The Second Sister Page 10

  I stopped him. I had to. I couldn’t let him go on like that, getting his hopes up.

  “Barney, I know you mean well, but . . . it’s too late for me to come home even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to. I have no good memories of this place.”

  Barney frowned, dropped my hands, and hauled himself to his feet. He began collecting dirty plates and silverware.

  “Then you’re remembering wrong,” he mumbled under his breath.

  “What?”

  He turned to face me. “You’re remembering wrong,” he repeated, enunciating each word, making sure I didn’t miss a one.

  “Lucy,” he said, “your dad was a card-carrying SOB. We all know that. But that doesn’t mean that everybody in Nilson’s Bay is. I’m not!” He dumped a stack of dishes into the sink and pointed to Peter, who was still sitting at the table, obviously uncomfortable to be listening in on such an intimate conversation, staring into the bottom of his coffee cup. “Peter isn’t! In fact, there are some real nice folks around here. And you had some good times here, Lucy. Happy times. If you’d give it a chance, you might remember that.”

  He spun around toward the sink and turned the faucet on full blast, his face mottled red, and started rinsing grease and syrup off plates.

  I stood up and crossed the kitchen, wondering if I should try to hug him. I handed him a dishrag instead.

  “Do you know those are the most words I’ve ever heard you string together at one time?”

  He grunted, took the dishrag from me, ran it under the water, and squirted it with green soap.

  “Maybe that’s because you haven’t been around much. I can talk a blue streak if there’s somebody around worth talking to.”

  “Barney. I know you’d like me to stay, but I just can’t. I’ve got to get myself to Washington. The president-elect needs me.”

  I squeezed his shoulder, then took a wet plate and started wiping it dry.

  “No, he doesn’t,” Barney said in a low voice. “He told you to take some time off. A month, he said. You don’t have to be in Washington until after the holidays.”

  “What?” I put down the dish and the towel, put a hand on my hip, and turned to look at my cousin. “How do you know that? Were you eavesdropping on me?”

  Barney’s face turned red. He cast his eyes to the floor.

  “I wasn’t . . . I didn’t mean to . . .” he mumbled, then lifted his head and looked me in the eye, his voice defensive. “I wasn’t eavesdropping. I just happened to be walking past your bedroom door at the same time you picked up the phone in the bedroom. And then I just . . . hung around for a while.”

  Now I had both hands on my hips.

  “And you don’t call that eavesdropping?”

  He didn’t answer the question.

  “Eight weeks,” he said. “That’s as long as you’d have to stay here to inherit the cottage. If you took your things over there today and stayed until January first . . .”

  Barney walked to the other side of the kitchen and flipped through the pages of a wall calendar with advertisements from Swan Cleaners, Fratelli’s Towing, and Dinah’s Pie Shop.

  “That’d be seven weeks right there. Seven! You’d only have to come up for one more week after that and the place would be yours. Just a week!” He turned and gave me a triumphant look.

  “People in my world don’t take weeklong vacations.”

  “How about weekends? They take weekends, don’t they?”

  “Sometimes,” I admitted. “But not often. And I just don’t—”

  Barney leaned to his left, looking around me to address Peter.

  “Could she do it on weekends?”

  “Sure,” Peter said, “weekends work. As long as it adds up to eight weeks total, she can come and go as she likes.”

  Barney stood up straight and grinned. “Did you hear that? You make up the last seven days by coming up for weekends, three weekends. Two if you decided to come on a national holiday—Fourth of July or something. Remember how nice the Fourth is in Nilson’s Bay? We got the parade and the picnic. And then the fireworks show. Remember?”

  I sighed and dropped my arms to my sides. How could I make him see?

  “Barney, I know that you’d love it if I moved home, but—”

  “That’s never going to happen,” he interrupted, his grin fading to neutrality. “I know. But be practical, Lucy. That cottage has got to be worth a couple hundred thousand dollars. You don’t want to walk away from that kind of money.”

  Peter cleared his throat.

