The Sweet Spot

by Heather Heyford

  Theresa had sprung gallantly to Jamie’s defense, but the fact was that Jamie was on her way out. Theresa had Brynn’s college tuition to save for. She needed to work.

  “Those are all the dishes people brought special for tomorrow. I guess it wouldn’t hurt anything to cut you a little piece of pie.”

  Jamie heard footsteps going toward the sideboard.

  “What kind do you want? There’s blueberry, here’s a cherry one . . .”

  “Surprise me. Put the pie and the sandwiches in that basket. I’ll be back for it in twenty minutes.”

  With that, Delilah left.

  Jamie exhaled and thought of falling onto Hank from Raven’s Rock . . . long, sweet kisses in the moonlight up on the Peak . . . clinking glasses with him in the tasting room.

  She thought she knew Hank. From day one, she had treated the Sweet Spot as if it were her own, giving willingly of her time and efforts without a second thought.

  In his grief, had he really caved to Delilah’s whim?

  Now, instead of rolling up her shirtsleeves yet again, she slipped out of the kitchen when Theresa’s back was turned.

  She ran to the cool shade of the stables and sat down in the straw next to Dancer until she knew the driver of the late van would be looking for her.

  And then she was packed into the van with the others, driving under the iron-link chain that held the weather-beaten sign that said WELCOME TO THE SWEET SPOT for the last time, and she felt like the heart with the bull’s-eye pierced by an arrow was a reflection of her own.

  * * *

  “I brought you something to eat.”

  Hank looked up bleary-eyed from his laptop, uncomprehending. Food was the last thing on his mind.

  “Hank,” said Delilah. “You’re exhausted.”

  “These emails can’t wait.”

  She reached over and, with a crimson fingertip, gently pressed down on the lid.

  “Hey. What—”

  “You need a break from all of that.”

  He must have been out of it, because the next thing he knew he was allowing himself to be led out of the tasting room.

  When he saw his Jeep idling outside, he stopped. “Where’d you get the keys?”

  “On the keyboard in the kitchen. It was easy. The hooks are labeled.”

  He followed Delilah to the Jeep and climbed into the passenger seat. “That way,” he said numbly, pointing down the private dirt road toward a random spot with a view.

  Minutes later they got out and he watched hesitatingly as Delilah spread Ellie’s old quilt on the rough ground.

  “Could’ve just eaten in the Jeep.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, sitting down cross-legged, patting the empty space in front of her. “What’s a picnic without a blanket?”

  He lowered himself in front of her and took the sandwich she offered him.

  “I know you’ve got a lot on your mind, but before we get into all that, there’s something I wanted to be sure I mentioned,” she said between bites. “Guess who I called? That top-notch aviation school in Colorado you were looking at right after college. They have a package that includes three ground lessons, two flight lessons, basic supplies, and a video training course. I couldn’t wait to tell you about it.”

  “Did you think I didn’t know? I learned that when I took my discovery flight back when I was still in school.”

  After that, they finished eating in silence. Afterward he sat with his elbows resting on his knees, resting his eyes on the scenery.

  Delilah lay down next to him, gazing into the azure sky.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  She seemed to sense that he needed to vent.

  “Overwhelmed. Since the minute she passed, it’s been nothing but people asking me nonstop questions about what I want to do about this and that. Did I want her buried or cremated? What should they dress her in? Who should do the service?

  “The number of people we’re expecting keeps growing. My cousin, Jack Friestatt, his wife, Jack’s parents, Don and Melinda, all my second and third cousins and their families. All the local growers and vintners knew and loved Ellie. Add to that the townspeople and the employees, past and present . . .”

  “Have you had time yet to think about the bigger picture? What you’re going to do, down the road?”

  “My grandmother’s body is barely cold. There’ll be plenty of time to think about that when all the fuss is over.”

  Delilah sat up suddenly. “Hank.”

