The next several days were extremely relaxing for Adam, a real break from the pressure cooker the last few months had been. As far as he was concerned it was the best vacation he’d ever had.

Not that he did much of anything, because he didn’t. The snack bar at the Channel Stop was open for breakfast and lunch, and it wasn’t busy. The three Lewises rotated through the wait staff and cooking duties for the handful of regulars who showed up, and even that didn’t involve a great deal of work; most of the time they sat around and shot the bull with the regulars as much as they actually worked. Adam knew it wasn’t like that in the summer, especially on weekends, when it could be a busy place indeed, but this was the first time he’d been there in the winter. He didn’t have much to do but join in, sipping coffee, not saying a great deal, but listening to hunting stories, fishing stories, bitching about politicians, and other things of absolutely no importance to him whatsoever.

It felt good.

In the afternoons, and the mornings when he didn’t have to take his turn in the snack bar, Jake took Adam with him to his father-in-law’s boat shed down near the highway, where there were a couple of boat projects going on. Adam spent several hours each day with paint scrapers and sandpaper in his hands, enjoying the dull, repetitive work that went on as he and Jake talked about one thing and another, often of very little importance. But it built a real friendship on top of the mutual respect they had for each other and their shared bond with Matt.

Adam had known that Jake and Brittany had been high school sweethearts long ago, but had broken up. He’d heard the long version of the breakup from Brittany from the day it had happened, but over the years he’d only heard snatches of Jake’s side of the story. Now he heard the whole thing in detail, and needless to say, it was considerably different from what Brittany had told him. If he’d known more of Jake’s version – which had the ring of truth to it – when he’d first gotten involved with Brittany he might have been a hell of a lot more careful, but that was water long over the dam.

He didn’t spend all of his time with Jake; one morning he had a long discussion with Amanda, a bright kid just out of high school, whose turn it was to be the waitress of the day. As Jake had said, she had little to no interest in going to college; she mostly wanted to spend her summers working on the charter boats, like her mother had before her. She’d already spent several summers working on them and expected to be at least a part-time skipper on one of the boats once she was old enough for the required license.

In a way, it seemed a shame that she wasn’t planning on college; she might be able to go far – but Adam could see right off that any such would be a direction that she didn’t want to go. She was wise enough to know that, something he hadn’t realized for himself when he had been her age.

He also heard from Amanda some of the details of Matt and Mary’s trip around Europe. Amanda had been with them for six weeks on the Mary Sue, mostly canal cruising from near Amsterdam to Paris. She said that it had been very snug for the three of them on a boat as small as the Mary Sue, but at least cruising canals it had often been possible to get off the boat to stretch her legs. It had been quite an adventure for a kid still in high school. While listening to her stories, Adam learned a great deal about Matt and Mary’s life together, something he’d only had an inkling about. He’d envied Amanda that; she’d had an experience with his son that he would have liked to share, but Brittany would never have heard of it. Another chance to be close with Matt lost.

Twice, Adam called Marcia at the office, mostly to check in to see if there had been any real, non-Brittany-related emergencies. Things were going all right without him, at least partly because it was the holiday season. Brittany had, not unexpectedly, been a pain in the ass, calling repeatedly and coming by the office several times to make sure he wasn’t there. The second time he called, Marcia had reported that Brittany had thrown a hell of a scene in the office, and it had been necessary to call the security guards. “After that, I told them to keep her out,” Marcia reported. “Is that all right with you?”

“Couldn’t be better. Make a record of it if you haven’t already, and I’ll pass it on to my attorney when I get back. He can pitch a bitch at her attorney, if she even has one yet.”

“I’ve already done that. Plus, I have a recording of this last episode, which includes video from my computer webcam.”

“Good deal,” he replied as he made a mental note to do something nice for Marcia at the first opportunity. “I’m sure my attorney will like to see that, as well.”

“I thought you’d like it. Any idea when you’re going to be back?”

“Can’t say yet. Probably not till after Christmas, but I know there’ll be some things I’ll have to review before year end.”

“Enjoy yourself, and have a good Christmas.”

