The Wonder of You

by Susan May Warren

  And brutally unfair how easily the memories could pin him to the past, turn him again into a teenager cowering in the shadows, clad in his dripping swim trunks, the slick of the ocean turning to ice upon his skin.

  Movement under the lights of the municipal parking lot caught his attention, and he got up.

  Was that Casper outside talking with another man? He recognized the frame, the dark hair, and then he turned, and Roark saw his face. Angry. And he had the man in question by the lapels of his trench coat.

  Roark was wondering if he should play some sort of ally when, abruptly, Casper let the man go, stalked off to his nearby truck, idling in the lot.

  Casper drove away a little too fast, though Roark understood it, his own need to shake free of the conversation with Ethan vibrating through him.

  He got up, the floor cool under his feet, went to the kitchen for a glass of water, then returned to the window to sort his thoughts.

  He spied more movement in the lot. The same man who’d fought with Casper hung his arm around a woman, walking with her—or was she helping him?—into a truck. She laughed; they kissed.

  Roark turned away, climbed back into bed, and stared at the ceiling.

  He finally conceded to his insomnia when the dawn began to pale the darkness, and headed for his closet, pulling on running clothes and his trainers.

  The fragrance of budding lilacs and new daffodils hung in the misty gray morning, the sun barely lipping the horizon as he jogged downstairs, out into the cool morning air.

  He settled into a brisk pace, clearing his head as he ran, reaching for a moment of quiet.

  Or possibly just the hope of outrunning his memories.

  He passed the fish house, saw early risers heading out of the harbor in their whalers, then continued up the hill, past the senior center and out to the open road that overlooked the silver lake.

  It reminded him of the Seine on that crisp New Year’s morning, the Eiffel Tower downy with new snow, his heart alight in his chest with the fragile, sweet memory of the kiss he’d shared with Amelia.

  Too quick, surprising, but oh, how he’d waited for it. Longed for it.

  He ran faster, his feet slapping the pavement.

  He hadn’t deserved her kiss then. Now he planned on being a man who didn’t weave his life from lies.

  Somehow.

  He stopped, leaning over, breathing hard, sweat tunneling down his back. Closed his eyes.

  And he was right there again, hearing his mother’s scream as he kicked up sand on his walk in from a clandestine swim.

  No. He shook the memory away and settled into a light jog back toward town. The sun now hovered over the horizon, a simmering fire that flooded the sky and turned the clouds a deep rose gold, the boulders along the lakeshore shiny black, some caked with a doily of frost.

  I want honesty every step of the way, no games. If you lie to me, even once, we’re over.

  As he picked up his pace, the smell of freshly fried donuts hit the breeze, luring him along the shoreline all the way to World’s Best Donuts. He stopped on the porch of the tiny red building, leaning against a balustrade to stretch.

  Inside, he saw movement, then heard, “Hey, aren’t you that guy who helped at the river?”

  He looked up. Seb Brewster, medium white chocolate mocha. Seb had come outside to flip over the Closed sign.

  “Hello, Mr. Mayor.”

  “Today, I’m the donut man.” A smile slid up his face. “I have to appreciate your dedication to early morning donuts.”

  “A bloke’s gotta have his pastries,” Roark said as he followed Seb inside, where his petite wife, wearing a red apron, her dark hair under a net, slid a tray of glistening raised glazed donuts onto the display shelf. The smell could leave a man weak.

  And he’d left all his money back at the flat.

  He must have worn the dilemma on his face because Seb grabbed a donut and handed it to Roark. “On the house. Welcome to God’s country.” Seb smiled.

  Roark matched it, despite the funny churning the words provoked in his chest. “I’ll stop by later and pay you.”

  “Oh yeah. We’ll be waiting for that eighty cents. Look out for the knee-breakers.” Seb laughed. “I meant it. On the house. Free.”

  “Right. Thank you.” He grabbed a napkin.

  “Can I interest you in a cup of hot joe? If you’re going to live in America, you have to acquire a taste for coffee.” Seb reached for a mug with the World’s Best label on it and poured him a cup, black.

