The Winter Lodge

by Susan Wiggs

  “What’s up with the Band-Aids?” he asked Rourke.

  “Trent,” was all Rourke said. It was all he had to say. Joey got it.

  Jenny Majesky didn’t even seem to mind that Joey was filthy and sweating. “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “Does a bear crap in the woods?” Joey replied.

  “I guess you’d know,” she said, and headed to the racks in the back of the truck. “Maple bars,” she said. “They’re my favorites.” She handed one to him and then one to Rourke.

  “Thanks,” he said, but Joey was already gabbing away, some story about seeing the red eyes of wild animals at night.

  And Rourke’s heart sank. Because it was already too late. Now Joey was checking her out, too. And Rourke knew that when two best friends wanted the same thing, it could only mean trouble.

  Chapter Seven

  July 3, 1988

  Dear Mom,

  This morning I was working behind the counter so Laura could get caught up on the books. When I was little, I used to feel really important, standing on a step stool behind the curved glass cases while people agonized over their choices. Kolache or cruller? Napoleon or cream puff? I suppose you could say it gave me a sense of power, having what they want so bad. Badly. I always get the -ly words mixed up, sorry.

  And then this morning the Alger family came in, Mr. and Mrs. Alger and their little boy, Zach, who is about as cute as a kid on a Cheerios commercial. They have a big house up on the River Road and a new car every year.

  They make me uncomfortable for several reasons. The top three are:

  They are just a totally normal family, so traditional, it makes me feel like a freak, because our own family is so totally not traditional.

  Mr. Alger is always asking me if I remember stuff about you, even though everybody in town knows I was really little when you took off. I would probably be carted off to the tee-hee farm if people knew all these diary entries are letters to you. But then again, maybe not. Anne Frank called her diary “Dear Kitty” so maybe it’s not that weird for me to call mine “Dear Mom.”

  Mrs. Alger feels sorry for me, and she doesn’t even try to hide it. I hate that. I hate it anytime somebody thinks I’m this pathetic orphan and starts feeling sorry for me.

  As soon as they left, I told Gram and Laura I wanted to do deliveries with Grandpa on the afternoon run. I had to get out. Because sometimes the bakery smells like safety—warm and sweet. But other times, like today, that same smell presses down on me and it’s hard to breathe.

  “Such a glorious summer day,” Laura said. “You should be out in the fresh air.”

  Laura always understands me. She says she’s like a second mom to me but that’s not quite right. In order to have a second mom, I’d need a first, and I don’t have that. I tell people you are doing undercover work for the government. When I was little, I thought they believed me but now I can see it in their faces—people think you took off and never came back because you didn’t want the trouble of raising a kid by yourself.

  Well, you know what? I’m really not that much trouble. Ask anybody.

  Like today, Grandpa was happy to let me ride along in the truck. He just retired from the glassworks down in Kingston. He’s hard of hearing on account of the noise at the plant. Now he helps out at the bakery and, every chance he gets, he goes fishing at Willow Lake. He’s friends with Mr. Bellamy, who owns the lake and Camp Kioga.

  Fishing is Grandpa’s passion, and he does it year round, even in the dead of winter, when he has to walk out on the frozen lake and make a hole in the ice that’s a foot thick. Sometimes he has to borrow a snowmobile to get up to Willow Lake because the roads aren’t plowed. He says he likes being all by himself in the middle of nowhere.

  Sometimes I go with him, but to me fishing is Boring with a capital B. I mean, you sit and wait for some random fish to take the bait, and then you yank it out of the water, take it home, fillet and eat it. What a lot of trouble when you can just open a can of tuna from the pantry anytime you want.

  When I say this to Grandpa, he chuckles and says mój misiaczku, which as you probably know means my little bear in Polish. He tells me fishing is not about what you take from the water. It’s about what you give to the silence. Or something like that. It sounds better in Polish. Here’s the funny thing about Grandpa. When he talks in English, he sounds like Yoda. He really does. And with his bald head that only has, like, nine hairs sprouting from it, he kind of looks like Yoda.

