She's Got a Way (Echo Lake #3) - Maggie McGinnis Page 0,3
drew the short straw.”
Luke felt his eyebrows go skyward as he pictured steel-wool hair and flowered muumuus. A housemother? “And is this … housemother responsible for entertaining them?”
“Apparently.”
“Well, this is just. Shit. What are we supposed to do with an elderly woman here? We can’t make her sleep in a frigging tent, Oliver.”
“You want to give up your cabin?”
“Hell, no. It’s all I’ve got left.” Luke rubbed his forehead with both hands. “But I’m not going to put her in a tent, for Christ’s sake.”
“Well, not sure we’ve got other options. I can’t put her in the back room of the admin cottage with me. People would talk.”
Luke smiled for the first time as he pictured Oliver’s living quarters, which were just about big enough to turn around in, as long as you held your breath so your stomach caved inward.
“We don’t have time to build them a cabin, not with our other priorities here. They’ll be here in a week.”
Oliver nodded. “Let’s play it by ear. Maybe she’s not elderly. Or maybe, if she is, she’s the type that loves a good summer of roughing it in the wild.”
“She works at Briarwood. The roughest thing they have there is the oatmeal, and even that’s probably organic and steel cut and gluten-free.” Luke felt his eyebrows pull together. “We’ve got a project list a mile long. What we need is a work crew, not a bunch of rich girls sunning on the beach.”
“Unless you turn them into your work crew.” Oliver bounced his eyebrows.
Luke leveled a look his way. “This is just the first step, Oliver. You see that, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—first they send a group like this, and they frame it as a desperation move, nowhere else to send them, yadda yadda. Next, we hear about how maybe they were a little hasty in their decision to keep Echo running as a boys’ camp, because look how well suited it was for their girls. And then we get a bunch of mumbo-jumbo paperwork that excuses us from our positions because their original mission has changed, but best of luck in the future—”
“Yadda yadda?”
“Exactly.” Luke nodded. “I’m just saying. This smacks of a plan, not an emergency at all.”
“Well, it sure sounded like an emergency.”
“I don’t buy it. They never intended to run this place as a boys’ camp, and this is their first step toward reneging on that promise. I’d bet my new handyman salary on it.”
Oliver rolled his eyes. “You’re the only one calling yourself that, Luke.”
Luke laughed, short and bitter. “Well, I went from running programs for a hundred needy kids every summer to working my way through an endless project list in an empty camp. It’s not much of a stretch.”
He sighed. He’d designed challenge-based programs for at-risk kids for ten years now under Oliver’s tutelage, and he was damn good at it, because he’d worked his ass off to get there. His own history gave him an auto-in with a lot of the boys, and helping them learn to give a shit about themselves and their futures was a job he took very, very seriously.
It was the best lesson Oliver had ever imparted, and it had started the moment Luke had walked onto Camp Echo property as an angry foster kid determined to make everyone hate him, because it was easier. You knew where you stood.
He knew exactly where these kids could end up without his help, and he didn’t want that for anyone. Been there, done that, had the scars to prove it.
He looked out at the lake, where a couple of little sailboats struggled to find a wisp of a breeze. “So what do we do?”
“We welcome them when they get here, we show them where everything is, and then we go on about our merry ways, doing the jobs we’re supposed to be doing for the summer. The fact that four Briarwood girls snuck off campus and got themselves into this situation isn’t our problem.”
“You’re going to stick to that?” Luke raised his eyebrows. “You’re not going to go all sympathetic when it’s clear that this housemother person is completely out of her Briarwood element here?”
“We don’t know that she will be.”
“Seriously.”
“Fine. She’ll be completely out of her element.” Oliver put up his hands. “But she can figure it out. I’m sure she’ll have a plan by the time she gets here.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
“Then we give her a week to flounder, and we send them home.”