“I noticed you got furniture,” he said to Nora. The living room was still spartan, but there was a small sofa and a side chair in it now. There was a table in the dining area, too.
Dr. Walsh surveyed the space with narrowed eyes. “What a dump.”
“Thanks, Grandma,” Nora said with affection in her voice. She turned to Jake. “My grandma is not known for suffering fools.”
“When you suffer fools, you suffer,” Dr. Walsh said. “And who wants to suffer?”
“Amen. And here’s to not suffering any more fools,” Erin said with a pointed look at Nora.
“Yeah, yeah,” Nora said, and he could only surmise that they were talking about her ex.
“Don’t worry, Dr. Walsh,” he said, “I’m going to help your granddaughter get this place into better shape.”
“I like him,” she said, pointing to him but speaking to Nora, who was headed for the kitchen. “Just this morning the UPS guy called me Penny. Can you imagine? I had to correct him. I earned my title.”
“Our grandma graduated from medical school in 1962,” Erin said. “She was one of Canada’s first female cardiac surgeons. There’s even a procedure named after her.”
“The Walsh repair,” Dr. Walsh said. “It’s a particular suturing technique for valve replacements.”
“That’s impressive. Clearly you inspired your granddaughter.”
“Nah,” Nora called from the kitchen. “Grandma is not impressed with family medicine. Real doctors cut people up.”
“That’s right!” Dr. Walsh yelled, even as she smiled at him and shook her head to show she was teasing. “My son—these girls’ dad—is a doctor, too. So is their older brother.”
“Wow. And what about you?” Jake asked Erin. “Did you go into the family business, too?”
“Heck, no,” Erin said. “I’m an accountant.”
“Every family needs its black sheep.” Dr. Walsh patted her granddaughter’s hand.
The affection among the three women was palpable, even as they razzed each other. It made Jake smile. It reminded him a little of the happy days of his childhood, when his mom had been alive and his brother still lived in town. They hadn’t been as snarky-smart as this family, but they’d known how to have fun, passing long, happy summer days in the cove.
He had been so looking forward to Jude getting older, so they could have adventures, too. Inside jokes.
Sadness settled on him like a blanket. But in so doing, it made him realize that it hadn’t been there earlier. He and Mick had passed an hour without him thinking about Jude.
He…didn’t know how to feel about that.
Nora appeared from the kitchen with a stack of glasses and a container from the town’s famous beachside lemonade stand. “Jake, you want to join us for some lemonade? We stopped at Legg’s in our outings today.”
He started to demur, but Dr. Walsh the elder patted the sofa next to her. “You might as well stay. You’re going to have to heft me down those stairs in about ten minutes.”
He sat and accepted a glass of lemonade from Nora.
“So,” her grandma said. “Is this thing you two have going a romantic thing?”
Nora choked on her lemonade and started coughing. “Oh my God, no.”
“Sexual?”
“Grandma.”
“What? I’m just asking.”
“Grandma, I just got out of a five-year relationship.”
“With an asshole.”
“What difference does that make?”
“Maybe you get over assholes faster.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I never dated any assholes.”
“Okay,” Erin said to Dr. Walsh. “Down, girl.”
“We’re just friends, Dr. Walsh,” Jake said.
He paused to consider that he hadn’t made a new friend in years. And that he hadn’t had sex since Kerrie.
He hadn’t thought he was in the market for either of those things. But look at him now: he had a new friend.
“Anyway, I told you,” Nora said, “I’ve declared a moratorium on boys. Dating, romance, all of it. The whole point of being here is to clear my head. Ponder my history of bad judgment.”
“You’ve put yourself in a time-out,” Dr. Walsh said.
He could see Nora gearing up to protest, but she cracked a smile instead. “That’s actually exactly right. I’ve been thinking of it more as a palate cleanser, or a life reset, but time-out works, too.”
“That’s all fine and good,” Erin said, pointing mock-sternly at Nora. “But don’t forget the other point of being here. Saving money. Have your woo-woo feelings, but save your pennies while you’re doing it.”
