Summer's End (9 page)

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.