Chapter 5
“Nice, so you and Gramps own your cottage as well?” Gram said, and maybe she didn’t feel the tension on the other side of the table. Wes knew his gramps was just doing his best to make conversation and also to secure food so that the two of them didn’t starve, but he hadn’t wanted them to know that they had money.
Of course, Birdie didn’t exactly look comfortable with his line of questioning either. He guessed that both of them had things that they didn’t want the other one to know.
Honestly, he wanted to be able to allow her to keep her secrets. But he also wanted to be able to keep his.
“We did. It’s pretty run down, and I’m sure you know it wasn’t that expensive.” That wasn’t entirely true. It wasn’t expensive compared to the other houses down near Strawberry Sands and Blueberry Beach where it was more industrialized and touristy. However, Raspberry Ridge was the next place those places would expand, and prices were going up.
He hadn’t even considered the bottom line, just bought the house because they needed it.
Still, the idea that she was a writer was interesting, and he wanted to talk more about that. Even if she couldn’t write his book for him, maybe she could help him with it.
“So how long have you been writing?” he asked, taking another bite and managing not to close his eyes and groan. This was the best food he’d had in a long time. Gram was definitely a good cook. And he didn’t want to stand in Gramps’s way if he was going to be able to get her to cook for them. He just didn’t want the entire world to know that he was here. But maybe once he got to know Birdie, he could tell her who he was. If she was going to help him with his story, he was going to have to admit his identity or act like he was writing a biography of a current professional hockey player.
“I’ve been writing all my life. I wrote little short poems when I was a kid, and... Yeah. I just do more short form than books.”
“I see.” Maybe she wouldn’t be a help after all. “If you’d like to spend some time writing together, we could meet on the beach at some point. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been struggling with a major case of writer’s block.” A block that had never been removed, since he had never been very good at writing.
“That’s funny. I’ve been struggling with writer’s block myself.” She paused, pushing the chicken that she had cut up around on her plate. He hadn’t seen her take more than one bite. Not that he was paying a lot of attention, she just...seemed skinny. “I wouldn’t mind meeting on the beach and trying to write.”
“Maybe I can give you some ideas for yours, and you can give me some ideas for mine.”
“Maybe we could.”
They were all quiet for a few minutes, but Wesley barely noticed. He didn’t think he was wrong that Birdie would rather they not know, but she also seemed...familiar, in a haunting kind of way. He almost had a visceral reaction to her, which was unusual for him. Typically he avoided people, ducking away from them, not trying to look under the surface of the person he was talking to and figure them out. But that’s how he felt about Birdie. Like there was a lot there, and he wanted to uncover it.
He tried to tell himself that there would be plenty of time for him to get to know her, since they were going to be meeting on the beach to write together.
“How long are you guys planning on staying? Is it your permanent home?” Gramps asked, scooping out his second helping of chicken divan.
“We’re not to be here any later than the end of September,” Gram said, and she sounded a little cagey. “What about you guys? How long am I going to be baking pies for you?” She added a little bit of humor to it, and it took some of the interrogation out of the question, but Wesley still felt like she was digging for information.
“We’re only here until the end of September. Maybe less. We’ll see,” Gramps said.
“I would think that it would be pretty rough here in the winter, although it might be fun to be snowed in,” Wes added to the conversation, although he knew that as long as he was playing hockey, there was no way he was going to be able to be here during the winter, not during the season.
“What kind of pies do you like to make?” Gramps asked Gram, taking another roll to go along with his second helping of chicken.
“I always make whatever fruit is in season. Right now, it’s blueberry season here in Michigan, and the beginning of apple season.”
“I love apple pies,” Wesley interjected, figuring that if Gramps had seconds, he might as well too. Birdie was still pushing around the first chicken she’d gotten on her plate, and she’d broken her roll in half, but she hadn’t eaten anything.
“I’ll have to make sure you get plenty. The later apples are the better apples for pies. These first apples are great for applesauce and for just eating.”
“You sound like you know a little bit of something about apples.”
“I come from a family of farmers, and we had an orchard growing up.”
“Where was that?” Gramps asked, sounding truly interested. Gramps had grown up on a farm as well, so that was probably where his interest came.
“The Ozarks. We have an apple down there called the Ozark Black. It’s a dark red apple, deep, with a very tart taste. It makes delicious pies. I doubt I’ll see it this far north,” Gram said, taking a sip of her water. “But I can probably make fair to middlin’ pies with whatever I can find around here.”
“What about pumpkin?” Wes asked, thinking of his second favorite pie.
“Pumpkin pies, minced meat pies, raspberry, strawberry, apple, blueberry, even sweet potato pies.”
“My favorite are your potpies. The savory ones.” Birdie spoke up. She hadn’t said anything since they talked about her writing and how long they were going to be staying. That’s when Birdie had clammed up, like she didn’t want any of that information to get out.
Pies seemed like a safe subject, and one that Gramps enjoyed anyway.
“We’ll make some of those too. I haven’t forgotten that you love those.”
“She makes them with cream, and they’re so good.”
“The secret ingredient is celery seeds. I’ll swear by it. Even though most people wrinkle their noses when I tell them that.”
“And thyme. You put thyme in them too. ”
“I wasn’t going to tell them about that secret ingredient,” Gram said, a little huffy, and Wesley almost believed that she had been going to keep that from them, like Gramps would have any idea of what thyme was or how to use it in a potpie.
