10. Homecoming At Tide Table
Homecoming At Tide Table
~CADE~
Every town has one door that never changed, and mine is propped open with the same brick it's been propped open with since I was six.
Mercer's Tide Table at seven in the morning smells like the inside of my entire childhood: coffee, bacon grease, pastry butter, and the low-tide salt that gets into everything on Harbor Street and stays.
I stand on the threshold with my jacket too good for the room and let it hit me like weather.
The chairs are up. The chalkboard says TODAY'S PIE in my mother's handwriting, with the actual pie still classified.
Behind the counter, in her apron, rolling dough with the marble pin that has outlived two ovens, one roof, and my father, is Marina Mercer, who looks up at her firstborn standing in the doorway after five years of phone calls and holiday layovers, and says:
"Wipe your feet."
I sadly can’t roll my eyes at my mother.
I wipe my feet.
She goes back to the dough. Roll, quarter-turn, roll, the rhythm that could calibrate clocks. I come in and stand across the counter from her the way forty years of fishermen have stood waiting for their coffee, and she lets the silence season properly before she uses it.
Because my mother has never once in her life rushed a crust or a reckoning.
"So." Roll. Quarter-turn. "Which is it, Cadence?" The full name. Loaded and aimed. "Did you come home for her, or for the work?"
There are performances for this.
Ma, I'm wounded. Ma, it's a job.
I stood in a hallway five days ago and retired the performances, so I give her what I gave Nolan, the unvarnished grain.
"Both. The work brought me. She's why I got on the plane instead of finding a reason not to. Both, Ma. I'm not going to insult your pie crust by pretending otherwise."
"Hm." She flips the dough, drapes it over the tin, trims the edge with four moves of the thumb I have never successfully copied. "Then hear me before you unpack.”
I have to keep myself prepared for the potential war she’s yearning to ensue on her child.
“Amber Whitlock is not a place, baby. You can't come home to her like she's a harbor that held your mooring.
What you're missing, what's got that look on you that you think your good jacket hides, isn't only the girl.
It's the boy you were when she looked at you.
Right at that man of the past, who left in a car five years ago.
He's not her problem to give back." She sets the pin down. Looks at me, all the way, the way only mothers and customs officers look. "You want the woman you desperately loved back? You’re gonna have to build the man you wish to become for her. Here. In daylight, where all those who judged her back then now have to judge you and your lot of cowardly Alphas to see if you’re worthy of their gossip hype.” I hate how her words are nothing but true.
“Whether or not she ever looks at you again is all on her. Can you do that?"
That’s a heavy question to burden me with so early in the day.
"I don't know," I say, honestly. "I'm going to try it sober, with applause, which is new."
She arches an eyebrow my way, but decides it’s a worthy response.
"Good answer."
Then, at last, she comes around the counter, flour to the elbows, and hugs me.
My mother is five foot three and hugs like a dock cleat.
I stand in the middle of the Tide Table with my chin on her head and my eyes shut, breathing coffee, pastry, and that longing aroma of home. If my scent slips its leash for a second, blood orange and sandalwood and salted caramel going warm all through my family's café.
There's nobody here yet, but us, and she'd never tell.
I’d dare to admit it, even to myself, it’s good to be home.
The bell over the door goes at half past, and my brother walks in hauling a monitor speaker, sees me, and sets it down with the specific care of a man giving his hands something to do.
"So it's real," Theo says. "The suitcase sighting. Dot Pearson had you at the streetlamp by nine-fifteen. Ruth had it by nine-thirty. Mom knew before you cleared the harbor road, so don't look surprised. This town has better distribution than the wire services."
He crosses over and hugs me, quick and hard, one thump between the shoulder blades. Then he steps back before it gets to be a thing, and there it is between us, the old warmth with the old splinter still in it, the thing we talk around every Christmas call.
Not today.
Today's the day the splinters come out, apparently, so while Mom slides the pie in and starts the second crust.
I pour us both coffee, put my brother on a counter stool, and finally say the thing I've owed him longer than I've owed almost anyone.
