A Vineyard Lullaby (The Vineyard Sunset Series Book 7)

by Katie Winters

  “When you’re back at college, you’ll probably have to take a class on the research process,” Lola said, her eyebrows lowering. “For any given article, you need at least two or three sources to back up any given claim.”

  “But how do you even find people to fit the narrative of the story?” Audrey demanded.

  “It’s a lot of work, my girl,” Lola said, her smile widening. “But you’ll get it.”

  At around eight, the screen door pushed open to reveal Amanda. She beamed as she entered and removed her travel backpack from her shoulders. “Thanks for throwing a party without me, guys!” she yelled out playfully. She then threw her arms around Audrey and whispered words just loud enough for Christine to hear. “I can’t believe we’ll get that baby home with us soon. I’m so glad. My heart is bursting.”

  Amanda passed by Christine as she headed toward her bedroom. She paused, lifted her hand to Christine’s elbow, and made eye contact. Christine was suddenly very aware that she hadn’t said a single word in thirty minutes, maybe more. She felt a little awkward.

  “Can I talk to you about something?” Amanda said softly.

  Christine lifted her glass of wine and followed behind Amanda, wordless. There was an urgency to Amanda’s eyes, something that told her the twenty-two-year-old girl meant business.

  Once inside Amanda’s bedroom, she shut the door closed, heaved a sigh, and said, “Christine, I just saw Zach.”

  Christine’s heart dropped into her belly. “What? Where?” She barely recognized her own voice.

  Amanda shrugged. “I saw his car just outside the driveway. He was inside like he was trying to dare himself to come in. I don’t know.”

  Christine’s throat constricted. “I thought he left the Vineyard.”

  “I guess he’s back,” Amanda told her, lying her backpack on the edge of the bed.

  Christine felt unsure of what to do. “What do you think I should do?” How ridiculous that she asked this question of her twenty-two-year-old niece. Somehow, at this moment, Amanda seemed worlds more mature than her.

  “It’s up to you,” Amanda said softly. “I mean, he really messed up. He like, Chris-style messed up.”

  “True.” Christine couldn’t bring herself to smile, even as Amanda picked fun at her own heartache.

  “But he did look miserable,” Amanda offered. “And he did come back. Chris never did that. I’m sure he has been struggling with his own demons, his past.”

  Christine walked in slow-motion. She felt herself go into the back mudroom, reach for her coat, and place her hat on her head. It was the middle of March, but when the sun sank below the horizon line, that same winter chill took over the air. Before anyone could ask her what she was up to, she ducked out onto the back porch and then walked toward the main road. The moon cast a strange light over everything. She felt as though she walked through a dream.

  When she reached the main road, she turned left to find Zach at the steering wheel of his car. He looked at her like a deer in headlights. She remained in front of him, with her hands pushed deep in her coat pocket. Slowly, he opened the car door and stepped out into the chilly air. They were about ten feet apart from each other, which was the closest they’d been since he had bailed on her weeks before.

  The silence stretched between them ominously. They locked eyes, as though each of them dared the other to speak first. Christine had never thought of herself as “brave,” exactly. But she just couldn’t bear the stillness any longer.

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” she finally said.

  Zach’s eyes dropped to the ground. He looked so sheepish and so sorry.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Zach muttered.

  Christine had about a million responses to that. You should have stayed. You should have been here to support Audrey and me. You should have done what you promised to do.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to say any of it.

  “I think you should go,” Christine finally said. She crossed her arms over her chest; she built a wall between them.

  Zach brought his eyes back toward hers. “Will you please let me explain?”

  Christine bit her lip for a long moment. Then, she said, “I don’t know if you deserve that after what you did.”

  Zach sucked his cheeks in. Christine felt like she’d just smacked him across the face, even though they were still ten feet from one another. Every single piece of her soul told her to jump toward him and wrap her arms around him. She wanted to sob against his chest. She needed him so badly.

  But she couldn’t let herself give in. He’d proved himself to not be loyal, unable to care for her and the baby and Audrey. What would happen if another serious issue arose? Would he just run off again?

  Finally, Zach dropped back into the car. He nodded and then pulled the car door back in place. Christine turned back toward the house and walked slowly, somberly. There was the sound of the engine, then the creak of the tires. In a moment, he was gone for good.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “You’re a monster, Christine. You bring all this bad luck on yourself. You can’t blame anyone else.”

  The words rang through Christine’s head late at night. She tossed and turned in the upstairs bedroom as sweat ran down her lower back and across her upper lip. She closed her eyes to try to drive out the thoughts, but they came back even stronger.

  “You can’t think that I make you drink like you do, Christine. You’re trying to run from something. But it isn’t me you’re trying to run from. You’re running from yourself.”

  Christine’s eyes popped open again. She turned to face the moon, which hovered like a strange creep out the window. The words weren’t exactly what her ex-boyfriend had said up in New York; they were like a mix of all the insults that previous ex-boyfriends had flung her way through her strange, twenty-year stint as a single woman in the world.

  Now, she had pushed the only man she’d ever really loved away when he’d come back to try to explain himself.

