Up at Butternut Lake

by Mary McNear

  “Who was he married to?” Allie asked.

  “She wasn’t from up here,” Jax said, with a shrug. “And she wasn’t very well liked, either. I mean, she was beautiful. But she was cold, too. They got married in the fall, and that winter, less than six months later, she left. That was it. Nobody really knows what happened. Nobody except Walker, that is. And he’s not talking.”

  I could hazard a guess as to what went wrong, Allie thought, remembering how off-putting she’d found Walker that morning. But she didn’t say anything about that to Jax.

  And Jax, sipping her iced tea, moved on to a different topic. “Allie,” she asked, “are you still interested in art?”

  “Art?” Allie echoed, uncertainly.

  Jax nodded. “I remember you used to bring those enormous art books up here with you. And study them, too. Just for fun. You told me once you wanted to major in art history in college and get a job in the art world afterward.”

  “Oh, that,” Allie said, slightly embarrassed. “Yes, I used to fantasize about moving to New York after college and working in a gallery in SoHo. But that didn’t exactly pan out the way I’d planned.”

  “Why not?” Jax asked.

  “Well, because reality intruded, I guess,” Allie said. “I did minor in art history in college, and I might have majored in it, too, except by then I knew that Gregg and his brother, Travis, were going to take over their family’s landscaping service, and I thought a degree in business might be more useful.” She’d been right. Together, the three of them had built what had been a small lawn-mowing business into a full-service landscaping company.

  “Did you like having a landscaping business?”

  Allie hesitated. “I liked it,” she said. “I don’t know if it was my dream. But it was exciting building something from the ground up.” Besides, she’d still snuck away to museums and galleries in Minneapolis whenever she could find the time.

  “Do you still own part of the business?” Jax asked.

  “No,” Allie said, “I sold out our half to Gregg’s brother. And I sold our house, too. So hopefully, I’ve bought myself some time to figure out what I want to do next. I mean, the money won’t last forever. I’ll have to earn a living again at some point.”

  “Well, then you’ll be just like the rest of us,” Jax said, breezily.

  “I guess I will,” Allie agreed. It was funny how Jax could be so direct without ever being unkind, she thought. Probably because she didn’t have an unkind bone in her body.

  Jax stood up from the table. “I should get going,” she said, a little reluctantly. “I need to be starting dinner.”

  “Of course,” Allie said, feeling like she’d already taken up too much of Jax’s time. “Wyatt and I will walk you out to your truck.” Wyatt had just wandered back into the kitchen and had opened the refrigerator. Now he was staring longingly at the strawberries inside. They’d have some for dessert, Allie decided. Over the vanilla ice cream she’d bought at the grocery store that day.

  As they started to leave the cabin, though, Jax turned back. She was looking at the buck’s head with the blanket draped over it.

  “I know someone who can help you with that,” she said. “And do any other work you need done around here, too.” She doubled back to the kitchen, where Allie had left a notepad and pencil on the counter, and scribbled down a name and phone number. She tore the sheet off and handed it to Allie.

  “His name’s Johnny Miller,” she said. “He’s a carpenter and a handyman. He’s pretty old, but his work is first-rate, and I think you’ll find his prices are reasonable.”

  “Thank you,” Allie said, studying the paper. “We can use all the help we can get.”

  She and Wyatt walked Jax out to her pickup and stood in the driveway until she’d driven out of sight. Then they went back inside. Wyatt seemed a little forlorn, and Allie didn’t blame him. The cabin had seemed somehow brighter, and lighter, with Jax inside of it.

  “Come on, kid, you can help me with dinner,” Allie said, feigning cheerfulness. But even to herself, her voice sounded a little hollow.

  CHAPTER 6

  Caroline knew she’d been sitting at her desk for too long when she felt the familiar knot of pain between her shoulder blades. She sat up straight, clasped her hands behind her head, and arched her back, trying to stretch her cramped muscles. Who would have thought that owning a coffee shop would require so much paperwork? she thought, closing the folder in front of her and filing it under “payroll taxes” in the file cabinet beside the desk.