“Sorry,” Birdie said, grinning a bit, but her cheeks got red.
Gram had given her a look, and some kind of communication passed between the two women. If Wesley had to guess, he’d say that Birdie was saying “you had given away some of my information, but I didn’t mean to give away any of yours,” and Gram had forgiven her.
“After supper, Birdie and I are heading to church. It will be our first time there. But you’re welcome to join us. I’m sure the whole community is welcome.”
“That seems to be the thing with churches. They’re always trying to get new members.”
“They help bring in money,” Gramps said, and he didn’t exactly sound bitter, but he did sound a little annoyed. Wesley tried not to cringe. The church had not been very good to him when his wife died. They brought a couple of meals and basically said “she was a great woman, see you later.”
Wesley wasn’t quite sure what exactly Gramps expected the church to do, but he expected a little bit more than a casserole and a wave.
Regardless, maybe it was just grief over Gram that had gotten Gramps bitter, but it was there.
“You can have your opinion if you want, but I’ve heard the church in Raspberry Ridge is quite good. They just got a new pastor, and he’s pretty enthusiastic.” Birdie pushed her chicken around again, looking back down at her plate after she spoke.
It was almost as though she didn’t want him to look into her eyes. Again, she felt familiar to him.
“I’d really like to go, but probably not tonight. We weren’t really planning on it, and Gramps has some things he wanted to finish in the cottage,” Wesley said. He actually did want to go and planned to on Sunday, but Wednesday night church seemed a little bit much.
“The cinnamon rolls are done,” Gram announced as the buzzer on the stove went off.
“And I think it’s perfect timing, since it looks like everybody’s cleaned their plate, except for Birdie,” Gramps said, seeming to be grateful for the change of subject. He probably was. Church was not on his list of things he was happy about currently .
Wesley figured he would get over it, although honestly, Wesley had had enough of his own problems that he hadn’t been thinking about Gramps’s issues. He probably hadn’t been as good to his grandpa after Gram died as he could have been. He had his own grief to handle.
Gram pulled two pans of cinnamon rolls out of the oven. “One of these is for supper, and one of these is for you guys to take home. I wasn’t going to send them home unless you gave me my pie pan back. We have a small amount of space and not a whole lot of pans to go around.”
“I’ll bring you every pan in our cottage if you keep sending goodies like blueberry pie and cinnamon rolls home.”
“All right. It’s a deal,” Gram said easily.
She seemed just as friendly and talkative as Birdie was not. A lot of times, the talkative ones got the attention. Low-hanging fruit, so to speak. But since her only competition was a seventy-year-old grandmother, his eyes seemed to be drawn back to Birdie. Did he know her from somewhere?
They ate the cinnamon rolls with a little bit of vanilla ice cream, and it was the perfect summer dessert. He could have gotten full just on the cinnamon rolls. But as a professional athlete, he knew he couldn’t eat junk and expect his body to perform at peak levels, so he limited himself to two helpings.
The pan was cool enough for him to hold in his hands as he and Gramps walked away from the cottage less than a half an hour later. They didn’t want to stay and keep the ladies from going to church.
“That lady can cook,” Gramps said, and that was a huge compliment coming from him, considering that he considered his late wife the best cook of all time.
“I can’t argue with you there. I ate so much I feel like I’m gonna pop.”
“Same here. I think I ate just as much as you did, and that’s pretty unusual.”
“I think you ate more.”
“Do you think Birdie was her given name?”
Wesley shrugged. “You said it was unusual, and she just kind of brushed you off. But I was wondering if it was a nickname, or something else.”
“You should ask about it.”
“Yeah. Maybe I’ll ask her tomorrow when we meet on the beach.” They had made those plans as they went out the door, that he’d be on the beach at one if she wanted to meet with him. She was there when he got back from his swim, and he thought that maybe she did it on a regular basis in the afternoon, although he hadn’t noticed.
Mostly he took the swims in the morning, but today he’d decided to take two. Not just in anticipation of the idea that he would probably be eating more than he normally did, but because he had been a little bit on edge about meeting people and worrying about whether he was going to be recognized or not. Not that it exactly mattered. Two ladies in a cottage were not going to be a problem, but if they decided that they wanted to sell pictures to the paparazzi... And there was always the chance that they would read the negative stories about him and have an opinion that would make being neighbors with them awkward.
The papers were usually wrong in what they said, but he didn’t typically have a chance to correct it. They had a microphone, and he didn’t. Not unless he wanted to interrupt one of his press conferences and refute them, which he had never done. Although it had been tempting at times.
Sometimes though, the things that the papers printed were accurate.
In the case of what he had done after his grandma died, they had been.
It wasn’t that he was proud of it.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to church? We didn’t really have anything planned, although you do have some work you said you wanted to finish up.”
“You can go if you want to, kiddo. I’m not going to. Not today.”
That was a step forward. He hadn’t shut the door on ever going again, like he had back home in Virginia.
Wesley took heart, and as much as he wanted to go to church just to see Birdie again and see if he could recognize where he knew her from, he decided that his questions could wait until tomorrow or some other time. There was no point in pushing things. After all, once he knew who she was, she would know who he was, and he wasn’t sure if he was ready for that.