Oh, good, it looks like we got here ahead of the crowd,” Billy said to Luke as she tugged open the wooden door to the Corner Bar. It was evening, a couple of days after she’d brought Luke home, and they were meeting Cal for dinner. To say that Billy was nervous about this was an understatement. It would be the first time not only that Cal and Luke had met each other but also that Billy and Cal had seen each other since he’d left for Seattle nine days earlier. (He’d driven straight here from the airport in Minneapolis.)
Billy blinked in the room’s dim light—she’d always found this place unnecessarily dark—and tried to make out Cal sitting at the bar. But he was waiting instead at the hostess station, and he waved to the two of them now. Billy waved back at him and then, impulsively, squeezed Luke’s shoulder. “Hey, thanks,” she said to him. She meant “thanks for agreeing to do this when we both know the only thing you can think about right now is meeting your dad in two weeks.” Luke wasn’t looking at her, though. He was looking at Cal.
“That’s him?” he said. “That’s the guy with the Porsche.”
“That’s right. Do you . . . know him?” Billy asked, mystified.
But Cal was already grinning at Luke. “Hey. I think we’ve met before?”
“Outside Pearl’s,” Luke agreed, shaking the hand Cal was holding out to him.
“Luke was, uh, admiring my car,” Cal explained to Billy. Of course, she thought. She should have known that everyone in Butternut would have seen his car by now. “Small town and all,” Cal said, as if reading her mind. At that moment, Joy, the hostess, descended on the three of them with menus.
And how had the rest of the evening gone? On the whole, Billy thought, pretty well. It was a little bit awkward, though that was, perhaps, to be expected. There were a couple of overlong pauses, a few unfinished sentences and, on Billy’s part, some gratuitous conversation with the waitress, Dawn. (Anything, she’d decided, to keep the table from sinking into silence.) It was possible that she tried too hard, and possible, too, that Luke didn’t try hard enough. Then again, maybe what Billy saw as a lack of effort on his part was really something else—watchfulness, or wariness. This was new for Luke. With the exception of Beige Ted, she’d never introduced anyone to Luke before, and even with Ted, Luke must have sensed the stakes weren’t very high. The only person at the table who seemed relaxed, in fact, was Cal; he was low-key, self-effacing, and funny. More important, he was careful not to be too affectionate with Billy, or too chummy with Luke.
That wasn’t so bad, Billy thought again later that night as she stood at her kitchen counter, twisting a corkscrew into a bottle of wine. (Luke was in his bedroom listening to music; Cal was out on the back porch with Murphy.) As she pulled the cork out and got two wineglasses from the cupboard, she considered how different Luke had been since she’d picked him up from camp. It wasn’t a vast sea of change, but rather a dozen subtle changes, and a fractional shift in mood. He seemed less angry and gloomy than he’d been before, more thoughtful and mature. Before picking him up from the hike, she’d wondered if he would be resistant to going back to work at Nature Camp, but he’d left for it the next morning without incident or complaint. Even better, yesterday evening he’d hung out with Toby, his old friend from down the block. “Nothing major,” as Luke had said—they’d just played foosball and watched some YouTube videos. Still, to Billy it had seemed like a positive sign. And then, when Cal had called her last night from Seattle and said he wanted to take her and Luke out for dinner tonight, Luke had said okay in a way that seemed noncommittal but not, thank God, openly hostile.
After pouring the two glasses of wine, Billy headed out to the back porch, where she found Cal sitting on the top step, throwing a tennis ball for Murphy.
“You know,” Billy said, handing him a glass and sitting down next to him, “this used to be a tennis ball–free zone.”
“Did it?” Cal asked, amused.
“Yes. It was the only way I could get any reading done out here. And now,” she said teasingly, “you’re going to completely spoil him.”
“That’s the idea,” he said. “You know that chew toy I brought him? I went into the snootiest pet store in Seattle and said, ‘Give me the most overpriced dog toy you have here.’”
Billy laughed. “You know it’s only going to take him one morning to get the squeaker out of that thing, right?”
“A morning?” Cal objected. “I was going to say an hour. I think she’s sold you short, Murphy,” Cal said as he returned with the tennis ball.
Murphy dropped the ball at Cal’s feet and wagged his tail obligingly.
Cal threw the ball for him again, but after Murphy had hurled himself in its direction, Cal turned to Billy, suddenly serious. “That was okay, wasn’t it?” he asked. He meant the dinner at the Corner Bar.
