She kept her eyes on her book. “What was the food like at the brunch?”
Nate turned off the TV, which made Terri put her book down.
“That woman has the ability to take the flavor out of anything. She had some baked egg thing that was crusty hard all the way through. Bob seemed to like it.”
“Bob hasn’t lived all over the world and sampled lamb roasted over an open fire.”
Nate gave a bit of a smile. “I doubt if he’s even tasted Mr. Parnelli’s sausages.”
He was facing the dark screen of the TV, while Terri had her feet on the couch. She extended her leg and nudged him in the hip with her heel. “Talk! You’ve been brooding since you got back, so tell me what’s bothering you.”
“I do not brood.”
Terri stuck her lower lip out, hung her head and deepened her voice. “I’m so down I ate green food.”
Nate chuckled. “I guess that is pretty depressed.” He turned so he was facing her, one foot on the floor, the other stretched out on the couch. Not quite touching her, but almost. “I really hate my new office.”
“So tell Stacy and change it. Get some different furniture.”
“It’s not that. It’s...”
Terri knew what was wrong but she wasn’t going to say it. She’d never seen anyone less suited to sit in an office all day than Nathaniel Taggert.
“Maybe I’m not made for small-town life. Maybe I should return to the Middle East. I’m sure Kit could find something for me to do.”
“Running away would sure solve all your problems. No more of the Hartmans. No more office that you can’t see out of. You think Stacy will want to leave her parents? Didn’t I hear that she’s opening a design business in town?”
Nate rolled his eyes. “I’m trying for some sympathy here. Help me out.”
“Nope. You have to man up and tell Stacy you hate that office. And what about the old Stanton house?”
He groaned. “What are you going to do? I mean, how do you see your future?”
“I’ll stay here,” Terri said. “I can’t imagine not living here. The lake, Dad, even this house. It’s where I belong.”
“Alone?”
Terri started to answer, but changed her mind. “How about some popcorn?”
“Why do we talk so much about me and never about you?”
“I’ve told you some of my most intimate secrets.”
“Like how you’d like to visit the locker room of the rugby players?”
Terri laughed. “You asked me what I thought of the game and I told you what it meant to me. I like men with meat on them.”
“Like Billy Thorndyke,” Nate said.
“What is it with you and Billy?” Her voice was rising. “He and I broke up years ago. Since then I’ve had three boyfriends.”
“Three, huh?”
“If you’re going to make fun of me, I’m leaving.” But she didn’t move.
“Let’s see. There was the NFL player here at the lake. Who else?”
Terri looked astonished for a moment, then grimaced. “I’m going to kill Della Kissel. I thought I saw her spying on me.”
“Why’d you break up with him?”
“He lives in Pittsburgh.”
“Steelers?”
She nodded.
“What about the other two?”
“What’s caused this interrogation?” she asked.
“Just curious. I’ll tell you about all the women in my life.”
“I can’t imagine why you think I’d want to hear that. Okay! I have a quirk in me that says I want a brain with a body. It took me years to find out that brains and brawn rarely go together. But then, those years were...” She smiled in memory.
For a moment they stared at each other. They could hear a boat motor outside; otherwise it was quiet. But the images in their minds were very loud.
Terri and Nate locked eyes and she could feel herself leaning toward him. Thoughts of honor and integrity, commitment and promises, weren’t in her mind.
Nate broke the contact, abruptly. He stood. “I have to get up early tomorrow. I better...” Swallowing, he gestured toward the bedroom.
“Me too,” Terri said, and she stood, as well. “Widiwick. Booths.”
“Yeah. I, uh...” With a quick nod of good-night, he hurried down the hall to his bedroom and shut the door firmly.
* * *
The next morning, as soon as Terri opened her eyes, she knew that Nate was gone. The house had an emptiness that she felt in her bones. She pulled the covers over her head and wished she could go back a few days. Go back to when the smell of coffee woke her, to a time when she’d stumble into the kitchen, yawning, and Nate would be frying bacon.
But she’d known it was all temporary. Only on that first day had she had about an hour when she thought she and Nate could be... Could be more than friends. She’d bragged to her father that it was better to love and lose than...
“Oh hell!” she muttered, and got out of bed. She had to look to the future, not the past. Someday Nate would be married to Stacy Hartman and they’d all laugh in fond memory of these past weeks.
“Yeah, right,” she mumbled. She got dressed. It was early, the sun just rising. Today was the opening of the festival and she’d be inundated with work. Good. And where would Nate be? With Stacy? Laughing together as she told amusing stories about her adventures in Italy?
“One time I had a flat tire on the way to Richmond,” Terri said under her breath. Changing that on the side of the highway with seventy mile an hour traffic had been a real adventure.
As she walked into the kitchen, she saw that Nate had taped a piece of paper on the fridge. It was a drawing of the back of a muscular man wearing a towel and holding a rugby ball. Hank Bullnose, prop forward, says he’ll meet you in the dressing room at noon. Bring sausages.
