Chapter Twenty-Three

Connor talked to Austin fairly regularly to catch up, but he was surprised one morning when Sam called. He was afraid something had happened, but that wasn’t it. She said she wanted to talk to him, so he turned off the jointer he’d been using to square a piece of wood and said he had time.

“I don’t want to go behind Mack’s back,” she started, and Connor tried to interrupt her because didn’t everyone understand that no amount of meddling could change who they were, and the fact that some kind of misplaced chemistry didn’t mean they would wind up together?

But then Sam kept talking. And Connor found that he kept listening. When she got off the phone, he went to the carriage house and got on his laptop. A Google search was easier than he’d expected. Billy’s, Sam had mentioned, and Connor didn’t know why he hadn’t put it together before.

He’d seen the picture at Mack’s house. The whole reason it stood out was because there were so few other shots from when she was young. He remembered she was standing between two older men, but he’d never bothered to find out who they were, where they were standing, why she kept that one piece of her past high on a shelf.

Now he was kicking himself for never asking about it, for not trying harder to know her when he had the chance.

The obituary for William C. Cutter was short, with no mention of parents, siblings, or descendants, but there was a line about leaving behind his loving husband, Todd Blackmore, and the lasting legacy of Billy’s Bar and Grill in Northwest Portland. The short paragraph on Billy’s life ended with the promise that the bar was staying open, but Connor could guess that hadn’t lasted. He pictured Mack throwing herself behind the project with everything she had, but if she didn’t want to change anything about the bar, for fear of eroding the one stable part of her past, then how could she have hoped to keep up with gentrification and a new generation of Portlanders looking for their favorite dive?

There were plenty of pictures of the bar available online. Now he could see where Mack had gotten every design decision. There was the same dark wood she’d wanted to put in the new restaurant. And the slanted print of the sign, the same way she’d written the name, Mackenzie’s, in her notebook as if she were designing a new sign.

But not a new sign, he realized as he pressed his fingertips to the computer screen, touching a picture of the sign that had been torn down years ago. An old one. Something she’d been thinking about since long before she got the chance to start her own place.

…

He didn’t know what he was doing until he was already doing it. He was used to working that way—mixing something together in the kitchen, tasting, adjusting, not knowing until he got to the end what he’d been making the whole time.

But it still surprised him when he realized what was happening. All the repairs Matthew had done to the farm meant he had a well-stocked woodworking studio, and he’d asked Connor if he’d make a new sign for the entrance. It wasn’t cooking, but wasn’t that the point? Connor got to work.

He’d drawn out the style, gotten thumbs-ups from Matthew and Kristen, and gone out to the tools in the back of the shed to make a sample. Only when he passed the wood through the cutter, what came out wasn’t a sign for Branding’s Farm.

The first attempts weren’t quite right, and he had to keep checking the pictures to get the curve of the letters, the slant of the apostrophe. It meant late nights revisiting his mock-ups and early mornings out with the tools while he was supposed to be finishing the sign for Matthew, putting in the baseboards around the new barn, mending a fence that had broken in the far field.

But somehow, he couldn’t stop focusing on what he shouldn’t have been doing long enough to finish what he should.

He could tell it was going to be a hot day on the morning he mounted the cutter between the two tables of the jointer and decided he was ready to stop practicing on small samples and build the real thing. Carefully he lowered the infeed table and passed the board across the machine, flattening the face of the wood until it was smooth and the edges square and straight. When he was satisfied, he pushed the wood through the planer, checking the thickness as he went.

He’d practiced on smaller pieces until he could trace every cut in his sleep, but he still had to steady his hands as he brushed sawdust off the surface. In construction, you could take as much time as you needed to measure and mark. But when it came time to cut, you got one shot—and there were a lot more chances to mess it up than get it right.

Funny how that felt exactly like his life.

He looked up in time to see Matthew walking down from the house, carrying a large thermos and two mugs. Connor had slipped out there early, getting a head start before breakfast, and while he was grateful for the coffee, he’d been hoping to have more time on his own. Hastily he powered off the tools and slid the smooth, finished wood under a pile of lumber. When Matthew barged in, it looked like he was busy selecting pieces for the fence he still needed to fix.

“Since when did you become such a go-getter?” Matthew asked as he picked his way over old wood. “I keep seeing you out here in the mornings but seriously, you don’t have to rush.”

Connor used to think of his brother as so much smaller, but recently it was like looking in a mirror. Not quite as tall, filled out with more muscle in the shoulders from farm work, his beard more fully grown in. The eyes were the same, though, the shape of his jaw and the set of his mouth. The way he carried himself, they could almost be twins.

