the beach umbrella. Caroline glanced at her friends again. Adam’s face was flushed.
“Did you ever touch bottom?” Sara asked.
“What? No,” Caroline said. “Never.”
Megan continued waving her over. Caroline shifted her weight from her right foot to her left, gazing at her friends. Sara stared at the diving boards.
Finally Caroline couldn’t stand it any longer. She had to know what her friends were up to. Sara’s mother had said she would only be a minute. She reasoned Sara wouldn’t be left alone for long. She bent down so she was at eye level with the little girl. “Wait for your mom, okay?”
Sara nodded.
“Okay,” she said, and in the next moment she was racing down the pier. “And remember,” she called, “the boys were just being stupid!”
CHAPTER TWO
Jo fooled herself into thinking she didn’t know the reason she had hopped into the old Chevy and sped down the dirt road away from the cabin. She rolled down the window. A warm breeze blew her long hair from her shoulders. “Three Times a Lady” by the Commodores crackled on the radio. You couldn’t get a decent radio station within twenty miles of the lake. With the Pocono Mountains surrounding you on every side, reception was scant, and the outside world as distant as outer space.
She was stuck in a time warp, and the year was 1978, when the lake was at its finest if you listened to the old-timers tell it. Vacationers were attracted to the sense of familiarity, simplicity, sameness. It was the lake’s charm and the reason you came back year after year. The place and the people and their desire to cling to the good old days were what pissed Jo off. There wasn’t anything good about the good old days, at least none that she could remember.
Still, the song wasn’t bad, and for awhile she sang along as she drove around the colony and fought the urge to turn onto the highway and leave the blasted lake and everything that came with it behind.
Tired and worn from years of battling with Gram, her mother—whom she had stopped calling Mom when Johnny had come along—she sunk farther into the driver’s seat. Her right hand lay limp in her lap while she loosely gripped the steering wheel with her left. Everything caught her eye as she passed by, the cabins and screened-in porches, the fishing poles and tackle boxes left outside front doors, the maple tree she had stood under the first time she had kissed Billy.
She turned the corner and looped back around. The smell of sun baked earth filled her head, and the dampness from the lake clung to her skin. The sights, the smells, the feel—all of it reminded her of Billy.
If only Gram knew what she was asking, demanding she stick around for a couple of days, but then again maybe she did know and she just didn’t care. “You can’t change the past,” Gram had said. “All you can do is live with it.”
But the hardest part for Jo to understand was the disappointment in Gram’s eyes whenever she looked at her. It had become a thing between them, this look of disappointment, separating them through the years. Neither one knew how to bridge the gap nor did it seem that either one wanted to try. Too many years had passed. Too much had been said or not said for either to back down now. It was as though both mother and daughter had given up on each other.
“I’m disappointed in you, too,” she whispered to herself in the car as the Commodores crooned about love.
Subconsciously, or maybe consciously, she steered toward Lake Road and headed down the hill, taking it slow, maneuvering the Chevy around the potholes nobody bothered to fill. She spied Johnny and his friends hanging out on the steps of the Pavilion. He cupped the cigarette he wasn’t supposed to be smoking in his hand and pretended not to recognize their car. As she drove past, she kept her eyes straight ahead.
Pretending not to see each other had been their unspoken agreement since Johnny had turned fourteen two years ago. She didn’t ask the typical questions a mother might ask her teenage son about where he was going and who he was going with mostly because she understood his desire for independence, for freedom. She believed Johnny appreciated the trust she had placed in him, and so far he hadn’t given her any reason not to. She understood better than anyone his