Along the Cane River: Books 1-5 in the Inspirational Cane River Romance Series

by Mary Jane Hathaway

  Andy. She’d been so shocked when they were introduced that she’d missed his name. He looked like an Andy, an All American guy who had everything he wanted, everything he needed, and made it all look effortless. She could imagine him in high school. Probably the quarterback, or maybe class president. There was probably a little sister in college, majoring in something like psychology and relentlessly posting selfies with her many friends. His dad would be a professional who worked too much and his mom spent all her time folding socks and micromanaging her children’s lives. Then again, that kind of home didn’t produce the kind of man who cared whether a street performer was suffering from dehydration. She couldn’t reconcile her first impression with her other first impression.

  As he walked toward them, the baby perched in his arms, Roxie felt her breathing go shallow. She’d always believed she was above all those hormone-addled women who melted into a puddle at the sight of a man with a baby, but clearly, she was far from it. Everything she’d known about herself was rapidly shifting and she intensely disliked the feeling.

  Her edgy, urbanite exterior had held a gooey romantic and she hadn’t known it until that very day.

  “Maybe just until I see them,” she said.

  He met her eyes and gave a half-hearted smile. She lifted her chin in response, trying not to care that he was clearly unimpressed with her.

  Tall. She could imagine his type: a leggy, lithe blonde with the same athletic build, the same open nature and warmth, a job that demanded respect and admiration. Not somebody like her, with the wildly curly hair, extra thirty pounds, and on-again, off-again relationship with a foam cupcake costume.

  Not that she cared, because she didn’t. Well, maybe a little. But she should just stop trying to make people happy in Natchitoches. It never ended well. She didn’t need to fit in. She needed to get out.

  “So, you’ll come with us?”

  “Sure,” she said, flashing a bright smile. “Let’s walk down there together.”

  Andy seemed to give a little sigh at her words and she narrowed her eyes. Fine. She was risking a lot. There was a probably an ugly moment of revelation in her near future, but for right now, his superior attitude had pushed a button marked “stubborn to the core”.

  “Wonderful,” Alice said. She pulled Roxie with her and headed up the sidewalk, leaving Andy and Paul to follow along a few feet behind.

  Roxie half-listened to Alice describe how Aurora loved Andy more than anybody other than her parents and tried to stay calm.

  She couldn’t help the fact that her heart was already compromised, but she could do her best to pretend it wasn’t true. She’d give her best impression of a Creole girl enjoying a low country boil and letting les bon temps roulez on a glorious fall evening. Tomorrow she’d be back at the bakery, elbow-deep in dough and feeling the atomized grease particles clinging to every inch of her skin. Her mamere might order the wrong ingredients again or let the kitchen become a certified disaster zone. Her aunt might call with another example of how confused her mamere was becoming and Roxie would have to confront the nagging suspicions that all was not well. All of those things might, and probably would, happen.

  She held the possibility away from herself; it was too awful to consider at the moment. For a little while, she would pretend she was someone else. She’d be a woman who had the confidence of a great job in a metropolitan city, was only in town for a few weeks, and didn’t care a bit if her dream guy wasn’t at all interested in getting to know her better.

  ***

  Andy had to admit the river bank looked festive. The trees were decorated with twinkle lights and miniature colored lanterns swung from a rope around the dance floor. The live band was warming up and taking requests from the crowd. The air was thick with food smells, but none of them were familiar.

  Glancing around the festival, he wondered if any booths were selling beignets. He was going to have to figure out his food situation before he starved to death. Maybe he’d been born without the proper taste buds for Southern living because the rest of the crowd was clearly enjoying the feast. Dozens of people stood patiently in line, waiting for their dinner to be shoveled into Styrofoam packages. The mountain of bright red crustaceans reminded him of the nature shows where people fried crickets in pork fat or roasted tarantulas on bamboo skewers. Nothing he saw in front of him looked like actual food.

  “You’ve been kind of quiet lately.” Paul’s words broke into his thoughts and he turned with a guilty start.

