Nice to Come Home To

by Liz Flaherty

  Never again.

  He grinned at Cass, but he could tell by the change in her expression that she’d absorbed the momentary change in his mood. Are you all right? He could see the silent question in her eyes.

  He nodded slightly, his grin softening into a smile meant just for her. I’m fine.

  For now.

  “Votes all in?” He watched as Neely passed a basket.

  While they waited for the count, he gave a so-far-this-season report on how things were going at the orchard. Sales were better than anticipated. All the apples were yielding nicely—some better than others—although there was a row of trees near the back that would be cut this year. Their replacements had gone into the ground in spring and were doing well. He still hoped to keep the orchard store open through the winter. The coffee shop would open the next morning, although the sign with its name obviously wouldn’t be done yet.

  “That’s not a problem,” Cass assured everyone. “People will just call it the coffee shop anyway.”

  “Then why did we go through all this naming thing?” asked Royce. “Not that it hasn’t been fun, even if my suggestion was ignored. I’m sixteen. People always ignore me.”

  Everyone either groaned or jeered. Seth patted her back and looked sad.

  “A lesson in marketing,” Luke said over the sound of laughter. “Like you said, it was fun. It increased awareness that the coffee shop was coming. People who entered suggestions stayed at the orchard longer, which translated into purchasing more things or eating another apple dumpling.”

  “Got a winner,” Neely announced, bringing Luke a sheet of paper with numbers on it. “It was by a landslide, I might add.”

  He took the paper, put on Zoey’s green plaid reading glasses—which he didn’t need—and made a show of trying to read the results.

  “From this day forth,” he said sadly, “the coffee shop will be known as Ground in the Round. Congratulations, Cass.”

  “Why, thank you.” She got to her feet and sketched a curtsy, beaming at the occupants of the table. “I appreciate your votes.”

  “And you’ll pay us later, right?” said Seth.

  “Yes.” She met Luke’s eyes again, and he put on a look of outrage. “When they told me how much you offered, I just upped the ante a little.”

  Zoey nodded wisely. “Sound business practice.”

  Everyone dispersed after dessert. Isaac, Mary, Seth and Royce rode back to the orchard in Isaac’s parents’ buggy. Zoey drove her car. She offered Luke and Cass a ride, but didn’t argue when they demurred, choosing to walk the two miles.

  “That was nice.” Cass waved at Neely as they left the building. “Do you do that often? Have meals with the employees?”

  “Not often, no. We start the season with a picnic and end it with a harvest supper that’s basically a pitch-in. We give bonuses then and say goodbye to our seasonal employees. Most of them return for the next season, but not all of them and not every year. We have a Christmas party for the skeleton crew that works year-round.”

  “Do you ever have to fire anyone?”

  He flinched. “I have before, but I admit they almost have to cause bodily harm to someone else before I can make myself do it.”

  Cass chuckled, the sound coming soft from her throat. “An orchard manager who’s afraid of heights and doesn’t like firing people. What a combination.”

  “Oh, there’s more.” He leaned in close to her and admitted in a stage whisper, “Unless they’re wrapped up in pie or dumplings or pressed into hard cider or a few other manifestations, I don’t much like apples, either.”

  Her laugh rang out then, bouncing off the lake. They walked on toward the orchard, their hands swinging between them and touching often enough that Luke finally caught and held hers.

  “Keep Cold Orchard,” she said, looking up at a sign that assured them they were going in the right direction. “It was Country Club Orchard when I was a kid. Where did the new name come from? I’ve meant to ask you that a dozen times, but always forget.”

  “Zoey came up with it. It was before I came to the lake to live, and that’s been eight years. It came from a Robert Frost poem.” Finding that out had given him a new appreciation for Frost. “Are you excited about the opening?”

