Patrick raked his upper lip with his teeth, guilt over the decision he’d made years ago forcing its way through the righteous anger and all his good intentions.
I didn’t argue with you, Pat, when you told me to stay away. Both times. And I couldn’t blame you. I know what I was and it’s why I left. I believed you and the boys were better without me, without my problems. But I sent you the signed divorce papers and you never signed them. Why isn’t this marriage over, Pat? If you hate me so much? Why aren’t we free of each other?
He nearly laughed. As if a piece of paper could make them free. God had joined them. Walking away or signing legal documents had nothing to do with it.
I’ve done what you asked. Twice. It’s broken my heart a thousand times a day, but I agreed with you. I left, I forfeited any rights I might have claimed. You were their father, raising them in my place. I bowed to your wishes and I have not been in touch with any of you for over twenty-five years.
But things are changed now, Pat. Things are different. I need to see you. I need to see my sons.
It won’t be for long and they don’t even need to know who I am. Please, Pat. My husband. I want to come home to you.
His knees buckled and he sat on the wooden railing. He lifted his face to the wind; the smell of the river and pine blew up from the valley, but it did not dry his tears.
Iris was coming home.
Alice scratched her nose on the sleeve of her chef jacket since her hands were covered in slime and chicken meat from the carcass she was tearing apart. The broth was already cooling in the fridge, to be put to use tomorrow night for the menu rollout. This meat would be put to use in the Thai stir-fry she craved for dinner. The clock above the stove told her she had about two hours before she needed to get that stir-fry cooking.
The door at her elbow swung open and she whirled, startled, splattering Patrick with chicken juice.
“Oh, no, Patrick.” She grabbed the dish towel that was tucked into the waist of her apron and handed it to him by the smallest corner she could. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t worry.” He smiled, then wiped at his flannel shirt and, oddly, his eyes. “I should know better than to sneak up on a woman murdering a chicken.”
She laughed and picked up the leg she’d stripped meat from. “It’s for a good cause, I promise.”
“Have you seen either of my boys, preferably Gabe?”
“Not for hours, sorry.” She noticed, as he seemed to take great efforts not to look directly at her, that his eyes were red. If he were any other person and not a Mitchell man, she’d think he had been weeping.
“Patrick.” She dropped the chicken and wiped her own hands. “Are you okay?”
“You bet.” Patrick’s smile was wide and, to the uninitiated, believable. But she’d spent years with this man’s offspring, translating the many smiles to mean any number of things, and this smile tried just a shade too hard.
She knew better than to call him on it, however, so, as she had in her marriage, she approached the topic sideways.
“I’m glad you stopped in,” she said. “I am so sorry about the first night I was here. I should not have said anything about Iris and my apology was almost as hideous as what I said. I’ve felt bad about it for two weeks, but I just haven’t had a chance to find you and say something.”
The smile twitched and she knew that whatever was making this man’s eyes red had something to do with Iris.
“I was a little out of sorts,” she continued. “Being back with—”
“Would Gabe and Max have been better off with their mother?” Patrick asked suddenly and Alice was rocked back on her heels. “I mean, not instead of me, but if she had been in the picture, would my boys have benefited?”
“Of course,” she said cautiously after a moment. “I mean, only if she wanted to be there. If she was there and didn’t want to be, well, then they were certainly better off with just a father who adored them.”
“Really?” he asked, white and stricken, and Alice felt trapped. “If she had wanted to come back—”
“But she didn’t come back,” she raced to say. “She left and no one heard from her again.”
Patrick went white and stared at his hands, at his thumb as it worried a cut on his palm.
Alice didn’t know what to think with this uncharacteristically insecure man in front of her.
She should say something, do something, to bring the regular Patrick back, but she didn’t have that power. His vulnerability called out to her and she could only stand there and bleed silent sympathy.
“She left, walked away without a word. Like none of us mattered,” he said. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Exactly what you did,” she said, tense and uncomfortable. There were a lot of things wrong with her ex-husband that could no doubt be traced back to being raised by a single father—by this single father who spent so much time pretending everything was fine—without the influence of a mother, but she could hardly say that to Patrick now.
He nodded slowly. “Right,” he said, his nod gaining speed and, as though he’d never left, the assured Patrick was back pink cheeked and smiling. “You’re right, sweetie.” He gave her a loud smacking kiss on the cheek. “Don’t worry about the other night,” he said. “We were all a little out of sorts. We’ll try it again tonight, without the arguments.”
She knew, of course, what he was referring to. They’d sit in front of the fire and share a drink, but she couldn’t do that. She’d committed. Like it or not. She’d stocked the kitchen, built a menu, worked herself to the bone from dawn until dusk without killing her ex-husband or taking a drink.
All good things.
“I’m sorry, Patrick.” She winced. “I am going to be so busy the next few weeks. Tomorrow night I’m rolling out my menu and on Monday I’ve got my first call with Bridezilla.”
“Too bad. Don’t let my son run you ragged.”
