“No. I actually, uh…want fewer hours. Like, ideally no hours.”
Huh? Also: Shit. Nora and Wynd might never be best friends, but Wynd did a good job keeping the clinic running.
“I know I just started. I’m so sorry. But Mike’s situation is the universe whispering to us about our next step.”
“Are you sure? Because if it’s whispering, you might be hearing it incorrectly.”
“Well, we had a big chat about it, and I swear to goddess, later that night we had a knock on our door from a Realtor who said he had clients in Toronto looking to pay cash for a place in Moonflower Bay, and were we interested in selling? So we’re going to do it. We sourced a used RV, and we’re going to move to the farm property and trust the process. If we work hard and we’re lucky, we’ll be hosting alpaca retreats by this time next year.”
“Well, congratulations,” Nora said weakly. She couldn’t crap on someone’s dream.
“I know it’s a lot sooner than we planned, but sometimes that’s the way things happen. When the universe gives you what you want, are you going to complain that it’s too early?”
“No?” Though she didn’t see why not. Didn’t they say that timing was everything?
“No,” Wynd said decisively. “Sometimes you just have to trust the universe.” She patted Nora’s arm. “Anyway, I wanted to talk to you today because I need my two weeks’ notice to start now. We’re moving this weekend, but I’ll commute in for the next two weeks. Unless you can find someone sooner?” she added hopefully.
Nora sighed. She had to go jab teenagers now. Maybe one of them would be about to graduate and hear the universe whispering, “Become a medical receptionist.”
She sighed again. Well, she could jab teenagers and contemplate her dilemma.
Sadly, this was a problem Jake couldn’t bail her out of.
Speaking of Jake…“Hey, can you slow down?” Nora asked Amber, who was driving the Mermaid Monstrosity. “That’s my dog!”
She rolled the window down as well as she could—it was manual and refused to budge after about the halfway mark—as Amber pulled up next to Jake. He had just come out of Jenna’s and was bending over to feed something to Mick.
“Are you giving him treats?”
He looked up, surprised. “Doc.” Then sheepish. “Guilty.”
“Jake’s keeping me in business.” Jenna had emerged from the store with a piece of chalk to update her sandwich board with the day’s new funny saying.
“He’s supposed to be on a diet!” Nora protested, but she couldn’t help smiling. Overall, Mick’s time under Jake’s care had slimmed him down considerably.
She hadn’t told Amber yet about Wynd, but suddenly she really wanted to tell Jake, even though she’d just been thinking that this was a problem he couldn’t solve. Sometimes it felt like she and Jake had ESP. Wynd just quit, and I’m freaking out about it.
It didn’t work. “He really likes those bacon–peanut butter things,” Jake said.
“Who wouldn’t like a bacon–peanut butter thing?” Maya appeared on the scene—she lived in the apartment above Jenna’s. “Hi, Nora! Are you on the move?”
“I am! Headed to the high school for a flu-shot clinic. You want to come?”
She wasn’t sure why she was asking. Maya wasn’t going to add any medical expertise, but she was really fun to be around, and Nora, still reeling from Wynd’s news, could use the distraction.
“Sure!” She opened the passenger-side door. “Scooch over, though, cause I’m not riding in back.”
The van had an old-school bench seat up front, so against her better judgment—the seat belt in the middle was only a lap belt—Nora scooted over.
“Sorry, Jake, no room!” Maya trilled, and they were off.
Though he would never admit it to anyone, Jake could kind of see the appeal of having a cell phone. If, for example, you knew someone who was running her first out-of-town flu-shot clinic and you had a cell phone, you could text that person and ask how it was going. You could ask that person to send you pictures.
If you were the kind of person who wanted to see pictures of flu-shot clinics.
For God’s sake.
It was midmorning. He and Sawyer didn’t have any active jobs. He and Mick had already been walking for an hour.
It was a beautiful day.
It was not a Tuesday. But what the hell. He wasn’t even sure what he was going to do. He had basically bequeathed his traps to a guy who fished out of Port Frederick. But maybe he could get out his tackle and just…fish? Like, for fun? When was the last time he’d done that?
Half an hour later, he was waiting for Dennis to lift the bridge to let a bigger sailboat in front of him pass. Mick was perched on the stern of his trawler, a squat little mascot.
Twenty minutes after that, he’d dropped anchor in a spot about three miles north of the cove. He was using an ancient rod and lure, ones he’d had as a kid. Once he’d come on board with his dad, pleasure fishing had fallen out of his life. But he’d held on to all the stuff, because, like his dad had done with both Jake and his brother, he had planned on taking Jude out.
He never had gotten Jude his own rod, though. They’d never made it into London for that shopping trip.
The feeling of casting was both familiar and foreign. Muscle memory kicked in, and within an hour he’d hauled in a dozen pickerel. He threw back most of them but kept a handful.
At a certain point he decided he’d had enough and sat back and stared at the horizon.
His boy was in this lake.
He and Kerrie had agreed on that, easily and immediately, even though everything else between them at that point had been fraught. They’d gone out in this very boat with no particular destination in mind. He had driven. Told her to let him know when she felt like they were in a good spot. She had nodded, so he knew she’d heard him, but she hadn’t said anything, not for an hour. So he’d just kept going. It felt like they’d reached the middle of the damn lake by the time she signaled him to stop, though he knew with his rational mind that they had not even come close.
The weird thing was, they hadn’t said anything. He’d racked his brain, trying to come up with words appropriate to the situation, but he kept coming up blank. She had been silent, too, but that was more unusual for her, the lawyer who always knew what to say. Maybe she had gone blank the same way he had. Or maybe she’d had lots to say but had been holding it in. Regardless, he hadn’t asked her, and now it was too late.
But she’d held his hand as he’d held the urn out over the gray water. It had reminded him of the wishing flowers. A macabre, inverted version of the town tradition. Except there were no wishes here. Kerrie had wished for Jude, and Jude had come. But then he had gone.
He observed with mild interest that he was thinking about all this without losing his shit. More often than not when he went out on his Tuesday expeditions, he ended up doubled over and gasping for breath, and it was a toss-up whether he would stay out long enough to get anything to sell on the pier.
For some reason, today, he was able to look at the endless expanse of water and imagine Jude in a different way. He used to think of Jude buried beneath it, trying to get out. Like Nora’s zombies, maybe. It was a nightmarish scenario, made no less so for its irrationality. He had told Nora, way back in her early days in town, that he’d stopped wanting to go out on the boat after Jude was gone. That was why. The waves so often came for him out here.