by Lisa Wingate
As Birdie fished around in her basket of random toys and produced a little plastic teapot, I felt a twinge of remorse at the thought of the kids I didn’t have never meeting the great-uncle I wouldn’t see again after this weekend.
Watching Birdie serve pretend tea, I wished life were different than it was.
The banter started again after Birdie had filled all the cups and then scampered off. A buzzer above the back door interrupted the conversation, and Uncle Charley stood up, peeking out the back window. “Looks like you need to turn on the gas pump down there, Pop. Put it on the Underhill’s bill. I’ll tell you what, that’s a nice fishin’ rig Blaine’s got. He could win some votes with that thing, sure enough.”
Before I’d even given it any thought, I was excusing myself, slipping from my seat, and grabbing my coat. I headed out the back door to discern— from the source—what business was going on between my brother and the local banker.
A brisk February wind whipped over the water and raced up the hill. Swinging the coat over my shoulders, I stuck my arms in the sleeves and quickly realized that I’d grabbed someone else’s outerwear from the pile on the empty booth. This one was large enough for me and my two best friends, and it was a camo color with roadstripe-orange western detailing. I pulled it on anyway, the bottom falling halfway to my knees, surrounding me like a puffy tent as I strode down the rock steps toward the lakeshore and the dock, where Blaine Underhill was nonchalantly gassing up his boat, one foot braced on the dock railing, the collar of a khaki-colored barn jacket turned upright against his neck, hiding his face. There was no sign of my brother or the red kayak. Apparently this morning’s fishing trip was over.
A strange tangle of past and present swirled in my thoughts, a fruitless attempt to mesh the memory of the boy from high school with the banker of today, my brother’s new best friend. If Blaine Underhill was the moneyman behind Clay’s plans, did he have any idea what a mistake he was making? Did he know that, sooner or later, their plan would result in disaster for the uncs and leave Clay responsible for not only financial obligations, but most likely the reality of once again going from hero to zero in the eyes of the family? With Clay’s history of chaotic life shifts, there was no telling where things might lead. Clay might join some mission trip to Bora-Bora and never come back. In the meantime, the property that had belonged to Uncle Herbert, Uncle Charley, and my family for generations would end up in foreclosure, in the hands of . . . the bank?
Potential motivations began taking shape in my mind, even though I didn’t want to entertain them. Would Blaine Underhill finance my brother’s flight of fancy, knowing that Clay would fail and the bank would end up with the property and whatever down payment my mother was putting into this unholy partnership? I tried to imagine the object of my chemistry-class crush, now playing the part of the heartless, shifty-eyed banker—the sort with the handlebar moustache and the evil laugh. The kind who would toss widows, orphans, and helpless old men out in the snow. Could he have changed so much from the prankster who had the ability to answer teachers’ questions but typically chose to go for a laugh instead?
Of course he could have changed. Haven’t you? After sixteen years, who could say what kind of person Blaine Underhill was? In truth, the Blaine I remembered was a schoolgirl fantasy. Even back then, I had no idea who he really was behind the high-school mask.
It didn’t matter now. If he had any intentions of taking advantage of my family, he had another think coming.
Every ounce of nostalgic sentiment evaporated from my thoughts, and I welcomed the empowering rush of righteous indignation. It was easier to handle than leftover puppy love and mushy gushy thoughts of an unrequited adoration. Blaine Underhill was about to find out that the wimpy, quiet, messed-up girl who let everyone push her around in high school had grown up and gotten a backbone.
He hooked the nozzle back on the gas pump as I hit the dock, the wooden heels on my suede boots making a hollow ping-tap-ping on the half-frozen wood. I took note of the cracks between the boards. The boots didn’t have high heels, but they did have heels, and those cracks were wide enough to create a misstep that would entirely ruin my entrance and put a kink in the strictly-business and slightly dragonlike persona that had served me so well in a male-dominated career field. The banker was about to see that not everyone in the Hampton family was filled with impractical dreams.
