Up at Butternut Lake: A Novel (The Butternut Lake Trilogy)

by McNear, Mary

  “Thanks,” he said, glancing over at the kitchen table. It was covered with a faded, flowered tablecloth, and in the center of it was a bunch of white asters in a water-filled Mason jar. The flowers, he noticed, looked fresh enough to have been picked that morning. And they were dappled with the sunlight streaming in through the kitchen windows.

  “I hope you’re hungry,” Allie said, placing a carafe of orange juice on the table, along with a whole basket of blueberry muffins.

  “I am,” Walker assured her, watching as she picked up a pair of pot holders, opened the oven door, and carefully removed a cast-iron frying pan from it, setting it on a trivet on the table.

  “I made a frittata,” she explained, as its delicious odor filled the kitchen.

  “A free-what?” Wyatt asked, coming into the kitchen. He had a freshly scrubbed look about him, and his normally curly hair was combed wetly down.

  “A frittata,” Allie said, gesturing for them to sit down at the table.

  Wyatt slid into his seat, staring suspiciously at the egg dish in the center of the table.

  “Don’t worry,” Allie said, cutting a wedge of it and putting it on his plate. “You’ll like it.”

  He put a forkful of it into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “Oh, it’s just eggs,” he said, with obvious relief.

  Walker and Allie both laughed, as they helped themselves to it, too.

  “By the way,” Walker said, between bites, “Cliff Donahue told me how much you two liked the boat you test-drove.” Earlier in the week, Cliff had towed a boat out to Butternut Lake and met Allie and Wyatt at the boat ramp there. Then he’d taken them out for a ride, giving Allie an opportunity to drive the boat, too. Walker had deliberately left himself out of the equation. He didn’t want Allie to feel that there were any strings attached.

  “We loved the boat,” Allie said, refilling Walker’s empty orange juice glass. “It ran beautifully. I just can’t believe how reasonably priced it is.”

  “That it is,” Walker agreed, thinking that, if he was lucky, he’d just about break even on that sale.

  After that, the two of them ate in silence. Wyatt, on the other hand, chatted merrily away, but without really asking for or needing their input. Walker wasn’t really listening to what he was saying anyway. Instead, he was savoring the moment. So ordinary somehow. But so unordinary too. They were like any family, he thought. Except, of course, that they weren’t a family. But still, this must be what it was like to be a part of a family. A real family. A happy family.

  “Can I be excused?” Wyatt asked, when he’d eaten two pieces of frittata and a huge blueberry muffin. Once again, he’d surprised Walker. How could anyone that small eat so much?

  “You may be excused,” Allie said. “Just take your plate to the sink.” Wyatt carried his plate to the sink and went into the living room where he immediately started constructing new track for his train set.

  “Can I help you clean up?” Walker asked Allie.

  “Sure,” she said. Together, they cleared the table and washed the dishes, Allie washing while he dried. It had never occurred to him before that there was anything sensual about washing dishes. But watching her bare, brown arms submerged to the elbows in hot soapy water was making him rethink this. So was the way she accidentally brushed against him when she reached up to put the dry dishes back in the cupboard. He was actually disappointed when they were finished with this chore.

  “Well, you’ve probably got things to do,” she said then, almost apologetically.

  Just work, Walker thought. And since I met you that’s been a hell of a lot less interesting than it used to be.

  But he shrugged and said, “Not really.”

  “No?” she said, looking mildly surprised.

  And he almost asked her then if he could stay, stay and spend the rest of the day with them. But he stopped himself. She was supposed to tell him when she was ready for more. And that had seemed reasonable to him when they’d agreed to it that night in her kitchen. The only problem was that now he was beginning to wonder when exactly she’d be ready for more. And how much longer he could realistically wait for her to be ready without going out of his mind.

  “Well, I think you’ve given us enough of your time for one day,” Allie said, smiling. “Come on, I’ll walk you to your boat.”

