Lakeside Cottage Read Online Free PDF Page B

he had nearly lost the affections of his two newly acquired stepchildren. The lakeside cottage had been in the Livingston family since the 1920s, far longer than a once-widowed, once-divorced retired CPA.
    “We’re never selling the lake house,” Phil had said. “Ever. End of discussion.” It didn’t matter to Phil that he had moved cross-country, all the way to New York, and that his visits would be few and far between. For him and Kate and their kids, the lakeside retreat held all that was special and magical about summer, and selling it would be sacrilege.
    “I’ll get your mother,” Clint said. “It’s great to hear from you.”
    While she waited, Kate pulled the Jeep around to the far edge of the parking lot so she could look out over the harbor. She had stood in this spot, regarding this view hundreds of times in her life. She never got tired of it. Port Angeles was a strange city, an eclectic jumble of cheap sportsman’s motels and diners, quaint bed-and-breakfast getaways, strip malls with peeling paint and buckled asphalt parking lots, waterfront restaurants and shops. A few times a day, the Coho ferry churned its crammed, exhausted hull across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Victoria, British Columbia, in all its gleaming splendor, and vehicles waited for hours for a coveted berth on board.
    “So you’re headed off into the wilderness,” her mother said cheerfully into the phone.
    “Just the two of us,” Kate said.
    “I wish you’d decided to bring Aaron here for the summer,” Georgina said. “We’re an hour’s drive from Walt Disney World, for heaven’s sake.”
    “Which is precisely why I didn’t want to bring him,” Kate said. “I’m just not a Disney sort of gal.”
    “And Aaron?”
    “He’d love it,” she confessed. “He would love to see you, too.” She watched her son rifling through the groceries in search of something to eat. He found the sack of golden Rainier cherries and dived in, seeing how far he could spit each pit out the window. Bandit, who was remarkably polite when his humans were eating, watched with restrained but intense concentration. “We want to be here this summer,” she reminded her mother. “It’s exactly where we need to be.”
    “If you say so.” Georgina had never loved the lakeside cottage the way the rest of the Livingstons did, though in deference to her late husband and children, she’d always been a good sport about spending every summer there.Now that she’d finally remarried, however, she was more than happy to stay in Florida.
    “I say so,” Kate told her mother. “I can finally spend quality time with my boy, and figure out what I want to be when I grow up.”
    “You’ll both go stir-crazy,” Georgina warned.
    Kate thought about her mother’s new home, a luxury condo on a golf course in Florida. Now that would make a person stir-crazy.
    She let Aaron say hello to his grandmother, and then she called Phil, but got his voice mail and left a brief message. “There,” she said. “I’ve checked in with everybody who matters.”
    “That’s not very many.”
    “It’s not the number of people. It’s how much they matter,” she explained. It made Kate wistful, thinking about how much she would miss her brother and his family this summer. She didn’t let it show, though. She wanted Aaron to believe this would be the summer of a lifetime. Sometimes she thought she’d give anything for a shoulder to cry on, but she wouldn’t allow her son to play that role. She’d seen other single moms leaning on their kids for emotional support, and she didn’t think it was fair. That was not what kids were for.
    Last year, she’d consulted a “life coach,” who’d counseled her to be her own partner in parenting and life, encouraging her to have long, searching conversations with herself. It hadn’t helped, but at least she found herself talking to someone she liked.
    “Ready?” she said to Aaron, putting away the phone. She eased the