Chapter Four Dominic
Chapter Four
Dominic
D ominic had no doubt that he had stumbled upon Amanda crying at dinner with her friends, but he had no idea what it might have been about. Or why it bothered him so much. When he’d spotted her and seen the tearstained cheeks that she was dabbing at with a napkin, he’d forgotten all about his eyestrain, which intensified most evenings, and felt this surge of protectiveness go through him that he hadn’t felt since… maybe ever.
It’s not that he wasn’t a protective person—he definitely was. If anyone tried to mess with his mother, they were asking for trouble. And he’d been that way with his ex, too, to some extent. But this still felt different. It felt like something had been activated in a part of himself that he’d forgotten he had access to. Or maybe he never knew it was there in the first place.
Dominic pushed his key into the front door of his new house and walked into the entryway. He kicked off his shoes to the side and made his way into the expansive kitchen that had been redone before selling, which now included a huge island countertop and a wall of glass windows to look out at the lake behind the house. The house itself was still relatively small given that it was an older home, but the last owners had put on a pretty large addition in the back that allowed for a bigger common area.
He placed his cell phone and the bag of takeout from Pastabilities on the counter and began pulling out everything he’d ordered—chicken parmesan, of course, with a side of garlic bread and a starting order of a house salad with way too many croutons. They’d included paper plates and utensils, thankfully, since he was nowhere near unpacked yet and hadn’t a clue which box the kitchen dishes were in.
Two bites into his dish, a notification popped up on his cell phone that caused him to pause—fork halfway to his mouth.
Us Weekly announces: Star Detroit Tigers hitter’s soon-to-be-ex-wife steps out with new love interest.
“What the…”
His reaction was almost immediately cut off by the phone screen turning to an incoming call with Melinda Gage’s name appearing on the screen.
The soon-to-be-ex-wife.
He swiped to answer. “Hello?”
“Hey. I wanted to give you a heads up about something,” Melinda responded, and he tried not to pay attention to the sinking feeling in his chest at the sound of her voice.
If there was one thing Dominic knew, it was that he wasn’t still in love with Melinda—that was absolutely certain. But she had been his college sweetheart, the woman he’d spent the last eighteen years of his life with. She was his family in many senses of the word, and even though they’d decided against having a family of their own, she was still a huge part of his story.
“I think I have a guess,” he replied, though he wasn’t sure he wanted more details after the headline he’d just seen.
“I’m dating someone,” Melinda finished her thought anyway. “And I just wanted you to be the first to know.”
Dominic tried not to scoff. “You mean before Us Weekly ?”
“Oh.” She was quiet for a moment on the other end of the phone. “You saw the article?”
“You’re allowed to date, Melinda,” he replied, shoving the bite of chicken parmesan into his mouth. “We’re separated.”
She cleared her throat. “Actually, um… we are divorced.”
“The judge signed it?” He knew they’d been waiting on that, but he hadn’t seen anything come through yet.
“Yeah,” she replied. “I got the packet in the mail today. The judge actually signed it about three weeks ago, so I don’t know why it took so long to get to us.”
Dominic frowned, but he wasn’t surprised at the court system at all. “I haven’t gotten anything.”
“Do they have your new address?” she asked.
“Shit.” He hadn’t thought about that part delaying it, even though he had set his mail to begin forwarding to Heart Lake as of a few days ago. “Maybe it’s held up because of that.”
Melinda sighed heavily into the phone, but it was sadder than it was passive aggressive. “Well, I can send you a copy if you don’t get it, but yeah… it’s done.”
Dominic stayed quiet. He wasn’t sure how to follow that up, or what he was supposed to say.
“It’s fine, Dominic,” Melinda finally answered for him. “We’re going to be fine. We’re going to stay friends, and it’s all going to work out.”
He wanted to say he was on the same page with her about that, but his hurt was still close to the surface. They’d been best friends for as long as he could remember, but as soon as he’d gone into a major depressive episode after his career ended, she’d decided that the spark was no longer there. And he understood where she was coming from. She was right. The spark was long gone, but it wasn’t about her or them. It was him.
His spark was gone.
Everything he’d hoped to become, the life he’d hoped to lead had been just within his grasp and then it was suddenly ripped away from him. There was nothing else left. There was no backup plan or follow-up. It wasn’t like he had a second career lined up or any sort of side passion. He didn’t have children, and now he didn’t have a wife. He had a few friends scattered across the country from college, but they only checked in on birthdays and holidays for the most part.
He didn’t have anything except for baseball.
“Sure,” he agreed with Melinda, even though he didn’t believe it one bit. “You know where to find me.”
“Yeah, I got your new address. Maybe I’ll come visit later this summer?”
