Chapter Twelve
Rob had just finished skimming the pool when he saw the twins from site twenty-eight headed toward the store.
Their mom said they could come in once per weekend for ice cream, but they’d had ice cream during the cookout yesterday with all the other kids.
And he was sure Melissa once mentioned them not having sugar before the long drive home on Sundays.
Also, they weren’t running, but were doing that weird fast walk-skip thing kids did when they were in a hurry, but an adult had told them not to run.
After hanging the skimmer on the hooks looped on the fence, he left the pool area and took the second to reset the lock.
Then he met them by the door of the store.
“Do you have a ladder?” Red asked before Rob could even say hello.
“What kind of ladder? How tall?” It seemed weird Scottie would send the boys down rather than coming himself.
The boys looked at each other and then Blue shrugged. “Tall like to get up on a roof, I guess.”
“Okay.” Maybe Scottie needed to get on the roof of his camper to seal a leak or something. “I can bring one up and give your dad a hand.”
“Dad’s not here.”
He was confused. “Your mom needs a ladder?”
Red shook his head. “She’s not here, either.”
Okay, that wasn’t great. They weren’t old enough to be here alone, and he definitely wasn’t going to give them a ladder so they could go on a roof to retrieve a ball or Frisbee or whatever got stuck up there. “Back up. What’s stuck on the roof?”
“Hannah,” they said in unison.
His heart skipped a beat. “Hannah’s on a roof?”
“Yep.” Blue nodded. “She climbed up a tree and hopped across and got the boomerang, but she said jumping onto a tree branch is scarier than jumping onto a roof and then she said...what did she say?”
“She said, ‘I didn’t really think that through,’” Red replied, doing a decent imitation of an exasperated woman. It was a tone he probably heard a lot from their mother, actually. “We’re supposed to ask Brian and not you, though.”
“Brian’s not here.” He went to talk to a guy about the price of having cordwood delivered already split to bundle for resale to campers versus splitting it themselves.
They were both hoping to make the former work, but the two brothers who weren’t on-site or doing the work were only looking at the dollar signs. “Where are your parents?”
“Mom got stung and she has an allergy pen, but Dad said she still had to go to the doctor. It’s super boring there, so Hannah said she would keep an eye on us.
And we told her we’re allowed to come to the store, but she made us promise not to run and to look before we cross the road even though it’s dirt and nobody drives through the campground fast, and we had to come straight here and not talk to strangers and we had to find Brian. ”
Rob smothered a chuckle. She’d really covered the nervous babysitter bases there. As far as he could tell, the Scott rules for the twins were stay off other people’s sites and don’t go out on Route 3. “Since Brian’s not here, I’ll get the ladder and be right there. Wait, which roof?”
“The bathhouse on the hill,” Red said, and then they headed back, doing the same not-running half trot.
It took him a couple of minutes to get the key to the UTV and write a “be right back” note for the door, which he locked. Then he had to go into the walk-out basement under the house and get the ladder to strap to the rack on the UTV.
When he got to the small bathhouse on the hill that served the cabins on that side of the campground—new since they were kids and Uncle Joe and Aunt Keri had to walk all the way to the big one in the middle of the campground—the boys were trying to throw something up to Hannah.
Red would throw it up and Blue would catch it. They’d switch and try again.
“We’re trying to give her a snack,” Red told him when he turned off the UTV.
“Huh.” He looked up at Hannah, who was sitting on the eave of the roof with the flats of her sneakers braced against the shingles. “How long have you been up there?”
“Long enough to want a snack,” she said. “Plus, if they’re standing here trying to throw me a snack, I know where they are.”
“True.” He put his hand out. “Let me try.”
“Just get me down and I can eat it on the ground.”
“I don’t know.” He tilted his head up to grin at her. “The boys said you only wanted Brian.”
She groaned. “I thought you’d be busy and I didn’t want to interrupt you.”
That was such a lie. “Really? That’s the reason?”
“Okay, fine. I didn’t really think this through, which wasn’t very smart, and since Brian already thinks I’m a—” She stopped, glancing at the boys. “I figured this wouldn’t make much of a difference in Brian’s opinion of me. Happy?”
