Harbor Nights by Marcia Evanick

He couldn’t blame the girls or the women they eventually became. A good portion of the men never returned home either after receiving their degrees. In some ways, Misty Harbor had been a slowly dying town.
    Lately though, the town was experiencing a much needed population growth. Last year, he had attended more weddings than funerals, and in March, he’d had a blast buying little trucks for his boss’s first child. Daniel and Gwen Creighton’s son, Andrew, was born during a March blizzard that had made driving impossible. Thankfully, Gwen’s sister, the town’s doctor, had been a short snowmobile ride away, and she had arrived in plenty of time to deliver her nephew. Gwen had pulled through the at-home delivery like a champ. Daniel had barely survived the experience.
    By the size of Doc Sydney, she was expecting her own bundle of joy any day now. Even Ethan Wycliffe’s wife, Olivia, had either taken up smuggling watermelons, or she was about to make a contribution to Misty Harbor’s growing population. The way things were going, in a couple of years, they would need to add on to the Misty Harbor Elementary School.
    Everyone’s taxes were about to go up.
    â€œNed,” said his mother, “could you please go get the baked beans. The casserole dish is sitting on the counter.” Peggy Porter placed the tray of condiments onto one of the picnic tables. “Be careful; it’s hot.”
    He tried not to roll his eyes as he headed into his parents’ house. His mother’s beans would not only be hot, but they would also be burnt and covered in a thick, black crust that turned to ash in your mouth. No one would ever confuse his mother with Julia Child or Martha Stewart. Over the years, he and his brothers had learned to hide their distaste of their mother’s beans. Their current trick was to feed them to Flipper, who seemed quite partial to his mother’s cooking. Of course, Flipper would be hurt and confused as to why he was being shut out of the bedroom tonight after eating nearly a quart of baked beans.
    Ned stepped into his mother’s kitchen and wondered which of his sisters-in-law had been cleaning up. Usually, his mom created mountains of dirty dishes, pots, and pans when she cooked, and every surface in the room was splattered with whatever she had been fixing.
    He and his brothers had gotten so good at guessing what was for dinner by the splattered surface of the stove or by what was dripping down the front of cabinet or two that, to this day, Peggy Porter still hadn’t figured out how her sons had known it would be meatloaf, tuna casserole, or one of the other three meals she knew how to make. She had chalked it up to big appetites and love. None of her boys or her husband had the heart to tell her the truth—she cooked worse than she could garden.
    Dinners might have tasted like charred roadkill and lay like lead bricks in your gut, but there had been plenty to go around . . . and around. Quantity was never the issue with his mother’s cooking.
    He picked up the two lobster-shaped potholders, reached for the baked beans, and froze. While the aged green casserole dish was the same one his mother had used to make her baked beans for his entire life, the contents weren’t hers. There were no burnt or incinerated beans. No blackened ash coated the steaming and deliciously smelling beans. Even his sisters-in-law couldn’t have performed such a miracle. That left one person—Norah’s mother, Joanna.
    Maybe the entire Stevens family was enchanted. Norah had caused the sickly rosebush to bloom, and Joanna had taught his mother the secret of pulling food out of the oven before it turned to ash.
    He had no idea if there were culinary fairies, but he wasn’t about to argue the point. He picked up the fragrant side dish and headed out back to enjoy the bounty.
    Norah laughed at the joke Matthew had just told for her mother’s benefit