  “Actually,” he said, “it’s worth double that. I checked with a couple of the Realtors in town. The lowest estimate was four-fifteen.”

  I gasped. “Four hundred and fifteen thousand? Dollars?”

  Peter nodded, confirming that both the figure and the currency were correct.

  “For the cottage? It’s tiny! The kitchen hasn’t been remodeled since 1972 and it only has one bathroom!”

  “A bath and half,” Peter said, correcting me. “But that doesn’t matter. Nobody cares about the house. The value is in the land, two acres of prime lakefront property. Whoever buys it will probably bulldoze it.”

  Barney’s face fell. “You mean they’d just tear it down?”

  “Well,” Peter replied slowly, obviously reluctant to acquaint my cousin with the truth, “I suppose it’s possible that someone might consider remodeling the existing structure or maybe adding on to it, but . . . not likely. Anybody investing that kind of money is going to want something much larger and more modern. They might even build two houses on the site. There’s room enough to subdivide.”

  He got up from his seat and carried his empty coffee cup to the sink.

  “You could consider doing that yourself, Lucy. You’d get more money for two smaller lots than you would for one big one, around a half million. Assuming you stick around long enough to collect the deed, that is.”

  Peter slipped one hand into the front pocket of his jeans and stood there staring at me, looking smug. Barney wrung out the wet dishrag and hung it over the edge of the sink.

  “My grandma and grandpa built that cottage,” Barney said quietly. “When I was little, we’d go there after church and Grandma would make a big dinner for the whole family—pot roast or ham or chicken. In the summer, when it was hot, my brothers and I would ride our bicycles out to the cottage and swim in the lake. Sometimes Grandpa would join us. When we got tired, we’d climb out of the water and lay on the grass in the sun to dry off. Grandma always came out with a big pitcher of cold lemonade and a plate of bars for us, her special recipe. You Like-A Me Bars, she called them.”

  “That was my great-great-grandma’s recipe?” I asked. “I never knew that.”

  “Uh-huh,” Barney confirmed as he sank down into one of the kitchen chairs, looking across the room at nothing in particular.

  “And now somebody is going to buy her house and bulldoze it. Half a million dollars,” he said softly. “I guess money counts for more than memories.”

  I crouched down next to my cousin’s chair.

  “Nobody is going to bulldoze the cottage, because I’m not going to sell it. But I’m not going to live in it either. If Alice wanted the pet rescue people to have it, then fine. Let them have it. I’m not going to uproot my whole life just because my sister was crazy.”

  Barney frowned and the wrinkles around his mouth deepened.

  “Uproot your life? You have no life, Lucy. You said so yourself. You’re always at work or traveling. You don’t have time for yourself or anyone else.”

  “I never said that,” I countered impatiently. “Yes, I’m busy. Yes, I work really long hours. But I never said I have no life.”

  Peter cleared his throat again. This seemed to be his preferred method of inserting himself into conversations that were none of his business.

  “Yes, you did. You said the same thing to me last night when I was driving you home. You repeated it three or four times.”

  I got bac
k to my feet, giving Peter my absolutely nastiest glare, the glare that had been known to make interns cry. It had no effect on him. He just stood there, leaning against the kitchen counter.

  “Why are you here? Do you always show up at people’s homes uninvited?”

  “I told you last night that I’d come by in the morning to bring your keys and give you a ride back to your car. Don’t you remember?” he asked sweetly, knowing full well that I didn’t.

  Peter reached into the back pocket of his jeans, pulled out two sets of keys, and set them on the table.

  “I brought the keys to the cottage too. Thought you might want some help getting settled in.”

  “No! I don’t! Because I am not moving into Alice’s cottage! I am not allowing my sister or anyone else to manipulate me into disrupting my—”

  Cousin Barney groaned and I turned quickly, worried that something might be wrong with him, but he looked fine. The faraway expression was gone from his face. He was clear-eyed and obviously unhappy with me.

