by Zoe York
He looped around the perimeter of the parking lot to get to his truck, a list of all the filthy things he might want to do with his daughter’s midwife if they’d met any other way, at any other time, spiralling through his mind.
Chapter Five
On Kerry’s first morning as a Pine Harbour resident, she woke up to sunshine streaming through the oversized windows. She went downstairs to the clinic, where Jake Foster had transformed the space into Jenna’s vision—on time and under budget. Kerry’s sole contribution to the decor was the fancy espresso machine, and she was grateful for it this morning. The night before at Mac’s, she’d discovered that Jenna hadn’t been kidding about Pine Harbour being a latte-free zone.
She’d made an outsider rookie mistake by falling for the cute poster above the booth closest to the door asking, How Do You Like Your Coffee? It proclaimed four options. One for black, two and three for gradients of cream, and four for a delicious frothy mug topped with cinnamon.
“Not on the menu,” she’d been told with a hearty laugh.
She could roll with that. Making frothy coffee at home would save her money in the long run, anyway. And nothing would get her down this weekend. It was the start of an exciting new adventure. First she would play barista, then she had big plans to explore her new town.
She filled her travel mug with perfectly brewed espresso and velvety steamed milk before bundling up for the cold weather and heading out on foot.
Pine Harbour was mostly neat blocks of residential neighbourhoods, a mix of post-war cottages, more modern bungalows, and on most corners, an oversized Victorian house like the ones Kerry always dreamed of living in one day when she was a little girl in an apartment in the city.
Every lot was large, the houses set back from the street, with space in between for driveways that often had more than one vehicle in it. A truck, a car, and on the second block, she saw two snowmobiles, too.
When she reached the outskirts of town, she looped back to the main drag and turned toward the lake. A hill separated the bulk of the town from the harbour. Main Street ended in a T-junction at the road that ringed the harbour. There was a sign advertising a marina, shuttered for the winter. Closer to her, across from the marina on the town side of the intersection, sat an abandoned gas station, nestled back into the pine trees climbing down the hill. To her right, across the road from the gas station was an empty lot covered in weeds. It lacked the sweet picturesque nature of the rest of the town, but the view of the harbor was stunning—and Kerry had it all to herself at this particular moment.
Wind whipped across the lake, churning the dark grey water into terrifying white caps, which bounced into the substantial ice and snow crests on the shore.
Kerry fell in love immediately. She crossed the road and turned right, following the sidewalk all the way around the harbour until the road curved away from the water again. There she found an entrance to a hiking path which was closed for the season.
Apparently the hiking trails went all the way from town to the provincial park. She took a picture with her phone so she wouldn’t forget to look it up online, and then turned back toward the water. Pine Harbour was full of unexpected treats and delightful secrets.
As she got closer to the T-junction, and the hill at the bottom of Main Street, she realized the empty lot was no longer empty—there was a car parked on a diagonal in the middle of it, the driver’s door hanging wide open and the front hood propped up. A big ol’ beater of a car, something straight out of a seventies buddy cop TV show. On the other side of it was a pickup truck, and it looked like three guys were trying to boost the car off the truck’s battery.
“How’s that? Still nothing?” called out one of the men working on it.
“Nothing. Might need to get it towed back to your place. I told you not to take it for a drive.”
“It was running just fine,” the first guy said.
The third guy popped out from beneath the hood, and Kerry recognized her mover, Adam. And because there was nobody else around, her movement caught his eye. He waved, then gestured to the others. With a sinking feeling, she realized the tallest one, with his back to her, must be Becca’s father.
The one Adam had tried to introduce her to last night, because her new town was just that small. Picturesque, perfect in many ways, but there was Owen Kincaid—glowering at her two days in a row.
Owen pivoted around when Adam gestured across the road, but immediately turned back on his heel.
“What are you doing?” he muttered to his brother.
“Being friendly.”
He made a face, then glanced over his shoulder. Becca’s midwife—Kerry, she has a name—had stopped. She was coming over. Great.
“Leave her alone,” he muttered at his brother, then picked up the pliers. “Let’s get this shit-box working again.”
Adam ignored him and slid out of the way, so when Kerry stopped in front of them, Owen was closest to her.
His brother wasn’t subtle about it, either.
She gave him a polite smile. “Hi.”
All the perfectly normal greetings Owen could usually produce died in his throat. “Yeah,” he barked out.
Kerry’s eyebrows jolted upwards.
He sighed and turned back to the car.
“Car trouble?” Kerry tried again, this time to Adam.
“More like a trouble car,” he said easily, then gestured to their other brother. “This is Will. It’s his disaster on wheels.”
Owen ignored the rest of the introductions. He tried to ignore the conversation about the car, too, although it was hard not to notice the way she leaned in, the way she used her smile to get more information as she asked a few more questions.
It was hard to ignore her, bundled up in her bright white parka like she’d just walked off the pages of the Canada Goose catalogue. Owen didn’t breathe properly until she said goodbye and headed up the hill towards town.
