“Holy shit!” Rachel cried once they hit top speed on the highway. “This is awesome!”
Zack would have shouted something back, but he needed to pay attention to the road.
He didn’t drive his motorcycle as often as he should, often opting to hang out on the open water as opposed to the open road. But he had been excited to take up the hobby in his early twenties after meeting a classmate at college who collected Harleys and insisted on showing Zack the ins and outs after learning he was a yacht fan. “They often go hand-in-hand,” the guy had said. Back then, Zack didn’t believe it. He was a believer now.
His family owned a lakeside cabin up the nearest mountain, but rarely used it. They definitely weren’t using it that weekend, although Zack went ahead and called the family scheduler to make sure he and Rachel would be alone – and that the place would be cleaned and stocked for an overnight stay. Even if they decided to come back into the city, they could at least have dinner first. We’ll be back in the city by sunset. It’s fine.
A man like Zack had to tell himself that. He couldn’t get his hopes up with Rachel. She had made that clear. She was celibate, if nothing else.
Still, that didn’t mean they couldn’t hang out, right?
It only took half an hour to reach the lakeside cabin, and Zack considered that lucky since Friday afternoon traffic in the summer was usually way worse than what they encountered. But thanks to getting there in record time, neither he nor Rachel were too sore to hop off with vigor and take in the sights of a sunny day by the lake.
“Wow,” Rachel said after taking off her helmet. “That was… amazing!”
“Glad you liked it.” Zack secured the helmets to his bike. “See that cabin right there? It’s ours for as long as we want it.”
“No way. You didn’t rent it, did you?”
“Ha! No. It belongs to my family. My grandfather bought it thirty years ago when he got really into fishing and my grandmother wanted to stay away from the city more often.”
“You… own it?”
“Not personally. Don’t worry, I cleared it with my family. Nobody else is here.”
“Is that so?”
Zack recognized that look. “This ain’t a romance pleasure cruise, Rachel.”
“Ew. You said ain’t.”
“Sorry. Am I too rich to be able to say ain’t?”
She giggled. “No. But I forget how rich you are until you’re showing off your motorcycles and one of your family’s vacation homes.”
Zack ignored that. “Come on. Check out the dock here. It’s my favorite spot.”
Rachel’s happiness crashed. “The dock?”
“Oh. Right.” Zack cleared his throat. “We’re not going in the water. We’ll be right on the shore. Is that okay?”
“Well… we’ll see.”
Zack offered his hand. “You’re not gonna fall in. The lake is super shallow by the shore.” He doubted it was all that deep in the center, either. Or at least he remembered finding the bottom easily enough the last time he swam in it.
He took the initiative to show Rachel how safe it was to sit at the end of the wooden dock jutting out into the tranquil lake. Zack wasn’t quite tall enough for his sandaled feet to break the surface of the water, so a shorty like Rachel wasn’t going to have any issues at all. (He assumed. He didn’t have any fears of the water, after all. His uncle Roy made sure he knew how to swim at the tender young age of five.)
Even so, Rachel approached with incredible hesitation, her feet sticking to the center of the dock and arms slightly out to protect her balance. Zack wanted to roll his eyes but kept his breath pent up in his throat. The last thing he should do was make fun of her in any way.
“Rachel,” he said with pep, “I swear if you don’t sit down right here, right now I am going to personally call your mother and demand she come in here and throw you in like she should have done when you were a baby.” That’s how he and his brothers learned to swim. Roy had shown no mercy to his land-loving nephews. (Daniel was still a little traumatized. Hm. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea for Rachel’s mother to do that after all.)
She sat down on the dock before letting one foot hang over the edge. “You can try calling her if you want,” Rachel muttered. “But she won’t know who you’re talking about.”
Zack folded his hands in his lap. A dragonfly whizzed by, and the water beneath his feet rippled when he kicked a pebble off the dock. Aside from that, the private property was picturesque tranquility. Not even a boat here. Had Zack planned far enough in advance, he could have conned Uncle Roy and maybe Seth into making it a guy’s weekend, complete with freshwater fishing, should Zack convince his father to lend him one of his smaller hobby vessels. Littoral living was mostly a Zack thing in the end, though.
