Nice to Come Home To

by Liz Flaherty

  Cass had written about seeing a red wave of anger before, but she’d never experienced it herself until now. She set her cup down so hard the table trembled from the force. “Linda died, Damaris, remember? She was in the seat I should have been in and she died. You think a little guilt isn’t called for?”

  “I’m a colonel in the US Army. I’ve made decisions that have caused people to die. Relatives, especially you, have raised my only child more than I have. I had one of those bad marriages you’re flagellating yourself about. I know all about guilt.” Her eyes, dark brown and shadowed with the pain she still suffered from her injuries, held Cass’s gaze. “I also know when you separate what you consider the bad from the good in yourself, you’re left with two incomplete identities.”

  “I don’t hurt anyone.”

  The other woman laughed, a soft and unexpected sound. “Yeah, you do. It’s fine that Cassandra is this exemplary human being, but it’s Sister Coffee Shop and Sister Chemo Brain and Sister Two-Left-Feet that I love best, that Royce loves best. She may be the one who’s made some mistakes and who’s a guilty mess over stuff that wasn’t her fault, but she’s the real thing. If you combine Cass and Cassandra…well, that’s who I want taking care of Royce if I can’t. That’s who my stepgirl is. Five’ll get you ten that’s who Luke Rossiter likes, too.”

  *

  LATER THAT DAY, walking through the orchard with Misty keeping her company, Cass looked through the branches of a pear tree, loving the picture the nearly leafless limbs made against the pale blue sky.

  She eyed the tree trunk where it divided. It made her wish she had one of the orchard’s ladders out here. It had been a while since she climbed a tree just for the sake of climbing it. The last time had probably been when the volleyball team camped near the creek at the back of the Worths’ farm.

  There weren’t enough leaves left on the tall Bartlett pear tree to offer the whispering accompaniment to her thoughts she remembered from those days, but still…it had been a while.

  A few minutes later, she knew she hadn’t lost the knack. With only one slightly scraped anklebone, she settled into where the tree’s trunk divided, giving herself a back scratch against its bark in the process. Misty crawled into the kangaroo pocket of her sweatshirt and fell asleep. Cass pulled out her phone and opened a notes app. She never used voice-activated programs, but her fingers were so slow on the phone’s keypad that she tapped the little microphone on the screen and dictated story thoughts.

  She didn’t know how much time had passed, but the sun was dangling low over the western horizon and the kitten had wakened and was sitting on her shoulder grooming herself when a voice came from below. “Please tell me you don’t need to be rescued.”

  She loved the sound of Luke’s voice. Even with an ear of tin like hers, she thought she could hear the music in it. “I’m good,” she called. “I’ll be right down.” She scrolled through the notes on her phone. And scrolled and scrolled.

  So this was why she couldn’t finish the book she’d started. Evidently Cassandra G. Porter needed some time off. The words on the screen came directly from Cass Gentry’s heart. There were a lot of them, and she could hardly wait to get to her computer to put them to good use.

  She climbed down, Misty clinging to her shirt. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing. I was at the apple barn pleading with the cider press to get us through this season. So far, it’s agreeing, but there’s no telling how it will go tomorrow. If our relationship were a marriage, we’d have been divorced years ago.”

  She grinned at him. “Too high maintenance for you?”

  “Sure is.” He flinched when Misty made the leap from Cass’s shirt to his shoulder. “Want to go to a movie tonight?”

  She started to agree, then stopped. “Actually, I’ve got some paperwork that won’t wait. I know we talked about reducing our hours, but we haven’t done it yet. You worked this afternoon and I’m opening the coffee shop in the morning. I really need to do this tonight.”

  “Okay. Not a problem.”

  He looked disappointed, which sent a happy chill scampering down her back. “Aunt Zoey’s teaching Dad and Damaris how to play euchre. I’m sure they’d be glad for a fourth if you’re not doing anything. Royce hates it, plus she’s always grumpy when Seth spends the weekend with your parents.”

