Page 163 of Distant Shores
My good mood stayed with me through the shots as I laughed with Pops and Delly so much that my cheeks hurt, but my usefulness ran out once we were done.
Ari came in and said Director Links didn’t want the residents to feel crowded in their apartments, so the rest of the Zinnia House photoshoots were done with just Cole and two helpers—either Delly and Ireland or Ari and Liem—so everyone but Cole could take breaks.
It was for the best. Cole and idle hands didn’t mix.
Pops was leaning against his cane, looking over the new photos Cole and I had hung for him in the hallway. Cole had brought some from Georgia for me, and now some photos from the cabin were intermingled with Beck’s. There was a photo of Ireland as a kid in a tutu beside one of Delly in braces, holding up a fish she caught in the creek. Above those was a colorful frame housing a newspaper cutout about one of Beck’s art exhibits beside a faded photo of Pops and Grams smiling in their Sunday best.
I stopped beside Pops to see which one he was looking at.
He was smiling at the photo of him and Grams on their wedding day in a tiny chapel in the mountains, Pops with the same mustache, just darker, and Grams smiling serenely beside him.
He glanced my way, then gestured toward the door in a silent invitation.
I found Ireland’s gaze and cocked my head toward the door. She tilted her chin up and bent her head toward the window with an expression that I took to mean“See you at home.”
I nodded and trailed my eyes over her one more time.
I’d be asking Cole to send the photos of her in this outfit to me the moment we were all back at the house.
With Pops using his cane and me on my scooter, we moseyed at a snail’s pace to the Zinnia House exit and then to the courtyard between it and the Locc.
Pops sighed in relief when we sat on the bench in front of the trickling fountain. The shade from the massive live oak tree made it cool enough to tolerate being outside, and for a long time, we just sat in each other’s quiet company.
When I stretched my arms across the back of the bench, Pops glanced over at me, blinking slowly as if he’d just remembered I was here.
“When I met your Grams,” he said, his words quiet and measured, “I saw the mountains.” His mustache moved as he smiled tightly, the tremors in his clasped hands resting on his lap faint. “I’d lived by them all my life, but for the first time, I really saw them. That endless blue horizon…. It meant something different to me then. I saw our future there. And those mountains saw all of it. Saw me on top of its peaks and struggling in its valleys.”
He looked at me, his gaze clear and intent. “When she agreed to marry me, and then I lost my mother. When we built the cabin with all those rooms, then found out we couldn’t have children. And then, there was the highest peak of all….” He swallowed thickly. “When a tough kid and a sick baby stumbled through the woods and changed us from just Nell and Wilbur to Grams and Pops.”
I tried to catch his eye, but he looked toward the cascading water, his brows furrowed.
My heart constricted painfully. “Pops….”
“Do you see the mountains with her? With Beck’s girl?”
The fountain bubbled, an air pocket releasing, so the stream of water splashed harder, sending droplets flying out of the reservoir. I leaned forward, bracing my arms onmy thighs, and watched each one, thinking even though I knew the answer.
Ireland’s cautious smile when I bandaged her knee.
The grief in her eyes when we met again, and those days she hid herself away.
When she finally stopped hiding, and her smile came easier.
My surgery, the notes, the easy friendship she and Delly formed.
Pops and Beck, forever intertwining our lives. And what that meant.
I saw it all with her. The pains we’d already shared, and the ones that would come.
“I see them.”
“Are you gonna marry that girl, Addy?”
I glanced down at my walking boot, wondering what he would think if I told him she was the reason I finally got my ankle fixed.
The next time I got on my knees for her, I was going to do it without worrying about my ankle giving out.
“Yeah, Pops. That’s the plan.”
