“I got one!” The canoe wobbled. “Oh, nuts, I lost it. Oh, well.” The canoe wobbled slightly again as Angela cast her line out.
Judith smiled. No, that was not the same thing at all as an interruption at Rutherford House. That was simply joy being expressed out loud. She watched the loon.
But then her attention turned to a flat line of ripples approaching across the lake, a curious thing. The line was quite straight. And behind it the water was really bumpy.
“Angela? Turn us around and let’s head back. You can fish from closer to shore.”
“But I don’t…well, I suppose, if you want.” The canoe wobbled. “Okay, Judith, you hold your paddle in the water straight up and down; don’t paddle, just hold it there; and I’ll paddle and turn us around.”
The line in the water was approaching quickly. And then it was here; it hit the canoe at an angle and they almost went over. From practically no wind to lots of wind instantly.
“Paddle! Paddle!” Angela cried.
Judith paddled! They were now positioned nose toward the shore, but the wind was driving them backward. They weren’t approaching shore; they were getting farther out.
The wind picked up more.
“Maybe we should just turn around and paddle for the far shore,” Judith called. “Then when this dies down, we can come back across.”
“I think you’re right! I’ll turn us around.”
Judith set her paddle vertically; she heard splashing and sloshing in back. The canoe began to turn. The wind caught then sideways, and they started to tip away from the wind.
“Lean into it!” Angela yelled. “Lean into it; it’s going to blow us over!”
Judith leaned into the wind. Too late, she realized that was a serious mistake; the wind now had more canoe surface to blow against. It shoved the canoe sideways, and then they were tipping over in a terrifying sort of slow motion. Before she could lean on the other side or something, it was too late.
Angela screamed; Judith screamed; they were in the water!
The water was cold! Ice! It pierced Judith’s clothes instantly. She was soaked to the skin with ice water. She gasped the biggest gasp she had ever gasped.
Angela was gasping, too, but she must have inhaled water; she was choking and coughing.
“Hang on to the canoe!” Judith cried. “Don’t let go of the canoe!”
“It’s going to sink, and…”
“It’s upside down, but it’s still floating; hang onto it!”
Cold! She was so horribly, miserably cold! They had only been in the water a few seconds and already she was shivering uncontrollably.
“Helllllp!” Why was Judith screaming for help? There was no one to hear her; no one ashore and certainly no one out here. And the cold…“Hellllllp!”
Angela managed words in between the coughing. “Help me! I can’t hold on.”
Judith was having trouble hanging on, too. Her hands were too cold to grip, her arms so cold they were stiff. Her legs were numb. Did she have feet? She didn’t feel them. She was never, ever going to be warm again, never. The cold was even in her chest.
The upside-down canoe offered nothing to hang on to; its sides were smooth. Judith had been gripping the edge—the gunwale—but it was underwater, under frigid water. Her fingers were too numb to do that now. She groped underneath and grasped one of the crosspieces. She hooked her left arm over it and sort of locked herself onto it.
With a yelp and a moan, Angela drifted out from the canoe; she’d lost her grip.
Judith grabbed her and pulled her in, curled her free right arm around her, and held her.
“Helllllllp!”
It was raining; not just raining, but a drumming, slamming rain. And the pounding raindrops were curiously warm.
Something nudged into Judith and shoved her head against the canoe. What was happening? Her head went under; she forced it back up.
And suddenly she realized her right arm was empty! Angela was not there!
She wanted to cry out, Angela! Angela! but it came out as “Aaahnsssh…Aaahnshh!” Her mouth and voice no longer obeyed her.
She couldn’t see anything because a huge gray blob right in front of her face blocked out everything. “Aaahnnssh!”
Hands were gripping her, pulling on her. “Let go!” Lynn’s voice. “Let go!”
The words were supposed to be, I can’t! I can’t feel…Angela is drowning! Find Angela! “kkkaahhhnn…Aaaaahnnnsssh…”
“Let go!”
