The Second Sister

by Marie Bostwick

  “Kind of like what happened to Alice,” I said. “After the accident, we knew she’d never be a vet, but my parents kept pushing her. And that wasn’t all bad. If not for them, she’d probably never have been able to live independently or have a normal life. But there were limits to what she could do. Dad just couldn’t accept that.

  “When I left for school, Alice did too. She enrolled in a two-year veterinary technician program in Madison. She was great with animals, got a B in her husbandry class, but flunked all her science classes. I think it must have hit her hard. She remembered what she’d been like before. Up until then, I don’t think she’d gotten any grade lower than an A-minus. Anyway, she dropped out. She was so down that my parents sent her off to live with Dad’s sister, Peggy, in California for a few months. That was the beginning of the depression. Sometimes it got so bad that she ended up in the hospital.”

  “I know,” he said. “Alice and I spent a lot of time together when I wrote her will. She was my first client; paid me one hundred dollars and a goldfish.”

  I chuckled. “Sounds like Alice. But tell me the rest of your story,” I said. “How did you go from college dropout to lawyer?”

  Peter took a quick swig from the bottle that was sitting next to him on the bench before going on. “Well, after two seasons and two concussions, I figured out that playing pond hockey with your buddies is different than playing on a real team with guys who’ve been training their whole lives. I didn’t want to come home twice a failure, so I moved to Milwaukee, got a job in a sporting goods store, an apartment with two other guys who were just as lost as me, smoked a lot of weed, and drifted.

  “A year after that, Dan, a retired special education teacher looking to earn a little extra cash, started working at the store. One day he took me out for a beer and asked what I was doing with my life, said I was too smart to be spending it selling hockey sticks and jock straps. So I told him the whole story. The condensed version—a lot quicker than I’m telling you,” he said, with an embarrassed little smile.

  “Keep going,” I urged him, sensing the approach of a happy ending. “Please. What did he say?”

  “He told me he thought I might have a learning disability and gave me the number of a doctor friend of his. I took the number, but didn’t call the guy. But Dan kept after me.”

  “And?”

  “And Dan was right. I have ADHD and some issues with speed of information processing. It was a relief to hear that there was a name for what was wrong with me, but a part of me wasn’t convinced. I spent so many years thinking of myself as a thickheaded jock that it was hard to put that aside. Anyway, the doc prescribed some medication and I enrolled in one class at the community college. The doc helped me get extra time on my exams and Dan tutored me, helped me work on my reading comprehension and organizational strategies. Sure enough, I earned a B in Introduction to the Novel. I worked incredibly hard and it paid off. Not just in terms of the grade. That one class taught me that I wasn’t dumb.

  “It took me six years to finish my bachelor’s because I was working part-time. I took out loans for law school. Since I was already twenty-six when I started, I decided I better bite the bullet and get it over with. And I did.”

  “Do you still take medication?”

  “No,” he said. “I was able to focus better as I got older. I’ve read some studies about that. A lot of people with ADHD have trouble with executive functioning when they’re young, but the brain eventually catches up. That’s what happened to me. I wasn’t dumb; I just needed time and some extra help.”

  “I never thought you were dumb,” I said. “I just thought you didn’t care about school.”

  “Yeah. That’s what everybody thought. But . . . hang on.” He sat up very straight, took the fishing line between his fingers, and gave a tug. “Never mind,” he said after a moment. “Thought I might have had a bite. They’re sure slow today.”

  “Did your mom feel bad that she wasn’t able to figure out what your learning issues were?”

  “Terrible. I think she apologized to me about fifty times for that. But it wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t trained in special education, and even if she had been, I did a good job of covering up. A lot of kids with learning problems withdraw or act out or become depressed, but because I was good at sports, I had something to kind of hang my hat on. I might not have made honor roll, but man . . .” He grinned and checked his line again. “When I’d slide into third and the hometown crowd went crazy, I felt pretty darned good about myself.”

