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Authors: Marilyn Brant

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BOOK: A Summer In Europe
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Her aunt shot a look at Connie Sue, who raised her eyebrows at Hester and who, in turn, nudged Zenia, who blurted, “Angie’s havin’ a hip replacement.”

“I—I’m sorry to hear that,” Gwen replied, slightly taken aback by the non sequitur. Angie had been hobbling around rather a lot in the past several months and her husband, Thomas, at age seventy-five, had insisted on pushing her in a wheelchair, which she hated. The surgery was unfortunate, of course, but hardly surprising. “I hope she’ll recover quickly.”

“That woman would do anything to get out of a bet!” Zenia ranted, swiping a few beads of sweat off her deep brown forehead with the sleeve of her dazzling green-and-gold tunic and pacing across the room and back. “Said she’d climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower with me.” She huffed. “Wimped her way out of it.”

Gwen squinted at her and nodded slowly. Perhaps the combination of all of the carbs in the potatoes, the cake and the lemon bars were getting to the older lady. Zenia had to watch her blood sugar. “That’s too bad,” Gwen said, wondering if she should offer the woman a glass of water or, maybe, a comfortable chair in which to sit down.

“What Zenia means, dear,” her aunt interrupted, “is that Angie and Thomas aren’t going to be taking the trip with the group.”

The trip. The trip. Some madcap bus tour through Europe, complete with a stop at a sudoku festival in Brussels. Gwen pursed her lips to keep from sighing. She’d heard rather enough about “The Trip” in the months prior and altogether too much that night. She’d been so relieved when her aunt claimed lack of interest in the month-long jaunt.... She didn’t want to have to worry about Bea frolicking around like an adolescent through the streets of Paris or getting lost in the Alps or hooking up with some Italian octogenarian or anything.

Then it hit her.

The careful explanation. The photograph of that map. The freaky focus on how surprises were “a good thing.”

The first wave of alarm started like a slow tsunami and rose to dangerous heights before the realization drenched her in dread. She stared at Aunt Beatrice, praying she’d somehow completely misunderstood.

“So, I bought their tickets and transferred them to our names,” her aunt said brightly. “We’re going on the trip instead.”

“Surprise!” the S&M club members cried in gleeful harmony.

Gwen’s heart paused, as if not sure whether it should keep beating. The anxiety at the prospect of undertaking such a journey with this nearly insane crew tangoed with the allure of her first foreign adventure.
I could see a world I’ve only read about....

“Oh, my God,” she murmured to herself, but no one, not even her aunt, heard her.

“And we leave in two days,” Hester said with a hearty cackle. “So you’d better start packing!”

2

From Home to Rome in Search of Adventure and Authentic Gelato

Thursday–Friday, June 28–29

 

N
ormal people, Gwen thought, would have had nothing exceptional to say about a typical transatlantic flight and would have spent their hours in the air discussing just about anything
other than
the actual plane ride. Yet, between Dr. Louie, Matilda and Davis—her seatmates in economy class, row 22, center—no mathematical point of interest was either too small for analysis or too insignificant for general commentary.

“Oooh! Did you hear that?” Matilda pronounced, in the midst of an energetic game of canasta with Dr. Louie. “The captain says we’ve dipped to 30,000 feet. A little more than four-fifths of our cruising altitude during his last announcement.”

“And can you feel the deceleration?” Dr. Louie remarked, discarding a three and drawing a more favorable ten and queen.

“A reduction of at least twenty-five percent from our previous speed of approximately 500 miles per hour,” Davis replied, glancing up at them from the puzzle he was working on in a level-six Sudoku Master Challenge workbook. As one of only a few S&M members who qualified for the competition in Belgium, he had to be ready.

Gwen, accustomed to far more quiet time than she was getting that day, was starting to feel as though she may have made a terrible mistake in coming—European adventure or no. She gazed across the compact seats to look out of the windows. The point of their numerical scrutiny was that they’d be landing in Rome in less than an hour. For the past two hours, she’d been forced to overhear the three of them debating the Boeing 747’s position, location, elevation and speed with stunning absorption.