  With a hand she gently turned his head to meet her eyes. “Look at me. Can’t you see it written all over my face? I love you. I think I’ve always loved you, even back when we were in school.”

  Hank blinked uncomprehendingly.

  “You feel it, too. I know you do. I can see it in your eyes.”

  Hank shook his head slowly, comprehension dawning on him. “I barely know you.”

  She shifted to sit directly in front of him, her face inches from his. “How can you say that,” she pleaded, “when we’ve known each other for years? You’re distraught, that’s all. I admit, now’s not the best timing, but I couldn’t hide it any longer. Now that Ellie’s gone, there’s nothing tying you to the Sweet Spot. Come back to Denver with me.”

  “Now?”

  “As soon as the funeral is over. We’ll get married! There’s nothing left for you here. Walk away.” She laid a hand on his arm. “Don’t overthink it. It’s that simple. Just walk away. We’ll start a whole new life together.”

  Married? Hank yanked his arm out of her grasp, leapt to his feet, and headed back to the Jeep, ignoring the remnants of their picnic.

  “Am I moving too fast?” Delilah hurried after him, catching his arm. “We can dial it back. I’ve become somewhat of an expert in boutique resorts. Once I transform this place, you won’t even recognize it. Hot tubs, a spa, an Olympic-sized pool . . .” She turned him around. “It’ll require an injection of capital, but we could end up with a net gain when we do sell.”

  Hank evaluated the woman before him the way he evaluated a wine, noting every aspect. She was beautiful, savvy, and ambitious.

  “Why me?” he asked.

  There were men who would beg for a wife like her.

  Men like Ryan Rowling.

  Following the gala, he’d never given Rowling another thought. Why now, with all the things crowding his mind?

  What were Rowling’s last words to him? Keep one hand on your wallet.

  Of course.

  Delilah opened her mouth to reply, but Hank held up a halting hand. “So you can share in the profits?”

  “Hank, I—”

  “That’s why you invited me to Denver in the first place, wasn’t it? Not because you’re my friend. You stood to get a cut of Stew’s sales commission. Come to think of it, that’s probably what inspired you to get your real estate license.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “And now you’re thinking if he can’t be persuaded to sell yet, I’ll marry him, improve the property to get even more from it, and then divorce him and split the proceeds fifty-fifty.”

  He stuck out his hand. “Where are the keys?”

  “Hold on,” she pleaded. “We’re not finished talking.”

  “Give. Them. To. Me.”

  When she finally relinquished them, he wasted no time making his way to the Jeep, leaving the food behind on the blanket.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to the inn. You can ride or walk. Your choice.”

  She had barely scrambled in beside him when he shoved the gear stick into drive and the Jeep jerked forward.

  “I want you out of my sight.”

  She dropped all pretense. She sounded like a stranger when she said, “The late van has come and gone.”

  “Rent a car. Call a cab. I don’t care how you do it, but I want you out of here now, today. I don’t want you here when I lay my grandmother to rest.”

  * * *

  Hank s
trode into the great room, a man on a mission. Then he spotted the baby grand and pulled up short and looked around.

  “Jamie!”

  But there was nothing but the ticking of the grandfather clock.

  He went to the kitchen. “Jamie!” he hollered, knowing in his heart of hearts that it was futile.

  Theresa looked up from the cutting board where she sliced tomatoes.

  With a sinking feeling, he checked the time. “Where’s the late van?”

  Pausing her knife, she said, “Been here and gone.”

  That couldn’t be. That meant that Jamie had gone and he hadn’t said good-bye to her.

  He breezed past Theresa without speaking and out the back door, letting it slam behind him, not knowing where he was headed.

  Jamie had been trying to get his attention since Ellie died. But like a fool, he had put other things ahead of her, as if they had all the time in the world.

  Now she was gone, just like that? Impossible! He began walking in circles.

  Not that she would have known where to find him if she’d looked, out picnicking with Delilah when he should have been planning his grandmother’s funeral.

