Chapter 4: The North Shore
By the time we got there, the garden was gone.
Six years of tomato cages and sunflowers and the bench where Mrs. Delgado sat every evening, flattened into brown mud under the headlights of two yellow bulldozers. Residents in bathrobes stood along the road with their phones up. Somebody’s little boy was crying.
Sam was out of the truck before it stopped. He walked straight up to the first machine and put his hand flat on its blade.
“Turn it off,” he said. “This land isn’t leased. You’re trespassing.”
The driver looked at him, at the canvas jacket and the boots, and laughed. Then he looked at the black sedan pulling in behind us, and at Arthur climbing out with a phone already at his ear saying the words sheriff and injunction, and he turned it off.
Sam came back to me with mud to his ankles. “They’re not getting the lake, Holly. Not Pine Hollow. Not any of it.”
“Then stop hiding,” I said. “Thursday. Tell them who you are.”
He looked at the flattened garden for a long time. Mrs. Delgado stood at the edge of the mud in her pink robe, holding one broken sunflower like a baby. She’d planted that garden with her husband thirty years ago.
“Okay,” Sam said quietly. “Thursday.”
I found my sister on the old fishing dock at the end of the road, in her white dress, barefoot, holding her heels.
“Courtney.”
She didn’t turn around. “Brent said it would be fine. He said once the dozers started, the town would have to approve it. Easier to ask forgiveness.”
“From who? The forty families who live here?”
“From the bank, Hol.” She finally looked at me, and her mascara was everywhere. “We’re broke. The lake house is mortgaged twice. The boat’s leased. Brent borrowed against everything to buy the Pine Hollow lots, and if Lakeshore Pointe doesn’t happen, we lose all of it.”
I stood there in the dark. The bulldozers ticked as they cooled.
“You laughed at Sam,” I said. “At your housewarming. With a mortgaged house.”
“I know.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “You want to know why? Because you two are happy. You live in that tiny house with that awful truck and you’re happy. And I’ve got five bedrooms and a husband who hasn’t looked at me in a year. Making fun of you was the only thing that made me feel rich.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Because she wasn’t the only one with something to confess.
Two Christmases ago, before dinner at Mom’s, I’d asked Sam not to wear his work boots. Just this once. You know how she is. He’d changed into his one pair of dress shoes without a word. They pinched. He wore them all night.
I’d been ashamed of him too. Just quietly. Just enough.
“I’m not any better than you, Court,” I said. “I just hid it better.”
She looked at me for a long time. Then she leaned her head on my shoulder, the way she used to when we shared a bedroom. She didn’t apologize. Not yet. But she stayed.
My phone rang. Mom.
I almost didn’t answer.
“Holly.” My mother’s voice was thin and high. “Is it true? Courtney just texted me. Is the project in trouble?”
“Mom, why does that matter to you?”
A long silence. Then, smaller than I’d ever heard her:
“Because Brent needed a guarantor for the last loan. And I signed. I put up the house, Holly. Gary’s house. My house.” She swallowed. “If the deal falls through Thursday, the bank takes it in thirty days.”
