Chapter 6 #2
Piper makes a strangled sound and turns red. “I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay.” I crouch to Hazel’s level. She smells like grass and grape lollipop. “I do have a story. But it’s a long one, and your dad’s right. Some questions are for later.”
She nods, solemn as a judge. “Okay. But you have to promise to tell me sometime. I’m a good listener. Daddy says so.”
“She is,” Colter confirms. “Better than most adults.”
Hazel tugs my sleeve. “Do you know Great Uncle Dean?”
Great Uncle Dean?
I look toward the doorway, where Dean is standing with Henry. Same height. Same set to the shoulders. Same eyes.
Oh.
Not Haven eyes, after all. Kinsella eyes.
Dean was Henry Haven’s little brother. Not a family friend the Havens absorbed somewhere along the way. Not a cousin, not an in-law.
Brother.
The age gap explains a lot. Dean was born into a family that already had a nephew his age. He grew up an uncle before he was old enough to understand what the word meant.
Henry must have taken his wife’s name when they married.
“He’s the greatest,” Hazel continues, oblivious to the fact I haven’t answered. “That’s why he’s Great Uncle Dean and not just Uncle Dean.” She delivers this as established fact. “Uncle Knox is good too, but he’s not here all the time.” A pause. “Don’t tell Uncle Knox. It would hurt his feelings.”
“Our other brother, Knox, is in Montana,” Colter explains, straightening. “Fire season started early. He’s been out on a line in the Bitterroot going on three weeks.”
“Is that bad?” I ask.
“It’s not good.” Shea says it without turning from the stove, and her voice has gone careful in a way it wasn’t a minute ago. “He called Tuesday. Sounded like he’d swallowed a campfire.”
“He always sounds like that,” Colter says.
“He didn’t used to.”
Nobody answers that. Mimi bangs a pot lid down harder than she needs to, and the conversation moves, but I notice Shea checks her phone twice in the next five minutes. Screen down on the counter, face up, screen down again.
Hazel hands me a stack of mismatched plates and marches me into the dining room like a small conscripting officer.
Photographs cover the walls. Generations of them. In the biggest frame, a dark-haired woman stands beside a younger Henry, laughing at something outside the shot.
“That’s Grandma Lana,” Hazel says. “She’s in heaven. But we still talk to her at dinner so she doesn’t get lonely.”
“We always set a place for Mom,” Wren adds.
“Used to weird me out when friends came over. I was pretty young when she died, and always thought it was embarrassing to have a dead mother. Now?” She lifts a shoulder, lets it drop.
“I don’t know. I get it, I guess. She was the love of Dad’s life.
We could all be so lucky to find that someday. ”
What would it have been like to have a mother like Lana Haven, a woman so loved that she still had a place at the dinner table years after she died?
I don’t know.
I think of my mother’s voice on a speakerphone, the noise of an airport lounge behind her as she tells me she’d try for the recital but couldn’t promise. I think of the nannies. Ilse, then Marta, then the one whose name I’ve genuinely lost.
I look up at Lana’s portrait again. “She was beautiful.”
“Yeah.” Wren nods, and there’s a softness in her that wasn’t there a second ago. “Dad says she had this laugh that could stop a room. And she was mean about it too. Like, she’d wait for the worst possible moment and just—bam.” She snaps her fingers. “Ruin whatever serious thing was happening.”
“I like her already.”
“Everybody did.” Wren adjusts another fork. “Except the Merricks, I guess. But that’s a whole other thing.”
I open my mouth to ask about that, but the front door opens, and a man strides in with a laptop under one arm and a tie pulled loose. The room’s temperature drops a few degrees. He has the same eyes as the rest of them and a jaw wound tight enough to crack a molar.
“Bodhi.” Shea turns from the stove, wiping her hands on her apron. “You’re late.”
“Dock permits. Again.”
“They denied you?” Dean asks.
“Delayed. Which is denial with more paperwork.” He drags a hand through his hair. “I’ve got until Thursday to file an appeal, or we lose south shore docking until next season.”
“That’s Malcolm.”
“I’m aware. He’s burying us in paperwork until we go out of business.”
“You should take him to court,” Wren suggests. “Fight him.”
Bodhi turns on her, and the kitchen goes very quiet.
“Take him to court.” He repeats it flat. “With what money, Wren? The diner’s barely breaking even. The bookstore’s in the red. Colter’s running the farm on a shoestring. The ferry and tours are carrying us, but if these dock permits fail, we’re fucked.”
She shoots a look at her oldest sister. “But Shea said the bed and breakfast—”
“Will close if we don’t have a good tourist season this year.
