Free The Godfather Returns by Mark Winegardner Page B

after which he’d looked better, but not exactly like before, never again exactly like himself. She had never once told him this.
    He walked to the door of the boathouse, reached up onto a ledge, found a key, and went in.
    Kay both did and didn’t want to ask whose boathouse this was. What stopped her wasn’t fear of the answer. It was fear of Michael not wanting to be asked.
    A moment later, he emerged, thrusting a dozen roses toward her. She moved backward a step. Then she reached forward and accepted them. They kissed.
    “Happy anniversary,” Michael said.
    “I thought this trip was my present.”
    “All part of the same package.”
    He ducked back into the boathouse and came out carrying a striped beach blanket and a huge picnic basket covered with a red-checked tablecloth. Two long loaves of Italian bread poked out of the basket, like crossed swords. “Voilà!” he said. With his head, he pointed toward the clearing. “Lunch at the beach.”
    Kay led. She set down her flowers and spread out the blanket.
    They sat down Indian-style, facing each other. They were both overcome by hunger, and they dug in. At one point Michael dangled a bunch of grapes over Kay’s head.
    “All right,” she said, “I’ll bite.” She bit off a grape.
    “Nicely done,” Michael said.
    She looked into the woods but could not see the men. “That wasn’t what I meant. That wasn’t
only
what I meant.” She paused. But why not ask? It wasn’t a question about business. He’d brought her here on a date. For their anniversary. “Where’d this food come from?”
    He pointed across the lake. “I had it delivered.”
    “Whose land is this?”
    “This land? Here?”
    She frowned.
    “Oh,” he said. “I guess it’s yours.”
    “You guess?”
    “It’s yours.” He stood. He pulled a piece of paper from his back pocket. It was a photostat of the deed. Like everything they owned, it had her name on it and not his. “Happy anniversary,” he said.
    Kay picked up her roses. That they could afford this, on top of the house in Las Vegas, both appalled her and thrilled her. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time,” she said.
    Michael knew he shouldn’t have called this land an anniversary pres-ent, too. He was overdoing it. “Your last present,” he said. He put his right hand on an imaginary Bible and raised his left. “I swear. No more surprises.”
    She looked up at him. She ate a strawberry. “You bought land here without telling me?”
    He shook his head. “I have an interest in a real estate company that bought it. It’s an investment. I was thinking we could develop the land here, for us. For the family.”
    “For the family?”
    “Right.”
    “Define family,” she said.
    He turned around and faced the lake. “Kay, you have to trust me. Things are in a delicate place right now, but nothing’s changed.”
    Everything has changed.
But she knew better than to say this. “You move us to Las Vegas and then, before we even unpack, you move us again, up here?”
    “Fredo already had things set up for us in Las Vegas. But in the long run Lake Tahoe is a better opportunity. For
us,
Kay. You can work with the architect, build your dream house. It may take a year, even two. Take your time. Get it right. The kids can grow up swimming in this lake, exploring the woods, riding horses, skiing.” He turned to face her. “The day I asked you to marry me, Kay, I said that if everything went right, our businesses would be completely legitimate in five years.”
    “I remember,” she said, though this was the first time they’d spoken of this since then.
    “That still holds. We’ve had to make some adjustments, it’s true, and not everything went right. I hadn’t counted on losing my father. There were other things, too. A person can’t expect everything in a plan that features human beings to go right. But”—he held up his index finger—“but: We’re close. Despite some setbacks, Kay, we are very, very