The Summer Guest (13 page)

He gave a little laugh. “Just a kid, my fanny.” He fished out another drumstick and held it up for emphasis as he talked. “Eleven is not just a kid, Luce. Eleven is a burning pyre of adolescent lust. You and the other waitresses had me so worked up, I could barely think straight.”

I felt a charge of pleasure; assuming he didn’t mean Daphne Markham-and I surely didn’t think he did-or one of the two older women who had tended the dining room with me, women my mother’s age if not a little older, I was the only waitress he could have been remembering.

“Those were good days,” I said.

“Better than this afternoon, anyway,” Hal said. He finished his second drumstick, wrapped up the bones in the napkin, and closed the basket. “Best I should save this for later. Franny might be hungry too. Who knows? Maybe my dad will surprise us all and actually eat something.”

“There’s enough there for an army. But if you need anything else, you know where the key to the kitchen is.”

“Back door, one step to the right, reach up, on the nail.” He nodded. “Piece of cake.” He raised his gaze past me then, casting his eyes over the lake, and gave a little nod to tell me to look where he was looking. I turned and saw, out on the dock a hundred yards distant, two figures sitting on the edge, their feet dangling over the water. It took me a moment for my eyes to discern what my brain had already guessed: Jordan and, sitting beside him in her gray sweatshirt, Kate.

“Those two getting along?”

“I think they’ve always liked each other.” I was surprised how guarded I sounded. “They’ve known each other for years.”

For a moment we said nothing. The silence of the lake and the late hour seemed to encircle us.

“The truth is,” Hal said, “I think my father just wanted to give it to somebody it already belonged to.” He looked at his hands a moment. “It’s the best kind of present. I’m only telling you in case you were, you know, wondering.”

“We all adore Jordan. Everybody’s happy for him. Joe too.”

Hal stood and lifted the basket from the floor. “Well, I guess I should look in on the patient. Scares me when he’s this quiet.” He moved around his chair, then stopped, suddenly gone into deeper thought.

“He loves this place, Lucy. That’s what it’s really all about. When my mother died, I know it saved him, somehow. He told me that once. The summer after she died, he came up here, and that’s what got him through it. I’ll never forget it. ‘It has the pure beauty of having been forgotten.’ That’s what he said about this place. He said it again this morning.”

My eyes were suddenly swimming again. I didn’t want Hal to see, so I stepped back from the railing, away from the light.

“Luce?”

“I’m all right,” I said. My voice caught a little, and I breathed to settle it, letting the air in my lungs push the tears away. But I knew I was only buying a moment, if that. In another minute I would be crying for real, the kind of tears you’ve kept inside so long you don’t know what they mean anymore, whether they’re happy or sad or both, only that they have to come out; as long as they’re coming, they own you, body and soul, these tears, and I didn’t want this to happen in front of Hal, or Joe, or anybody. I wanted to cry in a dark room somewhere, nobody around for miles to hear me, and cry until I was all cried out.

“It’s late,” I managed. “I should go. Good night, Hal.”

Twenty steps from porch to path, a hundred more down the shore toward the lodge, through the tangled shadows of the trees, the veil of laughter and cigar smoke. The pure beauty of having been forgotten, I thought, and that was the end for me.

At least I made it past the lawyers before the tears came.

You might think that the news your name had just appeared in a rich man’s will would blow you clean over like a March wind, but that wasn’t what happened to me. I was surprised, sure, dumbfounded really, and happy as hell, but I didn’t spend a second mooning over my good fortune, or wondering what I’d done to deserve it. (Since I’d done nothing.) What I did instead was this: After Hal had gone off to check on his family, and Joe and Kate had left to close down the kitchen for the night with Lucy, I headed down to the lake, sat myself on the dock with my back against the rail, opened a can of beer I’d filched from the fridge-I hadn’t touched the Scotch-and set my gear turning. I had run the books with Lucy long enough to know what the cash flow situation was. Kate had won a scholarship, but Bowdoin wasn’t cheap; her parents were forty grand in hock for it, and the meter was still running. Without anybody’s college degree to pay for, or a condo in the Keys, I figured I could turn a profit pretty quickly. A year from now I’d be running solidly in the black-not printing money, but doing well enough to buy a few ads in the Sunday travel sections of the Times and the Globe, and maybe a couple of well-timed notices in one of the glossy outdoor travel mags, to get in on the so-called adventure travel boom. The staff, of course, would have to grow. I’d need a couple of extra guides at least and maybe a full-time instructor, and then of course there were the cabins to consider, some modest renovation being the next, obvious step; I was thinking maybe something a bit upscale, with skylights over the bedrooms, good Danish woodwork and jets in the tub, just the sort of thing to attract the cross-country ski crowd, and while I was at it, why not keep the place running all year? (Never mind that I didn’t know anything about running a ski resort.) My thinking was all purely hypothetical, the way people will talk about what they’d buy if they won the pick-six, but the more I spun ideas around, the more the whole thing made a kind of sense, as if the camp had always been mine.

