!
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHORS
DEBBIE MACOMBER
“Popular romance writer Macomber has a gift for evoking the emotions that are at the heart of the genre’s popularity.”
—Publishers Weekly
“One of Macomber’s great strengths is her insight into human behavior—both admirable and ignoble.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
SUSAN WIGGS
Wiggs writes “a flawless story touched by real emotions.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Susan Wiggs is a superb storyteller.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
JILL BARNETT
“Barnett has a rare knack for humor. Her characters are joyously fresh and her style is a delight to read—a ray of summer sun.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Five Gold Stars! This is one delightfully funny read with witty, witty dialogue.”
—Heartland Critiques on Surrender a Dream
That Summer Place
Old Things
Jill Barnett
Private Paradise
Debbie Macomber
Island Time
Susan Wiggs
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Also by Susan Wiggs
The Lakeshore Chronicles SUMMER AT WILLOW LAKE THE WINTER LODGE DOCKSIDE AT WILLOW LAKE SNOWFALL AT WILLOW LAKE FIRESIDE LAKESHORE CHRISTMAS The Tudor Rose Trilogy AT THE KING’S COMMAND THE MAIDEN’S HAND AT THE QUEEN’S SUMMONS Contemporary HOME BEFORE DARK THE OCEAN BETWEEN US SUMMER BY THE SEA TABLE FOR FIVE LAKESIDE COTTAGE JUST BREATHE All available in eBook.
CONTENTS
Old Things
Jill Barnett
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
Private Paradise
Debbie Macomber
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Island Time
Susan Wiggs
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Old Things
Jill Barnett
Dear Reader,
Have you ever visited a place you’ve never been to before and found that you felt as if you were home? That’s what happened to me the first time I came to the Pacific Northwest. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I stepped off a ferry and found a paradise.
A few months later I’d bought a house overlooking a lovely harbor where the eagles fly and the sailboats drift by, where there is a sense of utter peace and quiet. Although I was born and raised on the West Coast, for me, my small chunk of this wonderful island is the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived.
Writing about an area that has captured my heart so completely has been very special for me. Oh, I’ve written about islands before. I’ve set four books on small islands and have even joked that I must have been an island in a past life. But this is my first contemporary work of fiction, and it’s set in a place where I live.
I feel so fortunate to have the opportunity to write for a collection with two fabulous and talented Northwest writers, who are now my good friends. Both Susan and Debbie welcomed me here with open arms and graciousness.
So I hope, as you read the stories, you will see a little of what we get to see every day—trees so lush and tall they can block out the sunshine, water so still you are afraid to breathe, and sunrises so perfect you think you must have dreamed them.
Enjoy!
Jill Barnett
c/o Rowe Enterprises
P.O. Box 8166
Fremont, CA 94536
To the readers who wanted an older couple,
particularly to Barbara,
who wrote and sent me one of the
funniest poems I’ve ever read.
One
San Francisco, 1997
Catherine Wardwell Winslow spent a week last winter at a time management seminar where the experts stood up on a big stage and told her that Wednesday was the slowest day of the work week.
They lied.
Catherine rested her chin in her hand and stared at her phone. It was a Wednesday, barely nine in the morning, and already four of the five phone lines were frantically blinking. She didn’t know which one to answer first. So she didn’t answer any of them.
Her life would be so much easier if she were one of those robots you see in the cartoons, the kind with slot machine eyes, a ball-bearing nose, and those spindly metal arms and slinky legs that jerk with every movement.
Like Rosie the Robot in The Jetsons.
But Catherine wasn’t in a space-age home that looked like the Space Needle. She was in her San Francisco office on the third floor of a restored Victorian. The building was just one of many candy-colored, gabled houses on a steep and narrow street that now held offices for dentists, attorneys and other professionals.
The last line buzzed obnoxiously and began to blink like the others. She groaned and closed her eyes to escape. Her imagination took over. In her mind’s eye she was Catherine the Robot rolling around her office on feet made of rollers that looked like brass sofa balls. She jammed report folders under her robot arms with the clawlike hands of a carnival toy machine, then she spun around her messy office, grabbing files and reports, adding up cost sheets and filing.
But the more paperwork she handled, the larger the piles on her desk grew. So the faster she rolled, here and there.
Hectic. Hectic. Hectic.
The desk phone suddenly morphed into an old fashioned black switchboard. The switchboard was filled with little glowing golden dots that blinked and buzzed and only stopped if she stuck one of a hundred black spiderlike plug cords into them. No matter how fast she plugged in the cords, the telephone lines kept flashing away like those warning lights at railroad crossings.
Warning overload! Warning! Warning!
Then…
Pow!
She suddenly blew up in a cloud of springs, bolts and flying nuts.
“Are you all right?”
Catherine sat upright in her desk chair, startled. She blinked. Myrtle Martin, her secretary of fifteen years, was standing in the doorway, staring at her.
“I’m fine.” Catherine quickly looked down, embarrassed. She busied herself by shuffling the papers all over her desk.
Myrtle gave Catherine’s desk a pointed look, then shifted her gaze to the blinking lines. “You aren’t answering the phone.”
“I know.” Catherine spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling with an already neat stack of the papers. She felt as if she had just blown up, like her nuts and bolts were scattered from here to kingdom come.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for my nuts,” Catherine muttered.
“You divorced your nuts eight years ago,” Myrtle said without a beat, then closed the connecting door.
Catherine shook her head and bit back a smile. She picked up a handful of papers and tapped them on the desk until their corners were neatly aligned.
Myrtle was staring at her.
She glanced up trying to look calm and collected and in complete control, as if nothing was out of the ordinary.
Her secretary just stood there with her rigid back pressed against the door jamb, a knowing look on her face.
It was impossible to ignore her. Impossible because Myrtle Martin had a new hair color. Orange. Blindingly bright orange.
Catherine never knew a hair color could actually hurt your eyes. For just one instant she had the sudden urge to whip out her sunglasses.
Back in January Myrtle had dyed her hair jet black, painted a mole on her cheek and drawn on thickly-arched, Night-of-the-Iguana eyebrows, then wore animal prints and huge faux diamonds. At the time she was dating a Welshman named Richard.
Myrtle walked toward her with one of her “you-need-me-to-tell-you-exactly-what-you-need-to-do” looks. She had been gone for two weeks and the office looked as if she’d been gone for a year.
Catherine braced herself for a lecture, but instead Myrtle just hitched her hip on the desk corner, picked up the phone, and began pressing buttons. “Ms. Winslow is unavailable today.”
Poof! Line one was gone.
“Ms. Winslow is in a meeting and cannot be disturbed.”
Line two gone.
“Ms. Winslow will get back to you as soon as possible.”
Line three gone.
Line four got the same treatment.
She punched line five. “Yes? Uh-huh. That’s right. Who? Oh, hi! Yes, I’m just fine. Uh-huh. Uh-huh…I changed it last night.” Myrtle smiled and patted her French twist. “Red Flambeaux. Yes, it’s very vibrant. I like color, too. Catherine? Yes, she’s right here.” Myrtle studied Catherine for a long moment. “She’s wearing a suit…of course. Black,” she added as if she were describing cockroaches.
Catherine glanced down at her tailored black suit and frowned. She liked this outfit; it fit her mood.
“What’s she doing?” Myrtle repeated, then gave Catherine a wicked smile. “Your daughter is looking for her nuts.”
Catherine snatched the phone out of Myrtle’s hand and glared at her.
Ignoring her, Myrtle just sank into a chair opposite the desk and began rifling through the papers on Catherine’s desk.
“Hi, Mom. Myrtle was just being funny. No, I don’t need any almonds. Yes, I’m sure.”
Catherine paused, listening to her mom because she was her mom. There were some things you never outgrew.
Finally she took a long breath and said, “I know almond oil is good for the skin.” She covered the mouthpiece and made shooting noises and gestures at Myrtle while her mother listed all the reasons nuts—almonds in particular—were good for her.
Five minutes later, when her eyes were glazed over and she now knew the complete history of the almond, she said, “Yes, I heard the whole thing. Every word, Mom.” She took a deep breath and spoke rapidly to sneak a few words in, “I have to go now. Have a good trip, okay? No, I don’t want any smoked almonds.”
She winced and rubbed a hand over her pounding forehead. “I remember they were Dad’s favorite. I love you, too. I promise I won’t forget to tell the girls.” She paused and added more softly, “Almonds make me cry, too, Mom.”
She sighed. “You don’t have anything to worry about. They give out pretzels on planes nowadays.” She paused and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know why.” She stared down at her desk blotter. “I know Dad hated pretzels.
“No!” She jerked upright in her chair. “Don’t cancel your flight!” She looked up at Myrtle, panicking. She ran a hand through her hair in frustration, then said more calmly, “Please, Mom. You need to go. This trip will be good for you.”
There was a long, drawn out pause. Catherine sat still, holding her breath while she listened to the silence on the other end. Then her mother agreed.
Catherine exhaled and sagged back against her chair. “Yes, it would be difficult to cancel now. You’ll have a good time. And the girls will miss you, too. Bye, Mom.” She hung up the phone and gave Myrtle a look that should have cooked her.
Myrtle leaned forward and slapped some money on the desk. “Ten bucks says a case of almonds arrives before the week is out.”
Catherine opened her desk drawer and threw out a wadded-up bill. “Twenty says it arrives tomorrow morning.” She paused, then added pointedly, “About the same time you get your pink slip.”
“You? Fire me?” Myrtle just ignored her. “Anyone else would bore you to death. Besides which, you need me.”
“I also needed hard labor to give birth.”
Myrtle burst out laughing.
Firing Myrtle was a ludicrous threat, since they both knew Catherine would be lost without her. Just one look at the cluttered office was proof enough.
Over the years she and Myrtle had become more than business associates; they had become friends. Catherine’s daughters called Myrtle Martin “Aunt Mickie.” It was Myrtle Martin who’d kept Catherine laughing through each difficult day after her husband, Tom, had walked away from her, and even more heart-wrenchingly, walked away from his young daughters because they caused too many complications in his life. Myrtle was the first person Catherine called when her ex-husband died two years after the divorce, and just six months ago, when her father was killed suddenly in an accident.
While Myrtle set about cleaning the office and filing papers, Catherine shoved away from her desk and stood. She crossed the room and opened the door to her small bath, where she dumped out an old cup of coffee, then rested both palms flat on the edges of the pedestal sink. She leaned into the mirror and wondered if that was really her face staring back.
She looked like her mother. And her grandmother. Blonde hair, brown eyes. Just like theirs except she had a dash of freckles across her nose that had never faded, even though her skin hadn’t been exposed to the sun for years. They just stayed there, reminders of a summer when she had been badly burned.
She heard Myrtle mumbling out in the office and stepped into the doorway. “Are you talking to me?”
“Yes.” Myrtle looked over her shoulder at Catherine. “I was saying that you’re the one who needs a trip to the Greek Isles.”
Catherine closed the adjoining door and crossed the office. “What I really need is to hire someone efficient while you’re out on vacation.” Catherine sat down.
Myrtle turned around. “At least I take vacations.”
“I take vacations.”
“When?”
Catherine raised her chin. “I took the girls to Disneyland.”
“They were two and six.”
Catherine’s daughters were now eleven and fifteen. “I went to New Orleans, remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Good.”
“Reagan was president.”
“He was not.”
“Well…” Myrtle gave her hand a dramatic wave and slapped a file drawer closed. “It must have been Bush. I know it was one of those good ol’ Republican boys.”
