Chapter Ten
Is anybody missing a dog? Looks like a shorthair breed mixed with a husky maybe? No collar. Very skittish and not friendly at all. We had a hard time getting him in the crate and had to use meat to trap him. Please spread the word because he’s very unhappy.
—Wayward Harbor Online Community Group
Eight days later, Lucy was such a tangled mess of nerves that, if her nerves were yarn, even the most experienced and frugal knitter would toss the skein and knit something else.
Helen was only one day into her two-week cruise, and Lucy hadn’t anticipated how much anxiety she’d have about her grandmother being on a floating resort out in the ocean.
She didn’t know what was going on with Nick.
Since the night they’d come very close to crossing the line from kissing to making out in her bedroom, he seemed to have retreated back across the friend zone line.
There was laughing and joking and conversation, but he hadn’t initiated another kiss, and she wasn’t brave enough to do it.
The whispers and looks around Wayward Harbor, especially at the Keel, weren’t dying down.
If anything, there were more, and she didn’t understand that.
The Las Vegas thing should definitely be dying down, and since Iris hadn’t followed her daughter to town, it felt as if people should be getting over Lucy’s last name by now.
And she was about to serve her “fancy shots,” as Billy called them, to ten obviously wealthy women on the deck. They were friendly enough, but clearly used to the best, and Lucy wanted desperately to deliver.
The shot had three layers—from the bottom up Kahlúa, then Bailey’s Irish Cream carefully tinted a pale blue, and at the top, a more intense blue made of blue curacao and vodka—resembling the beach, the ocean and the sky.
She set each shot glass on its own little saucer of sand.
Billy had grumbled about buying play sand when they lived on the ocean, but she’d curtly told him that good old Maine sand was full of bugs and bacteria and who knew what else, which shut him up.
The little shells she’d collected and cleaned with Nick.
When she’d explained what they were for, he’d taken the task seriously, and the shells were perfect.
She used tweezers to set a tiny floating candle in the center of each shot. Then, when she’d signaled Mattie and gotten the nod to indicate she was free to carry a tray, Lucy lit each candle and took a picture with her phone for her digital scrapbook.
Luckily, it was a still night, with no wind to blow out the candles. She’d obsessed over the weather forecast so much Nick had threatened to take her phone away, but Mother Nature had cut her a break.
Lucy and Mattie carried the two trays out to the deck and set a saucer in front of each woman. Their gasps and the way they scrambled for their phones to take pictures earned Lucy a smile from Mattie before she took the empty trays and went back to her customers.
“Get one of all of us, please,” the hostess said, handing over her phone.
Lucy took a deep breath and took a step back so she could fit them all in the frame. “This is a wish from all of us at the Uneven Keel, that all of you have a magical, wonderful summer. Now, three…two…”
She was ready when they blew out the candles and captured more of them laughing and clapping.
After setting down the phone, Lucy quickly and efficiently went around the table and used the tweezers to remove the candles and drop them onto an empty saucer.
She set it out of the photo frame and picked up the phone to take pictures of them downing the shots.
Then she returned the phone and went back inside, leaving them to their revelry.
“Pretty slick,” Billy said, giving her what she thought was a nod of approval. “You got a little sweat around your hairline there. They’ll be content for a few minutes, so go take a quick break.”
Lucy nodded, pulling her phone from her pocket as she went through the kitchen and out the back door.
While the joy and triumph were still pumping through her system, she was going to call Sydney.
And since the clock was ticking, she couldn’t think too long about it or second-guess herself.
She skimmed through her contacts and hit the button to call.
“Lucy!” Sydney’s greeting was so loud, she pulled the phone away from her ear for a second. “I’ve been so worried about you.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. I just… I was hiding from the world.”
“Where are you?” her friend demanded. “Are you still in Vegas?”
“I’m in Maine, actually.”
“Instead of coming right here, you went to Maine? Girl, it’s cold as hell there. Why would you do that?”
Lucy didn’t want to confess she was afraid Sydney would do like everybody else in her life and turn her back. “My Gran’s here and it felt like a good time to visit with her. During the transition, you know?”
“Oh, that’s right. I forgot you had family there. How’s she doing?”
Lucy laughed. “Good, from what I can tell. She’s not actually here.”