Wiping his hands on a rag, he looked up, blinked, and cocked his head to one side, as if a woman in dress boots, skinny jeans, and a giant camouflage coat weren’t an everyday sight on the dock.
Employing a strategy I’d long ago learned from Mel while dealing with difficult clients, I opened the dialog and got right to the point. “I’d like to know what, exactly, is going on between you and my brother.”
His expression went completely blank, and he backed away a step as I made it to the platform near the gas pumps. The decking rocked slightly in the current, causing me to spread my feet like a gunfighter about to draw down at the O.K. Corral.
“Ma’am?” A dark brow lifted, and his chin drew inward a bit, the little cleft there growing more pronounced. I’d forgotten about that cleft in his chin. . . .
I admonished myself to remain focused. It was harder than I’d thought it would be. His appreciative look, and the lanky southern cadence of his words lured me in some way I didn’t want to contemplate. “Please don’t insult my intelligence. He may be falling for this, but I’m not. Let’s be honest, shall we?”
Blaine finished wiping his hands and set the rag aside. “All right.” His eyes narrowed, black lashes fanning over the brown centers. His dark hair was shorter than it used to be, windblown right now, curling just a bit over his ears and on his collar.
I took a breath, paused a moment to get my thoughts in order, and remembered watching those lashes drift toward his cheeks as he rested his chin on his hand in chemistry class. “Have you checked my brother’s credit rating, looked into his background, investigated his history?”
Crossing his arms over his chest, Blaine leaned against the railing, the barest hint of amusement playing on his lips. I realized I was looking at his lips. I quit looking and focused on his forehead.
“That’s not really the way I like to do things. I don’t see the point.”
“Don’t see the point?” I threw my hands up, and the ends of the oversized leaf-print sleeves flopped like tree branches in the wind. “Are you serious?” Maybe Blaine Underhill really was still the goof-off he’d been in high school. Maybe his parents, aging and unable to figure out what else to do with him, were letting him use the bank as his personal play toy. Maybe he was more like my brother than I’d thought. Weren’t there federal regulators who prevented bankers from doing stupid things with other people’s money? “What kind of sense does that make?”
He shrugged nonchalantly, his response annoyingly calm. “I think it makes perfect sense. Some things just aren’t right to do.” He had the same drawl as Clay’s new girlfriend, Amy, though Blaine’s was less pronounced.
“What?” My tree-branch sleeves flopped up and down once, twice. Talking with my hands was one of those nervous habits I had yet to overcome. “Some things aren’t right to do. Give me a break. How can you possibly operate like that?” This innocent country-boy act had to be a way of toying with me, trying to throw me off track. Maybe I should report him to some kind of . . . I wasn’t sure who . . . the FDIC, or the board of banking, or someone.
“A man’s background is his own business.” He brushed a scrap of what looked like hay off his sleeve, and I noted that for a guy who’d just been out fishing, he was strangely neat and clean—pressed jeans, fairly new cowboy boots, and a white collar peeking around the top button of his coat. He looked like he was dressed for a barn dance or a night at the rodeo, rather than an early-morning fishing trip.
I rolled my eyes, irritated with the runaround. He needed to be upstairs telling milk-cow stories with Nester Grimland and Burt Lacey. No bank—not even
a little redneck bank like the one across the street from the Moses Lake post office—loaned out money without checking the applicant’s background. “Pah-lease. Do I look stupid to you?”
“No, ma’am,” he answered, his eyes twinkling. “A little fashion-challenged, maybe, but not stupid.” His lips spread into a grin that went right to the pit of my stomach and did something strange there.
