Catherine Lanigan - Katia's Promise

Even then, Katia had known that she was only a substitute playmate for Austin, someone to stand in when his father was too busy to see him, but she didn’t care. She thought Austin walked through the stars at night and skated on sunbeams in the day. In her eyes, he could do no wrong. When Austin was with her, he was happy, carefree and inquisitive. She didn’t care that he shunned her as a “servant” when he was trying to impress his school friends, though at times, their barbs pierced the edges of her feelings. Katia believed that Austin would be her hero and come to her rescue if she ever truly needed it. She believed they were closer than any two people alive and only she knew the “real” Austin.

When Austin was fifteen and she was twelve, Daniel McCreary died. Gone was the man Austin had revered and tried to emulate. She remembered eavesdropping on dinner conversations where Daniel would herald the accomplishments of his grandfather, Ambrose McCreary, who had been one of the pioneer automobile designers at the turn of the century in Indianapolis. He’d talked to his son about Duesenbergs, Auburn Cords and Studebakers. Names from the past, connoting elegance and innovation. Katia had been enthralled as Daniel had spun his dreams of manufacturing replacement parts for antique cars. Austin had continually nagged his father for more stories about Ambrose and the kind of mind that he’d had. More than once, Katia had heard Austin say, “I should have been born back then. I could have been great like him.”

Though she’d understood that Austin was expected to take over his father’s manufacturing plant once he finished business college, for Austin, life without his father in it was like sleepwalking.

Daniel’s funeral had been on Valentine’s Day. Afterward, nearly a hundred people had come to the McCreary mansion for an enormous buffet dinner reception. They’d eaten, drunk, cried, laughed and reminisced.

That night, a blizzard had barreled into Indian Lake, nearly shutting down the interstate. Many guests had been snowbound and talked about sleeping on the library floor until the weather cleared up.

For Austin, it had all been too much. He’d disappeared.

Katia had been frantic until she’d glanced out her bedroom window and seen a faint light glowing in one of the carriage houses. She pulled on her boots and coat, and, taking an envelope from under the sweaters in her dresser drawer, she’d clomped through the new-fallen snow to the carriage house.

She’d found Austin sitting in a blue 1926 Bugatti convertible—Daniel’s favorite. Austin had been sobbing his heart out.

Katia was careful not to make any noise as she approached the car. Daniel had never allowed her to look at the cars, much less touch them. Austin, however, had gleefully sneaked her into the carriage houses each time his father had acquired a new beauty. Austin had been all too happy to display his extensive knowledge of the features and history of each car. He’d taken pride in the fact that his father would go to great lengths to find authentic chrome bumpers for his Duesenberg or brass and glass headlamps for a 1920 Stutz Bearcat. Katia had loved the romance of the exquisite cars with their leather seats, velvet upholstered doors and sterling silver flower vases. It was her way of living in another era by literally touching objects from bygone times.

Sometimes Katia would double-dare Austin into sitting in the 1955 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. She liked to pretend she was a movie star or a princess in Monaco. Anyone but who she was—the maid’s daughter.

Most of the time, Austin obliged her. He’d told her that since she understood his love for antique cars, she had to be his “kindred soul.” She hadn’t known what that meant at the time, so she’d looked it up in one of the books in Daniel’s library. When she’d read the meaning, she’d wondered if this was Austin’s way of telling her that she was special to him.

She’d just begun to feel as if they were becoming real friends when Daniel had died.

Katia eased her hand over the side of the door and opened it from the inside so as not to smudge the polished exterior. Usually, touching the precious car would have been an invasion, but Katia felt that the world had somehow changed.

It was time for Austin to learn that she was more than just the housekeeper’s daughter and his stand-in playmate. Austin’s eyes were swollen. “Katia. I should have known you would find me.”

“I’m not leaving. Even if you ask me,” she said, climbing into the passenger seat.

“I won’t,” he said, wiping his tears on his tweed jacket sleeve. He folded his arms across the steering wheel and then laid his face on them. “I can’t believe he’s gone. What will I do?”

“What you’ve always done. You’ll grow. Learn and become a man,” she said with a tiny shrug.

“I miss him so much already,” Austin said. He gulped, sounding to Katia as if he’d swallowed something very large. She understood the feeling intensely.

“I know you do,” she said softly, looking at the round dials on the metal dashboard. “That part never goes away.”

His face twisted into a grimace of disdain and disbelief. “What do you—” He stopped abruptly. “I’m so sorry, Katia. So sorry. Of course you know how I feel. You know exactly how I feel. None of the people I go to school with have lost their dads. But you have.” Tears filled his eyes, yet he studied her as if he was seeing her for the first time. “It’s been a while since you talked about your father. Do you still miss him?”

“Every day,” she whispered, a flame igniting at the base of her esophagus and flaring up into her throat. “He—he used to call me Katia lyubov .”

“Louie bov?”

“ Lyubov. That’s how you say it.” She nodded. “It means Katia love.”

“He was a sentimental man, then?” Austin asked.

“Yes. He worked hard all his life, but my mother said he had the heart of a poet. She always loved fine things, and he wanted to give them to her—that’s why he worked so hard to bring us to America. He told her he would give her the world, but—”

“He died,” Austin finished for her. “Just like my dad.”

“Yes. Now they’re together. Watching over us, my mother says.”

“Do you believe her?” Austin asked solemnly.

“I do.”

“But how can you know? For sure, I mean. Sometimes I think that whole heaven thing is just another fairy tale.”

“You’re just angry right now. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I am angry. My dad wasn’t supposed to die. He was too young. We had great plans for after graduation. He told me we were going to go to Germany together and drive the autobahn. I wanted to see how they made German cars. I wanted to take classes over there and learn to fix all kinds of foreign cars.”

Katia looked away from him. “Your mother was never going to allow that to happen and you know it.”

“My dad could have talked her into it.”

“She would never let you be a mechanic. Even I know that! She wants you to be a businessman and get a degree from Harvard.”

“Well, it’s not what I want. Besides, I don’t see any other man of the house around here now, do you?” he asked.

“No.”

“See? That’s how things have changed. I’ll be making the rules now.”

Katia chuckled at the lofty tilt to his chin and the smirk on his lips.

She pushed her face up against his. “Don’t you ever look at me like that again, Austin McCreary, or I will never speak to you again. You are not the boss of me and never will be. You got that?”

Austin moved back a few inches. “I just meant that things will be different.”

“Yes. They will. But our parents still make the rules. We don’t have any power yet.”