Family Tree (10 page)

“Thank you for expediting this,” Caroline Rush said to Fletcher. “Annie doesn't need a power of attorney anymore. Especially not—” She
stopped herself from saying Martin's name. “And for stopping by the house. You didn't have to do that.”

“I wanted to. I'm sorry about what happened to Annie.”

Caroline's hand shook as she carefully placed the legal document in its folder. She felt an overwhelming sense of relief along with sadness and apprehension. Once upon a time, she had joyfully given her daughter to Martin Harlow, believing Annie's future was secure with a husband who would love her forever. Now Caroline was taking her daughter back, and she had no idea what to believe anymore.

“Sit down,” she said, gesturing at the kitchen table. “I just made a pot of coffee.”

“Thanks.”

She set down the French press along with a plate of salted maple shortbread cookies. “I don't have the baking skills of my mother or my daughter,” she said, “but I find that if you use enough butter and maple syrup in a recipe, you don't need much skill.”

He tasted one, and the expression on his face was gratifying. “Good to know.”

Fletcher Wyndham hadn't been Caroline's favorite, back when he'd been Annie's boyfriend. Caroline hadn't seen the potential there. All she'd seen was an obstacle to her daughter's future. In the eyes of a mother wanting a glorious future for her child, he was merely the son of a drifter, a kid who would probably stagnate in his blue-collar job at the garage, drink beer, and play the lottery, eventually turning soft and directionless in middle age.

Looking at him now, she felt shame and regret. She wished she had looked deeper and seen an extraordinary young man. The fact was, she hadn't looked at all. Her problem with Fletcher Wyndham had nothing to do with Fletcher Wyndham. Or with Annie, for that matter. It was Caroline who was the problem.

Enough with this Fletcher kid, Caroline had said to Annie, when her
daughter was teetering on the verge of changing her mind about college. Now Caroline had to admit to herself that what she was really saying was
Enough with this Ethan Lickenfelt.

Oh, she had loved that boy in his boxy white grocery truck. She'd been naive enough to believe that loving him would be enough to create a life of blissful perfection, no matter what. At eighteen, she hadn't understood that frustration and hardship had the power to corrode even the deepest love and thwart the most yearned-for dreams.

The divide between the life Ethan wanted and the one he'd found on Rush Mountain had ruined their marriage. They were both committed to their kids and their family, but ultimately, the strain took its toll. There were only so many lies a person could tell herself before she had to let in the truth.

“Mrs. Rush?” Fletcher's voice broke into her thoughts.

She wasn't Mrs. Rush. She wasn't Mrs. anything. “Please call me Caroline.”

“Caroline. I was just wondering what you thought.”

“Sorry, I wasn't listening,” she confessed.

“This must be really stressful for you,” he said.

“Yes . . . but it's not just that. I wanted to tell you I'm sorry.”

He frowned. “For what?”

She sighed and pushed the plate of cookies toward him. “It's a long-overdue apology. Really long, Fletcher, and it's awful that I haven't said anything until now. But I want you to know, I was wrong about you, back when you first moved to Switchback. A lot of people were wrong about you.”

He gave a quick, slightly crooked smile. One thing Caroline had
not
been wrong about—the boy was stunningly good-looking. But that had been part of her problem with Fletcher. How could a guy that gorgeous possibly be trusted?

“Don't feel bad,” he said to her. “Now that I have a kid of my own, I get how protective a parent feels.”

“Thank you, but that's no excuse. I never bothered to know you, and that wasn't fair.”

“I imagine you were more concerned with Annie. Besides, I was probably a little shit, anyway. The longer I work at court, the more I'm convinced that most guys are at that age.”

“When I think of the role I played in keeping you apart, I feel ashamed. None of this would have happened if I'd left the two of you alone.”

“Believe me, you weren't the cause of our breakup—not the first time, or the second. Annie and I managed to screw things up on our own.”

“Good of you to say. But that Martin Harlow. He ought to be strung up by the balls.”

“I can't help you with that,” he said.

“He brought her here from L.A. via medical transport, as if she were a piece of defective merchandise, can you imagine?”

“I . . . no. I can't.”

“I'm grateful she's here, though. She needs her family. Now more than ever. Her care team says it could be weeks or months before she can come home, but you know Annie. When she sets her mind to something, nothing can stop her.”

