Gone with the Whisker Read online

  I worked through the opening routines as Julia opened the door. “Sorry we’re late,” she said. “Construction.”

  The one-word explanation seemed to suffice. All three nodded and I let out a tiny sigh of relief. Though Rex was a decent guy, Nicole and Violet were among the more critical of our patrons. I could handle criticism, of course, but I didn’t like inviting it onto the bookmobile.

  Nicole came aboard. “Morning,” she said shortly, her stern face set in firm lines. She headed for the new fiction, her red hair bouncing as she went. Violet muttered something that might have been a greeting as she came up the steps, gave Nicole a hard glare, then wandered over to the video games. Rex bounded inside and greeted Julia and me with a smile. “Had a great bike ride this morning.” He nodded to the south, to the end of the road. “Went down that way for a bit. It’s pretty down there, if you like trees, which I do, so I’ll probably go that way again.” He looked around. “Is my little buddy riding along today?”

  I gestured toward the front, where Eddie was flopped on the console. “Waiting for you.”

  Rex went up and patted him on the head. “The bookmobile is here, and so is the bookmobile cat. All’s right with the world.”

  “Mrr!”

  It was hard to disagree with that, so no one did.

  * * *

  * * *

  On the Fourth of July, I woke to find Eddie nestled into the crook of my elbow. With my eyes still shut, I used my free hand to feel around for the exact location of his head. More than once I’d opened my eyes to the sight of big yellow ones staring me down at a point-blank range. It was not an ideal way to start a morning, so I’d learned to scout out the exact arrangement of his body parts first thing.

  “Mrr,” he said sleepily. The distance of his voice indicated it was safe to raise my eyelids, so I did, which was when I saw, through the white lacy curtains at the window, that the sky was that gorgeous blue color you dream of all winter long.

  “Not a cloud in sight,” I said with satisfaction, doing my best to slide out of the bed without disturbing its feline inhabitant. After a quick shower and a toweling of my stupidly curly hair, I slid into appropriate layers: shorts, T-shirt, and a fleece sweatshirt that would come off as soon as the temperature bumped to the seventy-degree range. I made the bed around Eddie and bounced up the few steps into the houseboat’s main room.

  “Happy Fourth of July!” I said cheerfully.

  “Go away.”

  My cheeriness dimmed a bit, but I determinedly pushed it back up. It had become clear to me over the last two weeks that Katrina was not a morning person. Of course, my oldest niece didn’t seem to be a night person, either. What she mostly seemed to do was sleep, something I’d heard teenagers did, but since I’d never done so, I hadn’t expected my own flesh and blood to have the habit.

  I studied the top of her head, her hair waving smoothly across the pillow, and tried to judge her actual level of sleepiness. When Katrina had arrived, I’d assumed she would sleep in the other berth in my tiny bedroom, but instead she’d wanted to bunk down in a sleeping bag on what used to be my dining table. The table lowered to the level of the bench seats and, with the addition of some pillows, was apparently a comfortable sleeping area.

  Though the loss of dining space was awkward at times, I was making do, and was even making progress in learning to avert my eyes from the piles of Katrina-related clothing and other miscellaneous belongings. If the piles started to expand and/or migrate, there would have to be a conversation, but so far, things were staying put.

  “We’re due at Aunt Frances and Otto’s house in less than an hour,” I said.

  Katrina groaned and yanked the sleeping bag over her head. “Do I have to go?”

  Until this summer, my aunt role had been giver of cool presents and teller of stories that made their father look bad. As aunt in loco parentis, however, things were different.

  “Yes,” I said firmly. “I told your parents you’d get the full Up North summer experience, and that includes morning-to-midnight Fourth of July activities. Up and at ’em, there’s fun to be had!”

  Grumbling about the unfairness of her life, Katrina oozed out of bed and shuffled into the bathroom.

