Chapter 16
Lexi walked through her grandparents’ back door and into Grandma Blaze’s outstretched arms. “We had to leave her until Monday.”
Pansy’s surgery had lasted almost an hour. Jake left in the middle of it to take Adam home, but Lexi wasn’t budging. The vet promised she could see Pansy as soon as the operation was finished. So she’d waited. She had to be the first face Pansy saw when she came to. And she was.
Next to Mom dying, walking away from Pansy was the hardest thing she’d ever done. When the anesthesia fully wore off, Pansy would wake up in a cage. She’d never been caged before. She’d be terrified, and Lexi wouldn’t be there to tell her everything was going to be fine.
“Thank goodness you found her and she’s going to be okay.” Grandma Blaze lifted her chin. “And thank goodness you’re here. And safe.”
“But what if—”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Why don’t you take a shower and get some rest before the barbecue. Emily’s clearing her stuff out of your room so—”
Lexi pulled away. “Emily? She’s here?”
Her grandmother grinned. “I thought you knew. I invited her to stay here when she left the hospital.”
“I knew, but I thought she’d be gone by now.” And no one said she took my room. With long strides she walked through the dining room and turned the corner. Laughter came from her room.
Adam sat cross-legged in the middle of her bed, holding his mirror over his head. A blob of light danced on Emily’s face as she stuffed clothes into a bag. Emily turned. “Lexi! Adam’s been telling me what happened. Poor Pansy.”
Lexi stared at a gray T-shirt on the floor. She never threw clothes on the floor. The bed was made, but the quilt was lower on one side than the other.
Emily reached toward her and rested a pasty-pale hand on her shoulder. “And how are you?”
Tears she thought she’d run out of pressed against the backs of her eyes. She didn’t know why. Emily’s voice was kind, her touch gentle. Adam liked her. And if Adam could be believed, so did Jake.
But Lexi didn’t. “Fine.” She would not shed those tears.
“What are you wearing to the barbeque?”
Her best friend was lying in a cage, her leg in a cast. What she wore to a silly barbeque wasn’t important. “Nothing special.” She reached behind the door, yanked her robe off its hook, and folded it in her arms, just the way she’d held Pansy only hours ago. “I’m going to take a shower.”
And you’d better be gone when I get back.
Emily stepped out of the shower in her own bathroom. She’d showered at the Bradens’ early this morning, but if she was going to do anything with her hair for the barbeque, washing it again was a necessity.
Head wrapped in a giant terry-cloth turban, she stared at her reflection with a more critical eye than she had since before the accident. Her skin looked dry and blotchy from eighteen months without moisturizer. Skin that had once been accustomed to monthly facials had done a poor job offending for itself while she’d been preoccupied with deciding if life was worth living. The split ends hidden by the towel had fared much worse. She wrote “hot oil treatment” on a Post-It note on the mirror, right under “moisturizer”. Looking up at the burned-out bulbs, she thought back to a matter of days ago when none of this mattered.
Jake was right. Someday the new, freed Emily Foster would actually want to be part of the real world. She’d want friends, maybe even dates. Until then, she needed to polish her rusty social skills and relearn confidence.
She needed life practice. Not “kiss and run,” but maybe “have fun and run.” So there it was—a new, rhyming life philosophy.
And what better place to start than here, where everyone knew she wasn’t staying and relationships were temporary. Like Post-It notes. Not too sticky.
She glanced at the time on her phone. She had two and a half hours before Blaze would pick her up. Enough time to replace the makeup and nail polish expiring in bins in her basement, pick up salad ingredients and a tub of peanut butter cookie dough, and do something drastic with her hair.
As she picked up her keys from the kitchen counter, an idea took shape. Lexi could use some cheering up. She pulled out her phone and stared at it. She didn’t have Blaze’s number.
She did have Jake’s.
Walking into what had once been the dining room, she nodded with approval. The wall the room had shared with the front parlor was gone. The openness was freeing. It confirmed what she’d known all along—she was right, and Renaissance Man, the guy with the biceps of a contractor but the heart of a poet, was wrong. She smiled, her gaze drifting to the dust-coated card table. Two imprints in the plaster dust marked the places he’d rested his arms. “Your eyes are the stars of the midnight sky. Tell me your name, fair princess.”
