Nice to Come Home To

by Liz Flaherty

  “If you look at it, you’ll see that it’s been broken right across the middle and put back together. My mom threw it at me once. She missed, but the bowl broke when it hit the floor. It was symbolic, I suppose, of the brokenness we’re talking about, but it was also something we kept and put back together. Because that’s what you do when things are broken—you put them back together and live with the scars and work at making them as smooth as possible.”

  Royce smiled, with just the slightest lift of one side of her pretty mouth. “Are you admitting I’m scarred by Mom leaving before the dance?”

  Cass gave her hair a tug. “I’m admitting nothing, but you need to give some deep thought to how many scars your mom has because the main purpose of her profession is to keep us all safe. Both physical and emotional.”

  “I need to call her, don’t I?”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I’ll text her now and apologize and then call her when I can send pictures of those silver shoes I just tried on.” The smile slipped into a grin. “Thanks, Sister Wise One.”

  Cass grinned back at her, relief that they were back on happier footing making her as hungry as she’d said she was a half hour before. “Is Seth getting you flowers?”

  “I don’t even know if they do that here. A lot of the guys didn’t at my other school because they thought it was lame.”

  “Do you think it’s lame?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, if he does, that’ll be a cool thing.” Should she call Luke to make sure Seth brought a corsage when he showed up Saturday night in the Camaro they’d decided on taking to the dance? The last thing Royce needed was more angst.

  No, probably the last thing she needed was Sister Overbearing interfering any more than she already had.

  They went home with silver shoes for Royce and manicures and pedicures for them both. They picked up pizza for supper with Zoey.

  The house felt empty without Damaris. When a friend asked Royce to go to a movie, Cass allowed it even though it was a school night. Zoey built a fire and made hot chocolate, and they sat and watched the flames and talked. In the interest of avoiding some subjects, they opened others.

  “Are you sorry you never married?” Cass had always wondered but had never asked, afraid of hurting her aunt’s feelings.

  “Not really.” Zoey looked thoughtful. “I’ve liked my life.” She smiled at Cass. “But you’re not me, sweetheart.”

  Cass snorted. “I failed at marriage from the very beginning. Doing it again, especially with the cancer recurrence thing hanging over my head? I don’t think so.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “A little. If everything’s fine and just a cyst, it will have still been a good reminder that Luke and I need to back away from each other. He lost his wife. The last thing he needs is to become serious about someone whose percentages are a little more worrisome than most.”

  It was Zoey’s turn to snort. “I may have never married, but if I wanted to, I wouldn’t let that kind of worry stop me. I don’t think Luke would, either. At least, I’d be very disappointed in him if it did. In you, too.”

  “If it had been meant to be, we wouldn’t have given up at the first rough spot, and we did. We both did.” The words were painful and she stared into the fire until she could regain her composure.

  “Will you still stay here?” Zoey asked softly. “If Luke leaves and Royce goes back to California, will you go, too? You can, if that’s what you want. The orchard isn’t one of those businesses that’s been in the family for a gazillion years. Your grandfather got it because the previous owner had a gambling problem and he lost it—Dad bought the debt. I couldn’t keep it up. That was why I sold to Luke.”

  “I’m not leaving and I’m not selling my half. Ground in the Round is like writing books. It’s a dream I never expected to come true. It’s up to Luke what he does.” She thought about the coffee shop and realized that it had been the dream of the Cass side of her. It was every bit as imperfect as she was, but words failed when she tried to explain—even to herself—how happy it made her. Even without Luke.

  In lieu of the business meeting, he had sent a printout with Zoey and a scribbled response to a note Cass had written earlier and left on his desk. He’d stopped coming by the house for coffee before work. His texts were purely business.

  When she woke at night, sometimes she cried. But she’d survived worse than this. Been lonelier and sadder. She’d be fine. One day at a time.

  *

  “MAKE SURE HE takes her flowers. Real ones, if he can get them, but they don’t have to be.” Rachel was as bossy as ever. Luke was surprised she hadn’t shown up to make sure Seth’s shirt was ironed.

