Whatever happens, know that I love you. I’m so proud of you.
Love you Ice Sweet,
Vic
Vic. He always signed his letters “Vic.” Never what she’d always called him. “Daddy.”
“I could never fault you for leaving.” Yet between the lines that’s just what he did. Nothing on the backs of any of the pages. She worked to refold the pages in the wind.
“No, you’re imagining things, Cass. You think too much. Get your head out of your own butt.” And she mostly did. One of the many gifts Vic Knowles had given her, the ability to be clear about her own actions and reactions.
He’d financed her dreams of getting away from the rain capital of the Pacific Northwest. He’d paid for her college in full and cooking school after that. It was only cleaning up his papers this last week that she saw how close it had come to breaking him. He’d just made it a natural assumption that she’d go to college and he’d pay. Just like her Mom who had a degree in economics from Vassar. He’d always talked about how smart Cassidy’s mother was. How beautiful. How much he missed her.
He hadn’t gone to college himself, not even high school. His past was little more than a few facts she’d winnowed over the years. His dad had left before he could remember. He’d dropped out of third grade to help his mother run the grocery store. They were desperately poor when she died. Then he’d gone to Vietnam at eighteen as the only way to make a living wage. And walked to a vineyard. But he gave Cassidy that gift of education as if it was no sacrifice to him.
Did he now begrudge her that past? The future he never had.
No. That didn’t make any sense. He hadn’t thought about the money, he’d invested in his dreams for her. She was just going nuts from missing him so much and angry at him for being dead.
“Useful, Cass, real useful.”
To prove her sanity, she forced the rumpled letter back into the envelope, as neatly as possible in the midst of the maelstrom, and she forced that back into her leather pack.
Her father, the self-educated man, also the most well-read man she’d ever met. But she’d learned early on to do her math and science homework before he came home from the fields. His frustration at being unable to help her with them had always been a strain.
Cassidy’s mother was a single solitary memory. She’d been standing in the open doorway of the house, leaving on a stormy night to answer a call to the hospital. The wind at the door blew her hair across her face as she leaned on her father’s arm. Cassidy’s only memory of Adrianne Knowles, a woman with no face. Then Bea Clark rushing in from next door to sit with her.
She and Daddy did talk about the books though. He had sharpened her mind as they puzzled out the books together. Ayn Rand piled next to Shakespeare, Heinlein and Hugo, Dickens and a biography of Jimi Hendrix. Their house was always awash in books. And the massive collection of wine books, thumbed again and again by both of them, the only books to have a proper bookcase, had sat in the place of honor in the living room. Everything else jumbled into stacked wooden crates, mounded on tops of dressers, and enough on the dining table to make it a battle to find room for two plates.
The chill spray of a particularly large wave spattered her with a few drops and the next with a few more.
The tide must be coming in.
She scrambled from her hiding place and rose back into the wind which threatened to topple her down into the roaring waves. She forged her way back up the hill. The wind tore at her backpack and thumped it against her spine. The camera. Right.
She squatted to get out of the wind and pulled out her trusty point-and-shoot. The wind nearly blinded her when she turned back into it. Her hair swirled about her head.
A sailboat.
Two lunatics in a sailboat were off the point of land. A cobalt-blue hull climbed out of one wave, pointing its bow to the sky, and then plunged down and buried its nose in the front of the next wave before rising again in a great arc of spray and green water. Huge, maroon sails snapped in the wind, loud enough to sound like a gunshot above the roaring surf.
Copyright 2013 Matthew Lieber Buchman
Published by Buchman Bookworks
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form
without permission from the author.
Discover more by this author at: www.buchmanbookworks.com
Cover images:
Helicopter over Baghdad © U.S. Army | Flickr
Pakistani Chengdu J-7 © Michael B. Keller, U.S. Air Force [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
A young and sexy brunette woman on a foggy background © Maksim Shmeljov | Dreamstime.com
White House and the National Christmas Tree
© Robert Crow | Dreamstime.com
Man and Woman Couple In Romantic Embrace On Beach
© Darren Baker | Dreamstime.com
Red and Green Candy cane over white © Lucie Lang | Dreamstime.com (back cover)
Other works by this author:
Angelo’s Hearth
Where Dreams are Born
Where Dreams Reside
Where Dreams Unfold
Where Dreams Are Written
The Night Stalkers
The Night Is Mine
I Own the Dawn
Daniel’s Christmas
Wait Until Dark
Frank’s Independence Day
Peter’s Christmas
Take Over at Midnight
Light Up the Night
Christmas at Steel Beach
Bring On the Dusk
Target of the Heart
Target Lock on Love
Christmas at Peleliu Cove
Zachary’s Christmas
Firehawks
Pure Heat
Wildfire at Dawn
Wildfire at Larch Creek
Wildfire on the Skagit
Hot Point
Delta Force
Target Engaged
Deities Anonymous
Cookbook from Hell: Reheated
Saviors 101
Thrillers
Swap Out!
One Chef!
Two Chef!
SF/F Titles
Nara
Monk’s Maze