Summer on Mirror Lake

by JoAnn Ross

  “Sounds as if you’re familiar with that.”

  “Sweetheart, you just described my life. If you let it, it can become addictive.”

  Yet another reminder that he wouldn’t be staying in slow-paced Honeymoon Harbor where the most excitement was the annual Christmas boat parade and the time a longhorn Angus bull had gotten loose from Eldon Manning’s ranch and gone running through town during the Fourth of July parade, creating havoc like, well, a bull in a china shop. One of the cowboys riding in a rodeo association group toward the back of the parade had finally raced his quarter horse down the street, just like something out of a Western movie, and lassoed the bull, putting a stop to the excitement.

  “I’ll take that as a warning.”

  “As it was meant. I also called my mom,” he divulged.

  “Oh?” He’d certainly been busy while she’d been chasing sleep.

  “Yeah. I figured she might have some ideas. She suggested putting the kids in day camp. Apparently they have all different age classes, and not only would that keep them busy, it sounds like a fun way to spend the summer. And those are two kids in serious need of fun. Which is an oxymoron now that I think of it, but you know what I mean.”

  “I do. And that’s a perfect solution. But is there still time to enroll them with school already being out?”

  “It was sold out last month. But don’t worry, that’s taken care of. Although I can’t remember her ever doing it before, she used Dad’s clout as mayor and got them in. It starts next Monday, so we only have to figure out what to do until then and how to tell them.”

  The first thing that struck her was that he’d said we. As if they’d become a team. Which, by default, they probably had. Still, he could’ve just let them stay at this house and left it at that. There’d been no reason for him to get involved.

  “I should feel sorry for people who don’t have your family’s influence,” Chelsea murmured, watching as Hailey chattered away while the girls set the wooden table in the breakfast nook. Like seemingly every room in the house, it boasted expansive windows offering a spectacular view. It was a waste, she thought, not to have a family living in this stunning home. “But I’m not going to.”

  Chelsea couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten breakfast with anyone other than librarians at an out of town conference. She and Brianna had shared that doughnut at Cops and Coffee, but it wasn’t the same thing as sitting around the table, almost like a family. No. Exactly like a family, she considered, watching Hannah devour the stories Gabriel was telling about his days growing up in Honeymoon Harbor. She was definitely going to have to find a new place sooner rather than later.

  * * *

  AFTER TELLING THEM about the camp, Hailey was over the moon, but Hannah was unsurprisingly skeptical. “What do you do at a camp?”

  “I’ve only ever been to a sleepaway camp,” Chelsea said, refusing to allow her own dismal experience to color her conversation. “But I think they have lots of fun arts and crafts stuff. And probably singing.”

  “Will I get to color?” Hailey asked. “I love coloring!”

  “I’m sure you will. And I’m sure the events will be age appropriate,” she assured Hannah.

  “If I don’t like it, do I have to stay there?”

  “Of course not. But you might want to give it a chance, in case your sister wants to stay. But here’s the deal—you cannot take off on your own. If you decide to leave, you have to promise to call me to come get you.”

  Hannah shrugged. “I guess I can do that.”

  “Then it’s settled. I was thinking that we should go to Seattle and get you some new summer clothes, but it’s getting a little late in the day to get there and back. So, how about you put on some swimsuits and we’ll go down to the beach and build a sandcastle?”

  “We don’t have any swimsuits, either.” When color rose in Hannah’s cheeks, revealing embarrassment, Chelsea wanted to bang her head against the nearest hard surface. From the lack of pajamas, she should have guessed that. So far, her mom skills were not exactly stellar.

  “I want to build a sandcastle,” Hailey shouted, just in case her big sister was going to shut the plan down.

  “Sandcastles are for kids.”

  Hailey put both small fisted hands on her hips. “I am a kid.”

  “They’re not just for kids,” Chelsea said. “Long Beach’s SandSations Sand-Sculpting Competition was named as one of the top ten best sand-sculpting competitions in America by Coastal Living magazine.

