Summer's End (28 page)

The garage door was broad, designed for two cars, and the three women, his mother, his sister, her sister, were silhouetted in the fading light.

There was no chance that they wouldn't understand. The way he had his arms, the angle of her head, there could be no question about what kind of kiss this was.

The light was at their backs. Amy couldn't see their expressions, but she had heard the gasps and now she felt the silence. She looked down. Jack's gloves, leather and worn, lay at her feet. A narrow rectangle of sawdust coated the floor beneath the pole he had been sanding.

Footsteps stumbled through the tamarack needles. It was Phoebe, whirling, leaving.

Amy's eyes shot to Jack's.
What shall I do?

I can't fix this for you
.

No, of course not. He had his own family to face.

Murmuring something to Gwen and Holly, she brushed past them, wanting to find her sister. They were dividing into two families, the Legends and the Wellses.

This was all wrong. She and Jack should be facing everyone together. It should be the two of them together facing a single family together.

Nothing was happening as she had planned.

She could see Phoebe going down toward the lake. She called out, “Phoebe. Phoebe, wait.”

Phoebe stopped on the steps, the split logs embedded in the sand. Her back was stiff. She turned slowly. She faced Amy, but she wasn't looking at her.
I don't want to talk to you
.

Phoebe was angry, bitterly angry. Amy knew that she had frustrated Phoebe, that she had irritated her, had made her impatient, but had she ever made her angry before?

Say something
, Amy willed herself to speak.
You need to go first. You're the one who has to explain. You don't have to apologize. You've done nothing wrong. But you need to explain
.

Explain what? Explain it how? Camp-Amy-and-Jack? How on earth was she going to explain that?
I needed someone to have fun with. We wanted to go roller-blading together
. That would sound ridiculous. “Phoebe, I—” Amy could feel herself starting to apologize.

Phoebe interrupted. “You're having a relationship with him, aren't you?”

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Amy hadn't imagined how it would be when her family found out, but it wasn't to be like this.

“When you went to the ranger station, that was when it happened, wasn't it?” Phoebe's voice was insistent.

What could Amy say?

Phoebe's lips tightened, and she tilted her head back, looking up to the sky. “And I agreed with Jack, I thought it was a good idea for you to go.” She leveled her chin, looked at Amy. “What were you thinking of? Don't you care about anyone else?”

“Of course I do.” Amy struggled to keep her voice
calm.
Phoebe's upset about everything else; she thinks she is losing the lake. It's not really me that she's mad at
. “But my relationship with Jack doesn't have to affect everyone else.”

“It doesn't? Here we all are, struggling to get along, struggling to make some kind of a family, and you are sneaking off to have a little fling?”

“It's not a little fling,” Amy protested.

“Then what is it? For God's sake, Amy”—Phoebe was lecturing her as if she were a little kid—“aren't things hard enough already? I know you're full of resentment. I know you think Mother and Dad didn't understand you, that they didn't treat you well, that spending tens of thousands of dollars on your skating every year wasn't enough, but does that justify the way you treat the family?”

“The way
I
treat the family?” Amy had no idea what Phoebe was talking about.

“Yes, the way you treat the family, the way you waltz in late for every single holiday…why come at all? If it's not important to you to spend the actual day with us, why come at all?”

“I'm
working
. Holidays, that's when I work. Don't you understand that?”

“I don't know what I understand. I just know that by now you must have a choice. Maybe you're making the right choice—you probably are, clearly being in some stupid parade somewhere is more important to you than anything else, but don't pretend it's not a choice.”

A stupid parade…was that all Phoebe knew about her work, knew about all the good she did? The libraries, the blood banks, the Special Olympics? Now Amy was mad too. “Nobody else at my level has to dash home after
every single holiday. Sure they do sometimes, but sometimes their families come to them.”

“So?” Phoebe clearly didn't see what this had to do with anything.

“You'd never come to me, would you?”

“You've never asked us.”

That couldn't be true. “Would you have come?”

“How do I know? It's never come up.”

Phoebe seemed very sure that Amy had not invited them. But it didn't matter. Invited, not invited, what difference did it make? They wouldn't have come. Amy knew that with all her heart.

“You come up here this summer and won't say how long you're staying for,” Phoebe continued. “How is anyone supposed to plan around that? And what does it mean? If we're all nice to you and treat you like a princess, you will stay an extra day?”

“No, it doesn't mean that at all. I don't want to be treated like a princess. It has to do with creativity, with whether or not I have any new ideas while I'm here—”

Phoebe waved her hand, dismissing that argument.

Of course she dismissed it. Amy's career was all about sequins and makeup to Phoebe, and maybe even about athleticism and technique. But creativity, inspiration, no, no, you couldn't use those words to describe what Amy did. Amy was the pretty one. The pretty ones couldn't do anything important, anything hard…because the smart ones wouldn't let them. “You do not know what you are talking about.”

Phoebe didn't like that. “What about when Mother died? You wouldn't even come when Mother was dying. Is it unfair to say that?”

Amy had had it. For a year and a half Phoebe had been
holding this over her head.
You weren't at Mother's side when she was dying
. Phoebe hadn't said it, but Amy knew that she was thinking it. It had been a test, Mother's deathbed, and hey, Phoebe had passed, and Amy had failed. Amy had failed big time…because Phoebe had designed the test. “They didn't tell me. You know that.” Amy had said this over and over.

“And do ‘they' still work for you? Did you fire them?”

No, no, she hadn't. They had made one bad decision, that was certainly true. But did Phoebe have any idea how hard it was to find people you could trust? Two, three pieces of bad advice, and your career as a public figure was over. Life in the public eye was that fragile.

