Kisses in the Rain (5 page)

He was an attractive man, and she wished she'd made some kind of impression on him. She didn't think she had, however. He'd obviously been more interested in talking her into using Alaskan salmon than in anything about her. Perhaps he was one of the local fishermen. He looked rugged and individualistic, the way Martha imagined a fisherman should look. He was only trying to drum up some business, and she couldn't blame him. She'd probably have done the same thing herself.

Martha slowly made her way to the car, stepping over lots of puddles. By the time she got back to her apartment, she had conjured up a scenario where he came back to buy a bagel the next day and the next and then they cruised off together into the sunset in his boat as she gazed into his brown eyes.

Which was utterly ridiculous, and she knew it. He was probably only being polite when he said he liked the bagel. And if he gazed into her eyes as he piloted the boat, they'd capsize or worse.

The trouble was that on her second day here, Martha was very lonely. She'd never been in a town where she didn't know one single person. She'd never had to start from scratch in building a social life. Come to think of it, she wondered if there was any social life around here.

That was something she'd find out tomorrow. There had to be something to do besides stand around in the rain and wish that weathered, rugged-looking men would carry her off into the sunset.

Anyway, he probably hated chocolate-chip cookies.

Chapter 3

Not long after he said goodbye to Martha at the dock, Nick Novak stomped the mud off his feet on the wide wooden porch of his snug cabin on Mooseleg Bay outside the town of Ketchikan.

The cabin was called Williwaw Lodge because his father's fishing boat had been driven ashore at this point on the ragged coastline of the bay during a furious williwaw, the name Alaskans gave to the often violent winds that roared over steep mountains, striking the water close by the shore. When the storm cleared to reveal a far-flung landscape of exaggerated grandeur, Nick's father knew that this horseshoe-shaped cove was the place where he wanted to raise his family. The Novaks became homesteaders. Nick had lived here all of his thirty-two years.

"Nick! Nick!" called a small voice, and a dark-haired boy catapulted around the woodpile stacked at the side of the house and latched on to one of Nick's legs.

"Hold it, hold it," he said, but then he swung the boy up and around, hoping that he would laugh. The boy never laughed.

"How are you, Davey?" he said, smoothing the boy's hair tenderly.

"Okay," said Davey.

"What does Hallie plan to feed us for dinner?"

Davey buried his face in Nick's neck.

Nick patted Davey on the back and strode, still carrying him, through the door into the house. The screen door slammed behind them.

"Hallie?"

"I'm back here," called his housekeeper. Nick saw her chunky figure through the kitchen window. She was bending over to pick strawberries.

Nick shifted Davey to his free arm and lifted the lid of the iron pot on the stove. Inside was fish stew, Hallie's own special concoction of fish and tomatoes, onions and peppers, and it smelled good.

Hallie huffed and puffed her heavy frame up the back steps. She carried a basket she had woven herself from marsh grass and seal gut, and it was filled with plump, juicy strawberries.

"I'm going to whip up a cobbler for dessert," she said breathlessly. "Davey helped me pick some of these, didn't you, Davey?"

Davey's eyes lit up with pride, but still he didn't speak.

"That's wonderful, Davey," Nick said. He was crazy about the kid, always had been. He just wished that Davey responded to him more.

"It'll be an hour or so before dinner's ready," Hallie said. "There's plenty of time for you and Davey to do something together if you like." She had recovered from her exertion on the stairs and began to hull strawberries over the sink.
Poor Hallie,
thought Nick. It was a lot to ask of her to keep up with a lively little boy every day.

Nick knew it was hard for Hallie, sociable soul that she was, to live here with Davey day in and day out when Davey hardly ever spoke a word. Hallie would prefer to live closer to her fellow Tlingits in the town of Ketchikan, which is what she had been planning to do three years ago when he'd suddenly, with no prior warning whatsoever, brought Davey home to stay.

"I see I can't leave you with an infant on your hands,"
 
Hallie had said on that long-ago day.

"If you could just stay until I get someone else," Nick suggested, not knowing at the time how hard it would be to find another housekeeper who was willing to live in the wilderness on the edge of the bay. Now, three years later, Hallie still lived here, and she was tired of the rigors of the Alaskan bush.

These days it seemed less likely than ever that Hallie would feel free to leave anytime soon. Of course, there was nothing holding her here—Nick had made it clear that if she absolutely wanted to, he would not make it difficult for her to go. No, there was nothing holding Hallie—nothing except a sweet little boy who hardly ever talked.

Nick carried Davey out to the wide, grassy front slope that led down to the dock where both his boat and his floatplane were moored. Davey ran to get a rubber ball, and they tossed it back and forth; Nick's quick eye discerned that Davey's motor development was equal to that of any of the children his age whom Nick had observed playing in the park at Ketchikan. Davey would be four years old tomorrow, and there seemed to be nothing wrong with him physically. He was slow in learning to talk, that was all.

Later, after dinner and after he had tucked Davey into the bottom bunk bed in the boy's room, Nick and Hallie sat out on the front porch, fighting the monster mosquitoes that stormed out of the woods on summer nights. Hallie burned an odoriferous bug bomb that held the insects at bay for a while, and even though Nick would have rather been inside reading a good book, he didn't excuse himself. Hallie had so few people to talk to.

"I spoke with Stella on the shortwave radio today," Hallie said. "She's baking the cake for Davey's birthday celebration tomorrow evening."

