Nice to Come Home To

by Liz Flaherty

  “I don’t care about Berkeley.”

  Cass frowned. “Excuse me? You’ve talked about it since first grade. I got you a cheerleading outfit for Christmas when you were seven. It’s where everyone in your mother’s family went to college.” She caught her sister’s gaze. “How much does this have to do with Seth? He’s going to Purdue, isn’t he?”

  Royce nodded. “Maybe—or Penn State. He hasn’t decided. But he’s not why. At least not the only why. There’s Aunt Zoey, too, and the orchard. I love the house—it feels like the one in the Anne of Green Gables movies on TV. You and Aunt Zoey even sit on the back porch and peel things the way Marilla and Rachel Lynde did. Then there’s Mary—I’ve never had a friend like her.”

  Cass’s heart ached. Once upon a magical time, she’d had a friend just like that. Linda Saylors had been the other half of her angst-ridden teenage soul. While she’d had many friends in the years since, no one had come close to filling the empty place left by Linda’s death.

  “It’s weird that we’re the same age and she doesn’t go to school anymore because she’s Amish. We both read the same books, though—she loves yours even though she doesn’t know who you are. I want to tell her, but I know it’s still this big secret.” Royce gave Cass a mildly resentful look before returning her attention to the kitten. “So, about Misty?”

  “You can keep her.” It would be another first for them. Neither of them had ever had a pet. Tony had liked animals as little as her father had, and it hadn’t been a battle she’d cared to fight.

  “What if I have to go back to California? They’ll probably make me when Mom is well enough.” Royce took the kitten back into her arms, holding it close to her face. “If they know my classes aren’t as advanced, they won’t let me stay here.”

  “I can’t promise you they will.” Cass reached across the table to push Royce’s hair back from her face. “But for what it’s worth, I’ll do all I can to keep you here. If you do have to go back, I’ll keep Misty for you wherever I am until you can have her. Deal?”

  Royce nodded, tears dampening her lashes. “And do you think the pictures don’t matter? I was the one who told Seth they did.”

  Cass had to blink back some moisture of her own. “No.” She shook her head and opened her laptop again. “Pictures don’t matter. The people in them—they matter. I suppose there are times and places that call for that kind of correctness, but not high school dances. Has Seth already invited one of the court?”

  “No.”

  “Then tell him you’ve changed your mind.”

  Royce looked uncertain, and Cass remembered, out of nowhere, the panic-laced night before her wedding. She’d sat down between her divorced parents and told them she was sorry, but she couldn’t go through with it. She’d told them she liked Tony, but that wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

  They had told her in no uncertain terms that it was too late to change her mind. That, yes, she could go through with it. So, even though she’d seen her own terror reflected in Tony’s eyes, that’s exactly what she’d done.

  “It’s never too late to do the right thing,” she said briskly, and waved her hand in a pushing motion. “Now go, and light the closed sign and lock the door. I have a scene to finish writing before I go home.”

  Royce got up, carrying the kitten, and went to rinse her cup. She came back to kiss Cass’s cheek. “Thanks, Sister Coffee Shop. I love you.”

  “Take my car home. It’s gotten completely dark while you’ve been bothering me. I love you, too.”

  As soon as the door closed behind a laughing Royce, Cass snatched a paper napkin from the dispenser and buried her face in it. She wasn’t sure why she cried, whether it was for her sister’s teenage angst or for her own. Or for Linda Saylors, who’d wanted the end seat in the van so that she wouldn’t crush her prom princess dress. Cass had wanted to sit there, too, because her legs were longer, but Linda had insisted and she’d given in. Sam had sat behind the driver’s seat and Jesse had taken his. Cass was beside the window, looking out into the rainy night and wishing they’d hurry up and get home. The dance had been fun, but there wasn’t room in their seating arrangement for both Jesse’s and her long legs.

  She’d been irritated with Linda, but the night had been too much fun to let it become an issue. Linda had never known her best friend was annoyed with her.

