Lakeside Cottage (3 page)

Then she caught herself furtively studying the object of Aaron’s attention, too. The stranger had the oddest combination of raw masculine appeal and backwoods roughness. She wondered how much he’d overheard earlier.

Snap out of it, she thought, moving the cart to the checkout line. She didn’t give a hoot about what this Carhartt-wearing, mullet-sporting local yokel thought of her. He looked like the kind of guy who didn’t have a birth certificate.

“Aaron,” she said, “time to go.” She turned away to avoid eye contact with the stranger, and pretended to browse the magazine racks. This was pretty much the extent of her involvement with the news media. It was shameful, really, as she considered herself a journalist. She didn’t watch TV, didn’t read the papers, didn’t act like the thing she said she was. This was yet another personal failing. Thanks to her late unlamented job, her work had consisted of nothing more challenging than observing Seattle’s fashion scene.

People
magazine touted a retrospective: “Reality TV Stars—Where Are They Now?”

“A burning issue in my life, for sure,” Kate murmured.

“Let’s get this one about the two-headed baby.” Aaron indicated one of the tabloids. Kate shook her head, although her eye was caught by a small inset photo of a guy
with chiseled cheeks and piercing eyes, a military-style haircut and dashing mustache. American Hero Captured by Terrorist Cult, proclaimed the headline.

“Let’s get a
TV Guide,
” Aaron suggested.

“We don’t have a TV.”

“So I can see what I’m missing. Wait, look, Mom.” He snatched a newspaper from the rack. “Your paper.” He handed it over.

Kate’s hands felt suddenly and unaccountably cold, nerveless. She hated the pounding in her throat, hated the tremor of her fingers as she took it from him. It was just a stupid paper, she told herself. It was the
Seattle News,
a dumb little weekly crammed with items about local bands and poetry slams, film reviews and fluffy culture articles. In addition to production and layout, her specialty for the past five years had been fashion. She had generated miles of ink about Seattleites’ tendency to wear socks with Birkenstocks, or the relative merits of body piercing versus tattooing as a fashion statement.

Apparently not quite enough miles, according to Sylvia, her editor. Instead of a five-year pin for distinguished service, Kate had received a pink slip.

The paper rattled as she turned to page B1 above the fold. There, where her column had been since its debut, was a stranger’s face, grinning smugly out over the shout line. “Style Grrl,” the byline called her, the self-important trendiness of it setting Kate’s teeth on edge. Style Grrl, who called herself Wendy Norwich, was really Elsie Crump, who had only recently moved up from the mail room. Today’s topic was an urgent rundown of local spray-on tanning salons.

At the very bottom of the page, in tiny italic print, was the reminder,
“Kate’s Fashion Statement is on hiatus.”

That was it. Her entire professional life summed up in six little words.

“What’s on hiya-tus mean?” Aaron asked.

“Kind of like on vacation,” she said, hating the thick lump she felt in her throat. She stuffed the paper back in the rack.
Only I’m never coming back.

“Can I have this gum?” Aaron asked, clearly unaware of her inner turmoil. “It’s sugar free.” He showed her a flat package containing more baseball cards than bubble gum.

“Sure, bud,” she said, bending to unload her groceries onto the conveyor belt.

An older couple got in line behind her. It took no more than a glance for Kate to surmise that they’d been together forever. They had the sort of ease that came from years of familiarity and caring, that special bond that let them communicate with a look or gesture.

A terrible yearning rose up in Kate. She was twenty-nine years old and she felt as though one of the most essential joys of life was passing her by. She had never heard a man declare he loved her and mean what he said. She had no idea what it felt like to have a true partner, a best friend, someone to stay by her side no matter what. Yes, she had a son she adored and a supportive extended family. She was grateful for those things and almost ashamed to catch herself craving more, wishing things could be different.

Still, sometimes when she saw a happy couple together, embracing and lost in each other, she felt a deep pang of emptiness. Being in love looked so simple. Yet it had never happened to her.

