by Susan Wiggs
She poured herself a cup of coffee.
Aly scooted over and patted the spot next to him. “Sit here, Mom.”
“No!” Dana said so suddenly Catherine looked up from her coffee with a startled expression.
The only sound for that split second was the rain on the roof, tapping tensely. It was the kind of constant monotonous warning sound that made you follow it with your hearing sharp and your breath held, waiting for the explosion.
Catherine cast a quick apologetic glance at him, then gave a small shrug.
So this wasn’t Dana’s normal behavior with men, he thought. It was him alone and not just any man that made her oldest daughter so protective.
Catherine sat down next to Dana at the opposite end of the sofa. She looked up at him. “We were doing a jigsaw puzzle before the power went out.”
He nodded. “So I see.”
She looked at Dana, who was hunched over the table. “What piece are you looking for?”
“Steve Tyler’s belly button,” she said without looking up.
Catherine looked at him as if she didn’t know what to say to that, which Michael knew was why Dana had said it. Shock value.
He reached out and picked up a puzzle piece and held it out to her. “Here, try this one.”
Dana looked at it, then up at him, then took the piece.
It fit.
He winked at Catherine, who looked as if she wanted to strangle Dana. He shook his head slightly. It didn’t matter. Catherine needed to ignore her daughter’s behavior. It would work better than letting her teenager trap her into getting angry, which was Dana’s objective, even if she didn’t consciously know it.
The tension in the room was so taut you couldn’t have broken through it with two hundred pounds of muscle and a timber ax.
Aly was quietly sitting cross-legged next to him. She had a huge book propped in her lap and seemed oblivious to what was going on with her sister.
Catherine looked at her and asked, “What are you reading?”
“An encyclopedia.”
“Oh.” Catherine frowned. “Why?”
“I was just curious about something.”
“What?”
“Those slug things.” She looked up and grinned. “Slugs are just like you, Mom. They don’t have a mate.”
Michael choked on his coffee and tried hard not to laugh.
He had his answer. There was no man.
Catherine just sat there numbly looking like Christmas in her bright green sweater and her even brighter red face.
“It says here that they are mollusks.”
He caught Catherine’s eye and told her exactly what he had been thinking. “Not only does Aly look just like you did at that age, she is you.”
Catherine sighed and gave him a weak smile. “I know.”
Aly groaned and slammed the book shut. “Everyone says that.” Then she stopped and looked back at her mother. “Not that you aren’t pretty, Mom. It’s just weird, you know?”
“I understand, kiddo. At eleven you want your own identity, not your mother’s. I felt the same way. So did Dana.”
“And at school everyone knows I’m Dana Winslow’s younger sister. Mr. Johnson, the science teacher, even calls me Dana sometimes.”
Dana looked up then. “Do you answer him?”
“I have to. If I don’t he thinks I’m not participating.” Aly got up and trounced over to the bookcase.
There was another lapse of awkward silence.
Catherine took a sip of coffee. “So. The island hasn’t changed much, has it?” She didn’t look at him.
He should tell her now, that he had changed, that he wasn’t a handyman. He watched her and found himself staring at her hair. If she looks at me, he thought, I will tell her the truth.
She stared into her coffee cup as if she were searching inside of it for something to say.
Aly plopped back down next to him. “Mom says there’s plenty to do here. Fishing and sailing and stuff.”
Before he could answer Dana asked, “Do you have a boat?”
Michael nodded. “Yes.”
The girl brightened suddenly. “Good, then you can take us back to the mainland.”
“Dana!” Catherine looked at him then, clearly mortified. “I’m sorry. She seems to have forgotten her manners.” She paused and took a deep breath, clearly exasperated. “Dana doesn’t like it here.”
“There’s nothing to do here.”
Michael was quiet. He looked away from Catherine and into Dana’s sharp eyes. “The engine’s not running right.”
Dana looked like she didn’t believe him. “What’s wrong with it?”
Catherine groaned and buried her face in a hand, shaking her head.
But he answered her daughter. “The plugs are bad and the points need to be replaced.” He stood up then. “I should leave.”
Catherine stood up after him and followed him to the door as if she wanted to say something but didn’t know what. He could feel Dana watching them intently and figured she would have been walking in between them if she thought she could have gotten away with it.
He took his jacket off the hook and put it on, then stepped out onto the porch, sat on the bench and pulled on his boots.
Catherine was leaning against the door jamb with her arms crossed, watching him. She had one of those wistful smiles he remembered, the kind she had just before he used to grab her and kiss the hell out of her.
“The rain’s stopped,” was all she said.
He stood and took two steps to stand near her. He looked down at her face. “I’ve got good timing.”
“I’m sorry about Dana.” She dropped her arms to her sides. “These teenage years aren’t easy.”
He nodded, thinking that she was a teenager the last time he’d seen her.
They stood there like that, not saying anything that mattered. It was as if they were both afraid to say what they were thinking.
He looked away. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Anytime.”
