Lynn and the other two girls walked over to wash their hands in the bucket provided for that purpose. The Feldman brothers headed off together to who-knew-where.
Good riddance, Lynn thought.
“Isn’t Jess a babe?” Jenny said to Melody, who stood behind her in line. Lynn, behind Melody, barely managed not to roll her eyes.
“Bodacious,” Melody agreed. Glancing around at Lynn, she added, “Don’t you think so, Mrs. Nelson?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Lynn said dryly, relieved to see Rory, clad now in dry jeans and a zip-up gray sweatshirt, crossing the clearing toward them. The half-dozen or so bright yellow geodesic tents were clustered together, and it seemed fair to speculate that Jess Feldman had gone inside one to change his wet jeans too. The idea of her hormone-jazzed daughter in close proximity to the object of her latest crush while both changed clothes was not conducive to motherly calm, to say the least.
“What are you guys talking about?” Rory asked her friends as she joined them.
“Jess Feldman,” Melody said. “Your mother thinks he’s an absolute babe.”
“She does?” Rory turned wide eyes on her parent as Jenny reached the bucket and began washing her hands.
Lynn couldn’t help it. This time she did roll her eyes. “Oh, a hunk.”
“Well, I think so,” Rory said, lifting her chin. Lynn could tell that Rory thought her mother was hopelessly old, hopelessly dull, and just hopeless, period. The other girls sent Rory commiserating looks.
“Don’t you think he’s kind of too mature for us?” Melody asked her friends as she took a turn washing her hands. That piece of good sense would have impressed Lynn had not the three girls exchanged glances, said, “Nah!” in the same breath, and burst into giggles.
“You girls better hurry if you want to eat!” called Pat Greer from the head of the chow line. The food and other necessities had been brought in by four-wheel drive—a red Jeep Grand Cherokee, to be precise. The vehicle, which had taken a different, presumably more accessible route to the campsite, had been waiting when they arrived. Now tantalizing smells of barbecue and baked beans emanated from kettles suspended over the largest of the fires.
“We’re coming!”
Melody handed Lynn the soap, and she and Jenny dashed off. Lynn passed the soap to Rory, electing to wait to wash her hands until after her daughter had finished.
Left alone with her mother, Rory soaped her fingers and cast Lynn a hooded glance. Lynn returned her look without speaking.
“Yes, Mother?” Rory said, her voice dripping sarcasm.
Until this last year Rory had called her Mom, or Mommy, in a warmly loving tone that Lynn had never imagined would change, world without end. When it did Lynn had been caught by surprise. The way Rory said Mother sounded both cold and calculated to wound. Lynn hated to acknowledge that it hurt, but it did.
“You know, it would be really easy for you girls to give Jess Feldman the wrong impression,” Lynn said gently. By referring to “girls” rather than just “you” Lynn hoped to defuse some of the animosity that was bound to result.
“I doubt it.” Rory set the soap down and plunged her hands in the bucket to rinse them. “I already told him I want to have his baby.”
“You told him what?” Lynn knew that revealing maternal consternation to Rory was as fatal as showing fear to a snarling dog, but she couldn’t help it. It just came out.
“I told him I want to have his baby,” Rory repeated with malicious enjoyment.
“Rory Elizabeth,” Lynn said, all but gasping as she fought to recover from this body blow. “You didn’t.”
“You are so lame, Mother.” Rory began to dry her hands. The blue eyes that were so like Lynn’s own glittered with hostility. “Owen’s the one you think is a babe, isn’t he? You really ought to try getting it on with him while we’re here. After all, you only live once, Mother, and you haven’t done it in a long time.”
“Rory!” Shock stole Lynn’s breath. Rory grinned, clearly pleased at the result of her bombshell. Tossing away her paper towel, she snatched up a plate from the stack near the bucket and scampered off to join her friends in the chow line. Left reeling, Lynn watched as Rory, in a characteristic gesture she’d been prone to ever since she was tiny, twisted her long blond hair into a rope over one shoulder while she said something in Jenny’s ear. Melody joined in, and the three girls whispered back and forth, leaving Lynn to wonder what they were talking so animatedly about.
Lynn decided she didn’t want to know.
