The Summer Seekers Read online

  Kathleen reached forward and patted her on the shoulder. “You like him, don’t you?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You like him.”

  “Okay, I like him but I’m not getting involved with someone who makes me feel bad about myself.”

  “No one can make you feel bad about yourself unless you let them.”

  “That’s a great theory. In practice it’s not that easy.”

  “Character is more important than bank balance. Josh has been heroic in his actions.”

  “Because he found a doctor?”

  “He also found bacon, which tells me he’s a man who has his priorities straight.” Kathleen lowered her sunglasses and looked at Martha. “Talk to him. I need to use the restroom, and I’m going to be at least fifteen minutes.”

  “Fifteen? Are you planning to redecorate or something?”

  “I plan to give you enough time for a proper conversation with Josh.”

  “I’d rather have a conversation with you,” Martha said. “You’ve been quiet and tired the last couple of days. I should come with you.”

  “You’re my driver, not my nurse although after my fainting episode I do understand why you might think your job description has expanded somewhat.” Kathleen gathered up her bag and her wrap and emerged into the bright sunlight. “Go. It’s the perfect moment.”

  Was it? He’d walked away. That could be taken as a clear indication that he was annoyed with her and didn’t want to continue the conversation. On the other hand he was reserving a table, which implied that he expected them to join him.

  And Martha believed strongly that issues shouldn’t be ignored. If there was one thing she couldn’t bear, it was an atmosphere.

  She slid her arm into Kathleen’s as they walked to the door of the restaurant. “Is it the letters? Is that why you’re quiet? You’ve been thinking about them?” She felt a tug on her arm and stopped walking. “I know a parking lot isn’t the place for this conversation, but I don’t want to say anything in front of Josh and I’m worried about you. I know those letters are important to you. You have to be wondering what they say. I don’t really understand why you haven’t read them before now.”

  “Because I was afraid I might not like what they say.”

  Kathleen was scared.

  Why hadn’t she realized that before? Fierce, fearless, Kathleen was scared. Even she had her vulnerabilities. She was as human as Martha.

  She covered Kathleen’s hand with hers. “But if Liza reads them, then you can talk about it together.”

  “I’m considering it. As I told you, we don’t have that kind of relationship. We’re not particularly close—my fault, of course.”

  Because Kathleen protected herself, Martha thought. And no one understood that better than her.

  But she knew how hard it must have been for Kathleen to admit that and was quick to reassure her.

  “Liza loves you. I saw that when I came to meet you that day. And I see it in the messages she sends, and the way she sounds on the phone when she asks how you are. You don’t have to protect yourself from someone who loves you. She’s an adult, Kathleen. Whatever is in those letters, she’ll handle it. She’d probably like the chance to support you.”

  “I don’t need support.”

  “We all need support.” Martha glanced at the diner, where Josh was sitting alone. Did Josh need support? “I’ll do what you suggest and talk to Josh. But if you’re more than fifteen minutes, I’m sending in a search party.”

  Kathleen squeezed Martha’s hand. “You are a very special young woman. You have high emotional intelligence.”

  Martha felt her throat thicken. “You say the nicest things.”

  Kathleen sighed. “I speak only the truth, and the sooner you stop mixing with dreadful people who make you think less of yourself the better. Did you delete Steven from your contacts?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, do it, while you still have the confidence to get out of bed in the morning.”

  Why hadn’t she deleted his number? He didn’t add anything to her life except stress. She didn’t want him in her life.

  “Perhaps you’re right.” Martha paused in the doorway of the diner. She could see the back of Josh’s head in a booth by the window.

  “Go.” Kathleen patted her arm. “You, Martha, are smarter than you think you are.” She headed to the restrooms while Martha joined Josh at the booth.

  He passed the menu across to her.

  “Thanks.” She took it and then put it down again. If she was going to do this, then she had to do it right away before Kathleen joined them. “I know I upset you in some way, and I’m sorry. If you’d like to talk about it, then I’d like to listen.” She stopped as the waitress arrived with coffee and iced waters. “You’re not crossing Route 66 for the fun of it, are you?” Presumably he could take a private jet if he wanted to. Or hire his own chauffeur. There had to be a reason that someone like him would want to hitchhike.

  Josh picked up his glass of water. Condensation misted the side of the glass. “I was supposed to do this trip with my brother.”

  It was the first personal thing he’d told her. “And he couldn’t make it?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Oh Josh—” She reached out and covered his hand with hers. She remembered how she’d felt when her grandmother had died. How empty, and alone. She felt him tense and waited for him to pull away from her, but after a pause his fingers closed over hers.

  “It’s been—hard. The toughest time of my life.”

  When her grandmother died many people had said clumsy things. Some hadn’t been in contact at all because they hadn’t known what to say, and that had been bad too. All of it had added to her sense of isolation.

  She knew it was important to say something, but she also knew that the words she chose mattered.