Long ago, she’d believed with all her heart that she and Nathan had been in love. Too late, she found out that what she thought she had with him had no solid
foundation, and when tested by the reality of her pregnancy, their relationship had broken apart, the pieces drifting away like sections of an ice floe.

As she unloaded the cart, Kate felt the John Deere guy watching her. She was sure of it, could sense those shifty eyes behind the glasses. He was two lanes over and his back was turned, but she knew darned well he’d been staring just a second ago. He was probably checking to see if she used food stamps.

None of your business, she thought. And you do too have a mullet. She glared at the broad, plaid shirt–covered shoulders.

She finished checking out, marveling at the amount of the bill. Ah, well. Starting over took a little capital up front. She swiped her debit card through the machine and got an error message. Great, she thought, and swiped it again. “Please wait for cashier,” the machine flashed.

“I don’t think my card’s working,” Kate said, handing it to her.

The cashier took it and put in the numbers manually. “I’m sorry, ma’am. The card’s been declined.”

Declined.
Kate’s stomach dropped, but she fumbled for a smile. “I’ll write you a check,” she said, taking out her checkbook.

“We can only accept local checks,” the cashier said apologetically.

Kate glanced at the couple behind her. “I’ll pay in cash, then,” she muttered. “You do accept cash, right?”

“Have you got enough?” Aaron asked. His piping voice carried, and she knew the lumberjack guy could hear.

She pursed her lips and counted out four twenties, a ten and two ones, and thirty-three cents change. It was all the cash she had on hand. She looked at the amount
on the cashier’s display. “Check your pockets, Aaron,” she said. “I’m two dollars and nine cents short.”

I hate this, she thought while Aaron dug in his Levi’s. I hate this.

She kept a bland smile in place, though her teeth were clenched, and she avoided eye contact with the cashier or with the couple behind her.

“I got a quarter and a penny,” Aaron said, “and that’s it.” He handed it over.

“I’ll have to put something back.” Kate wished she could just slink away. “I’m sorry,” she said to the older couple. She reached for the bag of Cheetos, their favorite guilty pleasure.

“Not the Cheetos. Anything but the Cheetos,” Aaron whispered through clenched teeth.

“Don’t do that,” said a deep, quiet voice behind her. “It’s covered.”

Even before Kate turned to look at him, she knew it was the guy. The mullet man, rescuing her.

She took a deep breath and turned. Go away, she wanted to tell him. I don’t need you. Instead, she said, “That’s not necessary—”

“Not a problem.” He handed two dollars to the cashier and headed out the door with his sack of groceries.

“Hey, thanks,” said Aaron.

The man didn’t turn, but touched the bill of his cap as he went outside.

Thoroughly flustered, Kate helped sack the groceries and load them into the cart. She hurried outside, hoping to catch the guy before he left. She spotted him in a green pickup truck, leaving the parking lot.

“That was real nice of him, huh?” said Aaron.

“Yep.”

“You forgot to tell him thank-you.”

“I didn’t forget. I was…startled, and then he took off before I could say anything.”

“You weren’t startled,” he said. “You were embarrassed.”

She opened her mouth to object. Then she let her shoulders slump. “Totally humiliated.” For Aaron’s sake, she summoned a smile. “I shouldn’t have said that. I should remind you that the kindness of strangers is a rare and wonderful thing.”

“A rare and wonderful and humiliating thing,” he said.

“Help me load these groceries, smart aleck. Let’s see if we can get to the lake before the Popsicles melt.”

K
ate’s Jeep Cherokee had seen better days, but it was the perfect vehicle for the lake, rugged enough to take on the unpaved roads and byways that wound through the mountains and rain forests of the Olympic Peninsula. Bandit greeted them as though they’d been gone a year, sneezing and slapping the seat with his tail.

“Now to the lake,” Kate said brightly. “We’ve got the house all to ourselves, how about that?”

Aaron buckled his seat belt in desultory fashion, barely reacting to Bandit’s sloppy kisses, and she realized she’d said the wrong thing.

