Lost Lake (Lost Lake, #1)(27)

“Excuse me,” Kate said as she approached. He didn’t hear her. “Excuse me!” she said, louder. No response.

She stopped a few feet away from him.

“Wes!” she yelled.

He finally stopped and craned his neck around to look at her with blue eyes that were so achingly familiar, now that she felt something unknotting in her chest. It really was him. His hair was a russet shade, like an autumn leaf, and it was stuck to his forehead with sweat. His color was high, with vivid pink slashes of exertion on his cheeks. His presence was just so vital, so centered. She wasn’t expecting that. She remembered him being the Sancho Panza to her Don Quixote that summer. He’d gone along with everything she’d wanted to do. He’d happily let her take the lead and stayed in her shadow.

He smiled when he saw her, then he put down his hammer. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

He stared at her, brows raised, until she realized he was waiting for her to speak. “Oh,” she finally said. “Eby wants to know if you’d like to join us for dinner.”

“Sorry, I can’t. Not tonight. I didn’t know it had gotten so late.” He lifted his face to the sky. The setting sun in the distance resembled a bright orange ember, as if a candle had just been blown out. “What time is it?”

Kate took her phone out of her pocket. She turned it on to see the time, and as soon as she did, she saw all the missed texts and voice mails from Cricket. There were dozens of them. She was going to have to call her back soon.

“It’s almost eight,” she said, returning the phone to her pocket.

“Thanks.”

He started to turn, but she stopped him by suddenly thrusting out her hand and saying, “Hi, I’m Kate. You probably don’t remember me.”

He stood. His hand was large and calloused, folding around hers like wrapping paper. “I know who you are,” he said, nicely but blandly. Milk and white rice. She knew that tone very well, that politeness ferociously guarding something else. Her mother-in-law was an expert at it. “I sent you a letter, years ago. Did you get it?”

“Eby just told me that you’d asked for my address. It never came.” She paused. “Or, at least, I never received it. My mother might have hidden it from me.”

He gave her a strange look. “Why would she do that?”

“She and Eby had some sort of argument that summer. That’s why we left so suddenly. I just found a postcard Eby wrote me years ago that my mother kept from me. When I get back home, I’ll look for your letter. I wish I had known. I had a great time here with you.”

“If you find it, just throw it away.”

“Why?” Kate asked, surprised. “What did it say?”

He shook his head. “It’s been a long time.”

He had come into his own with a confidence and presence that he hadn’t had before. But he’d lost something, too. She wasn’t quite sure what it was. Maybe, like her, he’d changed too much, left too much behind.

“Mom!” Devin called, running toward them. Her cowboy boots clunked on the dock boards as she approached. Kate didn’t have a quiet child. Devin could make noise in a room made of cotton. “Bulahdeen said to tell Wes that there’s cocktails if he’ll stay. Is that a bird?”

“Cocktails are grown-up drinks. Cockatiels are birds.” Kate put her arm around Devin’s shoulders. “Wes, this is my daughter, Devin. Devin, this is Wes. I met him the summer I came here when I was twelve. We were good friends.”

“Wes,” Devin asked breathlessly, her eyes wide, “have you ever seen any alligators here?”

He smiled. “No. Sorry.”

“Devin is newly interested in alligators,” Kate explained.

“When my brother was about your age, he was obsessed with alligators,” Wes told Devin. “He even called himself Alligator Boy, and he wouldn’t answer to anything else. He was determined to turn into an alligator when he grew up. He had it all planned out. One day he would wake up with a tail. The next day his alligator teeth would come in. This would go on for days until he was finally a whole alligator and no one, especially our father, would recognize him.”

Alligator Boy. Kate had almost forgotten about him. He had tagged along wherever they went but rarely said anything. It had been easy to forget he was even there. “Billy,” she said, suddenly remembering. “His name was Billy.”

“Yes. And you were the one who made up the story about him turning into an alligator,” Wes said. “He loved that.”

“Did he really turn into an alligator?” Devin asked, her voice quiet with awe.

“No. He passed away a long time ago in a house fire. But he wanted it so much that, if he had lived, I bet he would have.”

“I’m sorry, Wes,” Kate said, and put her hands in her pockets awkwardly. She felt her phone—and the scratch of something sharp against her knuckles. She took out the small curved bone she’d found on the stoop.

“What is that?” Devin asked.

“I found it this morning. I didn’t recognize it at first, but it looks like an animal tooth, like the kind Billy collected in a big box. Do you remember that?” she asked Wes. “He used to carry that box around wherever he went.”

“He called it the Alligator Box,” Wes said, staring at the tooth in her hand. “It was lost in the fire.”