  “He’s got them ordered already. One of us will pick them up tomorrow morning. He’s washed my car three times in the past week. He has plenty of money to take Royce out to dinner before the dance and there’s an umbrella in back in case it snows. Which it’s supposed to, by the way, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about that.” Luke kept his voice patient. He’d already had this conversation with his mother.

  “When Mom calls, pretend the Skype thingy isn’t working. She’s going to cry and Seth will get upset. He’s more sensitive than the rest of us.”

  Good point. “Jill’s influence,” he said, surprised at how easy that had been to say.

  “Yes. Too bad it didn’t rub off on you, too. I know she tried.”

  Luke laughed. “She did, at that.” He forgot sometimes how close Jill and Rachel had been. All the years his sister had badgered him to make a new life for himself, she was probably just doing what Jill would have wanted her to do. “Hey, I gotta go. The orchard’s still a busy place.”

  “Okay. You dumb brothers take care, okay?”

  “You dumb sisters, too. Hey, Rach?”

  “What?”

  “Thanks for everything.”

  He knew she understood. They may have spent their lives as affectionate adversaries, but they knew each other very well. “Don’t let it pass you by, Luke,” she said softly, and disconnected.

  The orchard was a busy place, but nowhere near as much as it had been before Halloween. He was able to let everyone go home early and man the store by himself until closing time.

  He walked over to Ground in the Round, the snow crunching under his feet. The parking lot was crowded, and when he stepped inside, the coffee shop was full, too. And noisy. Three guitarists and a woman with a violin were in the corner. They were playing a vintage Charlie Daniels song, and they had the crowd in their pocket. Cass was behind the counter, building lattes and mochas with Libby and Holly and laughing.

  The sound of her laughter and the light in her eyes seemed to grow the ache of how much he’d missed her in recent days. It made him wonder if she’d missed him at all, and he flinched from the realization that maybe she hadn’t.

  But then their eyes met across that crowded room someone had written a song about once, and he knew she had missed him. Knew she still did.

  “Hey, Luke,” called one of the guitarists. “Come and join us for a few.”

  Luke held up his hands. “No guitar.”

  Cass’s voice rose over the hubbub of a full house. “Seth keeps one here if you’d like to play. It’s in the office.”

  He met her eyes. “You don’t mind?” It wouldn’t fix everything, but music always made him feel better.

  She shook her head and looked away.

  He got the guitar, feeling like a trespasser when he was in her office, and took a seat with the other musicians, all people he’d jammed with on other occasions. He took the cup of coffee Cass brought, feeling a familiar spark when his fingers touched hers. How long would that last?

  Maybe forever.

  He nodded his thanks and smiled at her. She smiled back, and he thought maybe they could do this thing after all. The truth of the matter was that they were probably better off not trying to combine romance and business. They didn’t even have to be frien
ds to be professional partners, although it would help to at least stay amicable. Her smile promised that.

  The touch of her hand, warm against his when she handed him the cup, was something else again. Something more. But they could deal with it, at least until he accepted the job and prepared to move to Pennsylvania.

  He enjoyed playing, liking the camaraderie with the other players, although the music sounded a little hollow sometimes. As he drove home later, he reflected that it didn’t sound any hollower than he felt.

  The house was dark except for the light over the sink in the kitchen, which meant Seth was not only home but in bed. Luke changed and went for a run, thinking of a pair of turquoise eyes that had an ache around them and warm fingers that he had once wanted to take and hold. Forever.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CASS RECORDED A video of Luke’s black Camaro as it drove down the farmhouse’s driveway. “We now have more footage and still shots of one high school dance of Royce’s than we have of her entire life before this, going all the way back to the DVD I filmed in the delivery room because Dad was in Iraq or somewhere when she was born.”

  Zoey laughed. “I think yours was on VHS, wasn’t it? I forget where he was then, too.”

