“You think I’d go out with someone to get Dad’s approval?”
“Sometimes I think you’d do almost anything for it.”
Winona forced a laugh, but it didn’t fly. Sometimes she worried about that, too. How far would she go for her father’s approval? “This whole conversation is pointless because I’m fat. Luke won’t want to go out with me. He never did.”
Aurora gave her a sad, familiar look. “You know what amazes me about you, Win?”
“My keen intellect?”
“How wrong you are when you look in the mirror.”
“Says the size six former cheerleader.” Winona pushed to her feet. “Come over at three tomorrow, okay?”
“I’ll be there.”
“And Aurora? Don’t tell anyone about this. Especially Vivi Ann. That stupid crush was a long time ago. I wouldn’t want anyone to think it matters now. Hell, he’s probably married with three kids.”
“Your secrets have always been safe with me, Win.”
The next afternoon, Winona stared at herself in the full-length mirror in her bedroom. These were not good fashion times for a woman of her size: shoulder pads, high-waisted slim-legged jeans, and cowboy boots were hardly helpful to her cause.
Aurora had done her very best, and Winona appreciated the effort, but some endeavors were simply destined to fail, and trying to slim her down was one of them. She kicked off her boots and actually felt some satisfaction when they thunked against the wall. Instead, she slipped on a pair of well-worn flats.
“He’s going to think I haven’t stopped eating since he left.”
All the way to her car, and through town, she reminded herself that this was a business meeting with a man she used to know but didn’t anymore. She absolutely should not tangle the past up with the present. Her crush on him had been a childhood thing, not substantial enough to last.
She drove along the waterfront, past the touristy shops that lined the Canal, and turned left at the end of town. Here was the Water’s Edge property line. She couldn’t help noticing again how ragged the fences were looking. It reminded her again of yesterday’s meeting with her father. Out at the highway, she drove south for a quarter of a mile and then turned onto Luke’s land. Although the Grey and Connelly parcels were adjoining, Luke’s land had been vacant for years; the grass, even in winter, was tall and clumpy. Alder trees had sprouted up like weeds in the past few years, giving the acreage a spindly, unkempt look. The old house, an L-shaped rambler built in the early seventies, was sorely in need of paint and the shrubbery around it had grown wild. Junipers tangled with rhododendrons, which peeked through azaleas.
She parked alongside his big dually truck and killed the engine. “He’ll just want to give you the papers and say how nice it is to see you after all this time. Then he’ll introduce you to his wife and kids.” She took a deep breath and got out of the car.
The grass between her and the front door was soggy and brown. She left footprints that immediately filled with muddy water.
At the front door, she ran a hand through the hair Aurora had so meticulously curled and sprayed. Then she knocked at the door.
He answered almost instantly—and that was how quickly she knew she was in trouble.
He’d been tall in high school, but lanky and a little gawky. Those days were gone. He was tall and broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted—the kind of guy who went to the gym. His hair was still thick and mink brown, a perfect complement to his green eyes. “Win,” he said.
And there it was: the smile that had always kicked the hell out of her heart.
“L-Luke,” she stammered. “I came by for those documents . . .”
He pulled her into his arms and gave her the kind of whole-body hug she’d nearly forgotten existed.
“You think I’m going to let my best friend from high school just pick up some papers and go?”
He took her by the hand and led her through the house. It was like stepping into a time machine, being in the room that had changed so little in the past years. The same burnt-orange sculpted carpet was beneath her feet, the same brown and gold and orange plaid sofa hugged the wall, the same amber glass lamps with beaded switches sat on the end tables.