“It’s going to be a great summer,” she assured him.

“Right,” he replied without enthusiasm.

She could hear the apprehension in his voice. Though she wouldn’t say so aloud, she felt as apprehensive as Aaron.

He regarded her with disconcerting insight. “They fired you because of me, didn’t they?”

“No, I got fired because Sylvia is an inflexible stick of a woman who never appreciated real talent anyway.
Deadlines and the bottom line, that’s all she cares about.” Kate made herself stop. No point venting to Aaron; he already knew she was angry. The fact that Kate had been let go by Sylvia Latham, the managing editor, stung particularly. Like Kate, Sylvia was a single mother. Unlike Kate, she was a perfect single mother with two perfect kids, and because of this, she assumed everyone else could and should juggle career and family with the same finesse she did.

Kate ducked her head, hiding her expression. Aaron was clued in to much more than people expected of him. He knew as well as any other boy that one of the most basic realities of modern life was that a single mom missed work to take care of her kid. Why didn’t Sylvia get it? Because she had a perfect nanny to look after her perfect children. Until this past year, Aaron’s grandmother and sometimes his aunt watched him when he missed school. Now that they’d moved away, Kate tried to juggle everything on her own. And she’d failed. Miserably and unequivocally.

“I have to call the bank, figure out what’s the matter with my debit card,” she said, taking out her cell phone. “We don’t get reception at the lake.”

“Boooring,”
Aaron proclaimed and slumped down in his seat.

“I’m with you, bud.” She dialed the number on the back of her card. After listening to all the options— “because our menu has recently changed,” cooed the voice recording—she had to press an absurd combination of numbers only to learn that the bank, on East Coast time, was already closed. She leaned her head against the headrest and took a deep, cleansing breath. “It’s nothing,” she assured Aaron. “I’ll sort it out later.”

“I need to call Georgie next,” she said apologetically.

All five grandkids—Phil and Barbara’s four, plus Aaron—called her mother Georgie and sometimes even Georgie Girl.

“Don’t talk long,” Aaron said.
“Please.”

Kate punched in the unfamiliar new number and waited for it to connect. A male voice answered.

“This is Clinton Dow.” Georgie’s new husband always answered with courteous formality.

“And this is Katherine Elise Livingston,” she said, teasing a little.

“Kate.” His voice smoothed out with a smile she could hear. “How are you?”

“Excellent. We’re in Port Angeles, just about to head to the lake.”

“Sounds like a big adventure,” he said as jovially as could be. You’d never know that only last spring, he was urging her mother to sell the summer place. It was a white elephant, he’d declared, a big empty tax liability that had outlived its use to the family. With that one pronouncement, he had nearly lost the affections of his two newly acquired stepchildren. The lakeside cottage had been in the Livingston family since the 1920s, far longer than a once-widowed, once-divorced retired CPA.

“We’re never selling the lake house,” Phil had said. “Ever. End of discussion.” It didn’t matter to Phil that he had moved cross-country, all the way to New York, and that his visits would be few and far between. For him and Kate and their kids, the lakeside retreat held all that was special and magical about summer, and selling it would be sacrilege.

“I’ll get your mother,” Clint said. “It’s great to hear from you.”

While she waited, Kate pulled the Jeep around to the far edge of the parking lot so she could look out over the harbor. She had stood in this spot, regarding this view hundreds of times in her life. She never got tired of it. Port Angeles was a strange city, an eclectic jumble of cheap sportsman’s motels and diners, quaint bed-and-breakfast getaways, strip malls with peeling paint and buckled asphalt parking lots, waterfront restaurants and shops. A few times a day, the Coho ferry churned its crammed, exhausted hull across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Victoria, British Columbia, in all its gleaming splendor, and vehicles waited for hours for a coveted berth on board.

“So you’re headed off into the wilderness,” her mother said cheerfully into the phone.

“Just the two of us,” Kate said.

“I wish you’d decided to bring Aaron here for the summer,” Georgina said. “We’re an hour’s drive from Walt Disney World, for heaven’s sake.”

