by JoAnn Ross
The Douchetts had all ended up together, as had Maddy and Lucas and Charity and Gabe. Across the expanse of green lawn, lost in their own world, Kim and her fiancé were feeding each other bites of what appeared to be crab sliders.
After agreeing to go to the picnic with Mac, Annie had found a red, white, and blue hand-stitched quilt in the Dancing Deer’s expanded home-decorating section, and she and Mac spread it out on the lawn for everyone to sit on.
“This is damn good,” Charlie said as he dug into the potato salad.
“Chef Maddy, from Lavender Hill Farm restaurant, made it,” Annie confessed.
“Not surprised the girl grew up to be a famous chef,” he said. “Her grandmother could always cook circles around everyone in town. This tastes a lot like what Sofia De Luca always made for potlucks. My Annie used mayo in hers, which was really tasty, but I’ve got to admit that the spicy mustard gives this an extra zing.”
Speaking of zing . . . As she looked up into Mac’s eyes, which were looking down at her as if she were a decadent dessert that he couldn’t wait to taste, Annie experienced an entirely different type of zing in parts of her body she’d only recently discovered could go zing.
Unsurprisingly, Maddy’s potato salad and her crunchy, moist fried chicken were delicious; they could have been served in any four-star restaurant in New York City. And the brownies Sedona had contributed as a change from her usual cupcakes were rich and fudgy and equally perfect.
As Boyd and Charlie talked with one another about other vets who’d been in the parade, and Emma went dashing around, snapping photos of seemingly everyone and everything, Annie thought how lucky she was that Mac had already professed that her cooking was not what it was about her that had attracted him.
The city council had contracted with a company to set up a Ferris wheel on the bay by the pier. After taking Charlie back to Still Waters, Mac’s father, apparently remembering what it was like to be newly in love, took Emma with him in one of the cars of the ride, leaving Mac and Annie alone.
“I have a question that’s been bugging me,” he asked as the Ferris wheel stopped for a couple to get on below them.
“What?”
“Why Sandy from Shelter Bay? Why didn’t you just give your name?”
“Not everyone does,” she pointed out. “Unless his mother actually named him that, Cowboy doesn’t.”
“I’ll give you that one.”
“I’d never called a radio station before. And when I realized I had to tell you my name, Sandy was the first one to pop into my head.”
“Why that one?”
“It’s silly.” She sighed as the wheel started turning again. Below them Boyd was making the chair rock just enough to have Emma squealing with delight.
“When I was little, kids at school used to do a play on my name and situation, calling me Little Orphan Annie.”
“Kids can be cruel.”
“True. But after a while I developed a sort of shell, so it didn’t hurt as much.”
“No?” He pretended shock. “You? A shell?”
“I did. Until you.” Because it had been too long since she’d kissed him, Annie lifted her lips to his. The wheel stopped again, leaving them at the top of the world. At least their pretty corner of it. From here Annie could see her store. And Take the Cake, which, from the line out in front, appeared to be doing a brisk business.
Cole’s blue fishing boat, appropriately named the Kelli, was tied up at the dock. And as they did most every day, sailboats skimmed across the blue bay, some of them going beneath the bridge, out toward the sea.
“So, anyway, when you asked me my name, that came flashing back, and I thought of Sandy.”
“Little Orphan Annie’s dog.”
“Yeah. Silly, isn’t it?”
“Not at all. Though if you’d used your real name, I might have made the connection faster.”
“And we probably wouldn’t have talked nearly as freely,” she replied.
“Good point,” he said, then ended the conversation by kissing her again. Then one more time, as the Ferris wheel came around to let them off, earning applause from the people holding their yellow tickets and waiting to get on the ride.
57
“I had a thought,” Annie said as she made waffles for Mac and Emma the morning after the Fourth. They might be from a packaged mix, which Maddy would probably consider a cardinal culinary sin, but at least she’d managed to make a stack without having batter run all over the counter. “About your school uniform.”
Emma’s mouth turned down as she smeared a piece of waffle into a puddle of marionberry syrup. “I can’t wear any pink.”
“On the outside,” Annie said. “But the rules don’t say anything about what you wear under the uniform, do they?”
Blue eyes dazzled like sunshine on a summer sea as Emma caught Annie’s drift. “No. They don’t!”
“Well, then. When I bought my dress for the dance, I noticed that there’s a new Tots to Teens section down at the Dancing Deer Two. What would you say to you and I having a girls’ lunch out, then going shopping for underwear?”
“I’d say yes!” She knocked the chair over as she jumped off it and flung her arms, and the heavy cast that was on one of them, around Annie’s neck. “That’s the bestest idea ever! Isn’t it, Daddy?”
The warmth in Mac’s eyes, as they met Annie’s, had her feeling as if she’d swallowed the sun.
“The bestest,” he agreed.
• • •
“Are you going to be my new mommy?” Emma asked across the table at the Lavender Hill Farm restaurant.
“I think it’s a little early to talk about things like that,” Annie replied, hedging.
“Why?”
Wasn’t that what her friends had been asking? What Annie had even begun asking herself?
“It’s complicated. How was your mac and cheese?”
