Читать книгу Nice To Come Home To - Liz Flaherty - Страница 15

CHAPTER FIVE

HE WASN’T READY to give in on the coffee shop idea, but Luke had to admit he liked having an active partner in the orchard. For one thing, she didn’t mind climbing trees and she was—for someone he thought was on the skinny side of slim—strong enough to fill the bag over her shoulder as full as her sister did. It was the busiest time of year at the orchard and she pitched in wherever help was needed. She was great in the retail store and on the sorting machine—not so good when it came to making the orchard’s signature dumplings.

“It skipped a generation. That’s all I can figure,” Cass said, laughing, when Zoey and Luke looked at her first attempt with something like horror.

She often joined him and Zoey at the farmhouse for coffee in the morning. This became an increasingly pleasurable point during the day, since Zoey seemed to be on a one-woman crusade to fatten up her niece. Not wanting to make anyone feel uncomfortable about eating in front of him, Luke filled his plate and joined them at the table. They brainstormed about the orchard, about the Miniagua Lakers football team, about the coffee shop.

The daggone coffee shop.

She was serious about it. She’d even hauled him over to Peru on Monday morning to a place there called Aroma, where he drank two cups and got one to go of something really strong and good. She’d had something girly. Then, just when he’d built up a good argument, she’d taken him to a chain coffee place in Kokomo and another local one that sat just off campus at a nearby university. He’d eaten pastries at that one, and they hadn’t been as good as the ones from the Amish bakery, but Cass had shown him how popular they were and gotten off-the-top-of-her-head numbers from the barista about what their revenue was on a fairly slow weekday.

He was running out of arguments.

On Friday, Cass texted and said she couldn’t make breakfast and Royce called Seth and said she’d be late at the orchard. Neither of them offered an explanation. Zoey came to the apple barn, looking fretful, and stood at the sorter for a while. Sort of helping.

“What are you doing here?” Luke asked bluntly, dumping a box of Galas onto the conveyor. “Not that you’re not welcome—you most certainly are—but you don’t generally hang out in the barn. You go up to the store and the apple dumpling assembly.”

“Luke, what if they’re getting ready to go home? Royce needs to start school, so even though they planned to stay two weeks, they might not. It’s a long, hard drive.”

She literally wrung her hands, and Luke wanted to wring Cass’s neck. She’d had no business getting her aunt’s hopes up that she might stay at Miniagua if her intent all the time was to hightail it back to the West Coast. While he was relieved in a way not to have to come up with more reasons not to open a coffee shop in the round barn, he was seriously ticked that she would get everyone all excited and then just take off, even though from everything he’d heard that seemed to be her modus operandi.

Her friends from the wreck had stood by her since she’d come back. All the ones who were local had met at Gianna Gallagher’s on Tuesday night. “Not to ask questions,” Gianna had said, “but to welcome you home.”

Cass had cried when she’d talked about it at breakfast. Not the boo-hoo kind that Rachel had made into an art form when she was in high school, but silent, heartfelt weeping that she apologized for.

He knew all the other survivors of the wreck, what they’d been through and how they’d come out on the other side. Having her come back only to leave again would be like a slap in the face to them as much as it was to Zoey.

And to him. Daggone it. He didn’t want to take her likely desertion personally, but he did. They were getting to be friends, weren’t they? And he liked her. He thought she was pretty hot, too, but that was incidental and not to be acted on—she had way too much baggage going on and he just wasn’t going there. Not with her. Not with anyone.

“There’s nothing we can do either way,” he told Zoey. “You’re reestablishing a relationship with her and she’s not going to let that slide any more than you are.” I hope. “She has to consider Royce, too. Don’t forget, I’ve got that running back out there with me for the whole freakin’ school year because of a consideration like that.” He didn’t feel like defending her, not at all, but he owed her that one as one custodial sibling to another.

“I know, but it would be so nice for Royce to go here this year while her mother’s gone. It was great for Cass regardless of how things ended up. I believe that with all my heart.”

It was Zoey’s heart he was worried about. As far as he knew, she was healthy, but that heart was big and pretty wide open—he hated to see it get broken.

“Well, come on into the store. I’ll buy you some coffee and a dumpling.” He stepped away from the sorter and waited for her to join him.

They were at the open doors of the barn when Cass’s red SUV pulled into the parking lot, spitting some gravel when she stopped a little more suddenly than she maybe should have. That was explained when Royce got out of the driver’s side and took off running toward the trees where Seth and the others were picking. She had papers flapping in her hand, and she didn’t bother closing the door.

