Fireside

by Susan Wiggs

  They garnered a few looks from shoppers in the town square as Bo trolled for a parking spot. For a few minutes, he felt...kind of glad. He hadn’t been expecting that. The happiness. The feeling of connection. It was a terrible thing, what was happening to AJ, and Bo was going to do everything in his power to fix it, but for these few moments, driving along in the sunshine with his boy, he felt happy.

  “It sucks that we’re meeting because of what happened with your mom,” Bo said, “but I always wanted to meet you.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” AJ asked. The question was simple, direct and devastating. “It’s not hard.”

  “Your mom didn’t think it was a good idea, and I had to respect that.” There was a lot more to it than that, but he didn’t think AJ needed to hear all of it, not now.

  He turned up the car’s stereo. As he came around the corner, his gaze was drawn to a long-legged redhead in the distance, coming out of women’s shop called Zuzu’s Petals, carrying a big shopping bag. He felt a flicker of interest. Could it be...? Nah, he realized. Just wishful thinking.

  Chapter Seven

  The thump of a car stereo caught Kim’s attention as she exited the clothing boutique. She’d armed herself with the basics—thermal underwear, wool pants and a couple of sweaters. She was already wearing new jeans and boots and a new jacket, and was ready to embrace winter. This was something she’d missed, living in southern California. Crisp white winters, ice-skating and snowboarding.

  She had never worked with winter-sports athletes. Well, there was one, almost. She’d been assigned to work with a hockey player named Newton Granger, and he’d been missing so many teeth, he sounded like he had a speech impediment. Despite facing the myriad perils of the hockey rink, he had a pathological fear of dentists. Kim had tried to create an image of the strong, silent type, but the guy had a goofy, spontaneous and gap-toothed grin that spoiled the effect every time.

  Athletes, she thought. Never again. She was forging ahead to bigger and better things. She wasn’t sure what things, but they would definitely be bigger and better.

  Parcels in hand, she spotted the source of the thumping stereo. It was a low-slung sports car—with the top down—just rounding the corner into the main square of town. Sunlight flashed over the convertible, which looked as if it would be more at home in Malibu than upstate New York in the dead of winter.

  The car swung into a parking space in front of the Sport Haus, a shop that specialized in winter garments and gear. Its black canvas top arched up and over, obscuring the driver and passenger. A moment later a tall man got out. For a second, recognition flared, but she couldn’t quite place him. A moment later, a half-grown boy exited the passenger side. The kid looked as cold as Kim felt, huddled into an oversized jacket, no hat, hands shoved into his pockets. He kept looking around with an expression of wonder, like the groundhog poking his head out. The guy looked—all right, she was not completely numb—like the type proper girls weren’t supposed to like. He had an easy way of moving that hinted at a bit of an attitude. Kim had made a study of these things. It was her job to observe the image a person projected, and—in the case of her clients—to hone that image into a public persona.

  While she was shopping, Kim’s appetite had kicked in. It occurred to her that she hadn’t felt hungry since the black-tie affair in L.A. The fare that night had consisted of tiny samplings of baby vegetable timbale and field greens dressed in champagne vinaigrette and truffle oil.

  Screw the diet, she thought, and went into the Sky River Bakery, one of the oldest and indisputably the most popular establishment on the square. Kim always visited the landmark bakery when she was in Avalon.

  The moment she stepped into the glowing warmth of the crowded bakery, it felt like the only good decision she had made in a long time. Sweetness literally hung in the air here, the scents of sugar and yeast and butter filling her until there was room for nothing else. The warmth and smells were nearly unbearable—cinnamon, chocolate, brewing coffee, baking bread. The hiss and gurgle of a cappuccino maker punctuated the sound of laughter and conversation. The place looked wonderful, too, with its checkerboard tile floor and funky, eclectic decor.