Catherine glanced down at the paperwork on her desk. She had so much to do. “I can’t get away right now….” She let the last word fade out when she realized that Myrtle was silently mouthing the very same words.
Catherine stared at her, half in surprise and half in shame. Even to her own ears it sounded like something she’d said a dozen times. Nothing but the same old excuse.
She closed her eyes for a second, feeling as if she’d been hit with a huge anvil, one painted with the words Bad Mother. She ran a hand over her eyes. She could still see Aly and Dana’s eager young faces as they’d stood outside Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
Once upon a time they had been awestruck by Goofy, Mickey and the other Disney characters. Only last week Aly had hung a Hanson poster over her prized Beauty and the Beast print, and Dana had come home from a sleepover with a third hole pierced high in her ear.
Catherine sagged back in her chair and gave her secretary a direct look. “Has it really been that long?”
“It’s been a few years since you went away with just Aly and Dana.”
Her daughters’ last vacations had been with their grandparents or a random week each year at summer camp. Catherine was hit hard by a working mother’s guilt.
It had always sounded so perfect when her parents chose to take the girls some place special. And those trips always seemed to coincide with Catherine’s important presentations. Now, in retrospect, she felt selfish.
When she was growing up, her parents had spent almost every summer in Washington, in a wonderful Victorian clapboard house on a small San Juan island. Those summers had been easy and free, a time past when the air was clean, the sky was blue, and you woke up to the aching call of the gulls or the soft sound of rain on the roof. A place where your schedule was dictated only by the rise of the sun or the moon.
On Spruce Island, when she was seven, she had learned the names of all the stars and constellations, because there was no television to teach her that stars were merely people made by Hollywood.
On dark summer nights at the water’s edge, she had roasted her first marshmallow and heard her first ghost story around the golden flames of a beach fire. And on that same island, on a chilly Northwest morning she caught her first fish—a six inch bottom-sucker that her father didn’t make her throw back in spite of the game laws.
It was there where she had learned to swim, to sail, and to kiss, for it was on Spruce Island during a bittersweet summer in the Sixties—the days when she used Yardley soap, dressed like Jean Shrimpton, and ironed her long hair straight—that she had found her first love.
With Michael.
She felt that old wistful feeling you have when you remember something that might have been. His image was bittersweet as it formed in her mind, and she wondered if he really had been that tall, intense young man she remembered.
Michael Packard had been twenty years old, incredibly mature and mysterious to a seventeen year old late bloomer who’d had a crush on him since she was eleven.
At twenty he’d had a man’s strength and a man’s gentleness, qualities she had seen in her father, but never in any of the young men she knew. The boys in her hometown craved fast cars and even faster girls. They drank Colt 45 malt liquor, carried hard-packs of Marlboros in their madras-shirt pockets, and cruised the streets in shiny cars with loud engines and big tires.
But Michael was so different from those boys. Even today, some thirty years later, she could still remember things about him: his voice saying her name, his long tanned legs stretched out on the small sloop they’d sailed in the cove, his wonderful hands and the way they could haul up a boat anchor, carve her initials in a piece of wood, or just as easily wipe a tear from her cheek.
That June she had fallen hard for him, fallen hard for the dark-haired young man with a deep, quiet voice that sounded as if it came from his soul. He had a poet’s eyes, the kind of eyes she had seen in black-and-white photos of Laurence Ferlinghetti and Bob Dylan, eyes that could look right through you, especially if you were only seventeen. His hungry looks made her dreamy young heart melt like the cocoa butter they slathered over their suntanned skin. And he gave her long, hot kisses that could have burned the fog off Puget Sound.
“Good God…Whatever are you thinking about?”
Catherine straightened a little and stared at Myrtle. “Nothing. Why?”
“You look as if you just got lucky with George Clooney.”
Catherine laughed and shook her head. “I was remembering a summer from a long, long time ago.”
“It must have been one hot summer.”
It was hot, she thought, so hot that all her youthful dreams had burned right up. She glanced up and gave Myrtle a wry look. “It couldn’t have been too hot. I was only seventeen.”
Myrtle held up her hand and began to count off. “Cleopatra, Lolita—”
“Well, now I’m forty-seven,” Catherine said, cutting Myrtle off before she got going. She didn’t want to talk about things from a long time ago. She wanted to keep them locked away in that secret part of her heart, the place where her daydreams began and a lifetime of what-ifs were hidden away.
“I’m fifty-five,” Myrtle said. “And that doesn’t stop me.”
“Nothing stops you.”
“I know.” Myrtle grinned.
“Looking for someone or trying to start a relationship is too much hard work. I don’t have time, especially now when I have the biggest presentation of my career less than a month away.”
“Letni Corporation?”
Catherine nodded.
“I thought they weren’t ready to talk seriously until September.”
“So did I, but I got a call just before you came in. They want the presentation meeting scheduled for the first Tuesday in July.”
Now Myrtle appeared to be stunned silent, looking as surprised as Catherine had been this morning when she’d heard from Letni.
Catherine tried not to smile when she said, “John Turner’s been fired.”
Myrtle did smile, one of those wicked cat-in-the-cream kind of smiles.
“With Turner gone we actually have a chance to beat out Westlake for the first time.” Catherine could hear the excitement in her voice. “The company needs a big account. This is the chance we’ve waited for.”
The largest computer chip manufacturer in the world, Letni was expanding into two states, moving from the high tax locations of California to better locations in Washington and Arizona. Thousands of employees would be moving over the company’s ten-year plan.
Her heart raced a little at the thought that this deal could really happen. “The relocation accounts alone could keep us in the black for the next ten years.”
The desk phone buzzed and began to flash yellow.
Myrtle glanced down at the phone at the same time as Catherine.
Within seconds four more lines lit up.
Catherine closed her eyes and leaned back against her chair with a sigh of disgust.
Myrtle crossed the room and opened the door. “I’ll take care of those lines. For the rest of the day, I promise I’ll only put through the most urgent calls.”
Catherine gave her a weak smile as the door snapped closed, then sat there feeling lost and preoccupied and confused, as if she didn’t know where to start. After a stretch of seconds where the only sound was the wall clock ticking away, she grabbed a pile of research files, put on her bifocals, and opened the first file folder.
The words grew foggy and a handsome face from her youth flashed across her mind. For one rare and tender moment, just before she began to read, she wondered what had ever happened to Michael Packard.
Two
He stood at the end of a long dock. The breeze off the water whipped through his hair the same way it had thirty years before. He was fifty now, and though his hair was still dark, there were streaks of gray near his temples, ears, and just above his brow. Each and every one of those gray hairs had been earned over two decades of international flight miles.
His eyes were ice blue, and those who were foolish enough to have crossed him over the years could tell you that there was a sharp and coldly decisive mind behind those eyes, the mind and strength of a man who could put you in your place with a single hard look.
Deep in the corners of those cool eyes were laugh lines that his few close friends saw often. But those same lines also showed anyone who shook his hand for the first time that he’d lived, long enough to know exactly how to get what he wanted.
His stride was easy and loose, the gait of someone comfortable with the power he possessed. The old dock creaked every so often, as if the wood protested him walking on it. He headed for the boathouse, which stood at the end of the dock and was more gray and weathered than he was.
The boathouse had been there a long time. It had been there the first day he’d stepped foot on Spruce Island, when he was thirteen and orphaned and angry at a world where parents could be sitting around the breakfast table one morning and die in a car crash that same night.
His first day on the island he had walked past the old boathouse with his pride on his sleeve and a chip on his shoulder. He was on his way to meet a grandfather he’d only heard of the few times his father had talked about his past.
At thirteen Michael had thought the island was just some backward hayseed place stuck out in the tulles. To him his grandfather was a stranger who lived in a strange place, someone he didn’t know, yet who had the power to control his life. The island seemed like Alcatraz. And Michael had been scared.
But now, standing on the dock, he was older and wiser. World-weary. He didn’t have any of those feelings he’d had when he was young. Now he could feel the freedom of the island. He saw the rarity of this place that had never been coldly dissected by freeways.
It was lush and green, surrounded by silver glassy water instead of silver-glassed high-rise buildings. Fir, cedar, maple and hemlock towered along the jagged ridges that rose from the center of the island, and even along the sheer cliffs and quiet inlets where birds wheeled in the clean air.
He didn’t move for a minute, but stared out at the sharp blue sky above Cutters Cove where a large dark bird floated overhead. He did a sudden double-take. The bird had a majestic white head. With one hand, he shielded his eyes from the sun and stood there watching the eagle fly.
When the bird was out of sight, he shoved his hands back in his pockets and took a deep breath of cool, damp mid-morning air. The things that had been plaguing his mind suddenly fell into perspective in a way that was humbling and strangely welcome.
He had no idea how long he stood there, and it didn’t matter because there was no plane to catch. No meeting to get to. No stockholders to appease. No do-or-die deal to close. Here he could just…be.
When he finally did move, it was slowly and with purpose. He opened the boathouse door, which creaked loudly and scared away the black crows perched on the old shingled roof. He ducked down and stepped inside.
The late afternoon sun slipped though the panes of rustic time- and weather-frosted windows and cast shafts of milky light on the floor in a checkered pattern that looked like an oversized circuit board. Spiderwebs drifted in the light. He could smell the metallic and wet scent of algae that always grew on the wood in the Northwest.
He stepped over a few teak oars and tossed aside an old orange life vest that water, air, and the seasons had turned hard as concrete. He took a few more steps and ran his hand over the old boards along the windows. He leaned closer, squinting at the wood siding because he’d left his glasses in the cabin sitting next to his cell phone, electronic daytimer and briefcase.
He ran his hand over the old cedar boards carefully and more tentatively than any of his business associates would have thought possible. He was certain they thought he never did anything tentatively.
Yet his hands moved with care, the same way he’d wiped away her tears almost thirty years before. He stopped suddenly, his hand freezing in one splintered spot.
There, in the boards, were the ragged letters: M P + C W.
Summer, 1960
The first time he’d ever seen her he was fourteen and she was eleven. He was on an errand for his grandfather, walking down the gravel path that cut from his grandfather’s cabin, through the forest, and on to the old summer place.
She was hanging upside-down from an old pine tree, her skinned knees hooked over a low thick branch. She was swinging back and forth, so her long blond braids dangled like Tarzan’s jungle ropes. The whole time she hummed “Alley Oop” while she blew the biggest pink bubble he’d ever seen.
He didn’t know you could hum and blow bubble gum at the same time. As he walked past her, there was a loud pop!
“Who are you?” She swung up so she was straddling the branch with one leg, while the other dangled down. Her palms propped up her body and she stared down at him.
Needles and pine dust fell all over him and scowling he wiped off his face and head. On the same level as his nose was a pair of red canvas shoes with no shoelaces and the word Keds on the scuffed rubber tips. He slowly looked upward along her gangly freckled legs and scabbed-over knees to her small indignant face, which looked like a troll doll.
“I asked you who you were,” she repeated as if she were the queen of the island.
“I’m looking for a Mr. Wardwell.”
“Oh.” She blew another bubble, sucked in and popped it in an obnoxious way, then asked, “Why are ya lookin’ for him?”
“None of your business, Squirt.” Michael turned his back on her and started to walk down the gravel path that led toward the old house.
She jumped out of the tree and appeared beside him. “My name’s not Squirt. It’s Catherine.”
He grunted some response and kept walking.
“Hey! What’s your name?” she called out after him.
“It’s Mr. Packard,” he said to annoy her.
