The memories of her time with Ross began to surface. She’d made him hot chocolate the way he loved it, with a scoop of marshmallow fluff sprinkled with cinnamon on top. They had cuddled up together in this very spot, sipping from their mugs and laughing at the marshmallow mustaches that both of them had worn as they drank.
Hannah roused herself from the happy memory. Thinking about the good times would only make her wish that things could be different. It was time to face reality. Things couldn’t be different, not anymore. The situation was not salvageable. Ross had abandoned her and gone back to his wife. Memories of their romance had no place in her life. She had loved him with all her heart, but now that she knew the truth, her love had turned to a darker emotion. Ross had betrayed her. He’d lied and played her for a fool. She had to harden her heart against him.
Hannah’s living room window rattled with each gust of wind, and all she could see was a sheet of shifting, swirling white outside. Normally, she could see Marguerite and Clara Hollenbeck’s living room window from hers, but the visibility was down to only inches outside. The escalating storm suited Hannah’s mood perfectly. Her very soul felt icy cold. Ross was out of her life forever and she couldn’t let herself miss him.
The questions that plagued her sleepless nights emerged with the howling of the wind. Had there been warning signs that she should have spotted? Should she have insisted on a longer engagement so that she could find out more about Ross’s life during the time they’d been apart? Was she a fool for missing him so dreadfully, even now?
There was a knock, a very loud knock that successfully competed with the howling wind. Hannah moved Moishe to another cushion, sprang to her feet, and rushed across the room to the door. “Who is it?” she asked, shouting to compete with the cacophony of the storm.
“It’s Norman! I’ve got Cuddles with me! Let us in, Hannah! Another couple minutes out here and she’s going to turn into a cat-sicle!”
Hannah opened the door to a snow-covered figure carrying a snow-covered cat carrier. She helped Norman in, took his parka the moment he shrugged it off his shoulders, and dodged the orange-and-white blur that jumped off the couch with a thud and raced to see his favorite kitty friend.
“Ready?” Norman asked, preparing to pull up the grate on the cat carrier to let his pet out of confinement.
“Rrowww!” Moishe replied, and both Hannah and Norman laughed.
“That says it all!” Hannah remarked. “Go ahead, Norman.”
Norman pulled up the grate, Cuddles shot out like a rocket, and the kitty-derby down the carpeted hallway to the bedroom was on with Moishe in the lead and Cuddles chasing him.
“Feet up!” Hannah said, hurrying to the couch with Norman following suit. Once there, both Hannah and Norman tucked their feet under them and waited a scant second before they heard the sound of the two cats racing back into the living room.
Both Hannah and Norman knew that the derby consisted of three laps, from the bedroom out to the living room and back again. They counted them off, one by one, and after the third lap Hannah asked, “Are they through?”
“I’m not sure,” Norman replied. “Cuddles still has that crazed look in her eyes. She might be getting ready for one more lap.”
“If she is, Moishe will go for it. He’s panting, but he’ll chase her if she . . . oops!” Hannah drew her feet up quickly. “Feet up, Norman! They’re off and running!”
Norman laughed and lifted his feet as the two cats ran past him. Then he turned to Hannah with a puzzled expression. “What smells so good?”
“Ultimate Strawberry Bundt Cake. If it’s good, we’re going to bake it for Valentine’s Day.”
“If it tastes as good as it smells, it’ll be great.”
There was the sound of a timer ringing and Hannah got up from the couch. “I have to test the cake,” she told him. “If it’s done, I’ll take it out of the oven. I’ll be right back.”
“With cake?”
“Not quite yet. It has to cool for twenty minutes in the Bundt pan before I can put it on a plate.”
“That long?”
Hannah smiled. “That long. Patience is a virtue, Norman.”
“Patients are what I have in my dental chair every day,” Norman corrected her.
Hannah was saved from attempting to come up with a clever reply when her stove timer began to beep again. “That’s my second warning,” she told him. “If I don’t shut that off, it’ll beep steadily until I do.”
Norman sighed. “Then I guess I’ll have to practice the other kind of patience.”
Hannah chuckled all the way to the kitchen. She loved Norman’s ability to come up with the perfect rejoinder in a lot less time than it took for most people.
Once she’d shut off the timer, Hannah tested the cake, decided that it was done, and set it on a cold stove top burner. Then she reset the time for twenty minutes, the length of time it would take it to cool, and went back to the kitchen doorway.
“I’ve got Chicken in Cabernet Sauce in the Crock-Pot,” she told Norman. “I put it up this morning before I left for church and it should be almost ready by now. I was going to freeze it because I planned to go out to dinner with the family tonight, but we can eat it tonight. It’ll take me a few minutes to thicken the broth, but would you like some when that’s done?”
“You betcha!”
Norman’s answer came immediately in Minnesota vernacular, and Hannah smiled. Despite Norman’s years in dental school and the time he’d spent practicing at a large clinic in Seattle, he was still a Minnesotan at heart.
The aroma that escaped when Hannah lifted the lid on her slow cooker was enticing and her mouth began to water in anticipation. She heard the sound of footsteps behind her and she turned to smile at Norman.
“That really smells good, Hannah,” Norman said, crossing the kitchen floor to look at the contents of the Crock-Pot. “There’s a whole meal in there! It must have been a lot of work to make it.”
Hannah shook her head. “It wasn’t, not really. The slow cooker does most of the work while you’re doing something else. All you have to do is remember to turn it on before you leave the house. You could do this, Norman. And then you’d have a hot meal waiting for you when you got home. It’s so simple, even Mike could do it and he never cooks for himself.”
“I don’t think he ever does,” Norman said, and then he began to smile. “And speaking of Mike, I’m surprised he’s not here yet.”
“So am I,” Hannah admitted. “Just give him a little time, Norman. He’ll probably show up just after I set the table.”
“You’re right,” Norman agreed, acknowledging Mike’s uncanny knack for arriving at Hannah’s doorstep right before she was planning to serve dinner.
Just then there was a loud thump on Hannah’s door, and they exchanged amused glances.
“That’s probably him now,” Norman said, heading for the door. “I’ll let him in.”
Hannah finished adjusting the seasonings and thickening the broth. Then she clamped the lid on the Crock-Pot and went to greet Mike. But it wasn’t just Mike. When she emerged from the kitchen, she saw that Norman was taking parkas from Michelle, Lonnie, and Mike.
“How did you get through all this snow?” she asked Mike, draping their snow-covered parkas over several chairs.
“Carrie and Earl stopped by Mother’s place,” Michelle explained. “Earl wanted to make sure that Doc had made it home from the hospital. And when Earl saw us, he offered to lead us here in his snowplow.”
Hannah began to frown. “Didn’t you invite them in?”
“Of course we did,” Mike reassured her, “but they said they had to move on. Carrie managed to get through to Edna Fergusson at the farm and Earl promised to plow her driveway.”
“I wish you’d told them to wait until I could give them a thermos of hot coffee.”
Lonnie shook his head. “They’ve got plenty. Carrie brought three thermoses, and your mother gave her another one filled with hot chocolate.”
“Carrie was having the time of her life in that snowplow,” Mike told Hannah. “She said that Earl let her drive and only took over when she dumped a load of snow on Mayor Bascomb’s sidewalk by mistake.”
“Are you sure it was by mistake?” Norman asked.