Lakeside Cottage. Susan Wiggs
year, all the Livingstons made their annual pilgrimage to the old place on Lake Crescent, but recently everything had changed. Kate’s brother, Phil, his wife and four kids had relocated to the East Coast. Their mother, five years widowed, had remarried on Valentine’s Day and moved to Florida. That left Kate and Aaron in their house in West Seattle, on their own a continent away. Sometimes it felt as though an unseen force had taken her close-knit family and unraveled it.
This summer it would be just the two of them—Kate and her son—sharing the six-bedroom cottage.
Quit wallowing, she warned herself, and smiled at Mable Claire. “How have you been?” she asked.
“Good, all things considered.” Mable Claire had lost her husband two years before. “Some days—most days—I still feel married, like Wilbur never really left me. Other times, he seems as distant as the stars. I’m all right, though. My grandson Luke is spending the summer with me. Thanks for asking.”
On the form to activate trash pickup, Kate filled in the dates. The summer loomed before her, deliciously long, a golden string of empty days to fill however she wished. A whole summer, all to herself. She could take the entire time to figure out her life, her son, her future.
Mable Claire peered at her. “You’re looking a little peaked.”
“Just frazzled, I think.”
“Nothing a summer at the lake won’t cure.”
Kate summoned up a smile. “Exactly.” But suddenly, one summer didn’t seem like enough time.
“‘In want of a husband,’ my eye,” Kate muttered as she locked the Jeep at the Shop and Save, leaving the window cracked to give Bandit some fresh air. Aaron was already scurrying toward the entrance. Heck, thought Kate, watching a guy cross the parking lot, at this point I’d settle for a one-night stand.
He was a prime specimen in typical local garb—plaid shirt, Carhartts, work boots, a John Deere cap. Tall and broad-shouldered, he walked with a commanding, almost military stride. Longish hair and Strike King shades. But was that a mullet under the green-and-yellow cap? From a distance, she couldn’t tell. Ick, a mullet. It was only hair, she conceded. Nothing a quick snip of the scissors couldn’t fix.
“Mom? Mom.” A voice pierced her fantasy. Aaron rattled the cart he’d found in the parking lot.
“You’re acting like an impatient city dweller,” she said.
“I am an impatient city dweller,” he replied.
They passed beneath the sign of the giant laughing pink pig, which had stood sentinel over the grocery store for as long as Kate could remember. The marquee held a sign that advertised, Maple Sweet Bacon—$.99/lb.
What are you so happy about? Kate wondered, looking at the pig. She and Aaron went inside together to stock up on supplies, for the lake house had sat empty since last year. Something in Kate loved this process. It was like starting from scratch, with everything new. And this time, all the choices were hers to make. Without her mother or older brother around, Kate was the adult in charge. What a concept.
“Mom? Mom.” Aaron scowled at her. “You’re not even listening.”
“Oh. Sorry, buddy.” She selected some plums and put them in the cart. “I’m a bit preoccupied.”
“Tell me about it. So did you get fired or were you laid off?” he asked, hitching a ride on the grocery cart as she steered toward the next aisle. He regarded her implacably over the pile of cereal boxes and produce bags.
She looked right back at her nine-year-old son. His curiously adult-sounding question caught her off guard. “Maybe I quit,” she said. “Ever think of that?”
“Naw, you’d never quit.” He snagged a sack of Jolly Ranchers from a passing shelf and tossed them into the cart.
Kate put the candy back. Jolly Ranchers had yanked out more dental work than a bad dentist. “Why do you say I’d never quit?” she asked, taken aback. As he grew older, turning more and more into his own person, her son often said things that startled her.
“Because it’s true,” he said. “The only way you’d ever quit on your own is if something better came along, and I know for a fact that it hasn’t. It never does.”
Kate drummed her fingers on the handle of the shopping cart, the clear plastic scratched with age. She turned down the canned-goods aisle. “Oh, yeah?” she asked. “What makes you so darned sure?”
“Because you’re freaking out,” he informed her.
“I am not freaking out,” said Kate.
Oh, but she was. She absolutely was. At night, she walked the floors and stared out the window, often staying up so late she could see the lights of Seattle’s ferry terminals go out after the last boat came into the dock. That was the time she felt most alone and most frightened. That was when Kate the eternal optimist gave way to Kate in the pit of despair. If she had any interest in drinking, this would be the time to reach for a bottle. L’heure bleue, the French called it, the deep-blue hour between dark and dawn. That was when her relentlessly cheerful façade fell away and she engaged in something she hated—wallowing. This was her time to reflect on where she’d been and where she was going. This was when her lonely struggle to raise Aaron felt almost too hard to carry on. By the time the sun came up each morning, she snapped herself out of it and faced the day, ready to soldier on.
“We should get stuff marked with the WIC sticker,” Aaron advised, pointing out a green-and-black tag under a display of canned tuna.
She put back the can of albacore as though it had bitten her. “Why on earth would you say that?”
“Chandler told me his mother gets tons of stuff with WIC. Women, Infants and Children,” he explained. “It’s a feld … fed … Some kind of program for poor people.”
“We are not poor people,” Kate snapped.
She didn’t realize how loudly she’d spoken until a man at the end of the aisle turned to look at her. It was the same one she’d stared at in the parking lot, only he was much closer now. Beneath a five-o’clock shadow, she could make out a strong, clean jawline. He had traded the shades for a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, one side repaired with duct tape. In the split second that she met his gaze, she observed that his eyes had the depth and color of aged whiskey. But duct tape? Was he a loser? A nerd?
She whipped around to hide her flaming cheeks and shoved the cart fast in the other direction.
“See?” Aaron said. “This is how I know you would never quit your job. You get too embarrassed about being poor.”
“We are not—” Kate forced herself to stop. She took in a deep, calming breath. “Listen, bud. We are fine. Better than fine. I wasn’t getting anywhere at the paper, and it was time to move on, anyway.”
“So are we poor or not?”
She wished he would lower his voice. “Not,” she assured him.
In reality, her salary at the paper was barely a living wage, and the majority of her income came from the Seattle rental properties left to her by her father. Still, the job had defined her. She was a writer, and now that she’d been let go, she felt as though the rug had been ripped out from under her. “This means we get to spend the whole summer together, just the two of us.” She studied Aaron’s expression, spoke up before he turned too forlorn. “You got a problem with that?”
“Yeah,” he said with a twinkle of mischief in his eye. “Maybe I do.”
“Smart aleck.” She tugged the bill of his Seattle Mariners baseball cap down over his eyes and pushed onward. Lord, she thought, before she knew it, her little red-haired, freckle-faced boy would be as tall as she was.
The storm of his mood struck as it always did, without warning and no specific trigger. “This is stupid,” he snapped, his