Romancing Nadine

by Amy Lillard

Yes, she had said that Amos was free to have pie with whomever he wanted, and she had meant it. But a part of her didn’t want him to have pie with anyone but her. Pie or cookies, cake, coffee, ice cream, you name it. She had known that if she spent too much time with him that this was going to happen. She was going to start to fall in love with him. Or at the very least start to depend on him. As surely as that would happen, something would rip them apart. She was too old to go through that again. Her only choice was to cut herself off from him, save her heart, and pray for the best.

  * * *

  Saturday morning dawned as a perfect day to start again. And that’s exactly what Nadine planned to do.

  She and Charlotte ate their breakfast, cleaned up the mess, then worked with the puppy for a while. After that, it was time to get down to cleaning the barn. Goldie’s romp through the paint was enough to spur Nadine into finally organizing the barn, if not pitching out most of what was there. Plus she hoped she might run across some paint she could use to touch up the barn, but she was certain the only way to get a good match would be to paint the whole thing over again. She just wasn’t sure she was up for that herself. She wasn’t quite as young as she used to be.

  “Are you going over to see him today?” Charlotte asked. She lugged a couple of hubcaps to the trash heap, then dusted her hands. “Do you think the man who lived here before us was a hoarding?”

  “You mean a hoarder?” Nadine asked. “I don’t know. He sure had a lot of stuff.” Most of the people she knew kept a lot of stuff. Frugal, they’d called it back in her day. A person kept things that might be useful again. Nowadays you were basically accused of having some sort of problem if you kept too many things.

  “So are you?” Charlotte asked.

  Nadine shook her head. Somewhere she had lost the thread of the conversation. She took a load of empty frames to the trash heap. The pile to get rid of was already much larger than the section of things that they were going to keep. “Am I what?”

  “Going over to see Amos today?”

  “No.” Her answer brooked no argument. And that was how she was handling it. She was not going to see Amos. She had made up her mind. And she wasn’t changing it.

  “Did something happen?” Charlotte stopped and stretched. It wasn’t even noon, and the temperature was already in the seventies. Oklahoma weather tended to skip right over spring and dive headlong into summer. On top of the warmth, the air was thick with humidity and off to the west, the threat of rain clouded the sky.

  “No.” Nadine kept pulling things out of the barn at a steady pace. She wasn’t about to stop. She had to keep going, just like she had to keep going with this new direction with her life. No more messing around. No more putting her heart at risk. She had said it before; she was too old for this nonsense.

  “I feel like . . .” Charlotte stopped as Nadine made her way back into the barn. “I feel like something must have,” she said on a rush once Nadine appeared from inside again.

  Nadine set down the box of plastic bowls and lids and forced herself to stop. “Nothing happened. I’ve just ... well, I’ve just been kidding myself these last few weeks, but no more. Amos wants someone to love, and I don’t.”

  But as she said the words, her heart constricted as if a giant hand had squeezed it tight. She rubbed her chest.

  “You can’t mean that,” Charlotte replied.

  “I can, and I do.” Nadine knelt on the ground and started sorting through the plasticware. This had to be where Amos had found the lids he’d used to fashion the twins’ “horseshoes.”

  She shook her head at herself as she began to pick through them. She was doing everything in her power to forget about Amos, to put him from her mind, but at every turn, there he was again.

  She wished she could lay the blame with Charlotte. Her daughter-in-law might not be helping in Nadine’s efforts, but she wasn’t solely responsible. Nadine herself was having trouble getting him out of her thoughts.

  But she wasn’t giving up. She had to keep on. Just like with any pain, disappointment, or heartbreak, it eased with time. It wouldn’t go completely away, she knew that, and time was the only thing that could take away the sharp edges.

  “Well, okay.” Charlotte heaved a deep breath as if she was trying to settle herself to this change in plans. “I hope you don’t mind if I still give him his shirt.”

  “What do I care?” Nadine shrugged. “You made it for him.”