  But she was tired of being knocked around. Why was Susan allowed such a beautiful, honest, and open relationship with Scott? Why was Lola allowed adventure and beauty with Tommy? Where was Christine’s happy ending? Why did it happen for everyone else?

  Christine checked her phone. It was three in the morning. In a previous era, she might have forced herself awake at this point, as she normally liked to be at the bakery around four or four-thirty. She had never even really questioned that early wake-up time. She’d craved it: the silence of the mornings, the darkness outside the window as she preheated the ovens, the feel of the dough beneath her fingers. During those moments, she was allowed complete solitude. And in that silence, she felt free.

  Before she knew what she was doing, Christine whipped the blankets from her legs and stepped out into the chilly air. She jumped into the shower, scrubbed herself clean, and dried her hair, all without thinking another thought. By the time she snapped the lights on at the bistro itself, her eyes were wide open and her heart felt full.

  If she wanted to bake, then by gosh, she would bake.

  It was strange, knowing that nobody would arrive in the next few hours to set up the bistro for breakfast service. As Christine set to work on the croissants, the banana bread, the sourdough bread, and a few batches of cookies, she played music to drown out her thoughts. Each of the albums she picked were reflections of previous times of her life. She remembered her obsession with Patti Smith, age twenty-two, one of the years she’d perfected crème brulee. She then thought back to her late twenties, when she’d love party music, and had taken to the many clubs of Manhattan with zeal. She danced around the kitchen as she stirred, baked, and lost herself in time.

  Of course, every hour or so, the same thought returned to her: What the heck is wrong with me?

  She had always wondered this. As a teenager, she’d been the odd one out, while Susan had been goody-two-shoes, and Lola had been the “wild, adventurous one.” Christine Sheridan? She was dark
. Mysterious. Don’t get too close to her.

  “I should have known it wasn’t going to work,” Christine breathed.

  She stepped toward the oven around daybreak to peer in. The croissants rounded beautifully beneath the orange light. According to Susan, the inn was pretty full, despite the chill that remained in the air. She knew the guests would bite, especially if she set up a little table near the front desk. If she didn’t sell out, the croissants didn’t have a long shelf-life, anyway. The Sheridan’s were eaters, and front-desk Sam was in his mid-twenties and, therefore, a bottomless pit.

  Christine noticed that Zach’s office door was slightly ajar. She stepped toward it and pushed it open further. With the light cast over the space from the kitchen, she could make out the swivel chair, the massive desk, and the framed photograph of Christine and Zach from a long-lost day in early autumn when they had gone hiking along the coastline. Christine could see it in her expression: she had her eyes closed and her lips pressed against his cheek, and she loved him more than life itself. Zach’s expression was euphoric like he’d just learned he won the lottery.

  Wow. They’d really messed up a good thing, hadn’t they?

  Christine stepped into the office and perched at the edge of Zach’s chair. On the coat hanger to the left of the desk hung two of Zach’s winter hats, along with a sweater with a big ketchup stain on the back. Christine had been there for that incident, too. They had eaten French fries together between lunch and dinner rushes while making fun of some of their more annoying customers. “They don’t know your genius,” Christine had said with a laugh. “You’re an artist. Not just a cook.” Knowing she teased him, Zach had drawn his arm around her neck, like a boxer might, and said, “Don’t you dare make fun of me, Christine Sheridan!” Around then, he had accidentally knocked the ketchup over, and that had been it. They’d burst into endless laughter.

  Once the croissants were finished, Christine took a whole batch out toward the front desk. Susan and Sam stood behind it and analyzed a number of official-looking documents. Again, Christine thanked her lucky stars that she wasn’t involved in some of the intricate parts of the Sunrise Cove.

  “Christine Sheridan! What are you doing here?” Susan asked. Her smile was electric.

  Christine lifted the tray of croissants. She felt like a pastry graduate showing off her baking skills. “I just felt like baking today, I guess.”

  But neither Sam nor Susan made her feel anything but warmth. Sam wolfed down three croissants without even thinking about it, and Susan said they were even better than she’d remembered.

  “I thought we could sell some to the guests,” Christine suggested. “Maybe set up a little table right here by the front desk?”

  Sam set to work. He prepared a table, then positioned the croissants, some banana bread and sourdough and other delicacies on various brightly-colored dishes. He looked focused, his eyebrows low, and Christine sat back and leaned against the counter. The exhaustion from not sleeping and baking all morning hit her like a punch to the face.

  “You okay?” Susan asked under her breath.

  Christine buzzed her lips. “Depends on the meaning of okay.”

  Susan squeezed Christine’s upper arm. “Amanda might have mentioned that Zach stopped by the house last night.”

  Christine should have known that Amanda would fess up to her mother. They were thicker than thieves, those two.

  “He did, yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  Christine squeezed her eyes shut, a failed attempt to keep from crying all over again. “He wanted to explain why he just up and disappeared, but I wouldn’t let him.”

  There was silence for a moment. Finally, Susan replied, “It makes sense. He messed up. Bad.”

  Christine’s shoulders shook. “I just wanted us to work out so much. I don’t know why he had to do this. We had such a good thing going.”

