By Charles R. Ratliff

Dedication

To my wife, Elizabeth

These moments we share together

are not just everyday life.

These moments are more

Like dreams come true.

This one’s for you

Dunleavy’s Pier

Copyright © 2012 by Charles R. Ratliff. All rights reserved.

This novel is a work of fiction. All characters and events depicted in this story are fictional and the creation of the author. Any resemblance to people living or dead is entirely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

This title is available through Lost Lake Cottage Publishing.

Book design copyright © 2015 by Lost Lake Cottage Publishing. All rights reserved.

Published in the United States of America

ISBN: 1-0000000-0-0

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1.

2.

I’ll show them, she thought. She thumbed absent-mindedly through her resume folder sitting in her lap. The plane jolted slightly as it pushed aside an air pocket at thirty thousand feet, the soda in her glass sloshing ever so slightly. A chime rang throughout the cabin.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has turned on the fasten seatbelt sign as a precaution. Please return to your seats and fasten your seatbelts.”

Kayla thought that getting away for a while would do her some good, which was why she was on this plane in the first place.

I’ve never been let go – let alone fired – from a job! Kayla’s thoughts rampaged through her mind. As she fumed, the expressions on her face changed from anger, to wonderment, to despair.

You’d think after six years I would have been rewarded with a promotion, she continued thinking. She had actually thought that after getting her principal’s license she was going to get out of the classroom and be given an administrative position. Then her school sent her the letter last month that told her she no longer had a job.

With the downturn in the economy, school districts were losing students as waves of families began moving out of the major metropolitan areas. Her school district had begun cutting teachers and closing classrooms that were no longer needed in order to slash the budget deficit.

It was such a load of bull --, she thought to herself.

Kayla had spent two years in night school spending nearly all of her spare time to obtain her Master’s Degree and with it her administrative license. To top it off, as a classroom teacher, she had been named a Teacher of the Year, had designed cutting-edge technology classes and had helped teachers implement technology in the core classrooms. All of which would qualify her for at least an assistant principal’s position with her school district, right? Kayla was still one of the 50 or so teachers, however who were low enough on the totem pole, which meant that she was one of the ones who got placed on the chopping block.

So, now that she was a free woman Kayla had enough time to fly back east for nothing but fun in the sun at her parents’ cottage at Bass Lake, Indiana. After spending the month of June applying for open positions throughout Southern Arizona, she was going to spend the rest of her summer taking stock of her life and deciding what her next course of action would be.

She was jolted from her thoughts by another tremor in the airplane cabin; just enough of one that she had to reach and steady her nearly empty glass sitting on the edge of her tray table. She hadn’t realized how lost in thought she was when the attendants came through the cabin for a second time with the drink cart. When had she drunk her soda?

An attendant leaned over into her seat compartment. “Anything to drink?” she asked.

“Yes, I’ll take another,” Kayla politely replied and handed her empty cup to the attendant and received a full one in place of it.

The recently updated resume now sitting in her lap which she had dusted off after being dismissed held all of her important career information – recent letters of recommendation, copies of certificates for completed professional development training, and contact information for her references. She would make additional copies of this package to send out to other school districts in Arizona whether they were hiring or not. She thought she would have to return before the end of the summer if she landed any interviews, that is, if her efforts paid off.

The only thing she had going for her was her background and experience. When she had gone into teaching, she knew that the classroom was only the first step into reaching her dream job of an administrative position. Now, with her district forsaking her for budgetary problems, it was back to the starting line. Now, she thought, I’ll have to start all over again with another district.

Not to worry, Kayla thought.

She had a beautiful smile, always had one on her face, and framed by shoulder length blond hair. She had a positive outlook on life, possessed a great philosophy of education, and she had a real love for her kids. Her basic philosophy was driven by the simple question, “Will it benefit the kids?” Her supervising principals liked that about her and often worked to support her in her classroom, giving her whatever she needed to be successful.

She felt the slight sensation of leaning forward as the nose of the airplane dipped and the engine roar subsided, indicating that they were descending. The captain of her flight announced over the intercom that they were descending into Chicago’s Midway Airport.

