Skinny Dipping (35 page)

Mimi flinched. “I bet you wish you could have left the room, too.”

Solange shook her head. “No. Not at all. I wished you’d been a little quicker about the process, but we were in it together and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. We made it just fine, too.”

Solange had always seen her role as being there. Sometimes she’d been a little too much there, but Mimi had never doubted her mother’s dedication.

“You never were quick to leave a room,” Mimi said quietly. “I remember you used to read me to sleep every night.”

“Didn’t think you liked it that much,” Solange said with a small self-deprecating laugh.

“Well, I might have preferred
The Boxcar Children
to the
Iliad
, but…”

“The classics are the classics,” Solange said, rising to her feet. “I better get back to Sarah before she harms that nurse.”

She patted Mimi absently on the head and headed back to the room.

Mimi stretched, glancing up at the clock. Sarah had better get a move on, or Mimi was going to have to take off for the lawyers’ office without seeing Little Mignonette or the less popular Little Prescott. On the other hand, let the lawyers wait.

Still, she might as well be ready. She picked up her backpack and headed into the bathroom, where she stripped off her shirt and washed up as well as she could. She brushed her teeth and attempted to comb her hair with her fingers. She leaned over the sink, peering closely in the mirror. She was sure there was more gray in her hair today than there had been yesterday. Small wonder.

The door opened behind her. She glanced up in the mirror—

“Joe!” She spun around, her heart thudding like a snared rabbit’s, dizzy with happiness.

He looked perfect. The sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled up on those spectacular forearms, his collar was open, and his hair gleamed like polished carbon. He must have shaved in the parking lot. His jaw looked kissably smooth.

“Hello, Mimi.” His voice. Her toes curled in her shoes.

“How did you know I was in here?”

“The desk nurse saw you go in,” he answered, looking around. He saw a metal chair sitting at the end of the sinks and smiled. He picked it and tipped it backward, sliding the top under the door handle, saying conversationally, “I really would like us not to be interrupted.”

“Oh,” she said faintly.

“Did you get my e-mail?”

“Yes,” she nodded.

“You haven’t said ‘I love you,’” he said. “I thought I was pretty clear on that.”

Her heart was beating like a jackhammer. “Control freak,” she said, only it came out in a breathy little rush.

“Absolutely.” He walked over to her and, without breaking stride, cradled her face between his strong, beautifully manicured hands and proceeded to kiss the hell out of her. When he was done, his hands dropped to her waist, steadying her.

“I love you, Mimi,” he said. “I want to be with you. And if I can’t, as long as I know where to find you, I’ll be okay with it. When I was in Singapore, thinking about you, I had this feeling of finally having reached some destination even though I was thousands of miles away from you. For the first time in my adult life, I have somewhere to go and someone to go to. You.

“You’re my touchstone, Mimi.”

“I think you mean lodestone,” she said breathlessly. He smiled, his eyes crinkling up at the corners in an altogether sexy way.

She was having a hard time breathing and her hands seemed to keep reaching up to touch his face or smooth the material over his chest. Beneath her fingertips she could read the beat of his heart, and oops! She owed him a new shirt because his buttons were popping off and she was dragging his shirt from a very muscular pair of shoulders, her mouth nipping at the base of his throat, and—

“Come on, Mimi. Tell me.”

“Yes!” She lashed her arms around his bare torso. He felt warm and dense and oh, man, she just wanted to crawl into him.

“Yes, what?” he insisted.

“I love you.” He was looking at her and she realized that being half Scandinavian and therefore not prone to dramatic declaration had its drawbacks, because she couldn’t think of any words that could describe the intensity of this feeling, the enormity, the wonder of it. So, she went with what she could.
“Unequivocally!”

It seemed to satisfy him.

“Do you want to make love?” he asked, pulling her closer.

“Unequivocally.”

“Where have you been?” Solange asked suspiciously as Mimi entered the hospital room. Joe had left to find Prescott while Mimi went in search of someone to tell her how the birthing process was going. She discovered that while she and Joe had been otherwise engaged, the birthing process had been completed and that Sarah was the mother of a healthy baby girl.

“I was trying to get hold of Tom and the others,” she lied.

“And did you?”

“Yes,” she said, relieved the nurse had already tracked down the crew by the time they’d exited the bathroom. “They’re on their way. How are you doing, Sarah?”

She shouldn’t have bothered asking. Sarah was rapt, gazing adoringly at a small puckered little creature in a pink blanket with a pink skullcap on. The baby’s eyes were squished shut.

“Isn’t she absolutely the most ravishing thing you’ve ever seen?” Sarah whispered without lifting her eyes from the baby.

