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Patrick had just managed to get the fire going under the grate when the slow zip of a tent flap had him looking up in surprise. The surprise lessened when it was Twyla who appeared, sliding her feet into her sandals and zipping the tent behind her with the quiet efficiency Patrick had come to associate with her.
"Good morning," he said, not a whisper but low nonetheless, tuned to fit the just-after-dawn lighting of the little campsite they were inhabiting.
"Good morning, Patrick," Twyla responded in kind, looking only slightly bleary behind her soft smile. She stretched her arms above her head for a long moment, then dipped down to touch her toes with a surety that Patrick envied. "Sleep well?" she asked when she came back to standing upright, moving over to sit on the log beside him.
Patrick bobbed his head side to side in answer as he set the kettle on the grate. "First night's always the roughest."
Twyla's hum was knowing as she rifled through the cooler Patrick had taken down from the bear hoist earlier, holding an apple out to him with a questioning tilt of her head. He took with a little nod of thanks.
"David not awake yet?" she asked as she shone her own apple against the sweatpants covering her thigh.
Patrick glanced over at the tent with a quiet snort. "He took a couple melatonin last night, he'll be asleep for a while." The fire crackled and popped as it grew, and he poked it with his designated fire stick. "What about Alexis?"
"Nah, she sleeps like the dead." The crunch-snap of Twyla's apple when she bit into it blended into the sounds of the fire.
"Ah, a Rose family trait. David will sleep through anything if he's in an actual bed."
Twyla shook her head, looking a little wistful. "If only." Patrick gave her a curious look. "I'm always up with the birds, whether I want to or not. Years of opening the café," she finished with a little shrug.
Which made sense once Patrick considered it, of course, but it also made him once again aware of how little he actually knew about Twyla. He watched her out of the corner of his eye as he dropped teabags into a couple of enamelled tin mugs, trying to work through the shame that jumped at his guts for not knowing his almost-sister-in-law as well as he felt he should, not least because she'd been serving him at the café with an embarrassing frequency for so many years.
Resolving to deal with that snarl of guilt once he was a little bit more awake, Patrick instead poked the fire again and said, "I still don't really understand how we managed to get those two to go camping."
Twyla shrugged and sent a fond look over to the tent she'd just left. "Alexis is up for basically anything if you phrase it as a challenge." She went quiet for a few beats and when Patrick looked up, her eyes were so heart-shaped that he felt slightly voyeuristic for seeing them. He stirred the tiny fire with completely unnecessary vigour until she redirected her attention back to the conversation. "I'm shocked you got David to come, honestly."
"Bribery," Patrick said flatly, then cracked a smile when Twyla had to stifle her laughter, her eyes darting back over to the two silent tents to check for movement. "He wanted something from the new Kenzo line, I said we might find room in the budget if we saved on the hydro bill."
"By sleeping outside?"
"Something like that, yeah." Patrick waved a hand, batting away the entire concept of logic. "It worked, though. He's here, and with minimal grumbling."
Their eyes met and Patrick could read the amusement hidden behind Twyla's polite expression. Yes, 'minimal' was a relative term.
"Well," she said diplomatically. "I'm sure we're going to have a great time. Apparently, they've predicted a mild tick season this year!"
Patrick closed his eyes. "Please don't say that where David can hear you."
(She managed to avoid it for an entire day.)
🏕️
"Good morning!" Twyla said, her waitress smile firmly in place as she turned to see Patrick slipping out of his and David's tent. "I've already got the water on to boil."
Patrick merely narrowed his eyes.
Following up on the promise he'd made to himself the previous year, Patrick had deliberately spent a lot more time with Twyla in the months since the last camping trip. In that time, he'd discovered three important things:
First – Twyla was a huge hockey fan. It wasn't something she tended to talk about, but sit her down in front of a Saturday night game and she would start chirping and shouting and cursing the ref like she was made to do it. It had surprised Patrick the first time they'd caught a mid-season game on the tiny television behind the bar at the Wobbly, but it had formed an excellent shared interest on which to build a larger relationship.
