Seeking Carolina (Bitterly Suite Book 1)

by Terri-Lynne Defino

  Charlie’s eyebrows shot up. “You did, huh?”

  “It just sort of happened. You okay with it?”

  He was silent for a moment. “She’s a grown woman. She can do what she wants with her summer.”

  “Gina’s not going to be happy.”

  Leaning over the counter, his elbows sending up puffs of flour, he said, “Charlotte wasn’t going anyway. Even if she would have, it wouldn’t be for the whole summer. Same with Will. He’s already started hedging.”

  “But Gina can make him, no?”

  “She can, but she won’t. Gina made her choice. She knew what it meant when she made it. That’s between her and her children.”

  “You’re good, not to speak badly of her.”

  “Why would I? I’m sad for the kids, but I’m not sorry we divorced. Gina and I tried, but we just didn’t work. Not from day one.”

  Johanna leaned back on the stove handle, her hands gripping it to keep from reaching for her locket. So many summers ago, she thought Charlie McCallan was the happily-ever-after she never wanted. Her own parents and their furious love ending so tragically convinced her she didn’t want or need anything of the kind. Growing up, Johanna had few crushes that lasted more than a kiss, a fact she took pride in. Until the summer of her junior year. Until the skinny, ghost-pale kid whose parents took care of the local cemetery became the young man who made Johanna Coco’s heart dance.

  “I guess I should have seen something like this coming,” Charlie was saying.

  “Hmm…what?”

  “Charlotte. I hoped by letting the kids out of Christmas in Florida would help Charlotte get over her anger. I guess it won’t.”

  Johanna cleared her mind with a shake of her head. “She will, eventually. Gina is her mother. The only one she’s got.”

  “That’s what I keep telling her.” Charlie straightened, dusted off his elbows. “I hope you know what you’re getting yourself into. My daughter is…energetic.”

  “I prefer enthusiastic.” Johanna looked past him to where the young woman still texted with her friend. “She really does have a gift for baking. It takes creativity, as well as a scientific mind. Baking is all about chemistry.”

  “Then how the hell did you become a baker.” Charlie laughed. “You nearly blew up Mr. Ganatick’s lab, remember?”

  “Oh, wow. I do remember. The smell.”

  “Like rotten eggs and hair spray.”

  “Well,”—Johanna tossed her hair dramatically—“a woman can’t be pretty as a pixie and brilliant.”

  “Sure she can.” He moved to her side of the counter.

  Backed up against the stove, Johanna had no place to go even if she wanted to. She looked up at him suddenly so close.

  Charlie brushed flour or sugar from her face. “I’ve always known you were both.”

  “I—” She cleared her throat. “I never did well in school.”

  “That doesn’t mean you’re not brilliant.”

  “Not like Julietta.”

  “No, not like Julietta,” he said. “Yours is a different kind of brilliance. The being able to light up a room just by walking into it kind. The charming a passing grade from a teacher who should have failed you kind. The buying a bakery on a whim and making it not just profitable, but a local treasure kind.”

  “How did you…”

  “I know how the Internet works, Jo.” He moved a little closer. “I looked it up. ‘CC’s in Cape May, New Jersey.’” Closer. “‘Proprietress, Johanna Elsbet Coco.’” Charlie tipped her face up with one, thick finger. Johanna closed her eyes, closed off the world. Charlie whispered against her lips, “Best known for her chocolate mud cookies and—”

  The door slammed, startling them apart. Johanna’s heart hammered. Charlie was already lunging for the door. “Will,” he shouted. “William James.”

  “Dad, what is it? What’s wrong?” Charlotte stood in the doorway between dining room and kitchen, cell phone in hand and looking from her father to Johanna. “Oh,” she said. “Maybe I should go after him.”

  “Let him go.” Charlie pushed fingers through his hair. “We should probably head home anyway.”

