Summers at Blue Lake Read online

  I let her prattle on before I reminded her that it was a deathwatch and a police action that had kept Travis and me from the event. What I didn’t tell her was that after I had helped Nonna with the cake and Grandma Lena with the photographs, I had gone home and watched the fireworks from the roof of our barn. And even more damning was the fact that I had done it with Travis.

  “BJ, we have got to buy new outfits for Macy’s wedding. What do you wear to a pig roast? I know. We could ride our bikes to Aaron’s to go shopping. Mom said they are having summer clearance.”

  “Summer clearance? It’s only July fifth.” But I knew I would have to do anything Karen said, at least until she forgot the way I ditched her to help out my grandmas.

  That afternoon, with the eighty dollars I had earned as an apprentice, I pedaled with Karen to Aaron’s. To call the clientele snobbish would have left no room to label the women who worked there. With one contemptuous eyebrow raised, the saleswoman asked us if we were lost. Karen brushed her aside and headed for the juniors department.

  “I hope Kendall is here. She is the one who waited on us when Mom and I came here shopping for bathing suits last month.”

  Kendall was there, but Doris got to us first. She showed us to the rack of summer dresses that were marked 25 percent off. I gulped as I fingered the four twenty-dollar bills in my pocket. Nothing on the hangers was going to leave me any change. I would have to skimp on school clothes, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell that to Karen. Her mother had a running account at this store.

  Karen selected a linen jacket in a sophisticated salmon color with matching pin-striped pants. Doris accessorized the outfit with a matching necklace of sculpted wooden beads.

  “These are the latest pieces by Cairo, a jewelry designer from New York. We can’t seem to keep her work in our store.”

  Doris need not have wasted her sales rhetoric on Karen.

  “Cool.”

  I decided on a pair of drop earrings that were on sale and approached the cash register with my weak claim that nothing fit me very well. I wasn’t ashamed of the clothing I already had to wear, but I was embarrassed and a bit jealous of Karen’s access to funds.

  I was dying to tell Karen about Monday night. I didn’t, and I had to be satisfied knowing that her envy would eclipse mine if she knew all that had transpired.

  My grandmothers had stayed to enjoy the wedding reception. They had earned some fun after the day they had. I was so tired after baking and assembling and smiling, that I begged them to allow me to walk home while it was still light outside.

  The sky was dark by the time I got to the front door, but the streetlights illuminated the sidewalks for the final two blocks. I began to hear the rumblings of the celebration by the lake, though the apple tree was blocking the view from the porch. When the sky lit up from the first explosion, I noticed the ladder beside the open barn door. Was somebody there?

  I should have been more afraid, considering the animosity in the neighborhood, but I wasn’t.

  “Who’s up there?” I called.

  “Go away, BJ.” It was Travis, but his voice was funny—hollow almost.

  I didn’t listen to him. Instead I climbed the ladder without my usual fear of heights. Travis sat huddled on the lower roof above the garage doors. He was crying. I didn’t know what to do; I was already at the top of the ladder. To climb down would have seemed insensitive.

  “I’m sorry, Travis. Is it your granddad? Did he…”

  “No. He’s still alive. I just wanted to get away from everybody. This seemed like a good place.”

  I crawled over to join him. I was still wearing my dress from the wedding. My nylons, which had seen their last party, were wadded up in my pocket, and my shoes hung by their heels on the top ladder rung. I didn’t say anything for the longest time. Travis tried to hold his tears back, but he succeeded only in a few dry convulsions. When I put my arms around him, he sank into my lap.

  The first of the fireworks lit up the sky. We could see only the highest, most spectacular explosions. I waited for the rests between displays.

  “How is he?” I smoothed his hair with my fingertips. The dark curls rebounded.

  “They called Mom and me to the hospital at two a.m. His breathing and heart rate were all screwed up. They thought it was the end.” His voice was ragged. Travis sniffed, and the phlegm gurgled in his throat. “We got there, and he was sleeping. Then this morning, he woke up, and he talked to me like he hasn’t talked to me in months. We had an actual conversation.”

