A few minutes later, the wind had picked up and the rain was coming down so hard it bounced back up from the ground. Over five times Catherine had read and followed the old instructions that were engraved on a metal plate attached to the lid, and still nothing happened.
“Who writes these things?” she muttered. “Probably the same people who write software manuals.”
She took the flashlight from Dana and banged the generator a good one.
The motor gave a half-hearted start, then suddenly died.
“Oh Mom! It almost started!” Dana reached for the flashlight. “Let me try.” She hit it a few times.
The generator started up with a loud coughing rev like a huge lawnmower.
She and the girls cheered, then she took the flashlight from Dana and turned to trudge back to the porch. The clouds slipped by steadily and the moon cracked through with bright silver light. The wind blew in sudden, whipping gusts and caught the umbrella; it slipped from Aly’s hands and tumbled across the yard like an shiny wet acrobat.
They chased after it, all of them yelling “I’ll get it! I’ll get it!” Dana made a grab for it at the same time as Aly. Both girls fell in the mud just as the umbrella danced away from their outstretched hands.
Catherine looked down at her muddy children and began to laugh. “First one to get the umbrella doesn’t have to do any dishes for a week!” She ran after the umbrella while her girls scrambled after her.
“You’re cheating, Mom! You had a head start!”
“That’s because I’m old!” she shouted over her shoulder as she ran in front of them.
It became a game, one of them reaching for the umbrella just as the wind snatched it away, leaving behind nothing but their laughter. They were so wet the umbrella wouldn’t have done them a bit of good, but it didn’t matter. Between the stubborn and wild Winslow women, one of them was going to get that blasted umbrella.
Soaking wet and shouting, Catherine was now the closest to it. She gave a triumphant holler and launched after it like a missile.
One moment she was standing, the next she slipped in the mud and skidded on her stomach across the wet grass, all to the sound of her daughters’ laughter being carried upward by that rascally wind.
Mud splashed up into her face and through her wet hair, but she didn’t care. She hadn’t had this much fun since she was ten and her dad had brought home a bright yellow Slip ‘n Slide he’d attached to the garden hose in the yard.
“Yahoo! I’ve got it!” She laughed and hooted, then scrambled up and chased the umbrella, until she realized she couldn’t run fast enough to catch it. So she dove toward the wet ground on purpose and just slid after it on her belly.
Right into a large pair of Wellington boots.
A man’s Wellington boots.
For a second she stared at the huge rubber tips, partially sunken in the new mud, then slowly raised her wet head to look up.
The moonlight was behind him and all she could see was a tall silhouette of a man holding the umbrella. He shined a flashlight in her face and held it there.
She squinted and held up her hand to block out the glare.
Without a word he turned the light away from her.
She stared up at him.
His features were blurred, so she swiped the mud and water from her face and slapped her wet hair out of her eyes. Just for good measure she pulled the flashlight out of her jacket and shone it upward, figuring she could either blind him or beat him with it if he meant them any harm.
The light shone on his face. Everything seemed to stop suddenly. The rain. The wind. Her heart. Her breath.
The whole world stopped.
She stared up at him and felt as if she were stepping into her most secret dreams. She whispered, “Michael?”
Seven
It took Michael a minute to realize just who he was looking at. Every emotion imaginable raced through him. Yet he didn’t react; he had spent too much time in Vietnam, where he’d learned to never be surprised, and had developed nerves of steel that served him in his business and his personal life.
Until this very moment.
This was a face he had seen only in his memory for the last thirty years.
She was covered in mud and soaking wet. Her hair was dark and stringy from the rain, her mouth open in stunned surprise.
But that face was still uniquely Catherine.
“Hi, Squirt.”
“Ohmygod…It is you.” She buried her head in her arms the way she had when she was eleven. It was as if she still thought her embarrassing moments would just go away if she didn’t look at him.
“How long have you been standing there?” she said into her arms.
“Long enough to be entertained.”
She took a deep breath. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Who are you?” A young girl stuck her wet and muddy face in front of him. It was almost exactly the same face he had seen hanging upside-down from a tree.
Michael felt as if he were in an episode of “Star Trek,” thrown back to a unique and significant time in his life just to teach him something.
The youngest girl looked exactly like Catherine did at eleven. Another Squirt.
For one brief moment—just a nanosecond of regret that had never hit him before—he was sorry he had never fathered a child.
While he stood there speechless and frozen in time, Catherine rolled over and sat up, resting her hands on her bent knees. She looked at the two girls. “This is Michael Packard, girls. An old friend.”
“There are no houses around here,” the older girl said after scanning the trees. She looked at him as if she expected him to grow horns. “Where’d you come from?”
He didn’t take his eyes off Catherine when he answered her. “The stork dropped me down the chimney.”
Catherine looked right into his eyes, half surprised and half amused. A moment later she began to laugh.
He could see she remembered that all those years ago he’d said those same words to her. A second later the older girl called him a weirdo under her breath, and Michael decided that time didn’t change people very much.
“He was teasing you, Dana,” Catherine said.
He stuck out a hand to help her up. “Here.”
She sat there for a second, her gaze wandering over him. She paused to look at the tool belt hanging on his hips. He wondered what she