She’d overreacted, let her baggage get in the way again. His reaction had startled her. “What are your chains, Emily?” She needed to explain. But how much? How many links of her chain could he handle? Would he even answer her call? She walked to the window and stared out at her spruce tree. Karen twittered on a high branch. Cardinal Bob was nowhere to be seen or heard. For once, the song of the red-brown bird didn’t sound scolding or commanding. She sounded lonely. “Sure, you chase him away and miss him when he’s gone.”
Emily leaned her forehead against the window frame and dialed.
It rang four times then went to voice mail. “Hi, this is Jake with Braden Improvements. We’re here to make your space a better place. Leave a message and I’ll return your call ASAP. God bless.”
Had the last two words always been part of his message? She had no idea. “God bless.” His smile came through in the soft benediction. It caught her off guard. When the tone sounded, she scrambled to remember why she’d called.
“Jake. This is Emily. I was just heading to Walmart and thought maybe Lexi would like to ride along, but I don’t have your mom’s number. If you could give me a call and—”
Chimes announced an incoming call. “Hello?”
“Emily? It’s Jake. Sorry I missed your call.” No disgust or condemnation colored his greeting.
She explained why she’d called.
A long pause followed. She was about to say maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, when he cleared his throat. “That would be so good for her. Thank you.” He gave her the number. She wrote it in the plaster dust next to his arm prints. “I’ll warn you, though, she gets pretty silly when she’s happy.”
“I could use some silly about now.” She turned back to the window, back to Karen and her lonely song. “I’m sorry I didn’t respond the way I should have earlier. Sometimes I—”
“These apologies are going to have to stop, Miss Foster. Let’s make a deal. When you do something that genuinely offends me, I’ll let you know, okay?”
Cardinal Bob swooped onto a low branch. Emily smiled. “I think you’re far too ni—polite to do that.”
His laugh widened her smile. “I heard that. You almost called me nice.”
“I did no such thing.”
“So you don’t think I’m nice?”
Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Jake laughed again. “I’ll expect an answer to that question tonight. Have fun with my niece.” The connection ended—before she could tell him she wasn’t going to read the letters without him.
Lexi threw her brush at her dresser. “Without asking me? Why would you do that?”
The brush smacked the pen Emily had left there and projected it into the waste basket. “I don’t need a haircut.”
“That’s just an option, Lexi.” Her grandmother’s hands left her hips. She fished the pen out of the basket. “Emily’s getting her hair cut and she said if you wanted a trim at the same time…” A heavy sigh puffed her cheeks. “She thought it would be fun if you picked out nail polish together.”
“I don’t wear nail polish.”
“Lex. Emily just wants—”
“I know what she wants!” Every muscle in her body turned to steel like the strings on her guitar. Pressure built in her chest, demanding to be screamed out. “We don’t even know her. You let some stranger sleep in my bed and use my things and now you want me to go off with her to who knows where!”
“Walmart.” Grandma Blaze swooped her gaze to the ceiling and back to the floor. “Just Walmart, Lex, not Timbuktu.”
“What if she’s a kidnapper? What if she’s going to run off with me and send you ransom notes?”
The hands went back on the hips. “Then I’ll gladly give her every one of the three hundred and forty-two dollars in my checking account just to get you back.” Eyebrows lifted the same distance as the corners of her mouth.
“Sure, laugh.” Lexi shoved her feet into yellow flip-flops. “You probably wouldn’t pay anything to get me back.”
Her grandmother stepped toward the door. “You’re right, we probably wouldn’t. Funny, though, that such hard-hearted people are willing to shell out eight hundred and fourteen dollars to put a pin in a cat’s leg. Especially a cat that makes me sneeze.”
The doorbell rang. Grandma Blaze walked out.
Lexi crumpled on her bed in tears.
Who was the hateful girl taking over her body? Was she possessed? She’d heard that demons couldn’t take over your body if you believed in Jesus. Maybe that wasn’t true. Or maybe she just thought she believed but she really didn’t. Lord, what’s happening to me?
No answer came. Not even God wanted to spend time with a girl who hissed like an angry cat.
Her mouth jarred open. She looked down at her right hand, at the three red stripes she’d hidden from Jake and her grandma. Pansy had scratched because she was in pain and scared.
Just like her.
She hurt because Pansy hurt and because she missed her mom. She hurt because Adam thought it would be cool if Jake and Emily fell in love and got married and because her grandma laughed with Emily the way she used to laugh with Mom.