Second – Despite all her wonderful and positive traits, Twyla had one major, unignorable downfall: she was a Habs fan. Patrick knew sports rivalries were stupid, especially those carried between fans rather than the players, but it was ingrained in him in a way that no amount of rationality could ease – the Canadiens sucked, they had always sucked, and they would forever suck. Twyla was earnest in her preference though, and she gave as good as she got when it came to slamming each other's teams, which made for an extra element of fun as they watched the games together.
But the third thing had taken Patrick completely by surprise, and continued to do so, sneaking up with startling regularity.
Like right now, as Patrick made his way over to the sitting log to accept the granola bar offered in his direction, complete with innocent smile.
Because yes, he'd deliberately packed and worn his Leafs pyjama pants just to needle Twyla a little bit, and he saw her see them, a glance down and back up that matched the light in her eyes.
But the third thing about Twyla, he'd learned, was that she was secretly a huge troll.
And she was wearing not only pyjamas pants emblazoned with the Habs' logo, oh no, but pyjama plants plus a hoodie plus a toque to match, casually strutting around their morning campfire like she was on her way to game seven of the finals.
Patrick let out a long, slow breath and added a mental tally to her column in his head as he took the granola bar. "Nice shirt," he said as graciously as possible.
"Oh, this old thing?" She patted it down like it was covered in dust and not in almost pristine condition. "Thanks."
Patrick didn't think he'd ever wished harder for a kettle to boil; he needed tea.
🏕️
"They're going to freak out."
Probably. "We left a note." And they had, a bright yellow sticky note that read went canoeing, should be back by 10, panic only if not –xx and then, in smaller letters (yes, we have our PFDs) that was then attached to the lid of the coffee tin, the one place both Patrick and Twyla were certain it would be seen once their partners woke up.
Twyla giggled and Patrick shot her a smile over his shoulder as he dug his paddle into the water. She neatly adjusted their trajectory with a smooth J-stroke, correcting for Patrick's enthusiasm. "Still," she said, her voice bubbly with amusement. "What if they don't see the note until after they contact the park staff?"
"...Do they know how to contact park staff?"
"They'd figure it out. They're resourceful, you know."
And Patrick did know, of course he did, but he appreciated that Twyla included David as a part of that 'they'. Not many people would, though they'd be wrong not to.
"Well, hopefully they'll figure out to look for a note first."
"At this rate, we might get back before they even wake up." The lake was glass smooth, reflecting the sky in a perfect mirror except where they glided through, leaving a wake of ripples that caught the weak morning light and threw it back at them. The wind tended to pick up later in the day and Twyla had wanted to get out while it was still calm; Patrick couldn't disagree, so here they were, giggly and furtive as they slid away from their campsite in an attempt to circumnavigate the lake before the sun was high enough to make exercise unbearable.
Not long into the trip, they came across a cluster of boulders sticking out of the water. They could have easily gone around them and only added maybe a quarter of a kilometre to their trip, but the rocks weren't a dangerous or impassible obstacle by any means, so by mutual agreement they forewent the option of a detour and trailed into the spaces between the rocks.
"Paddle up, please," Twyla said mildly, and Patrick did precisely that, laying it across his lap in acknowledgment of what Twyla was too polite to actually say – he had a tendency to put too much power into his stroke, constantly throwing them slightly off course, and Twyla needed grace to get around the rocks, not speed.
"I'm glad we were able to take Mutt and Jake up on their offer," Patrick mused, skimming his hand along the water's surface as Twyla angled them around a particularly tall spire. "I've never been in a handmade canoe before. It's neat."
The silence that followed his statement was heavy in a way that the morning light wasn't. He glanced at Twyla over his shoulder and saw the smirk plastered over her face. "What?"