Neither of them spoke again for a long stretch of seconds. He felt like he was twenty again, standing on the same porch and wanting to touch her so badly he hurt with it. But knowing he couldn’t because her parents were right there on the other side of the door.
There were no parents this time; it was her children who were watching them, probably listening to them.
So he didn’t do what he wanted to. He turned and went down the steps and across the lawn. He heard the screen door slam shut.
“Michael?”
He turned around.
She was standing on the porch gripping the wooden railing in two hands and watching him. “I wrote you.
Several letters.” She waited, as if she wanted him to explain.
When he said nothing she added, “I never got any answer back from you.”
“I never got any letters, Catherine.” He turned then, and walked back into the woods.
Her father was shouting. They were in the boathouse, half-naked, their clothes askew, her hair tousled and her lips red and swollen. A foil Trojan wrapper was torn in two and carelessly thrown by their shoes.
Her father’s flashlight beam was shining on it.
Then the light went out. It was dark. So dark. He was in a VC prison camp, locked in a box with two other prisoners. He couldn’t move.
Something rattled the box. Opened it. Light pierced his eyes. His buddies rescued him. Suddenly they were half-dragging him through the jungle.
Go! Go….
Michael woke up fast and sat up in his bed in a cold sweat, panting like he’d been running from a sniper. Damn. He rubbed his face with his clammy hands. Those nightmares of Nam had stopped years ago.
Seeing Catherine tonight had brought it all back again—the scene with her father. Catherine and her mother disappearing from the island. Her father talking to his grandfather and to him.
He was not to call her. He couldn’t write to her. He was to disappear from
Catherine’s life. Or he would go to jail for statutory rape.
Instead he’d gone into the Navy less than a week later and ended up in Special Forces, infiltrating into Laos or patrolling the Mekong Delta for weeks at a time. He’d been captured and spent three months in a dark box.
He drove his hand through his hair and took a few deep breaths, thinking for just a brief moment about a life he had left far behind him and never wanted to think of again, because it was like reliving hell.
He sat there for a minute, then threw back the damp sheet and pulled on his jeans. He shrugged into a jacket and shoes, grabbed a flashlight and left the cabin.
The moon had gone down and it was darker outside than his memory of the deepest jungle. There was silence, and a little rain, that misty kind that came on like soggy fog.
He walked down to the small dock where he moored his boat. He unsnapped the tarp and stepped inside, where he lifted the engine cover and shone the flashlight down into the engine compartment until he saw what he was looking for.
A few minutes later he was walking back down the dock and toward the cabin, the plugs and points jammed into his jeans pocket.
He went inside the cabin and headed straight to the refrigerator, took out a carton of juice and lifted it to his lips. He drank half of it, stuck it back inside without closing it, and took out a Mexican beer.
He grabbed something to eat from a cabinet and popped the cap off the beer as he crossed the room to sit down in front of the dwindling fire. He raised the beer bottle to his mouth, took a long drink and set the bottle down on the table next to him. The smooth flavor of the beer was on his tongue, but what he craved was egg-salad sandwiches.
There was nothing he could do about what he was feeling and wanting, so he did the only thing he could do—he ate a whole damn bag of barbecued potato chips.
Nine
At ten the next morning Catherine stood on Michael’s front porch, rocking on her feet, her hands clenched behind her back while she waited for him to answer her knock. She could hear his footsteps clumping toward the door, so she licked her lips, brushed her hair back, and took a deep breath before he opened it.
He stared at her from eyes that looked awake but tired.
“The toilet is plugged and the boiler pilot won’t light.”
He seemed startled, like he didn’t know why she was there. And he didn’t exactly look happy to see her.
“I tried to light the boiler pilot again and again and we used the plunger on the toilet. No matter what I tried I couldn’t get them to work.”
He didn’t say anything.
Perhaps she was speaking too fast. Her ex-husband used to chide her for babbling when she was nervous. And she was nervous. She tilted her head slightly and explained more slowly, “There’s no hot water in the house without the boiler.”
“I know what a boiler is, Catherine.”
What a grump.
He turned without another sarcastic word and took a tool belt off a hook near the door. Besides an annoyed look, he was wearing a plaid shirt and jeans that were worn almost white in spots and that time and wear had molded to his body. He might be a grump in the morning but he sure looked good for fifty.
What would he look like in a suit? Catherine was a sucker for a man in a suit. And if a man wore a tux, well, she got all weak-kneed. Heck, Bill Gates probably looked sexy in a tux.
Life was unfair. Here she had to hike up her bra straps and slather on alpha hydroxy creams with a trowel. Some days she had to lie down on the bed to zip up her pants. He was three years older, wearing a plain old pair of jeans, and he looked stronger and sexier than he had when he was twenty.
The faces of all the men who had aged so well flashed through her mind: Sean Connery, Nick Nolte, Robert Redford, James Garner, James Brolin, Michael Packard.
She watched him strap and buckle the tool belt low on his hips the way Paul Newman had strapped on his guns in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
It seemed like such an earthy, male thing—a man doing up his belt buckle; it was sexy and suggestive and made her mouth a little dry.