“The only thing missing is a black light,” Luke said, grinning as he opened the avocado-colored fridge and pulled out a pair of beers. “It smells musty in here. I think the renters were smokers. Do you mind if we sit outside?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.” She followed him out to the big cement patio that ran the length of the house. Off to the left, a barbecue was slowly rusting apart and dozens of dead geraniums sagged in flower boxes along the railing, but none of that could diminish the view. Like Water’s Edge, this parcel of land looked out across the Canal—flat and silver on this late afternoon—and right at the saw-blade, snowcapped Olympic Mountain Range on the opposite shore. A thicket of trees provided total privacy between their properties. They sat in the rocking love seat that had once been Winona’s favorite place in the whole world.
“I guess we should start with the basics,” he said, opening his beer and leaning back to take a sip. “After we moved to Montana, I ended up going to WSU to become a vet. Big animals. Where did you go to school?”
“UW. Undergrad and law school.”
“I thought you were going to run off and see the world. I was surprised to hear that you’d come back.”
“They needed me at home. What about you? Did you ever make it to Australia?”
“Nope. Too many school loans.”
“I know what you mean.” She laughed, but when it faded, the day felt too quiet. “You ever get married?” she asked softly.
“No. You?”
“No.”
“Ever fall in love?”
She couldn’t help turning to him. “No. You?”
He shook his head. “Never met the right girl, I guess.”
Winona leaned back, looked out over the view. “Your mom must hate that you’ve moved away.”
“Nah. Caroline has four kids and no husband. That keeps Mom busy most of the time. And she knew I was getting restless.”
“Restless?”
“Sometimes you have to go looking for your life.” He took a sip of beer. “How are your sisters?”
“Good. Aurora met a guy named Richard a few years ago—a doctor—they have four-year-old twins. Ricky and Janie. I think they’re all doing well, but it’s hard to tell with Aurora. She wants everyone to be happy, so she doesn’t talk much about what bothers her. And Vivi Ann’s still the same. Spontaneous. Headstrong. She dives in first and thinks later.”
“Compared to you, no one thinks enough.”
Winona couldn’t help laughing at that. “What can I say? I’m always the smartest person in the room.”
They fell into a companionable silence, staring out over the untended field, drinking their beers, then, quietly, Luke said, “I think I saw Vivi Ann pulling out of the gas station yesterday.”
Winona heard something in his voice, a little catch that put her on guard. “She was on her way to Texas. She makes a lot of money at weekend rodeos. And meets a lot of handsome cowboys.”
“I’m not surprised. She’s beautiful,” he said.
Winona had heard that sentence from men all her life; they usually followed it up with: Do you think she’d go out with me? She felt herself stiffening, drawing back whatever feelers of hope she’d allowed foolishly to unfurl. “Stand in line,” she muttered under her breath.
What had she been thinking, anyway? He was too damn good-looking for Winona; it was dangerous to let herself expect anything at all. Especially now that he’d seen the beautiful Vivi Ann.
“It’s good to be back,” he said, bumping her shoulder-to-shoulder the way they used to when they were kids, when they were best friends, and suddenly her own warnings fell out of reach, clattered away.
“Yeah,” she said, not daring to look at him. “It’s good to have you home.”
Ch
All the next day, Winona told herself he wouldn’t call, but still she looked longingly at the phone, jumping a little every time it rang.
One day.
That was all it had been since she’d sat with her once-best friend in a porch swing at night. One day. Of course he wouldn’t call yet. Or at all. She was as big as a house, after all. Why would a man as good-looking as Luke Connelly want to go out with her?
“Focus, Winona,” she said, looking over the paperwork he’d given her last night. She’d made plenty of notes—things she needed to discuss with him, precautions he should take to protect his interests. In addition to her legal opinion, she had some thoughts as to the viability of becoming Woody Moorman’s partner; the man was well known to be a heavy drinker and he’d lost a lot of customers over the years.
When she’d made all her notes, she closed the Connelly file and opened the Smithson interrogatories. For the next few hours, she concentrated on work, until finally, at five o’clock, she shut down the office and went upstairs.
Usually she loved the evening news, but tonight she was restless, caught up in waiting for the phone to ring, and she couldn’t stand it, so she threw on a pair of jeans, a white turtle-neck sweater, and a thigh-length black vest.