  “Probably. It didn’t survive its last move, thank goodness.”

  Zoey squinted, scrolling through the pictures on her telephone. “They’re so beautiful. He got her exactly the right flowers. The shoes were perfect. Did she have money and her phone with her?”

  “Yes.” Cass put down the camera and hugged herself against the chill that had slipped in unnoticed.

  Zoey looked over at her, concern darkening her eyes. “Cass? Something wrong?”

  “Just some déjà vu going on, I think.” She looked out the door again. Shivered again. “It was dark like this the night of the prom.” There was no moon and we couldn’t even see the stars. Venus was always Libby’s guardian planet, and I remember her saying later that she couldn’t see it that night.”

  “You’ve changed so much since then. I think your fear of not being good enough stems from guilt over what happened. But you’ve taken care of a lot of that since you came back to the lake. Don’t let whatever’s happened between you and Luke get you started back down the same path.” Zoey checked her makeup in the mirror inside the mudroom door, something a houseful of women found extremely handy. She ran a critical finger over the smooth curve of her hair and got a coat from the row of hooks.

  Cass raised an eyebrow. “A date?”

  “Yes.” Zoey smiled mysteriously. “Kari Ross’s father is spending a few weeks at Kari’s lake house while he’s in the process of downsizing. I met him at the festival and he called today to ask me to have dinner with him. We’re both single and I’m old enough to think last-minute is more charming than thoughtless, so I’m going to meet him at the Grill.”

  “Have a good time. Stay safe.”

  “Don’t wait up.”

  When Zoey had left, Cass exchanged texts with her stepmother, reassuring her that Royce looked even more beautiful than her pictures, then carried Misty into her office. It was time to start a new book. It wouldn’t do for Lucy to have too much time off.

  Cass never listened to music when she wrote. Lyrics got in her way and even instrumental pieces affected the lay of the story. But something made her start the CD they’d made of Luke and Seth’s performance at the festival. Luke’s baritone, so quiet it didn’t seem as if it would carry but it did…it did…washed over her like the waterfall in Cottonwood Creek. The song was “Try to Remember,” a ballad that had made Zoey and Gianna and Luke’s mother sway and sing along with tears in their eyes.

  Cass typed as she listened, the words to the song carrying her into the first chapter. The story would take place in December and Lucy would be visiting her cousin in an apple orchard near a lake. Her heart would be newly broken.

  Life was supposed to imitate art, not the other way around. The thought made Cass smile a little. When the songs ended, she ejected the CD from her laptop and kept on writing. His voice stayed with her. His laughter between songs. His Whoa, little brother, when Seth hit a very bad note. His Hey, Cass, what do you think of this? when he played the opening riff of “Layla.”

  She was writing, she realized, as Cass. Cassandra had become, as she should have been all along, merely a pseudonym. Perhaps at some point…some later point…both her heart and Lucy’s would be unbroken.

  *

  THE DAYS WITHOUT her in them were far too long, and when Seth was gone in the evening, that time was long, too. Luke played guitar for hours on end, wearing his fingernails down because he didn’t use a pick, and had the bathroom almost finished enough to please even Rachel. But the rest of his life seemed to be kind of a…well, a gap. It didn’t just have an open, empty place in it, it was an open, empty place.

  Dan had called shortly after Seth left for the dance, wondering if Luke had decided on the job. He offered to bring him back out to Hollidaysburg to spend more time with the staff and get a better look at the projects. Before he’d hung up, he’d said, “Sometimes the best things really aren’t. You know that. I don’t mean to sound like your mother, because you have a fine one of those already, but it’s perfectly all right if you’re a good engineer who doesn’t really want to be one.”

  Luke thought about the words later, as he sat on his couch with a guitar. He was a pretty good player for a banger, but he’d never be good enough to make it his life’s work. He was a good orchardist, too, for one who’d gotten his training walking between the trees and making notes on napkins and fixing that godforsaken cider press.