  “Mrr.” At some point, Eddie had migrated to the boat’s dashboard, his current favorite spot. Usually he faced out to watch seagulls swoop up and around, but now he was facing down-boat, looking toward the bathroom door.

  “Yeah, I know.” I folded up the sleeping bag. “She didn’t say good morning to you, did she? Give her time. There are no pets at her house and she doesn’t understand the rules.”

  Eddie blinked, then rotated and flopped down.

  Katrina showered, I waited patiently, and by a small miracle we arrived at our intended destination only five minutes late.

  “You’re here!” Aunt Frances wrapped her arms around me in a huge hug, and once again I cogitated the fact that my aunt and I shared no physical traits whatsoever. She was tall and long-limbed and had short straight hair, once light brown, now mostly gray. For years she’d run the boardinghouse in the summer and taught woodworking at a nearby community college during the school year. But now that Aunt Frances was married, the boardinghouse was under Celeste’s management, and it was unclear whether or not she would return to teaching.

  “Of course we’re here,” I said, returning the slightly unusual hug. “Did you think we wouldn’t?”

  My aunt transferred her hug to Katrina, who, for the first time that morning, was smiling. Then again, it was hard not to smile in the presence of the powerfully optimistic Aunt Frances.

  “Breakfast is almost ready,” she said, leading us to the kitchen, which had been renovated while she and Otto were on their honeymoon. The new version was light and airy and spacious, with a new bump-out window seat that looked out over a backyard lush with blooming flowers of whose identity I was completely ignorant.

  Otto, at the cooktop, smiled as we walked in. “Good morning, ladies. And a very Happy Birthday to you, Minnie.”

  “Seriously?” Katrina stared. “Your birthday is the Fourth of July?”

  “Yep.” I bounced a little on the balls of my feet. “Best birthday possible. National holiday, parades, cooking out on the grill, fireworks. When I was little, I thought it was all for me.”

  From behind me, a male voice said, “What, you mean it’s not?”

  I turned and grinned at Rafe, who also enveloped me in a hug, but one with a slightly different flavor. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “That’s because I was here already. On time, you see?” He tapped the top of my head gently with the point of his chin.

  “Five minutes hardly counts as late,” I said, tipping my head up for a kiss.

  “Says the woman who is nose deep in a book if I’m more than ten seconds late to meet her for anything,” Rafe said to the room in general before leaning down.

  Post-kiss, I watched Otto stirring something in a small saucepan, a something I deeply hoped was buttered maple syrup with pecans that would soon be spread over fluffy pancakes. Aunt Frances had cooked my birthday breakfast all the summers I stayed with her as a kid, and she’d continued doing it when I moved here as an adult. The menu had shifted from the Mickey waffles of my youth, and we weren’t in the boardinghouse, but Aunt Frances was here, I was here, and having Otto and Rafe and Katrina here made the morning even better.

  When breakfast was over and the dishes washed, we’d shifted to the fun topic of what to do with the rest of the day.

  “Minnie gets to pick,” Rafe said, drying his hands on a kitchen towel. “You only get to turn thirty-five once.”

  I beamed at my beloved, who really should have known better. If the world had been a perfect place, we would have piled into a huge semitruck and visited bookstores across northern lower Michigan, filling the trailer as we went. But as much as I loved
books, there were two small problems with that dream day. One, I lacked the financial resources to fund that kind of a trip, and two, I didn’t have any place to put that many books.

  But even if the world wasn’t perfect, it was still a pretty nice place, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

  * * *

  * * *

  An hour later, the five of us were walking down a narrow dirt trail, each of us carrying backpacks laden with a picnic lunch, water, and in my case, emergency reading material. I suspected that Katrina had stuffed a copy of People magazine into hers, but since she didn’t seem to be talking to me on a voluntary basis, I decided not to ask.

