"Why does Sidney think Randy is a girl?"
"Oh, it's a silly rule he has about hiring only women to work in Bagel Barns. I never got around to informing him that Randy is a teenage boy. Hey, Lindsay, I'll call you next week. I hear Nick coming up the steps."
"Right. Good luck, Martha."
"With what?"
"Everything, but especially Nick. And if you ever want to talk about anything, I'm here."
"Thanks, Lindsay. Talk to you soon." She hung up just as Nick came in the door.
He kissed her, then pulled away. She knew at once that he had something on his mind.
"I'd like to take you out to dinner tonight," he told her with a worried frown. "But I don't know if I can."
"Is something wrong?"
"I have to go over to Wanda's. One of Wanda's grandchildren called my office at the cannery and left a crazy mixed-up message about Wanda's falling downstairs. Hallie and Davey were visiting Wanda today, and neither of them was there when I called back. I couldn't make heads or tails out of the message, so I want to see what's going on."
"I'll go with you," Martha said.
"No need for that. I'll drive over to Wanda's house and call you if I can't get back in time to take you to dinner, if that's all right with you."
"Sure," Martha said. "I wanted to change clothes anyway. I spilled hot chocolate down the front of these jeans this afternoon."
"If you'd been wearing your apron like Sidney said—"
He kissed her goodbye. "I'll call you soon," he said before ducking out the door.
But it wasn't soon, and when he did call he sounded exasperated.
"Wanda put out her hands to break her fall and broke a wrist. She's just been sent home with some kind of contraption on her wrist, and Hallie is trying to cook supper for everyone. I've decided that the best thing to do is to leave Hallie here in Ketchikan and take Davey home to Williwaw Lodge."
"I'm so sorry," Martha said. She'd met Wanda once and liked her.
"Not only that, but Hallie doesn't think Wanda can manage by herself, and she wants to stay for at least a week. I don't feel that I can leave Davey, though, not with all these other kids around. He's smaller than most of them, and they can get pretty rowdy, especially if Wanda isn't right there to correct them."
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know. We left Bear at Williwaw Lodge this morning with a large supply of clams and oysters, but he's due to run out of food, so I have to go home and feed him. I want to take Davey with me, but Bear and Davey together are a lot to handle alone, and—" Nick was interrupted by a crash and a loud wail. "You see what I mean about how the kids get out of hand," he said.
"Why don't I come to Williwaw Lodge with you? I can at least look after Bear while you take care of Davey. I could even spend the night if you'd like."
"What about work tomorrow?"
"You have to come into town to go to the cannery, right? I'll come in with you on the Tabor."
"Davey could go over to Wanda's tomorrow, I suppose," Nick said. "When the bigger kids are out playing or fishing or whatever, he'll play with the younger ones as usual." A hurried consultation with Hallie ensued.
"Hallie says it's a good idea for you to go to Williwaw Lodge. She says that the sheets for the guest room are in the bottom drawer of the dresser."
"So I have Hallie's approval, do I? Tell her I won't be sleeping in the guest room."
"Uh, no. I'll pick you up in a few minutes."
Martha hung up in a bemused frame of mind. She could have sworn that Hallie had said something in the background involving "married" and "a wife."
Chapter 12
Nick and Martha arrived at Williwaw Lodge to discover that Bear was crying and out of food. Davey, with a big happy smile on his face, leaned over the pen Nick had contrived for Bear in a corner of the kitchen, petting Bear while Bear barked and whistled and Nick unloaded more clams and oysters from the Tabor. Davey seemed entranced.
"Being in the seafood business certainly has its advantages," Nick said as they watched Bear floating in his bathtub and eating clams. Bear was almost completely weaned now and existed mostly on solid food.
Martha was inspecting the jar of earthworms she and Davey had dug up some weeks ago when Davey suddenly said, "More oysters, Nick! Bear needs more!"
She almost dropped the jar in surprise.