And that’s why she was scared. Life wasn’t good the way it used to be. Life would never be good for her again. But what if everyone around her got happy because Emily was there to make them laugh?
And make them forget.
Think. Nobody else was making sense. It was up to her. She took a deep breath, dried her tears, and went to the bathroom and washed her face. With a smile brighter than anyone had ever smiled, she walked into the living room.
“Hi, Emily. Thank you for thinking of me. This sounds like so much fun.”
Without a twinge of sadness Emily watched the faded ends—the last vestiges of her former self—drift to the floor. At the stylist station perpendicular to hers, Lexi leafed through a hair magazine.
Sophia, a short, round Italian with purple highlights in her black hair, held a chunk of Emily’s tarnished platinum over her head. “Say good-bye to the old you.”
Was the woman eavesdropping on her thoughts? “Good riddance.”
“I think you should do something really dramatic.” Lexi smiled at her in the mirror. “A wedge. You’d look pretty in really short hair.”
“You think so?” Strange that the opinion of a twelve-year-old actually mattered. “Okay, Sophia, you heard the boss. Let’s go shorter.”
Sophia’s scissors slid an inch closer to her scalp.
“What are you going to have done, Lexi?”
“I want bangs. And layers.” She pointed to a picture and handed the magazine to a tall, skinny redhead in a maroon smock.
The redhead nodded. “You two are going to a barbeque tonight?”
“Yep.” A purple cape settled over Lexi’s shoulders. “It’s in a barn where they’ve had dances every year since before the Civil War.”
The tingle scooting along Emily’s spine was becoming familiar. It was the visceral equivalent of the Twilight Zone theme. Would she dance tonight on the same floorboards as the writers of the letters? “I didn’t know that.”
“You didn’t know it was a dance, or you didn’t know they started doing them so long ago?”
“Neither. I thought we were going to eat.”
“We are. But there’s a band, too. Can you line dance?”
Could she line dance? Oh yeah. And, for some strange reason, none of the boxes and bags she’d donated to Goodwill before leaving Michigan had contained her gold-toed black boots. Also amazing was the fact that she knew which Rubbermaid bin they’d retired to. “Yeah. Pretty fair.”
“Jake hates dancing.” Lexi’s expression faded to blank.
What did that mean? It was more than just conversation, Emily was sure of it. There was meaning hidden somewhere in the comment.
Maybe she could blame it on the antibiotics, but the truth dawned embarrassingly slowly. She remembered being Lexi’s age—one foot in childhood, the other flailing around in the scary abyss of grown-up land. Fairy tales still seemed possible in that in-between age. And Emily had more than a hunch that Lexi was dreaming of an impossible happily-ever-after.
For Jake.
Not good. This fantasy had to stop before it began. In lieu of shaking her head, Emily tsked. Though she felt a kinship with the stone-cold Snow White, she wasn’t awaiting a magical kiss. “That’s too bad.” Did her voice convey the impossibility of her ever falling for a man who couldn’t do the electric slide? “Dancing is like breathing. It’s necessary for life, don’t you think?”
The redhead nodded. “Absolutely. Do you two have dates for tonight?”
“No.” They answered in unison, with equal enthusiasm.
“Okay, then.”
“What do you look for in a guy, Emily?” Lexi’s gaze hid her hopes well.
Sophia tipped Emily’s chin down to her chest. The timing was perfect. It gave her a moment to inventory Jake’s good qualities and come up with their polar opposites. She thought of the first time he’d found her in tears. Non-judging. The battle over her floor plan. Patient. Carrying her down the stairs. Strong, compassionate, unwavering. “What are your chains, Emily?” Intuitive, caring. “I’ll expect your answer tonight.” Funny. Eyes the color of a mountain lake. A truant groan leapt through her lips.
“Something hurt?”
The truth? “No. Just coughing.” She coughed into the cape to make it not a lie.
Sophia patted her back. “Do you need some suggestions of guy qualities?”
Emily faked a laugh. “I’m not really in the market at the moment.” Still looking down, she didn’t have to face the disappointment on a twelve-year-old face.
“Pick a color name that describes you.” Lexi waved her hand over two shelves of nail polish and smiled at Emily’s too-short hair. The day was turning out way better than she’d expected. Haircut, manicure, pedicure, and realizing Adam was wrong about Jake and Emily.
“I will if you will. And we have to go with the one we pick … even if it’s Mustard Yellow or Swamp Green.”
