Back to the Lake Breeze Hotel

by Amie Denman

  June smiled but didn’t say anything.

  “And Nate is a good PR director,” Alice said as she pulled off her ruined suede gloves. “I didn’t want you guys to have to replace him.”

  June waved to her mother and returned her attention to Alice. “I’m not sure what to think of my mother’s slightly goofy level of happiness lately. Playing Mrs. Claus is no surprise. She loves children and often shows up in some wacky costume to read to the kids in the Starlight Point daycare. It’s something else.”

  “Perhaps her...friendship...with Henry?” Alice suggested. “If I were to make a recommendation—”

  June sighed. “Let’s hear it.”

  “I’d tell you to let them figure it out. As much as I wish everything would turn out exactly as I think it should, people have to decide for themselves.”

  “And yet you plan weddings for people who might be making mistakes.”

  Alice let out a long breath. “Even though it doesn’t always go how I plan, I want happy endings for everyone.”

  “Says the woman who just rescued her ex-fiancé from drowning,” June said.

  Alice didn’t deny the fact as she watched Nate walk away with his family.

  “For what it’s worth,” June continued. “I think second chances are even sweeter than the first time around.”

  Alice waved goodbye to June, not trusting her voice. She stuffed her gloves in a trashcan, squared her shoulders and headed toward her office to prepare for the afternoon wedding scheduled at Starlight Point. At least she could help someone else get their happy ending.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  VIRGINIA PUT STAMPS on three dozen envelopes. That was the easy part. She stuck return labels on next. She remembered the first Christmas after Ford died, when she’d used up all their old labels with both their names on them. Ordering new ones with only her name had taken her months. And now she’d grown used to seeing only Virginia Hamilton on the stickers.

  She flipped open her address book and started writing the names of her lifetime of friends and family on the green envelopes. That was a chore, but signing her own name and not including Ford’s had been the hardest part the past few years.

  She wore her favorite soft yoga pants and turtleneck and settled in with a cup of coffee, determined to get the job done as quickly as possible. Letting it hang over her head was worse than the actual task, and if she didn’t get these Christmas cards in the mail in the next few days, the ones traveling the farthest wouldn’t make it in time for the holiday.

  Gladys barked and nosed aside the curtain in the front window. It wasn’t a warning bark, it was more of an excited sound. One of the kids? Virginia looked through the window and then opened the door.

  “I haven’t spent a whole winter back here in Michigan,” Henry said, “but I do know days as nice as this in the middle of December are an early Christmas gift.”

  He wore a long-sleeved shirt but no coat. Warm air circulated through the door and sunshine sparkled off the lake behind him. His vintage truck sat in her driveway, its windshield reflecting the morning sun. She had been so focused on her task that she hadn’t even noticed what a beautiful day it was.

  “What are you up to on such a nice day?” Virginia asked, waving him into the house and closing the door behind him. He brought with him the scent of the lake and fresh air. Just what she needed.

  “Anything outside.”

  “Coffee first?”

  “Sure,” he said. Henry followed Virginia into the kitchen and got two mugs from the cabinet over the stove without having to ask where she kept them.

  “You got your truck painted.” Virginia poured coffee into both mugs, leaving him an inch at the top for the milk she knew he’d add.

  “I’m out for a ride, making sure the paint sticks before I pay the final bill.”

  Virginia laughed. “Is that why you ended up here?”

  Henry shook his head. “I was headed here. I need someone to have fun with today. I already put up my Christmas lights yesterday and mailed cards to the same people I’ve been sending them to all my life.”

  “That’s what I was doing this morning.” She gestured to the end of the kitchen table, where envelopes and cards were stacked.

  “I could mail those for you when I go to the post office later.”

  She shook her head. “I’m nowhere near ready.”

  “Can I convince you to put it off for the morning? I’ve got the itch to leave the earth for a while.”

  Virginia’s breath caught. Henry laughed and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I mean take my plane up.”

  “Oh. And you want someone to go with you?”

  His hand slid down her arm and his fingers laced with hers. “I want you to go with me.”

  She hesitated. They’d spent a lot of time together, but Henry seemed different, deliberate today. He was in her space, at her table, drinking her coffee and dragging her away from a yearly obligation. Was he challenging the status quo of their relationship?

  “You’re not afraid of flying, are you?” he asked.

  “No, but I haven’t flown in years,” she said. She sipped her coffee. When was the last time? Ford had been with her. They’d flown to California, rented a car and toured the wine country and Napa Valley. She remembered a long, carefree drive down the Pacific coast. Their kids were grown up and they felt they had the rest of their lives in front of them. It seemed like another lifetime.

  “It’s been much too long, then,” Henry said. He rubbed the backs of her fingers as he spoke.

  Her last flight had been during the before period of her life. Virginia had slowly realized over the past few months that she’d created a dividing line in her life when Ford died. There were the before and since eras. Maybe it was time to create a now and tomorrow era.

  “You’re right,” she said.

