by Mary McNear
“Okay,” Mila said, feeling suddenly shy. But Allie was already shifting gears. “Are you ready to tread some water?” she asked Mila.
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Good,” Allie said, and she stood up and did a neat dive off the end of the dock, leaving Mila to ease her way down the ladder, and stand, shivering, in the shoulder-deep water, watching Allie swim a graceful front crawl that she’d promised Mila she would be swimming soon too.
“All right,” Allie said, surfacing beside her. “Let’s warm up treading water, and then we’ll work on your flutter kick.”
Allie had broken down the front crawl for her, and they’d practiced each element of it separately. This week, Allie explained, they would put them all together. “But can’t I just dog-paddle?” Mila had asked her at one point, impatient to start swimming.
“Absolutely not,” Allie had said. “I never let Wyatt dog-paddle, and I’m not going to let you do it either. When you swim—and you will swim, very soon—you’re going to swim a real stroke, and you’re going to swim it correctly.”
Now, as Mila started treading water beside Allie, she stole a quick look up at the cabin and thought she saw, through the trees, the glint of Reid’s wheelchair on the deck. She knew he watched her swimming lessons, though they’d never discussed it with each other. Still, she liked knowing that he watched them. It made her feel . . . but when she couldn’t quite decipher how it made her feel, she dunked her head beneath the water instead and came back up into the sunlight, smiling, and pushing water droplets out of her half-closed eyes.
Well, I’ll be damned,” Walker said, sliding open the screen door and coming out onto the deck. “When Lonnie told me you were out here, I didn’t believe her. I said, ‘Lonnie, that’s not possible. My brother doesn’t go outside anymore. Not willingly, anyway.’ But obviously, I stand corrected.”
“Obviously,” Reid said dryly, edging his wheelchair back from the deck’s railing.
“No, seriously, what are you doing out here?” Walker asked, coming over to him.
“I’m not doing anything,” Reid said, irked by the defensiveness he heard in his own voice. “Not that I need a reason to be outside on a nice day.” He turned his wheelchair slightly toward his brother.
“No, you’re right,” Walker said, suddenly contrite. “You don’t need a reason to be outside. In fact, you should be outside. I guess I’ve just gotten used to you being inside. I mean, you’re always inside.”
“Not always,” Reid said. Not on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 2:00 o’clock and 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon. “Aren’t you supposed to be at a meeting with one of our suppliers now?” Reid glanced pointedly at his watch. “I thought you told me this morning that—”
“Canceled,” Walker said blithely. “And I don’t have to pick Wyatt up from day camp either because he’s having a sleepover at a friend’s house. So I decided to surprise Allie and Brooke. But Allie’s not done yet with her swimming lesson”—he gestured at the lake—“and Brooke’s still taking her nap, so it looks like you’re stuck with me.”
“It does look that way, doesn’t it?” Reid said, with barely concealed irritation, though he knew that irritation was unfounded. Walker had no way of knowing how much Reid looked forward to watching Mila’s swimming lessons, and, if he had known, he would have been nothing short of amazed. Reid was a little amazed himself. He’d watched the first lesson out of a mild curiosity, and he’d assumed that that would be the end of it. But he hadn’t missed one since. They’d become the high point of his week. Oh hell, they’d become the high point of his life.
If Walker noticed his annoyance now, though, he chose to ignore it and instead went in search of a deck chair to drag over to Reid’s wheelchair. And as he was doing this, Reid rolled a little closer to the deck’s railing and stole a look down at the dock, wishing, for the one-hundredth time, that the view from here was less obstructed. But his brother had done the environmentally correct thing when he’d built this cabin, cutting down as few trees as possible, and sometimes, depending on where Allie and Mila were in the water, all Reid could make out through the trees were the splotches of color that were their bathing suits—Allie’s black and Mila’s red. Then again, he’d often thought, if he couldn’t see them that well, maybe they couldn’t see him that well either. Or at least that was what he told himself.
