The Lake Season Read Online Free Page A

was as dreamy and breathless as Leah’s voice.
    â€œPlease Come.”
    No signature, no date. Iris shook her head, reading the two words over and over. Come where? she wondered impatiently. Leah was all the way out in Seattle, where she had recently moved with her new fiancé, and the last Iris had heard, she wasn’t scheduled to fly in until just before her wedding. The same wedding she hadn’t even bothered to call her sister about, after not bothering to inform her that she’d become engaged to a man Iris had never even met. Maybe the postcard was an overdue attempt to reach out, an apology of sorts. It wasn’t as if the postcard was the wedding invitation itself. Iris had already received that lavish statement, an ecru (whatever that meant) card embossed with hand-gilded gold. She couldn’t help but wonder at the cost. Her parents had money, yes, but they were conservative. Modest. This invitation was all about excess.
    Iris tossed the postcard back on the pile of bills. How like Leah to pen something cryptic and leave her struggling to decipher it. As though she had nothing better to do. Iris wasn’t having it. If anyone should be sending off warning flares or writing messages in the sand, it was her. She called the kids inside for lunch. She cleared the dishes when they were done, took Samson for a long walk, and drove Lily across town to a playdate. But as with everything Leah touched, the orange postcard demanded attention, nagging at Iris’s thoughts throughout the day, and when she came home later that afternoon she sheepishly retrieved it from the mail pile and tucked it in her jeans pocket. As much as it annoyed her, the postcard represented something beyond Leah’s furtive message. It was a sort of final push. One that Iris accepted with both dread and relief.

Three
    E rnesto! Ernesto, is that you?” Her mother’s voice was distant, muffled, followed by a clunk and sharp barking. “Hello? Are you there?”
    Iris sighed. “Mom. It’s me.”
    â€œOh, hello, dear. I thought you were Ernesto. I sent him to the nursery and I can’t imagine what is keeping him.”
    Iris pictured Millie standing amid the well-tended plants in her vegetable garden, a cultivated wake of lettuce leaf and tomato vine trailing behind her. No doubt she was clad in her collared linen shirt and khaki shorts, a wide-brimmed hat set elegantly on her gray hair, as one of her rat terriers raced around the garden borders, in its usual crazed orbit.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, Mom?”
    Her mother’s pinched expression was vivid, through her voice alone. “Blight!”
    â€œYou got a bite?”
    â€œNo, Iris. Blight! The tomatoes have blight. I’ll have to tear out the whole lot!” Her voice was shrill now, and Iris imagined the blighty vines cowering in the shadow of her mother’s Wellington boots.
    Millie Standish was not an avid gardener. She was a champion, a commanding presence in her local garden club and a force to be reckoned with in her own backyard. Throughout her county, Millie gave seasonal lectures about preparing spring beds, cultivating summer soil, and putting perennials to sleep for the hard New England winter. Practices that gave the cozy, if false, impression that she was a nurturing woman. Her expertise in all things growing was well known and respected in the community, though Iris could hardly call her ministrations tender. Millie Standish did not coax flowers into bloom so much as she forced them. Her lush lakeside property may have evoked English countryside images of tea among the roses to the unknowing visitor. Big mistake. Millie Standish was an evolutionist, hard bent toward survival of the fittest. There was no pity for the delicate. She plucked and pruned with a vengeance, armed with various primitive tools to clip, hedge, and deadhead. What did not thrive was ripped from its roots and discarded without thought. Iris