  “I like coffee. I just prefer it with sugar. And cream. And tasting of tea.”

  Seb handed him the cup. “You’ll find the candy on the tables in the next room.” He gestured to the tiny room that served as a gathering place for the locals.

  Roark slid onto one of the curved Formica seats.

  God’s country.

  He took a bite of the donut, savoring the sugar that melted, still warm, in his mouth.

  He must have emitted a little moan of joy because Seb ducked his head around the corner. “I know, right?”

  “This is good,” Roark said. “Reminds me of these donuts I’d buy near my uncle’s house in Brussels. Like a funnel cake, only with pretzel dough and glaze.”

  Seb flipped a towel over his shoulder. Slid onto the bench across from Roark without asking. “Brussels, huh?”

  “I think they were German, actually.” He licked his fingers as he finished it off. Chased it with a sip of black coffee, then made a face and reached for the creamer. “In Russia, we used to add sweetened condensed milk to our coffee. Saves time.”

  “Russia too? Where haven’t you been?”

  Roark stirred in the creamer. “Fiji?”

  Seb laughed. “Okay, I’ll bite. Where have you been?”

  “Let’s see. Born in London, lived in far east Russia until I was twelve, moved to Brussels, schooled in London, did my gap year in Uganda, then attended university in Scotland, worked in Paris, traveled . . . well, all of Europe, over to Australia, with a stopover first in Iceland, swam with the sharks in New Zealand, then a hop to Tanzania to climb a mountain.”

  “Seriously.”

  Roark lifted a shoulder, for the first time really seeing it. “I guess I never found a place I wanted to call home.”

  Seb’s wife came over, set a cup in front of her husband, and kissed him on the cheek. “Five minutes and the next batch will be ready to fry.”

  She left him after glancing at Roark with a smile.

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Not long enough. We dated—sorta—in high school, and I just knew she was the one. Took me a while to accept it, though. I never really wanted to return to Deep Haven—always thought my best life was over the next horizon. Finally I realized that I hoped it was here. So I came back. It wasn’t until then that I saw I was running from the failure of my own expectations.”

  Roark considered Seb as he took another sip of coffee. “What do you mean?”

  Seb lifted a shoulder. “I left here thinking I was going to make a name for myself in football. Blew out my knee, and my career died. I was so angry at God because I thought I’d lost my one chance to make it big, to prove myself to Deep Haven. And to myself. I didn’t realize that I could make it big, prove myself every day here, if I had the courage to stop running. I had to figure out that until I forgave myself for letting myself down, I’d never find my way home.”

  The donut began to sit like glue in Roark’s gut. “Some things don’t deserve to be forgiven.” He wasn’t sure he’d said it aloud, but maybe he had because Seb frowned.

  Then said, “That’s a lie, dude. There’s nothing that God won’t forgive.”

  “I’m not talking about God,” Roark said quietly. He got up. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  He turned to go, then stopped and looked at Seb. “And as for God, let’s not forget that He’s not only love and forgiveness, but also justice and wrath.” He tempered his words with a smile but didn’t
stick around for Seb’s retort.

  Because although he’d realized that God had definitely found him, for the first time he considered that, if he wasn’t careful, someone was really going to get hurt.

  The fragrance of pancakes could wake a dead man, lure him to the Christiansen family table, where John, the head of the household and Grace’s somewhat-terrifying father, sat reading the morning paper.

  Max shot a glance at Grace, who was frying the cakes in a cast-iron pan on the stove, but she offered no encouragement to act on his statement last night, spoken as the moon cascaded into his room, Grace nestled in his arms.

  If you aren’t going to tell your father that we’re married, I will.

  He’d said it softly, his lips against her hair, so maybe she hadn’t heard him, just on the edge of slumber. But the resolve grew and cemented in his heart when his newlywed bride roused from the sofa bed and crept out to scuttle back to the childhood bedroom she shared with Amelia and Yulia.

