“Of course,” he said, stepping back and waving his hand like he could erase the invitation. “You’re busy. I was already interrupting.”
“No,” she said, and practically jumped to her feet. She fully shut the laptop so it wasn’t binging at her, but picked up her phone and slipped it into her back pocket. So, not totally untethered. “I’d love to help.”
“Well, full disclosure, Alice said if we showed up down there Daphne and Jonah would put us to work wrapping presents.”
“Oh my god, remember that year we had to wrap all the presents for the Haven House families? We were there until four a.m.”
He took a deep breath and nodded. “I remember all the years, Josie. All of them.”
In the truck Josie sat as far from him as she could, practically leaning into the passenger-side door. “So? Tell me the truth about Netflix and your YouTube channel.”
He turned onto the road leading toward the highway down the mountain to Athens Organics and Haven House.
He liked that she watched his show. Maybe more than he should. For a guy with a million followers, he always—every single time he uploaded a video—wondered if one of those million was her. And he’d wanted it to be. Ached for it to be.
“The truth about the show,” he said, “is that I’ve had some luck. And every once in a while, I have a few good ideas. And then…some more luck.” He shrugged.
“Do you like it?”
“I like cooking and talking about food and learning about food. But the bullshit around a show…”
“Yeah, that’s not really your style.”
“Not even a little bit. But it’s kind of a machine at this point. It runs itself. I mean, I don’t mind the idea of branching out and trying new things. But what Netflix and YouTube want from me doesn’t feel like me.” Big fat flakes of snow started to twirl down from the gray sky overhead. The beginning of the storm they were supposed to get.
“What about your job?” he asked. “Whole lot more glamorous than making coffee on some mountainside.”
“Nothing about what I’m doing is glamorous. Or even interesting.” She sighed.
“Then quit.”
She laughed.
“I’m serious.”
“And do what?”
“Literally anything. You can do literally anything, Josie. Take Common Ground someplace else.”
She rolled her head across the window.
“You used to say that to me all the time,” he said. “The night of your graduation you said it, and it was like I heard you. And I believed that you believed it, but I just could never believe it myself. And if I hadn’t left this place…I might not have ever believed it.”
“You’re saying quit my job and belief will come?”
“Yep.”
“Said by the guy who doesn’t have to pay rent in Queens.”
He laughed. “True, but so is what I’m saying. Sometimes you have to let go of one thing to grab onto another.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yeah, it is. You just don’t want it to be.” She was silent and he glanced over to see if she was glaring at him, but she was looking out the window, chewing on her lip. A classic Josie tell that she was thinking deep thoughts.
“Hey,” he said. “Alice wants to do a Five Questions.”
“That’s a great idea,” she said. “I’m surprised you haven’t done it yet.”
“Well, I started one yesterday but she brought up my mom and I stopped. And she said today that we could try again and she’d pretend she didn’t know me.”
“That would be awful,” Josie said.
“For her?”
“No. Awful TV.”
“What should I do?” he asked.
“Oh, I think you know what you should do,” she said. “You should do a Five Questions with her all about your relationship. And how you came to be at the inn and what she taught you and what you learned from her. It should be a total reveal about your beginning in the kitchen.”
“No one wants to see that,” he said.
“Everyone wants to see that. And you should be peeling potatoes while you do it.”
“You make it sound easy,” he said.
“It is. You just don’t want it to be.” She smiled at him like it was nothing how coy she was being. So coy he wanted to pull this truck over and get his hands under her shirt, teach her a lesson about what happened to girls who smiled like that.
God, the things I want to do to you.
He turned from the road onto the winding driveway that led to Athens Organics and Haven House.
“Wow, it’s gotten a lot bigger,” he said as they pulled up to park in front of the farmhouse.
He had a painful déjà vu. The last time he was here had been the night of Josie’s graduation. Helen had had a fake ID and sneaked out of the house to join Josie at the parties, but then got drunk and called her mom to tell her she loved her. Classic Helen.
He felt all the years, all at once. The years he’d been here. And the years he was away.
Part of him had believed that the inn and the farm and Haven House would sort of hang in suspended animation. Unchanging. And he was glad there had been progress, of course he was glad, it was just strange not to have seen it. Not to have helped.
Yeah. That was it. There’d been a lot of changes he hadn’t been a part of.
When, for a lot of years, all he’d wanted was to help this place grow.
There was a giant greenhouse behind the farm now. Daphne was experimenting with hydroponics. And one of the sheds he knew was devoted to her mushrooms. Behind and beside the greenhouses, the fields were all sleeping under the snow. The orchard, too. Next door was Haven House, built when he still lived at the farm. He’d had one summer job helping the contractor clear the area. He’d gotten poison ivy so badly he’d blown up like a balloon.
Don’t you know what poison ivy looks like? Josie had asked, rubbing calamine lotion on his arms.
I do now, he’d said, the excruciating embarrassment giving the itch a run for its money.
