free.
I walked down the sidewalk, enjoying the familiar feel of bumpy brick, hot beneath my sandals. Pots of red geraniums sat on broad steps. Impatiens tumbled over baskets hanging from painted wood porches. The Colonial Days Festival, held every June, was in full swing, and people crowded into shops like Urschpruk’s Books. In front of Faye’s Gallery wind chimes hung as they always had in one of the sycamores lining the main street.
Then the wind shifted. I smelled the river. Everything went cold inside me. Despite the sunlight, I started to shiver. For a moment I thought of returning to my car and driving straight back to Birch Hill Academy. This was why I hadn’t come back here. This was why boarding with teachers and vacationing with my father and his political staff had seemed the better way to spend a summer.
I forced myself to keep walking and tried to focus on the present, making it a game to identify everything that was different: the new sign on Teague’s Antiques, the dogwoods planted on the town hall lawn, the color of the window shutters along Lawyers Row.
“Are you lost?”
I turned around. “Excuse me?”
Two guys were sprawled on a bench close to the sidewalk. The one who had spoken wore tattered shorts and a colonial three-cornered hat-nothing else. He had wide shoulders and long, muscular legs. He stretched dramatically, then lay his tanned arms along the back of the bench. “You look lost,” he said. “Can I help you find something?”
“Uh, no, thanks. I was just looking.”
He grinned. “Me, too.”
“Oh?” I glanced around, thinking I’d missed something.
“At what?”
He and his friend burst out laughing.
Way to go, Lauren, I thought. He had been looking at me!
He was flirting.
Feeling stupid, I stuck my hands in my pockets and kept walking. I knew I was blushing.
“Have a good time looking,” he called after me.
I turned halfway around. “Thanks.”
On the one-to-ten scale of the girls at Birch Hill, he was a definite eight, maybe higher if he took off the hat. I could see from the slight tilt of his head that he was assigning a number to me, too. I turned back quickly and kept walking.
“Make sure you stop at the dunking booth,” he added. “It’s part of the festival, two blocks down. See you in about ten minutes.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “Okay… maybe.” I felt the warmth spreading on the back of my neck and wondered if the backs of my legs were pink as well.
Would he really meet me there? But then what? Nothing, of course. I was good at math and English, and good at sports, but lousy at guys. Of course, a girls’ boarding school didn’t allow for much experience with guys, but the real reason was that when I got the chance, I ducked it.
I wondered if Aunt Jule’s daughters were dating a lot now.
My godmother visited me twice a year and downloaded me on everything I had done, but she always brushed off my questions about Nora and Holly with short answers. And she never remembered to bring photos, so I couldn’t even picture them as teens. Maybe Nora and Holly knew this guy, I thought, then put him out of my mind.
The two and a half blocks from Washington Street to the town harbor were closed off to cars for the festival. I began to wander through the tents set up in the street. At a political booth I said a silent hello to my father. An unflattering picture of his face was blown up to beach-ball size and nicely framed by a red circle, a diagonal line drawn through it — the banning symbol. The farmers and watermen on the Eastern Shore hated his political agenda; if I were them, I would, too.
I passed the Mallard, a colonial tavern converted to a bed-and-breakfast, then stopped in at Tea Leaves Cafe, where the best cookies in the world were made. Standing inside the door, I enjoyed the cool draft from the ceiling fans and the rich, familiar smells of brown sugar and butter. Then a feeling of dread spread through me. My skin prickled with sweat and turned ice cold. I remembered sitting in the cafe as a little girl, watching my mother slowly descend the steps from the second floor, where fortunes were told.
Mommy’s face was the color of pale icing. Old Miss Lydia had peered into her crystal ball and seen grave danger and death. When my mother told me that — like a fact, not a prediction — I was so scared I cried. I didn’t know how I could protect her.
Looking back on it now, I realized that Miss Lydia hadn’t needed a crystal ball to make such a dark prediction. After a hundred tabloid stories about my father’s romances and my mother’s wealth, and having endured years of cruel comments from political advisers who saw my mother as a liability, she had come to believe that everyone was against her — everyone except me. She had clung to me as if I were a life preserver. Fear and anger had been written on her face, and that was all the fortune-teller needed to read.
I left the cafe and continued on, barely seeing the shops and booths I passed. Not until I crossed Cannon Street did I come back to the present, startled back into it by an amplified voice.
“Come on, all you spaghetti arms! Who’s going to wind up and throw that ball? You there — come on, skinny. Put me out of my misery. Dunk me!”
It was the guy from the bench, still wearing his threecornered hat. He razzed the fairgoers from a plank suspended above a vat of water. According to the sign, the dunking booth was raising money for Wisteria High School.
Two middle-aged men took the bait and threw at the target, a four-inch disk which, if struck, would upend the plank.
“Nice curve ball, buddy. Too bad it was five feet off.
Come on, girls, your turn. Show that guy how it’s done.”
Several groups of girls about my age had gathered around the booth, and guys were hanging out to watch the girls hanging out. There was a lot of body language going on — a glance over a bare shoulder, the sweep of eyelashes, the lifting of long waves of hair. I could learn something from these girls, I thought — not that I planned to use it anytime soon.
“Come on, limber up those pretty arms,” the guy with the hat urged. “Want me to make the target bigger? How big?
Big as a beach towel? Think you could hit that?”
I could, I thought. I could peg that little red disk. But I stayed at the back of the crowd, observing the flirting.
“Hey, it’s the looker!” he announced with delight. “I didn’t think you’d show, looker. Step right up! Why’re you standing all the way back there?”
I glanced to the left and the right, hoping someone would materialize next to me.
“You,” he said.
Everyone in the crowd turned to me. I’ve been stared at in Washington, where people know I’m “Brandt’s daughter,” and I’ve learned to shut it out. But this was different My instincts told me I couldn’t shut him out.
“You’re not shy, are you?”
“Shy of what?”
Some of the kids laughed. I hadn’t meant to be funny.
“Shy of showing off that arm.”
“No,” I said.
He waited for me to say more. There was a long pause. I felt as if I were back in the days when my father would call me up to the speaker’s podium and I was supposed to say something cute. I remained stubbornly silent.
“Then come on up. Do everybody a favor and shut me up,” he said. “Put down your money, pick up that ball, and let it fly, looker.”
“I’d rather not.”