  Kim perused the gleaming glass cases, abundant with a dizzying array of baked goods—kolaches and butterhorns, croissants stuffed with marzipan, raspberry or chocolate, gorgeous cakes with hand-crafted sugar-dough decorations, rustic loaves of bread. She ordered a cup of tea and an iced maple bar. As long as she was going to go off her diet, she might as well go big, as her mother might phrase it. In her old neighborhood in L.A., consuming a pastry like this would be considered a felony.

  She browsed the bakeshop while waiting for a seat to open up. Maybe she was just hyperaware of happy couples, but they seemed to be everywhere—smiling at each other across the café tables, holding hands as they waited in line for their orders, sharing intimate glances. So soon after the demise of her relationship with Lloyd, she should not feel a twinge, but Kim couldn’t help herself. She didn’t like the feeling of being alone in a crowd. Didn’t like the feeling of being alone, period.

  Good thing I’ve got a house full of people to keep me company, she reminded herself.

  The weekenders and day-trippers from the city looked delighted to be heading to the great outdoors of Catskill Park, a natural preserve designated as “forever wild.” Winter sports abounded in the area, where the pristine snowfall could always be counted on to cover the landscape in a picture-postcard blanket of white. Bundled in their colorful parkas and hats, people talked in animated fashion about the perfect weather—new snow, clear skies. She imagined some were headed to Deep Notch for ice climbing, others to Saddle Mountain for a day of skiing. There was also skating on Willow Lake, snowshoeing or snowmobiling in the backcountry. Everyone seemed excited about spending the day out in the bracing cold, away from cell phones and email, firmly in the raw grip of Mother Nature. They all seemed so...content. It was a feeling that had eluded Kim in every relationship she’d ever had. She’d stopped even believing it was possible.

  I used to love the winter, she thought. Perhaps she still did. Lately, she hadn’t paid much attention to her own likes and dislikes.

  A seat opened up at the counter, facing out the shop window. She settled down at the window bar with the newspaper, her pastry and mug of tea. The moment she sank her teeth into the soft, rich pastry, she saw stars. It tasted like pure ecstasy. It was all she could do not to moan. In those few moments, she forgot about Lloyd, and her exploding life, her crazy mother and uncertain future. If everyone would start the day with an iced maple bar, she thought, we would have world peace.

  She noticed a display of art photographs, beautifully matted and framed, showing off Avalon, Willow Lake and Catskill Park at their best—bathed in golden light, the colors soft and muted, as though painted by a master.

  Near the cash register, there was also a stack of books on display marked, “Just published! Signed by the author.” The title of the oversized book was Food for Thought: Kitchen Wisdom from a Family Bakery by Jennifer Majesky McKnight. The book’s cover image depicted an older woman’s flour-dusted hands, working a pale globe of bread dough.

  An array of daily papers lay on a side counter. While waiting for her tea to cool, she paged through the Avalon Troubadour. In addition to the bakery book, Jennifer Majesky McKnight had a regular column; today’s topic was a deep meditation on the attributes of black cocoa.

  Kim sipped her tea and skimmed the pages, wondering idly at the juxtaposition of births, deaths and marriages, all on the same page. Beginning, middle, end. With a whole lot left out. There was a column headed Milestones—graduations and job promotions. And Engagements, featuring smiling people, supremely confident of their future. Why didn’t people announce breakups? Kim wondered. Surely the end of love was a significant life event. People trumpeted it to the world when they got engaged. Why not when they got dumped? Why was
it treated like a secret, or like something shameful? Why not announce it as a major milestone, certainly far more significant than a graduation or a promotion at work. Or a demotion, for that matter. Or getting fired.

  Kim was a spin doctor. She’d been in sports PR and media training since graduating from USC, and she was good at it. She couldn’t believe breakups and divorces had not been spun into an industry by greeting card and chocolate companies. She imagined her own announcement for the press. “Kimberly van Dorn proudly announces her breakup with Lloyd Johnson, NBA star and point guard for the L.A. Lakers...”

  The “Pride of the Lakers,” as Johnson had been dubbed, was her star client. When he had fired her, loudly and publicly, in a room full of everyone who was anyone, she’d committed the ultimate faux pas of dropping her champagne glass. The tinkling, shattering sound had drawn the attention of everyone in the room. And it wasn’t just the sound of shattering glass. It was the sound of her career imploding. The ensuing scene in the parking lot—well, thank God no one else had witnessed that.