  Now he tunneled a hand through his shaggy hair—he’d need to shave it soon—and headed over to the counter, sliding onto a stool next to Yulia, who mopped up syrup with a thick blueberry-laden piece of buttermilk pancake. She was still dressed in a nightgown that Ingrid had dug up from her stores of old clothes. Her hair was a nest of tangles around her head, and her bare feet hooked to the sides of the stool. He imagined that, once upon a time, his Grace had been this little girl, snarls and nightgown and pancakes, and it turned his heart soft for the woman he’d married.

  Especially since she wouldn’t have a little girl of her own. Ever.

  “That looks good,” he said to Yulia, and she smiled at him, a gap where her front teeth should be. He leaned over and opened his mouth, and to his great surprise, she plunked the dripping bite in.

  Max made a roaring sound and gobbled it up, to Yulia’s giggles.

  “Here you go, honey,” Grace said, turning from the stove with a fresh plate of pancakes. She set the plate in front of him.

  If possible, his wife had become more beautiful every morning since the day he’d married her. Today she’d pushed her blonde hair back with a headband, wore a teal thermal shirt and yoga pants. He let his gaze skim over her body, remembering the sweetness of their clandestine union last night. Shoot, but he felt like a teenager, sneaking around like they were misbehaving.

  Enough. He grabbed the syrup and doctored his breakfast, then turned to John to suggest a conversation.

  But John had already closed the paper and risen, bringing his plate to the sink. “Good morning, Max. Feel like helping me with a project? I need to rebuild the fire pit before this weekend.”

  John pressed a quick kiss to Grace’s forehead before pouring himself another cup of coffee.

  “Sure,” Max said.

  Grace glanced at him, her eyes wide. He shrugged, a covert no-time-like-the-present message.

  “I’m headed out to get the backhoe running. Get some work clothes on. Unless—” John glanced at Grace, back at Max—“you want to stay in the kitchen and cook something.”

  “Dad,” Grace said, “I promise you’d rather have Max cooking something and me working in the yard. He can cook circles around me.”

  John grinned, pulling on a gimme cap. “I doubt that. But yes, I know Max can cook. I just thought he’d like to get outside. It’s a glorious day.”

  “Thanks, John. Yeah, I’ll be right out.” Max stirred a bite of his pancake into the syrup.

  When the door closed behind John, Grace rounded on Max, cutting her voice low. “Max, I know what you’re thinking, but . . . I don’t know if I’m ready. And—”

  The floor creaked upstairs, and she shot a look to the landing. Max followed her gaze, but no one stood there. Just her fears probably.

  What was it about telling her parents that had Grace so locked up inside? He cut his own voice low. “Grace, we can’t keep sneaking around.”

  She had turned off the stove, leaving the rest of the batter, and now came around to sit on the opposite side of Yulia. She ran her hands over the little girl’s hair. “Should I brush your hair, sweetie?”

  Yulia just looked at her, those brown eyes wide.

  “I don’t think she understands you,” Max said, considering adding a bit about how he didn’t seem to speak Grace’s language either. Instead he voiced a thought that had occurred to him more than once. “Do you regret marrying me?”

  The words tumbled out with too much of his heart hanging in them, and he wanted to yank them back.

  Or . . . not. Because he understood, and if she said yes, he’d be the first to suggest . . . what? An annulment? That might not be quite possible. But maybe a quick divorce.

  The word burned inside him. He should have seen this coming, should have—

  “No!”

  He raised his gaze, found Grace’s urgent and angry.

  “Of course not. I’m just savoring the quiet before the storm.” Her hand ran down Yulia’s hair again, smoothing over the snarls. “She’s made quite a mess of her hair. It’s going to hurt to brush it out.”

  Max frowned. “Yeah, I suppose. That’s the problem with long hair.”

  “But it’s so beautiful. It’s worth the pain. Trust me, I spent years flinching as my mother untangled my hair. I finally convinced her to let me cut it, only to regret it instantly. It took years to grow out, but I didn’t complain about the snarls ever again.”

  She leaned down and caught Yulia’s eyes. “Vakoosna?”

  He recognized the Russian word, something that Vasilley, one of his teammates, said occasionally. It meant delicious or good—although Vasilley usually said it as a hot rink bunny happened by.