  He said good-bye to Wyatt, who was lying on his stomach and pushing a train along the tracks, and followed Allie out onto the porch. Then he did something totally unexpected. Not only from her perspective, but from his, too. He took her in his arms, and leaning her up against the cabin wall, to the right of the door where they’d be out of view of Wyatt, he kissed her.

  Softly, at first. Then harder. She tensed, slightly, with surprise, but after a moment, he felt her body relax into his arms, felt her lips start to move against his. Hesitantly, at first, and then with less inhibition.

  Be gentle, a voice inside him warned. But he didn’t heed it. He couldn’t. He’d spent so many hours imagining this. This and more. Much more. So that now that he was actually holding her, and kissing her, and touching her, he couldn’t quite control himself. He knew he was holding her a little too tightly and kissing her a little too hard, and he would have apologized, too, if he could have stopped kissing her long enough to do it.

  But that was assuming, of course, that she wanted him to stop kissing her. Which she obviously didn’t. Because once she recovered from her surprise, she kissed him back as hungrily as he was kissing her. She was full of surprises that way, he knew. Beneath the reticence, and the shyness, was an urgency and a passion he’d barely scratched the surface of. When they did make love—and they would make love—it would change both of them forever. It wouldn’t be something that either of them would casually dismiss or forget. It would be something that burned itself into both of them, emotionally and physically.

  He slid his hands, now, into the back pockets of her denim cutoffs and pulled her against him. Hard. A little groan escaped from her throat, and she broke away from him.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, breathlessly, her eyes wide with astonishment. But she didn’t look angry. She looked like someone who knew she was veering dangerously close to losing control.

  “I’m kissing you,” he murmured, kissing her again.

  But she pushed him, gently but firmly, away.

  “That wasn’t a kiss,” she pointed out, still trying to catch her breath.

  He laughed. “What was it then?” he asked, leaning in again and nuzzling her neck.

  “That was making love with our clothes on.”

  Now it was his turn to groan a little. Just hearing her say those words managed to arouse him even more than he was already aroused. “I don’t know if that’s possible,” he murmured, kissing the hollow of her neck. “But I’m willing to try.”

  She sighed softly, and he pulled back far enough to look at her. Her hair was tousled, her eyes were warm and liquid, and her lips were slightly parted. He imagined picking her up, carrying her into the cabin, laying her down on her bed, and making love to her. Over and over and over again. There was nothing stopping him from doing exactly that, either, except for that little boy inside the cabin, playing with his train set.

  He took a step back, putting a safe, or maybe just a safer, distance between them. “Sorry about that,” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “I got a little carried away.”

  “That makes two of us,” Allie said, and he could tell she was concentrating on breathing normally. He leaned in again and he kissed her, softly, on the lips. Then he went back down to the dock, got into his boat, unhitched it, and drove it back across the bay to his boathouse.

  And the whole time, he knew she was still standing there, still leaning against the outside wall of the cabin for support, still wearing that dazed expression on her face. He didn’t know how he knew it. He just did. And he would have staked his life on its being true.

  CHAPTER 21

  On an unseasonably
cool Saturday night in mid-August, Allie found herself in an unusual position for the mother of a five-year-old child: She had nothing to do, and no one to do it with.

  Wyatt’s last sleepover at Caroline’s had been such a success that she’d invited him to do it again. Wyatt, of course, had been beside himself with excitement. Allie, though, had been less so. She loved the fact that Wyatt and Caroline had grown so close over the course of the summer. But what she didn’t love was having to figure out how to spend a whole evening by herself. Once, she’d been good at being alone. Lately, though, being alone meant only one thing. No, make that two things. Thinking about Walker Ford and trying not to think about Walker Ford.

  Of course, she didn’t just think about him when she was alone. She thought about him all the time. But when she was with other people—with a customer at the Pine Cone Gallery or with Wyatt at the cabin, for instance—it was easier to keep her mind occupied. And that was a good thing, because when her mind was unoccupied, and free to wander, it always wandered right over to Walker.

