Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
R ather than let the new tub go to waste, Bryan eventually dragged himself out of bed and ran the hottest bath he could stand to soak his wounded pride until long after the water went cold.
When the picketers got too loud with their chanting, he stood up, rivulets streaming down his chest, and shoved the brand-new double-hung window open, yelling, “ S -s-say it to my face, if you’re going to.”
They gawped at his bare chest and the tops of his hips, and then they started protesting again, so he slammed the window shut, drained the tub, and turned on the TV as loud as it would go.
He could drown out the real-time shouts, but he couldn’t drown their voices out of his head.
He barely got out of bed the next day, as though all the work and stress and sleepless nights were finally catching up and his body was shutting down. Lùcas came and pounded on the door, but he covered his head with a pillow, drifting in and out of fitful sleep. This wasn’t wallowing, it was self-care, he reasoned. He obviously needed the rest.
His cousin finally went away, only to come back later with Eòghann , who yelled through the bedroom window, threatening to break it. Bryan threw his pillow at the curtains and they both left again without making good on the threat.
On the third day, however, Cait proved herself the ultimate traitor, letting his cousins in with yet another spare key, while Bryan sat in his underwear staring into the soggy depths of a bowl of muesli.
“Didn’t she like the tub?” Lùcas asked with big grey-green eyes like a kicked puppy.
“No. But that wasn’t really the issue in the end,” he assured the lad when his face fell.
“What was, then?”
“Me. I said the wrong thing, like always.”
Which was fine, honestly, because he’d never wanted to fall for her. The sister of his old friend? Never a good idea. And a tourist, as well? Properly cliché for a reason. Bryan had known better from the moment he saw her on the beach, but somehow she’d wormed her way into his heart the same way she’d wormed her way into his home.
“The place looks grand, Bry ,” Eòghann said, looking around in breathless wonder.
“Bollocks. Wish I’d never started this mess.”
“Why not?” Lùcas asked with that same hang-dog expression.
“Seen the picketers? They’ll never accept me—or my distillery, either. Ought to have left well enough alone, left Cait to run her inn,” he added with a nod to his sister.
“Bollocks yourself,” Cait said. “ You think Grandad would’ve rested easy knowing strangers were trashing his house week in and week out? Every time I dropped off a new one, I was half-afraid he’d come back and haunt me for it. He left the place to you because he knew it would bring you home.”
Bryan scoffed and shook his head. He didn’t know why Grandad Mac had left the place to him, but he doubted it was to lure him back to the island.
“I’m not at all sure I should say it, but I can’t believe how much nicer you’ve made this old house. And Grandad would agree.”
His cousins nodded, and the knot in Bryan’s throat tightened. Praise from Cait was rare and usually couched in insult. He ought to savor it, bottle it up and store it for the open house, when kindness would surely be in short supply, but today he was in no place to hear soft words of affirmation.
“Don’t be daft. This house isn’t why I came home,” he told them.
“Why did you, then?” Lùcas asked.
Bryan glanced over at Eòghann , who tilted his head, waiting patiently for the answer.
“I abandoned you,” Bryan told his oldest cousin, his voice cracking at the admission. “ You , and everyone, just like Alec abandoned me—abandoned all of us.”
“No, you didn’t,” Eòghann said softly.
“I did. And it’s eaten away at me all these years until there was nothing left but raw edges and memories and shame. I wanted to make it up to you, and I didn’t know how. I didn’t even know how to pick up the phone and wish you happy birthday.”
Eòghann frowned at him like he was trying to smile but had forgotten how, and then suddenly he pulled Bryan into a fierce hug, like if he squeezed hard enough, Bryan wouldn’t feel guilty anymore. Then Cait closed in, rubbing Bryan’s arm hesitantly, and Lùc stood back awkwardly watching, as though all the adults had lost their minds.
Bryan took a shuddering breath. This , right here, was exactly why he’d come home.
“When the opportunity with Jules came up, I realized I had an idea, a good one, and I’d rather do it here among family than anywhere else surrounded by s-strangers. I guess maybe I wanted to prove to the island I’m not just a dumb little kid with a fantastical dream who dates everyone he meets, but a man with a vision for the future. I forgot I’d been gone so long that I’m the s-stranger now.”
“You don’t have anything to prove,” Cait said.
“I absolutely do.”
“Pish, no you don’t. But so we’re clear, mostly you came back because you missed me ,” Eòghann teased.
“Mostly.”
“And then you fell in love with a girl,” he added gently.
“More fool, me.”
“For Christ’s sake, Bry , why haven’t you said all this to the town?” Cait asked. “ Sure and it would get them on your side. I mean, not the part about the girl, that’s plain enough for everyone to see after the ceilidh.”
“When have they ever listened?” he asked, glancing towards the front of the house where he could still hear the muffled shouts of his picketing neighbors right through the stone walls.