  “Yeah,” I said, smiling and taking the last cheese curd from the bowl, “I’d kind of noticed that about you.”

  “Hey, you can’t blame me. There’s not one teenage boy in fifty who wouldn’t rather score the winning run in the hometown tournament than get an A on his history exam. Everybody knows that jocks get all the cute girls,” he said, and then paused for a moment. “Well, almost all the cute girls. Now and then one gets away. Well, really just one. The best one.”

  I blushed. Actually blushed! I couldn’t help it. Not only that, but his words and the way he said them, not with his usual cocky grin, but with a simple, almost nostalgic kind of smile, his tone just a tiny bit wistful, made my breath catch in my throat—and a cheese curd along with it.

  No kidding, I started to choke. And it wasn’t a momentary blockage, easily cleared with a polite cough or two. No, no, no. This was a full-on, hacking, face-reddening, “does anybody here know the Heimlich maneuver?” choking. It was so bad that Peter dropped his fishing pole, came over to my side of the room, and started pounding on my back.

  “You okay?” he asked when I finally stopped hacking and started breathing again, his expression worried.

  My eyes were tearing and my throat was still tight, but I bobbed my head and lifted my hand to wave off his concern. “Fine,” I rasped after a minute. “Cheese curd. Went down the wrong pipe. But I’m—”

  I didn’t get a chance to finish my sentence.

  Before I knew what was happening or could fully catch my breath, Peter locked me in his arms and kissed me, just like he had on Thanksgiving. It was a really, really good kiss. Even better than the first.

  Of course, it is possible that, having not been kissed like that in so very long, which is to say passionately, the pleasure of that kiss had been heightened by extended privation, the way a piece of rich, delicious dark chocolate tastes even richer and more delicious after you’ve been dieting. But I don’t think so.

  All I know for sure is that I was grateful to be sitting down, because if I’d been standing, my knees would probably have buckled under me. Seriously. I’ve read a number of novels in which the hero’s kiss leaves the heroine feeling faint and always thought it was silly, completely unrealistic. But at that moment, I suddenly understood what swooning meant.

  Maybe that was why, even though a part of my brain knew that this was a bad, bad idea, I kissed him back, because I felt faint, or was suffering from acute kiss deprivation, or because it didn’t seem quite real. Whatever the reason, I lifted my arms around his shoulders, let my lips fall slightly apart, and kissed him. It just felt so incredibly good. I didn’t want him to stop.

  And then, in case I hadn’t been thrown off balance enough, he made another surprise move, the kind of thing I was certain never happened except in books, movies, or the late-night fantasies of kiss-deprived women; he picked me up! No kidding! Without ever taking his lips from mine, he kind of scooted off the bench, scooped his arm under my legs, and starting carrying me across the room toward the bed.

  It was, without question, the single sexiest thing I have ever experienced in my life. He lifted me up like I was nothing! And as he did, a thought popped into my head: He planned this all along....

  Peter had come out here the day before, filled the fridge with snacks and beer, set the radio to what he thought was a romantic station (though he sadly misjudged that part), invited me out here, and wore down my defenses by plying me with liquor and opening
up to me and becoming irresistibly vulnerable, all in anticipation of the moment when he would kiss me like I’d never been kissed in my life, and carry me to the bed, and . . .

  He’d lured me! He had lured me to his ice shanty the way that the carnival guy had lured Daphne onto the Tilt-A-Whirl, both among the least likely possible spots for an assignation, knowing that we wouldn’t be expecting it! Hoping to catch us off guard and in a moment of weakness! Joe Feeney was right—I’d never have imagined Peter trying to make a move on me while we were ice fishing. If I had, I never would have agreed to come along. I thought we’d go to some tin shack and sit huddled around a hole in the ice wearing parkas and mittens and shivering. I had no idea there’d be music and conversation and beer and a bed.

  Peter knew that I wasn’t expecting this. And that was why, after I’d rebuffed his earlier advance, he had brought me here. No, lured me here!

