This Heart of Mine (Chicago Stars #5)(36)
"Doesn't matter. I don't do camp anymore. I had to go every summer when I was a kid, and I promised myself I'd never go back."
"What was so bad about camp?"
"All that organized activity. Sports." She blew her nose. "There was no time to read, no time to be alone with your thoughts."
"Not much of an athlete?"
One summer she'd sneaked out of her cabin in the middle of the night and gathered up every ball in the equipment shed—volleyballs, soccer, tennis, softballs. It had taken her half a dozen trips to carry them all to the lake and throw them in the water. The counselors had never discovered the culprit. Certainly no one had suspected quiet, brainy Molly Somerville, who'd been named Most Cooperative despite spraying her bangs green.
"I'm a better athlete than Phoebe," she said.
Kevin shuddered. "The guys are still talking about the last time she played softball at the Stars picnic."
Molly hadn't been there, but she could imagine.
He swung into the left lane and said, with an edge, "I wouldn't think spending a few weeks every summer at some rich-kid's camp damaged you too much."
"I suppose you're right."
Except she never went for a few weeks. She went all summer, every summer, from the time she was six.
When she'd been eleven, there was a measles outbreak and all the campers were sent home. Her father had been furious. He couldn't find anyone to stay with her, so he'd been forced to take her with him to Vegas, where he'd set her up in a suite separate from his own with a change girl as a babysitter, even though Molly kept telling him she was too old for one. During the day the girl watched the soaps, and at night she crossed the hall to sleep with Bert.
They'd been the best two weeks of Molly's childhood. She'd read the complete works of Mary Stewart, ordered cherry cheesecake from room service, and made friends with the Spanish-speaking maids. Sometimes she'd announce to her sitter that she was going down to the pool, but instead, she'd wander around near the casino until she found a family with a lot of kids. Then she'd stay as close as she could and pretend she belonged to them.
Normally, the memories of her childish attempts to create a family made her smile, but now she felt another prickle of tears and swallowed. "Have you noticed there's a speed limit?"
"Making you nervous?"
"You should be, but I'm numb from too many years of riding with Dan." Besides, she didn't care that much. It shocked her—the realization that she had no interest in the future. She couldn't even muster the energy to worry about her finances or the fact that her editor at Chik had stopped calling.
He backed off on the accelerator. "Just so you know, the campground is in the middle of nowhere, the cottages are so old they're probably in ruins by now, and the place is more boring than elevator music because nobody under the age of seventy ever goes there." He tilted his head toward the sack of food he'd picked up at the service station. "If you're done with that orange juice, there are some cheese crackers inside."
"Yummy, but I think I'll pass."
"You seem to have passed on a lot of meals lately."
"Thanks for noticing. I figure if I lose another sixty pounds, I might be as skinny as some of your chères amies."
"Feel free to concentrate on that nervous breakdown of yours. At least it'll keep you quiet."
She smiled. One thing she'd say for Kevin, he didn't handle her with kid gloves like Phoebe and Dan. It was nice to be treated as an adult. "Maybe I'll just take a nap instead."
"You do that."
But she didn't sleep. Instead, she closed her eyes and tried to make herself think about her next book, but her mind refused to take a single step into the cozy byways of Nightingale Woods.
After they got off the interstate, Kevin stopped at a roadside store with a smokehouse attached and returned carrying a brown paper bag that he tossed into her lap. "Michigan lunch. Do you think you can make some sandwiches?"
"Maybe if I concentrate."
Inside she found a generous piece of smoked whitefish, a hunk of sharp cheddar cheese, and a loaf of dark pumpernickel bread, along with a plastic knife and a few paper napkins. She mustered enough energy to put together two crude, open-faced sandwiches for him and a smaller one for herself, all but a few bites of which she ended up feeding to Roo.
They headed east toward the middle of the state. Through half-closed eyes she saw orchards coming into bloom and neat farms with silos. Then, as the afternoon light began to fade, they made their way north toward I-75, which stretched all the way to Sault Ste. Marie.
They didn't talk much. Kevin listened to the CDs he'd brought with him. He liked jazz, she discovered, everything from forties bebop to fusion. Unfortunately, he also liked rap, and after fifteen minutes of trying to ignore Tupac's views of women, she hit the eject button, grabbed the disk, and tossed it out the car window.
His ears turned red, she discovered, when he yelled.
It was getting dark when they reached the northern part of the state. Just beyond the pretty town of Grayling they left the freeway for a two-lane highway that seemed to lead nowhere. Before long they were driving through dense woods.
"Northeastern Michigan was nearly stripped of timber by the lumber industry during the 1800s," he said. "What you're seeing now is second-and third-growth forest. Some of it is pretty wild. Towns in this area are small and scattered."