Story of My Life (Story Lake #1)

12. A pancake to the face

12

A PANCAKE TO THE FACE

CAMPBELL

IntrepidReporterGuy:

Emergency town meeting called after eagle murderer starts bar fight at Angelo’s.

I opened the back door of my sister’s house without knocking. No one would have heard me anyway over the noise. Bacon sizzled, dogs barked, adults demanded more coffee.

It was a typical Bishop Breakfast. Too early, too loud, and far too many people crammed into too small a space.

I sat on the built-in bench and pried off my work boots. Melvin, the four-year-old Saint Bernard–Bernese mountain dog mix, lumbered into the room, his nails clicking on the hexagonal tile I’d helped install before he was born. He shoved his big head into my lap and grumbled a welcome.

“Hey, buddy,” I said, scruffing his ears back and forth before giving him a thump on the flank.

A split second later, my parents’ beagle, Bentley, charged into the mudroom, demanding his fair share of attention.

“That you, Cam?” my mother called from the kitchen.

Nothing got by Pepper “Pep” Bishop. Especially not when it came to her children. At fifteen, I’d once attempted to sneak out of the house to go to a friend’s. She’d beaten me there in the car and stood waiting for me on the sidewalk in her flannel pj’s. “Get your grounded ass in the car, Campbell Bishop,” she’d said. I wondered then if she knew that even when I was in trouble, her calling me a Bishop lit up something small and bright in my chest.

She always told everyone she’d never regretted her decision to take us on despite all the moments we’d given her to consider such things.

I dropped my boots in line with the rest of the family’s discarded footwear and followed the dogs into Laura’s cramped kitchen.

Mom was at the stove, flipping pancakes like it was a military action. Dad was next to the sink, blotting the grease off bacons strips with paper towels. My brothers were setting the table, and my sister was shooting everyone annoyed looks from the folding table that now served as her food prep area.

She scraped a mound of blueberries and cut strawberries into a glass bowl and pushed her wheelchair back from the table.

“I’ll take that,” Gage volunteered, sweeping in to relieve her of the bowl.

“I’m perfectly capable of taking fruit to the table, Gigi,” she reminded him with the patented Bishop growl.

Cammy, Gigi, and Livvy were my sister’s nicknames for us. She claimed she’d always wanted sisters instead of the wild pack of testosterone she’d been saddled with. But deep down, somewhere far beneath that prickly exterior, she loved us with a fierceness that would have embarrassed us all had any of us actually acknowledged it.

“I’ve got an extra hand, Larry,” Gage insisted.

“And I’ve got two extra fingers,” she said, shooting him both middle fingers.

“Children,” my mother warned without looking up from the pancakes.

I inched past Mom, dropping a kiss on her cheek on the way. “Don’t worry, your favorite is here,” I assured her.

All three of my siblings snorted in my direction.

The previous day’s fight long forgotten, I clapped Dad on the back and skirted around the island. The kitchen had been cramped when my sister and her husband, Miller, had moved in fifteen years ago. Now with three teenagers, a ninety-pound counter-surfing dog, and a wheelchair to contend with, the space was fucking useless.

The ramp outside was permanent. So was the chair. But the plastic folding table pushed up against the island and the first-floor den turned into a makeshift bedroom still pointed to temporary. The accident a year ago had pulled our family into a strange limbo that none of us seemed to know how to climb out of. Maybe because that meant admitting that things would never be the way they had been.

Unwilling to entertain any emotionally taxing revelations this early in the morning, I grabbed the handles of her chair and dipped her backward until she scowled up at me. I dropped a noisy kiss on top of her platinum-blond fauxhawk.

“Do not mess up my cool-ass hair, jerk,” she complained, giving me a relatively friendly punch to the arm.

“Stop with the pouting, Laura. You’ll give yourself deeper frown lines,” Mom warned my sister.

“I’ll stop pouting when you start letting me cook in my own kitchen. I told you I was going to plug in the electric griddle and do the pancakes myself.”

Laura and Mom were cut from the same take-no-shit cloth.

Mom expertly scooped the last of the pancakes onto the platter and covered it with a dish towel. “I’m not making the pancakes because you have a spinal injury, so calm the hell down.”

The men in the room froze. None of us took a breath for several seconds as we looked back and forth between the women.

“Oh, really? Then why am I stuck on berry duty?”

Mom’s grin was sharp and merciless. “Because your pancakes suck.”

The collective intake of breath had Melvin slinking out of the room backward. It was true. My gym-rat sister still insisted on putting some crap protein powder into her low-carb pancakes, which—let’s face it—didn’t hold a candle to Mom’s homemade sourdough insulin-spiking recipe. But none of us had the guts to tell Laura that.