“Not likely,” she quipped because she knew he’d like it and, as she’d expected, he laughed on his way out the door. The kitchen fell silent as if he’d never been there.
Wary of the lingering chicken grease, she wiped a stray black curl from her forehead with her wrist and went back to work. What had brought on Patrick’s mood? Hopefully it was over and they could all not talk about things such as regrets and what-ifs and second chances.
The next morning Alice woke up, her hands sore, her lower back in knots, and realized she needed about a million cloves of garlic peeled—on top of putting together the menu—and Cameron was just the man for the job. He’d gotten through the potatoes and the carrots yesterday.
“You sure?” Max asked while they both glared at the coffee machine, waiting for it to finish hissing and puffing. “He’s working out?”
“Well, he hasn’t cut himself or me. And as long as I don’t actually listen to him talk all day it seems to work out.” She shrugged. “I need the help and he’s doing okay.”
“Enough said.” Max filled his travel coffee mug, even though the machine wasn’t done, and Alice stuck her mug under the stream of coffee running onto the burner.
“I’ll send him your way when he arrives,” Max said and disappeared out the door.
“Send who where?” Gabe’s rusty voice asked from the dining-room door. She turned only to find him, hair standing on end and blurry eyed, propped up against the door frame.
“You look like crap,” she said and pulled out the mug she’d noticed was his favorite, despite the chip in the lip.
“Ah, is it any wonder we couldn’t make it work?” he asked without any heat and she found herself smiling at this morning version of Gabe. He’d always looked like a little boy in the morning, someone in desperate need of coffee and a long cuddle.
She’d enjoyed being the one to cuddle him, kissing his forehead and warming her cold feet against his thighs until his brain fully clicked into gear.
“I had this dream last night that I was being chased by pink swans,” he sai
d, gratefully accepting the coffee she’d poured for him.
“Stress dreams, you need a break,” she said.
He nodded and slurped from his mug.
“Did your dad find you yesterday?” she asked. “Just before dinner, he was looking for you.”
“He found me.” His voice changed. Cold Gabe stood before her, his blurry eyes gone, his easy morning repartee frozen out of him.
Is he okay? What did he want? What’s going on with your mother? Did you listen to him or freeze him out like you are me right now?
All of that and dozens of other questions burned at her lips, but she dammed them. The lessons of her marriage were ingrained and impossible to forget.
“Good,” she said and turned to her notebook of lists. “Have a good day.”
She was too tired, sore and preoccupied to do anything else.
Cameron arrived sullen and filthy just after three.
“Good God,” she cried. “What happened to you?”
“You and those potatoes,” he shot back, tossing his greasy brown hair over his eyes.
“Well, didn’t you shower last night? Or this morning?” She noticed he wore the same baggy black T-shirt with the anarchy symbol across the front. She doubted he even knew what it meant. She wondered what his home must be like if a kid could wander around covered in dirt for two days.
“It wouldn’t matter if I was outside dragging trees around,” he said.
“Well, you’re not. You’re in my kitchen. Let’s get you cleaned up.” She grabbed the bar of lava soap that had the power to remove the smell of garlic from hands and shoved him toward the employee bathrooms. “Lose the shirt and I’ll find you something else to wear.”
“I’m not wearing your clothes.” He sneered at her tomato-red Henley that she had put on for dramatic flair underneath her chef whites.
She nearly laughed at herself now.
“I’ll find you something,” she promised and nudged him into the bathroom.
Ten minutes later he emerged, soaking wet and shirtless. He looked embarrassed standing in the doorway, his thin arms crossed over his concave chest, two inches of his underwear visible at the top of his ratty blue jeans.
Poor kid, she thought, nearly smiling. But she didn’t because intuition told her that would just kill the fifteen-year-old. Instead she chucked her smallest, oldest chef jacket and pants at him.
He caught them and vanished, doing a strange side step into the bathroom before turning around. She just managed to see the purple-and-yellow bruise on his shoulder blade before the door slammed shut, the sound louder than her strangled gasp.
She knew most of the kids in Max’s program were from troubled homes, but seeing the proof of it was shocking. Searing.
For a brief period of time after the divorce, she went to a support group called Mother’s Without Babies. Everyone was on a different place on the spectrums of grief and anger and acceptance. But one thing they all shared was a profound horror, a gnawing sadness that there were parents in the world who would hurt their children. Children the women in that group would have died for.
And she felt the same primal rage, looking at the shut bathroom door, as she had sitting in that group, her grief still so raw she couldn’t look at children on the street.
The door swung open and Cameron stood there, hair dripping, clothes a little too big, but surprisingly not too bad since he was tall for his age.
“What happened to your back?” she asked point-blank.
“Nothing.”
“Your dad or—”
His face twisted in disdain. “Please,” he scoffed.
“He didn’t hit you?”
“Nah.” Cameron shook his head. “I think I did it two days ago hauling wood.”
She watched him, having years of experience with the excuses created by prep chefs and waitresses and dishwashers. She was pretty good at spotting a lie. And all her radars told her Cameron wasn’t lying.
