Gwen was thrilled. There was no doubt about it. Her children had come to her wedding. Now everything was perfect.
“Whenever I think about my first wedding, when I married your father,” she said at lunch afterward, “it always seems so odd that the two of you weren’t there. How could I have been doing something that important without my babies?”
Jack eyed how little was left in the second bottle of champagne. He looked up at Hal. “Did you understand what she just said?”
“I did,” Hal answered. “I don’t think it reflects particularly well on my intellect, but I did.”
Jack liked Hal. He seemed like a straightforward, good-natured man, much more flexible than Jack’s father had ever been. To Jack’s dad, the world had been full of things to be fixed and problems to be solved, whereas Hal saw things to be thought about and issues to be understood. Jack supposed that if he had to follow one of them into battle, he would have chosen his father’s quickness, but for just about everything else, he suspected that he was going to prefer Hal.
They were now talking about Hal’s cabin in Minnesota. When Jack had heard the word “primitive,” he had asked Hal exactly what that meant…not that he cared, but he imagined that his sister would.
Indeed she did. “Wait a minute…” Holly was staring at Hal. “What do you mean, no bathrooms?”
“Oh, we have a propane tank,” Hal said pleasantly, “so there’s a stove and a refrigerator. And lights, we have gas lights. They’re—”
“Could we get back to the part about bathrooms? Do you mean you don’t have indoor toilets?” She sounded horrified.
“I suppose that technically they’re indoors”—Hal’s voice was as mild as could be, but Jack suspected that Hal was enjoying this; if Jack were in Hal’s shoes, he would be—“but you do have to go outdoors to get back indoors.”
Holly was speechless. Holly was never speechless.
“You went to Girl Scout camp,” Jack reminded her. “They must have had latrines there.”
“I went to Girl Scout camp almost twenty years ago,” she answered. “I am not exactly a back-to-nature person these days.” She turned to Hal. “How is it that you don’t have electricity? I thought the R.E.A. took care of all these isolated places ages ago.”
Hal shook his head. “I don’t think any of us on the lake want electricity. It’s probably reverse snobbism in some way, to show how disdainful we are of modern conveniences.”
“So that’s why you don’t put in a generator?” Jack asked. He had already priced gas-powered generators with every intention of giving one to his mother as a wedding gift.
Across the table his mother was looking at him, listening. She gave her head a quick shake. She knew what he was planning and was telling him not to do it.
“I wasn’t going to put in a nuclear reactor, Mom,” he protested.
“One just never knows with you, Jack,” she answered.
Hal looked puzzled, interested, but Holly waved her hand, encouraging him to ignore them. “I still don’t understand,” she said. “How do you shower?”
“You don’t,” he said pleasantly.
“You don’t shower and you have to use a latrine?” Holly did not look happy.
“What did I ever do”—Gwen threw up her perfectly manicured hands—“to deserve such a prissy child? You’ll be fine, Holly. You take baths in the lake.”
“Holly is never fine,” Jack pointed out, but he scooted his chair toward hers and put his arm around her shoulders as he spoke, “if she is more than three steps from a fax machine.”
“Then bring a fax machine,” Hal suggested. “It won’t work. We have no phone lines, we have no electricity, but if it will make you feel better, by all means bring one.”
As soon as Holly got back to New York City, she bought her mother a state-of-the-art cellular phone that could be recharged in the car. Gwen sent it back. “It’s very sweet of you, but Hal says that even cellular phones don’t work at the lake. It’s too far from a transmitting tower.”
“But cell phones work everywhere,” Holly fussed at Jack. She was talking on her cordless phone; he was on his car phone. “Even backpackers take their cell phones with them.”
Jack shook his head. Holly knew the strangest damn people. “We aren’t babies, Holly. We don’t need to speak to our mother every minute. She’ll call us when she goes into town for groceries.”
That proved to be most unsatisfying. Gwen was in town only during the middle of the day, and so most of the time she would end up talking to Holly’s secretary and Jack’s answering machine. It drove them nuts. They would call each other and fret. “Apparently we are babies,” Jack concluded.
Jack was going to stay in Minnesota for as long as his mother needed him. Apparently Hal’s kids stayed for nearly a month.
“Don’t they have jobs?” Holly marveled. “How do they get so much time off?”
Jack was wondering how he himself was going to get so much time off. Sure, he was the boss, but that only made it worse. He could hardly expect his people to work hard when he wasn’t. But his crew chief Pete had recently lost a grandmother whose house had proved to be worth a startling amount of money. As her only grandchild, Pete had inherited it all, and he was, Jack knew, looking for a business of his own.
“What about this one?” Jack asked.
Pete stared at him. “You’re not thinking of selling, are you? Things are going great.”