  “Did he know who you were?”

  The fireworks lit up the night again and muffled Travis’s answer. I could feel the “Yes, he knew” as I stroked his temple. When I was in Virginia, I had kissed Jimmy at the last school dance, but somehow this felt more intimate.

  More fireworks erupted. I didn’t know what else to say. Travis’s breathing quieted, and I assumed he was watching the sky from between the folds in my skirt. I watched them, too, and wondered if across town the newlyweds were looking out the window atop the bank building. I could picture Nonna and Lena standing side by side, not touching, but wanting to. The newlyweds would kiss and cut the cake. The cake was our hardship, not theirs.

  But we shared the same fireworks. Travis and I watched without speaking until the sky resembled ashes and diamonds on velvet. The wind blew exactly right, and I could smell the fire, the water, and the earth all at once. Travis sat up. My skirt had a damp divot where his head had rested.

  “Are you okay? We can talk about it some more if you want,” I said.

  “I’m done talking. Sick of it. God, BJ, I am a terrible grandson. I wish he would just die already. I didn’t want to talk to him about the Phillies’ chances this year or what I’m going to do when I graduate.”

  “But it might have been the last time you’ll get to speak with him.”

  “Don’t you see?” Travis looked straight into my eyes, just inches away. In the reflected light, his eyes were gold and brown, sad and fervent. “It’s like he was still here all these months just locked away where I couldn’t reach him.”

  A car drove by with the radio blaring. The bass shook the barn. The windows rattled. More cars began the exit parade along Mulberry Street. A jeep, full of fraternity boys, stalled in front of the barn. One of the guys yelled, “Look at this action!”

  His friend joined in, “Keep it up, brother!” They got the engine started and pulled away. Their echo of their laughter and the exhaust fumes lingered to taunt us as they raced down the block.

  Travis and I sat on the roof, continuing to watch the parade of beachgoers as they headed home. We didn’t talk more about his granddad, though I tried my best to distract him with a game of Punchbuggy. We were supposed to punch each other when we saw a Volkswagen Beetle, but Travis’s heart wasn’t in the game, so we descended the ladder. I had tied my skirt between my legs. Travis had to coach me down because I was scared of the height we had climbed. At the bottom, he was silent—neither accepting nor refusing my offer of some lemonade.

  I watched from the porch as he walked toward his home ten blocks away. Even though his figure got smaller with distance, he didn’t leave me. What Travis had emoted that night was so real to me that I dressed myself in it, too. A lavender silk scarf. I tied it tight around my throat and then let it flutter against my collarbone.

  No, I could not tell Karen Sewicky about my night on the roof with Travis. She wouldn’t understand. How to keep Mushmouth Ray from kissing her was as serious a crisis as Karen could handle during summer vacation—that and what to wear to Macy Killian’s wedding. When she harped on the state of my wardrobe, I could not tell her that I was clothed in my friend’s fresh grief.

  ♦ 22 ♦

  2000

  WHEN I SLID INTO the booth at the pub, my drinks were awaiting me, a shot of tequila and a Corona with a twist.

  “This isn’t root beer,” I said to Karen who was already seated across from me.

  “I’ve
got news,” Karen replied grimly.

  I looked from the shot glass to the bottle. “Are we celebrating or drowning our sorrows.”

  “It depends how you look at it.”

  I held up the shot glass. “Okay, hit me.”

  “Guy Christopher, the lawyer I put you in touch with in Michigan?”

  “Yes?”

  “He ran into Bryce over the holiday.”

  “And?”

  “Bryce was with his girlfriend.”

  “Okay.”

  “His very pregnant girlfriend.”

  I carefully lowered my shot glass to the table and waited for a thought to pop into my head. Something to clue me into my feelings. I was drawing a complete blank. Then slowly my consciousness returned to me. I felt a flash of anger, just enough to feel human, but it was clothed unexpectedly in pity.

