Once Upon a Wedding

by JoAnn Ross

  Unfortunately, every time he tried to pry some details about the afterlife from Bodhi, he’d only get a shrug and the response that it wasn’t his place to tell, but not to worry, it wasn’t boringly pastoral and the music was a helluva lot cooler than just harp players.

  That was encouraging. Not that Aiden was in any hurry to find out for himself. He’d assured his mom that yeah, he might have issues. But she didn’t have to worry about him being suicidal. Part of him wondered if his imagination had recreated his partner to help him overcome the gut wrenching guilt that in the beginning, had hung over him like a cold, wet shroud. If that was the case, it seemed to be working, so he wasn’t going to dig too deeply into the question.

  He watched his father park the SUV and climb out with a cooler that Aiden knew was filled with meals his mom had cooked. She’d sent John Mannion out with a similar cooler last week. And every week since Aiden had arrived back in Washington.

  “You don’t have to keep coming all the way out here,” he greeted his dad. “The freezer has enough food for any army.”

  “You know your mother. She believes in the food pyramid. Which is why she sneaks green stuff into her dishes. I also picked up a pizza at Luca’s.”

  “Loaded?”

  “Is there any other kind?” John carried the cooler past Aiden and Bodhi and into the kitchen. “If you moved back to town, you could have all the pizza you wanted. And Luca won’t make you put vegetables on it.”

  “I’m happy where I am.”

  Sure, he was drifting, okay, maybe stalled, but what was wrong with that? Wasn’t a guy entitled? He had, after all, been shot. Maybe not that badly, but it should give him a pass.

  “I went to mom’s birthday party. And that wedding,” he pointed out.

  “Three months ago. And you only went to the wedding because your sister guilted you into it because her fiancé, who used to be your best friend’s mother had come back from Yellowstone Park to officiate.”

  It had been hard enough to sober up enough to drag himself out to the family Christmas tree farm just out of Honeymoon Harbor for his mother’s birthday celebration, but at least that had been just family—who, except for his grandfather, who seemed to have lost his conversational filter—had treated him with kid gloves.

  Then Brianna had taken him out to the barn, supposedly to show him all that had been done to fix it up for summer theater companies while he’d been away, and to tell him how she and Seth Harper were trying to decide whether to have their next year’s summer wedding here in the barn or in the garden of her bed and breakfast, Herons Landing.

  “And speaking of weddings,” she’d mentioned offhandedly, “Seth mom’s going to officiate Kylee and Mai’s ceremony tomorrow.”

  “You mentioned that, too”

  “You should come.”

  “Why? Kylee was yours and Zoe’s friend. I barely knew her. And I’ve never even met Mai.”

  “In the first place, you can’t hide away like a hermit forever. In the second place, you should go because you’ve been ignoring my fiancé, who used to be your best friend, and it’s not like an hour or so of socializing with a few old friends is going to kill you. And third—” she ticked the reasons off on fingers tipped in a turquoise polish that reminded him of the Caribbean”—”we’re all worried about you, Aiden. Including Seth. And me.”

  “You’re playing the Catholic guilt card,” he’d grumbled.

  She grinned, looking not the least bit guilty. “It’s my superpower.”

  And so, unable to say no, he’d caved. And while it had admittedly been good to talk with Seth, it still weirded him out thinking about his best friend and his sister having sex. Unfortunately, Brianna hadn’t warned him that Jolene Wells would also be there. That was probably because if his sister had no way of knowing about his and Jolene’s past.

  “You sure have a lot of secrets for a guy who always came off so uncomplicated,” Bodhi said. Aiden glanced over at his father, who, after putting the pizza on the center of the table, had begun loading up the refrigerator. Fortunately, he didn’t appear to hear a thing. That meant Aiden’s ghost, hallucination, or imagination, was a private one.

  Aiden followed his dad to the kitchen and got out some paper plates and napkins. “It hasn’t been that long,” he belatedly responded to his dad’s comment.

  “Four months.”