As the plane banked for its final approach she looked out the window and saw the scattered metropolis reaching far to the north. She could barely make out the blue haze of Lake Michigan beyond the towering skyscrapers of the Chicago skyline. Midway Airport, which sat south of downtown, and closer to her parent’s lake house in Indiana than O’Hare, was the destination of choice when coming to the lake for summer vacation.

Promising an arrival time by lunch, the grumbling Kayla felt would soon be satisfied after she met up with her parents and they could stop somewhere to eat on the way home.

All she had to do was convince her dad to hit the mall as well. A slow smile formed at her lips at the thought of doing a little shopping on the side. Things are beginning to look up, Kayla thought as the chime in the cabin and an announcement reminded the passengers to return their trays to a fully upright position.

Justin Dunleavy set his toolbox down and stared at the pier his mother once owned. From the cottage across the road, it hadn’t looked so bad. Now that he stood on his mother’s meander land, the piece of property that sat next to the lake, but was separated from the cottage by the frontage road that dissected the property, the pier looked positively rotten. The only good part was the metal support struts; rusted though they looked, support the pier they did with solid effectiveness. He only worried about falling through the rotten wood pieces that stretched across the support beams. Visions of adventurers crossing gorges on rotten rope bridges popped into his brain. His mother’s pier was just as rotten and the cross pieces were just as liable to break allowing a person to literally fall through the cracks.

“Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it looks,” a voice said from behind him. As Justin turned, he noticed a large man approaching him. He was broad in the shoulders, tall, with graying hair.

“It’s not the look I’m worried about,” Justin said. “It’s whether anybody will fall through and hurt themselves that has me scared. I’m Justin Dunleavy.” He stretched out his hand in greeting.

“Yes, I know. I’m Cal Anders,” the man replied, taking Justin’s hand and shaking it. “I’m your next door neighbor. I knew your mother. We visited a lot and she spoke often of you. My condolences.”

“Thank you,” Justin said. “I didn’t think anybody was home next door.”

“We arrived a few days ago,” Cal said. “This is our summer home.” He pointed toward the pier.

“I guess I’ve been pretty busy with repairs and the renovation to notice,” Justin said.

“Speaking of which,” Cal said, point at the pier, “it looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

“Yes,” Justin said. “I’m trying to figure out where to start.” As an afterthought he added, “By chance, you wouldn’t know anything about piers, would you?”

“I know quite a bit about them,” Cal answered with a chuckle. “I grew up at Bass Lake, spent most of my childhood here.”

Justin nodded in understanding. “So did my mother.”

“She grew up on the other side of the lake, didn’t she? I lived on this side, north of the point. I remember she used to hang out at the state beach when she was a teenager.”

“You were the lifeguard?” Justin asked.

“She told you about that, did she?” Cal replied, a smile forming at his lips.

“She said the man who lived next door to her used to be a lifeguard at the beach where she spent a lot of time as a teen-ager.”

Cal chuckled as he thought of those long ago memories. “We certainly had fun in those days.”

“So, where do you suggest I start?” Justin asked, extending his hand toward the pier that stretched nearly eighty feet into the lake.

“Well,” Cal began, “All you really have to do is replace the cross pieces. If I remember, a neighbor repaired the pier’s support beams a few years back. So, that’s not your main worry.”

“I figured as much,” Justin said. “They do look sturdier than the cross pieces.”

“Now, you’ll want to cut some replacement boards to begin with, say twenty or thirty or so, so that you’re not constantly running back and forth cutting and replacing, cutting and replacing.”

“I see,” said Justin nodding his head.

“Stack them right here at the edge, so they’re not too far from reach, then you start at the edge of your shore and replace the boards as you go out.”

“I’ll probably need more like a hundred boards or more,” Justin said.

“Yeah, but don’t cut more than what you can replace in one outing,” stated Cal. “If you leave them on the ground and they get rained on or they sit for days or weeks, then they won’t be useful to you. Just cut what you need to start with.”

“That makes sense,” Justin replied.

“Well, good luck, then,” Cal said and turned to leave, then paused, looking back, “holler if you need any help.” A broad smile crossed his face.