It was true; the business had done well. Jack had a comfortable cushion in the payroll account, a tidy profit at the end of the year, and a waiting list of clients. That was the problem.
Starting a new business was terrific. In a new business everything was a crisis from one minute to the next. It was almost as good as fighting fires. But the routine of running a successful business—that wasn’t for Jack. He had learned that about himself during his stint as a Wyoming hardware guy. Clearly what he needed to do was start businesses that would fail. He probably would have enjoyed that a whole lot, having a corporation that blew up in the sky and rained flaming pieces of metal all over Australia, but so far he was not succeeding in this pursuit of failure. The hardware store had left him with a big clump of cash that he hadn’t known what to do with, and now it looked like this business was going to do the same damn thing.
But Pete seemed to think success was a burden he could live with. They shook hands, agreed to hire someone to fix a price, and do the thing as quickly as possible. Jack hoped to get all the paperwork done before he disappeared to Camp Nowhere, but in the end he found that he was going to have to delay his departure by a couple of days.
“It’s just as well that you’re coming a bit later,” his mother told him on one of the rare occasions when they were speaking to each other. “This way Phoebe and Ian will arrive before you. I think they feel quite territorial about this place. It might be hard for them to come and find you already settled in.”
Jack really and truly did not give a shit about Phoebe’s and Ian’s territorial urges. “Why’s it so important to them? Is it really that great?”
“It’s incredibly beautiful, and you have to remember that they have been coming here their entire lives.”
“Okay.” Jack knew that having moved so much, he and Holly and Mom weren’t as attached to any one place as a lot of other people were. “But don’t they go nuts being so isolated?” The nearest phone was fifteen miles away over such lousy roads that it took almost a half hour to get there.
“Actually”—she lowered her voice—“that’s what they like about it. I think that the isolation makes them feel more like a family.”
“That’s weird.” Jack couldn’t imagine anything that would make Mom, Holly, and himself feel like more—or less—of a family.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” she said, although they both knew that she wasn’t likely to be. “I trust you won’t say anything about it.”
“Lord, no.” Jack was starting to think that he might be better off if he didn’t say anything about anything to Hal’s children.
Two days later Holly reported receiving a call from Phoebe Legend, Hal’s older daughter. “She said that it is cooler than we might expect, so bring sweaters and something warm to sleep in, but there’s plenty of rain gear up there. Don’t worry about packing that.”
Jack didn’t worry about the things he was supposed to worry about; he certainly didn’t worry about packing. “What did she sound like?”
“Polite. She was polite, I was polite, that was it.”
“You’re good at that.”
“Thanks. I also got a message from Mother, but I’m not sure I got it right. It said I was to be sure that you didn’t bring a generator.”
“A generator? Me?” he protested. “Now, why would she ever think that I would do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know,” Holly sighed. “I’m not completely sure what it is, but don’t bring one, okay? She doesn’t want you to.”
“Okay.”
Tommy was already on the ice when Amy came out to the boards and slipped off her skate guards. Technical people were milling around; a group of schoolgirls were sitting in a tight cluster on the bleachers, having gotten permission to watch practice, but Tommy and Amy were the only skaters.
That wasn’t unusual. Henry Carroll, Tommy Sargent, and Amy Legend, Oliver Young’s three skaters, were widely known for the length and diligence of their warm-ups and cool-downs. They were always the last ones on the ice to take their sweaters off, the last ones to start practicing their jumps, their routines. They never stretched until their muscles were warm; they never finished for the day without stretching again. Even when practice time was as limited as it often was during the big tours, they never shortened their warm-ups. They were fastidious about it.
And none of them had ever had a serious injury.
Amy waved to the schoolgirls—she would sign autographs for them later—and caught up with Tommy. This early into the warm-up, they could still talk.
“How’s Mark?” she asked.
“Lousy.”
They were in Canada, having come to guest-star in Canadian skater Mark Widemann’s television special. Of their threesome, only Amy and Tommy were there. Henry had not been invited because he and Mark were alike as skaters, muscular, powerful, technically precise, only Henry was better, and Mark would have been an idiot to have Henry come overshadow him on his own special. Everyone, including Henry himself, understood that. But Mark was having problems with his ankle. Like so many skaters he took too many chances with his training routines.
Amy and Tommy went on, warming up. The first ten minutes were always the hardest for Amy. After that her body took over, but until then self-discipline was the only motivation. Fortunately Henry and Tommy felt the same, and the three of them flogged each other through their opening drills.
