The One That I Want (9 page)

Analise lifted her head away from my body and glanced at the counselor, curious.

Shannon nodded. “The game is already set up, and your team won’t do nearly as well without you.” She reached down to grasp Analise’s hand—just holding it for now, but poised to tenderly tug her away, if necessary. I could feel it.

“When can I talk to my Mommy?”

“Tonight,” Shannon reassured her. “You can tell her all about the scavenger hunt, the opening feast, the dance party—”

“There’s a dance party?”

“Yep. Tonight,” the counselor said, tugging my daughter’s hand ever so gently. “You can call or text her and tell your mom all about it afterward. Sound good?”

With her free hand, Analise squeezed me tight again and pressed her face even harder into my body. I squeezed my eyes shut, willing myself not to cry. Not to pull her away from camp and take her home with me right now.

But a second later, she pulled herself away and allowed Shannon to lead her across the cabin to where Brooke and Lindsay were waiting patiently. Yvette stood at the door.

“Don’t worry,” the counselor said to me this time. “I’ll take good care of her.”

I nodded and walked with Yvette out of the cabin and into the parking lot, where my friend let me sob in the car for several minutes before we began the long drive home.

When I finally got back into the house, I collapsed on the sofa and tried not to let the pervasive silence of my surroundings bother me.
Four
weeks
of this, though! It already felt like an eternity, and it had just been a few hours.

I’d gotten a text from Shar on the way back that just said, “Call me when you get home,” so I figured I’d better get my act together and do it. Shar wasn’t as sweet or as patient as Yvette. Then again, as kind and responsible and caring as Yvette was, she’d never been my confidante. We were always casual, neighbor friends, even back in high school. Shar, on the other hand, was the sort of friend who was like a sister, and the rules were different with sister friends.

“Hey,” I said to Shar when she answered her phone. “Got your text. What’s up?”

“It’s not about
me
, girlfriend. I wanted to know about
you
.”

I couldn’t help it. I started crying again.

“How many hours until you can talk to her?” my best friend whispered.

I checked my watched. “Not ’til eight tonight.”

“Okay. I’m coming over. We’re gonna watch a Ryan Reynolds movie. And there just may be some ice cream involved.”

“Which one?” I asked.

“Which kind of ice cream? I was thinking, maybe, a tiramisu gelato—”

I laughed through my tears. “No, I meant which Ryan Reynolds movie?”

“Who cares?” Shar replied. “I just want to ogle his hot body for two hours. Those abs…mmm! He makes me wish I were Canadian.”

Shar was good at distracting me and, as I brushed away the wet splotches on my cheeks and thought about something as frivolous as hot actors again, I was reminded of an event I’d neglected to mention to my best friend.

“Oh! By the way, are you free on the night of the eighteenth?”

There was a pause while Shar checked her calendar. “Sure. Why?”

“Because I’ve got two VIP tickets that I can’t use for ‘The Bachelor Pad’—the Closing Night performance that Saturday night and the private party afterward. I thought maybe you and Elsie might like—”

“How did you get those?” she interrupted.

“From Dane Tyler. It’s, um, kind of a long story.”

The shocked silence on the other end of the line let me know that my words hadn’t gone unheard. Finally, Shar said, “I’m leaving now. There will be
no
Ryan Reynolds and
no
ice cream until I hear this story. In its entirety. That means Every. Flipping. Detail. Got it, girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Good. See you in five minutes.”

Chapter Eight

By the time Shar had finished grilling me on everything that had happened and every word that had been said between Dane Tyler and me the night of the dress rehearsal—and after we’d watched
The Proposal
for at least our tenth time each and devoured a pint of gelato straight from the container—the hour had finally come to talk to my daughter.

“How did the first day go?” I asked Analise.

She was almost gasping for air when she replied, as if she’d been running to keep up with a schedule that had left her breathless. “It was good, Mommy,” she began, and then went on to list the stream of activities that started within moments of the parents’ departure from camp earlier in the day.

I just listened and smiled—relieved and heartbroken at the same time that my baby girl had been forced to be so resilient. That such frenetic action was needed to break the pain of separation but, yet, that it could be done in the course of an afternoon and evening.

I told her enthusiastically, “Wow, you did a lot today! That sounds wonderful, honey.”

While inside I whispered, if only to myself, “I miss you with my whole heart.”

~*~

It was, perhaps, too much to expect that even the madcap daily routine of Camp Willowgreen would be enough to change the emotional circuits in my daughter’s brain for an entire month. I wasn’t, however, expecting her meltdown to come in the middle of my dinner date with Kristopher.

“I told them to bring us only the crispy fries,” he informed me with a grin I recognized, almost as if it had come straight out of our high-school yearbook.

“Hope they follow orders,” I replied, crossing my arms with mock severity. “Otherwise, we’re out the door.” I pointed to the exit of Sloppy Joe’s threateningly, which made Kristopher burst out laughing.

“Yeah. Somehow, I don’t think Joe is sweating in fear of losing our business,” he said. A funny statement to us both because Joe Redland, the owner of Mirabelle Harbor’s beloved burger joint, was one of Kristopher’s second cousins.

Not only that, Sloppy Joe’s was always packed—usually with repeat customers. We wouldn’t be missed in this carnivorous crowd. They served the juiciest burgers, the sauciest wings, the tangiest barbecued pork, and the most succulent ribs on the North Shore. All that and they also had crispy fries.

“Hey, you brought back an old friend tonight!” Joe Redland himself said to Kristopher, as he did a proud walk-through of his restaurant.

“So nice to see you again,” I told him, and I meant it. Joe was a good guy.

He clasped my hand and said warmly, “I’ve missed seeing you, Julia. I’m so, so sorry about Adam.”

