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  I returned with my pack as Charlie was swinging his suitcase into the rear of the van. Nannie, Emily Michelle, Karen, Andrew, and David Michael had come out on the porch to wave good-bye. David Michael’s hand rested on Shannon’s head. She was sitting by him, her tail swishing.

  “When you get to California,” said Karen, “don’t get eaten by sharks.”

  Andrew frowned. I patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry,” I told him and Karen. “This wedding is strictly on dry land. No sharks.” (I hoped that was true.)

  Nannie kissed my cheek. “Be good,” she said, just as she had said when I was little.

  “I will,” I promised.

  “Have fun,” said David Michael in a small voice. “Don’t forget you said you’d send cool postcards.”

  I dropped down and put my arm around his shoulders. “I won’t forget. And I’m going to call home, and then we’ll all be back next week.”

  Mom had finally convinced David Michael that he was too young to go to the wedding, and that with me, Sam, and Charlie going, she needed him at home. He wasn’t happy about it, but he’d accepted it at last. I’d talked to him too, a little, and promised him cool postcards and a surprise. That had helped, but I knew his feelings were hurt and nothing I could do would change that. And while I did think David Michael was too young to go to the wedding, I wished that it had been Patrick who’d worked it out with David Michael.

  We waved good-bye and Watson drove us to the airport. After what seemed like an endless, awkward wait, we finally boarded the plane. We had three seats together. Charlie slid in next to the window, folded his arms, and stared out the window. I slid in next to him, and Sam sat on the aisle.

  Sam leaned across me. “Thanks for asking,” he said to Charlie.

  “What?”

  “About whether anyone else wanted to sit by the window.”

  “Oh,” said Charlie. “Sorry. We can switch if you want.”

  “Why don’t we take turns,” I suggested. “After all, it’s a long flight.”

  Charlie nodded and turned back to scrutinizing the wing of the plane.

  I gave my list one more review and said, “The key. The house key? And the extra car keys?” (Neither Patrick nor Zoey could pick us up at the airport, so they’d left one of their cars in the lot, with the directions to the house in the glove compartment. Keys to the house and car had been in the overnight package.)

  “In my pocket,” said Charlie. “You saw Mom give them to me, Kristy. Stop worrying.” He paused, then added, “Although maybe you should. I’d be surprised if Patrick remembered to leave the car. It’d be just like him to forget, the way he forgot about us all these years.”

  Before I could answer, the flight attendant began to recite the safety instructions. I decided to let it go. I settled back.

  I stopped worrying about keys and luggage. I worried about Charlie. And Sam. And me. And what was going to happen at the wedding.

  Charlie was plainly making the trip against his will. I felt awkward and guilty. But what could I do? Making him feel better about the situation seemed impossible. And besides, even I knew that there were some things I couldn’t fix — such as how Charlie felt about our father.

  Sam (who’d put on his headset and was listening to music) wasn’t deep-down angry the way Charlie was. Or, at least, I didn’t think so. He’d been enthusiastic about a free trip to California and carefully neutral about the wedding itself.

  But now that I thought about it, Sam had always taken things less seriously than Charlie. He hid his emotions behind jokes and laughter.

  How long had it been since I’d hung around with my two older brothers? I couldn’t remember. When we were younger, when we’d been struggling to hold our family together after Patrick had left, we’d been together all the time. We’d all had chores and responsibilities, more than most kids.

  Even though he’d been only ten, Charlie had been our main baby-sitter. He’d taken care of us after school, while Mom sat at the kitchen table doing bookkeeping for various small companies or studying to complete her degree in accounting. Sometimes she’d rock David Michael in her arms as she flipped pages.

  But Charlie had taken care of David Michael most of the time, right down to diaper changing. He’d kept us quiet while Mom worked, he’d kept us entertained, he’d kept us out of trouble — mostly.

  I smiled suddenly, remembering the time Sam and I had “helped” by doing the laundry while Charlie was reading a story to David Michael. We’d gathered all our dirty clothes together, including a bright red shirt, and put them into the wash. Everything white had come out pink when the red shirt had run.

