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Miranda opened her mouth, then snapped it closed and shook her head as if she couldn’t fathom how stupid her youngest sister was.
“The bottom line is that Weston Taggert’s a hunk.” Tessa started up the stairs again.
“Stay away from him,” Miranda warned, then checked her watch and flew through the front door.
“What got into her?” Claire asked as she watched Randa dash across the sprinkler heads spraying water over the lawn.
“Who knows and, frankly, who cares? Randa’s always such a downer.”
“She’s just serious.”
“But not today,” Tessa observed from the second-story landing as she stared through the soaring windows of the foyer. Miranda’s spotless Camaro roared down the drive. “She’s been different lately.” Tessa’s lips puckered thoughtfully. “Do you think she’s meeting some secret boyfriend?”
“Miranda?” Claire tried to picture her older sister in some kind of romantic tryst. “Nah. Probably late to pick up a book at the library.”
“I don’t think so,” Tessa said, licking her upper lip thoughtfully as the dust settled in the drive. “No one is in that much of a hurry unless a boy’s involved.”
Claire didn’t believe Tessa, but then that wasn’t so abnormal. Claire discounted anything her younger sister said. While she looked upon Miranda as a fount of knowledge in all things except the male of the species, she thought Tessa was incredibly shallow. Tessa was too self-involved to realize there was more to life than Hollywood gossip, boys, and the small town of Chinook, which had become the center of her universe despite their mother’s insistence that they learn the social graces needed in the right circles of Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco.
Miranda spent her life gaining knowledge, while Tessa tried desperately to lose any she might have picked up along the smooth path of her fifteen years of life. She never doubted she was born to be rich or spoiled. She believed that the people her father employed, from Ruby Songbird to Dan Riley the caretaker, should be her personal servants. She was royalty, a fairy-tale princess with a defiant streak, though, Claire was certain, Tessa had no idea why she should rebel against a father who gave her everything she wanted.
While Miranda worried about nuclear disasters, farm price supports, endangered species, and women’s rights, Tessa didn’t know they existed. Claire was somewhere in the middle, as always, caught between her two polarly opposed sisters.
Still brooding about Tessa’s comments, Claire walked outside and away from the argument. She jogged along the path to the pier. Her father’s motorboat, tied to the pilings, rocked gently. Claire untied the craft and settled behind the wheel. Without so much as a cough, the engine started, and Claire angled the boat’s prow toward the island at the far end of the lake. It wasn’t much of an island really, just a rise of land dotted with a few sparse trees and a sprinkle of beach grass growing between an outcropping of boulders. But it was isolated and uninhabited and sometimes, like today, when her family and Harley were bothering her, it was a place she could go to think.
Fish jumped and seagulls cried as the boat sliced through the glassy water. The wind teased at her hair and she sighed, smelling the fresh scent of water. Slowing the boat, she guided it into a sandy cove and cut the engine. As she had dozens of times before, she tied up to a twisted tree whose branches spread over the lake. Splashing to the shore, she saw a hawk circling high above, his reflection darting on the lake’s surface. She shielded her eyes for a second to watch the bird before following an overgrown path and kicking dust onto her wet legs.
As she climbed the trail, she thought about Harley. Ever since she’d started seeing him she battled constant rumors that he was still involved at some level with Kendall. “Hogwash,” she muttered, but she couldn’t shake the little doubt that was drilling deeper into her heart. For all she knew the innuendo could have been started by her father, a man who made no bones about the fact that he wanted her to stop seeing anyone named Taggert. Only her mother seemed to understand.
“Harley Taggert is handsome and well-off. He’ll always be able to take care of you,” Dominique had said as she’d arranged roses in a tall crystal vase on the dining room table one early summer morning. “A woman could do worse.” Her hands had stopped moving for a second as she’d stared at the wall where some of her paintings graced the aged cedar panels. “It’s not a matter of love so much as survival.”
“What?”
“I know, I know. You think you love the Taggert boy.” Dominique’s smile had been sad and world-weary. “Probably for all the wrong reasons. The fact that your father forbids you from seeing him makes the boy all the more attractive.”
“No, Mom, I love—”
“Of course you do. But let’s be practical, shall we? If you marry Harley, or a boy of his station, you’ll never have to lift a finger, never have to hold down a job, never worry about where your next meal is coming from. Even if the marriage doesn’t work out, you’ll be fine.”
“It’s not like that.”
“No?” Dominique’s long fingers plucked a brown leaf from the stem of one of the roses. “Well, good. But it doesn’t hurt. Your sisters could take some advice from you, Claire. Miranda—well, she’s just plain odd, studying all the time to what end I’ll never know, and Tessa, oh Lord, that girl needs Valium, I swear. She’s so . . . well, wild and rebellious, doesn’t know what she wants in life.” Lines of strain marred her mother’s forehead. “I worry about Tessa—about all of you, but at least you seem to have a purpose and understand that marrying well defines a woman.”
“I take it you’re not a member of NOW.” Miranda had walked through the room at just this moment, and her jaw was clamped so tight, the bone bleached her chin. Her fingers tightened over the smooth back of one of the Thomasville chairs. “You remember, the National Organization for Women.”
“A pitiful organization made up of whining women who don’t know their place.”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to be liberated?”
“Heavens no!” Dominique laughed at her eldest daughter. “You’ll understand someday, Miranda, that men and women aren’t equal.”
“But their rights should be.”
“Not if you ask me. All those women’s libbers are doing is stirring up trouble. What happens to me if your father divorces me? Would I get alimony? Not if those screaming feminists have their way.”
“I can’t believe this,” Miranda said. “Mom, we aren’t living in the Dark Ages, for crying out loud!”
Dominique wasn’t convinced. “Women will always need men to provide for them.”
