Jack had been assigned quarters in the narrow enclosed porch of the log cabin. It had a set of bunk beds, and rather reluctantly he flipped back the covers on the lower one. He had never particularly liked bunk beds; that’s where men slept on a submarine. But this one wasn’t too bad, he decided a couple of minutes later. The bunks had been wedged along the narrow wall at the end of the room. There were windows along one side of the bed, and at the foot were more windows that faced the lake. The dark plaid curtains were drawn, but behind them the windows were open. The fresh air was cool, and the pile of quilts was heavy on his body.
Everyone had survived the evening without any hissing or snarling. Jack attributed it to his mother. People tended to behave themselves around her.
But the hissing and snarling were bound to come. There was too much tension for it not to.
Phoebe’s husband Giles, the one with the bum leg, seemed okay. In fact, he seemed like a pretty good egg. Phoebe herself Jack was less sure about; she seemed like she was swimming through a fog, forcing herself to eat and speak. But he had heard enough about her life, how busy and active she was, to know that she couldn’t always be this way.
Ian was tedious; he had spent most of the evening talking to Hal, which is what Jack would have liked to have been doing, but of course Ian was the Real Son, so Jack could hardly complain. Ian’s wife Joyce—the only good thing Jack could think about her was that she hadn’t been sleepwalking like Phoebe. But the world probably would have been a better place if she had been. Her energy was nervous and jangling, and she seemed to have her antennae pitched only to notice people’s mistakes, especially those she could interpret as criticism of herself.
His mom and Hal must have noticed all this—except maybe Ian’s tediousness, Hal didn’t seem to see that—but they were letting it happen.
His own father wouldn’t have. No, sir. Dad would taken charge. He wouldn’t have let snippy Miss Maggie get away with her rudeness. Such rudeness would have been considered insubordination in the ranks and treated as such.
But apparently Hal Legend didn’t view himself as commanding a submarine. He was an adult, playing host to other adults.
Jack woke to the muted sound of the screen door being eased shut. He hitched himself up on his elbows, listening for a moment. Morning light edged the curtains, but he heard nothing else. It was probably only Amy or Holly going to the outhouse. He punched his pillow and crooked his arm across his eyes.
A moment later he heard a rustling outside his window, followed by two whispering voices.
“I haven’t done this in ages,” he heard Amy say.
“I don’t think I’ve ever done it.” That was Holly. “Do you think anyone will see us?”
“So what if they do?”
“That’s easy for you to say. You probably have a gorgeous body.”
“No, I don’t,” Amy returned. “I have no waist, no hips.”
Jack sat up. Two splashes were followed by a muffled shriek.
Holly and Amy had gone skinny-dipping.
He heard more little yelps. The water must be cold.
This could not have been Holly’s idea, but it sounded like she was having fun.
Jack swung out of bed and pulled on his jeans. Embers were still glowing in the barrel stove, and so the water in the kettle was warm. He poured some into a saucepan and put it on the gas stove to get it hot enough for coffee. He built up the wood fire and draped a pair of blankets in front of it.
He was pouring the water through the coffee grounds when he heard the two of them returning. He glanced out the kitchen window. They were coming around the corner of the cabin. Both had towels wrapped around them, and they were mincing barefoot through the pine needles, their nightgowns in hand. He pulled open the screen door. “Hello, ladies.”
Startled, Holly shrieked, stopping so suddenly that Amy crashed into her.
“You scared the daylights out of me, Jack,” Holly reproved.
He smiled and held the door. They crowded past him into the little kitchen. Their hair was wet, their shoulders damp and bare.
Amy did have a narrow torso and almost boyish hips. Her arms and legs were long for someone her height.
“I am freezing,” Holly shivered. “Why did we do that? Why did I think I minded being dirty?”
Amy giggled. That was the only word for it. She didn’t laugh, she didn’t chuckle, she giggled. “I had fun.”