Without doing anything, Judith felt her arm slip free of that crosspiece. She was getting dragged up the side of the gray blob. She fell forward. She realized she was in an extremely awkward position, her cheek pressed against a flat surface, her hind end in the air, and her feet hanging down out there. And she couldn’t move to change it. Besides, she didn’t care anymore. Angela! Find Angela! “Aaahhnnsh…” So cold.
Was that she who was coughing or was it someone else?
Hands gripped her legs and tugged. She was going to slide back into the icy water feetfirst, and she could not move her arms or legs to do anything about it.
“Okay, Lynn, we’ve got her.” A man’s voice.
An engine kicked in; it sounded like it was moving away.
Judith could not feel her body parts at all, but she could at last raise her head to see what was going on. That inflatable boat they had seen at the dock was headed for shore. Lynn was operating it. And Angela was curled up beside her! Angela was safe!
And so was Judith. She, too, was in another inflatable being operated by two young men in navy-blue jumpsuits; they were soaking wet and didn’t seem to care. They were all headed for shore, where two aid vans were parked. The vans’ red lights flashed wildly, promising safety.
Who? What? This was all too much for her. And the heavy rain was warm.
They bumped into the dock. Strong arms lifted her up and out and onto a gurney, wheeling her into an aid van. She could hear the other aid van out there leaving, its siren growling up the scale.
“Lynn? Wanna come along?” a young man’s voice asked.
“Sure!” The doors slapped closed, and this van also began to move.
Grinning, Lynn plopped down on a jump seat across from Judith. “That was sure close!”
“Whhhuhhh…?”
“I pulled into the yard and opened the car door. Homer jumped out, barking like mad, and ran out onto the dock. If he hadn’t been barking at you, I would never have seen you two out there. I looked that way just as the canoe turned sideways and broached. Once it was upside down it became just about invisible. So I hopped into the Zodiac and hurried out to get you.”
One of the young men slipped a cone-shaped plastic mask onto Judith’s face. “And she called 911 on her way out.”
“In this lake country,” Lynn explained, “the fire department has a pickup truck with a Zodiac just for on-the-water responses. So we had two boats available, theirs and mine.”
“Whhhuhhh…”
The young man was smiling casually, as if he did this sort of thing every day. Maybe he did. “Your core temperature—the temperature of your innards—is dangerously low. We’re taking you to the emergency room, where they’ll warm you back up safely. You’ll be just fine. So will your fishing buddy in the other van.”
Her fishing buddy. For some reason that struck Judith as particularly funny, but she was too cold to laugh.
Angela was safe. But her new fishing equipment, her gift from her children, was now at the bottom of the lake.
Amend that. Angela was safe physically. But would she ever venture out in a canoe again? For that matter, would Judith?
Absolutely not!
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Angela walked in the library door to be greeted with Mary’s “Oh, am I glad you’re here! It’s a madhouse today, and the shelving is way behind!”
“Good! I like it best when there’s plenty to do.” She tossed her lunch sack into the fridge and hustled out to t
he desk. Behind with reshelving, indeed! Three carts piled high and the drop bin half full.
She had developed a system. She grabbed a cart at random and wheeled it out by the stacks. She set all the books on the cart on end, arranged them more or less numerically or, in the case of fiction, alphabetically. Then she started at one end of the stacks, shelved her way to the other end, and did the fiction around the walls on the way back. She brought the cart back to the desk empty only to find two-foot-high stacks waiting for a cart.
A middle-aged lady with blue hair stepped up to the desk. “I am looking for an inexpensive rental. Can you help? I already bought a paper.”
Their teenaged volunteer on the desk, Chrissa, pointed to Angela. “There’s our real estate pro. She’ll know.”
Angela smiled at the woman. “There is a hair parlor on the edge of town, the Clip Shop.”
“I saw that. Like the name.”