“Right, Marcia, and the same to you.”

It was a good Christmas, the best he’d had in . . . well, years. Probably before Matt came down with leukemia the first time. The Lewises took him in like he was part of the family, and in a way he was. Jake gave him a Navy-style pea jacket like Matt used to wear, and Adam realized now where Matt had picked up that taste in clothing.

Best of all, Mary called on Christmas day. Everything was going fine, she reported; Matty was sleeping through the night most nights, and for the most part was being a pretty good baby. A couple of days before she’d dressed him up in sort of a pirate costume and taken him out with a group of her friends mumming around the village. It was an old Newfoundland village Christmas tradition of visiting neighbors in costume, having drinks and snacks and having to guess who the mummers were. Of course, in his case, everyone could pretty well figure it out, but nobody let on. “He’s getting’ a fine start ta be a Newfie b’y,” she reported. “His pa would ha’ been proud a’ him.”

Of course, Adam had a little business to talk about with Mary, mostly bringing her up to date on the Brittany situation and filling her in on Brittany’s reaction to discovering that Matty existed at all. “If she knew where you were she’d be down your throat in an instant,” he had to tell her. “So I don’t intend on letting her find out. But I don’t doubt that she’ll keep trying, so now we have to be even more careful about contacting each other.”

“Aye,” Mary replied. “I’d rather she didn’t show up here, but if she does, there are a few things I can do ta let her know she’s not welcome. I’ve made a few preparations and I’ll make a few more.”

“I’ll do what I can from this end,” he promised. “The only possible lead she’d have to you is through either Jake or me. Jake’s not going to tell her anything, though I’m sure she’s going to work on me some more. The last shot in that battle hasn’t been fired, not by any means, but I think you can talk to Jake a little more freely than you can to me.”

“Do what ye can. Adam, I’d like ta be seein’ ye again some day.”

“I’d like to see you too, and I especially would like to see Matty. But I’m afraid it isn’t going to be anytime soon.”

“Ye’d be welcome here when ye can, but be lettin’ me know ’fore you come. I’ll have me a talk or two with Evan an’ some of the b’ys, an’ while I think they’d remember ye, they ain’t gonna be takin’ kindly ta strangers lookin’ for me an’ Matty.”

“That’s good to know, Mary. In fact, it’s some of the best news yet on this. The situation is still developing and I can’t tell what’s going to happen.”

“Ye be takin’ care, b’y,” she said. “I don’t envy ye havin’ ta deal wi’ her, but at least ye’re getting’ shed of ’er. That’s not a bad thing, b’y.”

“I don’t think it is, either. You take care yourself, Mary.”

The call went on for a while; everybody in the house wanted to talk with her a little. Jake asked her how the Mary Sue was, and Mary reported the boat was up on a homemade cradle along the shore, covered with tarps. “It just about knocked the stuffin’ outa the crane to get ’er up there,” she reported. “I mean, it was really wheezin’, ’cause it’s a couple mites heavier than the small fish boats that go on shore when the ice comes here. But I’m lookin’ forward ta gettin’ ’er back in the water come spring. I may not sail ’er much, but I’m lookin’ forward ta bein’ out wi’ her again.”

Eventually the call came to a close; it was sad to have to end it, even though they knew Mary had to call from a friend’s house since she didn’t have a phone at home. “I’ll tell you what,” Jake said. “Being back home has sure thickened up her Newfoundland accent a lot. Matt was starting to get it flushed out of her the last time we saw her. Of course, he was picking up a little of it himself.”

“I like it just fine,” Adam said. “It sort of reminds you that she’s not your normal girl, and especially not someone like that Stephanie leech Brittany was trying to stuff down Matt’s throat.”

“Sorta makes you wonder,” Amanda snickered. “Imagine if Brittany doesn’t get to meet Matty until he’s, oh, twenty, and he talks like that.”

“He probably will if nothing happens,” Adam conceded. “But Brittany would pop every circuit breaker she has, if she has any left by that time.” A smile crossed his face as he added, “That might even be fun to watch.”

