Susan Wiggs - That Summer Place - Island Time / Old Things / Private Paradise

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.”

“I know.” Myrtle grinned.

“Looking for someone or trying to start a relationship is too much hard work. I don’t have time, especially now when I have the biggest presentation of my career less than a month away.”

“Letni Corporation?”

Catherine nodded.

“I thought they weren’t ready to talk seriously until September.”

“So did I, but I got a call just before you came in. They want the presentation meeting scheduled for the first Tuesday in July.”

Now Myrtle appeared to be stunned silent, looking as surprised as Catherine had been this morning when she’d heard from Letni.

Catherine tried not to smile when she said, “John Turner’s been fired.”

Myrtle did smile, one of those wicked cat-in-the-cream kind of smiles.

“With Turner gone we actually have a chance to beat out Westlake for the first time.” Catherine could hear the excitement in her voice. “The company needs a big account. This is the chance we’ve waited for.”

The largest computer chip manufacturer in the world, Letni was expanding into two states, moving from the high tax locations of California to better locations in Washington and Arizona. Thousands of employees would be moving over the company’s ten-year plan.

Her heart raced a little at the thought that this deal could really happen. “The relocation accounts alone could keep us in the black for the next ten years.”

The desk phone buzzed and began to flash yellow.

Myrtle glanced down at the phone at the same time as Catherine.

Within seconds four more lines lit up.

Catherine closed her eyes and leaned back against her chair with a sigh of disgust.

Myrtle crossed the room and opened the door. “I’ll take care of those lines. For the rest of the day, I promise I’ll only put through the most urgent calls.”

Catherine gave her a weak smile as the door snapped closed, then sat there feeling lost and preoccupied and confused, as if she didn’t know where to start. After a stretch of seconds where the only sound was the wall clock ticking away, she grabbed a pile of research files, put on her bifocals, and opened the first file folder.

The words grew foggy and a handsome face from her youth flashed across her mind. For one rare and tender moment, just before she began to read, she wondered what had ever happened to Michael Packard.

He stood at the end of a long dock. The breeze off the water whipped through his hair the same way it had thirty years before. He was fifty now, and though his hair was still dark, there were streaks of gray near his temples, ears, and just above his brow. Each and every one of those gray hairs had been earned over two decades of international flight miles.

His eyes were ice blue, and those who were foolish enough to have crossed him over the years could tell you that there was a sharp and coldly decisive mind behind those eyes, the mind and strength of a man who could put you in your place with a single hard look.

Deep in the corners of those cool eyes were laugh lines that his few close friends saw often. But those same lines also showed anyone who shook his hand for the first time that he’d lived, long enough to know exactly how to get what he wanted.

His stride was easy and loose, the gait of someone comfortable with the power he possessed. The old dock creaked every so often, as if the wood protested him walking on it. He headed for the boathouse, which stood at the end of the dock and was more gray and weathered than he was.

The boathouse had been there a long time. It had been there the first day he’d stepped foot on Spruce Island, when he was thirteen and orphaned and angry at a world where parents could be sitting around the breakfast table one morning and die in a car crash that same night.