When his brothers returned their attention to the car, Adam was frowning. “What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing.” Owen squinted at the connection between the battery and the carburetor. He could feel Adam’s suspicious gaze lingering as he tightened the wires. “Try that again.”
It didn’t work.
Will swore under his breath.
Adam crossed his arms over his chest. “This thing is a piece of junk.”
Will frowned. “It’s a piece of history.”
“It’s history, that’s for sure. At least until we talk to Josh.” His second youngest brother was a mechanic who worked on the racing circuit in the States. Josh could fix anything, but they had reached their limit. Owen straightened up and flexed his freezing fingers. “Time to call for a tow.”
They didn’t bother to wait for the truck from the garage to show up. It would be a few hours, because it was low priority. So his brothers piled into his truck and they went back to his place, where they had been working on Will’s car when he’d gotten ambitious and decided to take it “around the block”. Owen had the bigger garage, so the piece of junk—or piece of history, depending on how you looked at it—lived at his place.
He didn’t know what had gotten into Will today, but he’d taken it further afield than just around the block, and as he’d gone down the hill toward the harbour, the shit-box had died on him. He’d coasted into the empty lot and called for help.
Back at Owen’s place, his brothers followed him into the house. Becca’s door was shut, so he told his brothers she was napping and led them into the kitchen, the furthest point away from her space.
“Is everything okay?” Of course Will picked up on the fact that Becca napping wasn’t normal. Owen shouldn’t have said anything.
“Yeah. She had a late night last night. She’s pulling more hours at the country club, that’s all.”
“You gotta be careful she’s not burning herself out with work.” That was the school principal speaking. The professional who had a different perspective on kids
than Owen did as a dad. “Is she stressing about next year? She hasn’t picked a college yet, has she?”
Owen wasn’t getting into that. He pulled open the fridge. “Beer? Coffee?”
Adam went for the former. Will asked for the latter.
Owen had both—but not at the same time. He downed his beer quickly. It didn’t do much for his cold hands, but it felt good going down, and distracted him from the slight tremor deep inside. Big feelings, he’d have called them when Becca was little and still learning to control her emotions. It’s okay to have big feelings. It’s not okay to hit when we’re mad.
He didn’t want to hit anything.
He didn’t know what he wanted. Lies. He wanted a white parka wrapped around a dark-haired beauty. He wanted freedom. He was trying so damn hard not to give in to the resentment of having to put off the next stage of his life, again.
Over the years, all of his brothers had been good confidants. When he broke up with Rachel, Seth—now a float plane pilot up north—and Will had listened to his shit with maturity way beyond their teen years, and promised him he would still be a good dad if he needed to leave.
He’d tried to live up to that belief, and turned back to them over and over again. As he re-negotiated custody when he came back, as Becca slid into her teen years like she was being chased by wild dogs.
But he couldn’t talk to them about the pregnancy. Not yet. So he downed a beer, then he poured himself a cup of coffee. Mr. Responsibility.
His brothers had gone back to arguing about the car.
“Speaking of old and wonderful things—”
“That’s a perversion of what I just said and you know it,” Adam said blandly.
Will kept going anyway. “I’m starting something really cool at the school.”
“You just said cool at the school. Ergo, it won’t be, because it has a Dad Joke-level of rhyming built right into the premise. Can’t support.”
Will rolled his eyes at their youngest brother. “Fine, I won’t tell you about it, but you’ll be sad you couldn’t get in on the ground floor and be a founding member of the Vintage Media Lab.”
Owen had been watching their conversation silently, but now he leaned in. “The what now?”
Adam was hooked, too. “Excuse me, I always want to be the founding member of everything.”
Will grinned broadly. “Then it’s time to dig out any old electronic equipment you have, because I want it all. I’ll make a ‘Donated by Principal Kincaid’s Whiny Little Brother’ plaque and everything.”
Adam ignored that. “Do you want VHS tapes?”
That made Will pause, suspiciously. “Depends what’s on them.”
“Fuck off. PG shit only. I know this is for kids.”
“Yeah. Our librarian will take a look at them. But if you’ve taped over them with anything…”
“All of my sex tapes are digital only, never fear.”
“We didn’t need to know that,” Owen said. “Moving on. What else do you want? I’ve got a stack of CDs I can go through.”
“Excellent. Did anyone keep Dad’s old eight-tracks?”
Owen squinted, trying to remember. That year had been a chaotic blur. “Maybe Seth has them.”
Adam’s eyes lit up. “He could bring them down, and then take us back up north with him. We could do a brothers’ trip into the wilderness.”
“Into the frozen tundra?”
“It’s hardly the tundra. And I’ve always wanted to go on one of those ice fishing expeditions he runs.”
“You haven’t done one of those because you work part time for a moving company and you don’t have the disposable income for a float plane to come and fetch you for weekends away.”
“Family discount.”
“That’s not the Kincaid way,” Owen barked.
Will shot him a warning look. Part what crawled up your ass? And part give the kid a break.
Adam shrugged. “I know. I don’t actually want Seth to pay for anything.”
