Across the room stood a statuesque redheaded woman wearing an apron, bent over a slop sink, elbow-deep in suds and steam.
“Hey, Maggie, I want you to meet Lori. She’s in the room across from mine.”
Maggie turned off the faucet and rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead, wiping away the sweat before she dried it on the edge of her smock.
A large man sporting a goatee walked toward us. Everything about him was oversized including his resonant baritone. “Nice to meet another adult.” It made perfect sense that Roger was the disc jockey.
“Wow, this is the second time today that myadvanced agehas been part of the conversation,” I said.
“No disrespect intended. Maggie and I’ve noticed that we’re old enough to be the parents of most of the counselors,” Roger said.
“Of course, we would’ve had them when we were fifteen.” Maggie smiled. “I just made a fresh pot of coffee. Can I pour you some?”
Maggie had set up a coffee station that included every type of sweetener and tiny containers of half and half like they had at diners.
I took a sip. “This is delicious.”
“I know, right? Honestly, it’s only Folgers, but I think it’s the water from the slop sink that makes it so good,” Maggie said.
We all looked at the filthy industrial-sized basin on the other side of the room. The spigot was covered in decades of dried clay and who knew what other kinds of toxic waste.
I looked inside the cup. “You mean I’m drinking dirty-water coffee?”
Maggie held hers up. “Yup.”
There were four large wooden tables with benches, coveredin old paint, glue, and glitter stains. We sat down together at one of them. It brought back happy memories of making hand molds and popsicle stick boxes at the bungalow colony.
“So, tell us, what brought you to Woodlands?” Maggie asked.
“You mean instead of basking in the sun on a Greek Isle with my husband?”
“He was alright with you leaving him for the summer?” Abby asked.
“He’s a trial attorney and preparing for a big case this summer.” I shrugged. “With the three of us here there are no distractions, so he can mentally shelve us and work around the clock without any guilt.”
I wasn’t about to tell them how unhappy I was with my husband. Ronnie put his work ahead of his family. What really put me over the edge was when his colleagues took center stage in front of our marriage. It was all about what Ed, his managing partner, thought, and wore, and did. What I said didn’t matter.
“Seems like a good solution,” Roger said.
Even I bought it. “What about you guys? How did you all end up working here?”
“A friend sent her kids here last summer, and they had a blast,” Abby said. “I looked into the camp, met with Jack, and told him that I’d only send my kids if I could go too. I waited a long time to have children, and there was no way I’d send them anywhere without me. If I can figure out a way, when the time comes, I’ll go with them to college.”
I laughed. “And your husband?”
“He wasn’t at all happy about it, but I didn’t give him a choice,” Abby said.
I swirled the swizzle stick in my cup and thought about all the arguments Ronnie and I had about sending the girls to sleepaway camp. In the end I hadn’t given him a choice either.
I looked up and asked, “What about you two? How’d you end up working at Woodlands, the sleepaway camp voted the best brother/sister camp on the Eastern Seaboard?”
Roger laughed. “When Abby said she was going to camp with her kids, we called Jack and asked if we could go with our son Tony. Jack wanted to meet us in person, so he invited us to his home on a Sunday morning.”
Maggie said, “You’re not gonna believe this. Roger, tell Lori about the first time we met Jack and Marilyn.”
Roger shrugged. “It’s early on a Sunday morning. We had to drag Tony out of bed, Sundays are his only day to sleep in. We knock, wait a bit, and finally a woman wearing a bathrobe, looking frazzled, answers the door. She just stares at us, twirling her hair.”
“She doesn’t ask who we are, why we’re there, just stares blankly at us, obviously confused,” Maggie said.
