“Well try,” Jessica did her best to not beg. “That’s what cousins and best friends are supposed to do.”
“If I’m you’re best friend, you must be in more trouble than I thought.”
“And don’t I know it.” Natalya didn’t look the least put out by Jessica’s jibe. Instead she eased off the pace before replying. They trotted in side-by-side ruts along the road. Thick grass and two-foot-tall alders had taken over the hump between them. It had been years since the last round of logging out here.
“I have advice, but you won’t like it.”
“Have I ever?”
“Nope. But that doesn’t make my advice any less right.”
Jessica would feel better if Natalya was a little less on the mark about that in general. “Okay, go ahead. Try me.”
“Worry less.”
“That’s it?” Jessica lengthened her stride to clear a low spot. “Worry less? That’s your grand, sage advice that I had to drag out of you?”
“Yep.”
“So, I should just give in and enjoy Greg while it lasts.”
“Yep.”
“And let Greg give up everything that he has going for him here—family, friends, and restaurant—and follow me to Chicago so that he can play Mr. He-man and rescue the helpless waif?”
“Well, no, though he wouldn’t be so bad in the role. Besides, since when did you turn into a helpless waif?”
Jessica had no good answer to that one. It didn’t sound like her. She’d written lead articles in national publications. She’d won a few regional press awards with hopes of more. The sad thing she’d learned about awards was that the payoffs of winning had been less than the cost of the new dresses to accept the useless things. There’d been no magic rise in her freelancer’s fee rates that had fallen out of the sky and into her bank account; no new magazines had appeared begging her to write for them. Actually, it had cost her money in the long run as several of her smaller markets had decided she was too important and expensive for them now that she’d won, even though she’d never hinted at a rate change.
“So, Waif Jessica. What are you going to do now?”
She checked her watch. There was enough time…just.
“I’m going to turn around and beat you to the front door of The Puffin Diner and you’re going to buy breakfast for two for being such a loser.”
“Not a chance.”
Jessica opened her mouth to renew her challenge.
Natalya took advantage of the momentary hesitation to shove Jessica sharply off the trail and send her tumbling onto a bed of moss and pine needles. Then Natalya turned and bolted down the hill.
Jessica leapt to her feet and hurried after the hastily retreating figure.
She’d forgotten that Natalya played dirty.
Greg had his hand on the “Open” sign, ready to turn it to “Closed,” when the front door slammed open and sent him sprawling onto the diner floor. The small bell on the back of the door clattered like a fire alarm.
The few remaining diners all jumped in their seats.
Jessica stormed in and started doing a victory dance in the middle of the room. Natalya raced in three steps behind her. Jessica whooped and gasped and danced and gasped some more.
He knew from personal experience that she had splendidly long legs, but lying on the floor looking up at her with her thin runner’s shorts and body-hugging Lycra top made them look even longer and more incredible than usual.
Natalya was as scantily clad, a study in dusky skin and powerful curves on a frame as lean as Jessica’s. The two of them were dripping with sweat and their morning run had caused their muscles to show more than usual proving that these were two very strong women.
Cal Sr. and a couple of other old timers had been lingering over coffee and debating the advantages of Cummins versus Detroit diesels for different types of fishing boats and were now all watching the show. Karen Thompson, who had dropped her book with a loud thump and a cry of surprise, was now shaking her head and searching for her page.
“Can I help you?” Greg struggled for some dignity as he sat up on the floor.
“What are you doing down there?” Jessica gasped out and grinned at him, “Again!”
Natalya ignored him and called back to the Judge, “Are you still serving? Please say no.”
Greg glanced up at the big clock and knew the answer…they’d cleared the door with fifteen seconds to spare.
“Of course we are,” he echoed the Judge.
Natalya cursed, “She won, so breakfast is on me.”
Then Jessica placed her fists on her hips like Wonder Woman and looked down at him. “Are you just going to sit there or are you going to kiss me and show us to our table?”
As he rose he noticed his father’s attention was very focused on him. He didn’t much care, in fact…
Greg took his time about kissing Jessica. She struggled only briefly, stopping and leaning in even before he could see if she really wanted to escape. He heard the hoots and hollers from Cal’s crowd and could feel his father’s continued close inspection. Karen he knew would spare them a glance and return to her reading.
When they did finally pull apart, she whispered beneath the on-going applause, “But it’s a pity you aren’t on the menu.”
For a kiss like that from Jessica Baxter, every day, he’d put himself on the menu anytime she asked. Price, one golden ring and happy ever after. Her “No way! Never!” stance didn’t worry him any longer. At least not as much.
No.
It didn’t worry him. He knew what he felt and he knew what Jessica felt. And if anyone ever knew what being tenacious meant, it was a chef.
He escorted the two of them to a table and delivered menus with all the finesse of a Michelin-star maître d’.
When he reached the kitchen to hand across their order, the Judge had a smile on his face. “You haven’t won the case yet, Son, so don’t get cocky,” he rumbled softly. “But I’d say that you are absolutely on the right track.”
