The Walker Family Vacation (Episode 2)
The Walker Family Vacation
episode 2
Shane McRory
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Episode 2
of The Walker Family Vacation serial
First Edition. January 29, 2018.
Copyright © 2018 by Shane McRory
All rights reserved.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Afterword
About the Author
1
Amanda
April asked her sister Amanda: “You think Dad’ll hook up with Christian’s mom?”
It came out of nowhere, and Amanda’s head fell back as she burst into silent laughter. The picture it provoked in her mind was ridiculous. One could always rely on April for the most welcome non-sequiturs. Both hands went to cover her stomach as if regaling with hilarity, and she turned away from the door with the big glass insert through which she’d been spying. April wasn’t even looking her way, wasn’t asking the question to make her laugh; back leaned against the greyed wooden support post that held up the metal awning they stood under, she flipped through her phone.
They stood on the low porch outside the Lavallée Riding Stable, a homestead on the outskirts of the town, a ten-minute ride away from the spa in two Holloway golf carts taxied by bellhops. The stable consisted of a white clapboard home, then five green-painted outbuildings conjoined to form one interlocked compound separated from the laneway by a white picket fence. The dooryard was bare, hard-packed earth beaten down by horse hooves, its perimeter interspersed with a half-dozen horse carriages with their butt ends up in the air, wagon poles dug in the dirt.
Tabby and Becca leaned their thighs against a long chain slung as a barricade across the barn door, phones aimed into the dim to take pictures of the horses’ heads jutting out of their stable doors. Stacy sat on the top curve of an iron wagon wheel, its lower half dug into the dirt. Arms folded across her chest, head leaned back to rest on the barn wall, she was off somewhere else with her eyes closed. White earbuds trailed their thin cords into her sweatshirt, her cheeks a rosy red from a workout in the spa gym before anyone else was out of bed this morning. Even on a vacation, her serious young daughter demanded much from herself, and she worried how she might deal with compounding pressure, even though it was mostly self-imposed. In retrograde, young Bethany chased a lone russet chicken across the macadam, giggling as the bird constantly confounded her with its jittering zig-zag.
“Dad and Evie?” she laughed, reaching the toe of a canvas Ked to touch her sister’s knee.
April looked up, puzzled. “Yeah. What?”
“That’s crazy.”
“You don’t ever worry about Dad being lonely?”
She hadn’t. Dad had his golf buddies, his condo board, a host of cronies he seemed to engage with regularly. “You think he’s lonely?”
April’s head sagged to the side with exasperation, she rolled her eyes to regard her sister and said, “Everyone wants love, even when they’re retired.”
Amanda nodded, folded her arms and walked back to the door and peeped into the office space. Sheila, the owner, was in there somewhere looking for a helmet small enough to fit Bethany’s head. When challenged on Bethany’s age, April had stepped in and fibbed: “She’s seven.” The Lavallée woman, stable master and homestead owner, a sober but seemingly competent woman their glamorous mother would have referred to as a clodhopper, had an age limit of six for her trail rides but hadn’t devised a scheme yet to provide a plywood ‘You must be this tall’ sign to weed out the inappropriately small and the habitual liars like April—a woman with six traffic violations in the last three years that she’d successfully argued herself free from in court.
Amanda nodded, put her hands in her pockets and came to lean against the same pole as her sister. “I hate to think of him lonely.”
“It’s been five years …” April let that hang unfinished.
They were quiet a moment, Amanda listening to April’s phone’s sound effects as her thumb whisked over the screen. She said, “That’s not why we invited Evie—”
“Obviously.”
“No, not Christian either. He’s worried about his mother …”
April turned her head a few degrees, said, “She’s not … sick … is she?”
“No, not sick. Shit … I guess he worried she was lonely.”
“See …?”
“He didn’t put it like that … not lonely … just that she—Christian’s words: she would shrivel up and die like a bitter half-cut lemon.”
Now April turned to face her. “That’s not very nice.”
“She’s not a happy person. Didn’t always have the best life, and her husband, Christian’s father, he spread it around …”
“Spread what around?”
“You know—he would screw anything with legs.”
“Nice,” April said, her brow twisting and her nose turning up. She turned back to her phone.
“Sorry,” Amanda said quietly. Now she watched her pretty younger sister as she focused on the screen of her phone. Her mouth had pursed tight, forming a slim line, she shook her head with a slight twist and her long hair fell forward to hide her face; sensing Amanda was spying her. She ran her hand up and down April’s bare tanned arm.
“Speak of the devil,” April said now, then turned back, her expression brighter.
“What?”
“I tell you what—I’m not lonely anymore …” She wagged her phone to indicate a message she received.
“I know you’re not,” she said, giving her a smile.