  We’d been appalled, especially at the pink shirts we’d all have to wear. But Charlie had come up with a solution. We’d washed the formerly white clothes again, this time with a new bright yellow towel. The yellow dye on top of the pink had produced a sort of faded, weird orange — much easier to take than a school year in faded, weird pink.

  If Mom had noticed, she’d never said a word.

  She had noticed when Charlie gave us all haircuts to save money. He’d been so proud — we all had — and she had looked stunned. Somehow, she’d managed to keep her composure while telling us that we all looked so different she wouldn’t have recognized us. She also managed to use the right words about taking us to the barber “just to get things evened up a little bit” so that our feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

  Our school pictures that year show us all with extremely short hair. Come to think of it, Sam is wearing a faded, weird orange shirt too.

  Another memory returned suddenly: Charlie’s face as he unwrapped a baseball glove on his eleventh birthday. It was from all of us, but I remember Sam had suggested it.

  Charlie’s face had glowed for a moment. Then he had said, “I can’t.”

  “Yes you can,” said Sam. “I’m almost ten. I can take care of things at least one day a week.”

  And Charlie, always careful to be fair, had said, “We can trade. One day a week.”

  Charlie hadn’t played baseball the whole first year after our dad had left because he’d been needed at home after school. But only Sam had known how much that had meant to Charlie. Charlie, outwardly easygoing and untouched, had never said a word. And Sam, quiet and more observant than people realized, had known how much it meant to Charlie.

  And they’d been careful to include me in their practice games of catch. That’s one of the reasons I’m a softball coach now.

  We’d been close back then. We’d taken care of one another. But then, somehow, as things became easier, we’d all gone in different directions. We weren’t as close as we’d been.

  Was that part of growing up? I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  Or maybe it was better that we were a family held together by love now, instead of an us-against-the-world family.

  We didn’t talk much the rest of the trip. Charlie brooded. Sam remained almost aloof, even when he took his turn at the window. I opted for the in-flight movie and then read until we started to descend. Then I elbowed Sam and made him switch places with me so I could watch us come down out of the clouds.

  The car was just where Patrick had said it would be and the directions inside were neat, complete, and concise. Charlie raised his eyebrows in surprise, but he didn’t say anything.

  I was surprised too. I wasn’t so surprised that the car and the directions were there, but I was surprised at the car: a sleek little blue Audi A4 with a sunroof. This didn’t fit my image of Patrick the journalist, traveling the world with a suitcase and a battered typewriter (not a computer — typewriters could be used anywhere, even in a desert or a cave). I realized that a part of me had always believed that Patrick had left us to pursue his dream of being a journalist, the kind who could take off at the drop of a hat in search of a story.

  It could still be true, I reassured myself. This must be Zoey’s car. After all, the directions weren’t in my father’s round cursive but in square, neat printing. I wonde
red if Zoey liked the idea of being a journalist’s wife, and how her snazzy car looked parked outside a ramshackle house in the hills of California, the kind of house that a writer like my father would have chosen.

  All these thoughts were tumbling around in my head, but I didn’t speak except to read the directions aloud to Charlie while Sam fiddled with the radio. Charlie remained silent too, until we tore a hole in the wall of fog halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “Interesting,” Charlie said, and smiled slightly.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. I would have punched him in the arm if he hadn’t been driving.

  The water was a sparkling sheet of midnight-blue far below. Ahead, the hills of Marin County (according to Patrick’s directions, or, rather, Zoey’s) boldly rose from the waves. I rolled down the window, which I had rolled up against the surprising summer chill of San Francisco, and took a deep breath of damp, briny air.

  The smell reminded me of home. It was like the Connecticut shore but wetter. It was a comforting smell.

  Then we were over the bridge and plunging down onto Bridgeway Boulevard and into Sausalito.

