Lie indeed. Cassidy couldn’t believe she’d swallowed Russell’s invitation—hook and all.
Cassidy and Jo joined Betsy and Perry for iced tea. It was bitter on her tongue as she watched Teri bend and flex while she worked with the ropes.
And Russell didn’t stop watching Teri for a moment.
Cassidy moved to the bow once they’d anchored, wishing she’d had the foresight to bring a book. It was an idyllic setting. Night was falling and Seattle was a shining backdrop as the last of the daylight was replaced by sparkling office and apartment lights. Myrtle Edwards Park was a throbbing mass of people—half the population of Seattle must be jammed in there to watch the fireworks. A band cranked out some serious dance tunes that made her feet twitch despite how she was feeling.
A hundred or more boats clustered as close to the fireworks barge as the police would allow. There were power yachts that must be over a hundred feet long and three stories tall. In between them ski boats, fishing skiffs, and two-person sailboats scuttled around while a massive three-masted sailboat cruised by in deeper water. She wanted to ask about it, but that would mean facing Russell and the permanent attachment to his hip. Teri had staked her territory and Russell played along as if everything was completely normal.
How had she so misjudged him? Perrin had been right. Jo had simply shaken her head sadly, even before Cassidy could ask the question. It wasn’t her imagination. At some point, she’d have to return to the cockpit and watch Teri continue to work at seducing Russell. For all she knew, Russell had been consoling her in the night since her ex had departed. She could easily imagine the woman producing big rolling tears that would drip down onto her heaving bosom, all on cue.
At least she hadn’t invited him to the condo. There it was, she looked shoreward, not a dozen blocks away. A dozen blocks to safety and a hundred yards of freezing water she couldn’t cross. It might as well be a hundred miles. She was good and surely trapped.
“Pretty boat.”
The voice came from a canoe close beside the catamaran. A pair of boys in their teens were looking at the boat the same way Teri was tracking Russell.
“Thanks. Um, but it’s not mine.”
“Still, it’s cool.”
“Yeah, cool.”
She’d rather be anywhere than here.
“Where are you guys from?”
“Wenatchee, you know, east of the mountains.”
She did; it was a huge grape growing area. “Did you paddle the whole way?”
The one in front rolled his eyes, but the one in the stern laughed.
“Nah, just the last little bit. We parked pretty close this morning.” He nodded toward the beach.
There was a flash and a thump from the barge. A thin trail of sparks soared upward. She followed it and was rewarded by a huge flash. A moment later the bang arrived so loud and hard she could feel it as much against her chest as her eardrums.
Sometimes the answer was so obvious, it was hard to believe she hadn’t had it earlier in the long, weary evening. She looked over her shoulder and saw Jo look her direction. Dave, Betsy, and Perry were chatting quietly. Russell and Teri were nowhere to be seen. They must be down below together, doing what she didn’t want to know.
Cassidy rocked her head toward the canoe.
Jo glanced over, paused for a moment and nodded. She made a shooing motion with one hand that none of the others noticed.
Cassidy tilted her head in a question.
Jo nodded again. She was sure.
“Hey, guys.” They were both still staring upward like frogs dazzled by a flashlight.
“Yeah?”
“I’m not feeling real well. Could you give me a lift to the beach?”
“Now?”
“Uh-huh.”
They both shrugged. “Sure, climb on in, lady.”
Moments later, as the second warning boomed overhead, she stepped onto terra firma and felt much better.
“Thanks, guys, you’re great.” She kissed each on the cheek. The one in front groaned, but the one in the stern leaned into the kiss for a moment.
“Any time, lady, any—”
The first big firework cut off his sentence as it soared aloft and burst like a huge chrysanthemum.
She was the only one moving away from the beach as flecks of colored light flew through the sky and lit the upturned faces before her. She didn’t turn back to look for the sailboat.
“Hi, this is Cassidy.”
“Hi, Cassidy. This is Russell. Look, I feel—”
“I’ll be out of town for the next couple weeks, but I will be checking for messages. Thanks.”
There was a nasty little beep.
“Aah!”
Nutcase scrambled away from where he’d thumped his hand on the table.
“No, that isn’t what I meant. Look, um, could you give me a call?”
Unbelievable! He was so abysmally hopeless.
“No, you won’t will you.”
He wouldn’t either if he was her.
“Look, your friend Jo, she read me the riot act. I had no idea. Every time I tried to get near you, you ran off.”
Good trick on a sailboat. He’d stopped chasing as soon as he got the message that she wanted nothing to do with him.
Jo had actually laughed in his face when he’d said that.
“I didn’t even notice Teri. She isn’t anywhere near your league. She’s just a lonely kid.”
He was sounding really pathetic. There had to be some way to cancel this message.
“Cassidy, I didn’t…” but he had. “I wanted to… I wanted to spend some time with you when I wasn’t being freaked out by my parents. I wanted—”
A beep cut him off.
He heard the click as his cell phone disconnected the dead call.
“Miss Knowles.”
“Cassidy.”
“Cassidy, thanks. You said that there are wines that aren’t real types of wine? I don’t understand that.”