A lump formed in my throat, so I just nodded. I hadn’t been here since the accident. Had it really been that long?

The older man squeezed my hand tightly for a second before letting go and turning to his cousin again. “So, what’s going on with your mom and that firecracker sister of yours?” he asked, grinning.

A look I couldn’t interpret flashed across Kristopher’s face. He looked—for want of a better word—
wary
. I thought about what Yvette had said on the drive up to the camp about him being secretive. My plan for tonight was to figure out more about him in the now. The adult Kristopher Karlsen. To see if I got the feeling that he was, indeed, hiding something.

“They’re doing great,” Kristopher said with an extra (pseudo?) burst of cheerfulness. “Haven’t talked with Tricia in a couple of weeks but, last I heard, she was planning some sort of trek through Maine with a few fellow hiking enthusiasts.” He laughed (forced?) and seemed to expect Joe to find it equally amusing.

The owner’s smile broadened. “Yeah, we could always count on your big sister for adventure. But you’re no slacker yourself, kiddo. How long are you gonna stay up in these parts, hmm? Planning the next big move or—” He shot a glance at me. “Ah. Maybe you’ll stick around a little longer this time?”

“Maybe,” Kristopher said quickly.

“Well, it’s always nice to get together with old friends, isn’t it?” Joe enthused, just as our server came rushing to the table with our order.

“Here you go,” the college boy said. “Two cheeseburgers with the works and a double order of crispy fries.”

“Thanks,” Kristopher and I chorused.

“It looks heavenly,” I added.

Joe beamed. He glanced at our table and called the boy back. “You get them a refill on their sodas and, while you’re back there, add on two chocolate-vanilla swirl milkshakes for them, my treat.” Then he winked at us and said, “Enjoy your dinner, kids.”

Before we could even thank him properly, he was gone, laughing with some customers half a room away.

“I swear that guy is, like, part leprechaun or something,” Kristopher said.

I laughed. “He does seem a touch magical, and he moves faster than anyone I’ve ever met, especially for a man in his seventies.”

“I know, right? My mom said he was like that, even when he was little.”

“So,” I said, between bites of my delectable cheeseburger, “how
is
your sister?” I knew Tricia was two years older than him and had been just as quick to blow out of town after high-school graduation as Kristopher did. “Did she ever get married? Start a family? I haven’t heard news about her for ages.”

He shifted awkwardly in his seat and fiddled with a couple of French fries before answering. “Uh, she’s been in and out of a few relationships. Nothing sticking, though.” He shrugged. “No children either, though it would be fun to be an uncle. I can just see the cute personalized mugs they’d give me for Christmas with ‘World’s Coolest Uncle’ scripted on the side.” He smiled.

I smiled in return, but I wasn’t going to let him change the subject so easily.

“What about
you
, then? No desire to settle down and have kids of your own?”

“Oh, I’m not ruling anything out. But I do like that ‘uncle’ idea. All the enjoyment, almost none of the responsibility.”

“Ha. Yeah, I can see where that would have its advantages, but what I meant was—”

“Oh, look!” He pointed out the window. There were a bunch of teens driving by. So many that they were almost spilling out of a silver convertible. “Wonder where they’re all headed.”

Another change of subject,
I thought. But I said, “They’re kids on summer vacation. Wherever they go, they’ll turn it into a party.”

He nodded, watching them with a gaze I could only describe as one of deep yearning. “Wouldn’t it be awesome to be that age again?”

No,
a loud voice in my head yelled. But I said, “I don’t know. I’m not sure I’d want to go back.”

“What if you could go back to being eighteen, knowing then what you know now?” he asked.

“That would be a little different, I guess, but life doesn’t work that way—at least outside of a time-travel movie. If you get all the youth, you also get all the uncertainty.”

He grimaced. “When you put it like that, I’m not sure I’d want to go back either.”

I laughed, but I was determined to get us back on a topic he kept avoiding: His family. “So, you and Tricia both left home really young. Was it hard for you to leave Mirabelle Harbor? Or were you glad to have escaped?”

He shot me an odd, anxious look. “What do you mean…escaped?”

“Oh, you know, getting away from the suburbs. The Midwest. The familiar.”

Some of the tightness in his shoulders seemed to fall away when he shrugged, almost as if he was trying to get rid of it faster. “There was a lot of, um,
tension
, I guess you could say, in my house when Tricia and I were growing up. I think we both needed to put a little distance between ourselves and that…atmosphere.”

This was the first I’d ever heard Kristopher speak of that. Although, thinking back, I remembered with a flood of recognition how he and I always went out for our dates or, on the few nights we stayed in to study, how we met at
my
house, not his. In fact, I remember only going into his room one time, and it was on a weekend when his parents were out of town and his sister was already living in another state. We made out on his bed for almost two hours that night. I blushed, remembering.

“What?” he asked me. “Are you okay? You look a little flushed. Too warm in here?”

“It’s fine. I’m good,” I said with a laugh.

I was about to ask a few follow-up questions about his parents, but I was mentally tripping over how to word it. No one just wanted to blurt right out and ask about the source of that kind of tension. Were his mom and dad always fighting?

I wasn’t given the chance to figure out the best phrasing, though, because my cell phone rang. Analise’s ringtone.

“Hello, sweetheart,” I said, delighted to hear from her, although it was a tad early. Her nightly calls didn’t usually come for another hour or so.

“Mommmmmy!” she cried. “Oh, Mommy, I want to go home.” There was a pause on the other end of the line and I heard my daughter’s big gulping sobs.

My pulse kicked into high gear. I jumped up and excused myself from the table, telling Kristopher to wait there. Then I raced out the front door and away from the noise inside the burger place. Before I could even ask her what was wrong, I was reaching for my car keys, ready to drive up to Camp Willowgreen with only a split second’s notice, if necessary.