  “Boy, you are just your dad all over, aren’t you? Stubborn as a mule. Lucy, if you turn down a half-million-dollar inheritance just because you don’t want to let your sister have the last word, then you’re the biggest fool on God’s green earth! What good would that do? You don’t think that letting the pet rescue get the house is going to save it from being bulldozed, do you?

  “Sure, I had dreams of you coming home for good. You can’t blame an old man for wanting some family around, but I know that’s not going to happen. Just like I know that nobody is ever going to live in the house, not ever again. But if it’s got to come down, then I’d just as soon see somebody I care about get the money. You say you don’t have a life? A half a million dollars would go a long way toward getting one. Wherever you land— Washington, DC, or someplace else—you could afford to get yourself a nice house, a real home of your own.”

  He paused for a moment. “Who knows? You even might want something with a guest room so your country cousin could come visit you every now and then. But the main thing is, I want you to be happy. Whether you believe it or not, that’s what Alice wanted for you too. And if you’ve got any arguments against that, then you go ahead and trot ’em out. I’ve got nothing to do today but listen.”

  I looked at Barney, then at Peter, then back to Barney, who looked right back at me, eyebrows raised, waiting for my decision. When I reached it, I took in a big breath, let it out with a whoosh, and snatched both sets of keys from the table.

  “Eight weeks,” I said, raising a cautionary finger. “But that’s it. That’s as long as I’m staying. Not one day more.”

  Barney’s eyes misted and he walked to the table and gave me a hug. Peter watched us, still leaning against the counter. I saw one corner of his lip tug into a lopsided grin.

  “Eight weeks,” he said. “That should be enough.”

  Chapter 15

  I tossed my suitcase into the back of Peter’s truck.

  “Is that all you brought?”

  “I hadn’t planned on being here very long.”

  I was quiet as we drove toward town, embarrassed as I recalled, however vaguely, the details of my last ride in this vehicle. But five miles is a long time to keep silent. After a couple of minutes I said, “Thanks for coming out to pick me up. And for bringing me home last night. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.”

  Eyes on the road, Peter shifted the truck into a higher gear.

  “No problem. I hosed out the cab as soon as I got home.”

  I gasped. “Oh, no! Peter, I am so sorry. . . .”

  He glanced quickly from the road to my face and back, a grin on his face.

  “Calm down. I’m kidding. I was able to pull over in plenty of time, remember?”

  “You jerk!” I swatted at the air next to his head. “What a mean trick to play! Like I wasn’t already humiliated enough about last night.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  But he didn’t look sorry. In fact, he looked pretty pleased with himself. I stared out the window. I’d had enough of Peter’s jokes. Law degree or not, he obviously hadn’t grown up a bit since high school.

  “Lucy?” Peter looked at me, but I didn’t say anything. “Oh, come on. It was just a little joke. You can’t be mad at me. After all, I’m the guy you picked to deflower you.”

  My head snapped toward Peter like it was spring-loaded. He was still looking at me. The nausea I felt when I first opened my eyes that morning returned, but this had nothing to do with my hangover. Yes, you can actually be so humiliated that it makes you want to throw up.

  “I told you about that?” I said weakly.

  “Afraid so.” Peter shifted the truck into another gear and shook his head. “Boy, you really don’t remember, do you? You really shouldn’t drink that much.”

  “Tell me something I don’t already know.” I groaned and buried my face in my hands.

  “Oh, come on. Don’t be so hard on yourself. It was right after your sister’s funeral. You were emotional and you had too much to drink. Could have happened to anybody.” His words might have been sympathetic, but his buoyant tone of voice made it clear that he was enjoying my humiliation. “And, hey, I was honored to learn that you picked me as your stud of choice. Really. I’m only sorry that we never got to go through with it.”

  He reached across the seat to pat my shoulder. I pushed his hand away.

  “Leave me alone. I am not talking to you.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t be mad. I was just teasing. Lucy?”

  I shook my head, hands still covering my face. Peter said my name again, but this time his tone was different, softer, and there was no laughter in his voice.

