Chapter One
Chapter One
J enna Stewart had a lot of regrets.
The first one was not spending more time with her mother before she passed away ten years ago. If only life had the expiration date stamped on the birth certificate, then there could be more preparation for what comes between the beginning and the end. Marsha Jenene Stewart was supposed to at least live as long as her own mother—Jenna’s maternal grandmother—who didn’t pass away until she was ninety. But that didn’t happen. She was brushing her teeth one second, and the aneurysm that had been hiding in her brain decided that it was time for her to step away from the earth and into eternity in the blink of an eye.
Second on her list of regrets: Bryce Johnson, Jenna’s ex-husband. She should have listened to her mother when she said something felt wrong about the man. But she fancied herself so much in love that she wouldn’t have listened to what angels had to say—not even if they had wings, a halo, and were playing harps while they told her to steer clear of men like Bryce. So she vowed to love him until death parted them. Eleven months after the wedding, she learned that her mother had been right, and that natural death couldn’t be more painful than the death of a marriage.
Both came on the same day. Bryce came into the art gallery where Jenna worked, handed her divorce papers, and told her that he had fallen in love with another woman. She was too numb to do anything but call her mother, and had the phone in her hand when it rang. Her mother’s picture popped up on the screen, and she answered it. Her mother’s housekeeper told her that Marsha was gone before she even hit the floor.
Stop thinking depressing thoughts. Her mother’s scolding voice seemed so real that for just a split second, Jenna thought she was sitting in the Adirondack chair beside her.
I wish you were really sitting there, Jenna thought. I would love to spend just one more day together here on the lake.
The one thing she did not regret was moving to the cabin after her mother’s death. She and her parents had shared happy memories there every summer, and her honeymoon with Bryce had been one of the few good times in their marriage. From day one, when she arrived at the cabin to live permanently, she had never had a single doubt that this was where she belonged.
A gentle night breeze blended the smell of freshly mowed grass, the earthy, musty odor of lake water, and the aroma of the rosebushes blooming beside her back porch. The sunsets over the water were always gorgeous, but that night, Mother Nature put on an especially beautiful show for her. Orange, yellow, purple, and pink streaks that swished through the sky like artists’ strokes were reflected in the water for a double show. A little group of rogue bluebonnets out at the edge of the lake added their own slice of color to the picture as the sun dropped below the horizon, and dusk settled in.
“Beautiful evening,” Carson Makay said.
His deep drawl startled Jenna and jerked her back into reality in a flash. “Yes, it is. There’s nothing like a Texas sunset over the water. Have a seat?” She motioned toward one of the empty chairs circled around a firepit. “Want a beer or a bottle of water?”
“Beer would be great, but I’m on duty,” he answered.
Carson was one of the new park rangers at Lake Livingston and would be taking over for Victor, who had been there as long as Jenna could remember. Carson was at least six feet tall, had brown eyes and dark hair that had finally grown out from the military haircut he had had when he first came to the area. His shoulders were broad, and he carried himself like a retired soldier. He had filled out a lot from the first time Jenna laid eyes on him, twenty years ago. Of course, he didn’t know that she’d seen him back when she was fifteen and still had braces, or that through the years, she had dreamed about him.
Back then, Victor told her that Carson was right out of high school and headed off to basic training when he and his folks left the cabin right next to her house. Even though she hadn’t formally met him until two months ago, she knew him from the stories Victor told her through the last ten years.
Jenna reached into a cooler and brought out an icy cold bottle of water. “How are things on the home front tonight?”
Carson took the water from her, twisted the lid off, and took a drink. “Pretty quiet for Memorial Day weekend. Uncle Victor has told some wild stories about holidays on the lake, so I was prepared for more.” He eased into a chair and set his bottle on the arm. “I’m not complaining. I’ll take quiet over rambunctious any day of the year. I had enough of that as a military policeman.”
“Hey! Got another one of those?” Victor waved from a few yards away.
“Sure do.” Jenna pointed toward the cooler. “Come on over and take a load off for a few minutes.”