  There was a light tap at the office door, and Frankie, the fry cook, opened it.

  “Miss Caroline, I’m going to leave now,” he said, his massive frame filling the entire doorway.

  Caroline glanced at the clock on her desk. “Frankie, it’s five o’clock,” she said in surprise. “Why are you still here?”

  He shrugged his gigantic shoulders. “I fixed the air-conditioning,” he said. “It’s been on the blink again. Then I cleaned the deep fryers. By then the floor needed another mopping, so I did that, too.”

  “Frankie, your shift ended at three o’clock,” Caroline protested.

  “I don’t mind working late.”

  “I know you don’t,” she said, motioning him into the room. “But that’s not what concerns me.”

  Frankie came into her office. It wasn’t easy for him. The room was low ceilinged, and he had to be careful not to let the top of his head scrape against the fluorescent lighting. But he couldn’t very well sit down, either. The only other chair in the room, besides the one Caroline was sitting in, was a rickety-looking folding chair. And both of them knew it wouldn’t support his weight.

  “What concerns me, Frankie,” Caroline said, “is that you’re working late because you feel you owe it to me to work late.”

  “That’s not it,” he said. “I just like working here.”

  “And I like that you like working here,” Caroline assured him. “But, Frankie, you only get paid to work until three o’clock. I wish I could pay you to work beyond then. But I can’t, Frankie. I can’t afford it. So you should stop work at three o’clock, and go home and do . . . well, whatever it is you like to do.” Here, her imagination failed her. Frankie had been working for her for three years, but she still had no idea how he spent his free time.

  “But what I like to do is work here,” he said, bringing the conversation full circle. “And,” he added, “while I don’t feel like I owe it to you, exactly, maybe I should feel that way. You took a chance on me, Miss Caroline, when no one else would. It’s not easy for an ex-con to find work.”

  “I know that, Frankie,” she said, gently. “But it was the right decision. You have more than justified my faith in you. And it hasn’t been a one-way street, either. You may have gotten a job, but I got the best fry cook I’ve ever had. Not to mention an air-conditioning repairman to boot.”

  Frankie smiled one of his rare smiles. “Well, I guess I’ll be going now, Miss Caroline.”

  “That’s fine. And Frankie?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do to persuade you to stop calling me Miss Caroline?” she asked, hopefully.

  Frankie thought about it, then shook his head. “No, ma’am,” he said. “It just wouldn’t seem respectful to call you anything else.”

  “Well, I thought it was worth a try.” Caroline sighed as Frankie turned to leave the office. This was no simple matter. He had to practically pivot in place to turn his gigantic body in such a small space, and then he had to more or less launch himself through the narrow doorway.

  When he’d left, closing the door behind him, Caroline stood up from her desk, stretched again, and left the office, too.

  Then she walked down the narrow hallway behind the coffee shop and up the flight of stairs to her apartment above it. She paused at the front door and took longer than necessary taking her keys out of her apron pocket and fitting one of them into the lock. She dreaded
this moment every single day. Had dreaded it, in fact, ever since her daughter, Daisy, had moved to Minneapolis two weeks earlier.

  She turned the key in the lock, pushed open the door, and went straight to the kitchen, where she turned on the radio. It was still tuned to the classic rock station that she and Daisy liked, and she turned the volume all the way up, trying to drown out the silence. But she was only partially successful. The music was loud. There was no doubt about that. But music had been only one of the many sounds ricocheting off the walls of their apartment when Daisy had lived there.

  Now, as Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” played, Caroline left the kitchen and walked over to the bathroom. She undressed and stepped into the shower, trying not to think about the silence that lay below the lyrics to the song. She shampooed her hair and lathered her body, washing away the odor of bacon grease that clung to her like a second skin by the end of every workday. Then she turned off the shower and stepped out of it, dripping on the bathmat. She toweled herself off, put on a bathrobe, and brushed out her wet hair, twisting it into a knot on top of her head.

