Keepsake for Eagle Cove

by M. L. Buchman

  It was cooler here; the tailgate put her at more ease than the close confines of the truck’s cab. Somehow Devin had known that. She scooted up next to him and he handed her a slice of pie. They ate together in a comfortable silence and watched the sun’s slow progress down into the clouds holding offshore.

  “Good pie,” she said when the silence had stretched long enough.

  “I carried it from Peggy’s myself.”

  “Tough job.”

  “Glad to do it.” Again the silence sat with them for a few minutes before the breeze brushed it away. “So, tell me about your anti-trip. I’ve never really traveled much outside Chicago.”

  “My stepfather always took us to the Orient. I speak Japanese and Mandarin…but neither has ever felt right, like my brain and my mouth weren’t built for those sounds. I heard a tape of Gaelic and somehow it made sense. It’s a crazy language, but it simply fit.”

  “Which language is hardest? I only speak English and construction-crew Spanish, which isn’t presentable anywhere except a build site.”

  “It depends…” and Tiffany marveled at herself as they discussed language and the travels they each hadn’t done. She hadn’t understood until this moment how little she’d spoken to men over the last few years. It was as if she’d forgotten how, had fallen out of practice. But Devin made it easy to recall, like a long forgotten sweater that still fit once patched, both familiar and new.

  When they finished their pie, Devin tossed the paper plates into the back of his truck, but tucked the plastic forks safely into a pocket and winked at her. Then he continued telling her about his cross-country road trip and how that had made him realize what he’d been missing by staying anchored in Chicago.

  If it had been a long time since she’d talked to a man, it had been even longer since she’d kissed one. She didn’t really count yesterday’s brief kiss. It had been ninety percent alarm on her part and only about ten percent kiss.

  “I know I have to go back to Chicago at some point, but for now—”

  For now.

  Now!

  Tiffany grabbed her nerves, wrestled them into submission, then leaned over and kissed Devin. She caught him mid-word, which should have been awkward, but he didn’t let it be.

  He tasted of strawberry-rhubarb pie.

  When he slid an arm about her shoulders and held her close, she didn’t feel trapped at all. Instead she was whirled up into a maelstrom of feelings. Her heart was moving blood at an unheard of rate, so fast the sonic boom was making her ears ring. She felt as if she could step off the cliff edge and fly over the sea as long as—

  Devin pulled back first and she almost fell forward off the tailgate at the aftershock. She’d never so thrown herself at man in her life. But before embarrassment or confusion could take hold, Devin whispered softly.

  “Oh my!”

  “Oh my?” Tiffany was amazed that she could speak.

  “Well, it sounds more western than the hard curses which would be more common in Chicago. Son of a— You know.”

  “Properly I’d be Daughter of one of you-knows!’ Which has the sad advantage of being true.”

  “Maybe we should introduce our moms. Sounds as if they’d hit it off.”

  Tiffany’s head was still spinning. Moms, amazing kisses, and throwing herself at Devin all collided to leave her speechless. Deep inside she decided that she definitely agreed with his assessment on one point though: Oh my!

  “If I’d ever met a woman who kissed like that…” Devin left her hanging for a long moment as he stared out to sea. “I guess I’d never have come to Eagle Cove.” It sounded as if he was speaking to himself, but she couldn’t feel guilty for eavesdropping. Then he turned back to her, cupped her cheek in his callused palm, and kissed her lightly.

  This time all rational thought didn’t tumble down to plunge into the sea, but there was still a dreamy sense of rightness as she pressed her own palm in turn upon his cheek. There was an impossible rightness to it.

  Maybe now she understood better the long sections of Lillian’s journal where she had waxed eloquent upon how a man made her feel. But Tiffany didn’t want to use her ancestor’s words—this was her time. Her moment.

  “Kissing you,” she whispered against Devin’s lips, “feels as right as speaking Gaelic.”

