Kisses in the Rain (11 page)

"Well," she said finally, "something happens to my hands when I get nervous. They fly around like frightened bats, or I crack my knuckles. I chew on the skin at the sides of my fingernails. It used to drive my friend Lindsay crazy."

He looked down at one of her manicured nails. Sure enough, the skin on the sides looked slightly gnawed. "Why don't you just bite your fingernails like everyone else? Why do you chew on the skin?"

She shrugged. His rain poncho nearly slid from her shoulders; he had to grab it to keep it from falling in the creek. He left his arm there, and she wasn't about to object.

"I can't bite my fingernails. It would ruin a perfectly good coat of nail polish," she said.

"In Ketchikan you won't have to wear nail polish. And you may want to keep your fingernails short for the outdoor life. Speaking of which, are you tired of walking in the rain yet?"

"No," she said. She'd always liked rain, and walking in it with someone special seemed fitting and right. It also kept the hair on her arms slicked down. She still hadn't figured out why it stood on end whenever he was around.

"Aren't you glad you changed clothes?" he asked.

"I'd forgotten how comfortable sweaters and jeans can be. And thank goodness I can wear boots here instead of three-inch heels. Any woman who says she likes wearing those little instruments of torture ought to have her head examined." She'd always felt this way; why then had she become so enamored of high-heeled shoes? At the moment, she couldn't imagine.

By this time it was close to noon, and they had been rambling around in the rain for a couple of hours. He said as much.

"As long as we keep moving, mold won't grow on us," she said solemnly.

"We can walk between the drops," he said.

"The rain washes down my umbrella," she said. "You'd be surprised how dusty my umbrella gets when it sits behind the door for a day or two."

"You mean on days when it doesn't rain? I don't remember any."

"I remember one. I think it was one of the first days I was here. The sun came but decided there must be someplace better to go and hurried back where it came from."

"Martha, I do believe you're the first Cheechako I've ever heard joke about our weather."

"Cheechako? What's that?"

"Someone who hasn't been in Alaska for a year yet."

"I'm going to fool people into thinking I'm a real Alaskan by getting my own pair of Southeast sandals," she said.

"You do that and I'll take you on a hike. We have some of the most beautiful scenery around here, and I want to be the one to show it to you."

She beamed up at him. "And I'd like you to be."

"For now, though," he said thoughtfully, "maybe you'd like to take a look at Novak and Sons' cannery." It wasn't anything he would have suggested to just anyone, because a cannery operation was messy. He had an idea, however, that Martha would be interested.

And she was.

The cannery hunkered on the edge of the island not far from the boat basin. It was an awkward arrangement of white painted buildings. Rain ran in streams off corrugated metal roofs. A pier jutted out into the water, its pilings thick with barnacles.

They went inside the office building through the outer door of Nick's office. Martha sent him an inquiring look when she saw the cot folded up in a corner.

"I slept in my office last night," he said. "I often do that when the weather is too bad for me to go home to Mooseleg Bay."

He led her through other offices and past a bulletin board. They climbed metal stairs to a catwalk suspended above huge bins of halibut. Workers below slapped fish onto conveyor belts from which the fish were swallowed up by big machines, only to emerge as cans of food at the end of the complicated process. It was noisy and smelly, but Martha watched avidly. She glanced once at Nick. He looked as if he enjoyed this.

"Come on," he said finally.

He took her to the section where the cans of fish were stacked in cartons. She had to jump out of the way of a speedy forklift carrying a load of sealed boxes to a loading dock.

"I'm surprised that so many people are working on Sunday," she shouted over the clang and the clamor.

"Fresh fish don't stay fresh for long," he shouted back. "Seiners bring their catch in by Saturday, because usually they don't work on weekends. By the time the quitting whistle blows tonight, we'll have this batch of fish put away." He motioned for her to follow him.

Back in his office, with several doors shut between them and the din, he turned and grinned. "Well?"

"I had no idea the cannery was such a big operation," she said.

"It wasn't until a few years ago. I built it up. I installed a shower off my office so I don't reek of fish when I leave here, and I keep my workers happy with high wages and fringe benefits. I like what I do."

They went outside, and Martha inhaled a breath of fresh, salt-scented air. The rain had stopped sweeping off the Narrows, and a fog was rolling in.

Nick took her hand. "How about a bowl of chili?" he offered. "There's a café down the street that makes the best in town."

They sat together at a little table. The air was steamy with the smell of wet wool, and the floor was damp with tracked-in water. He watched the way Martha studied the menu, the way she smiled at the waitress, the way her spirits seemed not to have been dampened by a day in the rain or the smells of the cannery.

And he knew that he had reached a turning point in his life. Whoever and whatever he had been before he met her was on the verge of becoming something different. Something more. That she was here with him now, blissfully spooning up chili, amazed him. He had spent all his life until this point without her, unaware that she even existed. Now it seemed impossible that Martha could have been somewhere in the world without his knowing it. The fact that she had appeared so suddenly on this cold, damp island in Alaska seemed like a miracle.

Martha looked up from her chili to find that Nick was watching her. His ruddy skin looked paler than normal, and at first she thought that perhaps he didn't feel well. In spite of his paler-than-normal skin, however, he was smiling at her.