“This is not a joke.” And how dare he think that I’d be weak enough to fall for the class-clown act. I wasn’t used to people blowing me off, not taking me seriously. I hadn’t gotten to the position of senior manager with a major firm by being the simpering little wimpkin I was in high school. “I guess maybe it’s a joke to you, or just business, or whatever, but as much as my brother drives me insane, I do care about his future. A lot. I don’t want him to end up falling flat on his face and taking the rest of the family with him. As brilliant as he is, he’s like a big . . . teenager, basically. He has never managed to stick with anything in his life, and he won’t stick with this. He’ll be into it just long enough to dig a great big hole, and then something else will catch his eye.” My arms, lost within the voluminous sleeves, beseeched him to look at Clay objectively.
“I hadn’t heard that about him, but it’s good to know.”
I had the sense that I might be getting somewhere. Maybe I could sway him and end this whole thing. Clay wouldn’t be happy with me, but he’d tack in a new direction soon enough, and then he’d be glad he hadn’t entangled himself in Moses Lake. So would my mother, actually, and the uncs would be rid of the burden of properties they could no longer take care of. I would continue on to be the project manager, and Moses Lake would have over three-hundred badly needed new jobs. Everyone would be better off.
“So, you can see that the best thing to do is just . . . not help him.”
Uncrossing his legs and then crossing them the other way, the banker blinked, cocking his head back a bit, as if he were trying to make sense of me. “I’m not trying to help him. I plan to come out a winner in this thing.”
My mouth dropped open, and I felt like one of those cartoon characters slowly turning red-hot from the chest, upward. Any minute now, my ears would go off like a steam whistle. He was actually admitting that he planned to take advantage of my brother and my entire family? How dare he! “You’re going to stand right here and tell me that? You’re not even trying to hide it?” The nerve of this guy! The arrogance.
Did he have reason to be so confident? How involved were he and Clay? Was this situation already beyond salvaging?
“It’s no secret,” he said, and I felt sick. “I don’t play to lose.”
A lump rose in my throat, and for a mortifying instant, I had that I’m-not-going-to-cry feeling. I swallowed it and rode another wave of anger, instead. “You know what? You have to be the biggest jerk I’ve ever met. If you think you’re going to just . . . take everything my family has worked for . . . for generations, and use my brother to do it, you’d better think again. That’ll happen over my dead body.”
His lips tugged at the corners. “That’d be a shame.” He watched me with a look that could only have been described as hot. And, sue me, but for a moment, I liked it. The mini-grin morphed into a full-fledged smile, and he shook his head, chuckling under his breath.
“What in the world are you laughing at?” An insistent foot-stomp confirmed that my toes were prickly cold. The suede boots were cute, but dysfunctional in this environment, unfortunately.
Lifting his chin, he uncrossed his legs and pushed away from the post. “I think I just figured out that we’re chattin’ out two different sides of the barn here. I don’t have any idea who you are or what you’re talking about.”
I felt my mouth dropping open again, my chin just hanging there against the flame-orange collar, my mind running like a hamster on a wheel, around and around in circles. Perpetual motion but no forward progress. “Wha . . . but . . . you . . .”
I could see it in his face. There was not one hint of recognition in his eyes. “You don’t . . .”
“I wish I did.” He delivered another smoldering smile, then wiped it away. “You’re not related to that idiot who’s running against me for county commission, are you?”
“County comish . . . What?” All I could think was, Blaine Underhill has no idea who I am. He’s looking right at me, and he has no idea who he’s looking at.
I wasn’t certain whether to feel wounded or pleased. How should a girl feel when confirming her belief that the object of her high-school crush never even gave her a second thought?
He was thinking about me now, though. That much was obvious enough, and even though I didn’t want to, I felt my ego purring like a kitten. Right now, he was clearly waiting for me to melt under the heat of that smile. I was tempted to, but of course that was a juvenile impulse. Somebody in my family had to act like an adult, to get down to business before it was too late. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m talking about my brother, Clay Hampton. I know he and my mother have some wild idea about getting the financing to buy Catfish Charley’s, the funeral home at Harmony Shores, and the thirds of the family farm that belong to Uncle Charley and Uncle Herb. They’ve been talking to you about it, haven’t they?”