“That’s where I get my hair done. She’s good. Also, she knows everything in the whole world about every person, cat, and dog in this town. Go tell her what you need. I’m confident she can give you some excellent leads.”
“Hairdresser! Of course. I never thought of that, and we have a hairdresser like that where I come from, too. Thank you!” She left beaming.
Chrissa laughed. “So real estate pros send clients to the hairdresser’s.”
“More than that; sometimes we’d take Bess Walberg’s hairdresser along with us on the bus on Sunday afternoon. She knew everything. She helped us sell a couple places that hadn’t even been listed yet.” Angela wheeled out the next cart.
“The bus?” Chrissa asked.
Angela started stacking and sorting. “On Sunday afternoons, Realtors go around to scope out all the open houses, see what’s there. Our agency had seventeen agents. Rather than seventeen of us trying to find parking, we’d just rent a Crown bus for the day. Stock it for the party afterward, of course. Since I rarely drink, I was the designated driver. We’d go—”
“Wait! What?” Over by the monitor, Mary stared at her. “You drive a bus?” She sounded so intense.
Cautiously, Angela replied, “I have a commercial bus endorsement on my driver’s license, yes. Is that bad?”
“It’s wonderful!” Mary snatched up the phone and punched a speed dial number, put it to her ear, waited…“Rose? Remember that volunteer I told you about, Angela? She has a commercial endorsement on her license! We have a driver!” Pause. “Yes!” Pause, pause. “Right away!” She good-byed and thumbed the off button.
Chrissa was helping a patron, so Angela went over to Mary and lowered her voice. “What’s going on?”
“We have a chance to obtain a used bookmobile out of Duluth, but we have to have a qualified driver before we can apply to get it. On the payroll. That driver would have to go over to Duluth, get checked out on the vehicle, and then bring it here.”
“No problem. A bookmobile is just a glorified bus. Or a shamefully huge motor home. When would this happen?”
“A month or two. The system can’t afford to hire a driver separately just for that, so it would have to be someone with library skills.”
“I see. Like when I drove the bus, but I was also one of the Realtors.”
“Exactly! Angela, we want that bookmobile so badly; this Detroit Lakes area has a lot of remote library patrons and some are not computer savvy enough to link into the system. And the children; the bookmobile is so useful in helping children find pleasure in books.”
Angela’s whole world brightened. “On the payroll,” she said. “Well, I’ll gladly help if I can.”
“And since you don’t have small children, you could be on the road a lot with no problems. Out to schools during the week and rural areas on weekends. Perfect! I’ll put together the paperwork to hire you.”
“Hire you”! Woo!
It took Angela another hour to get the reshelving completely caught up, sprinkled in between with answers to patrons’ questions. She stopped by Chrissa. “If you’ll handle the desk another half hour, I’ll take early lunch, and then I can do the desk over lunchtime.”
The girl nodded. “Works for me.”
She walked to the back room, started a pot of fresh coffee, poured the last of the old pot into her supersize mug, and retrieved her lunch from the fridge.
She sat down at the Formica table and got the Letter out of her purse.
Yesterday at dinner, Lynn had said, “I talked to Pastor Evanson for an hour. I told him about our difficulty with forgiveness. He suggested that we start working on it by writing letters to the people we cannot forgive: your father, Judith; Jack; and I am writing two—one to Paul and one to God.”
“Good luck getting them delivered,” Judith had said.
“Oh, not to send. We use them to organize our thoughts. Write them and eventually destroy them.”
So here sat Angela with the Letter. Because her mind worked best in list mode, it was actually the List. She listed all the negatives Jack had generated one way or another and a separate list of all the positives that had come out of this.
Short list of positives. But look at how weighty each item was! Finding her true self. Finding true friendship in Lynn and Judith, something she’d never had before. Much, much less stress. And there were a few frivolous items, too: getting reacquainted with creative cooking; at last having some time to herself; and most of all to rediscover the real Angela, from weight to personal interests, not the phony, dissatisfying, let’s-please-Jack version. None of that would have happened were she still the old Angela.