“But you must be used to freezing your tuckus off,” Holly returned. “I’m not.”
Amy made a face.
She had been quiet at dinner last night, hardly saying anything, but he had heard Holly and her talking softly in their bedroom late into the night.
“Do you ‘girls’ want some coffee?” he asked. Holly loathed being called a “girl.”
She didn’t even notice. “Coffee? Oh, Jack, you’re wonderful.”
She had already started to pour it, so he stepped into the living room and grabbed the blankets, folding them back in on themselves to hold in the warmth. He draped one over Holly, rubbing her shoulders briskly. She purred at the warmth. Even admirals like being taken care of once in a while.
He turned to give the other blanket to Amy. She looked up at him and smiled.
The early morning light from the open door shone against the smooth skin of her shoulders. The curve of her arms was lean and muscular. Everything about her was so…he didn’t have a good word for it…so compact. She was slender, even petite, and yet every ounce of her was muscle. He stepped forward with the blanket, ready to swirl it around her.
But then at the last moment, just as he was about to shake the blanket open, he stopped. He handed the blanket to her politely and moved to get her a cup of coffee.
He was interested in her. No, not interested. That was too polite a world, too cerebral. This was about bodies. He was drawn to hers, attracted to hers.
Which did not seem like good news.
It made no sense. His instincts were as good about women as they were about business and safety. If a woman was trouble, it didn’t matter what she looked like, he wasn’t attracted to her. Ever. He would walk into a room and be immediately drawn to the one woman who was funny, good-hearted, and wise long before he could have a clue that she was funny, good-hearted, and wise. His body was more astute than his mind.
Lurking at the ends of his consciousness had been wispy impressions of Amy—her posture, her gait, her perfume—and now suddenly Whammo! here it was—full-scale, industrial-strength attraction.
She’s in a towel. Who wouldn’t be attracted to a beautiful woman in a towel? And not only beautiful, but famous and incredibly fit as well. Who wouldn’t want her?
He wouldn’t, that’s who. Since when did he ever care about beauty and fame…although fitness, well, that could have its merits.
What could possibly be right about this? He was here for his mother and his sister; he needed to make sure Mom was okay and to try to get Holly to relax a little.
He wanted his mother to be happy. That’s what he cared about. No question about it. Two of Hal’s kids were having a lot of trouble with the idea of their dad having a new wife. Surely Jack’s attempting to seduce child number three wasn’t going to make the family-blending process any easier.
So his instincts were wrong.
But his instincts were never wrong.
With a deft move Amy swirled the blanket around her and then pulled her wet towel off from underneath. She bent her head forward and wrapped the towel turban-like around her hair. She straightened. Her neck was graceful, swan-like.
He wasn’t supposed to be noticing stuff like that.
What was it about her that attracted him? Was she funny, good-hearted, and wise? He had kept hearing hushed laughter in the dark last night; she and Holly had amused each other. And everything he had ever read about her talked about all the charity work she did and about her ability to comfort, to make people feel that someone cared. She must have a good heart.
But was she wise? She seemed a little childlike, a bit passive. Should we get some milk? she had asked. I wonder if we should get some milk.
When had he ever been attracted to a woman who couldn’t decide whether or not to buy a gallon of milk?
“Would you like a dry towel?” he asked.
“No.” She shook her now turban-covered head. “The rule is one towel a person. If you forget to hang yours up, you are out of luck. It’s too hard to do laundry.”
That might have been her mother’s rule, but it wasn’t his mother’s. When he had carried the suitcases into the little bedroom last night, he had seen a nice pile of towels on top of the dresser. Hadn’t she noticed them?
Holly had gone to sit in one of the rocking chairs. She rested her toes on the stove. She sipped her coffee. “You know, this isn’t so bad.”
Jack tried to focus on his sister. “You two sure were whispering late last night,” he said.
“I know.” Amy laughed again. “It was fun. It was like being at camp.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Holly said. “At least not any camp I was ever at. My counselors were all tyrants. They never let you talk after lights out.”