  Then, and only then, did she let herself do what she really wanted to do, which was to flop down on her double bed and bury her face in the pillows. But she didn’t cry. She wasn’t big on crying. Maybe because if life had taught her anything, it had taught her that crying was a waste of time. She’d had many opportunities to learn this firsthand. She’d lost both her parents, for instance, when she was still a young woman. She’d lost her husband, too, not to death but to serial infidelity on his part. She’d also raised a daughter alone and run a business by herself. If she’d let herself get into the habit of crying, she reasoned, it wouldn’t have left much time for her to do anything else.

  But Daisy’s leaving . . . That had hit her hard. The phone rang then, interrupting her thoughts. She reached over to the bedside table and answered it, hoping it would be Daisy. It was.

  “Hi, Mom,” Daisy said, sounding so much like herself that Caroline felt a catch in her throat.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Caroline said, with studied casualness. “How’ve you been?”

  “Other than worried about you?” Daisy asked.

  “You’re worried about me?” Caroline said. “I think it’s supposed to be the other way around, sweetie.”

  “But I don’t give you anything to worry about, do I?” Daisy asked. And it was true. She’d been born responsible, as far as Caroline could tell.

  “You don’t usually give me anything to worry about,” Caroline qualified. “But you’ve never lived on your own before. Even you might have a learning curve.”

  “Speaking of learning, guess what Giovanni said today?” Daisy asked. Giovanni was the Italian man who owned the coffee bar that Daisy was working at for the summer.

  “What?”

  “He said I made a perfect cappuccino.”

  “Well, of course you did,” Caroline said, loyally. Cappuccino, though, was out of her depth. She served two kinds of coffee at Pearl’s: regular and decaf.

  “Trust me, it’s not easy to make one,” Daisy said.

  “Well, it should be for you,” Caroline said. “You’ve got coffee in your veins, honey.”

  “That’s true,” Daisy laughed, and then she chatted with Caroline about her apartment, her roommates, and a boy who came into the coffee bar to flirt but hadn’t asked for her phone number yet. Caroline listened and made what she thought were all the appropriate remarks. But Daisy wasn’t fooled by her performance.

  “Mom, what’s wrong?” she asked, when there was a lull in the conversation.

  “Nothing,” Caroline said, a little too quickly.

  “Mom,” Daisy said, sighing, “I know you so well.” And she did. But if Caroline told her how much she missed her, it would only make Daisy feel guilty. So instead she told her about Frankie’s long hours, and about Allie Beckett, and her son Wyatt’s, terrible loss.

  “Mom, I know Frankie works too hard. And I’m sorry about that woman and her son. But I want to talk about you. Do you remember that conversation we had before I left?”

  “Which one?” Caroline asked, being deliberately vague.

  “The one where we talked about how you’re always worrying about everyone else, and never worrying about yourself?”

  “Well, I’m not worried about myself because I don’t have anything to worry about,” Caroline said. “I mean, beyond the usual things everyone worries about.”

  “Okay, forget I used the word ‘worry’ then. I don’t mean that, exactly. I mean, when is it going to be your turn to think about you?”

  Caroline frowned. “Wasn’t that an episode of Dr. Phil?”

  “I don’t know, maybe,” Daisy said, exasperated. “But again, Mom, you’re getting away from the point.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is that it’s your turn now. Your turn to concentrate on your own life. You took care of Grandpa and Grandma. You took care of me. Now you need to take care of yourself.”

  “I do take care of myself,” Caroline objected.

  “Mom, I’m not talking about taking vitamins, okay? I’m talking about doing things for yourself. Taking a class. Or taking a trip. Or joining a book club. Something like that.”

  “But I don’t want to join a book club,” Caroline said, a little irritably.

  “Mom, you like to read,” Daisy pointed out.

