Free The Long Journey to Jake Palmer by James L. Rubart

Peter, who had turned away from them and was rustling through a bag of groceries on the kitchen table.
    “I hope we have a chance to catch up a bit while we’re here. We haven’t talked much since last summer.” Camille’s mouth smiled at him, but there wasn’t any smile in her eyes.
    “Hope so.” Jake nodded and motioned toward the stove. “I’m going to get out of here and let you two figure out your menu for the rest of the week.”
    He pushed past Camille, through the family room, and out onto the deck, asking himself for the five hundredth time why Peter had married her in the first place. Jake stood at the railing of the deck and stared out over the lake. He’d die for Peter and maybe he was. In a way, being around Camille was like a slow death.
    A few minutes later, Peter came up beside him and handed him a drink. They stood in silence as a breeze brought the scent of pine swirling around them.
    “I’m sorry about that. Sometimes Camille isn’t the most sensitive person on the planet.”
    “Her performance in there isn’t giving me a lot of hope for the coming week.”
    “I’ll talk to her, but she’s had a hard year. It’s not about you, it’s about her trying to figure out where she fits in now that our kids are hitting the midteens and starting to get their own lives.”
    “I get it. I do. I’m just saying it doesn’t exactly make me want to slice open my chest and bare my soul this week.”
    “You’re going to have to do it someday. You ever want to find yourself in another relationship, you gotta let yourself be known.”
    “I don’t want to be in another relationship.”
    “Yeah you do.”
    “No. I don’t.”
    “I know a woman who would be perfect for you.”
    Jake clamped his mouth tight to keep from spewing his drink across the deck. “You’re kidding, right?”
    “Okay, I might have missed a couple of times, but I’ve become more discerning.”
    After Jake and Sienna’s divorce was final, Peter decided his new calling in life was to be Jake’s matchmaker. Every three weeks like a clock hitting midnight, he’d set Jake up on blind dates. No, that wasn’t accurate. They weren’t blind dates because Jake hadn’t agreed to any of them. They weren’t even dates. They were frontal assaults sprung on Jake without warning.

9
    H ello.”
    Jake had looked up from his laptop on a Friday afternoon in February to find a midthirties woman with short black hair standing over his table at the coffee shop. She had bright eyes behind brown glasses, and a stack of three books under her arm.
    “Yes?”
    “Are you Jacob Palmer?”
    “Jake. Yeah.”
    “I’m Irene Barring. It’s good to meet you.” She sat in the chair across from him and set her books on the table.
    “Who?”
    “Peter’s friend.”
    “Peter’s friend?”
    “Am I at the wrong table?” Irene glanced around the coffee shop.
    “Unfortunately not.”
    “Excuse me?” Irene cocked her head and frowned.
    “No, no, I don’t mean it like that. I just mean Peter didn’t tell me. I thought I was meeting him here, not you. So this is a bit of a shock.”
    “Nice.” Irene grabbed the edges of her books and pressed her lips together. “Not the way I wanted to break on through to the other side.”
    “The Doors.”
    “You know Jim Morrison’s work?” She leaned forward, eyes growing wider.
    “Only because my roommate for two years after college was way into classic rock. I couldn’t get him to stop talking about it.”
    “Then you may not know that Morrison was a prophet. He has more to say to us than anyone other than Sri Ramana Maharshi.”
    “Jim Morrison? A prophet?”
    “Yes.”
    “What about Elvis?”
    “That’s good. Very good. Very funny.” Irene smiled and pointed at him. “Peter said you had a great sense of humor. But I’m serious. Morrison was not a singer, not a rock star, he was a poet who was thrust into a world he didn’t want to be in. If we forget the music and look at the days