Up to Me (Shore Secrets)

by Christi Barth

  So it helped that this wasn’t an official date. Yes, an interesting and drool-worthy hunk of a man had his big hand wrapped around hers. Someone whom she’d wanted to stay up all night talking to every bit as much as she’d wanted to stay up all night kissing. To be on the safe side, however, Ella made sure Gray was the only date-like ingredient to the morning. Her yellow bra in no way matched her black-and-white-striped panties. No perfume, not even scented lotion. And the bright morning light glinting off the lake forced her into what had to be an unattractive squint. All of that should make it easier to give a straightforward recitation of the facts.

  She led Gray down the well-trodden dirt path through the trees to the tiny point of land that poked out into the lake like a grassy hangnail. A thick line of trees hid it from the road. Just a black, wrought-iron bench, some green stubble that would become a smattering of wildflowers in about a month, and a simple metal mailbox on a wooden post.

  “Here we are,” she said, needlessly. But it was better than diving right in, seeing as how Ella had no idea how to start. Would he be turned off? Think their town’s heartwarming tradition to be more weird than quirky? Think of her as weird, or worse yet, somehow broken?

  Gray approached the mailbox hesitantly, hands shoved into his jeans pockets. “From the way you all talked about it, I expected something more. Maybe a rainbow arcing across the top of it, or a fire-breathing dragon to guard it. Or a couple of virgins standing watch. Although I don’t know where you’d scare those up nowadays.”

  “You hit the nail on the head.” She nodded, and stuck her own hands into her back pockets. “When the combination of free love and reliable birth control hit in the sixties, we had to give up on the round-the-clock mailbox tending by virgins.”

  “The times, they are a-changing,” he intoned.

  Funny. Gray was super easy to talk to. She should stop her mental dithering and get on with it, because Ella really did want a night of candlelight and wine with him. The sooner the better, since he’d be gone in two weeks. All the more reason why it shouldn’t matter what she said now, or how she said it. Gray would be gone in two weeks. Period. If she scared him off today, she’d just be that much better practiced for the next hot guy that caught her eye.

  Ella put her hand next to his, fingertips grazing. Except she didn’t want the next hot guy. She wanted this one. Here. Now. How had her life turned into an algebraic equation? A (the truth) + B (telling Gray) = hopefully, a whole bunch of XXXs and OOOs. God, she’d always sucked at algebra. A deep breath. A concerted focus on her red sneakers.

  “Burt Cosgrove died in the Korean War.” She exhaled, looked up.

  Gray ran a hand through his hair. He sat down on the bench and crossed his long legs at the ankles out in front of him. “History intrigues me. You’ve got my attention.”

  Now that she’d begun, this part was easy. Ella had heard the story so many times, it flowed off her tongue automatically. “Before basic training, he’d never left Seneca Lake. Burt just never saw any reason to go. He thought this was his little slice of heaven on earth, and nowhere else could measure up.”

  Shading his eyes to look out over the sparkling water, Gray said, “You do basically live in a picture postcard.”

  “Burt grew up working in the general store. On weekends at first, and then after school when he was old enough. He always crossed the road to take his break right here. Sometimes with a cigarette, sometimes a sandwich, but every single day, Burt crossed to this spot and looked at the lake. He planned to take over running the store, but—”

  “But then he was drafted,” Gray guessed, in a flat tone.

  “Yes. He did marry his sweetheart, Dawn’s grandmother, before he left. Even got her pregnant. It’s said that Burt didn’t take well to being a soldier. He missed Agnes, and home.” Oh, how that resonated with Ella. She still missed her parents with a physical hollowness in her heart every single day. “Two years in Korea didn’t change his mind. Burt wrote to her every single week. No matter what else he said, how short or long the letters were, two things always showed up in them. How much he missed Agnes, and how much he missed standing here, looking at Seneca Lake.”