  “Sorry. Just thinking.”

  “No need to apologize.” Paul shoved his hands in his pockets and glanced back at the table where Alice and the new neighbor had staked out a few chairs. Aurora was doing her best to get on top of the table and Alice had both arms wrapped around her waist. “I know I’ve been busy lately. We should get out on the river this weekend. Just you, me, and Bix.”

  Bix was an employee of By the Book and although he was a good fifty years older and legally blind, the man knew the Cane River area better than almost anybody. If someone had told Andy a few years ago that one of his closest friends would be an elderly Creole man who seemed to only speak in crazy Southern sayings, he would have told them they needed to up their meds. Times sure had changed.

  “Sounds good. And don’t worry about me. I’m fine. You don’t need to babysit me,” Andy said. Of course he wanted to spend a lazy Saturday catching bream or bluegill that Bix’s wife Ruby would turn into the world’s best fried fish but he didn’t want to talk about his feelings while he did it. He and Paul had been inseparable since meeting in college. They built their company from the bottom, moved cross-country together, stayed close through a cyber attack on their company that cut their personal worth in half. He trusted Paul, one of the most honorable and loyal men he’d ever met. But he still didn’t want to talk about the fact he was as miserable as a kid sent off to summer camp.

  They moved a few steps closer to the tubs filled with crawdads. “I know it’s a big adjustment. It was for me and I’m from here.”

  “Mrs. Connors already gave me this speech. I’m not sure what gave everybody the impression I was unhappy, but I’m not. Really.”

  “How long have we known each other?”

  Andy said nothing. He liked to think he could keep his drama to himself, to keep perspective. They shuffled forward another few steps.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Homesickness isn’t just for kids,” Paul said.

  Andy sighed. Homesickness. Just like when he’d left for college for the first time. He was too old to be homesick. “I’ve moved around a lot in my life. I’m adaptable.”

  “Sure you are. So am I. But I prefer some places to others.” Paul glanced over at the table again, a softness in his eyes.

  “You mean wherever Alice and Aurora are.” Andy had never been jealous of Paul. Not when he came up with the most creative ideas and not when he seemed to absorb whole pages of poetry into his memory. Not when he had an uncanny knack of picking the perfect site for the next flagship store and Andy had to research an area for months before making a decision, and even then it didn’t always prove to be as profitable as they’d hoped. But this look Paul had― the one that said he’d found everything he’d ever dreamed of and more― this made a yearning rise up in him so strong that it nearly took his breath away.

  “I knew she wouldn’t be happy in New York.” Paul turned back to the line and they moved forward.

  “Away from her store,” Andy added. They both knew that By the Book was Alice’s calling and no matter what else changed in her life, the bookstore was the place she called home. Its wrought iron fixtures, hand carved woodwork, and aisles of leather bound books were a treasure that couldn’t be found just anywhere. Add in the long-time employees and a cast of cats named after literary characters, and the place was like a family member she couldn’t leave behind.

  Family. He wondered what Mark was doing, if he’d had a good day at work. Friday was taco night and he wondered if t
he new cook had made tacos just the way he liked them. “I’m not homesick exactly. It’s more that I miss my brother.”

  “You visited him on the weekends a lot.”

  “Right, but it was more than that. There were those Saturdays when I’d take him to the movies or to McDonald’s but I didn’t think about the times I’d head over for no reason, just to hang out,” he said. “I know it sounds weird to say we hung out, because we never did anything. Not really. Just watched ‘Free Willy’ and ate Pringles. Now that I think about it, his diet is probably a lot better now that I’m gone.”

  Paul half-smiled at him. “This sounds like a conversation I had with one of the younger programmers.” They moved forward in line again. “He had trouble understanding how I enjoyed spending so much time with Aurora when she can’t hold a real conversation yet.”

  “Exactly. Of course, Mark can talk. He talks a lot. You’ve met him. But I simply liked being there with him.” Andy felt a sudden swell of shame. “It’s just stupid that I never recognized it, never even considered that I would miss those visits where we did nothing at all.”

