The Homecoming (11 page)

“Seems like a lot more guys are out of work these days,” he said as he and his brother got busy measuring the floor space.

Maybe he’d add an Irish music night each month. Or maybe even once a week if it proved popular. There were enough Celtic musicians in the state that he probably wouldn’t have any problem finding groups willing to take a gig in one of the most spectacularly scenic locations on the planet.

“It’s always been hard here,” Cole broke into his thoughts. “Which is why so many folks end up moving away to the cities.”

His tone suggested he thought this was something akin to hell. Which made sense, since of the three Douchett brothers, Cole had always been the most rooted to this place. He’d spent his teens working on tourist fishing boats. Like Sax, he’d put his money aside while in the service, allowing him to buy a boat of his own from one of his former employers, who’d escaped the rain to retire in the dry desert heat of Arizona.

“Probably wouldn’t be hard to find construction workers,” Sax said.

“Put a sign on any corner in town and you’ll have a line going around the block an hour later. Especially given that they’d be working with a hero.”

“Which I’m not.”

“Try telling the town council that. The same council who’s all jazzed about this weekend’s parade.”

“Which I’m only doing for Mom and Dad, dammit.”

“I know. I also know how uncomfortable I’d feel if I were in your shoes. But the country—and especially this part of it—needs heroes right now. So, baby bro, looks as if you’re elected.”

“Lucky me.” Sax had no sooner said the words than a chill suddenly came over the place.

They were here.

He tried to remain casual as he glanced around. He couldn’t see them lurking in the shadows, but they were damn well inside Bon Temps. And visiting in the daytime, which was a first.

“Do you ever think about those days?” he asked, again with as much casualness as he could muster.

“Which days would that be?” Cole had taken a rag and was rubbing away at some window grime. When clean, the window framed a view of the arched bridge and harbor right off a picture postcard.

Sax rubbed the back of his neck, smoothing the hairs that were standing up. “The war days.”

“Sure.”

“And?”

“And what?” Cole shrugged. “I
think
of them. Think of some of the stuff I did. Fun stuff. Bad stuff. Stuff I saw. I think about friends who died. Then I thank my lucky stars I made it back home.

“Which is why you can rag me until the devil himself shows up and starts throwing snowballs here in Shelter Bay, but I’m not going to regret, for one single solitary moment, marrying the woman I love.”

That was nice. Sappy, but nice. Although they’d had their share of sibling rivalry growing up, they were different enough that Sax couldn’t remember ever envying his big brother over anything. Until now.

“Those dead friends. You ever dream about them?”

“I did, in the beginning. But then they, and I, eventually moved on.” He shot Sax a sharp look from beneath lowered brows. “You having nightmares?”

“No. Not exactly. Just sorta dreams.” Though they resonated with more clarity than any dreams he’d ever experienced before.

He decided that if he mentioned having conversations with his dead battle buddies, which apparently only he and Velcro could see, Cole would drag him into some sort of PTSD counseling. Which Sax thought was a good idea for people who needed it. He just didn’t think he was one of those people. Yet.

“Any flashbacks?”

“Not a one.” Which was a relief, because the regular type of memories could get tough enough.

“Blackouts?”

“Nope.”

“Of course, if you’re blacking out, you might not realize it. Being blacked out and all.”

“I’d realize it.”

“If you say so.” Cole rubbed his jaw. “You gotten laid lately?”

“Isn’t that a little personal? Even for a brother to ask?”

“Our mama used to give us baths together. We shared a double bed until Dad expanded the upstairs out over the garage when we were in middle school. Suffered chicken pox together and that pregnancy scare your junior year of high school after the condom broke while you were doing the horizontal hustle with Emily Denning in the backseat of your Camaro.”

“Nobody ever told me the damn things got old,” Sax muttered.

He’d been carrying the condom around in his pocket since his freshman year, after his mother had set him to doing the wash and he’d found a Trojan shoved deep into the pocket of Cole’s jeans. Figuring that if Cole had needed it, he wouldn’t have let it get into the wash, Sax had commandeered it. Because a guy just never knew when opportunity might arise.

