Summer's End (15 page)

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.

Gwen was mad at her son. Amy found that interesting.

Obviously Ian had planned on doing something in the sauna, but he had been taking forever, and so Jack had finished it for him.

Amy could see why Gwen didn't like that…on the other hand, she herself did. At Christmas last year, Ian had been always making everyone wait for him. He wasn't a congenitally tardy person. If he was doing something alone or with one or two others, he was prompt and efficient, but if the whole clan was trying to get out the door at one time, Ian was always busy completing something important and everyone had to wait. It seemed like some kind of power move. She had been mildly irritated by it; Phoebe had probably been incensed.

So she was glad that someone had called Ian's bluff.

It had been a nice day, probably the best time she had had at the lake since she had started skating. At family gatherings she usually drifted, uncertain of what she was supposed to be doing, how she was supposed to be helping. She never knew what she would be doing in the next twenty minutes.

She hated it. She was used to a day rigidly organized
around ice time, flight time, curtain time, warm-up time, and every other kind of time. A structureless, scheduleless day probably should have been a relaxing change—she couldn't help thinking that a sane, normal person would have found it so—but she couldn't cope with it.

When she and Holly had come over to the main cabin for breakfast that morning, however, there was a big sheet of paper posted on the cabin wall. It listed the day's schedule. Chores had been divided up; activities had been given a time. It was all very structured.

“Mother spent her whole adult life as a navy wife,” Holly explained. “She believes in order.”

“Don't apologize to me.” Amy loved knowing what she was supposed to do. “There can't be any group of people who are more addicted to routine than skaters. We can't stand having any choices.” She was looking for her name on the duty roster. Sweeping the porches, clearing the lunch dishes, setting the table at dinner—these were all things she could do. She wasn't going to have to ask a million questions.

She and Holly stuck together all day like two first-time summer campers. They swam, played cards with the kids, rode bikes out to one of the logging roads to see if the raspberries were ripe. Holly was her friend, her bunk mate, someone even more of an outsider than she, someone even more ignorant of the routines.

After lunch Giles launched his wooden fishing boat, the one he had restored so beautifully, and he took the kids for rides. Amy started to swim alongside the boat, and as her muscles warmed and eased, as she could feel the strength in her legs and across her back, she started to feel like herself again. The water was wonderfully soft. She could open her eyes and see the spray of diamond water
drops flung out by her rising arm. She could hear the rhythmic splash and pull of Giles's oars.

She didn't get enough exercise when she was with her family. She was always too busy standing around waiting to unload the dishwasher.

She stuck her head out of the water. “Could you row across the lake?” she asked Giles. “I'd like to see if I can swim it.”

“Of course,” he answered. Giles was always happy to be in his boat.

The lake was about a half mile across, and she made the round trip easily. Then Jack came down to the dock and quietly beckoned to Gwen, Holly, Phoebe, and herself.

“The sauna's ready. You four go first, before the kids get to the hot water.”

Amy had hardly known what he was talking about, but it turned out that the little building next to the log cabin which her family had always used as a woodshed had once been a sauna. Gwen had cleared it out; Jack had got it working.

It was deliciously warm, and the tank was full of hot water. The four of them lay on the benches until their skin was rosy and moist. Then they poured bucket after bucket of hot water on themselves. There was usually never hot water at the lake for anything but washing dishes, and the warmth, the cleanliness, was a luxury. Amy washed everyone's hair, loving the way that she could feel each one of them relax under her fingers. Even her sister had eased.

“I didn't think anything could make the lake better,” Phoebe sighed. “But this really does. I can't believe that it's been sitting here this whole time, and we've never used it.”

“I knew that Jack would run mad if he didn't have some projects,” Gwen said. She was speaking mildly, but she was clearly pleased. “Although we may have to put our heads together to think up some more. It's only been one day and he's making too much progress.”

The clouds thickened and lowered as they ate dinner. Amy lingered at the table with her dad and Gwen, Gwen being eager to ask all the questions everyone always asked Amy, how she had gotten started, what her life was like, what her daily routine was, what was she going to do when she wasn't able to skate, and the final, completely unanswerable one—what it was like to be famous. She usually answered those questions the same way each time, but now she found herself concentrating on her father's role in her career, how he had steered her onto the right path early in her career, how much of her music he was still finding. He even passed some along to Tommy and Henry. It was an enormous help. All three of them did their own choreography now. They didn't like being dependent on other people's creativity—many skaters just waited for their choreographers and coaches to have good ideas—but finding new music was extraordinarily time-consuming, and Hal's help was invaluable. He had grown to understand what a skater needed in a piece of music as well as any of the professional choreographers.

He waved a hand, dismissing his role. “I've learned a lot. But tell us, how long are you going to be able to stay? That was never clear in any of the messages.”

“I don't know,” Amy answered. Yesterday she couldn't have imagined being here for more than forty-eight hours, but clearly she was going to be able to make it for longer than that. “I've still got the four days left over from the television special.” That committed her. Now she had to stay
for at least four days. “At some point we need to start thinking about our fall programs and what we're going to do this spring.”

“Who's ‘we'?” Gwen asked.

“Henry Carroll, Tommy Sargent, and our coach Oliver Young. We're planning a tour next spring, primarily the three of us. We're really going to try to keep the ticket prices down.” That was particularly important to Tommy. The ticket prices for the big spring tours always seemed way too high. The venues usually sold out, but some of the people who cared the most couldn't go. “But keeping the ticket prices down is our only idea so far.”

“It's a good one,” her father said.

“Yes, but it's hard to skate too.”

He laughed. “I can't disagree with that.”

She liked seeing him laugh. He hadn't laughed last Christmas. “So I don't know. Mostly it's ideas I need, and I don't have to be in Denver to come up with ideas.”