  “He is, too. He’d rather Mom and Dad stayed down here every weekend. He doesn’t quite get that they have a life up there.”

  Cass scooped Misty into her hands and tucked her into her pocket. “Want to come home with me for supper even if you don’t play euchre? Aunt Zoey’s cooking, so it will be good.”

  “You talked me into it.” He caught her hand as they walked. “How’s it going with your dad? Is he going to stay here until Damaris is well?”

  “It’s all right, I guess. He’s leaving this week. He wants to have dinner with Royce and me by ourselves before he goes. That should be quite an experience.”

  “Think he’s trying to make up for time lost while you were growing up? I don’t know him well, and neither you nor Royce says much, but there’s no sense of warmth in the conversation. All your memories seem to revolve around your mothers—or in your case, Zoey and the lake.”

  “I don’t know.” Cass shook her head. “I keep telling Royce he loves us the only way he knows how, but I’m not sure he does.” It was no wonder she was weird about men. She’d never been loved by one. Not exactly the norm when a person’s father was living and she’d been married as long as she had.

  Luke didn’t argue her point. “It happens, although I admit I don’t understand it.”

  Cass thought fleetingly of her perfect alter ego who didn’t have issues like unloving fathers or debilitating guilt. If Cassandra had shown up in childhood, life would probably have been much easier.

  “Wait!” Luke drew them to a halt, standing still in the crunchy autumn grass. “Do you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “The music. Somewhere, someone’s playing an apple orchard waltz.” He swung her into his arms. “Come on, let’s dance.”

  She tried to pull away, both laughing and embarrassed. “Don’t tell me you’ve missed Royce calling me Sister Two-Left-Feet. She’s not kidding.”

  “Don’t worry about your feet.” He held her closer and smiled into her eyes. “Dance from your heart—that’s where the music is.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “YOU AND JILL were serious while you were still in high school, weren’t you?” Seth closed the dishwasher door on Monday night and took his guitar from its stand. He sat down with it, his eyes on Luke’s fingers. “Show me how to do that.”

  “We were.” Luke stilled his fingers on the neck of the Gibson so his brother could replicate the complicated chord.

  They had played together since Luke and Jill had bought Seth his first guitar for his sixth birthday. It was how the brothers were always able to communicate when the only alternative was shouting.

  “Was it a good idea? Was it hard?”

  Luke slipped into “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” knowing Seth loved playing the lead in the song. “It wasn’t an idea. It just was. It probably wasn’t overly smart, but we were seventeen—nothing we did was very smart. Everything was hard for Jill and me because she was sick.”

  He smiled, thinking of those days with his wife and the little brother they’d both loved. It used to hurt too much to call back those particular photographs of the heart, but now the memories were just sweet. “We had ten or eleven years to do what we anticipated having a whole lifetime for.”

  “Have you ever wondered if you’d have ended up together if she hadn’t gotten sick? You guys had extenuating circumstances that led every inch of your lives together. What if you hadn’t had those?” Seth moved into the difficult lead, and for a moment concentration on the music kept him from talking. Then he said, “Would you do it again?”

  Luke didn’t answer, concentrating on playing the song, the rhythm
he strummed adding fullness to his brother’s lead. He shook his head when Seth started to speak. “Come on. Sing.” The song about the doomed freighter was a long one. Maybe by the time it was done, Seth would have forgotten his questions. A guy could hope, anyway.

  He wasn’t big on hope, to tell the truth. He didn’t think he was negative, although his sisters were unrelenting in telling him he was, but he believed unfettered optimism was foolish. He worked hard to make good business decisions, even harder to bring those ideas to fruition. He enjoyed his personal life as it was, but he wasn’t going to hope for more than he had.

  “Sing with me.” Seth started again, so the song was even longer, and Luke couldn’t think when he sang. There were too many lyrics to remember.

  But he thought anyway, fumbling one of the verses enough that Seth scowled at him before bursting into laughter that forced them to start the stanza again.