  Cass didn’t know why the prom night memories bothered her so much right now. It was autumn instead of spring, and from everything she’d heard and seen since coming back to the lake, all the accident’s survivors were well and happy.

  She gave up on writing and got the coffee shop set up to reopen in the morning, then locked it behind her and walked through the orchard to the farmhouse, amazed at herself for being so comfortable alone in the dark.

  *

  “I DON’T THINK it’s going to make us rich.” Cass frowned at the bottom line from the week’s receipts after closing on Saturday night.

  She looked too tired. She was working too many hours—between the orchard and the coffee shop, she was at Keep Cold more than he was. Luke would love to send her home with orders to put her feet up the way he would anyone else who worked for him, but he wasn’t her boss. No, he was her partner, which he really liked, but still. Yeah, still. She needed some rest.

  He filled his cup and joined her at the corner table that seemed to have become the permanent home of her laptop. He wondered why the little computer was so important to her that she had it with her virtually every waking minute, but something kept him from asking. He would never have considered himself intuitive, but in this case he was going with that.

  “Was that the idea?” he asked. “Getting rich?” If it was, maybe she was more her father’s daughter than he’d have thought.

  She grinned at him. “No, the idea was that you would realize I was brilliant and that the coffee shop wasn’t a fiscal mistake. I’m still brilliant, but the fiscal part… I don’t know.” The grin slipped away. “Did we even break even?”

  He reached for the printout. “Not this week, but look at last week, when you made a killing. You’re staying open after the football games on Friday nights so kids won’t be all over the place in cars. A little bird told me you sell everything at half price unless the kid doesn’t have any money, in which case he gets it free. Sometimes good will is better than good profit.”

  She shook her head, color creeping up her cheeks, and he went on, wanting to make her feel better. “You’re featuring new fall flavors going into Halloween—you’ll make it back then. That’s the way business goes. You know that.” He stood just enough to lean across and kiss her. Lingeringly. “Because you’re brilliant.”

  She laughed and closed the book on the week’s paperwork. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked this hard or been this tired or had this much fun in my whole life—well, since junior year in high school anyway.”

  “How about a late dinner at Anything Goes?”

  “I’d like that.”

  She frowned when she got to her feet, and rubbed her upper arm.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Fine. Just not used to physical labor, and between the coffee shop and the orchard, it gets pretty physical.”

  “It does,” he agreed, holding her jacket for her. “Just think, you’re not going to get rich, either. What more could you ask?” She hesitated before slipping her left arm into its sleeve, dipping her head and catching her breath. “Cass? Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

  “I’m sure.” She smiled, the corners of her mouth tucking into her cheeks. “However, I am really hungry. Did you say you were buying?”

  “I’m buying, but this meal may be a lesson on scheduling. Keep Cold is lucky in the help it has. You need to give them more hours in the coffee shop and yourself fewer.”

  “Is that the pot calling the kettle black? You leave the orchard last every single day.”

  He was silent a moment, then he nodded. “You’re right. I need to wo
rk less, too. If you will, I will. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds good.”

  He thought it did, too, but he doubted either of them would stick to it.

  On the way to Anything Goes, Luke reached for her hand and held it loosely against his leg. “Does it feel odd to you to be dating someone? I get the impression you haven’t done a lot of it since your divorce.”

  “Try none. And it does seem odd in a way. How about you? Have you dated much?”

  “Off and on—Jill has been gone a long time. But I’ve only had one serious relationship. Then I figured out it wasn’t fair to ask for more from a woman than I was willing to offer in exchange.” He wondered as he spoke the words which one of them he was warning.

  She turned in her seat, taking back her hand and laying it on her other one in her lap. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure I can explain it without sounding like a complete loser, but mostly I don’t want to be in it for the long haul.”

  Cass shrugged. “Most men don’t, do they?”

  “Most of the guys I know who are married like it that way. I liked it, too, but I’m not willing to do it again.”