A couple of days after Christmas Adam had to concede that it was time to be heading back. He really didn’t want to leave; it was almost like he’d been part of the family. At the very least, it had been enjoying a friendship he hadn’t known in years. But, as he’d told Marcia, there were things he needed to do back at the office, especially before the end of the year. He was dead sure there were going to be issues involving Brittany too, so he had been gone long enough.

It didn’t take him long to pack, because he hadn’t brought much with him. It had served the purpose. “I’m sorry you have to go so soon,” Jake told him as he carried his bags out to the car. “Adam, I just want you to know you’re welcome to come back here any time you feel the need to get away.”

“I appreciate that, Jake. I really do. There’s no way I can thank you and your family enough for what you did for Matt, and I’m just glad to know we can be friends with him gone.”

“I have the feeling you need some friends. Like I said, drop by anytime, although if you show up on a busy summer weekend don’t be surprised to be put working the fuel dock or helping make up motel rooms.”

“You know, I think I’d like that,” Adam grinned. “It sure would be a change of pace. Keep in touch with Mary for me. I have to be pretty careful about that until this situation with Brittany gets ironed out.”

“No problem with that,” he smiled. “I’ve sort of been kicking around the idea of making a quick trip up to see her in the spring before we get busy here. I have to admit I’m a little curious about that place.”

“I wouldn’t mind spending some more time there myself, but it’s not going to happen soon. Maybe someday. Take care Jake.”

“You take care yourself, Adam. Get back up here after it warms up. We can go out on the Pixie and do some sailing.”

“Count on it. It gives me something to look forward to.”

Adam was soon on the road. There had been a heavy snowfall in the days he’d been at Winchester Harbor, and now the ground was covered with it. The roads were clear, but there were banks of snow alongside. A cold wave had followed the snow, and the harbor was frozen solid, the ice bare and gleaming. Some kids were messing around on ice skates down near the boat launch, taking him back mentally to when he was a kid himself. When he’d been that age he’d never had the chance to go ice skating on an ice-covered pond under a clear blue sky on such a crisp winter day. It looked like fun – and something else he’d missed out on when he’d been growing up.

The thought stayed with him as he got out on the highway. As far as he could remember, going out skating in the outdoors was something Matt had never been able to do either; it had been something that would have been hard to do as a city kid, like both of them had been. Oh, one winter before the leukemia Matt had skating lessons at an ice rink a few miles away, with Brittany looking on anxiously, but that wasn’t the same thing – nothing like going out and messing around with a bunch of friends. Sometimes it still amazed him that Matt had come up with the drive or the courage or whatever it was to break away from his mother and do his own thing, but Adam was sure Jake had been responsible for that.

Damn, he thought. I sure didn’t do a very good job of being a father to Matt. I was too damn wrapped up in the company, but that shouldn’t have been an excuse. I was trying to provide for Matt and Brittany the best I could, but I sure missed a lot of the good stuff along the way. Despite the actual facts of the parentage, I was always Matt’s father, but I put too goddamn much time into the company and not enough into the family. Any number of times, both before and after the leukemia, I should have drawn the line with Brittany a little more firmly.

Oh, well, he sighed. It’s all hindsight now. The best I can do now is to help Mary out, and try to be a good grandfather when I can, but I can’t even do that until this thing with Brittany gets settled. Newfoundland is a long way away.

The hell of it is, he realized after a while, was that he always had to remember that Matty was Mary’s son. While he wanted to help all he could, there had to be a limit to how much he should be interfering – unlike Brittany, who recognized no limits. Given a chance Brittany would brush Mary aside without a bit of thought and take Matty over as a reincarnation of Matt. Brittany had no respect for Mary whatsoever, and had never taken a moment to try to get to know her son’s wife, to respect her for the strong, competent, and loving person she was. Perhaps it’s not right to seal Brittany away from Mary and Matty, but give Brittany an inch and she would take all the miles she could without any consideration toward Mary in the slightest. There was no question in his mind that it would be what would happen; he knew Brittany much too well. So it had to be prevented, and most likely it would be the best service he could provide for his grandson.