“How’re the swimming lessons going?” Walker asked, rolling a deck chair over and sprawling out on it.
“I don’t know,” Reid lied, though of course he knew exactly how the swimming lessons were going. Mila’s progress, in his opinion, had been nothing short of amazing. He watched now as she practiced the flutter kick, and Allie, standing beside her at the dock, made minor adjustments in her form and offered murmurs of approval.
“Allie’s a good teacher,” he said, without thinking.
“Is she?” Walker said, smiling. “I’m not surprised. I know she taught Wyatt how to swim.” And if he thought it was strange that Reid, who claimed not to know how the swimming lessons were going, had known enough to make this observation, he didn’t say so.
Reid glanced over at Walker then and noticed, for the first time, that he’d brought a file folder with him, which he’d set on the deck beside his chair. So he hadn’t just come over to see Allie and Brooke, Reid thought, with an inward groan.
“What’s in the file?” he asked Walker, not really wanting to know.
“This?” Walker said, feigning casualness as he picked it up. “It’s a draft of the business plan for the new boatyard at Big Bear Lake.”
“Oh, that,” Reid said distractedly. There was the sound of laughter from the dock then, and he longed to know what Mila and Allie were laughing about.
“Do you think you might want to take a look at it?” Walker asked tentatively, holding it out to him.
“No thanks,” Reid said curtly, though in fairness to Walker, it had been Reid’s idea to buy that damn boatyard in the first place. Still, that had been a lifetime ago, hadn’t it?
Walker blew out a long breath now and dropped the file back onto the deck, but Reid was relieved to see that he didn’t seem to be overly disappointed. In fact, as he leaned back in his deck chair, he seemed to positively radiate contentment and well-being.
“What’re you so happy about?” Reid asked.
“Me? Oh, nothing.” Walker smiled. “I’m just thinking about last night.”
“What happened last night?”
“Allie and I went on a date.”
“In Butternut?”
Walker nodded.
“Let me guess. You went to the fish fry at the American Legion. Or was it karaoke night at the Elks Club?”
“You can make fun of Butternut all you want,” Walker said. “But today, I’m not taking the bait. Actually we were supposed to go to the Corner Bar for hamburgers, but after we dropped the kids off at Jax and Jeremy’s, I thought, ‘Why the hell are we going out in public?’ I mean, we could’ve talked, but we couldn’t . . . you know, do anything else.”
“Probably not without attracting the attention of other people,” Reid agreed. He was only giving Walker half his attention. The other half belonged to Allie and Mila. They were standing in waist-deep water now, as Allie watched Mila do the arm movements for the front crawl.
“Anyway,” Walker continued, “we went to the boatyard instead. And I sent the night watchman home. And then . . . well, you know. Or you get the general idea, anyway.”
“In the office?” Reid asked.
“No,” Walker chuckled. “Not the office. In one of the boats on the showroom floor. The Chris Craft Corsair, actually. The Capri 21. That is one beautiful boat. And very comfortable, too, it turns out.”
“You know we’re going to have to knock twenty-five percent off her sale price now, don’t you?” Reid said.
“Don’t worry,” Walker said amiably. “I brought a blanket in from the truck. But Reid, seriously, it was”—here he sat up on hi
s deck chair—“it was amazing. I mean, not only did we not have to worry about being interrupted, but afterwards, we actually had a conversation without either of us falling asleep. And then, you know, we did it again. And then again after that.”
“Okay, that’s too much information,” Reid protested.
But Walker only laughed. “You used to like hearing about my conquests, Reid.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think it’s considered a conquest if you’re already married.”
Walker laughed again. “Maybe not. But damn it, it felt like one.”
Just then, they heard Brooke crying from inside the cabin, and, a moment later, Lonnie appeared with her at the screen door. “She just woke up,” she said, “and she’s a little fussy. I tried giving her the bottle Allie left for her, but I think maybe she wants her daddy to give it to her instead.”