Nick regained his composure first. "Yes, Davey, Bear certainly does need more oysters. Here, I'll give him some." He tossed a few more oysters in the tub. Davey clapped his hands in glee as Bear gobbled them down.
"I didn't know Davey had been talking like that!" Martha remarked in an undertone after drawing Nick aside.
"No more than the usual four words. That was the most he's ever said. It's the closest Davey has ever come to normal speech!" Nick beamed excitedly.
"What should we do?" She was thoroughly enjoying this.
"Just respond normally. Act as though he's always talked. We'll reward Davey by giving him more leads, more questions he might want to answer. Like this—" More loudly this time, Nick said, "Would you like to put the oysters in the tub next time, Davey?"
But Davey only nodded his head up. His eyes lit up with delight, though, as the oysters fell from his hands into the water and Bear splashed after them.
Nick and Martha watched Davey and Bear play together, surreptitiously holding hands. It was fun to share the experience, and Martha smiled up at Nick, glad that they had brought this about.
After a while, Davey seemed to be tiring. "Davey, time for your bath," Nick said.
"Bear," Davey said. It was clear that he wanted Bear to take a bath with him.
"No, Bear has his tub and you have yours," responded Nick.
"Bear!"
"No, Davey." Nick took Davey firmly by the hand and led him away to the bathroom. Davey followed with only one backward glance at his pet. After his bath, Davey again ran back into the kitchen to see how Bear was faring. Bear regarded Davey with soulful eyes, twitching his whiskers and looking altogether lovable.
"They're so adorable together, Nick," Martha said.
"Davey has certainly taken to Bear," Nick agreed. "He spends lots of time just watching him. Hallie says that he's responded to Bear better than anything else she's ever tried, even other kids."
"Davey may feel intimidated by other children," Martha said, thinking of the hubbub at Wanda's house. "An animal is probably much less threatening. It doesn't talk, so it's like him. Bear is good for Davey."
Davey made no protest when Nick took him to his room for a story and bedtime, and afterward Nick piled logs in the fireplace and lit a big fire. He and Martha sat in front of it, holding hands and sharing thoughts.
"This is what my mother and father used to do when my brothers and I were kids. I used to get out of bed at night and find them in front of the fire, talking and holding hands. I thought it was silly and sappy then." He smiled.
"And now?"
"Now I think it's sweet and sentimental," he admitted. "I've never done it with anyone else."
This admission surprised her. "Surely you've brought other women here," she said.
"No," he said after a moment. "After my brothers married, it was just my dad and me and Hallie at Williwaw Lodge. And after my father died, it was just Hallie and me. I never knew a woman I'd feel comfortable bringing here."
"Why, Nick," Martha said, touched at his admission.
"You know what Hallie said tonight after you and I were talking on the phone," he said in a low voice.
"What?"
"She said she'd always hoped I'd get married and bring a wife to Williwaw Lodge. She said if she were going to choose the woman, it would be you."
Martha hardly knew what to say. She and Nick had never even talked about marriage, and he seemed to be signaling her in an oblique way that he was ready to explore the subject. She felt a pang of worry as she wondered how that conversation would go, what he would say, and how she'd reply.
Marry Nick? she thought, but then the idea dissolved and swirled away, eclipsed by the joy of being with him. When it occurred to her again much later, she was sure that he couldn't have meant it.
* * *
Hallie insisted that she couldn't leave Wanda, so Martha was still living at Williwaw Lodge two weeks later. She slept with Nick in his big bed, both of them glorying in their nightly lovemaking, but she crept to the guest room in the wee hours of the morning. Nick worried about the effect it would have on Davey if he woke up to find Martha in Nick's bed. Martha agreed with him. She didn't want Davey's burgeoning development to suffer any setback.
And Davey was becoming more outgoing day by day.
He began to talk haltingly in sentences by the end of the second week Martha was there. They were short sentences, and sometimes he didn't speak for hours. His infrequent smiles were brief, but at least he was smiling. The most promising sign was that Davey was beginning to communicate with words, and his eyes were beginning to lose that unexplained hidden pain in their depths.