And that's why Amy was not going to feel bad about her relationship with Jack. Phoebe was lucky. She had met Giles her first year in college. She probably thought it was easy, that men like Giles were everywhere. Well, they weren't. They were almost as rare as good advisers. Maybe more so.

But Amy had finally found one too. She wasn't about to give him up.

So it wasn't a matter for discussion.

She needed to make that clear. She wasn't going to be angry, Phoebe wasn't going to be angry, because there wasn't an issue. She and Jack were a fact. The family was going to have to accept that and move on.

She spoke quickly. “You know what you said earlier this evening about you and Giles looking for another place? Why not build on the Rim? That site is perfect; it's beautiful and there are no steps to the lake, and—”

“The Rim?” Phoebe stared at her. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“The property at the end of the lake, with the beach—”

Phoebe interrupted. “I know what the Rim is. It is
beautiful. So what are you proposing, that we try to homestead it, that we simply build there and hope that the owners don't care?”

“No, of course not.” Amy forced herself to be patient. This was what was going to help everyone move on. “I'm the owner. The Rim is mine.”

“What?” Phoebe stared at her. “You own the Rim?”

Amy nodded. “Back when everyone was so worried about developers buying the place—”

“Developers? What are you talking about?”

“Three years ago. I was up here, and people were all talking about someone buying the place to build a fly-in hunting resort—”

“A resort? Why would anyone build a resort here? We're so far from everything. There's plenty of places like that already. Why would anyone build one where there was no utilities?”

“But don't you remember, that day we were at that picnic the weekend after the Fourth, at the campgrounds, and that's all people were talking about, how much they didn't want a resort on the lake.”

Phoebe was shaking her head, puzzled. “A Fourth of July picnic?” Now she remembered. “Amy, everyone was drinking, especially that group from Chisholm. Don't tell me you bought a piece of property based on what a bunch of drunks said?”

Amy was speechless. What was Phoebe saying? A bunch of drunks?

She tried to remember the picnic. Maybe it had been that one group that kept bringing the matter up; maybe it had just been that one group forcing everyone else to talk about it. And no, of course, no one had wanted a resort
on the lake, but that didn't mean that anyone except the drunks were actually worried about it.

Amy drank so little—and no one else in the figure skating world drank very much either—that she didn't always have her antennae up about other people's drinking and what alcohol was making them say and do. So, yes, it was possible she had listened too much to people who had been drinking too much.

“Maybe it was an impulsive thing to do,” she admitted. “But it's worked out for the best now because you and Giles—”

“You want to give Giles and me the Rim?” Phoebe drew back. “Oh, God, Amy, don't start now.”

“Start what?”

“One thing I could say for you, you haven't thrown your money around, insisting on a lot of power because you have more money—”

Insist? Now Amy was mad again. She could own the Taj Mahal, the Mona Lisa, and all of Lipton College, and she would still have no power in this family.

“—Sure, your gifts to the kids are a little pricey, but that's understandable. We can live with that. But don't all of sudden start thinking you can fix everything with money. Don't start that, not when it's the only thing you're doing right.”

Phoebe marched back up the stairs. She was done with this conversation.

Amy glared after her.
I am not a little kid anymore. I will not be dragged to every stupid Science Fair that you and Ian won blue ribbons at. I have a right to be happy. I've earned it
.

Of course, Phoebe might be right about the Rim. Amy
forced herself to be objective about that. No one would have been more upset about a resort on the Rim than Phoebe. If she said it wasn't a threat, then it wasn't.

Amy remembered when she had told Pam and David to buy the Rim. It had been a hushed, hurried conversation outside the laundromat where her mother and Phoebe had been folding clothes. David had wanted to investigate; she had told him not to, that she wanted this done right away. If he had investigated, she realized now, he would have found out that the threat existed only in the minds of a group of drunks from Chisholm.

Why had she been so urgent? Why had she had to buy the property immediately? Because she had wanted to do something important. She had wanted to stop feeling like Amy the Afterthought.

Okay, she hadn't needed to buy it. It was a mistake, a bad investment, but she hadn't hurt anyone. She wasn't going to feel bad about it.

She heard footsteps behind her and knew without looking that it was Jack. She tilted her head back. “Did you talk to your mother and sister?”

He nodded. “They weren't all that surprised. They had both guessed how I was starting to feel about you. What about your sister?”

“She was completely surprised.” How typical—that his family understood him well enough to have anticipated this while her family had had no idea what she was thinking and feeling.

“Are things okay between the two of you?”

Amy waved her hand. “It will blow over. But it turns out that I was completely wrong about needing to buy the Rim.” She shook her head. “That whole idea of a resort coming up here, that was just alcohol talking.”

“I wondered,” he said. “There have to be hundreds of lakes in Minnesota where development would be easier. But why did this come up? I thought you weren't going to talk to her about the Rim.”

Amy shrugged. “Things got a little out of hand.”

“It sounds like it was more than that.”

Amy didn't answer.

Jack persisted. “Is she angry with you?”

Amy didn't want to talk about it. “You could say that.”

His lips tightened. “I don't want you to be fighting with your sister about this.”

“She's got to stop judging me. She knows nothing about my life, about what it's like to be me.”

“She can't help judging. That's who she is, but you have to admit that she's harder on herself than on anyone else.”

He did have a point there.

“Amy, I think we need to go to everyone and say that we're sorry, say that we made a mistake. We can't pretend that it didn't happen, but we can—”

“A mistake?” She couldn't be hearing this. “You think the other night was a mistake?”

“I do.” He was facing her squarely, looking straight at her. “You know it's not you. If we had met each other in any other way, if—”

“But it was so wonderful. How can it have been a mistake?”

“Because of what it's doing to you and your sister.”