"Nothing," was her immediate answer, but Patrick knew her better than that.
"No, what? What's up with the canoe? Did they not actually make it?"
"Oh no, nothing like that – they're both plenty able to make a canoe, and I'm sure that's exactly what they did." She glanced down at it and tapped her feet against the slightly rough floor demonstratively. "Looks handmade to me."
Patrick continued to give her a pointed look and Twyla bit her lip, tipping her head to the side in thought, before visibly deciding to tell him whatever it was that made her smile like that.
"I've just heard some rumours, is all."
"You hear all the rumours." Part and parcel of running the café, really.
"Perhaps," she allowed. Her brow furrowed as she wended them through a narrow space between two boulders, then relaxed again. "Regardless, I don't like spreading them myself."
"Of course. Whatever it is, I won't breathe a word of it, I promise."
She gave him a gently skeptical look which Patrick tried not to take offense at, and then said, "Well, if the rumours are to be believed – and they generally are, in my opinion – I'm not sure we should have been so enthusiastic in accepting the offer."
Patrick just kept giving her a coaxing look, debating how much puppy-eye he could use before she called him on it.
Her lower lip disappeared between her teeth and she leant forward, glancing around as though someone might be listening in on their conversation in the middle of the lake. "Apparently they use it for, um, extracurricular activities." At Patrick's confused silence, she continued in a slightly hushed voice, her eyebrows raised with intent. "Not the sort you'd usually use a canoe for."
Patrick's "What?" transformed into an "Oh—!" halfway through, creating a sound something like a whale saying "whoa", and Twyla giggled again, her cheeks blushing a pale pink as Patrick put together what she was implying. "Seriously?!"
"So say the rumours."
"So say the rumours," Patrick echoed faintly while he stared down at the canoe in which they were sitting and which Twyla was deftly maneuvering through the boulder field. "How do they not fall out?"
Twyla shrugged and flapped her hand at a bug that was hovering in front of her face. "Good balance, I guess."
Patrick stared into the middle distance ahead of him, the water parting silently at the bow as his mind irresistibly imagined exactly how much balance would be required for those sort of extracurricular activities.
Gracious.
Goodness gracious.
When the canoe shuddered, he blinked and came back to himself. A quick glance back at Twyla revealed that she'd switched sides as they'd left the rocks, making up for his inattention with a few quick strokes to gain speed. Patrick fumbled and almost dropped his paddle into the lake as he fought the warmth rising to his face.
"Sorry," he mumbled as he finally got the correct end of the paddle back in the water.
"For what?" Twyla asked mildly, but her smile was still knowing and her cheeks were still a bit pink, so Patrick just huffed out a laugh and shook his head as he found and matched her rhythm.
They made their way north, quiet in their enjoyment of the water and the pale sky, and it was almost half an hour later when Twyla, apropos of approximately nothing, said, "American beer."
Patrick blinked. "Pardon?"
"We should buy Mutt and Jake some American beer. In thanks for letting us use their canoe."
He twisted slightly in his seat to peer back at her; she had a serene look on her face, glowing in the morning light. "Why American specifically?"
"That old joke," she clarified. "Because it's fucking close to water."
Patrick's laughter scared a distant loon into flight.
🏕️
The stars were still out, blinking and twinkling in blissful ignorance of what was happening below them, so it could be argued that it was night, not morning. But Patrick had woken up after being asleep (if, admittedly, for not very long) and he had a cup of tea and there was a line of indigo starting to the east, just peeking out over the lake, so Patrick was calling it morning, technicalities and stars be damned.
When he realised he was getting angry at stars, he let out a long, slow breath. The stars hadn't done anything, regardless of what some people might say about fates and lives being written out in them. A shitty year is a shitty year, and the stars move on as they always had and always would.
And oh boy, it had been a shitty year. Patrick tugged on the strings of his hoodie, pinching the hood in tightly around his face to protect it from mosquitos. That this also hid his face from the world, well, he'd take what he could get.