  “Hey,” Paul said, turning to him and gripping his shoulder. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  Andy nodded but felt like he didn’t deserve much sympathy. What kind of person doesn’t realize he was going to miss his own brother? Maybe the kind of person who saw his brother as less than a whole person. “I keep calling and the house mother says he’s doing fine, but I can’t tell if that’s true. When Mark gets on the phone, I just catch a few words and then he passes the phone to someone else.”

  “He won’t Skype?”

  “I tried to set it up for him but when we connected, he got too distracted and kept getting up, walking into another room for something. The second time, someone asked him to go outside and he left, forgetting I was even there.” It had been frustrating at the time, but Andy couldn’t help laughing a little now. “I waited another twenty minutes, but finally figured he wasn’t coming back.”

  They were just a few customers away from the giant bath tubs full of crawfish and Andy could see smaller pots full of corn on the cob, red potatoes, and slaw. He wondered if anyone would notice if he just asked for the veggies. There were several women taking payment at a table to the side. Andy reached for his wallet but Paul waved a hand. “Tonight’s culinary torture is on me,” he said.

  “It’s not torture―”

  Paul fixed him with a look.

  “Ok, it’s not my favorite.”

  Paul handed over cash to a pretty teen with straight blonde hair and got several tickets in exchange. They moved to the next table, this time exchanging tickets for containers.

  “Have you thought of bringing Mark here?”

  Andy said nothing for a moment. That had been his first thought, the second day after he moved to Natchitoches. Some days he thought it was possible, that Mark would adapt to any place that had ‘Free Willy’ and unlimited sour cream and onion flavored Pringles. Then he thought of how hard it would be to find another group home that was just his speed. Mark also loved his part time job at the grocery store. It might be impossible to find another employer who would understand his limitations. Beyond all of that, maybe Mark didn’t need Andy as much as Andy needed Mark, with an ache that never really went away.

  “I have. I just don’t know if that would be the best for him. I don’t want to be selfish.”

  “I wonder if bringing him here for a weekend would help you decide,” Paul said.

  “I don’t know if I could get him on a plane. He’s never talked about it. Maybe the train would work, but that would be a really long trip, over thirty hours, not including stops,” Andy said. “And I know he wouldn’t want to be in a car that long. Come to think of it, neither would I.”

  “You’ve thought a lot about it.”

  They were at the serving table now and Andy just nodded. He had. From the first weekend in Natchitoches, he’d wondered whether Mark could be happy here.

  The burly crawfish server had a scoop in one hand and a Styrofoam container in the other. His long white apron was dotted with little crawfish in a jaunty pattern and his cap had a large, plastic crawfish attached to the top. Andy had trouble not staring at the feelers, which echoed the server’s every movement.

  The server looked up. The crawfish feelers jittered. “Two?”

  “Four, please. With sides.” Paul leaned closer. “Gerry?”

  The man paused mid-scoop. “Paul?” The next moment he dropped the scoop and grabbed Paul in a hug. “Great to see you,” he said as he pounded him a few times on the back. The fake feelers waved at Andy.

  “Andy, this is Gerry Antoine, my best friend from the second grade. He lived next door and we walked to the bus stop together.”

  “Hey, Andy. I think I seen ya runnin’ in the afternoon. At least, I think it was you. Don’t think there could be many other people runnin’ around in the heat.”

  “That was probably me.” Andy wanted to ask how everyone else got their exercise but maybe it was too personal of a question. “So, you and Paul were neighbors?”

  “Yessir. Had some real long bus rides and he always shared his mama’s cookies. I still remember that.”

  Andy thought of how Paul had grown up in such abject poverty that his childhood home, across the river and on the wrong side of town, wasn’t even fit for habitation but as a child he’d still shared what he had. That was typical of Paul.

  “She’ll be thrilled to hear it. Where did you go? I always hoped you’d come back,” Paul said.