“Which is precisely why I didn’t want to bring him,” Kate said. “I’m just not a Disney sort of gal.”

“And Aaron?”

“He’d love it,” she confessed. “He would love to see you, too.” She watched her son rifling through the groceries in search of something to eat. He found the sack of golden Rainier cherries and dived in, seeing how far he could spit each pit out the window. Bandit, who was remarkably polite when his humans were eating, watched with restrained but intense concentration. “We want to be here this summer,” she reminded her mother. “It’s exactly where we need to be.”

“If you say so.” Georgina had never loved the lakeside cottage the way the rest of the Livingstons did, though in deference to her late husband and children, she’d always been a good sport about spending every summer there.
Now that she’d finally remarried, however, she was more than happy to stay in Florida.

“I say so,” Kate told her mother. “I can finally spend quality time with my boy, and figure out what I want to be when I grow up.”

“You’ll both go stir-crazy,” Georgina warned.

Kate thought about her mother’s new home, a luxury condo on a golf course in Florida. Now
that
would make a person stir-crazy.

She let Aaron say hello to his grandmother, and then she called Phil, but got his voice mail and left a brief message. “There,” she said. “I’ve checked in with everybody who matters.”

“That’s not very many.”

“It’s not the number of people. It’s how much they matter,” she explained. It made Kate wistful, thinking about how much she would miss her brother and his family this summer. She didn’t let it show, though. She wanted Aaron to believe this would be the summer of a lifetime. Sometimes she thought she’d give anything for a shoulder to cry on, but she wouldn’t allow her son to play that role. She’d seen other single moms leaning on their kids for emotional support, and she didn’t think it was fair. That was not what kids were for.

Last year, she’d consulted a “life coach,” who’d counseled her to be her own partner in parenting and life, encouraging her to have long, searching conversations with herself. It hadn’t helped, but at least she found herself talking to someone she liked.

“Ready?” she said to Aaron, putting away the phone. She eased the Jeep out of the parking lot and merged onto Highway 101, heading west. The forests of Douglas fir and cedar thickened as they penetrated deeper into the Olympic Peninsula. Soaring to heights of two hundred
feet or more, the moss-draped trees arched over the two-lane highway, creating a mystical cathedral effect that never failed to enchant her. The filtered afternoon sunlight glowed with layers of green and gold, dappling the road with shifting patterns.

There was a sense, as they traveled away from the port city, of entering another world entirely. This was a place apart, where the silences were as vast and deep as the primal forests surrounding the lake. Thanks to the vigilance of the parks department, the character of the land never changed. Aaron was experiencing everything just as she and Phil had as children, and their father and grandparents before them. She remembered sitting in the backseat of their father’s old station wagon with the window rolled down, feeling the cool rush of the wind in her face and inhaling the fecund scent of moss and cedar. Four years her senior, Phil had a special gift for annoying her until she wept, though she had long since forgiven him for all the childhood torments. Somehow, seemingly by magic, her brother had turned into her best friend over the years.

Five miles from the lake, they passed the final hill where cell-phone reception was possible, in the parking lot of Grammy’s Café, which served the best marionberry pie known to man.

At the side of the road, she spotted a green pickup truck pulled off to the side. She slowed down as she passed, and saw that the driver was bent over the front passenger side, changing a tire, perhaps.

It was the John Deere guy. The one who had bailed her out at the grocery store.

She applied the brake, then put the car in Reverse and pulled off to the shoulder. She had no idea how to change a tire and he probably didn’t want or need her
help. But she stopped just the same, because like it or not, she owed him one.

“What’re you doing?” Aaron asked.

“Stay put,” she said. “Don’t let Bandit out.” She got out and walked toward the truck.

Here, surrounded by the extravagant lushness of the fern-carpeted forest, he looked even more interesting than he had in the grocery shop, a man in his element. Suddenly she felt vulnerable. This was a lonely stretch of road, and if he decided to come on to her, she’d be in trouble. Her brother often accused her of being too naive and trusting, yet she didn’t know how else to be. She did trust people, and they seldom let her down.