Henry and Tommy were her closest friends on the skating circuit. Almost none of the women she had grown up competing against were still skating at her level, and because women’s skating had by now become like gymnastics, with very young girls dominating the amateur competitions, Amy had little in common with the new skaters. She, Henry, and Tommy had by far the most sophisticated management in the skating world; the three of them spent their off-ice time reading reports from charitable foundations and studying business deals while the other skaters were playing ping-pong or flipping through catalogues. Often accompanied by a personal assistant, they were still the ones the media was the most interested in. While they would have hated the idea that they had become unapproachable stars, even “everyone-please-love-me” Amy had to admit that they didn’t spend much time with the new kids.
The three of them balanced each other, and the balance seemed essential to each individual career. Henry was still determinedly competitive; he kept them all skating their best. Tommy was the witty showman; he kept them from taking themselves too seriously. Amy was all warmth and sentiment; she reminded them why they were doing this. Henry was the muscle, Tommy the brain, Amy the heart—together, Tommy often joked, they made one fine human being.
Their warm-up routine was a little history of learning to skate. They would begin with front crossovers, then back crossovers. They ran through all the single jumps, doing them in the order that they had learned them, then all the doubles, and finally whatever triples they were doing at the moment.
Both Tommy and Amy were into their doubles when Amy noticed Gretchen, their personal assistant, at the boards, motioning to them. Amy caught Tommy’s attention, and the two of them skated over to Gretchen.
“It’s off,” Gretchen said immediately. “The taping’s been canceled. Mark’s ankle is worse. He may need surgery.”
Tommy whistled. “That’s hard luck.”
But it wasn’t all luck. Tommy and Amy knew that. Of course, either one of them could catch a rut wrong and be injured—it could happen in the next sixty seconds—but it was a whole lot less likely to happen to them than to anyone else.
“So are we free to go?” Amy asked.
“It’s not going to be announced until ten, so it would probably look better if you didn’t start packing until then.”
“What’s next?” Tommy asked.
None of them ever paid any attention to what they were scheduled to do next. Once they consented to do something, they deliberately forgot about it, letting Gretchen and everyone else worry about the details, while they focused entirely on what they were doing at the moment.
“Your break was next.” For three weeks every summer Oliver insisted that they not set foot on the ice, that as much as possible they not think about skating. It restored their bodies, he said, and allowed their subconscious minds to work more creatively. “So Oliver says you should just add another week to that.”
If all the schoolgirls hadn’t been watching, Amy would have made a face. None of them liked their break. Living so completely in the present, they never made any plans for their breaks and ended up moping around Denver for three weeks. The result was positive; when it was over, they were full of ideas and desperately eager to skate, but the break itself wasn’t as much fun as it should have been.
Henry and Tommy usually visited their families, but Amy’s family was at the lake during July and she didn’t like it there.
“You know,” Tommy said to her, “you ought to go see your family.”
“You say that every year.” Tommy was appalled at how little time she spent with her family. But his family was always very happy to arrange their schedule around his, to come see him wherever he might be.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “That Henry’s and my families treat us like the gods that we are not because we pay all their bills, and your family treats you like the little sister that you are, but you should still go. Your father just got remarried, and you haven’t met his wife.”
That was unanswerable. Even if she only went for a day, she should go. “But there are no showers up there, Tommy. And it’s boring. There’s nothing to do but swim and pick blueberries. There’s no TV, there’s no newspapers, and you always have to worry about wasting the batteries in the radio. You would hate it.”
“I am not proposing that I go,” he returned. “Just you. And we do stuff we hate all the time. Every single day there’s something we hate, but we do it anyway. There’s no reason why you can’t leave this afternoon or tomorrow. You can fly straight from here.”
“I can’t do that.” She was resigned to the fact that she should go. But not right this minute. “I don’t have any of the right clothes.”
“Is there anyone on earth who could buy an entirely new wardrobe more quickly than you?”
That was an exaggeration, but Amy was an extremely experienced shopper, and Toronto had some fine stores. “Even if I do get some new clothes, I can’t get in touch with them. There’s no way to let them know that I’m coming, what flight I am on, all that.”
“Then don’t let them know. Just show up. Rent a car at the airport and drive yourself there. You’re a grown woman. You can do that.”
“No, I can’t.” When it came to Amy’s family, she was most emphatically not a grown woman. “You just said it. I am the little sister. Little sisters don’t rent cars and drive themselves anywhere.”
“That’s if they want to go on being the little sister their whole lives.”
“You haven’t met Phoebe and Ian. Being the little sister is the only option.”
Gretchen was listening to this without much interest. She had heard it all before. “If you really want to go, Amy, I’ll figure out some way to notify your family.”
“There’re no phones there.”
Gretchen waved a hand. Phones, schmones. Like many skaters, Henry, Tommy, and Amy did not have particularly good problem-solving skills. She did. That’s what they paid her for. “You finish on the ice, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Twenty minutes later, she reported back. The receptionist of the area Chamber of Commerce had a teenage son, and yes, of course he would be happy to drive out to this lake with a message for Amy’s family. “I don’t suppose you know the fire number of your cabin, do you?” Gretchen asked. “That’s apparently what they use instead of addresses.”
