That Summer Place Read Online Free PDF

she’d spent so many summers.
    This June, she vowed, would be different for her girls.
     
    It was different. Her girls didn’t want to go.
    Dana had to turn down a free ticket to a rock concert at Great America and Aly was going to miss a birthday party at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. Aly had eventually accepted Catherine’s decision to go to the island, especially after Catherine had bribed her by letting her bring along her cat Harold. But fifteen year old Dana was still scowling at the world. Nothing worked with her. If there had been a high school course in sulking, Dana would have aced the class.
    Over an hour ago they had left the ferry at Orcas, purchased their supplies and loaded everything into a boat run by Blakely Charters. Until January, when daily ferry service would start to Spruce Island, the charter company made two runs a week. Sundays and Thursdays. Other than by seaplane, hiring a boat was the only way to get to the more remote and secluded islands of the San Juans.
    It was late and the sun was sliding down the horizon; it turned the cotton clouds in the western sky gold, purple and red. Catherine leaned over the bow of the boat and pointed west. “Girls! Quick! Look at that sky!”
    She had forgotten how gorgeous the sunsets were here. The color. The sheer beauty of nature. No one could possibly visit this part of the world and not believe in the perfect hand of God.
    She turned toward her silent daughters to share their first sight of a Northwest summer sunset, and her heart sank.
    Dana sat with her back to her, staring out at the water like a prisoner heading for death row. In her lap was an open copy of Stephen King’s Green Mile series. Without looking at Catherine, she blinked once, then buried her nose back in the book.
    Dana’s sulking hurt Catherine. She didn’t want to let on that Dana had gotten to her, so she looked away. Aly had on a set of headphones. She was head-bopping to some song that shrieked through the headphone earpieces.
    Catherine reached over, picked up the empty CD case, and read the name.
    Alanis Morrisette.
    She felt as if she were a hundred years old. She hated that music. Then she remembered how much her dad had disliked her Bob Dylan albums. She asked herself the question she always asked when she was dealing with the girls.
    Will it matter in five years?
    Dana’s sulking wouldn’t matter and hopefully some other hot young singer would be Aly’s favorite—if she still had her hearing.
    The generation gap between her and her daughters felt as if it were as wide as the Grand Canyon. But she did know one thing—her relationship with her daughters would matter in five years.
    She wanted her girls back, not these two young people she didn’t know anymore. She desperately wanted what few memories they could make this month, something special for them to look back on the same way she looked back on the island and those summers from her childhood.
    She thought of this trip as a fresh start; she needed to be a mother again.
    Catherine reached across and snatched the book out of Dana’s hands. “You can read this later.” She tucked it inside her duffel bag, then she punched the off button on Aly’s CD player and gestured for her to take off the headphones.
    Both girls gaped at her.
    She pointed ahead of them. “That’s Spruce Island,” she told them in a classic mother’s tone that demanded their attention—now.
    Against the horizon the island was a camel-shaped lump of rocks and trees and natural coastline that grew larger the closer they got.
    “I loved that island when I was your age. My favorite memories are there and it’s important to me that we spend time together so you can see what a wonderful place it is.”
    They continued to look at her, then turned in unison to look at the island ahead of them.
    “There are no houses,” Dana said in a voice that implied it was the very ends of the earth.
    “There are summer houses, a few cabins and a village on