He nodded. “That's the Annie I knew.”

They were quiet, sipping the last of their coffee. Caroline offered a refill, but he shook his head.

“I heard about your divorce,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

“This might be stating the obvious, but I'll say it anyway—it happens to the best of us.”

“After my divorce, people told me I should look at it as a chance to learn and grow.” Have I done that? she wondered. Some days, she wasn't so sure. “It's a big change, I know. How's your little boy?”

“Teddy's fantastic. Confused about the situation, but I'm keeping things as stable as I can for him. Bought a place on Henley Street—the old Webster house. The remodel was a major project. Teddy likes being close to school.”

Caroline felt another wave of regret. Fletcher seemed like a good man. Why had she never bothered to get to know him? “And what about you? Do you like it?”

He grinned. “After doing all that remodeling, I'm never moving.”

Then

W
e're moving,” said Fletcher's dad, dropping a bomb into the middle of his senior year of high school.

“Again?” Fletcher set aside his civics textbook and glared up at his father. The TV was blaring the news that never seemed to cease—the whole country was trying to figure out how to wage war against a terrorist group called the Taliban. Last September 11, the world had been turned inside out by the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. A couple of Fletcher's buddies had already made commitments to enlist in the military as soon as school ended. Now, with his father's sudden announcement, Fletcher contemplated enlisting. “I'm not going with you,” he stated.

“You don't have a choice. I need you, son. And you're gonna love this,” Dad said, his eyes lighting the way they did when he was convinced he was onto something.

Fletcher wasn't convinced of anything. He glared at the TV, which showed soldiers being moved around the desert in lumbering transport vehicles. “When?” he demanded.

“After Christmas break.”

“Shit, Dad.” He looked around the little bungalow. Same shabby furniture they had schlepped from place to place, different house. He'd been okay with living in Dover, where they'd been since last summer.
School here didn't suck. He was looking at the home stretch toward graduation and thinking about what to do after. “Shit,” he said again.

“Knock it off. This is a sweet deal. I bought myself a business up in Vermont—”

“Vermont?” Fletcher flashed on images of maple trees and snow. Endless acres of snow. And . . . what else? Ben & Jerry's. Cheddar and Cabot cheese. Autumn leaves.
Shit
.

Moving was the story of his life with his dad. Fletcher tried to count on his fingers the number of moves they had made. Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia, one of the Carolinas—he scarcely remembered which one—Indiana, Delaware . . . He ran out of fingers. And now this. Freaking Vermont.

His father was forever chasing after the next big thing that would put them on Easy Street. The trouble was, nothing ever panned out, because his ideas were nutty. He had once started a business turning urns of ashes into underwater reefs. He'd bought into a theme park for grown-ups featuring heavy equipment. Then there had been that herd of goats for rent to clear brush, the pizza delivery on an Italian scooter with speakers blaring Andrea Bocelli . . . If an idea was weird and doomed to fail, his dad embraced it.

“This time,” Dad said, the way he always did, “things are going to be different. You'll see.”

“Sure I will,” said Fletcher. The idea of slogging through another move in pursuit of another nutty idea made his head hurt.

“I got a line on a car repair garage from a guy who's retiring and selling everything. The deal comes with a ready-made clientele, all the equipment and inventory we need, ready to go. This is the only garage for miles. It's a no-brainer,” his dad said.

Meaning, thought Fletcher, if you had no brain, you'd think it was a good deal.

“And there's a major bonus,” Dad went on. “Scooters.”

“Scooters. You mean like motorbikes?” That piqued Fletcher's interest. Just a little.

“You betcha. Thanks to some obscure import-export law, Vermont is the best place to import a vintage scooter. I handle the paperwork, and we collect a nice chunk of the fee. It's a super deal. And I got this amazing espresso machine, a commercial one from Italy, too. We can set up an espresso bar right in the garage.”

“Cool,” Fletcher said. “Let's add a massage table. ‘Sanford's Garage, Scooter Works, Espresso, and Massage.'”

“And a nail salon,” Dad added. “Chicks love nail salons, right?”

“You would know.”

“Quit being a smart-ass.”

Fletcher knew he could argue until he ran out of words, but he also knew it would be pointless to bring up the myriad objections and pitfalls. His dad always had a ready answer for everything, even if the answer was wrong.