“Right.” Nora turned to Jake. “My sister and her kids and I are going to get a house together in a couple years.”
He remembered that from the salon, from the first day they’d met.
“Now that she doesn’t have to live with Doofus—oops, I mean Rufus—anymore, we’re going to pool our resources,” Erin said.
“My grandma lived next door to us when we were kids.” Nora cuddled up to her grandma on the sofa. “So we’re into the whole extended-family-in-close-proximity thing.”
Dr. Walsh smirked as she kissed Nora’s head. “This is the part where I should probably invite you girls to move in with me, but my condo is small, and honestly, I got the whole extended-family-in-close-proximity thing out of my system.”
Erin shook her head affectionately. “I hate to be the party pooper, but we should go.” She turned to her grandmother. “You have your group this evening.”
“Cancer survivors support group,” Dr. Walsh said to Jake. She rolled her eyes. “Honestly. In my day they cut out your tumor, blasted you with chemo, and called it a day. Now, they want you to talk about your feelings nonstop.”
“My mom died of cancer,” he said. Because apparently the Walsh family had the effect of making him blurt out his tales of woe and dead relatives.
“What kind?” Dr. Walsh asked.
“Breast.”
She nodded. “Same here. It’s a bitch.”
“It really is.” He still remembered the cutting news of his mom’s diagnosis, coming so soon after Jude died. Grief layered on grief.
“All right, Mr. Pack Mule Knight in Shining Armor.” Dr. Walsh held her arms out to him. “Get me out of here. I have to go talk about my feelings about my missing boobs.”
He chuckled and did as she asked. Erin ran ahead and opened the car door. Just as he was about to set Dr. Walsh on her feet, she tugged his head down so his ear was next to her mouth.
“She’s not as tough as she seems. You take care of her, okay, Jake?”
“Yeah,” he whispered. “You got it.”
Nora jogged down the steps, and hugs and farewells were exchanged. Soon she was waving at the car as it backed out of the driveway.
“Sorry,” she said. “My grandmother is a force.”
“Nah, she’s great.”
“She is great. Honestly, I think I miss her more than anyone else in Toronto. She was widowed early—that’s why she lived with us when I was growing up. So she was like a second mother. Except, you know, the kind who made you practice stitches on a banana when you were eleven.”
The car disappeared around a corner at the end of the block, and Nora turned back to the house. “What do you say we splash some bourbon into that lemonade and sit for a bit?”
“I say that sounds like a great idea.”
Once they were settled on the deck, she heaved a sigh. “Oh my God, I’m exhausted. I had no idea getting the clinic ready was going to be such a production.” She suddenly perked up. “But you know what?”
“What?”
“I was telling Karl Andersen about the chair we painted, saying how well it turned out and how I wished I had another one, because one chair is sort of sad. Well, he shows up early this morning with another one! Like, not exactly the same kind, but same vintage, you know? Metal, with those swooshy armrest things. I left it at the clini
c because I had my sister and grandma arriving, but I’m totally going to paint it to match that one”—she pointed—“now that I know how.”
“You remember when you asked me why everyone was being so nice to you?” he asked, thinking back to his aborted trip to the bar a week ago. “You asked me what the catch was. The catch is that a large proportion of this town will be all up in your business the moment you give them an inch.”
“Yeah, I heard. I also heard that one of these meddlers is your dad.”
“My dad is like one of those old guys who retired and didn’t know what to do with himself, so he started hanging out with this crew of old folks at the hardware store a couple years ago. A year after that, bam, he had a new wife.” She shot a worried glance at him, and he rushed to clarify. “Which is a good thing. She’s good for him and to him. I like her a lot. My point was just that yeah, they got to him and now he’s one of them.”
“You make it sound like zombies.”
He barked a laugh. He wasn’t used to laughing, but Nora sometimes had the most spot-on rejoinders. “It’s exactly like zombies.”