  We were headed down to the Jordan River Valley, to a section of trail I’d long wanted to hike. Otto was walking ahead with Katrina, and I was next to Aunt Frances, with Rafe close behind. The current trail was a fairly steep downhill that wound through a second growth forest of maple and beech trees, and I was mostly making sure I kept my footing and didn’t slide to the bottom in an untidy heap.

  “Did I tell you about Celeste?” Aunt Frances asked.

  I picked my way over a miniature crevasse, probably the result of a recent thunderstorm. “What about her?”

  “After all those promises, she’s not doing it. Not at all.”

  To the inexperienced ear, this would have made no sense. I, however, understood the meaning behind the ambiguous words.

  “Not doing what?” Rafe asked.

  I hadn’t realized he was close enough to overhear. Hmm. I looked over my shoulder. “Not doing the Saturday breakfast. You know, when the boarders cook for each other?”

  “Ah.” He lost interest and dropped behind us, and I focused on my aunt’s dilemma, which wasn’t so much a dilemma as an acceptance of change. My aunt’s summer boardinghouse had been more than a boardinghouse; it had also been, unbeknownst to most, a matchmaking enterprise.

  The applications for summer spots had always far exceeded the places available, and one year, on a whim, Aunt Frances had chosen her visitors based on how she thought they might pair up for long-term relationships. Every year it had worked like a charm—although it hadn’t always appeared so at first—and now she’d started getting applications from offspring of some of the first pairings.

  One activity that eased people together was the Saturday morning breakfast. This was the one day of the week my aunt hadn’t cooked breakfast for her boarders, instead requiring the boarders themselves to cook for the group. Everyone knew that going in, but what they didn’t know was that they would be paired up with the potential mate my aunt had selected. “Nothing like cooking a large meal,” she’d said often, “to show compatibility.”

  Now, I asked, “Celeste isn’t doing it at all?”

  “Not so far as I can tell,” my aunt said. “I know I should let her run things her own way, but she’s going to ruin the boardinghouse. She’s going to make it something else entirely. I would never have handed it over to her if I’d known she was going to pull this kind of stunt!”

  The voice of my normally calm, cool, and collected aunt had risen. Otto looked back and I met his gaze, arranging my face in a gesture that I hoped said, “Help!”

  He slowed and said, “Minnie, I haven’t asked how the library finances are moving along. Have there been any developments?”

  I sent him a grateful glance. I’d talk to Aunt Frances about Celeste, but that conversation should take place in private. Otto, a retired accountant, had taken an interest in the large bequest bestowed on the library by the late Stan Larabee. Though Stan’s estranged family had contested the will, the case had recently been settled.

  “The library board is still considering options,” I said.

  Otto nodded. “Understandable. With that amount of money, you don’t want to rush into decisions.”

  “Everyone else,” I said glumly, “is ready to go on a spending spree.”

  Otto laughed, and his Paul Newman–like appearance became even more pronounced. “Let me guess,” he said. “The staff and the Friends of the Library disagree on how the money should be spent.”

  “You are one of the smartest people I know.”

  “Smart enough to marry your aunt.” He looked at her, love writ so clearly in his expression that I looked away. Not because I was embarrassed at the display of emotion; more because the look she sent back mirrored his own and I felt like an intruder.

  I hung back, letting the two of them go ahead with Katrina, who chattered to them with no evident inhibitions. Since dwelling on the fact that the relationship with my niece was far from ideal wasn’t a happy way to spend my birthday, I thought instead about the recent weddings with which I’d been involved.

  Aunt Frances and Otto had married in April here in Chilson and spent a long honeymoon in Bermuda. The wedding itself had been small and the party afterward large, with half the town attending. I’d stood up as maid of honor, and Leo Kinsler, the former boarder whose stories of Aunt Frances had instigated Otto’s move north, stood up as best man. My dad had given the bride away, and there hadn’t been a dry eye when they’d exchanged vows.

  Kristen and Scruffy’s mid-May wedding had been large, the reception even larger, and the food so spectacular that the local guests were still talking about it. It was harder to tell about the out-of-town guests, but the parking lot of Three Seasons seemed to have more New York license plates than in previous years.