  “BJ, are you okay?” Karen searched my face for a sign that I understood the implications of what she was telling me.

  “I feel sorry for him,” I whispered.

  “BJ?”

  I looked at Karen. “I feel sorry for her, too. Who wants to have a baby under those conditions? But Bryce? He’s stupid if he thinks he can escape one family and find what he’s searching for in another. I actually feel sorry for the bastard.”

  “You should feel sorry for him. He’s agreed to sign the original settlement agreement. You will have full custody of Sam. You alternate Christmas and Thanksgiving, and Bryce gets Sam for spring break and six weeks during the summer.”

  I grabbed a menu and pretended to be considering my lunch options. Knowing that I’d order my standby, a BLT, gave me the space to think. My emotions were not as simple as anger, as condescending as pity. I needed to sort through years of interaction with this man and make it fit with all the questions I had in my mind. And not the least of these interactions was sex. As much as I would have liked to unhinge myself from any desire for my husband, it was still there, beating like a faraway drum sending me a signal. But what was the message? Two nights ago, I dreamed that Bryce was making love to me in an empty courtroom. The dream left me breathless and mortified. If that didn’t confuse me enough, the following night I had a dream that I murdered Bryce by locking him in a trunk and throwing it in the lake.

  I drank my tequila and felt it burn all the way down to my empty stomach. Let the mind haze begin.

  “The chicken salad is good here. It has almonds in it,” Karen said. She obviously didn’t need a menu, either to order or to camouflage her emotions.

  “Oh, and the waitress told me that the soup was gazpacho.”

  “Hmm.”

  I pretended to be interested in Karen’s words, but they could not draw my mind away from thoughts of Bryce and his pregnant girlfriend. The tequila was working, blurring my thoughts. I remembered telling Bryce that I was pregnant. We had taken a dinner cruise for the anniversary of our first date. Lake Michigan in the spring—it was cold. I had worn my red dress and a new pair of slingbacks with a silver buckle. A band was playing that song “The Lady in Red,” and I felt as if I were momentarily queened. Queasy and queened. My grand coronation was interrupted when I dashed to vomit over the side of the boat. I made it to the railing, but I twisted my ankle in the attempt.

  That night, Bryce had carried me into our house and bed. He kissed me with more tenderness than I had ever experienced before. He kissed my ankle and my belly and my breasts and spots along the way. We made love. Afterward we lay knotted in each other, holding on to that moment before we had to share our joy with everyone else.

  We joked about names. Bryce liked the name Daniel, but his niece’s name was Danielle. “We could still do it. It would really piss off Andrea and drive Mom nuts at the same time. We could kill two birds with one stone.”

  I took one look at his naughty grin, and I swear that I saw a vision of my future son. Then the moment was interrupted. I sprang naked from the bed and heaved into the trash can across the room. Bryce held a towel to my clammy face and wrapped my sweating body in a blanket so I wouldn’t get chilled. I didn’t get sick again for the rest of my pregnancy.

  I wondered now if Bryce’s girlfriend had gotten sick. How had she told him she was pregnant? When? That night he tore down those walls and confessed everything? Had she done it then?

  I felt a breeze on my arms. The air conditioning vent was directly above our table. I looked down at my sleeveless red shirt and rubbed my arms. Here I was again, dressed in red and feeling queasy. More comparisons, my mind kept racing and making the leap, asking the questions. I wondered if Bryce made an association every time his mistress reached a milestone in her pregnancy. Did he go with her to her doctor’s appointments? Had he heard his new child’s heartbeat? Did he drop his hands low on her belly to feel the baby hiccup?

  Bryce had moments of sensitivity. He could not have forgotten. That family dinner at his mother’s house when I first felt the flutter of a kick. Bryce had determined on that day that the baby would be a son. Did he ever tell her, the other woman? Did he relive his past life out loud so she would know who he had been these last years? Maybe he was silent, letting her think this new voyage into parenthood was singular in its magnitude.

  The thoughts and questions didn’t parade by in ceremony. They swirled in an instant and were gone, a vortex which left me numb.

