Summer's End (8 page)

They couldn't leave half-finished projects all over when Dad was home. Dad was used to life on a submarine
where everything had to be kept in order. Jack couldn't bolt his breakfast on Saturday morning and grab his bike and spend the day with his friends. “Dad wants to be with you, Jack.”

Then why the hell didn't he just stay home?

Even after he made admiral, even when he could have stayed home, he looked for every excuse to get back out to sea.

 

And now all these years later Mom was marrying again. “How's the date setting going?” he asked the next time he spoke to her. “Just name a time, and I'll be there.”

“I know that.” Her voice was soft, full of affection. “We're trying to find a date when all the kids can come. What does your calendar look like for late May or early June?”

“It doesn't matter. I will come anytime.”

“That's what your sister said.”

“She did?” Jack was surprised. To get Holly to take any time away from that precious law firm usually required a couple of sticks of good black-powder dynamite and a forklift. “Good for her. Then this should be easy. Just get the other guys to say what works for them, and Holly and I will show up.”

 

Getting the “other guys” to say what worked for them did not prove so easy.

Phoebe, Hal's oldest daughter, wanted the wedding to be in Iowa where she currently lived. Iowa was home. Her father should get married there.

“But Iowa's not
our
home,” Jack pointed out to Holly. Gwen was relaying the details of the family negotiations to Holly, who was then passing them along to him. “We've never heard of the place.”

Then it turned out that Ian, Hal's son, didn't think Iowa was such a good idea. He lived in California, and it was hard to fly to Iowa from California, there were never any direct flights at the times you wanted, and it was expensive. Flying coast to coast was often cheaper. Washington, where Gwen was living, would suit his family better. They could take the kids to see the sights.

“I don't know these people,” Jack reflected, “but I'm willing to bet that the brother doesn't want it in Iowa because then the big sister gets to be in charge.”

“Big sisters are always in charge,” Holly reminded him. “And we shouldn't be smug about being easygoing and flexible. Can you imagine how difficult we would seem if Aunt Barbara and Valerie were involved in planning this?”

Aunt Barbara was their mother's younger sister. Valerie was her daughter, their cousin.

“But that's the point,” Jack returned. “Aunt Barbara and Valerie aren't involved. Mother's too smart for that. She told them from the get-go that they could come, but that they had no say in the particulars. What about Miss Amy?” Jack kept expecting to hear more about the family celebrity. “Where does she want the wedding to be?”

“I don't know,” Holly answered. “Her name never comes up.”

“That's weird.” Jack would have thought that everything would revolve around her because she was famous. Apparently not.

Then there was a question of the date. Ian's and Phoebe's spring calendars were packed with soccer play-offs, the Cub Scout Blue and Gold banquet, the middle-school production of
Brigadoon
, the swim team barbecue.

Jack was now completely out of patience. “They're
being worse than Aunt Barbara would have been. What's important here? A kid's soccer team or two people getting married?”

“It's a
travel
soccer team,” Holly answered. Neither of them had a clue what a travel soccer team was. “Listen, Jack.” Her voice grew stern. “Mom says we need to remember that they aren't military. They aren't used to change like we are. We're to go along. Mom wants us to be cool about this, so we're going to be cool about it. Do you hear?”

Jack's foot started to tap. He heard. He heard it now; he had heard it before. Holly was sounding just as she had when their father would come home after a long tour at sea.
Mom wants us to be quiet. Remember, men on a submarine live on an eighteen-hour day, six hours on watch, twelve off Don't do everything at once, Jack. It's going to take Dad awhile to get used to daylight
.

 

Hal and Gwen finally gave up. There would be no family wedding. Jack and Holly were invited, welcomed, encouraged—“Hey, I know an order when I hear one,” Jack said—to come to the Legends' summer place in Minnesota for as long as they could. That would be a much better place for everyone to get to know each other.

Hal and Gwen were going to go off by themselves and get married. “We want to be alone,” Gwen assured her kids. “When all is said and done, that's what this is about, the two of us. So we're going to Niagara Falls.”

 

“Niagara Falls?
Niagara Falls?
” Phoebe was shocked. “Since when has Dad wanted to go to a place like Niagara Falls?”

Her family summered in the woods of northern Minnesota. They had traveled to Europe; they had been
to India and New Zealand. But ordinary American tourist spots—Disneyworld, the Great Smokies, Atlantic City—they never went to places like that.

“I think it's sweet,” her husband answered.

 

Jack wasn't buying this “we want to be alone” business for one minute. “This is nuts,” he groused to Holly. “She wants us there. I know it.”

“What Mother wants, Jack, is for things to be peaceful. She wants all of us little kiddies to like one another.”