“Not lonely at all,” she said toward her phone, then looking at Amanda saying, “Someone’s up now and sent me a picture …”
When she raised her phone for Amanda to see, she shot a hand up between them as a block, tugged her head away and looked to the metal awning above, like April had aimed a garden hose at her. “Don’t!”
“What?—look …”
Eyes turned up still she said, “Seriously, if it’s his dick I will punch you in the stomach. Fool me once …”
“It’s not,” she said. “It’s just his face … a bit of body, no dick.”
“I don’t want to see it through his underwear or anything, either. I mean it, it’s not funny …”
“Houston’s not like that, Amanda. Look …”
2
Hunt
Hunt held his can of cold beer up to Wooly’s in a salute to their burgeoning male independence. Wooly winked and Hunt smirked.
“Cheers, buddy,” he said, and they tipped their cans, and Hunt gulped as much beer as he could stand. The brew was harsh—bitter yet fragrant, zipping with that high-octane taste of alcohol that he didn’t even like. That was something, however, that he wouldn’t admit, and, to prove a point, he belched loud and long, a victorious proclamation of their bounty’s liberation.
The two of them perched on pale granite boulders
scattered around the shallow half-moon mouth of a cave set into a wooded bluff. They were up in the hills above the town, at the southernmost border of Michimac Provincial Park. The cave was one of three—collectively known as The Skeleton Caves—where some fur-trapper hid out from a vengeful group of natives during something called Pontiac’s War. In his account, written after he survived the ordeal, the fur-trapper claimed the cave in which he hid was filled with skeletons. No skeletons now; if they ever even existed. All this gleaned from a brass plaque on a post set on the trail they’d ambled, heading out of the resort and looking for somewhere private to enjoy their booty. There couldn’t be a more fitting place for two guys imagining they were on the run after purloining two cans of beer from the hotel next to the Holloway.
The Mini-Putt was their intended destination this morning, cutting a path across the Holloway that inadvertently took them to the lakeshore. To get themselves back to the road without having to backtrack through their resort they blazed their own trail through the adjacent hotel property. Outside one of the rooms, housekeeping left a janitor’s trolley that had an inventory meant to replenish the minibar. Hunt held Willie’s arm, stopped him. They loitered. The cart was unattended, the door to the room left open, and no sign of the maid moving around in there. In a bold move, he walked past and grabbed two cans of whatever was closest to the edge and they hustled out to the main street.
Underneath the towering cartoon windmill, the Mini-Putt’s 18th hole spectacle, they’d examined their pilferage: two cans of Molson Canadian. Plans for mini-golf and video games instantly abandoned, they headed across the street and up into the woods and parks that ran behind the old historic fort.
Now Wooly prepared to belch as well, sitting upright on his boulder, stomach sucked in, chin tucked to his chest, can of beer held off to the side to prevent anything spewing from his eructation and entering the can’s mouth. He let out a real cracker that echoed off the rock faces of the bluff, bounced around inside the cave and up into the sunny blue sky.
Hunt hunched his shoulders as if protecting his ears, burst out laughing then dampened it with a hand over his mouth. If they were too loud, they could attract the attention of people who would seek to ruin their fun. Two birds burst from an overhead maple and beat wings into the sky.
“Shit, Wooly, you’re scaring away all the birds!”
The mouth of the cave faced a gully, far side rising in a tall grassy slope and at its peak ran the skeletal line of a guardrail, separating it from the parking lot where they had descended. The lot had been empty when they arrived but he imagined it would see visitors soon.
Hunt took another sip and regarded his old friend who he’d known since nursery school; a friendship that had withstood the test of puberty, and the transition from grade school to secondary, and would even withstand this current debacle for which Hunt felt some responsibility.
In a quiet moment between slurps, he asked Wooly: “Did you want to talk about it?”
Wooly sighed, and even six feet apart he could smell the beer on his breath. “I don’t know. What’s there to talk about?”
“What we’re going to do when we go back.”
“Listen, buddy, I appreciate the ‘we,’ but he isn’t coming after you.”
“Yeah, but … it’s my fault.”
“Kind of,” Wooly agreed. “But … why would you want to get involved if he’s not looking for you?”
“It’s my fault that picture got around.”
“You didn’t do it on purpose.”
“I was the one who told you to pose …”
“I was the one that did it,” he said, and took another sip of beer.
Hunt swirled what remained in his can, felt its heavy weight; the idea of coming out here and drinking it so exciting but the reality not quite as much fun. He said, “How fast can you get a black belt?”
Wooly chuckled, took another swig, held the can between two hands. With his elbows on his knees, he leaned forward, the heels of his sneakers on a jagged ridge that ran through the boulder where he sat. He was a big kid for fourteen, probably had twenty pounds on Hunt. However, it didn’t go in all the right places. He was a lot like Hunt’s dad, husky, not athletic, but if you really knew him, you knew he wasn’t weak. Still, the fifteen-year-old that was coming after him was supposed to have a 225-pound bench press.
