“What are in these things?” he asked, examining Bub’s breakfast.
“I made two batches,” Caroline said. The pantry door slammed and a moment later she was halfway to the counter. She’d always been beautiful in jeans and killer in the right dress, but untucked flannel and blurry with flour was a relatively new look for her. “One with cherries and one with raspberries. I thought they might be good with chocolate, so I’m going to melt some down, add cream and maybe a dash of vanilla.” She emptied a bag of chocolate pieces into a saucepan fitted over a water bath.
“Are we expecting company?” Ben asked, pointing to the plates of pancakes.
“I’m trying out a recipe for the guests, Ben. I wasn’t sure about quantities.”
She clicked the burner until a burst of blue fire blossomed under the water bath. As she churned the chocolate, her foot beat a rhythm against the floor. Ben had wondered, as he did on all of his morning walks, what kind of day they would have together. The towering stacks of pancakes were a bad omen, and the note that had crept into Caroline’s voice when she spoke his name was more troubling still. But it was only eight-thirty, and Ben was not ready to count the day as a loss.
Ben kissed Charlie on the forehead as he sat down next to him. “Do you recommend the cherry or raspberry?” he asked him.
“I like them both,” Charlie said.
Ben leaned into Charlie. “I’m going to need your feedback on this one. I mean, how many pancakes would you say you’ve eaten in your time?”
“A lot.” He had a smear of syrup on his cheek, and Ben rubbed it away with a napkin.
“I’ll say. And not just ones made by Mom or me, right? You’ve eaten these things in restaurants across the tristate area. And what about when we went to California? You had some there, didn’t you?”
“They were good.”
“So you’re speaking from the position of having some pretty formidable experience under your belt in the arena of pancake eating.” Ben was talking to Charlie, but he was watching Caroline stir the saucepan at the stove. “Now, you should stop me if I’m overselling your credentials.”
“I will,” Charlie said.
“So how do these stack up?” A stupid pun, but some days he’d try anything. He was grateful to see the side of Caroline’s mouth twitch. Charlie was spare with his smiles, but not nearly as spare as his mother. Her face was as delicate and perfect as a doll’s, and these days almost as inexpressive.
“They’re good,” Charlie said after a moment. “Sweet.”
“Follow-up question: Do you think that the quart of maple syrup you’ve poured on them has anything to do with that?”
A smile, small but undeniable, opened across Caroline’s face.
“Maybe,” Charlie said.
Ben speared three pancakes of both varieties off plates in front of him. “These are excellent,” he said after he’d eaten one of each.
Caroline brought her tea over and sat at the table. The ghost of a smile lingered on her face, and that made some of the tension ebb from Ben’s shoulders. “Your phone buzzed while you were out.”
Ben reached back to pick it off the counter. There was a missed call and voice mail from the lawyer who’d been handling his grandmother’s estate. More bad news, Ben expected; the man never had any of the good variety.
“Any luck on those butterflies, Charlie?” Ben asked. He slipped the phone into his pocket.
Charlie had become very attached to a book that Ben had given him before they’d moved up here. It was about Hickory Heck, a boy who’d left his city life to live in the wild. Heck made his own clothes, gathered his own food, and he’d even hollowed out his own home under a massive tree. One of Heck’s many fantastic nature-themed adventures involved filling mason jars with butterflies of every color and training them to dance in the candlelight that illuminated his cozy burrow. Charlie had found some caterpillars a few days ago and put them in a jar filled with leaves. He hoped to teach them to dance when they turned into butterflies.
“I think they just need to eat some more. I gave them leaves, but they don’t like the dandelions,” Charlie said. “I don’t know why. You’d think they would.”
“I called someone about getting a truck up here to take away that mess in the basement,” Caroline said.
The Crofts had been filled with the detritus of the house’s previous inhabitants. Furniture had been left to molder, along with stacks of newspapers and magazines, piles of warped boxes, and dozens of broken appliances from past decades. One of the first things Caroline had Ben do was to move it all into the basement.
“If I were a caterpillar, I’d eat dandelions,” Charlie said.
“Me too,” Ben said. “And you know Bub would eat them, too, if we gave him a chance.”
“But the man I talked to won’t carry it out of the basement himself,” Caroline said.
“Did you offer to pay him extra?”
“Of course, but he said he had a bad back and no insurance. Besides, I don’t really want anyone from the village inside until we’ve finished fixing up the place.”
“When’s he coming?”
“Tomorrow, sometime in the morning. He wasn’t specific.”
“Okay.” Ben tried to keep his face expressionless, but Caroline still heard something in his voice.
“What was I supposed to do, Ben? We need that crap out of here.”
He could see the cords of her neck tense, and he didn’t need to look under the table to know that her well-muscled runner’s legs were jackhammering away at the antique walnut.
“It’s just that it’ll take a long time to get all of that outside,” Ben said.
“What else were you going to do today?”
“I was going to sand the floor in one of the second-floor bedrooms,” Ben said. “And the bookstore in Exton called. My order’s ready. I was hoping to pick it up.”