  She nodded. “Probably more than I should be. My husband was an entrepreneur and I was there for more business openings than I can remember, but it wasn’t the same. I was never invested, and I don’t mean financially—my heart was never involved and now I’m afraid it is. I knew I’d never get to know the people who worked in the places we started, never even get attached to the product. Ground in the Round is different. Everything else was already here, but this particular part of Keep Cold Orchard is my baby.”

  Her eyes were shining and he thought maybe her heart was in them. If he didn’t watch himself, his heart was going to get involved, too.

  “So, yes,” she said, “I am excited. Are you going to be there for the first pot in the morning?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it. Half caff. One cream and two sugars, light on the cream. You’ll have that, right?”

  “Even worse.” And now she sounded a little breathless. “I have it memorized.”

  *

  SOMETIMES YOU JUST know things.

  When the reporter from the lake’s bi-weekly tabloid-size newspaper interviewed her at the end of her first week as Ground in the Round’s chief barista, he’d asked her what made her want to serve coffee in a barn in a small community in Indiana.

  She’d said, “It’s a new venture and a new adventure. What’s not to like?” But in her heart, she’d just known.

  Before adopting Cassandra G. Porter as her alter ego, she’d always worked from home and liked it—there was something to be said for not getting dressed until noon—but writing in coffee shops had given her a longing to be the Cass Gentry she’d never been. To be Cassandra.

  After a week in Ground in the Round, with her feet sore and virtually every top she owned coffee stained, she was both jubilant and exhausted. Her only concern was that she hadn’t gotten very many new words written and she knew she needed to cut back her hours in the shop. This would be easy—the other baristas were willing and eager to work more.

  But it was so much fun. Learning the combinations and remembering who drank what. Writing names on cups.

  “You know,” Zoey worried, as they ate dinner together on the last Thursday in September, “you might be compromising your health. Should you be running at full tilt the way you are?”

  Arlie’s friend Kari Ross, who had become Cass’s gynecologist, had voiced the same concern a few days earlier. “I know you feel good and that your scans were good, but there are still fragile places there. It won’t hurt at all to nurse them along for a little bit.”

  But what if a little bit is all I have? It was something else she never said aloud, although it was sometimes difficult to quiet the inner voice that spoke the words into the dark silence of night.

  “Aunt Zoey, is there a room I can use as an office?” she asked abruptly. Although everyone in her family knew about Cassandra and the Mysteries on the Wabash books, they never asked her questions. “I’m going to fall too far behind if I don’t get busy.”

  Her aunt looked ready to object, but she didn’t. “There is,” she said. “The bedroom beside yours or the sunroom back here—either one would work and we can do anything to them you like or need. There’s the maid’s apartment off the other side of the kitchen, too, but I’d rather keep that as the guest room. But why don’t you just take your laptop to the coffee shop with you and write there?”

  “Because then they’ll know.” Cass sipped from her wine, willing the beverage to keep panic at bay.

  “They won’t know anything you don’t tell them, and who is ‘they,’ anyway? Do you go up to every customer who’s using a computer and ask them what they’re doing?”

  “Well, no, but…” She stopped. Why wouldn’t it work? She’d written at least half
her books at corner tables. What would be different about it being a table in her own shop?

  And if someone found out, so what? She didn’t have to worry about embarrassing Tony or her father anymore with what they’d called her “little stories”—they’d both removed themselves almost completely from her life. She was back at the lake, not hiding from that happy year in her past anymore.

  “You have a very good point.” She nodded, keeping her voice brisk. “I’ll take my laptop to work with me.”

  “Does anyone know?” Zoey asked.

  “I don’t think so, unless it would be Holly. I picked myself out in one of her books immediately. It wouldn’t surprise me if she latched onto the cheerleader with a prosthetic foot in one of mine.”

  “Is your cheerleader a romance writer of Italian descent?”

  “No. I didn’t want to be too obvious.”

  “Of course not.” Zoey laughed. “You can still have an office here in the house. There’s plenty of room. It will be yours one day anyway.”