Which it had, two years later, with less than happy results. But he’d lucked out that time. So had the lushly hot Emily, who, his mother had told him, was now happily married to a crab fisherman, with three kids. None of which—
thank you, Jesus!—
were Sax’s.

“Haven’t heard of you hooking up with anyone since you got back,” Cole said.

“It’s only been a few weeks.”

“Still, factor in all that time you were deployed, maybe that’s your only problem. Guy has sex, he sleeps better. And if he dreams afterward, he’s more likely to dream about sex than war.”

“Thank you, Dr. Ruth.” Though he figured that when it came to having sex on a regular basis, Cole probably knew what he was talking about.

“That little blonde from Take the Cake is as sweet as the cupcakes she bakes. Maybe you might want to give her a swing.”

“Yeah, that’d work. The baker and I hook up, she gets mad at Kelli because I’m the brother- in-law-to-be who doesn’t call, and she poisons the cute little wedding cupcakes for revenge. Or puts laxative in them, like we did Mr. Kiley’s fudge.” That had been more than twenty years ago, and Sax could still remember the look on the guy’s face when the stuff hit.

“Kiley deserved it. Damn sadist was definitely born in the wrong time, because he would’ve been a natural to run a Hitler Youth camp. But how do you know it’d just be a one- night hookup? She’s easy on the eyes. And smart. Graduated in accounting from Willamette and used to be a CPA. Kelli says she worked herself up an actual profit-and-loss business plan before she came here from Eugene to open up her bakery.”

“Anyone who does that much preplanning to sell cupcakes probably isn’t into spontaneous, casual sex.”

“Good point. You also have a point about not risking pissing her off, since Kelli would kill both of us if you acted like a butthead and screwed up her big day. But now that I think about it, Kelli’s got a cousin who moved down here from Astoria six months ago. A night bartender down at Finn McCool’s. A redhead with a rack out to here.” He held up his hands a good two feet from his chest.

“If that’s true, I’m amazed the woman can stand upright to pull the pints.”

His brother ignored his comment. Which wasn’t that unusual. There were times it sucked being the younger of the two. “Though she may be a little below average on the intelligence meter,” Cole mused, “seeing as how she actually likes you.”

“That does show an intel problem,” Sax agreed, “given that she’s never
met
me.”

“She’s seen you around. And she must also have a vision problem, given that, according to Kelli, she apparently likes what she saw.”

“I don’t need a fix-up from my big brother. I’m also not going to have sex just to get rid of some dreams. Which aren’t all that bad in the first place.”

Hell
. Sax was sorry he’d brought the damn subject up.

“Of course you’re not having sex because of the dreams,” Cole agreed with a wicked grin. “You’re going to have sex because it’s fun. The dream thing is just a bonus.”

“Christ, can we just get back to the topic?” Sax felt the air, which they always stirred, settle. His ghosts had just left the building. “Which would be fixing up Mom and Dad’s Bon Temps.”

“Since they’re happy as clams spending their semiretirement running their bait shop and making music for free with their friends, that would mean the place would then become yours.”

“That’s the plan. Unless you want a stake in it.”

“Hell, no. In case Mom’s right about your having suffered a wartime brain injury you haven’t mentioned, you might be able to recall that I’m the only person on both sides of several generations of our family who’s tone-deaf.”

“Yeah.” Sax sneered, beginning to feel at ease again. “I seem to remember something about dogs howling all the way up the coast to Astoria whenever we’d all sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Mom.”

“Ha, ha. So I guess that means you’re sticking around?”

“I guess so.” Sax, who’d joined the Navy to see the world, was probably as surprised as his brother at that revelation.

Cole gave him another of those deep, probing looks. The big-brother kind he’d subjected Sax to on more than one occasion growing up.

“You’re not hiding out from anything?”

“No.” Sax had developed a pretty tough stare himself over the years during the special-ops war on terrorism. He shot it back at his brother. “Are you?”