Recovering enough to plunge her hands into the bucket, Lynn found herself praying that Rory was lying to her. Surely she hadn’t said any such thing to Jess Feldman. Surely she knew better.
“So just how long has it been?” prodded a man’s voice behind her as she dried her hands on a paper towel.
Startled out of her reverie, Lynn glanced over her shoulder to find Jess Feldman, of all unwelcome people. Flannel shirtsleeves rolled up to his brawny elbows, he plunged his hands into the soapy water in the bucket. He was wearing dry jeans now and a different, predominantly blue shirt, but he still looked like Brad Pitt auditioning for the Marlboro Man.
Horrific visions of Rory telling him she wanted to have his baby unspooled across Lynn’s mind.
“How long has what been?” she asked evenly, trying to keep from overreacting before she sorted the mess out in her mind.
“Since you’ve done it,” he said, and grinned.
4
“THAT’S NOT REALLY any of your business, is it?”
If Lynn sounded hostile it was because hostile was exactly how she felt. He’d picked the wrong time to try a come-on with her. She wanted to pound him over the head with the nearest blunt object. Wadding up the paper towel, she aimed it at a nearby bucket earmarked for trash, wishing the paper towel were a rock and the bucket were his head.
The paper wad hit its target with commendable accuracy. Three years as star pitcher on her high school softball team had left a permanent mark: She nearly always hit what she aimed at.
“Hey, I just want you to know, if you’re looking for volunteers I could probably be persuaded.” Jess was still grinning at her as he soaped his hands. Apparently her hostility had not yet made an impression. Lynn wondered if he was too stupid to recognize dislike when it hit him in the face.
Probably. Pretty boys usually were.
“I just bet you could.” She looked him up and down, her gaze cold. “Keep your pants zipped, Romeo, you’re not my type.” Her voice dropped, and her expression turned deadly as he rinsed his hands and reached for a paper towel. “And while we’re on the subject, you’re not my daughter’s type either. She’s only fourteen years old, in case you didn’t know. Jailbait. I’d remember that if I were you.”
“She’s a cute little kid.” Amusement lit his eyes.
Lynn felt her temper ignite. With an effort she held on to a precarious surface cool. “Keep your hands off her. I warn you.”
“If you’re so concerned, you could distract me.” He wadded up his paper towel and tossed it toward the trash bucket. The missile fell short, and Lynn smiled nastily. He had never been a star pitcher, it was clear. He smiled back at her, seeming unperturbed by either her hostility or his missed shot. “Your kid’s cute. You, on the other hand, are hot.”
“And you’re obnoxious.”
“Think so?” Jess walked over to pick up the paper towel and drop it into the bucket, then turned to look at her again, hands sliding into the front pockets of his jeans. “You ought to know that Owen’s just getting over a real bad marriage. He’s vulnerable right now, and the last thing he needs is some sex-starved tourist using him for a vacation fling. I, on the other hand, am heart-whole, fancy-free, and available to satisfy your every desire. Obnoxious or not, if I were you I’d choose me.”
“Sex-starved …” Lynn couldn’t believe her ears. “Are you serious?”
“Serious as a grave. Rory says she thinks you haven’t gotten laid since you
broke up with her dad when she was a baby. She thinks that’s why you’re so crabby all the time.”
“She never said that!”
“Didn’t she?” He grinned tantalizingly.
“No!” Lynn was afraid Rory had said it and the bit about wanting to have his baby too. Lately, sex talk seemed to be a staple of Rory’s conversations.
“Lynn! You better come on if you want to eat! You too, Jess!” Pat Greer called. An outdoorsy, rah-rah type, Pat, with her curly dark hair and round, apple-cheeked face, had already assumed the persona of the expedition’s den mother. Clad in jeans that were a tad too tight across her ample rear and a tied-at-the-waist denim shirt, Pat looked like the kind of mother who was president of the PTA, made home-cooked meals every night, and never exchanged a cross word with her children. The kind of mother, in fact, that Rory wanted Lynn to be.
The kind of mother Lynn felt she should be, and wasn’t.
“Stay away from my daughter,” she said warningly to Jess Feldman. Turning her back on him, she walked toward the main campfire and supper.
