Off Course Read Free Page A

in the dirt at a jaunty angle, a red-and-white placard: LOTS FOR SALE. “What do you think?” said Sam.
    â€œNo harm in looking,” said Sylvia.
    â€œYou girls want to come in?”
    The sisters did not glance up from their books. The parents climbed out, smoothed themselves, and disappeared into the log building.
    Cress put down Hawaii and, wobbly from the drive, stepped squinting into the sun. The air was clean and thin. The parking lot, recently scraped from the woods, had high clumps of churned mud and brush at its edges. Windshields, car chrome, mica in stones bristled with sharp white slivers of light. A mean little headache began pulsing behind her eyes. Her parents emerged from the lodge with a small, bandy-legged man. “Girls!” they called. “Let’s go!”
    Reggie Thornton, land developer and lodge owner, wore blue jeans with a crisp white Western shirt. He had a meaty pink face, a spaniel’s woozy brown eyes, and a sculptural, milk-white pompadour. “Sam and Sylvia, you’re in front with me,” he said, pointing to a mud-spattered yellow Coupe de Ville. “Girls, in the back. That’s it, that’s it. Watch your head there, Sylvia.”
    He drove through the development with one hand; the other held a cigarette outside the car window. He was the first man Cress had ever met who wore a bracelet! A thick gold one. “You a skier, Sylvia?” he said. “We’re surveying for a rope lift, Syl, just across the road there.”
    â€œYou play tennis, Sam? Clay courts are what we have in mind—what do you think, Sam? We’re afraid concrete will crack.”
    A few glass-faced A-frames hid amid the trees, and one modernist box of stained wood and Thermopane, but the sprawling, ranch-style log home was most popular. Three of these log ranchers were spec homes and for sale, but Cress’s parents demurred, preferring a buildable lot. Reggie Thornton duly drove them first to a buggy hollow where a cabin might be tucked, then to a hillside view lot, and finally to a flat half-acre of scrub brush.
    â€œGot mostly retired folks so far, Sylvia, but once the ski slope and tennis courts go in, families’ll be on this mountain like a rash. Best get in early, Sam, before land prices skyrocket and all the prime lots sell.”
    His cologne fed Cress’s headache. She disdained, as her parents normally would, the inflated hair and 14-karat curb links, the pimply ostrich cowboy boots. She willed her parents to exchange that look, her father’s cue to say, Thank you, sir, we’ve seen enough , and liberate them from the Caddy’s stiff upholstery. But neither parent displayed impatience: apparently home sites in the big pines for under 5K eclipsed all their usual snobberies.
    Sam and Sylvia, whispering, settled on the view lot, Sylvia insisting, although it cost five hundred dollars more. The three-quarters acre of decomposed granite and car-sized boulders had seven tall pines, clusters of young spruce, and a long switchbacked driveway. The house site was graded, an electric pole already planted and strung.
    â€œYou’ve got a real eye for property, Sylvia—you know the best.”
    Solemn, and in palpable terror, her parents wrote a check for the deposit.
    â€œFully refundable, Syl, don’t you worry.
    â€œSylvia, Sam, girls. A pleasure.”
    Then came the rest of the road. On the map it was only thirty miles downhill to the tiny town of Sawyer, but the red squiggle glossed the steepness and tightness of the curves hugging the Hapsaw’s ravine. This road was far slower and more perilous than the way up from the Kern. Her father braked, downshifted, swung them back and forth. A pencil and a plastic cup rolled from one side of the van to the other. Halfway, Sharon roared for him to stop and burst from the van to vomit on the shoulder. Far below, the foam-white Hapsaw gushed with spring runoff. It took them an hour