Aunt Bea, who was sitting just across the aisle from her, was snoring softly in the seat next to Connie Sue. Alex was next to his wife, wide-awake and staring out the window.

Gwen took a deep breath, closed her eyes and pretended to listen to her iPod, which needed recharging because it had run out of juice somewhere over the Atlantic. While the music had been playing, she’d been all right—she’d felt much as she had at home, in her kitchen, listening to her soundtracks and preparing for her day. Without the songs, though, she felt immediately just how far away from Iowa she really was. And from Richard.

Richard, who, when she’d called him to tell him about her aunt’s gift, had said, “
Four
weeks in Europe? What on Earth are you going to do there for
that
long?”

“It’s technically five weeks,” she’d replied, having had a chance to study the itinerary at some length. “And we’re going to visit famous sites. Bunches of them.” She’d been reading up. A lot. She already knew a fair bit of European history and welcomed the chance to learn more, but she couldn’t help but fear this book knowledge wouldn’t be enough to fully understand the experience. She’d only left her home state a handful of times in her life. The S&M members were world travelers compared to her. What would the people she encountered in Europe think of her when they realized just how very noncosmopolitan she was? She probably shouldn’t venture an opinion aloud—on anything—for the first week at least.

There was a pause on the line. “But what about the Fourth of July? You won’t be able to come to the picnic.”

“I’m afraid not, Richard.” She didn’t say, although it was implied, that they wouldn’t get to “hang out” that weekend, either. Perhaps, if they’d actually been engaged, she would’ve had the nerve to turn down her aunt’s offer, but Gwen didn’t have the ready excuse of needing to spend the summer making wedding plans. (And
that
was Richard’s own fault.) She couldn’t bear to see Aunt Bea’s joyful expression turn to disappointment without some really good reason. “You’ll be so busy over the next month, you’ll hardly have a chance to miss me,” she told him, hoping this wasn’t true, but suspecting it might be.

He cleared his throat. “Of course I’ll miss you, Gwendolyn.”

“Well, I’m glad we got those passports now,” she said, thinking he’d be pleased to hear this. He’d had a conference scheduled last summer in Ottawa, and he’d asked her to drive up there with him. She’d been really excited to go, and they’d both gotten passports. But when the conference dates were changed, he’d canceled the trip, and they’d ended up not going anywhere together. Not even to Canada.

“Yeah. Yours will come in handy now,” he replied, his voice almost tart.

Was he envious? Perhaps he was really sad to see her leave.

“Hey,” she’d said. “I have an idea! Don’t you have a few days of vacation left this summer? Why don’t you join us for a little while?” Buoyed by this rare burst of spontaneity, Gwen held her breath, awaiting his reply.

Richard kept her waiting for at least twelve seconds. She’d counted. “I’ll think about it,” he said finally. “But it would have to be somewhere English-speaking.”

And, so, they’d left it that,
maybe,
he’d join the group for their final days in London, since that was where the tour concluded. The possibility of this reunion with him, and the romantic closeness it might inspire, was what had kept her going for the past forty-eight hours. She mentally gripped her daydream of that moment, clung to it like a lifeline.

A sudden jolt caused by an air pocket—“Clear-air turbulence,” Matilda informed them, evidently figuring they ought to know the technical term—jerked Aunt Beatrice awake.

“Good morning, Gwennie,” her aunt said with a yawn.

“More like ‘Good afternoon,’ ” Davis inserted, after a peek at his wristwatch. “We’re on Italian time now.”

Aunt Bea chuckled. “So we are.” She yawned again, stretching her bony arms far enough to knock both Connie Sue and Alex in the head, had they not shifted away just in time. “I’m looking forward to finally seeing the others.”