  “Shoot, too many places. My stepdaddy moved us so often, I couldn’t keep track.” He started scooping crawfish into the containers. “But soon as I had the choice, I come back here. This is my home, my people.”

  “I never thought I’d find myself back here, but somehow…” Paul’s voice trailed off and he shrugged, smiling. “Like old Micky’s pigeons, here I am.”

  “I forgot all about them pigeons,” Gerry said. He passed a container to the server next to him who placed several cobs of corn and a handful of potatoes on top. “What ever happened to ‘em?”

  “When Micky died, they tore down his place and one of his friends took them all away, but for a long time I’d hear them in the trees, trying to find Micky’s shack.”

  Gerry shook his head. The fake feelers waved from side to side. “That’s a shame. Well, bon appetite, mon ami.”

  “Merci,” Paul said and took the dinners. “Hope to see you around.”

  As they walked back toward the table, Paul was quiet. After a few moments he said, “Funny what people remember. I forgot about my Mama’s cookies. She always let me take extra for Gerry. Everybody knew his stepdaddy wasn’t very nice to him.”

  Paul’s mother was one of those wonderful women who were born to mother everybody, whether they were related or not. “I miss your mom. Is she still helping out her cousin?”

  “You miss my mama, or her food?” Paul asked. “And probably another few weeks. Those hip replacements take a lot of recovery time.”

  “Tell her I’m wasting away to nothing without her.”

  “Don’t let Alice hear that. She’ll be cooking pots of gumbo for you. That’s her love language,” Paul said.

  Andy laughed. He knew full well that Alice’s love language was old poetry, just like Paul. “So that’s what happened. I remember her bringing over a pot when you two were still trying to pretend you couldn’t stand each other.”

  “I never pretended anything of the like. For her, it was probably true, though.”

  Andy smiled and said nothing more as they approached the table. No sense in bringing up old arguments. Although it had all worked out in the end, Paul and Alice’s path to true love had been anything but smooth.

  “What a beautiful evening,” Paul said. And it was. The sun was setting and the river reflected the soft pink of the sky. Festival goers inspected trinkets and souvenirs, and the live band launched into another song.

&nbs
p; “By a departing light we see acuter quite than by a wick that stays,” Alice said.

  “There’s something in the flight that clarifies the sight and decks the rays,” Paul responded, ending the line with a kiss to the top of Alice’s head.

  “Emily Dickinson?” Roxie asked. “She’s one of my favorite poets.”

  “I knew she was the right person to live in that apartment,” Alice said to Paul.

  “Now we just need to convert Andy and we’ll have the quadrumvirate of classical poetry fans.”

  “I don’t think that’s a word.” Andy waited, feeling awkward as they handed out the dinners. He’d been planning to sit across from the new neighbor but Paul took that spot. Of course he’d want to sit next to Alice and help with Aurora. Andy hovered for a moment, unsure, then walked around the table to sit next to Roxie. She shifted a little, giving him more room, and he wondered if she would have given him an extra foot or two of space if she could get away with it.

  He opened the container and regarded the contents. What he wouldn’t give for a good roast beef sandwich, or even some chicken fajitas. Roxie had mirrored his movements, all the way down to the long pause as she looked at the crawfish.

  As Paul passed out the napkins and Alice put on Aurora’s bib, Andy slid a glance at Roxie. Her leather jacket was worn at the elbows, and unless she’d bought it already distressed, it was a wardrobe staple. She had a pile of braided leather bracelets at her wrists, a few silver charms woven into the black and brown strands. A wheel, a feather, a sun, a flame, a leaf. He wondered if they had special meaning, or if they were just pretty charms. She seemed the type to have chosen them for a reason.

  “What do the charms mean?”

  She glanced up at him. “They’re reminders.”

  He smiled at his plate. They had meaning but she wasn’t about to share it with him. He’d always loved a riddle and he couldn’t help sneaking another look at the silver pieces.

  “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” she said under her breath.

  He realized she was talking to her food and Andy started to laugh. “I think they’re past hope,” he whispered back.