The Second Sister (22 page)

“So this is what it feels like to have a staff,” I whispered as Peter and I, both smiling and looking straight ahead, walked briskly to the door.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said out of the side of my mouth. “Thanks for rescuing me.”

Peter shifted his gaze sideways so he could see me. I did the same and saw that he was smiling that same cocky, self-satisfied little smile. It wasn't as broad as before, but it was there.

“Anytime,” he said.

 

Peter wasn't kidding about having ice cream and cake with the teachers. He led me to the principal's office, making a joke about it having not changed a bit since he was last there, and showed me the wooden chair outside Mr. Derby's door with the initials “P.S.” carved into the right arm.

“I spent a lot of time in that chair,” he said.

“I can tell. Nice job on the carving. I love how you turned the periods into little flowers. Very creative.”

Peter grinned. “Woodshop was the only class I ever got an A in.”

Mr. Derby didn't mention Peter's early career as a low-level delinquent when he saw us. In fact, he shook Peter's hand, gave me a big bear hug, and introduced us both to the superintendent, saying he'd always known that the two of us would go far.

“Some students just have that spark, know what I mean?”

It was a nice little party, short but nice. Mrs. Swenson brought a homemade yellow sheet cake with chocolate frosting, and Mr. Crenshaw, who was still teaching algebra, brought a tub of vanilla ice cream. We sat around on plastic chairs, balancing our plates on our knees and visiting until the bell rang to signal the end of the lunch period, when the teachers had to get to their classes.

After we said good-bye to Mr. Derby and left the office, I thanked Peter again for saving me from the clutches of that reporter.

“But,” I said, lifting an eyebrow at him as we wended our way through the corridor, dodging kids who were scurrying to get to class before the second bell, “that doesn't mean I'm going to forgive you for that crazy business with the key. Why didn't you tell me about it? Or about the fact that my quiet little Q and A to a handful of your mom's students had turned into a media event?”

“Don't blame me!” Peter exclaimed, lifting his hands to protest his innocence. “I didn't know a thing about it until I showed up today.”

I shot him a look. “I see. So instead of going to your office and practicing law today, you just woke up and said to yourself, ‘I think I'll drive over to the school and say hello to my mother.' And when you arrived, somebody just handed you a giant key and told you to stand at the front of the auditorium and present it to me.”

“Pretty much,” he said. “Except for the part where I was talking to myself. My trial ended a day earlier than I thought it would, so I decided to take the day off to come watch your talk and then take you ice fishing. We hauled the shanty out onto the ice just yesterday. When I showed up, everybody was all in a panic because you were late and the mayor was sick with stomach flu. Mom asked me to step in for him and so I did.”

I gave him a hard stare. “Well. You still should have told me. Or somebody should have.”

“You can take it up with Mom; I am totally innocent here. So what do you say? Want to go ice fishing?”

“I'm not really dressed for it,” I said, looking down at my outfit. Even though it was snowing, I figured this was a somewhat formal occasion and I'd dug a pair of khakis and my blue blazer out of the closet and put on a pair of brown loafers with a little bit of a heel.

“No worries. I figured you'd be dressed up, so I brought a bunch of Karin's old stuff in the truck.”

“You did?” I smiled as we walked through the front door and into the freezing air. “Well, aren't you the well-prepared little Scout?”

“I try.”

“I don't know. I was planning to work on my quilt this afternoon.”

“It's not going anywhere, is it? And anyway,” he said, jerking his chin in the direction of my car, which was parked on the far side of the lot, “it might be a good idea to go hide out somewhere for a couple of hours.”

I turned to follow his gaze and saw that reporter, Kimble, standing next to my car with his back turned toward us, smoking a cigarette and waiting for me.

“Man. He doesn't give up, does he?” I shook my head and looked at Peter. “You're right. An afternoon of ice fishing suddenly seems like a very good idea.”

Chapter 30

I
changed into a pair of boots before getting out of the truck, but I really wasn't dressed for the weather. By the time we got inside the ice shanty, I was shivering.

Peter tossed me a bag filled with clothes. “You can change in the bathroom.”

“There's a bathroom?”

I went through the door Peter pointed to and sure enough found a tiny bathroom with a chemical toilet and even a little sink. I took off my khakis, jacket, and blouse and then pulled on a pair of jeans and a blue-and-white Nordic sweater.

Peter was kneeling down next to a dormitory-sized refrigerator when I came out of the bathroom. “Warmer now?”

I nodded. Peter held a beer out to me and I gave him a look.

“We're not working today,” he said. “C'mon. It's part of the experience.”

While Peter turned on the heater and prepared our fishing gear, I sipped my beer and took a little tour of the ice shanty. It wasn't large, maybe ten by ten feet and entirely paneled with knotty pine, but it was a lot cuter and more comfortable than I'd imagined.

Besides the bathroom, there was a kitchenette with a two-burner stove, the refrigerator, and a small countertop. A Formica-topped kitchen table with chrome trim and two chrome chairs with white trim and padded seats upholstered in red vinyl, like something you'd see in a 1950s diner, stood next to that. There were red-and-white gingham curtains hanging at the two tiny windows and red-and-white quilts with matching pillow shams on a set of bunk beds tucked in the corner. The red theme was even carried over to the two benches, upholstered in vinyl to match the kitchen chairs, that sat on either side of the ice holes.

