Pieces of the Heart

by Karen White

  “I think he means for this furniture to be all about my mom.” Jewel pointed to the top of the cabinet. “See—here’s an unfinished canvas of a painting she was working on when she died. If you look around the edges of the chest, you’ll find her paintbrushes and things she kept around her workroom that helped her paint.”

  Caroline stood and walked around the table slowly, taking everything in and wondering anew at the artistry of the work and still not being able to associate it with the artist. “What did your dad do before he came here?”

  “He was a partner in a big law firm. He always worked a lot.”

  Caroline’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding.”

  “No. Seriously. Why do you think I’m kidding?”

  “Oh, nothing. I’m just . . . surprised. I mean, he really has a talent for furniture making. I just can’t see the same guy who makes this furniture as a lawyer, that’s all.”

  Jewel sat down in one of the chairs and ran her hand over the smooth surface of the table. “Yeah, my mom used to say the same thing. They argued a lot about it. He said that he was as good a lawyer as he was a furniture maker. I think my mom understood that—but she hated that he spent all of his time as a lawyer. That pretty much didn’t leave any time for anything else.”

  “Does he miss it? Being a lawyer, I mean.”

  “Yeah, I think he does. He loves making furniture, but I think he misses being a lawyer; not that legal things got him so excited, but more like he misses mixing with other people, and arguing to get his way, and basically using his brain. After Mom died, he had this stupid idea that we needed to change our lives completely, so we sold everything and moved up here. He even bought a pickup truck. He looks so ridiculous in it.”

  Caroline didn’t agree at all, but she kept the thought to herself. “So you don’t like it here in Hart’s Valley?”

  The girl shrugged. “It’s not that bad—not that I’ll tell my dad that, of course. But I don’t think my dad’s any happier than he was before. He bought Grandma Rainy’s shop, but he doesn’t seem real excited about it. As much as he loves making his furniture, I think he needs to have his brain challenged in a different way, too, you know?”

  “Tell me about it. I think I’m going to die of brain atrophy if I don’t start using mine again. Speaking of which, I’m going to go use your phone now. Why don’t you go outside and start your stretches? I’ll be there in just a minute.”

  Jewel rose from her chair slowly. “What about you? You said you were an accountant. Didn’t you ever miss the quilting you used to do?”

  Caroline stilled, amazed again at this young girl who always seemed to see things much more clearly than most adults she knew. “I kept myself too busy to think about it.”

  Jewel stared at her with those eyes that made Caroline want to squirm under their scrutiny. “My mom used to tell me that it’s always the things you avoid that are the things you should do first. The more you avoid them, the harder they seem to chase you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, maybe you should get back into quilting again. I mean, what else are you going to do while you’re up here?”

  Caroline pushed a chair under the table a little too hard, making it knock into the wood. “I don’t think so. I’m so out of practice, and I have no patience for it anymore.”

  Jewel just stared at her, not saying anything.

  “I mean, where would I start?”

  “Well, there’s my mother’s quilt. You’d have your mom and my grandma to help you get started. Plus, you knew my mom. You’d be able to add stuff that would make it special.”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Oh, come on. If you don’t like it, you can quit. Just give it a try.”

  Caroline felt herself wavering, could almost feel the cotton fabric under her fingers and the tug and pull of a needle guiding thread. “Well, maybe just once, to get everybody started . . .”

  “Great! We’re meeting at your house tonight at seven o’clock. I’ll tell Grandma Rainy that you’re coming. See you outside.”

  Caroline stared at Jewel’s retreating back, wondering what had just happened.

  Jewel turned around in the doorway. “Do you remember if my mom ever started a quilt for somebody?”

  “No, definitely not. She hated to sew and wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Her thing was painting.”

  Jewel looked as if she wanted to say something else but then closed her mouth. Then she took off again and called out, “See you outside,” before Caroline heard the sound of the back screen door slamming shut.

  Caroline sat in her dad’s old director’s chair, one of the few of her father’s possessions her mother hadn’t yet thrown out. The bottom sagged and the navy-blue color had long since faded to a washed denim, but she loved it. It was one of the only things at the lake house that hadn’t changed.

  She took a long sip of coffee, the last of the caffeinated coffee she had brought with her before her exile from Atlanta. Anything that might stir her heart had been efficiently banned from the house by her mother. She took another sip, feeling a familiar heaviness in her chest and thinking that she’d been relatively successful doing pretty much the same thing for the last thirteen years.

  “Nothing like a quiet night on the lake, is there?”

  Caroline turned to see Drew approaching, his hands tucked deep into the pockets of his khaki pants, his button-down shirt untucked at the waist and sprinkled liberally with sawdust.

  “When it’s quiet, anyway.” She turned back to the lake.

  “If I didn’t have utter confidence in my suave style and easy-going nature, I would think that you were trying to give me the brush-off.”

  She looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, thank you. I think I will sit for a while.” He sat down on the deck beside her, stretching out his long legs and crossing them at the ankles.

  “Did you come down here just to harass me?”

  “No, actually. I came for my cordless phone.” He held out his hand. “Can I have it back, please?”