Gretchen now knew more about navigation in the region than Amy did. “I’m clueless.”
“That’s okay. She says he’ll find it.”
So Amy was going to the lake. And Amy did not like the lake. She hoisted her skate bag by the strap and hung it over Tommy’s shoulder. If he was making her do this, he could at least work a bit.
He hooked his thumb through the strap. “You can call me every day. I’ll listen to you moan.”
“There’re no phones up there, Tommy. Remember?”
“Oh.”
They started walking to the exit, where a car would be waiting to take them back to the skaters’ hotel. “How can there be no phones?” he asked. “Everyone has phones.”
“There just aren’t.”
Knowing that both Mom and Holly would, at best, scalp him if he disobeyed, Jack didn’t include a generator when he packed his truck. He was sorry. It wasn’t that he cared whether or not he had electricity, but he had no idea what he was going to do with himself at this lake. Water sports weren’t his thing, and he wasn’t any good at lazing around doing nothing—but a couple of two-hundred-foot boxes of Romex wire would liven up anyone’s day.
He was driving up from Kentucky. Hal had suggested that he could fly to Minneapolis and then change for a little commuter flight that would take him to a one-room airport within an hour of the lake. But Jack preferred to drive. He liked to drive, and as his sister frequently pointed out, he was an American male—he didn’t feel complete without a set of car keys in his pocket.
Holly decided to skip the commuter plane too. He would pick her at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, and they would drive the rest of the way together. The lake was about five hours north of the Twin Cities.
He arrived in plenty of time—owing in part to the fact that Iowa State Highway patrol were not showing their cheery little faces along their stretch of Interstate 80. He spent the morning poking around the Twin Cities—there was a great salvage place in St. Paul called the Ax Man. Just after lunch he went out to the airport and parked in the short-term lot. He didn’t usually pay higher rates to save himself a few steps, but Holly could get herself out of an airport faster than anyone he knew. She was always one of the first people off the plane, and she never checked her luggage.
But today a good thirty people disembarked before her, and when she did finally get off, she had only her attaché case with her. Jack stepped forward and hugged her.
“You checked your luggage?” He was surprised. She hated standing around waiting at baggage claim.
“Did I ever.” She grabbed the placket of his shirt and turned him around. “Look who came with me.” Her voice was suddenly all bright and chirpy. Holly was not a bright and chirpy person. “It’s Nick.”
Nick? Who was Nick? Jack looked at the person standing at her elbow. It was a kid, fifteen, sixteen. He was short with a wrestler’s compact built. His jaw was square, his forehead narrow, giving him a belligerent, bulldoggish look. He had on black jeans and a white T-shirt. A portable CD player was clipped to his belt, and a thin black cord snaked up to the headphones that were looped around his neck. Jack had no idea who he was.
“You remember Nicky, don’t you?” Holly’s elbow ground into his ribs.
No, he didn’t. They had a cousin named Nicky—actually, he was their first cousin once removed since he was Aunt Barbara’s grandson, Cousin Valerie’s son—but this wasn’t him. Nicky was a little kid.
But who else would it be? Jack stared at him. “You’re Nicky?”
“Yo, man.” The kid stuck up his thumb. His nails were bitten off, and there were little lines of red across the top of each nail bed.
“We had such a pleasant flight together,” Holly said sweetly.
Holly wasn’t a sweet person either. Jack didn’t dare look at her. “So are you visiting in Minneapolis?” he asked Nick. “Are we dropping you somewhere?”
“Oh, no,” said Holly. “He’s coming to the lake with us. Isn’t that nice?”
No, no, it wasn’t. Not in the least.
“My presence is not entirely voluntary.” Nick’s voice was bitingly sarcastic.
“Things were decided at the last minute,” Holly said, “so there was no way to get in touch with you, Jack. You seemed to have turned your car phone off, and someone else is answering your pager.”
He had turned his beeper over to Pete along with the rest of the business. But he had been on the road for only a day and a half. This must have been a very last-minute plan.
And if there hadn’t been any way to get in touch with him, then there wouldn’t have been any way to reach Planet Wilderness. “Does Mom know he’s coming?”
“We hope.” Holly’s voice lilted upward, drawing out the last word. Clearly she had written, telegrammed, Fed-Exed, hired a sky-writing plane, done everything she could to warn their mother, but when Valerie and Aunt Barbara collapsed, there wasn’t much else other people could do.
One of the absolute low points of Holly’s and Jack’s pre-adolescence had been when their cousin Valerie, then sixteen, had come to live with them while waiting out a pregnancy.