“You’re not Mr. Packard,” she said, skipping alongside of him. “Mr. Packard is taller and older and he has gray hair and a dog named King Crab.”
Michael ignored her.
“And he’s not a grump. Like you.”
He stopped and looked down her.
Her expression dared him to ignore her again.
“He’s my grandfather,” he told her and started walking away again.
She kept up with him, not saying anything, but he could feel her studying him. He looked at her finally. All he saw was an expressive face and a pair of frowning brown eyes that were the same color as root beer.
They were on the narrowest section of the sea cliff trail where it paralleled the water. He slowed his steps. “Watch it there, Squirt.” He grabbed her arm. “There’s a cliff on that side of the path. Fall down it and you’ll land in the water. Really cold water.”
She frowned down at his hand gripping her arm, then wriggled free with a stubborn independence and looked up at him. She stared for the longest time. “We come here every summer. I’ve never seen you here before.”
He wasn’t going to tell some kid why he had to live here.
But she wouldn’t shut up. “Where’d you come from anyway?”
“The stork dropped me down the chimney.”
“Funny.” She called him a dork under her breath.
He almost laughed then.
When he said nothing she piped up, “I’m not a baby, you know.”
He snorted and walked on.
“I know all about things like why the ocean is blue.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I know how planes fly and why engines need oil—” She paused as if she were waiting for him to make her prove it.
After a moment she announced, “And I know all about sex.”
He stopped and looked down at her. Then he did laugh. Loud and long, because she was so silly.
She planted her hands on her boyish hips, raised her chin, and said, “I do.”
He just shook his head and moved farther down the path. He could hear her running after him.
“Go ahead. Ask me something.”
“No.”
“But I know…” Her voice suddenly changed to a scream.
Michael turned.
One instant she was wobbling on the edge of the path, and before he could reach out, she tumbled down the hillside toward the water, hollering all the way.
Michael swore under his breath and went after her, sliding down the steep hillside feet-first.
She was still screaming. Below him he saw her hit the water. Rock and dirt and mud tumbled down ahead of him. The whole time he was watching for her silly head to pop up out of the glassy surface.
It didn’t.
He panicked and shoved off the hill in a half-dive. He hit the water just a foot away from where she’d sank. He dove down deeper.
The water was deep here and icy cold. She was frantic, kicking out and waving her arms like someone who couldn’t swim.
He clamped his arm around her wiggling, scrawny body and pushed upward. She stopped kicking and he felt her small hands tightly grip his forearm as they rose through the water.
Their heads broke the surface and he heard her gasp for breath. He swam through the water, pulling her with him to a rocky beach. He crawled onshore with her hanging limply under one arm.
Once they were safely on the gravel beach she stiffened and rolled away from him. She just lay there. She had her face buried in her folded arms, and her back rose with each gasp for breath. He knew she was going to be all right when she began to cough.
He sat up, resting his arms on his knees, and watched her. After a minute he could see one brown eye peeking out from her arms. He shook his head and gave her a stern look. “You need to watch where you walk, Squirt.”
She buried her head deeper in her arms and muttered something.
“What did you say?”
She scowled over at him. “I said I fell on purpose.” Her chin jutted out like a mule he’d seen once. “I wanted to see how cold the water was.”
They both knew she was lying.
She was too proud to admit she’d slipped and fallen in.
He stood, then looked down at her wet face staring up at him with a look that dared him to argue with her. He could have called her bluff. But he didn’t. Pride was something he understood. He turned away and started to walk toward the cove just beyond the rocky beach.
Behind him he heard her mumble that she wasn’t some squirty kid, that she was Catherine Wardwell and she did know all about sex.
He stopped and turned back around. “Hey, Squirt.”
She was standing now, looking right at him.
“If I were you, I’d stop trying to learn ‘all about sex’ and just learn how to swim.”
Three
Summer, 1963
The Wardwells were coming back to Spruce Island. For the past three years they had returned every June, and each year Catherine Wardwell spent most of the month bugging him. He’d discovered she had an annoying habit of popping up at the worst possible moment, like when he was in the woods drinking the beers he’d found in a boat his grandfather had loaned to some sportmen. Or when he was making out with a girl named Kristy behind the old well house near the cove where her parents had moored their boat.
It was June again, and like Dylan had sung, the times they were-a-changing. The Coca-Cola Company made a major move in packaging, from bottle containers to aluminum cans. The Beach Boys hit number one on the pop charts, and Dr. Strangelove or Why I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb opened in theaters with My Fair Lady.
But for Michael, June was hell month. Catherine Wardwell was back.
She was fourteen now, and she wore something called Erase for lipstick; it made her look too pale. She’d cut her hair short like some Seventeen magazine cover model. She looked pudgy and awkward and silly, as if she were trying too hard to be older.
He told her she wore too much makeup and looked half-dead. She told him his oxford shirt was buttoned too high and made him look like a geek.
It didn’t take long for her to get in his hair again. During that first week he woke up one morning and caught her peeking in the cabin window. He slipped outside and turned the hose on her.
The second week she stole a pack of cigarettes from him and had broken them all in two. He hadn’t cared much about smoking, just carried them to be cool, but to spite her he smoked all the stubs and blew the smoke in her face. She was so pig-headed she stood there and refused to run away.
But the worst incident was the afternoon he’d found a letter his dad had written to his grandfather on the day he was born, a letter that was filled with a father’s pride and dreams, things that only reminded Michael of the family he had lost.
No one had ever seen him cry; his pride would not let him show that he hurt.
But she saw him cry that day, when he was seventeen and sitting on a rock in a deserted section of the island. He thought he was alone when he sat there and sobbed in his knees.
That day she had walked right up to him and picked up the letter.
He cursed at her and tried to grab it away from her, but he could only see blurred images through his wet eyes.
She quickly stuffed it in her bra and ran away.
He didn’t have the energy to chase after her, so he just stared off into the distance, trying hard to picture his dad’s face and seeing nothing but the shadow of a tall man.
In a few minutes she came back, walking quietly.
From her tentative steps and her somber manner he could tell she’d read the letter.
She sat down next to him and handed him the crumpled paper.
He didn’t take it. Didn’t look at her. He only wanted to be left alone.
She began to smooth the paper against a rock, a lame effort to try to flatten it back to the way it had been.
It was a stupid thing to do. Like not having his dad anymore would hurt less if the letter weren’t creased.
She stopped after a minute and said nothing. Time passed in awkward and tense seconds that seemed to last an hour, one of those moments where you want to run away and hide from everything.
But she just sat there right next to him, so close that he could feel the warmth from her where their shoulders almost touched. She folded her hands in her lap and hung her head. Then she did the one thing he’d never expected.
She cried with him.
Summer, 1966
For the first time since 1963, the Wardwells had come back to the island. It was the same day he got his draft notice.
Dear Mr. Packard,
Greetings from the President of the United States…
There was no doubt the letter would change his future. The draft situation had newspapers and television stations full of protests and debates where activists argued against war, declaring the draft was archaic and unfair. Claiming you couldn’t buy beer, but you could die for your country. You couldn’t vote for the president of the United States, but you had to kill if he ordered you to.
Some who got the same letter went off to war. Some ran to Canada. But Michael just read the notice and set it down. He didn’t know how he felt about any of it. To him war seemed so far away, farther away than Vietnam. He went off into the woods to work so he wouldn’t have to think.
He hadn’t known the Wardwells were back this year. They hadn’t been back for two years so there was no reason to expect them. The moment Michael saw her leave the old house and walk down the beach toward the dock, he forgot all about the draft notice.
He was hidden in a group of cedar and maple trees that circled the cove. He was cutting wood from a tree that had fallen during the winter when he heard the hinges squeak and a screen door slam. He cast a quick glance toward the old Victorian rental house where a girl in a bright pink bikini came down the front porch steps and crossed the lawn.
He leaned a shoulder against a tree and just watched her. She had a body that was better than last month’s centerfold.
Then he recognized her face.
Gone was the pudgy and awkward blonde teen who wore too much makeup and followed him everywhere. She was taller now, a good three inches, and her shape blew him away. He remembered a poster he’d seen in Seattle, one of a soaking wet Ursula Andress dressed in a wet skin-colored bikini, her hair slicked back and her face and body guaranteed to make a man wake up in one helluva sweat.
He shook his head in disbelief. Gawky little Catherine Wardwell—the pest who knew all about sex, spied on him through windows, and had seen him cry—could have put the sexy Ursula to shame.
He felt a stab of something earthy and carnal go clear through the center of him. The ax slipped from his hand and hit the ground with a dull thud. He swore under his breath and shifted slightly.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. And he didn’t want to.
Her hair was lighter, longer and straighter; it brushed her shoulders as she walked down to the end of the dock where a red and blue nautical beach towel lay spread out and a transistor radio with a tall silver antenna played the Lovin’ Spoonful.
He leaned against the tree and crossed his arms, then blew out a breath slowly, kind of a half whistle of amazement that a girl could be put together that way.
She bent over and tossed something on the towel.
He groaned and closed his eyes. He heard the music throbbing through the air with the same beat that his heart pounded. He opened his eyes because he couldn’t hide any longer. He had to see her.
She was standing with her toes curled over the edge of the dock, her stance stiff and straight, her arms raised high, ready to dive.
He shoved off from the tree and moved down toward her. This year things had changed; he was following her.
She dove in.
When she hit the water, his breath caught and held as if he had to hold his own breath along with her. He walked faster, down the dock toward the water. But when he reached the towel, he stopped. He stood there staring at the rings of water she left behind, while the music from the radio blared out over the cove.
Her head broke through the surface, sleek and golden and wet. He bent and flicked down the volume on the radio, then he straightened and waited until she turned in the water.
She froze the instant she saw him. “Michael?”
Her voice was older and throaty. It made him think of things like smooth soft skin. Hot deep kisses. And Trojans.
He took two steps to the edge of the dock and squatted down, resting a hand on his thigh. He just looked at her and enjoyed the view. The air grew hotter and tighter and felt heavy.
She swam toward him.
He reached out a hand to her. “Hi, Squirt.”
She put her hand in his and he straightened, pulling her up with him while he watched the water run down her body.
She stood close to him, so close that all he had to do was lean forward and their bodies would touch. Chest to chest. Hip to hip. Mouth to mouth. He had a strange and laughable vision of them touching and steam suddenly fogging up the air around them.
She was five foot ten or so. No longer a little squirt. But it didn’t matter because she still had to look up at him. He was six foot two.
She slid her hand from his grip, turned away and grabbed the towel. She used it to cover herself while she awkwardly pretended to dry off.
He hadn’t moved, only watched her. He said nothing until she finally glanced up at him. He gave her a long look she’d have to be blind not to understand.
She got it. Her face flushed and she looked down quickly, rubbing the hell out of her legs so she missed the grin he had to bite to hide. She straightened then, still holding the towel. She raised her chin a little, defiant and challenging, the Catherine he remembered.
A moment passed. A minute maybe two. Neither said anything. They just stood on the dock and looked at each other under the warm and unpredictable sunshine. He felt like a thirsty man staring at an icy cold beer.
She dropped the act and returned his look, then whispered his name in that raspy grown-up voice he felt go all the way through him. “Michael.”
Just Michael.
And he was lost.
Time seemed to pass quickly after that. On days when it rained that misty rain that sometimes clouded the islands, they walked on the beach together, not minding the moodiness of the weather. The sunsets grew later and later as summer crept into the Northwest, and they fell in love.