  “People compete to build sandcastles?” Hannah still wasn’t convinced. But she was intrigued enough to take the bait.

  “They do. There are different skill levels, so beginners have a chance to win, and there are even classes beforehand.”

  “There are not.”

  “It’s true. We can go online and I’ll prove it. Meanwhile, shirts and shorts will be fine until we can buy you suits. I’ll gather up some measuring cups and whatever else I can find to make shapes, then we’ll go down to this cove’s beach and see what we can come up with.”

  “If you’re going to drag us to that sandcastle contest, I’m not going to compete in front of strangers,” Hannah warned her.

  “Did I say you had to? Watching’s fun, too. And did I mention there are free hot dogs?”

  “I don’t like hot dogs. They’re gross.”

  “We’ll pack a picnic, then. Or pick something up at a food booth or restaurant when we get there. It’ll be fun.”

  “You have to come, too,” Hailey insisted, looking up at Gabriel, showing that she did, indeed, possess an inner princess accustomed to bossing people around. “That way we’ll look like a real family.”

  Damn. Wasn’t this what Lily had warned her about? Chelsea exchanged a look with Gabriel, who looked as trapped as she felt. “We’ll see. If Gabriel has time. He has work to do this summer.”

  “What kind of work?” Hailey asked, showing a bit of her older sister’s distrust of any adult’s promise.

  “He’s building a boat.”

  “Like a model?” Hannah asked. She didn’t use the word stupid, but from her tone, it was implied.

  “No,” Gabriel said. “A real boat. Like you sail in a lake. Or the Sound. Or even along the coast.”

  “It’s a faering,” Chelsea jumped in. “Like the Vikings used. But smaller.”

  Hannah’s eyes widened, and for the first time since they’d met, she looked like a normal twelve-year-old excited about something. “I never knew anyone who built a boat before. Can I see it?”

  Gabe exchanged another of those WTF do I do? looks with Chelsea. They just kept getting in deeper and deeper. She shrugged.

  “Sure,” Gabriel said. “We can go down there after building the sandcastle. And get something to eat in town. Do you like tacos? I get them from the Taco the Town food truck most days so I don’t take a long break from the boat because I need to get it done before I go back to New York City.”

  “You live in New York?”

  “Yep. That’s where my job is. I’ve racked up a lot of vacation time, so I decided to take the summer off.”

  “Oh.” Chelsea watched Hannah digest that subtle warning. “Yeah. Okay. I like tacos.”

  As they unearthed measuring cups and various-sized mugs to use as molds, Chelsea realized that she and Gabriel would have to have a discussion about what to do about the fact that not only did the two of them have a connection, but right now, at this moment, they were behaving a lot like a family. Which could only end in heartache when Mrs. Douglas moved the girls to their new home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  AFTER BUILDING WHAT they all agreed wasn’t a bad first effort, they stuck a flag Chelsea had made from a cocktail pick into the top of the tallest turret of the castle. As they walked back up the steps to the house, Gabe realized that somehow, when he hadn’t been l
ooking, during that sandcastle project, he’d actually felt a flicker of something that felt like Zen.

  One advantage to a house this size was that with so many bathrooms, it didn’t take long to get everyone cleaned up and into the SUV and on the way to town.

  At the shop, Hannah appeared duly impressed and asked him a lot of questions about the building process of the boat, which then led to more. From the way she paid attention to every word, he suspected she was a human sponge, a lot like Chelsea must have been at her age.

  Hailey’s attention span, on the other hand, appeared to be somewhere under five minutes, so Chelsea took her out to the water’s edge to search for agates. “Look what I found,” she said, when she came back with her small hands filled. From the way she was holding them, they could have been diamonds. “Chelsea says that we can polish them and make them shiny.”

  “In a rock tumbler,” Gabe agreed. “I got one for Christmas when I was a little older than you. It was fun.”

  She looked up at Chelsea. “Can we get one?”