  “We’ve had the dessert portion of our evening.” Devin was unwilling to let her go yet but they couldn’t spend the whole evening sitting on the back of his pickup truck. The wind was picking up and it was turning chilly.

  “And the kissing portion,” Tiffany agreed.

  “Now it must be time for the movie portion,” Devin agreed, happily quoting one of the funniest movies ever. “I can’t believe you know My Favorite Year.”

  “The problem is, did you see what’s playing at The Flicker? The Poseidon Adventure. The 2005 version.”

  “Ack, gack!” Devin grabbed his throat and made choking noises until Tiffany laughed. Then he remembered Peggy had told him about Greg Slater’s Tuesday night for locals and that he qualified. He grabbed Tiffany’s hand and dragged her around to the passenger door of his truck.

  “What? Where are we going?”

  “I think it’s time for the dinner portion of the evening, don’t you?”

  “No! Wait!”

  But he knew if he waited, she’d slip away again. He closed the truck door, reached in through the open window, and toggled the lock. Then he rested his hands on the door frame and hoped as hard as he could.

  She only would have to move her finger a few inches to unlock the door. And he would open it and let her go if she did. Slowly, ever so slowly, she turned to look up at him. She gazed a long time into his eyes. Then with a soft smile and that same impossibly slow action, Tiffany reached out and took hold of the seatbelt.

  Devin held onto the door and hung his head until he heard the soft click of it engaging. He didn’t know why it took so much out of him or why he hoped so hard, but it had and he did.

  He climbed in beside her and drove them slowly back into town.

  Tiffany hadn’t eaten in a restaurant in three years. And not in a high-end one since leaving San Francisco most of a decade ago.

  Greg had transformed The Puffin. Fluorescent lighting had been abandoned and replaced by twinkle lights and table candles. Sheers had been drawn across the big windows, not quite hiding the main street, but softening it, making it feel far away. Worn Formica was masked by midnight blue table cloths. The individual tables had been pushed into a long line for communal service.

  It was in some sort of dreamlike fugue that Tiffany floated through the evening. It became a scattershot of images. Greg’s delight at her arrival. He and Devin debating about paying for the meal—Devin had ended up jamming two twenty-dollar bills down the back of Greg’s pants when he’d turned away thinking he’d won. When Greg had dug them out and tried to give them back, Devin had raised his palms outward. “Eww!”

  Tiffany had mimicked the motion and they had all three laughed together.

  She knew many of the people who came; they greeted her as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Greg had seated them at one end and she recognized but didn’t know the couple beside them, which was perfect. Mrs. Winslow and Hector at the far end—paying such attention to each other than Tiffany almost wondered if Mrs. Winslow hadn’t seen her. She’d certainly made no fuss.

  The food was exquisite. Her leeks showed up in the onion soup. The beets had been sliced, roasted to sweetness, and topped with a chilled salad based on fresh-caught crab. Snow peas adorned Asian-spiced rockfish. Fresh-made strawberry gelato with a dark chocolate sauce finished the meal. Becky’s beers had accompanied each course in tiny taster glasses that matched to perfection.

  There was only one thing in the entire meal that didn’t blur together until she couldn’t separate one thing from another.

  Devin.

  They talked movies, books, and even plays. It all meant nothing, and it all meant everything. Not once did h
e ask about her past, her farm, or even about her. Yet between their meaningless words, she was unsure if she had ever told anyone so much about herself.

  The sun had turned the sky red-gold and the sea black by the time he drove Tiffany back to the lighthouse meadow. At the invisible trailhead—Devin had assumed it was just a rabbit track when he’d scouted the edge of the woods two days before, looking for where she’d gone—she turned to him.

  No words.

  She simply placed a warm hand on the center of his chest, as if keeping him carefully away for a moment. He reached up with both hands to catch her thick hair and brush it back over her shoulders. He wanted a clear view of her face despite the fading light. Her fine lips and strong eyebrows came from her father’s Scots heritage, or so she’d said. The slender oval of her face from Italy. The hair and the shy smile, those were completely hers.