“I don’t want to hear that.” Amy made a face again. Jack was still watching her; he couldn’t help it. “Can’t you humor me? I never went to camp. It always sounded like such fun. Go and make friends you could pour your heart out to and have a wild summer romance—”
“A wild summer romance?” Holly interrupted her. “Where did you get your ideas about camp from? I never had a wild summer romance at camp. Did you, Jack?”
He had to clear his throat before answering. “Fortunately not. I went to Boy Scout camp.”
Amy protested. “But I thought there was always a girls’ camp down the road or across the lake and there would be dances and raids on each other’s tents, and so there would be someone to have a wild summer romance with.”
“Not at the camps our parents sent us to,” he said, and then spoke more briskly. “I hope the two of you sit here buck naked spinning tales about summer camp until high noon, but Mom gave me a list…and”—again he couldn’t help himself, he wanted to talk to her; he pointed a finger at Amy—“it includes trenching a line to the bunkhouse, something that you predicted would take five years.”
She smiled. “I still bet it takes you two.”
She did have some kind of smile. He had to get out of there.
He jerked open the screen door and stepped out in the sunlight. He looked over his mother’s list. He’d like to find one where he’d have half a chance of being alone for a while. He settled on number four, get the old sauna to work.
Just outside the log cabin was a little shack with a chimney. Jack pulled open the door. He stepped into a small room that had clothes hooks screwed into two of the walls. It must be a changing room. Beyond it was the sauna itself, another small room heated by an old, airtight wood-burning stove surrounded by rocks. Next to the stove was another old-fashioned hand pump like the one in the kitchens. It fed a thirty-gallon cistern. A pipe carried water from the cistern through the stove and back, and there was a drain in the floor. Clearly the place had been designed as much as a bathhouse as a sauna.
His mother’s letters had said it had been cold when they first arrived. Bathing in the lake couldn’t have been any fun. If he got this going, she and Holly—and Amy—would have thirty gallons of hot water and a warm place to wash their hair. Surely that would make a big difference to everyone’s comfort. Not as much as a generator would, of course, but still it would be nice.
So why hadn’t the Legends ever tried to use it? Of the three cabins, they had purchased this one the most recently, but they had bought it at least ten years ago. Oh, well, the past wasn’t any of his business. He started to take the stove pipe apart.
He was up on the roof, knocking the soot off the galvanized wired cage on top of the chimney, when he heard a voice on the ground. It was Ian, Hal’s son, Amy’s brother.
Ian was tall and lean like Hal, and he wore his light hair cropped close to his head, although Jack had seen in the main cabin some family photos no more than five years old that showed Ian wearing a ponytail. Jack wondered what made him cut it off. He was also thinner than he had been in the photos. Actually, Jack thought he looked gaunt. And maybe he was. His wife Joyce had gone on and on about low-fat cooking last night. Maybe the man simply wasn’t getting enough to eat. That would make Jack plenty foul-tempered.
“Dad says you’re taking a look at the sauna,” Ian said.
“I think we’ll be able to fire it up this afternoon.” There had been a few problems, but they had been minor.
“You really think it’s safe?”
No. I think it is a major fire hazard. That’s why I am doing this. I want to roast my mother and my sister and burn down the entire forest if I can.
Jack generally liked people. That’s the way he was. But this guy…you could make all the starvation excuses in the world, but Jack still didn’t like him.
Ian was a linguistics professor who learned and recorded Native American Indian languages. Apparently there were a bunch of these languages that were down to their last couple of surviving speakers. When they died, the language would. Ian found such people and had them talk into a tape recorder for a year or so.
Why? That had been Jack’s first thought. He hoped that he wasn’t anti-intellectual or anything, but he couldn’t see any practical value in Ian’s work. There weren’t any books or documents written in these languages. They were dying for a reason—no one wanted or needed to speak them anymore.