A quick check of the weather told her it was one of those rare January evenings when the sky was plum-colored and cloudless. Bundling up, she decided to walk over to Water’s Edge. The cold air might clear her head, and God knew she could use the exercise. It was less than a mile from one door to the other.
Pleased with her decision (it was so much better than watching TV alone), she headed down to Main Street.
Oyster Shores was set up like so many western Washington waterfront communities, in a T-bone pattern. The end of town was a four-block stretch of road that ran along the Canal’s gray shoreline. That was where the touristy shops were located—the kayak rental place, the ice-cream shop, the fish bar, and several souvenir-type stores. In the four-block by seven-block radius between the Canal and the highway lay the bulk of Winona’s childhood. She’d spent much of her youth in the library, reading Nancy Drew and Laura Ingalls Wilder; at Grey Park, she’d learned to play soccer and softball; on warm summer days, she and her sisters had often walked to King’s Market for Pop Rocks and Tabs.
Even though she’d seen it all a million times, she couldn’t help pausing at Shore Drive, drinking in the spectacular view. In other parts of the world, places more settled and less wild, a canal was a thin, lethargic strip of slow-moving water, a thing to be navigated at leisure in flat-bottomed boats. Not here; this was a wide and wild blue inlet of Puget Sound that ran inland for fifty miles, the only true fjord in the lower forty-eight states.
She turned left and walked out of town. As she passed the Waves Restaurant, the streetlamps came on, sent pretty golden patches panning out on the gray sidewalks and black pavement. In this cold season, when boats were scarce and tourists even scarcer, the street was still, maybe even a little forlorn. A mermaid wind sock hung limply from the flagpole in front of the Canal House Bed and Breakfast. In June the summer people would swarm these streets, taking over parking spots and cutting in line at the beach park boat launch, but for now it was quiet. The town belonged to the thirteen hundred people who called it home.
The ranch’s entrance was indicated by a rough-hewn wooden sign, carved by Winona’s great-grandfather in 1881. Passing it, she turned onto the long, rolling gravel driveway. On either side of her were green pastures lined in ragged four-rail fencing. Gullies of brown water bracketed the road. Dying black maple leaves lay stuck to the gravel, and potholes were everywhere, oozing gray rainwater. The place needed repairs.
Why wouldn’t her father see that she could help him? She was going over the humiliating meeting with him—again—when she noticed Luke’s truck.
She stopped and looked around.
There they were, on the porch, Luke and her father, talking together like old friends. She followed the wet, muddy driveway past the barn and down toward them.
As she approached, Luke laughed at something Dad had said.
Winona saw her dad smile and it actually brought her to a stop. It was like seeing the ocean turn suddenly red, or the moon go green. “Hey, guys,” she said, stepping up onto the porch’s bottom step. The old wood buckled beneath her weight, reminding her simultaneously that she was fat and the steps needed repair.
Luke reached out and put an arm around her, pulling her into a side embrace, out of which she stumbled a moment later feeling dazed. “If it weren’t for Winona here,” he said to Dad, “I never would have become a vet. She did most of my English homework in high school.”
“Yeah, she’s a brainy one, all right. Her latest big idea was for me to sell the land my family homesteaded.”
Winona couldn’t believe he’d bring that up in front of Luke. “I was just trying to protect your future.”
Dad ignored her and looked at Luke. “When Abelard left Wales he had fourteen dollars in his pocket.”
“Come on, Dad. No one wants to hear the old stories—”
“And Elijah lost his leg in the war and then came back to a dead wife and a dying son and land too wet to grow anything in, but he still managed to hang on to every acre through the Depression. He left his son every damned acre he’d inherited.”
“Those were different times, Dad. We know that. We don’t care if you leave us the same amount of land you inherited.”
“How did I know you’d say that?”