Gwen squinted at her. “The
others?
” she asked, already worried that being on a plane with such an offbeat cast of characters might be resemblance enough to a plotline from
Lost.
She didn’t need there to be “Others,” too.

“Oh, yes,” her aunt answered breezily. “Our friends from our English sister city are flying down from the U.K. today. We’ve only met online so far. Tournaments. Facebook. You know.”

Gwen didn’t know. Or, more accurately, she only vaguely remembered. “Dubuque, Iowa, has a sister city?” she asked slowly. “In England?”

“It does for our club!” her aunt exclaimed.

“They’re really into S&M there,” Dr. Louie said with his booming baritone. The flight attendant walking up the aisle swiveled around and shot him an odd look. Most of the passengers in rows 23, 24 and 25 abruptly stopped talking. Half of row 21 craned their necks to glance back at him. Gwen slunk down in her seat.

“Hey, where do these people live?” some random guy, sitting two rows behind them, asked with a laugh.

“Surrey, dear,” Aunt Bea called to him.

“Like the carriage,” Connie Sue piped up.

“Or the show tune,” Matilda supplied helpfully.

Dr. Louie, who was seated between Matilda and Gwen, tossed down his playing cards and all but leaped up to wave at the guy who’d asked the question. With a frighteningly delighted look on his face, he burst into song, much like some teen in
Glee
or
High School Musical,
only not. “Hens and mice and sheep better scurry-yy, when I take my friends in my surrey-yy—”

Aunt Bea laughed, but Matilda interrupted him. “Oh, stop it, Louie! There were no
sheep
in that song. There were chicks and ducks and geese, I think, and maybe a cow somewhere, but I know—”

“Then join me!” Dr. Louie enthused, half lifting a startled Matilda out of her seat and getting her to lead the midsection of the plane in the first verse and chorus of “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”

It was like a
Twilight Zone
version of a musical come to life. Gwen was sure the ghosts of both Rodgers
and
Hammerstein were spinning in their graves and, quite possibly, planning for Flight 435’s crash landing and consequent fiery destruction just off the coast of Corsica. Good thing Richard wasn’t along. He’d be horrified by the spectacle.

But was the flight attendant doing anything to curtail this display?
No.
She was laughing. And when Louie and Matilda went on to butcher the song “Oklahoma!” next, the woman in uniform actually joined in the singing, as did at least sixty percent of the passengers in the economy-class section. Dr. Louie had snatched Davis’s pen away from him and was using it as a conductor’s wand. On top of that, instead of the wind sweepin’
down the plain
the wind was sweepin’
cross the plane,
with Dr. Louie pretending to blow a gust of air across the aisles from the windows on one side to the windows on the other.

Gwen’s self-consciousness rose to unparalleled heights. Although she knew every verse of every song they sang, she didn’t have the nerve to exhibit herself that way.
Didn’t this prove they were nuts?!
She’d never be someone who’d get coerced into impromptu karaoke-like singing in public, no matter how much these wacky seniors tried to cajole her into joining them.

And, furthermore, this trip that she’d expected to be a semiseri-ous learning experience was turning out to be far less like a European documentary than a continuously looping sitcom. Their flight, already an eternity, seemed to drag on even longer.

Aunt Bea paused long enough in her warbling to say to Gwen, “Isn’t this fun? And we’re not even in Rome yet!”

After disembarking, they were greeted at the international arrivals terminal of Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport by a short, older gentleman wearing a plaid cap and chunky glasses. The portly, bespectacled man spoke in brief sentences with a thick Italian accent and introduced himself to the group as “Guido.”


He’s
the hot tour guide Cynthia was going on and on about?” Zenia hissed at Connie Sue.

Connie Sue shook her frosted blond head. “Can’t be.”

Gwen’s aunt, standing near her friends at the back fringes of the crowd, shrugged and said, “Anything’s possible, but he doesn’t look at all like Cynthia described him.”

“Or like his Twitter profile photo,” added Zenia, unable to disguise her resentment.

BOOK: A Summer In Europe
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