  “I do like to read,” Caroline conceded. “But I don’t want to be told what to read.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Daisy scolded. “You don’t even have to read the books if you don’t want to. Just think of it as an opportunity to socialize.”

  Caroline was silent. It was her opinion that she did plenty of socializing at the coffee shop as it was, but she didn’t want to hurt Daisy’s feelings.

  “Well, I give up for tonight,” Daisy said, with a sigh. “But I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Bye, sweetie,” Caroline said, and she hung up the phone slowly. Then she lay very still, listening. Was it her imagination, or was it even quieter now in the apartment than it had been before Daisy called?

  CHAPTER 7

  I wish you’d let me buy you a dishwasher,” Jeremy said to Jax, coming up behind her at the kitchen sink that night. He slid his arms around her waist—or what had, until recently, been her waist—and brushed his lips along the edge of her right ear.

  “I like doing dishes,” Jax said, her body responding instantaneously to Jeremy’s touch. Even after twelve years of marriage, she marveled, he still had that effect on her.

  “All right, I won’t buy you a dishwasher,” he said, tightening his arms around her. “But at least let me and the girls help you wash them.”

  “Maybe,” Jax mused. But she knew she wouldn’t. The truth was, she liked washing the dishes by herself. It was relaxing to her to be up to her elbows in warm, soapy water. And it allowed her time to think without being interrupted, something that was a precious commodity for a mother of three.

  Usually, she used the time to think about her daughters, and the things they’d said or done that day. She didn’t believe in chronicling every moment of their lives, the way so many of her friends did with their own children. She didn’t take videos, or keep scrapbooks, or write in baby journals. Instead, as she washed the dishes every night, while Jeremy said good night to the girls, she tried to commit their lives to memory. The big moments and the little moments. But mostly, the little moments.

  Tonight, though, her usually pleasurable dishwashing was tinged with sadness. It seemed wrong, somehow, to be happy when Allie and Wyatt were so sad. Her visit with them, only a few hours old, was still fresh in her mind. She’d told Jeremy about it before dinner.

  Now, cradling her in his arms at the sink, Jeremy asked, “Are you thinking about your friend and her son?”

  Jax nodded, somberly.

  “She was really special to you, wasn’t she?” Jeremy asked, gently.

  She nodded again. “That summer we were sixteen, we spent so
much time together. I loved being with her family at their cabin. They were so, so . . .” She struggled for the right word. “So normal,” she said, finally.

  “Jax, everyone’s family was normal compared to yours.”

  “That’s true,” she mused.

  “Honey, you know there’s nothing you can do about what happened to them, don’t you?” Jeremy asked, after a long silence.

  Jax nodded. But then, thinking of something, she brightened a little. “I can’t do anything about what happened to them, but I might be able to make things a little easier for them now. I mean, Wyatt doesn’t know any children here. And we have three of them. One of whom is practically the same age.”

  “Are you suggesting we adopt him?” Jeremy asked, nuzzling her neck. “Because his mother may not want to give him up that easily.”

  “I’m suggesting we include him in our lives,” Jax said, ignoring his teasing as she emptied the soapy water out of the sink and started to rinse the dishes. Jeremy reluctantly released her, picked up a dish towel, and started drying the dishes as she handed them to him. “I mean, I told the girls I’d take them blueberry picking next week,” Jax continued. “I’m going to ask Wyatt to come, too. And then, in July, we’re having our annual barbecue. Half the town will be there. We can have it be a ‘welcome to Butternut’ evening for the two of them.”

  “All right,” Jeremy said, drying another dish. “I’ll tell our social secretary to put them on the guest list.”

  “Very funny,” Jax said, but she stopped what she was doing and kissed him anyway. And when they were done with the dishes, Jeremy took her into his arms again and kissed her, with a sense of urgency that was unusual even for him. It’s like he’s knows there’s something wrong, Jax thought, uncomfortably. Something I’m not telling him about.

  And, as if on cue, he stopped kissing her long enough to murmur, “Before we go upstairs, there’s something we need to discuss.”