Summer's End (21 page)

And it had made life easier for Phoebe.

“I don't know,” Phoebe said now, “about leaving him here. I'm just not sure.” She really wasn't. “He'd probably do all right, but he's never been away from us before, and there would be no way of reaching us if there's a problem.” She heard herself sigh. It would have been fun to go with Giles and the older kids. “I don't see how we can make it work.”

Her dad suddenly smiled. “Gwen is way ahead of you on this, sweetheart.”

“What do you mean?” Giles asked.

“I thought we might do a little trial run first,” Gwen answered, “and see how he does here without you. The two of you could go into town and spend the night there. It will just be for one night, and if Thomas is really miserable, at least Ellie and the other kids will be here for him. He won't feel completely abandoned.”

Go into town…spend the night
…what an odd idea.

“It is true,” Giles was speaking, “that Ellie being here would make all the difference to him.”

“And even if we find out that the canoe trip isn't a good idea,” Gwen continued, “the two of you will at least have a night in town.”

“A night in town?” What were they talking about? Town was a place to be avoided. Whenever you went to town, you rushed through your errands, trying to get back to the lake as soon as possible.

“I don't suppose it would be the most thrilling trip you've ever taken,” Gwen answered. “But you'll have some time to yourselves.”

“Actually, it will be the most thrilling trip the two of us have had together in the last thirteen years,” Giles said. “It's very generous of you, and we accept.”

Phoebe stared at him. They were accepting? Just like that? She had barely finished her first cup of coffee.

He went on. “My folks took Ellie a couple of times when she was a baby, but my dad's health isn't what it should be. So this is great.”

“Then why not go today?” Gwen suggested. “If you left in an hour or so, you could have lunch in town.”

“Leave right now?” Phoebe stared at her. “Today?”

“I know I'm going to sound like Jack”—Gwen smiled at the thought—“but what's the point of waiting? It's not like you can plan anything or make any reservations from here.”

Phoebe could feel the objections welling up in her. “But we don't need groceries. Shouldn't we wait until we need to go again?”

“No, no, no.” Gwen took Phoebe by the arm and turned her around to face the path toward the new cabin. “Go get ready. You are not going to do one single errand. No groceries, no laundry, nothing at the hardware store. You are not to do a single practical thing.”

“Shouldn't we at least call about the permits so Holly doesn't have to go into town?”

“She would never forgive you.” Gwen was shooing them down the path. “She's having telephone withdrawal and is dying to get on the phone and start throwing her weight around.”

Phoebe shook her head. This had happened so fast. As soon as she and Giles were back at the new cabin, she said, “I wonder what made her offer to do this.”

“Jack and Holly will say that she wants to have Thomas all to herself and that she's wired a bomb to the ignition of the station wagon to be sure that we don't return, but I think the truth is that she likes you and she wants to help you.”

Phoebe stopped. “Me? Help me?”

“She remembers what raising kids is like, and she wants to do something to make it easier for you. But you aren't the easiest person to help, my love.”

“Is that why you accepted so quickly, because you thought I'd say no?”

“Let's just say that I knew right away that I really wanted to do it.”

“And what precisely do you think we're going to do in Hibbing?” Hibbing was a town of fifteen thousand people, smaller than even Iowa City.

“What are we going to do?” Giles asked. “We're going to have sex.”

 

And that was precisely what they did. Yes, they went out to dinner, and yes, they went out to see the big mine and they visited the high school with the crystal chandeliers and marble staircases paid for by the mining company. But mostly they had sex.

There was nothing they were supposed to be doing. No meals to prepare, no phone trees to distribute. And not once did Phoebe worry about Thomas.

And as they got in the car to drive back to the lake, she scooted over and buckled herself into the middle seat belt
so that she could sit right next to Giles. She couldn't remember when she had last done that. Certainly not in the lifetime of this particular car.

“I haven't been much fun for the past year or so, have I?” she said.

