CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Naomi
It was Saturday evening, and like we did every May after the opening day of the tasting room, we celebrated with a big family pizza party.
We always invited the staff too, held it in the tasting room and on the patio, and cranked the tunes.
“So, Damon,” Tom asked, biting into a piece of vegetarian pesto pizza. “How was your day yesterday with Mabel?”
Everyone went quiet and turned to my nephew. His cheeks pinked up a little, but they faded just as quickly, and he shrugged and sipped from his can of flavored sparkling water. “Fine.”
“I’ve been so consumed with opening day that I totally forgot to ask yesterday,” Gabrielle said, swirling her index finger around the rim of her glass of rosé. “I did notice that you finished your schoolwork faster than normal.”
“She helped me with some math,” Damon murmured, tossing his head so his floppy, brown hair bobbed over his forehead.
I really didn’t understand the current hairstyles of today’s teenage boys.
I’d seen a meme a few months ago that depicted a male deer rummaging around in the dense low brush, only to pop his head up, and his antlers were full of leaves and twigs.
It said that was what boys’ hairstyles currently resembled. It wasn’t wrong.
My son was guilty of it too; despite his numerous cowlicks, his hair was poker-straight. He didn’t get the volume, or curl and flip at the front the way Damon did.
“Then you went birdwatching?” Maverick asked, amusement dancing in his blue eyes.
Damon nodded. “Yeah.”
“Did you see many birds?” Danica asked. “Besides robins and sea gulls?”
“She says we did.” His nose wrinkled in a cute way, and he did another hair flip.
“We were walking through the trees over there,” he pointed southeast to indicate the copse of madronas, alders, and oaks near the edge of the property just past my cottage, “and she stopped and studied something on a tree. Then she turned to me and asked if I ever just paused and marveled at the complexity of lichen.”
“Lichen?” Maverick asked with a serious upward inflection to his tone.
Damon nodded again, one eyebrow trying to escape his forehead. “Yeah. She went on to explain how it’s a phenomenon of nature. A symbiotic relationship between a fungus and algae, and that it can grow just millimeters a year. She pointed at a piece on the tree and asked me how old I thought it was.”
My cousins and I all exchanged looks and smirked.
“What did you say?” Jagger asked. “Now I’m invested. I need to know how old this lichen was.”
Raina swatted his chest playfully.
Damon gave us all a bit of a helpless look. “Well, I didn’t want to look like a total idiot. So I said that yeah, I do think about lichen, but maybe not as much as I should. And I guessed that the piece she was pointing at was maybe twenty years old.”
Tom, Maverick, and Jagger chuckled.
“Good answer, good answer,” Maverick said. “Non-committal, but not a lie.” He scratched his chin. “Maybe I should start thinking about lichen more. It is a pretty cool part of nature.”
Gabrielle rolled her eyes.
“But you also birdwatched?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Yeah. She really likes birds. Knows the Latin names for every single one we saw.”
It was plain as day to see that despite how awkward I was sure their little outing together was, Damon was smitten with Mabel.
He was impressed with her intelligence and passion for birds.
I knew my nephew well enough to tell that he probably went home after they parted ways and Googled the heck out of lichen, and probably the birds they saw too.
“You’re not boyfriend and girlfriend, are you?” Maverick asked.
Damon shook his head. “She said we’re too young for that.”
Gabrielle smiled and also seemed relieved.
“She said that for now, we should focus on becoming good friends. That maybe in the future, when we’re older and more mature, if we feel that way about each other, we can discuss dating. But for now, she says she’s not interested in anything beyond friendship with me.”
“Damn,” Maverick said. “That girl is eloquent and knows what she wants.”
“It actually takes a lot of pressure off,” Damon added. “I’m cool with just being friends. The idea of more terrified me.”
I smiled at my nephew’s honesty. It seemed that not only was Mabel introducing him to the flora and fauna of the island, but she was also helping him explain and understand his feelings better. As well as discuss them openly with his family.
Women really were powerful creatures.
The conversations in our little party moved on to other topics as we all laughed, filled our bellies with pizza, and reflected on the expected chaos that came with opening day.
There were always hiccups on opening day.
We’d never gone a year without one.
This year’s hiccup was that our POS system wasn’t working properly.
For whatever reason, the sales of everything from a bottle of wine to a flight of glasses weren’t going through.
It took Maverick and Damon three hours to sort it out.