  The tea boiled in her stomach, and the smells of the bakery nearly overwhelmed her. How would she ever eat anything again? How would she ever face the world without panic clawing at her throat?

  To distract herself, she checked out the funny pages in the local paper, pleased to find her favorite syndicated comic strip. Just Breathe was about a young woman who’d moved in with her mother after her life fell apart. Ouch. This morning, that hit too close to home. Kim doubted she’d ever find any humor in the situation.

  Setting the paper aside, she studied the scene outside the window. Back in California, she used to wake up to a landscape misted in smog and filled with the roar of L.A. traffic. The current view of the quaint, beautiful mountain town made her feel as though she had entered a different dimension. The old-fashioned brick buildings of Avalon’s main square stood shoulder to shoulder, and shops and establishments were rolling out their awnings and salting their sidewalks as the day got started.

  Kim felt like a virtual stranger here in this obscure, storybook-pretty town, especially in winter, when everything was draped in a pristine veil of new snow. While she sat, gazing out the window, the tall man and the boy she’d spotted earlier walked diagonally across the square toward the bakery. The man moved purposefully, the boy following a few paces behind. He was bundled into a navy blue ski parka and gloves. He flexed and unflexed his hands as though unaccustomed to the feel of the gloves.

  A few minutes later, they entered the bakery, the bell over the door jangling brightly. Kim didn’t want to be obvious about checking them out, so she studied their reflection in the glass. The man still looked familiar to her, but she couldn’t place him. Then he brushed back the hood of his jacket, freeing his long hair.

  Oh, God. Now she realized why he’d caught her eye—that lion’s mane of hair. Kim stiffened, hunching up her shoulders as the guy helped himself to coffee at the side counter. The boy stood next to him, eating a kolache. A few minutes later, the guy paid at the register, chatting quietly with the counter girl. Kim saw him pick up a bakery box tied with string.

  “Come on, AJ,” the guy said. “We’d better get going.”

  Kim kept her eyes down. As he passed behind her, she heard him murmur a quick greeting: “Ma’am.”

  The two of them left the bakery.

  Ma’am.

  Alarmed, Kim swiveled around on the bar stool and craned her neck to get another look at him. No way. There was no possible way it could be...

  They got into the little sports car and were gone before she could make up her mind about whether or not she recognized the stranger.

  She did know, of course. A part of her had known who he was the instant she’d spotted him clear across the town square. He was the jerk from the airport. Of all the little backwater towns in upstate New York, he had to pick her backwater town.

  Chapter Eight

  “You’re going to like Sophie and Noah’s place,” Bo said. With a new jacket, boots and gloves for AJ, and a box of warm kolaches as an offering, they were headed to their meeting with Sophie. She had an office in town, but was adamant about staying home with her family on the weekends. “I guarantee it. They live on a farm, and he’s a veterinarian. You like dogs?”

  “I got bit last year when I tried to pet one.” AJ touched the side of his mouth, where a subtle white line formed a scar.

  So that was where the scar had come from. “No dog’s going to bite you,” Bo assured him. Privately, he thought, strike one. “How about cats?” he ventured. “You like cats?”

  AJ shrugged.

  Strike two. “Horses, then. Everybody likes horses, right?”

  “They make me sneeze.”

  Strike three. He’s outta there.

  “I have a confession to make,” Bo said. “I’m not all that keen on horses myself. When I first moved up here from Texas, everybody thought I was a cowboy.”

  AJ didn’t say anything.

  “Geez, AJ. How about pygmy hamsters? You got anything against pygmy hamsters?”

  “Never saw one. So they got pygmy hamsters at this place?”

  “Dunno,” Bo admitted, navigating the road that curved along the lakeshore. “Look, I know it’s weird for you, being here. And I know you’re worried about your mom. We’re going to do everything we can to help her. Okay?” He glanced over at the boy.