“Deal. Let’s pick two—a serious one and a fun one.”
Emily picked up a bottle the color of Barney the dinosaur. “Okay. Serious for fingers, silly for toes.”
“Cool.”
Lexi scanned the colors. “Mad as a Hatter” would have described her a couple of hours ago.
“I’ve got mine.” Emily held up two bottles.
Lexi took a few more minutes. “Me, too. It’s purrrrfect!” She couldn’t believe there was a nail color named for her. “Okay. Silly first.” She showed Emily a light blue shade. “It’s called ‘What’s with the Cattitude?’”
“That is purrrrfect!” Emily held out a bottle of pale pink polish. “Mine is ‘Who Needs a Prince?’”
Way perfect. Adam was so wrong. “What’s your serious one?”
“Breathe Life.” Emily’s bottom lip pushed against the top one. Her shoulders shrugged.
“Why did you pick—”
“Ladies pick colors now?” A short Asian woman gestured toward two open pedicure chairs.
“We’re ready.” Emily stepped aside and let Lexi follow the woman.
When they were seated, Lexi leaned toward Emily. “I picked my serious one because of you. It’s ‘Thank You Muchness.’”
October 10, 1852
“Mmm.” Dolly Baker batted her eyes in the general direction of Liam and two other men leaning against a wagon in front of the Settlement chapel. “I don’t believe there is a more handsome man anywhere in the world.”
On the blanket beside her, Hannah gnawed a chicken leg with unrefined vigor and feigned disinterest in all but the chicken. She chewed till there was nothing left of the bite in her mouth. “Can you believe what a gorgeous day this is?” She lifted her face to the sun. “Strange for October, isn’t it?”
“Hannah Shaw! Are you ill? There is a man like that in our midst and you talk about the weather?”
“Which man?” She asked it so casually it came out almost like a yawn.
“Liam, silly.” Fat sausage curls bounced. “Don’t you just feel fluttery when he’s around?”
“Hmm.” She swallowed the flutters crawling up her throat. “Not really.”
“You are ill. Or dead. Look at those eyes. Bluer than the bluest sky.” Dolly lingered on a wistful sigh.
And up close, in the moonlight, they sparkle like stars. “Wing?” She shoved a plate beneath Dolly’s nose.
“How can you think of food at a time like this?”
“Like what?”
“Like two weeks before the barn dance.” Dolly dipped her head, shielded her face with her bonnet, and whispered, “Can you keep a secret?”
Corn bread crumbs caught in Hannah’s throat, and she coughed until her eyes watered. If her best friend only knew what secrets she could keep. She nodded.
“Liam Keegan is going to ask me to the dance.”
A watermelon pickle lodged in her throat. She covered her mouth with the cloth that had wrapped the corn bread and forced a calm breath.
“Of course, Mother wouldn’t approve if she knew what I knew.” Dolly leaned forward and looked to her right and then her left. “Last week I hid behind the lilacs just to get a closer look at him. I heard him talking to your daddy.”
“Wh—what did you hear?”
Dolly laughed, fat curls skimming her shoulders. Her head dipped to one side. “You really don’t know, do you? Ah, let’s talk of more tasteful things.” She picked up a sorghum cookie. “Like Liam Keegan.”
With the inside of her mouth feeling like the bottom of her shoe, Hannah forced a laugh. “He told you he was going to ask you to the dance?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s never said anything more to me than ‘Good morning, Miss Baker.’ He won’t know he’s taking me until you tell him.”
“Wha …? Me?”
“I saw you at the smithy last week.”
“I was picking up hooks for my father.” Her face warmed. It was not a lie. She had been picking up coat hooks for the cellar. She had also picked up a stolen kiss.
“Did you or did you not talk to Liam when you were there?”
“I talked to Big Jim. I suppose I might have said a word or two to Liam.”
“There! I knew it.” Dolly picked up her reticule. “Order me a nice big hook for my father’s birthday. We so rarely come to town. And when you do, suggest that he ask me to the dance.”
“I can’t do—”
“You must.” Her eyes gleamed with something more intense than mischief. “Because if you don’t, I’ll tell your daddy’s not-so-little secret.”
Perspiration dampened Hannah’s blouse. “What secret?” Her voice was barely audible.
“The one”—Dolly rose gracefully to her feet and brushed crumbs from her skirt—“he would die if anyone knew.”
With that, she turned and fairly skipped back to the chapel.