  He strummed, playing part of “Classical Gas.” It was a favorite song, especially when Seth was there to play it with him. Luke loved the guitar. And the orchard. Even though he’d never be as good at either of them as he’d been as an engineer, he loved them.

  Across the room, Jill smiled at him from the photograph of her that sat on the mantel. “What do you think, Jilly?” he asked softly. “You’d have forgiven me, wouldn’t you?”

  Of course she would have. They’d forgiven each other many things in their time together. That’s what people who loved each other did.

  He hadn’t been sleeping well, so he was surprised that he fell asleep on the sofa. When the sound of his phone woke him, it took him a minute to get oriented. The number on the screen was unfamiliar. Why would a robocaller dial at this time of night? Irritation gave way to foreboding in the space of a heartbeat, and he swept the telephone’s screen. “What?”

  Five minutes later, he was in the truck and on the road. He spoke into his phone. “Are you already on your way or do you want me to pick you up?”

  “On my way.”

  *

  SAWYER’S HOSPITAL WAS SMALL, set well off the street in a parklike setting. There were walking paths all around it. The wrought iron fence that had surrounded the old building had been moved to this new location and now surrounded the visitors’ parking lot. Luke didn’t go there, though, nor did he notice the bucolic setting or the two-story Christmas tree that sat in the lobby. He parked beside Cass’s SUV, the truck’s tires slipping on the ice, and knew a moment’s wondering.

  Had the Camaro slipped on the ice?

  But he wasn’t going to think about that now. Only about the boy and girl who’d been in it. Who’d been injured, but that was all the disembodied caller would say. “You need to come if you can, sir.”

  “Please,” he said aloud on the way to the emergency room doors. “Please.” Father Doherty stood at the door, waiting, and Luke slowed his step, his tennis shoes skidding in the slush. “Please no. No.”

  The priest shook his head and put an arm over his shoulders when Luke stepped abreast of him. “Come on in, son. I just came out to wait for you.”

  “He’s not…they’re not…”

  “We don’t know anything yet.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “That’s part of what we don’t know.”r />
  “How many…” Luke’s voice faded away. He couldn’t bear to think of that yet.

  Father Doherty didn’t accompany him inside, and Luke looked back to see him standing where he’d been before. Waiting.

  Cass was alone in the visitors’ lounge, her face colorless above the neckline of her gray-and-white-striped sweatshirt. He wondered if she’d already been in bed when she’d gotten the call, but of course she had been. It was long after midnight and he was sure she’d been up early—she always was. Her hair was flat on one side, a detail that was heartbreaking although he wasn’t sure why.

  She stood at the window that looked out on the parking lot, as taut as the proverbial piano string. He thought if she moved, she’d break. He was afraid if he touched her, she’d break anyway.

  “Zoey?” he said instead, surprised her aunt had allowed her to come to the hospital alone.

  “She went to get Mary’s and Isaac’s parents.”

  “Oh.” He prayed again, silent and fervent and apologetic. I know I’m not good about praying, but I’ll do anything. I’ll never ask for anything again.

  He’d promised that before, sitting in a different hospital with Jill. Offering his life in exchange for hers if only she could be spared one more time. It hadn’t worked. It never worked. But he offered again. They’re just kids, and I swear I’ll never ask for anything again.

  “Did you call Father Doherty?”

  Cass shook her head. “He was here. He was here—” She drew a shuddering breath and then another, and Luke put his arm around her. If she did break, she wasn’t going to do it standing alone. “On prom night, when the first ambulance got here, he was waiting for it. I don’t know how he knows.”

  Luke shook his head. He didn’t understand it, either.

  The next time the automatic doors opened, Zoey came in with Mary’s and Isaac’s parents. A few minutes later, the doors swished again and a couple Luke didn’t know entered. The man was shouting and shaking his fist. When he looked over at where Luke and Cass stood, he aimed the fist in their direction. “It was your two that caused this. And you’ll pay. You’ll pay.”