Thirty-five students of the Culinary Institute of America eagerly awaited her answer. She always had a great time at the CIA summer-series classes. About the end of the first week, she couldn’t imagine why she didn’t move back to New York to live along the Hudson River and teach oenology. Invariably, by the end of the second week, she remembered why she never did. But this was the first week and her session had been booked out within hours of the class announcement. At least a dozen of the staff stood along the back wall to listen in.
She’d once sat in those chairs and listened just as eagerly to Craig Claiborne when he’d deigned to lecture. She was standing where Craig had stood and Palmer and Prudhomme and a host of other greats before her. She was either really good or fooling everyone.
“There are new wines all the time. Traditionally, the types of wine were based on grape and region. Bordeaux still only comes from Bordeaux, France. So, here you are, a new wine producer. You want to make your mark. What do you call your wine?”
“You just make up a name?” He was perhaps twenty years old, way too young. Sitting in the first row. Over the phone the night before, she’d bet Jo fifty cents that he’d chat her up afterward. He was ever so cute and he knew it.
“They’re called varietals. They have some of this grape, a bit of that. No one knows exactly what, except their vintner of course, and she’ll know to the nearest thousand pounds what grapes are used. Nearest hundred if they’re really good.” Not that she could tell. Curse Russell for being right. She didn’t really know what happened behind the scenes. Didn’t know the life of any wine at the level a vintner did. She’d spent an entire career in wine always a step back, a step away from the heart of the process. Even worse, away from the process that had been so important to her father.
“So, the vintner declares their wine by the grape, or doesn’t. I recently tasted a Sangiovese from a cliffside winery in Cinque Terre. The grape wasn’t labeled because Sangiovese is not much help to separate the winery from the herd—it makes up
over ten percent of the total Italian grape crop, a quarter of a million acres. Instead the winery labeled it, ‘Pizza Wine.’ It was simple, clear, and to-the-point marketing.”
Cassidy didn’t want a “pizza wine” fling anyway, and that’s all the cute student would be, but still it was flattering.
“Suddenly we have the ‘pizza wine’ grape. Or the ‘Fume Blanc,’ which sounds grander. But in either case it means whatever the vintner wants it to mean. Marketing. The higher end wines are generally true to their grape, Cabernet Sauvignon for example. Note that I said higher end, not necessarily better. Wine is matched to meal, occasion, and palate. A $28,000 magnum of Romanee Conti ’85 probably won’t be nearly as good a match for pizza as that twelve dollar varietal. But you don’t often compare a burgundy grand cru with a bit of Sangiovese marketing.”
Was that what Russell was doing with his daily phone messages? A bit of cheap marketing. Or had she really misread the situation?
Jo, even patient Jo, was getting tired of her long distance second-guessing.
Russell’s first message had been desperate. Then he’d left three more trying to explain he hadn’t noticed what Teri was doing before giving it up as a bad cause. She’d thought that was the last of him.
The next day, a new message. One deliberately lighter, much less assertive, but also less unsure. The history of the Mukilteo lighthouse. He’d done some digging. One hundred and fourteen weddings there since it was decommissioned. An admiral who couldn’t sleep at night because a fog horn sensor went off whenever the moonlight reflected off the white seawall. He had the wall painted black so he could get his sleep.
The day after that, no call from him. Instead, an invitation from his mom to drop down to New York for the weekend, a quick two-hour train ride.
The day after that, a poem that had nothing to do with wine, boat, or lighthouse, but rather flowers, hummingbirds, and wings beating with love—all read in his wonderful deep voice. Way over the top, but so charming she was still weak in the knees. Or maybe in the head.
She didn’t want to call him back and have to tell him to stop. Admit it Cassidy, you don’t want him to stop.
She didn’t notice when, at the end of class, the young questioner did indeed try to engage her attention. She walked away and left him talking to empty air.
Even before she was clear of the building, she’d pulled out her cell phone to see what Russell’s message was.
“One more chance.”
There was a silence on the phone to Cassidy’s opening salvo.
“Are you there?”
“Yes, just trying to catch my breath.” The sound of reprieve in Russell’s voice couldn’t have been greater if a firing squad had just been ordered back to barracks.
“Your mom was great by the way. They took me to the Four Seasons and completely spoiled me.”
“She’s good at that.”
“So?” She’d waited until she was home to call. Waited until his messages repeated themselves in her head so much she couldn’t sleep. Messages about the success and closing of his business. Of his childhood dreams to go sailing. Of the progress of his cat on her never-ending quest for the perfect nap. All passed on in two-minute clips allowed by her voicemail. At first he’d stumbled, been cut off, beeped out in mid-word. By the end of two weeks of silence on her part, he had the timing down. Each message ended with a hook that made her want to start the next. A winding “tale” as soft and comfortable as his cat’s.
“Well,” his voice was soft and deep. He had the most amazing phone voice which certainly hadn’t hurt his cause.
“There’s this lighthouse. You can only get there by boat…”
She glanced at the calendar over her sofa.
“Patos Island.”