Cait waved them away like they were no more than annoying midges. “ This is the first exciting thing they’ve had happen in a decade.”
Instead of irritating him as it would’ve done at seventeen, her unconcern eased the knot in Bryan’s stomach.
“You didn’t abandon me,” Eòghann said softly. “ I never felt you did. You left to become who you were meant to be. I know it, and they will too, if you let them see into this place. Let them see you, no mask, no walls.”
Bryan wasn’t so sure, but he’d always trusted Eòghann to know what was what—especially when it came to the island.
“Anything left to do here?” Lùcas asked.
“Aye,” Bryan told him, because he might as well finish what he’d started.
So Cait elicited a promise he’d come round for a vegetarian meal soon and then left his cousins to help him erect the new rainwater cistern behind some strategically placed shrubbery. Once filled by the next good rain, Bryan could switch over the utility, and the cistern would feed fresh water inside. With the greywater system complete, Grandad’s cottage would be fully off the grid.
Job done, Lùc and Eòghann tried to persuade him out to the pub, but he wasn’t in a mood for celebrating or socializing.
Instead, he stared down at a fresh document on his tablet, trying once more to form his thoughts into words that could turn picketers into supporters, a speech to welcome his investor and bring the town over to his side all in one go. It really needed to be some Aaron Sorkin –level shit.
He’d have liked to pick Grace’s brain. She had such a way with words, and she’d offered to help him on her way out the front door, but… well. What did it matter anyway?
The next time someone knocked, he shouted, “ Bugger off,” but they just kept on knocking. He really should install a doorbell camera with a rude prerecorded send off.
Finally, he threw open the door, surprised to find Wesley standing there, fist poised to hammer again, and he couldn’t help glancing behind and to either side of her in search of her shorter brunette bestie, but Wes had come alone. Even the picketers hadn’t yet assembled for the day.
“Forget your specs?” he asked, knowing full well there was no trace of either woman in his guest room, since he’d laid new floors in there the day before.
She shook her head. “ Can I come in for a dram?”
“At eight in the morning?”
Wes shrugged. “ It’s three a.m. where I’m from,” she said and sauntered inside, so Bryan finger-combed his hair and went to pour the whisky.
“Is she all right?” he allowed himself to ask calmly while his back was facing his guest.
“She’s a mess, actually, but she has been for a long time. That’s not on you.”
A fresh wave of guilt hit his belly, and he took a fortifying sip of Ardbeg . After all, it was probably five o’clock in Australia .
When he handed a glass to Wes , she lifted it in salute and said, “ Slàinte .”
“Slàinte mhath,” he replied, taking another sip.
“If it helps, she knows she overreacted.”
It didn’t, really, since they’d parted on friendly-ish terms, a mutual acknowledgment that things were coming to their natural conclusion. Tourists eventually go home—that’s their whole allure, and the biggest reason not to get involved.
“Are you really just going to let her go back to Tennessee ?” Wes asked.
“As opposed to kidnapping her and keeping her in my cellar?”
Wes grinned over her Glencairn glass.
“Did you convince her to celebrate her birthday?” he asked.
Her smile fell and she shook her head. “ I got her a present, but… in light of everything, I didn’t feel like I could bully her into my idea of how she should party. Not this year.”
An idea tickled in the back of Bryan’s head.
“I hate it, you know? I am a person who strongly believes in celebrating yourself as often as possible, and you only turn thirty once.”
“I think Cait turned thirty two or three times.”
Wes didn’t pause to laugh at his joke. “ She claims to hate birthday parties, and I get it. Some people don’t like fun. But the happiest I can remember seeing her was when we tricked her into having a twenty-first.”
“I turned thirty alone in a bad karaoke bar,” Bryan admitted. It had been grim.
Though he’d mostly known Grace with her nose to the grindstone, it was incongruous to picture her as someone who didn’t like fun. She’d resisted going out because of her deadline, but at the ceilidh she’d been lit up by the music and dancing. Why , her first night on Barra , he’d seen her cut loose at karaoke.
“She said she wanted a pinata,” he recalled. The tickle in his brain turning into a flood, pushing its way to the surface of his thoughts.
“Oh yeah,” Wes grinned.
He glanced at his tablet, which these days he mostly thought of as the library that held a single book by Gracie Rios .
“What?” Wes asked, drawing the word out, reading his face a little too easily.
“Do you know why she cancelled her quinceanera?”
Her brows pinched together, and she frowned. “ I didn’t know her then. After reading her book, I always assumed she had one. Are you sure?”
Bryan nodded, tears clogging his throat. “ There was an in-cident at school, and she fought with her dad, and… decided she didn’t deserve one.”
“And she’s been punishing herself ever since?” Wes asked, beginning to understand. “ That does sound like Gray .”
“Maybe it’s time we give her the quince she deserves?”
A slow smile spread across Wesley’s face. “ Well ,” she said, “ She’ll either love it or hate it.”