Dominic highly doubted she’d ever step foot in Heart Lake, but he wasn’t about to burst her bubble just to be contrarian. “You’re always welcome.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I… I’m sorry you saw the article before I could tell you. This new relationship is… I think it’s special. I’d love for you to meet them one day.”
“As long as they treat you well, that’s all I care about,” Dominic replied. “But listen, I have to go. I’ve got a lot of boxes to unpack. It’s still kind of a mess up here.”
“Oh, of course. I’ll talk to you later, Dominic.” Melinda said goodbye and then hung up the phone.
Dominic finished the remaining few bites of his dinner as he looked out the window over the kitchen sink at the lake behind his house. Thankfully, the sun was out a lot later in the summer, and he could still enjoy the beautiful view, but after that conversation, he was beginning to realize that a pretty view wasn’t going to be enough.
He needed a plan.
Sure, he’d moved. He was in a new place, a new house, a new town. Great. But now what? His not-fully-thought-out plan for this summer had been to kick his feet up at the lake and read all the books he’d been wanting to catch up on, as well as binge-watch the list of Netflix shows he’d saved to his queue over the last year but hadn’t had the motivation to watch yet.
Suddenly, however, this seemed wholly unsatisfying. His ex-wife was falling in love, and he was streaming every season of Suits and watching World War II documentaries. That was just pathetic.
Dominic sighed, then tossed his empty take-out container in the trash can.
A knock at his front door caught him off guard, but he walked through the living room to the entryway and pulled it open.
“Welcome to Heart Lake!” An older woman in a poncho with a long gray braid down her back twisted her hands around a small paper confetti cannon and suddenly Dominic was splattered in rainbow-colored glitter.
He jumped back in surprise. “What the hell?”
“My name is Marvel,” the older woman said as she shoved the now-empty confetti cannon into some hidden pocket in her clothes. She then put her hand out toward him. “I’m the Heart Lake Welcoming Committee!”
Dominic began brushing the pieces of confetti off his sweater, then stepped forward to look around behind the older woman. Finally, he shook her hand. “Where’s the rest of the committee?”
Marvel frowned, turning to look behind her as well. “Oh, no. It’s just me. I’m it!”
“It’s a one-person committee?” he asked, frowning now. “That’s a little lackluster, don’t you think?”
“When that one person is me, there’s nothing lackluster about it.” Marvel placed her hands on her hips and tilted her head to the side in a way that made her thoughts clear as to what she thought of him in that moment.
Dominic grinned, because he couldn’t help but enjoy the way she pushed back at him without a single care. “Well, Marvel, thanks for the visit. I’m Dominic—”
“Dominic Gage, hitter for the Detroit Tigers until you took a fastball to the face,” Marvel finished the sentence for him. “Whoo-whee, that was a real sucker punch. Your nose doesn’t look too crooked, so the doctors must have done a good job.”
He reached up to touch his nose, suddenly feeling a tad self-conscious. “It didn’t hit me in the nose.”
“Oh, so you were just born like that?” Marvel walked past him into the house like she lived there, making her way to the kitchen.
“Come on in,” he whispered under his breath sarcastically before closing the front door and following her into his own kitchen. He glanced in the mirror leaning up against the side wall that he was going to hang later, checking the shape of his nose. There was the smallest of bumps in it, but damn, now he was very aware of that bump.
She placed the basket of cookies she’d brought on the kitchen counter and began unpacking it. “Are you allergic to nuts? I put the ones with nuts in a separate container just in case. You can’t be too careful, you know. I have a friend whose son can’t even smell a whiff of peanut dust without his throat closing up.”
“I don’t have any allergies,” he replied, taking a seat on one of the counter stools next to where Marvel was standing. “These smell amazing. My mom makes the best cookies, too.”
“A mama’s boy? That’s a great sign. But her cookies aren’t as good as mine. Everyone loves my cookies,” Marvel clarified. “I’m going to have a stand at the parade if you want to come grab more once these run out. No charge for newbies.”
He took a white-chocolate-macadamia cookie from the stack. “What parade?”
“Oh, here.” She pulled a folded-up flyer out of a different hidden pocket in her poncho and handed it to him. “The Heart Lake Boat Parade. It’s a newer event—only been running a couple years—but everyone loves it. Half the people in this town own some sort of boat, so we line them all up at the little marina and everyone decorates to the nines. I’m talking big. Last year, Felix turned his and his sister’s boat into a literal black sheep because they own the Black Sheep Diner. It had a cotton puff tail over the rudder and everything.”
“Wow.” He couldn’t imagine a boat-size sheep, but there were a lot of surprises this town seemed to be throwing his way. “That sounds like quite the event.”
“Your next-door neighbor is running it,” Marvel added, leaning forward with her elbows on the counter as she munched on one of the cookies she brought. “Have you met Amanda Riverswood yet? Such a sweetheart, that one.”