This year had been the closest they'd ever come to not making this trip. Seven years now they'd been getting together, the four of them, and making their way into the wilderness with varying levels of enthusiasm to bond and gripe and bond about griping at this exact same campsite in the depths of Algonquin Park. And this year, it almost hadn't happened. It seemed silly to put so much emphasis on that fact, but it dug at Patrick, turning his stomach over and making his skin itch when he thought about it.
The past year had been made up of a series of unfortunate events. They were mostly unrelated, yet persistent. First, Patrick's father had a minor heart attack in the autumn and that had been stressful enough to almost send Patrick into one of his own. Then, for reasons that were still unclear, the store had never properly recovered from the post-Christmas downswing and they had struggled for months to make ends meet without dipping into their longterm savings. Then they discovered that David's sweaters had been harbouring an infestation of moths in a bad way, worse than the smattering of holes he'd experienced at the motel, and that had devolved into a whole week-long argument about house maintenance and clothing funds.
And then came Easter, which had been a truly unmitigated disaster. David was trying to be more observant, something Patrick was very supportive of, but they'd gotten their wires crossed about that particular weekend — David had been planning a big dinner at their place for Pesach while Patrick had been planning for their regular Easter trip to his parents. They hadn't figured it out until the night before, and Patrick had never before been so afraid for their relationship as he had been in the explosive aftermath of that realisation. They were okay now, sore but steady and sure, but it still hurt to think about it, to think about how they'd gotten so complacent about making assumptions and not sharing things with each other in the last few years.
Patrick rubbed his free hand over his face, sliding under the puckered edge of his hood to press at the bridge of his nose. He took a deep breath and let the cool early morning (not night) air calm his racing heart.
The flush of frustration and lingering fear had just left his fingertips, crawling back up his arms to whatever gland in his brain had produced it, when he heard the scrape of water-smooth stones rubbing together behind him. He turned around to see Twyla approaching, her flashlight sweeping the ground in front of her as she picked her way down to the lake. Well, he assumed it was Twyla – the figure was bundled up in baggy sweats and a coat, the hood of the sweatshirt pulled up around their face to add an extra layer of protection from the cold and, inconveniently, an extra layer of obscurity. However, the only person anywhere near that size in their party was Twyla, so if it wasn't her, it was a tiny intruder. If that were the case, Patrick figured he could take them.
Unless it was some sort of wood sprite or something. Which, given the past year, would just be his luck.
(Okay, maybe Patrick could admit it was actually night, not morning, and he needed more sleep.)
He was interrupted in his musings on the validity of insomnia-induced hallucinations when Twyla (and it was indeed Twyla, thank goodness) sat down beside him on the boulder, the whumpf of her contact louder than her size suggested it should be. She immediately leaned her shoulder against his, pressing the length of their upper arms together with a surprising amount of force. He looked at her with a tilted head, asking without saying a word, but she ignored him in favour of staring up at the sky as she clicked the flashlight off and stashed it in the depths of her hoodie.
Patrick waited, blinking his way back into his night vision and still a little startled by unexpected company, but Twyla said nothing and continued to say nothing even after the silence had strung itself out into unbearable thinness. Instead, she just leant heavily against his side and sighed.
Twyla, Patrick considered, had had a pretty shitty year, too. It wasn't just David and he who had almost needed to cancel on this trip; Alexis and Twyla had backed out and reconfirmed three times in the month leading up to their booked date. Alexis' most recent contract had her on the west coast more weeks than it hadn't, which had put pressure on her and Twyla's relationship in a way they hadn't experienced since their first months together, back in the days before they'd figured out boundaries and communication and a visitation schedule that worked for both of them. And while Twyla wasn't one to complain, Patrick knew how to read between her lines even when she was putting on her smiliest face and chatting away about whatever Bob or Ronnie or Roland had gotten up to recently – he knew that the reverberations from those long months of separation hadn't quite settled down yet, still testing the edges of how they fit together.
