She only had to make sure she didn’t lose sight of her twin objectives here in Cape Sanctuary—spending time with her sister’s family and helping her client—and she would be fine.
2
Nate
Nate glowered at the closed door of the trailer. Who the hell was this woman and what was her business with his mother?
More important, why hadn’t Eleanor told him she was expecting company?
He didn’t doubt Jess Clayton when she said Eleanor was expecting her. How could he? As she had pointed out, she knew details about Eleanor’s schedule she could only have received from his mother herself.
That didn’t mean the woman wasn’t some kind of scam artist. His mother was a vulnerable widow still dealing with the loss of her husband from cancer six months earlier. Someone with nefarious motives might consider her ripe for the plucking.
He would only find out by getting in touch with his mother.
Nate had intended to return to his job site, the new town library and city hall, but maybe he would change plans and work from home for the afternoon so he could keep an eye on his mother’s guest.
A half hour later, he was set up in his office, which happened to have a clear view of the Airstream, when Eleanor finally called him back.
“I’m sorry, darling. I turned off my phone when the movie started. That’s what they tell you to do, isn’t it? Turn off your devices so you don’t disturb others in the theater?”
His mother’s innocent tone didn’t fool Nate for an instant. “Right.”
“Is something wrong? It appears I’ve missed four phone calls from you. We told you we would be at the matinee this afternoon after the orthodontist, didn’t we?”
He had known, he had just forgotten. Until Jess Clayton reminded him. “You told me.”
“Then I assume something terrible must have happened if you needed to reach me so urgently.”
“Not terrible. Only somewhat concerning. You have a visitor. A strange woman set up a trailer on the property, on the flat piece of land next to the beach path.”
“She made good time. Oh, that should offer a lovely view of the ocean for Jess. I was thinking that might be the very place. I couldn’t have picked a better spot for her myself. I’m so glad.”
Nate tried not to grind his teeth. That wasn’t the point, was it?
“Obviously you were expecting her.”
“Yes. And I’m embarrassed I’m such a poor hostess that I couldn’t be there when she arrived. Jess originally hadn’t planned to reach Cape Sanctuary until this evening. After she told me she changed her plans and was leaving earlier, I had to explain about the orthodontist and the movie I had already promised Sophie. Thank you for helping Jess settle in, son.”
He waited for his mother to offer some other explanation but she didn’t elaborate. Eleanor had been acting strangely of late. Really, since his father died six months earlier after a long and painful battle with colon cancer.
“Will she be visiting for long?”
“As long as it takes,” Eleanor said cryptically.
“Which tells me exactly nothing about who she is and what she’s doing here.”
She laughed, though it sounded forced and perhaps even a bit guilty. “I should have told you she was coming. I’m sorry. I suppose I wasn’t sure how you would feel about it. And to be honest, I couldn’t figure out how to tell you.”
“Try.”
Eleanor sighed. “Do you remember when I told you my childhood friend Lucinda in Seattle hired a lovely woman to help her clean out her house before she put it on the market and moved into that retirement village in Florida?”
“Yes,” he said slowly, looking out the window at the silvery Airstream glinting in the sunlight as he tried to process the connections. “But you’re not moving into assisted living, Mom. You’re not moving anywhere.”
Her sigh was deep and heartfelt. “Not right now, but who knows what might happen in the future? Your father was here one moment and gone the next.”
“Dad had colon cancer. He had a terminal diagnosis for two years before he died.”
“I’m aware of that. But none of us were ready for him to go. My point is, I don’t want you to have the burden of cleaning out years of accumulated crap. Whitaker House is a cluttered mess and I’m tired of it.”
“Tired of the house or tired of the mess?”
“The mess. Not only do I have all your father’s things that I haven’t been able to part with yet but I still have boxes left over from your grandparents’ day when they lived in the house. Things your father didn’t want to get rid of out of some misguided sense of loyalty to them.”
He knew there was truth to that. Five generations of Whitakers had lived in the house. Six, counting the years when he and Sophie had lived there before he finished gutting and renovating a small abandoned house on the property into a comfortable three-bedroom cottage about six years earlier.
“I need help clearing it all out,” Eleanor continued. “I’ll never do it on my own so I’ve asked Jess to stay for a few weeks to hold my feet to the fire, as it were.”
“Sophie and I could have helped you. You didn’t need to turn to a stranger.”
“Yeah, Gram. We could help.”
He heard his daughter in the background and was glad she was on his side. About this, anyway. He and Sophie didn’t agree on too many other things these days.
“That is a lovely offer. I do appreciate it, but I also know how busy you both are. Nate, you’re running a construction company with more projects than I can keep track of and Sophie is plenty busy with school.”
“We can still find time to help you,” he started to say but his mother cut him off.
“This is what Jess does for a living. Lucinda told me hiring Transitions was the best decision she had ever made. She said Jess made the process of cleaning out years of clutter as painless as possible.”