Patos Island Lighthouse
Patos Island
First lit: 1893
Automated: 1974
48.789 -122.9715
The Isla de Patos, “Island of Ducks” is 210 acres of trees, rock, and sea caves making it a great favorite of smugglers over the years. In the early 1900s the lighthouse keeper and his family made a once per month trip across twenty-six miles of water to Bellingham, Washington for supplies. His nearest neighbor? The Canadian lighthouse keeper on Saturna Island over five miles in the other direction.
When smallpox struck his family, he flew the lighthouse flag upside down as a distress sign to passing ships. By the time help arrived, three of his thirteen children had died.
AUGUST 1
Mt. Baker rose like a beacon, soaring up into the heat of the summer day. Russell’s boat slid up to the public pier in Anacortes. He’d told her it was a two-day trip to sail from Seattle to Patos Island and back. Cassidy had covered most of the distance in the two-hour drive north in order to avoid sleeping aboard. He’d promised she could be as safe as she wanted, which was sweet. But since they’d never been together for more than an hour without ticking each other off, she chose to meet him at the closest port.
His boat looked sharp, graceful, prettier than it had before. He’d finally repainted it. The bowsprit now had copper handrails wrapped around it. The dinghy was upside down on the top of the cabin. Everything looked shipshape, even elegant. His grin of pride was infectious.
The boat slid up to the dock and, with a brief, low rumble from her engine, came to a halt in front of Cassidy. He dropped the lifeline and helped her aboard with an extended hand—warm, strong hand.
He retreated to the cockpit and moments later, the dock was sliding away. She didn’t feel the pull of the dock as she had before. This time she was glad to be aboard. Some part of her, a wild part, the one that didn’t always want to do precisely the right and cautious thing, had won out, perhaps for the first time in her life. She’d driven here with the windows down, the sunroof open, and the oldies station blasting.
“Here, take the tiller.”
She stared at the stick of polished wood, longer than her arm. “I don’t know how to steer a boat.”
Even as she spoke, he grabbed her daypack and lowered it through the hatch. In moments, she was sitting as she’d seen him sit, the wood smooth and warm beneath her hand.
“Just choose a point and aim for it.” He pointed over his shoulder. “Mt. Baker should be fine for the moment.”
He moved off and began working with the ropes.
“But I don’t know…” He probably couldn’t hear her over the dull throb of the engine.
She stared at the mountain. It was a little off to the right, starboard. She pulled the tiller that way…and the mountain got further away. Maybe there was a current pushing them the opposite way. She pulled the tiller harder, right into her lap. The situation just got worse.
“Russell!”
He called over his shoulder, without even turning around to help her.
“It’s opposite. Steer left to go right.”
“Steer left to go right. What kind of a silly system is that?”
Well, right wasn’t helping so she pushed the tiller the wrong way—away from her to port.
The boat swung obligingly until its bowsprit was aimed right at the mountain. And then it kept going past the other side.
She pulled it back into her lap. Russell stumbled toward the right rail, she shoved it to the left.
He didn’t say anything, just steadied himself and started untying a rope from around the sail.
Smaller corrections. A little pull, a little push, and she finally had it centered on the mountain. As the boat lifted over the small waves, the bow went to the right and as it settled back into the water it went to left, but it was the best she could do. The average was about right and it wasn’t as if there were highway lanes on the water she had to stay in. The only other traffic around were two small sailboats, a water skier, and off in the distance a pair of monstrous oil tankers anchored in the broad bay.
Russell pulled up the sails with an easy hand-over-hand motion. As the great flaps of red mainsail slid upward, she expected that
there was more muscle to the process than it appeared. He made it look easy.
He tied off the first one and raised the one up front—the jib.
“Turn off the key.”
There was one at the end of the cockpit, right next to some dials and meters. Who knew sailboats had keys? With a click, the rumble ceased and the world was suddenly quiet. Several of the dials flopped over to zero.
“Aim for Lummi,” he pointed negligently off the left side. Port side. Four letters in port and left, more letters in starboard and right.
“Which one’s Lummi?”
“The third island.” He returned to the bow, ending the conversation.
Third island? She didn’t see any islands, just a line of green hills. Maybe the third hill was the third island. She pulled the tiller toward her and the bow moved the wrong way. She caught it quickly and pushed it away.
Russell didn’t stumble this time. Maybe she was getting smoother control—or he’d prepared himself now that he knew she didn’t have a clue.
The boat had been coasting since she’d turned off the motor…then the wind caught the sails. In moments they were sliding ahead. The meter labeled in knots slid upward four, five, six and the boat heeled over.
It took some pressure to keep the tiller straight, but not a lot, just enough to know she was steering the boat. Russell took his time tidying up various ropes along the deck. He even stopped to play with his cat. When they were done, he tossed the cat at the sail; it slid down to the boom and settled quickly for a nap.
Blast them both.
By the time he finally returned to the cockpit, she was getting the hang of steering. It was the most powerful feeling she’d ever had—the great craft answered her whim and the force of the wind drove them forward with a happy splashing of the waves down the side. She didn’t really want to give it up, but it was his boat.
The Complete Where Dreams Page 23