Butternut Summer

by Mary McNear

  “No?” he asked innocently. Too innocently.

  “No,” she repeated, crossing her arms over her chest. “So let’s cut to the chase, all right?”

  “All right,” he said, leaning back in his chair, his dark blue eyes resting on her.

  “What are you doing here, Jack? In Butternut?”

  “I told you. I’m living here.”

  “At Wayland’s old cabin?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you say Wayland left it to you?”

  Jack nodded.

  But she was skeptical. “I didn’t know you and Wayland had stayed in touch, Jack. I mean, when was the last time you even saw him?”

  A shadow crossed his face. “I went to visit him in the hospital in Duluth when he . . . when he was sick. Really sick, toward the end.”

  Caroline nodded somberly. “He had cancer, didn’t he?”

  “Liver cancer,” Jack said. “Terminal cancer’s never good, obviously,” he said, quietly. “But this . . . this seemed especially bad, somehow.”

  Caroline sighed. Poor Wayland. He’d been a sweet, though ineffectual man. And unlike Jack . . . well, unlike Jack, all the good times had finally caught up with him.

  “Anyway,” Jack said. “Wayland didn’t say anything about a will when I visited him in the hospital. Honestly, I would have been surprised to know he even had a will. But then, about a year ago, I got a call from his lawyer. I didn’t know he had one of those, either. Anyway, it wasn’t until this summer that I was able to move back up here and, you know, actually live in it.”

  “You can’t be serious, Jack.”

  “About what?”

  “About living in that . . . place,” she said, because cabin suddenly seemed to be too kind a word. “I mean, is it even habitable?”

  “Depends on your definition of the word. But it’s going to be, by the time I get through with it. I’ve never done anything quite like this before, but I figure, what the hell. I know my way around a tool belt.”

  “A tool belt, Jack? I think a bulldozer might be more apt, don’t you?”

  There was that little shoulder lift again. If he was intimidated by what lay ahead, he wasn’t saying so.

  “Okay, so you’re going to fix up that cabin. But with what money, Jack? And what are you going to live on while you do it?”

  “I’ve saved some money over the past couple of years, working at the refinery.”

  She’d taken a sip of her iced tea, and now she practically choked on it. “Oh please, Jack,” she said, trying not to laugh. “You’ve never saved a penny in your life.” Not if you could sink it into a card game instead.

  But Jack didn’t argue the point. He only lifted his shoulders a little, as if to say, We’ll see.

  “All right then,” she said challengingly, “what do you do when you’re done with the cabin? Sell it to some unlucky soul?”

  “Or I stay,” Jack said casually. “Put down roots in this fine community.”

  “This fine community that you’ve always hated, Jack,” Caroline pointed out. “Or have you forgotten?”

  But he sidestepped the question and said, with his infuriating nonchalance, “Towns change, Caroline. So do people.”

  “Trust me, Jack, this town hasn’t changed.”

  “Then maybe I have,” he said, his dark blue eyes suddenly serious.

  “That’s what your daughter thinks,” Caroline said. “But I know better. And, Jack, I give you two weeks here; a month, tops.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, sipping his coffee again. “But in the meantime, I’m looking forward to spending the summer here.”

  “And seeing my daughter?” Caroline asked.

  Jack hesitated. “Yes, Caroline. And seeing our daughter.”

  Caroline flinched. Our daughter. That sounded strange. That sounded . . . wrong. It had been years since Caroline had thought of Daisy as anything other than her daughter. She squeezed her lemon wedge, angrily, into her glass of tea and tried to organize her thoughts. Because what she was going to say next was the real reason she’d asked him to come here today—and the real reason, too, she hadn’t been able to sleep last night. So she chose her words carefully now, or as carefully as she could when you considered how furious she was.

  “Look, Jack, I don’t know why, after all this time, you’ve resurfaced in Daisy’s life. And I don’t know why she has developed such a touching faith in you either. But I don’t share that faith, Jack. I know how this is going to end. And it’s going to end badly.”