  “That’s understandable. I feel the same way. I liked marriage, or at least the idea of it, but I think I’m like my parents and just not good at it.” She chuckled, although her eyes had that haunted look they occasionally got. “That’s what Tony said, too.”

  “Was he good at it?”

  She hesitated. While she thought most of the anger over her marriage had left her, the sense of failure was still healthy and strong. Sometimes it was hard to separate the two. “I think he may be better at it with someone else. He’s married again, to someone he met while we were supposedly together. They have a little girl and are expecting another. He calls me a couple of times a year to make sure I’m all right, and I don’t know whether it’s guilt or because his wife is a nice woman who makes him do it. But, no, he wasn’t any better at it than I was.”

  He pulled in at Anything Goes, turned off the car and looked at her. “How long did it take you to know that?”

  She reached for her door handle. “What’s the date today?”

  He started to answer before he realized what she meant. “You thought it was all your fault?”

  “Sure, I did. Sometimes I still do.” She let go of the door handle and pushed back her hair.

  He had to bite back irritation. He’d been single for ten years, but even so he knew relationship failures were seldom one-sided. “Don’t you think that’s a little on the martyrdom side?”

  “No,” she said mildly, “it’s a lot on the martyrdom side. Doesn’t change how I feel some days. I know we were the textbook couple who married too young and for the wrong reasons, but I still feel like a failure because we couldn’t make it work.”

  He thought back to when he’d visited the cemetery in Pennsylvania the week before, placing colorful chrysanthemums on Jill’s grave. He’d remembered, stroking a hand over the wind chime that hung from a shepherd’s hook beside her marker, how deep their love had been. And how punishing the grief when she’d died. For a moment, standing there in the chilly afternoon sun, the old pain had revived and seared him like a slow-motion streak of lightning. Unable to move with the force of it, he’d spoken aloud to her, which he never did. “Why, Jill?”

  Just as there’d been no answers ten years before, there weren’t any then. By the time he’d gotten in the car and driven away, he’d been all right again. Thinking about the orchard and Seth’s football game and—before he knew it was happening—seeing Cass later that day.

  “You’re right.” He smiled at Cass. “We do all have our days, don’t we?”

  *

  “SOMETIMES I HAVE to be hit over the head.” Alone with Damaris at breakfast the following morning, Cass took a bite of the applesauce Zoey had just made. It was still warm, redolent of cinnamon and so smooth she had to stop herself from groaning with the satisfaction of it. “I never knew applesauce was ambrosia.”

  Damaris laughed. “That’s what you had to be hit over the head with?”

  “No. I think I figured out that Lucy Garten needs to take a sabbatical. She went so far outside the lines in the last book that I don’t seem to be able to reign her back in.”

  Her stepmother looked thoughtful. “When are you going to let Cassandra come out of the family closet?”

  Cass shrugged. “I don’t know. What’s the point after all this time? Cassandra G. Porter’s been around for twelve years. Dad and Tony—”

  “Your dad and Tony aren’t the point here,” Damaris interrupted, sounding every inch the officer she was. “Although they had a lot to do with how you became who you are, they no longer have any power over you unless you let them have it. You owe it to Cass Gentry to be Cass Gentry.”

  “Got any real idea who that is? Because I surely don’t.” Cass’s arm hurt again, and fear feathered through her. “I was just thinking the other day about how happy I am right here and right now. But I’m not even sure it’s the real me who’s happy. There’ve been too many losses, too much illness and too much of the crap that goes with it. What you have here—” she raised her right arm dramatically “—is the empty shell of a person. Every loss has taken its toll, whether it was physical, emotional or mental. Or, to be really poor-me about it, all three.” She lowered her arm and met Damaris’s eyes. “But Cassandra G. Porter remains intact. She has the body parts she was born with. She doesn’t have an unsuccessful marriage in her back-of-the-book bio. She wasn’t a grievous disappointment to her parents.” Cass smiled, but she didn’t really mean it. “Let her live.”