Eleanor paused, then added quietly, “I think I’ve been through enough pain, don’t you?”
Her words stripped away all his objections. He had worried for her physical and emotional health since his father died. She was only now beginning to smile again over the past month or so, to find some enjoyment out of life.
If she was excited about cleaning out Whitaker House, how could he argue?
“Who knows?” Eleanor went on with a small laugh. “It might turn out that I’m not able to part with a single dishcloth and Jess might find she wasted her time coming all this way up here.”
Jess Clayton. He grimaced, remembering his surliness when she arrived. “I wish you had given me some warning that you were expecting company. I wasn’t very welcoming to her when she pulled in and started parking her trailer.”
“I know. I should have told you. I’m sorry I put it off. I suppose I’ve been afraid to tell you. I know how much you miss your father, too. I wasn’t sure how you would feel about me clearing out all his old things when he’s only been gone six months.”
He did miss his father, though their relationship had always been somewhat complicated.
“I don’t care about a few old shirts and sweaters, Mom.”
“I know I’m being silly,” Eleanor said. “Change is always so hard.”
“But inevitable.”
“Whether we like it, or not.” His mother paused. “I hope you weren’t too hard on my guest. She’s giving me two weeks of her very packed schedule so we can go through the house. She’ll be staying on the property for that time. You’re bound to run into her again. I would hate for things to be uncomfortable between you.”
“I’ll talk to her and try to clear the air,” he said.
“Come for dinner,” his mother suggested. “I planned to make that lemon shrimp pasta you like.”
He sighed. “I’ll have to see. I’m behind on a couple of projects an
d might be late but I’ll try. Don’t wait for me.”
“Of course.”
They said their goodbyes. As he disconnected the call, he saw their guest backing her pickup truck out of the spot and driving down the street.
She left her trailer behind, so he could only assume she would return at some point.
He needed to apologize.
The realization wasn’t a pleasant one. He had been rude and unwelcoming, treating her as if she were trespassing. Had he really threatened to call the police on her? He could be such an overprotective ass sometimes.
He needed to apologize as soon as possible. Eleanor had pointed out that Jess Clayton would be staying at Whitaker House for two weeks, living only a few hundred yards away from him. For his mother’s sake, he had to make things right.
That didn’t mean he had to like it.
3
Rachel
“For the love of Christopher Robin, can you please give me five more minutes? That’s all I need. Five minutes.”
“But I’m starving!” Her five-year-old daughter, Ava, whined, just as if she hadn’t finished a mozzarella stick and several apple slices a half hour earlier. “If I don’t eat something, I’m going to die. Can I have one of your cookies?”
“Eat.” Her brother, Silas, echoed the sentiment if not the words.
Rachel Clayton McBride closed her eyes and released a heavy breath to keep from snapping back. She dredged up a calm smile. “Give me five more minutes and I will be done taking pictures, I promise. Then I can make you some macaroni and cheese.”
“I don’t want macaroni and cheese. I want a cookie.”
Of course she did. If Rachel had said she would give her a cookie, Ava would have said she was in the mood for macaroni and cheese. She was in training for the debate Olympics, apparently.
“I don’t need a cookie, Mama,” her other daughter, Grace, said from the kitchen table in a prim voice that seemed out of place in a seven-year-old girl.
She knew her oldest well enough to be quite certain Grace would quickly change her tune if Rachel actually did start doling out cookies to Grace’s younger siblings. That wasn’t going to happen with these particular cookies. She had worked too hard on them to see them gobbled up by little mouths that wouldn’t appreciate the nuances of flavor.
“Grace, could you please grab a granola bar for Ava and Silas?”
“I don’t want a granola bar,” Ava whined. “I want one of those. It’s purple and pretty.”
Ava pointed to the tray of perfectly decorated almond sugar cookies Rachel had been working on all afternoon.
“I told you when we were making them. These are for my book group tonight. I made some for only us and you can have one after dinner.”
“But they’re so pretty. Why can’t I have one now?” Ava whined.
“Because you can’t.” It was the worst sort of maternal response but she was just about out of patience for the day.
Undeterred, Silas reached on tiptoe for one but still couldn’t reach. If she hadn’t been focused on the photographs for her blog and social media properties, she might have seen the telltale signs of a tantrum. The jutted-out lip, the rising color, the obstinate jawline.
He grunted and tried to reach.
“See? Silas wants one, too,” Ava informed her. “Daddy would give us one.”
“I’m sure he would. But Daddy’s not here right now, is he?”
All right. She was heading straight into full-on bitch mode. It wasn’t Ava’s fault that her father seemed to be spending more and more time working these days.
She wanted to think it was simply an uptick in the construction business that had him leaving before sunrise and coming home after dark most days. As the owner of a successful roofing company, her husband had plenty of obligations outside the home—which meant most of the work inside the home fell on Rachel’s shoulders.