“No one hit you?”
He shook his head. “No one even notices me,” he said. “Now, what disgusting thing am I supposed to do today.”
She set him up at the chopping block with the cloves of garlic and explained how to deskin them.
“I’m gonna stink!” he protested.
“It’s not as if you smell like roses right now.”
“Who wants to smell like roses?”
“It’s an expression.” The small tiny curve in the corner of his mouth told her he was giving her a hard time and she had to fight herself from ruffling his hair.
“Get to work,” she joked and set up her own station of chopping the garlic he peeled.
She had about two hours before she needed to get to work on the menu rollout. She’d already set the table in the dining room, putting a little effort into the flowers and candles, letting Gabe see how it should be done, rather than the tiny bud vases and two votives he usually used.
“So, like, how’d you become a cook?” Cameron asked.
“Chef,” she corrected, just to give him a hard time.
“Right, whatever.” He rolled his eyes at her and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had this much fun with her staff. Torturing Trudy had been fun for her, but it wasn’t a reciprocal thing. “How’d you become a chef?”
“I went to school for it,” she said, smashing the garlic with the flat of her knife and then dicing it into tiny pieces. She’d preserve it in oil, perfect shortcut for soups, stews and quick sautés.
“Why?”
She took a deep breath and considered her answer to a question no one had ever asked her. “I guess I’ve always wanted to be a chef. My grandmother and father were chefs and I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with them. I always really loved it.”
He grunted, his eyes narrowed over the garlic clove in his pink hands.
“What do you want to do?” she asked.
“DJ,” he answered quickly.
“Oh really?” she asked, again fighting the grin. “You like music?”
“I like parties.”
“It might take more than that,” she said.
“Maybe you can show me how to cook something and I’ll see if I like that.”
She blinked, taken aback. An apprentice. A fifteen-year-old juvenile-delinquent apprentice.
Stranger things had happened, she guessed.
“Okay,” she said, “but you need to tell me what you got in trouble for.”
“Max didn’t tell you?” He asked.
“Max doesn’t talk much. I don’t know if you noticed.”
Cameron grinned and went back to his peeling. “I missed a lot of school,” he said. “Truancy or something.”
“Why’d you miss school?”
He shrugged again, his face carved of stone. Her years with Gabe had taught her not to push against people made of stone. She knew she wouldn’t get any more from him.
“All right,” she said. “When we finish this we can start work on the menu I’ve put together for the inn. Tonight we’re trying it out.”
The boy’s muddy-brown eyes, usually downcast and sullen, sparkled with sudden interest and Alice felt an answering spark in her breast.
“Cool,” he said and went to work double time. “Hey,” he said after a moment. “Where are your kids?”
Her stomach fell to the floor. “Why…” She swallowed. “Why do you think I have kids.”
“Because that’s what adults do. They have kids. Don’t they?”
“Not me.” She smashed the flat of her knife down on the butcher block. “I don’t have any.”
“Too bad,” he said as if it weren’t devastating, as if his words, so casual and friendly, didn’t lay waste to her. “You’d be good at it.”
9
It was perfect, the slow spin of satisfaction in her chest told her that. The bubble of joy in her throat confirmed it. Appetizer portions of the lunch menu and dinner salads sat, beautifully plated, ready to be served.
“All right, Cam
eron,” she said—and because they’d worked hard together and he’d listened and only dropped one sandwich, which he ate, and because he seemed to really enjoy himself—she put her hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Let’s show ’em.”
She grabbed three of the plates and left him with two. “You remember your lines?” She asked, turning backward to face him and opening the door with her butt.
“Spinach salad,” he murmured, rehearsing. “Grapefruit vinegar—”
“Vinaigrette,” she corrected.
“Grapefruit vinaigrette, blue cheese, egg and pine nuts.”
“Not bad.” She smiled at him and they stepped into the dark dining room.
The table she’d prepared was a small island of glittering light in the shadowed room. The three men sitting there looked up at her with expectation and happiness on their faces.
It was what every chef wanted to see when they stepped from kitchen to dining room. It was like being wrapped in a warm embrace, a victorious hug.
I love it, she thought, her throat choked with sudden pride. I love it so much.
She set down her first dish in front of Gabe because it was one of his favorites. “Grilled salmon salad with miso dressing,” she said. “You have to share.”
He grinned at her, his fork already poised to eat.
“Ham and white cheddar panini with sweet maple mustard.” She set the plate down in front of Max, who groaned as if there were women performing sex acts on him.
“Thai chicken stir-fry,” she said, placing the bowl under Patrick’s eager nose. “With soba noodles.”
She turned toward Cameron. In this light with everyone looking at him, the kid seemed suddenly so young. So vulnerable. Her heart hiccupped with pride and the old longing she had gazing at any child.
“Spinach salad,” he said, placing the salad next to Max. The candle glow revealed his sudden nerves, his naked glance at Max who, she realized, might be more of a father figure than Cameron had ever had.
Wedding At the Riverview Inn Page 9