“I did,” he confirmed. “Does she have a boat in the parade, too?”
Marvel shook her head. “She sold hers last year, but she came in second place with her sunflower decorations.”
He grinned, not at all surprised. What was it with that woman and sunflowers?
“You should ask her if she needs help if you have the time, since her partner dropped out of the planning this year. That kid was a dumbass anyway, so she’s better off without him.”
Dominic felt his stomach flip-flop. “She has a partner?”
“Partner in the parade committee, but Blake was just trying to get a date out of the whole thing.” Marvel shook her head. “These boys out here always have nefarious agendas. You’re not going to be a Casanova around town now, are you? Because I’m very protective of the ladies in Heart Lake, and I will whack you with a clay pot if you hurt one of them.”
He let out a loud, barking laugh. “With a clay pot?”
She kept her expression deadpan. “I own Dirty Birds Clay studio off Main Street, so I have access to as many clay pots as I need. And I can easily hide the evidence. It’s the perfect crime, really.”
Dominic put his hand up like he was taking an oath. “I promise not to Casanova around town.”
He’d never used that word as a verb before, but it made sense.
Marvel nodded, seemingly satisfied with that answer. “So are you single? There’s a pale line on your ring finger. Looks like you were wearing a wedding ring not too long ago.”
He glanced down at his hand, and sure enough, there was a slightly less-tan line on his finger where the wedding band had once been. “Uh, I’m divorced. Actually, I just found out a few minutes before you got here.”
She looked concerned now and handed him another cookie. “You found out? You didn’t know you were getting divorced? Dang, that’s like that soap-star actress I follow in Us Weekly —her husband divorced her via text message, but now she’s married to a rock star without a gender. So, buck up, kid. Things can still really turn around for you.”
“No, I knew,” he clarified with a small chuckle. “It wasn’t a surprise divorce, and, thank God, it wasn’t via text message. I just meant the judge signed off on everything finally.”
Marvel grabbed another cookie for herself as well. “So she left you, huh? Was it the shiner to the face? Because she must have already known about the nose situation when she married you.”
Dominic made a mental note to look at his nose again in the mirror later, because he’d never considered it to be crooked before, but Marvel was definitely giving him a complex now. “I don’t know if I’d say it was because of the fastball, but more so the impact it had on our lives.”
She grinned at that. “You mean the impact on your face? See? I was right.”
“Clearly everyone in Heart Lake knows about my career ender.” He tried not to groan, but it escaped his lips anyway. “I guess I wasn’t expecting everyone up here to be so clued in to the rest of the world. I moved here to get away from all of that, though.”
“That’s the problem with running away from your troubles,” Marvel said. “They just tag along with you to the new place. And we have internet here. And televisions. And the newspaper, and radios…”
“I get it,” he said with a laugh. She had a point about running away, though. “I used to come here when I was a kid in the summers with my mother and grandfather.”
He had no clue why he felt compelled to tell this woman anything at all, but here he was ready to spill his guts to a whacky stranger. There was a friendliness and openness to her that he couldn’t help feeling comfortable around. He’d heard people described as a “calming presence” before, but this was the first time he’d genuinely felt it.
“Heart Lake holds some good memories for me.”
“I thought you looked familiar,” Marvel replied, then suddenly her hand went to her mouth, and she belted out the loudest laugh he’d ever heard. “Oh my God… are you Carleton’s grandson?”
Dominic paused, a cookie halfway to his mouth. “Uh… you knew my grandfather?”
“If you mean did I know him in the Biblical sense?” Marvel asked, then nodded with a wide grin. “Then, yes. I knew him many times over. Sometimes I knew him a few times a night. He was a stallion, kid. You’ve got some good genes in you. Man, I had some good genes of his in me back in the day.”
“Oh, dear God.” Dominic groaned and shook his head as he placed the cookie he was eating back in the basket. “Please, please tell me you’re kidding.”
“I would never joke about my lovers,” Marvel continued, her face completely earnest. “If I remember correctly, he had some shrapnel in his ass cheek still from the war. He’d get all cagey if you tried to touch it—he really wasn’t a fan of butt stuff.”
Small miracles. “Okay, well, that is an image that no amount of therapy can erase for me. I think it’s time to call it a night.”
Marvel laughed and started walking toward the front door as he followed her out. “I left my card in the basket with my cell phone number, so call any time you need anything. And make sure you come to the Boat Parade—I’ll introduce you around to everyone.”
He opened the front door and ushered her out onto the porch. “I appreciate the hospitality.”
“That’s my job,” Marvel replied while reaching into her pocket and apparently scooping up some confetti that she then tossed in the air between them. “Welcome to Heart Lake!”
Dominic closed the door fast.