Bluegrass Courtship

by Allie Pleiter

  “Ask Annie—she’d know. Octopi?” Drew guessed as the bus doors slid open.

  “Yeah, but who is it?”

  “Who is who?”

  “Who is whom? And it’s octopoda.” Annie corrected as they walked past her head poking up from a box of files.

  “The hostile. The person you kept looking for in the crowd tonight—” he nodded toward Annie “—whom I’m pretty sure you didn’t find. When are you going to stop that? Don’t you get that by definition, the hostiles aren’t going to show up to the Night One prayer meeting?”

  Drew winced. “Was I that obvious?”

  “Only to me,” Kevin replied.

  “And me,” Annie added, now triumphantly holding the file she’d evidently been seeking in the enormous box. She straightened up and grabbed her coat. “Y’all can stay up all night and plan your brains out, I’m out of here.” Annie, while a bedrock of calm during the day, knew her limits and disappeared at night whenever possible, generally to a local hotel or, in this case, the local bed and breakfast. Kevin and Drew always had the bus, while Jeremy, Mike, and the others slept on-site in a collection of rented trailers. Drew gladly approved Annie’s off-site lodging budget—if she came unglued, the rest of them would fall to pieces within the hour.

  And they were, officially, on-site. The bus had been moved to the block just south of the church, beside the firehouse just off Middleburg’s main road. Close enough to Ballad Road for them to run over and get something when needed—which Drew imagined would more often than not be something from Bishop Hardware—but not enough to become a logjam for local businesses. The fire station was more than happy to have a little of the limelight, and Missionnovation had long since learned that strong firefighters came in mighty handy on demolition and move-in day.

  Kevin collapsed onto the bus couch. He hit a few buttons on the stereo in the wall beside him, and country music began to play over the bus’s sound system. “You still haven’t answered me.”

  “The hardware store owner,” Drew said, sitting at the table. “Our hostile is the hardware store owner.”

  A frown creased Kevin’s face. “A bit of a challenge, but you ought to be able to bring him around by the end of the week if not sooner.”

  “No chance. This is one situation where I cannot bring him around.”

  Kevin propped himself up on one elbow. “Drew Downing, admitting defeat on Day One? Why?”

  “Because he is a she. Janet Bishop, owner of Bishop Hardware and not, it seems, a big fan of Missionnovation.”

  “Oh, well at least we know it’s not genetic,” Kevin laughed. “Now I know why Barbara Bishop introduced herself as Janet Bishop’s mother like it ought to mean something. Janet may be your hostile, but her mom is definitely a big fan.” A smug grin played across Kevin’s face. “I’m her favorite member of the design team. Plants rule!”

  Kevin was a big, burly guy with a head full of dark brown curls, usually escaping from under a baseball cap worn backward. His role was landscaping and comic relief. If something goofy happened on the show, Kevin was usually behind it. Drew lost count of the number of arguments Kevin had diffused with some joke or prank. They’d split the Missionnovation viewer demographic right down the middle—girls loved Drew, moms and grandmas loved Kevin. Drew, of course, lost no opportunity to rub in Kevin’s “gray hair” appeal. Kevin, in turn, mocked Drew’s “hunk” status every chance he got. Mike and Jeremy wisely stayed out of the rivalry. Mostly because Mike didn’t care who liked him, and Jeremy was sure everyone secretly loved him best anyway.

  “The hardware store owner, hmm?” Kevin hoisted his feet up on the couch. “That should make things interesting. How you gonna make this work without her cooperation?”

  “She’s cooperating, just with suspicion.”

  Kevin rolled his eyes. “Oh, you love the suspicious ones. They’re your favorite. You sulked for weeks over that last one.”

  Drew found a Missionnovation bandana sitting on the table behind him and tossed it at his friend. “Don’t you have some roots to dig up somewhere? Something to weed?”

  Kevin stuffed his hand into the open box of Dave’s cookies on the counter beside him. “I’ll put her on my prayer list,” he said. He yawned and pulled out a handful of cookies. “Trouble is, which one do I pray for…her or you?”