Terri knew the cartoon was supposed to make her smile, but instead, it brought tears to her eyes. She ran across the room, threw the door open and went outside to fall into one of the chairs. Her chair. The one next to Nate’s. Where the two of them had sat in the evenings and on weekends. Where they’d shared meals and laughter and confidences.
The lake was beginning to come alive. She saw lights coming on, heard a couple of shouts and motors.
It was Widiwick, she thought. It was a festival that had been started by an eleven-year-old boy with a heart as big as the earth. A boy the town came to love to the point where he was their ideal of perfection. WWBD. What would Billy do? they asked one another. It became a motto. Something to achieve.
All through school Terri had been too busy to think about the things other girls did. She wasn’t interested in the dances—unless they were to be held at the lake. Then her concern was feeding people and getting them across the docks without falling in after they’d had too much spiked punch.
She’d heard the girls giggling over beautiful Billy Thorndyke. Who was he going to date when he ever did? He couldn’t spend his entire life studying and playing sports, could he?
Because Terri had always been exposed to the sexual shenanigans that went on at the lake, she knew more of the world than the townies did. She truly believed Billy was gay. It made sense. He was always with boys, never alone with a girl. Girls threw themselves at him, but Billy ignored them.
When she and Billy were in elementary school together, they’d been buddies. Terri had been a tomboy, strong from all she did at the lake, so she could keep up with Billy on the playground. When the school set up swimming classes at a nearby pool, Billy had been impressed when Terri swam the length easily and quickly.
But by the time they reached the seventh grade, the sexes began to separate. It was like the Garden of Eden and the kids became aware of bodies and feelings they didn’t understand. Terri hadn’t had time to be part of all that. By that time, she’d gro
wn tall and knew enough that she was a good help to her dad and Uncle Jake. She worked before and after school and on weekends. In the summer she was working every minute.
One day in the last months of their junior year, Billy stopped at Terri’s locker and asked what she was doing on Saturday. “Cleaning the oil filters,” or some such was her answer.
“I could save you a seat at the game,” Billy said.
“That would be nice. There are some bored teenagers at the lake now. They’d probably like to go. Thanks.” She turned away to head to class.
Billy caught her arm. “I meant for you. Come to the game and after we can go get something to eat.”
“Can’t. Sorry. Too much to do.” She’d run to her class.
When Terri looked back on it, she was astonished that she’d been so oblivious to Billy’s attempts to ask her out on a date. But then, so many of the kids sucked up to her in the hopes of getting something for free at the lake that she’d learned to ignore them. The girls showed up whenever something like a soccer team booked cabins. The boys came to see some female swimmers. And when they did, they acted as though Terri was their best friend.
For all that Terri didn’t participate with the others at school, she was certainly feeling what they did. It was just that she kept everything at the lake. There was kissing behind the boathouse. Behind the pizza stand, a guy’s hand slipped under her shirt. Nothing was particularly serious, just fun and laughter. And nothing was with any of the Summer Hill kids.
But then, Terri had worked hard to learn not to concern herself with was what was going on in the little town. Since her mother had run off and left her and her dad, meaning all of Terri’s life, she’d heard whispers. “Isn’t that the girl whose mother...?”
In the ninth grade, there had been that incident in a stairwell when Hector and his friend tried to slam Terri up against a wall. It was after school and the building was nearly empty. The heavy fire door would prevent anyone from hearing her yell. Hector said, “Come on, you know you want it. Everybody says you’re just like your mother.”
Terri had gone into a blind rage. She’d used her backpack as a weapon and tapped into every muscle she’d made at the lake. She’d had to duck booms and flying oars since she could walk, so she was agile. When she came back to reality, there were two boys on the floor. She threw open the door and ran into the empty hall.
She would have left it there and never spoken of it, but a bunch of cheerleaders, Stacy Hartman one of them, saw the boys crumpled on the floor and asked what happened. Of course the boys had to save their male pride and say they had been attacked without reason. With sad faces of suffering, they let the pretty girls put their arms around them to help them walk.
In the ensuing weeks, the boys exaggerated what had happened in the stairwell to make it seem that Terri had attacked them with weapons.
Terri, her father beside her, had made only one attempt to defend herself by telling the truth. Right away, she saw that it was a lost cause. She was not popular in school and had no defenders, while the boys were the stars of the football team. They were needed; Terri was not.
Brody had been so angry about it all that he’d lost his temper—which hadn’t helped. His rage was the final straw. It seemed to be proof that Terri had done just what the boys said she had.
The boys got off with no punishment, while Terri was expelled for three days. Worse was that one of the boys, Hector, blamed the incident for his failure to become a professional football player. Terri had yet another mark against her.
All in all, it had made her disconnect even more from the people of Summer Hill.
But she’d been content. She had the people at the lake, all of whom liked her. And eventually she began planning for college and what she was going to do afterward. Maybe after college she’d go into marine biology. Maybe she’d change from freshwater to salt. Oh! but she’d had plans.
