Cara
Grandma was already setting a platter down at the center of the table when I came back across the lawn with my sisters trailing behind me.
The string lights Grandpa had hung over the long table were on now, throwing their soft yellow glow over everything, and the last of the sunset was bleeding pink and gold behind the trees.
The air had cooled, but it was still nice enough to sit outside in just a sweater.
We took our seats around the long table, in the loose, unspoken arrangement that had evolved over the years.
Grandma at the head of the table, Grandpa at the foot.
Piper and Ren on one side, Eliza and Nate next to them, with Tilly between them.
Lucy and Spencer on the other side. Hunter at Grandpa’s elbow with Noah next to him.
Lark and Briar sat across from each other in a way that let them maintain their endless silent sisterly communication.
Paige came out of the back door of the house just as I was sitting down, carrying a pitcher of iced tea, and slid into her seat next to Hunter without making a fuss about being late.
She caught my eye across the table and gave me a small private smile that said I see you.
Later. I gave her a small private smile back that said I know. Later.
Dinner was loud and layered, three conversations at once.
Hot dogs and burgers off the grill. Potato salad, baked beans, corn on the cob, and watermelon cut into cold pink wedges.
Grandma was at the end of the table, watching all of it like a queen surveying her kingdom, which she was.
Grandpa was at his end, eating slowly, listening more than talking.
I was right in the middle of all of it and also somewhere else. My phone was in my pocket. I had thought about Jasper at least nine times in the last hour, and I was about to do something about it, but I wasn’t sure I had the courage yet.
I gave up about halfway through my second hot dog. I slipped my phone out of my pocket under the edge of the table and typed a message before I could talk myself out of it.
Me: I’m at the Honeybrook with the whole family. There’s a llama, three pugs, a chocolate lab, and a goose. Wish you were here.
I hit send and immediately wanted to throw my phone into the rescue enclosure.
The reply came back within thirty seconds.
JASPER: I wish I were there too. Send me a selfie of you and the llama. Larry, right?
I laughed out loud at the table without meaning to.
Lucy looked up from across the table and gave me the I know exactly who that is look. Eliza, two seats down, made a small soft sound that meant she’d seen Lucy’s face and figured it out. Grandma’s eyebrow went up another quarter inch.
“I’ll be right back,” I said to no one in particular, and I got up from the table with my phone in my hand and walked across the lawn to the rescue enclosure. The string lights threw a soft yellow glow most of the way out, and Larry came over to the fence, sensing my approach. I held up the phone.
“Larry. Selfie for a friend.”
He looked directly at the camera with the dignified, slightly stunned expression he reserved for his closest friends, his enormous chin already settling onto the top rail in anticipation. This was a llama used to taking selfies with his fans.
I sent it.
JASPER: He’s perfect. Tell him I said hi.
Me: He says hi back.
JASPER: Friday. Can’t wait.
Me: Same.
I pressed the phone against my chest for a second before I put it back in my pocket. Larry huffed at me through the fence in mild disapproval at being used as a prop and then forgiven again, and I scratched the spot on his neck he liked.
“He says hi,” I told him, low and private.
Larry blinked at me.
“I’m going to introduce him to you eventually.”
Larry blinked again, and I chose to interpret it as approval.
When I turned around, my grandmother was standing on the back porch watching me, holding a dish towel in one hand.
She didn’t say anything. She just lifted her eyebrow approximately a quarter of an inch, which, on Grandma, was the equivalent of a whole speech.
I looked down at my shoes and walked back across the lawn, smiling and trying to hide it at the same time, and I am sure I did not pull it off.
After dinner, while Grandma was bringing out the rest of the desserts she’d made—a peach cobbler, an apple crumble, and my cookies, the beautiful culinary overkill she was famous for—the kids slowly drifted off in different directions.
Noah and Lark went out on the lawn to throw a ball for Lois.
Briar went back to the rescue enclosure.
Tilly fell asleep on Nate’s shoulder somewhere between the cobbler and the crumble, and Eliza and Nate took her inside to settle her on the couch in the living room with one of Grandma’s quilts over her.