Jack rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. Nothing he had heard about Phoebe or Ian Legend had made them sound the least bit likable. “This isn't the Brady Bunch, Holly. We're not going to have to start sharing bedrooms. Mother wants us at her wedding. I'm sure of it.”

Jack was a person of strong instincts. Time and again during his adolescence his parents had bemoaned his tendency to act on impulse. “For God's sake, Jack, didn't you
think?
” And the answer was no, he hadn't.

But he wasn't an adolescent anymore, and he knew himself. Thinking was useful when he was figuring out
how
to do something. But when deciding whether or not to do it in the first place, thinking only got him in trouble. When something was right, he knew it in his gut.

He let his instincts run his life. If a beam felt right to him, he crawled across it. If he felt good about a person, he hired him. But if he felt the least pause, the slightest fluttering about something, whether it was a ladder or a piece of fruit or a business opportunity, he walked away from it.

So when Jack said he was sure of something, he was very sure. And he acted. Three days before his mother's
wedding he changed the oil in his truck, checked the air in his tires, and called his sister. “We're going. I'm on my way. I'll pick you up tomorrow night.”

 

While Holly Wells was prepared to drop everything and go to her mother's wedding, she was not about to drive across New York state. “Do you have any idea how long that would take?” she demanded of her brother.

Probably not as long as she thought it would. He did drive pretty fast. “Then fly to Buffalo,” he suggested. “I'll get you at the airport.”

He was waiting when her plane landed.

“So what did Mother say about us coming?” she asked him. “Was she thrilled?”

“I didn't tell her. I thought it would be fun to surprise her.”

“Jack!” Holly stopped dead. Other passengers had to check their step, move around her. “You didn't talk to her? You didn't set up a place to meet? What if we miss them? What if we've come all this way and then we're not able to find them?”

“Oh, we'll find them.” Jack was confident. “You worry too much.”

When Holly traveled, all hotel rooms were reserved and guaranteed, the hours for tourist attractions were researched and noted. She left nothing to chance. Jack was the exact opposite. He had great faith that things would work out, and what irritated Holly, what seemed wildly unfair to her, was that they generally did work out for him.

And indeed, just as they were entering the bustling lobby of the hotel where they knew their mother was stay
ing, just as Holly was trying to decide whether she should plant herself at the door and send Jack on a scouting party or vice versa, she heard a shriek of delight—

“Holly! Jack! You're here!”

Gwen was thrilled. There was no doubt about it. Her children had come to her wedding. Now everything was perfect.

“Whenever I think about my first wedding, when I married your father,” she said at lunch afterward, “it always seems so odd that the two of you weren't there. How could I have been doing something that important without my babies?”

Jack eyed how little was left in the second bottle of champagne. He looked up at Hal. “Did you understand what she just said?”

“I did,” Hal answered. “I don't think it reflects particularly well on my intellect, but I did.”

Jack liked Hal. He seemed like a straightforward, good-natured man, much more flexible than Jack's father had ever been. To Jack's dad, the world had been full of things to be fixed and problems to be solved, whereas Hal saw things to be thought about and issues to be understood. Jack supposed that if he had to follow one of them into battle, he would have chosen his father's quickness, but for just about everything else, he suspected that he was going to prefer Hal.

They were now talking about Hal's cabin in Minnesota. When Jack had heard the word “primitive,” he had asked Hal exactly what that meant…not that he cared, but he imagined that his sister would.

Indeed she did. “Wait a minute…” Holly was staring at Hal. “What do you mean, no bathrooms?”

“Oh, we have a propane tank,” Hal said pleasantly, “so there's a stove and a refrigerator. And lights, we have gas lights. They're—”

“Could we get back to the part about bathrooms? Do you mean you don't have indoor toilets?” She sounded horrified.

“I suppose that technically they're indoors”—Hal's voice was as mild as could be, but Jack suspected that Hal was enjoying this; if Jack were in Hal's shoes, he would be—“but you do have to go outdoors to get back indoors.”

Holly was speechless. Holly was never speechless.

“You went to Girl Scout camp,” Jack reminded her. “They must have had latrines there.”

“I went to Girl Scout camp almost twenty years ago,” she answered. “I am not exactly a back-to-nature person these days.” She turned to Hal. “How is it that you don't have electricity? I thought the R.E.A. took care of all these isolated places ages ago.”

Hal shook his head. “I don't think any of us on the lake want electricity. It's probably reverse snobbism in some way, to show how disdainful we are of modern conveniences.”

“So that's why you don't put in a generator?” Jack asked. He had already priced gas-powered generators with every intention of giving one to his mother as a wedding gift.

Across the table his mother was looking at him, listening. She gave her head a quick shake. She knew what he was planning and was telling him not to do it.