  “I’m proud of you,” Luke said, when the notes of the song finally faded away. “At the orchard, on the field, in music. You’re the go-to guy for things, and I’ve spent enough time in the workplace to know that’s irreplaceable. Jill—” He cleared his throat and went on. “Jill always said you would excel at whatever you put your mind to doing. She was right.”

  He set his guitar on its stand and got to his feet. “Understand, if you ever tell anyone what I just said, I’ll deny it right down the line, but I mean it.”

  Seth fingerpicked quietly. “Thank you. That’s cool to hear.” He waited. “So?”

  Luke sat back down and reached for his shoes. “What?”

  “Questions, bro. The ones I asked. You didn’t answer them.”

  “You are a pain in the—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” Seth picked out a familiar-sounding melody, then silenced the strings. “I’m waiting.”

  “Fine. Number one, yes, I think we would have ended up together. We’d have had half a dozen kids and it would have been the best life imaginable. Not because of me but because of Jill—she was that great. Second, life always offers extenuating circumstances—it’s how you handle them that makes all the difference. Dad told me that when we first found out Jill wasn’t going to make it, and he was absolutely right.”

  “And?”

  “And we just talked about this not two months ago. Weren’t you listening? Yes, I would marry Jill again. I would live every minute with her I could, just like I did. And, no, I probably won’t let myself fall back into the same situation with someone else.” Even now, he sometimes woke with the expectation that Jill was there. Not in bed beside him, surely, or even in the house, but in his life. In his heart. In his mind, she’d never aged, so even though he was thirty-eight with silver starting to work its way into his hair, she was forever twenty-seven.

  “It’s probably naïve to say I can avoid it, because I know you don’t always choose who you love, but you can choose the life you live. I imagine at some point I’ll love someone, but I don’t plan to share a life or have a family. I’ll never say it wasn’t worth the pain with Jill, because it was, but I will say I’m not going to go through it again. Does that make sense and can I count on you not asking me that question again?”

  He tied his second shoe and regarded Seth, sitting silent and somehow watchful on the couch. “Are you thinking about Jill and me or about you and Royce?”

  “Maybe both. I like her more than I meant to. I think she feels the same way.”

  Luke hesitated, not sure what his brother was asking and even less sure of what to tell him. “You know to be careful, right?” he said quietly. “To protect both her and yourself so that you don’t have to be a grown-up before your time?”

  “I know.”

  The quiet dignity in the answer convinced Luke to back off. Seth might have his faults, but he was never less than honest.

  “We had to hurry with everything.” Luke held his gaze. “If you want my advice, or even if you don’t, that’s it. You don’t have to hurry, so don’t.”

  Seth nodded. “You going out?”

  “Cass and I are going to try to figure out scheduling for both the orchard and the coffee shop. It’ll change as we go into winter, but at least we can create a workable base.”

  Seth looked thoughtful. “You see each other almost every day, don’t you? Besides at work, I mean. You’re going out.”

  “Back in the dark ages, we called it dating, and yeah, we are. But that’s all there is to it.” He realized as he said the words that they weren’t quite true. But that they needed to be.

  He and Cass met at Anything Goes a half hour later, sipping hot chocolate and sharing an order of French fries. She had her omnipresent laptop, so she typed in their schedule as he wrote it out in pencil on a yellow legal pad.

  “I think it will work,” she said happily when they were finished. She closed the computer and beamed with satisfaction.

  “Except that by the end of no more than two workdays, something will have happened to make half this schedule null and void.”

  She propped her chin in her hand and gazed across the table at him in somber silence. “You do know there’s nothing wrong with thinking positively sometimes, right?”

  He met her eyes, thinking how beautiful they were. She’d suffered divorce, cancer and the loss of her mother in a two-year time span. That she was still haunted by things he didn’t understand and secrets she didn’t share showed in the shadows in those eyes. He was almost certain thinking positive was no more natural to her than it was to him.

