The Adventures Of Bette Porter And Sissee Gardner After Yale (Part 5, Chapter 8)

PART FIVE: PHILLIPS, WISCONSIN

Chapter 8

Bette and I exchanged many telephone calls over the next few days, in between enjoying a very Merry Christmas with our respective families.

Then something happened on Monday afternoon that totally blew me away. In fact, now, twenty years later, it still boggles my mind to think that because of an unexpected chain of events, two people who were at opposite ends of my life, were brought together, in the same room, face to face in my home town.

Since I was only indirectly involved at first, I can only recapitulate it as it was eventually told to me by both parties.

Let us start with Howie, up in Ashland. With Christmas over and his visiting family members returned to their homes, he decided to say goodbye to his folks and head south to spend the rest of his vacation in Phillips.

His intentions were honorable. He did not want to push me into any inconvenient circumstances. He just wanted me to know that he was going to be at the Skyline, our one and only motel, until we were ready to go back to Minneapolis on Wednesday for our return flight to California.

He had noticed when he dropped me off earlier, that there were a lot of ice fishing huts on Lake Duroy, just across the highway and down a hill from my parent’s house. He wanted to try ice fishing, a thing he had never done before. He also wanted to follow some of the resort signs he had seen on county road turnoffs to see if he could rent a cabin in the future to possibly come back and fish the Chain O’Lakes. He figured that would keep him busy if I had other plans. That then was why he checked into the motel at noon on Monday, the 26^th. When he discovered there were no telephones in his room, he went back to the motel office to use theirs and called my parent’s house.

My mother answered and told him that everyone had gone snowmobiling for the day and would not be back until dark. Howie asked her to give me a message. He invited me to join him for dinner at the Skyline Supper Club if it was possible and that he would be waiting for me in the bar.