“Wesley! Harrison! Isla!” Laura shouted.

Heavy footsteps echoed overhead and then thundered down the stairs. My niece and nephews obediently joined the crowd. The boys were sixteen with newly minted driver’s licenses. Wesley wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes. His curly hair was an unruly mess, and he had pillow creases on his face. Harrison was dressed in workout clothes and sweating. Isla was in pajamas and had her shoulder-length hair rolled up in one of those weird sock things on top of her head. At fifteen, even with the weird sock thing, she was turning into the kind of teenage beauty that made me remember all the stupid shit high school boys pulled to get close to pretty girls.

“What’s up, Mom?” Isla chirped, as if it was perfectly reasonable to be summoned to the breakfast table at 7 a.m. on one of the precious last days of summer vacation.

Before the accident, the kids had been typical surly teenagers who challenged their parents’ authority at every turn. Since then, they’d turned into well-behaved baby adults, meal prepping, doing yard work, even running their mother through her at-home physical therapy exercises. As grateful as I was to them for stepping up in the worst of times, there was a part of me that hated this for them.

“Your grandmother says my pancakes suck,” Laura reported.

Wesley and Isla exchanged a guarded look. Harry became fascinated by something on the ceiling. My sister’s eyes narrowed dangerously.

“Yours are definitely better,” Isla insisted just a beat too late.

“Yeah, Gram’s are garbage,” Wesley agreed.

“Excuse me?” my mother interjected.

“Too far, kid. Too far,” Gage stage-whispered.

“Harrison?” Laura said.

“Huh? Who, me?” Harry pointed to himself. “Nothing will ever beat your pancakes, Mom.”

The kid was a gifted and charming liar. It was almost a shame he only used his powers for good now instead of enjoying the harmless teenage rebellion they all deserved.

“What we mean is that both recipes have their pros,” Isla said diplomatically as she elbowed her brothers.

“Which one has more pros?” Mom demanded.

Sensing imminent danger, Levi snatched the towel off the pancakes already on the table, plucked the top one off the stack, and slapped Gage in the face with it.

In self-defense, Gage grabbed a spoonful of scrambled eggs and fired it back.

“Levi Fletcher and Gage Preston Bishop, how many times have I told you not to play with your food?” Mom bellowed.

“Hey, who wants bacon?” Dad cut in. He held up the plate like he was one of the showcase models on The Price Is Right . Bentley planted his ass at Dad’s feet, tail wagging.

“Me,” chorused the rest of the male family members.

“I need a couple more measurements for the Heart House estimate. If you can get them for me today, I should have it done tomorrow,” Dad announced as we sat asses to elbows around the too-small dining table. There was more room than there’d once been, and I knew we all felt it. That’s why I sat with my back to the photos on the wall. I didn’t need or want to be reminded of the loss. Laura, however, always faced them.

I choked on my coffee. “Seriously?” I’d assumed it would take at least a week for him to pull together an estimate. A week in which Hazel would get sick of small-town life and pack her wine-soaked bags and I could forget I ever met her.

“What are we looking at?” Gage asked as he slid another pancake onto his plate.

“Six figures with a fifty percent deposit,” Dad said proudly.

Gage let out a low whistle that had both dogs’ heads popping up from under the table. The hopeful expressions around the table almost made me feel like an asshole for wanting a certain romance novelist to give up and move on. Almost.

“Think she’ll go for it?” Levi asked me.

“How should I know?” I said irritably.

“She’s a damn good writer. Let’s hope that’s reflected in her bank account,” Laura said, reaching for the gross healthy person syrup.

“I picked up one of her books at the library yesterday,” Mom said.

“I did some research on her. Turns out she’s the damsel in distress I ran into at the gas station yesterday,” Gage said. “I got to play hero before Cam.”

“Uncle Cam gives off villain vibes,” Isla announced from her perch at the island.

“I do not,” I snarled.

Isla grinned. “Sinker.”

I made sure my mother was preoccupied covertly feeding Bentley under the table before Frisbeeing a pancake at my niece’s head.

“Hey!” Isla said as my brothers snickered.

Mom lasered in on me, and I smiled innocently.

“She seemed nice. I liked her,” Gage said, coming to my rescue. “Terrible driver but friendly and funny. Pretty too.”

“You must not have spent enough time with her,” I said into my coffee.

“You don’t think she’s attractive?” Levi baited me.

“I don’t find trouble attractive.”

“Bullshit,” my brothers said together.

“Darius said you yelled at her through half the tour,” Harrison cut in.

“It’s Uncle Cam’s love language,” Isla said.

“I did not, and I don’t have a love language. You’re both out of my will,” I said, pointing a fork at my pain-in-the-ass niece and nephew.