“Stay as long as you like,” Gwen said, “but in the meantime would you help me bring all the towels in? It looks like it's going to rain tonight.”

Taking towels off the line—this too was something Amy could do, and she happily followed Gwen outside.

The towels were still damp. “When it was just your father and I,” Gwen said, “I hung them up in front of the fire for the night, but there's too many now. What did your mother do?”

“I don't know,” Amy admitted. “But whatever it was, it wasn't very effective.” In fact, whenever Amy smelled mildew, it reminded her of towels at the lake. She thought for a moment. Laundry was her hobby, her sole domestic skill. She couldn't cook, she couldn't tell one cleaning product from the next, but every time she moved it was
to get better laundry facilities. She owned five different shapes of tailors' hams, and her ironing board was German with a vacuum-producing motor that pulled the steam through the garment. She should be able to figure out what to do with damp towels even if there were almost twenty of them. “What about if we hung them in the sauna? Wouldn't they dry in there?”

“That's a good idea. We can add another log on the fire, and they'll be perfect in the morning.”

As they were carrying the baskets over to the sauna, they met Phoebe coming toward the main cabin.

“We thought we would hang these in the sauna,” Gwen explained. “So they can dry overnight.”

“That should work,” Phoebe said. “It's a good idea.”

A good idea? Phoebe had just said that she had had a good idea.

This is laundry
, Amy reminded herself.
Just laundry. Surely you are not such an idiot as to be pleased that your sister likes your idea about laundry
.

Of course, Phoebe didn't know that it was Amy's idea. She probably thought it was Gwen's.

The three of them draped the towels over the benches, and while Phoebe built up the fire, Amy carried the empty baskets back to the main cabin. She set them in their place—she had watched Gwen pick them up—and then went back outside, letting the screen door shut behind her.

She started back down the path. Then she heard a noise from the far side of the bunkhouse. She went around and looked.

It was Jack. He was halfway up on a small ladder, caulking a window. He was working quickly, his grip on the caulking gun sure and strong. He jumped down from
the ladder and bent over, tilting his head to do the underside of the window.

Amy watched him work. He was so busy with all his tasks. It almost seemed as if he were a handyman paid to work while the rest of them vacationed.

He finished the underside of the window. He ran his fingers lightly over the seam and then began rubbing his thumb over his fingertips. He must have gotten some of the caulk on his hands and was trying to bead it up.

He saw her. “This stuff is supposed to be quick-dry,” he said, “but I'd feel better if the rain held off until after midnight.”

“The towels are in,” she said lightly. “So we laundresses are prepared.”

“Good for you. Now tell me, have you taken a look at that limb?” He was speaking again, now pointing at a tree overhead. “Don't you think it ought to come down?”

Amy looked up. She saw a mass of green leaves. She supposed that the leaves were attached to a branch, and if they had been silk leaves, she probably could have figured out how to iron them if that proved to be necessary, but since they were real, she didn't have one thing to say about them. “If you think it needs to come down, then take it down.”

“I shouldn't do it without talking to your dad.”

“Then talk to him. He was inside a couple of minutes ago.”

Jack shook his head. “Not anymore. He's doing something with your brother. And they'll probably want to do it themselves; they must have their own way of working.”

“That they do,” she agreed.

He closed up his ladder and picked it up. “So what are you up to?”

“Nothing.” She stopped herself. She was not going to be that way. She was going to make her own plans. Even if they were little and pointless, they would at least be her own. “I'm going to go on a walk. If anyone asks where I am, will you tell them I've gone down to the Rim?” She had been meaning to do this ever since she had arrived yesterday.

“The Rim? Where's that?”

“At the other end of the lake. Would you like to come?”

He paused for a second. “Sure. Why not? Let me put this ladder away. It will only take a second. Shall we try to find Holly?”

“That's a good idea.” Amy watched as he picked up the ladder, levered it across one shoulder, and started carrying it to the garage. Then she changed her mind about finding Holly. “Actually, I'm not so sure that it is a good idea. While we're looking for her, we'll run into everyone else, and they'll want to come, and people will need to get sweaters and the kids will have to use the biffy and someone else will think of one other quick little thing that they have to do first, and someone else will think of another, and it will be dark before everyone gets ready, and then we won't be able to go.”

He came out of the garage, brushing his hands. “I like my sister, but not that much.”

He scooped up a wool shirt that had been lying on the steps to the bunkhouse, and they started down the driveway. He threw a last glance at the tree hanging over the bunkhouse.

His shirt was plaid, browns and camels with a touch of gold.

They started walking up the drive. “That's a nice shirt. It must look good on you,” she said.

He had hooked the shirt on his finger and slung it over his shoulder. At her words he twisted his head to look at the shirt as if he remembered nothing about it.

“The colors,” Amy continued. “They must look good on you.”

He shook his head. She could have been speaking Greek for all he understood. “If you say so. Holly gave it to me.”

At the end of the driveway they turned right, heading away from the campground and the turn-off from the main road. He was walking easily, his shoulders back, the kind of effortless posture that came from good abs and traps.

Amy was used to male figure skaters. They were leanly built, often quite short men. And her father and brother, although tall, also had trim, sleek builds. But Jack was crafted on generous, solid lines with broad shoulders, big hands, and a strong chest.

Holly had told her all about him last night, about his different business ventures, his different romances. In terms of romance, Holly had called him a “rescuer.” His relationships were with women who were making important transitions in their lives, returning to school or starting a business. Jack gave them a lot of practical support, from cleaning their gutters to advising them when a client wasn't worth the effort. Once the woman emerged from her transition, Holly said, she and Jack amicably lost interest in one another.