But then, the summer before her senior year, Billy Thorndyke changed her life. The day after school let out, he showed up at the lake and asked Terri to teach him to swim.
“You know how to swim,” she told him.
“But not like you do. I might want to join the swim team.”
She pointedly looked him up and down. He had on baggy swim trunks and a towel around his neck. He had the body of a football player, not the long, sleek muscles of a swimmer.
He grinned at her insinuation. “Okay, so maybe the coach wants me to improve my running. I thought maybe swimming would help.”
She knew he was lying but she had no idea why. She’d have to check the reservations. Maybe some celebrity had booked and he’d learned about it and wanted to be there when he/she arrived. She told Billy to return at two for his first class.
When he came back that afternoon, Terri put him in with her six-year-olds and under. She thought he’d be so insulted that he’d leave, but putting Billy with little kids was like pouring chocolate sauce over ice cream. The children went crazy with delight at the very sight of him. They unanimously decided to see how many of them could sit, lie, hold on to Billy while he swam the length of the pool.
After only ten minutes, Terri gave up trying to restore order for lessons. Instead, she helped the children come up with ways to attach themselves to Billy. After thirty minutes, half the lake was there yelling encouragement to Billy to swim harder. Kids held on to his neck, shoulders, waist, legs.
At the end, he had the whole class attached to him, and there were fifty people around the pool shouting at him to go! go! go!
He made it the entire length, then pulled himself out and took a bow. Only Terri saw beneath his bravado. He was so deeply exhausted, he was about to pass out. To do so in front of all those people would do irreparable damage to his teenage male ego.
Terri decided to be the bad guy. She blew her whistle and told everyone to go away. She then yelled at Billy that he was to go with her so she could give him a lecture about water safety.
Brody was standing in the doorway, his brows drawn together in anger. Terri knew she was going to get the lecture for allowing this to happen.
She got Billy up the stairs. At that time, she was living in the apartment at Club Circle and Brody had a cabin. Once inside, she got Billy onto her bed, put a mask on his face and gave him oxygen.
He was shaking his head, but she ignored him. “Just be still and breathe.” The stethoscope wasn’t in her emergency kit, so she put her hand on his heart to feel how hard it was pounding.
Billy managed to smile under the mask and held her hand to his chest.
She started to pull away, but when he wouldn’t release her, everything hit her. She looked into his blue eyes and understood it all. He wasn’t gay. He’d just been waiting for her. And he’d known her well enough that he’d not approached her until they were close to graduation. He intuitively knew that if he’d tried to do the boyfriend/girlfriend thing earlier, she would have knocked him across the sandbox.
When he saw that she finally understood, he closed his eyes and his heart slowed down—but he didn’t release her hand.
He dozed a bit and Terri stayed beside him.
Brody came in to check on them, saw that they were holding hands and gave a grunt. “Poor guy. I think he was about to give up hope.” He left the apartment.
To Terri’s astonishment, several people at the lake had seen that Billy Thorndyke was mad for her. Only she hadn’t known it.
After that day, she and Billy took their time. He was slow and cautious, never rushing anything. He asked Terri to give him private swimming lessons and she did teach him how to cut the water more smoothly. She taught him to float and do the backstroke.
They began spending more and more time together. Billy started helping her get her work done so they could go out alone.
They made love the first time when they got caught in the rain on the Island. Billy had been ge
ntle and sweet, worried that he was hurting her.
It took a week before the “gentle and sweet” left them and their hormones kicked in. They were young and athletic and adventurous. They made love everywhere and in every possible position.
In normal circumstances, they might have received disapproval, but not in their case. Billy was as popular in town as Terri was at the lake. It was like the prince and princess of two neighboring kingdoms uniting. Terri’s family of Brody, Jake and Frank was very happy about the union. The Thorndykes were so glad that their son might marry a hometown girl and stay in Summer Hill that they never quit smiling.
And Terri and Billy were ecstatic. By the end of the summer they were rarely apart. They ran in and out of each other’s houses freely. Terri came to know the big old Thorndyke mansion as well as the cabins at the lake.
When school started, Terri’s place in the ruthless teenage hierarchy had changed. No one could understand why the-boy-every-girl-wanted had chosen her, but he had. Terri was asked to parties and overnighters, and even let in on the school gossip. At the lake, Brody hired three boys to do what Terri did so she could have time with Billy.
Their senior year was sublime. Laughter, lovemaking, arguments, making up. It was all there. LIFE. That’s what they’d shared.
And it had all ended in one horrible, devastating, irreversible moment. One day heaven, the next hell.
Billy wanted to go on, but Terri couldn’t. The sins of her mother hung over her too strongly. She’d spent her life trying to make people look at her family differently. She could not go through the rest of her life with yet another mark against her.
Billy’s family left town. He told her they were going to leave—and he begged her to go with them.
“You’re asking me to choose between you and my father.”
Met Her Match Page 15