  Rather than kissing him, she shifted her hand around his waist and hugged him. Hard.

  There was no hesitation. No worries that he might “muss up” the woman in his arms. She simply held onto him and he did the same to her.

  The crazy synergy of their kiss slammed back in, then built at a steamroller pace. When Tiffany hugged him, nothing was held in reserve. He could feel the soft curves of her body pressing against him as well as the fierce strength of her arms wrapped about his waist. When she rested her head on his shoulder, all he could think about was never letting go.

  And then with a smile and a softly-whispered “Thank you,” she slipped away into the dark forest. Just mere steps into the trees and she was gone like a ghost.

  Chapter 4

  Wednesday was delivery day and Tiffany spent much of it running her ATV with its little trailer out through the woods. She had a deal with a farm supply over in Eugene for biweekly deliveries of goat and chicken feed, along with anything else she called in. Once her garden had started producing and she’d canned a season’s worth of food, her personal needs had been minimal. They also delivered propane whenever the biweekly truck driver noticed it was running low.

  Her pick-up point was two miles up an old logging road that had the advantage of meeting the highway well out of town. The driver always dropped the load in a lean-to she’d placed along that road. It was the closest any vehicle bigger than an ATV could travel.

  Three years before, after finishing with the heavy equipment, she’d planted a thick patch of native trees across the end of where her access driveway had been. In just a few months they’d blended into the forest until there was no sign that there had ever been a turn-off onto this road lost deep in the woods. A hundred feet before her now-hidden driveway, she’d built the lean-to mostly out of moss-covered logs and branches from the forest floor and topped it with rusted, corrugated metal. It had looked thirty years abandoned by the time it was done—exactly the effect she was after. On the back side, where it couldn’t be seen without knowing it was there, stood her propane tank. After each delivery, she used a rake to spread forest floor detritus over her fresh tracks.

  The lean-to also kept the feedbags and other supplies dry while waiting for her to fetch them in the thin rain that had moved in overnight. She’d heard it patter on the yurt’s roof as she lay awake and considered the effects of her choices.

  Three years alone in the woods had definitely been the best years of her life…so far. It was the “so far” that kept niggling at her, like a mischievous angel poking at her with a terribly ticklish feather—a very uncomfortable feeling. For the first time in a long while, a part of her had awoken with a question, a new one.

  “What’s next?”

  She had no clearer idea after she’d pulled on slicks and tromped out into the morning weather.

  Rain wasn’t a constant on the coast like most people thought; instead it was a whimsical force that often slid in from the ocean with little warning. More often than long steady pours, it arrived as brutal dumps, then moved on. Her rain gauge had counted sixty-five inches last year (three-point-two inches in one day was her record so far) and this year was right on track—January had been chilly and dry, but February had already more than made up for it in sheeting downpours. March had again been dry and surprisingly warm. Only time would tell what April would provide. Her Wednesday delivery day was a “typical” long, slow drizzle, just heavy enough to require she wear slicks and just warm enough that she cooked in them.

  She spent most of Thursday, after the storm system had thankfully moved inland and left behind a patchy gray overcast, shifting the goat pen. It was a challenging task as the goats were always so glad to see her that she could barely move as they clustered around. Maybe letting them learn that she always had some treat in her pockets had been a mistake. She doled out bits of early carrot and kale. Why in the world she’d ever planted kale she didn’t know. It was healthy, but tough and took forever to cook.

  Tiffany didn’t mind the crowding. The baby goats were calf-high and bounced about as if their legs were made of pogo sticks. She was out of names from Little Women. She considered Star Trek, but if she did, she’d run out after Uhura and Chapel and have to name them all for Kirk’s women. This year’s kids would be from Fiddler on the Roof. Soon Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava were all chasing Motel Kamzoil around the pen. If the last two were girls, they’d be Shprintze and Bielke; all five girls together again.