“Well, I’ve been warned about them already, but this chair thing made me think that maybe a meddling pack of old people could be exploited for good. I mean, can I just tell Karl or Pearl that I’m, say, missing my mom’s chili, and voilà, I’ll suddenly have chili?”
He smiled. “Probably, but you should remember that they’ll be playing a long game. They might give you chairs and chili, but it will be in service of a larger scheme to trap you here. You’re only planning to stay two years, right?”
While they drank, she told him she was taking advantage of a program that would help her get rid of her student debt and that since the cost of living was so much lower here, she was hoping to save a bunch of money to help with the down payment she and her sister would need. She smirked. “Well, it’s partly that. There’s also the part where I fled my entire life after it imploded.”
“The new chapter,” he said, thinking back to her using that phrase when they were talking about the Tigers.
“Exactly. Anyway, my point is that I’ve been very open with everyone, including Pearl and Karl, about the fact that I have a two-year lease on the clinic. I’m gonna get my head on straight, pay down my debt, and then I’m leaving.”
“That’s what you say now.”
“What are they going to do? Tie me up?”
“No, but they’ll try to make you put roots down however they can, including, probably, by trying to matchmake you with someone.” He didn’t outright tell her that “someone” was Jason Sims. She’d figure it out soon enough.
“A hard no to that.” She made a jokey retching noise. “I’m definitely not in relationship mode right now.” Her eyes narrowed. “Wait. Was the deck part of this? Is the fence part of this?” She pointed at him. “Are you a secret agent of the town busybodies?”
“Nope. I stay out of it. We have an unspoken truce. They leave me alone. I think they think I’m beyond help with my tragic history and all.”
“Oh, right. Of course. Sorry.”
He shrugged. “Don’t be. I’m basically the only person in town they don’t try to mess with.” He huffed a bitter laugh. “I guess that’s the one perk of having a dead kid.”
He waited for a hint that the waves were coming. For the feeling that he needed to get out of here, to go home and sit by the lake and be with his boy and try to hold off the waves—or at least anchor himself to endure them. He had become familiar enough with this feeling to know that certain sets of circumstances triggered it. One of them was heavier-than-usual doses of socializing. And Nora’s family, for him, had been a heavier-than-usual dose of socializing.
The feeling—that warning bell of a feeling—didn’t come.
Another one did, though. That feeling of communion he sometimes had at home, only occasionally, only when he was very, very lucky. It was a sense that Jude was here somehow, even though Jake knew, objectively, that was ridiculous.
But the point was, Nora’s presence didn’t preclude that feeling. Being here in her backyard, instead of by the lake, didn’t preclude it. There wasn’t a precedent for that.
Nora laid her palm on the back of his hand. “I don’t think there are any perks to having a dead kid.”
“No. No, there aren’t.” He paused and took in her small fingers, tipped with short, slightly squared nails. Everyone was always telling him that he needed to learn how to cope with his loss. They had all kinds of bullshit phrases that sounded nice but didn’t actually mean anything. Move through your grief. Let go. What those people, suffocating him with their grasping and scheming, didn’t understand was that he didn’t need to move on. He needed to hold on, even if holding on came with a cost. Came with the waves. “Some people try to see silver linings,” he said. “They talk about God’s plan or God opening a window or some shit.”
She moved her hand to pick up her lemonade. He kind of wanted her not to do that. He kind of wanted her to keep resting that small, capable hand on top of his.
She took a sip of her lemonade. “Well, fuck those people.”
He smiled. Exactly.
When Jake got home late that night, Eve and Sawyer were swimming in the lake near his house. Jake lived in a little cottage on the beach in a small, hidden cove. His grandparents had built the place back when the town was a lot smaller than it was today. They, and later his parents, had treated it as a sort of getaway, visiting mostly on the weekends. Probably because getting to Paradise Cove was a bit of a production. The only way in was on foot, and you had to walk out and around a rocky outcropping that separated the cove from the lake proper.
