Butternut Summer

by Mary McNear

  “Hi, Will,” Christy said, opening her car door. She unfolded her long, baby-oil-soft legs and followed them out of the car.

  “Hi, Christy,” Will said, and if his voice sounded a little strange to him, it was probably because he was surprised by her appearance. She was wearing a short, tight dress that barely skimmed the top of her thighs and high-heeled sandals. Her blond hair was piled up on her head, and in place of the pink lip gloss she usually wore was bright red lipstick. She looked . . . she looked like a woman with one thing on her mind, and one thing only. And for once, it wasn’t the same thing that Will had on his mind.

  “Is anyone else around here?” Christy asked, glancing over her shoulder as she came into the service bay.

  “Just Jason,” Will said with a shrug.

  “Good,” Christy said. “I told Mac I had to run some errands.” She smiled mischievously.

  In that dress? Will thought.

  “You know, Will,” she said, turning to face him once they were inside, “it would have been easier if you could have waited for Mac to leave on Wednesday.”

  “Yeah, I know. But it couldn’t wait that long.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, looking pleased, and Will realized he needed to choose his words more carefully.

  “Well, I’m glad you couldn’t wait to see me this time,” she said. “Because the last time you saw me, you got mad at me for interrupting a game of pool.”

  “I wasn’t mad at you for that—”

  “I know, Will,” she said, stepping closer. Close enough so that he could smell her sweet, fruity perfume. “But you were mad. And you know what?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t blame you. I know it’s been hard for you—all of this. Especially the part about not being able to see each other whenever we want to. It’s been hard for me too.” She pouted, then reached out and put one perfectly manicured hand on his arm.

  He looked down at her hand, feeling a strange sense of detachment and wondering if this conversation could be going any worse than it already was. Or if he could have expressed himself any more inadequately than he already had. How was it, exactly, that he’d planned to tell her what he needed to tell her? He couldn’t remember now, but he needed to say something else—fast.

  “Christy, I’m seeing someone.”

  She blinked.

  “What?”

  He said it again.

  She took her hand off his arm. Her pout straightened itself out into a thin line, a thin red lipsticked line.

  “How long?” she asked, quietly.

  “Not long. Not long at all,” he said, which, God knows, was the truth.

  “So it’s not serious, then?” she asked.

  He hesitated. “No. It’s not.” So why did he feel, in some strange way, that he was being disloyal to Daisy by discussing it with Christy?

  “Who is she?” Christy asked now, and the thin red line that was her mouth got thinner.

  “That’s not important.”

  “It is to me.”

  “Well, that’s too bad,” he said, feeling the first spark of irritation. “Because I don’t owe you that information.”

  A flush spread across her face then, overlaying her too-tan cheeks. “Oh, right, Will. You just spend the night with me, what, like a hundred times? And now you don’t owe me anything?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t owe you anything, Christy. I just said I didn’t owe you that.”

  “What do you owe me, Will?”

  “Well, I think I owe it to you to be honest with you,” he said, although as he said this, it occurred to Will that it was a little late for that in a relationship that had been built on dishonesty.

  She thought about this for a long time, and he saw a muscle working in her jaw, like she was concentrating. Hard. He heard another rumble of thunder, closer this time.

  Then Christy did the strangest thing. She put her hand back on his arm and gave him a light, caressing touch. “Okay, that’s fair,” she said, brightening a little. “I get it. I do. I mean, obviously, there are certain . . . limitations built into our seeing each other. And I don’t blame you for feeling frustrated with them, and for wanting, sometimes, to see someone openly. But, Will, I don’t understand why we can’t keep seeing each other, even if you do have a girlfriend now. I mean, I won’t tell if you won’t tell.” She gave him a little smile and leaned closer to him.

  “What? No,” Will said, shaking his head.

  “Why not?” she said, her fingers running suggestively up his arm. “That way, we’d both have a secret.”

  “Christy, no,” he said. “That wouldn’t . . . that wouldn’t be fair to her.”

  “Fair to her,” she repeated softly, like she was testing out the words. Christy took her hand off Will’s arm. She was angry now, very angry, as angry as he’d expected her to be. And for some reason, it came as a relief to him.