  Chapter Six

  Kevin had been snoring for an hour in the top bunk when Drew read Charlie’s e-mail one more time. Charlie had sent notes from the initial meeting with the network, and it seemed big things were in the works. HomeBase was considering kicking their sponsorship up to a whole new level, and Drew was staring at negotiations for a multi-season, major network deal. Just think of the lives they could touch. The witness they could be. It felt like God had told Drew to fasten his seat belt and hold on for the ride of his life. And it had been such a ride already.

  Drew scanned all those complex tables, outlines and numbers, and gave a heartfelt prayer of thanksgiving for Charlie. Stuff like market share, ratings, brand exposure—all this was Charlie’s native tongue and he excelled at it.

  Even though he knew Charlie prayed mightily over every move he made, Drew still felt antsy. As if he were holding a very large power tool he’d never used before with no manual in sight. Thrilling, but dangerous. Where are You taking me, Lord? Where are You taking Missionnovation? Keep me focused on You and Your plan, will You? We could have all the success in the world, and if You’re not in it, it won’t matter at all.

  Sawdust.

  Nothing on earth smelled like it, hung in the air like it, or stuck to things with the same airy weightlessness as sawdust. The scent struck a deep chord in Janet every time she caught a whiff of it. Sawdust meant Dad and things being built and Saturday mornings sitting on his workbench, still in her pajamas, sipping chocolate milk from a cup with a bendy straw. Watching Dad explain why you measured every piece of wood twice so you never cut it wrong. She practiced her alphabet by drawing letters in the sawdust with her fingers. She played with the curled yellow shavings from her father’s woodcutter, assembled leftover bits of wood the way other kids assembled blocks.

  It was the smell of sawdust that came to Janet first as she approached the church grounds. And the sounds; sawing, hammering, drilling, the particular tone of wood clunking together. Those noises and smells created one of Janet’s favorite feelings. All too often these days, she was buried under inventory and back orders and bookkeeping. And yet she still loved construction. The texture of wood beneath her hands, the smell of shavings, the satisfaction when two things fit together the way they ought to—these things were at the very core of her love for Bishop Hardware. They were what drew her to her own little version of construction—building birdhouses. Janet had turned one of her bedrooms into a workshop to spend her free hours building artful birdhouses. Castles, lighthouses, English cottages and all kinds of buildings became birdhouse styles for her to miniaturize. She was always cutting photographs of interesting houses from magazines, storing up ideas for future birdhouses. Her workroom had half a dozen carefully crafted pieces—some of them taking months to get just right—lined up on a shelf. To cut and feel and shape and join—even on a tiny scale—fed something so basic in her she couldn’t even begin to describe it. Dinah always said she “baked to live.” Janet’s nature was too practical for such an esoteric sense of vocation, and besides, you really baked to eat, didn’t you? But when she finished a birdhouse, or on a morning like this, when she walked onto a job site and saw the raw materials coming together to make something so much more than themselves, she could catch a glimpse of what Dinah meant.

  Middleburg Community Church, or “MCC” to its congregation, was what most people pictured when they thought of a small-town church. White siding, tall columns on either side of a china-blue front door, nestled up against a hillside with a parking lot that needed serious patching. The little fenced-in yard of the preschool was a muddy mess since the storm. The portion of the church that had house
d the school had been a patchwork of make-do and as-we-get-the-funds repairs for weeks, leaving the church looking wounded and bandaged in a collection of tarps.

  Janet looked up as she crossed the church lawn to see that the preschool wing of the church was now completely gone. Simply cut right off the end, like a corner off a sheet cake. That side of the building stood neatly swathed in blue plastic tarps nailed down to the remaining walls with strips of lumber so that the unpredictable winds of a Kentucky autumn couldn’t snatch them away. People clad in white hard hats swarmed over the site and clustered around members of the design team.

  “Hey, look out there!” Janet’s astonished reverie was broken by a crew member’s hand grabbing her elbow just before she would have tripped over a wiggling black cable. It was then that she noticed the cameras. There must have been six of them, shouldered by a camera crew that poked in and out of the clustered workers. Three of them, naturally, were trained on Drew Downing. One cameraman was trying, as gracefully as possible, to get Howard Epson to move so he could shoot the rest of the community’s participation.