  “Good grief,” I murmured. It looked like one of those small New England towns that tourists love, except this one was California style: shops and restaurants and drifting crowds of people and charming buildings that looked old and new at the same time. Only I knew that these had to be all new. California towns haven’t been around that long.

  Charlie edged through town and turned left. The road wound slightly upward into the hills. But the houses we saw weren’t shacks. They were glass-and-cedar constructions, nestling in jungles of carefully tended flowers.

  “Good grief,” I said again. Suddenly, I didn’t think Patrick lived in a shack anymore.

  And I was right.

  “Whoa,” said Sam, switching off the radio as we pulled up to one side of the cedar, stone, and glass structure that could have come from the pages of a very expensive magazine. The house was set on a slight hill. We followed a path from the car to the back door (the one for which we had the key), past a rock garden filled with ferns and hostas (which I recognized from Watson’s and Nannie’s gardens) and tiny creeping plants with flowers like stars. Up ahead, a little waterfall trickled down into a pool. Glancing up, I saw that one of the big back windows looked down at the waterfall. A deck wrapped partway around the house. In one place a huge old tree was growing up through the middle of it. Although the house obviously wasn’t very old, it looked as if it belonged in the setting, unlike a lot of the big, fancy houses in my hometown. The place felt serene and calm.

  Did Patrick really live here?

  We let ourselves into an enormous room with tall ceilings and a flood of light.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “He appears to have done okay for himself,” Charlie grumbled.

  I gave Charlie a Look.

  We dumped our bags by the door. Sam said, suddenly, “I’m thirsty,” and made a beeline for the state-of-the-art stainless steel refrigerator nestled in one corner of the room.

  “Sam,” I began.

  “Hey, the letter said to make ourselves at home,” Sam replied, opening a glass-fronted cabinet and setting a glass on the slate countertop. He opened the huge, sleek refrigerator and filled the glass with orange juice. “Anyone else want some?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  Charlie shook his head. He was examining the sound system in one corner of the room. I saw his eyes go to the speakers.

  I noted that the plants had followed us inside. Several of them reached up toward the sun streaming through the broad windows. On a small table, a cluster of cacti of every shape and color bristled. I tried to imagine Patrick tending to the plants. I knew that cacti didn’t need to be watered much, but even so, I couldn’t see it.

  To one side, a hall led to four small rooms. One pair of rooms was joined by a bathroom. At the end of the hall, a larger room was obviously a study, with a scarred desk buried beneath a computer, a printer, a jumble of paper, and some books. More books were stacked all over the floor, and pictures of Willie Mays, Cynthia Cooper, Babe Didrickson Zaharias, and Lou Gehrig (that famous photograph taken on his last day in baseball) were thumbtacked to the walls and a bulletin board. Across the hall, next to a half bath, was another room. This one was neat as a pin, but it too had a desk, a computer, and a printer. Here, there were orderly rows of bookshelves.

  Zoey’s? I went in and found a photograph on the desk: a strongly built woman of about my father’s age — and just as tall as he was — standing next to my father with the ocean behind them and far below.

  I put the photograph back and returned to what I thought was my father’s study. But I saw no photographs except those of the sports stars.

  When I returned to the living room, Charlie was walking down the stairs that curled up to the gallery above. “This joint is huge. It doesn’t look it, but it is,” he said, and his tone sounded disapproving somehow. “There’s a gigantic bedroom with a deck back there,” he motioned toward the end of the gallery, above where I’d been exploring, “and two more rooms and a bath along the gallery.”

  “Two studies, two bedrooms,” I reported, nodding in the direction from which I’d come. I wandered over to a low bookshelf and bent to examine the photographs on top of it.

  I recognized Patrick right away, of course. And I recognized the woman standing next to him from the photo I’d seen on her desk. Her head was turned and she was smiling at someone to one side of the photograph. Patrick’s arms were around her and she was grinning a megawatt grin.