“I’d love to give it to her,” Walker said. He stood up and clapped Reid on the shoulder. “Don’t forget, day after tomorrow, you get your cast off. Then the party, right?”
Reid nodded resignedly. He’d already tried, and failed, to convince his brother a party wasn’t necessary.
“Oh, Walker, don’t forget the business plan,” Reid said, pointing to the file his brother had left beside the deck chair.
“Right,” Walker said, picking it up.
“And, uh, if you want, you can leave that on my dresser,” Reid said. “I’m not promising anything, but I can probably take a look at it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. But don’t get too excited, all right? I didn’t say I was coming back to work.”
“No, of course not,” Walker said. And then, because he knew Reid too well to press his luck by saying anything more about it, he started to leave.
“Hey, Walk?” Reid called out to him.
“Yeah?”
“You know the barbershop in Butternut?”
“Yeah, it’s a good one.”
“You think you could run me over to it tomorrow?”
“God, yes,” Walker said, instantly coming back. “You gonna get the works? Haircut, shave, the whole thing?”
“All right, calm down,” Reid said, waving him away. “Go take care of your kid.”
After Walker went back inside the cabin, sliding the screen door shut behind him, Reid was left alone to watch the end of the swimming lesson. There wasn’t much to see. It was winding down now, both women moving leisurely toward the ladder. He’d stay out here a little longer though, he decided. At least until they started to come up from the dock. A breeze blew off the lake, stirring the trees that towered above the deck and bringing with it the scent of dry pine needles and the clean, tangy smell of lake water after it’s rained. And Reid, looking down at Mila, her red bathing suit speckled by the sunlight, felt it again, the feeling he got sometimes when he watched her swimming lessons. It was a lightness, a buoyancy, a weightlessness, almost, that made him forget, momentarily at least, that he was in a wheelchair, and that he wasn’t even walking right now, let alone floating.
He’d felt this feeling before, but it had been a long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that he had to make a mental effort to travel back that far in his mind. The last time he’d felt this way—really felt this way—was the summer he and Walker had bought their first boatyard. They’d paid almost nothing for it, only to realize later that they’d still paid too much for it. But they hadn’t known that then. They hadn’t known anything then, as far as Reid could tell, except, of course, that they loved boats. Building them, repairing them, customizing them. Anything having to do with them, really. And they’d thought that that would be enough to build a successful business. Well, that and the fact that they were willing to work like maniacs to do it. As it turned out, of course, that had been enough. But there was no way they could have known that then. Then, they should have been afraid. Should have been, but weren’t.
The best part of that first summer, oddly enough, hadn’t been the days, but the nights. The nights were when the two of them sat on the hood of Walker’s pickup truck, which they parked outside the boatyard’s office, and split a six-pack of beer while they listened to an old transistor radio Walker had found in an abandoned boat. They talked, far into the night, leaning back against the windshield of the truck, looking up at the sky, reluctant to go to sleep even after they’d finished the beer and the radio’s corroded batteries had finally given out. They’d talked about the business, of course. About everything they wanted to do with that boatyard. And other boatyards too. This, when they’d barely had enough money to buy the cans of soup they ate for dinner, heated up on a hot plate in the boatyard’s office. But they’d talked about other things as well. What other things they talked about, Reid wasn’t quite sure now. Sports, probably. Women, definitely, though, as he recalled, they hadn’t had a lot of time to meet any of them that summer.
Finally, though, the two of them would call it a night, climb into the bed of the pickup truck, and unroll their sleeping bags. Why had they slept in the truck, Reid wondered now, when they’d had the boatyard office right next door? But then he remembered. Rats. The office, the whole boatyard, actually, had been overrun by rats the size of small cats. They’d slept in the truck to get away from them.