They swam in the cove where the water was shallow and warm enough to enjoy. He taught her to sail. The first time a heavy summer rain hit, they moored and took shelter inside the sailboat’s small cabin, laughing at the foolish weather and eating a lunch of egg-salad sandwiches and barbecued potato chips she’d brought along.
The flavor of salt and barbecue spices lingered on her lips. Years later he could still not eat barbecued potato chips without thinking of that day, where a six-foot by six-foot sailboat cabin was too small and things quickly grew intense, so much so that they ended up moored to an old buoy and necking for most of the afternoon.
After that day, whenever they took the boat out he silently prayed for rain. Finally, rain or not, they spent afternoons in the cabin of his boat, where things got hot and heavy, where they would steam up the small mirror above the hard bunk and leave the sloop with their lips swollen and their bodies tense with need.
Michael learned the true meaning of wanting a woman that month. He learned the dark side of sex: the forbidden guilt and hunger that was teenage love. He would lie awake at night so hard from the mere thought of her that he couldn’t sleep. And when she would look at him in that way she had, as if he knew the answers to all the questions in the world, he felt real and alive, as if he could take on the world just for her. He learned that when you were young, nothing else mattered but the girl you loved.
One day he oiled the hinges on the old screen door because it gave him an excuse to be near her. She slipped out of the old house for the first time that night and met him walking in the woods where he pinned her against a tree and kissed the hell out of her, unhooked her bra and felt her up.
All he had to do was touch Catherine and both of them burned up. But they didn’t just touch and kiss and steam up the glass. Sometimes they would sit, hidden by those big old gray rocks near the cove, and watch the night drift by them.
And they would talk. About her hometown. About the war. About the poetry she loved. About the music he loved. About how Bob Dylan and Paul Simon were both poets and musicians. They talked about life and death and dreams.
She taught him the names of the stars because she said when he touched her and kissed her she always felt as if he took her clear up to those stars.
He didn’t care that she was seventeen and he was almost twenty. He didn’t care that the world thought he was a man who was ready to go to war, while she had one more year of high school and was jailbait.
He didn’t care because when he kissed Catherine Wardwell, nothing else in the whole goddamned screwed-up world mattered. Until the night they couldn’t stop and went all the way, the same night he’d carved their initials in the wood.
The same night her father caught them in the boathouse.
Four
San Francisco, 1997
Catherine slipped off her glasses and sagged back in her chair, staring out at the pink Victorian across the street from her office. It was four o’clock and almost every ten minutes there had been an urgent call.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and saw stars. When her vision cleared, she was looking at her desktop, where a cluster of silver-framed images of her daughters Alyson and Dana were grinning back at her.
In a frame with delicate ballet shoes decorating the corners was a photograph of Dana, her oldest daughter, dressed in a pink tutu, her blonde hair scraped back off her small heart-shaped face. She had been six then and had no front teeth. Her gummy smile looked almost too big for her face. There was another shot next to it of her sitting on Santa’s knee, her eyes turned up to him in complete awe. And the last photo was taken only a few months ago when Dana went to the Sadie Hawkins dance.
She turned to Alyson’s pictures. There was her second-grade photo taken the day after she’d tried to cut her own bangs; she looked like she’d had a fight with a lawnmower. Every time Catherine saw that photo she smiled.
There was no picture of Aly on Santa’s knee. Aly had always preferred animals to humans. She had liked Disney’s Robin Hood better than Sleeping Beauty. She wouldn’t go near Santa because when she was three the older kids at her preschool had told her there was no such thing as Santa Claus. After that day, Santa meant nothing to her.
Now the Easter Bunny, well, that was different. Those kids hadn’t said anything about the Easter Bunny. So instead of a Santa photo, there was one of Aly sitting on top of the Easter Bunny’s furry knee, her hands cupping his pink fuzzy cheeks while she demanded to know how he got around to all the houses in the world and managed to hide all those eggs in only one night. One of Aly’s typical questions—the kind that were hard to answer.
Catherine glanced back at the stack of report folders in a jagged pile on her desk, then up at the smiling images of her daughters. She picked up the phone, punched in a series of numbers and got Seattle information.
Fifteen minutes later she had rented the same quaint Victorian house in the same cove on the same secluded San Juan island where she’d spent so many summers.
This June, she vowed, would be different for her girls.
It was different. Her girls didn’t want to go.
Dana had to turn down a free ticket to a rock concert at Great America and Aly was going to miss a birthday party at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. Aly had eventually accepted Catherine’s decision to go to the island, especially after Catherine had bribed her by letting her bring along her cat Harold. But fifteen year old Dana was still scowling at the world. Nothing worked with her. If there had been a high school course in sulking, Dana would have aced the class.
Over an hour ago they had left the ferry at Orcas, purchased their supplies and loaded everything into a boat run by Blakely Charters. Until January, when daily ferry service would start to Spruce Island, the charter company made two runs a week. Sundays and Thursdays. Other than by seaplane, hiring a boat was the only way to get to the more remote and secluded islands of the San Juans.
It was late and the sun was sliding down the horizon; it turned the cotton clouds in the western sky gold, purple and red. Catherine leaned over the bow of the boat and pointed west. “Girls! Quick! Look at that sky!”
She had forgotten how gorgeous the sunsets were here. The color. The sheer beauty of nature. No one could possibly visit this part of the world and not believe in the perfect hand of God.
She turned toward her silent daughters to share their first sight of a Northwest summer sunset, and her heart sank.
Dana sat with her back to her, staring out at the water like a prisoner heading for death row. In her lap was an open copy of Stephen King’s Green Mile series. Without looking at Catherine, she blinked once, then buried her nose back in the book.
Dana’s sulking hurt Catherine. She didn’t want to let on that Dana had gotten to her, so she looked away. Aly had on a set of headphones. She was head-bopping to some song that shrieked through the headphone earpieces.
Catherine reached over, picked up the empty CD case, and read the name.
Alanis Morrisette.
She felt as if she were a hundred years old. She hated that music. Then she remembered how much her dad had disliked her Bob Dylan albums. She asked herself the question she always asked when she was dealing with the girls.
Will it matter in five years?
Dana’s sulking wouldn’t matter and hopefully some other hot young singer would be Aly’s favorite—if she still had her hearing.
The generation gap between her and her daughters felt as if it were as wide as the Grand Canyon. But she did know one thing—her relationship with her daughters would matter in five years.
She wanted her girls back, not these two young people she didn’t know anymore. She desperately wanted what few memories they could make this month, something special for them to look back on the same way she looked back on the island and those summers from her childhood.
She thought of this trip as a fresh start; she needed to be a mother again.
Catherine reached across and snatched the book out of Dana’s hands. “You can read this later.” She tucked it inside her duffel bag, then she punched the off button on Aly’s CD player and gestured for her to take off the headphones.
Both girls gaped at her.
She pointed ahead of them. “That’s Spruce Island,” she told them in a classic mother’s tone that demanded their attention—now.
Against the horizon the island was a camel-shaped lump of rocks and trees and natural coastline that grew larger the closer they got.
“I loved that island when I was your age. My favorite memories are there and it’s important to me that we spend time together so you can see what a wonderful place it is.”
They continued to look at her, then turned in unison to look at the island ahead of them.
“There are no houses,” Dana said in a voice that implied it was the very ends of the earth.
“There are summer houses, a few cabins and a village on the other side of the island. You can’t see them on this side. It’s more isolated. The island has always been a place where people go to get away.” She paused, then added, “Like us.”
They turned back around. From the looks on their faces you’d think she had just spoken Greek.
“The first houses were summer homes built late in the nineteenth century. Those hills are parkland and there are hiking trails.”
Dana frowned at her. “You hate hiking. You said you’d rather chew on foil than traipse up some mountain.”
“Yeah,” Aly said, siding with her sister. “You said smart people leave mountain climbing to the goats.”
Catherine realized she would never have to worry about losing her memory. She had her daughters to remind her of every single thing she had ever said.
“Fine. Forget about hiking. As I was saying, the house is on a cove on the western side of the island. There’s a private dock and a mooring. The rental agent said the owners still keep a sailboat. We’re free to use it. There are supposed to be bikes, too. When we used to come here there was a handyman’s cabin on a nearby inlet and a small harbor where boats from the mainland could moor. Other than that the island is pretty isolated.”
Twenty minutes later they stood at the end of a gray weathered dock, their bags and supplies stacked like building blocks and Harold whining in his cat carrier. There was nothing before them but silvery water. Catherine watched the boat turn around in a wide swath and head back for the mainland.
For just one moment she looked around her and was a little scared. It was secluded, and they were three women alone.
She raised a hand to her forehead and scanned the island. The large house was partially hidden by cedar and maple trees, but Catherine could see the sharp roofline. The old shingles were green with algae and moss, the way everything grew green in the dampness of the islands.
She took a deep breath, bent down, picked up a duffel and two plastic bags of groceries, then she marched bravely down the dock toward the rocky beach. Over her shoulder she called out, “Grab something and let’s go, girls. It’s getting dark.”
Five
It wasn’t dark enough.
Not to hide what time and weather had done to the old house. It was painted the same color yellow with the same white trim. Catherine walked toward the house and the closer she got the more she realized that the house looked the same because it was probably the same coat of paint as in 1966. It certainly looked about thirty years old.
Behind her she heard Dana’s shoes crunching on the gravel. A second later she heard a gasp.
“Mo-ther!”
“What?” Catherine snapped and turned around. She wasn’t ready for a confrontation.
“What are those?” With her horrified expression, Dana stood pointing at the ground. Next to her Aly clutched the cat carrier to her chest the way one holds a child after a close call.
Catherine looked at the ground. “They’re slugs.”
“Ugh!” Both girls shivered and stepped back.
“Oh God! I stepped on one!” Dana dropped her backpack and jumped around, shrieking.
It was the most life she’d shown since Catherine told the girls about the trip and she’d given her best Mother-you are-going-to-ruin-my-life act.
“Get it off! Get it off!”
“Stop hopping all over the place. You’ll step on another one.”
Dana froze.
“Just wipe your shoe off on the grass.”
Dana moaned, then hobbled over to a patch of wet grass and made a big to-do about wiping off her shoe.
Aly had shifted her cat carrier and was scanning the ground. “Do they travel with a mate?”
“I have no idea. They’re just like the snails we have at home only without the shells.” Catherine quickly checked the ground for slugs, then set down her bags. She had for gotten about those huge slugs that slithered all over the place whenever it rained.
“This place is awful,” Dana muttered from behind her.
“It’s not awful. It’s rustic and quaint,” Catherine told her, trying to keep her voice light but not feeling light at all.
Dana snorted.
“Follow me.” She could hear the girls whispering behind her and Harold began to whine. She didn’t really blame them. She had a bad feeling about this. She opened the screen door and held it with her shoulder while she pulled the rental envelope with the key out of her pocket and unlocked the front door.
Please, she thought, please let the inside be better than the outside.
Better was a relative term.
The inside wasn’t the Four Seasons. Catherine looked around the room. It was clean and neat and furnished in an odd mishmash of styles. There was an eastlake style sofa upholstered in a brown and red western print with bronco-riding cowboys, red and black lariats, and a smattering of green horseshoes. There were throw pillows scattered across it—one was yellow gingham, one was needlepoint bulldogs, and the other was black and white and shaped like a soccer ball. A Blackwatch plaid stadium blanket with the Mariners emblem embroidered in the corner was thrown over the edge of a brown recliner. Next to it was a white French provincial chair that looked exactly like one her grandmother had in front of her bedroom dressing table.