The plan was for the baby to be given up for adoption, and Gwen, who knew her divorced younger sister very well, had urged and urged Barbara, Valerie’s mother, not to come for the baby’s birth. But Barbara came. Both she and Valerie saw the baby, and they had wept themselves into taking the child home, thus giving them a chance to continue all of their tantrums and power struggles over the rearing of a child. Whenever they reached the end of their rope, they dumped Nicky on Gwen.
“He’s not as awful as he looks,” Holly said softly. Nick had pulled his headphones back over his ears and drifted over to the newspaper machines.
“Why didn’t you just say no?” Jack demanded.
“Because I knew Mother would expect me to say yes.”
She had a point there. The only thing that irritated Jack about his mother was that she never told her younger sister to go hang herself. He groaned. They were doomed. “What’s the story?”
“He was picked up shoplifting—”
“Shoplifting? Oh, lovely.”
“—and all Barbara and Valerie could think of to do with him was ship him off to Mother.”
“I don’t suppose it occurred to either of them that Mom deserves a chance to get settled into this marriage before she has to take on their problems?”
Holly didn’t answer that. There was no reason to. “The therapist they talked to said that Nick needed a good male role model.”
“Oh, this is really nice. Hal has been in the family for four and a half weeks now, and we’re already expecting him to be a good male role model for Nicky.”
“They were thinking about you.”
“Me?” Jack stared at her. “Me? No way. I’m no role model.”
“You’re better than anything else he’s got.”
That was probably true. Jack looked at Nicky again. In the flat, harsh airport light his skin was sallow and blotchy. What an unpromising-looking individual. “What’s he going to do at this place?”
“What are any of us going to do?”
She had another point. She sure was right a lot. That’s why she should have been an admiral. Admirals ought to be right most of the time. The world would probably be a better place if they were.
“Well, it’s not going to get any better by waiting,” he sighed. At least not at short-term parking rates. “Let’s go get your bags and hit the road.”
“Fine, but we’re also supposed to pick up Amy. She’s coming in from Toronto. Her flight—”
“Amy? As in our new stepsister Amy-the-Legend? We’re picking her up?” This was another surprise.
“That’s what the message said.” Holly clearly hated this business of having to operate just on messages her secretary transmitted. “I never got to actually talk to Mom and Hal about it.”
“I thought she never went to this place. When did she decide to come?”
“I don’t know. Apparently she was in the middle of taping a TV special when she hurt herself and had to take a break from skating. I know nothing about it.”
Holly was starting to sound very tense. “I’m not blaming you,” he assured her. “But, Holly, think about it, you, me, Nicky, and now Miss Amy, that’s four people. Excuse me for sounding excessively detail-oriented”—he was probably the least detail-oriented person on the continent—“but I have a truck, a pickup. It only holds three people.”
“Oh.” Obviously she hadn’t considered that. “You don’t have one of those little bench things in back? I thought you did.”
That had been five years ago. “Different truck, different time. You were just in this one last month, remember?”
“Now I do.” She sounded rueful.
“I’ll take the bus up,” Nicky called out. “I’ve already checked it out. There’s bus service to a town about twenty miles away. I can hitch the rest of the way.”
He was still over at the newspaper machines. He wasn’t supposed to have been able to hear them. Jack had thought headphones had destroyed the hearing of all kids his age. “No, you are not taking the bus up.” Jack could imagine what his mother would say to that plan. And what kind of kid had already checked the bus schedule? He had probably been planning his escape route. Jack almost admired that. “We’ll figure something out.”
“But we all have to have our own seat belts.” Nicky ambled closer. “Remember, I was brought up on Sesame Street. My generation wears seat belts. We use drugs and we commit suicide, but we wear our seat belts.”
“How commendable of you. But we’ll figure something out. Maybe Amy’s so badly injured that she’s on a stretcher, and we can load her into the back of the truck.” He took her flight information from Holly and went over to the monitors. Amy’s plane was coming in at Gate 67.
“The two of you go on down to her gate,” Holly called to him. “I’ve got a couple calls to make. I’ll meet you there.”
“And I’ll meet you at the baggage claim,” Nicky said.
“No.” Jack was firm. “We’re all staying together.”
He knew his sister. She would call work and then never get off the phone. He didn’t know Nick—he didn’t want to know Nick—but he suspected if he let the kid out of his sight, he would end up furthering the acquaintance in the company of a bail bondsman. He took his sister by the arm, glared at Nick, and began marching off down the concourse. He got them down the Gold Concourse across the airport to the Green Concourse, then out to Gate 67. He almost had them corralled into chairs when Holly spied a bank of phones and broke free. Nick slumped down into a chair and shut his eyes. A moment later he started tapping his feet and drumming out a beat on the leg of his black jeans.
