“You weren’t startled,” he said. “You were embarrassed.”
She opened her mouth to object. Then she let her shoulders slump. “Totally humiliated.” For Aaron’s sake, she summoned a smile. “I shouldn’t have said that. I should remind you that the kindness of strangers is a rare and wonderful thing.”
“A rare and wonderful and humiliating thing,” he said. “Help me load these groceries, smart aleck. Let’s see if we can get to the lake before the Popsicles melt.”
Three
Kate’s Jeep Cherokee had seen better days, but it was the perfect vehicle for the lake, rugged enough to take on the unpaved roads and byways that wound through the mountains and rain forests of the Olympic Peninsula. Bandit greeted them as though they’d been gone a year, sneezing and slapping the seat with his tail.
“Now to the lake,” Kate said brightly. “We’ve got the house all to ourselves, how about that?”
Aaron buckled his seat belt in desultory fashion, barely reacting to Bandit’s sloppy kisses, and she realized she’d said the wrong thing.
“It’s going to be a great summer,” she assured him.
“Right,” he replied without enthusiasm.
She could hear the apprehension in his voice. Though she wouldn’t say so aloud, she felt as apprehensive as Aaron.
He regarded her with disconcerting insight. “They fired you because of me, didn’t they?”
“No, I got fired because Sylvia is an inflexible stick of a woman who never appreciated real talent anyway. Deadlinesand the bottom line, that’s all she cares about.” Kate made herself stop. No point venting to Aaron; he already knew she was angry. The fact that Kate had been let go by Sylvia Latham, the managing editor, stung particularly. Like Kate, Sylvia was a single mother. Unlike Kate, she was a perfect single mother with two perfect kids, and because of this, she assumed everyone else could and should juggle career and family with the same finesse she did.
Kate ducked her head, hiding her expression. Aaron was clued in to much more than people expected of him. He knew as well as any other boy that one of the most basic realities of modern life was that a single mom missed work to take care of her kid. Why didn’t Sylvia get it? Because she had a perfect nanny to look after her perfect children. Until this past year, Aaron’s grandmother and sometimes his aunt watched him when he missed school. Now that they’d moved away, Kate tried to juggle everything on her own. And she’d failed. Miserably and unequivocally.
“I have to call the bank, figure out what’s the matter with my debit card,” she said, taking out her cell phone. “We don’t get reception at the lake.”
“Boooring,” Aaron proclaimed and slumped down in his seat.
“I’m with you, bud.” She dialed the number on the back of her card. After listening to all the options—”because our menu has recently changed,” cooed the voice recording—she had to press an absurd combination of numbers only to learn that the bank, on East Coast time, was already closed. She leaned her head against the headrest and took a deep, cleansing breath. “It’s nothing,” she assured Aaron. “I’ll sort it out later.”
“I need to call Georgie next,” she said apologetically.
All five grandkids—Phil and Barbara’s four, plus Aaron—called her mother Georgie and sometimes even Georgie Girl.
“Don’t talk long,” Aaron said. “Please.”
Kate punched in the unfamiliar new number and waited for it to connect. A male voice answered.
“This is Clinton Dow.” Georgie’s new husband always answered with courteous formality.
“And this is Katherine Elise Livingston,” she said, teasing a little.
“Kate.” His voice smoothed out with a smile she could hear. “How are you?”
“Excellent. We’re in Port Angeles, just about to head to the lake.”
“Sounds like a big adventure,” he said as jovially as could be. You’d never know that only last spring, he was urging her mother to sell the summer place. It was a white elephant, he’d declared, a big empty tax liability that had outlived its use to the family. With that one pronouncement, he had nearly lost the affections of his two newly acquired stepchildren. The lakeside cottage had been in the Livingston family since the 1920s, far longer than a once-widowed, once-divorced retired CPA.
“We’re never selling the lake house,” Phil had said. “Ever. End of discussion.” It didn’t matter to Phil that he had moved cross-country, all the way to New York, and that his visits would be few and far between. For him and Kate and their kids, the lakeside retreat held all that was special and magical about summer, and selling it would be sacrilege.
“I’ll get your mother,” Clint said. “It’s great to hear from you.”
While she waited, Kate pulled the Jeep around to the far edge of the parking lot so she could look out over the harbor. She had stood in this spot, regarding this view hundreds of times in her life. She never got tired of it. Port Angeles was a strange city, an eclectic jumble of cheap sportsman’s motels and diners, quaint bed-and-breakfast getaways, strip malls with peeling paint and buckled asphalt parking lots, waterfront restaurants and shops. A few times a day, the Coho ferry churned its crammed, exhausted hull across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Victoria, British Columbia, in all its gleaming splendor, and vehicles waited for hours for a coveted berth on board.
“So you’re headed off into the wilderness,” her mother said cheerfully into the phone.
“Just the two of us,” Kate said.
“I wish you’d decided to bring Aaron here for the summer,” Georgina said. “We’re an hour’s drive from Walt Disney World, for heaven’s sake.”
“Which is precisely why I didn’t want to bring him,” Kate said. “I’m just not a Disney sort of gal.”
“And Aaron?”
“He’d love it,” she confessed. “He would love to see you, too.” She watched her son rifling through the groceries in search of something to eat. He found the sack of golden Rainier cherries and dived in, seeing how far he could spit each pit out the window. Bandit, who was remarkably polite when his humans were eating, watched with restrained but intense concentration. “We want to be here this summer,” she reminded her mother. “It’s exactly where we need to be.”
“If you say so.” Georgina had never loved the lakeside cottage the way the rest of the Livingstons did, though in deference to her late husband and children, she’d always been a good sport about spending every summer there. Now that she’d finally remarried, however, she was more than happy to stay in Florida.
“I say so,” Kate told her mother. “I can finally spend quality time with my boy, and figure out what I want to be when I grow up.”
“You’ll both go stir-crazy,” Georgina warned.
Kate thought about her mother’s
