He steered the truck in the direction of the boardwalk. Signs of autumn were all over town; birch trees dropping their leaves, scrub grass turning brown, nasturtiums drooping in their planters.
Her mother had always prepared for frost by bringing in her potted herbs and mulching her perennial beds—until she grew too sick to tend to that sort of thing. Last autumn, when Lulu had her hands completely full, she’d barely gotten the pots inside before frost set in.
And now…everything was in storage and Mama’s next door neighbor had taken custody of the rosemary and thyme. And Lulu was halfway around the world, stranded in a tiny town where frost would soon set in.
She shook off her moment of memory, but not before she caught Tristan giving her a curious glance.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Brilliant. Just admiring the scenery. Do you ever get tired of magnificent mountains and such? Do you ever just long for a strip of concrete or one of those high-rises like boxes piled on top of each other?”
He lifted an eyebrow at her, as if he didn’t believe her claim of “brilliant.” “Yes, actually, sometimes I just sit on the beach and stare at the breakwater. It’s made of big chunks of concrete and other non-scenic slabs of rocks.”
“I’m sorry, that doesn’t count. Not when there’s a beach involved.”
“Sounds like a challenge.”
Which was how, half an hour later, they ended up sitting side by side, ice cream sundaes in hand, on a giant slab of granite below the road that led to the boardwalk. The road had been shored up with rocks and blocks of concrete of all sizes—what Tristan called the “breakwater.” The rumble of cars whizzing overhead echoed between the jagged rocks. She had to admit—scenic, it was not.
“You really know how to show a girl a good time, don’t you?” She licked peanut butter ice cream off a pink plastic spoon.
“Yes, I generally find that bringing them to a debate where I make an ass of myself, then treating them to ice cream with a view of broken concrete gets them all revved up. Is it working?”
“Put it this way. It’s not not working.” With a quick wink, she dug her spoon back into her ice cream. For whatever reason, she wanted to keep Tristan off guard. And from the way his eyebrows shot up his forehead, it was working.
“In that case, you gonna tell me what’s going on?”
Nine
Lulu shot him an outraged glance, as if he’d tricked her. “I thought we were celebrating our dropout-ness. Which, by the way, you haven’t said one word about. As your now unemployed campaign manager, I think I deserve some answers.”
“To clarify, you were never technically ‘employed.’ That would imply that I have a payroll and campaign funds, neither of which is true. Besides, I said it all at the debate.”
He adjusted his position on the rocks, so his back wasn’t leaning against such a sharp corner. He’d always loved this breakwater, which looked as if a horde of ogres had come through and stomped on every slab they could find. But despite Lulu’s suggestion, he didn’t normally bring dates out here.
But this wasn’t a “date” anyway. He wasn’t sure how he’d categorize it, or his relationship with Lulu, but “date” wasn’t even in the running.
“You think Melvin Crow would be a better mayor?” she asked.
“Malcolm. Do you have a mental block about names?”
“Yes, Triscuit, I do. But that’s not the point.”
He burst out laughing. He couldn’t help it; something about her light touch with a quip got under his defenses in no time.
“Why do you think he’d be better?” she continued.
“It wasn’t even my idea to run for mayor. The guys pressured me into it. The other fishermen.”
“You didn’t answer the question. Don’t you think you’d be a good mayor?”
Why was she pushing this? It was over. He’d stepped aside. For all the right reasons. He wasn’t cut out for anything like that.
“Malcolm Crow’s a smart man and he knows this town. If I’d known he was running, I would have stayed out. What he said is right. We’ve always had the same type of mayors. Why not give someone else a chance?”
“And you? Aren’t you a smart man?”
“The fact that I let you stay on my boat is making me question that,” he grumbled. “Why the third degree? What’s it to you, other than you just lost your cover story?”
She delicately twirled her tongue around a spoonful of ice cream. Her newly darkened hair lifted in the breeze off the ocean. “I may not have mentioned this before, but one of my strengths, aside from tap-dancing on cruise ships, is reading people. It started when my mother—” Stopping abruptly, she gave a cough. “And I perfected it on cruise ships. It’s always good to know who’s going to give you the best tips.”
“After your mother what?” he asked, intrigued enough to pursue a topic that clearly made her uncomfortable.
“Got sick,” she finally answered. “I dealt with a lot of doctors and I learned to read their expressions better than a patient chart.”
Her expression told him to leave it at that, and he did. “So you can read people. Good skill to have. Is that why you fled the cruise ship? You read someone and got scared?”
“I wouldn’t say scared…okay, terrified. Yes, more or less, that’s what happened.” Finally, some truth. Now if he could just get her to fill in the details. “But we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you and what I read in your face when you announced you were dropping out of the race.”
“Relief because I didn’t have to debate Trixie over whether or not to build a new ferry terminal?”
She chuckled a bit. He liked how she laughed, as if laughter was oxygen, or drinking water—something essential to life. “No. It’s not quite that specific when I read people. I thought you looked like you were proving something.”
“Proving something?”
“Yes, proving something to yourself.”
“That I’m a dropout?” he asked wryly, but he didn’t deny her point. Maybe he was proving something. That he wasn’t his father. That he wasn’t a leader. That he wasn’t promising anything to anyone ever again.
“Dropouts unite.” She lifted her plastic spoon and clicked it against his. An odd sense of freedom drifted through him. This woman didn’t expect anything from him, so he could never disappoint her. She didn’t know a Del Rey from a stingray. As far as she was concerned, he was just a dude with a fishing boat. And in the end, what else was he?
A dude with a fishing boat and a divorce and a brain surgery scar and a brief encounter with town politics.
“So is this your first time dropping out?” she asked him. Clearly she didn’t give up easily.
“I dropped out of marriage. But that was really my ex’s choice, so I can’t call that a dropout. Actually, maybe I should. She’d probably say I dropped out every time I left the harbor on a fishing trip.”
Lulu’s forehead wrinkled quizzically. “Didn’t she know you were a fisherman when you got married?”