He supposed he could understand it as a matter of curiosity, and admittedly he had on occasions felt some regret when he closed up a ceiling. With an unfinished ceiling you knew exactly what was there, where all the wires and pipes were, but once the ceiling was up, everything was by guess and by golly. Of course, with a ceiling if you really had to know, you could rip it down, but on this language thing he supposed there was no going back once the old guys were dead.
Looking at it that way, Jack felt a little more sympathy. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, maybe it even was something worthwhile and important to be doing, but Ian didn’t have to talk about it as if it were second only to spiritual salvation.
And the Indian part didn’t make sense. Jack couldn’t say that he was an informed cultural anthropologist, but wasn’t Indian culture closely bound to nature without a lot of artificial laws—now that he thought about it, he probably would have done okay himself if a tribe had kidnapped him from the wagon train when he was six. Indian culture was earthy, moist, mysterious, and dark, whereas this guy, this Ian fellow, was cool and dry. He’d freeze-dry anything he looked at.
Jack swung back down the ladder. “It looks in pretty good shape. Whoever built it was a little nutty, but I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be fine.”
They were in the sauna now. Ian was looking around like he knew what he was talking about—and maybe he did. “The stove seems too close to the wall.”
“It’s probably not up to code.” Jack didn’t think they had to worry about the building inspectors descending on them…unless Ian called them. “But that’s why there’s all this brick work here.” And for how many years were you a profrssional firefighter, Mr. Dr. Professor of Dead Indian Languages?
“What about the window?” Ian continued. “Shouldn’t the window open freely?”
There was a little casement window on the sauna’s outer wall, and in the best of all worlds, Jack supposed yes, it would open. That would be a quick way to cool the place down if it got too hot. But it had been painted shut years ago.
“If people feel in peril, they can break the window.” Jack had found an old ballpeen hammer and had suspended it near the window. The window was too small for an adult to climb out, but it would let in enough fresh air to keep a person from cooking.
“Breaking glass is dangerous business,” Ian said. “I wonder if any of the children know how to do it safely.”
He sounded like he worked for OSHA. “If no one’s taught them, then they probably don’t.”
“What about this door? It should open outward.”
The door opened inward, and that had given Jack pause. You were going to have people throwing water on the rocks. Humidity would cause the door to swell. That might make it hard to open, and you couldn’t put your shoulder to a door that opened inward.
“I suppose that theoretically that might be a problem,” Jack admitted. “But the thing fits so badly in the first place. As it is, you’re going to have to fold towels along the bottom to block the drafts.”
“I don’t think we can trust the children’s safety to that. The door needs to be rehung.” Ian spoke flatly as if this were his decision and his alone.
“Okay.” There was no point in fighting this battle. Ian was peeing on the fire hydrant. Hal was his dad, he was the Real Son, and this was his turf. “I’ll get a screwdriver.” Jack knew that his mother would want him to let Ian pee wherever Ian wanted to pee.
“No, no. I’m the one who thinks it needs to be done. I’ll do it.”
“Do you need any help?”
“Rehanging a door?” Ian was faintly sarcastic. “I shouldn’t think so.”
“Fine.” Jack nodded and turned, going through the small dressing room and then outside into the light.
Jesus, what an asshole.
Jack spent the rest of the morning working on the gas line, bringing it to the bunkhouse in order to install some lights. It should not have been a big deal. Hal had the lights and all the necessary fittings, and the ground was sand, the easiest thing to dig through. But within five minutes of starting he had a horrible feeling that Amy did have at least some degree of wisdom. She might be right about this taking two years.
The four young kids wanted to help.
Jack looked down at their cheery little faces. What was more important to his mother, getting propane to the bunkhouse or having him spend a wonderful morning bonding with these children? He tried hard, but there was no way he could convince himself that she would have voted for the propane. So he marked the line with some spray paint and turned over his shovel. In a minute Hal came out.
