Page 36 of A Hero Comes Home

“Do ya want that K-4 fella ta be takin’ Sally fishin’, if ya get my meaning?”

K-4 . . . that would be Kevin Fortunato, a new guy in town who’d been sniffing around Sally. Nope, Jake didn’t need any competition. Not that his son couldn’t handle the challenge. And deep down Joe knew that Sally loved his boy, and vice versa. There was a legend in his family that the Dawson men fell hard and fast for the women in their lives, and that it lasted. It certainly had for him and Marge. But could he just assume that Jake and Sally would get their acts together? Wouldn’t that be tempting fate? And it seemed to Joe that fate hadn’t been treating Jake very well in recent years.

“It’ll be fun,” Mike insisted.

Joe arched his brows. “Since when did you become Mister Matchmaker?”

“Don’t be so grumpy, or they’ll be votin’ you the Grinch of Bell Cove come Christmas.”

“I’m not grumpy. You’re the one who’s grumpy.”

“Anyways, those two need some time alone together.”

They both took long draws on their bottles of beer and looked at Jake, who was alone for the moment. He drew a kitchen counter stool over and leaned his butt back on it with a long sigh. Being on his leg for this long was taking its toll, but Joe knew without making the suggestion that his stubborn son would decline pain meds or any obvious fussing over him.

But then Jake’s attention seemed to be caught by something across the yard. Sally was welcoming Jeff Hale, the new doctor who’d taken over the local medical clinic. A single doctor! As they talked, Jeff put his hand on Sally’s forearm and leaned in to whisper something in her ear. She threw her head back and laughed out loud. The hand on the forearm remained.

Not good!

Jake stiffened.

Definitely not good!

On the other hand, good, if he’s finally dropping that mask of “I don’t give a shit” emotional detachment that he’s been wearing like a shield since he got home.

Bad, if he’s going to react in some public way.

“Okay, I’m in,” Joe said.

Yep, blue eyes—or a blue eye—can still turn green . . .

The barbecue wasn’t as bad as Jake had expected. In fact, it was kind of nice to meet up with neighbors, some of whom he’d known his entire life.

What made it more palatable in this small crowd—about fifteen people so far—was that they acted as if he was back from a routine deployment. None of them grilled him about where he’d been the last three years and what exactly happened to him. Yeah, he had the canned dickhead responses that his dickhead liaison had fed him for practically every question. Luckily, he hadn’t needed to use any of them.

He wasn’t sure if his father and Sally had prepared the way for him by warning folks not to ask those kinds of questions, but more likely these were just good, sensitive people—friends—who knew how to be polite. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t be gossiping about him when they got home. It was Bell Cove, after all, where everyone minded everyone else’s business.

“Hey, buddy!” Karl Gustafson said, coming up to shake his hand. Jake had to remove one of the vinyl gloves he was wearing to handle the raw hamburger, and, yes, to hide his nailless fingertips, before taking Gus’s clasp. Gus didn’t stop there, though. The big blond giant of a man, whom he’d known from grade school, pulled Jake into a bro hug.

Jake almost fell, but caught himself just in time, regaining his balance with a hand on the side shelf of the barbecue.

“Gus! How you doing? Still playing football?” He’d been drafted right out of college by the Dallas Cowboys—which prompted much teasing by the sports pundits because a guy of Norse descent had been expected to go with the Vikings.

“Hell, no! I retired more than two years ago when my knee got torn up again. Shortest career in NFL history!”

That wasn’t quite true. As Jake recalled, Gus had been playing pro for several years before Jake had left on his last deployment. Four years in the pros was nothing to sneeze at. “And now? You left the limelight and you’re back in Bell Cove?”

“The limelight isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Home is where the heart is and all that shit.” He grinned and took a long swig of beer.

“Doing what?”

“I have a convenience store on the outskirts of town,” he said. At Jake’s snort of disbelief, he added, “And more recently, I joined up with Bell Cove Treasure and Salvaging. That’s a new operation started up by a former Navy SEAL, Merrill Good. You’ll meet him soon enough. Your wife and Good’s wife, Delilah, are best friends.”

Really? That’s news to me. First, the SEAL she’d been dating, and now BFF with another SEAL’s wife. Just how many SEAL connections does my wife have?

Like that matters!

Jake flipped the burgers and turned the hot dogs as they talked. “I heard about that company. Izzie—Isaac Bernstein, you remember him, don’t you?—sent me a bunch of old Bell Cove newspapers. A big shipwreck discovery, huh?”