“I didn’t mean that. I just meant we want you to be comfortable. That’s what matters.”
“You can’t understand loving this land like Vivi and I do. It ain’t in you.”
How easily he culled her from the herd and set her aside.
“The place looks great, Henry,” Luke said into the awkward silence that followed. “Just like I remember. And I want to thank you for maintaining the fence. I’d like to pay you for that, by the way. Somehow Mom and I forgot to keep up on it.”
Dad nodded. “I wouldn’t take a dime from you, son. That’s what neighbors do.”
Son.
It was a tiny slice of pain, the way her father included Luke so easily, like sticking your hand in soapy water and finding a sharp knife blade. You didn’t even realize you’d been cut until you drew back and saw the bead of blood on your skin.
“It’s Vivi Ann who done most of it, anyway; her and whatever hand she’s found to help her around here. This land is her soul.” Dad looked at Winona when he said that.
“I hear she’s a fine barrel racer.”
“Best in the state,” Dad said.
“I’m hardly surprised. I don’t think I ever saw her when she wasn’t on that mare of Donna’s, riding at the speed of sound.”
“Yeah,” Dad said. “She and Clem are quite a team.”
Winona held her tongue while Dad went on and on about Vivi Ann. What a great horsewoman she was, how everyone came to her for help, how men lined up to date her but she hadn’t found the right fella yet.
Finally, Winona couldn’t take it anymore. She actually interrupted the conversation to say, “I better go. I just came by to—”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Luke said, taking her arm. “I want to treat you and Henry to dinner in town.”
“I can’t,” Henry said. “I’m meetin’ some of the boys down at the Eagles. But thanks.”
Luke turned. “Winona?”
Don’t think anything of it. He asked your dad, too. The advice rang clear in her head, but when she looked up at him, it left in a rush, and the worst emotion swept in to replace it: hope.
“Sure.”
“Where should we go?” he asked.
“The Waves is good. On the corner of First and Shore Drive.”
“Let’s go.” Luke reached out and shook Dad’s hand. “Thanks again for everything, Henry. And don’t forget my offer: if you ever need to use my pasture, just say so.”
Henry nodded and went back into the house, closing the door solidly behind him.
“Asshole,” Winona muttered.
Luke grinned down at her. “You used to call him a jerk.”
“I’ve improved my vocabulary. I could think of a few more choice words, if you’d like.” Smiling, she walked across the front yard and got into the passenger side of his big truck. The minute the engine turned over, the stereo came on loudly. “Stairway to Heaven” was playing.
She looked at him and knew they were remembering the same thing: the two of them at the Sadie Hawkins Dance, moving together—or trying to—beneath a silvery disco ball.
“We sure showed those popular kids how to dance, didn’t we?” he said.
She felt a smile start. Somehow, in the flurry of his return, she’d forgotten how they’d come together in that first year after her mother’s death—a fat, quiet fifteen-year-old girl who lived in her own head and a gawky boy with a bad complexion who’d lost his father in a boating accident nearly a decade before. It gets easier. That was the first thing he said to her that she really noticed. Before that, he’d been just the son of her mom’s best friend.
After that, for two years, almost everything he’d said had been right. Then he moved away, without ever even kissing her, and he hadn’t called. They’d written back and forth for a while, but then that had been lost, too.
He pulled up in front of the Waves Restaurant and parked along the curb. A spotlight near the front door illuminated a yard full of ceramic gnomes that looked cute in the summer sun and oddly macabre on this winter evening. She led the way into the Victorian-home-turned-restaurant. On this evening, they were the only people under sixty in the whole restaurant, and the hostess led them to a corner table overlooking the Canal. Below, a discolored bulkhead held the water back, revealing a stretch of gray sand that was covered with broken white oyster shells and strands of bronze kelp. A tangle of harbor seals lay on the restaurant’s wooden dock.
In moments, they had their drinks—him a beer, and her a margarita.
“To old friends,” he said.
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