“Are you all right?” Hal asked him. “I don’t want you to feel abandoned in a sea of children.”
“We’re doing great.” It was a lie, but it was, he knew, the lie that his mother would want him to tell.
What a shame. She really had worried about him during his adolescence, worried that he would flunk out of school, wrap his car around a tree, or both, that he would get a girl pregnant, that he would murder his father or that his father would murder him. If she could have peered into the future and seen how docile and obedient he was being this morning, she could have had an extra decade’s worth of a decent night’s sleep.
Hal brought out two more shovels, but that only made everything worse. Now there were three shovels and four kids, and one of the shovels was more desirable than the others, so Jack had to spend the entire morning keeping track of whose turn it was to have the good shovel and whose turn it was to have none at all. Then Thomas, the one still in diapers, appeared and wanted a piece of the action too. Fortunately he brought his own tool—a bright red plastic spade—but he was always getting in everyone’s way, and that was something else for Jack to monitor.
Eventually Amy and Holly appeared. They were coming over to the main cabin to help fix lunch. “What wonderful progress you’re making,” Amy remarked.
They were making horrible progress, and Amy knew it. Her eyes were dancing, and Jack would have loved to have—
To continue happily supervising his very non-union crew of child laborers. Oh, yes, that was precisely what he wanted to be doing in this moment. Nothing else could have made his world so complete.
Fortunately after lunch it was warm enough to go swimming, and Jack lost all his helpers. He worked quickly, wanting to get this over with before anyone else could get involved. When he was sure that everyone else was down at the lake, he sneaked into the tool compartment of his truck, got out his battery-operated drill, and had the lights up in no time. He was done by two o’clock. As he carried his tools back to their hiding place in his truck, he realized that if he started the fire in the sauna now, the water would be hot when people came up from the lake to get ready for dinner. So he went back to the log cabin and, gathering up an armload of wood, he hooked the handle of the screen door with his little finger and used his hip to bounce the door open. He went inside the changing room.
And dropped the wood with a crash. The sauna door wasn’t up. He marched over to the opening. The hinges were off, but Ian hadn’t even gotten around to chiseling the niches to reposition them. He had been working in here most of the morning. What had he been doing?
The door itself was lying on a pair of sawhorses. On top of it was a card with the most absurd measurements. The measurements alone would have taken a person over an hour to do. To a sixteenth of an inch, Ian had calibrated the uneven slope of the concrete threshold. Why? Sure, there were things you could do about an uneven threshold, but a folded towel would work almost as well as any of them.
It was clear to Jack that Ian planned to let this task take a couple of days. Everyone else was going to have to wait to use the sauna while Ian did exactly what Ian wanted.
That was bullshit. Jack checked the battery in his drill and picked up the chisel.
His mother was furious. “You should not have done that, Jack. Ian had started the project.”
“Come on, Mom. It would have taken him forever, and Holly wanted to wash her hair.”
“Holly can wash her hair in cold water. She did it this morning.”
Everyone had again gathered for cocktails in front of the cabin. All the women obviously felt clean and happy, having relished the abundant—and until now unprecedented—supply of hot water. His mother had felt that way too until she had heard Ian’s very stiff questions about Jack’s hanging of the door.
“Don’t you understand?” she went on. “It was important to him. He wanted to be the one who got the sauna going.”
“But, Mom, he had ten years to do it.”
“Jack, you need to stop and think. Try to respect their position.”
Stop and think. This was like being a kid again. Everyone telling him to stop and think. Especially his dad. His cautious, precise father. His dad would have measured the floor. A folded towel would not have been good enough for his dad.
You couldn’t go around wadding up old towels to plug leaks on a nuclear submarine. Jack was willing to grant that. But why did everything have to be done according to submarine standards? Why not just make do once in a while? Duct tape was one of God’s finest gifts to mankind. Jack’s whole life was held together with it.
But his father had used duct tape only on ductwork.