Broken Hearts, Fences and Other Things to Mend Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    posit back. And now that I no longer had any commitments, I
    was pretty much planning on continuing to spend the summer
    exactly where I was.
    “Well,” my mother said, “we thought you were going to be in
    Ec ua dor, darling. So we made plans.”
    “Colombia,” I corrected, looking from my mom to Walter. “What
    plans?”
    “We’re going to Loch Faskally,” Walter piped up from the door-
    way. “It’s prime spawning season in the Highlands.” I fl inched
    slightly, as I always did whenever I had to hear my stepfather use
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    the word “spawning,” which was far more frequently than I would
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    “You’re going to Scotland ?” I asked, taking a guess, since that
    was the only place I’d ever heard of that had lochs.
    “Yes,” Walter said, taking a tiny step into the room, looking
    animated, the way he only ever did when talking about fi sh. “The
    laird asked me personally. We’re staying in the castle as his guests.”
    “So, you see, you really can’t stay here alone, Gem. And while
    we’d love for you to come . . .” My mother let this sentence trail
    off, with a small shrug. It appeared I was not invited, even though
    I really wouldn’t have minded hanging out in a castle all sum-
    mer. But I guess you really can’t just call up lairds and ask if your
    stepdaughter can come along, especially if she has no interest in
    fi sh.
    “Fine,” I said, fl opping back against my propped- up pillows.
    This whole conversation was exhausting me. “I’ll go stay with Dad.”
    My father was a screenwriter who lived in Los Angeles. When
    he’d been married to my mom, he was a struggling novelist who
    wrote freelance articles to get by. After they separated, though,
    he moved to L.A. His former college roommate, Bruce Davidson,
    had become a big- time Hollywood producer, and he offered my
    dad a rewrite job on a terrible movie about time- traveling turtles.
    And while I thought even the rewritten version of Time Crawls
    was still pretty bad, Bruce was thrilled, and my dad had a new
    career. I saw my father on holidays, and usually for a few weeks
    in the summer anyway. It might be a nice change, staying with
    him in California. Hanging out with my dad always meant that
    we saw a lot of movies and ate lots of pizza, two things that sounded
    very appealing to me at the moment.
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    “Good,” my mom said, smiling like she was happy things had
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    been settled so easily. “Why don’t you call your dad and fi gure out
    when in the next few days you want to head out there? And then
    Walter can drive you.”
    This made me sit all the way up. There was absolutely no way
    I was going to drive across the country with Walter. We’d run out
    of things to talk about before we left Connecticut. “Drive me to
    the airport,” I clarifi ed. And also, I was the tiniest bit stung that
    she seemed to want to get me out of the house so quickly. She
    could have at least pretended that she wasn’t quite so eager to see
    me gone. I mean, really.
    “Oh, no,” my mom said, standing up and smoothing down the
    quilt where she’d been sitting. “Your dad’s in the Hamptons this
    summer, working on a movie for Bruce. So it’s just a few hours away!”
    I froze, even as my mom talked on, about logistics and plans
    and what I should pack. I hadn’t been back to the Hamptons in
    fi ve years. It was where everything had gone down that summer,
    and I had avoided it ever since. It had always felt, to me, like the
    scene of the crime.
    “Gem?” I looked up and realized my mom was looking at me
    expectantly.
    “What was that?” I asked, trying to focus on her.
    “I just asked,” my mom said, her smile getting a little forced.
    I could tell she wanted to wrap this conversation