“No.” He shook his head and opened his backpack. “No joke. I don’t make jokes about poisonous snakes.”
“You mean, there really are rattlesnakes around here?” She cast dubious glances at the ground.
“Sure. You’re in the woods.” He looked up and saw her uncertainty. “It’s okay. I checked. It’s safe.”
She sat but looked uncomfortable.
“So how do you feel?” he asked.
“Seriously?” She looked up at him and he nodded. “I’m tired, I’m hungry, thirsty, and I do not like snakes.”
“Other than that, what do you think of the view?”
“It’s beautiful,” she admitted.
She looked out across a green valley. Overhead a hawk circled, and in the trees somewhere behind them, a bird was singing. “I do understand why people like to do this. Other people, though, not necessarily me.”
He took off his backpack, opened it, and handed her a bottle of water.
“Don’t drink it too quickly,” he warned. “Just sip it.”
She did her best not to chug it. It was lukewarm but tasted wonderful. Amazing how good water can taste when you are truly thirsty.
“And look, Ness.” He pointed off to her right and grabbed her hand. “That’s a bald eagle. Look at the wingspread …”
“Oh.” She stared at the huge bird that had soared up from below the rocks. “I’ve never seen one that close. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one at all. It’s … it’s breathtaking.”
They watched it rise, then glide across the valley.
“That was a moment.” She smiled up at him. “One I will remember for a long time.”
“Good.” He squeezed her hand. “Now, are you ready for lunch?”
“Oh my God, I thought you’d never ask.” She leaned back on her elbows and held her face up to the sun.
“Here you go.” He put something in her hand.
She opened her eyes and looked down.
“Normally, I’d be the last person to turn down a candy bar,” she told him, “but I’m starving and I need real food, so I hope you have something fabulous in that backpack of yours.”
“It’s not a candy bar, it’s an energy bar. And it is lunch.”
“This”—she held up the wrapped bar—“is lunch? I walked for two hours and this is all I get?”
He nodded calmly.
“See all the good stuff it has in it?” He turned the bar over and pointed to the list of ingredients but she appeared not to notice. He shrugged, then unwrapped his bar, took a bite, and began to chew. “It’s really good. Honest. I take them out on the trail with me all the time.”
“Why don’t we have real food?”
“Because it’s easier, more convenient, and certainly lighter in weight. You’re getting all that your body needs between the nutrition in the bar and the water.”
She continued to stare at him.
Finally she said, “Grady, do you remember when we were making cookies at my house before the wedding?”
“Sure.”
“And you said that Mia didn’t know you had a job and if I promised not to tell her that you’d buy my silence—your words—with anything I wanted?”
“Right.”
“Well, I never told her, so the offer is still good. I mean, it’s still open, right?”
“Uh-huh.” He took another bite. If he was worried about where this was leading, it didn’t show.
“And it was anything I wanted, right?”
“That was the deal.”
“Here.” She held out her energy bar. “You’re going to need it.”
“Why?” He frowned and took the last bite of his.
“Because I know what I want.”
“I always pay up. Go ahead. What is it?”
“I want you to carry me down off this damned mountain and buy me a burger.”
For my dad and my brother—who both passed on in the last months of 2009, and who are loved and missed every day. And for Elliot, whose birth reminds us that life does indeed go on, and that the chain remains unbroken.
Many thanks to:
Those incredible folks at Ballantine Books for their support, encouragement, and enthusiasm—Linda Marrow, Libby McGuire, Scott Shannon, Kim Hovey—and Kate Collins, my fabulous editor, whose guidance has made every one of my books better; Scott Biel, for coming up with the beautiful covers that are so right for these stories; and last but not least—the long-suffering production staff.
The lovely Grace Sinclair, whose winning of a drawing at Country Meadows Retirement Village in Hershey, PA, inspired a character.
Victoria Alexander, who saved me from reinventing the wheel. When I told her I wanted to write a series set in a small town filled with interesting characters on the Chesapeake, she reminded me that I already had a little town on the Bay filled with interesting characters (St. Dennis from Last Words) and I should set my new series there and write more about the characters I already had. So I did.
And as always, St. Loretta the Divine.
Home Again is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Ballantine Books Mass Market Original
Copyright © 2010 by Marti Robb
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52036-4
www.ballantinebooks.com
v3.0_r1
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
Home Again
Title Page
Copyright
First Page
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Dedication
Acknowledgments
July 13, 1983
Diary ~
Another sunny summer day in sleepy St. Dennis. Spent the morning at the Inn helping the housekeeping staff wash the bed linens, and the afternoon washing the lunch dishes and trying to keep my children out of trouble. Oh, the glamorous life of an innkeeper on the Chesapeake Bay!
