Savor It

Chapter 6. Fisher

It’s been a total of about eight weeks since Indy first showed up on my doorstep. A whopping two months in this new role plus a few days in this town is all it took for me to fuck up in the most fundamental way possible. It seems I’ve lost the kid.

Let me explain.

So far, in a mere matter of days, we’ve met not only Spunes’s first responder force but also the town veterinarian—a younger woman who dropped off pastries and told me she’d happily stitch me up should I ever need her, despite my lack of fur—as well as a redheaded woman who ran her fingers through my hair unabashedly before she handed me a coupon for a free trim. She somehow managed to get me to tell her about the restaurant, that I was recently fired-slash-reassigned, that Indy is my niece, that I live in New York, and that I’m single and have never been married. I felt like I’d just filled out a loan application and left a therapy session in the span of ten minutes after she blustered back out of the house.

Indy slitted her eyes at me when the door clicked shut.

“What?!” I shrugged at her narrowed look.

“You can’t be that clueless, truly,” she sneered. “Don’t give the townies fuel, Fisher. You know better.” And then she trudged up the stairs with her arms still folded. And as much as I miss the kid that requested custom cakes in lieu of birthday presents and the one who called me Uncle Pishy, I was just happy this one finally spoke more than a few words to me.

Also, she was right. Clearly, I’m out of practice when it comes to playing things close to the chest, but I do know better.

This is exactly why, when the doorbell rang at 9:00 on the dot this morning, I immediately ducked behind the kitchen island and hoped that whoever it was would think we weren’t home. The multiple large windows in this house should be charming, I’m sure, but make hiding inconvenient.

Still, I shouldn’t have been surprised when, despite waving my arms around maniacally to grab her attention, shaking my head and hiss-whispering, “NO!” Indy simply tipped her chin into a grin and opened the front door anyway.

“Hello there!” Indy sang. “Uncle, I do believe you have a visitor!” But the smug look melted off her face when this particular visitor pushed past and let herself in. I straightened from behind my would-be hiding spot and reluctantly tried to plaster on a smile, tensing the closer this woman got. She reminded me of my elementary school principal with her pursed lips, severe frown, and short salt-and-pepper hair.

“Martha O’Doyle,” she said, stabbing her hand out for me to shake.

“Fisher Lange,” I echoed, flinching at her viselike grip.

“I thought it important for me to come and introduce myself to you as head of the Main Street Businesses Coalition for Spunes.” She took her hand back and lifted a brow expectantly, like I should’ve known what that implied.

“Uhh… thank you?”

She blinked rapidly, color heightening to the point that I was fairly certain this was about to take a turn for the worse. “You are responsible for the desecration of our once-beloved town community center, are you not?”

Oh. So this is one ofthose people, I thought. One of the people making things difficult for Carlie, too.

I’m not sure what it says about me that I was glad she’d given me an excuse to drop the friendly fa?ade. I haven’t been here for a week, let alone long enough to desecrate anything, despite my superb ability to fuck things up as of late.

“Nope. I’m not, actually,” I replied with a sarcastic grin.

More rapid blinking. “But you’re here for the new restaurant it’s being renovated into?”

Typical, tired small-town antics. Of course my business had already been spread. “I am, but I don’t own any part of it, and I haven’t actually touched the place,” I told her.

She crossed her arms, her face squeezing like she’d sucked on a lemon. “Then I’d like to get in touch with the person in charge. Whoever’s responsible for the design, particularly. We have standards—”

“I’m sure a very resourceful person such as yourself will have no problem doing so.” I smiled with all my teeth, and color splotches bled across her face once more.

“Are you not going to offer any more information than that? If you’re not in charge, what capacity are you here in?”

“I’m certain you’ll be able to find that out on your own, too, seeing how much information you’ve already gathered. Now, I’m sorry to cut this visit short, but my niece and I have plans.”

“We do?” Indy piped up before she noticed the daggers in my eyes and added, “Oh, right. We do.”

I showed the woman out amid a slew of indignant, huffy noises before I swung the door closed at her back, probably harder than necessary.

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” Indy immediately snapped at me. I was about to hustle up the stairs to grab my wallet and keys so I could flee and get a moment to think, but then another knock rapped against the front door.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” I growled before I marched that way and ripped the door back open.

Only to find a stringy youth staring back at me this time.