  I sighed happily at the memories. Kristen, gorgeous in flowing white. Scruffy, even more impeccably clad than normal in a summer tux. The wedding cake decorated with lifelike fondant roses. The appetizers of crab cakes, rumaki, teeny tiny waffles topped with real maple syrup and bits of real whipped cream, shrimp on top of tiny tortillas with a slice of avocado between, something I’d been told was spanakopita, half strawberries with the cutest little ice cream cones imaginable stuck into them and filled with custard, and—

  “Are you mad at me?”

  I started at Rafe’s question and almost tripped over a tree root. “Why do you think I’m mad?”

  “You’re not talking.”

  “That’s evidence of anger?”

  He shrugged. “You haven’t said a word to me since Frances mentioned Celeste, so it only follows that talking about Celeste made you think about the boardinghouse, which made you think about the houseboat, which made you think about how you’re jammed in there all summer with Katrina when it would have been a lot better if I’d been able to finish the house and we could all be staying there instead of the two of you being in such close quarters, which can’t be easy.”

  The trail was now relatively flat, and Rafe was walking next to me, his long legs taking one step to every step and a half of mine. His straight black hair glinted in the sun, and his slightly reddish skin, an inheritance from native ancestors, seemed to almost glow. I felt a burst of love for him and wondered if my face looked anything like my aunt’s had. “That was a very long sentence,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t say anything else, which made me laugh. “Did you know,” I asked, “there’s a betting pool going for when you get the house done?”

  Rafe stopped. “That can’t be. I’m the one who sets up pools, not the subject of them.”

  “Yeah, well, not this time.” He would eventually find out I was the one who started the pool, but with any luck, it wouldn’t be soon. “Absolutely no one had you down for finishing in April.” I’d been collecting money for months and the kitty had grown to the point that I was keeping it at the library in a locked drawer. And every week someone handed me more cash and whispered a date.

  “Huh.” He started walking again. “Don’t suppose you’d tell me the day you have down.”

  I smiled at him fondly. “Nope.”

  “Don’t suppose you’d let me put some money in.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “How abou
t the average date? The last date? How many people entered?”

  Grinning, I shook my head to all of his questions. It was a rare thing for me to have so much information he didn’t have, and I was finding the sensation enjoyable. Which should have been disturbing, but wasn’t.

  He heaved a tremendous sigh and took my hand. “Then I guess we’ll just have to go on with enjoying your birthday.”

  “Guess so,” I said, and felt my heart swell with love.

  * * *

  * * *

  The sun had slid down over the line of hills that separated Janay Lake from the majestic Lake Michigan. A small channel connected the two lakes, and Chilson was strung along the northwest end of twenty-mile-long Janay Lake. The waterside location had allowed the city council to, over the years, construct a public marina, an adjacent park complete with gazebo, and a performance shell that hosted everything from chamber of commerce awards to traveling professional shows. Tonight the stage would be crowded with a local community band who’d be playing music to accompany the fireworks, and I’d been looking forward to the evening for weeks.

  Up at my aunt’s house, we’d stuffed ourselves with hamburgers, corn on the cob, and potato salad, and we’d walked the long way to the park to work off some of our intake.

  “I haven’t gone to fireworks since I was little,” Katrina said, watching as Rafe and I spread blankets on the grass. “Fireworks are for kids and old people. They’re all the same. Boring.”

  I glanced at Aunt Frances, but she was hand in hand with Otto, chatting away with our right-hand neighbors, a quartet of downstaters in their fifties. Though I assumed Katrina meant fireworks were boring, not little kids and the elderly, I wanted clarification. “You don’t think fireworks are fun?”

  “Booooring,” she said, drawing out the word.

  Rafe looked at her, looked at me, and smiled, since he knew what was coming.

  “Only boring people find life boring,” I said.