Despite all the fresh air, hard physical work, and abundant food, Lynn found she didn’t have much of an appetite. She nibbled at too-spicy barbecue and gummy baked beans, scratched bumps on her neck where the no-see-ums had penetrated the layers of insect repellent slathered on her skin, blinked smoke from her eyes, and in general had the kind of down-home good time promised in Adventure, Inc.’s glossy promotional literature.
Seated around a roaring campfire, you will dine on authentic Western cuisine while you commune with nature.
She couldn’t claim she’d been lied to, Lynn had to admit. She was doing everything the brochure had promised—but it sure had sounded like a lot more fun when she was reading about it in the comfort of her living room.
Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware. She knew that. What had she expected? A horsey, mobile Ritz-Carlton in the wilderness?
Lynn finally gave up on the “authentic Western cuisine” and threw her plate into a dishpan with most of the food uneaten. She looked around for her daughter. If she could just spend some quality time with Rory, the trip—despite all its attendant misery—would be worthwhile. Maybe if they talked enough they could find a bridge across the huge chasm that seemed to be widening between them.
Lynn hoped so. She wanted her little girl back.
Rory, her half-eaten plate of food on her lap, was in a huddle with a group of her friends. Lynn headed toward her.
“Feel like going for a walk after you’ve finished?” Lynn put a conciliatory hand on Rory’s shoulder from behind. Rory glanced up at her.
“Sure,” Rory said, then spoiled it with a gesture encompassing the circle of girls. “With them. We’re going to explore the woods. Jess says it’s perfectly safe as long as we make lots of noise, so the bears or whatever hear us coming. And as long as we don’t go too far.”
“Bears?” Lynn asked, forcing a smile. I meant go for a walk with me, she thought just us two, alone, and you know it. But Rory’s eyes were bright with defiance, and it was clear that she had no intention of changing her plans to accommodate her mother.
Lynn wasn’t going to insist. To do so, she felt, would be counterproductive. But it hurt that Rory preferred the company of her friends to that of her mother.
“They’re out there, Mrs. Nelson. They’re probably watching us right now. That’s why we have to be careful to put the food up at night,” Melody said earnestly.
“Have a good time, then. Be careful,” Lynn said, smoothing a hand over Rory’s hair. It was an automatic gesture, one she had been making for years. Rory jerked her head away, casting an impatient look at her mother.
“Sorry,” Lynn mouthed, knowing how much Rory hated being made to look like a baby in front of her friends. Lynn had learned the hard way that any affectionate gesture from a mother had that effect.
“Leave,” Rory hissed with a brief flash of white teeth (whose straightening had cost the earth) that was apparently supposed to pass for a smile. Before Lynn could respond, Rory was already turning back to her friends.
A reprimand for rudeness sprang to Lynn’s lips, but she swallowed it. Whatever was going on with Rory—whether it was the teenage thing, as Lynn’s mother put it, or something more serious—staging a battle in front of her friends was not going to help.
Lynn accepted her dismissal with a wry quirk of her lips. It was ironic, in a way: in every other aspect of her life she was, by every inner and outward measure, herself a success. How could she be such a failure as a mother?
Knowing that Rory would not appreciate her hovering, Lynn moved away. She saw that Debbie Stapleton was talking to ruddy-faced, stocky Irene Holtman, one of the teachers. Lucy Johnson, the other teacher, a sixtyish woman with stylishly short silver hair, was heading for the tents with a ponytailed brunette in tow. The teenager looked on the verge of tears, and Lynn guessed she’d been stricken by homesickness. Last night, the first of their trip, two other girls had been similarly afflicted. Since the night had been spent at the barrackslike dorm on the Feldmans’ ranch, the entire group had overheard the girls’ misery.
Rory wouldn’t have suffered from homesickness had her mother not come with her, Lynn felt sure. Lately, Rory seemed most pleased to be wherever home wasn’t.
A quartet of girls assigned to KP for the night was washing dishes in a pair of rubber dishpans. Pat Greer was tidying up the campsite, picking up trash, rescuing a forgotten sweatshirt from a tree limb, helping the outfitters Bob and Ernst who’d been in charge of supper pack uneaten food into the back of the Jeep. Pat’s daughter, Katie, stayed close by her mother’s side, helping her—cheerfully. Of course, since Pat was the perfect mother, she would have no problems with her daughter.