  Four months, one week, and five days, he thought. There had admittedly been those lost weeks when he’d first arrived.

  “I need your help,” his dad said as he popped the top on two bottles of beer.

  “I’m not drinking.”

  “Good for you. This is a nonalcoholic winter ale your brother made.”

  “Because nothing says I’m an alcoholic like drinking a non-alcoholic beer.”

  “Or it could say, I’m a smart guy who wants to keep my wits about me while the morons around me are getting plastered,” John Mannion suggested in that deceptively mild tone that somehow possessed as much power as Aiden’s former drill instructor’s shouts. “Why don’t you withhold judgement until you taste it?”

  Shrugging, Aiden took the bottle, tipped it to his lips, and swallowed. But not before rolling it around in his mouth. He may not be an expert, but he’d drunk enough beer over his lifetime to recognize good stuff when he tasted it.

  “This is really great.” Good enough if you gave it to a guy without a label, he might not realize it was alcohol free.

  “Can you imagine Quinn doing anything that wasn’t?”

  No. Quinn Mannion always been the quintessential perfect eldest child. A real life Eagle Scout with the badges to prove it, along with being head altar boy at St. Peter the Fishermen’s Church, had made him a hard act to follow. Which was why Aiden hadn’t even tried, instead going for a gold medal in rebellion.

  Quinn had been making big bucks as a corporate lawyer in Seattle when he’d up and quit, come home to Honeymoon Harbor, and started a brewery and pub, following in the footsteps of their ancestor Finn Mannion, who’d been forced to shutter the Mannion family pub during prohibition. The beer was as perfect as everything else Quinn did. It was dark, with an honest-to-god beer flavor that carried a hint of seasonal spices.

  “He makes a summer version, too,” John said. “It’s got a citrusy taste that’s great for cookouts. It got a lot of buzz locally, so he’s going regional with it next summer. This is the first season, but I suspect it’s going to do as well as his Captain Jack Sparrow.”

  The beer had won a bunch of awards, Aiden knew. It had also made it down to L.A., where it was strictly a draft beer, because, according to Quinn, most distributors and bars kept kegs cold all the time, allowing for a consistent flavor advantage. The kegs also protected the beer from light. And proving that Quinn hadn’t exactly given up capitalism when he’d walked away from his big bucks lawyer gig, he’d told Aiden that kegs had bars buying and sell a lot more than in bottles.

  “Damn, I miss beer.” Bodhi heaved a huge sigh and shook his sun-bleached hair “And pizza. It’s a bummer having to live vicariously through you, since you’ve never exactly been Mr. Party Guy, but the past few months have been brutal.”

  “You could leave,” Aiden shot back. Then cringed, when his dad, who’d been dishing up slices of pizza glanced up. Damn.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he backtracked. “I meant you didn’t have to hang around to keep me company just because mom’s worried about me.”

  “Parents worry. It comes with the job. But this is a busy time, getting ready for the Christmas tree selling season, so I’m only staying long enough to eat a slice of pizza and offer you a proposition.”

  “Okay.”

  While his mother could be a velvet steamroller you could see coming from a mile away, his dad had stealth ninja skills that had you agreeing to something before you knew what had hit you. Like that
judge who’d been tempted to throw up his hands and send Aiden to juvie. But without attempting to use the power of his office, that John Mannion had far too much integrity to ever try, he’d deftly worked out a deal where, so long as Aiden stayed out of trouble for the last two months of high school, he could enlist in the Marines when he turned eighteen and have his juvenile crime spree record expunged.

  Because his father had gone to bat for him, risking his own reputation, Aiden had started growing up on the spot by keeping to his part of the deal. Later the Marines, as tough as his Afghanistan deployment had been, had proved to be the best thing that had ever happened to him.

  They sat at the table where he and all his brothers had carved their initials, to the feigned consternation of his mother. The fire in the kitchen fireplace, that before electricity had made its way to this upper part of the Olympic Peninsula Coast, had served as both a heater and oven, added a wood-scented comfort. Bodhi was sitting on the edge of the counter, tanned legs swinging.

