Doubleback: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

locations.”
    “Where?” Rachel asked.
    “Their headquarters is in central Illinois. Between Peoria and Bloomington. We’ll be taking a look at some farms out that way, too. We can’t shoot until the corn is higher, of course.”
    “Knee high by the Fourth of July,” Dad said. He put down his fork and started to hum.
    Rachel looked mystified.
    “There’s an old saying...” I started to explain then glanced at Dad. He was still humming and his eyes twinkled. I listened more closely. It was the tune of “Wonderful Guy” from South Pacific, the song that goes, “I’m as corny as Kansas in August...” I shook my head. Dad’s sense of humor still surprises me.
    Rachel looked from Dad to me, still puzzled. I was about to explain, but the phone rang. Rachel jumped up and hurried into the kitchen to answer it.
    “Oh hi, Becky.” Her voice carried back outside. “Yeah. I’m just finishing dinner. Nothing except that my Opa is practicing for American Idol ...”
    Dad smiled, then picked up his knife. His eyes went flat. “So, what do you hear from that—Sutton man?”
    Dad still can’t accept that David Linden and I broke up. My boyfriend of three years, David and my father had a personal, almost familial connection: as a young man my father had been in love with his mother. But intimate relationships have never been one of my strengths, and David was deficient in that area too. We might still have been stumbling along, had I not fallen in love with Luke Sutton.
    Not that it’s been easy there. Luke has baggage—serious baggage filled with the repercussions of family secrets that I unintentionally exposed. In fact, you couldn’t really call what we have a “relationship.” It’s more like an IOU, a chit to be surrendered sometime in the future. Still, when he walked through my front door last summer, I remember tingling and blazing like a Fourth of July sparkler. I still do. Susan says it’s just hormones. I think she’s wrong, but even if she’s not, I’m grateful I have enough of them left to fire.
    All of which made it difficult to answer my father. “Luke’s fine.” I finally managed. I felt like an uncommunicative teenager.
    It was dark, and long shadows fell across Dad’s face, but I could feel him frown.
    “Look, I know he’s not Jewish,” I said. “And I know he’s got issues, but—”
    “What kind of example are you setting for your daughter?”
    “Example? Me?” Irritation scratched the back of my throat. I was tempted to tell him about the condom. Although, in truth, since meeting Christine Messenger, the condom incident just didn’t seem that significant. Rachel was eighteen; her grades were good; she had a job as a lifeguard. She might even have been telling the truth: that it was Mary—not she—who’d been partying in the guest room. In the end, though, if it was Rachel, she’d been practicing safe sex, she was out of harm’s way, and, unlike Molly Messenger, she was here .
    I kept my mouth shut.
    The wonderful thing about my father is that he doesn’t rub it in. As I got up to clear the dishes, he rose too and tried to lower the umbrella that had been angled to block the rays of the setting sun. He wrestled with it, pulling and pushing and finally shaking the pole, but he couldn’t straighten it. “I think something’s wrong,” he said.
    Rachel came back out with a plate of chocolate chip cookies. I helped myself to one. Rachel passed the plate to my father.
    “Sweetheart, Opa says something’s wrong with the umbrella. Can you lift it up and put it away? I’ll ask Fouad to look at it next time he comes.”
    “It’s pretty old. Why don’t you throw it away and get a new one?” she said.
    “I just bought it last year,” I said around a mouthful of cookie. “Can you put it away, please?”
    “Okay.” She grabbed a couple of cookies.
    We cleared the rest of the plates and went inside before the mosquitoes made a meal out of us. Dad and I settled in the