Free Summer Harbor by Susan Wilson Page A

up the ploy of wanting a sailing lesson from him to cover his curiosity. Would Will, either with calculation or innocence, introduce his mother to his sailing instructor? What sort of awkward hell would that be?
    Kiley sat at the middle table in the center of the room with her profile to Grainger, and he thought he might just be able to slip out of the tavern unnoticed when Will clanged open the door and came in with that lope of tall young men. He threw himself into the chair next to his mother, his back to Grainger; facing the door and closing off escape. Instinctively Grainger leaned back against the wall so that the timber was even more obscuring: He didn’t want to face Kiley Harris here, in a reunion neither one of them was prepared for. Not yet.
    So he was trapped, then. Trapped by circumstance and by stubbornness. Pilot sighed at his feet, and when Mattie Lou came to clear his plate, Grainer ordered another beer.
    Sitting in the Osprey’s Nest, drinking a lukewarm beer, he couldn’t keep his eyes off the woman sitting twenty feet away, sipping a glass of wine in a place where no one drank wine. Kiley and Will spoke to each other in between long pauses, short bursts of conversation spiced with a little laughter. Now that she had her son beside her, Kiley was more animated, her gestures and mannerisms striking him hard with their familiarity. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her.
    There was no intensive dialogue as he imagined might take place between mother and son. Despite his own rough upbringing, he knew that parents and children did speak to one another. Mack’s parents spoke to him and sometimes their voices were the only kind adult words he heard in a week. Mrs. MacKenzie would scold, then joke. Even with him, her half-fostered son, she’d tease and then ask about homework.
    Grainger bought her Mother’s Day cards. The first time he did that, she wept, so sorry for the boy with the absent mother, never believing that he had wanted to do it for her, rather than out of some misplaced wish he could give it to his own mother. Grainger was never able to successfully express that, in her dependable kindness, Mrs. MacKenzie was more important to him than his deserting parent. He found those Hallmark cards addressed to “someone who has been like a mother to me.” Saccharine, perhaps, but genuine. Grainger wished she’d invite him to call her Mom, but some delicacy prevented her from making that suggestion. Grainger couldn’t remember ever calling her by name.
    His mother’s desertion had corrupted his love for her, and he never sentimentalized his memories of her. Where he had previously seen her as his father’s victim, afterward he saw his mother as free. She had abandoned her son to Rollie Egan, freed herself and left Grainger as hostage. Once Grainger had given up childish hope, he’d never deluded himself that she had some plan to come to his rescue. He never expected an apology or an excuse. She had saved herself and that was clear, even to a boy of ten. Later Grainger told himself that if he’d had the wherewithal, he would have done the same thing. So he shut her away, forbidding her betrayal to hurt. Grainger did not fault her, neither did he defend her.
    In the same way, Grainger had come to look at Kiley with different eyes. There could be no return to their old friendship. She had cost him the only happiness he had ever known as a boy, his safe haven. She had trampled on his feelings, and Mack’s. Even now, a lifetime away from all that happened, the sight of Kiley Harris pained Grainger to the point of physical hurt. His chest felt tight and he realized he was breathing very shallowly as he hid from this woman who had wrecked his life, the same way wreckers had once lured ships onto the rocks to plunder them.
     
    As Grainger nursed his unwanted second beer, he recalled the last summer Kiley had come to Hawke’s Cove. He and Mack had walked to her house to greet her return, excited that their