  This revelation was so surprising, comical, and—I’ll admit it—oddly flattering that it actually made me feel a little giddy. If Peter’s lips hadn’t still been pressed to mine, I might have started laughing. But when he actually set me down on the bed, pulled away, and made a move to pull his sweater over his head, I came to my senses—quickly.

  “Oh, Peter.” I clutched at his wrist. “I can’t. This is a bad idea.”

  “Yes, you can,” he said. He loosened my hand from his wrist. “And it’s an incredibly good idea. One I’ve been working on since we were both sixteen years old. Let me show you.”

  He turned my wrist upward, uncurled my clenched fingers, one at a time, then pressed his lips to my palm. Where had he learned that? How did he know that the feeling of his lips, so soft and sure and slow, would make my heart pound like a conga line and fill me with the urge to throw him down onto the bed?

  I pulled my hand away and held it tight against my chest. “No, Peter. I can’t. Really. I can’t afford to let myself get mixed up in a relationship with anybody right now, especially someone who lives thousands of miles from DC. If I let myself get caught up with you, it’d be for all the wrong reasons.”

  “So you’re saying you’d just be using me for sex?” He pressed his lips together and furrowed his brow as if considering the implications of my statement. “I can live with that,” he said, and reached for me again.

  I scooted to the far end of the bed, dodging his grasp. “No! Peter, I mean it! This is a really bad idea! I’m going back to DC in just a few weeks and you . . . Ack!”

  A sudden clatter of plastic against wood as my fishing pole was jerked from the holder made me yelp with surprise. The pole started skittering across the floor toward the open hole in the ice.

  “Grab it!” Peter yelled.

  I lunged for the pole, but he got there first, snatching the handle only a moment before it disappeared into the water. Kneeling on the floor, he tried to reel in the line as quickly as he could. The fight and weight of the fish made the pole bend so far that I thought it might snap in two.

  “Whoa! This is a huge mutha!” Peter exclaimed, his eyes bright with excitement. “Luce! Help me out here! Grab the line and pull him in!”

  Though flustered and a little unsure about exactly what I was supposed to do, I followed his instructions, clutching at the fishing line and pulling it in, hand over hand, drawing the enormous whitefish toward the opening in the ice. The water was clear blue. When I looked down, I could see the fish, twisting and fighting to get away, silver scales glinting like star points in the water.

  “Oh, it’s beautiful!”

  “Sure is!” Peter cried, moving closer and bending down to get a better look. “Man! Look at that bad boy! He’s gonna be too big for the frying pan!”

  “Frying pan?” My eyes went wide as I realized what he was saying. “Peter, we’re not going to eat this fish!”

  “Of course we are,” he said, looking as if he thought I’d lost my mind. “What else should we do? Adopt him? Hang on!”

  The silver leviathan wasn’t giving up easily. It twisted its body from side to side, banging into the bottom of the ice, as if it had an understanding of its own size in relationship to the opening and knew that it would never fit through unless it was in a perfect, nose up–tail down position. Peter cursed and pulled up the sleeve of his sweater and plunged his arm into the frigid water.

  Moving quickly, I untangled myself from the loops of fishing line, grabbed the tackle box, and scrabbled frantically through the various compartments, searching. I found the wire cutters just as Peter sat back on his haunches, grinning from ear to ear as the silvery head of the enormous whitefish emerged from the hole.

  “Look at that! What a beauty! He’s got to be eleven or twelve—”

  In one quick and unexpected movement—if not for the element of surprise I’d never have managed it—I shoved Peter aside as hard as I could, sending him sprawling, then snipped the line and pulled the hook from the fish’s mouth.

  “Lucy!” He rocked forward and made a grab at the line, but he was too late; I released the fish into the water. He peered into the hole with his mouth ajar as the silver streak made its escape and disappeared into the depths.

  He sat back on his haunches again, staring at me with a mixture of anger and confusion. “Are you insane? That was our dinner!”

