She should go.
Not yet, she thought, putting the car in gear and turning off the key. She wanted to have another look at Sam’s place and imagine him here. She wanted to fill in the blank spot of the “before us and after us,” the part of Sam’s life that had called him back.
As Hannah stepped out of her car she heard the sound of a door slamming shut. She turned in time to see Ethan charge out of the house, buttoning his shirt as he ran.
He slowed down as he saw her, then walked her way, tucking the faded plaid shirt into old, worn jeans.
“Hey, there,” he said as he came nearer. “Come to check the place out after all?”
“I was just going for a drive.”
He stopped on the other side of her car and leaned on the roof. “You want a tour?”
“No. It looks like you’re busy. I was just…” She lifted her chin. “Just curious.”
Ethan nodded, drumming his fingers on the roof.
Hannah looked past him to the house with the lake shining in the background. “It’s a beautiful spot,” she said quietly.
Ethan glanced back in the same direction she’d been looking. “That it is,” he agreed. “I spent a lot of hours on that lake. I think I know every drop of water it holds.”
“Does the lake have fish?”
“Uncle Sam and I have been trying for the past couple of years to stock it with trout. My cousins and I used to fish on it.”
“Cousins.” She digested that thought a moment. “How many are there of you?”
“I was blessed with two parents, Morris and Dot, one sister, Francine, a bunch of girl cousins and two male cousins. Sam, of course, had no kids.”
And there it came again. The faint backward slap of dismissal. She and her mother were never a legal part of the Westerveld clan, hence they didn’t count.
Did the whole family see her and her mother this way? Some shadowy interlude? A mistake rectified only when Sam returned to the Westerveld bosom and all that messy business back East was cleared out of his life so he could move on?
Did they even think about her and her mother and what had happened to them when Sam left?
Hannah looked back at the house again and an old yearning trembled awake. She remembered Sam talking about the farm. About the garden he used to grow.
One spring, when she was eight, they bought some potting soil, a huge planter and some bedding plants. They planted and watered them. June and July their balcony was a cornucopia of flowers and scents. But best of all, in August, they plucked sun-warmed tomatoes for their salad. Sam made BLTs every night for a week. Hannah easily remembered the sweet tang of those tomatoes.
And she remembered the wistful look on Sam’s face when they pulled the dead plant up and took the pot to the Dumpster in the parking lot of the apartment.
This was what he’d been missing. Hannah surveyed the yard, the house, and that perfect little lake behind. Was this why he had stayed away from her and her mother?
To her surprise and dismay, tears pricked her eyes. She turned away, pretending to look at another part of the yard while she swiped the tears from her cheek.
“Did Sam have a garden here?” she asked, trying to sound normal and contained.
“Yeah. Behind the house. But the past couple of years, he didn’t do much gardening. Do you want to see it?”
“Look, you have work to do and I’d better get back to town. Thanks for the offer though.” She gave him a quick smile and ducked into the car.
But before she put the car in Reverse, she looked at the house again, trying to imagine Sam sitting on the porch, looking out over the lake.
Well, this was it. Her last look at the place he’d come to. She’d probably never see it again.
Hannah sat bolt upright in the bed, pulling herself out of a busy, fretful dream. She blinked as she looked around, her mind trying to make sense of where she was. The light coming into the room was all wrong.
Cheap prints on the wall, thin curtains at the window.
Hannah rubbed her eyes. The motel in Riverbend.
She glanced the clock radio beside her bed and blinked at the numbers.
Eight forty-five in the morning.
She pulled her hands over her face as sleep still dragged at her mind. She couldn’t believe she had slept that long. Of course in Toronto the screeching of the GO train past her window in the morning got her up well before her alarm clock rang.
The day slowly registered. The day she was supposed to tell Dan Westerveld that she wouldn’t be staying. Yesterday she had done what Lizzie suggested and driven around town. She walked down Main Street, had coffee at the coffee shop, listening to the chitchat of the local people as they wandered in and out. The owner, an attractive woman of indeterminate age, had glanced at her with curiosity from time to time, but had left her alone.
She had driven around some more, but had avoided going down the road with the Farm for Sale sign. A puzzling restlessness had clawed at her, keeping her on the move.
Now it was Sunday morning and this afternoon her plane was leaving. She stretched across the bed, snagged her cell phone off the bed and punched in Lizzie’s number again.
Yawning, she walked to the window of the hotel room and tugged one curtain aside. As with all motels, her window looked out over a parking lot, but beyond that she could see a field and above it all the blue bowl of the sky wisped with clouds.
Another beautiful day in Alberta.
She frowned as the phone kept ringing. Where was Lizzie? She had tried to phone Lizzie a couple of times yesterday, but had been shunted to Lizzie’s answering system each time. Hannah snapped the phone shut, folding her hand around it as she leaned in the window, her eyes following the path of a hawk in the sky above.
The sprightly tune of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” jangled from her fist and she snapped open the phone, glancing at the name.
“Taylor. Hello.”
“Hey, congratulations, beautiful.” Taylor’s fake heartiness annoyed her, as it always did. “I heard you inherited half a farm. Lizzie told me not to call you, but I couldn’t resist. I’m trying to imagine you slopping hogs and feeding chickens.”
His faintly mocking voice irked her, as well. Ever since she had turned Taylor down for a date, he’d treated her with a veiled measure of disdain. Just enough to grate but not enough to call him out on it. “I only get the farm if I stick around for six months, which I’m not.”
“You’re not? Lizzie said you were moving out there.”
Hannah frowned as she tried to make sense of what Taylor was telling her. “Lizzie told you wrong.”
“But…I thought…That’s why I signed the deal with her and Pete.”
“What deal?”
“The salon deal. Lizzie said Pete came in as a partner when she found out you were staying out West. He had a bunch of money he wanted to invest. I signed everything up with her yesterday. She’s the new owner.”
She couldn’t marshal her thoughts as protests, shock, dismay and anger, then fury, fought with each other to be articulated.
“You sold the salon to Lizzie?”
“She and Pete will take possession in a week and move in upstairs. She told me she wanted to tell you herself but I thought