Cara Colter
CARA COLTER lives in British Columbia with her partner, Rob, and eleven horses. She has three grown children and a grandson. She is a recent recipient of an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award in the Love and Laughter category. Cara loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her or learn more about her on her Facebook page.
This story is for my sister, Anna, for my brother-in-law, Dale, and especially for Courtenay.
You are my greatest teachers.
BLOSSOM VALLEY. IN A fast-paced world, David Blaze thought, a trifle sardonically, his hometown was a place unchanging.
Built on the edges of a large bay that meandered inland from Lake Ontario, it had always been a resort town, a summer escape from the oppressive July humidity and heat for the well-heeled, mostly from Canada’s largest city, Toronto.
The drive, two hours—with the top down on David’s mint 1957 two-seater pearl-gray ragtop convertible—followed a route that traveled pleasantly through rolling, lush hills dotted with contented cattle, faded red barns, weathered fruit stands and sleepy service stations that still sold ice-cold soda pop in thick, glass bottles.
Upon arrival, Blossom Valley’s main street welcomed. The buildings were Victorian, the oldest one, now an antiques store, had a tasteful bronze plaque that said it had been built in 1832.
Each business front sparkled, lovingly restored and preserved, the paned windows polished, the hanging planters and window boxes spilling rainbow hues of petunias in cheerful abundance.
Unfortunately, the main street had been constructed—no doubt by one of David’s ancestors—to accommodate horses and buggies and the occasional Model T. It was too narrow at the best of times; now it was clogged with summer traffic.
David, though he had been here only on visits since leaving after high school, found himself uncharmed by the quaintness of the main street, pretty as it was. He still had a local’s impatience with the congestion.
Plus, once there had been two carefree boys who raced their bicycles in and out of the summer traffic, laughing at the tourists honking their horns at them....
David shook it off. This was the problem with being stuck in traffic in his hometown. In Toronto, being stuck in traffic was nothing. He had a car and driver at his disposal twenty-four hours a day, and it was a time to catch up on phone calls and sort through emails.
He was accustomed to running Blaze Enterprises, his Toronto-based investment firm, and he had only one speed—flat out. His position did not lend itself, thank God, to ruminating about a past that could not be changed, that was rife with losses.
Then, up ahead of him, as if mocking his attempts to leave the memories of those kids on bicycles behind, he saw a girl on a bike, threading her way through traffic with a local’s panache.
The bicycle was an outlandish shade of purple, and the old-fashioned kind, with a downward sloping center bar, high handlebars and a basket. Pedaling away from him, the girl was in a calf-length, white, cotton skirt. The midday sun shone through the thinness of the summer fabric outlining the coltish length of her legs.
She was wearing a tank top, and it was as if she’d chosen it to match the bike. The girl’s narrow, bare shoulders had already turned golden from the sun.
She had on a huge straw hat, the crown encircled with a thick, white ribbon that trailed down her back.
He caught a glimpse of a small, beige, wire-haired dog, or maybe a puppy, peeping around her with a faintly worried expression. The dog was sharing the bicycle basket with some green, leafy lettuce and a bouquet of sunflowers.
For a moment, David’s impatience waned, and he felt the innocence of the picture—all the things that had been so good about growing up here. The girl herself seemed familiar, something about the slope of her shoulders and the way she held her head.
He could feel himself holding his breath. Then the girl shoulder checked, and he caught a glimpse of her face.
Kayla?
Someone honked at a jaywalker, and David began to breathe again and yanked his attention back to the traffic.
It wasn’t Kayla. It was just that his hometown stirred a certain unavoidable melancholy in him. The loss of innocence. The loss of his best friend.
Kayla. The loss of his first love.
Grimly, David snapped on his sound system and inched forward. The street, if he followed it a full six blocks, would end at Blossom Valley’s claim to fame, its lakefront, Gala Beach, named not because galas were held there, but after a popular brand of apples that grew in the local orchards.
Gala Beach was a half kilometer stretch of perfect white sand in a protected cove of relatively calm, shallow water. The upper portions, shaded by fifty-year-old cottonwoods, held playground equipment and picnic tables, concessions and rental booths.
It had been a decade since David had been a lifeguard on that beach, and yet his stomach still looped crazily downward when he caught a glimpse of the sun-speckled waters of the bay sparkling at the end of Main Street.
David Blaze hated coming home.
He turned left onto Sugar Maple Lane, and the difference between it and Main Street was jarring. He was transported from the swirling noise and color and energy of Main Street to the deep, shaded silence of Sugar Maple: wide boulevards housed the huge, century-old trees that had given the street its name.
Set well off the road in large, perfectly manicured yards were turn-of-the-century, stately homes—Victorians. Solid columns supported roofs over deeply shadowed verandas. On one he caught a glimpse of white wicker furniture padded with overstuffed, color-splashed cushions that made him think of sugary ice tea in the heat of the afternoon.
And there was the girl on her bike again, up ahead of him, pedaling leisurely, fitting in perfectly with a street that invited life to slow down, to be savored—
He frowned. There was something familiar about her. And then, as he watched, the serenity of the scene suddenly dissolved.
The girl gave a small shriek and leaped from the bike. It crashed down, spilling sunflowers out onto the road. The puppy, all five pounds of it, tumbled out of the basket and darted away, tiny tail between tiny legs.
The girl was doing a mad jig, slapping at herself. It momentarily amused, but then David realized there was an edge of desperation in the wild dance. Her hat flew off, and her hair, loosely held with a band, cascaded out from under it, shiny, as straight as the ribbon around the brim of her hat, the soft light filtering through the trees turning its light brown tones to spun gold.
David felt his stomach loop crazily for the second time in a couple of minutes.
Please, no.
He had slowed his car to a crawl; now he slammed on the brake and shoved the gear stick into Neutral in the middle of the street. He jumped out, not even bothering to shut the door. He raced to the girl, who was slapping at her thighs through the summer-weight cotton of the skirt.
His shadow fell over her and she went very still, straightened and looked up at him.
It wasn’t