  “Grief is a horrible, cruel thing. People talk about going through stages, but honestly it wasn’t like that for me. I think of it like being on the ocean. One moment things are calm and you start to relax, and you feel almost confident and think ‘I’ve got this’, and then the next minute you’re swamped by a wave and you’re gasping for air and drowning.”

  “You’ve lost someone close to you?”

  “My Nanna. It’s different, I know, because she’d lived a full life, but she was the person I loved most in the world. She understood me. When she died it was as if I’d lost a layer of protection. I felt raw. My whole world changed shape. Losing her was the biggest thing I’ve had to handle—worse than my divorce to be honest—and she wasn’t there to help me through it.”

  “But you coped.”

  Martha stared down at their hands, still locked together. “Not really. Not in a way that makes me proud. I was lonely, vulnerable, desperate to connect with someone and feel close and understood, the way I had been with Nanna. When Steven suggested marriage, I said yes. I thought it would fix everything. It didn’t. It made everything worse. Feeling lonely inside a marriage is a thousand times worse than feeling lonely outside. The whole thing was a mistake really. I guess he thought so too.”

  Why had she been so hard on herself? She’d been beating herself up about making bad decisions, but when she laid the facts out like that her decisions made more sense.

  He nodded. “Your grandmother sounds like a special person.”

  “She really was.” She paused. “Had you been planning this trip with your brother for a long time?”

  He put the glass down. “He’d been threatening me with it for two years, but I was always too busy.”

  “Threatening?”

  He gave a faint smile. “Red and I were very—different.”

  “Red?”

  “His name was Lance, but everyone called him Red because if there was danger to be found, that’s where you’d
find my brother. I was the serious one. Tech addicted, focused, driven. He was a laid-back cool surfer dude. He loved water. I hate water. When we were teenagers, I built a surfing game that I could play from my bedroom so that we could connect—it was our joke. That I managed to find a way to surf on dry land, while he was out there doing the real thing.” He stared into the glass of water. “I used to ask him when he was going to do something serious with his life, and he always told me that serious was overrated and that looking at me made him realize he’d made all the right choices. He thought my life was insane. I felt the same way about his. Despite that, we were close. That probably sounds unlikely to you.”

  “No. One life does not fit all, a bit like clothes. Just because you’re wearing something I wouldn’t wear, doesn’t mean I don’t think you look good.”

  He smiled. “That’s an interesting way of looking at it.”

  Why hadn’t it occurred to her before? Just because her decisions seemed bad to her family, didn’t mean they were bad. For some reason she didn’t understand she was programmed to believe her family were right in all things.

  She forced her attention back to Josh. “Is that why you’re hitchhiking? You’re wearing his clothes? Doing it his way?”

  “In a way. He said I’d forgotten how to connect with real life. He wasn’t right, but still—” He let go of her hand. “He died in a surfing accident, which is exactly how he would have chosen to go. It’s been two years, and I miss him every day.”

  He’d been traveling the road alone, thinking of his brother. Missing his brother.

  She’d been thinking that he had life all figured out, and he didn’t have it figured out at all.

  “I think it’s great that you’re doing this trip. It’s the perfect way to honor him and remember him.” Martha felt her throat thicken. “What was on his list? What would he have talked you into doing?”

  Josh sat back in his chair and smiled. “You’re right—we would have wanted to do different things. I would have tried to drag him to museums and places that highlight the history of the road. He would have been using my credit card to book an expensive river rafting trip. I would have complained the whole time.”

  She made a mental note to research it. She was going to make him do something he would have done with his brother.

  “Do you have a photo of him?”

  He dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. “This one was taken when he visited me at my offices. It was one of the few days when I was wearing a suit. He wouldn’t let me forget it, even though I’m usually in jeans.” He pushed it across the table. “He joked that he wore his only clean shirt.”

  Martha picked it up and saw a smiling man with shaggy blond hair and a wicked smile. “You’re alike.”

  “We’re nothing alike, Martha. Apart from my aversion to water, he’s vegan and I’d drive seven hours for a decent steak. He can name every breed of shark, and I can build a computer from scratch. I don’t think there’s a single area where our tastes aligned. And I’m doing it again—talking about him as if he’s still here.” He paused, emotion close to the surface and she felt a stab of sympathy. She’d done the same thing herself, many times.

  “I’m not talking about what you enjoy, or the way you’re dressed. But you have the same smile. And eyes.”

  “That’s what you see when you look at that photo?”

  She saw love.

  And pride, in both their eyes. But maybe this wasn’t the time to say that. “I see brothers.” Sadness punched through her. She didn’t have a single photo like this one with her sister. Josh and his brother looked comfortable together. She and Pippa had never willingly appeared in a photo together. They’d never been comfortable together. Maybe she should stop trying to fix that and accept that it was the way it was. “Do you have more?”

  He flicked through his wallet and pulled out a couple more. “These were taken when he took me surfing. He joked that the ocean was his office. I was never sporty. I can fix your laptop but don’t ever ask me to catch a ball or a wave.”