He had followed in their footsteps initially, keeping a place in town and coming to the cottage with Kerrie and Jude to watch the odd sunset. Kerrie had always been more of a people person, and the isolation got to her. The same way he needed quiet to feel okay, Kerrie had thrived off the energy of other people. But once she’d gone back to work, he and Jude and Daisy had come here almost every day, splashing in the shallows and retreating inside for stories and lunch when the sun got too strong.
Then, when Jude and Kerrie were both gone, he’d moved out here for good.
“Hey.” Sawyer was wading in to shore.
“Don’t mind me,” Jake said, heading for the cottage. He, like his parents before him, didn’t mind townspeople using the beach. Sawyer had taught Eve how to swim here last year, and he suspected the two of them had mushy feelings about the place—which he had no desire to know about. He was all for them taking a moonlight swim, but he didn’t need to witness it.
“We missed you at the bar tonight.”
Oh, shit. It was Friday. He’d completely forgotten.
Well, he hadn’t forgotten. He’d known it was Friday—or he’d started the day knowing it was Friday, anyway. He’d finished installing some built-in shelves in Bayshore and had gone to Nora’s place intending to finish the fence and head downtown to Law’s.
But then Nora’s family happened. She happened. And apparently, all his plans just evaporated from his brain.
“Yeah, I didn’t feel like it tonight.”
Which wasn’t really a lie. What he had felt like doing tonight was sitting on Nora’s deck, the deck he’d built for her, and listening to her say, “Fuck those people.” They’d spent the whole evening out there, talking as they watched the stars come out.
“A bunch of us are going out on Law’s boat tomorrow. We thought we’d introduce Nora Walsh to some people beyond the usual Friday-night crew. Make her feel welcome. I know you never want to come to this kind of stuff, but you know I’m going to persist in inviting you.”
“What time?”
Sawyer raised his eyebrows. “Four. At the marina.”
Eve splashed up. “Are you coming?” She and Sawyer shared a look Jake couldn’t decode.
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I don’t have anything better to do.”
By the next weekend—the lo
ng Labor Day weekend—Nora was beginning to think that there were two versions of Jake. There was Friend Jake, who, although he was far from chatty, was thoughtful and, she would even go so far as to say, charming in his own quiet, low-key way.
Then there was Public Jake. Public Jake didn’t talk unless he was asked a direct question. On the boat ride last weekend, for example, he’d been as silent and grumpy as the one time they’d overlapped at the bar.
And today, the day of the infamous Mermaid Parade, he was practically mute, to use Maya’s characterization.
But to be fair, maybe that was because he was busy. On the boat ride, he had agreed to be the brawn to Maya’s brains—Maya had been cooking up schemes for the vaccine information table Nora was planning for outside the clinic. She was really gung ho about designing it, and frankly, Nora was happy to let her run with it.
The funny thing was that there were a few different ways a person could interpret vaccine information table. Nora had—call her crazy—imagined a table. With some information. And yes, probably some pretty signs or maybe even some balloons.
Maya, however, had interpreted vaccine information table by sourcing a nearly dead used van from this guy Jordan who owned an auto shop in town. She had enlisted Pearl to help paint and decorate it, though the word decorate did not seem to do justice to what had occurred.
“Welcome to the Vaccine Machine!” Maya exclaimed, waving her arms in the air like a game-show hostess.
“The concept is based on the Mystery Machine from Scooby-Doo,” Pearl said while Nora stood there with her mouth hanging open, “But with mermaids.”
“Mermaids getting shots,” Maya added.
The outlandishness of the van, they theorized, would attract attention. They were not wrong about that.
“Wow,” Nora said. The van was painted aqua and lime green, like its Scooby-Doo namesake. But it was also painted with mermaids—mermaids getting shots, just as Maya had promised/threatened.
“Oh my,” Eve said, laughter in her voice—the bar crowd was on hand for the unveiling. “This sure is…something.”
Law snorted.
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