  “And what about Mac, Will? Was it fair to him all those times we were together without him knowing it?”

  “No, Christy. It wasn’t.”

  He saw her whole body tense with anger, and, for a second, he thought she was going to haul off and hit him. But she didn’t. Instead, she leaned closer, so close that she was almost touching him, and she said, very quietly, “Go to hell, Will.” And then she turned on her high heels and walked rapidly out of the garage.

  Will didn’t go back to work after she’d driven away. He didn’t do anything except listen to the sounds of the approaching storm. It was getting closer now, bringing with it gusts of wind that shook the trees out front and smelled like cool, damp earth. It was raining somewhere, not far away, and soon it would be raining here, too.

  “Jesus, Will, she looked pissed,” Jason said, coming into the service bay and shaking Will out of his torpor. “I think she peeled out of here going sixty. What’d you say to her?”

  “Not now, Jason,” Will said warningly, pulling on his work gloves.

  “Hey, I was just trying—”

  “Well, don’t,” Will snapped. “I mean it. Get out of here; go pretend to work somewhere else, all right?”

  “All right,” Jason said, backing away. He was surprised, but so was Will. He and Jason never fought, and they only rarely departed from the easy banter they’d spent years perfecting.

  Jason left, and Will tried to work, but he couldn’t. He wandered over to the service bay door to watch the first big raindrops splash down onto the parched concrete. The wind blew, stronger this time, blowing rain onto him. But he didn’t move. He was thinking about what he’d said to Christy, and to Jason. He felt like a jerk, on both counts, but he felt like a jerk on his count, too. Because he realized now that for a long time, he’d been drifting, drifting in a relationship that wasn’t really a relationship, and drifting in a job that wasn’t really a job.

  Jack was on the roof of the cabin when he saw the storm approaching from across the lake. He’d known it was coming. He’d heard the faraway thunder, annoying but persistent, like a mosquito buzzing in his ear, and he’d seen the distant lightning, benign and random, like a child flicking the lights on and off. But he’d told himself he still had plenty of time to patch the hole in the roof. He’d already pulled up the old shingles, now all he needed to do was put down the piece of wood he’d cut that morning and nail the new shingles over it.

  But as he looked out over the bay, to where the gray line of the rain was beginning to move over the grayer line of the water, he decided he only had five minutes left to do it in. No, three, he amended, as a lightning bolt traced a jagged line down to the opposite shore. He’d have to finish it later. He grabbed the plastic tarp from behind him, opened it up, and shook it out, trying to spread it back over the hole. But the wind was picking up now, and it kept catching the corners of the tarp and yanking them up again. Finally, though, he managed to wrestle it down, and anchor its four corners with cinder blocks. That would hold, for now, he thought, if the wind didn’t blow too hard, and the rain d
idn’t last too long.

  Trying not to let his nerves get to him, Jack carefully worked his way down the steep slope of the roof. He wasn’t afraid of heights, but he’d fallen off a roof once when he was about eleven or twelve, and the memory had stayed with him. He’d been helping his uncle, who, along with his aunt, had raised him, and he’d lost his footing and slipped right off the edge of their farmhouse roof. He’d been lucky, he supposed; he’d only broken an arm and a couple of ribs, but what he remembered about that day now was sitting in the backseat of his uncle’s pickup on the way to the hospital, trying hard not to cry, and even harder not to throw up, and having his uncle turn to him and say, “You just cost me a whole morning’s worth of work.”

  Jack reached the ladder, climbed down it, and ducked under the roof’s overhang about ten seconds before a deafening crack of lightning split a nearby tree. That was followed, almost immediately, by a boom of thunder and a whoosh of rain as the sky above the cabin opened up. He knew he should go inside and see whether or not the roof was leaking, but he stayed where he was, leaning against the side of the cabin and watching the storm. He loved storms—he always had—especially their fury and unpredictability. And besides, on a day like today, a good thunderstorm was likely to be the only entertainment he was going to get.

