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“Dawn.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Somehow, ten minutes later, he was peeling potatoes in the industrial kitchen of the inn surrounded by what seemed like seven million Mitchells.
“Look at you,” Alice said, looking over his shoulder as he made short work of the potatoes. “You’ve done this before.”
“My first job was in a kitchen,” he said. He set down the peeler and looked at the heap of potatoes on the acrylic cutting board. “You want me to cut them?”
“Julienne? But big?”
“Sure. You’re making fries?”
“Bea created the menu, so fries it is.”
A big guy came into the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel.
“Hey,” Alice said, turning from the stove. “Max meet Micah. Micah, Max.”
Max was a big guy, dark hair. He was the kind of guy who, even when he was completely silent, was somehow the loudest guy in the room. He just had weight—and in the whole of Helen’s family, all the men had weight and gravitas. But Max was something special.
“Hi,” Max said and came up and shook Micah’s hand.
“Hi. Nice to meet you. Thanks for having me in your home.”
“We’ve met before, though, right?” Max squinted at him, his head turned like he was trying to see him clearly.
“I was a kid. I doubt you—”
“You helped me build the fence at the edge of Haven House when it first opened. You were real quiet. I liked that about you.”
Delia, the redhead came in with some teenagers. Max slung his arm around his wife’s neck and kissed her forehead.
“Yeah,” Micah said, stupidly pleased someone remembered him. “That was me.”
“Not so quiet anymore. I loved that duet you did with Brandi Carlile.”
Max grabbed a beer from the fridge and offered Micah one.
“No thanks,” he said. Max pulled up a stool.
“How is the tour prep going?” Delia asked.
The kitchen door opened again and it was Helen and Daphne coming in, Jonah behind them. It seemed everyone was suddenly in the kitchen.
“We’ve got lots of time. Two months until we open at Madison Square Garden, so we’re still working out some kinks.”
“I love the new album,” one of the teenagers said, in a great rush. She was bright pink with dark hair and she looked so much like Max that she could only be his kid. He just couldn’t remember the name. There were so many teenagers.
“Thank you.”
“Did you really write the whole thing during the pandemic?”
“I did.”
“Those live Instagrams you did were smoking hot,” another teenage girl said, and there was a riot of giggles and Jonah turned and gave them solid glares.
“Well,” Delia, under Max’s arm, shrugged. “They were.”
“It was kind of the point,” Micah said.
“Was it hard?” a boy asked. This kid looked like a linebacker but he had the mullet of a hockey player. “Writing an album by yourself, in lockdown and everything?”
Micah felt Jonah’s stare and Helen standing unaware. Saying it now, here, in front of everyone didn’t seem right.
“It was actually easier than it’s ever been,” Micah answered truthfully. “I think because there weren’t any distractions. I just wrote and played music. It’s weird, and I know it was awful for a lot of people and I come from a place of privilege, but for me the lockdown wasn’t too bad.”
The teenagers jumped into a conversation about who’d had it worse during the lockdown, and the argument flowed around the room, people chiming in and calling people out. Everyone laughing. No one took the argument seriously.
Micah realized how amazing this was, the way all the kids were talking and the parents weren’t having to bridge all the gaps. No one had their phones out, either. It spoke of a place where everyone felt safe. Trusted. No one was checking the temperature of the undercurrents.
He'd been checking the undercurrents his whole life.
He wished, in a way, that his mother could have been alive to see this. When they’d driven up here in the Datsun, she’d wanted something like this. For both him and Alex.
And they got a version of it, but meaner. Colder. Transactional.
I wish my brother was here to see this.
I wish my mother was.
“All right!” Alice said and clapped her hands. She’d been tirelessly working the fryer while her husband, Gabe, had been out at a charcoal grill with steaks. “Kids, set the table. Pour water. Dinner is ready.”
The teenagers, in very un-teenager-like behavior, jumped to do what she asked and Bea, who’d been sitting next to him as quality control, soaking the potatoes, took his hand. “We do water,” she said. And he was pulled into the next room, which was huge.
A dining room occupied the area in front of the tall windows. Tables had been pushed together and tablecloths stretched over them. There were at least a dozen chairs squeezed around the makeshift table. Down a few steps was a spacious living room, with big couches and chairs and two fireplaces. There were four dogs flopped around on the floor.