The boyfriends and fiancés gradually drifted toward the fire pit Grandpa had built years ago, where the men in this family always ended up at the end of the night after they helped clean up.
Grandma went inside to make tea, ignoring everyone’s offers to help, because making tea after a family meal was Grandma’s particular meditation, and we had all learned years ago not to interfere with it.
I ended up at the porch railing by myself with a slice of cobbler, watching the fire pit and the kids on the lawn and the slow, soft settling of the evening into its quietest hour.
Paige walked over and joined me at the railing without saying anything for a minute. Just leaned her elbows on the wood.
“Hi,” she said eventually. “I heard you have a date on Friday.”
“From Lucy. Am I right?”
“Of course, Lucy. But also Jasper. He told me tonight at work—finally. I’ve known something was up with him all week. I’ve been waiting for you to be free of the others so I could have my turn.”
“Jasper told you? I suspected he wouldn’t keep it from you. Glad I was right.”
“Yeah. He did. He’s going to be good to you, Cara. Not because I threatened him,” she joked. “Because he’s into you.”
I looked sideways at her. There was something else in her voice tonight.
Not just the warm, supportive sister voice she always used.
Something that sounded like she actually knew things.
And I suppose she did. Paige had worked with him for almost a year.
Paige saw him five days a week. Paige had been watching him watch me from across her bar for a long time before I had let myself look back.
“How can you be sure?”
“I just know. I see him at the bar. I see how he is with everyone. I see how he’s been since you came back into focus for him.
He’s a good man, Cara. He is being very intentional about you.
I wanted you to know that I see it, because I think it might help you to hear it from somebody who’s been watching from the side of the room. ”
“Paige…”
“I’m telling you because nobody told me, during all that time I wasted with my stupid ex-husband, that I should have been with Hunter all along.
I had to figure out for myself that he was a good man, and it took me longer than it should have.
We had a head start as friends, and I still almost missed him.
I’m not going to make my little sister figure something out on her own when I can just tell her. ”
I inhaled a sharp breath. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” A pause. “I want you to enjoy Friday. I want you to walk into it like a woman who knows she deserves a nice dinner with a man who is choosing her. Can you do that for me?”
“I’ll try.”
“I’m not letting you off the hook. Promise me you’ll let yourself have it.”
I looked down at my cobbler. “I promise.”
“Good.”
We stood there at the railing for a minute without saying anything.
The fire pit threw a warm orange flicker across the lawn, and I could hear the low murmur of the men talking at the fire, and Lois, was lying at Nate’s feet with her chin on his boot, and somewhere out near the rescue enclosure, Briar was still talking quietly to Larry.
The night had gotten properly dark now. The stars were starting to come out over the trees behind the inn.
I thought about Lucy’s offhand comment from earlier, about the Coffee Cabin being creep-free, and the small, loose thread it had left in me. I almost let it stay loose. Then I decided, for no reason I could articulate at the time, to pull on it.
“Lucy mentioned earlier that the Coffee Cabin has been creep-free this week,” I said, casually, into my cobbler. “I noticed that too. Eric hasn’t been around at all. It’s been a relief.”
I felt Paige go still beside me. Her hand had been resting on the railing next to mine, and I felt her fingers tighten, just barely, against the wood.
I turned my head and looked at her.
Her face was already arranging itself back into the warm sister face.
But she had not been quite fast enough. There had been something there for a fraction of a second—a tightness around her mouth, a flicker behind her eyes, the small private rearranging she did when she was thinking about something she wasn’t going to say out loud.
It was there, and then it was gone. By the time I was actually looking at her, she was looking back at me with an expression that was almost convincing.
“Yeah,” she said. “Good. That’s good.”
“Paige. What was that look?”
“What look?”
“That look you just had.”
“I didn’t have a look, Cara.”
“You absolutely had a look.”
She turned back to face the lawn and took a small breath, and I watched her decide what she was going to say next.
Paige was a careful person about a lot of things, but she was not usually careful with me.
Tonight, she was being careful with me. It was the carefulness that made my stomach do the small, uncertain thing it had not done all evening.