One Hot Summer

“Have a Heart for the Bears!” he exclaims over me, nodding enthusiastically. “It’s perfect! I like it a lot, ladies. Great work. Nice job with these two, Norm. Get on this right away. Whatever they need.”

I whip my head to face Leigh, my voice a furious whisper. “A fundraiser, Leigh? A goddamned fundraiser? I can’t plan a fundraiser!”

She shrugs her shoulders. “He wanted to be Amazon. You could see it.”

“We can’t make him Amazon!” I hiss. “I needed your help.”

“And I gave it. You go to Sitka. I’ll handle the fundraiser planning from here. How hard can it be?”

“Are you crazy?” I whisper-growl. “You’re having a baby in ten minutes!”

“We’ll figure it out,” she says, gathering up her notes and the energy to stand up. “Planning is mostly phone calls and emails. I can do that. Even with a baby.”

“Have you ever planned an event this big?”

“Does my cousin’s bridal shower count? There were, like, a hundred and—”

“No!”

I glance back at Steve, who’s making big plans for the Sentinel to sponsor my fictional, theoretical bear fundraiser.

“The bears were just supposed to be a filler until I came up with a real idea,” I lament.

“Well…now they are the real idea.” She pauses. “And if you ask me? It’s not bad.”

My shoulders slump. “What did you just do to us?”

“Nothing that we can’t handle,” she says, and I envy her confidence. We have approximately six weeks to write a column and plan an

entire fundraiser while one of us becomes a new mother. “Truly. You write. I’ll plan.”

I am entirely unconvinced that we will be able to pull this off.

“Do you have a warm coat?” she asks me with a grin. “May in Alaska’s bound to be a little nippy.”

And that’s when my semi-wobbly head finally connects to reality: like it or not, I’m about to spend the next two weeks in Alaska researching a “story” that was inspired by some headline I bearly even read. I cross my fingers under the table hoping that Sitka, Alaska, still has an actual bear problem for me to report on. What if it doesn’t? Then what?

“We’ve got to get me out of this,” I moan.

Leigh glances over at Steve. “No chance, girl. This is happening. You,” she says, pushing in her chair and waddling toward the door, “are headed north.”

“Great,” I mutter. I’m going to goddamned Alaska to save the goddamned bears. “Just great.”

2

Luke

“Five seconds, guys. Five. And then my car is pulling out of that driveway. You hear?”

I wait at the foot of the stairs for their replies.

“Yes, sir!” calls Chad, my thirteen-year-old boy scout.

“Got it!” yells his sister, Gillian, who is eleven going on fifteen.

Heading back to the kitchen, I grin at five-year-old Meghan, who’s sitting at the table, finishing her cereal.

“You gotta buckle my shoes,” she says, swinging her legs in my direction.