“Yeah.”

“Mom, does she look like any of us when we were babies?”

“Impossibly, she’s even more beautiful,” cooed Solange, reaching over and gently stroking the baby’s cheek with the back of her finger.

“I think so, too!” gushed Sarah.

“You look good, Sarah,” Mimi said. “Considering how long you were in labor.” She did, too. It was as if someone had carved the fat from her face to find the cheekbones again.

“Yup,” Sarah said. “The doctor said I was mostly carrying fluid.” She giggled and stuck one leg out from under the blanket. “See? No more cankles.”

Her leg was still a little canklish in Mimi’s opinion, but in honor of the occasion, she kept it to herself.

“So, what did you name the little sweetheart?”

“Well,” Sarah started. “You know how much I wanted to honor both you and Prescott for all the support you’ve given me and everything you’ve done for me for the past few months. But most especially for going behind my back and calling Mom so that she could be with me when the baby was born, because I don’t think you would have been so good at that.”

“Probably not,” Mimi conceded.

“And Prescott,” she sighed. “Such a doll. He cleaned up after me all the time. Did you know that?”

Again, Mimi kept to herself the fact that Prescott wasn’t acting because of love, but because of a phobia.

“So what could I do? I couldn’t name her after one of you and not the other!” Sarah chirped brightly. “And let’s face it, Mimi, ‘Mescott’ or ‘Pipi’ just wasn’t going to happen.”

“So, what
did
you name her?” Mimi asked.

“Solange!”

Solange gave Mimi a complacent smile.

Mimi stared at Sarah a moment. “Okay. But you’re telling Prescott.”

“Oh, Mimi. Prescott won’t mind. He’ll be so giddy over being the godfather, he won’t care.”

“Prescott’s going to be the godfather?”

“Well, who else?” Sarah said, her tone declaring
duh.
“He’s family.”

“Speaking of family, Mimi,” said Solange, “aren’t you supposed to be at the lawyers’ office”—she glanced at the clock—“now?”

Mimi, hovering in the back of the room, barely heard this last bit. Something Sarah had said reminded her of something Joe had said, and that reminded her—

That was it!

She got going.

Mimi flung open the door to the lawyers’ conference room. It banged against the inner wall and bounced back, nearly hitting her in the face. So much for her dramatic entrance. She pushed it open with a little less force this time and stepped into the room. Mike Peterson, the lawyer, Birgie, Charlie, Gerry, Johanna, Naomi, and Half-Uncle Bill sat around a pine table. In front of each were open file folders and pens. An empty chair and file folder waited for her.

“What’s wrong, honey?” Naomi asked. “Is Sarah all right?”

“Sarah’s fine. Has a baby girl. Healthy. Named her Solange,” she said. “Too early yet to tell about the cankles…But that’s not why I’m here.”

“We know why you’re here,” Gerry said tiredly.

“No, you don’t. I’m here because
we can’t sell Chez Ducky
,” she announced.

“You okay, honey?” Johanna asked. “It looked like that door hit you square in the nose.”

“I’m fine,” Mimi said, closing the door behind her. “Did you hear what I said about not selling Chez Ducky?”

“Yeah,” Birgie said. She looked alert, interested. And well she ought to, thought Mimi. As matriarch of Chez Ducky, she should be the one doing this. “Why?”

“We can’t sell because without Chez Ducky we’ll fall apart. As a family. We’ll disappear from one another’s lives. Chez Ducky is the touchstone—or maybe it’s a lodestone, I don’t know—but it’s the place we all keep coming back to,” she said triumphantly. “
That
is the reason why we can’t sell, why none of you have signed those papers yet!”

At this, Birgie glanced furtively around at the others’ piles, and then casually covered up the bottom of her paper with her forearm.

“Oh, bull,” Charlie said sourly. “You honestly think the bunch of us won’t get together again?”

The lawyer stuck his legs straight out, slouched back down in his chair, rested his chin on his chest, and stared patiently at the toes of his wingtips.

“Okay,” Mimi conceded, “maybe those of you here will, but what about the rest of the family?”

Her family traded confused glances. “Rest of the family?”

“Yeah,” Mimi said. “When will they all get a chance to be together? To get to know one another? Not just blood relations and direct descendents, but all the other people who are part of Chez Ducky one way or the other? What about Frank and Carl?” Mimi spoke directly to Gerry. “What about Halverd? How is he going to know his half brothers?” she asked Johanna. “What about Emil and your ex-son-in-law Willy? Or the cousins three times removed?”

Johanna reached out and gave Gerry’s hand a squeeze. Naomi dabbed at her eyes.