Hallie, with whom Davey stayed at Wanda's during the daytime when Nick and Martha were at work, was ecstatic at this turnaround in Davey's behavior.
"It's because of you, Martha," she said. "You're so warm and friendly—so good with him—that he couldn't help responding."
"No," Martha demurred. "Davey's not talking because of anything I did. If Davey has improved, it's because of his visits to Dr. Whitmer. And maybe because of Bear."
Davey continued to open up to the little sea otter in a way that neither Nick nor Martha would have believed possible. The first thing Davey did when he arrived home at the lodge every evening was to dash into the kitchen to see how Bear was doing. He clapped his hands to applaud Bear's antics; he dug clams on the beach for Bear's dinner. He would sit holding Bear as long as Bear would be still, stroking Bear's silky gray-brown fur.
When Nick took Davey to Juneau to see Dr. Whitmer for their next appointment, Nick came back with glowing reports.
"Dr. Whitmer told me about something called pet therapy," he told Martha. "Psychologists have found that lots of people respond to pets when they don't respond to anything else. Elderly people who are lonely or unhappy often become more optimistic after they get a dog or a cat. Kids with behavior problems or trauma in their backgrounds begin to feel more comfortable about themselves when they have a pet. Dr. Whitmer thinks that Bear is playing an important role in Davey's development."
"I thought you weren't going to keep Bear," Martha said.
"I've agreed to let the fish-and-wildlife people release Bear in a colony of sea otters when he's old enough," Nick said. "I don't know how to break the news to Davey that Bear will leave us eventually."
Martha, who had spent time getting to know both Davey and Bear, said, "Let me talk to him about it."
"All right," Nick agreed.
Martha found a book about sea otters in the children's section of the Ketchikan library, and she brought it back to Williwaw Lodge one night. Davey listened with wide eyes as she read it to him.
The book told about the life cycle of sea otters, and it showed wonderful color pictures of a newborn sea otter and one that had just been weaned. The one that had been weaned looked just like Bear, and Martha pointed out that soon this bigger otter would go away and start a family of its own.
"Bear will go away someday, too," she told Davey. "He will grow up and want to be with other sea otters."
"Not today," Davey said with a worried look.
"No, not today. After a lot of tomorrows, though. Bear will want to go play with his friends in the ocean, like you go to play with your friends at Wanda's," Martha said.
"Oh," Davey said. He patted the picture on the page of the book. "This looks like Bear."
"Maybe Nick would take pictures of you and Bear together so that you'll always have a picture of him. We could hang the picture in your room."
Davey grinned at that.
"Why don't you go ask Nick to take a picture of Bear while he eats tonight? And of Bear sitting in your lap while you rub his stomach?"
"Okay," Davey said, and he ran away to find Nick.
Martha closed the book, hoping she'd said all the right things. It was so hard to know with Davey. Communication was so new to him and he was so much in the habit of concealing his feelings that she wasn't always sure if she was getting her point across.
Nick took several pictures of Bear alone and of Bear and Davey together. Martha bought frames for the pictures, and they hung the best ones on the wall of Davey's room. One night while Bear was napping, Davey, under Martha's direction, sat at the kitchen table and pasted the other pictures of Bear in a big scrapbook.
"How do you know how to do all the things you do with Davey?" Nick asked.
Martha shrugged. "Having a mother who taught kindergarten probably helped. Mother was always thinking up ways to teach her students. I helped her sometimes with the preparations, like mixing paints and binding construction paper into scrapbooks for the kids."
"You're a natural-born mother," he said, thinking that when he'd first observed her on the dock in Ketchikan looking so glossy and sophisticated and assembling bagels so efficiently he never would have guessed it.
"My only connection with children so far is that I'm an honorary aunt to my former roommate's daughter," insisted Martha, but nevertheless, Nick's admiration for her ability to handle Davey couldn't help but grow.
As for Martha, Davey was rapidly becoming one of her enthusiasms. She could hardly wait to see him running down the steps at Wanda's house when she and Nick picked him up every evening.
