“I’ll leave ’er out on the counter to thaw and tonight when I get home, I’ll clean ’er. You’ll be here for supper?”
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
Dad slid the salmon back into the bag and laid it on a plastic tray on the counter and headed toward the door.
“They also want me to come up with designs for a holiday tabletop line for both china and paper . . .”
“It’s trash day,” Mom hollered to Dad’s back as she cranked on the water in the sink full blast to wash the breakfast dishes. “Don’t forget to put the cans out.”
“I been taking the trash out for twenty-nine years,” said Dad. “I don’t think I need instructions.”
“That’s not all,” said Harley, still trying to get their attention. “I’m in talks with a furniture company about doing a full line of home décor, lighting, and bedding.”
“How about that? Won’t Louise be psyched,” said Mom, plunging her yellow rubber gloves into the soapsuds.
Louise and her husband, Abe, owned the Victorian on the ridge. Mom had been making good money as an exotic dancer, but she gave that up when she got pregnant with Harley and started cleaning houses for Newberry’s upper crust, of whom Louise was one.
“Louise always got a kick out of hearing me talk about your little drawings. Oh, Tuck? Take the lid off the can. Last time they threw it onto the flowerbed.”
“Have you seen the guys that lift them cans? They’re kids. What do they care about a few flowers? Few lids won’t hurt ’em anyway.”
“. . . And so, now that I can afford it, I’ve decided to adopt a baby.”
The faucet shut off with a thunk and a shudder of the old pipes.
Dad spun around on the threshold and stared at Harley, his forehead furrowed.
For a long moment, the only sound in the kitchen was the muted voice of the local newscaster on the kitchen TV, reporting on the effect of the recent weather on the county’s wine grape crop.
“What’s this?” Dad walked back to the table like wading through wet cement.
This time, Mom didn’t say a word about his boots.
“You heard. I’m going to adopt.”
Mom came over to the table, drying her hands on her dish towel, and lowered herself into the chair across from Harley’s. “It’s hard raising a baby by yourself. Don’t you want to wait till you find Mr. Right?”
Mom was a good one to talk; she and Dad had never officially tied the knot. Yet their relationship seemed to grow stronger with time until now, despite their separate interests—or maybe because of them—they were solid as a rock. But apparently, when it came to their only daughter, they had a different set of standards.
“I’ve given up on finding a man.”
“What about one of those dating apps? I thought you said you were on one of them.”
“I am. And you’re right; it’s almost too easy. I can have five guys a night, if I want—”
Dad clapped his hands over his ears and screwed his eyes shut. “Do me a favor, wouldja? Save that kind of talk for after I go to work.”
“—but no one I want to have a baby with. My clock is ticking. I’m almost thirty years old. You know how much I’ve always wanted children. If I can’t have any of my own, I’m just going to do it.”
“Thirty’s nothing. You got plenty of time. Doesn’t she, Tuck?”
“You always said how glad you two were to have had me so young,” said Harley. “You said you loved growing up along with me.”
“Well, sure, but . . .” Dad frowned, while Mom twisted the large turquoise stone Dad bought from a Navajo artisan on a road trip to New Mexico that took the place of a traditional wedding ring.
“Didn’t I always say you was artistic?” said Mom finally.
“That’s true, Mom. You always did.”
Harley’s heart warmed. Mom never failed to look on the bright side. People like the Miller-Joneses, who lived paycheck to paycheck, couldn’t afford to buy their kids electronic tablets or ski weekends at Mt. Hood. Slim as her pocketbook was, though, somehow Mom had always found money for art supplies. Once, clutching a set of Electro Pop Sharpies Mom had waited a half hour for her to pick out, Harley had peered up at her from where they waited in the line for her weekly lottery tickets and asked, “Are you sure?” “Don’t worry about it,” Mom had barked. And whenever Harley’s sketchpads ran out, a ream of snow-white copier paper would mysteriously appear after her next cleaning job.