Victor pulled a bottle of water from the cooler and plopped down into an empty chair. No one would ever believe that the short, round man with a rim of gray hair around his otherwise bald head could possibly be related to Carson. A couple of months ago, he had brought his nephew around to introduce him to the permanent folks living around the lake, and let everyone know that Carson would be taking his place as park ranger when he retired on the first of June.
“Is Dorena counting the days?” Jenna asked. “I haven’t seen her in a couple of weeks. I can remember having to clean out the house in Beaumont when my mama passed away. I didn’t realize that a person could gather up so much stuff in thirty years.”
“We’ve been here twenty years, but she’s so ready to leave that she’s had the house packed up for a month. She’s so ready to get on the road to Virginia. The movers will be here bright and early on Saturday morning, and me and Dorena will be in our RV and headed east at daybreak on Sunday morning.”
“I bet your daughter is counting the days until you are living close to her.”
Jenna thought of her mother and wished that she’d lived closer to her after getting married to Bryce. One more regret, but Bryce insisted that they live in Lufkin, close to her job. When they were dating, he told her that he owned a roofing company and traveled a lot. A couple of months into the marriage, he quit that job and sold used cars. By the time they divorced, he had had six jobs in eleven months.
She blinked a couple of times to shut out unpleasant thoughts and listened to Victor.
“Dorena is very excited, and our daughter is over the moon. But then so are our three grandsons,” Victor answered. “Carson can have my job and my cabin for the next twenty years or until he’s ready to retire. Then he’ll have a double retirement. Out with the old, and in with the new. And, honey, these old knees of mine are glad that they are getting to retire.”
“I imagine when that time comes, I’ll be glad to turn it over to someone else,” Carson said with a chuckle. “But I’m going to miss you and Aunt Dorena. That woman could make a meal out of cardboard and glue.”
“Yep, she could,” Victor agreed. “Hey, isn’t this about the time of the year that all your friends come around for a week?”
“Yes, it is,” Jenna replied. “They both get here tomorrow about noon. Seems like a hundred years since they visited the last time, and I’m so excited to see them.”
“I remember them coming around for the last several years,” Victor said. “Maybe we can all get together for a breakfast over at the marina café we all like. Got your plans all lined up?”
“I’ve been cooking for weeks so that we don’t have to do anything but visit and talk about our memories.” Jenna turned up her beer and finished it off.
“They call her house the memory cabin,” Victor explained to Carson.
“Why’s that?” Carson asked.
“Because the three of us met at grief counseling ten years ago, became friends, and the next year we decided to get together right here for a week,” Jenna answered. “We talk about our memories, both good and bad.”
Victor stood up. “It’s kind of like a once-a-year therapy session, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely, but we try our best to keep it balanced. If we talk about a bad memory, then we have to remember a good one and talk about it,” Jenna explained.
“Be careful,” Carson said in a serious tone, but his eyes sparkled like he was kidding. “If folks find out what’s going on, you might have to hang out a shingle.”
“He’s right. The permanent residents around the lake would keep you so busy, you wouldn’t even have time to paint.” Victor stood up. “We should be going to finish up the rest of our rounds. Even if it is a fairly quiet holiday weekend, we need folks to know that the park rangers are out checking on things.”
“See you later,” Carson said, as he got to his feet and followed his uncle out into the darkness.
A splash took Jenna’s attention to the dock on the left, where a bunch of bikini- and Speedo-clad teenagers did cannonball jumps out into the lake. She remembered back when she was that age and doing the same thing when she and her folks came to the lake for the summer. She might not have worn a skimpy bathing suit—her mother would never have allowed that—but she did make a few transient friends among those who only came for a week, and not for the whole summer like she and her folks did.
She heard voices to her right and turned her head to look at the dock a hundred yards on down the lake from the other side of her property. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but one girl did a perfect swan dive from the end of the dock out into the water. Not to be outdone, the young fellow with her did one just as beautiful.
“Hey, you two newlyweds!” Someone called out from the dock. “Don’t forget we’re going out to dinner in an hour.”
“Thank you,” the woman yelled.
