“You fit in well,” Evan said when the other men had left. He had invited Drew to stay behind and share a beer with him. Emily, his ex-girlfriend, would be coming back later with Caleb, who mostly lived with Evan. “The guys like you.”
“It’s nice being here,” Drew said. “It feels normal.”
“We’re normal guys. So are you.”
“I don’t always feel normal.”
Evan sipped his beer. “Why’s that?”
“I’m not a celebrity like an actor or a singer, but people know my name, and during the season, I always have to look over my shoulder to see who might be watching me. The media are always hunting for a story.”
“You were popular in the sports tabloids for a while. The news loved your rivalry with Quentin Hartley.”
Drew looked out at Evan’s backyard. Fireflies darted around the cool, humid night air. “We weren’t really rivals,” he said. “We were friends. The media just decided it would be more interesting if we were rivals.”
“Werefriends?” Evan asked, catching the past tense.
“I guess,” Drew said. He didn’t want to get into everything with Evan. He figured he could trust Evan, but he liked that, while he was here, he didn’t need to justify anything about himself. “Things happen, you know?”
Evan nodded sagely. He was a couple of years younger than Drew, but they felt like contemporaries. Evan was a good man. He had integrity and a good sense of humor. “I know. I hope that everything is okay with you guys. And it seems like you’ve been settling in nicely to Orion. You and Gabriel have gotten to know each other, right?”
Drew hid a smile. He wondered how long it would take for people to notice. It was a small town, and people gossiped. “We have. He’s a good guy.”
“He is.” Evan sighed. “I’m a few years older than him, so we didn’t overlap much at school, but I wish I had known him better. He’s friends with Aubrey Wozniak—have you met her? Incredible girl.” He got a wistful look in his eyes. “If things had worked out differently, I would’ve loved to take her out.”
“You still could,” Drew said.
“Maybe, but she only lives here in the summer.”
“Nothing wrong with a summer romance,” Drew said, and then took a long drink of his beer.
Evan looked at him steadily, and Drew wondered if Evan knew what Drew was thinking. “No, nothing wrong with a summer romance.”
Chapter 13
Gabriel
Gabriel wore many hats working at Orion’s BeltHockey Camp. He worked in maintenance, in overseeing the counselors, in organizing events, and in the office. Gabriel had a business mind and had studied business consulting at the University of Michigan, so his parents sometimes had him come in to look at the books and see how things were going. He knew that they didn’t have the money they used to have. Much of their personal savings had been depleted because of his dad’s treatment last year, and the camp wasn’t bringing in the income it once had. There were fewer campers, and they had to lower the cost of tuition at the camp. They couldn’t pay Richie what they used to pay him, which was why he had quit, and the salary they had offered Stu was lower than they wanted to pay him. Gabriel guessed that if they had paid Stu more, he might’ve stayed after the prank. But as it was, he saw the prank as a haunting, and he was a religious man, even more so than Gabriel’s parents, and he wasn’t going to stick around and mess with a ghost.
Drew agreeing to volunteer as the coach at the camp was good for the camp’s finances. It meant they didn’t need to budget a salary for him. They could use that money for other things the camp needed, like repairs and new equipment. It still wasn’t enough.
Gabriel didn’t like to see his parents’ business in the red. They cared about the camp. They had met there, and they loved it. Ownership of the camp had been a wedding gift to them, and for almost thirty years, it hadbeena gift. Now he worried that it had become a burden.
His parents weren’t old; they weren’t even sixty, but his father had been aged by the cancer, and his mother by the stress of caring for him. If they were lucky, they might live for another twenty or thirty years, but Gabriel could tell that the thought of running the camp for that much longer didn’t appeal to them.
Three weeks after Drew started volunteering at the camp, halfway through the second session of campers, Gabriel met with his parents to go over the camp’s finances.
They sat in Don’s office, drinking coffee, and crowded around Don’s old Dell desktop computer. He had pulled up a large spreadsheet with all the expenses and income. The picture wasn’t pretty.
“I don’t like how this looks,” Gabriel admitted, after going through the whole spreadsheet. He was trying his best to approach this as a business consultant, not as his parents’ son. As their son, he wanted to offer them comfort. As a business consultant, he needed them to be realistic about their situation.
“We’re not bringing in enough money to keep operating the way we have been,” he said. “People just aren’t signing up for camp the way they used to.” They had two cabins sitting empty this session. “It might be time to think about making some changes here.”
His parents exchanged a look, and he got the sense that there was something they hadn’t told him.
“What’s up?” he asked.
Don spoke first. “There’s been an offer. Do you know Stanley Schumacher?”