  “Sure. We might find one at a craft store here. If not, I know there are places that have them in Port Townsend.”

  “Yay!” Her bright gaze turned to Gabriel. “You can teach me.”

  He tipped an imaginary hat. “Of course, Princess Hailey.” He thought it was funny that despite the fantasy bedroom with more toys than any little girl could possibly need, she’d gotten the most excited about common beach rocks. It reminded him of the times his parents would claim they could’ve saved a lot of money if they’d skipped buying their five kids toys, and just wrapped the boxes they came in.

  She beamed. “This is turning out to be the best day ever!”

  “Don’t get used to it,” Hannah, the voice of doom, and, unfortunately, experience, muttered.

  “I’m impressed by how far it’s come along,” Chelsea said in an obvious attempt to lift the mood again as they drove to the food truck. “It actually looks like a boat.”

  “Then I’m on the right track because it’s supposed to look like a boat.

  “I had no doubt, but I couldn’t envision that flat chalk drawing in 3-D form, and those boards didn’t have any shape yet.”

  “It’s hard to envision if you don’t actually do it,” he said. “Yet Hannah certainly caught on quick.”

  “That’s great.” Although she didn’t say it aloud, Gabe suspected Chelsea was as surprised as he was by the enthusiasm the older girl had shown. He guessed she’d enjoy sailing, but decided to wait until he was alone with Chelsea to suggest it. It was a tricky tightrope they’d unexpectedly found themselves walking on. How not to get the girls’ hopes up, while trying to make their lives brighter for this short window in time.

  Diego greeted them with his usual smile when they arrived at the bright red-and-yellow food truck’s window. Noticing Hannah’s brow furrow as she studied the menu, Gabe realized many of the specialty items would be foreign to her. He also suspected she wasn’t going to risk embarrassing herself by asking what any of them were.

  “How about I order a bit of everything to share?” he suggested. “Then we can go up to the park and have a picnic?”

  “A picnic!” Hailey shouted, obviously on board with the idea. And, from the yearning in her eyes, Gabe suspected that Hannah, too, secretly liked the suggestion. But from the shadows in those wary brown depths he also wondered if she was perhaps thinking back to another time when her family was happy and whole and summer days had included picnics at Olympic National Park, which had always been a popular spot with locals, who felt it was their place. Though, since they brought a lot of money to town, visitors were tolerated.

  After getting enough food for an army, they drove to the park, and up the twisting, winding road of Hurricane Ridge.

  “We used to come here with our parents,” Hannah murmured as they passed the visitor center.

  “Me, too,” Chelsea told her.

  “I don’t remember,” Hailey said.

  “You were too young,” Hannah said. Chelsea couldn’t tell if this had been a good idea or one that might trigger memories of that day the girls had lost their parents. If only children came with an instruction manual. “It was fun times, though.” Hannah sighed, and glancing back in the visor’s mirror, Chelsea thought she could see the moisture in her eyes.

  “It’s good to remember fun times,” Chelsea said. “Memories keep them alive.”

  “Yeah. I guess so.” Hannah didn’t seem convinced, but Chelsea hoped they’d made progress.

  She’d gone online last night before falling asleep and read that there wasn’t any timetable for bonding with a foster child. Each situation was different, each child unique, as she was already discovering with Hannah and Hailey. She wondered if, perhaps, because she’d lost her parents at such a young age, Hailey wasn’t feeling the loss as strongly as Hannah.

  Once at the picnic site, Gabriel opened all the boxes and put them in the center of the wooden table while Chelsea got out the drinks. Milk for Hailey and fresh-squeezed lemonade for Hannah. Both Chelsea and Gabriel had nixed the idea of cola, which apparently most of their previous foster parents had allowed. Chelsea had gone with iced tea, while Gabriel had chosen coffee.

  It was a glorious summer day, with only high, puffy clouds in the sky. “This was a great idea,” Chelsea said. She hadn’t realized how stressed out she’d been by last night’s events until she felt herself begin to relax.