She hoped work was the reason Cody was gone so much, anyway, and that he wasn’t trying to avoid the hard realities of home life, especially their son’s early diagnosis of autism two months earlier.
When Cody was home, he seemed distracted, as if he couldn’t wait to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.
She shoved down the low, constant thrum of anxiety to focus on her children. “A granola bar or nothing,” she told Ava. “Those are your choices until dinner. Silas, you can’t do that. No. Play with your car on the floor.”
As she might have expected, her son ignored her. She might as well have been talking to one of those flower-shaped cookies. He continued driving his car along the edge of the island.
At least he hadn’t had a meltdown over not getting a cookie. Rachel decided to focus on the positive as she took a few more shots of two cookies on a piece of antique china she had picked up at a thrift store.
This would make a beautiful post about spring baking when she shared the recipe on her blog, she thought.
Her phone rang with Cody’s distinctive ringtone, a jazz song they had danced to on an amazing trip to Sonoma for their anniversary some years back.
She was quite certain she had conceived Silas on that trip.
Even though doctors had told her it wasn’t the case, Rachel still wondered whether Silas’s autism was a result of all the wine she had consumed, in between magical afternoons spent making love.
“Hi,” she said breathlessly. Oh, how she missed sex. It had been weeks, for one reason or another.
“Hey, babe. I’m going to be late again. I’m sorry. I’m down two guys and the job is taking longer than we thought. It’s supposed to rain overnight and we can’t leave the Tanners with a hole in their roof.”
“Again? You promised you would be home on time tonight! I have my book group, remember?”
Rachel had been holding on desperately to the idea of a little adult conversation. Okay, most of the time her group rarely actually managed to make time to discuss the book. It was more about drinking wine and having a discussion that didn’t involve her wiping someone’s nose or telling someone else to stop jumping on the furniture.
“Oh, damn. I completely forgot about book group. Maybe my mom could sit with the kids until I get home.”
He could remember the batting average of every single hitter on the Giants lineup but didn’t bother to remember the one night a month when she could pretend to have a life outside her kids.
“Your mom will be at the book group. I can’t ask her to miss it to tend my kids. So will your sister and Jan.”
Those were about the only people she dared entrust with all three of her children, especially considering Silas’s behavior issues.
“What time is it over? I should be able to wrap things up here and leave the rest of the job to the guys so I can be home by eight. You would only be a little late.”
“Don’t bother. It’s fine. Finish the job.”
“No. I’ll see what I can do. I don’t want you to miss book group.”
“You said it yourself. You can’t leave the Tanners with a hole in their roof with rain in the forecast. Do what you need to do. I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll do what I can,” he repeated. “I’ve got to go. Love you.”
It sounded so practiced, so casually offhand that she suddenly wanted to cry.
“Bye,” she said, tapping her wireless earbud to end the call.
She stared into space, aching inside for everything that had gotten in the way of the vast love they used to share.
She was distracted from her grim thoughts by a clatter and matching squeals from the girls. When she whirled around, she found Silas and Ava standing over her tray of beautiful sugar cookies, now a jumble of broken glass, crumbs and frosting all over the floor. An entire day of work. She had been working on them all day and had finally perfected the lavender-infused icing.
“Look what you’ve done!” s
he exclaimed. The stress of the day chasing kids seemed to pour over her like water gushing over the cliffs to the ocean.
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” Ava said, tears dripping. “We didn’t mean to ruin your cookies. I was trying to look at one when you were on the phone. Only look. And Silas grabbed it and the whole tray fell down.”
“They were so pretty.” Grace wandered over to look at the disaster with a mournful look. “Now they’re trash. Should I clean them up and throw them away?”
Grace was being helpful, she knew, but Rachel still couldn’t like the way her daughter was always so eager to throw away anything that wasn’t perfect, whether it was a coloring page where she went outside the line or a toy with a broken piece.
Silas sat down and picked up a cookie piece from the floor. Before Rachel could stop him, he popped it into his mouth.
“Silas, stop. Don’t eat that. There’s glass.”
He looked at her, barely acknowledging she was there, and picked up another broken cookie to eat.
She wasn’t even sure he would notice if he ate glass. His reactions to things were sometimes so far out of the realm of what most people would consider normal. He could hold his hand under hot water without making a sound but have a complete meltdown if she left a tag on his shirt that bothered him.
“No,” she said again and swooped around the kitchen island to pick him up and physically move him out of harm’s way.
As she might have expected, Silas didn’t like that. He wriggled to get down, grunting his displeasure at her. “You’ll hurt yourself on glass,” she said.
He started banging his head back against her, something new and fun he had recently discovered.
“Stop,” she ordered. How did he manage to wriggle his body and buck his head like that at the same time? Sometimes keeping him from danger was like wrestling an angry baby alligator.
She had finally managed to restrain him and calm him a little when the doorbell rang, starting him up again.
The Path to Sunshine Cove Page 2