  He stopped at the paddock fence and called Jamie’s phone, but when it went straight to voice mail he hung up quickly. What would he say?

  Briefly he considered racing to the airport to try to catch her before she boarded her flight.

  And then what? he thought, halfway to his vehicle. Take her in his arms? Ask her to give up her teaching career and come back to the Sweet Spot on a whim? That was hardly rational, or fair.

  Head bowed low, he turned around and trudged back to the inn.

  Just when he’d lost Ellie, now Jamie was gone, too.

  He tore off his cap as he walked. How was he going to get through tomorrow’s wake without her?

  And what about after that? He’d gotten used to her being there, from their first cup of coffee of the day, to helping him with any problem that arose, to hearing her singing the last thing at night before he hauled his work-weary body up to bed.

  He dragged a hand down his face, distorting his features. How could he live without her?

  He heard the screen door open and looked up to see Theresa standing there with a worried look on her face, wringing her hands.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  She was obviously distraught.

  But though he was dying inside, he had to get a grip. He was the only one left holding this place together.

  He straightened his spine. “I’m fine.”

  “I have to talk to you.”

  Hank wrapped his arm around Theresa’s shoulder—surprised at what he could do when he set his mind to it—and led her around the inn onto the back porch.

  “Have a seat. There, in Miss Ellie’s rocker.”

  “I wouldn’t feel right sitting there, so close to . . .”

  Right. Bad idea. “Okay. Well, do you want to take a walk?”

  In answer, she descended the back steps and headed toward the pond.

  “Spare hand, my foot,” muttered Theresa, looking over her shoulder, once they were safely out of earshot of the inn. “I can’t imagine what it’ll be like when that woman moves in full time. Specially if Miss Ellie isn’t here to mind things. I’m telling you right now, Hank, you’re going to be losing people left and right.”

  “What are you talking about? Who’s moving in?”

  “Miss High-and-Mighty. She comes into my kitchen and starts ordering me around like I’m her personal servant or something. And when it’s plain as day I’m trying to get ready for Miss Ellie’s wake!”

  “What did Delilah say to you?” Hank growled.

  “That she’s in charge from now on.”

  Inside, Hank seethed. But somehow, he kept his voice calm. “Well, you don’t have to worry about Delilah. She’s been, let’s say, permanently banned from the Sweet Spot.”

  “Really?” Theresa’s face relaxed, to his great relief.

  “Really. And I’m sorry she upset you, and I hope it won’t affect your working here. Because I value your work and I would hate to lose you any sooner than I have to, when you go back to your job at the cafeteria.”

  Her heart flew to her ample breast. “Oh, thank goodness.”

  Then she was sober again. “What about Jamie? Didn’t you get to say good-bye to her?”

  “I must’ve just missed her,” he said around the hard lump in his throat.

  Theresa turned down her lip.

  “Did you?” He craved knowing something, anything about Jamie’s final moments at the vineyards.

  “No.”

  Strange. That didn’t seem like Jamie.

  “She is a good person,” said Theresa with a sigh. “She’ll be missed.”

  You have no idea, thought Hank, rubbing his jaw. No freaking idea.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Jamie stepped outside the airport in Philly and inhaled air as thick as pea soup. She’d forgotten how humid the Mid-Atlantic could be in August. Within minutes her hair frizzed up into a pyramid twice its normal size.

  She hadn’t seen her family all summer. Though retired from farming, Dad still got up before dawn every morning. He said it would be nothing for him to drive the hour and a half to the airport to meet her incoming red-eye and then take her back to Lancaster County. But in the time since she had booked her return flight in June, life had gone on. An organizational meeting had been scheduled at her school. If she rented a car, she would have just enough time to pop by and see the apartment her sister had found for her before showing up for the meeting, and then head home that afternoon.

