“Um, well…no.” He leaned against the oak’s lowest branch, the bark abrading his palm. When he’d been Jackie’s age, it had taken some doing to swing up onto it. But he’d grown a lot since then. He was tired, but he still managed to pull himself up onto it and straddle it like a horse.
“There’s a spot up at the very top of this tree that’s like a crow’s nest on a ship,” he said, choosing to ignore the kid’s question.
The kid looked up at him, his face pale in the growing twilight. “You know about that?”
Topher smiled at the bittersweet memories. “Yeah. I do. I used—” He cut himself off.
“What?”
Maybe he shouldn’t encourage the kid. Topher knew all about Jackie and his fixation on the ghost of William Teal—the pirate who had lost his life in a shipwreck down the bay hundreds of years ago. So maybe telling the kid about how he used to pretend to be a pirate wouldn’t be the right thing to do.
Maybe instead, he should take Granddad’s tack and buy the kid a football and show him how to throw it.
“Nothing,” Topher said. “I just used to like climbing up there.”
The kid turned away, and they sat quietly for a long moment before the boy pushed himself up from the ground. “I gotta go before Mom figures out I’m not upstairs watching TV. It’s Tuesday. The Piece Makers are coming.”
Jackie headed off across the lawn, leaving him stranded in the tree. Topher had forgotten that it was Tuesday. His cousins Karen and Sandra would be coming over, and they’d find a moment to swoop down on him with a zillion questions about how he was feeling. They would probably have twin coronaries if he ever told them he’d been out here swimming.
Or if they ever found out he’d climbed a tree.
And he’d have no trouble keeping those things a secret from them if he could just find a way to get back down to the ground. The lawn below seemed impossibly far away, but he was not going to be an excuse for Ashley to call in the fire and rescue.
He inhaled, swung his bad leg over the side, closed his eyes, and slipped back to earth. The pain jangled all the way up his spine, but miraculously, he didn’t fall on his ass.
* * *
Ashley Scott rarely made caramel cake. It might be a delicious staple of the South, but it took forever to whip the caramel icing—twenty minutes in the stand mixer to get the right frothy consistency.
But Jackie loved caramel cake. And since today marked the end of his summer vacation, she’d made a whole cake just for him. He’d already had a slice after dinner. And there would be plenty to pack in his school lunches for the rest of the week.
Maybe that would improve his mood. Jackie was too smart for his own good sometimes. And he was also just a little odd, her boy. What with his imaginary pirate friend…who might be a ghost.
Kids teased him, and school wasn’t his favorite place, especially at recess or lunchtime. Ashley sometimes wondered what Adam, her late husband, might think of their child. Would her husband, who’d been a man’s man, be ashamed of the boy who got perpetually bullied at school?
Probably.
But she wasn’t ashamed. She worried about Jackie. And loved him with all her heart, which was why she’d made a double recipe of caramel cake—so Jackie could have his own cake and the ladies of the Piece Makers quilting club could have theirs.
The quilting group met every Tuesday at Howland House, and they’d been getting scratch-made cake every week for decades. The cakes were a tradition that Ashley’s grandmother had started when she’d formed the group during World War II. Ashley had taken over the tradition after her husband and grandmother had died within a year of each other.
It seemed impossible that it had been three years since Adam had been killed on deployment. She still cried for him, especially at night, but she’d been learning to live with the loneliness. Besides, her bed-and-breakfast kept her too busy for self-pity most of the time.
Grandmother might not have liked the idea of turning Howland House into an inn, but it had been the only way Ashley could keep the old place in the Howland family. Her married name was Scott, but she’d been born a Howland—a direct descendant of Rose Howland, the woman who had planted the daffodils that had