  And participate they had. As she began to recognize face after face out of the green-shirted crowd, nearly everyone Janet knew in Middleburg was either helping on the site or watching from the sidewalks. The girls Downing had commissioned to recruit the high school had evidently been quite successful—Janet guessed she was looking at the entire senior class. High school seniors up at seven in the morning on a Saturday? Maybe Downing did have the power of the Almighty working on his behalf.

  Or, more likely, the glare of the television lights.

  As if he’d heard her thoughts, Drew Downing began walking in her direction. With two cameras in tow. I knew it’d get like this.

  “Did you ever think you’d see a hardware spectacle?” Drew asked, pulling a measuring tape off his tool belt and depositing it on a table beside him with an unceremonious thunk. “I love demolition day. It’s more fun than anyone should be allowed to have on television.”

  And that, Janet thought, is just the point. Demolition was serious, even dangerous business. She hoped Missionnovation took safety as seriously as entertainment.

  “You’ve come just in time—this ought to be fabulous. Ever pull a wall down before?”

  “Yes,” Janet said without any hint of excitement.

  Drew pointed at her. “With your bare hands?” He thrust his hands into a large box to his left and pulled out a white hard hat with the green Missionnovation logo. He held it out to Janet.

  “C’mon, lend a hand,” Downing said, offering the hat with a gigawatt smile. “You might have a bit of fun if you’re not careful. But don’t worry, we’re careful, too.” He motioned toward the line of people gathering across from a trio of ropes that were tied to the church’s remaining West wall.

  “We’ve decided to replace the church’s entire roof for you, too,” he said as they began walking. “Kevin’s got an idea to create a garden outside the school windows. It’ll even have a miniature cistern to retain rainwater. You know, teach the kids about ecology and water preservation.”

  Okay, perhaps it was a little impressive. The church had been in dire need of structural improvements even back when she was involved, and based on her mom’s conversation not much had changed in the years she’d stayed away. “Have you looked into a full system that feeds off all the roof gutters? If you’re going to replace the whole roof anyway, why not alter it into a rainwater retrieval system for the entire church?”

  He stopped for a moment, taken aback by her suggestion. “We might take a serious look at that. How many other ideas do you have lurking in the back of that head of yours?”

  Janet decided not to suppress the smile that crept across her face. “Probably more than you want to hear.”

  He grinned as he settled a hard hat down onto his own head. “Let’s test that theory. After we yank this baby down, that is.”

  Howard was getting in the way of things, determined to be at the head of the line until Drew handed Howard his megaphone and insisted that only the Mayor could give the command to pull. Now, one should always think twice before handing Howard Epson a megaphone, but he kept his speech down to an endurable thirty seconds before yelling, “One, two, three, pull!”

  And, just like Jericho, the wall came a-tumblin’ down in what, Janet had to admit, was an enthusiastic but highly controlled manner.

  A second team immediately slid a temporary wall into place that would protect the existing rooms while the framework for the new school wing was constructed. Kevin and Mike walked through the cheering crowd with a collection of bright green crowbars, showing volunteers how to dismantle the fallen lumber and remove the nails. Like happy ants in green T-shirts, volunteers began crawling over the wall, breaking it up and carrying it away. Janet permitted herself a smidge of admiration. They were doing it right.

  Until someone started singing. The crowd joined in, and when she caught sight of her mother conducting half the women’s guild with a crowbar, Janet walked off, depositing her hard hat on a table with an annoyed grumble.

  Vern met her at the door of the hardware store. She took the day’s mail from him and pointed back in the direction of the church. “They’re singing. It’s like a scene from The Sound of Music over there—people in matching outfits chirping away.”

  “I can hear ’em,” Vern said. He scratched his chin and narrowed his eyes. “What you got against happy people all of a sudden? Maybe it ain’t Sound of Music. Maybe it’s Snow White and I’m a’starin’ right at Grumpy.”

