Independence Day. Amy Frazier

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СКАЧАТЬ glanced from the stranded athletic supporter to the smirking tourists to his daughters to his watch. That damned watch. Then, with the same practiced patience he’d use as high-school principal on any one of his recalcitrant students, he stared up at his wife and cleared his throat.

      “Chessie,” he said, enunciating carefully. “The parade starts in ten minutes. I have a speech to give in thirty. Could we discuss this later?”

      Chessie took a deep breath for courage. Across the street her friend Martha Weiss stood in her doorway, a bemused expression on her face. “Could we discuss this later?” she repeated, returning her gaze to Nick. “I don’t think so. What I want from the three of you is a little bit of now.”

      One of the tourists, a middle-aged woman wearing an enormous red hat and a purple jersey tunic, applauded.

      Feeling a glorious sense of release, Chessie slammed the window shut. She picked up her empty coffee mug, then headed downstairs to her studio and her potter’s wheel in the barn. Not that she expected to get any work done immediately. Nick and the girls wouldn’t let her opening salvo go unanswered. Oh, no.

      Hormonally charged Gabriella wouldn’t lose this opportunity to tell her mother—yet again—how she was absolutely ruining the teenager’s life. While sweet, sensitive and poetic Isabel would take the opportunity to watch life unfold before her, ever the observer, marginally the participant.

      And Nick…

      Nick. Nick. Nick.

      Nick, the proud and virile man Chessie had married eighteen years ago, would inwardly seethe at this inconvenient show of emotion, this lack of family solidarity. Nick, the workaholic and determined provider she’d followed around the country as he’d climbed his way from beginner teacher to full-fledged-high-school-principal-on-the-fast-track-tosuperintendent…this Nick wouldn’t be amused by her rebellion. Her husband, the now restrained and emotionally distant man she loved as a part of herself, but no longer understood, would instantly go into denial.

      He’d try to find a way to minimize her outburst, pull his family together in a semblance of greeting-card perfection and still make his speech in the village square with five minutes to spare for schmoozing.

      Well, not today. Today spin control wasn’t going to cut it, not when the new and improved Chessie refused to be spun.

      In the dining room, Chessie glanced out the window and saw her family in the yard, trotting in line toward the barn. Grim Father Goose and his irate goslings. They knew her well enough to anticipate her destination.

      Working her way through the cluttered kitchen, she placed her empty coffee mug precariously on top of the mound of unwashed dishes in the sink and sighed. The dirty dish fairy wasn’t going to do the job this morning. Nope. She’d just wiped scullery duty from her priority list.

      Steeling her will toward the revolution, she went out the kitchen door and through the furnace room. Oh, to get her hands in some therapeutic clay. As she opened the door into the barn’s lower level, three stern faces brought her up short.

      “What’s all this about?” Nick asked, not without genuine concern.

      Chessie moved toward the stairs leading to her studio and classroom. “I’ve chosen today to grant the three of you—and myself—emotional independence.” She brushed past them. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, the creative juices are flowing.”

      “But it’s the Fourth of July,” Gabriella whined. “You’ll miss the parade and Daddy’s speech.”

      “I’ll open the loft windows.” Their cottage was only one door removed from the village square. “I’ll hear the band and, with the PA system, Daddy’s speech.”

      Isabel frowned. “But we won’t be together.”

      Pausing, Chessie turned to her older daughter. “As cruel as it sounds, sweetie, we’re none of us joined at the hip. And I need to work.”

      “Geez, Dad,” Gabriella groused, “she was sane at breakfast.”

      Yes, she had been sane at breakfast.

      It was after breakfast she’d needed to take fifteen minutes—fifteen minutes—for herself in her studio to sketch out the plans for the piece that had been buzzing inside her head for days now, the piece that might prove to be a significant advancement in a career that had never fully taken root because the family moved every couple years for Nick’s career.

      But noooo…her own fifteen minutes were not to be.

      Nick couldn’t find his red suspenders. Gabriella couldn’t find her favorite jean shorts. And Isabel couldn’t find her iPod. All three looked to Chessie to produce the missing items as if by magic. When she’d finally got into the bathroom to wash her face and run a brush through her hair, she’d been met by the avalanche of dirty laundry.

      The proverbial straw.

      She was expected to be a 24/7 concierge for everyone else, but wasn’t allowed fifteen uninterrupted minutes to be herself. Not someone’s wife. Not someone’s mother. Not someone’s maid. Herself. A concept she’d almost forgotten the meaning of.

      She felt her face go red with frustration.

      “Mom?” Isabel’s worried voice brought Chessie back to the barn and the present. “Are you all right?”

      Nick glanced at his watch. Again with the watch. “Girls, for whatever reason, I think your mom needs some time alone. We can all meet up for the picnic later.” He leaned over and kissed Chessie on the forehead. A very chaste kiss, infuriating in its total lack of passion.

      “Do your thing,” he murmured in a tone that bordered dangerously close to patronizing. “Get it all out of your system. Come to the parade later if you can make it. Either way, we’ll have fun this afternoon on the islands.” He delivered his lines with administrative deliberation. “I’m counting on you. As I always do.”

      Poor Nick. He didn’t have a clue that the rules had changed this morning.

      If his kiss hadn’t been so platonic and his tone so dismissive, Chessie might’ve limited her initial declaration to the shower of dirty laundry. But it seemed her family still needed a more public nudge.

      FROM THE PODIUM in front of the flagpole, Nick looked out over the attentive crowd. As he spotted his daughters and the rest of the McCabe clan—his father, Penn, his sister Mariah, and his brothers Jonas, Brad, with Emily and their four children, and Sean, with Kit and Alexandra—he felt very proud. He’d delivered a worthy speech—brief, patriotic and stirring—and he’d delivered it from the heart. Despite Chessie’s unaccountable behavior earlier, he felt a real sense of hometown satisfaction.

      “And in closing, I ask each and every one of you,” he concluded with conviction, “as you enjoy today’s activities, to count your blessings. There is no finer, freer place to live than Pritchard’s Neck, Maine.”

      As the applause broke out around him, a flash of sunlight on metal captured his attention. Ever the principal, Nick worried that a brass player with the high-school band had gone AWOL for a smoke behind the library—until he saw Chessie in front of the library, adjusting a slapdash sandwich-board sign over her shoulders as she held aloft Nick’s battered junior-high-school trumpet. The sign secure, she put the instrument СКАЧАТЬ