  “Good. I’ll probably go over and give it to him this afternoon.”

  Nadine looked up at the sky and wiped a hand across her brow. “Then you better get to helping me get all this sorted before the rain starts.”

  * * *

  The first fat drops fell as they were putting the last of the “keepers” back into the barn. The trash pile was taller than Nadine and bigger around than the buggy. She’d had no idea that there was so much ... junk in the barn. It had simply been there and no one had ever bothered to clean it up. But now that it was in the middle of their yard, they were going to have to find someone to come and haul it off for them.

  “I’m sure if you ask Titus, he and Buddy will come.”

  Nadine nodded. She was certain of that too, but she hated to trade on their good favor. If she called a stranger, she would pay him. But she would rather give the money to a friend. But the friend would never accept it. And round and round it went.

  “I could make them a cake.”

  “I’m sure they would greatly appreciate that,” Nadine said. A cake would nowhere near cover the cost of hiring someone, but at least there was some sort of payment involved.

  They stared at the front window at the falling rain.

  “I guess the pile can stay there until Monday,” Charlotte commented.

  Nadine nodded. “I suppose so. Tomorrow’s Sunday.” And though it was an off-church Sunday, that still meant no work other than what was strictly necessary.

  “We could ride over and talk to Titus and Buddy about it. Visit with Jenna.” Charlotte smiled at Nadine as if she needed cheering up. She supposed she could use a little good cheer, but it would take time for her to bounce back. That’s what everyone said. It was what she knew from her own experiences.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get to take the shirt to Amos before the rain set in.” Bah! There she went again, talking about him when no one else had even brought him up.

  “It’s all right.” Charlotte turned away from the window. “I think I’ll sew for a bit.” She made her way over to the table and spread the material out on the flat surface.

  “A new dress for Jenna?” Nadine asked. The color was beautiful, even if it was a little dark for Jenna’s tastes.

  “This one is for you.” Charlotte smiled, then went back to smoothing the fabric.

  “I told you that you didn’t have to make me a new dress. I just made one last week.”

  “Well, I’m making you one this week. Now say thank you and go watch it rain.”

  Nadine didn’t know what to say, so in the end, she did as Charlotte asked. But there was only so much time a person could spend looking at the weather.

  * * *

  It rained off and on all through the night and continued after the sun came up on Sunday. A non-church Sunday usually meant visiting and enjoying family and friends. When it wasn’t raining, that was. But no one wanted to get out in the wet unless they absolutely had to. And they didn’t, so Nadine and Charlotte stayed in.

  Charlotte had finished Nadine’s dress the night before, and it was now hanging in her closet for the next occasion she would have to wear something special. It was an everyday dress, but something about the color . . . or maybe because it was new . . . Nadine wanted to save it.

  “I’ve been wanting to take some time and read,” Charlotte said. She settled down in the rocking chair with a book Nadine had never seen before.

  “Rainy days are good for reading.”

  “And needlework.” She nodded toward the blanket Nadine was knitting. />
  “Jah.”

  Charlotte opened her book and started to read. The only sounds that could be heard were the patter of the rain on the roof, the steady tick of the mantel clock, and the irregular snores of one little golden-colored puppy.

  “I don’t suppose he’ll come by today. Not with the rain.”

  “Who?” Nadine asked, though she knew. She just wanted to pretend like she didn’t.

  “Amos.”

  “Nobody will get out in this. Why should he?”

  Charlotte pressed her lips together in that prim way she had. “I was hoping he would come by to see you. Then I could give him his new shirt.”

  “I’m sure the rain will keep him home.” Like yesterday afternoon. But she didn’t want to think about yesterday morning when the weather had been nice with no clouds in sight. He’d just been busy was all.

  But there was this nagging little part of everyone that tells them they aren’t pretty enough, tall enough, slim enough. All the things that make a person feel unworthy. And that part was telling her that Amos had moved on.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Charlotte said.