“If I change schools now, I might not be able to graduate on time.” Holy crap. That would truly suck.

His father scratched his head. “What do you need to graduate for? You're already smart enough.”

Fletcher slammed the civics book shut. “Oh, I don't know. Maybe so I have a shot at going to college? And yeah, I know the whole story of how you left home at sixteen and made a life for yourself without having to waste time in a classroom. But I'm not you, Dad.”

“Agreed. You're ten times smarter than I'll ever be. That's why I need you, Fletch. Just help me get this thing off the ground, and you won't have to worry about me.” He glowered at the two sets of coveralls hanging by the front door. They were from the express-oil-change place where they had both been working since the move to Dover, an outfit called Here We Go Lube-B-Lube. The place sucked ass, but it paid the rent—just barely. “That's a dead end for sure,” his dad said,
indicating the coveralls. “We'll be in charge of the whole show at the garage in Vermont.”

Fletcher knew when an argument was lost. So with a dull sense of resignation, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “Cool.”

The next week, they packed all their belongings into a rented trailer, hitched it up behind the pickup truck, and drove from Delaware to Vermont.

Fletcher tried not to think about what he was leaving behind—a few friends he liked to go mountain biking or to the shore with, a girlfriend named Kayla who had cried in his arms when he said good-bye, and a steady job at the oil-change place. By now, he had stopped hoping life would settle into some normal pattern. He simply went along with whatever plan his dad dreamed up, expecting nothing. Except maybe a catch. There always seemed to be a catch, some reason the plan would go awry, and they'd find themselves broke and on the road again.

The town was called Switchback, which already sounded odd to Fletcher. In order to get there, they drove along icy, snowy roads over rolling hills and up into granite mountains, winding around hairpin curves that had probably given the town its name. The higher they climbed, the colder and snowier the landscape became. The sky was a flat gray—the color of cold. Fletcher had never experienced winter quite like this—rolling acres of snow, the roadside piled high with dirty plowed snowbanks, the sky a bleak, colorless expanse of nothingness.

Finally they passed a hand-carved wooden sign that read
Switchback, Vermont. Elevation: 2207. Population: 7647.
The next sign, from the Chamber of Commerce, proclaimed,
Welcome to Switchback. Once You Switch, You'll Never Go Back
.

Har, har.

In the town center, the speed limit went down to twenty miles per hour. Fletcher had seen pictures of typical New England villages, and this place was even more . . . villagey. There was a white-steepled church
and a village green with a railed gazebo, a pillared library called an atheneum, shops and small businesses that reeked of quaintness, and a grand, solid block of a high school with a notice on the marquee—
Home of the Fighting Wildcats.
The side streets were lined with slender trees and painted wooden houses, the picket-fenced yards nearly buried under thick blankets of snow.

The main feature of the town was the courthouse, a perfectly symmetrical New England classic with 1878 spelled out in the stonework in Roman numerals. The stately and majestic building sat at the entrance to a park. With the lights glowing in the windows and in the bell cupola atop the roof, the courthouse was beautiful and peaceful-looking. A handful of clerks and lawyers with briefcases were on their way home, descending the wide steps beneath the front columns.

Business looked slow at the local shops and cafés. Clearly, January was not the most popular month for tourist outings to Vermont.

Dad stopped at Sweet Maria's Coffee Shop, which smelled like heaven—coffee and baked goods and onions on the grill. They had a bite to eat, and Dad asked a guy sitting at the counter for directions to the Rookery, where they were going to stay until Dad found a place to rent. They could hardly understand the guy's speech. It sounded like a “shawt hop to Mahket Squay-ah.”

The Rookery turned out to be a bed-and-breakfast inn filled with fussy-looking antiques and doilies on every surface. When they dumped their shabby duffel bags in the foyer, the hostess—Mildred Deacon—did not visibly wrinkle her nose, although Fletcher suspected she was doing it in her mind.

The day he enrolled as a new student at Switchback High School, he had one goal. He intended to turn invisible. He wanted to keep a low profile and somehow get himself to the end of the year so he could move on with his life.

He knew the drill. He had to submit his school records to the administration
, meet with a counselor, and get a schedule of classes. He hoped he'd end up with enough credits to graduate.

The school counselor was a woman named Ms. Elkins, who sat on one of those big inflated fitness balls behind a cluttered desk as she went through his records. She had a gap between her two front teeth, streaks of purple in her hair, and horn-rimmed glasses with pointy corners.

