The Coldwater Warm Hearts Club (11 page)

Jake gave the chair a sidelong glance. “There's a cigarette burn on the seat. We never could get Dad to quit. I take it new upholstery wouldn't mess up any value the thing might have.”

“Not at all,” she said. “But good design isn't just about what a piece is worth. It's about what you choose to surround yourself with, and how you live with those things. How they function. How they make you feel.”

“Never gave it much thought.”

“No time like the present. What does this chair say to you?”

Jake frowned at it. “Not a thing.”

When she made a noise of exasperation, he said, “Sit on me?”

“Really?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I don't speak furniture-ese.”

“Come on, Jake. Try. Do you like the way the arms curve? How does the thickness of the cushions make you feel? What about how the chair works in the room?”

“It's my
feeling
that if a chair will hold my weight, it
works
just fine.”

Jake would never get as excited as she did about the interplay of light and dark, proportion and line.

“So what do you need to redo the chair?” Jake asked.

“First, your mom would have to decide whether she wants to try to recapture the original style of the piece or do something that pulls it into this century a tad. Either choice is a good one
if
you pick the right fabric.”

“Well, my mom's birthday is next month,” Jake said. “How about if you pick the fabric and help me get this chair fixed up for her?”

“Sure. We can do the work on the wood ourselves, but I'll have to find an upholsterer who can do the piece justice. Put me in front of a sewing machine and I'm likely to stitch my thumbs together.”

“I doubt that, but see who you can find to recover the cushions just in case.” Jake caught up her hand and planted a quick kiss on the pad of her thumb. “A perfectly good thumb is a terrible thing to waste.”

It seemed like a joke, but then he gave her a searching look. Before Lacy could decipher what she read in Jake's dark eyes, he dropped her hand. Then without another word, he hoisted up the chair and hauled it out to the back of his pickup.

Lacy scanned the room, satisfied she'd done the best she could with what she had to work with. It was just an old cottage filled with castoffs and rejects, but what the room lacked in beauty, it now made up for in functionality. She decided to think of the place as an ugly duckling. With the right design, the right pieces brought together to tell a cohesive story of the family and friends who used the place, the Tyler lake house could be charming.

But the kind of charm Lacy had in mind cost money and she doubted that Jake's widowed mother was rolling in it.

Lacy had one foot on the bottom step leading up to what Jake called the bunkhouse when he popped his head back in at the side door.

“We're done inside for today. I don't want you working anymore,” he told her. “Since I have to get you back to town early, let's take that moonlight cruise now.”

“But there's no moonlight.”

“We'll improvise.”

 

—Mrs. Paderewski, piano teacher, wannabe real estate tycoon, and cat fancier extraordinaire

 

 

 

J
ake cranked the winch to lower the rowboat from its winter berth in the boathouse into the clear cold water. Keeping a tight hold on the rope attached to the bow, he floated the craft around to the dock. Then he tied it off and loaded the rods and tackle box in case Lacy wanted to fish. He started to hand her in, but without his help, she scrambled from the dock to the seat in the bow.

The forward thwart,
he remembered from his Boy Scout days. He settled onto the center thwart, where he slipped the oars into the rowlocks.

“No motor?” she asked.

“Naw. My dad always said the sound scared off the fish.”

“He was quite the angler, wasn't he?”

“The terror of anything with fins, that was my dad. At least, on a good day. Other times, he could only claim to be a drowner of worms.” Jake pushed off from the dock and began rowing along the lakeshore, heading west. “He's been gone not quite a year. I still miss him every day.”

“My folks told me he passed while I was in Boston. I'm sorry, Jake.”

“Don't be. I didn't have him long enough to suit me, but he taught me a lot in the time we had together.” Marvin Tyler had always been there for Jake. His father had baited his first hook, tossed him his first football, and delivered either a pep talk or a kick in the butt whenever he needed it. Along the way, his dad had taught him everything he knew about being a man. “He gave me all he could and it was all I needed.”

“Sounds like you and I were both blessed in the dad department,” Lacy said. “My father was so patient with me. He tried to get me interested in law. Since neither of my sibs seemed to be headed that way, I was his last chance to groom someone in the family to take over his practice. Unfortunately, torts and codicils make me yawn. What a disappointment I must have been.”

“I doubt that.”

“You're looking at the only person in history to have been sent home from law camp.”

“Law camp? Is there such a thing?”