  So I try not to squirm too much when he takes me fishing. Mostly, I daydream the usual daydream (I’ve told you about this before) of moving to the city and being a famous writer, and one day I’m having a book signing and my fans are lined up out the door, like I’m Judy Blume or R.L. Stine. And that’s when I look up from signing books and there you are, Mom, looking just like you do in the pictures, and you smile and tell me how proud you are of me.

  And I don’t even ask you where you’ve been all these years and why you went away, because it’s my daydream and I know there’s no good explanation or excuse, so the subject doesn’t even come up. We just go for a Cherry Coke or egg cream, and we go shoe shopping and everything is perfect.

  When he’s fishing, Grandpa thinks about you, too, but not the way I do. He thinks about the past, when you used to be his daughter. He tells me how you loved fishing as much as he did and even when you grew up and had me, you would still go fishing with him.

  He said you made your own sinkers at night in the kitchen, melting the solder—which has a low boiling point, which I know because we studied chemistry in school—over the stove and pouring it into the molds shaped like upside-down pyramids while the radio played.

  And that’s when I start to remember, just a little. Okay, maybe it’s not an actual memory, maybe I just think I remember because Grandpa has told me the story so many times. I’m in the kitchen, sitting at the scrubbed pine table that smells like kitchen Lysol. And you’re standing at the stove and singing to the radio. I even know what song you’re singing because it’s the Jenny song. It really is: “867-5309/Jenny,” by Tommy Tutone.

  Jenny is an okay name, I guess. Even though the guy singing the song got it off a bathroom wall.

  But really, it’s kind of a happy, bouncy tune and I have a perfect memory of you with your hair held back in a butterfly clip, wearing one of Gram’s aprons, singing along while you make fishing sinkers.

  At some point in the memory, Gram comes in and she scolds you for using her good gravy pan and now it’s contaminated and she’ll have to go out and get a new pan.

  I remember your laugh and the sparkle in your eyes when you say, “Ma, I’ll buy you a hundred gravy pans! And a servant to make the gravy, and another to pour it on your potatoes. I’ll buy you anything you want!” And then you pick me up and we dance around the room with the Jenny song playing on the radio.

  I think that might be my last memory of you. I don’t know how much of it is real and how much of it I made up. But I do know all the sinkers you made are still in the bottom of Grandpa’s tackle box. He never uses them. He uses shot pellets instead. He says the ones you made are too heavy and besides, he doesn’t want to lose them.

  Like hanging on to something you made is going to bring you back.

  Today Grandpa had a delivery to make to Camp Kioga. In the summer, they’re our best customer because they have like a few hundred kids at their summer camp. It was one of those blue-sky-perfect days, and I was glad to be out on deliveries with Grandpa instead of cooped up at the bakery. At the camp, he went inside and I was just sitting, listening to the radio, WKRW, which plays oldies. And you’ll never guess which song came on: “867-5309/Jenny.”

  I took it as a sign.

  It turned out to be a bad sign because three boys from the camp started stealing from the back of the truck. When I first saw
them, I got confused. I mean, I’ve never been stolen from before. It felt really...icky. Like someone was doing something directly to me. I’m feeling icky just remembering.

  I’m also very sorry to tell you that I got scared. I almost chickened out and slid down to the floor of the truck to hide until they stole everything they wanted and went away.

  There, I admit it. I was scared. What a baby.

  In social studies, I once wrote a report on Eleanor Roosevelt and she said a lot of famous quotes. One of them I memorized is this: “We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face.”

  (I get straight A’s in school, did I tell you?)

  And when I was sitting there frozen while those kids were stealing from the back of the truck, I remembered those words exactly. And I was like, Okay, Eleanor, whatever you say, but I’ll probably get my ass kicked.

  I almost did, too. Well, not really. The bullies—they were your typical rich boys, with shiny hair and straight white teeth—they did something else, something I didn’t expect. They made fun of me for working on a bakery truck. And then they started shoving me around, saying, “How about a kiss?” And “I bet you can do more than kiss.”

