Like Always

by Robert Elmer

  “Uh…I still have to replank that broken section of dock, and there’s a leak in the—”

  She stopped him with a gentle finger to his lips.

  “You’ve been working your tail off all week. Just walk with me for a little while, and then I’ll let you get back to it.”

  “Well…”

  “Besides, we’ve hardly talked since we got here. How late did you get to bed last night? Eleven?”

  “Actually…” He rubbed the back of his head and looked sheepish. “More like midnight. I was trying to fix that compressor and kind of broke something in the process.”

  “And you’re painting the boathouse.” Merit licked her thumb and tried to rub a spot of paint off his forehead. “Restocking the snack bar. Repairing the roof. Fixing the gas pumps. Then you sleep like a dead man until the alarm goes off at five thirty.”

  Even if he did have two right thumbs, no one could say Will Sullivan wasn’t a hard worker.

  “You’re not complaining?” he asked.

  She shook her head as they headed down the hall. “Of course not. We both I knew what we were getting into, and I’m proud of you for tackling all those jobs. Of course, I haven’t exactly been sitting around eating bonbons or watching soap operas.”

  The idea sounded strangely appealing all of a sudden. At least for the next seven and a half months, she would have a convenient excuse for weird cravings or incoherent thoughts.

  “I could use a couple bonbons right now.” Will sighed and unbuckled his tool belt. It gave him a macho look Merit had never seen when he wore business suits and striped ties. Right now, though, she’d settle for a little of his attention, away from the bustle of renovation work. He closed the front door behind them.

  “Sorry, I’m all out of those.” She gripped his hand to help her up the trail behind the cabin, walking as slowly as she could. He just laughed.

  “Look up there.” She pointed to a fish hawk circling the thermals above the lake. “Stephanie says they can spot a trout underwater from all the way up there.”

  “Better eyesight than I have.” Will smiled, finally seeming to relax.

  At the top of the hill, they paused to survey their new world. Merit pointed out a canoe launching from the dock behind the boathouse.

  “Speaking of Stephanie…” Merit smiled. “See that?”

  “Hey, I’m not completely blind.” Will leaned against a boulder in the shade as they watched Michael paddle, more crookedly than he probably realized. Stephanie, who couldn’t know she was being watched from the hillside, had stepped outside the floating store to observe. The two younger girls joined her a moment later. Michael had somehow managed to lose his paddle and pushed the water with his hands, soaking himself in the process. They could hear Stephanie giggling.

  “I hope he doesn’t fall in,” said Merit. “That water is still ice cold.”

  “If he does, I think she’ll go after him.”

  “As long as Abby and Olivia stay where they are.”

  They watched the little comedy unfold below them. Stephanie and the girls hopped up and down on the dock, waving and shouting encouragement.

  Will turned to Merit. “So you think it was a good move after all?”

  She thought for a minute, smiled, and nodded. “You know,” she said, “I wasn’t sure at first, but this place has already won me over.”

  “Just the place?”

  “Well, the people too. I think we have a chance to start something new here. Get back into a church. Don’t you think?”

  Will said nothing but after a moment, finally nodded.

  “It’s a good place to raise our kids.” She was certain Will could hear the thumping of her heart. “I mean, Michael obviously doesn’t need any more raising from us.”

  They looked down at the canoe, and Will laughed.

  “But the girls, they still need us.” She took a deep breath. “And they’re going to love being big sisters.”

  In the distance a crow called, and they could hear the whisper of wind in the firs behind them on the slope. A laugh drifted up from the canoe, and Will looked at Merit out of the corner of his eye.

  “I thought we already talked about adopting again.” His jaw tightened, and he sounded as if he thought ice was about to break under his feet. “I mean, after adopting Michael… I thought we already decided against it, a long time ago.”

  “I know we did.” Merit slipped her hand into his. She’d never been very good at being coy. “I’m not talking about adopting. I’m talking about having another baby.”

