Page 64 of Axe Backwards
A laugh rumbled out of me. “What, you got married and magically acquired manners?”
He gave me an eye roll and bent down to scratch Ripley’s ears. Cole’s marriage had been about as big a surprise as my return to Lovewell with a baby. As big as discovering that Gus had an ex-wife. A woman who came back after twenty years as his enemy and was now the mother of his child.
It was still hard to believe. Cole, our wilder, reckless half brother, had married responsible, upstanding Doctor Willa Savard.
I’d missed so much. Luckily, Mom had insisted on babysitting tonight so I could catch up with my brothers.
Cole leaned over, his reach half the length of this house, and stole a slice of bell pepper.
Jude glared at him.
He shrugged. “I’m hungry.”
“You know I have a process,” my twin grumbled.
Gus cracked a beer and handed it to me, then opened a second and set it on the counter near Jude. But for reasons unknown to me, he skipped over Cole.
“You hit nine hundred yet?” he asked.
Jude didn’t look up from the dough. “Check.”
Gus sauntered over to the sliding glass door that led to a small patio and a tidy yard surrounded by dense pine forest.
I followed, curious about what he was checking. When I saw it, I was pretty sure my jaw dropped. “Holy shit. That pizza oven is massive. Where did it come from?”
The outdoor oven was dome-shaped and beautiful, with colorful blue tiles and storage for wood underneath.
Cole snorted as he filled a glass with water. “Owen.”
I looked at Gus. Cole was married to Owen’s fiancée’s best friend, and yet the two men did not get along.
“You know Owen. He gets obsessed.” Gus shrugged. “Lila’s got celiac disease, so Owen made it his mission to make the best gluten-free pizza on earth. During his search for the best pizza oven, he bought several. He gave the rejects away. I have a small one in my garage somewhere.”
“He’d bought half a dozen of them before he decided these models weren’t good enough,” Jude said, still expertly stretching the dough. “So he flew some Italian artisan in to build an oven athis place in Boston. State-of-the-art, mosaic tiles from Tuscany. This guy is in his seventies and has been doing it since he was a kid.”
“Had to get a special permit from the city for the exhaust.” Cole rolled his eyes.
Gus let out a low, quiet chuckle. “Totally over-the-top. As usual.”
“The guy, Pasquale, stayed a month. He was great. He mentioned that he wanted to visit Maine, so Owen sent him up here. I showed him around, and we drove down the coast. Before he went home to Italy, he built this in my backyard as a thank-you.”
It was so Jude. Hewouldbefriend an elderly Italian stone mason. Just like Owen would fly in a senior citizen with decades of experience so he could make fancy pizza for his girlfriend.
Gus, our practical brother and the oldest, would surely think it was all absurd. He’d probably chop down a couple of trees and roast a whole cow over a fire for Chloe. And the woman would probably think that was romantic.
I’d missed them. They’d grown and evolved into men I didn’t really know. Even my twin was now a semi-professional pizza chef and hadn’t bothered to tell me.
Finn showed up at the exact moment the first pizza came out of the oven. Which was a minute after it went in, considering Jude had that thing cranking at nine hundred degrees and Gus tended to the fire, keeping it replenished with fresh hardwood.
Finn’s hair was pulled back into a messy bun, his beard needed a trim, and his T-shirt had a hole in the back, but his smile lit up the tiny house. His first order of business was to pull me into a hug, complete with a firm back slap. The second was to whip out his phone so we could compare photos of our kids. Thor was a couple of months older than Tess and already walking and causing chaos wherever he went.
Finn was gearing up for a busy season. His relatively new flight tourism business had exploded when a celebrity featured him in a magazine spread. He was booked for years in advance and had hired staff to keep up with the demand.
We settled into the Adirondak chairs on the patio, the air warm from the pizza oven. Ripley patrolled our surroundings, ready to snatch up any fallen pieces of crust as we demolished pie after pie.
Fig and prosciutto.
Mushroom and fontina.