  “BJ?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your order?”

  The waitress stood smiling above me.

  “A BLT, no, make that a tuna melt. That’s all.”

  The waitress reached across the table for our menus, and I could see clear down her shirt. Karen must have caught the awkward expression on my face because she laughed. I looked around at all the businessmen having lunches and wondered if this is how it happens, the other woman. Is it as innocent as that? Catching a whiff of perfume and seeing the rise of a breast.

  Karen returned to the matter at hand. “I got some more information for you, if you’re ready, though I don’t know if it’s going to cheer you up at all.”

  “Okay.”

  “Remember when you asked about Anja changing her will to include Travis? She did that on September twenty-seventh. She said she talked to you on the twenty-sixth. I even wrote it in my notes.”

  September twenty-sixth. The date didn’t ring a bell. I resolved to go home and flip through my sketchbooks. Sometimes I made journal notations in them. If not, maybe I had written something in my day planner.

  “Are you considering contesting the will?” Karen asked.

  “No. Nonna had a reason to give Travis the paintings. I’ll make sure he gets them.” I blushed slightly, and then made a distracted attempt to raise the bottle of beer to my lips.

  “BJ, is there something you aren’t telling me?” Karen paused to watch the color rise to my cheeks. “There is! Come on, girlfriend. What happened with you and Travis out there on the boat?”

  “I am afraid I don’t give that kind of information away after only two drinks.”

  “Bartender,” Karen called out.

  “Don’t waste your money; nothing happened. We talked.” I could see the disappointment sweep across Karen’s face. She patted my hand.

  “Talking is good,” I said.

  “Fucking is better,” Karen rejoined.

  “Karen!”

  “Well, it is. You need a good rebound fling. It might as well be Travis.”

  I blushed again, more completely, telling Karen with my color that I had already had that same thought about the same prize. Who could blame me? It wasn’t often a girl could banish a husband and fulfill her teenage fantasy with one naked transaction.

  “Thanks. I am good for now,” I lied. “But ask me about Travis again after all the papers are signed, and my kid is back here in Pennsylvania with tales of his new baby sister.”

  “Speaking of the kid, where is he?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? My dad drove up from Richmond. He got in last night. It’s been great to have him around, especially fo
r Sam.”

  “Have you told him about the divorce?”

  “Very little. I did some research at the library about how to talk to kids, but I’m waiting until Bryce and I are together.”

  “Not Sam, your dad.”

  “Oh, Dad. Well, I think he suspects, but we are having such a nice time. I don’t know if I want to do it this week.”

  Karen rolled her eyes. “My advice? Do it soon. The baby will be here in September. It will make a heck of a family picture for your Christmas cards.”

  “On second thought, Karen, go ahead and order me that drink.”

  ♦ 23 ♦

  1983

  “DID YOU HEAR about Vera Wagner?”

  “No.”

  “She’s moving to Montana permanently.”

  “No! What about her job?”

  “She’s going to be her grandson’s nanny when his mother goes back to work. And get this—they are building her an apartment off the back of their house.”

  Card club was twice as animated as usual. After the news of Vera Wagner, my grandmothers recounted their rendezvous with the law to which our guests responded by growling in the direction of Mr. Kovack’s house. Later, when he came outside to garden, the women clucked rudely at his bent form, which was visible from our picture window. Predictably the conversation moved on to the Edson-Hollinger wedding and the Hollinger-Kauffman divorce. My grandmothers had been front row center for both spectacles. Mrs. Katie Kauffman (née Hollinger) was sister of the groom at the Independence Day wedding. She was using Clarence Sewicky to represent her in the divorce, thus treating all of us to a double perspective on the split.

  However, in the heat of the second game of cards, even the society news became vapid. Grandma Lena and I had finished our game against Mrs. Bomberger and Mrs. Millhouse when I started to eavesdrop on Nonna at her table. We were going to play against her team next, and I wanted an edge. For Grandma Lena’s sake I hoped to keep our winning streak alive.