Dad folded his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. “How far along are you with this idea of yours? Hell, I don’t even know the right questions to ask. What do you do, call up and place your order, like for takeout? Do you get to pick what color eyes it has and if it’s gonna be good with its hands?” His eyes widened. “Do you already got one in mind?”
Harley laughed. “As a matter of fact . . . I was having coffee last week with Kelly. She’s a web developer who lives in my building. Her husband’s a doctor in the Reserves. At the time I moved in, he was deployed. Kelly and I were both new in town and looking for a friend.
“I confided in her about wanting to adopt, and she burst out bawling. Turns out, she just found out she’s pregnant.”
Dad and Mom exchanged glances.
“She already has two toddlers, born in the same year. They don’t want another baby. At least, not right now.”
“That’s what they say now. What if they change their minds?” asked Mom.
“They’d already talked it through. Even contacted an adoption agency. Anyway, Kelly squeezed my hand so hard I thought it would break, and she was shaking, and we just looked at each other and then I started crying and—”sniff “—well, to make a long story short, we knew it was a sign.” Sniff. She snatched a napkin from the basket in the middle of the kitchen table and honked into it.
Mom came over and hugged Harley’s head into her pillowy breasts, smothering her in a cloud of patchouli. “Awww, honey. Don’t cry. So, they canceled the agency?”
“I found a family lawyer online, and she told me that it can take years to get a baby through an agency, and I should seriously consider what Kelly had to say.”
“When is it—” Mom started. “Is it a he or a she?”
“Around Christmas. We won’t know the gender until eighteen weeks.”
“Long as you can take care of it,” said Dad, now somewhat recovered. “The only ones who say money’s not everything is the ones who’ve got it.” He kissed the top of Harley’s head. “Now I got to go before I fool around and get my ass fired. How long till you go back up north?”
“I thought I’d head back Friday afternoon. I have an appointment Saturday morning with a Realtor.”
“Guess you’ll be needing some more room, now that there’ll be two of you.”
“Kelly wants the baby to be raised in a house, not an apartment. That’s where she hopes to raise their other kids, and she doesn’t want anything less for this one.”
“Your first real house!” exclaimed Mom.
“Actually—” she had one more piece of news, “I’m starting a bed-and-breakfast.”
“A B and B!?” Mom exclaimed. For the second time, she and Dad exchanged looks. “Don’t think we don’t go along with your fancy. We’re always there for you . . .”
Except when you’re off playing the slots or hiking the Appalachian Trail for months on end, thought Harley, bemused. Her parents had always been adventurous types.
“. . . but running a bed-and-breakfast won’t be easy. The place always has to be neat as a pin.”
“I can do it. I have a successful business, remember?”
“No offense, but you were never that big on housecleaning.”
So maybe Harley never made her bed when she was still living at home. Come to think of it, she still didn’t. It didn’t seem important. But she would if she had to.
“I’ll be making decent money on my franchise deals, but I’m far from rich. And I’ll be raising the baby on my own, so the
extra income will come in handy. Because I already work from home, it seems like the perfect solution.”
“If that’s what you want.” Mom lit up. “Why, you ought to come back home here, to Yamhill County! They’re slapping up hotels as fast as they can to take advantage of the wine boom, but there aren’t enough quaint little places where you can get the real feel of the area. All you got is that swanky resort on the other side of town where a salad’ll set you back fifty bucks, or one of those chains on 99, where you need earplugs to drown out the traffic noise so you can sleep at night. Nothing much in between.”
Return to Ribbon Ridge? Harley might be a born risk-taker, but that was one risk she would never take. For her, Ribbon Ridge would always be synonymous with Jack Friestatt.
From the day eight-year-old Harley came across Jack in the hedgerow surrounding his family vineyards, they became inseparable. Playing hide and seek between the rows . . . stooping to examine rocks. And especially Jack’s favorite thing to play—pirates. Harley drew the maps and Jack swiped his mother’s silver spoons to dig for buried treasure.