  “Axel Swenson had a stroke,” John Quinn broke the comfortable silence.

  “That’s too bad.” Aiden and the Chief of Police had had an adversarial relationship, which, he had to admit, had all been on him. “How is he?”

  “Okay. There are some memory issues that may or may not clear up. And lingering weakness in his right arm, but he’s going to undergo therapy for that.”

  “That’s good to hear.” Brianna had called and told him that their grandfather Harper had had a TIA, and while Jerome Harper continued to insist all was fine, Aiden knew his mother worried about her father more than she let on. Although he knew enough not to talk about this with his grandpop, Aiden hated the idea of losing the gruff old family patriarch.

  “Yeah. Axel might have a chance of coming back to work, but his wife put her foot down. She wants him to focus on getting better, then she’s booked that cruise to Alaska he’s been promising her for the entire forty-five years of their marriage.”

  “Sounds about right.” And a lot like Seth’s parents taking off to see the country in a motorhome. Apparently Boomers aged into gypsies. But not his parents. He couldn’t imagine them ever leaving the farm they’d gotten married on. Built a house and raised four sons and a daughter on.

  “Here it comes,” Bodhi warned.

  “I’d like to see those glaciers before they’re all gone, myself,” his dad said, “Maybe your mom and I can book one of those cruises next year. After the new trees are planted.

  “I’ll bet mom would like that.” He couldn’t remember the last time his parents had taken a real vacation, other than a few days here at the coast house.

  His dad took another pull on the brown bottle with the snow-flaked fir tree on the label. “The thing is, it’s going to be hard to find someone to fill Axel’s shoes.”

  Bang! The damn ninja star hit its mark.

  “No.”

  John lifted a brow, but didn’t bother to pretend not to know that Aiden had jumped a step ahead. “Why don’t you just hear me out?” he suggested. “I did bring pizza. And beer.”

  “What would mom say if she knew you’d stooped to bribery?

  “As it happens, we’re on the same page about this. Well, except for maybe the triple meat on the pizza. Which she needn’t know about.”

  His mother had always been into healthy eating before farm to table became a concept. Her one exception was her award winning fried chicken that had been passed down through generations of Harpers before her becoming a Mannion by marriage.

  “My lips are sealed.”

  “Mine, too, unfortunately,” Bodhi moaned. “That Italian sausage would be making my stomach growl.” He put a hand on his buffed up abdomen. “If I had one.”

  It was all Aiden could do not to roll his eyes. While he liked pizza and burgers as much as the next guy, Bodhi had always worshipped in the church of carnivores. With fries and onion rings on the side. Their woman captain, a forty-something vegan who was into yoga, had always sworn Bodhi’s arteries must look like the Pacific Coast Highway at rush hour and claimed he was a walking heart attack waiting to happen.

  Unfortunately, Bodhi hadn’t lived long enough to test the validity of her accusation.

  “I’m not talking about a long-term commitment,” his father said. “Unfortunately Axel had his stroke on the night we were at Mannions, celebrating his twenty-fifth anniversary in the job.”

  “He could’ve taken that as a sign it was time to get out of law enforcement,” Aiden said.

  “There is that. My point is the position is open and we need someone. Now.”

  “You’re the mayor. Appoint someone. Anyone but me.”

  “You’re the only viable candidate. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got some good young deputies, but they’re green. We’re also a small town with a small budget, so the others who have more experience under their belt are either volunteers or retired from other cities and don’t want to get back into full time police work.”

  “I fully appreciate their thinking.”

  “This isn’t the same as what you were doing in California,” his father said. “Instead of working the rough streets chasing down bad guys, you’d mostly be helping out Honeymoon Harbor citizens.”

