Barb looked from me to Tucker and back. “Our bookmobile angel and our emergency room doctor hero are an item?” She clapped her hands. “Oh, how perfect this is. How absolutely perfect!”
“Stop her,” Cade said, “or she’ll be making calls for your wedding caterer.”
“We’ve only been dating a few weeks,” I said, my face once again going warm.
“Good weeks, though, right?” Tucker kissed the top of my head. “Good to see you’re doing well, Mr. McCade.”
“Thank you again, Dr. Kleinow,” Barb said. “Thank you so very much.”
He smiled. “Just doing my job, ma’am.” He nodded a good-bye, gave me a quick hug, and left.
“I should get going, too.” I stood. “I’m glad you’re doing so well, Cade.”
Barb stood, too. “I’ll walk you out, Minnie.” She leaned forward. “Go to sleep, my sweet. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Mmm.” Cade’s eyes were already closed. By the time Barb and I reached the door, he was snoring.
Out in the carpeted hallway, Barb stopped. “Minnie…” But whatever words she wanted to say got lost somewhere and she just stood there, looking at me with eyes full of emotion.
My throat clogged up a little. “You don’t need to say anything, okay? I’m glad I was there to help. Truly.”
“You’re a lovely girl.” Barb laid her hand on my cheek for a brief moment. “Your parents must be very proud.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, but hey, maybe she was right.
“I’ll call you,” she said. “We’ll set a date for a nice lunch. I should have called before, but I’ve been a little…” She looked back down the hall.
“Busy,” I supplied. “Don’t worry about it. My cell number’s on my card. Call whenever you want.”
“Thank you, Minnie.” She gave me a hard hug. “So very much.”
I watched her walk back down the hall to her husband’s room, sniffled a little, and felt a sudden urge to talk to my aunt Frances.
• • •
“Minnie, my sweet. How are you?”
Even though I wasn’t feeling bad, not really, hearing my aunt’s voice made me feel better. She had a knack for making people feel not just better, but happier. And beyond that, more comfortable with themselves and who they could be.
It was a mild push from Aunt Frances that had gotten my friend Kristen thinking about opening a restaurant, and it was an Aunt Frances suggestion that motivated a neighbor of hers to make the move from composing music for friends and family to selling it over the Internet and eventually to making a mint writing movie sound tracks.
I glanced through my office doorway. No one in sight. “Just wondering about breakfast on Saturday. And how things are, you know, going.” Because Aunt Frances ran more than a summer boardinghouse and she did more than amateur career coaching; she was a secret matchmaker.
My aunt sighed. It was an uncharacteristic sound from my permanently cheerful relative. “There are what you might call issues.”
Every spring Aunt Frances took careful stock of the boardinghouse applicants for the upcoming summer. Though she didn’t have a Web site or even a Facebook page, she did have years upon years of happy boarders who referred friends and family and near strangers. The stack of letters and e-mails from people asking to stay was thicker than the phone book for the entire county.
Aunt Frances studied each letter carefully, and if a candidate looked at all probable, an intense series of letters and phone calls followed. To explain the unusual setup at the boardinghouse, Aunt Frances would say, and go on to explain that the summer’s fee included a daily breakfast, with one catch. On Saturday, a boarder cooked for everyone else. The daunting task of cooking for the six boarders, Aunt Frances, and often her librarian niece had made more than one applicant back away.
The cooking of breakfast, however, was a requirement Aunt Frances would never change. Because the real reason she took so much time studying the applicants was that the entire summer was a secret matchmaking setup, pairing boarder with boarder.
“There’s no better way to get a person’s measure than to see him or her working in the kitchen,” she’d said to me privately. And she had a gift for pairing up her boarders. In all the years she’d been running the boardinghouse, which had been ever since her husband died so young that I barely remembered him, she’d never once missed. Until now.
She sighed again. “It’s a downright mess.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
There was a pause. “Not really.” Then she spoke in a lighter tone. “It’ll work out. I’m sure of it.”
Because this year, early on, her carefully selected summer pairs had mismatched completely. The lovely twenty-six-year-old Deena and the fifty-year-old Quincy had taken to each other with a liking that seemed far more than friendship. This had pushed fifty-three-year-old Paulette, Quincy’s theoretical match, into the companionship of sixty-five-year-old Leo, which left twenty-three-year-old Harris, Deena’s supposed match, to spend a lot of time with Zofia, a grandmother who wore clothes of many colors and a baker’s dozen of rings. But Zofia had been matched with Leo. It was a problem and my matchmaking aunt was ready to pull out her hair.
“Well,” I said, “there’s always breakfast to look forward to. And that’s one of the reasons I called. Tucker and I both have the day off and I was wondering if it would be okay to bring him.”
“Oh, honey.” Aunt Frances laughed. “Of all the Saturdays to bring your young man to breakfast, you pick this one.”
“What’s up?”
“Harris,” she said succinctly. “He’s been making a mess of the kitchen all week, working on a culinary creation of his own.”
“Not good?”
“Horrible. I can’t count the number of eggs he’s gone through, and I have to tell you, the smell of burning maple syrup isn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy.”
“You don’t have an enemy in the world.”
“I’ll have a houseful if I don’t have a backup plan for breakfast this Saturday. Do you have any ideas where I could hide a few boxes of cereal?”
I suggested the trunk of her car, thanked her for the warning about breakfast, and went back to work.
• • •
Saturday morning, the first Saturday I’d had off in weeks, started off with a dawn so bright and shiny that the world felt brand-new.
I’d taken my aunt’s warnings to heart and had asked Tucker to come by the houseboat later that morning, but I found some courage, took a deep breath, and headed up to the boardinghouse.
“Good morning, favorite niece,” Aunt Frances greeted me on the front porch. She had a mug of steaming coffee in her hand. “Would you like a cup? It’ll be the best thing about breakfast.”
Since I was her only niece, I didn’t let the favorite comment go to my head. “Is it going to be that bad?”
She sipped her coffee. “You be the judge. But you know the rules.”
“No making fun of the food and always compliment the cook.”
She smiled. “A credit to the family, that’s what you are.”
I glanced at the front door. “So, how are things going in there? Apart from the breakfast, I mean.”
Her smile fell away. “Horrible. Simply horrible.”
It disturbed me to see my normally cheerful aunt look so morose. “I’ll be the judge of that,” I said, and opened the wooden screen door for her. We passed through the spacious living room, oak floorboards creaking, past the end tables and coffee tables built from driftwood, past the maps thumbtacked to the walls and the fieldstone fireplace, and entered the dining room.
I exchanged morning greetings with five of the six boarders, and within five minutes, I understood what my aunt had meant. The young, funny, intelligent, beautiful Deena was pouring coffee for the middle-aged and balding Quincy. She added sugar and a little cream, stirred it, then handed it to him and watched anxiously until he sipped it and nodded. Her resulting smile was bright and happy and I didn’t dare look at Aunt Frances.