Giles checked the rearview mirror and then lifted his right arm to put it around her shoulders. “Phoebe, my love, having fun has never been your strong suit.”

“But it's been worse since Mother died, hasn't it?”

“Yes,” he said simply. Giles never lied to her. “You've been grieving.”

Her Jewish friends told her that their religion gave them one year to mourn a death. After that a person was obliged to resume living to the fullest, to find life's joys again. Phoebe had always thought that sensible and healthy.

But Mother had been dead for more than a year and a half. “I'm stuck,” she said. “I want to stop thinking about Mother so much, but I can't.”

Giles nodded. He knew.

“Have you been worried about me?” she asked. She didn't like people worrying about her.

“Yes,” he said again. “And I've been a little hurt,” he added honestly. “It sometimes has seemed that being your mother's daughter was more important to you than being my wife or the children's mother.”

Phoebe felt a prickling heat at the back of her neck. It spread to her face, down her arms to her hands. She was mortified. “Oh, Giles…”

His arm tightened around her shoulders. “Don't be so hard on yourself. We just had a wonderful twenty-four hours. Let's view this as a new start.”

They were close to the cabin now, past the spot on the
trail where you could first see the lake over the wild grasses. Giles was driving slowly, obviously in no hurry to get back. As they crested a little hill, they saw a small group walking toward them. It was Ellie, the two little girls, and Amy. Claire and Emily started jumping up and down when they saw the car, shrieking for Giles to stop so they could ride home on the tailgate.

The lake was the only place where the kids were allowed to sit on the tailgate of the station wagon and dangle their feet. Giles stopped the car, got out, and lowered it for them. They dashed to the side of the road to get sticks so that they could make designs in the sand while the car was moving. Amy said she would ride in back with them; Ellie squeezed into the front seat next to Phoebe. Phoebe put her arm around her.

“Thomas did great,” she reported. “Gwen had Nick and Maggie and me eat over at the new cabin so he wouldn't see me so much,” Ellie reported.

“I hope that was fun,” Phoebe said.

Ellie ducked her head, but Phoebe could see that she was blushing. “It really was.”

So Nick must not have openly favored one girl over the other.

Phoebe was grateful to him.

Giles was driving even more slowly now because of the open tailgate, but they were soon at the cabins. Holly and Gwen came out to greet them.

“Thomas just fell asleep,” Gwen reported.

“Then let's not wake him,” Phoebe said. She'd love seeing him, but she wasn't in any great hurry.

“What do we know about the canoe trip?” she asked Holly. “Did you get the permits?”

She had. For such a large group they needed two per
mits, but by leaving mid-week they were able to get them. “So you're leaving on Wednesday,” Holly said.

Today was Sunday. “I guess we should start thinking about menus,” Phoebe said. There was a lot to be done, planning, shopping, packing. “We'll probably need to go into town on—”

“You don't have to worry about any of that,” Holly interrupted. “The outfitter is packing all the food and the equipment for you. You just have to show up.”

“The outfitter?” Phoebe knew that outfitters provided such services, but it would have never occurred to her to use them. “Isn't that expensive?”

“Hideously so,” Holly answered cheerfully. “But we put it all on Amy's credit card.”

Amy's card? Why Amy's card?

Because Amy had more money than everyone else. Phoebe kept forgetting that.

“So what I am supposed to do with myself,” Phoebe asked, and she was only half joking, “if I don't get to spend the next day and a half packing Tang and dried skim milk into Ziplock bags?”

“You could have fun,” Gwen suggested.

Phoebe let herself make a face. “My husband just told me I'm no good at that.”

“Then you need to start practicing.”

 

Nick believed that when you fucked up, you ought to admit it to yourself. Lie to the rest of the world, but be straight with yourself—it was a point of honor with him. Stare in the bathroom mirror and admit that you had screwed up.