  “Let’s not even go there.” Cass frowned at her and got up from the table, gathering her dishes.

  “Leave it.” Zoey fussed at her. “You cooked. I’ll clean up. Besides, unless I miss my guess, our business partner will be here any minute asking you if you want to go get ice cream.”

  Luke’s distinctive rap came on the door at that moment, and the women laughed as Cass went to open it. He called, “Evening, Zoey,” and pulled Cass onto the porch, wrapping his arms around her. “This is probably wrong on so many different levels, but I can’t care right now. It’s a kissing kind of day.” The last words were murmured against her lips, and all she could do was swallow a sigh.

  They’d avoided physical contact beyond the occasional one-armed hug, even though they’d talked all around the subject. The conversation always ended with the assertion that neither of them was interested in dating anyone, much less someone they were in business with. If they got a little hormonal, well, that was just the way it was. They were adults, after all—they could handle themselves. Besides everything else, they were in charge of two teenagers whose hormones made their own look like rank amateurs.

  But all those sensible conclusions were before Cass stood on the back porch in Luke’s arms. She thought she could still feel the day’s sun in his skin, taste the sweetness of the cherry lollipops that were his guilty pleasure and see an expression in his eyes she hadn’t seen…ever. He was taller than she was, but not that much; meeting his gaze meant only the slightest upward tilt of her head. When her arms went up over his shoulders, she didn’t feel as if she was clutching him for balance. She just liked touching him.

  It had been such a long time since she’d wanted to touch someone or had wanted someone to touch her. His hands were firm at her waist, his body solid against hers, but it was his lips, warm and welcoming on hers, that made an ordinary evening into something star-spangled and joyful.

  She came to believe, in the space of a few minutes, that the kissing kind of day was the best kind of all.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK?” Luke held his double-dip chocolate cone in one hand, Cass’s slender fingers in the other. “Business is wicked good at the orchard, and you’re proving me more wrong about the coffee shop on a daily basis.” In certain ways his life had started anew the day her red Equinox pulled into the orchard’s parking lot.

  He frowned, trying to sort out how he felt about that. He didn’t want a new life.

  “Think about what?” She swirled her tongue around her scoop of butter pecan. Swallowed as if it were ambrosia in her mouth. She licked a drop off her bottom lip slowly, delicately, then slurped the ice cream into a point she promptly bit off with even, white teeth.

  He watched her, unable to look away. Only when she looked questioningly at him did he realize she’d asked him something. What was it?

  Oh. “How do you like the way things are going?” A chill rippled up his spine with the words and he wished he could take them back. Nothing like tempting fate. Thinking about a new life was more than enough of that. “At the orchard, I mean.” Not about the interlude on the porch. That was still too new. Too fresh.

  Too exciting.

  “I like it.” She smiled at him, but the expression wore caution around its edges. “But I…” She stopped.

  From a boat on the lake came the sound of the Eagles singing “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” and Luke chuckled. “Did I just interrupt that ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ they’re singing about? You don’t roll that way, do you?”

  She didn’t answer, and they walked on. Eating their ice cream. Their fingers still linked. But with a distance between them that he’d have described as a chasm if he’d been trying to use his junior high vocabulary words.

  What had happened since the interlude on Zoey’s back porch, when they’d found what Rachel would have called “kindred spiritedness”? When they’d been so close that Cass’s heartbeat had kept time with his.

  They reached the park bench beside the dock outside Anything Goes and sat down. Only then did Cass speak. “I guess I don’t. In my experience, there’s always a shoe about to drop somewhere.”

  It was a feeling he didn’t understand. Even losing Jill hadn’t been a surprise. It had been horrible in every way and they’d fought against its inevitability with the persistence of the very young. But they’d known it was coming. Only when Jill had said, “Let it go, Luke, and let’s just have a good time,” had they given up.

  And what a good time they’d had. Even after ten years, he could relish that last year of equal parts pleasure and pain. Just like in that movie, he wouldn’t have given up either.

