the peace and quiet, you mean?”
“Is that a hint for me to shut up?”
“If I wanted you to shut up, I’d have told you,” he said, turning the key in the ignition. The engine spluttered and caught with an unmuffled roar. “Hang on tight,” he advised over the noise of the truck.
There were no seat belts in the old pickup, so Liza did as she was told.
Forrester drove carefully down the narrow road that wound through the trees from the lodge, the truck bouncing roughly in the potholes despite his caution. When he hit the highway at the bottom of the long driveway, he didn’t pick up speed but continued to drive the noisy truck very slowly. His prudent driving might have annoyed Liza under most circumstances, because she liked to get where she was going without dillydallying. But this morning she was in no rush to get to the town where she’d grown up. The thought of setting foot in Tyler made her very nervous. Unconsciously, she started chewing her thumbnail—an old habit she’d never broken completely.
“Look,” she said when they headed west on the highway with the sunlight streaming after them, “maybe there’s a better garage in Bonneville. Why don’t you turn around and go the other way?”
“Don’t worry so much,” said Forrester, not taking his eyes from the road. “Maybe you won’t see anybody you know.”
“I’m not worried about that! It’s my car, that’s all. It’s a delicate machine. It needs expert care.”
“Like the kind of care you were giving it when you ran over that tree? Don’t try to snow me, please. It’s obvious you’re scared to death about going home again.”
“I am not!”
“Why did you come back to Tyler if you didn’t really want to see your family?”
“It was a mistake,” Liza said, turning sulky. She looked out the window at the passing scenery—the lush pastures punctuated by stands of tall, Wisconsin trees. Sunlight was just starting to sparkle on the dew, turning the landscape into a dazzling green carpet.
Half to herself, Liza said, “I—I didn’t mean to end up here. It just happened. I was driving around.”
“What for?”
“I was mad! I was—oh, what do you care?”
“Mad about what?”
Liza sighed and leaned against the window, propping her fist against her chin. Despite her instinct to keep the facts secret, she said, “I quit my job.”
“Quit?” Forrester shot a look across at her.
“All right, I was fired. Satisfied?”
“How come you got fired?”
“It’s a long story, and the ending isn’t very interesting. I’m broke, to tell you the truth. The lease on my apartment expired last week, and the landlord changed the lock. Can you believe it! The old coot won’t give me my clothes until I pay the rent!”
“That explains the outfit, then,” Forrester said wryly. “It was the only thing you could get from the Salvation Army, right?”
“Who asked you for an opinion?”
He didn’t react to her anger, but continued to drive along the pasture fences. “Why don’t you just pay your rent?”
“I told you. I’m broke.”
“A grown woman like you can’t balance a checkbook?”
“It’s not that simple,” Liza said. “I’m an interior designer, see? I really wanted my last job to turn out great, so I...well, I kicked in a few bucks of my own. It messed up my cash flow.”
“What did you do that for?”
“Because I wanted the job to be wonderful! You see, it was this great executive office—overlooking Lake Michigan, marvelous sunlight all day, this beautiful view from a dozen floor-to-ceiling windows—everything! I made the place look terrific. Everybody said so. It needed a sculpture, though, to finish the concept. An artist friend of mine had the perfect piece—this mother and child thing that’s great—emotional, you know? Erotic, too, in a way that was very sophisticated. It was perfect for the office, and my friend needed the money very badly. So I—”
“So you spent your rent money on a sculpture that you’re never going to see again.”
“It’s not like that!”
Liza remembered the whole scenario in detail, but doubted she could make Forrester understand. Her artist friend, Julio Jakkar, had needed the money to finance a trip to a drug rehab clinic. Julio was ready to make it work this time, he said, but he’d refused Liza’s offer to pay for the treatment outright. Buying one of Julio’s pieces had seemed like the perfect solution to his problem. Except Liza hadn’t counted on losing her job a few days later.
She couldn’t make a tough loner like Cliff Forrester understand the complexities of a friendship with a sensitive, vulnerable guy like Julio, though.
On another sigh, she said, “I just had to do it, that’s all.”
“So now you’ve got no apartment and no job.”
“I’m not running home to my mother, if that’s what you’re thinking! I’ve been in scrapes before. I can get myself out of this one.”
“Sure,” said Forrester.
“I’d never run to my mother for help, anyway. She’s got troubles of her own, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“She’s stronger than you think.”
“I’m stronger than everybody thinks!”
Forrester didn’t say a word at that, and Liza pretended to be interested in the passing scenery. Things hadn’t changed much, she noticed sourly. People still treated her like a rambunctious child.
Other things hadn’t changed, either. The same farms still stood along the road to Tyler, with even the same names painted on the mailboxes. German names and Swedish names, mostly. Old families that could trace their family trees back to the first settlers.
The history of Tyler was much like the history of other small towns in Wisconsin. Founded 140 years ago by German immigrants who fled autocratic rulers in their native land, the original town was called Tilgher, after one of the founding families. Years later, the name was anglicized to Tyler by an impatient official from the land office who couldn’t pronounce the German word. Swedish immigrants followed the Germans, each family paying ten dollars to receive 160 acres of farmland.
One such Swedish immigrant had been Gunther Ingalls, who took his family by wagon train to his parcel. On the rugged trail, he stopped to help an Irish immigrant mend a broken wagon wheel. Jackie Kelsey and Gunther Ingalls became friends over that wheel and proceeded to Tyler together, where they split Gunther’s acreage into two small farms. In the century that followed, the Kelsey family and the Ingalls family flourished side by side. And sometimes feuded, too.
Now