“I’m the good one,” Wesley announced with pride.

“Back to the job. If Hazel’s good for the money, are you good for the labor? No offense,” my sister added.

“Offended,” Levi complained.

“I’m serious,” Laura said. “Gigi is part-time construction and part-time lawyering. Dad’s pretty much retired from jobsites. Most of your recent jobs have been handyman-level projects.”

“I’m perfectly capable of putting in the hours on-site,” Dad began to argue.

It took one pointed look from Mom for him to throw it into reverse.

“But I don’t need to because I have you boys who I taught everything,” he added quickly.

“What’s the biggest job you guys have done lately?” Laura pressed.

“That basement renovation over in Park Lake was almost two thousand square feet,” Gage said.

My sister raised a sharp eyebrow. “And that was, what? Ten, eleven months ago?”

“We can handle the job, Larry,” I said, trying to hide my annoyance. “It’s nothing we haven’t done before. Besides, we worked on the place ten years ago, so we’re already familiar with the house.”

“I just hope you can keep the owner happy,” Laura said pointedly. “You know. Treat her with respect. Listen to her concerns. Don’t make her ring up and then bag her own groceries.”

“That’s an oddly specific example,” Dad noted. “Was she the whopper receipt from the store last night?”

“Did you seriously make a potential new client ring herself out?” Gage asked, looking appalled.

“Of course he didn’t,” Mom insisted. “I raised three gentlemen. And I’m sure Cam has been nothing but professional and courteous to Hazel Hart.”

It took everything I had not to squirm in my seat.

“I just gotta ask,” Gage said. “Have you met Cam, Mom?”

“I’m just saying, the last thing Bishop Brothers needs is to piss off a high-profile client with the most noteworthy house in town,” Laura said innocently. “If this job goes south and you have an unhappy famous client, everyone is going to hear about it.”

Bishop Brothers had been started by my grandfather and his brother before being handed down to my father and then to my brothers and me. The business had survived and sometimes even thrived for fifty years. But things had never been this lean before. On most issues, I couldn’t speak for my brothers. But on this we were all in agreement. We didn’t want to be the generation that put the nail in the coffin on the family business.

“No one is gonna be unhappy,” Levi promised.

“Except for Cam because he’s always unhappy,” Gage pointed out.

In my absence, Levi had stepped up to become the leader. His bond with Gage, the youngest, had deepened into something I almost envied. But I was back now and we all had to get used to it.

“I’m not unhappy. I just have resting dick face.”

My statement kicked off a spirited and occasionally inappropriate discussion of what exactly resting dick face entailed. Which left the topic of Hazel Hart exactly where I wanted it. Off the table.

My family looked at her and saw salvation. I looked at her and saw nothing but trouble. Trouble that had me spending the better part of the night tossing and turning thinking about her.

“Now, I need one of you to take in two kittens,” Mom announced.

We didn’t let her finish the sentence before interrupting her with a collective groan.

“Come on, people. It’s just for a few days until they’re dewormed. A week tops,” Mom said.

“Mom, I have a dog, two cats, four lizards, and that goddamn bunny you said was going to get adopted. I am drawing the line,” Laura said.

“Not it,” Gage insisted. “I had to drive two hours to the bird sanctuary last week to drop off that too-stupid-to-live purple finch that got caught in the landscape netting.”

“Sorry. My landlord has a strict no-pets policy,” I said.

“We’re your landlord, dummy,” Laura pointed out.

“Give ’em to Livvy. He has a whole cabin for them to destroy,” I pleaded.

“Sorry. I still have the chickens,” Levi said, casually reaching for another piece of bacon.

“You’ve had those chickens for a while now,” I noted with suspicion. Levi had gotten out of the last several rounds of Mom’s pathological animal fostering due to a pair of injured chickens he allegedly took off the hands of a stranger who found them on the side of the road.

“Yeah, has anyone else actually seen these chickens?” Laura demanded.

“You said they were asleep in the coop last time I stopped by,” Gage said accusingly to Levi.

“Oh my God. There were never any chickens, were there?” Laura screeched.

Throwing each other under the bus was the Bishop way. In the moment, I loved them all so much it physically hurt. Not that I would ever tell them that.

Instead, I went in for the kill with mock disbelief. “Did you build an entire chicken coop just to get out of taking in helpless animals, Livvy?”

“That’s diabolical, Uncle Levi,” Isla said.

“I don’t know where we went wrong, Frank. This is the paintball incident all over again, isn’t it?” Mom said.

Levi threw down his fork. “For fuck’s sake! I swear on Grandma Bernie’s lemon square recipe I did not shoot up that barn door.”

“Bullshit,” Gage and I said together.