  “Lucy. Look at me.”

  Reluctantly, I lowered my hands from my face, straightened my back, and turned my head to the left. Peter wasn’t grinning now. He wasn’t even smiling.

  “I won’t joke about it anymore. But you know something? Even though it never happened, I really was proud to know you’d wanted me to be the first. You know what a huge crush I had on you in high school.”

  “Oh, stop it. You did not.”

  “Huge crush,” he repeated. “I actually wrote poems to you, terrible, lovesick, teenage poems that I kept hidden under the mattress in my room.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Sure you did. Right next to the ragged copies of Playboy you stole from the drugstore, no doubt.”

  He shrugged. “Just one copy, an October issue. And I didn’t steal it. I borrowed it from Jimmy Grinell’s older brother. Actually, Jimmy and I dug it out of the trash can when he was packing his room to go to college. He let me have it.”

  I sat back in the seat, relaxing a little, smiling to think that adolescent Peter, who I had thought of as worldly and experienced, had been just as awkward, confused, and driven by hormones as any other teenager.

  “So what happened to them?” I asked.

  “The poems?” He laughed to himself. “One day while I was at school, my mom went in to clean my bedroom and found the poems. And the copy of Playboy.”

  He removed his eyes from the road and tossed me a stricken glance. I laughed. I couldn’t help myself.

  “What’d she do? Wash your mouth out with soap? Make you go to confession?”

  “Naw. She came into my room, closed the door, and showed me what she’d found. That was humiliation enough. I wished the floor would open up and swallow me. She told me that the magazine was going into the burn barrel, but gave back the poems. Then she left the room and never mentioned it again. Oh, but not before reminding me that ‘exquisite’ is spelled with an ‘e’ at the beginning and the end.”

  I laughed again. That sounded so much like Mrs. Swenson.

  “I always did like your mom.”

  “She liked you, too, said you were one of the best students she ever had. As long as you’re going to be in town for a while, why don’t you drop by the house and see her? In fact, why don’t you come for Thanksgiving?”

  “Oh, I c
ouldn’t impose,” I said, lifting my hand.

  “You wouldn’t be imposing. Mom always cooks enough for an army. And think of it this way—you’d be doing my dad a favor, saving him from one more round of dried-out turkey sandwiches. You’ve got to spend the holiday somewhere, don’t you?” He cranked the steering wheel to the right, heading south on Bayshore. “What do you usually do for Thanksgiving?”

  “Last year I ate a turkey wrap, sweet potato fries, and a Diet Coke in my hotel room while reading polling data and watching a rerun of Dance Moms.”

  “Gee. Sounds like fun,” Peter said flatly.

  “You’re sweet to invite me, but I can’t. Barney always had Thanksgiving with Alice, and this will be the first year . . .”

  I let the rest of the sentence fade away and looked out the window, remembering that after Thanksgiving came Christmas, the holiday that I’d always spent in sun-kissed Orlando, or Miami, or Charleston, or Bermuda, accompanied by my work and my sister.

  This year I’d spend the twenty-fifth of December in frigid, frozen Nilson’s Bay, with only Cousin Barney for company. The first year alone.

  “So bring him along,” Peter said simply. “My folks would love to have him too. Mom loves a full table. Seriously.”

  We turned into the parking lot of the church. Peter pulled up next to my car and set the parking brake.

  “I don’t know. I should really talk to Barney first.”

  “Fair enough.”

  We got out of the truck. I reached for my suitcase, but Peter beat me to it.

  “I got it,” he said, pulling it out of the truck bed and carrying it to my car.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said.

  I meant it too. It was nice of him to make sure I got home safely and then come to collect me the next day. I was sure he had better things to do.

  “No problem,” he said. “And, Luce, that stuff you told me last night? What happens in The Library stays in The Library. So don’t worry about it, okay?”

  “Thanks.”

  He bobbed his head, just once, and started to walk away from me.

  “Peter!”