Chapter 14 #2
He’d wanted to do something for her and had known enough not to try. He believed that sometimes leaving a person alone was the thing you did. He’d learned that the hard way.
He drank his coffee and looked toward the corner of the porch where Emma had found her father’s initials. After a while, he got up and walked over. He crouched beside the railing and ran a finger along the underside until he found the shallow grooves.
D.K.
David Kendrick had been seven years old when he carved them there. Jake pictured a boy with a pocketknife, checking over his shoulder to make sure his mother wasn’t watching. Maybe he’d expected to come back the next summer and the summer after that and see his initials every time.
Jake sat on the porch step.
He understood more about leaving something behind than he used to.
For seven years, his hands had been used at fires, car wrecks and medical calls out of a Miami station. He had liked being a paramedic and had been good at it too, until being good at it stopped being enough to keep the worst parts of the job from following him home.
The company came afterward. Two ER doctors at Jackson Memorial were developing a trauma monitor small enough to carry in a paramedic’s kit. They needed someone who had actually tried to use equipment in the back of a moving ambulance at three in the morning. Jake became their third employee.
They built it and tweaked it until it worked. Eventually they sold the company.
Jake walked away with enough money that he didn’t have to worry much about earning more. What he needed was somewhere to go, and so, one day he filled a duffel bag and drove south.
A week after arriving in Key West, he signed the lease on the cottage from Arthur Kendrick. They met at a coffee shop, where Arthur showed up with a folder of papers and an easy smile. Jake had been too tired then to accept both without asking many questions.
That was three years ago.
On his first afternoon at the cottage, Jake had gone straight to the garden. He pulled weeds from the lily bed until his back hurt, his knees were stiff and his hands scratched and bleeding. When he was done he sat on the porch step and cried for the first time in eight months.
The cottage gave him something to care for when he wasn’t sure what to do with himself.
He learned the names of the plants and figured out which ones needed morning light and which ones did better in the shade.
He rebuilt the porch swing during his first summer and built the bench beneath the lignum vitae two years later.
For most of the last year, he had thought about putting a pergola in the back corner of the yard. He’d even bought the cedar in the spring, but there had never been any reason to hurry.
Until now.
Jake looked toward the back garden.
A week ago, Emma had walked through the gate and asked him questions he wasn’t prepared to answer.
He didn’t like her much at first, or at least that was what he’d told himself.
Now she was in Miami with Edmund and Rachel, retrieving the original will that might finally make the cottage legally hers.
If it did, Jake had no idea what that meant for him.
Emma lived in Chicago. She had a career there and a life she had every reason to return to. She’d told him she most likely would be in Key West for a month, and he had no reason to believe that had changed.
Still, when he thought about her leaving, his heart raced and stomach turned.
Jake had spent three years building a life that asked very little of him emotionally. He had friends in town. He worked when he wanted to and spent most days outside. He wasn’t lonely, or at least he hadn’t thought he was.
Then Emma showed up.
He wasn’t ready to put a name to whatever had changed, but he knew something had.
Jake finished his coffee, went to the workshop and pulled the blue tarp from the stack of cedar.
If Emma ended up keeping the cottage, he wanted there to be a place in the back garden where she could sit. Maybe she would only use it when she came down for a week or two. Maybe Jake wouldn’t be living here by then.
He didn’t know. He only knew he wanted to build it.
By eight, he had the base measured and the corners marked. He worked through the day, stopping only long enough to eat a sandwich and drink water to stay hydrated.
By late afternoon, the first two cedar posts were set.
He cleaned up his tools, swept the porch and made another cup of coffee. He was sitting on the front step when he heard Emma’s rental pull up in front of the cottage.
She came through the gate with a tote over one shoulder and a folder in her hand. Her hair was down, and she looked tired, but when she saw him, she smiled.
Then she noticed the cedar posts in the back garden.
“You built something.”
“I started something. We’ll see how it goes.”
“What?”
“Come see.”
Jake led her around the cottage.
Emma stopped in front of the two posts and looked at the marked corners in the ground.
“It’s a pergola.”
“It will be.”
“You did this this morning?”
“Most of it.”
“While I was in Miami?”
Jake smiled. “I had time.”
Emma looked at the cedar again, then at him.
“Why?”
He could have told her he’d been planning it for a year, which was true. He could have said the lumber was already there and he needed something to do, which was also true.
Instead he shrugged. “I thought the garden needed one.”
Emma gave him a look that said she didn’t entirely believe him, but she let it go.
“Jake, I got the original will. Rachel says it matches the copy and she thinks it’s going to hold.”
“That’s really good, Emma.”
“I know.” She smiled, and this time there was relief in it. “I don’t think I realized how much I needed to hear her say that until she did.”
Jake nodded. “So the trip was a success.”
“My grandmother’s wedding ring and a notebook she kept were also in the safe deposit box. There was a picture too.”
“Of what?”
“Me with my father. We were here at the cottage. I was four.”
Jake waited.
“He was laughing,” Emma said. “I don’t remember the picture being taken, but Gloria wrote on the back that it was the summer he taught me to swim.”
“Do you remember that?”
“A little. My memory is fuzzy.”
Jake saw her eyes change and didn’t ask anything else.
After a moment, Emma reached into her tote and took out the cardboard sleeve.
“Would you like to see it?”
“I would.”
She slid the photograph free and handed it to him.
Jake held it carefully by the edges. Emma was a little girl in a red bathing suit, grinning at the camera while a young man crouched beside her with one hand on her shoulder. Jake looked from David’s face to Emma’s and could see the resemblance.
“He looks happy,” Jake said.
Emma looked at the photograph in his hands. “He does.”
“He looks happy to be with you.”
Her eyes filled, but she smiled.
“My grandmother said he was a good father.”
“I think she was right.”
Jake handed the photograph back. Emma returned it to the sleeve and put it carefully into her tote.
They stood in the garden while the light softened around them.
“Thank you,” Emma said.
“For what?”
“The pergola. Yesterday. Letting me have the house to myself when I needed it. All of it.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I know, but I want to.”
Jake looked at her. “Then you’re welcome.”
Emma smiled again.
She had cried enough in the last day that her eyes still looked tired, but there was something different in her face tonight. Jake couldn’t have explained it, and he wasn’t going to try. He only knew he liked seeing her standing in the garden as though she belonged there.
“I should go,” she said. “I’m exhausted.”
“I figured.”
“I also haven’t eaten since Islamorada.”
Jake frowned. “That was hours ago.”
“I know.”
“Go back to Winslow’s and eat something.”
Emma laughed softly. “Yes, sir.”
He walked her to the gate.
Before she left, Emma looked back toward the unfinished pergola.
“When do you think you’ll finish it?”
“A couple of days.”
“I’d like to see it when it’s done.”
Jake looked at her. “You will.”
She got into the rental car and pulled away.
Jake stayed at the gate until her taillights disappeared at the end of Hibiscus Lane. Then he went back into the garden and sat beneath the lignum vitae for a while.
For three years, the cottage had been the place where Jake came to stop thinking about what came next.
Now, for the first time in a long time, he found himself wondering.