  Not that he minded; he didn’t. His life had taken on an almost monastic quality since he’d moved out here, and he found that it suited him—sleep and work, work and sleep. The sleep part, of course, wasn’t going that well; more often than not, he was awake at night. But the work part had paid off. He’d already built a completely new front porch, rebuilt the back deck, and replaced the rotted-out planks on Wayland’s old dock.

  He’d done all this by starting early in the morning, before it got too hot, and continuing well into the evening, when it got too dark to see and the mosquitoes were threatening to eat him alive. He was exhausted by then. But he liked the tiredness, even if it didn’t let him sleep. He liked the new calluses on his hands, too, and the new ache in his shoulders, and the new sunburn on his neck. It felt right somehow, all of it. It felt like penance. And Jack knew he had plenty to atone for.

  It wasn’t all work, of course. He went into town, too, to the hardware store, or the lumber mill, or the grocery store, and, two or three nights a week, to the Redeemer Lutheran Church, or more specifically, to the basement of the Redeemer Lutheran Church. And there was the time he spent with Daisy. Jack had let her call the shots; he didn’t want her to feel like she had to see him. But she usually drove out a couple of times a week, in the late afternoon, and they’d sit on the front porch, on the smooth, new, yellow pine steps, and talk. Yesterday, she’d had the day off from work, and she’d brought over an impromptu picnic lunch. Jack had felt a little guilty, knowing that the iced tea and the ham sandwiches they were eating were too good to have come from anywhere but Pearl’s; he hoped Daisy hadn’t had to sneak them out of there like some kind of contraband. But mostly, he’d just been happy to be with her.

  But Daisy wasn’t the problem right now, he thought, almost oblivious to the storm raging all around him. The problem was Caroline. They’d had no contact at all since that morning at Pearl’s, and to be this close to her—his cabin was less than ten miles from Butternut—without ever actually seeing her was harder than he’d have thought possible. But he’d been true to his word. He hadn’t gone into Pearl’s, and he hadn’t tried either to frequent the places he thought she might go in Butternut. If he came back into her life, he knew it would have to be on her terms. In the meantime, he channeled all his energy into the cabin, savored every second he spent with his daughter, and prayed—yes, prayed—for some realignment of the universe to bring him and Caroline back together again. Because when he was honest with himself, which he hoped was most of the time, he knew that a realignment of the universe was about what it was going to take for the two of them to have a future with each other.

  The storm was moving on, he realized then. The intervals between lightning and thunder were lengthening, and the drumming of the rain on the eaves above him was slowing. Soon it would be over, and the air would be sweet with the smell of pine needles, and the evening breeze would be cooler and fresher than it had been all of this hot, muggy week. And Jack? Well, he couldn’t go back up on the roof; it would be too slippery now. He thought, instead, that he might spend the rest of the day ripping up the cabin’s floors. It would be hard, knuckle-scraping, backbreaking work. And he couldn’t wait to get started on it.

  CHAPTER 7

  Lemonade?” Caroline’s friend Allie asked, holding out a tray with three tall glasses on it.

  “Thank you,” Caroline said, reaching up and taking one. “I can’t tell you how nice it is to have someone wait on me for a change.” She leaned back on her deck chair and took a sip.

  Caroline was sitting with her two best friends, Allie and Jax, on the deck of Allie’s cabin, overlooking Butternut Lake. It was a lovely, twilit evening. Yesterday’s storm had left the pale, lavender sky so crystalline and the air so sweet that it was as if it had washed away all the hazy humidity of the last week. And Caroline, rearranging herself on her deck chair for the umpteenth time, was trying to relax and enjoy the lovely evening. Trying, and failing. It was a shame, really, when you considered how much she looked forward to these girls’ nights out, or, in their case, girls’ nights in.

  They had started three years ago, when Allie and her son, Wyatt, had moved to Butternut, and they’d continued ever since, always with the same simple set of rules: the three of them met once a month, alternating houses; there were no men or children allowed; dinner was low maintenance, usually takeout. And the nights went as late as they needed to go, which, by their standards anyway, were usually pretty late.