The coffee table was a huge wooden piece with burned edges, something you see in a roadside stand next to the velvet paintings of Elvis. In the center of the table was a monkeypod bowl with a silver nut cracker and a chrome and black leather ashtray. The end tables weren’t end tables at all, but small dressers. One was painted aqua and the other canary yellow. The aqua dresser had a white milkglass lamp with a beige ruffled shade. The only other light in the room was a red and orange lava lamp.
“Who decorated this place?” Dana said with a disgusted voice.
“Dale Evans and Barbara Cartland,” Catherine said as she set down the bags.
“Who?”
“James Bond and the Monkees?”
“James Bond and the Monkees?” Aly repeated. “Was that a rock group in the olden days?”
“Hey, hey, we’re the mon-kees,” Catherine sang, bopping her head as she did the Pony across the linoleum in the kitchen.
Her daughters looked at each other and rolled their eyes. She sighed. Her children had their father’s sense of humor.
“Yes, the Monkees were a rock group and surely you know who James Bond is.”
“Oh yeah. I forgot. Pierce Brosnan, huh?”
“Sean Connery.”
“The old guy? Uh-uh,” Aly shook her head. “He was Indiana Jones’s dad.”
Catherine felt ancient.
Aly dropped the grocery bags on a rag rug and plopped down on the cowboy sofa. She switched on the lamp. “I love lava lamps.” She rested her chin in her hands and watched the lamp bubble.
Catherine watched her youngest daughter and was overcome with a sense of déjà vu. Aly was dressed in bell-bottomed jeans, a wide black belt, and a skinny turtleneck. She even had on a thick white headband and a flip hairdo like the Breck girl.
“Can we get one, Mom?”
“One what?”
“A lava lamp.”
Catherine hadn’t liked lava lamps back when they were new. To her they were in the same category as Chia pets and diet tablets that helped you lose ten pounds overnight.
Aly was staring at her through the liquid of the lamp.
“We’ll see.”
“Where’s the TV?” Dana looked at her and popped her gum.
Here it comes, Catherine thought. She opened the refrigerator and started putting things inside. When she had her head sufficiently hidden behind the door she said, “There is no TV.”
It took a few minutes before she could get a word in between their melodramatic protests. Aly was going to miss “Nick at Night” and Dana just plain hated the island and wanted to go home, where “it was normal.” And she wanted to go now.
“You need to give this place a chance. And even if I was willing to leave—which I’m not—there’s no boat until Thursday.”
Catherine crossed the room to the bookcase made of cinderblock and wood planks. “There’s a whole wall of books here.” She opened a huge cabinet. “Look in here. I see stacks of puzzles and games.”
Dana shifted her gaze to the cabinet. “Oh yea!” She clapped her hands like a baby. “Candyland and Chutes and Ladders.”
Catherine looked inside. “Don’t be smart. There are adult games in here, too. And puzzles are always fun. We used to do those at home.” She pulled out the top puzzle box. “Look at this one. It’s a thousand-piece puzzle of a pepperoni pizza. You both like pizza.”
Aly stood next to her and looked inside. She tilted her head sideways to read. “What’s this? Two thousand pieces.” She looked back at Catherine. “We’ve never done a puzzle with that many pieces. Have you?”
Catherine shook her head.
Aly read the puzzle label. “It says Classic Puzzle Series: Metal Rockers.”
Catherine pictured a photograph made up of sleek, chrome and black leather Brancusi rocking chairs cut up into thousands of tiny pieces all shaped like Mickey Mouse. She smiled. It would be the kind of puzzle that was almost impossible to do in less than three days. “Take it out, Aly, and let’s take a look.”
Aly held up the box and they stared down at the lid. A whole group of chalk-white faces framed with wild black hairdos stared back at them.
Catherine felt her smile fade.
“Cool!” Dana said, taking the box from her sister. “It’s Aerosmith and Kiss.” Both girls moved over to the sofa as if they were chasing concert tickets, sat down and dumped out a huge pile of tiny puzzle pieces on the coffee table.
Dana looked up impatiently. “Come on, Mom.”
“Let’s get comfortable first.” Catherine ran toward the downstairs bedroom. “Last one in their sweats has to make dinner!”
A few minutes later when she walked back into the room wearing old sweats, she found Dana already in her flannel pajamas and sprawled out on the sofa with Aly’s cat asleep on her stomach.
“No Aly?”
Dana shook her head. “She couldn’t find her boxers.”
Catherine grinned. “Good. I don’t have to cook.”
A minute later Aly came running down the stairs wearing a pair of white cotton boxers patterned with bright red lips and a cropped T-shirt that said Smile and Kiss Me. She looked at Dana, then at Catherine. “I’m last, huh?”
They nodded.
Aly was a trooper. She just shrugged, walked over to the sofa and scooped up her cat. “I know exactly what I’m fixing for dinner.”
“What?” Catherine asked.
She exchanged a sly look with Dana, then said, “It’s a surprise.”
Catherine didn’t care what she made as long as the girls were reasonably happy for now. She’d take this one moment at a time. She walked toward the coffee table, then started to sit opposite it on the floor.
“Sit here, Mom.” Aly tucked the cat onto her hip, shifted sides of the coffee table, then sank gracefully down to the rug. “You don’t want to sit on the floor. Remember that time you couldn’t get up?”
“I’d been skiing all day,” Catherine said defensively.
Her daughters exchanged a look that said, “Yeah. Sure.”
“I had.” Catherine sat down on the Dale Evans sofa.
Dana laughed, a refreshing sound, then in a falsetto voice she said, “Help! Help! I’ve fallen down and I can’t get up!”
Aly caught on and said, “We’ll order you one of those clapper things, Mom.”
“Funny. Real funny.” Catherine tried to look serious and failed. Both her girls were grinning at her. For the first time in the last few days she thought that perhaps her plan just might work. The three of them were talking together and joking with each other. The girls were laughing instead of ignoring her.
“I found a corner piece!” Aly said, hunched over the puzzle with Harold purring in her lap. She sat up, her pert little nose in the air. “I was first.”
A minute later, in the name of good old healthy female competition, they all lost themselves to the other one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.
Six
Michael was outside cutting wood when the air began to fill with the smell of rain. Daylight had faded away and the wind was picking up, so he went inside. He hung his jacket on the old iron coat-rack, next to where his grandfather’s tool belt still hung on the exact same hook as it had for almost forty years.
He’d kept that belt around long after his grandfather had died. The canvas was frayed, the edges were black with grease, and the leather was cracked. At first he’d told himself he kept it around because they didn’t make tool belts like they used to, with a slot for a flashlight and for tools.
Hell. Now they made tool belts out of space-age, NASA-developed weave that was stronger than canvas and leather could ever be.
The truth was, he’d kept it for sentimental reasons. And he still used it. Maybe he wore it because he was trying to recapture his past. Maybe he was just old and needed something from his youth to cling to.
He turned away, not really giving a damn why he wore the thing. He just did.
He crossed the room and started a fire, then went into the kitchen where he made some soup. He stood at the stove and ate right from the pan. He ate most of his meals that way, when he was home alone and too lazy to dirty a plate or to bother with sitting down at a table.
Unless there was a football game on TV, then he sat down in front of his big screen while he ate from the pan.
Single people had singular habits. He drank milk and orange juice from the carton while standing at the open refrigerator, his arm resting on the door. He dipped his toast in the jam jar. He didn’t pick up his socks or make his bed unless someone was going to join him in it. He usually left the cap off the toothpaste and squeezed the tube from the middle.
He knew himself pretty well, he thought as he crossed the room. He picked up the latest issue of Money magazine, then set down a glass of Jack Daniel’s on a small table and sat in an old comfortable chair in front of the older rock fireplace that blazed and crackled with a fire.
He propped his feet up on a tired leather ottoman and relaxed—something he couldn’t seem to do much of lately. At some point he had lost the ability to sleep on planes. Hell, sometimes he even lost the ability to sleep in a hotel room, and it didn’t seem to matter how exhausted he was.
At this moment, though, he wasn’t tired. But he knew he could easily fall asleep in the old chair if he just closed his eyes. There was a comfort in knowing he could do something easily, something that had until now eluded him.
He chose to sip his drink and look around him instead of escaping to sleep. He had a strong sense that he was where he belonged, in a place that seemed to fit him better than his sleek glass offices or his huge home.
He’d gotten so he only lived in three of the rooms in that enormous house on the water. Usually he came in through the garage, because when he walked in the front doors he felt as if he were walking into the Guggenheim.
Here he was surrounded by old things. He liked old things.
He took his glasses out of his flannel shirt pocket and slipped them on, then began to read the magazine. The Asian markets were on a downtrend and the Wall Street wizards expected the NASDAQ to drop. Some hotshot at Merrill Lynch predicted Letni stock to drop and profits to be down.
Michael had been reading about and hearing those rumors for over a year. But each quarter the company proved to be stronger than ever. This magazine issue was barely a week old, yet just yesterday, before he’d loaded the boat with supplies and motored to the island, Letni had released to the public the profit reports for the last quarter.
They were twice as high as he had expected.
He laughed and tossed the magazine into the fireplace, where it curled into dark flame that was as black as the magazine’s predictions. He watched it burn, then picked up his drink and mockingly raised his glass to the jackass who’d written the article.
Michael toasted him with two extremely crude words.
By eight o’clock Catherine and the girls had polished off six cans of cream soda, a can of cheese Pringles, a box of Wheat Thins and two containers of Allouette spread, five apples, a slab of Tillamook cheese and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s Wavy Gravy ice cream—Aly’s idea of dinner.
“One more piece and we’ll have the outside frame done.” Catherine stuck her spoon in the empty ice cream carton and scanned the table for a piece that had a flat edge.
Dana was chewing on a handful of smoked almonds—a gift from Catherine’s mother—and eyeing the small puzzle pieces with a determined look on her face. It seemed that Dana was driven to find that puzzle piece.
But not Aly. She had given up on the puzzle frame and was putting together Gene Simmons’s chalky face. Even upside-down Catherine could see that in the photograph his tongue was sticking out.
She suddenly wished they were putting together a picture of Bambi, Thumper and Flower. She sighed in that quiet, tired way, when you knew time had slipped past far too quickly, then went back to the puzzle.
A few minutes later she had an awful thought. “If this puzzle is missing any pieces I’m going to scream.”
Almost simultaneously she spotted the last outside end piece.
Aha!
She locked her eyes on it and casually set down the empty ice cream carton. Then she leaned forward and quickly reached across the table to snatch up the puzzle piece.
At that very same moment the lights went out.
It didn’t take Catherine long to remember that whenever a storm hit Spruce Island, the power went out. The sudden and complete island darkness could jar your memory quickly.
There were no streetlights here. Just the stars and the moon, and on some rainy nights, not even that.
What she saw in the darkness was the remembered image of her father cursing at the old generator behind the rental house. She could remember her mother holding an umbrella and scolding her dad for cursing, and how Catherine always got to hold the flashlight so her dad could see inside the generator while he cursed at it.
So she and the girls went outside, loaded with one big old metal flashlight and a huge Mary Poppins-sized umbrella. Dana whipped the flashlight back and forth across the ground. She was on slug patrol.
Aly carried the umbrella. Catherine stumbled on a rock and almost fell on her face; she couldn’t see because Dana, her slug-fearing daughter, had the flashlight shining near her own feet instead of the path that ran toward the north end of the yard.
Catherine stopped and turned around. “Dana.”
“Huh?”
“Keep the flashlight ahead of us so I don’t fall and kill myself.”
Dana never even looked up at her.