That probably would have been bad enough by itself, really, but add in her mother's dementia flaring up (around Christmas, no less), her cousin dying in a car collision, and the café needing a major renovation after the blizzard put a tree limb through the front window, and Patrick realised why they were both sitting in the dark and taking in the clean air with steady, controlled breaths.
A breeze slid over the lake, rustling the reeds on the shore, and it was cool and sweet. Twyla shivered slightly under her hoodie and her jacket, just enough for Patrick to feel, so he put his arm around her shoulders and inched closer, tucking her into his warmth. She went easily, her arm coming around his waist in counterpoint and her head resting on the ball of his shoulder as she tipped her face up to the sky again. Patrick followed suit, tracing out the shapes of the constellations he knew and inventing connections for those he didn't.
Sure, Patrick mused as he twitched away from a buzzing mosquito, the stars didn't do anything but shimmer and burn a million miles away, but as they stared up at them together in companionable silence, he thought that maybe he could understand why people sometimes thought they did.
🏕️
"Is your arm okay?"
Patrick looked up at Twyla's voice, startled, then back down to where he'd been absent-mindedly fussing his hand over his bare forearm. "Uh, yeah, it's fine."
That got him a frown. "Are you sure? It seems sore." And yeah, it was; catching yourself in a fall tended to do that.
"It's nothing," he tried again, tugging the sleeve of his henley back down as he picked up his tea. "I just strained in on the hike in. It'll go away." He tipped his head up to the crowns of the trees above them, lit by the dim morning sunlight, and searched for a change in conversation. "Is that a Baltimore or Orchard oriole?"
But Twyla was not to be deterred. "Oh!" she said brightly and stood, brushing the toast crumbs from her lap. "I've got something for that, just one sec." She disappeared back into her test to rustle about softly, and Patrick just pursed his lips up at the oriole he very well knew was a Baltimore as he waited for her to come back.
"Here." Twyla popped out of the tent again and thrust a squat brown glass jar into his hand. "My grandmother makes it. Well, sort of."
Patrick rubbed his thumb over the peeling label; it was completely illegible. "She sort of makes it?"
"No," she said on a laugh, like Patrick had said the silliest thing imaginable. "She's sort of my grandmother."
"Oh." He didn't ask for clarification.
"It's great stuff! I use it all the time. Heavy plates," she added, and mimed lifting a serving tray. "Worth its weight in gold, really. It's a secret recipe that I think might actually be illegal somehow? But it works so well."
"I'll just use a little bit, then." Or none at all – really, it wasn't that sore. He could manage.
Twyla waved a hand dismissively. "No, please, use as much as you want. Honestly, just keep the whole thing. I can get more; Gran Frink loves when I go visit her."
Patrick stared at her. "Twyla, I can't just take your special handmade ointment."
"Why not?" Twyla turned away from the kettle to give him a baffled look, like she truly couldn't understand the problem.
Which is about when Patrick realised that she truly didn't understand. He needed something and she could provide it – there was nothing more to it that that.
"Okay," he acquiesced. "Thank you, Twyla." Bemused and more than a little touched, he cracked open the jar and dipped his finger in curiously. It was thick and greasy and smelled of peat, with a rising scent of alcohol that attacked the back of his sinuses. Rolling his sleeve back up, he started working a smear of the ointment into the meat of his forearm, wincing at the pain of the massage.
"So." Twyla looked up as she sipped from her mug, the sleeves of her sweater wrapped around her hands to protect them from the hot metal, and Patrick nodded at the little jar and its odd contents. "Who's Gran Frink?"
Twyla beamed and started in on a long and convoluted explanation that, in the end, somehow involved World War II, accusations of witchcraft, and a duck.
But by the time she was done, Patrick's arm felt like new.