  “You can’t know how this is going to end, Caroline. None of us knows that.” And there was that shadow, again, crossing so quickly over his face she wondered if it had been there at all.

  “Look,” she said, changing tack. “I can’t tell you what to do, Jack; I never could. Just don’t . . . don’t hurt her, okay?”

  He nodded slowly, his blue eyes serious. “I have no intention of hurting her, Caroline; at least not any more than I already have. And don’t think I don’t know how much I’ve already hurt her,” he added. “I’m not an idiot, Caroline. And even if I were one, Daisy spelled it out for me the first time I saw her again.”

  “She did?” Caroline asked, surprised. Since she’d found out about these meetings, Daisy had volunteered very little information about them, and Caroline hadn’t wanted to pry. But the truth was, she was curious, damned curious.

  Jack nodded. “She was so angry that morning I met her for coffee,” he said, “in this little dive coffeehouse near the university, that it put the fear of God in me. She told me she hadn’t known until the last minute whether she’d come and meet me or not. She said that I was a sorry excuse for a father, and that if I thought I could just walk back into her life again after all these years, I was dead wrong. She told me, too, that the two of you had done just fine without me the whole time she was growing up, and if you hadn’t needed me then, there was no reason you needed me now.” With an admiring smile, he added, “There was more, but that was the gist of it.”

  “Daisy said all that?” Caroline asked, wonderingly. She’d never even guessed at the depth of Daisy’s anger toward Jack. But, then again, she hadn’t wanted Daisy to guess at the anger she felt toward him either.

  “She said all that and more,” Jack said. “Much more. That was when I realized how articulate she was. It didn’t surprise me, later, when she told me she’d been on the debate team in high school.”

  “What did you do, Jack, while she was saying all this to you?” Caroline asked, genuinely curious.

  He shrugged. “I sat there and listened to her. What else could I do? Every word she said was true. I couldn’t argue with her, so I just tried to take it like a man.”

  Caroline squeezed her already pulverized lemon wedge into her iced tea again and tried to imagine Jack sitting there and taking it. But she couldn’t. The Jack she remembered had hated being on the receiving end of a lecture. He’d hated it so much that as soon as he’d felt one coming on, he was out the door.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “things got better between us, eventually. The third or fourth time I met her, we had an actual conversation. It was good, Caroline—really good—just talking to her. She was less angry, and I was less nervous. But I was still awed by her.”

  “Awed?”

  He nodded. “Awed by the person she’d become. And humbled, too, by the knowledge that I couldn’t take any credit for her becoming that person.”

  Caroline felt confused. Because the Jack she’d known had had many qualities, some of them even good qualities, but humility? Humility had never been one of them.

  “But you know what, Caroline?” he continued now. “I might not be able to take credit for the person Daisy has become, but you can. And you should. Because you’ve raised one hell of a daughter.”

  “I . . . need to get a refill on my tea,” she said abruptly, feeling disconcerted by the direction the conversation had taken. And by seeing a side of Jack that felt wholly unfamiliar to
her. She stood up. “Would you, would you like more coffee?” she asked.

  “No, thank you,” he said, chuckling. “And you still can’t take a compliment, can you, Caroline?”

  But she ignored that question, took her glass to the counter, refilled it, and brought it back to the table. The forty-five seconds it took her to do this was crucial, because it allowed her to collect herself, refocus herself.

  “Okay, let’s assume, for the time being anyway, that you’re going to stay in Butternut, Jack,” she said. “If that’s the case, then we need to establish some ground rules.”

  “Ground rules, huh?” he repeated, a smile playing around his lips. He was back, the old Jack. “That sounds serious, Caroline.”

  “It is serious. Because long after you’ve decided your little experiment here has failed, I’ll still have to live here and work here. So I’d appreciate if you’d take this seriously, Jack.”

  “All right,” he said, “I will, Caroline. In fact, just tell me what the rules are, and I’ll follow them.”