  She’d brought a couple of biscuits for Tall Guy, who she then teased about how she’d met another man. He’d nodded his big black muzzle and huffed out a sigh as if that was only to be expected, or perhaps because she’d only brought two biscuits.

  Devin was never far from her thoughts. There seemed to be an amplitude curve—the closer she worked to the west end of her property where the trail led to the lighthouse, the more aware of him she became. That’s part of why she was working on the goat pen to the east. She wasn’t exactly avoiding him, but she wasn’t seeking him out either. That the pen needed moving—well, almost—was only part of the excuse.

  Tiffany discovered that it was confusing to be attracted to a man again. It was as if that part of her had fallen so out of practice that the signals were constantly crossing. Social graces had never been one of her strengths but she’d gone out with a few nice guys in college and grad school, and “few” had been just fine with her. But with three years alone in the woods, she’d lost what little skills she’d had.

  Lunging at Devin when she’d wanted to kiss him…the memory made her wince at her own ineptness. A woman was supposed to be…what?

  “Well for one thing,” she told Beth, who had always been her favorite goat, a dainty gray with black boots and a white mask, “she’s not supposed to smell like a goat unless she is one.” Amy came over—all elegant in her pure, soft silver coat—because she always did when another goat was receiving attention. Tiffany knew that she wouldn’t smell of goat, she’d reek of it. She gave in and sat upon the drying grass to play with them and rest from the heavy work of moving the fence. Tall Guy took that as an invitation to come over and sit on her lap to keep her firmly in place.

  “At a hundred and thirty pounds, you are not a lap dog,” she groaned.

  In answer, he began beating her in the ribs with wags of his great tail.

  “A woman isn’t supposed to smell like a dog either,” but she scratched his ear as he kept her pinned to the wet grass.

  Another happy thump against her ribs.

  “I guess dog is better than goat.”

  As if she had a choice.

  Was there anything else she could do to be less attractive to her own species?

  Devin walked into the Puffin Bay Diner as it opened on Friday morning—and was nearly bowled over by Cal Sr. coming in on his heels.

  “I swear. This is the last time Junior ever gets to leave town on a honeymoon. That’s it. One time only.” Cal stormed up to the counter and called out to the Judge working over his grill. “Tall stack, John. And double up on the coffee, Greg,” he told the waiter, a slender man who might be the retired judge�
�s son.

  “Trouble at the bakery?” Greg poured him a mug.

  “Wasn’t paying enough attention these last few years. Junior has made all of these little expansions to our business, and dealt with ’em just fine without me really noticing. Now I’m making beer bread for the brewery, sourdough for our lunch service, pizza dough for Carrier Pigeon. The list goes on forever. And now Vincent McCall comes in wanting some kind of pretty cake for his tenth anniversary. Boy doesn’t have a clue what, which tells me that Dawn didn’t send him because she’d have included instructions—guess he’s finally thinking how to keep her happy, but now it’s making me unhappy as I can’t just call up the girl and ask what she wants.”

  “Do you have their wedding cake on file?” Mrs. Winslow asked from where she’d come in behind Devin. “Pineapple Upside Down Cake if I recall. A single tier, as they were very poor when they started out. I suggest that you add a second tier as a marker of their success in building a family.”

  “Great! Thanks, Maggie. You’re a wonder and that’s the truth.”

  “Tell that to my students. Are you planning to stand there all day, boy?” She said the last to Devin.

  “Uh, no, ma’am.” Devin got caught between a smile that she must quell her second graders and a wince at the admonition aimed his way. She waved him to one of the tables and, like a bad little boy, he headed for his corner.

  The Puffin Bay Diner was a classic diner plucked right out of the fifties. Worn linoleum flooring. A dozen battered Formica tables of indeterminate color. Fresh paint and a mixture of art on the walls. There were two main artists represented, and the work was exceptional by both. They were almost related, but the vision was so different that they had to be two people. Even Picasso from Blue to Cubism, as he’d seen at The Art Institute of Chicago, you could see the same hand.