He didn’t answer at first. He was staring at me, his expression one of pure, unmitigated shock. “You’re . . . Heather Hampton?”
Once again, I wasn’t sure how to feel. I had, at least, managed to completely eradicate my high school self, as well as to wipe that smug look off his face. While I had him off-balance, I decided to go in for the kill. “Yes. And I don’t want you doing business with my brother—bankrolling him or in any other way encouraging him or my mother in this idiotic fantasy they’ve hatched. I don’t know what’s going on with them, because the last time I checked, neither one of them wanted anything to do with Moses Lake. But this needs to end now. I can promise you that any business they open in Moses Lake would be a bad investment. My brother has a history of starting things and not finishing them, and my mother is . . . Well, let’s just say she’s no different than she’s always been.”
Blaine Underhill shook his head, trying to clear the fog, apparently. “You’re Heather Hampton.” An eyebrow squeezed low over one brown eye.
“Yes.” Enough already. This was getting a little irritating, really. “And I suppose you see my point . . . about the bank loans.”
He scratched the back of his neck, looking down at the dock. “Ma’am, I can’t discuss someone else’s financial business with you.”
“This is my family we’re talking about.” Why did he have to be so obtuse? “I have a right to know what’s happening.”
“You’ll have to talk to your family about that.” He lifted his palms in a way that said, Hands off, sorry.
I clenched and unclenched my fingers inside my sleeves, a half-dozen broken fingernails from yesterday’s adventure pressing jagged teeth into my skin. “You’re the one behind this supposed competing offer, aren’t you? You’re helping my brother.”
“Your brother and I are friends,” he answered cautiously.
“You know what? A friend doesn’t help you do something stupid. A friend doesn’t set you up for a fall, so the friend can make a profit.”
He drew back as if I’d offended him. “That’s what you think I’m doing?”
My thin thread of patience was unwinding at a frightening pace. My feet were ice cubes, the cold had penetrated my jeans, and the damp wind off the lake had changed directions, striking me head on and slipping inside the collar of my oversized jacket. “I don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why I asked.” Pinpricks stabbed my left foot and traveled up my leg. An unsteady backward step sent a bootheel sinking between the icy boards, and the next thing I knew, I was staggering off balance, my hands flying in the air, the floppy sleeves flailing, slapping me, then swatting the railing, then some other solid object, which I realized was Blaine, because suddenly the jacket was tighte
r on one side. He used it to pull me upright and stop me from landing on the deck.
Once I was safely on my feet, he pulled his hands away as if he feared that keeping them there any longer might result in the loss of a finger or two. We stood for a moment at a stalemate. I felt my cold cheeks going hot.
“Look, all I can tell you is that you need to talk to your brother,” he said finally.
Humiliated, angry, and realizing that I’d accomplished nothing other than tipping my hand and refreshing his memory of the uncoordinated, awkward girl he hadn’t thought about since high school, I did the best thing I could think of.
I just turned around and walked away, taking care to avoid the gaps in the dock.
The water downstream ain’t clear,
if the water upstream is muddy.
—Len Barnes, veteran, proud grandpa, and Moses Lake resident
Chapter 7
After having tried to reason with my mother, confronting the highly-irritating banker on the Waterbird dock, and finally attempting to get some straight answers from the uncs during our drive back to Harmony Shores, I decided to attack the problem at its source: my brother. Clay was at the center of this debacle and obviously had been for a while. The frustrating thing was that he would waste time involving himself in Moses Lake at all. Clay was brilliant, talented, personable—amazing, really. He was three times as book-smart as I could ever hope to be. He would be a great lawyer, if he would just buckle down and get through school.
I found my brother by the lakeshore, unstacking the canoes and setting them upside down on the lawn, apparently checking for condition. I remembered the uncs doing that in the past. My dad and I had helped a time or two when I was little. The uncs had engaged in heated discussions as to which canoes needed to be scrapped and which could go another season.
