CHAPTER ELEVEN
1977
“Oh, Laura, look at this one. I like this shot, don’t you?” Mariska Majesky handed her a photograph from the envelope of prints she’d picked up from the one-hour photo. “I really like this new haircut on me.”
Laura Tuttle studied the photo with an enthusiasm that was, she admitted to herself, forced. While Laura worked the early shift at the bakery all summer, her best friend, Mariska, had been having a storybook romance, complete with Prince Charming. Laura had fallen into a secondary role, and now at summer’s end, she was weary of it. But she put on her game face and admired the picture, which showed a laughing Mariska and a tanned and gorgeous Philip Bellamy holding a tennis trophy cup. The green hills and placid lake of Camp Kioga rolled out in the background.
“I like this shot, too.” Still hiding her discontent, Laura handed back the photo. A pleasant breeze rippled through the alleyway behind the bakery, where she and Mariska were supposed to be rolling empty racks out of the truck after a delivery. They had paused to take a break before heading back to the yeasty-scented heat of the bakery.
“Tell you what,” Mariska said, shaking out her attractive, layer-cut hair. “I had double prints made. I’m going to find a frame for this. Philip’s heading back to Yale in a few days and this is the only picture of us together.”
“That’s because you’re not supposed to be together,” Laura pointed out.
“Don’t start.” A warning flashed in Mariska’s eyes.
Laura could handle her friend’s temper. “He’s engaged to someone else,” she reminded her.
“Yeah, to Pamela Lightsey, who ditched him for an entire summer so she could go to Italy. She deserves to lose him.”
“You don’t even know her, so how do you know what she deserves?”
“I know what she’s like,” Mariska insisted. “A spoiled rich girl. When Philip breaks up with her, she’ll probably buy a new BMW to console herself.”
“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t bleed, same as you and me,” Laura said. She didn’t know why she was defending Pamela Lightsey, a stranger.
“Aw, Laura.” Mariska rolled the last rack out of the truck. “Be happy for me and Philip. He’s so, so…everything.”
“Listen to yourself.” Laura felt like the adult in this friendship. She always had. Mariska was the free spirit, the adventurous one, who worked hard and played harder. Laura was the practical one, who worked hard and then worked harder. So everything. “Is it Philip you love, or the Bellamy money?”
“Don’t be silly. You can’t separate the two. Philip is Philip because he’s a Bellamy.”
“So if the family went bankrupt tomorrow and you’d have to live like a pauper, that wouldn’t matter?” Laura couldn’t help asking the question because, deep down, she knew the answer. And if Philip knew, maybe he wouldn’t be so gaga over Mariska.
Mariska laughed, that shimmering, sexy laugh that had made her the most popular girl at Avalon High. At graduation last June, she’d been voted the girl most likely to get by on her looks. She’d taken it all in stride, because she knew darn well there was a lot more to her than looks. She had an incredible work ethic, for example. She worked two jobs—one here at her parents’ bakery and another as a part-time salesclerk at the jewelry shop next door.
“What are you going to do with yourself after you get rich?” Laura asked. “Seriously, you’re going to be so bored.”
“Nonsense. I’m going to see the world and shop my whole life away.”
“And what about Philip?” Did Mariska even know him? Laura wondered. Did she know he saved the middle of his pain au chocolat for last, that he’d seen the Allman Brothers at the Fillmore East before Duane Allman got killed, that his eyes crinkled at the corners when he laughed?
“What about Philip?” She sighed. “He’s—Laura, you have to promise not to say anything…”
“About what?” Laura frowned. “Where does he fit in with all the traveling and shopping?”
“That’s just it. Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll get bored with him.”
Laura wanted to shake her. “If you’re afraid of that, then why are you planning a future with this man?”
“God, I swear, you’re like an old, wet blanket,” Mariska said with a frown. She bent to check her reflection in the side-view mirror of the truck, feathering her hair out at the temples. “I never should have told you about us.” She fixed her lipstick and leaned back against the white panel truck. “That’s not so. I had to tell somebody. This secret is just too good to keep to myself all summer long, and you’re the only one I can trust.”
Despite her yearning for Philip, Laura felt privileged that Mariska had entrusted her with the details of her clandestine love affair, because that was probably as close as Laura would ever get to a love affair of her own. She had the dullest life on the planet. Her best source for drama and romance was Mariska, who lived her life as though she was a character in a soap opera.
Unfortunately, characters in soap operas usually ended up heartbroken and alone, or at least with a bad case of amnesia.
“Listen,” she said to Mariska. “I really hope everything works out.”
“But what?”
“I didn’t say but.”
“You didn’t have to. I heard it, anyway. But what?”
Laura took a deep breath. “I’m just worried about what’s going to happen with you now that summer is over and Philip’s going back to Yale. He might…well, you know what can happen. It’s where the term summer romance comes from. When summer ends, so does the romance.”
“Not for Philip and me,” Mariska insisted.
Laura bit her tongue. Mariska and Philip were from two completely different worlds, and they were fooling themselves if they thought it would be easy to fit their lives together. Laura had seen this kind of thing before. People with such different