“You need to start at the beginning and tell me everything.”
“Okay, but I’m on break, so I have to talk fast.”
Lucy told Sydney everything, from having coffee with Reese Noonan to her job at the Uneven Keel. She even told Sydney about Nick, though she left out the kissing. She wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t want to talk about that.
“So you’re in Maine, freezing your ass off, while living with a guy you just met and slinging beer at a dive bar,” Sydney said when she finished.
“I wouldn’t call it a dive bar. And I remember hot days here when I was a kid, so I know summer will come eventually.”
“When’s your Gran coming back?”
“I’m not sure. At least another month if not a little more, I think.”
“Okay,” Sydney said, and Lucy could hear the click of her nails as she drummed her fingers on a hard surface. It made her think of Lavinia, and she smiled. “So I’ll expect you in two to three months, then? I mean, I assume you’ll want to visit with your grandmother for a while.”
For a few seconds, as relief flooded her body and washed out the tension, Lucy wasn’t sure she could speak. She nodded, but Sydney couldn’t hear that, obviously, so she did her best to swallow the knot of emotion. “Yeah, but I’ll let you know when things start winding down up here.”
“We’ll have the guest room ready for you. I’m so excited to see you again!”
A tear slid over Lucy’s cheek even though she was smiling. It was good to have somebody who wanted her. “Me, too. I’ll talk to you soon!”
She’d done it, she thought as she slid her phone back into her pocket.
The dream life in Miami was still waiting for her.
* * *
“Since you’re rarely in a good mood, it can be hard to tell, but I’m pretty sure you’re in a really foul mood today,” Gray said, leaning against Helen’s garden shed.
They’d just finished reframing the doorway and installing new hinges because the shed was getting old and the door wasn’t closing properly anymore. All that was left was to hang the new door, but it was a two-man job and Gray had drawn the short straw.
“My mood is fine. I just want to get this door hung before you have to leave to meet those people about the addition.”
“Why am I taking the meeting again?”
The question irked Nick because he’d rather they talked and worked at the same time, but it was a valid one.
Nick usually took the meetings with prospective clients.
“Because I went to high school with the guy—and, sure, we’re all adults now—but let’s just say we weren’t friends and leave it at that. ”
“It’s probably for the best,” his brother said, lifting the new door so it stood on end. “You’re definitely in a bad mood.”
Nick didn’t bother denying it again. Mostly because Gray wasn’t wrong. He’d been in a mood since Lucy got home from work last night, though he thought he’d been doing a good job of hiding it.
He couldn’t have missed the joy and pride radiating from Lucy when she walked through the door, but he’d assumed the shots she made for the private party were a success. Then she told him about calling her friend in Miami.
The first hit had been realizing Lucy still intended to go.
The second came when he realized, on some level, he’d started to believe she might not.
Oh, he’d smiled. He congratulated her, both for the party and for having called Sydney. He admired the photos she’d taken. He said all the right things, but he was sulking on the inside.
They’d just finished hanging the door and making sure the hinges and clasps and locks all aligned when they heard a car pull into the drive out front.
“Is that Lucy?”
Nick frowned. “It shouldn’t be, but it sounds like her car.”
Gray checked the time on his phone. “I hope she didn’t block me in because I have to run. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
Nick started picking up his tools, and a few minutes passed before the fact he hadn’t heard Gray’s truck start stole his attention from thoughts about how much he hated Miami considering he’d never been there.
He was just starting around the corner of the house when he heard the truck start, and Nick reached the front just in time to see Lucy wave as Gray pulled into the road.
Of course she was wearing his hoodie over whatever shirt she’d worn to work. Between the air conditioning inside and the evening breeze right off the water outside, she was always cold when she left the Keel.
“Why aren’t you at work?”
“Because it was super dead and Billy said I looked tired, which might have been an insult or might have been an expression of concern. Or, knowing Billy, a little of both. But anyway, here I am.”
“He cut your shift because you look tired?”
She laughed. “No, he cut my shift because there weren’t many customers and it didn’t seem right to make Mattie split the tips when the Keel is her entire livelihood. And I actually am tired because I didn’t sleep well last night.”
She was probably too excited to sleep and lay awake dreaming of Miami, he thought sourly.