Free That Summer Place by Susan Wiggs, Debbie Macomber, Jill Barnett - That Summer Place Page B

a garter snake.”
    “Oh.” She watched it a second. “Why do they smell?”
    “Oh, who cares!” Dana snapped from around the corner. “Just get rid of it! Hurry! Please!”
    The whole time Harold just sat there with the black snake hanging out of his mouth. He was waiting for praise.
    Michael put on the work gloves, then he squatted down in front of Harold, who immediately dropped the snake.
    Dana screamed again.
    The snake slithered a few inches.
    Harold ran off the porch.
    Aly ran after him.
    Michael picked up the snake.
    So Catherine backed away into the middle of the yard. A good twenty feet away.
    Michael walked down the porch stairs with the snake in his hands just as Aly came back to Catherine’s side with Harold in her arms.
    She stood by Catherine while she stroked Harold’s purring head. After a second she started to follow Michael, but Catherine had a tight hold on her arm, so Aly stretched her neck toward them and asked, “Where are you taking it?”
    “Away,” he said over his shoulder as he walked toward the woods.
    “Far away,” Catherine added.
     
    Michael was lying on his back on the bathroom floor with his head under the john. If his friends could see him now….
    As Michael worked on the main pipe, he tried to decide how to go about telling Catherine he wasn’t the island handyman. Sprawled underneath the toilet didn’t feel like the right time for confessions. “Hand me the crescent wrench.”
    “Which one is the crescent wrench?” Catherine asked him.
    “The one with the blue handle.”
    She handed it to him, then stepped back. After a stretch of silence she said, “You know all the tools by color.” She made it sound like he was a kindergartner who had just picked the right crayon from the Crayola box.
    Keep digging the hole deeper there, Squirt.
    With narrowed eyes he watched her through the small space between the pipe and the bowl.
    She was staring at his belt buckle.
    He shot a quick glance to his fly, which wasn’t open. He turned over on his side, then squirmed farther under the pipe and tried to get better leverage to loosen it. He kept cranking at it.
    How the hell long were the threads on this pipe joint?
    She shifted places, shoved the shower curtain back, and sat down on the rim of the tub. “So.”
    He cast her a quick glance over a shoulder.
    She had her hands clasped in her lap and stared at his butt. “Do you get a lot of work on the island?”
    He turned back to the pipes and didn’t answer her. Instead, he kept on turning the wrench as hard as he could.
    “I mean…” She paused. “…there are so many old houses on the island…”
    He gripped the wrench harder and pulled.
    “So I expect you keep busy.” She stopped as if she were searching for the right words, then explained, “I mean, with you doing plumbing and all.”
    He twisted the wrench. “I make a good living.”
    “It must be a fascinating business.”
    Crissake, Catherine. That’s stretching it.
    “I mean working on old houses, watching them come to life again. It’s like that TV show. What is the name of that show?” she muttered.
    “’This Old House.’” He pulled so hard that the pipe almost came loose with one turn.
    “That’s it!” she said brightly.
    “Yep, just fascinating.” He adjusted the pipe. “Clogged drains rate right up there with snake catching and curing cancer.”
    She laughed. “That’s funny, Michael. I bet you watch ‘Home Improvement.’”
    That hole she was digging herself into just got two feet deeper.
    “My office in San Francisco is in a restored Victorian.”
    He grunted some kind of response and slid out from under the toilet, put a bucket under the pipe, then snaked it.
    A balled up pair of white athletic socks fell into the bucket with a plop.
    “There’s your problem,” he said.
    “Good God, what moron would flush a pair of socks down the toilet?”
    He shrugged, fixed the pipe, and checked the flushing mechanism. He finished up, put the