Summer's End by Kathleen Gilles Seidel Read Free Book Online

other until they were sure.
    But privately, within their hearts, each was already sure. Hal had first thought of her as Athena, the cool, dispassionate goddess of wisdom. Now he knew she was Vestia, the protector of the hearth and home. Her own home was ordered, graceful, and filled with light. Hecould see how a man, after months in the dark, tight spaces of a submarine, would be lured and then soothed by the quiet warmth of her world.
    Hal had fallen in love with Eleanor because she seemed so unlike the nice Midwestern girls he had grown up with. Her strength of spirit, her will, her independence, her sexual permissiveness, seemed almost masculine to him, and he had been mesmerized. But he was wiser now and knew that such spirit, will, and independence could also come in a more conventionally feminine form. And the sexual permissiveness—which had riveted him at age twenty-two—attracted him less now. He knew that it came with drawbacks.
    He had to return to Iowa for a weekend in late April. “Why don’t you come with me?” he said to Gwen. “You can look around the place, meet Phoebe.”
    Phoebe was his older daughter, the child of his who had been the closest to their mother. Gwen too had a daughter. Holly was her older child, and while Gwen did not love her daughter more than her son, she was closer to Holly.
    And she had to wonder—if she had died before John and John was getting to know someone in the way that she was getting to know Hal, how would Holly have felt?
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    â€œYou think what? ” Phoebe stared at her husband.
    â€œI think they are going to get married.” Giles Smith spoke mildly as always. He was a big, shaggy sort of man with a silky reddish-brown beard. He seemed soft and approachable, almost a teddy bear, but his eyes were alert and intelligent. Sometimes his gaze was steady; sometimes it was in motion, flicking from one person to the next,taking in everything that was happening, understanding it all. “The senior recitals are the most public thing the music department does all year. Your father’s going to have thought long and hard about bringing someone all the way from Washington for this particular weekend.”
    Earlier in the day Phoebe had gotten a call from her father. When he had taken a leave of absence to go to Washington, D.C., for the spring semester, he had always said he would return to Iowa for the recitals of the senior music majors. Today he had called to say he would be bringing with him this Gwen person.
    â€œBut they’ve only known each other three months,” Phoebe protested. “They can’t be thinking about getting married.”
    â€œThey aren’t exactly kids. They have to know their own minds by now.”
    Dad marrying again? Phoebe couldn’t imagine it. Someone else living in the house with him, working in Mother’s kitchen—it seemed impossible. Dad caring about someone, really loving her? Phoebe felt as if she didn’t know him.
    She, Giles, and their four children lived in Iowa City, which was about twenty miles away from the smaller town of Lipton, where Phoebe had grown up and where her father still lived. Both Phoebe and Giles were lawyers. Giles was general counsel for the University of Iowa, a job that he loved. It was tough and exciting, combining public relations, damage control, and the law, and he was shrewd enough to exploit the misleading mildness of his appearance and manner.
    Phoebe herself was in legal aid, working part-time, running a legal-services clinic staffed by law students from the university. She didn’t love her work as Giles did his;the law probably wasn’t her calling in life, but she certainly did believe that what she did was important. It was work that needed to be done.
    Doing the right thing mattered to Phoebe. She was conscientious and orderly, both at work and at home. She typed the carpool schedules and did up the soccer phone tree. She