Oh—one exciting thing did happen! Over the weekend, Beryl Eberle—the fabulous actress Beryl Townsend, for anyone in St. Dennis who’s been under a rock for the past quarter century—came back and opened up her family’s home as if she intended to stay awhile. I was at the market early in the week and overhead one of the clerks mention that Beryl—Berry, to those of us who have been lucky enough to have known her forever—had called in an order that morning and he was getting ready to deliver it, and just which of those big old houses out on River Road was hers? (I was able to tell him, of course.) There was a time when she and my cousin Archer were sweet on each other, but she’s a huge movie star and he’s a country lawyer, so anyone could tell that was going nowhere.
Anyway. Berry’s nephew Ned had a fatal heart attack and died very suddenly two weeks ago. Berry, of course, dropped everything and flew from California straight to New Jersey, where Ned lived with his family. Berry is taking Ned’s children for the summer. Imagine Berry—who never had a child of her own, and, as far as I know, never missed the experience—having full responsibi
lity for a seven-year-old boy and an eleven-year-old girl for the rest of the summer. Yes, I said full responsibility: It appears that while Roberta did bring the children to St. Dennis, she returned to New Jersey—alone—the following morning.
Word has it that Berry had to back out of a movie she was to begin filming to spend the summer here with her grand-niece and -nephew. While many in town have expressed surprise over this, I do not. Berry adored Ned—he was clearly her favorite of her siblings’ children. It should be an interesting summer.
~ Grace ~
P.S. I spotted the children with Berry at the park today. The little boy has hellion written all over his face; the girl looks lost and sad and is very quiet. Berry will have her hands full this summer, no doubt about that.
Prologue
July 18, 1983
Everything in Dallas MacGregor’s life was wrong and she wanted to die. At least if she died, she’d be with her father, and the taunts of these hateful people wouldn’t matter. Her mother had promised her a summer of fun with lots of new friends at her great-aunt’s beautiful house by the beach, but she’d lied. She’d lied about everything.
There was no beach here, no ocean, just the Bay, and the river, neither of which had what a girl from New Jersey considered a proper beach, so that was lie number one. Lie number two: She hadn’t had a minute of fun since they arrived here in St. Dennis. Lie number three: The kids here all hated her and called her names like Pudge and Chub. And her great-aunt Berry’s house was like a museum. All the furniture was old and stiff and uncomfortable and there was only one small television, which her great-aunt rarely turned on except to let Dallas’s little brother, Wade, watch Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood or Sesame Street. What fun was there in any of that?
Dallas threw herself down on the riverbank and sobbed. Even if she died, no one would care. Why, she could walk right into that river and drown and it would probably take weeks before someone missed her. Yeah, no one would even realize she was gone until her mother came at the end of the summer to pick up her and Wade.
Except maybe Wade. He’d probably miss her some.
The thought of her little brother missing her—maybe even crying for her—made her cry even harder. He was only seven, and he still didn’t really understand that his father wasn’t coming back or why. For that matter, neither did Dallas.
It was bad enough that her father had died, but dying so suddenly, without even having been sick, had denied his family the chance to say good-bye. Ned MacGregor’s heart attack, at age forty, had come totally without warning. Dallas had gone to the viewing and the funeral with her mother’s sister, Lynette, who’d flown up from Florida as soon as she’d heard, but the still man in the wooden box surrounded by flowers didn’t look anything like her father, even though everyone said it was really him.
Maybe that had been another lie.
And then to have her mother send her and Wade away for the whole rest of the summer … why, that all but made them orphans. Unwanted and alone like Anne Shirley, in Anne of Green Gables. Her eleven-year-old’s sense of drama awakened, she would now be Dallas of … of …
Did Aunt Berry’s house have a name? She wasn’t even sure what a gable was, so it was hard to tell if the house had any of those.
Dallas sat up and wiped the tears from her face with the backs of her hands. Her arms wrapped around her knees, she stared out at the river, feeling immensely sorry for herself. She just wanted someone to tell her why her father had been taken from them, and why her mother seemed so far away even before they left home to come here, and why she’d left her son and daughter in St. Dennis when she returned to Dunellen where they lived.
Her father had always told her that the only stupid question was the one you didn’t ask when you didn’t know, but what if you ask and no one has an answer that makes any sense? Her mother certainly hadn’t made any sense when she told Dallas she just wanted “you kids to have a good summer and enjoy yourselves.” Obviously another lie.
Dallas began to sob again, so loudly that she didn’t hear the girls who had parked their bikes under the trees and were creeping up behind her.
“Look at the crybaby, crying like a baby.” One of the girls stood in front of Dallas, her fists on her hips, her face an ugly mask of derision. “Do you do anything but cry, little baby?”
“ ‘My daddy died, boo-hoo,’ ” one of the others mocked, rubbing her eyes.
