Читать книгу Zoey Phillips - Judith Bowen - Страница 6

WHOSE IDEA HAD IT BEEN to look up everyone’s first love, anyway?

First love, first crush…whatever.

The challenge, as Zoey recalled, had been tossed out last spring at the ten-year reunion of the Jasper Park Lodge female summer staff. Zoey and her best friends, Charlotte Moore and Lydia Lane, both of whom she’d met at the lodge that long-ago summer, had flown from Toronto to Calgary for the big event, rented a car and driven through Banff and the glorious Alberta Rockies to Jasper. Last time they’d been there, they’d been swabbing out bathrooms, changing sheets and peeling vegetables. This time, they were paying guests.

About twenty girls had shown up. Someone—Jenny Springer?—had announced that they all ought to look up their first crushes, just for the fun of it, even if he’d been the cute guy with the freckles in kindergarten. Simple curiosity. Just to see what had happened to that first heartbreaker in a girl’s life. Probably bald, boring and hopelessly unappealing now. Then—here was the test—they’d all report back at next year’s reunion.

Zoey hadn’t given the suggestion a thought, but later, when she and Charlotte and Lydia were floating under a clear midnight sky in the outdoor pool overlooking Lake Beauvert, the topic had come up again. Lydia, naturally, had sneaked in a bottle of bubbly and some plastic glasses and they’d each had a glass or two. There were so many events and memories to toast….

“I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to do it.” Charlotte raised her glass to the others. “Wish me luck.”

“Do what?” Zoey had been idly watching the tattered balloons of her breath hanging in the cold air over the heated water and thinking of bears. Wondering if they were still hibernating—it was late April—and if they ever came out of the woods and wandered down to the lodge pool to check out the contents.

“Look up my first crush.” Charlotte was delicate and fragile in appearance, with blue eyes and perfect skin—in fact, everything about Charlotte was perfect—but Zoey knew what kind of energy was hidden beneath that remote, hands-off exterior. The three of them had run a business together, the Call-a-Girl Company, nearly eight years ago. They’d done children’s birthday parties, house-sitting, gardening, last-minute catering, pet-walking, what-have-you—and no one had put in more hours or devised better, more off-the-wall money-making schemes than Charlotte.

“Yeah, and who would that be?” Lydia asked. She was a tawny blonde, a little taller than the other two, whose lazy, sensual looks hid a razor-sharp mind.

“My first?” Charlotte gave a throaty chuckle. “Liam Connery. He was in my sister’s class at school when I was in grade five. A loner type. He’d just moved to Toronto from somewhere else, the East coast, I think, and I remember he had a big brown dog. All I know is that I was desperately in love and that he wanted to fly airplanes when he grew up. He was so handsome, at least I thought so at ten, eleven, whatever I was.”

Zoey and Lydia laughed.

“My sister hung out with him,” Charlotte continued dreamily. “I’m not sure we ever even spoke! The age difference is huge when you’re in grade five and he’s in high school, but—” She shrugged and raised her glass. “Oh, what a heavenly feeling, just to know he was looking at me. Once in a while, anyway!”

Lydia laughed and raised her glass, too. “To first love. Drink up!”

They all repeated the toast solemnly and downed the champagne. Zoey felt silly. First love? That would be Ryan Donnelly, the handsome track star at Fullerton Valley High who’d taught her what a French kiss was and then laughed at her when she wanted more.

“That’s it?” Lydia asked. “No more juicy details?”

“That’s it.” Charlotte smiled through the ghostly mist that undulated on the surface of the pool. “I have no idea what happened to him. They moved, I guess.” She laughed and took a sip of her champagne. “Probably married and living in Scarborough and the closest he’s ever come to flying is taking his kids on the Sky-master at the CNE each year.”

“So why look him up?” Zoey asked. She was perplexed and yet genuinely interested. Charlotte was a smart woman. She had a boyfriend, a handsome, successful lawyer type on Bay Street. Why would she waste her time on this?