Yes, Rob was happy because that meant she cared about his opinion of her. He unstrapped the ladder and found a solid place to foot it. “Do you want me to come up and help you?”
“I can do it,” she said, moving sideways across the roof. “And if you come up and the ladder falls over, then we’re both on the roof and the boys are in charge of the campground.”
The twins seemed excited by that possibility, but Hannah had no problem swinging around and climbing down the ladder on her own. And he didn’t mind the view from the ground, though he didn’t comment on that.
As soon as her feet hit the ground, Melissa’s SUV turned up the road and Scottie braked when he saw them all farther up the hill with the UTV and the ladder. The boys took off running, probably to fill them in on Hannah’s adventures on the bathhouse roof.
“I guess I won’t be asked to babysit the twins again,” she said, brushing old pine needles off her backside.
“On the plus side, you won’t have to babysit the twins again.”
She laughed and helped him lift the ladder onto the rack, then she crossed the road to sit on the stone bench set into the trees between the two cabins while he tied it down. Then, because she was still sitting there when he finished, he crossed and sat next to her.
“Thank you for the rescue,” she said. “Climbing the tree and hopping onto the roof wasn’t a big deal, but on the return trip, the branches didn’t look quite as solid and the gap seemed a little bigger.”
“I would have gotten the boomerang for them.”
“I told them a ball would have just rolled down, but they’re practicing with the boomerang because they saw it in a movie.”
He snorted. “I didn’t think you threw them up in the air like that.”
“Well, I don’t think they’ve really mastered it yet.” She sighed. “So yesterday seemed like a success for you guys.”
“Yeah, it went better than I expected. I guess the next hurdle will be Memorial Day weekend. The trails will be open so we’ll have to police the machines going through the campground. And weekenders will be another learning curve for us.”
“Don’t worry. Dave and Sheila will tell you if you’re doing it wrong.”
Rob laughed. “You know, I think Dave yelled at me once when I was here as a kid.”
“Only once?”
“Well...probably more than once. We got yelled at as a group sometimes. Brian had an attitude even when he was a kid, so adults tended to focus on him. But I think Dave yelled at me once for taking pictures because he thought I was trying to take one of him.”
“So that’s a pattern for you, then?” she asked in a teasing voice.
“You’d think I’d have learned to pay more attention to the background by now.”
“Speaking of when you were a kid, I heard you being called Bobby a lot,” she said, and he groaned.
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “I get that a lot when the family’s all together because I was Bobby from the time I was born until around middle school.
I guess I went through a phase where I thought Rob sounded more adult, and by being Rob, I could make my family see me as a responsible grown man and not the baby.
But sometimes they either regress or do it deliberately to get under my skin. ”
“I’ve noticed your brothers do it to annoy you sometimes. But your parents and grandparents just seem to forget.”
“Yeah, old habits and all that. They do try, though.”
She smiled. “Just look at it this way—the people who really love you call you Bobby sometimes, and Bobby’s very loved.”
“I like that.” He returned the smile. “I’ve never thought of it that way, but you’re right. The people who call me Bobby love me. Even my brothers, who often do it to push my buttons.”
“I don’t have three older brothers, but I have an older sister, and pushing our buttons is part of their jobs, I think.”
“You said she’s married with kids and lives next door to your parents. What about you? Ever been married?” He just wanted to learn more about Hannah, of course. He couldn’t help himself.
“Nope. No husbands, ex or otherwise. No kids. It’s just me and my parents and my sister and her family. That’s it. Other than that, what you see is what you get.” She gestured in the direction of her site when she said it. “What about you? Ever been married?”
“No. Never found the one, I guess. I thought I had once, but then I brought her home to meet the family. She didn’t really fit in.”
“Ouch.”
He tried not to think about Hannah and Gram, heads together over the recipe. “Well, it started with her launching into a lecture about how doom is actually a bad thing, and it went downhill from there.”
“It’s not as though you use the word literally. Nobody’s lining up to go on an actual Camping Trip of Doom.”
“Exactly. But I guess she needed to be right more than she cared if they liked her, and maybe it was wrong of me, but she knew how important my family is to me, so I took her lack of caring about them as a sign she cared less about me than I thought.”
“I’m sorry, but you’re probably right. I can’t imagine wanting a future with somebody who didn’t get along with my family.”