“All things considered, I think it was more than okay.”
“If he has reservations about me, though, I get it,” Cal said.
“I think the reservations are more about me,” Billy said. “Specifically about me . . . dating someone. Add to that his anxiety over meeting his dad, and I think it’s a wonder he agreed to go at all tonight.”
Cal nodded. “It’s a lot for someone his age,” he said, putting his wineglass down so he could throw the ball for Murphy again. “He seems like he’s handling it really well, though.”
“I think so,” she said softly. She twirled her wine around in her glass. “I think I’ll be relieved, though, when the next few weeks are over. I really want this meeting with Wesley to go well.” She’d spoken with him again the previous night to set up a date and time for them to meet in Minneapolis.
“I know,” Cal said. “You liked him, though, didn’t you? When you talked to him on the phone?”
“I did,” Billy said. She stopped twirling her wine. “He sounded nice. Still a little hesitant, of course. But how could he not be? His wife, apparently, is also . . . surprised,” she added, choosing that word carefully.
“Is she . . . not happy about this?”
“He didn’t say that, exactly. But he implied that it’s been an adjustment for her.” Billy brushed a mosquito away. She didn’t want to go inside, though. It was too pretty out here. The sky was a dark purplish black, and the stars were just beginning to come out. Even the fireflies, flickering at the edge of the yard, seemed intent on making the night beautiful.
Murphy came trotting up to them. Cal took the ball out of his mouth and tossed it again. He followed Murphy with his eyes, but he said to Billy, “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.” He picked up his wine, and Billy realized with surprise that he was nervous. Had she ever seen him nervous before, even at dinner tonight? She didn’t think so.
“Remember I told you about that friend of mine from graduate school, the architect, who I went to see in Minneapolis a couple weeks ago?” Billy nodded. “His name is Steve Landau. We were Skyping while I was in Seattle, and he asked me to work with him on a project starting in September. I said yes.”
“Cal, that’s wonderful,” Billy said, smiling. “Does that mean . . . you’ll be staying in Minneapolis this fall?”
“No, it means I’ll be moving there. I’ve been looking at apartments on Zillow.”
“You’re leaving Seattle?” she clarified.
“I am,” he said, watching her carefully. “I feel like my life there somehow got away from me. I need to start over somewhere else, and this time, from the beginning, I need to concentrate on what’s important to me. And you’re part of that, Billy. I know this is really new, but I want to see where it goes.” He smiled at her and, brushing a hair off her face, he kissed her, a lovely, tender, sweet kiss. Well, it wasn’t all sweetness. There was enough of something else there—lust?—to make her think about that evening and night they’d spent together. It would happen again, she knew, when things settled down a little. Maybe not a whole night, not right away, but she pictured a stolen hour of lovemaking on his twin bed at the cabin. Cal had said the cabin wasn’t designed for that kind of fun, but obviously, they would prove this idea wrong. Unless . . .
“Cal?” she asked suddenly. “Will you still be using the cabin?”
“I hope so. I haven’t told Allie yet. But she said I could use it whenever I want to. And I’m planning on it. Hopefully you and Luke will be coming down to St. Paul, too.”
“We will,” she said, flushing with pleasure. “We already visit my mom at least once a month. Now, though, between you being there and Luke having a new friend from camp there, I think we’ll probably come down more.”
“Good,” he said, kissing her again. And Billy felt it, the feeling she’d had the evening they’d first made love. It was a clear, sweet, pure happiness. Murphy barked now, a little bark of impatience, standing in front of them, tennis ball at his feet. They both laughed, and as Cal threw it again, Billy sipped her wine. She caught sight then of something out of the corner of her eye. It was the Jane Austen box set sitting on the little table. She must have left it out here overnight. Funny, she’d never done that before. And seeing it made her wonder . . .
“What’s wrong?” Cal asked.
“Nothing,” Billy said. Had she been frowning? “I just realized something, though. It’s going to be complicated, isn’t it? Me and you and Luke and Wesley. There won’t be any neatly resolved storylines, will there?”
“Storylines?” Cal said, his eyebrows quirking up in amusement. Billy blushed. “No,” he admitted. “No neatly resolved storylines. Is that a bad thing?”
Billy chuckled. “I’m a romantic. In novels—not all novels, just my favorite ones—everything has a way of falling effortlessly into place.”
He smiled. “Hmm. Well there’s definitely going to be some effort involved here. But I’ll tell you one thing about this storyline. It won’t be boring.”