  Or maybe he had finally followed her demands and had given up. But they had vowed to be friends. That meant something . . . didn’t it?

  “Maybe,” she said, but she didn’t believe it herself.

  * * *

  “I guess the whole barn will eventually need painting,” Nadine said the following morning. It had rained for most of Sunday but cleared up just as the sun was going down. Dusk was no time to be out visiting, so if Amos had wanted to come over, he wouldn’t have been able to, and—why was she still thinking about this?

  It was done. Just as she had known it would be, and she should be thanking her lucky stars that she had escaped with her heart.

  Most of her heart.

  Half of it, at any rate.

  But how was she supposed to resist someone like Amos Fisher? He was smart and kind and funny and good at everything. The miracle of miracles was how he had managed to remain unmarried until he was over sixty. The girls who lived in Missouri must not have been very smart.

  The good news was whatever damage had been done to her heart would heal. At least he’d left her while she still held most of it for herself.

  Now she just had to get on with the business of living. And repainting the barn.

  “I’ll hire someone to do it. Isn’t there a bulletin board in the front of the post office?” Charlotte asked. “I’ll see if someone who posted there does such tasks.”

  “I guess we’ll have to. I’m not as young as I used to be,” Nadine said. “And neither are you,” she added before Charlotte could dispute her. She had just been that way lately, Charlotte had, saying one thing, then contradicting herself in the next breath. Nadine was beginning to wonder if she truly was going through the change.

  Nadine looked over to where Goldie played, romping in the yard, chasing whatever took her fancy, from sunrays to the wind. She was filthy. Cute, but very, very dirty from running through the puddles left from yesterday’s rain.

  “You are not going to be able to let her back into the house without another bath.” It had only been a couple of days since the bath to clean the paint off her. Fortunately most of the green had come off, but there were still spots of caked fur covered with green paint on the backs of all four legs. Of course, now they were covered again with Oklahoma red-dirt mud. Nadine couldn’t decide which was worse.

  The mud, she thought. Paint could only last so long, and she had seen T-shirts at the gift shop in town that had been dyed using Oklahoma dirt.

  “I’ll go run the water.” Charlotte sighed and made her way around the back of the house.

  Nadine chuckled, but not so loudly that Charlotte could hear, and continued pitching discarded items from the barn into the trash barrel.

  “Are you going tonight?” Charlotte asked a few minutes later. She was trying to coax the puppy to her using everything from her favorite toy to the hot-dog-shaped treats she had bought at the Super Cost Saver grocery store.

  “Going where?” Nadine asked. She had stopped dumping trash and was watching the play between dog and woman acting out before her. The puppy was smarter than either one of them had given her credit for, and somehow she knew that accepting the treat or the toy would lead to something unpleasant.

  Or maybe she was just in the mood to play.

  It was hard to tell.

  Her brown eyes seemed intelligent, like those of a horse, but with that pink tongue lolling out the side of her mouth, it was hard to believe she was anything but a sweet doofus.

  Charlotte was down on all fours herself, kneeling on a large piece of cardboard that had been stored in the barn. She extended the treat toward Goldie. “To the seniors’ meeting.” She took her eyes from the dog and centered them on Nadine.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you—” Her words broke off as Goldie darted forward when she wasn’t looking and snatched the treat from Charlotte’s fingers. “Ugh! Dog, you are impossible.” She flounced over to the porch and picked up another treat. But Goldie was perfectly content for the time being and wasn’t about to risk getting caught in order to try and snag another morsel.

  Nadine waited for a heartbeat longer, then turned back to stuffing as much as she could into the trash barrel. She wasn’t about to remind Charlotte of the conversation she had abandoned.

  Charlotte propped her rear on the edge of the porch and tossed the treat to the puppy. “Because you need to go and let Amos see that you are perfectly okay with him eating pie with Mabel Ebersol. You are, aren’t you?” Charlotte asked. “Okay with him eating pie with her? Because you said you were, but I’m just verifying that I have the story straight.”