  Previous generations of Mannions had been doing exactly that since their arrival on the Olympic peninsula, though he was the only police officer in the family that he knew of. The tallest building in town, discounting the clock tower, was the three-story gray town hall built in 1876 by one of Seth Harper’s ancestors. The bronze plaque on the side of the building named Finn Mannion as mayor. The same position his dad had held for years. Partly, he’d say, because no one ever wanted the unpaid job, that kept anyone from running against him.

  “Take it from me, any streets can be rough these days,” Aiden said.

  “Your dad obviously doesn’t watch Dateline,” Bodhi said. “Hell, if you watch that show enough, you’d never leave your house”

  Aiden bit back the smile, not wanting his dad to think he was smiling at the idea of Honeymoon Harbor’s former bad boy playing Andy Griffith for the Pacific Northwest’s version of Mayberry. His mother used to claim that just because his name meant he’d been born from fire, didn’t mean he needed to be constantly setting them at every opportunity. He’d admittedly been the family black sheep, a wildling who’d constantly rebelled at what he’d viewed as the constraints put on him growing up with the town’s mayor as his father and a high school principal mom.

  He routinely got into fights, could have papered the wall of the bedroom he’d shared with his brother Burke with parking tickets, and had once gotten caught TP-ing the house of a guy who’d stood up his teenage sister Brianna for the Spring Fling.

  Luckily, he seemed to have inherited whatever family gene had made his uncle Mike the Mannion family charmer, and Aiden would have been the first to admit that he’d talked his way out of more trouble than a lot of guys would have gotten away with. But even his family name and charm came screeching to an end when he swiped a twelve-pack of Coors from the back of a delivery truck outside Marshall’s Market. That had caused the judge to issue his ultimatum and give seventeen-year-old Aiden a choice: the military after graduation, or he could leave the courtroom and go straight to juvie.

  “The city council approved me hiring you this afternoon.”

  Given his former reputation, showed how desperate they were. “Good for them. Now you can go back and tell them to come up with another candidate because I’m not interested.”

  “We’re not meeting again until next month. Are you suggesting the town go without a police chief while we’re doing a hiring search?”

  “You could always contract with the county sheriff’s department.”

  “They’re good people,” John allowed. “But although Honeymoon Harbor has always been the county seat, we value our independence and prefer to run our own to
wn.”

  Which, as mayor, his dad had always done well, while managing to handle expanding growth with environmental concerns. “Even if I were to consider it, which I’m not,” he said quickly, holding up a hand, “the operations I worked in L.A. weren’t play-by-the-book deals. I spent a lot of time undercover, that definitely didn’t involve playing with others.”

  Other than his partner, who’d always had his back. “How do you know I even have leadership skills?”

  “You know, I watched a documentary on the History Channel last week,” his dad said mildly, as he appeared to sidetrack the conversation. But Aiden knew that he was just buying time to set up another Ninja attack. “How, since 1775, Marines have embodied our country’s standards of courage, esprit, and military prowess. You may have taken off the uniform, Son. But you’ll always be a United States Marine. There isn’t anyone who’d be better.”

  “He’s got you there, dude,” Bodhi chimed in again. “Besides, now that you’re not drinking yourself into a stupor trying to get over misplaced survivor’s guilt, you’re going to need something else to do. I gotta tell you, dude, I’m getting cabin fever hanging around here.”

  Aiden hated to admit it, but they both had a point. Now that he was sober, he was beginning to get bored. And restless. And there was also the fact that he owed his dad. Without this isolated coast house to crash in when he’d gotten out of L.A., he wasn’t sure how far off the rails he might’ve gone.

  “How long are we talking?”

  “Well, ideally, you’d settle in and like the job—”

  Aiden crossed his arms. “How. Long?”

  “If you find you don’t feel like the job’s a good fit for you, only until we find a replacement. Say, sometime mid-February?”

  “That’s six months.”

  “He can do math, too,” Bodhi said.

  “Why don’t you sleep on it?” his dad suggested. Then, savvy politician that he was, he turned the conversation to the Seahawks chances of making the Super Bowl while they finished off the pizza.