He traded a smile with his father and headed back to their table with a small pot of herbal tea and a big mug of hot chocolate with plenty of marshmallows.
Chapter 10
(Saturday)
Jessica’s last few days had gone by impossibly quickly.
She’d spent Thursday afternoon out on the boat with Dad, a glorious day of bright sun, large fish, and happy tourists. The sole damper on the beautiful day was that it was the high season and her father’s boat hadn’t been full. Those two empty spots had glared at her for the entire trip as if she somehow had the answer. Money, family, sightseeing, fishing… It was wrapped up in there somewhere, but she still couldn’t find it.
Friday afternoon knitting had turned into an extended state of panic for her mother; it was all Jessica could do to keep Monica Baxter distracted from her nerves. Aunt Gina had even abandoned teasing her sister by providing first-night cautionary tales for new brides.
“It’s not like you haven’t married him before,” had turned out to be the most soothing thing to say. Not because it soothed, but rather because it briefly shifted her mother’s near panic into a sigh about her own daughter’s shortcomings.
Something had shifted for Jessica during her race to the diner with Natalya on Wednesday. It wasn’t just that she liked winning, she did. It was a more that she liked the memory of winning but had forgotten what it felt like. Her career had backed her into a corner so slowly that she hadn’t noticed until she escaped to Eagle Cove.
And if she wanted to win, she had to get back in the game. The game may have changed, but it was time she took responsibility for her own career.
The afternoons were for Natalya and the rest of her family and the nights were Greg’s, but the mornings were hers. Greg had been busy on the wedding prep anyway as the true scale of Monica Baxter’s guest list became apparent.
Wednesday after breakfast in The Puffin Diner and then both of the following mornings, after Greg had gone to serve b
reakfast, she had climbed the steep ladder to the top story of his Victorian house’s circular turret.
With the trap door closed behind her, there was just a small couch that was luxurious for one and would be cozy with two, and a circle of windows filled with the most spectacular view imaginable. Beach, water, and sky to the west. The big main house wrapped in trees commanded the view to the south, backdropped by the towering heights of Orca Head and the lighthouse. The sun-dappled forest lay to the east.
She sat there as cozy as a cat in the sun and doodled on a pad of paper. Marjorie Winslow had taught her an appreciation for the blank sheet of paper. She lived with a recorder, a backup recorder, a laptop, a tablet computer, a cell phone…her purse was more about chargers and cables than wallet and makeup. But her favorite tool for thinking was still a pad of lined yellow paper.
Jessica had started with a list of her clients: past, present, and possibilities for the future. The list was a tapering funnel that was going completely the wrong direction, like down the toilet; of course, just when she really didn’t want it, the too appropriate metaphor cropped up.
Now recognizing her current career for what it was, and not being fragile—she had to keep reminding herself to purge her secret inner waifishness—she started on building a new plan of attack. She began listing her skill set, then brainstorming alternate markets that she might be able to apply those skills to.
Television news was turning into social media feeds done by the masses which made that industry just as much of a pending disaster area as special-interest journalism.
Intriguing companies, new artists, and innovative thinkers were all doing their own marketing in websites, blogs, newsletters, and again the ubiquitous social media.
Jessica had been a freelancer for so long that she hated the idea of going in and becoming some cog in a corporate marketing department. She’d keep that idea in reserve.
She seriously considered Greg’s offer. But it was a senseless. She thought of him without his father, the restaurant, and his friends who greeted him on the streets each morning.
He belonged here, right in Eagle Cove of all crazy ideas. She could finally see that it was true.
By Friday morning, as she sat and watched the tourists wandering the beach, she began sketching Greg’s picture in different poses until she found one that she’d liked. Not the naked lover, but the chef serving fine dining. Of the look on his face as the entire restaurant had burst into applause after that amazing halibut dinner. There was a humility there, but there was also a pride. The pride of achieving something long sought after.
There was a catch.
He couldn’t run the kind of restaurant he wanted to one or two nights a month. And Eagle Cove didn’t have the tourist volume to justify more. It hurt her heart picturing him having to leave this town, leave his home.
Her sketches were starting to form into…she wasn’t sure what. She still only had the idea that there was an idea by the time the Friday afternoon knitting session arrived. The sketches were still rough, but she’d thought that the concepts were good even if she wasn’t sure yet how they fit together.
She’d showed them to Marjorie anyway.
Marjorie Winslow hadn’t said a word. Instead, she’d sent Jessica inside for a glass of ice tea and been gone before Jessica returned. A cautious phone call had elicited no response and no return call. Jessica had hoped that Marjorie would have some piece of sage advice for her career as well, but apparently that was hoping for too much. Now she merely hoped that she hadn’t somehow damaged their friendship.
Clearly she’d left so that she didn’t have to tell Jessica what she’d really thought of them. That hurt so horribly, that she didn’t mention anything to anyone. She stuffed the drawings and all of her scribblings away, would have torched them if it had been a cooler night and the fireplace had been burning.