  He chuckled and pushed himself off the boulder. “You had me going there for a minute. Sorry, I can’t help you in that department.”

  “You already did, Will.” She didn’t let go of his hand, and she felt him tighten up. “Come on, don’t be so dense. I’m trying to tell you I’m pregnant.”

  The tentative smile on his face froze and then his mouth dropped open.

  “I—how—I…”

  “I wasn’t going to take the test at first, but there was a couple it happened to back in Walnut Creek, remember?” She knew she’d better start explaining before this took a turn for the worse. “And then I read about it online. They say there’s a tiny, tiny chance of your plumbing…you know, growing back together. They call it recanalization. It depends on what they did to you in the first place, exactly, and—”

  “All right, all right. You don’t have to get medical on me.”

  “Well, we can check with the doctor, but I think that’s what happened.”

  Will’s eyes glassed over, and Merit wondered if he was going into shock.

  “Will?” She nuzzled his shoulder. “It’s not as if anything terrible has happened. I know we decided a long time ago not to have any more, but last time I checked, we were still married.”

  Will slipped his hand from her grasp and hugged his arms to his chest as he paced around the boulder.

  “So,” he finally croaked, “how long have you known? I mean, how far along are you? Are you sure? You haven’t been to a doctor yet, right? Is it a boy or a girl?”

  She smiled and touched the tip of his nose. “I looked at the calendar, and I think I’m about six weeks along. I’ve taken a home test twice, and it indicated the same thing both times. The test doesn’t show if it’s a boy or a girl, though,” she said smiling.

  “Wait a minute,” Will said, the squint releasing from his eyes. “You never ate a bad chicken wing, after all, did you?”

  “Oh, aren’t you the clever one.”

  She didn’t have to tell him about every ache and pain. She assumed getting pregnant in her forties was different than in her twenties or thirties, that’s all. Right?

  Will headed down the hill, raking his fingers through his hair and mumbling, “Oh wow, oh wow,” over and over.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled after him. “Where are you going?”

  Over his shoulder he informed her this would take some getting used to, and that he might have a word with the surgeon who had supposedly performed his operation.

  Halfway down the hill, he skidded to a stop and turned around.

  “Wait a minute.” He put out his hands, signaling her to stay put. “I’ll help you down. In fact, from now on, be sure Stephanie helps you with everything. No reaching, no running, no working up a sweat. Got it?”

  She laughed as he returned to escort her back to the cabin. “You go from acting like you’re in shock to acting like I’m an invalid.”

  “You better believe I’m in shock,” he managed. “Aren’t you?”

  “Oh yeah.” She arched her back as if she were already in her third trimester. “Just give me a couple of months, dear, and I’ll really give you something to be in shock about.”

  sixteen

  Give a man a fish and he has food for a day; teach him how

  to fish and you can get rid of him for the entire weekend.

  ZENNA SCHAFFER

  I’;m glad you took us up on our invit
ation, Michael.” Stephanie’s dad, Pastor Bud, adjusted the brim of his faded Montana Outfitters cap, the one with fake seagull poop on top that Mom never let him wear at home. “Especially on the spur of the moment.”

  Our invitation? Stephanie thought it a casual use of the word our. Dad could have at least warned her, given her the chance to find an excuse not to come. She watched an osprey in the distance working the far shore and paying no attention to the men.

  “Yeah, Will’s going to be sorry he didn’t come,” replied Michael. “What about Mrs. Unruh, though? Does she ever—”

  “My mom doesn’t like fishing,” Stephanie explained. “She never has. The scales, the smell, the hooks. She thinks it’s all yuck.”

  “And you don’t?”

  Stephanie shrugged but never took her eyes off the distant bird. “Doesn’t bother me. Dad and I have always been fishing buddies.”

  She held on to the side of the boat and let the wind whip her hair back like a flag. In the bright morning sunlight, the freckles on her face would stand out—but so what if they did? She let her father tell the rest of the story as they bounced over a light chop in their trusty old aluminum boat. Dad had stenciled Amazing Grace on the side, which explained how it had held together over the years.