“Oh…just because,” she’d answered dreamily. “Don’t you ever wonder what happened to your first guy?”

She hadn’t. Then, six months later, Zoey accepted a childhood friend’s invitation to help plan her stepmother’s wedding. Until then, she hadn’t thought she’d see Stoney Creek or the Fullerton Valley again. Or Ryan Donnelly. But on the drive up from Vancouver to Williams Lake and north, to Stoney Creek, she’d thought of little else. Did he still live there? He was from a large, well-established Chilcotin ranching family. Was he still handsome? The eighteen-year-old had been both a football hero and a track star. And, even more puzzling, how exactly had a sensible girl like Zoey ended up head-over-heels in love with him in the first place?

As she recalled the situation, Ryan had suggested in their last year of high school that he and Zoey pretend to be an item so he could make another girl jealous, the class beauty, Adele Martinez. Zoey already secretly adored him so she’d jumped at the chance. Surely any girl of that age would be forgiven for believing that events might turn out differently. She certainly had. In her preferred version, Ryan concluded that, of course, Adele wasn’t the one for him; Zoey Phillips was.

Or, Joey Phillips, as she’d been then. Joey was short for Josephetta Antonia. There were six Phillips girls and every one of them had a feminized male name: Thomasina, Frederica, Roberta, Frances, Josephetta and the baby, Stephanie. Harvey Phillips had clearly wanted a boy, but after six girls, he’d given up.

Stephanie was the only one who got off relatively easy, Zoey thought.

Joey, another boy’s name, was bad enough. Everyone knew exactly what it was short for, the weird Josephetta, which was the name teachers read out for roll call and the name typed out in full on her report card. She’d dumped Joey her first year away from home, part of the calculated distance she wanted to put between who she was now and who she’d been then, at least in the eyes of Stoney Creek. Zoey was glamorous. Mysterious. Different. And so was the second-youngest Phillips girl, Zoey had decided. She’d tried Chloe for a while, but no one could spell or pronounce it, so she’d tossed it for Zoey.

Stoney Creek was the closest she’d come to having a hometown. It was the longest the Phillipses had stayed in one place, first in the run-down house across the tracks and later, as Harvey Phillips’s fortunes improved, in the white-painted clapboard house with the lilac hedge and the big maple trees at the top of the hill. They moved a lot. Zoey remembered leaving one elementary school after only two months—finish school on Friday, gone by Monday. Her father was an inventor and a dreamer, always searching for the perfect place to live, always losing or quitting his job. Luckily, her mother was a nurse and could get work nearly everywhere they went.

There was no money for education but Zoey had made up her mind she was going to college. She put herself through with summer jobs and the money she made with Call-a-Girl Company, which she and Charlotte and Lydia ran year-round, even during the academic year. Charlotte, from an upper-crust Rosedale family, had the contacts and no shortage of good ideas. Lydia, a dreamy girl with a lot of imagination and a soft heart, was an excellent cook and organizer and had taken charge of most of the catering they’d landed. Her goal was to earn enough to travel to Australia. Zoey, who claimed no particular domestic or culinary skills, pitched in wherever help was needed, dealing with the advertising and promotion for their little company as well.

After graduation, Zoey had managed to turn her English major into a successful editing and book packaging career, first in Toronto, then in New York for a couple of years and now back in Toronto. Her time was her own and she made good money now that she worked exclusively with bestselling mystery writer Jamie Chinchilla, whipping the author’s convoluted manuscripts into shape before Chinchilla’s publisher saw them.

As a single, independent woman, she now moved when she wanted to—not when there were too many bills to pay and the most attractive option, according to Harvey Phillips’s modus operandi, was simply to leave town.

Zoey Phillips had—in her estimation—arrived. She’d worked hard to get where she was today. Perhaps it was time to return to Stoney Creek for a visit. She’d changed—had the town?