  The main boy—the one who was calling the shots—pushed me back against the truck and kept trying to kiss me. And here’s the thing: I think about kissing boys all the time. Me and all my friends. We even practice making out with our pillows. So it’s not like this was a big mystery to me.

  Except it wasn’t nice or romantic or fun or anything like I imagined.

  I would rather get my ass kicked.

  I like to think I fought him off but that’s not exactly what happened. What happened was, I was rescued.

  Can I just say, I hate being rescued?

  It’s simply another form of being helpless. One minute I was helpless while El Creepo was trying to kiss me and feel me up. And then the next minute I was helpless while another kid swooped in and took on all three creeps. In about a half a minute, he had them all howling. And, me, I stood by during the fight like the stupidest girl in the stupidest movie ever made. Just stood there biting my knuckles. A total dork.

  If I’d seen me in a movie I would have screamed, “Don’t just stand there, help him, already!”

  I mean, how lame is that, standing there while the kid went berserk? It’s hard to describe but it was kind of mesmerizing, the way he fought. He pounded the biggest kid like the kid was a hunk of meat. I looked down and saw that dots of blood had spattered my feet and legs.

  And finally, I unfroze enough to say something, one word: Stop. Then I said two more words: That’s enough.

  It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. The wild kid raised his hands and got up and stepped away from the guy who tried to kiss me.

  And all three boys ran away like a pack of scalded dogs.

  I was still staring at the boy who had rescued me. I say rescued but did he really? I stood back, eyeing him like something that explodes when you touch it. He was sweating and his face was red but then, almost like magic, a kind of calm came over him. The blue of his eyes changed from hot to cool. The color of his red-flushed face subsided.

  I just stared with my mouth moving like a trout out of water. Because now that he was standing completely still, I could see that this kid was not just your garden-variety camper. This kid was, like, incredibly cute. Like movie-star, magazine-cover cute. He seemed totally different from the maniac who had chased off the others.

  He was staring right back at me. Into my eyes and I think maybe at my mouth. We both got embarrassed at the same time and shuffled our feet. And then I finally found my brains again and gave him the first-aid kit.

  I learned his name is Rourke McKnight. He probably thinks I’ll never go back to Camp Kioga again on deliveries with Grandpa. He’s totally wrong. I’ll go back there every chance I get. Because here’s the thing. I wish you were here, Mom, because this is not the kind of thing I can discuss with Gram. I had a funny feeling, talking to this kid, like butterflies in my stomach—except that it was a good feeling. Maybe I would have talked to him some more and figured out why he made me feel that way, but then this other kid showed up. I was worried at first that he was another bully, but he turned out to be Joey Santini, Rourke’s best friend.

  Okay, so now I’m looking at both of them and thinking, this can’t be happening. They’re both being really really nice but especially Joey, who has the biggest, brownest, softest eyes I ever saw. If he was a girl, those would be cover girl eyes. He kept trying to tell stories to impress me, which was kind of sweet. Now Rourke didn’t seem sweet at all, but for some reason, he’s the one who gave me the butterflies.

  Anyway, I can’t wait to tell Nina. She will have a cow when she hears I just met the two cutest boys at Camp Kioga. Correction: the two cutest boys on the planet.

  * * *

  Jenny’s best friend was Nina Romano. They had met when they were in grade school. Nina was more than a year older than Jenny but they were in the same grade. Nina claimed her mom forgot to enroll her in kindergarten for a whole year on account of there being nine kids in Nina’s family. The fact was, Nina struggled in school, and being from a family that big meant she didn’t get a lot of help with her homework. Mrs. Romano used to show up at the bakery nearly every day, fifteen minutes before closing time. She knew exactly when the day-old bread went on sale for half price.