“I wasn't going to put in a nuclear reactor, Mom,” he protested.

“One just never knows with you, Jack,” she answered.

Hal looked puzzled, interested, but Holly waved her hand, encouraging him to ignore them. “I still don't understand,” she said. “How do you shower?”

“You don't,” he said pleasantly.

“You don't shower and you have to use a latrine?” Holly did not look happy.

“What did I ever do”—Gwen threw up her perfectly manicured hands—“to deserve such a prissy child? You'll be fine, Holly. You take baths in the lake.”

“Holly is never fine,” Jack pointed out, but he scooted his chair toward hers and put his arm around her shoulders as he spoke, “if she is more than three steps from a fax machine.”

“Then bring a fax machine,” Hal suggested. “It won't work. We have no phone lines, we have no electricity, but if it will make you feel better, by all means bring one.”

As soon as Holly got back to New York City, she bought her mother a state-of-the-art cellular phone that could be recharged in the car. Gwen sent it back. “It's very sweet of you, but Hal says that even cellular phones don't work at the lake. It's too far from a transmitting tower.”

“But cell phones work everywhere,” Holly fussed at Jack. She was talking on her cordless phone; he was on his car phone. “Even backpackers take their cell phones with them.”

Jack shook his head. Holly knew the strangest damn people. “We aren't babies, Holly. We don't need to speak
to our mother every minute. She'll call us when she goes into town for groceries.”

That proved to be most unsatisfying. Gwen was in town only during the middle of the day, and so most of the time she would end up talking to Holly's secretary and Jack's answering machine. It drove them nuts. They would call each other and fret. “Apparently we are babies,” Jack concluded.

 

Jack was going to stay in Minnesota for as long as his mother needed him. Apparently Hal's kids stayed for nearly a month.

“Don't they have jobs?” Holly marveled. “How do they get so much time off?”

Jack was wondering how he himself was going to get so much time off. Sure, he was the boss, but that only made it worse. He could hardly expect his people to work hard when he wasn't. But his crew chief Pete had recently lost a grandmother whose house had proved to be worth a startling amount of money. As her only grandchild, Pete had inherited it all, and he was, Jack knew, looking for a business of his own.

“What about this one?” Jack asked.

Pete stared at him. “You're not thinking of selling, are you? Things are going great.”

It was true; the business had done well. Jack had a comfortable cushion in the payroll account, a tidy profit at the end of the year, and a waiting list of clients. That was the problem.

Starting a new business was terrific. In a new business everything was a crisis from one minute to the next. It was almost as good as fighting fires. But the routine of running a successful business—that wasn't for Jack. He had learned
that about himself during his stint as a Wyoming hardware guy. Clearly what he needed to do was start businesses that would fail. He probably would have enjoyed that a whole lot, having a corporation that blew up in the sky and rained flaming pieces of metal all over Australia, but so far he was not succeeding in this pursuit of failure. The hardware store had left him with a big clump of cash that he hadn't known what to do with, and now it looked like this business was going to do the same damn thing.

But Pete seemed to think success was a burden he could live with. They shook hands, agreed to hire someone to fix a price, and do the thing as quickly as possible. Jack hoped to get all the paperwork done before he disappeared to Camp Nowhere, but in the end he found that he was going to have to delay his departure by a couple of days.

“It's just as well that you're coming a bit later,” his mother told him on one of the rare occasions when they were speaking to each other. “This way Phoebe and Ian will arrive before you. I think they feel quite territorial about this place. It might be hard for them to come and find you already settled in.”

Jack really and truly did not give a shit about Phoebe's and Ian's territorial urges. “Why's it so important to them? Is it really that great?”

“It's incredibly beautiful, and you have to remember that they have been coming here their entire lives.”

“Okay.” Jack knew that having moved so much, he and Holly and Mom weren't as attached to any one place as a lot of other people were. “But don't they go nuts being so isolated?” The nearest phone was fifteen miles away over such lousy roads that it took almost a half hour to get there.

“Actually”—she lowered her voice—“that's what they
like about it. I think that the isolation makes them feel more like a family.”

“That's weird.” Jack couldn't imagine anything that would make Mom, Holly, and himself feel like more—or less—of a family.

“Maybe I'm wrong,” she said, although they both knew that she wasn't likely to be. “I trust you won't say anything about it.”

“Lord, no.” Jack was starting to think that he might be better off if he didn't say anything about anything to Hal's children.

 

Two days later Holly reported receiving a call from Phoebe Legend, Hal's older daughter. “She said that it is cooler than we might expect, so bring sweaters and something warm to sleep in, but there's plenty of rain gear up there. Don't worry about packing that.”

Jack didn't worry about the things he was supposed to worry about; he certainly didn't worry about packing. “What did she sound like?”