Huddled under the umbrella with Aly, Catherine tapped Dana on the arm. “I promise no slugs are going to suddenly leap up from the ground and latch on to your face like that monster did in Alien.”
“Oh, Mom.”
Catherine stopped in front of a small wooden garden shed with a trap door. “Ah, here it is. Voila!” She paused and waved her hand dramatically. “This, my girls, is a generator…I think. Hold the flashlight up, Dana.”
“Does it work?” Dana asked, glancing up for only one brief second before she turned her gaze back to the grass.
“I don’t know. It used to drive your grandpa nuts, though. I’d come out here with him and hold the flashlight. Like you are, Dana. Aim it here, sweetie. That’s right. I can still remember him banging on this metal thing when he couldn’t get it to work. He made so much noise you could have heard him hammering on it all the way across the island. He used to say a generator is like a mule. It needs a swift kick to get going.”
A few minutes later, the wind had picked up and the rain was coming down so hard it bounced back up from the ground. Over five times Catherine had read and followed the old instructions that were engraved on a metal plate attached to the lid, and still nothing happened.
“Who writes these things?” she muttered. “Probably the same people who write software manuals.”
She took the flashlight from Dana and banged the generator a good one.
The motor gave a half-hearted start, then suddenly died.
“Oh Mom! It almost started!” Dana reached for the flashlight. “Let me try.” She hit it a few times.
The generator started up with a loud coughing rev like a huge lawnmower.
She and the girls cheered, then she took the flashlight from Dana and turned to trudge back to the porch. The clouds slipped by steadily and the moon cracked through with bright silver light. The wind blew in sudden, whipping gusts and caught the umbrella; it slipped from Aly’s hands and tumbled across the yard like an shiny wet acrobat.
They chased after it, all of them yelling “I’ll get it! I’ll get it!” Dana made a grab for it at the same time as Aly. Both girls fell in the mud just as the umbrella danced away from their outstretched hands.
Catherine looked down at her muddy children and began to laugh. “First one to get the umbrella doesn’t have to do any dishes for a week!” She ran after the umbrella while her girls scrambled after her.
“You’re cheating, Mom! You had a head start!”
“That’s because I’m old!” she shouted over her shoulder as she ran in front of them.
It became a game, one of them reaching for the umbrella just as the wind snatched it away, leaving behind nothing but their laughter. They were so wet the umbrella wouldn’t have done them a bit of good, but it didn’t matter. Between the stubborn and wild Winslow women, one of them was going to get that blasted umbrella.
Soaking wet and shouting, Catherine was now the closest to it. She gave a triumphant holler and launched after it like a missile.
One moment she was standing, the next she slipped in the mud and skidded on her stomach across the wet grass, all to the sound of her daughters’ laughter being carried upward by that rascally wind.
Mud splashed up into her face and through her wet hair, but she didn’t care. She hadn’t had this much fun since she was ten and her dad had brought home a bright yellow Slip ‘n Slide he’d attached to the garden hose in the yard.
“Yahoo! I’ve got it!” She laughed and hooted, then scrambled up and chased the umbrella, until she realized she couldn’t run fast enough to catch it. So she dove toward the wet ground on purpose and just slid after it on her belly.
Right into a large pair of Wellington boots.
A man’s Wellington boots.
For a second she stared at the huge rubber tips, partially sunken in the new mud, then slowly raised her wet head to look up.
The moonlight was behind him and all she could see was a tall silhouette of a man holding the umbrella. He shined a flashlight in her face and held it there.
She squinted and held up her hand to block out the glare.
Without a word he turned the light away from her.
She stared up at him.
His features were blurred, so she swiped the mud and water from her face and slapped her wet hair out of her eyes. Just for good measure she pulled the flashlight out of her jacket and shone it upward, figuring she could either blind him or beat him with it if he meant them any harm.
The light shone on his face. Everything seemed to stop suddenly. The rain. The wind. Her heart. Her breath.
The whole world stopped.
She stared up at him and felt as if she were stepping into her most secret dreams. She whispered, “Michael?”
Seven
It took Michael a minute to realize just who he was looking at. Every emotion imaginable raced through him. Yet he didn’t react; he had spent too much time in Vietnam, where he’d learned to never be surprised, and had developed nerves of steel that served him in his business and his personal life.
Until this very moment.
This was a face he had seen only in his memory for the last thirty years.
She was covered in mud and soaking wet. Her hair was dark and stringy from the rain, her mouth open in stunned surprise.
But that face was still uniquely Catherine.
“Hi, Squirt.”
“Ohmygod…It is you.” She buried her head in her arms the way she had when she was eleven. It was as if she still thought her embarrassing moments would just go away if she didn’t look at him.
“How long have you been standing there?” she said into her arms.
“Long enough to be entertained.”
She took a deep breath. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Who are you?” A young girl stuck her wet and muddy face in front of him. It was almost exactly the same face he had seen hanging upside-down from a tree.
Michael felt as if he were in an episode of “Star Trek,” thrown back to a unique and significant time in his life just to teach him something.
The youngest girl looked exactly like Catherine did at eleven. Another Squirt.
For one brief moment—just a nanosecond of regret that had never hit him before—he was sorry he had never fathered a child.
While he stood there speechless and frozen in time, Catherine rolled over and sat up, resting her hands on her bent knees. She looked at the two girls. “This is Michael Packard, girls. An old friend.”
“There are no houses around here,” the older girl said after scanning the trees. She looked at him as if she expected him to grow horns. “Where’d you come from?”
He didn’t take his eyes off Catherine when he answered her. “The stork dropped me down the chimney.”
Catherine looked right into his eyes, half surprised and half amused. A moment later she began to laugh.
He could see she remembered that all those years ago he’d said those same words to her. A second later the older girl called him a weirdo under her breath, and Michael decided that time didn’t change people very much.
“He was teasing you, Dana,” Catherine said.
He stuck out a hand to help her up. “Here.”
She sat there for a second, her gaze wandering over him. She paused to look at the tool belt hanging on his hips. He wondered what she was thinking when she looked at him like that.
She looked down quickly as if to hide her thoughts, like she was embarrassed. She wiped her muddy hand off on her even muddier pants, then put it into his hand.
He started to pull her to her feet.
“Michael is the handyman on the island,” she told her daughters.
He had the sudden urge to drop her.
“Just like his grandfather was,” she added not looking at him and in a tone that was all too bright and cheery to be real.
Damn it if he didn’t just let go.
She plopped back down in the mud with a splat, and her daughters laughed.
“Sorry,” he said through a slightly tight jaw.
She looked up at him with a stunned expression.
He shrugged. “My hand slipped.” He stuck out his hand again.
“No, thanks. I can get up on my own.” She stood then with her back to him so he couldn’t see her face.
She thought he was a handyman. And from her voice he could tell she was disappointed.
He shouldn’t have let go of her. It was vindictive.
He looked away quickly because he thought he might smile. He took a deep breath, shoved his hands into his pockets, and with a straight face he turned back around.
The older girl was looking at him suspiciously. He waited a moment, then gave her the same speculative look she was giving him.
She stared at him longer than most. He wasn’t certain how to gauge that—as teenaged stubbornness or an innate strength of character he should respect.
She finally looked down and began to fiddle with her hand.
“These are my daughters. Dana and Aly.”
He nodded to them. Daughters meant there was a father. A husband. He glanced at her hand. No ring.
The rain changed meter and began to pound down in sheets. They all looked up for a second, then Catherine touched his shoulder. “Come on to the house!”
She half-ran, half-trudged toward the house with the girls running ahead of her.
At the crooked porch, she pried off her wet tennis shoes by stepping on her heel with one foot, then did the same with the other foot. Her daughters pulled off their shoes and rushed inside, while he sat on an old bench and pulled off his mud boots.
Catherine waited for him, watching him until he stood and she had to look up. She opened the old screen door, which creaked on its hinges the way it used to.
“Come on in,” she said in a rushed voice that was breathy and still too sexy for her own good.
He felt a little numb as he followed her inside and stood there while she took his wet jacket and hung it on a hook. They went into the big old living room where a red and yellow glow from an old lava lamp made the room seem warmer.
No husband on the sofa. No man’s jacket on the hook or boots on the porch. No man.
She walked a few feet into the room and stopped so suddenly it was as if she had hit an invisible wall.
He followed her gaze to the sofa where empty soda cans and boxes and ice cream cartons littered the sofa and floor. A low table was covered with a jigsaw puzzle.
She mumbled something that sounded like a swear word, then rushed over and began to scoop together the mess.
“Girls, help me here.” She jammed soda cans under her arms and he tried not to laugh.
“Don’t mess up the puzzle, Mom,” the youngest girl said as she bent down and picked up a spoon that had fallen on the rug next to a big gray cat that was sound asleep.
From the way Catherine darted all over the place snatching up empty food containers, he could see she was embarrassed.
Both girls stood there in front of him, soaking wet and staring at him as if they expected him to do something strange, like split and multiply.
He should just leave. Take his tool belt and go back to his cabin and forget Catherine was ever here.
Instead he squatted down and gave the cat a stroke on his back. “Hey, fella.”
“He likes you.”
Michael looked up at the kid called Aly and nodded. “You sound surprised.”
“He doesn’t usually let strangers touch him. His name is Harold.”
Harold rolled over on his side and began to purr loudly.
“What would you like to drink?” Catherine called out from the kitchen where she was stuffing trash into a bag under the sink. “I don’t have beer, but I have soft drinks and plenty of coffee.”
Michael sat down on the sofa and flinched. He reached behind him and pulled out an empty aluminum can.
Cream soda.
The youngest girl giggled and took it from him. He gave her a quick wink and said to Catherine, “Coffee’s fine.”
Catherine looked at her daughters and said, “Go upstairs and change out of those wet clothes, girls. I’m not sure which one of you is the muddiest.”
Dana gave him a look as if she were weighing whether he could be trusted to be left alone with her mom.
Aly jabbed her with an elbow. “Come on.”
They went upstairs together arguing over who looked the worst.
At the top of the landing Aly stuck her head out over the stair rail and looked down just as Catherine came out of the kitchen with a tray.
“We’re both wrong, Dana.”
Catherine stopped in front of the coffee table and looked up at her daughter, who was grinning down at her.
“Mother’s the muddiest!” she said, then disappeared after her sister.
He watched Catherine’s face as she looked down at herself for the first time. He could read her expression perfectly.
Again his first thought was that he should be a gentleman and leave. Instead he stood and took the tray from her. “Go get into some dry clothes.”
She nodded and muddy hair fell into her face and stuck to her lips. She looked at him rather helplessly, then raised her chin as if she wasn’t soaked and covered in mud and she walked toward the back bedroom.
Catherine Wardwell and her stubborn pride; it was still there after all these years.
He watched her, because she was Catherine and because he didn’t want to look away, even though he knew it would make her feel less conspicuous.
Just before she turned the corner of the hall, she flicked on the hall light and he caught the expression on her pale face. She looked like she wanted the ground to just open up and swallow her.
Catherine certainly had wanted the earth to open up and swallow her. The trouble was, she looked as if it already had and then spit her back out again.
She stood at the mirror in the bathroom and had trouble looking at herself without wincing. It was worse than she had imagined.
There was grass in her hair, which was glued to her head and plastered around her forehead and ears. Flecks of mud and slim green blades of grass were stuck to her cheeks and neck. Her sweatshirt was soaked and clung to her chest.
She stepped back and turned around. The muddy sweatpants were stuck to her butt, too. She continued to stare. Oh, why had she quit step-aerobics?
Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot!