Which we won’t if we don’t have the dock permits to ferry the tourists into our businesses.
” He doesn’t raise his voice, which somehow makes it worse.
“And you’d know that if you showed up to a single one of the family business meetings I’ve been emailing you about for three months. ”
Wren’s phone disappears into her back pocket, and her chin comes up. “I’ve been busy.”
“Busy.” Bodhi sets his laptop down on the sideboard with a careful click that says more than shouting would.
“Doing what, exactly? You’ve changed your major twice, dropped out of the community college program Shea got you into, and now you’re—what?
Baking cookies at the diner three mornings a week and calling it a career? ”
The air in the kitchen turns thick enough to cut.
Wren’s jaw sets. Her arms cross, and the phone in her back pocket buzzes once, twice, but she doesn’t reach for it. “I’m figuring it out.”
“Figure it out faster. Everyone’s pulling their weight around here but you.”
“Bodhi,” Henry snaps in what I can only assume is his dad voice. “Enough. We have company.”
That’s when Bodhi finally sees me.
His gaze snaps to me and stops, and for a second I’m not sure he’s recognized me at all. Then something clicks behind his tired eyes, and his jaw tightens another notch.
He looks past me at Dean with a look that says, clear as a headline, what the hell is she doing in my kitchen?
Dean tips his head, barely, toward Mimi, who is at this moment gesturing with that wooden spoon and informing Colter that if he touches the dumplings before she’s ready, she’ll break his fingers.
Bodhi’s jaw works.
Dean lifts one shoulder. What was I supposed to do?
So Bodhi told Dean to keep me away from the family. I’m not going to lie, the fact he failed and will likely get bitched out by Bodhi later gives me a little tingle of pleasure.
Serves the grumpy bastard right.
Bodhi exhales through his nose and turns back to his sister. “I’m sorry, Wren. I’ve had a shit day. Wasn’t fair to take it out on you.”
Wren stays stubbornly silent for a second, then sighs. “Don’t apologize for caring. I know you’re trying to keep us all afloat.”
And then she crosses the kitchen and throws her arms around his neck, and he catches her, and for a second neither of them says anything at all.
I stare.
Ninety seconds ago he told her she was baking cookies and calling it a career, in front of a stranger, and now she’s got her face in his shoulder and he’s holding on like she’s the one who needed it.
In my family, that argument would have lasted through Christmas.
Two Christmases. My mother could hold a grudge across a decade and three time zones, and she never once apologized for anything, because apologizing meant admitting there had been something to apologize for.
And at that lunch table this afternoon, Malcolm said one word to his daughter—Cordelia—and Corey drained her wine and didn’t speak again for twenty minutes.
Nobody here is keeping score. They said the ugly thing, and then they put it down.
I didn’t know you were allowed to do that.
Bodhi releases her, rubs his temples with his fingers, and his shoulders drop an inch. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days.
“Bodhi Haven,” he says, turning to me with a hand extended. “You must be Scarlett Crawford.”
“Guilty as charged.” I take his hand. His grip is firm, his palm calloused, which surprises me. For a man who runs the business side of things, he has the hands of someone who works with them.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” I say, because it’s true, and because I want to see if he flinches.
He doesn’t. “I’m sure you have.” His smile is polite and doesn’t reach his eyes. “Malcolm’s been talking about bringing a reporter out here for a while. I just didn’t expect you’d end up at our dinner table.”
“That was my fault,” Mimi announces, materializing at my elbow with a ladle. “I invited her. So if you have a problem, Bodhi, you take it up with me.”
Bodhi looks at Mimi with equal parts respect, affection, and frustration. “I don’t have a problem, Mimi.”
“Good. Because the stew’s ready—”
The screen door bangs again.
He has the same blue-gray eyes as the rest of them, but his are different—they see through walls, maybe even through me.
The hair is trimmed tight against his scalp, dark as oil, and his jaw looks like it’s been carved out of stone by someone in a hurry and left to set that way.
He wears black: black shirt stretched over lean muscle, black cargo pants, and boots that have seen better days.
He doesn’t linger on anyone. First, his gaze sweeps the corners and shadows of the room, checking for threats.
Then, and only then, does he size up the people.
He never unclenches his jaw. That, more than anything, sets my nerves on edge.
There’s something behind his stare, something coiled, and it makes the back of my neck prickle.
Mimi crosses the kitchen, reaches up, and takes his face between both hands. She doesn’t say anything. Just holds on. His shoulders come down half an inch. He leans into her palms for one second, maybe less, then steps back.
“Hey, stranger,” she says.