Summer's End (31 page)

It took an additional four hours to get from the lake to Minneapolis. Jack should be here by now.

On the seventeenth she called Holly and asked her straight out. “Where's Jack?”

“In Kentucky. He called a couple days ago.”

“Kentucky?”
Why did he call you? Why didn't he call me?
“What's he doing there?”

“He lives there,” Holly pointed out. “Although actually I don't know what he's doing there. He sold his business at the beginning of the summer, and he signed a two-year no-compete clause that really limits what he can do in Kentucky, Tennessee, or Virginia.”

Denver wasn't in Kentucky or Tennessee or Virginia. He could do anything he wanted in Colorado. Why didn't he come?

“Is he going to learn to fly helicopters?” Amy asked. “He talked about that once.”

“How would I know?” Holly answered.

Amy slid the antenna back into the phone. Jack wasn't coming.

On August nineteenth she had Gretchen send copies of the musical arrangements to Iowa by overnight mail. On the twentieth she had to shorten her morning workout to go to a meeting of a board for a charitable foundation. But she returned to the rink in the late afternoon. She was experimenting with a different way of squaring her hips in one sequence, and that meant all kinds of
other things had to be changed as well. She was liking the effect the hips had, but she wasn't sure about everything else. There was nothing to do except repeat the sequence over and over, making tiny adjustments, working until things started to feel right. Every so often she would stop and skate one of the other programs completely simply to give herself a rest.

It was halfway through one of those programs when she became aware that someone was in the rink with her. She stopped skating. The overhead lights were on, and she had to lift her hand, shading her eyes so that she could see into the bleachers. There was a person in the third row.

It was Jack.

She couldn't believe it. Jack. She called out his name and dug her toe pick deep into the ice to speed toward him. He rose and started climbing down the bleachers.

“You're here! I thought you were in Kentucky. I was so sure you weren't coming.” The waist-high barrier was between them, but she reached out her hands and his closed around them, warm and strong.

He looked great. Even though he was wearing blue and the sleeves of his shirt were rumpled from having been rolled up and the upper thighs of his jeans were heavily creased from sitting behind the steering wheel and he hadn't shaven in two days, he really did look great.

“Let's go somewhere we can sit. My place is just across the street. I have to go out through the locker room because my stuff's there, so it's probably easiest if I meet you out front, but I'll just grab everything. I can shower at home. Do you know the way?”

She was chattering. Not saying anything, just chattering. She hadn't said this much in a week. It was so good to see him. The words were gushing out of her.

In the locker room, she tugged off her skates, crammed her feet into her street shoes, and pulled a big sweatshirt on over her skating dress. She was almost out of breath when she got to the lobby.

She hadn't cooled down. She hadn't stretched. That was stupid. That was how you ended up sore.

Oh, well. So what if she was sore for once? What difference did it make? Jack was here.

He was waiting for her, leaning against the wall near the security desk, chatting with the guard. He straightened at the sight of her and held out his hand for her skate bag. He held open the door for her.

“Holly said that you went to Kentucky first. Wouldn't it have made more sense geography-wise to have come straight here?”

“Probably.”

She wondered why he was here. Maybe it didn't matter. It was so wonderful to see him. She tucked her hand in his arm as they waited for the elevator in her building.

She got her keys out of the side pocket of her skate bag without taking it off his shoulder and opened the door to her condominium. Jack followed her inside.

“I have to take a shower,” she said. “It won't take me long. Can I get you something first? Something to eat? A beer? Not that I have either one, but I can call the deli downstairs and they'll bring it up.” She couldn't stop talking. She was so happy to see him.

“I'll go get it myself,” he said. “I'd rather do that than wait around for a delivery. Do you want anything?”

Amy started to shake her head when the phone rang. Her cordless was on the side table next to the sofa. She answered.

“Amy?”

“Sweetheart, it's us.”

It was her father and Gwen. That was odd. They were never in town in the evening.

But it was August twentieth, the day they were going back to Iowa. Amy had forgotten. “Are you home? You must have just walked in the door.”

On the other side of the room, Jack was shaking his head, crossing his hands in front of his face. He was not here.

Amy suddenly sobered. Jack had not told them that he was coming to Denver.

“We left the lake this morning,” Gwen was saying. “We made it in just over ten hours. It was an easy trip.”

“Jack had brought in the dock and closed up the other two cabins,” Hal was saying. “It made leaving so easy.”

“That's good.” Amy didn't know what else to say.

“Gwen told you about the skylights, didn't she?” he continued. “You're really going to like them.”

“That's what she said.” This was awful. How could she not tell them he was here?

“Your tapes were here when we got home,” her father continued. “I'm cager to listen to them. I'll try to get to them tomorrow.”

He wouldn't
try
to listen to them tomorrow. He would do it. He would have guessed from the fact that she had sent them overnight, timing their arrival so carefully, that she was still working on the arrangements, that she would want a quick response.

How selfish she was. Just sending them like that, demanding his immediate attention, when he would have millions of things to do tomorrow, all the unpacking, the pounds and pounds of mail that would have piled up in his office.

Was this what Phoebe had been talking about?

“How is your skating going?” Gwen asked.

“Fine,” Amy said. She was sounding too abrupt. But how could she talk about what she was doing, the new elements in her work, with Jack standing right there, pretending not to be there?

“What are you working on?” Gwen went on. “Are you coming up with new programs?”

Gwen wanted to chat. That was understandable. For the past two weeks she had seen only Hal and Jack. She was home now, but home was unfamiliar. It was still Eleanor's house. Of course she would want to settle in for a long talk with the one member of Hal's family she felt closest to.