If not for Emily Redmond, they might still be together today.
The Redmonds, like the Friestatts, had lived on Ribbon Ridge for generations. The two families were twisted together like a grapevine on a wire. Emily and Jack had been born in the same hospital, baptized in the same church, and attended the same parochial school. They went to all each other’s birthday parties. The Redmonds and Freistatts even vacationed together, in exotic places like Hawaii and Alaska.
To a kid like Harley, it might as well have been Mars and Jupiter.
There was an unspoken expectation that Jack and Emily were destined for each other. They even had their own nickname—Jemily. Harley shouldn’t have been surprised when Jack suddenly married Emily when they were eighteen.
But Harley was surprised. More than surprised. She was devastated. She couldn’t bear to stick around and watch Jemily live out their fairy-tale existence. She had left Ribbon Ridge for good.
But once again, fate proved it had no respect for fairy tales. Jack’s family moved to the wine country of New Zealand to expand their business. There, five years later, Emily was killed in a car crash.
Yet for Harley, Ribbon Ridge was still steeped in Jack’s presence. Every time she came home to visit, in her fertile imagination she still saw him everywhere she looked. His red truck haunted the back roads, his rangy gait stalked down Main Street.
“Mom, aren’t you forgetting something? You’ll be gone around the time the baby comes. You’re going to Spain to hike that Camino-whatever trail.”
Mom and her longtime hiking buddy, Blain, had already conquered the triple crown of hiking: the Pacific Crest, the Appalachian Trail, and the Continental Divide. Now they were ready to hike in Europe. Back when Harley was in high school, Mom’s unconventional ways raised more than few eyebrows, but Dad didn’t seem to mind. Then again, her parents had never believed in sacrificing their individuality to their partnership.
“Camino de Santiago de Compostela.”
From the sound of it, Mom had been practicing her Spanish accent. “Right. That one.”
“I’ll only be gone a month.”
“I was going to start looking around the Seattle suburbs. Maybe the Bainbridge Island area.”
Mom swallowed back any misgivings she might have had. “Just think. You’re going to be famous for your art—”
“That’s kind of a stretch.” Harley laughed.
“—you’re going to buy your first house, and you’re having a baby, all at the same time! It’s all so exciting, I can’t stand it!” She raised her coffee mug in a salute. “Here’s to you, baby girl. I can’t wait to tell everyone!”
“Hold on. Dad, you too. You can’t tell anyone. Not a soul. I don’t want to jinx this. Kelly isn’t even past her first trimester yet.”
“Then when? How long do you expect me to hold on to news this juicy? I don’t know if I can stand it.”
“I don’t know yet. It’s all still brand-new. Now, listen. I wanted you to be the first to know. But you’re going to have to play along with me, do it my way until I give you the word. Do you promise?”
“My lips are sealed,” said Dad. “See you tonight.”
Across the table, Mom looked doubtful. “I’ll try, but I still don’t know why—”
“Mom! Promise.”
She sighed. “If you say so. I’ll do my damnedest.”
Harley poured herself another cup of coffee while Mom moved efficiently around the kitchen, putting her own house in order before going off to straighten someone else’s.
Harley knew she could trust Dad. Mom, she wasn’t so sure.
Chapter Four
A week later, Harley was walking to her neighborhood coffeehouse in the rain when Mom called.
“How’s the house-hunting going? Find anything that strikes your fancy?”
“Not yet—” Crap! She hopped out of the puddle she’d stepped in, cold water dripping from her sandal. “—but we’ve just started looking.”
That wasn’t completely true. She’d looked at no fewer than a dozen properties, but all of them were either laid-out wrong or on a busy street where a child couldn’t safely ride a bike or too far from the main tourist sites. She was merely aping what the Realtor had told her Saturday after a long day of looking. But she wasn’t quite as impulsive as she used to be. She’d done a bit of her own research. Every place remaining on her list was a compromise. Then again, maybe she was setting her sights too high.
“What’s new with you?”