She shoved back the shower curtain, turned on the shower and stripped off her clothes, then hopped inside. She soaped up, washed her hair and was out in about two minutes. She dried off, shrugged into a robe, brushed her teeth longer than necessary, then went into the bedroom.
She changed clothes seven times in under five minutes, until she finally decided her bra was the problem and put on a different one, then hiked the adjustment on the straps up a good inch. After that her green cotton sweater looked better.
She hopped around the room, shoving her legs into the pair of jeans that made them look the longest, then she laid down on the bed so she could zip them up.
She stood and jerked the sweater down over her butt and ran back to the bathroom, where she swiped on some deodorant, brushed her wet hair back and twisted it up, then stuck in a hair pick to hold it.
She slapped on some makeup. She didn’t need any blush; her face was too flushed already. She was nervous, so she put on more deodorant, then stood back and looked at herself.
He had been attracted to her once, when they were young. But what would he see when he looked at her now?
When she looked at herself she saw her outside changing, growing older, while inside she still felt young. Aging was a strange thing—made you feel like you were wearing a striped shirt and plaid pants. Mismatched. Because you never felt as old inside as you looked on the outside.
There were those days now when she went to put on her eye shadow and little lines of it caked at the corners of her eyes. She had to smudge the eye shadow into her skin with a Q-tip.
And there were those little vertical lines along her lips that her old lipstick had recently started bleeding into. She’d had to change types of lip liner and lipstick, something matte that wouldn’t seep in the age cracks that were just beginning to show on her lips.
She put one finger at each end of her mouth and pulled her lips back. Collagen? A peel?
Neither appealed to her.
Bad pun.
She stood there for a long time, gripping the sides of the sink with her hands, hesitant to go out of the bathroom. Scared. Deep down inside, she wanted to still be young for him.
She stared at herself in the mirror. A moment later she pulled her bra straps out of the neckline of her sweater and tightened them another half an inch, then she bent over and grabbed the bottom of her bra and wiggled so she filled the cups differently. Higher. Younger?
She looked at the result in the mirror, then tugged down on her sweater. That was better. She wished she had packed perfume. She lifted her arm. She smelled like Camay soap and baby powder-scented deodorant.
Better than smelling like a garden slug.
Her hand closed over the glass door knob. She took a deep breath and finally mustered the courage to leave the bathroom.
Eight
Michael knew the exact moment she stepped into the room. It should have frightened him that he could be so attuned to another person that her mere presence could distract him. With anyone else he would have fought that awareness with a vengeance. Because it was a control thing, and he was a man who needed to be in control.
His awareness of Catherine was different; it didn’t threaten him. It somehow felt right, as if the power between them, this thread of something that linked them together, was an innate part of him.
He glanced up at her from over the rim of a coffee mug. She stood framed in the hall doorway as if she were a painting that had just come alive.
She had been a knockout when she was a young woman. Fresh and tall and sleek. Now she was thirty years older, still beautiful, but added to her face was something better than youthful beauty.
She had character.
He had lived long enough to understand and respect that life did that to you, etched lines of experience on you that said to the world, “I’ve been there, done that, and lived through it.”
On Catherine all that living only made her sexier.
“Hi,” she said and walked calmly into the room, which suddenly felt smaller and warmer.
Aly and Dana had come back downstairs earlier and had been talking to him. Well, Aly had been talking to him. Dana was sitting on the sofa, pretending to work on the puzzle when she wasn’t eyeing him like he was the Antichrist.
Catherine came over to the sofa in that same old long-legged walk of hers that after all these years could still get him hot and tight.
She poured herself a cup of coffee.
Aly scooted over and patted the spot next to him. “Sit here, Mom.”
“No!” Dana said so suddenly Catherine looked up from her coffee with a startled expression.
The only sound for that split second was the rain on the roof, tapping tensely. It was the kind of constant monotonous warning sound that made you follow it with your hearing sharp and your breath held, waiting for the explosion.
Catherine cast a quick apologetic glance at him, then gave a small shrug.
So this wasn’t Dana’s normal behavior with men, he thought. It was him alone and not just any man that made her oldest daughter so protective.
Catherine sat down next to Dana at the opposite end of the sofa. She looked up at him. “We were doing a jigsaw puzzle before the power went out.”
He nodded. “So I see.”
She looked at Dana, who was hunched over the table. “What piece are you looking for?”
“Steve Tyler’s belly button,” she said without looking up.
Catherine looked at him as if she didn’t know what to say to that, which Michael knew was why Dana had said it. Shock value.
He reached out and picked up a puzzle piece and held it out to her. “Here, try this one.”
Dana looked at it, then up at him, then took the piece.
It fit.
He winked at Catherine, who looked as if she wanted to strangle Dana. He shook his head slightly. It didn’t matter. Catherine needed to ignore her daughter’s behavior. It would work better than letting her teenager trap her into getting angry, which was Dana’s objective, even if she didn’t consciously know it.
The tension in the room was so taut you couldn’t have broken through it with two hundred pounds of muscle and a timber ax.
Aly was quietly sitting cross-legged next to him. She had a huge book propped in her lap and seemed oblivious to what was going on with her sister.
Catherine looked at her and asked, “What are you reading?”
“An encyclopedia.”
“Oh.” Catherine frowned. “Why?”
“I was just curious about something.”
“What?”
“Those slug things.” She looked up and grinned. “Slugs are just like you, Mom. They don’t have a mate.”
Michael choked on his coffee and tried hard not to laugh.
He had his answer. There was no man.
Catherine just sat there numbly looking like Christmas in her bright green sweater and her even brighter red face.
“It says here that they are mollusks.”
He caught Catherine’s eye and told her exactly what he had been thinking. “Not only does Aly look just like you did at that age, she is you.”
Catherine sighed and gave him a weak smile. “I know.”
Aly groaned and slammed the book shut. “Everyone says that.” Then she stopped and looked back at her mother. “Not that you aren’t pretty, Mom. It’s just weird, you know?”
“I understand, kiddo. At eleven you want your own identity, not your mother’s. I felt the same way. So did Dana.”
“And at school everyone knows I’m Dana Winslow’s younger sister. Mr. Johnson, the science teacher, even calls me Dana sometimes.”
Dana looked up then. “Do you answer him?”
“I have to. If I don’t he thinks I’m not participating.” Aly got up and trounced over to the bookcase.
There was another lapse of awkward silence.
Catherine took a sip of coffee. “So. The island hasn’t changed much, has it?” She didn’t look at him.
He should tell her now, that he had changed, that he wasn’t a handyman. He watched her and found himself staring at her hair. If she looks at me, he thought, I will tell her the truth.
She stared into her coffee cup as if she were searching inside of it for something to say.
Aly plopped back down next to him. “Mom says there’s plenty to do here. Fishing and sailing and stuff.”
Before he could answer Dana asked, “Do you have a boat?”
Michael nodded. “Yes.”
The girl brightened suddenly. “Good, then you can take us back to the mainland.”
“Dana!” Catherine looked at him then, clearly mortified. “I’m sorry. She seems to have forgotten her manners.” She paused and took a deep breath, clearly exasperated. “Dana doesn’t like it here.”
“There’s nothing to do here.”
Michael was quiet. He looked away from Catherine and into Dana’s sharp eyes. “The engine’s not running right.”
Dana looked like she didn’t believe him. “What’s wrong with it?”
Catherine groaned and buried her face in a hand, shaking her head.
But he answered her daughter. “The plugs are bad and the points need to be replaced.” He stood up then. “I should leave.”
Catherine stood up after him and followed him to the door as if she wanted to say something but didn’t know what. He could feel Dana watching them intently and figured she would have been walking in between them if she thought she could have gotten away with it.
He took his jacket off the hook and put it on, then stepped out onto the porch, sat on the bench and pulled on his boots.
Catherine was leaning against the door jamb with her arms crossed, watching him. She had one of those wistful smiles he remembered, the kind she had just before he used to grab her and kiss the hell out of her.
“The rain’s stopped,” was all she said.
He stood and took two steps to stand near her. He looked down at her face. “I’ve got good timing.”
“I’m sorry about Dana.” She dropped her arms to her sides. “These teenage years aren’t easy.”
He nodded, thinking that she was a teenager the last time he’d seen her.
They stood there like that, not saying anything that mattered. It was as if they were both afraid to say what they were thinking.
He looked away. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Anytime.”
Neither of them spoke again for a long stretch of seconds. He felt like he was twenty again, standing on the same porch and wanting to touch her so badly he hurt with it. But knowing he couldn’t because her parents were right there on the other side of the door.
There were no parents this time; it was her children who were watching them, probably listening to them.
So he didn’t do what he wanted to. He turned and went down the steps and across the lawn. He heard the screen door slam shut.
“Michael?”
He turned around.
She was standing on the porch gripping the wooden railing in two hands and watching him. “I wrote you.
Several letters.” She waited, as if she wanted him to explain.
When he said nothing she added, “I never got any answer back from you.”
“I never got any letters, Catherine.” He turned then, and walked back into the woods.
Her father was shouting. They were in the boathouse, half-naked, their clothes askew, her hair tousled and her lips red and swollen. A foil Trojan wrapper was torn in two and carelessly thrown by their shoes.
Her father’s flashlight beam was shining on it.
Then the light went out. It was dark. So dark. He was in a VC prison camp, locked in a box with two other prisoners. He couldn’t move.
Something rattled the box. Opened it. Light pierced his eyes. His buddies rescued him. Suddenly they were half-dragging him through the jungle.
Go! Go….
Michael woke up fast and sat up in his bed in a cold sweat, panting like he’d been running from a sniper. Damn. He rubbed his face with his clammy hands. Those nightmares of Nam had stopped years ago.
Seeing Catherine tonight had brought it all back again—the scene with her father. Catherine and her mother disappearing from the island. Her father talking to his grandfather and to him.
He was not to call her. He couldn’t write to her. He was to disappear from Catherine’s life. Or he would go to jail for statutory rape.
Instead he’d gone into the Navy less than a week later and ended up in Special Forces, infiltrating into Laos or patrolling the Mekong Delta for weeks at a time. He’d been captured and spent three months in a dark box.
He drove his hand through his hair and took a few deep breaths, thinking for just a brief moment about a life he had left far behind him and never wanted to think of again, because it was like reliving hell.
He sat there for a minute, then threw back the damp sheet and pulled on his jeans. He shrugged into a jacket and shoes, grabbed a flashlight and left the cabin.
The moon had gone down and it was darker outside than his memory of the deepest jungle. There was silence, and a little rain, that misty kind that came on like soggy fog.
He walked down to the small dock where he moored his boat. He unsnapped the tarp and stepped inside, where he lifted the engine cover and shone the flashlight down into the engine compartment until he saw what he was looking for.
A few minutes later he was walking back down the dock and toward the cabin, the plugs and points jammed into his jeans pocket.
He went inside the cabin and headed straight to the refrigerator, took out a carton of juice and lifted it to his lips. He drank half of it, stuck it back inside without closing it, and took out a Mexican beer.
He grabbed something to eat from a cabinet and popped the cap off the beer as he crossed the room to sit down in front of the dwindling fire. He raised the beer bottle to his mouth, took a long drink and set the bottle down on the table next to him. The smooth flavor of the beer was on his tongue, but what he craved was egg-salad sandwiches.
There was nothing he could do about what he was feeling and wanting, so he did the only thing he could do—he ate a whole damn bag of barbecued potato chips.