  “I do, sometimes,” he said, because he wanted to lighten those shadows if only for the moment. “That’s when I dance in the orchard with my best girl.”

  *

  “AT LEAST I’M old enough to not be disappointed anymore.” Royce looked at the table they’d set in anticipation of their father’s arrival for the dinner with just the two of them he’d requested.

  Ken had just left, after bringing envelopes for each them and begging off dinner. He could catch a military flight from Grissom, the nearby air reserve base, so had to leave earlier than anticipated. He’d been sorry to spoil their plans.

  Of course, he’d always been sorry to spoil their plans. He’d flown to Indiana the day after the prom night accident, determined Cass was going to live and be relatively unscarred and flown out again the same day. He’d missed her high school graduation and been late to her wedding. He’d missed both their births.

  “You think that’s bad,” said Royce, when Cass reminded her of those facts. “He was supposed to be my show-and-tell person in the third grade and didn’t show up. Mom was TDY somewhere and I was staying with him and a live-in nanny. The nanny came and brought some really great cookies, so in the end, I guess I was relieved. All Dad would have done was scowl at everyone and tell them to do their duty.”

  Zoey pushed Damaris’s wheelchair into the dining room. Regret showed on both the older women’s faces. Regret, but not surprise. They knew all about being let down by Ken Gentry.

  “Well,” said Cass, “let’s set another place.” She smiled at each of them in turn. “This is a family dinner, right? I’m happy you’re my family.”

  “Me, too,” said Royce. “But I lied about not being disappointed. It would be nice if he followed through sometimes.”

  “We’re glad he followed through at least twice.” Zoey took her usual seat at the head of the table and nodded at Damaris at the other end. “I think we’re both pretty pleased to have you girls as our family.”

  Damaris smiled. “And grateful. I’m glad not to be married to your dad, but I can never be sorry I was.”

  They talked about gratitude all the way through dinner. By the time dessert was finished, Cass thought Royce’s disappointment was forgotten.

  The others shooed Cass out of the kitchen after dinner. “Go work on the book you’re supposed to be writing,” said Zoey. “We’re going to the movies. Damaris needs practice with the crutches and the boot.”

  Cass was glad to go into the sunroom she us
ed as an office. She needed to decide what to write. What had gone so wrong with Murder on Market Street? She knew Lucy Garten as intimately as any flesh-and-blood friend she’d ever had, yet suddenly the sleuth seemed to be going out on her own. Falling in love and selling the condo she’d lived in ever since Murder Downriver, the first book in the series. The next thing Cass knew, the character would be insisting on getting rid of her MG in favor of a minivan.

  Frowning, she typed an email to Holly.

  How did you know it was time to change from contemporary to regency romances?

  A few minutes later, an answer popped up.

  When I found myself bored with my own writing—I knew that couldn’t be good!

  Cass frowned. She wasn’t bored. She loved Lucy’s stories, including the one she seemed unable to finish. But something wasn’t right in the telling of it.

  Another email came through.

  Anything you’d like to talk about? I can come over.

  Cass typed, I’m good. Thanks anyway, but deleted the message and wrote another. I’ll put the coffee on. And she hit Send.

  *

  THE COFFEEMAKER HAD just finished its gasping, throaty process when the light knock came at the back door. Cass opened it with a smile, surprised when Holly pulled her into a hug. The other woman was shorter by half a foot and probably two sizes bigger around. She smelled sweetly of the snickerdoodles she was carrying in a paper sack. “I made these because when I’m trying to plot, I need calories to get me through. Then when the book’s done, I have to go to the gym for a couple of months.”

  Cass nodded. “Sounds reasonable. Can we eat them now?”

  “You bet.”

  They had just taken seats at the kitchen table when Holly said, “Wait a minute. Show me your office. I want to see if you’re as big of a slob as I am.”

  Cass met her glance. “My office?”

  Holly grinned at her, although her dark eyes were serious. “Yes, Cassandra, the room where you and Lucy do your creative thing.”

  “Cassandra?”