Читать книгу Secret Summers - Glynda Shaw - Страница 5

Drawing near to the Continental Airlines counter, I almost cried out, at first thinking Mom was there waiting for me. My aunt swept me into her arms. Barbara, the stewardess, smiled knowingly as if she’d made some kind of match for life between me and this strange yet so familiar lady. Then she hurried off.

“Good Heavens,” Aunt Claire said, releasing me at last. ”You look just like,” then she hesitated before saying, “your mother,” like maybe she’d started to say something else. Aunt Claire wore a long, cream-colored dress, the kind they call a sheath, with a light green sweater over it. Her hair, the same shade as mine, was long and free flowing. There was a tiny silver figure at her throat on a choker chain, and she wore several rings on her fingers with stone settings: blue, green yellow, orange. ”Well,” she said, “time to go fight with baggage.” She planted me in a chair with my bag and her purse and, taking my claim check, hurried to collect my suitcase. I figured I could have done that for myself, but maybe it was like so much else, a grown-up thing that I wasn’t allowed to do on my own.

About a half hour later, we were finally in Aunt Claire’s red Thunderbird convertible heading west out of town.

Aunt Claire spread a map on the dashboard, holding it open with one hand. ”Here,” she said, putting an apple-colored finger nail on the spot where it said Portland. ”This is where we are now.” She moved the finger to the left and downward to where the blue of ocean water showed. ”We’re headed down here. So we’ll go like this.” Beginning again at Portland, she traced downward to Salem, over through Dallas, Monmouth, Philomath and Toledo then on to Newport and thence southward along the coast to a non-definite series of landmarks and local place names by the sea. ”And here,” she said, moving toward an evident representation of a lighthouse and a habitat for sea lions, “is where your poor old broken down aunt makes her humble habitation.”

I couldn’t help grinning at her dark red hair, piercing blue eyes, and creamy skin. Living only with women as I had since about age five, gives one, I think, a sense of attractiveness in either sex. ”You look like Mom,” I said, then perhaps a bit gratuitously, “except younger, a little.” I added hastily, hoping not too hastily. ”You are younger?”

“No, my dear,” Claire said with a distant smile. I’m the evil elder of the two of us.” She drove silently for a while. Then “Tell me,” she said at last, “about your sisters.”

“Well,” I said, “They’re not at home anymore.”

“I know that,” Claire said, “but how are they?” Mom tended to handle both issues, where and how in one statement, but now it was a new answer which seemed to be wanted.

“They’re still okay, I think,” I told her. “I get letters sometimes, and they seem to be happy.”

“How old is Vivian?” she asked then.

“Just turning eighteen.”

“And Jillian?”

“Twenty.”

“Hmmm,” Claire said, “Viv’s leaving obviously upset your mother.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. ”She was still seventeen then, and Mom would’ve called the police if it wouldn’t have embarrassed the family.”

“Meaning Cloudia herself?” Again that strange inflection on Mom’s name that I’d noted previously.

“Pretty much,” I admitted, thinking how Mom would kill me if she heard the way we were talking just now.

“She says Jill and Viv are frivolous,” I said in a rather desperate attempt to shift the conversation away from Mom.

“Frivolous,” Claire reflected. ”Hell, they’re just kids yet. How else are they supposed to be?”

“Mom says they don’t consider the important things in life,” I told her.

“But some time is required to decide which things are important,” Aunt Claire countered. ”They need time just to be young women,” she hesitated, “not being forced to make major life decisions so soon. How about you?” she asked then. ”Are you serious or frivolous?”

“I have no idea how to answer that,” I said. ”I’m only ten.”

She laughed then, her crystal laugh sounding like a schoolgirl’s. ”Well put!”

In spite of myself, I found I was laughing too. It seemed the first time since before The Letter had arrived. ”I worry though,” I told her.

“Worry? About what?”

“Now Mom hasn’t got anybody at home with her, just the cat.”

“And how do you suppose your kitty would feel about being called just ‘THE CAT,’” she pronounced. “In any case Moms once in a while need time alone to decide whether they’re really serious or if they’re also frivolous. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I think so,” I replied. We went on like this, talking about my school, our neighborhood, fun things I liked to do, fun things she liked to do, and in less time than I could believe, we’d covered all of that distance on the map between Portland and where the ocean was. We stopped for a dinner of chowder, bread, and salad at a small restaurant overlooking the ocean (my first good look at it) then directed our way down along what she called The Coast Road.