Swept Away. Gwynne Forster
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Название: Swept Away
Автор: Gwynne Forster
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
isbn: 9781472018885
isbn:
She pushed back the threatening tears, though there was no sorrow in them. Just an overwhelming love. “Thanks, Papa. You know I will.”
She waited for him to say goodbye, but he hadn’t finished. “If you’re running from something, girl, you might as well stand still and face it, cause it’ll catch you anyway. I can testify to that. And if you’re trying to find something, look inside yourself first. It’s there, baby. You just need the courage to take it.”
How had he read her so accurately? “I know, Papa. I know. Here’s my cell phone number in case you lost it. You can reach me wherever I am in the country. Love you, Papa.”
“You’re my heart, Veronica. Always have been. Always will be.”
Nothing had changed, but she felt a lot better. She phoned Hertz for a rental car, got out some maps and sat down to figure out where next to satisfy her wanderlust. The following morning she packed a few essentials along with her Buddy Guy, George Strait and Leontyne Price cassettes, her knitting bag, six cans of ginger ale and a supply of Butterfingers. She laughed at her taste in music. Blues, country and opera, not to mention the jazz and chamber music and other classical morsels that she wasn’t taking along. She went back into the house and got a couple of Billie Holiday cassettes, in case she stayed away more than a few days and began to miss them. She looked at the beloved house that she once hated to leave for any reason, shook her head at the changes in her, got in the Mercury Cougar and headed for the Adirondack Mountains.
Dusk had begun to settle over the tiny hamlet of Indian Lake when she turned into Geandreau’s Cabins, a group of furnished, red clapboard cabins on Highway 28 facing Adirondack Lake. The brochure promised scenic beauty and only nature for company, if one wanted that. Here and there, houses predating the Revolutionary War proudly displayed their plaques of authenticity and stood arrogantly, as it were, among the youthful and less imposing school, church, tiny post office, hardware store and Giant supermarket. What did the villages do for entertainment or for intellectual stimulation? An eerie quiet. Solitude.
She quickly learned that if she wanted that, she’d have to insist on it. At supper in the nearby café, a stranger joined her as soon she sat down.
“You’re not from ’round here,” the old man said. “Staying long?”
She remembered that she was in a small town, tried not to show impatience and made herself smile. “A few days.”
“Ain’t much to do here ’cept swim and go canoeing. Fish don’t never bite no more; weeds suck up the oxygen in the lake.”
Not according to her knowledge of chemistry; like all other lakes, that one was nothing more than a combination of oxygen and hydrogen. She let the old man have his wisdom. “That so?”
“Sure thing,” he said. “If yer husband wants to go fishing, I can take him down to the Indian Lake in the morning. They bites down there. No charge. Just friendly. I likes the company.”
She supposed if she lived in a tiny place like Indian Lake, she’d be expected to have a husband. “I’m not married.”
He peered at her as if to make sure his eyes hadn’t fooled him. “Where you from?”
She told him, and watched him shake his head, seemingly in dismay. “No wonder. Them city fellows don’t know a woman when they sees one. You better get started. Raising young’ uns ain’t easy when you get older. Takes more energy than you got. Get yerself a good man ’fore you too old to find one.” He looked closely at her. “You got one, ain’t you?”
What could she say? There was someone who could fill her life with all it lacked, all she desired, but he was just another of her dreams.
“There is someone, but I have no hope for an enduring relationship with him.”
The old man cocked an eyebrow and rubbed the gray stubble that grew from his jaw. “He ain’t married or engaged, is he?”
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