Chapter 21
Fourteen wine glasses had gone out on Thursday. Fourteen had come back. Kaitlyn considered that the greatest administrative achievement of her career.
Saturday morning found her wrapping them one at a time in newspaper at the long table in Paradise Harbor House.
The shutters were open to the side street.
The ceiling fan turned lazily overhead, and somebody’s radio played from somewhere down the block.
The hand-painted sign out front had needed redoing for two years.
Kaitlyn still couldn’t decide whether repainting it would be an improvement or a betrayal.
The donor evening had gone better than any of them expected. Sixty-one people had crowded into a house built for forty. A woman from Miami played cello for an hour. Later, a man in a linen shirt wrote a check at the door and apologized for the amount. The check was for four thousand dollars.
By any reasonable measure, Kaitlyn should have been pleased. Instead, she was thinking about Will again.
Elena Armstrong came through from the office with her reading glasses pushed into her hair. She stopped when she saw the boxes.
“You’re still on the glasses.”
“I’m on the last nine.”
“Leave them. Somebody else can do the last nine.”
“Nobody else wraps them right, and then we lose some. My aunts will kill me if I don’t get them all back.”
Elena sat on the arm of the sofa. Kaitlyn knew what that meant. Her employer wasn’t simply passing through anymore.
“Thursday was good,” Elena said.
“It was awesome.”
“So why have you got that face on?”
Kaitlyn set down the glass in her hand. She’d been out of sorts for three weeks without complaining about it to anyone.
That was mostly self-preservation. Her Aunt Tess would have a theory before Kaitlyn finished the sentence.
Aunt Leah would have a plan by lunch. Elena, at least, would listen first.
“Will’s been strange.”
Kaitlyn told her about Patrick’s boat and the project Will wouldn’t explain. She mentioned the two canceled dinners too. Lately, he sometimes seemed to answer a question forty minutes after she asked it.
“Wednesday I asked what he was thinking about, and he said nothing worth mentioning. Will has never once, as long as I’ve known him, had nothing worth mentioning. That man mentions everything.”
Elena’s expression barely changed. “And what have you decided it means?”
“I’ve been trying not to decide.”
“Kaitlyn, don’t stick your head in the sand. If you have concerns you need to talk to Will about them.”
Kaitlyn looked down at the newspaper spread across the table. “I think he may be working himself up to telling me something I don’t want to hear.”
Saying it made the fear feel more real, but at least it was out there.
Will got quiet before. It was his way of dealing with difficult things.
He’d done it before the Atlanta job and disappeared into his own thoughts for nearly two weeks.
Then he finally told her about the offer.
In the end, he turned it down. Kaitlyn had never known whether all that silence had been about taking the job or deciding not to.
“Have you asked him?” Elena said.
“Four times.”
“You’ve asked what he’s thinking about. That isn’t the same thing.”
Kaitlyn looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“You keep giving him an opening and hoping he’ll walk through it,” Elena continued. “Ask the question you actually want answered.”
“And if the answer is bad?”
“Then at least you’ll know what you’re dealing with.”
Kaitlyn knew Elena was right.
“You and Will have been through too much together to start guessing at what the other one feels now. Trust me, you’ll be glad you told him how you feel.”
Elena went back to the office and left the door open behind her.
Kaitlyn finished wrapping the glasses and stacked the boxes by the front door. Then she stood in the middle of the room with her phone in her hand. Borrowed chairs and folded linens were still scattered around her.
For several minutes she did nothing.
At ten past eleven, she finally typed, Are you home tonight?
His answer came within a minute.
It’ll be late. Don’t wait up. Tomorrow will be better.
Kaitlyn read his words twice. There was nothing wrong with them. That didn’t stop her from worrying.
Tomorrow, she wrote.
Then she carried the first box toward her car. She hoped Tess and Leah would meet her outside Max’s, although she wasn’t in the mood to listen to their opinions.
Emma had planned to spend two hours helping Jake with the pergola. Six hours had passed by the time she left Hibiscus Lane.
The morning had gone easily. Emma held cedar slats while Jake checked the spacing and handed him screws when he needed them.
Eventually, she earned the right to hold the level without supervision.
At some point, he stopped teasing her about the bubble.
He simply trusted her to tell him when the board was straight.
They made a late-morning run to the Cuban place on Simonton.