Haven House looked like a cross between a stately manor home and a very beautiful hotel. There were porches and balconies outside every window. White gingerbread nestled into peaked roofs. And all of it right now was covered in Christmas lights. Some blinking and flashing. Some steady and plain white. It was like a patchwork quilt of lights. Daphne’s doing. She didn’t like uniformity or themes the way Alice did. She liked a little mayhem.
“Another water slide?” he asked. The new one burst out of the fourth floor and snaked around the building only to disappear through an exterior wall on the ground floor.
“Helen said they got it a two years ago.” She shook her head, smiling the same smile he imagined he had on his face. Like it was all just so damn good. Good to see. Good to feel. “I’d forgotten how big this place is.”
He turned off the car, and in the silence the truck felt smaller. Snow landed on the windshield and melted, running down the glass.
“Why haven’t you been back, Josie?”
She looked over at him and he saw how complicated it all was. The same complicated that had made him want to leave the other morning.
“It’s not…all because of me and that night?”
“That’s part of it,” she answered. “But part of it is also my job.”
“Because you’re busy?”
“Yeah, and my mom just can’t keep her opinions about it to herself. And defending my choices every time I see her is a drag. And…” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know. I guess…I’d put the Riverview away.”
“Away?” he asked with a laugh, like he didn’t know exactly what she meant. Like it didn’t strike some deep chord in him, too. No, he thought, he didn’t want to fall backward into that place they’d occupied—knowing each other’s thoughts before they were words. Knowing each other’s experiences because they shared such a similar way of being in the world.
“I
made them come to me,” she whispered. “Visiting me in the city because I was so busy. They were busy, too, building this place…”
“But they visited you?”
She nodded. “I acted like my work was more important and, I mean, look at how wrong I was.”
“Not everything has to be important,” he said.
“That sounds ridiculous.’’ She rolled her eyes at him.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sure I Do/I Don’t is important to its viewers. You know, who are looking for something mindless to take them away from whatever hard reality they’ve got happening.”
She looked at him for a long moment and then smiled. “You always were good at that.”
“At what?’
“Making me feel better.”
The front door of the farmhouse was thrown open, and there was Helen looking nervous.
“She planned this, you know,” he said, leaning forward so he could see her out of Josie’s window. He felt Josie’s breath on his cheek, the skin of his neck.
“Helen is always planning something,” Josie said.
“You mad at her?”
“Are you?” Josie asked, turning to look at him, and their faces were inches apart. Not even.
“No,” he whispered, his eyes on her mouth. Remembering so clearly what she’d tasted like that night. Artificial fruit salad. And now she would taste like Chapstick and coffee. Maybe the lasagna he’d made with his own hands. “I’m glad she brought me back. I missed this place.”
And you. He didn’t say it. Largely because it didn’t need to be said. It just was. Like breathing. Like the beauty of Christmas at the Riverview Inn.
“We…we should go,” she said, opening the truck door and letting in the freezing cold air. She was about to slip out but he grabbed her hand. Too much, maybe, but he had to know where things stood. It felt a little like he was pushing on something that he shouldn’t be pushing on.
But at the touch of his hand on hers, she stopped.
“I wish I knew how to not hurt you,” he said, and she looked up at him.
“You’re not hurting me,” she whispered.
“They why are you running…?”
“I’m not hurt,” she said. “I’m scared.”
“Of me?” He sat back, putting as much distance between them as he could. “I’m sorry. I swear—”
This time it was her hand reaching for his. The cold air made plumes of their breath. But when her fingers touched his they were warm.
“I’m scared of what you make me feel, Cameron,” she said with a wry twist to her mouth. “I always have been. And that…I mean, I can’t believe it, but it hasn’t changed.”
“What do I make you feel, Josie?”
She smiled, but it shook at the edges. She blew out a long breath and it, too, was shaky. “Everything,” she answered. “You make me feel everything. Everything I told myself I didn’t want to feel anymore.”
13
MAX
The ceiling had nothing to say. It never did. He’d been staring up at this ceiling since Cameron left all those years ago and not once had there been any insight from it or the fan or the spiderweb in the corner.
It was just him and his mistakes.
“Max?” Delia’s sleepy mumble at his shoulder made him turn his head.
“Go back to sleep,” he whispered and kissed her forehead.
“What time is it?”
He looked toward the window, the sheers lighter now than then they’d been when he initially woke up.
“Seven, maybe?”
She groaned and burrowed closer to him, and he could feel her, the way he always did, fall back to sleep. The slight loosening of her body, the easing of her mind. All the energy that was Delia awake, but turned down several notches.
We made a mistake, he wanted to say. No, that wasn’t right. I made the mistake. All those years ago. I made a terrible mistake.
He eased away from Delia, replacing his body heat, which was what Delia primarily wanted him for on these cold mornings, with the quilt, tucking it up around her shoulders.