And of course, I was really waiting on the dock for Kate, though it was even money whether it would be she or Joe who came to find me. It was Kate I wanted to see that night, there by the lake on the first really chilly night of summer, all my plans hatching. But an hour passed, the beer can grew warm and light in my fist, and I was still alone. Across the lake, the loons, quiet since sunset, piped up again. The lights of Harry’s cabin were still on; shapes moved by the window, and I saw Hal come out to the porch, holding January in his arms. It would be a difficult night for all of them, I knew. And when I think of that night, as I like to do, my memory begins here, with Hal on the porch with his daughter in his arms and the sound of the loons, their ghostly, echoing music filling the starry air.

I was just about to give up and head in when I heard footsteps coming down the gravel path to the catwalk behind me. A light step that I knew: Kate.

“Howdy, stranger.” She plopped down beside me, and I saw that she had changed into blue jeans and an oversize sweatshirt (PROPERTY OF BOWDOIN ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT). She pulled her knees up to her chest and drew the sweatshirt down over them, bundling herself all the way to her ankles.

“Great loons,” she said. “Aren’t you cold?”

“Some.” I held up my empty can and rattled the dregs. “I’d offer you a beer, but I drank it.”

“I should have thought to bring some. Or maybe champagne?”

“Is the news that good?”

Kate sighed and looked out over the lake. “Well, I wish my parents had let me in on the whole story. And I’m a little pissed off at my father for that stunt with the Scotch. But yes, on the whole, yes. It’s what they want. That it’s you who gets the place is… well, something nice. A bonus.”

“What about you?”

“Well, that’s a question, Jordan.” Her voice was serious. “What about me?”

I followed her eyes across the water. The land on the other side wasn’t actually part of Harry’s estate, though it might just as well have been, since the camp held a ninety-nine-year lease from Maine Paper for two hundred acres rimming the lake to the north and west. I would be a very old man when it ran out. I didn’t know exactly where the lines fell, but I didn’t have to. It was so much land it didn’t matter.

“I guess I was thinking maybe you’d stay. You know, guide in the summers.”

“Maybe nothing, Jordan.” She hugged herself in the cold. “Say what’s on your mind. You want me as a guide?”

“That’s not what I meant.” I didn’t know what to say. I thought about the winter just passed, the long months of thinking about her and the hard emptiness it had carved inside me. Until that night-until just a couple of hours ago, in fact-I’d been ready to give up everything: the camp, the life I had here, who I was. “I’d miss you.”

She bumped my shoulder with hers. “Better. Now, how bad exactly?”

“Well. A lot. I’d say I’d miss you plenty.”

“It wouldn’t be the same without me, something like that? I’m not leading the witness here, am I?”

I nodded. It was too dark to see her face clearly, but I thought she was smiling. She enjoyed being smart in just this way, her mind moving a little faster than everybody else’s.

“No, it wouldn’t be the same. Not at all.”

Kate undid her legs from under the sweatshirt and let them fall over the edge of the dock, shifting her weight to balance on her palms. “I don’t mean to put words in your mouth, Jordan, but sometimes you work this north-country Mainer thing a little too hard. Maybe it’s the winters up here, I don’t know, but waiting to hear from Jordan can be pretty trying sometimes.”

“It gets pretty quiet,” I said. “You spend a lot of time not even really thinking.”

“ Jordan,” she said a little crossly, “I know you. I’ve had eight years to figure this out. I’ll admit there are still some things I don’t get. But not thinking?” She shook her head. “I don’t believe that for a second.”

A moment went by, and from Harry’s cabin, breaking the stillness, came the sound of muffled coughing. I thought of the plastic mask, the shiny tank with wheels. His long night had only just begun. Kate was perfectly right about me, of course. I wondered why I hadn’t thought anyone would notice. But now I knew they had.

“You know, last winter I almost came down to see you at school. I practically had the truck packed before I decided not to.”