  He’d become a partner in the orchard before his other job had ended. The former manager had been ready to retire so that Luke had never missed a day’s work. He’d had to do some financial scrambling, but more than three years after losing his job, he was better off than he’d been. He’d never be rich, which was fine with him, but he was comfortable, and he liked that.

  Having the second bathroom finished would be nice, too, but even with a few thousand dollars and some travertine tile still to go, he knew it would be done one day and that the quality of the finished product wouldn’t be a surprise.

  But how he’d felt on the porch and how he felt a few minutes ago when the gulf had spread between them—those were both unexpected. And maybe dangerous, at least to his peace of mind.

  “What do you do,” he asked slowly, “when the shoe drops?”

  “Oh.” Her voice sounded reedy. “It depends.”

  “On?” He could tell she didn’t want to talk about it. Zoey’s voice thinned when she was finished with a subject, too, and her chin did the same upward tilt as Cass’s.

  Cass laughed, not very convincingly. “On whether it’s a combat boot or a flip-flop.”

  He nodded, finding sense in that. “What about a nice, comfortable loafer? How do you react then?” He kept his voice slow, with a smile in it. Just because he was feeling a little nervous himself, he didn’t want to scare her away from the conversation.

  She was silent again, for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was quiet. “I haven’t had many loafer drops, to tell the truth. Usually it’s the combat boots, in which case I turn tail and run.”

  “So.” He stared out at the lake’s glassy surface and crossed his ankle over his knee. “I hope there’s no shoe this time.”

  “Me, too.” But her voice told him she knew better.

  He put his arm around her, drawing her into his side. She raised her head as he lowered his, and their lips met in a sweet version of an age-old dance.

  “What’s between you and me doesn’t have to do with the orchard or the coffee shop,” he whispered. “It’s courtship simply for the pleasure of it. Nothing more and nothing less. No promises, no demands. No permanency.” He kissed her again, treasuring her sweet response. “No shoes.”

  *

  HOT CHOCOLATE BEFORE bed became a habit f
or Cass and Royce with the cooling evenings of late September. They sliced and shared different varieties of apples and talked until sleep beckoned. Sometimes Zoey joined them, but more often it was just the two of them. It was one of Cass’s favorite times of day.

  “I love school here,” said Royce, filling her backpack while Cass made the cocoa. “It’s so friendly. There are cliques, I guess, but no one cares all that much.”

  “That’s nice.” Cass thought back to the terror of changing schools—even with eight moves in twelve years, it had never gone away. “You’ve been okay with making friends, right?”

  Royce spent more time with the kids who worked at the orchard than with anyone else, although she had attended a couple of parties. Cass was happy with her sister’s social life, but she wasn’t sure how the girl’s mother would feel about it—it wasn’t anything they’d discussed at length. When she came home, Damaris would take Royce back to California and to the life they shared there. It was a good life, but it was different from being at the lake and going to one of the smallest high schools in the state.

  “Oh, sure.” Royce sipped her chocolate and licked away the resultant mustache in a gesture so innocent, Cass knew the unreasonable yearning to protect her little sister from all pain forever. “But Seth and Mary and Isaac are my best friends, even though Mary and Isaac don’t go to school anymore.” The Amish didn’t usually finish high school, a concept that had shocked Royce.

  “What’s your favorite thing at school?” Cass remembered going to the Gallagher house after school. Holly’s mother and Arlie’s stepmother, Gianna, always had snacks ready, and then she’d sit at the table with the girls and everyone would talk about their day. No story was too slight, no hurt feelings too unimportant, no victory too small to share. Cass’s grandmother had been too ill and her own mother mostly uninterested, so Cass had kept both her victories and her losses to herself. She had known, if she ever had kids, that she would sit with them at the kitchen table and listen to them talk.

  This chance with her sister, complete with hot chocolate and sliced apples, wasn’t one she was giving up.