| |
Soon Casey was busier at the camp than she’d ever been. It wasn’t like she was doing so much more than she had under Geller, since she’d already taken over most of the work. But she was conscious of her desire to do a good job and assure him the camp was in safe hands.
It helped to be occupied, though. When she wasn’t chopping wood or arranging sites or scheduling reservations, she kept herself constantly moving. There had been weeks after the show that she hadn’t painted at all, but now she couldn’t stop generating new work. It was as though the whole mountain range was alive. Every time she turned her head, something new crashed into her, begging to be seen.
She ignored Geoffrey’s voice and kept the canvases in the shed, under her bed, anywhere they would fit. Some she hung on the office walls, smiling at the compliments of campers but declining to announce they were hers. Others she stacked behind the futon or leaned on the bookcase, the desk, behind the door. Lee took a new one for her living room, and although Casey refused to take any money for it, she came home to find an envelope slipped under the cabin door with five crisp hundred-dollar bills and a note that made her laugh.
I know it’s worth much more, but permit an old lady her small investment. Lee kept insisting she needed to own a Webb original before the market exploded and she couldn’t afford one anymore.
“I’m going to retire on you,” she’d say, wagging a finger at Casey. “You mark my words.”
Casey’s response was always that it was a good thing Lee owned her house with the storefront downstairs and had simple needs. “It’s more likely that one of your junk buys in the store will turn out to be worth millions,” she’d say, and Lee would cross her fingers like she was praying for her big break.
Everything almost felt back to normal, as it had before Ben arrived and turned her whole world upside down.
Except for one thing.
Spring was starting to swell into summer when Casey’s mind finally computed what she’d been noting for several weeks—campers rolling into the site with coffee cups and paper bags that smelled of cinnamon and sugar, or chocolate, or nutmeg and clove. Warm, buttery scents. Scents that made your mouth water even before you know what was in the bag.
Pam’s sold decent enough coffee, but nothing you’d bother going to town for when you could heat water on a fire to make your own. Besides, these were different cups, white with a pale blue stamp on the side showing a thick circle with a hole in the middle. It looked like a donut or a bagel, except that the hole was toward the bottom, where the arms of the curve tapered and met. Above the outer rim of the circle, following the shape of the arc, was a simple stamp that said S.A.
The logo was everywhere, the paper cups filling the compost piles and curling to ash in the fire pits. There were too many of them to be coming from Pam’s. Not to mention that the luxurious smell that wafted into the office one morning, when a middle-aged couple came in carrying one of the now-ubiquitous bags, was so much more enticing than anything that usually came from the kitchens of downtown Bonnet. Pam’s pancakes were good, but people didn’t usually take them to go.
Her curiosity getting the better of her, she finally asked.
“You haven’t heard?” one of the men said as Casey wrote up a receipt for the couple’s stay. “There’s a new café opened up on the turn toward Bonnet. Some city kid started it up. Best thing around, if you’re ever looking for a cup.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“We’ve been coming here for years. I always said the only thing this placed needed was a decent place to get a sandwich.”
“Now try to keep us away!” his husband exclaimed. As they headed out the door, she heard them still raving about the food.
Casey didn’t need to drive somewhere for coffee when she was happy with what she brewed at home, but anything that kept people coming in and talking up the area was good news in her mind. Tired of picking lids out of the leaves, she put up extra signs reminding campers to pick up their trash. Other than that, she gave no thought to the new café. It wasn’t right in town, and she didn’t have a reason to head in that direction.
At least she had finally given up all thoughts of Ben and the life they might have had together. There was a new “it” novelist with new interviews and blogs, and Nick receded from her mind, a pleasant reminder that all things heal if given time. She even asked her parents if they wanted to fly out and visit her now that this was her home.
Sometimes she was lonely and often she was alone. But she wasn’t unhappy. She had made peace with what her life had become.
* * * * *
ONE MONDAY AFTERNOON Casey was behind the office chopping wood in preparation for the summer rush.