The flight’s arrival time neared. Other people were gathering. Right on schedule the stately silver plane rolled up to the gate. Jack caught Holly’s eye and gestured her to get off the phone. He planted himself in the center of the people waiting to meet the disembarking passengers.
Okay. It was time to admit to a certain amount of male vanity here. In the best of all possible worlds, it would be nice to make a good first impression on Amy-the-Legend. He didn’t need her to be instantly smitten with his multifold masculine charms, but it would be nice if she didn’t leap back and make the sign of the cross.
But he had been driving for two days, he had spent the morning at the Ax Man, he was towing one juvenile delinquent and one chained-to-her-fax lawyer. A good impression wasn’t likely. Probably not even possible. Oh, well, that was life in the regular-guy world. And Jack considered himself to be a regular guy to end all regular guys. He jammed his hands into his pockets.
He looked over his shoulder. Holly was still on the phone.
The ticket agent opened the gate. Two businessmen came out, and right after them was Amy Legend.
There was no question about it. This was Amy Legend, the sunny blonde hair, the clear features, the blue-green eyes. Her smile didn’t quite have the full-wattage incandescence of her pictures, but that was hardly to be expected. She was getting off a plane; what was there to smile about? Jack stepped forward.
“Amy, I’m Jack Wells.” She was shorter than he had expected.
She put out her hand and greeted him quickly. Her handshake was firm; her voice was pleasant but rushed. “I did check my baggage, I hope that’s not a problem.”
“No, no.” But before Jack could say any more, she started off down the concourse. She didn’t pause, she didn’t turn her head to see if he was with her, she didn’t leap back and make the sign of the cross, she just took off.
So much for the good first impression. She had hardly looked at him.
But he had a bigger problem. One of his charges was still on the phone, another was plugged in and tuned out, and the third—the injured one—was speeding down the concourse.
Holly could take care of herself, and she was too much their mother’s daughter to let anything happen to St. Nick. So Jack set out after Amy.
It took him a few paces to catch up with her. Then she stopped so quickly that he almost crashed into her. She gestured at the door of the ladies’ room. “If a lady in a fuchsia blouse comes by, don’t let her in. The blouse has tucks and a notched collar and a stain right here.”
She pointed at her collarbone and disappeared inside the rest room. The door swung shut behind her. Jack stared at it. This was really great. What was he supposed to say if the lady in fuchsia had to go pee? “I’m sorry, madam, this facility is under surveillance.” He wasn’t even sure what color fuchsia was. And tucks and a notched collar? What did that mean?
Jack looked down the concourse. Indeed, there was an overweight woman in a bright pink blouse, puffing along as fast as she could. She had three kids with her, and they were all as fat as she was. “She must have come this way,” the mother said. “We can’t have missed her.”
Jack now understood. America’s sweetheart was hiding from her public.
“Maybe we’ll see her at the baggage claim,” one of the kids said, and the whole family lumbered off.
“Where’s Amy?” It was Holly. Nick was a couple of steps behind her. “In the bathroom?”
Jack nodded, and a moment later the ladies’ room door eased open and he could see the top of a honey-blonde head.
“You can come out,” he called. “The wicked witch is dead. The house has landed on her.”
Amy Legend came out of the bathroom. “I am sorry. That wasn’t very dignified, was it?” Her smile was apologetic, but her gaze was very level and direct. “Thank you for helping. I don’t like not being able to manage on my own, but sometimes I can’t.”
“I didn’t do a thing,” he pointed out.
“I was desperate,” she continued. “They have not left me alone for one minute. They kept trying to make up excuses to come up to the front of the plane. It was hard on everyone, not just me.”
“They’re hoping to meet you at the baggage claim.”
She made a face, then flicked a hand. “Oh, well, I didn’t need any of that stuff.”
“Do things like this happen to you often?” Holly asked.
Amy shook her head. “Most of the time I’m traveling with someone. And if you are clearly in a conversation, people usually don’t interrupt.”
She was, Jack noticed, standing a little closer to them than the casualness of this conversation warranted. About ten feet away two teenage girls were standing and staring at her. He made a shooing motion with his hands, and they moved on.
Holly spoke. “I hope Jack introduced himself. I’m his sister Holly, and this is our cousin, Nick Curtis.”
Amy and Holly shook hands. Before she could put out her hand to Nick, he stuck up his thumb again, and she returned his gesture. She had very pretty hands, fluid and graceful. “The message I got from my father was unclear,” she said. “Are we all driving up to the lake together?”
“That’s the plan,” Jack answered. “Whether or not said plan is going to be carried out pretty much depends on everyone’s hip size.” If he had been speaking to a normal person, he would have said “butt,” not hip. “We’ve got to squeeze four people into three seat belts. But we’ve got to get the luggage first.”