“Keep away,” he called to her without looking up from what he was doing. “I’ve got a wounded animal here.”

Definitely not a come-on.

She saw a half-grown raccoon lying on its side, struggling and making a terrible noise. Wearing a pair of logging gloves, the guy was trying to bag the hissing, scratching creature in a canvas sack, but the raccoon was having none of it.

Ignoring orders, Aaron jumped out. Bandit whined from the Jeep.

Kate grabbed Aaron’s shoulder and held him next to her. “What can we do to help?”

“That’s— Damn.” The guy jumped back, examining his gloved hand.

“Did it bite you?” she asked.

“Tried to.”

“Did you hit it?” Aaron asked. His chin trembled. He absolutely hated it when an animal was injured.

“Nope. Found it like this,” the man said. For the first time, he took his eyes off the raccoon and turned to look at them. The sunglasses masked his reaction, but
she could tell he recognized her from the grocery store. Something—a subtle tensing in his big, lean body—reacted to her.

“Is it going to die?” Aaron asked.

“Hope not. There’s a wildlife rehab station back in Port Angeles. If I can get it there, I’m pretty sure it can be saved.”

“How can he fight like that?” Kate said. “He’s half-dead.”

“Not even close. And the survival instinct is strong when something feels threatened.”

“Hey,” Aaron said, diving into the back of the Jeep. “You can use the Igloo.”

Kate helped him empty the forty-five-gallon cooler, which had plenty of room for a half-grown raccoon. Together, they pulled the cooler out and dragged it over, easing it over the raccoon. It scrabbled around, but the stranger managed to get the lid under it. Slowly and gently, the three of them tilted the cooler until it was upright, then pressed the lid in place.

“Will he smother?” asked Aaron.

Kate opened the drain plug. “He should be all right for a while.”

The man loaded the cooler into his truck. The back was littered with tools, cans of marine varnish and a chain saw. Behind the driver’s seat was a gun rack, which held fishing poles and a coffee mug instead of guns. When he turned back, she got a good look at his face. Even with those glasses, he had the kind of rough masculinity that made her go weak in the knees—strong features, a chiseled mouth, a five-o’clock shadow. Oh, Kate, she thought, you’re pathetic.

“Thanks,” he said.

Aaron’s chest inflated in that unconscious way he had
of puffing up around another male. Kate ruffled his hair. “We’re glad to help.”

“Do you live around here?” the stranger asked. “Can I bring the cooler to you when I’m done?”

Kate felt a prickle of hesitation. It was never a good idea to tell a stranger where you lived, especially if you lived in a secluded lakeside cottage where no one could hear you scream.

“I’m staying at the Schroeder place,” he said as if reading her thoughts. “It’s on Lake Crescent.”

The Schroeder place. She used to play with Sammy and Sally Schroeder when she was little. Mable Claire Newman had even mentioned this guy, only half teasing:
Wait till you see him.
And the guy was a rescuer of raccoons, Kate reflected. How bad could he be?

“We’re a quarter of a mile down the road from you,” she told him. “The driveway is marked with a sign that says The Livingstons. I’m Kate Livingston, and this is Aaron.”

“Nice to meet you. I’d shake hands, but I’ve been handling wildlife.”

For some reason, that struck Kate as funny and she giggled. Ridiculously, like a schoolgirl. She stopped herself with an effort. “So, are you one of the Schroeders?” she asked.

“A friend, actually,” he said. “JD Harris.”

“JD?” Aaron echoed.

“Mr. Harris to you,” Kate told him.

“Everyone calls me JD, Aaron included,” the man insisted.

Aaron stood even straighter and squared his shoulders. Kate kept staring at JD Harris. There was something…it was crazy, but she was sure that behind the dark glasses, he was checking her out, and maybe even liking what
he saw. And instead of being offended, she felt a flush of mutual interest.

“I’d better get this thing transported,” he said, turning away. “I’ll bring your cooler over later.”