As soon as Kendra got back to town, she stashed her bike in the garage and hurried inside her parents’ house. Her house, she corrected herself. She’d been living here since she left the Twin Cities, and hadn’t made any moves towards finding her own place. Maybe if she’d gotten the town manager position, she would have moved out and reclaimed her independence. But why bother to do that, when she might end up leaving Lake Bittersweet again?
If she’d gotten the position.
Make that—if Dominic hadn’t interfered and cost her the position.
She ought to be furious. Maybe in some pocket of her heart, she was. But mostly, she wanted to know what he was up to. Dominic trying to sabotage her was a whole different story than Dominic forgetting all about her. She wasn’t sure which was worse.
That fucker always got her twisted up.
“I’m home!” she called into the spacious sunken living room where her father spent most of his time. Her mother was back in Arkansas again with Grandma. She’d come home for a whirlwind three weeks, cleaned the house, done all the laundry, and lectured Kendra about please, please, please making sure Alvin took his blood pressure meds.
She also texted every other day as a reminder.
Kendra sighed and checked her father’s pill tray. On track.
“In here!” her father called. “Mind helping me with something?”
Damn, she really wanted to call Dominic, and with the time difference, her window was closing. She hurried into the living room and saw that her father had gotten one leg of his favorite old track suit stuck in the workings of his recliner.
“Lordy, Pop. The trouble you get into when I’m not around.”
She remembered another time, just recently, when he’d tried to move the refrigerator in the restaurant kitchen and gotten stuck behind that. And a few weeks ago, he’d worn his house slippers to the restaurant. After an hour of shuffling around and tripping over himself, he’d sent her home to fetch his shoes.
What was going on with her dad? She loved and adored her father more than any other human being in the world, even her mother. She and her mom had never been close the way she and Alvin were. Everyone in the family called her a Daddy’s girl, and she never objected. After the Dominic disaster, all she’d wanted was to run home to her daddy. So it fit.
“That’s me, Mr. Trouble.” Her father hummed one of his old songs, “Trouble on my Mind.”
She felt his deep voice in her bones as she worked on freeing his pants leg. That voice had sung her to sleep when she was little, serenaded her and her friends during slumber parties, soothed her lonely moments in Minneapolis when she played her “Redfish” channel on Spotify. For her, there was no voice in the world like his.
“I might have to rip this old thing,” she told him, tugging on his pants leg. “You okay with that?”
“We could call someone to help. Where’s Jason at?”
“It’s Jason’s day off. Besides, the fire department has better things to do than rescue a twenty-year-old track suit from getting torn.”
“It’s at least thirty. Picked it up in Kansas City before a show, there was an old thrift shop right down the street from the theater. They called it Threads Be Bared, I’ll never forget that.”
And just like that, Kendra relaxed. Her father remembered an amazing amount of detail from his days on the road. He was just fine. He wasn’t showing signs of decline, she was just being hypersensitive because he was so important to her.
She pulled the velour fabric away from the metal, limiting the rip as much as she could. “You’re free. There’s a grease stain, but nothing Mom can’t handle when she gets back.”
Her mother always insisted on doing the laundry, claiming no one else could do it right, and neither of them put up a fuss about that.
“Thanks, princess. I was just going to get myself a ginger ale.”
“I’ll get it. You relax.”
In the kitchen, she poured him a glass of his favorite raspberry-flavored ginger ale and gazed around the expansive kitchen that her mother had left in its usual immaculate state.
Dominic had never been here. She’d wanted him to spend Christmas with her family, but he’d gone back to his own family in Toronto instead.
How had he known she was going for the town manager job?
Mark must have told him. Maybe her little dunking prank had backfired on her in yet another way. What had she been thinking?
She hadn’t been thinking, per se. She’d been remembering the carefree days of that summer with her friends. The rush of giddy fun, the high of being young, with your whole future ahead. That old fearlessness…she’d wanted that back.
Jason brought that feeling back. That was why she’d momentarily lost her mind on that pier.
She padded across the soft taupe carpet into the living room, only to discover that her father had fallen asleep. A light snore filled the room, and his head was tilted back, mouth slightly open. Asleep, he looked…older. His cheeks sagged without his usual smile. She could hardly bear it. Wake up, scold me for not using Mom’s coaster, then wink at me.
Gently. she set down the glass—on a coaster, of course—on the side table next to the recliner. She picked up the remote and turned down the music he’d been listening to—old-school Bootsy Collins.
Then she tiptoed from the living room and went to her own room to call Dominic. Her mother had left everything just as it was, so she’d have a place to stay during visits. But when she’d returned from Minneapolis, she’d boxed up most of her old high school stuff—achievement certificates, photos of her with her friends, flyers for various bands who’d played at the Blue Drake—so her surroundings wouldn’t seem so childish. But she hadn’t put up anything in their place, so the walls were mostly bare, other than an inspirational Maya Angelou poster on one wall—“Do the best you can until you know better, then when you know better, do better”—and an Eartha Kitt quote on the other. “My recipe for life is not being afraid of myself, afraid of what I think or of my opinions.” Those were worth keeping around.
She drew in a deep breath and pressed Dominic’s number, which she’d never deleted from her contacts. They were still business partners, after all, in a cursed kind of way.
“Do you know what time it is?” Dominic grumbled through a yawn. His familiar voice sent a shockwave through her—it felt almost surreal to hear him on the phone.
“You didn’t have to pick up. “
“I thought it was an emergency. You called twice.” That was the only way to get through the “do not disturb” setting on his phone.
“It is an emergency.” You sabotaged my job, you devious fuck. “Wait, are you speaking with a British accent now?”
“I’m a chameleon, Kendra. It’s part of what makes me so effective. I know how to adapt to my surroundings, and then, of course, dominate them.”
Was his vibrant baritone even sexier with a British accent? Why yes. Yes it was. Damnit.
She lay back on her bed and stared up at the ceiling, which she’d once covered with glow-in-the-dark stars. Most of them had fallen off over the years, and if that wasn’t a commentary on her hopes and dreams, she didn’t know what was.