“Maybe you should be riding that bike instead of sitting around,” the girl to Dallas’s left taunted. “Maybe you wouldn’t be such a pudge.”
Dallas’s stomach clenched, and for a moment, she was afraid she’d throw up. She tried to think of something to say that would make them shut up and go away, but there were five of them and only one of her, and humiliation had clouded her mind and cut off all hope of coming up with something smart or clever to say.
“Go away,” was the only thing she could think of. “Just go away and leave me alone.”
“Who’s gonna make us?” The girl who was standing behind Dallas poked her in the back.
“Maybe I will.”
The boy had come out of nowhere, but he walked up the riverbank with a fishing rod in one hand and a bucket in the other. “Brooke, why don’t you take your stupid friends and just get lost?”
“Or what, Grant?” A girl with dark blond hair in a long ponytail stepped out from behind Dallas.
“Or maybe I’ll toss this bucket of worms on you.” The boy held up the bucket.
“You wouldn’t dare.” She smirked.
He did.
The girls screamed, swatted the worms away, and ran for their bikes. When the girl who’d issued the dare reached the trees, she turned around and called back over her shoulder in a singsong voice, “Grant’s in love with Pudge!” and the others took up the chant.
The boy ignored them and sat down next to Dallas on the ground. For a long time he didn’t speak. When he did, he said, “You ever been fishing?”
Still so embarrassed she dared not speak, she shook her head no.
“Come on down by the water.” He stood. “If you want to, that is.”
Dallas couldn’t tell him that all she really wanted was to go home and have things be the way they used to be, with her mother and father and brother, so she didn’t say anything. He walked down to the river’s edge and sat on the bank and threaded a worm onto the hook that was hanging from the rod’s line. He turned to look over his shoulder before casting the hook out into the river with a flick of his wrist. She sat and watched while time and again he reeled in the line, only to put another worm on the hook to replace the one that was missing, and cast back out again.
“Why do you keep doing that?” she called to him.
“What?” He half turned. “I can’t hear you. Come down here if you want to ask me something.”
She hesitated, then looked behind her and found the taunting chorus had disappeared. She got up and joined him. “I asked you why you keep putting more worms on that hook and throwing it back into the river.”
He shrugged. “I figure something out there must be eating the bait but is smart enough to avoid getting hooked. Maybe it’ll get careless and take the hook one of these times.”
“Maybe you’ll keep losing your worms.”
“Maybe. Plenty more where they came from.”
They sat for a few minutes in silence, then he asked, “How old are you?”
She looked up into his eyes. “Eleven.”
“You’re small for eleven. I’m almost twelve.”
“Maybe you’re big for almost twelve,” she said, and he smiled, the ends of his mouth turning up.
“I am. Everyone says so.”
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Grant. What’s yours?”
“Dallas,” she told him. “Dallas MacGregor.”
“You’re Miss B’s niece, aren’t you?”
“Grandniece,” she corrected him. “Aunt Berry is my dad’s aunt.” Her throat co
nstricted just to say the word “dad.” When it passed, she asked, “Do you know Aunt Berry?”
“Everybody knows her. She’s a famous movie star. She’s the only famous person who ever lived in St. Dennis.”
He looked down into her face and stared at her for a moment, then said, “You do know that she’s a famous movie star, don’t you?”
“Of course. I’m not stupid.” She frowned. “She’s my aunt. Great-aunt.”
“No one thinks you’re stupid,” he told her.
“Those girls do,” she said softly.
“Those girls who were here before?” He shrugged. “They don’t know anything. None of them do.”
“Do you go to school with them?”
“Uh-huh. They were all in my class this year.” He reeled in the line and started over.
“Why were they mean to me?” she whispered.
“They’re mean to everyone. Especially Brooke.”
“Are they mean to you?”
He laughed. “Like I would care.”
She wanted to thank him for making himself a target for her sake, but couldn’t figure out the right way to say it. Thank you for making them stop calling me names? It just sounded dumb so she didn’t try.
“Why did you chase them away?”
“Because I hate it when people are mean and say mean things for no reason at all.”
They sat in silence again. Finally, Dallas heard herself say, “My father died. He had a heart attack and died while I was at camp.”
“I know.”
“Everyone says I’ll see him again when I get to heaven, but I don’t know where heaven is. People say it’s up there”—she pointed toward the sky—“but if they’ve never been there, how would they know?”
“I don’t think grown-ups know as much as they pretend.”
“Where do you think heaven is?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I think it’s wherever God wants it to be. He doesn’t have to tell us where.”
She thought this over and it made sense. It was the first thing that had in weeks.
The Chesapeake Diaries Series 7-Book Bundle: Coming HOme, Home Again, Almost Home, Hometown Girl, Home for the Summer, The Long Way Home, At the River's Edge Page 30