  Caroline tried her best to look affronted. “What makes you think I’ve got it?”

  It was his turn to raise an eyebrow. “I went to use it and saw it wasn’t there, and it took me less than one second to figure out where it might be. Did you get any reception down here?”

  With a heavy sigh, she reached under her cardigan and pulled out the phone. “No. Not that it would matter, anyway. When I do speak with my boss or my coworkers they all tell me not to worry about anything, to take it easy and they’ll take care of everything.”

  “Hard to imagine that the world turns without you, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not that at all. I love my job and I want to make sure it’s still there when I get back.”

  “It’s a good thing to love your job. There’re too many people out there who are tied to their desks doing something they dread getting up for every morning. But the one thing about a job is that it can’t love you back.”

  His words stung, especially since her mother had spoken almost the identical words when she’d come to the hospital after Caroline’s first panic attack. How could she ever explain to them that it was more than just loving her job? It was more like loving the way it filled that huge empty void inside her so she wouldn’t have to think about anything else.

  She stood and began folding up her chair. “You don’t know the first thing about me, and you certainly don’t have the right to be making judgment calls about me.”

  He stood, too, and reached to take the chair she was trying to fold while balancing her coffee mug in the other hand. “You’re right. I’m sorry. And I wasn’t really talking about you at all. I was making an observation about my own life.”

  “Oh.” She felt her anger deflate a little. “I’m . . . sorry.”

  “But if you heard some truth, then maybe it’s a good thing I said it.”

  She reached for her chair to yank
it out of his grasp, but when he lifted it, she saw a long, angry cut bisecting his forearm. A small beige Band-Aid inadequately stretched across the middle of it. “What happened? Did you irritate somebody so much that they bit you?”

  “No, actually. It was our loon. Rainy made it an inside pen in her kitchen, and I went to move the darned thing and it attacked me.”

  The chair clattered to the dock as she let go of it to look at his cut. Something had softened inside her when he’d said our loon. “Weren’t you wearing your gloves?”

  “Well, it was acting so docile in Rainy’s lap that I thought it was used to us humans, so I just reached in without any protection.”

  “Score one for the loon,” she said under her breath as she studied the cut. His skin felt warm under her fingers, surprising her somehow. She jerked her head up and realized they were standing very close, unnerving her. He was smiling at her, completely comfortable being that near.

  She dropped his hand, feeling hot and flushed all of a sudden. “Come on up to the house. My mom has an arsenal of emergency first-aid supplies, so I know we’ll have something to fix you up better than that little Band-Aid.”

  She began walking, sensing him following close behind her.

  “Are you going to use Merthiolate?”

  Caroline stopped in surprise, then laughed out loud, recalling the time she, Jude, and Shelby had taken a ride on Caroline’s bicycle banana seat and had hit a curb, mangling the bike and tearing skin off of arms and legs. Caroline’s mother had panicked and had rushed out of the house with a large bottle of Merthiolate, the red-staining, germ-killing, scream-out-loud-painful antiseptic. She kept telling them that the more it hurt, the more germs it was killing. Her mother had made Caroline go first, and she remembered holding in her own screams so Jude wouldn’t be scared. Their skin had been streaked red from the medicine so that when Rainy came to pick up Shelby, it appeared that they had been thrown into a combine, and she had nearly fainted. It had been an experience they had never forgotten, and one that had made them laugh every time they thought about it.

  “Did Shelby tell you about the Merthiolate?”

  She heard the smile in his voice. “Yeah, she did. Can’t say I’ve ever been treated by it, but I think I’d rather my arm fall off. Less painful that way.”

  She sent him a sidelong glance. “Maybe my mother still has some hanging around inside a medicine cabinet. If not, we’ll use the boring old pain-free stuff.”

  As they reached the porch steps, Drew put a hand on her arm and gently pulled her to face him. “You should laugh more often, you know. It’s good for you.”

  Her lighthearted mood faded, his words bringing her back to the present and reminding her of the reason she didn’t laugh anymore. She pulled away from him and reached for the doorknob.

  He stood right behind her. “You can’t run away forever, you know. Eventually everything you’ve been running from will find you. It’ll be like an oncoming wave, and if you’re not looking for it, it can drown you.”

  She struggled to keep her breathing even. “You don’t know. You can’t possibly know.”

  “You’re right. I can’t. But I can speak from my own experience. Maybe your being here with your mother is your second chance. And that’s something most of us never get.”

  What was it about this man who refused to tiptoe around her feelings like everybody else? She felt an alarming urge either to push him hard or hold him close. She did neither. Instead, she turned away and opened the door. “Let’s go see if we can find some of that Merthiolate.”

  She heard him chuckle behind her as he followed her inside.

  Rainy, Margaret, and Jewel were already sitting around the table with a quilt spread between them.

  Rainy stood and came toward them. “This is girl time, Drew. What are you doing here?”

  He held out his arm. “Caroline doesn’t think my doctoring is good enough. She’s come to make sure my arm doesn’t putrify.”

  Rainy smiled widely at Caroline. “Too bad they don’t make Merthiolate anymore, huh?”