“That so?” He didn’t know what else to say.
“Unfortunately. My mother has dementia.”
“Wow.” Zack had certainly not been expecting that. “That’s… I take it all back now.”
Rachel chuckled. “It’s fine. I’ve grown accustomed to it.”
Accustomed to dementia? Zack didn’t even know that was possible. Not that he knew anyone who had dementia. There were rumors that his grandfather had Alzheimer’s when he died, but that was yet another family secret buried. I didn’t speak to the man the last few years of his life. Zack had been a kid, and if something happened to his grandparents, his own parents did their best to shield him from it. Like that time his dear grandmother fell down a flight of stairs and split half her leg open. Rude. I would’ve loved to have seen that.
“Who’s taking care of her?” Zack doubted Rachel had her memory-addled mother locked up in her tiny apartment. “Your dad?”
“I don’t have one,” she was quick to say. “He skipped out when I was a kid.”
“Damn.”
“After I left to go to college, my mother moved in with a friend of hers to split the rent and so neither one of them had to be alone more than necessary. My mother was always older than my friends’. She had me when she was forty. I was used to hearing her concerns about aging, and I supported her when she was in her sixties and worried about living alone.”
“Makes sense.”
“But one day I got a call from her roommate telling me that my mother had gotten in the car, pantsless, and was convinced she was going to work at a job she retired from two years before. Because the clock said it was eight, and she knew she had to go to work at eight. Except it was the middle of summer, so it was actually eight at night and not in the morning.”
“Damn,” Zack said again. “That’s awful. I’m sorry.” I can’t imagine that happening to my parents. Let alone his mother! The thought of that put-together woman running out of the house without any clothes on, convinced she had somewhere to go well into the night, sent a shudder through Zack’s body. Except, even if something like that did happen to his parents, there were people, organizations, and money in place to immediately take care of it. They could hire the best in-home care or, if it truly were too dangerous to keep someone at home, they would afford the best facility in America. Barring that? Build it. Zack’s grandfather donated an entire wing to a hospital because its oncology department was too subpar for his mother-in-law’s breast cancer treatments.
“Yeah, well, she’s in a better place now.”
Zack swallowed. “My condolences.” Wow, I sound like an asshole.
“I mean she moved into a memory care facility where they specialize in taking care of people with her condition.”
“Oh. Either way, that really sucks.”
“Yeah, in many ways, I feel like I’ve mourned her already.”
Jesus. “That’s…”
“Because she’s gone, you know?” Rachel kicked both feet over the edge of the dock. “The woman who was my mother isn’t coming back. I can’t go to her when I need something. I can’t ask her for advice. There are no more birthday presents and no more Christmas dinners. It sucks, because I knew I would have to deal with the death of my mother one day, but I didn’t think it would be like this.”
“And you don’t have anyone else to help? How are you paying for it?”
“She had insurance thanks to the job she had, but they’re always fighting me on making payments. So I have to pick up where it slacks off.”
Holy shit, that can’t be inexpensive. There was no way Rachel was making enough money to pay for that and her own expenses. How was she holding herself together? No wonder she kept bugging Zack whenever he interrupted her!
Like that day. I interrupted her work, making the money she needs to support her mother, and she still came out with me? Granted, she took some convincing, but…
Zack felt like shit. This may have been his first time hearing about her mother, but the least he could’ve done was be more considerate of her time.
“You have an interesting life, Rachel.”
She looked at him, the sun illuminating her brown hair from above. It’s a bit gold in the light, isn’t it? Brunettes always had the most interesting hair coloring in the summer sunlight. Rich, delicate, and bold. While Zack never subscribed himself as a man with a love for only a certain hair color, he had to admit that Rachel really raised the bar when it came to beautiful brown hair. Wonder if she got it from her mom…