Feels like Home (Lake Fisher Book 2) Read online

  In fact…he laughed. It was a full-on belly laugh, and I caught the tips of my lips quirking into a grin.

  “I’m Eli,” he said.

  “Bess,” I replied.

  “Is that short for anything?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Is Eli short for anything?”

  “Elijah.”

  I grinned. “Elizabeth.”

  “You want to play pool?” he asked, jerking his thumb toward the table.

  “Sure,” I said, and I motioned for Lynda and Aaron to join us, but they preferred to go stand in a dark corner together. If they stayed there too long, Mr. Jacobson would get out his high-powered spotlight and shine the light into the dark corner of the room. Nobody enjoyed that.

  “You’re new,” I said as he racked the balls.

  “We just got here,” he replied and handed me a pool stick.

  “How long are you staying?” I pretended like I didn’t care, but I kind of did.

  “Until the end of summer,” he replied. “You?”

  “Same.” I took in a breath. “Do you have any friends here?”

  He smiled at me. “Just you.”

  My belly dropped down toward my toes. Then he tossed his head to get the hair out of his eyes, lined up his shot, and broke the balls.

  I beat him, and I didn’t feel bad about it at all.

  7

  Bess

  “And that was how it all began,” I say as I stand up and take a small bow. Aaron has just been unhooked from all the tubes and he looks like he can barely keep his eyes open, but he’d listened intently as I’d talked. He grins at me. He has a signature smirk and he’s had it as long as I can remember.

  “An auspicious start, to say the least,” he says with a grin. “You two were inseparable that summer. I never thought I’d get to spend time with you again.”

  “You’re one to talk. You and Lynda were glued together even before Eli came along.”

  “True.” He stares at me. “I still missed you. You were my best friend.”

  And he was mine. Only time and distance had kept us apart. Then it became easy not to talk. “Well, you have me now,” I say.

  He nods. “Thanks for hanging out with me.”

  I motion around the room. “How many treatments do you have left?”

  “Every other day for the next two weeks.” He groans as he adjusts himself in the chair.

  “That many?”

  He nods. “I’ll need a driver. Are you up for it?”

  “Every other day for two weeks?” I shake my head. “We’re not going to be at the lake that long.”

  He reaches over and extends his hand, palm up. Then he stares at me and waits. He makes a clenching motion with his fingers and I place my palm against his. He holds it tightly. “Can you give me a week, then, Bess? Please?”

  A week. One solid week of sharing a cabin with Eli.

  “The lake’s a happy place,” he almost sings out. “The happiest of happy places.”

  “I know. It’s just…”

  “It’s just what?” he asks, his voice quiet and soft, almost breakable.

  “It’s just awkward right now with Eli,” I admit. “We’re right in the middle of the divorce…” I let my voice trail off. “It’s just hard, you know?”

  “No, Bess,” he says, still holding tightly to my hand. “I don’t know. I know I’d give anything to have Lynda back, and you’re giving it all up.”

  “You don’t understand what it’s like between me and Eli.”

  “Then tell me. Explain it to me.” His voice is hurried and urgent.

  I shake my head. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Did it start with the first baby?” he asks. I try to jerk my hand back, but he doesn’t let me go. Instead, he holds on even more tightly. “Or was it the second, or the third?”

  Eli and I had tried so many times to get pregnant. And occasionally we did, but it never lasted. We never could make a family.

  I let my hand go lax in his. “There were more than three,” I whisper. A tear slips from the corner of my eye and rolls down my cheek, leaving a warm trail behind it. I don’t even try to wipe it away. “I wanted a family so bad.”

  “You don’t need children to make a family, Bess. You and Eli are a family, all on your own. The two of you are a whole unit. Don’t ever think differently.”

  “It’s too late.”

  He looks sad. “I know. You told me.”

  The nurse returns with his paperwork and unhooks the medical equipment. Aaron buttons his shirt and stands up, a little wobbly on his feet. “Whoa. You might have to drive, Bess,” he says.

