I looked at the tiny Colosseum on Will’s backpack. “Italy. That’s it so far.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I used to visit a couple times a year, for holidays and stuff,” he said, squinting into the sun before looking back to me. “But now with visiting my dad and my sister here, it’s harder to get over there.”
“Are you close with your sister?”
“Yeah. Annabel’s three years younger than me, so she was eleven when Mom left. We got along before, but after, it was us against our dad. We’re tight.”
I straightened the Colosseum. “Do you think she’d ever move back?”
“My mom? No way. She says Toronto’s the birthplace of mediocrity, and she needs to be somewhere that inspires her. Her art comes first.”
“That must have been hard.”
He shrugged and looked at his hands. “I sometimes feel like a selfish asshole for moving away and leaving my sister to deal with Dad by herself.”
“Hey,” I said, nudging him with my elbow until his eyes found mine. In the sun, I could see they weren’t black. They were a deep coffee brown with an ebony ring around the perimeter. “I don’t think living your life in Vancouver makes you an asshole. But I only met you today, so I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that does. Just not that.”
Will’s gaze darted around my face. “You’re sweet.”
“I haven’t really been anywhere,” I said after a moment.
He cocked his head. “I find that surprising.”
I copied the gesture. “I’ll take that as a compliment. I visited my grandparents in British Columbia once. I didn’t make it to Vancouver, though. They’re in Victoria.”
The four of us lived in the house together until I was about seven, when Grandma and Grandpa moved into a retrofitted apartment in the resort’s lodge. After school, I’d find them playing cards in the library among a crowd of white-haired guests, and I’d settle down on the couch in front of the fireplace with my homework. On Fridays, Peter and I would fail to beat them in euchre, and Mom would send over fish and chips from the restaurant. When she finished her rounds in the dining room, she’d join us, a tray with three frosty beer glasses and a Sprite balanced on one hand. We’d all cheer at her arrival, and if there was no one else in the library, she’d lock the doors and kick off her heels, rolling her ankles and cracking her stocking-covered toes.
“What did you think of Victoria?” Will asked. “I’ve been out to Vancouver Island a few times. Drove up to Tofino with a couple friends last summer. For the record, I can’t surf for shit.”
“I didn’t get outside the city, but I liked it. Beacon Hill Park, Butchart Gardens, the harbor. I’m going out to Banff in November for the ski season to work at one of the resorts.”
Jamie and I were looking for a short-term furnished rental, but I was nervous. He was a good long-distance boyfriend, but I didn’t know about sharing an apartment with him. I’d seen the state of his bunk in the staff cabins, and the way his hair became a blond nest by the second week of summer.
“Why Banff?”
I pulled at the frayed edge of my shorts. “My mom owns a resort up in Muskoka—it’s kind of our family business. So Banff is partly a travel opportunity, but it’s also good work experience.” When I floated the idea to Mom, hoping to buy a few more months out in the world, I expected her to shoot it down. But she thought some time at one of the bigger hotels would be valuable.
“You grew up at a resort?”
“Uh-huh.” I looped a thread around my finger, pulling it tight until the tip turned white. “I’m moving back there in nine days.”
Will put his hands over mine, then unraveled the thread. Blood filled my finger. My eyes skidded to his, and he let go.
“When you say it’s the family business, does that mean you’re going to run it one day?”
“That’s the idea.”
“But you don’t want to.”
“No, I do.” My voice had gone up an octave, and my lungs felt pinched, like there wasn’t enough space for them in my rib cage.
Will leaned a little closer, stealing all the oxygen between us, his gaze hooked on mine. “One great thing about meeting someone you’ll likely never see again is that you can tell them anything about yourself without any consequences.”
I shook my head. “Everything has a consequence.” I learned that when I was seventeen.
7
Now
Downtown Huntsville is choked with cottagers and tourists from May until the trees give up the last of their fall color. Luckily, I find a parking spot large enough to maneuver the Cadillac that Whitney’s uncle has loaned me. The thing handles like a cruise ship and smells like dusty potpourri, but I need a car—the resort is twenty minutes outside town—and I don’t own one.
When Mom died six weeks ago, Whitney brought me back. By the time Peter called to tell me about the accident, she was already on her way south, baby Owen in tow. In all the years I’ve lived in Toronto, it’s the only time she’s braved driving there. She packed my suitcase and took me home, white-knuckling the steering wheel until we were an hour north of the city.
I ring the doorbell of a powder blue house, and Reginald Oswald greets me. He’s well past retirement age, wearing suspenders, as always, and a wrinkled checked shirt. Reggie’s been the resort’s accountant since my grandparents bought the place in the late sixties.
“Rosemary’s at church, but she said to give you a big hug.” Reggie does not share his wife’s commitment to Sunday service. “How are your grandparents faring? I’ve been meaning to check in with them.”
The flight from Victoria was too much for Grandma Izzy, so Grandpa Gerry came on his own for the funeral. He’d seemed so much older. Small and frail and so unlike the bombastic man I’d known growing up.
“They say they’re holding up, but I think they’re trying to make me feel better.”
The last I spoke with Grandma Izzy, she broke down midway through our conversation. “You just sound so much like her,” she’d said.
My grandparents lived on the other side of the country, but Mom was on a first-name basis with the staff members at their retirement community. She knew their events calendar better than they did. She befriended their neighbors’ adult children who lived nearby so she had someone with eyes on the ground to check in. She gave Grandma and Grandpa regular reports on everything happening at the resort.
“I expect you to do the same for me when I retire,” she used to tell me, and I’d roll my eyes. “Mom, we both know that will never happen.”
“I’ll call them this afternoon,” Reggie says as he leads me down the hallway to his office, the smell of a bacon and eggs breakfast lingering in the air.
Reggie extends his hand at one of the guest chairs. “You a coffee drinker? You might need some for this.”
Reggie fixes me a cup and then delivers the news. It isn’t good.
“I’ll be honest with you, Fern,” he says, peering out at me over his wire frames. I’m playing with the hole in my jeans, but my fingers still at Reggie’s expression. “Maggie was a smart businesswoman, really turned things around when she took over from your grandparents. But with the tourism business being what it has over the last couple of years, finances are break-even. Your mother stopped taking a salary.”
I rub at the spot between my eyebrows. This is so much worse than I could have guessed.
Reggie blows his gin-blossomed nose into a polka-dotted hanky and continues. “Hopefully, this year will be stronger than the last two. Do you know how bookings are heading into fall and winter?”