  Susan’s hand rubbed the apex of Christine’s back and slowly eased over her shoulder. Christine knew her body was tight as ever; she was in real need of a massage or some kind of hug, but she hadn’t gone out of her way to get it. Everyone was focused on baby Max — including herself. She didn’t need anyone, or so she thought.

  “What do you think?” Sam called from the table. He gestured toward the croissants and the cookies.

  “Great display,” Christine remarked, although she could hardly see it through her tears. “If you build it, they will come.”

  A few minutes later, Sam went upstairs to tend to another guest. Christine turned and leaned on her elbows while Susan made several notes to herself on a notepad. She muttered as she wrote, something she’d done ever since she’d been a little girl. Christine wanted to point this out, but she held it back. Maybe Susan didn’t even know she did it.

  “I want to discuss something with you, Christine,” Susan said then. She bit on her lower lip and then turned her eyes up. They didn’t meet Christine’s.

  Christine’s heart thudded strangely. “Okay.”

  “Now that things are slowing down, and Max will be coming home, we need to find a way back to normality,” Susan continued.

  “I agree,” Christine said, although she wasn’t fully sure what Susan meant.

  “I hate to say it, but the guests need a place to eat. And we’re losing a lot of revenue with the bistro closed,” Susan continued.

  Christine’s throat was filled with lumps. She nodded somberly, as though she totally agreed.

  “And I was considering finally putting up an ad for a new chef position,” Susan went on. “But I wanted to tell you before I made it official..”

  Christine wanted to scream into the abyss. She wanted to yell and scream that things should have been different. For a long time, she let the silence between herself and her sister fester. And then, after another pause, she nodded somberly.

  “Of course. The bistro needs to be open. I think we can all agree on that.”

  Susan exhaled deeply. “I’m so glad to hear you say that. I was so worried. But I really need your help in picking out someone perfect for the place. You know the restaurant world better than anyone.”

  “True. I do,” Christine said sadly.

  “Maybe we can find a really wonderful female chef,” Susan suggested brightly.

  Christine knew that Susan meant only the best with this sentiment. Still, it felt like just another slap in the face, like Christine just couldn’t handle having a man around, or else she would get sexually involved with him. It was, after all, her typical story.

  Gosh, what was wrong with her?

  “Yeah. A female chef,” Christine said. Her bright voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.

  “Anyway. I have to run,” Susan said. “Amanda is waiting for me at the office. We have about three meetings lined up this morning if you can believe it. Do you mind standing at this desk for a few minutes until Sam gets back? I’m sure he won’t be long.”

  Christine found herself behind the front desk with her arms hanging sadly at her sides. She was hardly aware of anything around her. In a weird way, she cursed the exterior weather, the way spring had flung itself over everything, as though flaunting the passage of time in her face. Give her anything else! Give her winter, if it meant it was the previous one before all had gone wrong in her world.

  A woman in her late sixties appeared at the front desk a few minutes later. It took Christine a few moments to even recognized that the woman needed something from her. She wore only a robe and a pair of slippers, and her dyed red curls were lined with white.

  “Hello? Can you please get me a spare towel?” the woman asked. Her voice was clearly annoyed at this point, which meant that she’d asked already a few times, and Christine just hadn’t noticed.

  “A new towel?” Christine asked. The words sounded foreign. With a jolt, she realized she hardly knew where they kept anything like that these days. “Of course. I can. Um. Let’s go find one.”

  Christine led the woman down the
back hallway, where she tried the first closet, then the next, until she traipsed her back up the hallway, toward the staircase. The woman grumbled to herself as they went, but Christine was too exhausted to explain herself.

  Upstairs, Christine opened yet another closet and found only cleaning supplies and unused sponges piled up. Immediately, she burst into tears. Her body shook with panic and sadness and fear. It was the culmination of everything, but it happened here, in front of this woman. How embarrassing.

  The woman’s eyebrows raised high on her forehead. For a long time, she gazed at Christine, who really couldn’t get ahold of herself.

  After another few of Christine’s sobs echoed through the hallway, the woman said, “You know, it’s really just a towel. I can probably do without it.” Then, she disappeared down the hallway and out of sight.

  Chapter Sixteen

  March 17. It was St. Patrick’s Day, a full nineteen days after Max’s birth, and Audrey again awoke before the crack of dawn, prepared a pot of coffee, and gazed out across the horizon line, in wait for that first peek of grey light. Today was the day she would bring her baby home. Today was the day everything would change for good, and she was allowed to test herself at being a mother. She was crawling out of her skin.

  The previous afternoon, Audrey and Lola had stopped by Christine and Zach’s place to pick up all the baby supplies. Christine had given them the key, along with instructions on where everything was, and Audrey and Lola had gone, alert, big-eyed, fully aware that they might have a Zach-interaction once there. But when they entered, he was nowhere to be found. The place was spick-and-span, also much cleaner than Audrey had seen it when Christine had lived there with Zach. Lola had snuck a peek in the fridge to find a full selection of fruits, vegetables, and deli meats.

  “Looks like someone’s on a health kick,” Lola had said with her eyebrows raised.