Starting Over On Blackberry Lane. Sheila Roberts

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СКАЧАТЬ slap on the back. “You ready for a beer? I’ve got some Hale’s Supergoose double IPA.”

      “Sounds great,” Grant said and followed him into the kitchen.

      The place looked a little bare, sparse on furniture and missing those feminine touches that proclaimed there was a woman in the house. No knickknacks, no flowers anywhere, and some of the pictures had left the wall. The kitchen was downright Spartan. No bowl of fruit on the counter, no figurines of French chefs. No canisters. Not a good sign. He knew his son had been having trouble in his marriage, but the impression he was getting here suggested they’d gone way beyond that.

      “Where’s Lexie?” he asked as he settled on a chair at the kitchen table.

      Matt frowned at the bottle of beer he was opening. “She’s gone.” He handed it over and got busy with his own.

      “Gone. As in forever?”

      “Yeah. The divorce will be final end of May,” Matt said and took a long drink of his beer.

      Grant studied his second-born son. Dan had gotten Grant’s darker coloring but Matt resembled his mom—less square jawline, light brown hair, freckles. He’d been a cute kid and he was a good-looking man. He and Lexie had made a fine-looking couple. Too bad they hadn’t managed to make a fine marriage.

      Grant wasn’t surprised to hear it, though. He’d thought the girl was spoiled. And a whiner. Unlike his Lou, who’d been hardworking and always had a smile, this babe had been a leech and a downer. Matt needed someone positive in his life, someone to encourage him. Grant wasn’t sorry to hear she was gone.

      He did feel bad for his son, though, and it saddened him that Matt hadn’t felt he could call and talk to him. Too embarrassed, he was willing to bet, considering the fact that Grant had questioned whether he and Lexie were really a fit when Matt first started getting serious.

      “Want to talk about it?” Grant asked.

      “Nope.”

      Then this wasn’t the time to tell his son that everything would be all right, that somehow his life would go on. He nodded. “Okay. Got any pretzels to go with that beer?”

      Matt dug out a bag, ripped it open and laid it on the table. “You know what really gets me?”

      Yep, didn’t want to talk about it. “What?”

      “She didn’t even give me a hint that she wasn’t happy.”

      “Are you sure, son?” Women left hints, verbal and nonverbal cues that they laid out like a trail of breadcrumbs for a man to follow. Only problem was, it seemed that most guys had a tendency to step right over those breadcrumbs and not even see them. He knew. He’d done his share of missing the clues when he and Louise were first married.

      Matt shrugged. Now he was blinking furiously, trying to fight back unmanly tears.

      Men ought to be allowed to cry, Grant thought, saving his son’s pride by pretending not to see.

      “I could never please her. I mean, I was working my butt off at the restaurant and then doing roofing jobs on my days off. She was never happy, no matter what I did or how much extra money I made. What more did she want?”

      Who knew?

      “Well, screw her,” his son muttered.

      That was how the kid had ended up here in the first place. If you asked Grant, kids jumped into relationships way too quickly. He kept his mouth shut on that topic and simply said, “I’m sorry, son.”

      Matt shrugged. “Shit happens, right? That’s what you used to say. You hungry? I can make you a Philly steak sandwich.”

      “Oh, man. I haven’t had one of those in ages.”

      It used to be his specialty. Lou had loved to bake, but she’d found the meat-and-potatoes stuff challenging. Grant had often pitched in and helped in the kitchen on weekends. He’d been the king of the grill and of Sunday-morning breakfast.

      Matt had been his kitchen buddy, always happy to help out. The kid had wound up going to culinary school at Seattle Central, turning himself into a top-rate chef. He’d often talked about having his own place someday, but for the moment he was cooking at a high-end restaurant on the Seattle waterfront that specialized in seafood.

      Matt nodded and began cutting sirloin into thin strips. He seasoned it with paprika, chili powder and a mess of other herbs, then cut up onions. He dragged out the old cast-iron skillet that had been his mom’s, poured in olive oil and got to work. Half an hour later, they were both sitting at the kitchen bar, downing the best thing Grant had eaten in the last year. Oh, yeah, it was good to be in the States again.

      “So, you’re going back over the mountains, huh?” Matt said and chomped off another chunk of sandwich.

      “I think so. Your brother tells me there’s a real demand for handymen in Icicle Falls.”

      “There’s a real demand for handymen everywhere,” said Matt, who’d been lobbying for Grant to move to Seattle. “Way more action here than over there.”

      “At my age I don’t need action,” Grant informed him.

      “Jeez, Dad, you’re not dead.”

      There was an awkward moment as Matt realized he’d just brought the ghost of his mom into the room with that one word. “Shit,” he muttered and stuffed more of his sandwich in his mouth.

      Grant clapped him on the back. “It’s all right, son. I know what you meant.”

      Now Matt really looked like he was going to cry. “I miss her, Dad.”

      It wasn’t hard to figure out which “her” his son was referring to. “I know. I do, too.”

      Lou had been a stay-at-home mom and the heartbeat of their family. Death had come for her way too soon. So many times Grant had wished it had been him who’d had the heart attack and not her.

      “I wish you were gonna stay here.”

      Poor Matt. People were leaving him right and left. “It’s not that far over the mountains. We’ll see a lot of each other, a lot more than we did when I was in Mexico.”

      Both his sons and their wives had come down to visit him at Christmas, and they’d all had a great time. Well, except for Lexie, who’d topped off a bad sunburn with a case of Montezuma’s revenge. She’d been miserable and she’d done her best to make everyone else miserable, too. Yep, no loss there.

      “I’m coming up on weekends during the winter,” Matt threatened with a grin.

      Skiing and snowboarding—both his boys loved their winter sports, just like he did. He’d see more of Matt now that he was back in the Pacific Northwest. And he’d sure see a lot more of Dan.

      As he’d discovered, he wasn’t cut out for the life of an old hermit crab.

      Matt wanted him to stay a few days but had to work at the restaurant for the rest of the week, and Grant didn’t want to sit around cooling his heels. He was anxious to get to Icicle СКАЧАТЬ