“Polite. She was polite, I was polite, that was it.”

“You're good at that.”

“Thanks. I also got a message from Mother, but I'm not sure I got it right. It said I was to be sure that you didn't bring a generator.”

“A generator? Me?” he protested. “Now, why would she ever think that I would do a thing like that?”

“I don't know,” Holly sighed. “I'm not completely sure what it is, but don't bring one, okay? She doesn't want you to.”

“Okay.”

 

Tommy was already on the ice when Amy came out to the boards and slipped off her skate guards. Technical people were milling around; a group of schoolgirls were sitting in a tight cluster on the bleachers, having gotten permission to watch practice, but Tommy and Amy were the only skaters.

That wasn't unusual. Henry Carroll, Tommy Sargent, and Amy Legend, Oliver Young's three skaters, were widely known for the length and diligence of their warm-ups and cool-downs. They were always the last ones on the ice to take their sweaters off, the last ones to start practicing their jumps, their routines. They never stretched until their muscles were warm; they never finished for the day without stretching again. Even when practice time was as limited as it often was during the big tours, they never shortened their warm-ups. They were fastidious about it.

And none of them had ever had a serious injury.

Amy waved to the schoolgirls—she would sign autographs for them later—and caught up with Tommy. This early into the warm-up, they could still talk.

“How's Mark?” she asked.

“Lousy.”

They were in Canada, having come to guest-star in Canadian skater Mark Widemann's television special. Of their threesome, only Amy and Tommy were there. Henry had not been invited because he and Mark were alike as skaters, muscular, powerful, technically precise, only Henry was better, and Mark would have been an idiot to have Henry come overshadow him on his own special. Everyone, including Henry himself, understood that. But Mark was having problems with his ankle. Like so many skaters he took too many chances with his training routines.

Amy and Tommy went on, warming up. The first ten
minutes were always the hardest for Amy. After that her body took over, but until then self-discipline was the only motivation. Fortunately Henry and Tommy felt the same, and the three of them flogged each other through their opening drills.

Henry and Tommy were her closest friends on the skating circuit. Almost none of the women she had grown up competing against were still skating at her level, and because women's skating had by now become like gymnastics, with very young girls dominating the amateur competitions, Amy had little in common with the new skaters. She, Henry, and Tommy had by far the most sophisticated management in the skating world; the three of them spent their off-ice time reading reports from charitable foundations and studying business deals while the other skaters were playing ping-pong or flipping through catalogues. Often accompanied by a personal assistant, they were still the ones the media was the most interested in. While they would have hated the idea that they had become unapproachable stars, even “everyone-please-love-me” Amy had to admit that they didn't spend much time with the new kids.

The three of them balanced each other, and the balance seemed essential to each individual career. Henry was still determinedly competitive; he kept them all skating their best. Tommy was the witty showman; he kept them from taking themselves too seriously. Amy was all warmth and sentiment; she reminded them why they were doing this. Henry was the muscle, Tommy the brain, Amy the heart—together, Tommy often joked, they made one fine human being.

Their warm-up routine was a little history of learning to skate. They would begin with front crossovers, then
back crossovers. They ran through all the single jumps, doing them in the order that they had learned them, then all the doubles, and finally whatever triples they were doing at the moment.

Both Tommy and Amy were into their doubles when Amy noticed Gretchen, their personal assistant, at the boards, motioning to them. Amy caught Tommy's attention, and the two of them skated over to Gretchen.

“It's off,” Gretchen said immediately. “The taping's been canceled. Mark's ankle is worse. He may need surgery.”

Tommy whistled. “That's hard luck.”

But it wasn't all luck. Tommy and Amy knew that. Of course, either one of them could catch a rut wrong and be injured—it could happen in the next sixty seconds—but it was a whole lot less likely to happen to them than to anyone else.

“So are we free to go?” Amy asked.

“It's not going to be announced until ten, so it would probably look better if you didn't start packing until then.”

“What's next?” Tommy asked.

None of them ever paid any attention to what they were scheduled to do next. Once they consented to do something, they deliberately forgot about it, letting Gretchen and everyone else worry about the details, while they focused entirely on what they were doing at the moment.

“Your break was next.” For three weeks every summer Oliver insisted that they not set foot on the ice, that as much as possible they not think about skating. It restored their bodies, he said, and allowed their subconscious
minds to work more creatively. “So Oliver says you should just add another week to that.”

If all the schoolgirls hadn't been watching, Amy would have made a face. None of them liked their break. Living so completely in the present, they never made any plans for their breaks and ended up moping around Denver for three weeks. The result was positive; when it was over, they were full of ideas and desperately eager to skate, but the break itself wasn't as much fun as it should have been.