Candlelight Christmas. Сьюзен Виггс
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not getting one. Hurts too bad when you have to say goodbye.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said again. “But I still like having a dog.”
“Tell me something nice about Blake,” Logan said.
“I never needed an alarm to get up for school in the morning. She’d just come into my room and burrow under the covers, like a rabbit, and she’d squirm until I got up.” He smiled, just a little. “She got old and quiet and gentle. And then she couldn’t jump up on the bed anymore, so I had to lift her.”
“I bet you were really gentle with her.”
He nodded. After another silence, he said, “Dad?”
“Yeah, bud?”
“I kinda want another dog.”
Aw, jeez. Logan patted him on the shoulder. “You can talk to your mom about it tomorrow, when you see her.” Yeah, he thought. Let Charlie’s mom deal with the mess and inconvenience of a dog.
“Okay,” said Charlie. “But, Dad?”
“Yeah, buddy?”
“Kids were telling ghost stories in the cabin last night,” he said, picking at a thread in the webbing of his harness.
“You’re at summer camp. Kids are supposed to tell ghost stories.”
“André told the one about these people who committed suicide by jumping off a cliff above the falls.”
“I’ve heard that story. Goes way back to the 1920s.”
“Yeah, well, the ghosts are still around.”
“They won’t mess with the zip line.”
“How do you know?”
Logan pointed to the group of kids and counselors on the distant platform. “They all got across, no problem. You saw them.” The other campers appeared to be having the time of their lives, eating Cheetos and acting like Tarzan.
“Show me again, Dad,” said Charlie. “I want to see you do it.”
“Sure, buddy.” Logan clipped Charlie to the safety cable and himself to the pulleys. “You’re gonna love it.” With a grin, he stepped off the platform into thin air, giving Charlie the thumbs-up sign with his free hand.
His son stood on the platform, his arms folded, his face screwed into an expression of skepticism. Logan tipped himself upside down, a crazy perspective for watching the waterfall below, crashing against the rocks. How could any kid not like this?
When Logan was young, he would have loved having a dad who would take him zip-lining, a dad who knew the difference between fun and frivolity, a dad who encouraged rather than demanded.
He landed with an exaggerated flourish on the opposite platform. Paige Albertson, cocounselor of the group, pointed at Charlie. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“Oh yeah, my only son. Oops.”
“Why is he staying over there?” asked Rufus, one of the kids.
“I bet he’s scared,” said another kid.
Logan ignored them. On the opposite platform, Charlie looked very small and alone. Vulnerable.
“Everything all right?” Paige put her hand on Logan’s arm.
Paige had a crush on him. Logan knew this. He even wished he felt the same way, because she was great. She was a kindergarten teacher during the school year and a Camp Kioga volunteer during the summer. She had the all-American cheerleader looks, the bubbly, uncomplicated personality that most guys couldn’t resist. She was exactly the kind of girl his parents would want for him—pretty, stable, from a good family.
Could be that was the reason he wasn’t feeling it for her.
“He’s balking,” said Logan. “And he feels really bad about it. I thought he’d love zip-lining.”
“It’s not for everybody,” Paige pointed out. “And remember, if he doesn’t go for it, the world won’t come to an end.”
“Good point.” Logan saluted her and jumped off, crossing back to the platform on the other side, where Charlie waited. The zipping sound of the pulley and cable sang in his ears. Damn, this never got old.
“Just like Spider-Man,” he said as he came in for a landing. “I swear, it’s the coolest thing ever.”
Charlie shuffled across the wooden planks of the platform. Logan reached for the clips to attach him to the pulley. “That’s gonna be one small step for Charlie,” he intoned, “one giant leap for—”
“Dad, hang on a second,” Charlie said, shrinking back. “I changed my mind again.”
Logan studied his son’s posture: the hunched shoulders, the knees that were literally shaking. “Seriously?”
“Unhook me.” Beneath the helmet, Charlie’s face was pale, his green eyes haunted and wide.
“It’s okay to change your mind,” Logan said, “but I don’t want you to have any regrets. Remember, we talked about regrets.”
“When you have a chance to do something and then you don’t do it and later on you wish you had,” Charlie muttered.
Which pretty much summed up Logan’s assessment of his marriage. “Yep,” he said. “At the farewell dinner tonight, are you going to wish you’d done the zip line?”
Logan unhitched himself. Charlie studied the cables and pulleys with a look of yearning on his face. Okay, Logan admitted to himself, it bugged him that Charlie had conquered the jump off the dock with his mom, but Logan couldn’t get him to push past his fear of the zip line. He had a flashing urge to grab the kid, strap him in and shove him off the platform, just to get him past his hesitation.
Then he remembered his own pushy father: get in there and fight. Don’t be a chickenshit. Al O’Donnell had been a blustering, bossy, demanding dad. Logan had grown up resenting the hell out of him in a tense relationship that even now was full of turmoil.
The moment Charlie was born, Logan had made a vow. He would never be that dad.
“All right, buddy,” he said, forcing cheerfulness into his tone. “Maybe another time. Let’s climb down together.”
* * *
The final dinner of summer at Camp Kioga was served banquet-style in the massive dining hall of the main pavilion. There was a spaghetti feed with all the trimmings—garlic bread, a salad bar, watermelon, ice cream. Awards would be given, songs sung, jokes told, tributes offered and farewells spoken.
The families of the campers were invited to the event. Parents arrived, eager to reunite with their kids and hear about their summer.
A sense of tradition hung like the painted paddles and colorful woven blankets on the walls. The old Catskills camp had been in operation since the 1920s. People as far back as Logan’s grandparents remembered with nostalgia the childhood summers they’d spent in the draughty timber-and-stone cabins, swimming in the clear, cold waters of Willow Lake, boating in the summer sun each day, sitting around the campfire and telling stories at night. In a hundred years, the traditions had scarcely changed.
But the kids had. Back in the era of the Great Camps, places like Camp Kioga had been a playground for the ultrawealthy—Vanderbilts, Asters, Roosevelts. These days, the campers were a more diverse bunch. This summer’s group included kids of Hollywood power brokers and Manhattan tycoons, recording artists and star athletes, alongside kids from the projects of the inner city and downriver industrial towns.
The organizers of the city kids program, Sonnet and Zach Alger, pulled out all the stops for the end of summer party. In addition to the banquet, there would be a performance by Jezebel, a hip-hop artist who had starred in a hit reality TV series. The show had been filmed at