He stuck a pair of work gloves into his back pocket and turned back around. She quickly looked away.
“I need to find the toolbox. I’ll be right back.” He grabbed a key and walked past her.
She nodded without looking up, then decided to follow him. She didn’t suppose luck would be on her side and there would be a tux in the shed, but heck, he might undo the belt buckle again.
She smiled a wicked little smile as she crossed over to a small shed he had already unlocked.
Heaven be praised if he didn’t bend down to search through it. His jeans pulled tight over his thighs in a way that made her give thanks to Levi Strauss.
Then he knelt on one knee and leaned inside. If she stepped back just a foot or so she had a great shot of his backside. The work gloves stuck out of one back pocket and looked like fingers waving at her. It was almost as if they were calling to her, “Look here.”
“Here it is.” He stood up with a battered old red toolbox.
She quickly looked up at the sky. After a slight pause she said, “Nice day. No clouds.”
He followed her gaze upward, then frowned. “The radio said it was supposed to rain today.”
There was one thing different about this Michael Packard; he was no Mr. Sunshine in the morning.
She walked ahead of him on the gravel path between his place and hers. The silence just about drove her nuts.
Her mind was going a mile a minute, wondering what he was thinking, wondering if they could go the whole day without bringing up the past.
When they were about halfway there she braved the beast. “I wrote you five letters.”
“I never got any letters from you.”
She stopped, spun around and planted her hands on her hips. She looked him straight in the eye. “Are you saying I’m lying?”
“No. I’m saying I never got any letters.” He paused, looking squarely at her. His expression grew tighter. “What I did get was a promise from your father that he’d press charges of statutory rape if I tried to contact you.”
“Oh God. Michael…” She sagged back against a tree, staring at the ground. “Did he really do that?”
“Yes.”
“He was upset. I don’t think he would have sent you to jail.”
“Yes. He would have, Catherine.”
There was nothing between them but a lapse of tense silence.
She looked at him again. “Did you really think I could just walk away after that summer together and never have any contact with you again? Didn’t you know me better than that?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“How do you figure that?”
“You thought I would ignore your letters.”
“Give me a break, here,” she snapped. “I was seventeen.” She straightened and started to walk away.
He dropped the toolbox and touched her shoulder. “I know. And I was twenty, just drafted, and in love with a seventeen-year-old girl.”
She stopped, but she didn’t turn around. He had truly loved her then, all those years ago. Many times over the years she had wondered about that, if he had cared or if she had just wished he had.
His hand was still on her shoulder. She bit her lip because she thought she might do something silly like cry. “I’m sorry.” She took a deep breath and turned around.
His hand fell away.
“When time passes by and you can’t understand why something happened, I guess you make up excuses. You blame others.” She looked at him then. “I was hurt and scared. I blamed you. After a while, when I didn’t hear from you, I believed you were just lying to me about how you had felt so you could—” She stopped because she didn’t need to say anything more.
“Get into your pants?”
“Thank you for sugar-coating it so nicely.” She gave a laugh that wasn’t amused. “But you’re right. That was what I thought.�
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He only stared at her, not saying anything.
So she did. “It’s stupid to stand here in the middle of the woods and argue over something that happened so long ago. We’re different people now. It’s 1997 not 1967.” She looked back up into those blue eyes of his and stuck out her hand. “How about a truce?”
His gaze dropped to her outstretched hand.
“Friends,” she said emphatically.
A moment later his hand closed over hers and she almost melted into the ground. It was like she was seventeen all over again. She stared at their hands so she could hide her eyes from him.
Just for good measure she gave his hand a firm shake.
When she looked up he was staring at her face not at their clasped hands.
He pulled her against him, clamped his free hand to the back of her head, and kissed her.
Oh God…She felt like Silly Putty. Her hand fell away from his and moved to his shoulder.
His other hand grabbed her and pulled her against him in one of those hot, eating kind of kisses you see in the movies, all wildness and heat, where an instant later they’ve unbuttoned half their clothes and they’re doing it against a wall.
His hands ran over her back, pressed her closer. There were tools pressed against her belly. A hammer, a flashlight, screwdriver—lots of long, hard things.
One second his tongue was deep inside her mouth.
The next…the damn idiot let her go.
She stood there seeing stars and trying to keep her balance.
“Friends.” He whacked her on the backside with one hand, picked up his toolbox and sauntered on down the path toward her place.
Ten
She caught him from behind, which surprised the hell out of him. The toolbox slipped from his hand and she shoved him back up against a tree with both hands.
“Catherine?”
One palm was flat against his chest; the other slid up to grip the back of his head.
“What the hell are you doing?”
A second later she was kissing him the way he’d just kissed her. Hard and fast and wild.
He bent his knees, hooked his arms under her butt and picked her up. Her hands drove through his hair, gripped his head and tilted it, then she thrust her small tongue into his mouth the same way he had done to her.