Owen started ticking off the points on his fingers. “He pays for the fuel. His time is money. He—”
“He’s also our brother, and did you ever consider that he might want to spend time with Adam?” Will said. “Seth’s a grown-up, too, and he can say yes or no. Besides, pretty soon, we’re only going to have each other.”
Another reference to Becca moving away for school. Adam had said the same thing last night. Little did they know. But they didn’t, they couldn’t, and Owen knew that, but he barked anyway. ”Jesus, that’s maudlin. You planning ahead to when we all need to move back in together to make ends meet on our fixed income retirement?”
Will shrugged. “Would that be so bad?”
Owen rolled his head around, cracking his neck. “I’m planning a good long run of living on my own before we need to come to that point. Talk to me in forty years about being old.”
“Maybe if we talk now, about other shit, you won’t spend the next forty years alone and miserable.”
“Who said I’m miserable?”
Will was saved from answering that by the arrival of his niece. Becca wandered into the kitchen. “What are you guys yelling about?”
“Uncle Will’s car broke down.”
“The clunker?” She said it with all the genuine love a niece could have for an uncle, but it still made Adam howl, which made her giggle.
And that made Will smile, even though his precious hunk of junk was being insulted. Becca poured herself a glass of water, then leaned against the counter and settled in to roast the older generation. “Look at you all in your matching boots and big, burly plaid shirts. How are you all single?”
“That was the other topic of conversation. How we’re all going to live together when we’re old,” said Will.
“I can totally see that. You’d be the baddest old guys on the block. My daddy and his ferocious brothers,” Becca teased.
Adam hooked his arm around her neck and she squeaked as he gave her a noogie. “Who are you calling ferocious?”
“Definitely not you,” she grunted as she kicked him in the shin. “Picking on a—” Owen could hear her pause, like she was maybe going to say pregnant woman. But she didn’t, and his pulse slowed down. “Picking on a little girl. Only bullies do that.”
“You started it.” Adam threw his hands in the air. “But I’ll call uncle.”
It was a game they’d played since she was little and Adam had been the doting teen halfway between her and her dad in age. He’d pick a mock fight, she’d “win”, and he’d have to beg for mercy. She used to think it was the funniest thing in the world to make her uncle cry uncle.
It still made Owen laugh.
He didn’t miss the look Will shot him across the room, as if saying, see? She’s fine. But his brother didn’t know the rest of it.
“What’s wrong with plaid shirts and boots?” Will asked.
She gave him an innocent shrug. “Nothing.”
“She was just starting shit,” Owen rumbled.
Becca glanced sideways at Will. “Why do you ask? Is there anyone you’re trying to impress with your sartorial choices?”
His brother stared straight ahead. “No.”
“There is.” She bounced up and down. “Uncle Will has a crush on someone!”
The hair on the back of Owen’s neck stood up, like the word crush might shine a spotlight on him. Not that he had a crush on anyone. She has a name. He had grown-up, complicated fantasies, and that was completely different.
“Leave him alone,” he said gruffly. “Go back to picking on Adam.”
She twirled toward her other uncle, but then pulled her phone from her back pocket.
“Saved by the silent text message,” Adam teased. “Who’s that? Hayden? Haven’t heard much about your hockey player lately.”
Owen thought about throwing his full mug of coffee right across the room, anything to save Becca from having to answer that question, but his daughter just shrugged and smiled, seemingly unpert
urbed by the reference to the shithead who wasn’t returning her messages. Unless there was an update Owen was unaware of. Concern roared to life inside him, shoving away his selfish thoughts about his own non-problems.
That night he asked Rachel about it when they had a moment alone before dinner.
“He’s in the middle of the hockey season,” she said. “I’m not excusing him for that, but Becca might be. I’ll talk to her about him.”
“Tell her—” Owen cut himself off, then groaned. He was about to do to Rachel what Becca did to him, try to stage manage a conversation. “All right. Thanks.”
Rachel gave him a serious look. “You need to prepare yourself for her giving him a lot of slack here. She’s his biggest fan.”
He was painfully aware of that fact. “Yeah.”
Chapter Six
The last weeks of winter sped by in a blur of meeting new neighbours, learning more about Pine Harbour, and spreading the word about their new clinic to get more clients.
All in all, Kerry was loving her new town. But every so often, she'd bump into Owen Kincaid, who she’d renamed from Mr. Alpha, which was way too generic, to Mr. Broody. The intense brooding presence he’d projected during Becca’s first appointment continued. He was cold and awkward each time she ran into him, and Becca’s mother Rachel came to her next two appointments. For the first one they drove to Walkerton but then Becca surprised her and announced she was fine with the Pine Harbour clinic. Kerry was happy to see her young client get more comfortable with being pregnant in her own community. That would ease the transition to being a new mom.
At each appointment, they didn’t just talk about the physiological changes of pregnancy, but the emotional impact as well. Becca had supportive parents, but her ex-boyfriend wasn’t in the picture.
“He’s a hockey player and it’s the end of their season,” Becca said. “Maybe once he’s through playoffs…But if he doesn’t want to be involved, that’s his choice.”