Cass got out of the other side, moving more slowly but with a certain buoyancy in her step that made Luke’s heartbeat go skippy for a couple of beats. She walked around to close the other door, then approached where Luke and Zoey waited. “Sorry to miss this morning.” She hugged Zoey and smiled at Luke. He couldn’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses she wore, but he’d have bet they were smiling, too.

They didn’t ask her the circumstances of her absence. She was a grown-up and he knew Zoey didn’t want to push her away. Luke didn’t, either, but he was still in the stage of maybe they’d be friends and maybe not; trying to bring her closer might scare her off completely.

She spoke before he could. “I have had no coffee. Can we get some?”

They went into the store, waving at the woman behind the counter, and back to the self-serve coffee station. Cass had replaced the foam cups with promotional cups from all over Miniagua and Sawyer. He didn’t know how she’d found time to collect them, but they were nice for customers and the environment, and the coffee sure tasted better out of them.

“Royce and I talked a lot last night,” she said when they’d gone back outside and taken seats at one of the patio tables on the wide porch. “I said we needed to leave by Wednesday of next week in order to get her into school for the second week. Not being there the first week is fine, not so much another one. She misses her friends, misses the shopping and looks forward to the advanced placement curriculum and getting into Berkeley. She has mentioned a minimum of seven hundred times that there’s nothing to do here. I thought, other than her no longer seeing your ‘seriously hot’ younger brother and my ‘seriously cool’ aunt every day, that Royce was ready to go home.” She cleared her throat and took a long drink of coffee. “I was wrong.”

“Oh.” Zoey clasped her hands in anticipation, and Luke almost did. What was wrong with him anyway? Any minute now, he’d be telling her he thought the coffee shop was a fine idea. And it wasn’t. For heaven’s sake, it just so was not.

“Yes.” Cass sounded gleeful, and Luke caught a glimpse and a sound-bite of the girl she must have been when she’d spent her junior year here. “Even though she wants to return to California when her mother comes home, she’d really like to try school here and she’d like to spend quality time—yes, she actually used that term—with Aunt Zoey and...yeah, she wouldn’t mind seeing Seth occasionally, too.” Cass bounced—literally—in her seat. “Where is that boy? I need to find him and kiss his face.”

“So, you’re staying.” He couldn’t be wrong if he stated the obvious, could he? And he wasn’t going to think about her kissing Seth’s face. Or anyone else’s.

“Yes. At least until Royce’s mother gets home, and longer if I can find a place to live and settle in. We enrolled Royce in school this morning and have spent the last thirty minutes discussing the fact that she doesn’t have a single thing to wear, which means spending a whole day and a bunch of money in Kokomo.” Her brows knit into a slight frown. “It shouldn’t be a problem finding a house to rent, with the lake season ending, should it?”

“No.” Zoey sounded frantic. “No.” She pointed in the vague direction of the farmhouse. “Twelve rooms, Cass, and four of them are upstairs bedrooms. You and Royce wouldn’t even have to share a bath because there are two of them up there. It’ll be yours someday anyway, so move in now. Make it your home.”

“Aunt Zoey.” Cass pinned her gaze to her aunt. “How long has it been since you’ve lived with a sixteen-year-old? It’s not for the faint of heart.”

Zoey laughed, that big, full sound that delighted everyone within hearing. “I shared a room and a bathroom with your mother and lived to tell the story. Any more questions?”

“Are you sure?”

“More than sure.”

It was already a sunny day, but Luke thought it had gotten brighter within the last few minutes. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Maybe a coffee shop would be a good idea.”

* * *

IT HAD BEEN a busy, busy day. When they’d gotten home from the orchard, accompanied by a pizza and two milkshakes, Cass had to convince Royce they couldn’t move into the farmhouse that very minute. After supper, she spent an hour trying to decide what to do with her apartment in Sacramento.

When Royce Skyped with her mother that evening, Lieutenant Colonel Gentry asked to talk to Cass.

“Is it okay,” asked Cass, “that we’re staying here?”

“More than okay.” Damaris bit her lip, and Cass thought she looked tired. “Your dad probably won’t come there. I think that’s a good thing for both of you.”

“I think so, too.” Cass hesitated, frowning at her favorite stepmother’s flickering image. “Damaris? You doing all right?”

“Yeah.” The other woman’s face cleared. “Not a good place or a good time. I’m so grateful to you for keeping Royce. It’s still okay...you know, if anything happens—you’ll still keep her?”

