“Grammy.” Adelaide peered at me over her eyelids. “She was a Playboy model. Of course she would swim naked in the lake.”
“How did you know she was a Playboy model?” Despite her intellect, and even though she had posed one time only, for a college spread, Livy’s common sense has often come into question.
“Daddy told me.” Adelaide clicked off her screen and slid her phone inside her back pocket.
“How does he know?”
She lifted her shoulders so high she nearly touched her ears.
“Well, some big shot movie director talked her into it. He told her if she posed for one photo, he’d get her a major movie role. You see where that landed her.”
“OnThe Love Boat.”
I held up a finger. “One episode.”
“It’s still cool.”
I nodded. “Very cool. Thank God she quit all that and went to law school. She’s a darn good entertainment attorney.”
I wouldn’t call Livy my best friend, not in the way my husband and I are best friends, but we certainly love each other. She and both her daughters live not far from us in California. Her husband left her for a younger woman ten years back. I told her a long time ago she shouldn’t trust him.
Adelaide rubbed her hands together. “Did you take off your clothes? You can tell me the truth. I’m a grown-ass woman now.”
Indeed. Almost the age I became a grown-ass woman, right here in this pasture.
I simply gave her an elusive shrug.Adelaide, darling,I mused,I won’t answer that. I took off my clothes in a butterfly meadow with a lovely man I’d only known forty-six hours. That, however, is something I will keep to myself.
Granddaughters don’t need to know everything.
Each second of my time at Woodstock is still very much alive. The ecstasy of hearing Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young live. The thrill of happening upon a monarch migration. The constant butterflies I had while falling in love with a boy who seemed to want me as much as I wanted him. Silly. It’s been so long. Yet the festival is every bit as vivid as it was fifty years ago.
Someone dressed in a flannel shirt with red, white, and blue fringe dangling from the sleeves walks past my dressing room before backing up. He pokes his head around the doorframe. “Suzannah Withers!” he exclaims, as if he’s the luckiest man alive. “I was hoping I’d get to see you.”
My smile opens wide. “John! How are you?”
“Super! Now that I’m with you.”
Waving away his compliment, I say, “Have you met my granddaughter, Adelaide?”
“I have not.” John steps inside the doorway, places an arm behind his back, and gives her a bow. “John Fogerty. Glad to know you, young lady. Your granny is something special.”
Adelaide’s eyes practically pop out of her skull. She can hardly speak. “So nice to meet you, Mr. Fogerty. Would you mind if we take a selfie?”
“Not one bit.” John moves in between us and stretches his arms across our shoulders.
When she snaps the picture, I glow, remembering Saturday night of Woodstock, when I’d first heard John play. That night is still very much alive in my memory.
“Have you guys heard?” John asks. “We’ve got a full house. Fifteen thousand folks here tonight.”
“A drop in the bucket from the last time you played here,” I say with a wink. “You put a spell on me that night, John Fogerty.”
“You were here?”
“All four days. I got this top at the Bindy Bazaar.” I pinch the fabric circling Adelaide’s pretty little neck.
John smiles. “Wish I’d known you were here.”
“Oh, you,” I say, tousling his hair.
