Read The Inn at Lake Devine for Free Online Page B

would like the company. He also needed—wink—help choosing the penny candy. I waited for him to sweep Robin into the invitation, but she didn’t look up from her cereal, the same Sugar Pops every day. I said, “Okay. Sure. If you want me to.”
    He waited until we had turned onto the paved road, then said, “Natalie, I hope you know that we think very, very highly of the Jewish people.”
    I was stunned by the subject matter and by Robin’s overnight betrayal.
    He said, “We live in a state that sent a Jewish man to the U.S. Senate.”
    “I know. Robin told me.”
    He said, “I work with several very smart and dedicated teachers of the Jewish faith.”
    I said, “You do?”
    “And you know I love music. I don’t have to tell you that. Do you know how many of the world’s greatest composers and lyricists are Jewish?”
    “Lots?”
    “George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Sammy Cahn … I could go on and on.”
    It was so Mr. Fife-ish, but so earnest and well meaning that my eyes prickled with tears. I pictured the emergency conference he and Mrs. Fife must have had before breakfast—how would they handle Natalie’s religious crisis?
    I managed to say, my throat a knot, “I know you’re nice to everyone.”
    “And I wouldn’t tolerate anything else. Not in my family. Not in my classroom, not in my church, my choir, not anywhere.”
    “I know,” I said.
    “I play golf at a club that has several Jewish members. And Mrs. Fife and I have voted for Senator Ribicoff every time he’s run for office. He would
not
get elected in Connecticut if only Jewish people voted for him, would he?”
    I said that must be right. What I didn’t know how to say was, Haven’t you noticed that you’ve been vacationing at a Christians-only hotel for the past fourteen years?
    “Do you promise me you won’t worry about this anymore?” he coaxed.
    I said I wouldn’t worry about it anymore.
    “If you ever hear a word that insults you or your religion, then you’ll come to me. Promise? Even if it’s a month from now? A year?”
    It was just the gassy gust of wind I needed to dry my eyes and restore my skepticism. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” Yeah right, Mr. Fife, my lifelong friend. Father of the stupidest girl at Camp Minnehaha.
    “So do we feel better?”
    I said I felt much better.
    “Maybe a little homesick?”
    “Maybe that was it,” I said.
    “We’re your parents this week. And Robin is your sister. And Jeff and Chip are your brothers as long as we’re at Lake Devine.”
    “Thanks,” I said, for the twentieth time.
    “Can I say one more thing?” He flashed me the coy grin of a leading man about to break into song.
    “Sure,” I said.
    He smiled, waited a beat, then said proudly, “
Shalom hah-vay-reem
.”
    Oh, God—Hebrew.
Hello, friends
. I asked how he knew that.
    “It’s a round! I had a counselor at music camp when I was about your age who was from Palestine.” Then Mr. Fife sang in his most cantorial baritone: “
Shalom, chaverim, shalom, chaverim, shalom, shalom
 …”
    “You come in … now!” he instructed, chopping the air between us.
    And so we sang, round and round in a minor key, all the way to the store and back—“
Shalom, chaverim, shalom, chaverim, shalom, shalom
”—until the final sixty seconds, when we turned onto the dirt road and had to switch to counting.

SIX

    I could only speculate from Mr. Berry’s outward display of good humor that he was, at his core, more Christian than his wife. The term was supplied by Robin, who, quoting some Sunday School lesson, said that
Christian
meant kind, fair, good … 
exactly
like Jesus and his disciples—nice like her parents, like Nelson, like Mo, our junior counselor, and Mrs. Abodeely, the camp nutritionist, and, and …
    “Me?”
    She thought this over, frowning, her first bump into the guardrail between temple and church.
    “If it means ‘nice’ or ‘fair,’ ” I argued, “then you must