It was warm out and she had stripped down to a thin, faded blue T-shirt. She was wiping the sweat from her face, her hair tied up off her neck, when she heard footsteps behind her. Probably a camper wanting something. She rested the axe against the chopping log and turned around.
“Jesus.” Her heart skidded to a stop in her chest. Standing behind her, hands sunk into the pockets of his low-slung jeans, was Ben.
“You need some water?” he asked. He was wearing a light brown Henley T-shirt that brought out the softness in his eyes.
“I’m okay, just working.” Casey gestured toward the split logs, her mind racing but her voice stuck on pause. What in the world was he doing here?
“Can you take a break?” He nudged the dirt with his toe. They were the same brown leather boots she’d once stared at under a bathroom door, equally at home in the woods as they had been in a Chelsea gallery. One thing she could say for him, he never seemed to worry about getting his expensive clothes dirty.
Casey looked to the axe as though it held an answer. But it lay there, inert.
At one point the prospect of running into him again with an axe in her hands might have been quite appealing. But enough time had passed that she wasn’t angry anymore. She’d resigned herself to accepting what the situation was. He’d moved on, so she had, too. She rested the axe on the ground.
She meant to walk him toward the office, keeping them on neutral territory, but it couldn’t be helped. Their feet seemed to turn automatically toward the lake. At least they skirted Casey’s cabin and the memories it contained as they walked to the rocks by the shore.
But there were memories everywhere. No part of Bonnet was safe. This was the spot where Ben had interrupted her swim one morning. Where they had run into the water together. Where they had launched the rowboat out to the opposite shore. Where he had stood and told her after their first night together that he’d be coming back.
“Never thought I’d see you again.” Casey broke the silence, even though it seemed to her that Ben was the one with the explaining to do.
“You don’t know?” Ben asked, raising an eyebrow at her.
“Know what?”
“Sweet Amandine.”
“What are you talking about?” Then, with a flash, Casey remembered the couple she’d asked about the café. “Some city kid,” they’d said. She hadn’t thought anything of it, but now she couldn’t believe her ears. “You’re kidding me.” She felt herself exhale.
“I thought you’d come visit.”
Casey frowned. “How was I supposed to know?”
“Surely you’ve seen the logo.”
“The circle?”
“The croissant.”
She remembered the curve on the cups she’d seen. Now she understood. It wasn’t a weird bagel, it was a croissant. And S. A. stamped on the front. Sweet Amandine.
“Who’s Amandine?” she asked, eyes narrowed. If it was that Lauren’s last name or grandmother or childhood nickname or whatever, she was going to throw him in the lake and hold him under, no matter how cold the water still was.
“Not who.” He smiled. “What.”
“Sorry, what is amandine?”
Ben shrugged, a teasing smile dancing across his face. “You’ll have to look it up.”
She scowled, but he hardly seemed to notice. He was too busy gazing up at the mountain view that had captivated him so long ago.
“It’s so beautiful here. Just like I remembered.”
He sounded old then, much older than twenty-seven. Casey wondered what had happened to him since she saw him last. “I didn’t think you’d come back,” she said quietly, her eyes just as captivated by the view. No matter how many times she stood on the rocks, the lake stretching before her, mountains towering overhead, she could never pull away.
“You might’ve known sooner if you’d read my emails or returned my calls.”
He laughed, but Casey didn’t see what was funny. “What about going out to brunch with what’s-her-name?”
“Lauren,” Ben interjected.
“I know, asshole,” Casey snapped. Of course she knew. How could she forget? But she wasn’t going to say the name aloud.
Ben sighed. “That was nothing, Casey. The worst timing in the world. Braise introduced us at a party and bent over backward trying to set us up. She’d just moved to the city and I felt bad that she knew so few people. She was looking at apartments so I told her to swing by to get a better sense of the neighborhood. It had been a while since you and I—I mean, since I’d last been up here. By the time I saw you at the gallery that night, it was too late to break off the date.”
“You still could’ve,” Casey said softly.