  Johanna’s racing heart stuttered, but she did not argue. He called his kids who groaned and complained but did as they were told. As he was helping them on with their snow clothes, Mike arrived to say, ‘Merry Christmas,’ swipe some cookies and hustle his wife and sons out the door. From joyful bliss to an almost-kiss to alone in fifteen minutes flat. Johanna leaned against the door.

  “What happened?” Nina asked, coming down the hall.

  “Charlie’s son saw him about to kiss me and took off.”

  “Oh.” Nina grimaced, and then she smiled. “Oh!”

  “About to.” Johanna sighed. “He didn’t quite get there.”

  “It’s only a matter of time.”

  “Maybe it’s better if he doesn’t.”

  Nina put her arm around her shoulders, jostled her. “I never thought you, of all people, would give up on something you want so badly.”

  “You might be laying it on a little thick, don’t you think?”

  “Are you honestly going to try to convince me you don’t want Charlie McCallan?”

  Johanna slumped, deflated and discovered. “It’s only been a few days, Nina.”

  “Jo.” Nina threw up her arms. “It has been twenty years. Do you really think we all don’t know he broke your heart? That you stay away from Bitterly because of him?”

  “Not only because of him.” Johanna smiled despite herself. “I didn’t think I was so obvious.”

  “Darling, there is nothing subtle about you and never has been.”

  Johanna leaned into her sister, whose arms came around her. Nina kissed the top of her head. “I know the other reasons you haven’t come home. We all know about that too.”

  “They’re like ghosts I can’t escape here,” Johanna said. “I think I brought them with me from New Hampshire.”

  “They didn’t die in the fire, Jo. You know they didn’t.”

  “They died for me. And for you. It’s the last time we saw them.”

  “That’s probably a good thing. At least we had weird but loving parents. They got so much worse after we got taken away.”

  “Poor Emma and Julietta. What do you think life was like for them?”

  “We’ll probably never know. They were both so small when Gram brought them home.”

  “When Gram brought who home?”

  The sisters spun to see Julietta coming down the stairs, mug and cookie plate in hand.

  “Those kittens we had,” Nina said. “Remember them?”

  “Sugar and Spice.” Julietta made a face. “Why would you be talking about them?”

  “I’m thinking of getting a pair of cats for the bakery,” Johanna lied. “Did you make your deadline?”

  “Of course. It’s so quiet down here.” Julietta looked beyond her sisters. “Where did everyone go?”

  “Mike came for Emma and the boys,” Nina answered. “And Charlie and his kids had to go.”

  Julietta grimaced. She looked at her watch. “Can we still get pizza?”

  * * * *

  His son still hadn’t looked at him. Will spent his teenage years avoiding eye contact, but Charlie remembered when he was a little boy shy of strangers, yet with an intense curiosity that made asking questions a constant. Will never really liked cartoons, but would sit for hours watching a documentary about dinosaurs, or how telescopes were made. Sitting in the family room with his son now, knowing Charlotte was in the kitchen eavesdropping, Charlie missed the little boy he was and the simplicity of it all back then.

  “I’m sorry, Dad.” Words fell out of Will’s mouth like water rushing down a mountain. “I don’t know why I got so mad. I wasn’t…it just didn’t occur to me that you’d ever want…”

  “Another woman?”

  Will nodded.

  “I�
��m only thirty-eight, son. Your mom didn’t die. She left me for another man.”

  “She left us!” Another long exhale. “Sorry. This is just hard, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I ruined your big moment back there.”

  “A little bit.” Charlie laughed. “I’ve done my share of ruining things with Johanna.”

  “She was your girlfriend before Mom, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why’d you break up?”

  Charlie’s chest tightened. Because I was an idiot. Because sometimes you make mistakes, son, and there’s only doing what’s right. “Just a high school thing that didn’t work out,” he lied.

  “I guess you can say the same about you and mom.”

  “I guess you can. We tried though. And we got you kids. No regrets, kiddo.”

  Will’s eyebrow quirked, but he met Charlie’s gaze and, slapping hands to his knees, got to his feet.

  “Since I ruined pizza at the Coco’s, I’ll take care of dinner.”

  “That’s not necessary, son.”