Nine
At ten the next morning Catherine stood on Michael’s front porch, rocking on her feet, her hands clenched behind her back while she waited for him to answer her knock. She could hear his footsteps clumping toward the door, so she licked her lips, brushed her hair back, and took a deep breath before he opened it.
He stared at her from eyes that looked awake but tired.
“The toilet is plugged and the boiler pilot won’t light.”
He seemed startled, like he didn’t know why she was there. And he didn’t exactly look happy to see her.
“I tried to light the boiler pilot again and again and we used the plunger on the toilet. No matter what I tried I couldn’t get them to work.”
He didn’t say anything.
Perhaps she was speaking too fast. Her ex-husband used to chide her for babbling when she was nervous. And she was nervous. She tilted her head slightly and explained more slowly, “There’s no hot water in the house without the boiler.”
“I know what a boiler is, Catherine.”
What a grump.
He turned without another sarcastic word and took a tool belt off a hook near the door. Besides an annoyed look, he was wearing a plaid shirt and jeans that were worn almost white in spots and that time and wear had molded to his body. He might be a grump in the morning but he sure looked good for fifty.
What would he look like in a suit? Catherine was a sucker for a man in a suit. And if a man wore a tux, well, she got all weak-kneed. Heck, Bill Gates probably looked sexy in a tux.
Life was unfair. Here she had to hike up her bra straps and slather on alpha hydroxy creams with a trowel. Some days she had to lie down on the bed to zip up her pants. He was three years older, wearing a plain old pair of jeans, and he looked stronger and sexier than he had when he was twenty.
The faces of all the men who had aged so well flashed through her mind: Sean Connery, Nick Nolte, Robert Redford, James Garner, James Brolin, Michael Packard.
She watched him strap and buckle the tool belt low on his hips the way Paul Newman had strapped on his guns in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
It seemed like such an earthy, male thing—a man doing up his belt buckle; it was sexy and suggestive and made her mouth a little dry.
He stuck a pair of work gloves into his back pocket and turned back around. She quickly looked away.
“I need to find the toolbox. I’ll be right back.” He grabbed a key and walked past her.
She nodded without looking up, then decided to follow him. She didn’t suppose luck would be on her side and there would be a tux in the shed, but heck, he might undo the belt buckle again.
She smiled a wicked little smile as she crossed over to a small shed he had already unlocked.
Heaven be praised if he didn’t bend down to search through it. His jeans pulled tight over his thighs in a way that made her give thanks to Levi Strauss.
Then he knelt on one knee and leaned inside. If she stepped back just a foot or so she had a great shot of his backside. The work gloves stuck out of one back pocket and looked like fingers waving at her. It was almost as if they were calling to her, “Look here.”
“Here it is.” He stood up with a battered old red toolbox.
She quickly looked up at the sky. After a slight pause she said, “Nice day. No clouds.”
He followed her gaze upward, then frowned. “The radio said it was supposed to rain today.”
There was one thing different about this Michael Packard; he was no Mr. Sunshine in the morning.
She walked ahead of him on the gravel path between his place and hers. The silence just about drove her nuts.
Her mind was going a mile a minute, wondering what he was thinking, wondering if they could go the whole day without bringing up the past.
When they were about halfway there she braved the beast. “I wrote you five letters.”
“I never got any letters from you.”
She stopped, spun around and planted her hands on her hips. She looked him straight in the eye. “Are you saying I’m lying?”
“No. I’m saying I never got any letters.” He paused, looking squarely at her. His expression grew tighter. “What I did get was a promise from your father that he’d press charges of statutory rape if I tried to contact you.”
“Oh God. Michael…” She sagged back against a tree, staring at the ground. “Did he really do that?”
“Yes.”
“He was upset. I don’t think he would have sent you to jail.”
“Yes. He would have, Catherine.”
There was nothing between them but a lapse of tense silence.
She looked at him again. “Did you really think I could just walk away after that summer together and never have any contact with you again? Didn’t you know me better than that?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“How do you figure that?”
“You thought I would ignore your letters.”
“Give me a break, here,” she snapped. “I was seventeen.” She straightened and started to walk away.
He dropped the toolbox and touched her shoulder. “I know. And I was twenty, just drafted, and in love with a seventeen-year-old girl.”
She stopped, but she didn’t turn around. He had truly loved her then, all those years ago. Many times over the years she had wondered about that, if he had cared or if she had just wished he had.
His hand was still on her shoulder. She bit her lip because she thought she might do something silly like cry. “I’m sorry.” She took a deep breath and turned around.
His hand fell away.
“When time passes by and you can’t understand why something happened, I guess you make up excuses. You blame others.” She looked at him then. “I was hurt and scared. I blamed you. After a while, when I didn’t hear from you, I believed you were just lying to me about how you had felt so you could—” She stopped because she didn’t need to say anything more.
“Get into your pants?”
“Thank you for sugar-coating it so nicely.” She gave a laugh that wasn’t amused. “But you’re right. That was what I thought.”
He only stared at her, not saying anything.
So she did. “It’s stupid to stand here in the middle of the woods and argue over something that happened so long ago. We’re different people now. It’s 1997 not 1967.” She looked back up into those blue eyes of his and stuck out her hand. “How about a truce?”
His gaze dropped to her outstretched hand.
“Friends,” she said emphatically.
A moment later his hand closed over hers and she almost melted into the ground. It was like she was seventeen all over again. She stared at their hands so she could hide her eyes from him.
Just for good measure she gave his hand a firm shake.
When she looked up he was staring at her face not at their clasped hands.
He pulled her against him, clamped his free hand to the back of her head, and kissed her.
Oh God…She felt like Silly Putty. Her hand fell away from his and moved to his shoulder.
His other hand grabbed her and pulled her against him in one of those hot, eating kind of kisses you see in the movies, all wildness and heat, where an instant later they’ve unbuttoned half their clothes and they’re doing it against a wall.
His hands ran over her back, pressed her closer. There were tools pressed against her belly. A hammer, a flashlight, screwdriver—lots of long, hard things.
One second his tongue was deep inside her mouth.
The next…the damn idiot let her go.
She stood there seeing stars and trying to keep her balance.
“Friends.” He whacked her on the backside with one hand, picked up his toolbox and sauntered on down the path toward her place.
Ten
She caught him from behind, which surprised the hell out of him. The toolbox slipped from his hand and she shoved him back up against a tree with both hands.
“Catherine?”
One palm was flat against his chest; the other slid up to grip the back of his head.
“What the hell are you doing?”
A second later she was kissing him the way he’d just kissed her. Hard and fast and wild.
He bent his knees, hooked his arms under her butt and picked her up. Her hands drove through his hair, gripped his head and tilted it, then she thrust her small tongue into his mouth the same way he had done to her.
He pushed away from the tree, turned and pinned her against it, holding her there with his body so his hands were free. He slid one hand across her shoulder, pushed her sweater aside and tried to pull down her bra strap.
He couldn’t get his finger under it. Damn. It was so tight you’d think it was made of iron.
He slid both hands to her waist and up under her sweater to cup her from beneath. She moaned against his mouth and their tongues switched places.
God, but she tasted so good. She felt so good. Her nipples grew hard from his fingers and her breasts were heavy and soft and felt just about as good as a woman could feel.
He slid his hands around and grabbed the back of her bra to unhook it.
“Harold!”
They both froze.
“Ohmygod! It’s Aly!” Catherine wiggled out from between him and the tree trunk, jerking at her clothes and taking big gulps of air. She looked up at him. “Bend down. Quick!”
He did and she used her fingers to comb back his hair.
“Harrr-old!”
“Hurry!” she whispered, still straightening her clothes which looked fine. “Get your toolbox!”
When Aly came down the path a few seconds later, they were both walking casually with no signs of the passion that had burned between them just moments before. No outward signs.
“Mom!” Aly ran toward her mother with tears in her eyes. “Harold got out. I can’t find him anywhere.”
Catherine opened her arms and hugged her daughter to her. “Hey, sweetie, we’ll find him. He won’t go far. It’s Harold. Remember? He never strays far from where we are.”
“But this is a new place and remember when we moved that time and how the vet said animals can get lost because the smells are new and they get confused and can’t find their way back.”
Catherine pulled Aly away from her shoulder and held her head in two hands. “We’ll find him. I promise you.”
Aly sobbed.
“Tell you what. I’ll cook some bacon. That ought to bring him running back home.”
“You will?” Aly looked a little brighter.
“Of course I will.” Catherine wiped the long strips of blond hair out of her daughter’s eyes and smiled. “We’ll look for Harold while Michael fixes the plumbing. Okay?”
Aly nodded, then cast a quick glance at him. “Hi, Mr. Packard.”
“The island’s small,” he reassured her. “Your cat won’t go far.”
“Thanks.” She sniffed again.
He walked past them and stopped. He wiped a tear from Aly’s chin with one finger. “Don’t worry there, Little Squirt. We’ll find your cat.”
Then before she could say anything about what he’d called her, he walked on down the pathway.
“Little Squirt?” he heard her whisper to her mother.
“I’ll explain later,” Catherine said.
He didn’t look back but from behind him he could hear the two of them following at a slower pace, beating the ferns and woods and calling out for the cat.
He kept walking. He might make over a half a million dollars a year in salary and another mil in stock options, but hell, he had a toilet to fix.
He walked out of the woods and into the clearing near the house. Dana was walking from the front door along the crooked porch.
She turned the corner to the side of the house and froze.
A second later she screamed so loud it sounded as if she had cracked the sky.
He ran toward her.
Harold was back, proudly sitting on the porch. He had a two foot long garter snake hanging from his mouth.
Eleven
“Dana!” Catherine came running toward the house just as she saw Michael hop over the porch railing and put his arm around Dana. She was huddled into a frightened stance, looking too scared to move.
Aly was about to run past her toward the porch, so Catherine grabbed her arm. “Stop.”
“What’s going on?” Aly frowned at her.
“I don’t know, but don’t move.” Catherine looked up. “Michael?”
He was still talking to Dana, then he turned to her.
At that same moment Aly called out, “Is it Harold?” She already sounded like she was crying.
“It’s Harold and he’s fine so don’t start crying. He brought home a present.”
“Stay here,” Catherine ordered Aly and she walked to the porch. It had been years, but she could smell the snake before she got there. She stopped where she was and peered over the porch railing, then up at him. “I forgot how much those things stink.”
Aly was suddenly right next to her. “Oh, yuk! Harold! Get away from it!”
Catherine looked at her. “I told you to stay put.”
“Is it poisonous?” Aly asked.
“No.” Michael pulled his gloves out of his back pocket. “It’s only a garter snake.”
“Oh.” She watched it a second. “Why do they smell?”
“Oh, who cares!” Dana snapped from around the corner. “Just get rid of it! Hurry! Please!”
The whole time Harold just sat there with the black snake hanging out of his mouth. He was waiting for praise.
Michael put on the work gloves, then he squatted down in front of Harold, who immediately dropped the snake.
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Сьюзен Виггс и Debbie Macomber
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Perfect for fans of Maeve Binchy′ – CandisIt′s nothing special on the surface, merely a rambling old Victorian summerhouse on a secluded island, where the sky is blue and the water is clear.Yet after a month at the Rainshadow Lodge, people begin to change–and fall in love. How else can you account for what happens to the most mismatched, unlikely couples? There′s Beth, who′s stuck sharing the lodge with a complete stranger–and a difficult one at that.And Mitch, a workaholic on a deadline who has to depend on free-spirited Rosie, who functions on «island time.» Not to mention Catherine, who′s falling in love with Michael, the lodge′s handyman–for the second time!