Connor smacked his hands against his jeans to get out the dust. “Figured it was time to get cracking on that fence I promised you. Do you have more wire, or should I pick some up?”

“I told you,” Matthew said, pouring coffee into a mug. “There’s always going to be more work. You don’t have to kill yourself getting it done.”

“And I told you, I’m not here for handouts. Thanks.” Connor accepted the mug and lifted it to say cheers. “I needed this.”

“I figured. I saw you come out here an hour ago. You’ve been working that long and you haven’t even managed to pick out which pieces of wood to use?”

Connor’s hand froze with the mug partway to his lips. “Am I too slow?”

Matthew blew on his coffee and laughed. “Come on, don’t be an ass. I’m just wondering what you’re up to.” He raised an eyebrow, waiting.

Connor decided there were definite drawbacks to having someone in your life who knew you well enough to predict when you needed coffee and could tell when you were lying through your teeth.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, looking away as he took such a huge gulp of coffee he burned his tongue.

“I don’t believe you for a second,” Matthew said, cupping his mug, and Connor began to suspect this little coffee run had nothing to do with caffeine.

“I know it’s been an adjustment,” Matthew went on. “To be honest, even when Dad said you were coming, I hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly—or I thought you’d go back and forth more before you fully moved. If you fully moved,” he corrected himself, and Connor wondered why he was speaking so carefully.

“Matty.” He put his mug down. “What exactly are you asking?”

“Kristen sent me out here,” Matthew said sheepishly, the same boyish grin he’d once used to weasel out of trouble when he’d been caught stealing sips from their dad’s liquor cabinet or sneaking a girl into his room. “She said it was time for us to have a talk.”

“Sounds serious.”

Matthew laughed. “Not a talk talk. A check-in, I guess? I wondered if it was something Austin or Sam might have said. Or if—” He looked around, as though the woodworking could supply the end of the sentence. He looked back at Connor. “I’m just going to say it, okay?”

Connor nodded. “You have me nervous, baby bro. Out with it already.”

“If there’s something going on at Gold Mountain. If you want to go back—for a few days, a few weeks, or forever—you should totally, one hundred percent, feel free to do it.” He held up a hand when Connor began to protest. “I’m not kicking you out. I’m not saying we want you to go. I just want you to know that option is on the table. Kristen and I won’t be offended. No matter what Dad says, neither of us wants you to feel obligated to us or to the farm.”

“I told you I’d work for you,” Connor said. “I’d never back down on that.”

But he wondered, even as he said it, how much a commitment from him meant when he was so good at changing his mind.

Matthew, though, didn’t seem to doubt him. “I know that, which is why I’m telling you explicitly that I wouldn’t take it that way.”

“I appreciate that. I guess. But why are you telling me this?”

“Because you’re my brother, and my best friend, and I want you to be happy. If this isn’t what you want, it’s okay to go back to Gold Mountain. Even if you thought it’s what you wanted but it turns out not to be, I’d rather have you there and happy than here and missing something.”

Connor’s face felt like it had lost all feeling. “Why would you think I’m missing something?”

“At first I thought you were crazy to open a restaurant with Mack.” At the mention of her name, Connor inhaled, the air filling him too fast so that he thought something in him might burst. Anyone else might not have noticed, but this was Matthew. He narrowed his eyes.

“But I wonder if maybe that’s what you need,” he continued, still giving Connor that careful look, alert to every breath.

Connor pushed out a laugh. “You think I need a heart attack waiting to happen?”

Matthew smiled. “I think you need to be cooking. Even better if you’re doing it with someone who keeps you on your toes.”

“Trust me,” Connor said, picking up his coffee again. “There are plenty of ways to keep life interesting without that particular brand of stress.”

“Are there, though?”

Connor stared at him blankly, not understanding.

“I’m talking about having someone around who challenges you,” Matthew went on. “I know building fences isn’t the same kind of work as being in a kitchen, and even if you think you want the change, I’m afraid you’re going to miss it. You will,” he said when he saw Connor’s expression. “I’m afraid you miss it already. Face it, Kristen and I love everything you do for us.” He laughed. “But is that enough?”

Connor realized Matthew meant it as a real question. “Of course it is,” he said. “It’s better than constant uphill battles.”

But he didn’t feel like Matthew believed him. And he wasn’t sure he believed himself. Was it a fight Mack had provided, or something else?

And if he didn’t want her attention, her feedback, her presence in his life, then why did he pull out the wood he was working on as soon as Matthew left?

If staying with Matthew and Kristen and working on the farm were enough, why was he still thinking of Mack?