  “It’s no big deal to call for takeout.” He smiled and they laughed together as they hadn’t in a long time. “Chinese okay? I’m kind of tired of pizza.”

  “Sounds good. Don’t forget egg-drop soup for Millie.”

  He headed for the kitchen. “Hey, Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Johanna gave me and Caleb twenty bucks each the other day for shoveling.”

  “I know. Caleb already told me.”

  “Snitch.”

  “You know he is. Thanks for telling me.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  Charlie sat in the quiet family room, listening to the distant noises in the rest of the house: Will on the phone with the Chinese take-out place, Caleb and Tony playing video games in their attic room, Millie singing to whatever dolls hadn’t been wrapped up in plastic garbage bags and quarantined out in the garage. The boys never complained about sharing the big attic room. When Charlotte left for college and told Will he could borrow hers while she was gone, he hadn’t taken her up on it.

  Your room is too girlie.

  But Charlie knew better. Since Gina left, his kids stuck together as ferociously as the Coco girls always had.

  He knew little about their parents, only that Nina and Johanna arrived in Bitterly years before Emma and Julietta did. Something about a car crash and a psychiatric ward escape. He thought there was a fire in there someplace too. Or it could have all been gossip the small town thrived upon. Over the years, he did figure out that Adelina and Giovanni Coco must have adopted the girls officially. Though they all had the same parents, they bore their mother’s last name. At least, it was what he decided during those years after Johanna left Bitterly, fantasizing about her when life as an eighteen-year-old father and husband got to be so hard.

  “Hey, Daddy.”

  Charlotte’s soft voice didn’t startle him, but chased his thoughts away nonetheless. She sat down on the sofa beside him, put her head upon his shoulder.

  “You okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You looked so sad when I came in.”

  “I was just thinking.”

  “About Johanna?”

  He nodded. “I really like her, Daddy.”

  “So do I.”

  “I don’t think we like her in the same way.” Charlotte nudged him. “You okay with me going to work for her this summer?”

  “You don’t need my permission.”

  “I wasn’t asking it. I just asked if you were okay with it.”

  He put his arm around his daughter, kissed the top of her head. “You’re going to have to see your mother sometime.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Char, she’s your mother. And she loves you.”

  “But she loves Bertie more.”

  “It’s not like that—”

  Charlotte sat forward. She turned to face him. “I don’t want to talk about mom. And why are you always defending her? But I don’t want to talk about her. Okay? Let’s just go back to talking about you and Jo and how you’re going to go over there and make something magical happen for her on Christmas Eve.”

  Charlie sighed. “Is that what we were talking about?”

  “We were getting there.”

  “What do you suggest I do?”

  “I don’t know. Sing outside her window?”

  “You’ve heard me sing, Charlotte.”

  “True. How about…oh.”

  “Oh, what?”

  “I have the perfect thing.” Charlotte bounced on the sofa, clapping her hands like a little girl. “What’s Dan Greene’s phone number?”

  * * * *

  She had such different visions for the evening. After a day of baking cookies, and an evening of pizza, more cookies, and Christmas specials with the kids, Charlotte would have taken her siblings home, leaving Charlie to watch It’s a Wonderful Life with her, her sisters, and their men. As it turned out, after yet more pizza and the beer Gunner brought with him, he and Nina curled up on one sofa, Julietta and Efan lounged on the floor, and Johanna sat with a pillow hugged to her chest, feeling like the fifth wheel on a hay-wagon.

  She tried not to sulk. Until coming home for her grandmother’s funeral, Johanna had spent years actively avoiding Charlie McCallan. He hadn’t exactly ditched her this time. Will had gotten upset seeing his father about to kiss someone who wasn’t his mother. He had to come first. She’d have been disappointed in Charlie if he brushed off his son’s feelings for the sake of a kiss. Every rational bit of brain matter told her it was childish to pout, but Johanna found herself doing so anyway.

  “Will you quit it?”