  “A great idea!” Hailey bit into a crunchy corn taco with emphasis. “Why do they call it Hurricane Ridge? Will a hurricane come?”

  “No,” Gabriel assured her, leaning over to wipe a bit of sauce off her cheek. “But the winds do blow really hard up here in the winter. They can get up to seventy-five miles an hour and the snow can be thirty-five feet high.”

  “You mean inches,” Hannah said.

  “He means feet,” Chelsea told her. “One year it hit a record sixty-two feet.”

  “That’s higher than a house.”

  “It is. But it makes for good skiing and snowboarding. Also, the winds and all that snow are hard on trees, which helps create all the meadows. That and the wind scraping the snow over them all winter.”

  “Do you ski?”

  “I never have, but we’d come up and play in the snow when I was little,” Chelsea said.

  “The last time I skied was Christmas break my senior year in college,” Gabriel said.

  “Skiing looks scary,” Hannah said. “But I was watching snowboarding on the Olympics and it looked really cool.”

  “You can get hurt,” Hailey said. “And maybe die.”

  You would have had to have been deaf not to hear the worry in her thin voice. “I don’t think you can die just regular snowboarding,” Hannah assured her. “Or even get hurt. I wouldn’t do all those flips and flying tricks.” She ruffled her sister’s hair. “But you don’t have to worry because I’ll probably never do it, anyway.”

  Chelsea was about to suggest that they could try it next winter, then immediately remembered that the girls wouldn’t be with her then. Although she might not have been through foster parent training, she knew interfering in the next family’s life with the girls would be the entirely wrong thing to do.

  “Look!” Hailey had left that worry behind as a herd of tame deer came out of a stand of trees into the meadow and came toward them. “Deer!”

  “Great,” her sister muttered, reminding Chelsea that a deer had been inadvertently responsible for her landing in the situation they were in. Not wanting to get into such a discussion here, Chelsea reached out and linked fingers with Hannah’s icy ones.

  “Can we feed them?” Hailey was obviously unaware of the tension surrounding her.

  “The sign says not to,” Gabriel said. “Because people food is bad for them, and although they’re used to people, they’re still wild animals and should stay t
hat way.”

  “Like dragons,” Hailey decided.

  “Exactly,” he answered.

  He had an easy way with children. Chelsea had seen adults, parents with children of their own who volunteered to read on story night, not be nearly as comfortable. Another thing she never would have expected from that surly Gabriel in the boat shop.

  “Look!” It was Hannah’s turn to point up into the blue sky where a bald eagle was riding on the thermals. They all watched for a time, then she said, “I wish I could fly.”

  “I suspect you’re not alone. When I was a little girl, about your age, Hailey, I’d tie a towel around my neck, like a cape, and jump off a box, trying to fly because Peter Pan said that thinking happy thoughts will give you wings. It never worked.”

  “That’s because you probably didn’t have any pixie dust,” Hailey said.

  “You’re right.” Chelsea hit her forehead with the heel of her hand. “How could I forget that?”

  It was about that time that the lone cloud overhead, which had been getting grayer during the lunch, floated over their way and began sprinkling rain on them.

  “I guess we’d better go,” Chelsea said, a part of her wishing they could just freeze this moment in time. “Wait a minute. We need a picture.” She pulled her phone from her bag, then had Gabriel and Hailey come and sit on the bench with Hannah and her.

  “Say pickles,” Gabriel said, drawing giggles from Hailey and an actual true smile from her sister.

  “Perfect!” Chelsea said, showing the others the photo.

  “That is one good-looking group,” Gabriel said.

  Chelsea could not argue that. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought that they were a real family.

  “Hashtag Great Day,” she said.

  * * *

  FORTUNATELY, THE LIBRARY was closed the next day, when Chelsea took the girls shopping in Seattle. No way was she going to send them to that day camp in the obviously well-used clothing they’d packed into those garbage bags.