  Ella sat down next to Gray, let her fingers seek his out to twine together in comfort. “After he was killed in action, Agnes bought this very bench. She put it here, without any fanfare, along with the mailbox. And inside the mailbox, she placed a journal. On the first page, she wrote about her husband’s love for this place. That in his memory, she wanted other people to be able to sit and enjoy the serenity of his favorite surroundings.”

  “Romantic. Sad. Bittersweet.” Gray gave her a double squeeze, like he was letting her know that he got it. Whew.

  “Oh, it gets better. When she came back the next day, Agnes checked the mailbox. Other people had written in the journal. They’d shared memories of Burt, of the lake. As time passed, people just wrote anything and everything in it. Poured their hearts out, actually. It became a safe place to say what troubled them—anonymously. To vent their anger, cry out their anguish, dare to voice their deepest dreams. People came to the shoreline to share their secrets. And they’ve never stopped.”

  This was the point where Gray might stop being intrigued by the history and start getting weirded out. But she’d gone too far to leave the story hanging half-finished. Ella got up and opened the tin door to the mailbox. She pulled out a red leather-bound book and carried it back over to the bench. “I forget which volume we’re up to by now. They’re shelved on the second floor of the general store, all the way back to the first one from 1953.”

  He blinked once. Then shook his head. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  Uh-oh. That didn’t bode well. Ella plastered a smile on her face. “Nope. This is far from a joke. We all take the journal very, very seriously.”

  Gray’s eyebrows shot up to his scalp. “People air their dirty laundry in that thing? For any random person to walk by and read?”

  Big, big uh-oh. Strangers always fell—strongly—into one of two camps about the mailbox journal. Either they thought it was a physical manifestation of small-town charm, or they thought it was nuts. It was usually impossible to shift their opinion one way or the other. And she’d really, really wanted this man to get it. “Yes.”

  “That’s quite a tale.” He snorted. “Whoever does that is flat-out crazy. Can’t be that many head cases in this small a town, though.” Gray pulled it onto his lap and thumbed through a few pages without really looking at them. “But I still don’t see what it has to do with you and me.”

  “Oh. I’m getting to that part. First, I needed you to understand that the entire town comes here and uses the journal. Often, people pose questions, ask advice. And the answers flood back.” Ella let a trio of ducks paddling at the water’s edge finish quacking before she blurted out the rest. “So I come here, and I write in the journal, to get advice.”

  Gray half laughed, half snorted. “On dating? Because what, your Ouija board is broken?”

  Rats. That was enough for her to be able to tell this conversation was already off the rails. That Gray didn’t understand the immensely strong ties interweaving the town to this mailbox and its journal. How it wasn’t just a sweet story, but a way of life on Seneca Lake. Their way of life. Ella sat up a little straighter, trying to let her posture and the determined jut of her chin convey the seriousness with which they all took this unspoken social contract.

  “Yes, on dating. On everything. Everything big, anyway.”

  Gray slammed the journal shut with another snort. Pretty soon she’d have to offer him a tissue. “You actually listen to anonymous advice on big issues in your life? And follow it? And you’re freely admitting this to a guy you barely know? I thought we were hitting it off. Now it seems like you’re trying to scare me away.”

  Okay, she didn’t blame him for being skeptical. But if he�
�d stop interrupting, she could finish her explanation. Ella stood. This part of the story definitely called for pacing. “You see, I’ve made a couple of really, truly bad decisions. Bad enough to convince me that I should leave all the serious decision-making up to somebody else.”

  “Hang on. What could be so bad?” His voice now lacked both the lilt of teasing and the less-than-faint hint of derision it had carried only moments before.

  Nope. Pacing didn’t work after all. Pacing was too peppy. Far too energetic for her maudlin tale of woe. Ella sank cross-legged onto the ground and began to run a long blade of grass between her fingers. “My career.”