  Johanna glanced down at her sister on the floor. She and Efan sat foot-to-foot, the only contact between them her plaid Christmas socks and his black ones.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “What did I do?”

  Julietta threw herself back against the pillows stacked behind her, sighing dramatically.

  “I am not doing that.”

  “You’re not as loud,” Gunner said. “But you are doing a lot of sighing over there. Sounds like a tire leaking.”

  Efan and Julietta snorted, then laughed at one another. On the screen, Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart were dancing the Charleston.

  “What is it about this house that turns otherwise mature adults into children?” Nina scolded, but snorted in her effort not to laugh. “You know, Jo, you could go over to his house. He’s probably sighing like a leaky tire over there, too.”

  “Now who’s being childish? I’m going to bed.”

  Tossing the pillow at Julietta, who caught it and put it behind her head, Johanna pushed out of the sofa and headed for the stairs. At the front door, she hesitated. Her boots sat on the rack. Her coat hung on a hook. The keys to Gram’s old Explorer were still in the brass bowl on the breakfront. She picked them up. Gripped them in her hand.

  Her belly fluttered.

  Johanna touched fingers to the place and found the locket beneath her shirt. Static sparked, nicking her fingers and coursing up to her scalp. For a split moment, she smelled summer. Hot air. The woods. The stream there. And it was gone.

  She opened her eyes, only then realizing they’d been closed, and found herself outside beside the old Explorer, keys in hand. She looked to the house. Back to the SUV. When had she put on a coat, or stuffed her bare feet into fuzzy boots? She even wore mittens and a hat. A scarf wound ‘round her neck.

  “Damn…”

  She leaned against the car door, staring at the keys. This was all too much. Being home, facing ghosts she’d been successfully avoiding for years, Gram’s death, finding the locket. And Charlie. After so many years, Charlie McCallan. Johanna bowed her head and took deep breaths, wishing for something of summer to make her promises she was too afraid to ask for.

  The jingling of be
lls picked up her head. The sound got louder, now accompanied by hoof beats on pavement. Johanna started towards the road. A carriage and two came to a stop at the foot of the driveway.

  “Merry Christmas, Jo.”

  “Hey, Dan.” She glanced to the passenger in the carriage bed. Bundled against the cold, there was still no mistaking him, or the summer scents suddenly rushing at her. “Hey, Charlie,” she managed to say. “You gentlemen out for a night on the town, Colonial style?”

  “My sister and her kids are home waiting for me to play Santa,” Dan answered. He gestured over his shoulder. “He’s the only one I’d do this for, on Christmas Eve, no less. But when Charlie McCallan says he needs a favor, there’s not one person in this town who’d say no. Not even grouchy-me.”

  “When have you ever been grouchy, Daniel?”

  “Daniel, huh? When my sister calls me Daniel, it means trouble.”

  “Am I going to get a word or two into my attempt to sweep her off her feet, Dan?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry. Forget I’m here. I’m invisible. A deaf-mute. Honest.”

  “You’re still talking.”

  Dan motioned a zipper across his lips, his eyes going skyward as if he would count the stars. Johanna leaned on the carriage door. “Are you here for me, then?”

  “I thought a Christmas Eve carriage ride through Bitterly would be a romantic way of apologizing.”

  “You did, huh?”

  “He’s lying. It was Charlotte.”

  “I thought you were a deaf-mute.”

  “Sorry. Sorry.” Another zip.

  Johanna laughed softly, shaking her head. “Keep the heat in,” she said as Charlie started lifting the mounds of blankets. “I can climb up myself.”

  “You sure?”

  Johanna gripped the sides, tried to heave herself up into the carriage, but it was higher than it looked, she was very small, and her coat was too bulky. She heaved once, twice, on the third, she felt two hands pushing her up from behind.

  “There you go.”

  “Just like in the movies,” she laughed, flopping forward with the momentum of Dan’s heave. “Such chivalry.”

  Charlie lifted the blankets and she got under them quickly. “This is not how I planned for it to go.”

  Johanna snuggled into him. “Nothing ever has with us, Charlie.”