If Matty wound up growing up in a Newfoundland fishing village and talking like a Newfoundland fisherman, well, so be it. It would be hard to not try to force his own vision of the future on his grandson, but somehow he had to manage it.

Adam could remember back when he’d been in college, a time when he’d dared to dream of a life that wasn’t defined by his father. His father had expected him to come into Caldwell-Deerfield right out of college and make his life there. It wasn’t the life he really wanted, not that he’d known what he did want, but he’d never had the ghost of a chance to do anything else. But any chance of breaking free had been blown away the instant Brittany had announced she was pregnant. With the option of a good job at the company lying before him, there didn’t seem to be any point in trying to break away from his destiny.

The bitter irony that Matt wasn’t his natural son hadn’t been revealed for more than a dozen years, and by that time it was much too late for recriminations, especially with Matt in the hospital, getting weaker and sicker by the day. While Matt may not have been his natural son, in every other way he was his son, and he couldn’t see any other way he could have handled things by that time other than the way he’d done them.

Having Jake get into the picture had probably been the pry bar that had allowed Matt to have his own life, brief though it may have been. Both Brittany and Adam’s father Samuel had planned Matt’s future right down the line; Matt would follow his father into Caldwell-Deerfield, and Brittany would have had him married to some vapid gold-digging leech like Stephanie, keeping him firmly under her thumb. But thank God, Matt and Jake fooled them all, right up to the morning when Matt stepped onto the Mary Sue in Frenchtown Harbor and sailed away from them. Though Adam had been publicly dismayed at the time, in private he was proud of his son for breaking away like he himself had been unable to do. And he was still proud of him for that.

It would be nice to be able to follow in his son’s footsteps – maybe not sailing away on a boat as small as the Mary Sue, but something else. It wasn’t impossible; after all with the divorce in the works, one of the clamps holding him to his life was in the process of being removed, but there was another one he had no idea of how to solve.

The simple fact of the matter was that he was tied to Caldwell-Deerfield even more tightly than he’d been to Brittany. True, he may have been the chief operating officer and vice chairman of the board, but he owned virtually none of the company, and was dependent on his paycheck, just like the humblest machine operator on the plant floor. His paycheck wasn’t comparable to other people in similar positions, either; in fact, he’d taken a big pay cut in the recent past when the auto industry went sour. It really hadn’t been necessary and he could have avoided it, but it set a good example of just how belts were going to have to be tightened until things got better again.

At the same time, he’d been thinking of a possible divorce, although that hadn’t come to a head at that time. He was aware that a lower income could have a favorable effect on any settlement if the quarter-century old prenuptial agreement didn’t hold up in a divorce court. It still was a concern, but he and his attorney had hopes that they could stampede Brittany into accepting the proposed settlement. If she didn’t and things went into court . . . well, he was done with Brittany, in any case.

But it would be best if the divorce and the settlement could be over as quickly as possible. Adam’s father still owned most of the company, and although he was at least supposedly semi-retired he still pretty much ran things with an iron fist. It was, by God, his company and he didn’t have any intention of letting it go until the undertaker pried it from his cold dead hand. Which could happen; he was in his mid-eighties, and not in as good health as he had been a few years before. What that meant was that Adam was stuck staying with the company until it wound up in his lap.

Up until last summer in Boston, Adam had more or less planned on holding onto the company so there would be room in it for Matt, even though the prospect of Matt’s leukemia returning made that part of the future fuzzy at best. Though he’d managed to concede that the unthinkable might not happen, it had still been a possibility lying out there. But that wasn’t a factor now and never would be again. He certainly didn’t plan on holding out for Matty. He wouldn’t wish that on the kid; hell, he’d never wished it on himself.

But, Adam thought, not for the first time, if he could hold out till his father passed on, probably in the next few years, and if Brittany weren’t a factor in his life by then, maybe a chance still remained for him to do something different with his life. Maybe it would be possible to follow in his son’s footsteps.

He had no idea of what he would do. The one thing he was sure of was that he had some time to think about it.

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