  “The airfield where I keep my plane is only twenty minutes away. For an added bonus, you get to ride in my pickup. The guy at the body shop called it an antique, so I had to remind him it’s younger than I am. He didn’t know what to say after that.”

  Virginia laughed. “Before we go, I think I should ask how old your plane is.”

  Henry kissed her cheek. “It’s only two years old.” He paused, his lips hovering just over hers. “Thanks for taking a chance on me.”

  Virginia kissed him on the lips and ran her fingers through his neatly cut hair. They had kissed before, but it was the first she’d initiated. He made her feel young and light, desirable. How much stronger would that feeling be when they were up in the air?

  “You’re a professional pilot,” she said lightly, breaking the kiss. “So I don’t get many points for bravery.”

  “I wasn’t just talking about flying,” he said.

  She bit her lip. “I know.”

  They drove to the airport in Henry’s pickup. In the narrow old-fashioned cab with a giant windshield, the sun washed over them as Henry deftly shifted gears.

  “Can you drive or fly anything?” Virginia asked.

  “Anything I’ve tried, but there are a lot of things I haven’t had the chance to operate. Like helicopters, tanks, fire trucks and trains. I wouldn’t mind driving a train.”

  “We have one at Starlight Point. I could probably make that happen.”

  Henry shrugged. “I wouldn’t want people to say I’m using our relationship to get access to the locomotive.”

  What was their relationship? Virginia couldn’t give it a name, but she would willingly trust Henry with her car, lawnmower or train. And her heart? That’s what frightened her.

  Virginia’s phone dinged in her purse and she pulled it out and read a text from June.

  Want me to pick you up for lunch?

  Thanks, honey, Virginia answered. But I have plans.

  She didn’t te
ll her daughter what those plans were.

  June responded after only seconds. I’ll call u later. Love you.

  Virginia dropped the phone back into her purse and turned to Henry. “Do you really own your own plane?”

  “Part owner. It’s pretty expensive, so I made a deal with another guy at the airport and we share it. We split the purchase price and the maintenance, and we work out the rest. I called him this morning and he’s not planning to go up this week. He still works part time and his company has a project they’re finishing up before the holidays.”

  “So it’s all ours,” Virginia said.

  Henry slanted a glance her way. “It is.”

  Twenty minutes later, after a preflight check and other formalities, Virginia and Henry raced down the small airstrip and took off. Her heart lifted and adrenaline poured through her as she left the ground.

  “You’re smiling,” Henry said. “Good sign.”

  “I feel like a baby bird getting out of the nest.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Oh,” Virginia said. “Didn’t you tell that man at the airport where we were going?”

  “I filed a flight plan, but I can radio in a change. You tell me where you’d like to go.”

  Virginia’s phone dinged and she glanced at the text from Evie.

  Are you doing okay?

  Fine, Virginia answered. Hope you are, too.

  “Just Evie saying hello,” she said as she looked out her window. Lake Huron stretched across the horizon, and they seemed to be following the shoreline. “Can we fly over Bayside and Starlight Point?”

  “Sure. You’ve probably done that before, right?”

  She shook her head. “Never. I’ve never been in a small plane and flown low enough to see anything familiar.”

  “You’re about to, and I won’t even have to change my flight plan. I’ll try to make sure you don’t miss a thing.”

  Henry piloted the aircraft along the shore and Virginia recognized several landmarks as they approached Bayside. She saw the beach and pier of the state park, and the downtown docks stretching into the bay.

  “I never realized that the bay looks like a big teapot from the air,” she said. She couldn’t stop looking at something that was so familiar yet so new. Finally, she raised her eyes to the peninsula across the bay.

  “Ready for a flyover of Starlight Point?”

  She nodded. Her heart fluttered with excitement and nerves. She should be home addressing Christmas cards, but she was up in the air with a man who made her forget her boundaries. If she abandoned the role of wife and mother she’d always played, what would she be?

  She could already see the Starlight Point peninsula jutting into the lake. Roller coasters looked two-dimensional from the air. The marina scooped a semicircle from the bay side. The white concrete midway shone in the morning sun, and the hotel’s green roof spread along the beach side. The familiar midway and rides looked so different from the air. Had she never imagined what they would look like from above? What else had she been missing all these years?

  “I wish my kids could see this,” she said. “If I called them and told them to look up in the sky, they’d never believe what I’m doing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because...” Virginia couldn’t think of a single reason why not. Her kids weren’t the ones confining her to the role of grieving widow. She leaned closer to her window and peered down at a place she knew by heart. She would always be Ford Hamilton’s wife, married in her heart to him and Starlight Point. Always be the mother to the three wonderful children who now steered the amusement park with great care and success.

  But she could be herself and also welcome another love into her life. It wouldn’t change the past, but it would make the future even sweeter.

  “Are you having fun?” Henry asked.

  “To say the least,” she marveled, turning her attention back to him. “I feel as if I’m opening my eyes for the first time.”

  Her phone signaled a text again and she glanced at the message from Jack. She didn’t want to miss the view from the plane’s window.