Back at the cottage, they ate egg sandwiches on the porch step and drank strong coffee.
Nothing important was said. They talked about the pergola and a neighbor’s cat.
Jake teased Emma about whether she had enough practical experience to demand a promotion.
Jake threatened to make her foreman, and Emma threatened to unionize.
For most of the morning, neither of them talked about the kiss, although Emma couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Every time Jake stood close enough for his arm to brush hers, Emma noticed.
She noticed when he looked at her a little longer than the conversation required too.
The kiss hadn’t made things awkward between them, which was something she had worried about the night before.
If anything, being with him felt easier now.
That might have frightened her once, but it didn’t today.
At one-thirty, Emma finally insisted Jake didn’t need to walk her to the gate.
“I’ll call you later?”
“Absolutely.”
She drove into town with the taste of Cuban coffee still in her mouth. Her muscles had the pleasant ache of a morning spent doing something with her hands.
She couldn’t explain to anyone why she needed time with the people she’d come to think of as family, but Leah, Tess and Connie were as close as they come. There were few days when she didn’t find herself walking through the doors of Margarita Max’s and today was no exception.
Margarita Max’s was three-quarters full when she came through the door just before two.
The Saturday lunch crowd filled most of the tables.
Lloyd occupied his usual stool. Joey sat in the corner playing something slow on his guitar, while Leah worked the register.
Tess was crossing toward the back with a tray of glasses.
Tess saw Emma and immediately changed direction.
“Hey, you. Come sit down.”
Before Emma had a chance to answer, Tess was telling Lloyd to move his stool over.
“I’m not moving,” he said. “This stool and I have an understanding.”
“I didn’t tell you to get off it. Give Emma some room.”
Lloyd shifted his stool an inch or two. Emma suspected that was the most cooperation Tess was going to get.
“Hello, Emma.”
“Hello, Lloyd, and thank you.”
“I hear you had a hell of a week.”
Emma sat down. “I did.”
Lloyd drank his beer and appeared to lose interest in the conversation. Emma knew better. He probably wasn’t finished.
A moment later, he proved her right. “I don’t know enough about your family to have an opinion about it, but your uncle is the kind of man I wouldn’t have moved over for. I want that on the record.”
Emma smiled despite herself. “Thank you, Lloyd.”
“That’s my opinion.”
“You just said you didn’t have one.”
“That was a general statement. This is a particular one.”
“I see the distinction.”
“Good.”
He returned to his beer.
Emma looked toward Leah, who had been watching from the register.
“Word travels.”
“In this town, word doesn’t travel. It accelerates.”
Leah brought her a glass of ice water and explained that Rachel’s latest filing was public record. There were enough numbers in it to make people curious. By Friday morning, most of the people who cared about such things had heard some version of the story.
Emma pressed her fingers against her forehead.
For weeks, Emma had tried to keep the details of her uncle’s crimes somewhat private. Now she understood that privacy had probably stopped being an option much earlier. Arthur had tried to sell a Key West house that wasn’t his, and people were bound to talk.
Emma wasn’t embarrassed because what Arthur had done belonged to him. Still, she hadn’t expected to become a story people discussed over coffee or from one end of a bar to the other.
“You were going to be a story the minute that linen blazer came through my door,” Leah said.
Emma laughed softly. “I understand that now.”
Leah offered her tomato basil soup. Emma accepted.
While she waited, Joey moved into another song. A few bars passed before Emma recognized one Gloria had liked. She couldn’t remember the last time she had heard it. The melody brought back an image of her grandmother humming in the kitchen with a dish towel over one shoulder.
Emma looked toward Joey.
He caught her eye and gave the smallest nod without missing a note.
Emma had no idea whether Joey knew what the song meant to her, but somehow she thought he did.
The screen door opened and Maeve came in with Patrick.
Emma recognized Patrick immediately from Maeve’s description. The red baseball cap and sun-browned forearms probably would have given him away anyway. Maeve introduced them and added that Patrick’s boat described his entire personality.
“No Worries,” Patrick said as he shook Emma’s hand.
Patrick’s smile was easy. Emma understood almost immediately what Maeve saw in him.
Patrick moved down the bar to speak with Lloyd while Maeve took the stool beside Emma.
“You okay?”
“I’ve been better, and I’ve been worse. On balance, I’m all right. My uncle is the gift that keeps on giving.”