"He adores you," Hallie insisted when she accompanied Davey out to the car one time.
"Oh, I like him a lot, too," Martha said, understating the facts. To tell the truth, she had fallen in love with Davey's pudgy little cheeks, his almond-shaped eyes, which were so often brightened by a smile these days, and with the attention she got from him.
Martha knew now why people wanted kids. The unquestioning adoration in their eyes when they gazed up at you, the funny little things they said and did, and what she had begun to think of as their cuddability when they snuggled against you to be read to at bedtime—all these things brought a new maturity and understanding to Martha that she had never experienced before.
She explained to Nick that she had coined the word cuddable to be applied to Davey, but Nick only laughed and said that if anyone was cuddable it was Martha. She was glad he felt that way, but a child was infinitely more cuddable than she was, she was sure.
All the while she was forging this incredible new bond with Davey, Martha continued to run the Bagel Barn. The running of the business continued to be a challenge, and she enjoyed dealing with her customers. She had become friends with Randy, who never ceased to amaze her with his versatility and originality.
For example, one morning Martha walked up the dock after arriving on the Tabor with Nick and Davey to find a new sign posted on the side of the Bagel Barn. The sign said Free Cookies Tomorrow.
She confronted a grinning Randy with an incredulous look on her face.
"What in the world are you doing, Randy, promising free cookies tomorrow?"
"Oh, it's just a way to get customers to stop. They're going to be curious, right? And the sign says Free Cookies Tomorrow, right?"
"Well, yes, but—"
"So if the sign always says Free Cookies Tomorrow we don't give away free cookies today. Tomorrow is always tomorrow. The sign always says it'll be tomorrow. And they'll have to buy the cookies today to find out if they want to come back for free cookies tomorrow. Most of our passengers come off cruise ships, anyway. They won't be back the next day."
Martha stifled a laugh. This was one case in which she couldn't allow Randy's spirit of enterprise to prevail.
"Take the sign down,
Randy," she directed. "I'm much more interested in the cookies we'll sell today rather than the free ones we're giving away tomorrow, even if tomorrow never comes."
Chagrined, Randy took down the sign and replaced it with one that said Chocolate-Chip Cookie Special. That day they sold more cookies than on any other day.
"I'll have to double the recipe again tonight," Martha said. "It seems as if I just can't bake them fast enough."
"Your cookies outsold the bagels today," observed Randy as he thumbed through a stack of five-dollar bills.
"They've caught on with the townspeople, too," Martha said. "I used to think that the locals bought them just to get a look at the woman Nick Novak is seeing, but they keep coming back for more, so I guess that's not it."
"You should be proud of yourself for developing the recipe."
"I'm getting tired of baking cookies. It used to be more fun when I lived alone in my apartment. Baking the cookies was something to fill the lonely hours. But now that I'm at Williwaw Lodge with Nick and Davey, it's all I can do to bake enough."
Martha enlisted Nick and Davey in her cookie-baking efforts. Davey, who still loved chocolate better than anything except perhaps Bear, was a help in fetching spoons and utensils. Nick could mix the recipe and do almost everything that Martha could do, although it took him longer. Together they spent every night in Hallie's little kitchen baking batch after batch of chocolate-chip cookies. The aroma of cookies filled the air at Williwaw Lodge. Nick loved it.
"This old lodge finally smells like I've always thought a home ought to smell," he told Martha.
"I guess it's better than the smell of fish," she said with a little laugh, because that was how the cannery smelled. Nick could only agree.
All in all, Martha's presence had made a big difference at Williwaw Lodge. Whereas before Nick had had to force himself to visit with Hallie after Davey had gone to bed, he now looked forward to that quiet period as a time when he could be alone with Martha. The atmosphere at the lodge since Martha had arrived was cheerful. It was never tense. If a problem arose—for instance, when Davey once refused to take his bath and lapsed into a temper tantrum—Martha handled it with characteristic understanding and efficiency.
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