And here Amy was acting all abrupt and distant, making it sound as if she didn't care about the family when she was working.

This too was what Phoebe had been talking about.

Gwen introduced another subject—how charming she found the house, how she was looking forward to settling in. But Amy only murmured the vaguest responses, and a minute later the conversation was over.

She hung up the phone.

“Well, that stank,” she said.

Jack had his hands in his pockets; his shoulders were slightly hunched. “I hate having put you in that position.”

“Why didn't you want them to know that you were here?” she asked. He had been the one who didn't think they should have secrets.

“I didn't want to have to explain my reasons to everyone.”

“Are you going to explain them to me?”

He took his hands out of his pockets and then put them back in again. “That's pretty amazing stuff that you do on the ice.”

“Were you surprised by the speed?”

He frowned. “Not particularly…should I have been?”

“No. But that's what people always say when they first see us live, how fast we skate. The speed doesn't come across on TV. But I guess the sequence I was working on was slower, wasn't it?”

“I have no idea. I was amazed by how sexy it was.”

“Oh, that.” She smiled. “Everyone is amazed by that, including me. It's completely new.”
You changed me. You taught me things about myself and my body that I didn't know. Iwouldn't be skating like this except for you
.

But this wasn't why he had come. Amy gestured for him to sit down. She sat across from him. She could see her blurred reflection in one of the copper pillars.

He put his hands on his knees. “I've said I'm no good at talking about my feelings.”

Amy nodded.

“And you need to understand,” he continued, “that I don't want anything from you, that I'm not thinking that what I'm about to say will change anything between us, because all the family stuff is still there.”

He wasn't making any sense. “What are you trying to say?”

“That I love you.”

Amy went still. Every nerve, every muscle, every vein froze.

He got up from the sofa and moved nervously to the windows, his movements chopped and jerky, not at all like him. “I've never said that to anyone before. I don't even think I've ever thought about it, ever spent time wonder
ing whether or not I love someone, but after you left the lake, that's all I could think about. Did I love you? But why else was I putting skylights in the log cabin and new benches in the sauna? I wanted to make the place better for you. I wanted you to know that I loved you. And I thought maybe you'd come next time and you'd see the skylights and know that I loved you. But then that seemed pretty stupid since first of all, you may not go back there for another four years and second, you might see the skylights and think that they were just about getting more light into somewhere dark. So even though this isn't my way of doing things, I figured I'd come out here and tell you.”

“Oh, Jack…” She could feel her hand at her throat. She did not know what to say.
It's not like we love each other
. That's what she had said to his sister.

“Maybe it would have been better to keep my mouth shut since this doesn't change anything between the two of us, but I don't know…your career…the way the audience loves you. I thought maybe you would like to know that in addition to all of them, there's also one ordinary guy who loves you too. I don't know where I'll be, what I'll be doing, but there's one thing that you can count on—you are loved.”

He loved her. Amy felt as if the floor had suddenly disappeared. She was plunging downward, head over heels, falling so fast that she could see nothing, hear nothing.

He loved her.

He stood up. “That's what I wanted you to know. So I'm going to go now.”

“Go? You're leaving?”

“I can't stay here.”

“You drove from Kentucky to Colorado”—Amy had
no idea how long that took—“and now you're leaving? People don't do that.”

“I do. And I told you that this doesn't change anything. This doesn't fix anything.”

What was he talking about? This had to change things. “Wouldn't you please spend the night here?” she begged him. “It can't be safe to get back on the road.”

“I won't drive long. I'll stop outside town.”

“Then why not stay here?” Maybe in the morning she would know what to say. “You don't have to stay with me. There's a guest room.”

He shook his head. “You know what would happen if I stayed, and I admit that once I saw you skate like that, I didn't give a damn about anything else. But that phone call from Mom made it clear. I can't stand having secrets from my family.”

He was right. Amy knew that at this very moment Gwen was back in Iowa, making a grocery list or sorting laundry, feeling uneasy about how curt Amy had been on the phone.

“Amy, I've thought about this a lot. I have no role in your life, except to love you, and I can do that from anywhere.”

“Where are you going? What are you going to do?”

He was at the door. “I'll go back to Kentucky, I suppose, although I don't have a clue what I'll do. Think about you probably.”

“Oh, Jack…”

His hand was on the knob. “Just remember—every time you put on your skates, every time you open a door and all sorts of cameras go off, just remember that you are loved.”

Now her front door was open, and a moment later she
was staring blankly at the elevator door sliding shut. She hurried back across her living room to the windows, and holding aside the sheer under drape with one hand, she waited for him to come out from beneath the awning that covered the stretch of sidewalk between the front door and the street. But she didn't see him. He must have used the side door.

All these weeks when she had been skating obsessively, he had been at the lake, struggling to decide whether or not he loved her.

He was right. His loving her did not solve anything. If there was to be a solution, if there was ever going to be an Amy-and-Jack, the change had to come from her. She had to stop feeling like Amy the Afterthought; she had to stop being so passive when she was with her family. She needed to accept more responsibility. She needed to grow up.

And what had she been doing to achieve that? Nothing. She had been too busy skating.

When was she ever going to grow up? When was she ever going to stop always thinking of skating first?

 

Gwen smiled politely. “If you get started on it right away,” one of the other music professors' wives was saying, “you'll be able to join us in September.”

“It should work out fine,” someone else added, “two and a half weeks should be plenty of time to read
Anna Karenina
.”

Gwen didn't agree. Two and a half weeks did not seem like enough time to read
Anna Karenina
, even if she had wanted to, which she did not.