Alarm shivered up Cass’s spine. “I’ll always keep her,” she said, her tone as level as she could make it, “but nothing’s going to happen to you. You survived life with Major Gentry, sir, remember?”

They all joked about it, even the two stepmothers Cass hadn’t bonded with, that they’d escaped unscathed from life with her father. They used to say that when he’d read Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini, he’d thought it was an instruction manual.

“You’re right. Nothing’s going to happen. Except we both know something might. I’ve always heard about the lake. From you. From your mother. Even from your aunt Zoey when Marynell was ill. I like the idea of Royce being there and of her being with you.” She smiled. “Are you giving up your apartment?”

“I’m trying to decide.”

“Let me help with that.” Damaris leaned closer, and it was as if she was reaching through the screen of Cass’s laptop computer. “Let it go. Hire someone to pack it up and ship it to you. You’re home now. Plan on staying there.”

Where shivers had been, Cass thought maybe some steel was working its way up her spine. Home. “I think you’re right.”

“I need to go. Give my girl a hug for me. I love you, stepgirl.”

Cass went still. Damaris called her that sometimes and, occasionally, she added a casual “love ya” at the end of their conversations, but not like this. Never like this.

“Damaris?”

“Got to go.”

“Okay.” She shook off the wave of foreboding. “Love you, too, Colonel.”

After Royce went to bed, Cass poured herself a glass of wine and sat at the table in front of her computer. She hadn’t been very productive since they’d gotten to the lake, something nearly unheard of—one of the things Cassandra G. Porter’s readers counted on was that she would have a new mystery on the shelves every June and every December. That meant writing a certain amount every day. She still wrote every day, but the word count had taken a serious road trip to the wayside.

She’d finished a book while she was taking chemo. “It’s not my best,” she qualified when she sent its file to her editor, “but it was my best at the time.” Lucy Garten, the sleuth who was the protagonist in the series, had developed breast cancer and gone through treatment as Cass did, solving The Case of Daisy’s Ashes while she was bald, grouchy and nauseated.

Damaris had been her beta reader, proofreading as she went. It had cemented a bond born from the tenuous threads of their step-relationship.

To date, it was her bestselling book. Clutching that success close was what had given her the courage to come back to the lake, but now she needed to stay successful.

The thought made her grin at herself. It also led to getting several pages done by the time the wine bottle was empty and her eyelids were drooping. Before she went to bed, she walked down to the lake, looking out over its surface. The moon was waning, but still lent its light to the ruffly little waves that slapped the shore. She thought of the look on Damaris’s face, of Royce’s almost palpable excitement when it was decided they would stay in Miniagua, of the warmth of Zoey’s jubilant hug.

She thought of Luke Rossiter and of what tables and chairs she’d find for the coffee shop and wondered if she was insane for wanting to be a barista. You’re a writer, for heaven’s sake, and you can finally almost make a living at it. But the round barn at the orchard had called out to a part of her she’d been holding back since she left the lake, the part that didn’t want to be alone. As much as she loved writing and the solitude that went along with it, she needed something that would force her away from that aloneness.

And she loved coffee shops. What more reason did she need?

Back in the cottage, she went to bed, thinking again of Damaris’s tired face. And then, before sleep overtook her, of Luke Rossiter’s smiling one.

* * *

“TELL ME AGAIN why we can’t just have the coffee shop in the center corridor of the barn. It’s plenty big enough and access is right there from both entrances. That leaves the side areas for offices or even other little shops if this thing takes off.” Luke looked both tired and impatient. And on the edge of angry.

Cass wasn’t good at standing her ground—it wasn’t something that had ever worked particularly well for her. But... “Because the coziness factor would be gone. It would never be quiet or intimate or conducive to working.” She had said all this. She knew she had. Who knew that under that straight, silky hair of his, Luke Rossiter had such a thick head?

“Working? I thought it was for coffee. If people want to work, they should rent their own office space—maybe in the side rooms of the round barn.”

“How did you get through college without studying in coffee shops?” she demanded.

“Easy. I studied in the student union or even occasionally—call me crazy—in the library. I thought a coffee shop was for drinking coffee.” He grinned, but it wasn’t his usual funny, endearing expression. It was more like a smirk.

“It is. And for visiting, studying and working. It’s a great place for parents to recharge after a day with kids. For artists to sketch and writers to write. Even for music. Open mic nights or karaoke.”