Liz Flaherty - Nice To Come Home To

“Everyone has weaknesses,” Zoey concluded, “and mine combined with your parents’ created quite a cluster of pain and sorrow.”

Seth came as they were finishing dessert, and Cass excused her sister from cleanup duty. Before the cottage’s front door closed behind the young couple, awkwardness slipped inside.

“I should go.” Zoey pushed back from the table. “Let me help with the dishes.”

Cass almost let her leave. That was how she’d spent most of her life, wasn’t it, walking the long way around to avoid being hurt more than necessary? She’d learned to live without her beloved aunt’s emotional support. Why take a chance of regaining it only to lose it once more?

Because she was thirty-five, not sixteen, that was why. Because she had a little sister she needed to set an example for. Because there were steps out of loneliness and she was ready to take a big one.

“No,” she said. “Please.” She stood up. “Will you make coffee while I clear the table? Or would you rather have more wine?”

“Coffee would be good.”

“Yours always was, even when it was half cream and two-thirds refined sugar. Did Nana know you gave it to me like that?”

Zoey chuckled. “I doubt it. It didn’t seem to have taken, though—you’ve been thin as a rail your whole life.”

When the coffee was done and they were once more sitting across from each other at the table, Cass revealed, “I got chunky in high school, when we were in Korea. Dad found a doctor who put me on a program that un-chunked me in a matter of months. I took pills that were illegal here, but that was during the Barbie-stepmother time and she used them all the time. We both survived and I stayed thin until after I was married.”

“You gained weight then? It’s hard to imagine.”

“Some. Enough to make Tony panic. So I became an exercise and fasting addict. I couldn’t stop losing weight when I was ready to and it scared me to death. My metabolism was so messed up, and it pretty much stayed that way until I got the breast cancer diagnosis.” Cass smiled, although the gesture cost her—there was nothing funny in the memories. “So now I’m your basic slug. I walk for exercise, but I do it better if there’s ice cream at the end of it.”

Zoey laughed, a big sound that filled Cass’s heart and gave buoyancy to her own chuckle. “I’m with you, sweetheart.” The older woman sipped from the coffee in front of her, then leaned her forearms on the table and met Cass’s eyes. “Where did you go, Cassandra? Did you really believe I didn’t want you here? That I ever didn’t want you at all? That the people at the lake didn’t want you? Gianna Gallagher used to ask me, but I never said where you were, just that you were all right even though I was never really sure you really were.”

“Mother could be pretty convincing. You know that. It wasn’t until she got sick that she admitted she’d made most of it up, that you’d only been concerned about me staying with Nana and Grandpa because they weren’t all that well. I should have talked to you then.” Marynell had made other confessions, too, all in one long, pain-ridden night. She’d asked her daughter’s forgiveness and Cass had given it.

She hadn’t meant the words of forgiveness, but she’d said what a dying woman needed to hear. Six months and change later, she thought she’d done the right thing, but a pardoning heart had come harder than the words had.

“Will you forgive me?” she asked. “For believing her and for not making it right even when I knew better?”

“Oh, honey.” Zoey got up, came around the table and drew Cass out of the chair and into her arms. “Marynell was who she was and she couldn’t help that. We all fell prey to her at one time or another. Let’s just concentrate on not losing each other again. What do you say?”

“I’d like that a lot.”

When they were seated again, their cups refilled and second servings of dessert on plates in front of them, Zoey said, “What do you think of Luke?”

“He must be a good businessman. The orchard looks great.”

She thought more than that, of course. Noticed more. Thought about him before she fell asleep in one of the cottage’s two little bedrooms. She knew he had beautiful, sun-streaked dark brown hair and thickly lashed eyes the color of milk chocolate. That he would probably be a little taller than she was even if she was wearing heels. That he was built really nicely but not as if it was on purpose—it was more like the muscles were a by-product of pruning and picking apples. That his voice warmed places in her that hadn’t known warmth in a long time. Maybe ever.

She took a deep breath. “I suggested a coffee shop on the premises, in the round barn. I don’t think he likes the idea.”

Zoey shrugged. “Convince him, if it’s something you’d like to do that you think would be successful, but remember that he’s run the place by himself for several years. As long as your mother got her checks, she never offered any input. I’m sure Luke expected the same thing from you.” She smiled, her eyes twinkling. “I’ll be so delighted to see him be wrong.”

CHAPTER FIVE

HE WASN’T READY to give in on the coffee shop idea, but Luke had to admit he liked having an active partner in the orchard. For one thing, she didn’t mind climbing trees and she was—for someone he thought was on the skinny side of slim—strong enough to fill the bag over her shoulder as full as her sister did. It was the busiest time of year at the orchard and she pitched in wherever help was needed. She was great in the retail store and on the sorting machine—not so good when it came to making the orchard’s signature dumplings.

“It skipped a generation. That’s all I can figure,” Cass said, laughing, when Zoey and Luke looked at her first attempt with something like horror.

She often joined him and Zoey at the farmhouse for coffee in the morning. This became an increasingly pleasurable point during the day, since Zoey seemed to be on a one-woman crusade to fatten up her niece. Not wanting to make anyone feel uncomfortable about eating in front of him, Luke filled his plate and joined them at the table. They brainstormed about the orchard, about the Miniagua Lakers football team, about the coffee shop.

The daggone coffee shop.

She was serious about it. She’d even hauled him over to Peru on Monday morning to a place there called Aroma, where he drank two cups and got one to go of something really strong and good. She’d had something girly. Then, just when he’d built up a good argument, she’d taken him to a chain coffee place in Kokomo and another local one that sat just off campus at a nearby university. He’d eaten pastries at that one, and they hadn’t been as good as the ones from the Amish bakery, but Cass had shown him how popular they were and gotten off-the-top-of-her-head numbers from the barista about what their revenue was on a fairly slow weekday.

He was running out of arguments.

On Friday, Cass texted and said she couldn’t make breakfast and Royce called Seth and said she’d be late at the orchard. Neither of them offered an explanation. Zoey came to the apple barn, looking fretful, and stood at the sorter for a while. Sort of helping.

“What are you doing here?” Luke asked bluntly, dumping a box of Galas onto the conveyor. “Not that you’re not welcome—you most certainly are—but you don’t generally hang out in the barn. You go up to the store and the apple dumpling assembly.”

“Luke, what if they’re getting ready to go home? Royce needs to start school, so even though they planned to stay two weeks, they might not. It’s a long, hard drive.”

She literally wrung her hands, and Luke wanted to wring Cass’s neck. She’d had no business getting her aunt’s hopes up that she might stay at Miniagua if her intent all the time was to hightail it back to the West Coast. While he was relieved in a way not to have to come up with more reasons not to open a coffee shop in the round barn, he was seriously ticked that she would get everyone all excited and then just take off, even though from everything he’d heard that seemed to be her modus operandi.