That Summer Place: Island Time / Old Things / Private Paradise

Catherine opened her desk drawer and threw out a wadded-up bill. “Twenty says it arrives tomorrow morning.” She paused, then added pointedly, “About the same time you get your pink slip.”

“You? Fire me?” Myrtle just ignored her. “Anyone else would bore you to death. Besides which, you need me.”

“I also needed hard labor to give birth.”

Myrtle burst out laughing.

Firing Myrtle was a ludicrous threat, since they both knew Catherine would be lost without her. Just one look at the cluttered office was proof enough.

Over the years she and Myrtle had become more than business associates; they had become friends. Catherine’s daughters called Myrtle Martin “Aunt Mickie.” It was Myrtle Martin who’d kept Catherine laughing through each difficult day after her husband, Tom, had walked away from her, and even more heart-wrenchingly, walked away from his young daughters because they caused too many complications in his life. Myrtle was the first person Catherine called when her ex-husband died two years after the divorce, and just six months ago, when her father was killed suddenly in an accident.

While Myrtle set about cleaning the office and filing papers, Catherine shoved away from her desk and stood. She crossed the room and opened the door to her small bath, where she dumped out an old cup of coffee, then rested both palms flat on the edges of the pedestal sink. She leaned into the mirror and wondered if that was really her face staring back.

She looked like her mother. And her grandmother. Blonde hair, brown eyes. Just like theirs except she had a dash of freckles across her nose that had never faded, even though her skin hadn’t been exposed to the sun for years. They just stayed there, reminders of a summer when she had been badly burned.

She heard Myrtle mumbling out in the office and stepped into the doorway. “Are you talking to me?”

“Yes.” Myrtle looked over her shoulder at Catherine. “I was saying that you’re the one who needs a trip to the Greek Isles.”

Catherine closed the adjoining door and crossed the office. “What I really need is to hire someone efficient while you’re out on vacation.” Catherine sat down.

Myrtle turned around. “At least I take vacations.”

“I take vacations.”

“When?”

Catherine raised her chin. “I took the girls to Disneyland.”

“They were two and six.”

Catherine’s daughters were now eleven and fifteen. “I went to New Orleans, remember?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Good.”

“Reagan was president.”

“He was not.”

“Well…” Myrtle gave her hand a dramatic wave and slapped a file drawer closed. “It must have been Bush. I know it was one of those good ol’ Republican boys.”

Catherine glanced down at the paperwork on her desk. She had so much to do. “I can’t get away right now….” She let the last word fade out when she realized that Myrtle was silently mouthing the very same words.

Catherine stared at her, half in surprise and half in shame. Even to her own ears it sounded like something she’d said a dozen times. Nothing but the same old excuse.

She closed her eyes for a second, feeling as if she’d been hit with a huge anvil, one painted with the words Bad Mother. She ran a hand over her eyes. She could still see Aly and Dana’s eager young faces as they’d stood outside Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

Once upon a time they had been awestruck by Goofy, Mickey and the other Disney characters. Only last week Aly had hung a Hanson poster over her prized Beauty and the Beast print, and Dana had come home from a sleepover with a third hole pierced high in her ear.

Catherine sagged back in her chair and gave her secretary a direct look. “Has it really been that long?”

“It’s been a few years since you went away with just Aly and Dana.”

Her daughters’ last vacations had been with their grandparents or a random week each year at summer camp. Catherine was hit hard by a working mother’s guilt.

It had always sounded so perfect when her parents chose to take the girls some place special. And those trips always seemed to coincide with Catherine’s important presentations. Now, in retrospect, she felt selfish.

When she was growing up, her parents had spent almost every summer in Washington, in a wonderful Victorian clapboard house on a small San Juan island. Those summers had been easy and free, a time past when the air was clean, the sky was blue, and you woke up to the aching call of the gulls or the soft sound of rain on the roof. A place where your schedule was dictated only by the rise of the sun or the moon.

On Spruce Island, when she was seven, she had learned the names of all the stars and constellations, because there was no television to teach her that stars were merely people made by Hollywood.

On dark summer nights at the water’s edge, she had roasted her first marshmallow and heard her first ghost story around the golden flames of a beach fire. And on that same island, on a chilly Northwest morning she caught her first fish—a six inch bottom-sucker that her father didn’t make her throw back in spite of the game laws.

It was there where she had learned to swim, to sail, and to kiss, for it was on Spruce Island during a bittersweet summer in the Sixties—the days when she used Yardley soap, dressed like Jean Shrimpton, and ironed her long hair straight—that she had found her first love.

With Michael.

She felt that old wistful feeling you have when you remember something that might have been. His image was bittersweet as it formed in her mind, and she wondered if he really had been that tall, intense young man she remembered.

Michael Packard had been twenty years old, incredibly mature and mysterious to a seventeen year old late bloomer who’d had a crush on him since she was eleven.

At twenty he’d had a man’s strength and a man’s gentleness, qualities she had seen in her father, but never in any of the young men she knew. The boys in her hometown craved fast cars and even faster girls. They drank Colt 45 malt liquor, carried hard-packs of Marlboros in their madras-shirt pockets, and cruised the streets in shiny cars with loud engines and big tires.

But Michael was so different from those boys. Even today, some thirty years later, she could still remember things about him: his voice saying her name, his long tanned legs stretched out on the small sloop they’d sailed in the cove, his wonderful hands and the way they could haul up a boat anchor, carve her initials in a piece of wood, or just as easily wipe a tear from her cheek.

That June she had fallen hard for him, fallen hard for the dark-haired young man with a deep, quiet voice that sounded as if it came from his soul. He had a poet’s eyes, the kind of eyes she had seen in black-and-white photos of Laurence Ferlinghetti and Bob Dylan, eyes that could look right through you, especially if you were only seventeen. His hungry looks made her dreamy young heart melt like the cocoa butter they slathered over their suntanned skin. And he gave her long, hot kisses that could have burned the fog off Puget Sound.

“Good God…Whatever are you thinking about?”

Catherine straightened a little and stared at Myrtle. “Nothing. Why?”

“You look as if you just got lucky with George Clooney.”

Catherine laughed and shook her head. “I was remembering a summer from a long, long time ago.”

“It must have been one hot summer.”

It was hot, she thought, so hot that all her youthful dreams had burned right up. She glanced up and gave Myrtle a wry look. “It couldn’t have been too hot. I was only seventeen.”

Myrtle held up her hand and began to count off. “Cleopatra, Lolita—”

“Well, now I’m forty-seven,” Catherine said, cutting Myrtle off before she got going. She didn’t want to talk about things from a long time ago. She wanted to keep them locked away in that secret part of her heart, the place where her daydreams began and a lifetime of what-ifs were hidden away.

“I’m fifty-five,” Myrtle said. “And that doesn’t stop me.”

“Nothing stops you.”