“I'm sorry to tell you there is and it's as riveting as watching paint dry, which is probably how I came to fall asleep during every mock trial and inquest. I never understood why I couldn't have gone to Space Camp and gotten sick on the anti-grav machine instead.” She flashed him a wry smile. “What sorts of things did your dad teach you?”

“Which tool to use for which job and how to take care of all of them.” Jake's oar strokes fell into an easy rhythm as the boat surged across the clear water. “Not to irritate my brothers and sister more than they could bear. How to be a gentleman.”

“A gentleman? Really? So, we have Mr. Tyler to thank for the smooth moves of the heartbreaker of Coldwater High.”

Jake laughed. “That's not his fault. He tried to teach me how to treat a lady. It doesn't mean I learned.”

“Oh, that's right.” She trailed her hand in the water. “You do better in subjects where the answer is a matter of opinion.”

“You remembered! You seemed so distracted that morning in the grill when you first came home, I wasn't sure you were listening to a word I said.”

“I
was
distracted and . . . ‘car-lagged' for lack of a better word, but when did Jacob Tyler ever have anything but a girl's full attention?”

He wondered if she was teasing. Her smile suggested she'd always paid attention to him. Maybe he hadn't lost all his smooth moves.

“After all,” she said, “you do make the best waffles on the planet.”

So much for his smooth moves.

Lacy leaned back, tipped her chin up, and closed her eyes, basking in the sun. If she were a cat, she'd have started purring. Then she sat up and shaded her eyes with one hand. Jake glanced in the direction of her gaze between long strokes of the oars. In soft blues and greens, rounded peaks rose above the sparkling lake.

“I know our mountains are really just little bumps on the earth compared to the Rockies or even the Berkshires,” Lacy said, “but they sure look tall from here.”

“As Dad always said, ‘It's not that the hills are so high, but that the valleys are so low.'”

“I wish I'd known him. Your father sounds like a fount of useful information.”

“Use
less
information, he'd have said. You should have seen him watching
Jeopardy!
He tried so hard to answer the questions, but he'd only get one right in ten, unless the clue had to do with geography. Then he was bang on the money. He was always studying an atlas just for fun.”

As Jake turned the bow of the boat into a quiet cove and dropped anchor, Lacy sighed. “You know, I've heard people say that geography is destiny. Usually, they're talking about third world countries and the limited choices the people who live there have based on where they were born. But I wonder if it doesn't apply to us in a way, too.”

“How do you mean?”

“Do you think maybe the reason I didn't make it in Boston is because I was born in Coldwater Cove?”

“You're blaming the town for that?”

“No, I'm blaming the town for the way I turned out—gullible and too trusting by half.”

“That's not fair. Sure, part of who you are was shaped by growing up here, but you also get to choose what kind of person you're going to be no matter where you're born.” Jake had encountered honorable and dishonorable people everywhere his unit went in Afghanistan. It wasn't fair to make generalizations based on where someone grew up. “Besides, it didn't sound to me like your Boston troubles were entirely of your own making.”

“I chose the wrong business partner. That's on me.”

Jake wondered if that was all the guy had been to her. She had claimed to have been almost engaged once. “We all make choices we wish we hadn't.”

“And pay for them,” she said pensively. Then she gave herself a slight shake. “I'm sorry for being so serious. I don't know what's wrong with me. It's a gorgeous day. I'm with the best-looking guy in the county. I shouldn't be wasting time kicking myself over the past.”

“Best-looking guy in the county?” It was all he heard in that bundle of words.

Lacy splashed a little water in his direction. “As if you didn't think so, too. I'm your friend so I can be honest with you. Even in your dad's old clothes, you're still hot.”

She thinks I'm hot,
streaked through his brain, followed by,
Easy, dude. She also called herself your friend.

If that wasn't the kiss of death, he didn't know what was.

“But anyway,” Lacy went on, “I still can't help wondering if things would have shaken out differently in Boston if I'd grown up in, say, Amherst or Cambridge.”

“Wherever you go, there you are.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You can decide to be happy anywhere.”

“Really? How about Afghanistan?” Then her eyes widened and she clapped a hand over her mouth. “Forgive me. I shouldn't have said that.”

“You don't need to tiptoe around me, Lacy. I'm not that fragile.” Of course, his occasional flashback meant there was something going on inside his head that was decidedly fragile, but he had a handle on it. He had a cast-iron will. The past wasn't going to intrude on the present if he could help it. “But honestly, when I was hanging with my buddies, there were times when I was happy even in Helmand province. It all depends on who you're with. Say, did I ever tell you the story about how my grandparents came to Coldwater? My mom's folks, I mean.”