  I dropped off some special pastries from Augusta a few minutes ago at your house, but you weren’t home. I only let Gladys eat one and I put them out of reach. Love you.

  “Kids again,” Virginia said.

  “You have great kids. And it’s nice they all text you every morning.”

  “They don’t usually.”

  “Is it a special occasion?” Henry asked. “Don’t tell me it’s your birthday and I didn’t get you a card.”

  Virginia laughed. “My birthday’s in June.” She returned to her study of Starlight Point from the air, but the memory hit her a second later. It was Ford’s birthday. How could she possibly have forgotten the date?

  She approached it with a hole in her heart every year, but she’d been so busy with the Christmas activities this year, she’d only given it a brief thought earlier in the week.

  Her children were worried about her and missing their father, and she was flying high with another man. She had to figure out her own emotions before she hurt the people she loved.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE you called our uncle the last time this happened,” Nate’s sister, Susan, said. They stood just outside the emergency room doors while they waited for hospital staff to find their father a room. “He’s about as comforting as a brick pillow.”

  “He’s helpful in a crisis,” Nate protested.

  “For what? Telling you to dry your tears and pull yourself up by your bootstraps? Good thing he never had any kids of his own,” Susan said.

  Nate felt guilty for calling his sister at three in the morning, but last time he hadn’t called her and she was furious. Neither of them had gotten any sleep. “You need coffee or bourbon or something,” he said.

  “I’m serious. Do you know what he told me at our mother’s funeral? Our mother’s funeral,” she reiterated. “I was fifteen, bawling my eyes out, and he said I should be grateful I still had one parent left.”

  Nate swallowed his emotions. Being outside the emergency room doors brought back a swarm of nausea he battled with all his might.

  “He also told me I should be stoic for you,” Susan continued. “What the hell does that mean? You didn’t need someone to be stoic. You were twelve. You needed someone to hug you and say she loves you. And that’s exactly what I did.”

  “I remember,” Nate whispered. His voice wouldn’t work. His head felt hot. Maybe he had the same fever his father did, an illness that had landed him in the hospital between chemotherapy appointments again.

  “Will you be all right here?” his sister asked. “I’m going to run back to Dad’s house and grab a few things for him since it looks like he’ll be staying at least a day or two. He asked me to bring his robe and slippers and some other stuff.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll text you the room number when they move him.”

  Nate waited outside the emergency entrance for a few more minutes. He hated walking through those doors. Years ago, he’d come here thinking he’d arrived just in time, but his mother was already gone. He stood between the two sets of doors—those leading out to the parking lot and the ones leading to his dad, waiting on a stretcher. The wide outer doors let in the relentless December cold. After a few minutes, the chill drove him inside to wait with other family members until his father got admitted to a room upstairs.

  The wait gave him time to think about all the things he’d been avoiding. His mother’s funeral was horrible enough, but seeing his picture in the local newspaper in an article vilifying the drunk driver was worse. His seventh-grade teacher hadn’t meant for him to see it. The paper happened to be lying on her desk when he’d finally gone back to school after a week at home. How many of his classmates had seen his shocked
and tearstained face, naked emotion and vulnerability all over it?

  That’s where he’d learned to put on a brave face. A smile that masked his inner life that was no one’s business but his own. He’d pitied his father for crying alone in his room and shunned the pity his friends, their parents, his pastor, teachers, everyone had tried to give him. And Alice? She’d grown up in Bayside, and she knew what happened to his mother. They never talked about it. Had she ever seen that picture?

  Finally, an hour later, Nate sat by his dad’s bedside in a private room on the third floor of the hospital. He hoped his sister would get there soon with some comfort items for his dad, because he needed all the comfort he could get. They all did.

  “She hasn’t changed,” his father said. He sat up in bed and turned bright eyes on his son.

  “Susan? Nope, bossy as ever,” Nate agreed. “But that’s a good thing sometimes.”

  “Not Susan. Alice. You haven’t wanted to talk about her all fall, but I know you see her every day. I thought maybe she was giving you the cold shoulder since you never mentioned her, but when you fell in the marina, she and I were the first ones there to pull you out.”

  Nate nodded.

  “All those other bystanders hanging around, and she flew out of nowhere and started grabbing anything she could find in that water as if she’d lost a treasure in there,” his father continued.

  Nate remembered a hand grabbing him. Was it Alice’s or his father’s? When he’d bobbed to the surface in the shockingly cold water, the first face he saw was Alice’s. Her face had been tortured, frightened. His father’s expression was the same. Nate had tried to quickly de-escalate the situation and save face by smiling and claiming everything was just fine. And it was. With no actual harm done, he’d gone home and dried off. But his father was right about Alice. Nate had no doubt she would have dove into the water to find him if he hadn’t come up quickly.

  The thought brought a lump to his throat.

  “I’m going to see if the nurses will bring you some breakfast,” Nate said. “And I think it’s a little too hot in here. I’ll check on that.”