  “Steph’s right,” Pastor Bud told Michael as he leaned against the steering wheel. “I never could convince her mother to come out with me. I think the boats too small for her.”

  “Small?” A waved rocked them from side to side, and Michael clung to his seat. “Well, I can see her point.”

  Stephanie’s father grinned and gunned the outboard motor once they passed the line of buoys marking the entrance to Kokanee Cove and the end of the no-wake zone. The motor stuttered for a moment, wheezing and smoking. It had seen just as many summers as the Amazing Grace, which was several. The motor caught, pushing them straight through a wave and slamming them down on the next one. The wind whipped a shower of spray over the boat.

  “Hoo!” Michael whooped. “That’s as chilly as the other day.”

  Stephanie didn’t step through the door he opened for her, but she hid a smile at the memory of Michael demonstrating the finer points of paddling a canoe without a paddle. Too bad her father hadn’t been there. He might have harvested a sermon illustration from the incident.

  They plowed across the southern end of the lake, where the floor rested over a thousand feet below the boat’s thin aluminum skin, heading for the western shore. Her father aimed for the abandoned limestone mine, his favorite place to drop his lines. The deep shadows of the Selkirk peaks sheltered the waters there, holding off the choppier waves.

  “Stephanie tells me you’re a mechanic at your folks’ resort,” Pastor Bud said to Michael, charging off on a new topic of conversation. Michael would be able to show his better side now, wouldn’t he?

  Michael explained that he took engines apart and put them back together again and that he’d been a mechanic in the service for a few years, where he’d worked on Humvees and personnel carriers in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it wasn’t anything special, he said. A motor was a motor no matter where he found it. Here in Kokanee Cove, he’d already tackled the pile of broken outboard motors in the boathouse.

  He crouched next to the pastor and looked at the blue green blend of mountains and horizon, speaking just loud enough to be heard over the drone of the motor. Stephanie wondered again why her father had asked him to come along.

  He seemed different when he talked about things that he liked, things that mattered to him, like fixing things and delivering people safely, without incident. Her father kept asking questions, and she couldn’t help listening. Out here Michael didn’t sound like someone who thought he was anything special, like so many other guys she’d met.

  “We prayed for you.” Her dad looked at their guest out of the corner of his eye to check his reaction. He got a puzzled stare. “Of course, we didn’t know who it was at the time, just the soldiers in the Middle East who needed our prayers.”

  “Oh.” Michael nodded. “You mean, in general. I appreciate that. Really, I do. And I appreciate you taking me out like this. I don’t think I’ve ever been out fishing in a boat before.”

  “Really?” Stephanie asked before she could stop herself. “Never? What did you do in California for fun?”

  “Oh, you know.” He shrugged. “California stuff. I was big into skateboards when I was a kid. Broke my arm in three places. Then motorized skateboards, then motorcycles, then cars. Drove my parents crazy.”

  “So you were never a surfer?” her dad asked. He throttled down, and they drifted into a calmer patch of water, close to a steep, wooded shore with a narrow, gravel beach.

  The question made Michael laugh—a light, pleasant chuckle. “No surfers where I lived. That’s the other California, L.A. I grew up in northern California. Suburbs. About fifty miles east of San Francisco.”

  Stephanie had never thought of it like that, as if there were two Californias. She’d never thought much about California, period, except to realize that a lot more people were coming here from there, and there wasn’t much she could do about it.

  There was also a lot to Michael that surprised her, like how he handled a fishing pole.

  “Uh…” He fiddled a bit with the reel, caught himself in the finger with a hook, then looked to see what Stephanie and her father were doing. “Are we supposed to put worms or something on these things?”

  Pastor Bud laughed and helped extricate the barb from Michael’s thumb. He didn’t flinch, just popped the thumb in his mouth, but it had to hurt.