She smiled in her sleep and he ached with love for her.
With the love he had for what they had built.
He’d spent the first year after Cameron left telling himself that he’d made the decision because he was protecting his family. All while missing Cameron with a pain so sharp it hurt to take a deep breath—like Cameron somehow wasn’t part of his family. Wasn’t the first son he’d always dreamed of, long before Dom came into being.
The house was quiet and cool and he walked into the kitchen expecting to find Josie beating her laptop into submission. But the kitchen and living room were empty. He walked back toward her bedroom but the door was open, the covers on her bed hastily pulled back up.
Dom was in his room. His gigantic son with the wicked slap shot and the subversive sense of humor. His feet hung off the bed and his head was buried in the pillows, only his hair visible.
What would I have done if it had been Dom in Cameron’s position?
The answer, to his great chagrin, was—everything different. He would have protected him and talked to him about everything that happened. There would have been more conversation. Not less. More support. Not less.
He walked back into the dark kitchen.
Snow was starting. Christmas Eve was in two days and the forecast was calling for snow every one of those days. Cameron, if he was going to leave, or Josie, if she was going to leave, weren’t going to be going anywhere after today.
Was that good or bad? he wondered.
Years ago, after the shooting that had cost him his job in the city, after he’d made that horrible mistake and a whole family had had to pay for it, he’d lived in this kind of…blank space. He tried very hard not to think anything. Or feel anything.
Delia and Josie had pulled him out of that into a Technicolor, wildly and deeply emotional world.
And he’d been grateful for it every day. Like, on his knees grateful. But every time he looked at Josie, he saw the same kind of blank space. Yeah, she was busy and important and doing a job that she seemed to like…but that look in her eyes. He recognized it. And last night he’d seen it in Cameron.
I’m not your employee anymore.
God, the words had been bullets right through his heart. But the look in Cameron’s eyes had been worse. All that distance Cameron and Josie were putting between themselves and the world. All that distance between themselves and love.
Max had some work to do. He was still the Family Officer for the county and Christmas was usually a time when kids got into trouble. No school to keep them occupied. Home lives in trouble. So he and Dante at the parole office had been trying to keep some of the most at-risk kids in the area busy. Delivering food. Shoveling sidewalks. The usual.
As he opened up his email, he remembered so clearly how he’d been desperate to do the same for Cameron. And how Cameron had fought and fought and fought…
Until he got tired. The way so many of those kids got tired. Of pretending they didn’t need love and boundaries and to use their bodies and brains and be respected for what they could do.
And then Alice had taken Cameron into the kitchen and it had been game over for the boy. He’d found himself, found something he cared about and someone to help him learn it.
And I took all of that away.
The guilt was a fresh hot spike in his chest.
Max and Dante exchanged emails regarding some shoveling they were planning to do in town in the next week and which kids they were going to get involved. He wondered if Cameron would be interested in helping out. After all those years of fighting Cameron was the first guy to sign up for these kinds of thing.
But then he wondered if Cameron would still be here in a week.
If he was still here now.
And suddenly he had an urgent need to know. To see the kid. To try, the way he hadn’t been able to the previous night, to repair what had gone so wrong
between them.
He closed the laptop, left the rest of the coffee for when Delia woke up, and shrugged into his coat. It had been a long time since he’d been down at the lodge in the morning, but he found himself looking forward to it.
Alice’s bread, the black tar she pretended was coffee. The hum and business of the kitchens. Dad coming in to light the fires.
And Cameron.
Snow was falling, and so he skid a little when he braked at the stop sign. Turning on his right blinker, he saw the taillights to a van heading left down the road, toward Daphne and Jonah’s place.
“Shit,” he muttered, hoping he hadn’t missed his chance.
The snow was coming down hard, and when he parked in the back, where the van usually sat, the snow was already filling in its tracks. The air smelled cold and crackly, which usually meant they were going to get a real storm. Josie had used Delia’s truck to come down here at dawn, apparently, and he parked beside it.
In the time it took him to walk from the truck to the back door, snow had gathered in his hair. Along his jacket.
The warmth of the Riverview kitchen enveloped him the way it always did, like arms coming around him. The smell of coffee, lasagna, and bread didn’t hurt.
“If you’re looking for the kids you just missed them,” Alice said, wiping off the last of her big baking trays and putting it in the rack beside the oven.
“I’m guessing you mean Cameron and Josie?”
She smiled, one side of her mouth lifting as much with bitterness as with joy. “Coffee?”
“Sure.”
“Lasagna?”
“For breakfast?”
“Like you don’t want it.”
He pulled out one of the stools at the island and sat. Alice poured him a cup and brought him a slab of lasagna that practically hung over the edges of the plate. He picked up his fork but couldn’t quite find the will to eat it.
“You all right?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “ You?”
“I spent the morning cooking with Cameron. I didn’t think that would ever happen again.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t suppose you did.” They sat in silence.
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