  “You hate my driving,” I retort. Actually, he just hates riding with anyone else. He always has.

  “I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” he asks. He looks like he can barely hold his head up.

  The moment he gets in the passenger seat of the car, he lays the seat back. “Sorry, but I think I’m going to take a quick nap,” he mutters, sounding fatigued.

  I reach over and give his arm a squeeze, kind of glad that he’s going to sleep so we can stop talking about the past. Parts of it still hurt too much to discuss.

  8

  Eli

  I’m not at all sure I like Aaron’s kid. The middle one is adorable, with her big curls and her charming grin. And the little one’s a baby, and you can’t help but love babies. They are untapped potential. But Sam…

  I’m struggling to like her, and that fact alone makes me feel bad. Her bare feet dangle over the water as she sits and fishes off the end of the wooden dock. Her bobber floats along aimlessly until I can’t see it anymore.

  “Your bobber is gone,” I warn her. I point to beneath the dock, thinking she’ll reel it in and cast it out again.

  “Whatever,” she says with a grunt. She holds her pole negligently, like she doesn’t care about it at all. My father would be appalled.

  “If you can’t see it, how will you know when you catch a fish?” I ask. I reel my own line in and cast it back out.

  “Fine,” she snaps as she reels her line in. Her hook is bare.

  “Looks like something stole your bait when you couldn’t see the bobber,” I say flippantly. I hold out the can of earthworms that I dug up this morning. “Put a fresh one on.” I shake it at her, but she just stares into the can. “Something wrong?”

  She sets her pole down on the dock next to her. “I don’t like fishing.”

  “Your mom loved to fish,” I say quietly. Mornings at the lake are quiet and comfortable, and loud voices that break the silence ruin it all, in my opinion.

  “My mom liked to fish?” she asks warily. She looks around like she’s checking to be sure no one can hear her. “You knew my mom?”

  “I did. Bess and I used to hang out with her and your dad.”

  “My dad doesn’t like to talk about my mom,” she says, her voice tight, her words clipped.

  I looked over at her. “What makes you think that?”

  She shrugs. “When I talk about her, he gets this look on his face like I’m hurting him. That’s all.”

  “It probably does hurt a little,” I reply. “But it also feels really good to talk about people we’ve lost. It helps us keep them alive in our hearts.” I lay my hand over mine. She does the same. “The feel-good part is much better than the hurting part. The hurting part is temporary. The feel-good part lasts forever.” She stares at me like I’m a big old liar. I rush to amend, “Or at least that’s how I feel.”

  “Do you know somebody who died?”

  I think for a minute. “I’ve known quite a few people who have died. My dad died a few years ago.”

  “Do you talk about him?” she asks.

  I reach over and pick up her hook, slide a worm onto it, and hand her rod to her. She looks at it for a moment and then casts it into the water. “I do talk about him, but he has been gone for a few years, so it doesn’t hurt quite as much as it did early on. And he was sick for a long time.
I felt kind of grateful when he died, because he wasn’t in pain anymore.” I reach over and turn the wheel on her pole. “You have to turn it until it clicks, so the fish won’t be able to pull the line away when you catch one.”

  “Your dad was in pain?”

  I nod. “He was.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  “Only every single day. Especially days like this. He used to take me fishing from this same dock.” I reel my line in and recast it.

  “Did you catch a lot of fish?”

  “We did. You want to hear something funny?” I ask. I hold my breath.

  “Sure,” she says warily.

  “My dad used to let my friends go fishing with us sometimes, but he refused to take Katie.”

  Her brow furrows. “He didn’t like her?”

  “He liked her fine, but he didn’t like to fish with her. She would only fish with bread balls as bait because she didn’t want to kill the worms, and she made us put all the fish back. She didn’t like to kill them and eat them.” I point to her twitching bobber. “Something is playing with it.”