  The woman was in several other photographs with Patrick too: standing next to what looked like a recently planted tree, with a group of friends on someone’s deck, perched on the steps of a building. She had to be Zoey, I concluded. To my surprise, I realized I was relieved. Zoey looked friendly and nice and, well, reliable. Her hair was light brown streaked with blonde and what might have been the beginnings of gray, and she wore it short. In fact, I noticed that Patrick’s hair was as long as hers.

  Patrick looked like a solid citizen too, I had to admit. I noticed that several of the photographs had been taken in front of the same restaurant and in one of those shots, Patrick was wearing an apron.

  “Hey,” I said. “Check this out.” Sam and then Charlie appeared at my side. “He’s wearing an apron,” I pointed out. “You think he got a new job or something?”

  “Cooking?” Charlie’s eyebrows went up.

  “No way,” said Sam. “He’s a sportswriter, remember? It was probably just some party.”

  Remembering the cluttered study with the faces of famous athletes looking down from the walls, I had to agree.

  Charlie added, “Yeah. It’s the one thing he’s been consistent about. His dedication to his career as a sportswriter.”

  As if on cue, the back door opened. The three of us turned as Patrick walked into the house and back into our lives.

  “You’re here,” he said as if he were somehow surprised. He stopped and stared at us. He was holding a shopping bag.

  I put the photograph down. My brain registered that the woman from the other pictures stood right behind him and that she was holding a shopping bag too.

  Nobody moved or said anything for a long moment. Then Zoey crossed the room, set her shopping bag down, returned and took the shopping bag from Patrick, and gave him a little push with her free hand.

  He walked across the room toward us. I started forward too. When I reached my father, I hugged him. In fact, I hugged him a lot harder than he hugged me. He seemed tentative, unsure of himself. When he let go, he turned, and I realized that Sam was standing next to me.

  “Well,” Patrick said. “Sam.”

  Another pause, and then Patrick held out his hand, and he and Sam shook hands. It wasn’t a particularly fatherly gesture, but I thought Sam seemed a little relieved.

  Next, Patrick turned to Charlie, who, I was glad to see, had joined us. But Charlie didn’t
reach out to return the handshake Patrick offered. Instead, he said coolly, “Hello.”

  Patrick smiled. He stepped back. “Let me look at you,” he said. “It’s been so long.”

  “Whose fault is that?” said Charlie. His voice had gone from cool to cold.

  Patrick’s cheeks reddened. Uh-oh. I tried to think of something to say.

  The woman stepped forward and smiled at us. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  I sensed rather than saw Charlie open his mouth, ready to take another shot at Patrick. But he didn’t get a chance.

  Beaming, my father put his arm around the woman. He said proudly, “Sam, Charlie, Kristy, this is Zoey Amberson. She’s about to become my new wife.”

  My new wife. How strange that sounded. How deeply weird.

  This would make Zoey my stepmother.

  That and a million other thoughts rushed through my mind as I stepped forward and held out my hand. “I’m glad to meet you,” I said. We shook hands.

  She smiled and the creases on the sides of her mouth deepened into dimples. “I’m glad to meet you too, Kristy. Call me Zoey.”

  She shook hands with Sam and Charlie, and I was relieved to see that Charlie was polite and even smiled at her. At least he wasn’t transferring his anger at Patrick onto an innocent bystander.

  And then I thought about those words — innocent bystander — and wondered if Zoey knew just how unreliable Patrick was. She’d said she’d heard a lot about us, but what had she heard? What had Patrick told her about the family he walked out on? How was he going to explain the awkwardness of this meeting, Sam’s formality, Charlie’s hostility?

  When we’d finished saying hello, Patrick looked at his watch. “Anybody hungry? After that plane ride and the airplane food, you should be. And it’s past lunchtime here.”

  Somewhat to my surprise, I realized that I was.

  I nodded and Sam said, “Sure.”

  Charlie shrugged.

  If Patrick noticed, he gave no sign. He and Zoey were already moving toward the kitchen. With team-like precision that seemed to suggest they often worked together, they began to unpack the two bags they’d set on the counter.