“Aye,” Bryan agreed. “ But we can’t do it alone.”
* * *
Bryan wasn’t the kind of person who asked for help easily. It was one thing to implore folk to save the planet by reducing their single-use plastics or planting flowers for the pollinators. But to ask for himself felt like an admission of failure.
As someone who’d grown up under the microscope of a speech impediment, where people held their breaths every time he opened his mouth, bracing for secondhand embarrassment, or else impatiently chivvied him along—he preferred grappling with his own challenges in solitude.
But there was no way he and Wes could plan a double quinceanera on their own in a few short days.
And so, he accepted Cait’s invitation to family tea and arrived hat in hand to ask for help from the people least likely to say no.
“What do you need us to do?” his mother asked, dishing out mouthwatering helpings of Parmesan aubergine.
“Any chance the shop could order a pinata in time?”
Her face fell. “ Not by Monday , love.”
Across the table, Sara bounced excitedly in her chair and Cait shushed her.
“Maybe Teàrlach could pick one up in Glasgow ?” Elspeth suggested, but Cait shook her head.
“He’s busy all week— Sara will you please sit still?”
“But I have something to say!” the little girl implored.
“Spit it out, then,” Auntie Eilidh encouraged her great-great niece, who grinned, suddenly shy.
“Sara?” Cait prompted.
With all eyes on her, Sara took a deep breath and drew herself up straight in her chair. “ I know how to make a pinata from papier-maché. We did them in school!”
“Did you?” Cait asked. “ I never saw it.”
Sam grinned. “?’ Cause she beat hers to pieces ’til there was nothing left.”
Tossing her brother a withering look, Sara replied, “ That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“Do you think you could make another?” El asked.
Sara nodded, giddy. “ Definitely , if you help me.”
“Well, that’s sorted,” Ma said with a nod. “ What about food? I’ve always wanted to try my hand at tamales.”
“That’d be grand, Ma ,” Bryan said, warmth flooding his chest and loosening the eternal tightness inside.
Auntie Eilidh was watching him shrewdly and seemed to notice his relief. “ Don’t worry,” she said. “ This family knows a thing or two about pulling off a grand affair.” She winked at Bryan’s father, who’d remained unusually quiet so far. “ And what about me? What role do I play? You know I love a spectacle,” Eilidh added.
Resisting every inclination to chastise his great aunt for lending the girls her old motorboat, while she sat there with a gleam in her eye practically daring him to, Bryan leaned forward and smiled. “ Auntie you have the most important job of all. I need you to pull off a miracle, but you’ve only got a week.”
She puffed up just as Sara had done. “ Who am I , Jesus ?” she scoffed. “ I’m a woman, young man. I’ll do it in half the time.”
Everyone burst out laughing, and as he dug into the plate of cheesy, saucy aubergine, Bryan found an appetite he hadn’t known for weeks. It may not be the quinceanera of Grace’s dreams, but she certainly wouldn’t forget it—or the Hebrides —any time soon. Maybe she’d decide to stay?
He batted that thought away. She had a life back in Tennessee , friends, a job. This was just his way of cementing their friendship, sending her off in style, that was all.
* * *
After the meal, Bryan stood in the back garden watching his niece and nephew run around with their dog, when his father approached carrying two glasses and an open bottle of Rionnagach .
“This is the finest dram I’ve ever tasted, Son ,” his father said in a gravelly voice. “ It’s yours?”
Bryan nodded, his own throat too clogged to reply.
Cameron poured them each a drink and held his up in toast. Bryan mirrored his father before wetting his parched throat with a sip.
“Would you like to use the community center for your shindig?”
It was a touching offer, but he’d imagined the party outside on the beach, and he was none too eager to set foot back inside the community center any time soon.
“Thanks, Da . But I was going to hold it out back of Grandad’s house.”
His father nodded. “ You should stop calling it that. It’s your place now.” He laughed a little sadly. “ Always was.”
The distance between them was palpable, but his father was trying to bridge it.
“He was always different with you than he was with me. Even when I was young.”
Bryan turned in surprise to study his father’s face and found it tense with grief and regret.
“If I was hard on you—about the stammer—it’s because that’s how he was with me. And I outgrew mine. I thought—feared—that you didn’t because with you he was always too soft.”
Standing there with his father, Bryan’s worldview titled sideways, like Uranus , spinning along with an unfamiliar view.
His father’d had a stammer?
“I was so afraid it would stop you living up to your potential, and you always showed so much potential. But I guess we just needed to get out of your way.”
Bryan shook his head, eyes watery, unable to speak.
Before turning to go back inside, his father cupped the back of Bryan’s neck, the closest they’d come to an embrace in decades.
“Tag, you’re it!” Sam shouted, tapping Bryan’s leg and darting away shrieking with delight, as Bryan set down his whisky glass and chased after the kids to peals of joyful barks and summer laughter.