“Really good. But I like yours better.”
Annie decided not to point out that she’d used this same recipe and, unsurprisingly, Maddy’s was definitely the superior dish.
“Thank you. Do you want dessert? Or would you rather wait and stop for a cupcake after shopping?”
Emma took a moment to weigh her options. “A cupcake,” she decided. “Why is it complicated?” Her smooth forehead furrowed into a frown. “Is it because of me?”
“Oh, no.” Having been rejected so many times growing up, Annie knew that even as bright and cheerful as Emma was, and as hard as Mac was working to fill both parental roles, her mother’s abandonment had to have left the child feeling more insecure than she sometimes let on. “I can’t imagine a more extra-special daughter than you.”
“Then why won’t you marry my daddy?”
“You’ll understand when you’re a grown-up,” Annie tried, not having the answer to that one herself.
Emma’s frustrated sigh ruffled her corn-silk bangs. “I hate it when grown-ups say that.”
“I know.” Annie reached across the table and stroked Emma’s hair soothingly. “But relationships take time if you want to do them right. Your daddy and I are in the getting-to-know-each-other stage right now.”
“Oh!” The last of the worry and frustration on her small face cleared. “Like Belle and the beast did. Although he seemed really mean and grumpy at first, he let her read his books and then they had to become friends before they could have a romantic dinner and dance and fall in forever-after love.”
“Exactly.”
That seemed to settle the problem.
At least for now.
Later that afternoon, as they returned home with cupcakes, shopping bags filled with cotton underwear covered with pink flowers, hearts, and various Disney Princess designs, Annie considered making a thank-you card to send to those Disney filmmakers.
• • •
/> The days that followed were, hands down, the most wonderful ones of Annie’s life. Although it still took some juggling to make time for Mac and her to be alone, and there were some nights that they barely got any sleep at all, for the first time in her life, Annie was learning to play.
Since summer days were long on the coast, they spent every evening together. Barbecuing, walking on the beach, even going out on Cole’s boat for a private whale-watching trip. As if they were becoming the family she’d always dreamed of, those evenings were always spent with Emma. Less and less with Boyd, who’d begun seeing Marian Long, a widowed nurse he’d met while dropping by the hospital to visit a patient.
The possibility of the handsome, eligible doctor being taken off the market had not only cut back on the amount of baked goods flowing into the Buchanan men’s home, but it had the couple claiming Mac and Annie’s spot in the Shelter Bay spotlight.
“I tell you, it’s the water,” the mayor said one day when she’d been standing at Take the Cake’s counter, waiting her turn after Emma and Annie. “One of these days I’m going to come up with a marketing campaign and bottle it. After all, this town was started by selling water from the hot springs as a miracle cure. What’s more miraculous than falling in love?”
Annie couldn’t argue with that.
Another evening, Annie was outside setting the picnic table while Mac grilled prawns for dinner, when Emma, who was tossing wadded-up pieces of paper to Pirate—who Annie had belatedly discovered knew how to fetch—asked, “Why is he named Pirate?”
“Because he was found on this cove,” Annie said as she set down the coleslaw, which she’d actually made herself from one of the recipes she’d learned in Maddy’s beginning cooking class. “It’s called Castaway Cove because there was this pirate, Sir Francis Drake, who had the fastest ship on the sea.”
“The Golden Hind,” Mac volunteered from the grill.
“That was it. And actually, Sir Francis was a privateer, but that’s pretty much the same thing as a pirate. He was just working for the queen of England instead of for himself.”
“Like Daddy works at KBAY.”
“Sort of like that,” Annie said. “But his job was to run down other ships and steal their treasures.”
“That’s a pirate, all right,” Emma said, with a decisive nod. “I saw them at the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. I wonder if he chased women like those do.”
Annie ignored Mac’s smothered laugh.
“I’m not sure about that,” she said mildly. “He was actually quite a gentleman, for a pirate. He’d force the other ships close to the land, then allow all the crewmen to wade ashore. This was one of his favorite spots to catch the ships, so they’d end up here. Which is why it’s called Castaway Cove.”
“I like that story,” Emma decided. “We should make it into a scrapbook page. With a picture of Pirate.”
“I think that’s an excellent idea.”
As she exchanged a look with Mac, she could tell he was thinking the same thing. That this moment in time was about as perfect as life could get.
But as life had taught her, perfection, like so many things, was fleeting.
A month after the Fourth of July, Annie received a call at the shop. “I thought I’d better warn you,” Mac said. “We’re having a funeral tonight.”
Her heart clenched. “Don’t tell me Charlie—”
“Oh, sorry. Hell, no. He’s fine. At least Analiese said he is. Emma and I are going over to see him today. But Nemo died.”
Nemo being one of Emma’s two goldfish.
“Oh. Well. That’s too bad. Is she terribly upset?”
“Not as bad as I thought she’d be. There were some tears. But I promised her we’d bury him in the backyard, so she’s busy coloring a box to put him in.”
“I have some stickers of goldfish. I’ll bring them over to the house after work.”
“Thanks.” He paused. “You know what?”
“What?”
“Even burying a goldfish together just feels right.”