  Probably Grace didn’t realize that.

  Yulia beamed and said, “Da.”

  Grace glanced at Max. “I downloaded a dictionary of basic Russian off the net, thought I’d learn a few words to make her feel more comfortable.” She turned to Yulia. “Yeshow?”

  More. He got that from the way Yulia nodded, then held out her plate. Grace forked her another pancake and covered it in syrup and powdered sugar. “She’s so brave. Hardly makes a peep in her sleep. Smiles like she hasn’t just lost everything. I wish we could talk to her.”

  It wasn’t so much her words as her tone that slid between Max’s ribs to jab at his heart. And when Grace backed it up by putting her hand on Yulia’s shoulder in an affectionate gesture of compassion, he wanted to weep. Because he could have predicted her next soft words, spoken through a tender expression as she slid the pancake plate in front of Yulia again.

  “It must be so terrible to be the only one left.”

  There it was. The awful truth of their marriage.

  He’d doomed his wife to a life of grief.

  He pushed his plate away. “Grace, maybe . . . maybe we need to think a little harder about all this. Maybe there’s a reason you don’t want to tell your parents about us.”

  She frowned, started shaking her head, but he held up his hand, cutting off her words. “I love you. You know that. But love isn’t enough to carry you through our future.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  He could see the fire kindling in her eyes, kept his voice low. “No, it’s not. You haven’t lived through it, seen the damage, the grief. And I should have really thought about that before we said, ‘I do’ in Cancún. But I’m thinking now maybe it’s not too late.”

  A little of the blood drained from her face. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying . . . maybe we should get a . . . divorce.”

  The words seared through him, but he refused to wince. Refused to release the wail building to a crescendo inside him.

  Grace exhaled in a shaky stream of pain. “I think you need to go help my father.” She flashed a lopsided smile at Yulia when the little girl glanced at her and got up. “I’m going to find a hairbrush and straighten out this mess.”

  Max slid off the stool, reached for her arm, but she yanked it away, not looking at him. “Leave, Max.
Because I’m not sure how to keep from saying what I want to say to you right now, and I don’t want my parents to overhear and discover that I’ve married a man who is so afraid of living, he’d rather destroy the very thing that makes him feel alive.”

  A DAY LIKE THIS, with sparrows chirruping from the poplar trees and a fresh, lilac-scented wind over the lake, could clear a girl’s thoughts, make her lean into hope.

  Cajole her into believing that heartbreak didn’t lurk just beyond the horizon.

  It helped, too, that the photo shoots of the Sawdust Sweeties had eaten up Amelia’s free time over the past three days. Sure, she’d joined in cleaning the Evergreen Resort cabins, airing linens, and planting flower boxes with pansies for the upcoming Mother’s Day weekend and fishing opener, but she’d also managed to escape with her camera, taking portrait shots of the pageant girls all over town.

  At the harbor dock, with the lake an inviting indigo as a background. On the abandoned railroad tracks west of town. On the hood of a peeling Ford pickup in the woods near Pincushion Trail, and on a stack of hay bales at the Crosbys’ farm, just out of town. There, she’d posed one of the girls in a yellow-hubbed tractor wheel, and another with an umbrella in the middle of a field of tall grasses. Then they headed up to the school and took shots in the rickety wooden bleachers on the visitors’ side of the football field, and others at the baseball diamond backstop. Finally Amelia took pictures of all six girls eating ice cream cones from Licks and Stuff and gathered around the beautiful street lanterns that bordered Main Street.

  She had managed a look inside Java Cup, just to check, and yes, Roark still worked the coffee counter, garbed in an apron, those blue eyes charming the coffee addicts. Or if they weren’t addicts yet, they would be, especially when he started taking orders with that too-devastating accent of his.

  Even that thought had sent Amelia scuttling back to the resort in a sort of shame.

  Two men. A girl who didn’t know what she wanted and still nursing failure shouldn’t be allowed that much male attention.

  Who knew what crazy decisions she might make? Like settle down with Seth? Run away with Roark?