  “Well, for one, I don’t want you coming in here anymore,” she said, gesturing around the coffee shop. “If you need to speak to me again—although I don’t think that will be necessary—you can call me here and we can meet. Privately. I’m not giving this town any more opportunities to gossip about us, and that’s exactly what they’ll do if you start coming in here.”

  “And where am I supposed to get my morning coffee?”

  “Anywhere but here,” she said, without missing a beat.

  He hesitated. “All right, fine. If it makes you uncomfortable, I won’t come in here anymore. Unless you invite me in, of course.”

  “I won’t invite you in,” she said crisply. “Which brings me to the second ground rule, Jack.” She looked down now, away from his dark blue eyes, which she found distracting, and focused instead on the small triangle of bare, suntanned chest visible above the top unbuttoned button of his blue work shirt. But that was distracting, too. So she looked down at her own iced tea, stirring it vigorously with the straw. “I’m seeing someone now, Jack,” she said. “I have been for the last couple of years.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?” she asked, looking up with surprise.

  He nodded. “His name is Buster, right? Buster Caine. He’s retired. Ex-military.”

  She frowned. “How do you know all that?”

  “Daisy told me.”

  “Daisy discussed my personal life with you?” she said, feeling another rare flash of anger at her daughter.

  Jack saw that anger, and his face fell. “No, Caroline. She didn’t. It wasn’t like that. That’s all she told me. And the only reason she told me that was because I asked, asked if you were seeing anyone, I mean.”

  “Well, I still don’t like it,” Caroline said, wondering, with irritation, why Jack was probing into her love life.

  “Okay. Don’t like it. But blame me. Not Daisy.”

  She stirred her tea again, but didn’t say what she was thinking, which was that as far as she was concerned, there was plenty of blame to go around for both of them. When she started talking again, she could hear the irritation in her own voice. “Well, whatever Daisy told you, Jack, Buster and I have been dating for a couple of years now and—”

  “Is it serious?” he interrupted her.

  She looked at him sharply, surprised by the question. “That, Jack, is none of your business. But even if it were, I don’t think you’d understand my relationship with Buster.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s an adult relationship, Jack, a mature relationship based on mutual respect for each other. I don’t think Buster and I have ever even had a minor disagreement, let alone a real argument.” Here she flashed on an image of her shouting at Jack after one of his late nights out, so angry at him she could have throttled him. “Anyway, Buster and I have settled into a routine—again, something you wouldn’t know anything about. We see each other every Wednesday and Saturday night. It’s something—”

  She stopped then, because she’d seen the corner of Jack’s mouth twitch up in an involuntary smile.

  “What is it, Jack? What’s so funny about two grown-ups dating each other?”

  “Nothing,” he said, but there was that twitch again. “It’s just . . . don’t you ever see each other any other day of the week. On a Tuesday maybe? Or a Thursday?”

  She glared at him, not least of all because Buster’s way of scheduling their relationship had always been a sticking point with her. But she was damned if she’d let her ex-husband see that. “Look, like I said, Jack. I don’t expect you to understand this. We’re getting off track, anyway. We’re supposed to be discussing ground rules, remember?”

  “Okay,” he said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “So what’s the ground rule about you and Buster?”

  “It’s . . . it’s not a rule, exactly. It’s just that I want you to be respectful of him. Respectful of us. It’s a little awkward for him, having you back in town. I think he might feel . . .” She struggled here. She didn’t want to give Buster’s feelings credence by repeating them to Jack, but then again, they were his feelings, however misplaced they might be. “I think he might feel threatened by your being here,” she said. “I told him that was ridiculous,” she added quickly. “That we don’t have feelings for each other anymore. But still, he’s worried, I think.” She waited for Jack to say something, something about how crazy it was for Buster to worry that they still had feelings for each other. But when he didn’t say anything, she glanced up at him.

  He was looking at her, thoughtfully, almost gently, it seemed. “Tell Buster that I’ll be respectful of him, and of his relationship with you,” he said quietly.

  “I will,” she said, feeling disoriented again, this time by Jack’s sudden seriousness. “I’ll tell him that.”