They set off down the concourse. Amy stopped three times to speak to people or sign autographs. Each time they paused for that, Holly eyed the phones and Nick drifted toward one of the shops. Jack wished he had brought a rope in from the truck. He could have lassoed the three of them together and tied them to his belt.
Two suitcases and a box were the last remaining bags on the carousel assigned to the New York flight. Jack recognized one suitcase as Holly’s. Nick picked up the other.
“The box is ours too,” Holly said.
That surprised Jack. Traveling with a roped cardboard box was not his sister’s style.
He lifted it off the carousel. It wasn’t heavy. But the knots were well tied, a bowline in one end, a slipknot in another. That was one thing about being a navy kid. You learned your knots. Holly probably tied the best knots of anyone in her law firm. “What’s in here?”
“A three-dimensional Scrabble game, a Twister game, six bags of those loops you make pot holders from, and an American flag.” Holly didn’t sound happy about this. “And you want to know something? They do not sell pot holder loops on Wall Street.”
“Mom had you buy all that? What for?”
“I have no idea. This all came in a message. Maybe she knows you’re worried about getting bored and wants some nice craft projects for you.” She stopped, having obviously realized how she was sounding. “I’m sorry, Amy. Please don’t think this is Mother complaining. It’s me. She’s really been having a wonderful summer. She says that the lake is everything your father said it would be.”
“Oh, don’t worry about offending me.” Amy waved one of her pretty hands. “You need to be careful around my sister and brother, but me, I hate the place.”
“What?” Jack hadn’t expected to hear that. “I thought this was Mecca, Nirvana, every person’s dream.”
“Oh, the rest of my family loves it. And I’m sure you will. Really. Don’t let me put you off. It’s just me.” She was apologizing, even more than Holly had.
“Then it’s good of you to come,” Holly said, and they all started to walk again. Jack couldn’t help noticing Amy’s stride; it was long and graceful. And her posture was great. His sister stood reasonably straight, probably better than every other lawyer on the planet, but a lot worse than your average admiral. Amy-the-Legend had even the admirals beat; her posture seemed easy and effortless.
“I thought you were injured,” he said.
“Who, me?” She was surprised. “No, it wasn’t me. I’m never injured. It was Mark Widemann, the Canadian skater. I was about to start working on his television special, but he was having so many ankle problems that they had to postpone the whole thing. So I suddenly had some free time and here I am.”
“How long are you staying for?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It depends on a lot of things.”
She sounded deliberately vague, so Jack shut up. They were approaching the carousel where the bags from her flight had been unloaded. He hid her behind a pillar while he scouted the area. Her fans had given up on her. She had a pair of nice-looking leather bags. Jack balanced Holly’s box on his shoulder and took one of Amy’s suitcases from her. The workmanship on it was impressive, although there was something strange about the handle. It was small.
She must have had it made to fit her own hand.
Jack generally tried to get his clothes to fit him, although it wasn’t certainly anything he obsessed about. It had never occurred to him to try to get luggage handles to fit him.
Out in the parking lot, he stowed the luggage in the back of his truck. Then he reached for Holly’s attaché case. She tried to pull it away. “I’ll just keep it with me,” she said.
“For God’s sake, Holly, do you honestly think you’re going to be able to work on the drive up? There are going to be four of us, crammed into a space for three. You’ll put someone’s eye out just trying to get the damn thing open.”
Reluctantly Holly gave it up.
Jack slammed the tailgate shut. “All right, folks, let’s see if we fit.”
His plan was to put Amy next to the window, then Holly next to her with Nick squeezed in between Holly and himself. Surely the pleasure of being crammed up to Nick for five hours belonged to his blood relatives.
But Amy had already gotten in, and Holly was sliding in next to her. Holly pulled out the middle seat belt and passed it over to Amy. Fortunately it was a long one without a shoulder harness. The two of them snuggled their hips together, and the seat belt clicked in.
“It’s a good thing our butts aren’t any bigger, isn’t it?” Amy laughed.
She was being a good sport. Jack liked that. He could forgive just about anything in people as long as they didn’t whine or think themselves too good for the rest of the world. And so far Amy Legend had been a very good sport. She looked interestedly at the dashboard of the truck. “This can’t be the kind of transportation you’re used to,” he said.
“That’s why it seems so exciting. It feels like we’re all going to summer camp.” She sounded as if she thought that would be fun.
“I think that’s what Holly’s worried about.” Jack put the key in the ignition. “Now, who knows where we’re going?”
“I have the instructions in my attaché case,” Holly said and pointedly looked toward the back of the truck.
“Too late,” Jack told her. “You know how to get there, don’t you?” he asked Amy.