“Well, you should have, Jordan.” She gave a measured nod. “If you’d called, I would have told you to come.”

“I wish I had.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. Let me ask you something. What else do you wish? That maybe you could kiss me?”

I started to speak but couldn’t, and Kate gave a little laugh. “I’m sorry to rattle you, Jordan, but someone’s got to.”

I began to take a sip of my beer before I remembered it was empty. “I’ve thought about it,” I said.

“Me too, Jordan. Me too. But it hasn’t happened. You know, most of the men who want to kiss me at least go ahead and try.”

“How do they do?”

“Oh, about average. Some get kissed back. The ones that don’t… well, I’m sure they’ll be all right. Nothing really terrible ever happens, though. Nothing terrible would happen to you.”

“It’s not that simple,” I said. “I don’t think your folks would be too crazy about it.”

I heard her sigh. “Oh, Jordan, probably they’d like nothing better. You know that as well as I do.”

Did I? But I couldn’t remember; couldn’t say if, sometime between the knock-kneed thirteen-year-old-tomboy Kate I’d first met and the Kate who sat beside me now-the Kate that was, in every way, a free agent and grown woman, smart and sensible and basically interesting-I’d detected any signals from Joe and Lucy, one way or the other.

“Besides, Jordan. I don’t need their permission. You think you do, but that’s because you’re a gentleman. All the more reason, if you ask me.”

Out on the black lake, the loons went to work again-not the long, mournful cries of first darkness, but a crazy babbling that seemed to ricochet to the far shore and back, and the tussling splash of wings on water. It took a minute for everything to quiet down once more.

“So, it’s agreed, then?” Kate said. “You’ll kiss me sometime? It’s just an idea I have.”

We were holding hands, though I couldn’t say exactly how this had happened. “It seems like a good one.”

“And kids, lots of kids. I was an only child, and that wasn’t the best deal around.”

“God almighty, Kate.”

She laughed again, enjoying herself. “A little fast? Okay, I see your point. In fact, I can’t even kiss you now, much as I’d like to. You might think it was only because you’re rich.”

“I’m not rich.”

“Oh, yes you are, Jordan. You might be too nice to know it, but you are.” She paused and straightened her back. “So I’m not going to. I wish somebody had kissed somebody around here a long time ago, but now we’ll have to wait.”

I was barely following any of it; I felt like I was being dragged from a horse, though I was happy too-more than happy. “If you think that’s best.”

“And I’m not the prize, you know. I don’t necessarily come with Harry’s deal.”

“I never thought you did.”

She leveled her gaze at me. “Just so that’s clear. And I have med school to think about. It may not seem like it, but that’s mostly what’s on my mind right now.”

I nodded. “That makes sense to me.”

“Good.”

We heard Harry’s door swing open. A dark form stepped out on the porch: Hal again. With his hands on his hips he arched out his back in a long stretch; catching sight of us, he gave a little wave to tell us everything was all right. He sat down in one of the chairs with his feet up on the railing, and then I saw someone else coming up the path to meet him. It was the right size and shape to be Frances, but when she stepped into the light of the porch lamp I saw it was Lucy. She was carrying a picnic basket-a late supper, I figured-and passed it to Hal over the rail. The two of them spoke quietly for a few minutes before Lucy hurried back the way she’d come. Hal stood a minute before taking the basket inside. At last the light by the door went out.

“I’m worried about her,” Kate said finally. “She’s taking this hard.”

“Your mother you mean?”

Kate nodded. “She’s always been fond of him. It wasn’t always easy for her up here, but Harry was one of the good things.”

For a second we just sat there, looking at one another. I felt her thumb brush over the top of my hand-the smallest gesture, light as air.

“ Goddamnit, Jordan.”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Am I all alone out here? Are you really that rusty?” She signed impatiently at my blank look. “That was when you were supposed to try something.”

“Just then? I thought we were supposed to wait.”

“We were, Jordan. I never said how long.” She shook her head, though I thought she was about to laugh. “Another moment lost,” she groaned.

“This is complicated,” I said.

“Yes and no.” Kate rose, releasing my hand to come around behind me, where she knelt on her haunches and put her arms around my chest, her chin resting in the hollow of my shoulder. It hurt a little, and I think that’s what she had in mind. “You lovely, lonely man,” she said, close to my ear. “You really are this place. Harry knows it, I know it, my folks know it. Everyone knows it but you.” Then she pressed her cheek to mine-a bright quick burst of Kate-and was gone.