“Good point.” Cole nodded, apparently decided to drop the subject, and glanced around again. “If you’re serious about fixing this place up, Kelli’s brothers and father would probably help. Being the youngest child, not to mention the only girl, she’s pretty much the family princess.”

“Okay, so finding workers shouldn’t be a problem,” Sax said. “But, except for Kelli’s family, even if I’d be willing to play the hero card, which I wouldn’t, that still wouldn’t be enough incentive for folks to work for free.”

“Probably not. People here might be bighearted. But they also need to eat.”

“So I’ll be needing some construction bridge financing,” Sax mused. Maybe he should go have a talk with Kelli’s wedding baker. Even if the woman wasn’t an accountant anymore, maybe she’d be willing to make some extra bucks taking on a freelance business client to help him out with the books. How much money could there be in cupcakes, anyway?

The place needed a new stage. Not like the high dinner club one where his mother had once sung like a lush-throated nightingale; more of a platform raised just a bit above the dancers. But big enough for a piano. After doing some research online, he had his eye on a snazzy black ebony electronic baby grand.

“Unless you wanted to go to the cities, getting financing would mean paying a visit to Gerald Gardner,” Cole said.

“Yeah.” Sax reminded himself that every adventure had a downside. “Dad said he’d inherited the bank.”

“Along with the Ford dealership where I bought that SUV you ragged me about. And just last week he snatched up Genarro’s funeral home when Tony got behind in paying off the loan he’d taken out to update the place and pay his wife’s heart-bypass medical bills.”

“That’s our boy Gerald,” Sax said. “Mr. Bleeding Heart.”

“His father wasn’t any better.”

Which they both knew firsthand because Old Man Gardner had once nearly foreclosed on this place when their father had fallen behind on a loan he’d taken to buy a new commercial stove he’d needed to meet county restaurant codes.

Sax had been about ten at the time, Cole eleven, and although they’d pitched in their paper route money, Lucien had been forced to take on an extra job framing cottages designed to be rented out to tourists. Working along with him after school and on weekends was how both boys had learned their own construction skills.

“Can’t see many people wanting to buy that funeral parlor, given all the stories about its being haunted.” He’d never believed those stories. Until the guys had started showing up.

“Two things surely certain are death and taxes,” Cole said. “Since it’s the only mortuary in town, sooner or later everyone’s going to end up being a customer. And it turns out that Gardner’s not going to try to sell it.”

“He’s not going to run the place himself?”

“Nah. He might be a damn bloodsucker, but there’s gotta be a learned skill to embalming folks. So, out of the goodness of his stone-cold black heart, he’s allowing Tony to stay on and keep burying folks. But now, instead of owning the store, Tony will be working for the bank.”

“The Genarro family’s been handling funerals in this county for the past four generations. That’s gotta sting.”

“Imagine so. There was talk of getting up a collection to help, but a lot of folks were still hurting from the storms before the recession hit. Which was what helped give Tony the knockout punch. Not much of a market for fancy, satin- lined mahogany caskets when people are having trouble stretching out their food budgets to the end of the month.”

Sax stood in the middle of the abandoned building, slowly turning around. Instead of the boarded-up windows, he saw lights shining through the cleaned windows out into the bay, welcoming people to the new, improved Bon Temps.

Ignoring the spiders the size of his fist that had set up homes in the corners, he saw cozy booths filled with happy families enjoying an inexpensive night out.

He imagined the ceiling rafters, which had become home to two birds’ nests, stained a deep, rich ebony.

And rather than the scarred floor still swamped in mud and green gunk, he viewed boots scooting over plank wood polished to a gleaming shine.

“We’ll need to completely redo the kitchen.” He stated the obvious after opening the oven door and finding a pile of pink insulation and droppings that suggested some mice or rats had set up house.

“What’s this
we
, kemo sabe?”

“Kelli’s your fiancée,” Sax reminded him. “A
princess
, I believe you said. You want her to know you bailed on helping achieve the wedding she’s been dreaming of ever since she was a little girl playing with bridal Barbie?”

“You fight dirty.”

“You’re the one who taught me. So, what do you think? Want to give it a shot?”