Лори Касс: Gone With The Whisker

From behind me, a male voice said, “What, you mean it’s not?”

I turned and grinned at Rafe, who also enveloped me in a hug, but one with a slightly different flavor. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“That’s because I was here already. On time, you see?” He tapped the top of my head gently with the point of his chin.

“Five minutes hardly counts as late,” I said, tipping my head up for a kiss.

“Says the woman who is nose deep in a book if I’m more than ten seconds late to meet her for anything,” Rafe said to the room in general before leaning down.

Post-kiss, I watched Otto stirring something in a small saucepan, a something I deeply hoped was buttered maple syrup with pecans that would soon be spread over fluffy pancakes. Aunt Frances had cooked my birthday breakfast all the summers I stayed with her as a kid, and she’d continued doing it when I moved here as an adult. The menu had shifted from the Mickey waffles of my youth, and we weren’t in the boardinghouse, but Aunt Frances was here, I was here, and having Otto and Rafe and Katrina here made the morning even better.

When breakfast was over and the dishes washed, we’d shifted to the fun topic of what to do with the rest of the day.

“Minnie gets to pick,” Rafe said, drying his hands on a kitchen towel. “You only get to turn thirty-five once.”

I beamed at my beloved, who really should have known better. If the world had been a perfect place, we would have piled into a huge semitruck and visited bookstores across northern lower Michigan, filling the trailer as we went. But as much as I loved books, there were two small problems with that dream day. One, I lacked the financial resources to fund that kind of a trip, and two, I didn’t have any place to put that many books.

But even if the world wasn’t perfect, it was still a pretty nice place, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

* * *

An hour later, the five of us were walking down a narrow dirt trail, each of us carrying backpacks laden with a picnic lunch, water, and in my case, emergency reading material. I suspected that Katrina had stuffed a copy of People magazine into hers, but since she didn’t seem to be talking to me on a voluntary basis, I decided not to ask.

We were headed down to the Jordan River Valley, to a section of trail I’d long wanted to hike. Otto was walking ahead with Katrina, and I was next to Aunt Frances, with Rafe close behind. The current trail was a fairly steep downhill that wound through a second growth forest of maple and beech trees, and I was mostly making sure I kept my footing and didn’t slide to the bottom in an untidy heap.

“Did I tell you about Celeste?” Aunt Frances asked.

I picked my way over a miniature crevasse, probably the result of a recent thunderstorm. “What about her?”

“After all those promises, she’s not doing it. Not at all.”

To the inexperienced ear, this would have made no sense. I, however, understood the meaning behind the ambiguous words.

“Not doing what?” Rafe asked.

I hadn’t realized he was close enough to overhear. Hmm . I looked over my shoulder. “Not doing the Saturday breakfast. You know, when the boarders cook for each other?”

“Ah.” He lost interest and dropped behind us, and I focused on my aunt’s dilemma, which wasn’t so much a dilemma as an acceptance of change. My aunt’s summer boardinghouse had been more than a boardinghouse; it had also been, unbeknownst to most, a matchmaking enterprise.

The applications for summer spots had always far exceeded the places available, and one year, on a whim, Aunt Frances had chosen her visitors based on how she thought they might pair up for long-term relationships. Every year it had worked like a charm—although it hadn’t always appeared so at first—and now she’d started getting applications from offspring of some of the first pairings.

One activity that eased people together was the Saturday morning breakfast. This was the one day of the week my aunt hadn’t cooked breakfast for her boarders, instead requiring the boarders themselves to cook for the group. Everyone knew that going in, but what they didn’t know was that they would be paired up with the potential mate my aunt had selected. “Nothing like cooking a large meal,” she’d said often, “to show compatibility.”

Now, I asked, “Celeste isn’t doing it at all?”

“Not so far as I can tell,” my aunt said. “I know I should let her run things her own way, but she’s going to ruin the boardinghouse. She’s going to make it something else entirely. I would never have handed it over to her if I’d known she was going to pull this kind of stunt!”

The voice of my normally calm, cool, and collected aunt had risen. Otto looked back and I met his gaze, arranging my face in a gesture that I hoped said, “Help!”

He slowed and said, “Minnie, I haven’t asked how the library finances are moving along. Have there been any developments?”

I sent him a grateful glance. I’d talk to Aunt Frances about Celeste, but that conversation should take place in private. Otto, a retired accountant, had taken an interest in the large bequest bestowed on the library by the late Stan Larabee. Though Stan’s estranged family had contested the will, the case had recently been settled.

“The library board is still considering options,” I said.

Otto nodded. “Understandable. With that amount of money, you don’t want to rush into decisions.”

“Everyone else,” I said glumly, “is ready to go on a spending spree.”

Otto laughed, and his Paul Newman–like appearance became even more pronounced. “Let me guess,” he said. “The staff and the Friends of the Library disagree on how the money should be spent.”

“You are one of the smartest people I know.”

“Smart enough to marry your aunt.” He looked at her, love writ so clearly in his expression that I looked away. Not because I was embarrassed at the display of emotion; more because the look she sent back mirrored his own and I felt like an intruder.

I hung back, letting the two of them go ahead with Katrina, who chattered to them with no evident inhibitions. Since dwelling on the fact that the relationship with my niece was far from ideal wasn’t a happy way to spend my birthday, I thought instead about the recent weddings with which I’d been involved.

Aunt Frances and Otto had married in April here in Chilson and spent a long honeymoon in Bermuda. The wedding itself had been small and the party afterward large, with half the town attending. I’d stood up as maid of honor, and Leo Kinsler, the former boarder whose stories of Aunt Frances had instigated Otto’s move north, stood up as best man. My dad had given the bride away, and there hadn’t been a dry eye when they’d exchanged vows.

Kristen and Scruffy’s mid-May wedding had been large, the reception even larger, and the food so spectacular that the local guests were still talking about it. It was harder to tell about the out-of-town guests, but the parking lot of Three Seasons seemed to have more New York license plates than in previous years.

I sighed happily at the memories. Kristen, gorgeous in flowing white. Scruffy, even more impeccably clad than normal in a summer tux. The wedding cake decorated with lifelike fondant roses. The appetizers of crab cakes, rumaki, teeny tiny waffles topped with real maple syrup and bits of real whipped cream, shrimp on top of tiny tortillas with a slice of avocado between, something I’d been told was spanakopita, half strawberries with the cutest little ice cream cones imaginable stuck into them and filled with custard, and—

“Are you mad at me?”

I started at Rafe’s question and almost tripped over a tree root. “Why do you think I’m mad?”