  She shivered now, sitting on a deck chair at the end of the dock and wondering if the chilly night air was just a rare summer cold snap or a harbinger of the fast-approaching autumn. After she’d come back from driving Wyatt to Caroline’s, she’d pulled on an oversized wool sweater, poured herself a glass of white wine, and come down to the lake, ostensibly to enjoy the view of the sunset, but, in reality, to watch Walker’s cabin across the bay.

  It was pathetic, she knew, to act this way. Like a sixteen-year-old girl with an unrequited crush. But she couldn’t help herself. Or didn’t want to help herself. One or the other.

  Either way, she often found herself, at odd moments of the day and night, looking across the bay at Walker’s dock and boathouse, and at the cabin perched on the bluff above them. Usually, she tried to justify doing this by doing something else at the same time. She’d be hanging wet bathing suits and towels on a clothesline she’d strung behind the cabin, for instance, and she’d be glancing casually over at Walker’s dock at the same time. Or she’d be reading a bedtime story to Wyatt and every time she turned a page she’d look out the window at his distant dock light, glowing softly in the dusky twilight.

  For all the time she spent looking across the bay at his cabin, though, she’d never been able to see Walker there. It was simply too far away. Even her twenty-twenty vision wasn’t that good. Once, she’d thought about getting out the old binoculars she knew were on the top shelf of the hall closet. But she’d decided that would be crossing a line, a line between idle daydreaming and premeditated stalking.

  Still, when she watched his cabin at night, she’d wonder if he was there, and what he was doing if he was. And she’d wonder, too, much to her annoyance, if he was alone or if he was with someone else. Someone else who happened to be a woman. Because while Walker had told her he’d wait for her to be ready, he’d stopped short of saying he wouldn’t see other women while he waited for her to be ready.

  And why shouldn’t he see other women? Allie asked herself, during the rare moment she felt capable of considering the question logically. After all, she hadn’t asked him not to see other women, and she hadn’t given him any reason to believe she’d be ready for him anytime soon, either. So what was he supposed to do, take a vow of celibacy?

  Yes, a voice inside her answered. An admittedly irrational voice. That’s exactly what he’s supposed to do. If for no other reason than the thought of him with another woman filled her with a white-hot jealousy. And, as an aftertaste of that, an aching sadness. Sadness that she could want something so badly and still not let herself have it.

  She shivered again now and thought about getting a blanket from the house. Or maybe just calling it a night and going inside. She’d been sitting here for a couple of hours already. The sun had set, darkness had fallen, and the temperature had gone from pleasantly cool to uncomfortably cold. And she was still sitting here. A sensible person would go back to the cabin now and take a bath, or get in bed with a good book, but she was way beyond sensible. So she stayed put and watched the light at the end of Walker’s dock.

  Tonight, like most nights, the dock light had come on at nine o’clock. She wondered if he had it set to a timer. It wouldn’t surprise her if he did. It was the kind of thing that would never occur to her, but Walker would do it as a matter of course. He was logical. Practical. Organized. But he was also attractive, she mused. Attractive and incredibly, maddeningly, crazily sexy.

  She replayed their last kiss, on the front porch of her cabin last Sunday morning, and she felt her desire for him slowly envelop her, like the real, palpable thing it had become. Then she imagined that desire traveling over the black, rippled surface of the nighttime lake and finding Walker, wherever he was and whatever he was doing, and wrapping itself around him, softly at first, and then more tightly.

  Now you’re really getting crazy, she thought, impatiently. Now you really need to go inside and go to bed. But still, she didn’t move. And in a little while, it became clear to her why she didn’t move. Tonight was going to be different. Tonight she was going to answer the question she kept asking herself. Why didn’t she go to him? Just get up and go to him? There was no obvious reason why she shouldn’t. They were both adults. Both available. Both free to enter into a relationship with each other. She needed to consider Wyatt, of course, but she had considered Wyatt. Wyatt adored Walker. Trusted Walker. And loved being with him.