  And yet he’d gone surfing with his brother. And he lit up when he talked about him.

  She handed the photos back. “You had fun.”

  “Spending time with him was fun, although I would have chosen to spend it on dry land. I wish I’d done it more often. I wish I’d spent less time fixated on work and more time having fun with Red. I’m not big on life advice, but if I were to give some it would be ‘do it now, because there may not be a tomorrow’.”

  And now she understood why he’d reacted so strongly to their conversation about success. His success was a wound. He was being tortured by every moment he’d spent at work and not with his brother.

  She could see the regret in his eyes. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.” He put the photos back in his pocket.

  “I don’t pretend to understand what you do, but it does seem to me that you love it. It’s your passion, yes?”

  “Yes. Since I was a kid. I was as crazy about my computer as my brother was about his surfboard. I had as much fun with my virtual surfing game as he did with the real thing.”

  She sipped her water. “You both followed your passion. It wasn’t as if you’d gone down the route you chose because you were chasing money, or corporate success—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Money is a necessity, that’s a fact. But the point is you loved the job. So did he. You were both doing what you loved. You said you had nothing in common, but you had that. I don’t claim to know much about anything, but doing what you love is the very definition of a life well lived, surely? That’s the success I see, not the money. And I think that’s something to be proud of, not a cause for regret.”

  He was silent for a long moment. “You’re wise, do you know that?”

  “No. Usually I’m told I know nothing about real life.”

  “I think you know a lot more about life than you think, Martha. Maybe you should spend less time listening to other people and listen to yourself.”

  Kathleen had said the same thing.

  She put her glass down. Did she have the confidence to do that? Ignore the people around her, and follow her own instincts?

  What would she do if people weren’t constantly putting her off and minimizing her ideas?

  Something that involved connecting with people. But that wasn’t a passion, was it? Not like surfing or tech.

  Josh seemed about to say something else when Kathleen finally joined them.

  She’d timed her entrance so perfectly that Martha wondered if she’d been listening or lip reading.

  “Do they have tacos?” Kathleen sat down next to Martha and pulled the guidebook out of her bag. “Planning time. Josh, I hope you’ll join us for the next phase of our trip.”

  Martha held her breath and focused on her menu. She’d assumed he’d leave, but now she knew his story she badly wanted him to carry on his journey with them. She wanted to do what his brother would have done and encourage him to have fun. She sensed he needed that, and she wanted to be the person to help him do it.

  Josh glanced up from the menu. “I appreciate the offer, but there are things I need to do.”

  And now she knew why he was making this trip, Martha was determined that he wasn’t going to do those things alone. “Just because you hitch a ride, doesn’t mean you have to stick with us like glue. Kathleen and I will probably be out and about getting up to serious mischief anyway.”

  “I don’t doubt that.” There was a smile in his eyes. “But I’ll want to stay a little longer in the Grand Canyon than you had planned.”

  “We don’t have plans as such—” Kathleen waved a hand. “Take as long as you wish. Martha will amend our booking. I can’t think of a better place to linger.”

  Josh hesitated. “If we do this, then I’d insist on being in charge of the a
ccommodation.”

  “We can argue that part later.”

  “So that’s settled?” Martha’s mind was already working. She needed to research trips on the Colorado River. She didn’t want to leave Kathleen for long, so it would have to be a day trip. And anyway, if Josh was going to complain and moan about getting wet the whole time, a day would probably be more than enough for both of them.

  Their food arrived, plates heaped high with refried beans, spicy enchiladas and tacos for Kathleen.

  “I confess I like having you around for reassurance, Josh,” Kathleen said. “What if I collapse again? You proved to be most useful when it came to finding a doctor.”

  Martha reached for the salt. “I could find a doctor if we needed one.”

  But she too, wanted Josh to continue with them on the trip, even more so now that she understood how much this journey meant to him. He shouldn’t be on his own for this, should he? It was clear he was finding it difficult. He might need a friend and he seemed a little like Kathleen—so used to handling life’s challenges on his own that he didn’t know how to reach out. And if he continued alone, who would step into his brother’s shoes and nudge him to do the things he wouldn’t normally do?

  She was going to stop thinking about his job and that he was so successful in his business. Just like Kathleen, there was a person behind the success. A human being, who felt all the same things every person felt. He was a man grieving for his brother. A confused man, who somehow felt he’d let his brother down.

  A person wasn’t defined by their job, and she was going to keep reminding herself of that.

  They finished their meal and returned to the car.

  Filled with a sense of purpose, Martha slid into the driver’s seat. “You’re lucky to be traveling with us, Josh. You probably haven’t heard, but I’m a great driver.”

  “I heard that.” He slid into the passenger seat. “I heard that roundabouts and reversing are your favorite things, so I’ll try and find a route that gives us plenty of both.”

  “Very funny.”

  He smiled at her and her heart bumped hard against her chest. He’d smiled at her before, of course, but this was different. This smile was slower, intimate, the type of smile shared between two people who knew each other.