She shook her head. Her hair brushed against his arm. He could smell her perfume. It was light and woodsy. “Actually, no. We take a left turn somewhere, that’s all I know. I don’t pay any attention to where I am going unless I am driving, and not always then.”
“That sounds safe.” Jack put the truck in gear. “Let’s just go until we get bored, and then we’ll take a left turn.”
“Jack!” Holly protested. “If you can wait two seconds, I’ll get the directions.”
“Oh, no, it will be more fun this way.”
He was teasing her. He had checked a map while waiting for her plane, and he was reasonably sure he could get them within five or six miles of where they were supposed to be. Then they could start the left turns and see what happened.
By the time he was out of the airport traffic, Holly and Amy were already well launched into a conversation about clothes that was far too technical for him. If you had the arm holes in your jackets cut very high, he learned, it was more flattering to your waist. “You can’t move,” Amy reported, “but you look great.”
Nick had pulled his earphones back on. Jack didn’t blame him.
They were soon on Interstate 35 heading north. Holly and Amy were talking about shoes. Amy propped her foot up on the dashboard to demonstrate something about an “instep strap.” Her knee bumped against the steering wheel.
“Sorry,” she said to him and went back to talking to Holly. “It is hard to find a daytime shoe with a strap that doesn’t make you look like a schoolgirl or a tart, but some years diagonal straps are out there in leather. If you can find a closed shoe with straps and a court heel, you can climb Everest even on three-inch heels.”
Jack glanced at his sister. She was nodding. She had understood every word. “What are you doing about shoulder pads these days?” she asked.
That opened the gates for another vocabulary—“haircanvas base” and “feathering at the neckline edge.” Both of them were gesturing toward their shoulders, drawing curving lines over their clavicles. Each time one of them moved, Amy was crowded closer to him. He put his arm along the back of the seat to give her more room. When, a few minutes later, she leaned forward to struggle out of her jacket—he now knew it to be reversible, washable silk—so that she and Holly could figure out how the inner jacket had been “turned”—whatever the hell that meant—her elbow poked into his chest.
Finally Holly changed the subject. “So tell us more about this lake. Your family has three cabins?”
They did, Amy answered, but all three were quite small. The one that the family had had from the beginning had only one bedroom. It was log-sided, and they called it the “main cabin.” “Even though it’s probably the smallest, it’s where we always eat and such.”
The “new” cabin actually had been purchased next. It was called the “new” cabin because it had been built only a few years before the family bought it. “It’s the most comfortable. It has two bedrooms and lots of windows, so it’s light and it has a much more open floor plan. The kitchen’s separated from the living room only by a counter, things like that.”
“Then why don’t you eat there?” Holly asked.
“Because we don’t. The important thing about the lake is to go up and do exactly what you did the year before.”
The third cabin was called the “log” cabin because it was made of logs, not just sided with them. “It’s pretty dark. So my brother’s and sister’s families alternate years—one year Phoebe and Giles stay in the new cabin, the next in the log. Everyone likes it when it’s their year in the new cabin.”
“So your parents stayed in the main cabin, your brother and sister traded off between the other two,” Holly said. “Where did that leave you?”
“Usually in Amsterdam or somewhere like that. I don’t come very often anymore. But there’s a bunkhouse. I suppose that’s where we’ll all be staying.”
“A bunkhouse?” Holly didn’t sound happy.
“It’s okay, but the mattresses are kind of crummy, and there’re no lights or mirrors or anywhere to put your clothes.”
Jack imagined that she was used to lights, mirrors, and places to put her clothes. “So why do they put you there?” He hadn’t said anything in a while.
She looked up at him. “I’m never there for as long as the others, so it doesn’t make sense for me to take one of the better beds.”
“But doesn’t sleeping on a lumpy mattress tend to make your stay even shorter?” Holly asked. “It would mine.”
Amy smiled and wrinkled her nose, her answer obvious.
“There’s no reason for us to whine about this.” Jack had no patience for martyrs. “If the mattresses are lumpy, we’ll go into town and buy new ones. And how far is it from the propane tank? Why not trench a gas line out to the place and put up a light? How long could it take?”
“Two years if you’re lucky,” Amy laughed. “More likely five. You have to understand the culture up there. They don’t make changes.”
Well, they were going to have to. Jack knew that his mother expected her two children to be good sports. She expected them to be accommodating, to respect the fact that the Legend family had been coming to this place for years and years. She would put up with endless inconvenience herself and expect them to as well. But she would draw the line somewhere. And Holly having a decent place to sleep would probably be it. He didn’t know how that would sit with the travel-soccer, Cub-Scout-Blue-and-Gold-banquet parents, but they would have been at this precious lake for twenty-four hours by now. They were at last going to have to admit that changes were taking place.