  “Good,” he said. “Now you probably want me to get going.”

  “That . . . that would be nice,” she said. “I’ve got some things I need to do around here.”

  “Okay,” he said, reaching for his empty coffee cup.

  “Just leave that, Jack,” she said distractedly.

  “All right,” he said, pushing his chair back. “But thank you. It was the best cup of coffee I’ve had in a long time.” Then he smiled at her. He smiled that smile, that slow, I-have-all-the-time-in-the-world-for-you smile she remembered so well. Only this time, she wasn’t having it.

  “Don’t smile that smile at me, Jack,” she snapped.

  “What smile?”

  “And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about either,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “I’m not some girl you just met in a bar,” she added. “I know you, Jack; I know you better than you know yourself.”

  He looked at her for a long time, an unreadable expression on his face. “I hope that’s not true anymore, Caroline,” he said finally, and he got up and walked out the door.

  She sat there then, thinking about what he’d said. She didn’t understand it; she didn’t understand him. And she didn’t understand herself right now either, because seeing Jack again had dredged up so many old feelings for her. Most of them were easily identifiable—anger, disbelief, exasperation—but some of them . . . some of them were harder to classify.

  Why had he come back? she wondered, using her straw to play with the ice cubes in her glass. Why had he really come back? And why now? After all this time? “What are you up to, Jack?” she murmured to herself, clinking the ice cubes together. “What in the hell are you up to?”

  CHAPTER 4

  When Will picked Daisy up for their date that Saturday night, he felt a twinge of guilt.

  “You look really nice,” he said, glancing sideways at her as he drove down Butternut’s Main Street. You look too nice to just be going to the town beach, he added to himself.

  “Thank you,” she said, and she smiled shyly and looked out the passenger-side window of his pickup.

  “What
do you think about driving out to the beach to watch the sunset?” he asked, stealing another look at her. She was wearing a sundress, and her reddish-gold hair was smooth and shiny. As she turned to face him now, it brushed against her bare, creamy shoulders in an especially distracting way.

  “I think watching the sunset sounds nice,” she said, smiling again.

  He felt another twinge of guilt. “You don’t mind that we’re just going to the beach?”

  “Why would I mind?”

  “I mean, you wouldn’t rather be going out for dinner?” he asked, thinking about what Jason had said about dating a girl like Daisy.

  “Oh, God no,” she said. “The last place I want to go at the end of the day is to another restaurant.”

  “I bet,” Will said, and he made a mental note to tell Jason he’d been wrong about Daisy. She was going to be a cheap date after all. No, not a cheap date, he amended. Cheap wasn’t a word he’d associate with her; she was going to be an inexpensive date.

  They drove in silence the rest of the way out to the lake. When they turned into the parking lot at the Butternut town beach, Daisy drew in a breath. “It’s beautiful,” she said, of the sunset over the lake, which was a swirl of pinks, oranges, and reds. Inexpensive and easy to please, Will thought, sliding into a parking space that faced the water and cutting the engine.

  “I come here, sometimes, in the late afternoon for a swim,” Daisy said now. “But it’s so different at this time of day, isn’t it? Without all the cranky toddlers? And the Popsicle wrappers?” And Will laughed, because he knew exactly what she meant. By day, the beach belonged, for the most part, to families with children, and to their damp beach towels, and soggy swim diapers, their peanut butter and jelly sandwich crusts, and lopsided sandcastles, and their inflatable rafts that refused to stay inflated. Even now, hours after the last stragglers had left, there were still signs of their presence: garbage cans overflowing with picnic remnants, a set of sand toys forgotten by the water’s edge.

  But as night fell, the beach took on a different quality. It seemed less domesticated somehow—wilder, and more mysterious. A soft wind blew off the lake, carrying with it the clean, tangy smell of deep, green water; the great northern pines that fringed the beach seemed to sway, almost imperceptibly, in that wind, their branches an inky black against the pale pink sky. From across the bay, a loon’s call echoed mournfully, and a little eerily, over the water.