Lacy shook her head and leaned back on the padded seat. “That's an abrupt change of topics.”

“It's really not. It's all about being happy wherever you are.”

“We'll see,” Lacy said with grimace. “At the risk of giving me conversational whiplash, go ahead.”

“OK. Well, my grandpa Wilson was Army, all the way. They lived pretty much everywhere, hopping from base to base. So when he retired after his twenty-year hitch, he and my grandma needed to find a place to settle and put down some roots.”

“So your mom didn't grow up here?”

“Not completely.” Jake shipped the oars. Water droplets ran up the smooth wood like a string of clear pearls. “She was a sophomore in high school when her parents moved the family to Coldwater Cove.”

“Did they have relatives in the area?”

“Nope.”

“So why did your grandparents choose this town?”

“Well, you see, they met in Tulsa and got married right after he enlisted. They didn't have much time before he had to report to Fort Sill, so they honeymooned over a weekend in a little town near the Arkansas line. Grandma always said they started married life in a lovely place with a brand-new ‘art deco' courthouse in the center of the square.”

“Art deco? She knew design?”

“Sort of. She knew what she liked and what she liked was anything modern, which at the time was art deco, I guess. There were a bunch of new murals inside that courthouse that made her feel as if she were visiting a fancy museum. Even in a tiny place in Oklahoma, there was art and beauty and culture.”

“Your grandma sounds like a woman after my own heart.”

“She'd have liked you, too,” Jake said. “Anyway, when he retired and they needed to pick a place to settle, she decided it would be good to go back to where they'd started, to the town where they'd spent their honeymoon.”

“How romantic.”

“Only trouble was, neither my grandma or granddad could remember the
name
of the town. They finally agreed that it started with
C
. After studying a map of southeastern Oklahoma, they decided it must have been Coldwater Cove.”

“But Coldwater—”

“Let me finish,” Jake said. “So they came to town and bought a house and had all their stuff shipped to their new address. After Grandma got her kitchen unpacked, she told my granddad she needed a break from moving. ‘Why don't we go down to the Square and take a look at those murals in the courthouse?' she said. Art had a way of unraveling all her knots, you see.”

“That's my idea of refreshing, too. When I was in Boston, I can't tell you how many times I'd get stuck on something and needed to push away from work for a while. So I'd hop on the Green line and take a stroll through the Isabella Gardner Museum. Nine times out of ten, the solution to my problem would present itself somewhere between the John Singer Sargent and the Titian.”

“You and my grandma were kindred spirits,” Jake agreed, and then pushed ahead with his story. “But when my grandparents got down to the Town Square, instead of the clean lines of a modern courthouse—”

“Your grandma was confronted by Coldwater's fussy old Victorian,” Lacy finished for him.

Jake laughed. “That's right. ‘Where the heck are we?' she asked my granddad. ‘Darned if I know,' he fired back, ‘but we already bought the house. We'll just have to bloom where we planted ourselves.'”

“So they moved to Coldwater Cove by accident?”

“Yep. Turns out the town they'd honeymooned in was Colton Springs, about fifty miles to the south. Actually, it was a good thing they didn't move there because that courthouse my grandma loved so much wasn't even there anymore. A few years after their honeymoon, a tornado came through and took it out along with most of the square.”

“So all's well that ends well for your grandparents.”

“Seems so. They were happy here together for the rest of their lives,” Jake said with a smile. Then he sobered. “You can be happy here, too, Lacy.”

She lifted her shoulders. “I don't know. Coldwater feels like it belongs to my past. I don't see a future for me here.”

Jake always enjoyed a challenge, but he certainly had his work cut out for him with Lacy. He picked up one of the poles and opened his tackle box. “How about your immediate future? Do you see yourself doing a little fishing?”

“Sounds good.” She flashed him a genuine smile. He was coming to need those smiles like he needed sunshine.

Then she cocked her head and eyed the crumpled-up oilcloth on the hull of the boat between them. “Well, let's get this old rag out of the way in case I have to land a whale here.”

Before he could stop her, she leaned forward and yanked it up.

Jake's dad was a pretty handy fellow, but he hadn't been one for an overly fancy fix if it might interfere with his fishing time. When his rowboat started leaking one day, he had simply wrapped a bung in oilcloth, wedged it into the spot, and then went on casting. The patch had held for going on five years, but it was no match for Lacy Evans.

Water gushed through the hole as the boat started to sink.