When she didn’t answer right away, he said, “We’re going to have to talk about where we’re going.”
He’d tried before, but she kept putting him off. Because, she knew, she couldn’t quite trust what might be around the bend.
“Tonight we’re going to a funeral for a fish,” she said.
“Annie—”
“I just need a little more time, Mac.”
He sighed and she knew he had to make an effort to bite back his frustration. She couldn’t blame him. As Sedona and the others kept telling her, she had no good reason not to move their relationship on to the next step.
Mac was not just sexy Midnight Mac, the deejay that women all over Shelter Bay probably lay in bed fantasizing about. He was a good man. A decent man. He’d already told her he loved her and she had no reason to doubt his word.
They had, as Emma pointed out about Belle and the Beast, become not just lovers but friends.
So why, Annie wondered as she greeted a customer who had come in for supplies to make a whale memory page, did she feel as if she were standing on the edge of a cliff where one false step would send her tumbling headlong over the edge?
58
“My fish died, Poppy,” Emma told Charlie later that afternoon when Mac took her to Still Waters. “Nemo. Daddy and Annie and I are going to bury him tonight. In a box I made him.”
“I’m sorry you lost him, Emma. And that’s nice you’re going to bury his body. But you don’t have to worry. Because he’s already up in heaven with your great-grandmother.”
“Fish go to heaven?”
“Sure they do. They’re actually happier there because instead of a bowl, they have a whole ocean to swim in.”
“What if the big fish eat them?”
“Not in heaven,” he assured her. “Believe me, honey, he’s one happy goldfish right now.”
“Okay.” She exhaled a long, relieved breath. Then her brow furrowed. “Maybe if I took Dory out of the water, she’d die, too. Then she could be happy in heaven, with Nemo.”
“No, you wouldn’t want to do that,” Charlie told her. “Because like my Annie always tells me, we all have to go in our own time. And it’s not Dory’s time yet.”
“Oh. But do you think she misses Nemo?”
“Probably. But if my Annie can come visit me, he’ll probably be able to visit her, too. And tell her all about all the wonderful things he’s seen in the sea up there.”
“She’d like that,” Emma said. “Because I named her after Dory, from the movie, who likes to talk. So this way she’ll still have Nemo to talk to.”
That problem solved, she went on to tell him all about tonight’s sleepover with her friend Peggy. A sleepover where she’d be staying for breakfast, Mac thought with anticipation.
Which should give him and Annie plenty of time to talk about their future.
• • •
“Nemo is too in heaven,” Emma told her friend after her daddy had dropped her off for the sleepover. It was the last one they’d be having before she began first grade.
“Is not,” Peggy said. “Goldfish don’t go to heaven.”
Emma put her hands on her hips. “Poppy said they do.”
“Ha.” Peggy tossed her red head. “Everybody in town knows your grandfather’s crazy. That’s why he’s locked up in that home.”
“That’s not true.” Emma’s hands curled into fists. “Take it back.”
It was Peggy’s turn to put her hands on her hips. “Make me.”
Emma was about to hit her, right in the eye, the way she did Kenny. Then she remembered what her daddy had told her about hitting people.
But her poppy had told her that standing up for family was the right thing to do. And Peggy had just said bad things about Nemo and her poppy.
“If you hit me, I’ll tell,” Peggy said. “And you’ll get grounded. And probably even spanked.”
Emma was momentarily shocked into silence. Then she said, “My daddy would never hit me.”
“He might. My mother says that he was a soldier in the Army.”
“Shows how much you know. Daddy was in the Air Force.”
“It’s all the same thing.” Peggy’s skinny lips twisted in a sneer that had Emma’s temper shooting so high she thought it might take the top of her head off. Or make it explode like those fireworks on the Fourth of July.
“My mother says that lots of times soldiers have PMS,” her friend-turned-enemy said. “And when they have it they can go crazy and shoot people so I should be careful when I’m over at your house.”
“My daddy would never shoot anyone!” Emma shouted.
Her palms were hurting from her fingernails cutting into them as she tried her hardest not to hit Peggy and get grounded for her last week of summer vacation. Especially since her daddy and Annie were taking her to Seaside for the weekend.
“He was in the war,” Peggy said. “People in war shoot people all the time. I’ve seen it on TV. And he got blown up, so my mother told my father that there’s no telling what that did to his brain.”
“You are such a liar.” Her daddy was the smartest man she knew. His brain was just fine.
“And your family is crazy with people who shoot people and who think fish go to heaven,” Peggy shot back.
That did it. Grabbing her rolling overnight bag, Emma marched out of the room, down the stairs, and out the door.
Headed for home.
59
Mac was as gray as a ghost and obviously frantic when Annie arrived at his house. Kara was already there, looking grim and official in her starched khaki uniform.
“What happened?” Annie asked.
“Emma’s gone missing. I’ve got to go look for her.”
“I’ve got deputies out doing that. And I’ve called in an AMBER Alert,” Kara said. “Let me just get a couple more details about what she was wearing and we’ll get a search party started. Believe me, there’s a way to handle this, and just running out without a plan isn’t going to make the situation any better.”