He smiled now as he saw he and Walker as they’d been on those early summer mornings, after a night spent in the pickup. They’d crawl stiffly out of their dew-covered sleeping bags, which they’d hang out to dry on the hood of the truck, and then they’d eat handfuls of cereal right out of the box for their breakfast. They couldn’t wait to get started then on rebuilding that boatyard, that pathetic little boatyard that Reid knew now should have failed. Should have, but didn’t.
And the funny thing was, they’d been right to make big plans. Their business had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. But the more it grew, Reid suddenly understood, the further he’d gotten from the way he’d felt sitting on top of that pickup truck that first summer.
But when had it stopped being so much fun? he wondered now. When did it become like everything else in life? Another problem to solve. Another item to check off a list. Another reason to stay up late, or wake up early, or work for sixteen hours at a stretch? He couldn’t remember when it had happened; he just knew that it had. So why had Reid kept pushing himself so hard? Kept pushing both of them so hard? What was it that he’d wanted? And why hadn’t anything he’d gotten ever been enough? He knew what Walker would say; he knew because Walker had already said it many times before. He’d say that Reid was trying to even some score with their dad, some score that could never be evened. It was their dad who’d introduced them to boats. When they were little, he’d always had one in the garage that he was working on. He’d let them help him sometimes, too, and he’d give them little jobs to do, little projects to work on. For their dad, though, boats were just a hobby, and as much as he would have loved for them to be a business, he didn’t know how to make them one. He lacked something, the courage, maybe, or the drive, to turn his love of them into a full-time job.
And then he’d left. Left not just their mom, but them, too. He’d tried to stay in their lives, for a while, anyway. But then he’d stopped trying. Maybe it was because he and their mom kept fighting, even after the divorce, about child support checks, about visitation, about every little thing they could think to fight about it seemed. Or maybe it was because he’d met another woman and, eventually, had a daughter with her. He’d never introduced them to their half sister. They’d only heard about her, and not from their father, either, but from a friend of their father. By the time she was born, their dad had dropped out of their lives for good.
But no matter, Reid had told himself. He and his brother had taken something their father had loved to do and done him one better. No, done him one hundred times better. One thousand times better. They hadn’t needed him. And they hadn’t succeeded because of him, either. In fact, they’d succeeded in spite of him. But none of their success had ever given Reid the satisfaction
he’d thought it would.
He remembered now the night of the accident, not the part after he’d gotten in his car, but the part before he’d gotten in his car. He stopped himself though. He wouldn’t think about that now. Not when he was in this good of a mood. He looked down at the lake. Mila and Allie had dried themselves off, and, still wrapped in their towels, they were making their unhurried way to the set of steps that led up to the deck. Soon, very soon, he’d go back inside. But for a moment, he lingered there, feeling that unfamiliar, but welcome feeling. It was happiness, Reid knew. And it had come into his life again when he’d least expected it to.
CHAPTER 14
By the time Brandon walked into the coffee shop that morning, Ed Tuck was already wedged into one of the back booths and already hard at work on what looked to be the breakfast special. Brandon knew that special well. It was what he’d ordered when Mila had worked at this place. It was the only thing on the menu, as far as he could tell, that was even halfway decent.
His stomach grumbled hungrily as he made his way down the narrow aisle to Mr. Tuck’s booth. He was starving. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to eat anything here. Too many memories. It would have been easier to pick someplace else to have this meeting. He knew that. But this place was symbolic. And if there was one thing Brandon could appreciate, it was symbolism.
“Good morning,” Brandon said, sliding into the booth opposite Mr. Tuck.
“You’re late,” Mr. Tuck said, barely looking up from his plate, where he was using his toast to mop up the yolky remains of his fried eggs.
Brandon, annoyed, flipped over the empty cup of coffee on the table in front of him and signaled to the waitress. “It’s my dime, Mr. Tuck,” he said.
Mr. Tuck shrugged. “Maybe,” he said, shoveling hash browns into his mouth. “But you already owe me a lot of dimes.”