Jenna wiped away a tear. Ten years ago, she was a new bride, and she and Byrce had spent their honeymoon at her folks’ cabin. They had dived off the docks and swam in the lake every evening, and she thought she would be married to him forever. Who would have thought that eleven months later, he would walk in and tell her that he wanted a divorce? Or that when the story came out, he would admit that he’d only married her for the fifty grand that the prenup guaranteed when he divorced her.
“Thank God for prenups,” she muttered, as she picked up the cooler and headed back to the house. “If Mama hadn’t insisted on one, he would have gotten half of my trust fund.”
* * *
The only sounds that Carson heard as he and Victor made their way back to his uncle’s house were the occasional rumble of a boat coming to shore or the laughter of folks gathered around a firepit. In comparison to the bomb and missile alerts he heard when he was deployed, the noise of folks having a good time was downright peaceful.
“You’ve been pretty quiet since we left Jenna’s place,” Victor said. “I can guess that you are remembering being somewhere that didn’t involve a lake. When I first got out of the Army and took the position as a park ranger here at the lake, it took me a while to get used to the fact that Dorena and I were putting down roots. Mary Beth was grown and living in Virginia, and we missed getting to be around the grandchildren more, but Dorena’s mama was still alive and living south of Lufkin. This was the perfect place and the perfect job to let us spend a lot of time with her before she passed away two years ago.”
“And now you get to enjoy time with Mary Beth and her family,” Carson said.
“Yep,” Victor agreed, “and in just another week, we’ll trade places with you. You get the cabin that comes with the job, and Dorena and I will take the motor home on our road trip to Virginia and get settled in our new home a couple of miles from Mary Beth. Think you are ready?”
Carson stopped by the steps leading up to the front door of the trailer that had been his home for the past several weeks. “It’s been an adjustment for sure, but I’m finally settling into it. It’s a lot slower paced than what I was used to.”
“That’s a good thing, right?” Victor asked.
“I believe it is.” A visual of Jenna popped into Carson’s head. He didn’t believe in all that bunk about love at first sight. Still, there was something about her that seemed to draw him to her backyard almost every evening.
Victor took a step toward the house. “Good night, and we’ll see you at breakfast tomorrow morning.”
Carson opened the door into the RV. “I’m going to miss Aunt Dorena’s cooking.”
Victor wiggled his eyebrows. “Maybe you can get Jenna to invite you over to her house for a few meals when you get tired of bologna sandwiches and canned soup.”
“Or I can go into town and get a pizza,” Carson threw over his shoulder.
Victor chuckled and waved.
What Carson had called home for the past couple of months was a loft-type bed above the cab of the motor home, and a suitcase to hold a couple of changes of clothing. The rest of his things were stored in the spare bedroom of the cabin. Dorena had turned that room into a craft area when they moved in all those years ago. Now, when Mary Beth came back to the lake every few months, Victor rented one of the many cabins around the lake for her and her family to stay in.
Carson and his parents had visited his aunt and uncle at the lake twice in the past. Once just after he’d graduated from high school, and then again just before he deployed for six months—that turned into two tours of duty and lasted over a year—to the Middle East. Both times, they had stayed in the cabin right next door to where Jenna now lived. He hadn’t actually met her until two months ago when his uncle introduced them, but that didn’t mean he didn’t remember her, or that she even noticed him. The first time, he would have guessed her to be about fifteen, a beautiful woman in the making. The second time, she spent most of her time on the back porch, concentrating on a painting she was working on. A lovely woman had emerged, but from a distance, she seemed distracted and sad. Victor had told him that she had just recently moved to the lake as a permanent resident, and that she had lost her mother.
His uncle often said that life was a circle. He slipped a pastry into the toaster for a night snack and pondered that idea while it cooked. If the saying were true, then where was he on that sphere, and where would the next step take him?
The toaster popped and threw his pastry out onto the cabinet. He grabbed it and played a one-person game of hot potato, shifting it from hand to hand until it cooled. Then he sat down at the small table and wondered what had happened to Jenna Stewart in the last twenty years. If he had met the tall brunette back when they were just teenagers, or later when they were in their twenties, would that have changed the course of their lives?
“It is what it is, and no one has invented a time machine yet so we could go back and see what would happen if we’d met then,” he muttered as he took a bite of the brown sugar and cinnamon pastry.