“Don’t think I haven’t thought that every day since.” He shook his head, hair falling into his eyes. “I was trying to be nice. I was trying to, I don’t know, try on someone else’s life. Be someone I wasn’t. And in the process, I hurt the one person I care about most in this world. We got bagels and that was it, Casey. I made it clear that morning that I wasn’t available for anything else.”
Casey thought about the stardust look in Lauren’s eyes, and the fact that Ben could have started dating her. Probably had wanted to start dating her. Or more like, at one point, had wanted to want to start dating her.
But he hadn’t.
“So then how long are you planning on hanging out here?” he asked.
“I sold my place,” he said.
Her eyebrow shot up. “That was a nice place.”
“Nice enough to let me get out of New York.”
“I’m still waiting for the part where you say you’re joking.”
He shook his head.
“You sold your place in Brooklyn and moved to Bonnet?” She couldn’t keep the confusion out of her voice.
“Lake Pines, actually—the café is right over the line.”
“This is too weird,” Casey mumbled. She stepped away from him and walked closer to the shore. Closer to the view.
She skipped a stone out over the lake and it bounced two, three, four times before sinking in. The ripples started small and then spread. Ben came up beside her. He stood close, too close, but he was careful not to touch her.
For a while they breathed in the silence, unsure of each other. Unsure of what to say.
“Why didn’t you come earlier?” Casey finally asked, shooting another flat rock across the velvet surface of the lake.
His voice was so soft she almost didn’t hear him. But there was no mistaking what he said when he finally found the words. “I wanted you to be sure that I’d stay.”
“Wait until you try the first winter.” She still couldn’t take anything but a matter-of-fact approach to what he was implying. She’d been burned too many times to believe he could really be hers.
Not now, at least. Not when she’d finally let go and started living on her own.
“It can’t be worse than New York,” Ben said. “It can’t be worse than anywhere without you.”
She flung a rock so hard it plunked straight into the water. She wanted not to care anymore. She wanted to run into the lake and let the water be her tears. But somehow, she stood her ground.
It seemed like an eternity before Ben finally took a deep breath and spoke. “I know there’s nothing I can say that will undo the ways I’ve hurt you. But I want you to know, this past year for me has been terrible. I’m not asking for your sympathy—I just want you to know it’s been rough. I hated my job, which mostly consisted of trying not to chop off my fingers or sweat on the plates while being yelled at over any number of the eighteen thousand things I was supposed to be doing at once.
“I hated my apartment, which was alien and isolating and a devastating place to come home to after being shouted at all night by every other chef in the restaurant—not to mention wait staff, management, even a few customers who’d always take it upon themselves to chime in.”
He took another deep breath, and then he turned from the mountains to her. “But mostly, Casey, I hated being away from you.” He held up his hand to stop her when she opened her mouth. “I said goodbye to my friends, sold the apartment, and bought that big vacant house off Route 216. I spent all summer turning the ground floor into Sweet Amandine. Which, by the way, I do expect you to Google. So what I’m trying to say, although probably not very well, is that I’m here. For good this time. If you ever want to come by, I’ll be waiting.”
There was a long pause. “I thought you already knew and were still avoiding me, and that’s fine. But then I thought, maybe not. So I wanted to swing by and let you know. Like I said, I’m here.”
He stuffed his fists into his pockets and looked out at the view, scarlet tinged on his ears and cheeks. He had laid it all out, Casey knew, and now he was done. It was up to her to make the next move.
She looked at him and nodded. “Duly noted,” she said.
As they stood there in the afternoon light starting to fade into evening, she tried to see him as someone else might. Someone who walked by him on the street and didn’t care. How would it feel to be friends with him—to see his hair fall across his forehead and not want to reach up and brush it from his eyes? How would it feel to exist with him in this town?
Could she do it? She didn’t know.
“So, I’ll see you?” he asked hopefully.
“Sometime,” she said evasively. Deep in her heart, she knew that she wasn’t ready to give him anything more.
Ben extended his hand with mock formality reminiscent of their run-in on his apartment steps. “I look forward to your visit,” he said as they shook hands. Then he turned and walked back up the path to his SUV. Casey stayed out on the rocks until the sun went down, and she was trembling with uncertainty and cold.