"Is anything wrong?" she asked, though by this time she knew there wasn't. With a sudden flip of her heart, she knew he was in love with her.

"My dear Cheechako," he said gently, coining an endearment uniquely hers. "Nothing is wrong. In fact, everything seems perfectly right."

"Rightly perfect," Martha whispered.

After that, neither of them could finish eating.

Chapter 6

It was the third week in June, and the sun, which was making a rare appearance, seemed blindingly bright. The day had invited Nick and Martha outside and beckoned them to Deer Mountain. Ketchikanites joked that Deer Mountain was the world's tallest barometer: if you couldn't see the top of Deer Mountain, it was raining. If you could, it was going to rain. Today they both hoped that the rain would hold off until they got back to civilization.

The view from their private spot on the mountainside was breathtaking. Below, the town spread alongside the glittering water of the Narrows, with Pennock and Gravina Islands beyond. Birds in the Sitka spruce trees surrounding them nattered querulously at this invasion by two humans.

Martha snapped selfies of her and Nick so she could send them to Lindsay and her mother and sisters. Afterward she leaned back against a fallen log and let the sun bake her face. She propped her feet, which, like Nick's, were handsomely clad in a pair of brown leather hiking boots, on a tree stump. "What a nice day," she said lazily.

"Rain or shine, any day is nicer when we spend it together," Nick said. He picked up her hand; she had dispensed with nail polish, and her fingernails were short and squared off.

"Mmm-hmm," she agreed.

"Hungry?" he asked her.

"I didn't bring any bagels, if that's what you're wondering," she said, opening one eye and squinting at him.

"No matter," he said. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a small packet.

"What's that?" Martha said.

"Gorp. Want some?"

She opened both eyes. "With a name like that, it doesn't sound like anything I'd want to eat. Are you sure it's not some awful Alaskan insect you dug out from under a rock?"

He rolled his eyes. "Oh, the education of a Cheechako. Martha dear, gorp is granola, dried fruits and nuts. It's considered nutritious by backpackers." He tossed a raisin into his mouth, watching her.

Martha opened her mouth, too, like a hungry baby bird. Nick very gently placed a raisin on her tongue and closed her mouth with a kiss. He would have continued kissing her if she hadn't pulled away.

"I can't chew when you're kissing me."

"Stop chewing, then."

She did. He kissed her again, this time more thoroughly. He tasted of sunshine and raisins, which was unusual. She'd become accustomed to rain-flavored kisses.

"If I'd known that hiking was this much fun, I'd have taken it up long ago," she murmured into the long lean line of his jaw.

He rubbed his cheek against her chin and wrapped his arms around her so that he could hear her heartbeat. It sped up in response to his. He kissed her again and eased her down into the sweet-smelling grass.

She smiled up at him and traced the lines at the outer corners of his eyes with the fingers of both hands, letting her hands continue across the ridge-like cheekbones and around his head until she could pull his lips down to meet hers.

Martha had been kissing Nick a lot lately, but she would never get enough of it. Not much more than kissing had happened, but she liked it that way. She'd watched a whirlwind romance developing between Lindsay and Sigmund before her very eyes, and such a beginning seemed hasty and insincere to her now that she knew Nick.

She had learned a lot about Nick in the past weeks. By this time she knew that he could turn moody, abrupt, or remote in an instant. She had also discovered that he could laugh and be serious and that he adored her. Their sexual attraction was right up there, "A top attraction," Nick had said, "but not
the
top attraction."

The top attraction between them, they'd decided seriously on the Sunday when he had taken her to see Novak and Sons' cannery, was the real person inside each of them.

"Too often I've seen people fall in love with the person they
thought
the other one was. They create the perfect mate in the one they love and then they're disappointed when the other one doesn't live up to it."

"It's normal to put the best foot forward when you're interested in someone."

"Sure it is. But most people do more than that. They get caught up in pretending to be what the other person wants. And the other person perpetuates it by having the wrong expectations. Let's not do that."

"We won't," Martha had agreed solemnly. And they had kissed on it, their first real kiss.

Consequently they'd stood back and watched their love grow and blossom in a most natural way. Here where nature played such a big part in their lives, it seemed only right that they learn all the different facets of each other, a kind of extension of nature study, as Martha termed it. Like most people in love, they were caught up in themselves, but both of them wanted to progress slowly.

For Martha, her delightful discovery of Nick was marred only by the knowledge that she would be leaving after Labor Day. Right now, September and San Francisco seemed far away, but they lingered in the back of her mind like two yellow lights signaling
caution.
She'd fallen in love with Nick Novak, but she would eventually have to leave him. It would hurt to say goodbye—it would hurt so much that she could hardly stand to think about it. Or maybe she wouldn't leave, but that seemed unlikely.

She had no idea if Nick had thought about how he would feel about parting at the end of the summer. Now Nick lay back on the grass beside her, content. She was content, too. She was much too happy and in love with him to think about future sorrows.

"All the rainy days make me appreciate the sunny days so much more," Martha said dreamily. Above them, a bald eagle inscribed lazy circles on a brilliant blue sky. A breeze ruffled a field of wildflowers sloping down the side of the mountain.