Luckily, Raina was able to set up a quick QR code, and people were able to pay via a payment app instead.
It wasn’t ideal, but it meant we didn’t lose out on any sales.
I was on my third slice of pizza—well-deserved after I skipped breakfast and lunch today—and chatting with Amy about a few things I wanted her to focus on as assistant manager, when her eyes darted to the front door behind me and a cute, knowing smile curled her mouth.
Nosy as hell, I glanced over my shoulder to find Lennox standing there.
Maverick, Tom, and Jagger surrounded him, shaking his hand and welcoming him, but his eyes found mine and ignited a pleasant heat in my lower belly.
Gabrielle bumped my shoulder. “You’ve got company,” she whispered.
My heart did a little pitter-patter as he broke free from the guys and came toward me. Instantly, he looped his arm around my waist and pecked me on the side of the head. “How’d opening day go?” he asked.
I grinned up at him, a little breathless just from being in his orbit. Was this what it felt like to truly fall for someone? To get this winded and giddy when they walked through the door?
“We never have an opening day without a glitch or two, but all in all, it went well.”
“That’s good.”
“Mabel here?” I glanced around to see if she’d found her way over to Damon, but Lennox shook his head. “No. She has requested that for the next three days she see only me and birds.”
My brows narrowed. “Did something happen?”
He heaved a small sigh and thanked Raina, who had placed a half-glass of merlot in his hand. “She confronted Jolene at the farmers market today.”
It was like a record scratched; the entire room went quiet. Someone even dropped the volume of the music.
Then he told us what had happened and how Mabel had marched right up to The Island Mouth and told her to leave them alone. She even called her “The Island Mouth” to her face, which made more than a few of us gasp and snicker.
“Woman seemed shocked that that is her nickname,” he said.
Gabrielle and Jagger snorted.
“Oh, she knows,” Jagger said. “She’s just playing dumb.”
Heads bobbed.
“But we’re hoping now that Jolene has met Mabel, she will leave us alone.”
Faces around the room didn’t seem convinced.
Neither was I. The fact that Jolene asked Mabel her father’s age, and it didn’t sound like Mabel told her, meant that The Island Mouth would just keep digging until she got what she wanted.
She was relentless in her quest for gossip, which she called “information for the good of the island.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Danica said softly.
“That’s my fear,” Lennox confirmed. “I’m proud of my kid either way though. She drew a bit of a crowd telling that old biddy off.”
Jagger snorted again. “I’m sure she did. I would have paid good money to see that.”
Lennox squeezed my elbow and tilted his head to the side. “Can we go outside and talk for a sec?”
Fear ran cold and hurried steps through me. Was he breaking things off?
Nodding, I finished my wine for some liquid courage, and we excused ourselves, stepping out into the warm evening breeze. He laced his fingers through mine as we aimlessly wandered off toward my cottage, the walkway lit up with strings of solar lights to guide the way.
He wouldn’t hold my hand if he planned to break up with me, right? I was just paranoid. A total noob at this dating thing, and expecting every “talk” to be the “last talk.” I needed to give the guy a bit more credit. Clearly something was bugging him and he just wanted to speak about it in private.
I told my nerves to calm down and let him explain.
“Dawn called me yesterday,” he said, after a couple of minutes of just the frogs, crickets, and our shoes on the gravel filling the silent space between us.
“Everything okay?”
“Kyla has moved out of Florida.”
Oh shit.
“What does that mean?”
“Apparently, she was unable to get a job in Tallahassee. Her sister in Cedar Bluff, Alabama, runs a salon and offered Kyla a place to live and work. So she’s moving to Cedar Bluff.
She’ll get a new PO and have to report to them.
Dawn is worried that Kyla being out of state will make it tougher for us to keep tabs on her.
Dawn had a good relationship with Kyla’s current PO.
She has a lot of contacts in the justice system and knows who to call to get information.
Those connections don’t extend outside of Florida though. ”
“You think she’ll stay in Cedar Bluff?”
“I have no idea.” He raked his free hand through his hair, causing his biceps to bulge beneath his black T-shirt.
His sigh held all kinds of worry, and I was sure he wasn’t sleeping very well knowing his abuser and the mother of his child was out there in the world.
“I actively tried not to get to know this woman during the seven years she … Anyway, I have no clue how her mind works.”
“Right. That’s fair. Does Mabel know?”