Chapter Five #2
“She belongs to the whole town?”
He considered that for a moment. “I wouldn’t say she belongs to the whole town. It’s more like the whole town belongs to her.”
“Who takes care of her, though?”
“Everybody. She’s spayed, and there’s always a collection jar at the market for people to drop in change.
It adds up pretty quickly and takes care of her routine medical care.
If she needs a little extra, more jars go out with a note from the vet detailing what she needs.
Like, recently she had a procedure to have a lump checked out, which is expensive.
And there are folks who feed their own cats on their porches and Dolly has a rotation of who she visits, and she gets her preventatives every month with a little tuna from old Bob. ”
“What about during the winter?” She started walking again—Nick really did have to get back to work—and so did Dolly.
“She’s got plenty of places to go, and during a bad cold spell, she usually goes to the Bergeron house.
They’ve got a dog door for their pair of goldens, and the Bergerons will wake up to find Dolly curled up with the dogs.
” He nudged Lucy with his elbow and took her attention away from the cat in time to keep her from walking into a sign.
“And in the summer,” he continued, “you can tell when a storm’s going to be a bad one because she always goes to Edna’s. She lost her husband years ago when a tree fell on him during a wicked storm, and I think Dolly knows she needs the comfort.”
“She’s a lucky cat.”
“We’re a lucky town. Dolly has some kind of relationship with almost everybody here, and if she doesn’t like you? You might not be our kind of people.”
Lucy stopped at the edge of the market’s parking lot. “So if I don’t pass the scrutiny of a stray cat, the good people of Wayward Harbor won’t like me?”
“I wouldn’t lead with calling her a stray.”
“I’m already Iris Macauley’s daughter. What chance do I have if Dolly doesn’t like me?”
“None really. You’d probably just have to put all your stuff back in your car and head on down the road.”
When she laughed, he laughed with her, and the impact of the low, warm sound made her start walking again so she wouldn’t stare at him. The man really needed to laugh more often because it was incredibly sexy.
Lucy made quick work of grabbing the things she needed at the market. Usually, she liked to wander through stores, looking for anything that might strike her fancy in the moment, but with Nick hovering next to her like a rain cloud, she kept to the things she’d come for.
They’d barely gone ten feet from the door when a woman grabbed her arm. “Hey, are you going to the—”
When Lucy turned her head to look at the woman, she gasped and retracted her hand.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were—” The woman paused, the quick shake of her head not clearing the confusion wrinkling her forehead. “Somebody else. Sorry.”
“No problem.” The woman was moving before she could say anything else, though she did look over her shoulder once.
“Let’s go,” Nick said, sounding tense again as he frowned at the departing woman, which Lucy didn’t understand. Stuff like that happened to people all the time. “I actually do have to go back to work.”
Once they’d gotten back to the truck and were on the road, Lucy got tired of the silence. The man needed to turn his radio on. “What kind of work are you doing on the cottage, anyway?”
“Nothing major, except for the small bedroom and the back deck. The original structure only had the one bedroom, like a box, I guess. It was built to last, and it has. The second bedroom is an addition put on shortly before your grandparents bought it, built by somebody who probably didn’t make his living as a builder. ”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
He shrugged. “The hard part was already done. A friend of your grandparents jacked up the addition and put a proper footing under it. He reframed the window, and Helen had professionals come in and fix the way the roof tied into the main cottage. Unfortunately, her friend passed away with some loose ends left undone, and I’m taking care of them. ”
“That’s nice of you.”
“We take care of our neighbors around here.”
“The ones Dolly approves of, anyway.”
“Of course.”
“What are you doing to the back deck?” she asked.
“You might have noticed, when we grilled outside, that it’s not in great shape and the steps are pretty much a hazard? I’m going to rebuild the deck and steps, but also add a ramp off the end.”
“Does Gran need a ramp? I thought she was running 5ks.”
“She doesn’t need a ramp right now and maybe she won’t. But it doesn’t hurt to add one while I’m doing the work. Plus, when she puts stuff in the shed for the winter, she can use a dolly and roll it down the ramp rather than carrying things down the steps.”
She nodded, relieved. “I bet I can help with building a deck.”
To her surprise, he didn’t scoff at her. Instead, he appeared to think about it for a minute. “There will probably be times I could use a hand. Add checking in the shed to see if Helen has any work gloves that’ll fit you to your list.”
“What list?”
Nick glanced over at her, but only for a second because the shoreline—and therefore the road—was particularly curvy. “Your list. You know, your ongoing list of things you need to do and buy and take care of in general.”
She shrugged. “Okay.”
“You don’t have a list, do you?”
“That can’t be a surprise to you.” When he snorted, she laughed. “Just like it’s not a surprise to me that you do have a list. Probably plural. I bet you have multiple lists.”
When he didn’t respond to that, she laughed again. They were pulling into Gran’s drive, so she gathered her phone and her bag.
“I can grab the groceries, so you don’t have to get out,” she said as he pulled to a stop. “I know you’re already late getting back to work.”
“I’ll run them in, and you can put them away,” he told her.
Since she was in the driveway already, Lucy took the time to walk out to the end and grab Helen’s mail. She’d put the junk mail in recycling and the important stuff in a basket on the bookshelf where Nick had been putting it.
He was on his way out when she passed him. “Have a good rest of your day. And thank you.”
He stopped with his hand on his truck’s door handle. “For what?”
She smiled. “For getting me out from under the blankets.”
The smile he gave her in return was like the sun breaking through a dense morning fog. A real smile, with white teeth and crinkling eyes that made it hard for her to breathe. “Anytime.”
And when she walked inside, the first thing she saw was a sheet of paper stuck to the front of the fridge with one of Gran’s magnets. House List it said across the top. And under that, in neat block letters: Find Lucy some gloves.