Take a Chance on Me(38)

She layered lettuce and tomato on her burger, hating that she’d reminded them of so much pain. “I see.”

“But once a pyromaniac, always a pyromaniac,” Casper said, clapping his brother on his back. “He only learned to fight fires because he spent years setting them.”

“That is not true,” Darek said. He picked up two plates—one for Tiger, probably.

Ivy added fruit and potato salad to her plate and headed over to the condiments.

“Really. Then who was it that burned down the garage, huh?” This from Grace, and Ivy suddenly wanted to thank her—and Casper—for rescuing her.

“I didn’t burn down the garage—”

“It wasn’t his fault. Not exactly,” Ingrid said, setting Tiger on a bench. “I’m the one who told him to make a nice bed for the dog.”

Huh? She must have frowned because Casper laughed and said, “We’re just confusing her.” He came up beside Ivy, slid his arm around her. “We had this outbuilding, see. Something my grandfather built years ago. More of a workroom. My grandfather called it his doghouse—he even installed a little heater and electricity in there so he could listen to the Husky football games in peace.”

“My mother was a baseball fan,” John said. He turned off the grill.

“Anyway, this was before we got Butter—we had this old dog named Chester, and he used to love to sleep in there. We even put in a dog door. One day, Mom was cleaning out the basement and found this old foam pillow from one of the sofas we’d long since destroyed. She thought it might make a good bed for Chester.”

“I just wanted him to go put it in the outbuilding—”

“She told Darek here to make a good bed for the dog. So he did. Shoved that foam pillow right up against the heater.”

Ivy glanced at Darek. He shrugged, but a smile played on his face. She sat down at the picnic table next to Casper, across from Ingrid.

“I looked out the kitchen window about three hours later and saw this strange glow from the woods,” Ingrid said. “Right about then, Darek, who’d long forgotten about the dog bed, came through the house asking about dinner. He saw the glow, opened the door, stood there for a moment, and then said . . .”

As if they’d planned it, in unison, every person recited, in a long, awe-filled tone: “Wow.”

“‘Wow’? That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Ingrid said. “Then he shut the door.”

Ivy stared at Darek. “What were you thinking?”

Darek set Tiger’s plate in front of him. “I was thinking, Wow.”

She laughed and picked up her burger. The juices dripped onto her plate as she took a bite. She just barely stopped her eyes from rolling back in her head. “Delicious,” she said to John.

“Thank you.”

“What did you do?” Ivy asked Ingrid, taking another bite.

“Well, I asked, ‘What’s wow?’ then opened the door. The garage was an inferno, two stories tall, engulfing the building.”

“Oh, my.” Ivy nearly choked and wiped her face with a napkin. She could have eighty more of those burgers.

“Yes. I yelled to John and grabbed the phone. By the time the fire trucks got here, we’d decided to douse the surrounding forest with hoses, knowing the place was long gone.”

“It didn’t catch anything else on fire?” She dug into the potato salad.

“Nope. We were lucky. But I was more specific in my instructions the next time.”

“I was a very obedient child,” Darek said.

Ingrid rolled her eyes as John coughed, pounded his chest.

“What? It’s Casper who caused the most trouble. Didn’t he steal a car at the age of seven? How about sink his snowmobile in Lake Superior in July? And what about the time we came home to find him and the entire Deep Haven hockey team skinny-dipping in Evergreen Lake in February?”

“That was Owen’s fault, not mine, and it was a dare.”

Everyone laughed. Ivy had never felt so full, so satisfied.

“Did someone mention my name?”

She looked up, past Ingrid, and saw a young man, a younger version of the broad-shouldered Darek, come around the house to the porch. He wore a Minnesota Wild T-shirt, a pair of loose athletic shorts. Behind him came a pretty woman with her mother’s signature blonde hair, wearing loose faded jeans and a sleeveless orange shirt.

“Owen!” Ingrid jumped up, stepped over the picnic bench, and hurtled toward her youngest son.

He wrapped her in his arms, twirling her around.

Casper had also risen and now hugged the other woman tight. “You should have called us!”