“I think I’ll be all right,” Justin said. He set his tool belt down and walked back across the street to his cottage. Sitting in front were several sawhorses, sitting in a straight line beneath the windows. Placed there so he could replace the sashes and trim, Justin used the horses for support. He grabbed two, one in each hand, and easily carried them back toward the lake.

Next, he walked behind his house, got into his truck, drove around front and parked on the meander land beside the sawhorses. The boards he needed he had already picked up at the lumberyard that morning on his way back from the coffee shop. From the bed of the truck he removed four of the eight-foot boards and placed them crosswise on the sawhorses. He pulled out a battery-operated radial saw and set it down on the ground at the foot of one of the sawhorses.

Pulling out a tape measure he walked over to the pier and measured the distance of the first cross piece and wrote down the number in inches. He walked back and began making marks on all the boards he had placed out. Picking up the saw, he cut more than a dozen cross pieces in a matter of just a few moments.. Whistling while he worked, the sound of the radial saw drowned out the tunes emanating from his lips. He didn’t mind, though, it was the whistling that kept his mind concentrated on the task at hand.

He carried the pieces over to the pier and stacked them on the ground where the shore met the wood of the pier. Retrieving his battery-operated radial saw, he removed the battery and pulled from the bed of his pick-up truck a power drill. He inserted the battery into the base of the handle and squeezed the trigger to make sure it was working. He knelt on the ground and began withdrawing the old wood screws on the first crosspiece and removed it from the support struts.

He made short work of the first several crosspieces. As he moved further down the pier, he found himself crawling on the new wood to get to the old wood. He glanced up and noticed the pier stretching into the distance. This is going to take forever! He shook the thought from his mind and continued to remove the next rotten crosspiece.

After two hours, his shirt soaked in sweat, Justin walked back to his truck and pulled a water bottle from a cooler he had sitting in the rear seat behind the bench. He went over and sat on the pier on the new wood, walking the length of it, putting pressure on the boards through his feet, then sitting on the edge with his legs draped over the side of the pier. Even though he was nearly six feet tall, with long legs, sitting on the pier the way he was, his feet dangled a scant inch above the water.

As the exertion in his muscles faded, the sweat against his body dried in the light breeze coming off the water of Bass Lake, he remembered the time he first walked on this pier.

He had been no more than 18 years old. That was nearly 15 years ago, he thought to himself. After graduating from high school, he had joined the Army National Guard and went off to boot camp and technical school. Gone only six months, it was long enough for his mom to pack up the family house in Phoenix, selling most of the things she couldn’t move, and relocating to Bass Lake. At the time, it had been less than a year since his father had passed away, and his mother refused to be alone in the big city. She said she had yearned to return to the place of her childhood.

Upon his discharge from active duty, he stopped by Bass Lake to visit her before returning to Phoenix. Although he could have transferred his reserve status to the Indiana National Guard, Justin had friends, college, and a job in Phoenix to which he could return. Coming to Bass Lake that summer, he ended up staying several weeks, swimming and boating, fishing and tanning. He loved every minute of it. Most importantly, however, he saw a change in his mother.

Looking at his neighbor’s house, he remembered the Anders’ cottage had once been run down, with someone else owning it. He remembered his mother telling him a few years ago in a phone conversation that the Anders had bought it to renovate as a vacation home. He never knew them; that visit fifteen years ago had been his one and only visit to Bass Lake. He saw his mother when she often visited Arizona in the winter, that is, until she got too sick to travel.

Living at Bass Lake, however, she was happier than she had ever been. Mrs. Dunleavy had reconnected with friends from her childhood. She even tormented the neighborhood children if they tried to swim off her shore area or use her pier. She made up for it, however, with the candy she loved to give out a Halloween, or the Angel tree presents she bought through her church at Christmas time.

His mother loved Bass Lake. His repairing the house and the pier brought him closer to the memory of his mother. He felt a change coming over him. He felt almost as if the old rotten wood inside him was being replaced by new. The pier that was his soul was beginning to be repaired, replaced by new wood.

If he absolutely had a choice in the matter, he would never leave Bass Lake again.