  “What’s wrong with your career? I mean, that was one hell of an impassioned speech you gave the other day. Extolling the virtues of massage? It convinced me to put myself at your mercy.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with my career. Not now, that is. I love being a massage therapist.” Ella pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them tight. If he kept asking questions, she’d be in the full-on fetal position by the time she finished. “But my parents raised me to take over running Mayhew Manor. They sent me to college for a degree in hotel and restaurant management. I hated it. Just never wanted to do it, from the start. Mom and Dad wouldn’t listen. The hotel was my legacy, and I needed to learn how to handle it. My great-grandparents kept it going through the Depression. My grandparents kept it going through wars. For generations, my family worked hard to share the beauty of the Manor with the public. Apparently, if it didn’t pass down to me, their sacrifices, their work meant nothing.”

  “Bullshit.” His heated response snapped her head up. Gray’s full lips thinned into an incensed, bloodless line. After his laconic amusement so far, the change in his demeanor, the sudden rigidness to all his muscles, surprised her. Even though it was painful, it looked like she’d found a topic where they truly connected. “Those people made a choice. Why the hell shouldn’t you get to make your own choice? Your life’s not determined on the basis of shared DNA.”

  Even with all the years that had elapsed since Ella last waged that particular argument, it felt good to have someone in her corner. “That’s kind of what I said. It didn’t make any difference. We fought for the entire four years, it seemed.”

  He skimmed a gentle hand down her forearm. “What was that like?”

  “Horrible.” Ella’s stomach clenched, the same way it had during every circular, useless argument. “I’ll be the first to admit that I had a pretty idyllic childhood. I adored my parents. Fighting with them was never on my radar. I trailed them around Mayhew Manor and had fun.” She laughed at the disbelief that pulled at the corner of his mouth. “Yes, that’s right. Not every teenager is full of angst and rebellion.”

  “Speak for yourself,” he muttered down towards the grass.

  Okay. Gray clearly had family issues. But even though curiosity pinched at her with the tenacity of a tiny crab, Ella didn’t have the energy to ask him for details. It would take everything in her just to finish her own tale. “I honestly enjoyed spending time with my parents. Right up until college night at the start of my senior year of high school. The night they had to explain three times over—because I just didn’t get it—that they’d only send me to a college with an HRM program.”

  Now he looked befuddled. Which was funny to see on this man who rocked a solid core of confidence. “Why did you go?” he asked.

  Ella rolled her eyes. “I’m not an idiot. Come on, who turns down a free college degree? Even if it’s the wrong one. But I came up with a plan. A stupid, selfish plan, as it turned out. When I turned twenty-one, I got control over all my shares in the family trust.”

  Gray sucked in a short, sharp breath. “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t take away one-hundred-percent family ownership by selling your shares.”

  Oh, how she wished she could deny it. Wished that she could go back in time and undo her complete idiocy. But thanks to budget cuts, NASA didn’t even have the space shuttle program anymore. Chances were slim that anyone was throwing millions of dollars at the possibility of time travel. Or that if there was a secret lab for it somewhere, they’d use it to solve her very first-world problems instead of going back and bitch slapping Hitler.

  “I did. It took me a few months, but I secretly found a buyer. The day I graduated from college, I used that money to enroll in massage therapy school.” She’d felt so free and empowered in that moment. Which made the anger and disappointment that followed all the more painful in contrast.

  Another dagger-stab of a breath from Gray. “Did your parents find out?”

  “Of course. There are always consequences, especially to stupidity. Mom and Dad found out within an hour of the sale. But by then it was too late to stop it. My choice?” She let the word hang in the air, a toxic bubble of memory. “It almost destroyed them, and the hurt and betrayal they felt almost destroyed us as a family. You see, they’d already extended themselves financially to make renovations on the Lakeview Lodge. For the first time ever, they took on a mortgage in order to expand. Buying back my shares stretched the coffers pretty darn thin.”

  “Why’d they bother? Didn’t your parents still hold the majority interest?”