  I got up from the floor, wiped my wet, freezing hands on my pants, and sat down on the bench across from him.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Chapter 31

  Actually, I was hungry. So was Peter. Cheese curds and a few handfuls of Chex Mix don’t quite constitute a well-balanced meal. And so, after we got back into the truck, I suggested we go to the fish boil at the White Gull Inn. It was kind of a peace offering. After all, not only had I rebuffed the man’s sexual advances, I’d released his dinner into the wild. I couldn’t blame him for being mad.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I just couldn’t bear the idea of eating such a beautiful, wild creature.”

  He turned the ignition switch, revving the engine a couple of times to warm it up after sitting so long in the cold. “The whitefish we’ll eat at the boil were beautiful, wild creatures too.”

  “I know. But I wasn’t the one responsible for killing them.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  I clicked my seat belt together. “I don’t know, but it does. Anyway, do you want to go or not?”

  “Okay,” he said, his expression softening as he shifted the truck into gear.

  “Just one thing. I’m buying.” He started to protest, but I cut him off. “No! I want to pay this time. I owe you a fish. And, Peter . . . after this? If we go anywhere or do anything together, we split the bill. I meant what I said in there. I’m not getting myself tangled up in another dead-end, long-distance relationship. I’m done with all that. My next relationship is going to be with someone who is the one. Or at least has the potential to be the one. And if I never meet that guy, then so be it. I’m not settling for anything less than the real deal. But,” I said, looking to my left so I could see his face, “I am still taking applications for friends. So if that sounds good to you . . .”

  Peter shifted his eyes from the road to my face. “Not as good as letting you use me for sex, but since that doesn’t seem to be an option . . .”

  “It isn’t,” I said. “I mean that.”

  “Okay,” he said with a shrug, conceding more quickly and easily than I’d supposed he would. “Friends.”

  “Good,” I said and fixed my eyes on the road. “Friends.”

  During the summer, the White Gull Inn in Fish Creek is the place to go for tourists and vacationers wanting to take part in a traditional Door County fish boil. From May through October, the White Gull hosts three boils a night, four nights a week. During the winter, they have only one boil a week, on Friday night. Since only the hard-core populace of the peninsula is crazy enough to think that standing around a giant cauldron of potatoes and fish bubbling over a big open fire in twenty-degree weather is fun, most of the
wintertime guests are locals.

  There were about fifty people in the crowd, and we knew quite a few of them. It was almost like going to a neighborhood party. Father Damon was there with his brother, Bill, who had driven up from Eau Claire for the weekend, and Mrs. Lieshout was there, too, with her husband, Lars, and her in-laws. We saw Mr. and Mrs. DeVine too. They told me they came to the boil almost every Friday night. “Only during the winter, though,” Mrs. DeVine said. “Too many people in summer, but when the snow comes, I’m looking for any excuse to get out of the house.”

  “And away from the kids,” Mr. DeVine added, smiling as he put an arm around his wife’s waist.

  I spotted Celia standing off to one side with a burly, almost hulking man who was holding a tumbler of brown liquor. I figured he must be her boyfriend, Pat. I considered going over to say hello, but they seemed to be in the middle of an intense, somewhat unpleasant conversation. Celia looked up with shiny, tear-filled eyes and warned me off, so I decided to stay put.

  The rest of us stood around the fire pit, bundled up in sweaters, boots, and hats, holding steaming cups of hot cider or something stronger in our gloved hands as we chatted with our neighbors and watched the white-haired boil master stand crackling cedar logs vertically against the sides of the cylindrical pot so the boil would stay strong even after he added pounds and pounds of red potatoes and fish, and at least a couple of quarts of salt to the water.

  The heat of the fire was intense, the yellow-gold glow of the flames piercing the darkness and casting dancing shadows across the faces of the people and the silhouetted circle of surrounding trees. The million stars in the sharp cold of the winter sky sparkled brilliant and bright, like scattered diamonds on an infinite field of black velvet. It was beautiful and sort of mystical, possibly even a little bit pagan, like a solstice celebration in the palace of some ancient Viking king.