"Theo. The wedding. There's a piece you half know, and you should have the whole of it." His face goes careful. Mom's pin keeps rolling, slower. "The morning of, documents came to Beckett. From Alistair Whitlock, through a lawyer, timed to the hour, and they were clearly creating the perfect trap. I’m not going to get in the logistics, cause obviously…it’s too long ago to bring up matters that can’t be changed, but we panicked because it was a load of threats. One of them directed to you.” It’s the first time I’m actually admitting it to someone outside of our pack.
It feels far too late to give me a sense of relief…
“Your conservatory acceptance. The scholarship money.
Alistair had, or claimed to have, ways of making that evaporate, along with August's family accounts and the Lantern House's loans.
Felt like a damn triple threat amongst a list of other disasters that would be forced and targeting the lot of Honeybell Harbor and ruin so many lives if three unsuitable boys put a ring on his daughter's designation.”
I have to take a steady breath, because the admission is a lot heavier than I expected to bear after all this time. You’d think time would have healed the wound.
It simply laid a Band-Aid on it…
“I sat in that car telling myself I was protecting my little brother's whole future…and those across this small town who’ve helped raise us. Whose businesses…their livelihoods…their futures all on the line over a greedy rich man who wants his daughter to simply be miserable. I told myself I drove away that day partly to protect you, the town, the cycle of work that runs through our small knot of a town, but at the expense of the Omega we adored’s heart. "
I take a breath, letting it out as if I was holding it for far too long.
Theo doesn't rush me.
He's got our mother's undertow too, when he wants it.
“I’ve told myself for the longest time that it’s the most noble thing we could have done without it blowing up into a big deal…
but I guess the reality is, it did implode on itself and simply left wounds that can surely never heal.
Just scars and inconveniences for the sake of saving my brother, the town, and I guess our own livelihoods. ”
The more I talk it out, the more I truly feel like shit.
Like a villain…
"Yeah," he says finally. "You did tell yourself that. You told me that, actually. At least part of that.” When I clearly look confused, he elaborates with, “Called me from a gas station in Connecticut sobbing about how you'd saved my future.
" He sets the coffee down. "So let me give it back to you, since you've clearly been carrying it like a lung.”
I know without a doubt this man is going to give me a reality check.
Like mother, like son, clearly.
“You didn't leave her for me, Cade. Or for those of Honeybell Harbor. You left because you were terrified, and I was a reason that sounded nicer than being a frightened coward going against a big bad wolf with an endless amount of money. Or at least enough to wipe away our little town and everyone in it, which honestly, would have been better than what you did to Amber.” That stings.
“I never asked to be protected. I'd have handed that scholarship back myself and worked the docks before I let you use my name as a getaway car. "
The café is very quiet.
He’s fucking right…We both know it.
"I know," I finally admit. "I've known for a while. I needed you to hear that, though. Maybe confessing would remind me of what an arse I had been in the past."
"Okay." He picks the coffee back up. Just like that, the weight redistributes, the way it only can with the one person who's known you since before you learned to be charming. "Okay. That's…yeah. Good." A beat. "You're still an idiot."
Asshole.
"Deeply."
"But you drove four thousand miles to stand in a café and let Mom put you through a wood chipper before breakfast, so." He knocks his shoulder into mine. "There's hope. Marginal. Insurance-adjuster hope."
"That's the most anyone's offered me in years."
I know this is the start to the road of not only healing, but maybe growing a pair and fixing what is still broken in the depths of this town.
With a beating heart that I hope I can gather the pieces of and glue them back together, piece by piece before begging for forgiveness…
If we even get a chance.
"Don't waste it," he encourages with a clink of our mugs.
The town arrives in installments, the way it always did, because nothing in Honeybell Harbor stays private past breakfast.
I am, this morning, the breakfast gossip.
Delia Grant clocks in at seven and stops dead with her apron half-tied.
"Well, look what the tide dragged up the steps.
" She's been serving the morning shift here since I was in high school, and she remembers every romance this town has ever produced, filed and cross-referenced.
"How long are we keeping you, then? Weekend?
Season? Or is this one of your famous four-day appearances where you kiss everybody's cheek and vanish before the check comes? "
"Ten weeks, Delia. Maybe."
"Maybe." She ties the apron with a snap. "I'll believe the tenth week when I'm standing in it."
Ruth Kettle materializes at seven-fifteen, which is a genuine feat of nature, because the general store is a full six blocks up the hill and Ruth does not walk downhill for her health.