Friday night it had been an utterly exhausted man who had collapsed beside her in his bed for a few hours of sleep before he had to return to complete his prep for the Saturday wedding. She had briefly considered showing her ideas to him, but he was too biased—he kept insisting that his move to Chicago somehow made sense—and too exhausted. And she already had Marjorie Winslow’s feedback, she certainly didn’t need another body slam like that.
Instead, she wrapped around him and held on tight while he slept.
In the morning, they both arose early and parted with little more than a kiss.
She would miss her final private morning in the small tower, but Marjorie’s verdict had proved that it wasn’t helping anyway. Still, she’d miss it.
Jessica went home. Both of her parents were morning people, so the Baxter household was already on the move by the time she arrived.
Dad was in the kitchen making bacon and omelets, Mom was toasting thick slices of Cal Mason Jr.’s slow-fermented sourdough bread. The Blackbird Bakery’s sourdough had been built on a starter his father had brought from San Francisco after a stint there in the Coast Guard. Father and now son had been nursing it along ever since and Jessica had never tasted better in any of her travels.
Dad handed over the spatula and whispered, “Keep your mom busy for a minute,” then he sauntered out of the room.
Her mother poured her a mug of hot chocolate and leaned back against the counter, “I finally feel calm this morning. It’s as if this whole last week hadn’t happened.”
“Maybe as if the last two years hadn’t?”
“Maybe,” Mom’s smile showed that maybe that was the case. “But I think it was watching you these last few days.”
“Me?” Jessica almost dumped the eggs she’d been beating for a third omelet onto the hot stove. “I’ve been a train wreck these last few days.” No! She hadn’t meant to say that, especially not on the morning of Mom’s wedding.
“No. You might have been a train wreck the first few days you arrived here, but something is shifting. I don’t know what because you always hold your thoughts so close, dear. I don’t even know if it’s because of Greg Slater or not. It made you a troublesome child to raise.”
“Troublesome?” In hindsight she’d always thought she was too well-behaved as a child. She’d acted out a little as a teen, but she’d been such a good girl that her idea of acting out had been remarkable only in how trivial it was.
“Perhaps troubling is a better word. You choose; words were always your gift.”
As if Jessica was having such luck explaining herself to herself this week.
“We never knew what you were thinking. Someday you’ll have a child—”
Jessica bit back on her desire to argue the point.
“You will, honey. And you’ll be an amazing mom because you won’t be able to help yourself. I just hope for your sake that she doesn’t keep her thoughts so carefully hidden.”
“It wasn’t on purpose, Mom.” Only a little. Monica Baxter had always seemed a little frantic and Jessica had never wanted to add to her mother’s burdens.
“I know that, dear. Start your omelet. It’s just the sort of person you are. Even as a baby in the crib you tended to just watch and think.”
She started her omelet and wished she was someone different, but she wasn’t exactly sure who. Becky had always been the exuberant one. Natalya had been somewhere in the middle between them. If she herself became any quieter, she’d end up like that girl Tiffany living alone in the woods with her animals, only slipping from her cloister on knitting days.
Jessica poked at the omelet a bit. “You must abuse your omelet,” Julia Child said on her cooking show, an episode Dad had made her watch whenever it was rerun. Jessica had never quite had the flare for it, but omelets were his thing. He and Judge Slater often debated omelet technique as if it were a difficult legal case. When it was nearly done, she dribbled some smoked salmon and shredded cheese down the center, then folded it onto a warm plate and slipped it into the oven.
Her father stuck his head back into the room, “Come along you two. I have someth
ing to show my girls.” Then he was gone again.
“That man,” his bride huffed after him. “He can’t even sit down to a wedding morning breakfast without starting some project or other. Come along, Jessica. We’ll never eat until we admire whatever he’s done this time.”
They dutifully trooped down the hall, past the master bedroom that would once again hold a married couple tonight…Jessica crossed her fingers on that one so that her thoughts didn’t hex it. Past the gym that had been her childhood bedroom and then her father’s office.
The breezeway door opened at the end of the hall. There was a lace cloth hanging over something on the wall right beside the door that opened from the breezeway into her mother’s wing of the house.
The first thing Jessica noticed was that the stack of notices were gone from the center of the glass door. The taped-down layers of divorce filing, topped by marriage license, topped by divorce filing, and so on—each layer going backward more and more yellow with age—were gone. It took giving her mother a gentle nudge and pointing circumspectly before she noticed the change.
“What are you up to, Ralph Baxter?” Mom’s tone was a mix of curious and cautious.
Like a magician, Dad yanked aside the bit of lace.
A large frame hung there. Tasteful, modern, a sea-blue mat around the edges, and nothing in the center of the display.
“That,” he pointed a callused finger, “is where our last ever marriage license will be encased tonight for any and all to see. I know it will be the last because my beloved fiancé told me so.”
“Oh you,” Mom stepped into Dad’s arms and held him so tightly. It was a type of hug that Jessica recognized, the embrace of a woman who never wanted to be anywhere else.
An embrace that felt very familiar.
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