He laughed in relief. “No surprise. Some of us hadn’t worked up the nerve to kiss a girl yet.”
Amy eyed him speculatively. “You? You’ve always been so good-looking, and I don’t remember you ever going through, I don’t know, one of those gawky phases. You didn’t even get acne, did you?”
He shook his head. “I actually think I was in one of those awkward phases that summer, though. I was sullen all the time. You were blinded because I was older.”
“Maybe.” She looked away, back out the side window. “Twelve was a hard age for me. Puberty, you know, and middle school.”
He nodded, although he wasn’t sure she saw him.
This whole conversation felt astonishingly comfortable and yet really strange, too. In their entire history, they had never had a real conversation of any kind. Unlike most siblings or even stepsister and stepbrother, they hadn’t banded together against their parents. He’d waged his campaign of torment and she’d fought back as effectively as a much younger, smaller and weaker opponent could. Jakob felt a little sick at knowing how unrelentingly cruel he’d been.
Which brought him back to brooding about why he had volunteered for this ridiculous expedition. Yeah, he’d been taking it a little easier these past couple weeks, after the successful launch of a store in Flagstaff. He’d given some thought to finding a friend to join him in a backpacking trip this week. Sometimes he needed to turn off his phone and disappear into the mountains. Instead...here he was.
Amy stayed silent for a while. He kept sneaking looks at her averted face.
She’d changed, and yet...she hadn’t. As a kid, he’d thought she looked like some kind of changeling, as if a little fairy blood had sneaked in. Pointy chin, high forehead and eyes subtly set at a slant. Her eyes weren’t an ordinary brown, either; they had glints of gold that intensified when she got mad. She’d always been small. Not so much short—he guessed she was five foot four or five inches tall, but slight, with delicate bones. None of that had changed, even though there was nothing childish about her now.
He’d always been fascinated by her hair, too. When she was a baby and toddler, he’d spent a lot of time staring at her curls. He had never seen anyone with hair quite that color, or quite so exuberant. Not that the word exuberant had been in his vocabulary then. One of his earliest memories was getting yelled at when all he was doing was touching her hair. He’d been experimenting to see if the curls bounced back when he straightened them. Michelle had told Dad he was pulling Amy’s hair. He still remembered the flash of resentment at being falsely accused.
Good God, he thought, there he’d been, three years old, maybe four—Amy hadn’t been a newborn by then, but not walking yet, either—and the seeds of their discord had already been sown.
He surely did hope she didn’t remember what he’d done to her hair when she was a lot older.
She had beautiful hair, the color hard to pin down. He’d finally figured out it was because she had strands of seemingly dozens of colors all mixed together. Everything from ash to mahogany, and just enough of a sort of cherrywood to make you think she was a redhead even though she wasn’t exactly. She didn’t have the Little Orphan Annie thing going—her curls weren’t red enough, and they weren’t tight enough, either. When she was a teenager Amy grew her hair long enough to pull back in some kind of elastic. And in a couple of her school pictures, she’d obviously straightened it, which must have been a battle royal. Her hair wouldn’t have taken it sitting down.
He smiled, thinking about it.
“Every time I look at you, you’re smirking,” she said, surprising him. Her tone was mock-resigned.
Jakob chuckled. “I was imagining how hard it must have been to straighten your hair for your senior picture. You don’t do that anymore, do you?”
She wrinkled her small, rather cute nose at him. “Lord, no. The only times I got away with it were when I was aiming for a very specific time. I had about an hour-and-a-half window of opportunity before curls started popping out like, I don’t know, anthills in the sand. Boing, boing.” She surveyed him in disfavor. “You have no idea how much I envied you your hair, do you?”
“Me?” he said in surprise. “It’s straight. It’s blond. It’s boring. Yours has life.”
She seemed to hunch her shoulders the tiniest bit. “I would have liked to look more like Dad. You do.”
Jakob was glad to have the excuse of concentrating on passing a slow-moving RV right then so he didn’t have to address her comment immediately, or directly.
Once he had his Subaru Outback in the east-bound lane, he glanced at Amy. “My mother was blonde when she was a kid, too, you know. Her hair darkened like mine has. A little more, I guess. I thought of hers as brown.”
She nodded. “I’ve seen pictures.”
Yeah, he guessed she would have. That’s all he had of his mother, since he hadn’t been even a year old when she was killed in a car accident. For a young guy like his dad, who worked construction, finding himself the single parent of a baby must have been a major cataclysm. In retrospect, Jakob couldn’t blame him for remarrying the first chance he got. Unfortunately, Jakob had been an adult before he achieved any understanding of his father’s choices.
“We’re getting there,” he observed.
They had crossed into Washington State when the Columbia River swung in a horseshoe, first north and then east, the highway separating from the Columbia to take them along the Snake River north of Walla Walla and Waitsburg. He saw a sign for Frenchman Lake—25 miles. Half an hour, tops.
“I made reservations.”
She’d already told him that. She sounded nervous, Jakob realized. In fact, her hands were knotted together, squeezing, on her lap.
“Did I tell you that creep Gordon Haywood refused to talk to me?”
“Yeah.” He smiled. “You can’t totally blame the guy for not wanting to be hit up by a journalist when he’s trying to enjoy a walk down memory lane.”
“‘Hit up’? I have thoughtful, provocative conversations with people I interview.”
“Do you accuse them of smirking?”
“You’re my brother,” she said with dignity. “That’s different.”
He laughed out loud. “Good to know I get favored treatment.”
Amy didn’t rise to his comment. She was quiet for a good ten miles, but Jakob kept an eye on her. “Was this a really stupid idea?” she blurted.
From his point of view? Maybe. Jakob couldn’t help feeling a little uneasy at this tectonic shift in their relationship.
But for her? He thought about it for a minute. “No,” he said at last, with certainty that surprised him. “This matters to you. You may not even know why, but it does. I assume you’re trying to figure out some things about your mother. You could have waited placidly back in Portland until whatever she stuck in the time capsule appeared in your mailbox. But passive isn’t your style. Charging ahead and demanding what you want is a better fit. That’s all we’re doing here.”
She frowned at him. “You make me sound like a bitch.”
“No. You were a feisty little girl, and unless you’ve changed more than I think you have, you’re a feisty woman. That’s a good thing, not bad.”
“Oh.” She fell silent again for a few minutes. “Okay. Thanks, Jakob.”
The gratitude sounded less grudging than usual. Amusement lifted one side of his mouth when he glanced at her. “You’re welcome.”
“I meant...not only for what you said. For coming along, too.