"Chocolate, I hope," Nick said with a chuckle. Davey loved chocolate, and Stella, who was Nick's sister-in-law, baked the best chocolate cakes Nick had ever tasted.

"Of course it'll be chocolate. I'm going to fry a few chickens and mash some potatoes for dinner, and Davey and the other kids can play tag and pop balloons after we eat. It'll be a good old-fashioned birthday party."

"Are the adults expected to join in?"

Hallie laughed. "I guess it depends on how good you are at pinning the tail on the donkey."

"Not too good, as I recall. I only went to one birthday party during my childhood because we always lived way out here."

Hallie's smile faded. "That's too bad. A kid should live near other kids, I've always thought."

"I had other kids. My brothers Dan and Fred. And my friend Hank." Hank had grown up on the bay with the three Novak boys; his family had homesteaded a parcel of land on the other side.

"Davey has no one. Maybe you should think about moving into town. Davey might talk more if he had children his own age to play with."

Nick's father had fished Alaskan waters all his adult life from this homestead on the bay. Nick couldn't imagine living in town after all these years. He loved it on the bay.

He said, "Mmm. I've been thinking about it. I can't picture leaving the old home place, though."

"For Davey's sake you could leave," Hallie pointed out.

"It depends on how well the store does this summer," Nick hedged.

"How's business so far?" Hallie wanted to know.

"It's off and running. These tourists can't get enough Alaskan salmon. I'm glad now that I opened the store, and I wonder why I waited so long."

"Are you going to close it this winter?"

"I haven't decided. There won't be so many tourists then, but maybe we'll do a brisk local business."

"I doubt it. So many of the locals catch their own fish or know somebody who does. They won't want to buy smoked fish out of a store when they can get free fish and smoke it themselves."

Nick sighed. "That's true." He wondered idly about the Cheechako woman he'd met today at the new Bagel Barn down by the dock. Surely she wasn't planning on keeping that little snack shack open in the winter. He wished he'd been able to talk her into serving Alaskan salmon on her bagels. She might want to try sablefish, too. He'd mention it to her next time he saw her, and he hoped that would be soon. There was something intriguing about her.

"I heard there's a new snack place in town," said Hallie as though she could read his mind.

"Yeah, I know. I ate there today."

"What do they sell? Wanda told me it was some kind of doughnut." Wanda was Hallie's sister; they talked every day on the shortwave radio, which was the only way to communicate from Nick's cabin with anyone in town.

"It's not doughnuts. It's bagels. I'll bring you one sometime."

"Maybe I'll stop by there next time I go to town. Wanda says the lady who runs the place is real pretty. Maybe she'd make you a good wife. If you had a wife, I could go live in town with Wanda and her grandkids."

"You can go live with Wanda anytime you really want to," Nick said. He didn't want this to morph into a conversation about him.

"Humph. I won't really want to as long as Davey needs me. You know that, Nick."

"Yeah. I know that." Suddenly Nick stood up. "I can't handle the mosquitoes any longer," he said. "I think I'll turn in." He wheeled and walked abruptly inside.

"Good night," Hallie called after him, but he didn't reply. Well, Nick was always a little moody. Like Hallie said, Nick needed a wife.

Hallie lingered for a while on the front porch, creaking back and forth placidly in her rocking chair and staring out over the slick black water of Mooseleg Bay. Out on the bay, rearranging the reflected patterns of stars on the surface of the black water, she saw a slow-moving trawler. She heard the engine juddering along toward the other shore and wondered who it was. It was a lonely job, fishing. She was glad Nick didn't fish anymore. He had plenty to do with running Novak and Sons Cold Storage and Cannery and now the new store selling fish to tourists.

Of course, Nick had been a highliner, as the best fishermen were called, for a long time, and he was still in partnership with his brothers Dan and Fred, who were the ones who oversaw the Novak and Sons fishing-boat operation now. But Nick seldom went out on the boats these days because Davey needed him at home. He was truly devoted to the boy.

Hallie wished she knew the full story about where Davey came from and whose child he really was. Even with all the gossip passed on by her sister Wanda, Hallie had never cleared up the mysterious circumstances surrounding Davey's arrival in Nick Novak's home. First it had been just Hallie and Nick in the cabin after Nick's father, old man Novak, died. And then Hallie had decided to move to town to live with her sister Wanda, who was raising five grandchildren and needed Hallie's help. But one day shortly thereafter Nick had shown up with Davey. The fat baby boy's black button eyes had peered fearfully at Hallie from amid the folds of the fluffy white blanket, and Nick had curtly announced that Davey was henceforth going to live with him.

No one knew how or why the baby came to live with Nick, even though the rumors around Ketchikan had flown fast as fur in a cat fight. Pretty soon the gossip had died down to a speculative glance at Nick now and then, usually whenever someone would forget and say, "I wonder why that handsome Nick Novak has never married." Then someone else would reply in a hushed tone, "Well, he has that little boy, and there's something not quite right about the kid."

Hallie had learned to field questions about Nick or Davey with no more than a shrug and a smile, as if to say that the peculiarities of the situation were beyond her. But still, Hallie wondered, too. As far as she knew, Nick had never explained anything about the boy to anyone. If he had, the story would have been all over town. Ketchikan was like a small town anyplace. Everyone knew everyone else's personal business.

Except for Nick Novak's personal business, that is. The only thing that anyone ever really knew about him was that he had a kind heart, because otherwise why would he have taken in a kid who most likely wasn't related to him?