  “Which one of you comes home from dates with Luke Rossiter with stars in her eyes?”

  “That would be my little sister, and it’s Seth, not Luke.”

  Damaris shook her head, smiling. “I wasn’t born quite yesterday, Cass.”

  “It’s just not a place I’m ready to go. I like Luke. I even like dating—who’d have thought it? But it’s a nice, safe thing. He doesn’t want to become involved with anyone and neither do I. Not only that, we’re business partners—that’s not a good basis for a personal relationship.”

  “So, which one of you is it?”

  Cass got up to get them more coffee. They’d both stayed home from church and had been enjoying the quiet time. Even Misty was sleeping on the windowsill instead of chewing their toes as the kitten had shown herself prone to doing.

  She thought about her stepmother’s question, trying to separate the two selves she claimed in her mind. “I’d like for it to be Cassandra—her life’s in pretty good order, you know?” she said finally, stirring her coffee. “But I’m afraid it’s probably me in my best screw-up mode. We’ll date and have a good time and keep an eye out on each other’s siblings, but eventually something will pound a wedge between us and we’ll go on separately. That’s the way life is. You know that as well as I do.” The words were agonizing to say. She could hear her voice shattering from the effort. She kept stirring the coffee. And stirring. What if Luke knew her as Cassandra? Would “the long haul” look better to him then?

  Damaris lifted the papers in front of her and extended them toward Cass. “See these?”

  Cass set down the spoon, frowning at her trembling hand, and leafed through the printed sheets. She’d seen them before. She’d signed them several times since Damaris and her father had divorced. They granted Cass temporary custody of Royce in the event neither parent could make a home for her. It also gave Cass full power of attorney.

  “What about them? Do I need to sign something else?” Do you want someone else to take care of her? The thought ripped a new place in the list of wounds she’d just reeled off. That particular loss was one she couldn’t bear to consider.

  “No. They’re all in order. I was just checking over them, because Ken has a way of hammering in those wedges you just mentioned at the most difficult of times.” She shrugged. “What he doesn’t tear asunder, the army
does. I have loved one or both of them most of my adult life, but there’s no denying the truth of that.”

  Concern made the short hair on the back of Cass’s neck stand up. “What are you saying?”

  “That things happen—I have these lovely broken bones to attest to that—and I have to know Royce will be with you no matter what. And I want to know she’s with the complete you. You might see yourself as two people, stepgirl, but you’re not. Until you know that, I’m worried about you not only as yourself but as Royce’s next-in-line parent.”

  “I’ll always be Cassandra for Royce. I can do that. Grouchier sometimes than I’d like her to be, but still Cassandra.” I won’t let anything happen to her. I’ll never leave her because I don’t know how to stay. I can learn, here in this place. I can learn how to stay.

  “That’s not what I want,” said Damaris gently. “I don’t want her to be afraid to make mistakes or love the wrong person or to not have a best friend because that’s how a girl gets hurt. Did you ever think how odd it is that you turned Cassandra G. Porter into the person you thought your parents wanted you to be?”

  Cass drew back, feeling as though she’d been slapped. “That’s not true.” She glared at Damaris.

  Her stepmother laughed, a gentle sound that eased the hurt. “Of course it’s true. Cassandra’s beautiful, although no one would know for sure because your author photo is so doctored that you’re completely unrecognizable in it.”

  “That was on purpose. You know that. The publisher insisted on a picture, but they never minded that no one could tell who I was in it. It worked to their advantage to have the mystery writer be a bit of a mystery herself.” Cass took a sip of coffee, spilling it down the sides of the cup because her hand was still shaking.

  Damaris was calm. She always was, something Cass usually appreciated and envied, but not now. Now was not a good time for calm. “Yes, I know that. And you said the rest of it yourself. No bad marriage. No reconstructed breast. No guilt over an accident you had no control over or because you couldn’t satisfy parents who were, quite frankly, not satisfiable.”