And as she pondered this, she thought that perhaps she should forgive Jack after all. His motives were selfish, and he obviously didn’t feel like honoring his promise made at the wedding altar, but in the end, he had done her great good. Tonight she would write the Letter itself to him, forgiving him; it was a start.
What would be the next step, then? Lynn would have more ideas about that.
She thought for a few moments about that call from Gwynn days ago and how distraught her daughter had been. She reached for a pencil to add to her list. She had been so wounded by Jack’s perfidy that she had not paused to think about the effect on Charles and Gwynn. The kids were so torn up. On the other hand, what could she do about it? Jack was the one. Always it came back to that. Jack was the one.
And she was furious with him all over again. He was using the children to get to her. After destroying their world, he was using them, sucking them into the mess.
And then she reminded herself that they were her offspring, but they weren’t children, not anymore. They were adults, and they had the power to choose—choose to get sucked in and choose to back off. And yet, she had spent decades raising them; she still had an obligation to them; to herself as their mother, if not them.
So confusing and convoluted and all because Jack…there it was again. Jack.
She studied the Lists, looking for answers that were not there.
Forgiveness. That was the first step. Forgive. She would do that for the children. She even drafted the first paragraph before she put her empty lunch sack in the trash and went back out on the desk.
Chrissa hopped up and headed for the lunchroom. No, the bathroom. Angela took her seat as another patron stepped up to the desk.
Mary appeared an hour later with a fistful of papers. Between checking out books and answering questions, it was five minutes before Angela could see what the papers were.
“All this just to get hired?” Forms. Statements. Tax things. Regulations. Good grief. “Should I do this now or take them home and bring them back to you tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow is fine. Angela, I’m so glad you can do this!”
“Not as glad as I am to be able to do this for you.” She folded them in half, ran back to the lunchroom, and slipped them into her purse. Then back out to the desk.
A towheaded boy stepped up, so short he could probably rest his chin on the desk. “Mrs. Bishop, I have to find out about fur trapping for Cu
b Scouts.”
“Fur trapping. There’s a computer open over there. Let’s go see if we can find you some resources. We’ll also check the shelves. I think we can learn a lot about fur trapping.”
She spent less than five minutes showing him search engines. Being young, he grabbed the concept intuitively and cackled with glee. Then they looked up some book titles in the online catalogue and went to the shelves. Crowing “Wow! This is perfect, Mrs. Bishop!” he checked out four books and left.
Mrs. Bishop. Here was something else to think about. Once the divorce was final, should she keep Bishop or take back her maiden name? How would it affect the kids? She would run it past them both first, that was for sure.
Twenty minutes before closing, she reshelved everything in the carts. She would not leave undone work for the people who opened tomorrow. Then the flurry of checkouts as closing time approached. Finally she could gently shoo out the last of the lingerers.
The cleaning lady, Claire, came in. “Good evening, Angela!”
“Good evening, Claire. How is Doodie?”
“Much better. The incision is healing nicely. And the kids went through the yard very, very carefully, picking up anything he might gulp down. One paper wad blocking his gut was enough.”
“I’m happy to hear it. Have a good evening.”
“You, too.” Claire headed for the janitorial closet and Angela walked out into the night.
And froze. Her mouth dropped open.
Jack.
He stood there smiling. “Angela.”
“What do you want?”
“To talk to you.”
“Talk to my lawyer. That’s what she’s there for.”
“No! I need to talk to you.” He stepped forward quickly and clasped both her hands in his. “I love you, Angela.”
“I love you.” She tried to think of the last time he’d said that. She couldn’t. As far back as she could remember, never had he said that. Could it be that Gwynn was right and he was in fact changed? That he had somehow awakened to what he had lost?
He pressed on. “I saw a little café down the street half a block, a diner, and it’s open all night. Let’s sit down there and talk. That’s all. Just talk.”
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