Lynn glanced at Rory again and felt now-familiar twinges of helplessness and inadequacy. She loved her child desperately and had tried her best to be a good mother, but somehow their relationship had gone awry. She had hoped this trip would help put things right between them. But far from improving, their relationship just seemed to be going from bad to worse.
What she craved was a cigarette, a vice that Rory deplored and that Lynn was quite unable to give up. A habit of twenty-some years’ duration was not easily kicked, Lynn had found. Besides, smoking helped her stay slim.
Every time she thought about the twenty pounds she would almost certainly gain if she succeeded in quitting, she lit another cigarette. In her line of work smoking was pure self-defense.
She skirted the edges of the clearing, afraid that if Pat saw her she would be drafted for some project or other and not feeling up to putting on a show of cheerful industry at the moment. Lynn found a lonely hay bale and sank down upon it. Sitting brought pain with it—but so did not sitting. It just hurt in different places.
Wriggling around to find the most comfortable position, Lynn finally ended up perched on the edge of the bale with her legs crossed at the knees. Not that that position didn’t hurt. It merely hurt less than any other she tried.
Extracting her lighter and cigarettes from the pocket of her windbreaker, Lynn lit a cigarette and inhaled.
“How’re the sore muscles?”
Lynn looked up to find Owen standing over her. It was full night now, and the air had cooled dramatically, even though this was the third week of June. She took another drag on her cigarette, started to stub it out, then thought better of it and defiantly inhaled again. Why should she feel guilty about smoking, especially out here in the open air? The only creatures at risk from her secondhand smoke were the no-see-ums, and she could only pray they choked.
“Sore,” she said, and smiled. As if her smile were an invitation he sat down beside her. What Lynn really wanted, needed, was to be alone. But Owen seemed like a nice enough guy, even if he did have a prick for a brother. Politeness wouldn’t kill her, she decided.
“You tried that liniment yet?” Owen’s denim-jacketed elbows rested on his blue-jeaned knees as he glanced at her. The orange lig
ht cast by the fire ended some yards away; shifting shadows made it hard to read his expression. Somewhere in the darkness a pony whickered and stomped its feet, echoed by its fellows, one after the other. The forest rustled endlessly. The smell of smoke and barbecued ribs drifted in the air.
“Not yet. I thought I’d use it before I went to sleep.” Lynn patted the too-quaint can in her pocket.
“Good idea. The stuff works better than any insect repellent to help ward off the creepy-crawlies.”
“What kind of creepy-crawlies?” The idea of things scuttling around in the dark while she lay sleeping made Lynn uneasy.
“You name it, and it’s probably out here.” Owen grinned. “What’s a camping trip without bugs and spiders and snakes and—”
Lynn held up a hand to shut him up. “I’d love to find out.” She took another drag on her cigarette.
“Can I bum a cigarette off you?”
“You smoke?” Lynn glanced at him in surprise.
“Yeah.” He accepted the cigarette and lighter she held out to him and lit up. “I quit for years. After—a few months ago I started up again. It helps me to relax.”
“Me too.” He passed her lighter back. Lynn dropped it in her pocket with her cigarettes.
“You enjoying the trip so far?”
“Oh, I’m loving every minute of it.”
Owen laughed. “Why do I get the impression that the great outdoors is not your thing?”
“Maybe because it’s not.”
“Jess said you’re on TV. He said you’ve got some kind of real glamorous job.”
Lynn’s eyes narrowed as she slowly exhaled smoke. “I don’t know how Jess would know—oh, Rory, I guess—but I’m an anchorwoman for WMAQ in Chicago. Believe me, it’s not particularly glamorous.”
“You been doing it long?”
“Four years.”
“Oh, yeah? How’d you get a job like that?”
“I majored in communications at Indiana University. While I was still in school I started working as a gopher for a station in Indianapolis. When I graduated I got a job as a reporter for a station in Evansville. From there I went to Peoria as a weekend anchor, and from there I went to Chicago to work for WMAQ. Voilà.” It was an oft-asked question. Lynn’s bare-bones response had been whittled down over years of answering.
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