“Who are you?” I bit out. I’m sure I was the paradigm of the grouchy old curmudgeon about to scream at this kid to get off my lawn, but then Indy skirted past me. Maybe she picked up the scent of Axe wafting through the air and recognized it as one of her own. Either way, introductions were made. This was Sam, the nephew Sage was telling me about.

“It would probably be smart if Sam showed me around town,” Indy had said. Sam was visibly taken aback, and looked to me for confirmation. But I’d caught the slightest glimpse of an upward curve on Indy’s lips—the smallest sprout of a smile—and had caved. I doubt she really needed my approval, anyway.

It is currently fourteen hours later; forty-seven minutes past 11:00 P.M., and I’ve texted and called about as many times with no word back from her.

It’s at midnight that I finally decide I’ve had enough.

I don’t care if that neighbor did help me out with the doom patrol, she’s the one who foisted her nephew on my niece, so she can be the one to help me track them down.

I’ve seen her fluttering around her property over the last few days. Always in some outrageous robe like an eccentric bird. Byrd. Ha! Hopefully a night owl because I’m about to wake her ass up and make her get a hold of her precious nephew. God, more with the puns. I need out of this place already.

I launch myself down the porch steps and into the dark meadow, worrying my nervousness into rage and accelerating my pace. I pound my fist against her front door and shift on my feet, trying to breathe through the anxiety. A dog barks from inside somewhere and I hear more commotion, and before I know it, she’s there, opening her door and squinting a sleepy look up at me, clad in slippers and pajamas.

She’s wearing a giant, baby-yellow T-shirt with a smiling snail on it—a smiling snail holding a tiny snail-sized baseball bat. Big, bubbly text above it says, GO GET ’EM, SLUGGER!

My indignation trips. How perfectly fucking irritating. How perfectly cliché. The ball of sunshine, wholesome girl next door.

“Fisher? Everything okay?” she asks, her voice husky with sleep in a way that shoots through my core. Of course she remembers my name and seems unbothered by the late hour, more concerned with me. She’s so cute it’s downright offensive.

“Sam,” I sputter. More syllables, man. “Need you to call Sam, please. He has Indy.”

“Oh, all right.” Another bark from inside that makes me jump but neglects to faze her. “I could just check his location for you on my phone, too?”

“Yes. Yeah, I need you to do that,” I say, trying and failing to sound adequately pissed.

She lets out one of those breathy laughs like she finds me amusing. “Would you like to come in for some tea or anything while you wait?”

“Tea?”

“Coffee, maybe?”

“Coffee?”

“Café au lait?”

My mind goes blank with white-hot annoyance. “No… I would not… like tea or coffee,” I manage.

“All right,” she says with a careless toss of her shoulders, and it’s watching her little fuzzy slippers tremble when she steps away that tips me over the edge.

“No, I don’t want tea or coffee,” I repeat more firmly. “And while we’re at it, I don’t want your misfit townies banging down my door multiple times a day, either. I don’t want to meet your banal, geriatric, ill-tempered but delightfully intrusive friends from the VA hall or nursing home you probably volunteer at. And I have zero interest in participating in your kissing booth to save some beloved town rock or pumpkin patch or whatever the fuck else you’ve got in mind. I need you to track down the nephew that is out with my niece, thanks to you. Otherwise, I’ll—I’ll call the police.”

She chuckles at me. Chortles, even. That tempting, slinky sound. I feel deranged.

And then she stretches her face into something pleading, blinking big cow eyes up at me. “But that rock you’re talking about is rich in history and sentiment!” she squalls. “That kissing booth paid for new grass on the soccer field at the elementary school, Fisher! My parents conceived me in that pumpkin patch!” She flutters her lashes dramatically.

I refuse to laugh. “Sarcasm doesn’t suit you,” I say.

“Really? Damn. Cranky and condescending works on you,” she replies breezily, waving a flippant hand at me over her shoulder when she turns to grab her phone. “And I doubt you’d really want to jump to call the police, given that you already met, like, an entire quarter of the force in Ian the other night.” Before I can come up with a rebuttal, she flips her phone out to me to show a location labeled “Sam” moving on the map. “They’re almost home.”

“Did he say what the hell they were out doing all this time?!”

She nudges the phone closer to my face as if in answer. “He didn’t, but you’ll get to ask them in mere moments, my friend,” she says. I open my mouth to respond, but then her smile broadens—like she’s excited for us to spar some more. It throws me off-balance. So I turn on my heel instead, just as I see the high beams cutting through the night in a car’s approach.