  “I am not grumpy.”

  Vern leaned against the door and adjusted his cap. “You’ve been a whole truckload of grumpy since those television folks came into town. I know I had my doubts when they got here, but they seem like good folk to me. I watched them set up yesterday. Good work. Maybe we should give them a little more credit for what they’re tryin’ to do. Ain’t no harm if they have a little fun in the process.”

  Janet’s jaw dropped. That was the closest thing to a lecture Vern had given her in ages. He’d eyed her, drug his feet at some of the things she’d asked him to do, muttered under his breath now and then, but never out-and-out told her off like he just did. Given his first suspicions, this sudden outburst baffled her, and she stared at him.

  The old man walked toward her. “Yeah, I was worried at first, too. And I know they’re a bit much to take. You’re sure we could be blinded by shiny lights and free T-shirts. That we’ll all be so busy looking at the cameras we won’t see them pulling a fast one on us. And I love you for caring so much about this town. But it seems to me that we ought to remember that Drew ain’t Tony. And Middleburg has good folk watching over her. So don’t go putting it on your shoulders.” He reached out and touched her cheek, his lined face folding into a lopsided old grin. “You don’t have to hold up the world, Jannybean. Just Bishop Hardware. And even that you could put down for a time or two if you wanted.”

  Janet swallowed, caught off-guard by Vern’s gesture. “I’m not that grumpy, am I?”

  He winked, crinkling up his face even more. “You ain’t a potful of glee.”

  Potful of glee? Where’d Vern come up with that crazy image? Dinah? “Vern, I have never been a ‘potful of glee’, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be. I think Dinah’s sort of got that covered, anyway.”

  Vern chuckled. “That she does.”

  Janet sighed and rolled her shoulders. She had been a bundle of knots since Missionnovation pulled into town, and Vern was right: the team had yet to give her any grounds to be suspicious. “I suppose I could cut them a little slack. They are trying to do good out there, even if it is bright, shiny, good.”

  Vern tucked his thumbs under his suspenders. “I reckon you can find a middle ground between grumpy and glee.”

  Janet was just about to plant a kiss on the old man’s cheek when the hardware store door flew open.

  “Get a load of these,” Dinah shouted, holding a tray of small cake
s with green and white glaze. “Muffinnovations!”

  Janet rolled her eyes while Vern said under his breath, “Well, then again, maybe you better worry just a little.”

  Chapter Seven

  Janet was walking back from Deacon’s Grill with a roast beef sandwich to go when she heard someone yell “Janet!” and saw Drew Downing jogging up the street to catch up with her. Remembering Vern’s admonition to give Missionnovation a chance, Janet sat down on a bench by the park and waited for Drew to join her. “Go ahead, don’t let me keep you from your lunch,” he said, motioning toward the sandwich she held in her lap. “That from Deacon’s? Everyone has been telling me to eat there.”

  “They make the best pie in the county,” Janet offered. “And a pretty mean roast beef sandwich besides.”

  “Looks like it. Although I have to say, I’m really much more of a cake and cookie man, myself.”

  No wonder Dinah had a thing for him. “Then my friend Dinah Hopkins’s Taste and See Bakery is the place you want. You saw the…”

  “Muffinnovations?” he chuckled. “I gotta admit, that’s a first. Hard to make something that green taste that good. I’m thinking we should post her recipe on the show’s Web site, if she’ll share.”

  “Dinah’s very big on sharing. And she’s very big on Missionnovation. She’ll be thrilled.” Janet took a bite of her sandwich.

  “But you’re not. Thrilled. Yet,” Downing added.

  “Believe it or not, Vern gave me a talking-to on how I should ‘give y’all the benefit of the doubt.’”

  “I just left a list of electrical conduit and wiring with him. We’ll be done framing tomorrow and ready to start pulling some of the utilities through the walls. He’s a hoot, your Vern. Reminds me a whole lot of my dad.”

  “I used to call him ‘Uncle Vern’ when I was little. He’s like a member of our family, he’s been around for so long.”