  Suddenly, the bobber goes under. “Reel it in!” I say loudly. She jumps and starts to spin the handle until the line goes taut. The tip of the rod bends and I reach for the net. When the fish breaks the water, I scoop under it and bring it up so we can both look at it. “That’s a nice fish,” I say, even though it’s tiny.

  “What do we do with it now?” she asks, but she’s grinning from ear to ear.

  “You have to kiss it.”

  Her eyes jerk up to meet mine. “Why?”

  “It’s tradition. You kiss the first fish.” I shrug my shoulders. I push the net toward her. “You have to take it off the hook.”

  She gingerly reaches into the net and scoops out the little bream. He is much too small to eat, but those little fish are fun to catch. She gingerly removes the hook, wincing all the while. Then she kisses it square on the mouth. She wipes her mouth with the back of her free hand.

  “Do we eat it now?”

  I shake my head. “I think we should put him back and let him do some growing.”

  “Oh.” She doesn’t look unhappy about it. She tosses him back into the water. “My hands are fishy.” She sniffs her fingers and her face scrunches up. “Was my mom good at fishing?” she asks.

  “I wouldn’t say she was great at it, but she had a lot of fun doing it. She could sit for hours and never get bored, even though my dad and I were both very quiet when we fished.”

  “My mom knew how to have fun,” she says almost in a whisper.

  “Yeah, she did.” I reach over and palm the top of her head. It feels natural, and she doesn’t shrink away from me. “You need a fishing hat,” I say when I see that the sun is in her eyes. “I have one in the cabin you can use next time we go fishing.”

  “Can we do this again tomorrow?”

  “We can do this whenever you want.”

  She reels her line in by herself, retrieves a worm, and tosses it back out. “Okay,” she says. “This is fun.”

  She looks up at me and grins. And I can’t help but think how lucky Aaron is to have such wonderful children in his life. If Bess and I had ever had kids, we might not be in the state we’re in now. Maybe she wouldn’t hate me quite so much. Maybe she’d be willing to tolerate me, just a little bit longer.

  Maybe I’d have lived up to the promises I made the day we got married.

  9

  Bess

  Aaron looks a bit green by the time we get back to Lake Fisher. He slept the whole way back, and he groans when he gets out of the car.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “Yep,” he says with a grunt as he walks toward the front door of his cabin. “Thanks for going with me,” he calls out over his shoulder, without really looking back at me.

  I have no idea what he would have done if I hadn’t gone. There’s no way he could have driven himself home.

  “I’ll see you on Wednesday!” he yells as he opens the door to his cabin.

  “Wait,” I call out. I jog toward him and toward the front door.

  “Can’t,” he says. “I have to throw up now.” He walks in and slams the door in my face. I stand there on the porch for a minute, not sure what to do. But the only thing on my mind is the fact that he has three children to take care of, but he feels terrible.

  I open the door and walk in behind him. I can hear him heaving in the bathroom, so I give him some privacy. I look around his tiny cottage. It’s laid out exactly like mine, but his mom didn’t have all the family photos and knick-knacks that my mom always left lying around. His mom said that things like that were just more to have to dust.

  Finally, he comes out and sinks down on the sofa that’s as old as I am. “Feel better?” I ask him.

  “Much.” He leans his head back and closes his eyes.

  “Where are the kids?” I go to his kitchen and start looking through his cabinets. He needs some soup or some toast, but I don’t find anything but kid snacks and juice pouches. I grab a juice pouch, punch the straw into it, and take it to him.

  “They’re with Eli,” he says. He doesn’t look at me when he says it. He just keeps his eyes closed, but he takes a few tentative sips from the juice pouch.

  I lay a hand on my chest. “They’re with my Eli?”

  “Yep.” He belches and grins at me, still without opening his eyes.

  “Why are they with Eli?” Eli doesn’t know anything about kids. He’s never spent any time at all with them and God knows we never had any.

  “I asked him to watch them. Gabby’s helping him.”