It takes almost no time to confirm that it is indeed them under the glow of the vehicle’s interior light, silhouetted against the surrounding dark. I’m not even halfway across the meadow when I see them dive for one another and begin aggressively making out. I grimace and mutter to myself when I cover the rest of the distance and she’s still got her tongue down that Timothée Chalamet doppelg?nger’s throat, and they’re still mauling each other like animals in a Nat Geo documentary.

I wait what has to be another four minutes, and they’ve yet to come up for air.

Another thirty seconds.

Fuck it. I’m already not winning points with her, and this little attempt at a coup d’état spiked my adrenaline so much that now that I see that she’s safe, I’m crashing. I’m exhausted and pissed off.

I rip open my truck door and lay on the horn.

They spring apart in a gratifying shock before I feel her glare through the passenger window, horn still blaring. She slams out of the Jeep, Casanova hurrying out behind her. He slips on the gravel and rounds the back of his car before he continues tripping at her heels.

When I eventually let off the horn, Freya’s dark eyes burn defiantly back at me from Indy’s face. Chestnut hair bounces in a mussed-up halo around her head and shoulders. She doesn’t slow down, just quirks her lips up in a phony, saccharine grin before she bolts into the house.

“B-bye, Indy,” the sentient penis with a car calls after her, waving a sad hand through the air. The only response he gets is the slam of the front door.

He swallows and twitches my way. “Hi, Mr. Lange, I’m—I’m sorry if she was past curfew or something. She told me it was midnight and—sorry about that.”

The kid is as tall as I am but looks like he’s been put through a pasta maker to get that way. Lanky, thin, skinny wrists and sharp elbows—probably in some state of nicotine addiction. My saucier back at Marrow had a collage of bony-faced, droopy-eyed boys taped up in her work locker that looked just like him. Jesus, I think I might’ve looked similar at that age, too. The realization makes me feel even older and more tired.

But something also makes me doubt it was this knob’s fault that she was back so late. I spare him one more look and wearily head up the porch.

When I make it inside, I find that Indy’s already disappeared upstairs, and the temptation to scrap the day and go straight to bed so we can start over tomorrow is strong.

But that’s what I’ve always done. If it wasn’t perfect, I’d toss it aside. I didn’t care if we were backed up and understaffed and dead on our feet, if I saw a sloppy plate, I didn’t let it go to service.

Coffee tastes slightly off in the morning? Dump it down the sink.

Relationships that aren’t convenient, comfortable, or easy? The ones that are never end up that way in the long run, so why get invested to begin with?

And I don’t know if applying that culinary logic to this guardian role is ridiculous or not, but I do know that I’ve already been using it in other areas of my life, and it’s not done me any good in those, either.

I steel myself before I make my way to her bedroom door and knock.

“Indy, come talk to me for one second, please,” I say. I hear the creak of the bed and the shuffling of her feet before she opens the door in a manner equivalent to an eye roll. “I’m not trying to smother you here. But I do need to know where you are and that you’re safe and what time you’ll be home.”

“I told you, he was showing me around.” She jerks her shoulders up and shakes her head like I’ve just told her I expect her to wear a shock collar and not simply extend some common courtesy.

“You also left over half a day ago and—and hold on, showing you around what?! His oral cavity?! His upper respiratory system?! You know what—never mind.” I inhale and exhale before I continue. “Let’s not pretend you didn’t take advantage of the fact that I’m not exactly practiced at this and wouldn’t think to give you a curfew before you left. Your curfew is eleven, by the way.” She breathes out an empty laugh at that, but I press on. “I’d like us to respect each other enough to get you through this summer in one piece, yeah? I won’t make it harder than it has to be if you don’t.”

Her eyes harden and her cheeks redden before her face smooths itself back into indifference. “Didn’t you pass on your chance to parent me, oh, three years ago or so?” she spits.

The blow lands like she intended. I grapple with my brain for a response and come up empty. I’m not sure how she even knows this. I wonder if it was something my parents revealed in a moment of frustration, or… It doesn’t seem like something they’d ever do on purpose, though.

And—and I guess it’s the truth, anyway.

This time when she shuts the door in my face, she does it softly, which is somehow worse. Like the punch didn’t need emphasis to be justified.

I drag a hand through my hair and head to my unfamiliar room, asleep as soon as I hit the pillow.