“We’ll tell Seamus to text you,” Kyle said.
“Perfect,” he said, unreasonably touched that the boys wanted to spend time with him.
“Welp, we’d better get going. Mr. Jace needs to get to work, and so do I.” Seamus ruffled two blond heads and kissed Carolina on the way out the door.
“I’ll see you again soon,” Jace said to the boys.
He tossed the bike into the back of Seamus’s truck and got in the passenger side. “Thanks for the lift.”
“Woulda taken you a while to get all that stuff home on a bike.”
“For sure.”
“You got a place to keep it?”
“I just rented a room in a house in town for the off-season. I’m living with Cindy Lawry.”
“She’s good people. All the Lawrys are.”
“She’s great. We’ve known each other awhile from her coming into the Beachcomber.”
Seamus glanced over at him. “She’s to be handled with kid gloves. You know what that means, right?”
“I do.”
Seamus shook his head. “No one in this town would take kindly to someone hurting her.”
“I like her a lot. I’d never hurt her.”
“See that you don’t.”
The comment put Jace on edge, but he supposed he ought to expect a warning like that from one of the people on the island who knew his story—and Cindy’s. Right before they reached town, Seamus took a left turn that led to the cemetery. He drove through the gates and hung another left.
Jace took note of two other turns before Seamus parked along a row of headstones and got out of the truck.
“Are you coming?” he asked Jace before he closed the driver’s door.
“Yeah.” Jace followed him through several rows of stones before Seamus stopped next to a flat stone with Lisa’s name, the dates of her birth and death and the words Devoted Mother engraved below the dates. The sight of her name engraved in stone brought tears to Jace’s eyes as he squatted for a closer look. With his left hand, he brushed away some dirt. “Did a lot of people come to the service?”
“Hundreds.”
“That’s good. She deserved that.” He pulled a couple of weeds near the stone. “Do you bring the boys here?”
“We’ve come a few times, but only when they’ve asked. We don’t force it on them.”
Jace stood. “They seem to be doing really well.”
“They are. Still have a rough moment or two, usually at bedtime, when the grief catches up to them. Jackson told me he’s afraid he’s going to forget her.”
“God, what did you say to that?”
“I told him he’ll carry her in his heart for the rest of his life, and even if he can’t remember every detail, he’ll never forget how much she loved him.”
“That’s nice, Seamus. Did it seem to help?”
“For that moment, but there’ll be others, and we’ll keep reminding them that their mum loved them more than anything. Because she did. They were her only concern after she was diagnosed.”
“I hate that I wasn’t here with them when that happened, that I haven’t been there for them at all.”