  Jenny had looked into Nina’s friendly, inquisitive eyes and had seen a kindred spirit. They became the best of friends, migrating seamlessly from Jenny’s house on Maple Street to Nina’s on Elm. Nina loved the peace and quiet of Jenny’s house. She would stop right in the middle of playing Barbies to say “I can hear a clock ticking!” with a reverent sense of wonder.

  Jenny, in turn, loved the noise and chaos of the Romano household. The older the kids got, the louder and more boisterous they became. Somebody was always yelling at somebody else. Tempers flared and subsided like kitchen matches being struck. Jenny adored the life and passion she found there. She was fascinated by the ability of siblings to argue over absolutely nothing.

  “I’d give anything to have a sister,” she said.

  “Count your blessings,” Nina would say, rubbing her head where her big sister Loretta had just pulled her hair. “You do not want a sister. Or a brother.” One time, her brother Carmine had stolen her diary and read it aloud over the school’s PA system when he was supposed to be reading the morning announcements. The prospect of her writing being broadcast like that secretly thrilled Jenny, but she didn’t say so.

  On a summer day the grown-ups had declared a “scorcher,” Jenny and Nina found themselves with nothing to do. They went to the bakery then, which was something Nina loved so much that her pleasure made it seem special to Jenny, too, even though it was as ordinary to her as her own backyard. To Jenny’s surprise, they found about a dozen little girls in the bakery kitchen, all lined up in the prep area. Laura Tuttle explained that it was Parents’ Weekend at Camp Kioga. The parents of all the campers came from far and wide for a visit, and the camp hosted special outings, like tours of an actual working bakery. It seemed people had an endless fascination with how a simple loaf of bread came into being.

  The girls were wearing red shorts and gray T-shirts with the Camp Kioga logo. Their parents—the mothers in crisp, sleeveless blouses and the fathers in golf shirts and Bermuda shorts—stood back, looking on. On each girl’s chest was a sticker that said “Hi! My name is...” followed by what Jenny considered rich-girl names—Ondine and Jacqueline, Brooke and Blythe and Garamond. Dare and Lolly.

  “We’re the Fledglings,” the perky counselor “—Hi! My name is Buffy—” was telling Laura. “That means we’re in the eight-to-eleven age group. And it also means we get to do the best field trips, don’t we, Fledglings?”

  Th
e girls chirped in reply.

  Jenny and Nina clapped their hands over their mouths to keep from laughing aloud. A chubby blond girl at the end of the line lingered near Jenny. While the rest of the group checked out the prep area, she said, “I’m Olivia Bellamy.”

  “Hi, Olivia,” Jenny said, though she observed that the name tag read “Lolly.”

  She glanced over at a tall, serious-looking man who stood with the other visiting parents. He had sandy hair and light eyes, and he seemed to be wishing he could be anywhere but crammed into a bakery prep area. The girl glanced at him and whispered, “My parents are getting a divorce.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jenny said awkwardly. Sometimes kids were funny, telling their secrets to strangers the way Jenny told them to her diary. “Have a donut, Olivia.”

  Laura clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention. “My name is Miss Tuttle,” she said. “Let me show you around, and then we’ll have a cookie tasting.”

  Bored, Jenny and Nina helped themselves to fountain lemonade from behind the counter and headed outside. They could easily pick out the Camp Kioga parents. They didn’t wear uniforms like the campers, but they were all creased and expensive-looking, as though they’d spent hours trying to achieve that casual air. The kids in camp colors swarmed the town in packs, showing off the town to their parents.

  Jenny immediately spotted Rourke McKnight, off by himself. And he was looking right at her.

  Okay, she thought. Now what? Decision time. She could pretend she hadn’t seen him. Or she could act like his friend.

  “Come on,” she said to Nina. “There’s someone I want you to meet.” Maybe she would go with Rourke, and Nina would go with Joey, and the four of them would be friends forever. How cool would that be? Except Nina wouldn’t be interested. She had a secret boyfriend who went to the prep school in the next town. She had to keep him a secret because she said her brothers would rearrange his face if they found out, because they considered her way too young for a boyfriend.