There weren't any bathroom mirrors up here—there
being no bathrooms—but he could admit it anyway. He had loused up this canoe trip something fierce, so much so that he was almost considering apologizing—and that certainly was not a part of his code.

He had not wanted to go out in the wilderness alone with Jack. Right away he understood that this was a mission of mercy. Let poor fatherless Nick grieve. That bugged him. He could handle his shit himself. And a canoe trip? What a mismatch that would be—Jack could start fires, Jack could split wood, Jack could have probably melted down the canoe and built a B—52 bomber out of it. And what could good old Nick do? Nothing, zippo.

So like the jackass idiot that he was, he had suggested that everyone should come…just to protect himself from feeling like an ignoramus. Now the trip had become this huge, expensive production, and of course he was still feeling like an ignoramus.

They were renting four canoes—three seventeen-foot canoes and one fifteen-footer. There had been a lot of discussion about who should be in which canoes. There would, he was sure, be a lot of discussion about everything; these people didn't do anything without a lot of discussion. This subject simply happened to be the first.

Maggie wanted to be in a canoe with him. It took him two seconds to figure that one out. She was being smart about it, never saying that she wanted to be with him; she simply objected to every other arrangement. But the idea was stupid. Neither he nor she knew a thing about canoes. They had to be split up.

Ultimately Nick ended up with Jack, but they were going to have the two little boys riding in the middle of their canoe. Ellie's parents had the two little girls and a
knapsack full of Barbie dolls in the middle of theirs. Maggie would be in the last of the larger canoes with her parents, while Ellie and the ice skater had the smaller one to themselves.

Canoes—Nick learned—had a front and a back, a bow and a stern. And there was a real power ladder about who sat where. The person in the stern was the boss. He—or she—got to steer the boat. Nick would be hard pressed to say that any canoe stroke was interesting, but the person in the front had only two strokes, forward and reverse—“straightaway” and “backwater” was the lingo—while the person in the back led a life of fun-filled drama with an arsenal of at least four or five strokes.

So it was cool to sit in back. It was less cool to sit in front. It was totally uncool to sit in the middle, because you didn't have a real seat and just had to squirm your way around the big trail packs. So the dads—Giles, Ian, and Jack—were all in back.

Ellie had automatically gone to sit in the front of her canoe. After all, she was a kid riding with an adult, and adults always kept the cool jobs for themselves.

“What on earth are you doing?” the skater called out instantly. She went over to the smaller canoe…and Nick had to admit that it was something to watch her move. It was like that with coaches who had once been really good wrestlers. You could tell just from the way they walked, and her walk was even better than theirs. Her torso hardly moved. From her collarbone through her rib cage down to her pelvis, her body remained in a clean, straight line. “You aren't expecting
me
to steer this thing, are you?”

Ellie turned and looked at her. “Don't you want to? It's more fun to be in the stern.”

“Not for me it wouldn't be. I've never sterned in my
life. Actually, I ought to be with Claire and Emily playing Barbies. I'm probably very good at Barbies.”

Nick had never paid a minute's attention to ice skating, but he did know that Amy had a gold medal from the Olympics. Maybe that's why she could stand there and admit that she couldn't stern a canoe without looking like a doofus because she knew she was really great at something else.

He'd have to remember that.

“And,” she continued, waving Ellie out of the canoe, “to be in the stern you have to be power-mad, and I am terrified of power and responsibility.”

“I'm not power-mad,” Ellie protested, laughing.

“I know it doesn't seem like it,” Amy returned, “but you're an oldest sister. You have to be power-mad. Now get into the back of this stupid boat or we'll both drown.”

This arrangement left Ellie in the stern, and Maggie not even in the bow like Nick, but in the middle, between her parents. Maggie was clearly not thrilled with the arrangement.

So they set off. The first lake was long and narrow. They launched at its tip, and there was a small cluster of cabins near the launch site, but after fifteen minutes of paddling there was nothing on the banks except trees. No power lines, no road, just water and trees—that was all there was between here and Canada.