“I was just talking to Louise . . .”
An Asian woman sporting blue hair and fishnets tipped her head sideways to avoid Harley’s umbrella.
“Anyways, the Grimskys are taking their dream trip to Italy, and then they’re retiring to Arizona. They already picked out a place down there. I’ve started helping them pack up their stuff.”
“Wait.” Harley’s feet froze on the sidewalk. “What?”
“They’re taking a long vacation—”
“No. Go back. The Grimskys are moving? They’re putting the Victorian up for sale?”
“Didn’t I tell you? Louise is getting her hip replaced. She won’t be able to do stairs for a while, so instead of waiting, they’re going to move first and have the surgery down there so she can recover in her new home. She made me be sure to pack the framed print you gave her—you know which one, that best seller—so she can hang it on her wall down in Arizona. It’s one of those fifty-five-and-over places that’s all on one—”
“The Grimskys are selling, and you waited until today to tell me?”
There was a pause on the phone. “When was I supposed to tell you?”
“Yesterday. Before that. The very second you found out.”
“How was I supposed to know that? Listen. You remember the Grimskys couldn’t have kids. When I told them you’re adopting a baby, Louise told me to invite you up to see the house.”
“I told you not to tell anyone about the baby!”
“It’s just the Grimskys.”
“Mom!”
A lumbersexual in a plaid shirt whose grooming was better than hers dodged her, and she realized she was standing in the center of the busy sidewalk. Her feet began moving again.
“Do you really think the people down in Tucson are going to give two hoots about what Miss Harley Miller-Jones from Newberry is up to?”
“Seattle. I’ve been in Seattle for ten years.” By now, she was practically a native. The barista at the coffeehouse brought her usual without being asked. She could point out Kurt Cobain’s house to tourists, and she knew never to visit Pike Place Market on a Saturday.
“Once word gets out, it’s just a matter of time before other people find out.”
“I don’t get what the big deal is. In today’s world, people need good news. Matter of fact, they crave it. Is this because of Jack?”
Harley tensed. Mom knew how badly Jack had hurt
her. If it hadn’t been for him, she never would have left Newberry.
“Because Jack’s been gone going on five years now. He’s a whole hemisphere away—as far from Ribbon Ridge as you can get. You don’t have to worry about running into him anymore.”
She stooped to deposit her usual folded bill into the hat of the homeless guy who lived at the corner. “I could never afford the Victorian anyway.”
Mom sighed. “You’ll never know if you don’t ask. We can go up and see it when you’re here Saturday for my birthday. What have you got to lose?”
No fair pulling out the birthday card. “I’ll think about it.”
“Oh, good. Louise will be thrilled.”
“I didn’t promise anything . . .”
“You can go to my goat yoga class with me, too.”
She groaned inwardly. Harley and yoga had an on-again, off-again relationship. She only went back when enough time had passed between classes for her to forget how grueling it was.
“It is my birthday.”
Harley sighed heavily. “Okay.” After they said good-bye she dropped her phone into her bag. But a door she had slammed shut all those years ago had cracked open, and a sliver of light shone through.
Chapter Five
The following Saturday
Harley stared at a spot on the wall, hands in prayer position, trying to balance on one foot.
“Breathe . . .” said the instructor.
Easy for you to say. Sweat trickled down between her shoulder blades. She bet not even B.K.S. Iyengar could hold tree pose for long with a goat licking the sensitive spot behind his knee. The barely stifled giggles of the other yogis didn’t help matters any.
Whoa . . . oof. The straw beneath her mat rustled as the kid skipped blithely away.
Time crawled while she tried to maintain the pose. She looked around for a clock to watch, but barns didn’t typically have clocks, and this one was no exception. Note to self: Yet another reason not to do goat yoga. They were piling up. She wrinkled her nose. Piling up . . . literally.
The instructor was speaking again. “Lying on our backs, we’re going to go into bridge. So, bending our knees, placing our feet close to our sit bones. And now, class, if your body wants to—”
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