  Philly’s rush hour streets were in a state of chaos. Wherever she looked she saw tall buildings in some stage of construction or deconstruction. She felt hemmed in by a mass of cars, trucks, and buses, all alternating between speeding and jerking to a stop a hairsbreadth from the bumper in front of them.

  Great. Now she was stuck behind a lovely trash truck. The smell had her holding her shirt over her nose to breathe. And now there was a siren wailing behind her. In her rearview, the column of vehicles inched toward the right, but she was stuck in the middle lane with no place to go. Somehow the ambulance threaded the needle until it was directly behind her, red lights flashing, the driver gesturing angrily at her.

  She rolled down her window, the humidity immediately making her skin stick to the seat of her rental car, and threw her hands in the air. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t move!” she yelled into her mirror.

  Eventually, the cars to her left found a way to edge over enough to let the ambulance pass.

  She’d already seen pictures of the apartment, so there were no real surprises there. The best thing that could be said about it was that it had a bathtub. Not that she could have upgraded if she wanted to. Even an administrator’s salary only stretched so far.

  She had managed to snatch a few hours of restless sleep on the flight, but by the time she arrived at school, she was feeling the effects of trying to squeeze too many commitments into a limited amount of time.

  The meeting of department heads was in a second-floor classroom. Jamie sat next to a window with a view of postage-stamp-sized macadam wedged between the school and the graffiti’d brick wall of another commercial building. Halfway through the meeting she heard shouting and looked down to see a boy in a white T-shirt take a swing at his friend and miss, resulting in a chasing match that had them zigzagging back and forth within the chain-link enclosure until one tagged the other, and then they changed direction.

  “Jamie?”

  “Hm?”

  “Parent volunteers,” said the superintendent. “Would you be willing to coordinate that committee?”

  “Those students . . .” Jamie said with a nod toward the window. “Are they ours?”

  Her school had a policy of opening up their playground to the neighborhood kids during the summer.

  Her superintendent strolled over and looked outside. “I�
�m not sure. I don’t interact with individual students enough to get to know them.”

  “They look familiar, but then I teach—er, used to teach—every student in the school, so I’m not sure,” said Jamie.

  “Let me have a look.” The young, athletic language-arts chair seized the chance to climb out of his cramped seat. “This is only my third year out of the classroom. I might recognize them.” He leaned over the window. “Yes.” A smile lit up his face and he knocked on the glass and waved. “That’s Malcolm Levon and Kwame Jackson.”

  The boys looked up and started yelling and waving their arms at their former English teacher.

  “I thought I recognized them,” said Jamie with a small wave of her own.

  Her heart started to pound. What was she going to do, now that she wouldn’t be around them every day, guiding them, nurturing their budding talent, watching them grow?

  But the school year was about to start. Too late now to call up Dr. Keller. Newberry’s new music teacher would already have been hired. At this moment, he or she was no doubt in a meeting of her own, or readying the music room for the year’s new crop of eager young faces.

  “The volunteers,” said her superintendent.

  Jamie blinked. “Yes,” she said, jotting a note of it with a trembling hand.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “A little jet-lagged. Would it be possible to turn up the air conditioning?”

  The other administrators exchanged glances.

  “It’s already freezing in here,” said the science chair, pulling her sweater closed.

  Then why was Jamie suddenly burning up, but her hands were so cold she could barely control her pen?

  Somehow she managed to make it through the meeting.

  When it was over, she walked down the hall to her new office. On her desk was the box of books and files she’d requested to be delivered there. Last spring, when she’d carefully packed them up, they had seemed indispensable. Now, when she pulled them out one at a time, they seemed to belong to someone else.

  She sat down in her black vinyl chair and practiced rolling it in and out, only to find there wasn’t enough room between her desk and the wall and she kept bumping into it. She’d have to be careful of that.

  When she was driving down I-76, halfway to Lancaster County, it occurred to her that she hadn’t put away any of her books. Why not? There was certainly no shortage of shelves, given all the wall space afforded by the lack of windows.