  AJ sank his chin into the downy pile of the jacket, nodding his head.

  “Sophie will know what to do,” Bo assured him, “and I’m not just saying that. She used to work at an international court in The Hague. That’s somewhere over in Europe.”

  “In Holland,” AJ said. “Seat of the Dutch government.”

  “You’re pretty smart,” Bo said, impressed. “Most people have never heard of The Hague. I don’t know much about it myself, just that you have to be a hell of a lawyer in order to work there.”

  He had total confidence in Sophie, who had married his best friend, Noah Shepherd, the previous spring. She’d been involved in some kind of violent incident over in The Hague, and the experience had brought her back home to Avalon. She had two kids from her previous marriage, and she and Noah had recently adopted two young children, a brother and sister from a small country in southern Africa. Bo was a little in awe of Noah and Sophie for taking a leap of faith like that, getting married and having kids all at once. He couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t imagine being so sure of himself, so sure of loving a woman and so confident about being a father, to do such a thing.

  He could barely make his own life work. Marriage, a family—all that stuff felt far from his grasp, as distant as the moon.

  AJ’s unexpected arrival was a fly ball out of left field. Through the years, Bo had given this boy plenty of thought, as well as a monthly check. Yet this was the first time he’d considered AJ as a flesh-and-blood person with needs and feelings and eyes so full of pain and fear that Bo felt it like a knife wound. He hurt for this kid; having his mother ripped away from him and being shipped to a strange, cold place was the stuff of nightmares or dark fairy tales. Having a loser stepfather, who wouldn’t give him the time of day, much less his phone number, only made matters worse. And now the boy had Bo Crutcher for a father. He must be wondering what he’d done to deserve this.

  Once a dairy farm, Noah’s place sprawled out on a slope overlooking Willow Lake. There was a big, old-fashioned farmhouse and numerous outbuildings, including a storage silo, a barn and paddock, and the animal hospital. A sign reading Shepherd Animal Hospital marked the driveway. The dairy had been founded by Noah’s grandparents, and he’d grown up here, never living anywhere else except when he went to college and then to Cornell for vet school. It was hard for Bo to imagine what it was like to belong to a family that had roots, that stayed in one place for so long, that stayed together. Noah was the most well-adjusted, happy person Bo knew, and he susp
ected that came from a deep, lifelong sense of security. He wished someone had provided that for AJ. It might already be too late, though.

  He parked the car at the side of the house, and the minute they got out, a pair of big, furry shapes came barreling down the snowy slope behind the house. AJ moved like lightning, jumping back into the car and slamming the door. Bo was used to the two friendly mutts called Rudy and Opal, but they probably appeared as scary as hell to a boy who had been attacked in the face by a dog.

  “Settle down, now,” he said as the dogs bounded around him. “Go on now, git.” Fortunately, they had been trained to mind. They fell back, keeping their distance as he motioned to AJ. “It’s all right, they’ll stay away. That’s a promise.”

  AJ hesitated.

  “It’s all right,” Bo repeated. “I swear, it’s fine. I won’t let them near you.”

  AJ slowly got out of the car and walked up to the porch. Bo didn’t take any credit for helping the boy overcome his fear. He knew AJ was simply trying to save face.

  Sophie was waiting at the door, greeting them with a smile. She was blond and as soft as a sunrise, attractive despite the well-worn jeans and a sweater with what looked like a grape-jelly stain on it.

  “Hey, Bo,” she said, and then smiled warmly at AJ. “I’m Sophie,” she said. “You must be AJ.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He stepped into the foyer and looked around uncertainly.

  “Let me take your coats,” she said, motioning them into the house. When she had married Noah, she’d changed every aspect of his life, including this house. In Noah’s bachelor days, it had been perfect for a guy on his own. Gone were the lighted beer clocks, the foosball table, the drum set in a corner of the living room, where the garage band used to practice. All of that had been relegated to the actual garage, which wasn’t such a bad thing, since it was heated and had a refrigerated beer keg.