  So why was she still sitting here, shivering, when she could be spending the next twelve hours in Walker’s arms, making blissful, uninterrupted love?

  She didn’t need to look very far for the answer to this question. It was on the ring finger of her left hand. A thin, gold band she’d worn for eight years. Six years during which she and Gregg had been married, and another two years—no, more than two years, two years, four months, and ten days—during which she’d been widowed.

  She’d tried taking it off before. Just recently, she’d taken it off several times. But she always ended up putting it back on again. Without it, her ring finger felt naked. And she felt uncomfortable. Incomplete. Like she was missing a limb, instead of a ring.

  Worse yet, if she left it off long enough, she felt the same way she’d felt after she and Walker had kissed each of those times. She felt as if she was being unfaithful to Gregg, or at least to his memory.

  Now, she thought about what Gregg would have wanted for her. Would he have wanted her to be alone? she asked herself. But she knew, in a heartbeat, he wouldn’t have. He hadn’t been selfish. He’d been the opposite of selfish. He would have wanted her life to go on after his ended. And not just go on but be full of love and happiness.

  So why couldn’t she take the ring off? She twisted it impatiently on her finger, but she didn’t take it off. That was going to be hard for her, she knew. To take it off and keep it off. It might even be the hardest thing she’d had to do yet. Not that the other things hadn’t been hard, too. Telling Wyatt his father wasn’t coming back. Attending Gregg’s funeral. Packing up his belongings . . .

  She paused now, remembering something. She’d never admitted this to anyone, but even after she’d sold their house, and even after she and Wyatt had moved out of it, she hadn’t been able to give Gregg’s things away. She’d saved everything, from the trivial—unopened disposable razors—to the mundane—white athletic socks, freshly bleached and neatly rolled into pairs. She’d packed everything with meticulous care, in neatly labeled cardboard boxes, and put it in a rented storage unit. And she’d never really asked herself why. Until tonight.

  She bit her lower lip now, concentrating. Why would she do that? Why would she keep all his things unless . . . unless. She sat perfectly still. She didn’t even breathe. She was right on the edge of something, right at the brink of some discovery. Something so simple but at the same time so difficult for her to understand.

  And then it came to her. The reason she’d kept all his things was because, on some level, she didn
’t really believe he was gone. She didn’t really believe he wasn’t coming back.

  But he is gone, she told herself now. He isn’t coming back. Not now. Not ever. Their life together was over. Forever. And the only thing she and Wyatt had left of Gregg were their memories of him.

  She waited for something to happen. Something dramatic. Cataclysmic, even. She waited for a bolt of lightning to strike a nearby tree or a crack of thunder to rend the night sky. But nothing happened. Or rather, everything happened. But it happened in her heart and in her head. And as shocking as her discovery was to her, the rest of the world continued exactly as it had been before.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there when she suddenly stood up and walked, unsteadily, back to the cabin. She let herself in, went straight to her bedroom, and took a photo box out of her bottom dresser drawer. This was where she kept the part of her and Gregg’s life she couldn’t bear to put in storage.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed now and forced herself to go through the box, one item at a time. There was a picture of her and Gregg taken during their freshman year of college, looking impossibly young and happy. There was an invitation to their wedding, five years later. There was a letter Gregg had written her after he’d left her and Wyatt at the hospital, the night after Wyatt was born. In it, he told her how much he loved them both, and he promised to be the best father to Wyatt he could possibly be. There was another photograph, this one of a two-and-a-half-year-old Wyatt sitting on Gregg’s shoulders right before they left for their first Minnesota Twins game together. Of course, as it turned out, it would also be their last one together.

  There was another letter, too, this one from a man in Gregg’s National Guard unit, written after Gregg had been killed. In it, he told Allie how brave Gregg had been and how concerned he’d been for the welfare of the other men in his unit. It had been an honor to serve with him, he wrote.