Home Matched
© 2020 Camellia Tate. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Chapter One
Sam
It was practically impossible not to hum O Canada as I walked from the plane to my rental car. Despite how many times I traveled home, it never got old. This year marked ten years since I joined the Salt Lake Pumas. It felt like an actual forever. So many things had happened and yet, coming home? That always felt the same.
Except this year, it was different. The Pumas hadn’t won the Stanley Cup but we’d come pretty close. I always came home after the playoffs, but this year I planned to spend the whole summer in Lunengrove. Truthfully, the last time I’d spent more than a week here was years ago.
Being home reminded me of all the things that had changed in my life since leaving the small town I grew up in. Coming home always felt like stepping back in time. It was one of the reasons I didn’t come back for very long.
This summer, though, was different.
For one, my baby brother Patrick had asked me to stay around. Pat was getting married at the end of the summer and was building a house for his new wife. If that wasn’t some of the most romantic shit ever, then I didn’t know what romance was.
The fact that Pat was marrying my ex-girlfriend’s - no, ex-fiancée’s - best friend was maybe a little awkward. I had barely spoken to Charlotte since Helena and I had broken up. Ten years was a long time not to speak to someone. She and Pat had gotten together about five years ago. While I knew about how that had happened, I’d never truly seen them together.
But Pat was my baby brother; I would do anything for him.
Including helping him build a house over the summer.
The two-hour car ride from the airport to my parents’ house was plenty of time to think about how strange it would be to be back for such a long period. Three months felt like eternity when the longest I’d been home was a week at a time.
“But you’re doing it for Pat,” I reminded myself, parking the car. My parents were on some sort of a whale-watching cruise for a few more days, which was why I was a little surprised to see the lights on in the house.
Letting myself in, I called out a ‘hello’ that resounded through the house. Maybe they’d come back early. Though, from the smell of something burning, I was guessing that it wasn’t mom and dad who were home!
“Are you welcoming me with a burnt cake?” I teased Pat as I walked into the kitchen, setting my bags down and giving my brother a wide grin.
Pat dropped the oven glove he was holding, zipping around the kitchen island so he could barrel straight into my chest. Luckily, Pat had always been the skinnier brother. The full force of his embrace barely rocked me on my heels.
“No, I’m making a macaroni bake,” he answered, pulling back with a beaming smile plastered across his face. “But maybe I didn’t clean the roasting tin very well. There might have been some crumbs left on it from whenever.”
He looked completely unapologetic, making it impossible not to laugh. “How was your flight? Are you excited to be home?”
To Pat, Lunengrove had always been our home. It didn’t matter that I’d moved twice chasing my dream of playing professional hockey.
Salt Lake had been home for a decade now, yet, it was impossible not to think of Lunengrove as my home as well. Especially when Pat welcomed me into the house I’d grown up in with mac and cheese! It reminded me of all the times mom had taught us how to cook; Pat had always been much better at the follow through than me.
“I’m excited to see you,” I told him honestly, taking a seat at the table in the corner that was normally used by dad to read a paper in the morning. “Does mom know you’re using her oven?” I teased. “And burning things in it.”
Pat opened the oven, releasing a waft of cheesy air - that only smelled a little burned. “She knows I’m using it,” he promised. “And so she should assume I’m probably burning things in it. It’s not like dad doesn’t do way worse.” Dad liked to put trays back in the oven after the food had been served out of them, to crisp up all the bits around the edges. It drove mom crazy, but she’d never stopped him from doing it.
“I felt bad that I couldn’t pick you up from the airport, but I’m spending every spare minute at the house. Well, when Charlotte hasn’t got me running back and forth looking at wedding things. Do you know how many different shades of white there are?!”
“I really don’t,” I laughed. While I had, once upon a very long time ago, proposed marriage, Helena and I never got to a point where we had to pick out shades of white. A wedding was something that had always been quite far off in the future; we’d been pretty young when we got engaged.
It was strange to have all these thoughts come back to me. For years, I had avoided thinking about Helena at all - and certainly about what our wedding might have been like! But now, it seemed almost so far in the past that I could think about it.
Maybe.
There was, somewhere quite deep down, an ache