  Whatever Gray did for a living, he understood business. “That whole ‘legacy’ thing again.” She put air quotes around the word with her fingers. If there’d been a way to indicate bold and italics, maybe with her toes, Ella would’ve done that too. “Mayhew Manor belongs to Mayhews, and only Mayhews, now and forevermore.”

  “Do you agree?” His blue eyes bored into her, a truth-seeking dowsing rod. Funny how her answer today was completely different than it had been at the time.

  “The thing is, I kind of do, now.”

  He balanced his elbows on his knees, letting his hands dangle, loose as his teasing grin. “You mean, now that you’ve gotten your way, along with your massage school certification?”

  “Actually, yes. I fought so hard because I cared. A little maturity helped me see that my ancestors worked just as hard at keeping the hotel going. Selling off my shares was the same as thumbing my nose at their decades of hard work. It was thoughtless and selfish and I wholly regret it.”

  No, that wasn’t all of it. Her ex-therapist Dr. Takeuchi would be disappointed if she couldn’t reveal the whole truth, after all their years of hard work. Ella scrubbed her hands across her eyes and whooshed a deep, cleansing breath in and out.

  Gray gently tugged her hands down. He looked at her, but not with the pitying concern she was so darn sick of, the knowing looks people exchanged across the top of her head if she so much as blinked twice, which wordlessly said Ella’s too fragile for this conversation, or Ella’s too emotional for this conversation. Nope, Gray’s eyes held nothing but honest, basic curiosity. It made it so easy to talk to him. No judging, just two people, sharing.

  “What is it?” he asked. His warm hands still cradled hers.

  “I guess it’s that a connection to family—any connection, no matter how tenuous—became so much more precious to me once my whole family was gone. I still don’t want to run it, but I don’t want to let it go, either.” There. No bursting into tears, just a flat declaration of a belief she’d mocked, or at best, ignored, almost her entire life. One that she now clung to with the vise-grip determination of someone dangling by their fingernails from the edge of the Grand Canyon. “It took their deaths to make me see that I’d do anything to maintain that legacy. To uphold the Mayhew name and tradition. I’m all that’s left. I can’t let their memory down.”

  Gray seemed to absorb that for a few moments. “What happened? With your parents, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Her hands clenched around his. But Ella wanted to get it all out. If this man was the first in three years she actually wanted to date, she wanted to do it right. Be totally upfront. So what if he was only here for two weeks? It could be the
best, most intense two weeks of her life. It could set the tone for all her dating relationships going forward. Although that felt too portentous. Probably unwise to heap all those expectations onto him. This was all about her. How Ella wanted to move forward. How she didn’t want to tiptoe—or worse, have him do it—around the truth of her past. Gray’s response, good or bad, wasn’t the point. Mostly.

  “Funny you should ask. That’s the final part of my story. Are you sure you want me to keep going?”

  The corners of his mouth twitched. “I’m sure I want to take you out on a date, and this appears to be the only way to make that happen.” Sliding off the bench, he leaned back against it, with one arm draped along the seat. Gray beckoned her over.

  Whether he was being sweet, or just polite, she didn’t want to squander the opportunity to touch more of him. Ella didn’t hesitate to scooch into the warmth of his side. She deserved some reward for revisiting this emotional battlefield, didn’t she? And it was too early for her usual go-to: a triple scoop of chocolate ice cream with dark chocolate sauce, four cherries, and as much whipped cream as she could squirt directly into her mouth. But cuddling with Gray might just be better. His hand curled around her shoulder in a comforting, miniature version of a hug.

  “My parents and I achieved an uneasy peace once I agreed to work as a massage therapist in the spa at Mayhew Manor.”

  “Really? They just rolled over?”

  Hardly. “After a three-month battle during which they tried to convince me to run the place. But I held firm. I’d be a massage therapist, either here or elsewhere. That was the only choice. So they decided agreeing meant I’d at least be under their roof, so to speak. My interpretation was that I needed to get out from under at least one of their roofs, and get my own apartment.”