Wooly said, “Maybe your sister could teach me something.”
“I doubt it,” Hunt said, not taking that seriously.
Wooly agreed, “No, she probably wouldn’t.”
“Hey,” he said, getting an idea now. “If we could arrange for her to be there …”
“Yeah?” Wooly said hopefully.
“I think … like, if she saw you getting beat up she would probably step in.”
Wooly’s face stayed expectant, gradually fell to disappointment and his shoulders slumped. “That’s not much of a plan,” he said. “I like the plan where this all goes away. Your plan sounds more like revenge.” With that, Wooly leaned back and tilted up his beer can, drinking until it was empty. He belched again, steam blasting through his nose and making his eyes water. Can pinched in the middle, he twisted then crushed it to a disk. “Should we take these with us?”
“Yeah, I guess so. You want the rest of mine?”
“You don’t like it?”
“I like it, just seems like you like it more …”
Wooly smirked, leaned forward to take the can from him. Hunt saw his eyes traveling behind him.
As he took the can, Wooly said, “Who’s this?”
High up at the parking lot’s guardrail, two heads periscoped, faces turned down watching them.
3
Amanda
Through narrowed eyes, she regarded April’s phone, head tilted back protectively. It was a picture of Houston that he’d taken of himself; sweet, but a little vain. Him in bed, shirtless, shoulders up, smiling sleepily for the camera. The sun came in from the windows and lit up his pale blue eyes. Below, he had texted When u gettin back?
“Yeah, it’s a nice picture,” she agreed. “Not what I thought.”
April turned the phone back and watched the screen wistfully. She said, “What kind of girl do you think I am?”
“Come on …”
April frowned, put her phone away in a shorts pocket, shaking her head admonishingly. “Amanda …”
“I don’t know—after last night …”
“What was last night?”
“Our rooms butt up against one another.”
“So?—oh. Sorry. I didn’t know that.”
“It’s all right.”
“Did Christian hear?”
Amanda showed her a seriously? face, smirking this time.
“Hoo boy. Was he mad?”
“No. We laughed. We marveled, though … after what we saw in the restaurant we weren’t in the mood at all—you two, however …”
“It’s more than sex with Houston. Give me my moment, all right—some of us aren’t lucky enough to marry men like Christian—”
“Houston seems like a good guy, April.”
“—some of us marry assholes who sleep with one of their students behind your back and get their name in the paper and you have to move away from your home and your friends. So please, just let me enjoy Houston.”
Amanda ran her hand over April’s shoulder, soothing her. “You need it, I know. You need someone good.”
“He is, you know. Houston’s a good guy.”
“I’m teasing you, hun.” Since April’s disastrous divorce her sister went on a tear through her dating app, and nary once, the way Amanda imagined it, swiped left. It was a sign of trouble, but you couldn’t tell April anything especially when it came to relationships. By now, Amanda had hoped her sister would realize she might benefit from outside counsel. It was true though, not much bad could be said about Houston. Gainfully employed, former soldier, and frequently well-spoken. Sure, he bore the trappings of April’s poorer choices—a c
ertain masculine arrogance, a lot of muscle, and, God, tattoos … if their mother were still alive she would drop dead from a second stroke. But what did she know, anyway?—Mom practically pushed her daughter to marry the handsome young high school teacher who brought permanent unshakeable reproach to mostly innocent April.
With perfect comedic timing, a young man in dirty jeans drunkenly stumbled along the laneway. Tall, a good build, and in April’s dating age, she raised a finger casually so the man wouldn’t know she talked about him, whispering to April, “It’s just I know the men you’ve dated—oh look, here’s one of them now, wanting to know if you’re still single.”
April jabbed her with an elbow, catching her in the ribs and folding her in two, cachinnating with held-back humor. Amanda stumbled two steps away, drawing in a hoarse laugh and soothing where her sister had poked her, while behind her April whispered, “You’re such a bitch.”
She turned and drew her sister in for a hug, April unable to suppress a smirk, rolling her eyes and encircling Amanda with her arms.
“I think … I think I might love Houston.”
“I imagined you might,” Amanda said, holding her tighter, “when you begged me to let him come along.”
Still embracing, they watched now as the young man paused at the opening to the stables, supporting himself with one arm hooked over the taller end post that exclaimed the end of the picket fence line. He swayed like he would vomit imminently.
In the voice of a wildlife film narrator, April said, “Here we see an honest-to-goodness Michimac Hangover, spotted in its natural habitat.”
Amanda snickered, said, “I would go over and offer him a bottle of water and an aspirin if I hadn’t seen that he peed himself.”