  But on this particular night, Caroline couldn’t relax. She couldn’t ignore the nagging sensation that all was not right in her little world, which, of course, it wasn’t. And it wouldn’t be right, either, not until she could figure out how to repay the bank loan, and not until Jack Keegan gave up whatever game he was playing and left Butternut for good.

  She sighed now, sipped her lemonade, and tried to think about something else, something besides Pearl’s, and something besides Jack. So she thought instead about her friend Allie, who had put down the empty tray and was lowering herself onto a deck chair beside Caroline. There was something about the way she did this—some almost imperceptible carefulness to her movements—that made Caroline wonder if she would have guessed Allie was pregnant even if she hadn’t already known she was. Yes, she decided, she would have known. If not because of the way she was moving, then because of the way she looked. Allie had already been lovely, with her honey brown hair cascading down her shoulders, and her golden complexion bringing out the green in her hazel eyes, but lately, she seemed to have been infused with a special light. Maybe the whole pregnancy glow thing wasn’t just a cliché after all, Caroline thought.

  “How many weeks are you now?” she asked Allie.

  “Almost twelve,” Allie said, lounging back against the deck chair’s yellow-and-white-striped cushion. “We’re almost ready to tell people outside of our immediate family.” Caroline flushed with pleasure to think that Allie considered her and Jax immediate family.

  “How are you for maternity clothes?” Jax asked from her deck chair, her blue eyes serious in her pert, freckled face. Jax, who had four children, was something of an expert on maternity wear.

  “Funny you should ask that,” Allie said, tucking a strand of honey-colored hair behind her ear. “Because this morning, for the first time, I couldn’t button my favorite pair of blue jeans. I told Walker I’ve reached the point of no return,” she mused. “And that it’d be pretty grim from here on out.”

  “Don’t say that,” Jax protested. “I bet you looked beautiful when you were pregnant with Wyatt. And I love the dress you’re wearing now. Did you save that from last time?”

  “This?” Allie said, gesturing at her slightly
blousy cotton sundress. “No, this isn’t maternity; it’s just very forgiving. I didn’t save any maternity clothes from my pregnancy with Wyatt. I mean, I did, initially, but later, I gave them away.”

  A silence fell over the three of them. By “later” Allie meant when her first husband, Gregg, had died in Afghanistan. That had been five years earlier, when Wyatt was three. She’d thought at the time she would never marry again, let alone have children again. That was before she’d moved to Butternut and met Walker Ford, her current husband, and now, Wyatt’s adoptive father.

  “I’m sorry,” Jax murmured. “Of course you didn’t save them.”

  “Jax, I hope you know by now you don’t need to apologize,” Allie chided her gently.

  “I know, but still,” Jax said softly. Then, brightening, she said, “Allie, why don’t you come raid my closet? I have enough maternity clothes to take you through three pregnancies.”

  “Jax, please tell me you haven’t saved all those clothes,” Allie said, her eyes widening.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it means you’re at least entertaining the possibility of having a fifth child.”

  “Well, it’s not in the works,” Jax said, with a mischievous smile. “But, you know, ‘never say never.’”

  “Oh, honestly, Jax,” Allie said, her affection mingling with exasperation.

  “No, seriously,” Jax said, “I wouldn’t dream of having another baby until I finish my degree.” Two years earlier, Jax, who had never been to college, had started making the twice weekly drive to the University Extension in Ely, where she was working toward a degree in accounting.

  “How are your classes going?” Caroline asked, finally jumping into the conversation.

  “They’re going really well,” she said, drawing her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms around them. “But I feel so old sometimes. In one class, Cost Accounting, there’s no one else over the age of twenty in the room, never mind thirty.”

  “Oh, please, Jax,” Allie said, rolling her eyes. “You still look barely old enough to drive.” It was true. Even at thirty-three, Jax could still have passed for a teenager. Partly, it was her size; she was barely five feet tall, and even after four pregnancies, she was still only approaching the one-hundred-pound mark. But partly, too, it was her sense of fun and liveliness. Even with all her responsibilities—her daughters, the hardware store she ran with her husband, Jeremy, and now, her college classes—Jax never took herself, or her life, too seriously.