  Caroline laughed again, a sound he realized he had begun listening for, waiting for it in the same way he imagined the desert waited for rain.

  He turned to see if Margaret was laughing, too, but she only looked at them in confusion as if she had no idea what they were talking about.

  Caroline seemed to notice, too, and she quickly sobered. “I’ll get him fixed up and have him out of here as soon as possible, if not sooner.”

  “And then you can come join us,” Rainy said. “Jewel told us that you agreed to help get us started. We’re trying to decide how the whole thing is going to be laid out.”

  Caroline pursed her lips, as if regretting a rash promise. “I’m pretty tired. . . .”

  Margaret Collier piped up. “It’s still early, dear. I’ll make us some of that low-salt, butter-free popcorn that you love so much, all right? All that crunching should wake you up.”

  Drew waggled his eyebrows at her. “Or you could come over to my house and watch TV with me.”

  “I’ll be right there, Mom. Save me a spot.” She headed toward the back hallway, not waiting to see if he followed.

  They walked through what he figured was Margaret Collier’s bedroom on the way to her bathroom. A large four-poster bed dominated the room, but what really caught his attention were the numerous framed photographs liberally sprinkled on the bedside tables, dresser, and walls. A large photo near the bed caught his attention, and he picked it up to examine it more closely.

  Caroline popped her head out of the bathroom. “Did you get lost?”

  “No, just taking a break.”

  She moved to stand next to him. “From what?”

  “You.”

  She tried to take the picture from him. “Come on, I haven’t got all night.”

  He held firmly to the frame. “Is this Jude?”

  Caroline nodded, her hands dropping to her sides as they both looked at the picture of a boy in a football uniform, kneeling on one knee with his helmet tucked under an arm.

  “He looks a lot like you.” The boy in the picture was blond, with gray-green eyes. His wide, engaging smile captured Drew’s attention. There were hints in it of Caroline, and he wondered if she had ever smiled like that, without any hint of the sadness that now haunted her eyes.

  “Yeah. People used to think we were twins. I was just a little over a year older than him, but we were about the same height for a long time before he outgrew me. He would get such a kick out of it, too. He never even had to get a fake ID because he’d never get carded—just me. It was embarrassing.”

  Carefully, Drew put the picture back on the table and glanced around the room. “Where are all your swimming pictures?”

  “Good question. You’ll have to ask my mother. It’s actually kind of hard to find a picture of me—there aren’t that many. Tons of Jude, though.”

  She said it blithely, like it didn’t bother her.

  “Maybe I’ll ask her,” he said as he followed Caroline to the bathroom and waited for her to pull out antiseptic and bandages.

  Her fingers were cool on his skin, and he could tell she didn’t like being this near to him. It made him stand even closer.

  “What have you got against quilting?”

  She looked up from where she was dabbing at his wound with a cotton ball, and he could tell she was startled to find his face so close to hers. It was a technique that had always worked in the courtroom.

  “Nothing.” She went back to applying antiseptic, and he thought for a minute that she wasn’t going to say anything else. Instead she said, “Was there anything that you used to love doing but it reminded you so much of Shelby that it hurt every time you did it?”

  He thought for a moment. “Not really. Not anymore. That’s why I moved here. She was always the one encouraging me to make furniture.”

  “It’s . . . different for me. I was . . . I was with Jude when . . . when he died. That’s
the only thing I see when I pick up a needle.” She reached for the box of bandages and knocked it over, spilling most of them onto the floor. “Damn. Why do you always seem to make me talk about things I don’t want to? Can’t you just leave me alone?”

  She grabbed a handful of bandages that had stayed on the edge of the counter and began peeling the wrappers.

  He made his voice gentle. “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with you. Nobody makes you face what’s hurting you.”

  Caroline began sticking three large Band-Aids on his forearm, a few more than necessary in his opinion, but certainly enough to pull off most of the hair on his arm.

  “Nothing’s wrong with me. Before I was forced to come here, I was perfectly fine.”

  “Fine—but not happy, I would suspect, or you would have used that word.”

  She stared at him, and he was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “Stop trying to analyze me. I’ve had plenty of that over the years, and none of it helped. I learned to help myself and have earned the quiet, uneventful, and—yes—boring life that I have. It’s the only peace I’ve found after thirteen years, and I don’t need you digging up old stuff that doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Caroline ran out of the bathroom, and he followed, watching her hesitate at her own bedroom door as if that were where she really wanted to be. Instead she turned back toward the great room, where Jewel and the two older women waited. She straightened her shoulders and took a deep breath, then walked in.

  He heard the smile in her voice. “Okay, I’m here. I’m going to sit here and sort through these pictures and allow you to pick my brain. But don’t ask me to sew anything. That’s just for beginners and old ladies. I’m merely the consultant on this project.”

  Drew watched as she took a seat near the craft table, understanding a little more about what it had cost her to enter that room, and feeling a flicker of admiration for that false bravado that lurked inside of her, occasionally forced to the surface when she was at her most vulnerable.

  He said his good-byes, then left the women to their quilt and their memories.