“Five schools in four years,” she said. “And this is number six. Wow.”

Fletcher said nothing. She didn't seem to expect a reply. Through the window of the counseling office, he could see students arriving for the day. They looked like kids anywhere, moving around in social clumps, talking loudly, and shoving back and forth as they made their way to lockers and homerooms. Most were bundled up against the cold, in puffy jackets, tall boots, hats with earflaps.

“Your grades are excellent.” Ms. Elkins said this with some surprise.

He nodded again, just wanting the meeting to be over.

“In order to satisfy the graduation requirements,” she continued, “you're going to need to finish senior English, a science with a lab, a foreign language, and a PE credit.” She drummed a pencil on the desk, then turned to her computer, studying the screen with deep concentration. “I think we can make this work. So here's the deal. I can get the schedule you need if you forfeit a study hall and take AP English. Does that sound doable?”

“Sure,” he said.
Whatever
.

“Your homeroom is the industrial arts shop with Mr. Dow.”

“Okay.”

“What about extracurriculars?” she asked. “Sports, clubs? Theater? Band?”

God, no. “Uh, no, ma'am.”

She filled out a form and hit print. “What brings you to Switchback?”

“My dad bought a garage and import business in town,” he said.

“Oh—Crestfield's garage,” she said in a chirpy tone. “Of course. Everybody
takes all their repair jobs there. Mr. Crestfield is retiring, I hear. So your dad's a mechanic.”

“That's right.” Despite his lack of business sense, Sanford Wyndham had a God-given gift. He could fix anything. Through the years, he had repaired car and boat engines, small motors, huge generators, golf carts, wind machines, bulldozers, tractors—if it had moving parts, he could fix it. He'd always wanted a garage of his own, but could never afford to set himself up in business until now. Apparently a repair garage in the middle of a frozen nowhere carried a low price tag.

“Do you work on cars, too?”

“Yes,” he said. “I'll be working for my dad after school and on weekends.” Fletcher was good at fixing things, too. He didn't really have a choice, since he and his dad rarely had the dough to pay someone else to do the work.

“And after graduation?” she asked. “What are your plans?”

“Um.” Get the hell out. Was that a plan? “I guess I'll keep helping my dad. Maybe something else.”

“Have you applied to any colleges?”

Right, he thought. College. What's that? “No, ma'am.”

“Well,” said Ms. Elkins. “We can talk about that more later. With your grades, you're a good prospect for college. Don't hesitate to come to me if you have any questions. Anything at all.”

“All right. Thanks.”

The schedule page whispered from the printer. She handed it to him. “It's a challenge, being new,” she said. “I'm sure you'll do all right here. This is a nice group of students, and the teachers are top-notch. You'll fit right in.”

“Sure, thanks,” he said. The minute he stepped outside the office, a bell rang. Some kid slammed into Fletcher's shoulder.

“Hey,” said the kid. “Watch where you're going.”

Nice.

The corridor was overheated and smelled like wet dog. There were flyers taped to the walls announcing a swim meet, a bake sale, a rainbow rally, a dance.

Fletcher took a deep breath and merged into the jostle and flow of students making their way to class. He found his assigned locker, then made his way to homeroom—the industrial arts shop. He stepped inside and surveyed the room. Kids were milling around, slinging backpacks and talking loudly about nothing and everything. It could have been any classroom in any high school. He found an empty spot at a table across from a girl with long yellow hair and awesome boobs. Trying to keep his eyes on her face, he gave her a nod of greeting. “I'm Fletcher,” he said. “It's my first day.”

She gave him a slow once-over. “Lucky you,” she said. “I'm Celia. Celia Swank.” She had a nice smile. She had a nice . . . everything.

The instructor was a harried-looking guy named Mr. Dow. Fletcher went to introduce himself. He stood by the door to wait his turn. At the moment, he was facing off with a small, dark-haired girl who claimed to have an urgent need for a blowtorch.

“I can't let you take that out of here, Annie,” he said. “What do you need it for, anyway?”

She indicated a tray of glass custard cups. “My maple crème brûlée,” she said. “I'm making it in the home ec kitchen. Please. I'll bring it right back.”

He scowled at her, then glanced up at the clock. “Okay, fine. I want it returned the second you're done.”