  “Are they up at the big house with Katie and Jake?”

  He shakes his head, wincing in discomfort as he does it. “They’re at your cabin. Gabby said she was going to make fairy wings with them today.” He grins again. “I can’t wait to see Eli in wings.”

  I snort out a laugh. “I can assure you that Eli is not going to wear wings.”

  “I can assure you that Kerry-Anne will talk him into it.” He settles more deeply into the sofa. “She’s very persuasive.”

  “She looks more like you than Lynda. Sam, on the other hand, looks like Lynda spit her right out of her mouth.”

  “Your North Carolina is showing,” he teases. He finishes his juice pouch and holds it up for me to take it. “Thanks,” he grunts out when I get up to throw it away.

  “Is chemo always this hard on you?” I ask.

  “Oh, this is nothing compared to the last round. I only threw up once, and I’m pretty sure that was because of your sucky driving.” He picks up a scatter pillow and throws it in my direction.

  “Hey!” I complain, but the pillow falls a few feet short of me, proof that he’s feeling worse than he’s letting on.

  “You need to learn what a turn signal is for.” He sticks his tongue out at me and I return the gesture.

  I throw the pillow back at him. “How old are you? Twelve?”

  “At twelve, I didn’t have hair on my balls.”

  Heat creeps up my cheeks. “Oh, jeez,” I breathe out, but I’m laughing too. Aaron always did have a way of shocking me into laughing. I’ve missed it, those random moments of gleeful embarrassment.

  A knock sounds on the door and it opens up. Eli sticks his head in. He looks from me to Aaron and back. “I just wanted to be sure you guys were okay,” he says.

  Aaron sits up and asks, “How were the kids today?”

  “Miles took a two-hour nap, Kerry-Anne played with Trixie most of the morning, and Sam kicked my ass at fishing.”

  “That’s my girl,” Aaron croons, with a fist pump.

  “I told her that I’d find her a fishing hat,” Eli says. “The sun was in her eyes all morning.”

  “I have one,” Aaron says. He gets slowly to his feet and walks to the tiny closet in the corner of the room. From the top shelf, he takes out a dusty pink cap. He knocks it against his leg and dust floats in the air.

  “That was Lynda’s,” I say q
uietly.

  Aaron stares at the cap. “Yeah. She’d be happy knowing Sam has it.” He knocks it against his leg again.

  Eli jerks his thumb toward the door. “I’m going to get back to the kids.” He looks at Aaron’s hands, still holding the cap. “Do you want me to take that?”

  Aaron shakes his head. “Nah. I want to give it to her.”

  “I don’t know if this is the right time or not…” Eli lets his voice trail off, and he stares at the floor.

  “It’s always the right time if it’s about my kids,” Aaron replies.

  “Sam wants to talk to you about her mom, but she says it makes you sad,” Eli suddenly blurts out, and then he looks like he wishes he could take it back. The wince on his face says it all.

  “It does make me sad. But it makes me happy too.” He stares at the cap. “I’ll be sure she knows that.”

  Eli nods and turns to slip back out the door.

  “I wish we’d bet on those fairy wings.” Aaron chuckles and gives me a wink.

  It’s only then that I realize that Eli had had two large misshapen appendages sticking out from his back.

  “Told you Kerry-Anne is persuasive. It’s that cherubic smile. Gets you every time.”

  He walks toward the front door, and I follow him. “Where are you going?”

  “To give my daughter her mother’s hat, and to talk to her about Lynda as much as she wants. Want to come along?” He stands in the open doorway and looks back at me, waiting.

  “Well, they’re at my house,” I remind him.

  “C’mon,” he says, and he rocks his head in the direction he wants me to go. As I walk by him, he grabs my hand and stops me. He stares, hard, into my eyes, and his well up with tears. He blinks them back, but not before I notice. “Thank you for going with me today.” He gives my hand a tight squeeze and I squeeze his back, trying to swallow the lump that’s suddenly in my throat.