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pressed
the lusciousness of her freezing body into his.
    She seemed uptight, though, and the level of her anger at him
gave him pause.
    Unbidden, he wondered if she ever slipped into the lake and
skinny-dipped under the full moon. Would she still think it was the most daring
thing a person could do, and that she was risking arrest and public
humiliation?
    What made her laugh now? In high school it seemed as if she had
been at the center of every circle, popular and carefree. That laugh, from deep
within her, was so joyous and unchained the birds stopped singing to listen.
    Mac snorted in annoyance with himself, reminding himself curtly
that he had broken that particular spell a long time ago. Though if that was
completely true, why the reluctance to return Lucy’s calls? Why the aversion to
coming back?
    If that was completely true, why had he
told Lucy Lindstrom, of all people, that his father had been a
ditchdigger?
    That had been bothering him since the words had come out of his
mouth. Maybe that confession had even contributed to the fiasco on the dock.
    * * *
    “What’s she doing?” Mama asked, worried. “Is she wet,
too? She looks wet.”
    “We both ended up in the lake.”
    “But how?”
    “A comedy of errors. Don’t worry about it, Mama.”
    But Mama was determined to worry. “She should have come here. I
would look after her. She could catch her death.”
    Mama Freda, still looking after everyone. Except maybe herself.
She was looking toward Lucy’s house as if she was thinking of going to get
her.
    He noticed the grass blended seamlessly together, almost as if
the lawns of the two houses were one. That was new. Dr. Lindstrom had gone to
great lengths to accentuate the boundaries of his yard, to lower any risk of
association with the place next door.
    Despite now sharing a lawn with its shabby neighbor, the
Lindstrom place still looked like something off a magazine spread.
    A bank of French doors had been added to the back of the house.
Beyond the redwood of the multilayered deck, a lawn, tender with new grass,
ended at a sea of yellow and red tulips. The flowers cascaded down a gentle
slope to the fine white sand of the private beach.
    On the L-shaped section of the bleached gray wood of the dock a
dozen canoes were upside down.
    What was with all the canoes? He was pretty sure that Mama had
said Lucy was by herself since she had come home a year ago.
    A bird called, and Mac could smell the rich scent of sun
heating the fallen needles of the ponderosa pine.
    As he gazed out over the lake, he was surprised by how much he
had missed this place. Not the town, which was exceptionally cliquey; you were
either “in” or you were “out” in Lindstrom Beach.
    Lucy’s family had always been “in.” Of course, “in” was
determined by the location of your house on the lake, the size of the lot, the
house itself, what kind of boat you had and who your connections were. “In” was
determined by your occupation, your membership in the church and the yacht club,
and by your income, never mentioned outright, always insinuated.
    He, on the other hand, had been “out,” a kid of questionable
background, in foster care, in Mama’s house, the only remaining of the original
cabins that had been built around the lake in the forties. Her house, little
more than a fishing shack, had been the bane of the entire neighborhood.
    And so the sharing of the lawn was new and unexpected.
    “Do you and Lucy go in together to hire someone to look after
the grounds?” he asked.
    “No, Lucy does it.”
    That startled him. Lucy mowed the expansive lawns? He couldn’t
really imagine her pushing a lawn mower. He remembered her and her friends
sitting on the deck in their bikinis while the “help” sweated under the hot sun
keeping the grounds of her house immaculate. But he didn’t want Lucy to crowd
back into his thoughts.
    “You look well, Mama,” he said, an invitation for her to
confide in him. He should have known it