🏕️
Patrick was squinting before he even opened his eyes, the light coming in through his eyelids in a way that stabbed at the back of his head.
One glass too many last night, it seemed.
Then he opened his eyes and reconsidered; maybe two glasses too many.
They'd been celebrating the anniversary of their tenth camping trip, and David had surprised them all with several bottles of wine – which he'd secretly lugged to the site in his own bag, much to Patrick's astonishment. It had been good wine, and the fire had been pleasantly roaring, and there may have been some Never Have I Ever (always a hilarious choice with the Rose siblings), and Patrick didn't really remember getting into the tent at the end of the night, but he did remember having a good time and that was what counted.
The sun shone through the fly above him, far higher in the sky than he was used to it being while still horizontal, and he spent another three minutes feeling sorry for himself before suddenly realising that David wasn't in his usual place beside him.
A spike of panic shot up Patrick's spine and cleared his head in a hurry – sure, David was a lot better at the whole camping thing than he'd been ten years ago, but he still wasn't great at it, and Patrick now had visions dancing through his mind's eye of alcohol-induced forest adventures that ended poorly for everyone involved.
"David?" he called as he fought with the tent's zip, stumbling over his own feet as he tried to stand and detangle from his sleeping bag at the same time. But when he managed to get the flap open and his head thrust out into the fresh air, he bit off his second "Davi—?" with a click of his teeth.
David was not only perfectly safe and accounted for, perched on the end of the sitting log by the firepit, but he was also giving Patrick an amused look over the steaming mug clasped in his hands.
"Good morning," he said, raising an eyebrow.
Patrick closed his mouth. "Good morning."
"Good morning, Patrick!" Alexis cooed from where she was doing something energetic with a bowl and a fork at the picnic table. Scrambling eggs? Huh. "Sleep well?"
"Um, yes. I think so. You?"
"Like a li'l baby." She punctuated this with a shoulder shimmy that pulled a smile from Patrick.
He'd just gotten himself together enough to work the zipper of the tent down fully, stepping out into the sun with only a minor stumble over his sandals, when a quietly worried call of "Alexis?" emerged from the second tent.
"Out here, babe."
Twyla's head popped out of their tent, her hair in complete disarray and her expression still fogged with sleep. "Oh."
"I'm starting to wonder if we should be offended," David said, twisting to look at Alexis. She handed him the bowl with a shrug, and he poured the contents – yup, eggs – into the frying pan waiting on the grate.
Patrick caught Twyla's eye and they exchanged befuddled looks. Not once in the past decade of camping had they slept in longer than either David or Alexis, let alone both.
"What was in that wine?" Patrick asked, sotto voce, and Twyla giggled in response as she climbed out of her tent, her hands smoothly gathering her hair into a bun.
"It's the Rose steel livers," she explained, a smile tugging at the corners of her lips. "Unfair, but true."
"Ahem!" Alexis said. She didn't actually clear her throat, though; she just said "ahem!" and gave them both a little imperious look. "We made tea. Or coffee. Whatever, we made hot water and there's caffeine to put in it."
"Thank you, Alexis," Patrick and Twyla chorused in sync, then laughed at the looks that earned them from both siblings.
"Okay, go back to bed until you're real people again, please."
"Love you too," Patrick said as he made his way over to the fire, pressing a kiss to David's temple when he got close enough. He snagged a couple of mugs, added teabags and the proudly hot water, then handed one to Twyla, who took it with a grateful nod.
They all ended up on the log as four little bumps in a row. David and Alexis squabbled about how to best cook the eggs, loud bookends to Patrick and Twyla's quiet tea sipping between them. Twyla had a huge smile on her face, framed by the wisps of hair that had escaped her bun, and if his sore cheeks were anything to go by, Patrick's expression was similar.
"Here's to ten more years," he murmured, holding his mug out slightly in her direction.
Twyla tapped it gently with her own. "And ten more after that."