  “That’s right,” Nadine said, even though she knew that Charlotte knew what the story was on her and Amos.

  Or something like that.

  “Well, if you are—truly okay with him having pie with her—then you should go tonight to prove to them both that you’re okay with it.”

  Nadine mulled over the words in her head before finally nodding. “Jah. I think so.”

  “I know so. You need to go tonight, wear your new dress. Let me fix your hair for you, and you can show him that you have moved on.”

  * * *

  Nadine wasn’t sure the exact moment when she realized that Charlotte had played on her good nature and tender emotions to get her to confront Amos, but standing outside on Martha Schrock’s porch in the new beautiful blue dress Charlotte had made for her, Nadine was very aware of it. So very aware.

  This was so very juvenile, from wearing new clothes to coming to the meeting tonight to prove to him that she didn’t care. If she didn’t care—and she was working hard toward that very goal—then why would she need to prove anything to him? But she had realized it a little late.

  But not too late. All she had to do was ease back down the porch steps, hustle back over to her tractor, and head on home before anyone knew that she was there.

  The front door opened.

  Too late.

  “I thought I heard someone out here,” Martha said. “Come on in, Nadine. We’re just about to start the decorating contest.”

  Decorating contest? She hadn’t remembered anyone saying anything about that at the last meeting. Or maybe she had been too wrapped up in other things—namely Amos Fisher—which just went to show you that some relationships were simply not healthy. If she was forgetting something so basic as a . . .

  She walked into the dining room behind Martha.

  “Look who I found,” Martha told the room as a whole.

  The men were all gathered around the dining room table. Sugar cookies in various shapes were piled on plates in the middle of the table with bowls of different-colored icing, all sorts of jimmies and other various tools used for cookie and cake decorating.

  “Hi, Nadine.” Several of the women greeted her and only a couple of the men, the only ones who wer
en’t embroiled in the decorating contest. At least she thought that was what she was witnessing.

  “The men were saying how we got it easy and all the things we do are so simple.”

  “So they were challenged to a cookie-decorating contest?”

  “I figured we might actually get them to do this,” Martha said.

  Verna Yutzy bustled over. “Jah, we figured if we told them they had to do a load of laundry, they might get suspicious.”

  “You’re right about that,” Cleon said.

  “Why aren’t you in the middle of this battle?” Nadine asked.

  He held up a tiny strip of paper. “I drew second round. You missed all that.”

  “Jah,” she murmured. She really needed to get there on time if things like this continued to happen. There might really be something going on that she wanted to see. And not just—

  “Amos?” His name burst from her lips. Was she surprised to see him? No, but she was surprised to see that his new shirt, the one that Charlotte had worked so hard on Friday night, was the exact same color ... made out of the exact same material ... as the dress Charlotte had made for her.

  Nadine couldn’t fight the feeling that she had been set up.

  “Aren’t y’all cute.” Maddie Kauffman frowned at the two of them as if wearing matching clothes were somehow against the Ordnung. And they all knew that that wasn’t true. Some families went everywhere dressed in the same colors. But Nadine surely didn’t want to be dressed in the same color as Amos. That looked a little too much like a couple thing to do. And they were not a couple.

  “Hey, Nadine.” He looked up from his cookie only long enough to greet her; then he focused his attention back on the decorating.

  She should have known that his cookie would be the best. That was just Amos: He excelled at everything. His was covered in pink icing with a white border of little star-shaped blobs of white icing. He had used silver balls of candy that looked like little BBs to add details to the swirls of white icing decorating the top. It was pretty and elegant and by far the most professional looking of them all.

  She stifled a snort and turned away. Cookie-decorating contest! Whoever heard of such a thing? She half-listened to the chatter and cheers and went in search of something to drink. Her mouth was dry. Or maybe she was bored. Coming here was a mistake. How had she allowed Charlotte to talk her into coming tonight? It had been a setup all along.