  “You could use worms if you wanted to,” said her dad, “but that wouldn’t help us catch what we’re catching today.”

  “Which is…”

  “Rainbow trout, my friend.” Pastor Bud expertly cast off the side of the boat with a flick of his wrist then turned to help their guest. “They’re all over Lake Pend Oreille, and we catch ‘em first because they eat the kokanee hatch-lings, which are protected and, if you noticed, we named our town after the kokanee, so—

  “Yeah, what’s the deal with that name?” Michael asked in a curious tone. Here came the history lesson. Her dad smiled.

  “Kokanee is from the Salish Indian word kikinee, for the little landlocked salmon they liked so well. Our town’s founders liked the fishing here too. And I’ll tell you, if you haven’t had fresh trout cooked up in my wife’s frypan before, boy, are you in for a treat.”

  Stephanie gritted her teeth and wondered if her dad would invite Michael to dinner as well.

  “That’s the one reason she puts up with our fishing,” she said. She switched off the drag to free up her line and flicked her silver spoon lure several yards out to the side—every bit as expertly as her dad. That got Michael’s attention, and she had to keep herself from grinning.

  Were girls supposed to enjoy fishing the way she always had with her father? She wasn’t sure, but right now she was getting a kick out of watching this tough GI wrestle with a rod and reel.

  “You’ve really never been fishing before?” she asked. She wouldn’t have believed him if she hadn’t seen his rumbling.

  “We caught crawdads in the creek behind my house.” He smiled. “Does that count?”

  “Hmm. Your dad’s not a fisherman, either, I guess.”

  As soon as the words slipped from her mouth, she wished she could rewind the moment.

  Michael winced. “Will, uh…he was always gone while I was growing up. Sales trips, conventions, you know. I ended up doing my own thing.”

  That was the second time he’d said Will—not Dad or even my father. Stephanie exchanged looks with her own father, who gave her a subtle shake of the head—his signal to back off. She would have anyway, but she had a hard time imagining growing up like that. And what kind of man called his father by his first name?

  “Well, it’s good that you guys can work together now,” Stephanie finally said.

  Michael didn’t answer.


  “I don’t know about you two,” said Pastor Bud, “but I’m planning to catch Old Joe today.”

  Michael lifted his eyebrows in a question. “You’re going to have to explain who Old Joe is.”

  Stephanie did, grateful for the change in topic. Old Joe had been swimming these waters since she was seven, never mind that fish didn’t live that long. The legend of Old Joe was enough to keep them coming out time after time, looking for the big one that would bend their poles and nibble their lures—only to swim off with everything from hook to sinker.

  Michael nodded, and it occurred to Stephanie that he might be a good listener.

  “That Old Joe has been good for a sermon illustration or two,” her father said, studying his line as they trolled just offshore. By this time, Michael had his own line in the water, lure and sinker properly attached.

  “You think?” Stephanie laughed. “You’ve got to watch out for my dad. He sees a sermon illustration just about everywhere, but especially out here on the; lake.”

  “Out here?” Michael said, looking around.

  “Out here. Like the time I fell off the boat when I was four, and I wasn’t wearing a life jacket.”

  “That was a good one,” her dad said. “The illustration, I mean. Not what happened.”

  Stephanie smiled. “And the time I came home with an owl chick when I was ten.”

  “Another sermon illustration?” asked Michael.

  She nodded and pointed to a spot just under her left eye. “Especially when I got my face too close, and it nipped me right in the face.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Wasn’t his fault. He was just hungry. See this little scar?”

  He leaned closer, which made her flush and turn away. What was she thinking?

  “Oh, and the time—” her dad started, oblivious. He didn’t finish, though, as his pole dipped. “Hold on, hold on!”

  They sprang into action, Stephanie grabbing the net as her dad slowly reeled in his prize. She throttled down the outboard motor even more, and it sputtered and died.

  In all the excitement, no one noticed Michael’s pole until it was too late.