“You got yourself quite the fancy clubhouse here,” I said. “I was picturing something a little more man cave than
Better Homes and Gardens
.”

“Oh, yeah . . . well. Mom got to it a couple of years ago. Decided she'd fix the place up as an anniversary present for Dad. It was pretty rugged before that.”

I walked over to the propane-powered space heater and turned around so I could talk to Peter while warming my backside.

“And from the way you're saying it, should I assume that he might have preferred if she'd just left well enough alone?”

Peter flipped open the lid of a black plastic box loaded with fishing lures and started attaching them to our lines.

“Let's just say it was a good thing I was able to talk her out of tearing out the paneling and putting up wallpaper.”

“Well, I think it's nice.” My behind was getting too hot, so after a minute I walked across the room to the bed. “So do you actually sleep out here?”

“Not very often,” Peter said, keeping his head bent low as he worked. “It's more for naps. Ice fishing isn't just about the fish, you know. Sometimes it's about just getting away by yourself for a while.”

“So it really is your little clubhouse,” I said and opened the door on the cabinet on the wall. “Oh, my gosh! You've got a TV in there! And a DVD player!”

“Dad was going to hook up a satellite dish, too, so he wouldn't miss the games when he brought his buddies out to fish. But he doesn't bring the guys out here much now.”

“Why not? I think it's darling.” I took a bigger swig from the bottle in my hand and sat down on the bench next to Peter.

“Yeah. So does Mom. But when a guy describes his ice shanty to another guy, ‘darling' is not one of the preferred adjectives. All set,” Peter said, putting the poles aside. “Now we just need some bait.”

He reached into the tackle box, pulled out a jar, and unscrewed the lid.

“Eeeww!” I cried when he stuck his fingers inside the jar and pulled out four fat, squashy, disgusting, white creatures. “Are those maggots?”

“They're waxies—the larvae of white caterpillar moths. Whitefish love 'em.” He opened his palm and showed them to me. “Here. Put two on the hook.”

I cringed and drew back. “I am
not
touching those things!”

Peter rolled his eyes. “Fine. I'll do it.”

After the poles were baited, he opened two covers in the floor of the shanty. Looking down, I could see several inches of white ice and then the clear, cold water. Peter showed me how to drop the line and told me how much to let out.

“Now what?” I asked when he handed me the pole.

“Now we wait.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes,” he said. “Ice fishing is all about patience.”

“Sounds very Zen. You know that I tried yoga once and was asked to leave in the middle of the class, right?”

Peter smiled. “How about if I turn on some music and get you another beer? You hungry? I brought cheese curds and a bag of Chex mix.”

 

In spite of Peter's unfortunate love of seventies rock, the music helped me relax. So did the beer. The cheese curds were yummy, too, and the way they squeaked when I bit them made me smile. Alice and I had loved that when we were kids.

After a little bit, I started to understand what men see in ice fishing. There's something peaceful about removing yourself from the distractions of life, having nothing more pressing to do than hold on to one end of a stick while talking with an old friend.

I'd seen Peter a few times since my return, but there'd always been other people around and whenever I asked him questions he tended to dodge them and start asking his own, bringing the conversation back around to me. But the quiet atmosphere of the ice shanty helped loosen his tongue.

“So,” I said, “you didn't start practicing law until you were thirty-two. Did you take a break between college and law school?”

“More like a break between college and college. I dropped out in my freshman year.”

“I didn't know that. Why?”

“Well,” he said, looking up at me and pausing for a moment, as if trying to decide how much to say, “the official line is that I decided that I wanted to give professional hockey a try before it was too late, and I did play on a minor league team for two seasons. But hockey was kind of an excuse. The real reason I dropped out is that I couldn't handle the work, but if I said that to my mom, she'd have shown up at my dorm with a list of tutors, some kind of new calendar system to get me organized, then given me a lecture about buckling down and trying harder.”

I frowned and took another tiny sip of my beer—two was my limit and I wanted to make it last. It was strange to hear Peter talk about his mom like that. I'd always thought of her as the perfect mother and the Swensons as the perfect family. When I was in Mrs. Swenson's class, sometimes I'd have a guilty fantasy that my real parents had been killed or kidnapped—that version was slightly less guilt inducing—and that the Swensons would adopt me and Alice and I'd live happily ever after with this very nice, very normal, regular family with parents who never spoke a harsh word to me or each other and never made me feel like a disappointment.

I'd always thought he was the one kid in our school who'd had it together and was comfortable in his own skin, content with his life. I guess it just goes to show you that no family is perfect and that everybody, no matter how happy they appear to be, has their own secret regrets, disappointments, and doubts.

“I'm sure she just felt like . . . I mean, if your mom is a teacher . . .”