“How’re we going to make sure they know the story about Great-Great-Aunt Ruth and the runaway Model T? Who’s gonna tell Frank’s kids that his great-grandfather’s twin won a medal in World War II? Or that his great-great-uncle was a female impersonator during Prohibition?”

“If we’re lucky, no one,” said Charlie, and Johanna swatted him.

“And who’s going to tell everyone where they get their eyes or their hair color or their six toes?” Mimi asked.

“What about that digital computer you’re working on?” Gerry asked.

Mimi rounded on him.
“You are missing the point, Ger!”

“Yeah, Ger.” Amazingly, it was Half-Uncle Bill who’d spoken. He leaned forward. “You just keep on talking, Mimi.”

Being championed from such an unexpected corner caught Mimi off guard, but she marshaled her thoughts. “If we sell Chez Ducky, all this stuff, who we are, who we were, is going to be forgotten. Because without all of us telling the stories, the threads will get lost and the connections will fade away. And don’t make any mistake about it,” she went on sternly. “This place isn’t just about Olsons anymore; we’re just the custodians.”

Charlie chewed on the inside of his cheek. Gerry’s eyes had gone suspiciously wide.

“What about my niece? What about little Solange?” Mimi whispered. “Where’s she going to go to know about all the people who loved her and all the people
I
loved? And your granddaughters, Johanna. They live with their mother but they come up every summer. Where will they know us and where will we know them if it isn’t here?”

She had their attention now. “This family is a convoluted mess. All families are. We don’t have a homestead. We don’t have a family Bible. We don’t have a written genealogy or come from the same town or the same state. A lot of us don’t have the same name, and if we do, that could change tomorrow. What we
do
have is Chez Ducky. All of us.”

She started walking slowly around the conference table. “Like the swallows to Capistrano, the monarch butterflies to Michoacán, Mexico, and the college kids to Cancún, so are we drawn inexorably to the weedy shores of Fowl Lake.”

She stopped, studying each face solemnly in turn. “Just as the salmon wander the oceans their entire lives only to return to the place from where they came—and I swear to God, Gerry, if you point out that no one was born at Chez Ducky, I will come at you like your worst nightmare—we are drawn back to Chez Ducky.”

Gerry didn’t say a word.

“Like lemmings have their cliff and elephants have their graveyard, some places we are simply compelled to go to, to leave, and to return again.”

She stopped. There was no more to say. She’d given it her best shot, and now it was up to them.

Charlie’s face was unreadable; Gerry was blinking like the sentimental slob he was; Birgie was doodling over the bottom of her papers; Johanna twisted her braid, concentrating; Half-Uncle Bill had thrust out his lower lip and was scratching thoughtfully under his toupee; and Naomi’s eyes were closed. She was chanting.

They were almost there. Mimi could feel that they wanted to keep Chez Ducky. But they were practical, unsentimental Minnesota stock, and they were considering passing up a great deal of money. They just needed something, something to tip the balance. Any excuse.
Anything
…

She took a deep breath. Closed her eyes.

“Ardis doesn’t want us to sell,” she said and opened her eyes.

For a full, pregnant thirty seconds no one said a word. Then Naomi cleared her throat.

“Really?” she asked.

“That’s right,” Mimi nodded. “If Chez Ducky is gone, then where does she go? Not you and I or just the kids…where do the
ghosts
go? Where will we go when we’ve shuffled off this mortal coil? Ardis is concerned. She thinks it’s a bad idea.”

“Huh? Are you talking about the dead, er, the deceased woman?” The lawyer had come out of his trance and was staring at Mimi as if she’d sprouted a second head. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Nah-uh,” said Charlie, a small smile starting at the corners of his mouth.

“If Mimi says Ardis doesn’t want us to sell Chez Ducky, Ardis doesn’t want us to sell. And that,” Johanna said firmly, “is good enough for me.”

“Me, too!” Birgie said, slamming her hand on the table and jumping to her feet. Quite a feat, considering how much there was to jump.

Half-Uncle Bill pushed himself back from the table. “Then I guess we’re done?”

“Yup,” Charlie said.

“Yup. Pretty much says it all,” said Gerry.

“But…you can’t be serious?” the lawyer said. “You don’t really believe this woman talked to Ardis Olson?”

“Well, now, Mr. Peterson, Mimi here is a professional ghost whisperer,” Gerry said with just a trace of what Mimi thought might be pride. Mimi blushed.

“Tele-medium,” she mumbled.

“You can’t argue with a professional, Mr. Peterson,” Half-Uncle Bill said and, grabbing Mimi’s arm, swept her out of the room along with the rest of the Olson clan.