“Mom was trying to help,” he said, lifting his hand to stay my sympathy. “I always knew that. It had to be frustrating for her, spending her life helping other people's kids succeed academically and not being able to do the same for her own. She was always so sure that if I just tried a little harder . . . You know what my reputation was in school: a cheerful, charming, but slightly arrogant jock who wasn't all that bright and didn't care. I did care. And I did try, way harder than my folks or anyone else realized. It didn't make any difference. So after a while, I fell back on what I
was
good at, sports.

“The only reason I got into college in the first place was because I held the county record for stolen bases. But the baseball coach was kind of a jerk, believed in the ‘break 'em down to build 'em up' school of coaching. That didn't work with me. I didn't need to feel any worse about myself than I already did, you know? One day, in the middle of practice, I walked off the field, packed my stuff, and left. I blamed it on the coach, but, truth was, I just couldn't handle the pressure.”

“Kind of like what happened to Alice,” I said. “After the accident, we knew she'd never be a vet, but my parents kept pushing her. And that wasn't all bad. If not for them, she'd probably never have been able to live independently or have a normal life. But there were limits to what she could do. Dad just couldn't accept that.

“When I left for school, Alice did too. She enrolled in a two-year veterinary technician program in Madison. She was great with animals, got a B in her husbandry class, but flunked all her science classes. I think it must have hit her hard. She remembered what she'd been like before. Up until then, I don't think she'd gotten any grade lower than an A-minus. Anyway, she dropped out. She was so down that my parents sent her off to live with Dad's sister, Peggy, in California for a few months. That was the beginning of the depression. Sometimes it got so bad that she ended up in the hospital.”

“I know,” he said. “Alice and I spent a lot of time together when I wrote her will. She was my first client; paid me one hundred dollars and a goldfish.”

I chuckled. “Sounds like Alice. But tell me the rest of your story,” I said. “How did you go from college dropout to lawyer?”

Peter took a quick swig from the bottle that was sitting next to him on the bench before going on. “Well, after two seasons and two concussions, I figured out that playing pond hockey with your buddies is different than playing on a real team with guys who've been training their whole lives. I didn't want to come home twice a failure, so I moved to Milwaukee, got a job in a sporting goods store, an apartment with two other guys who were just as lost as me, smoked a lot of weed, and drifted.

“A year after that, Dan, a retired special education teacher looking to earn a little extra cash, started working at the store. One day he took me out for a beer and asked what I was doing with my life, said I was too smart to be spending it selling hockey sticks and jock straps. So I told him the whole story. The condensed version—a lot quicker than I'm telling you,” he said, with an embarrassed little smile.

“Keep going,” I urged him, sensing the approach of a happy ending. “Please. What did he say?”

“He told me he thought I might have a learning disability and gave me the number of a doctor friend of his. I took the number, but didn't call the guy. But Dan kept after me.”

“And?”

“And Dan was right. I have ADHD and some issues with speed of information processing. It was a relief to hear that there was a name for what was wrong with me, but a part of me wasn't convinced. I spent so many years thinking of myself as a thickheaded jock that it was hard to put that aside. Anyway, the doc prescribed some medication and I enrolled in one class at the community college. The doc helped me get extra time on my exams and Dan tutored me, helped me work on my reading comprehension and organizational strategies. Sure enough, I earned a B in Introduction to the Novel. I worked incredibly hard and it paid off. Not just in terms of the grade. That one class taught me that I wasn't dumb.

“It took me six years to finish my bachelor's because I was working part-time. I took out loans for law school. Since I was already twenty-six when I started, I decided I better bite the bullet and get it over with. And I did.”

“Do you still take medication?”

“No,” he said. “I was able to focus better as I got older. I've read some studies about that. A lot of people with ADHD have trouble with executive functioning when they're young, but the brain eventually catches up. That's what happened to me. I wasn't dumb; I just needed time and some extra help.”

“I never thought you were dumb,” I said. “I just thought you didn't care about school.”

“Yeah. That's what everybody thought. But . . . hang on.” He sat up very straight, took the fishing line between his fingers, and gave a tug. “Never mind,” he said after a moment. “Thought I might have had a bite. They're sure slow today.”

“Did your mom feel bad that she wasn't able to figure out what your learning issues were?”

“Terrible. I think she apologized to me about fifty times for that. But it wasn't her fault. She wasn't trained in special education, and even if she had been, I did a good job of covering up. A lot of kids with learning problems withdraw or act out or become depressed, but because I was good at sports, I had something to kind of hang my hat on. I might not have made honor roll, but man . . .” He grinned and checked his line again. “When I'd slide into third and the hometown crowd went crazy, I felt pretty darned good about myself.”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling and taking the last cheese curd from the bowl, “I'd kind of noticed that about you.”

“Hey, you can't blame me. There's not one teenage boy in fifty who wouldn't rather score the winning run in the hometown tournament than get an A on his history exam. Everybody knows that jocks get all the cute girls,” he said, and then paused for a moment. “Well, almost all the cute girls. Now and then one gets away. Well, really just one. The best one.”

I blushed. Actually blushed! I couldn't help it. Not only that, but his words and the way he said them, not with his usual cocky grin, but with a simple, almost nostalgic kind of smile, his tone just a tiny bit wistful, made my breath catch in my throat—and a cheese curd along with it.