Easter Promises

by Lois Richer

  She didn’t really expect the Good Shepherd Jesus to offer up wise counsel, but it would have been so nice if He did. As it was, she left the sanctuary with her thoughts still in tangles.

  “I told you Howard wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Emily Sorrent said as she concentrated on her needles when Audrey met her in the town bakery that afternoon. Emily’s baby girl was due in June and Audrey was teaching her to knit pink booties. “Oh, I dropped another stitch. How do I fix this again?” Audrey took the needles from Emily, admiring again the yarn’s exquisite softness and “aww”-producing pink hue. Even with the smattering of new-knitter mistakes, the booties were adorable. She worked the wayward stitch back into place as she bemoaned her fruitless conversation with Howard. “I can’t believe I backed down and said I’d think about it. I need to be off that project. I should have just marched down that hall after him and made him let me off.” She handed the restored project back to Emily and took up her own project, a sweater for Emily’s baby girl out of the same delectable pink yarn. She was so glad that Emily had asked for knitting lessons, and that together they were partnering to make the baby a matched set. It felt like loving this little girl into the world one stitch at a time.

  “You’d be the first,” Emily chuckled. “No one changes that man’s mind.” Emily started up knitting again. “Are you really having seven lambs? And you didn’t know?”

  Only twenty-four hours, and word had spread. It was making Audrey nuts to have to admit her ignorance to everyone in Middleburg. Lots of shepherds never know which of their ewes are lambing until they’re shorn. She just never wanted to be “lots of shepherds.” While Audrey understood that Dusty’s adventures made for a highly amusing tale, she felt like all the fun was at her expense. The worst practical joke ever, with live, four-legged consequences. The word made her think of the equally amusing bit with Lilly and the red chair, and she told Emily the story.

  “Paul seems really nice. Gil likes him.” Gil, Emily’s husband, wasn’t exactly the welcoming type, so that earned Paul high marks from Audrey. “Gil told me he’s joined the men’s Bible study at church. It’s so sad to see an adorable little girl without her mother.”

  Audrey thought of Lilly’s great, round eyes, imagining tears flowing out of them instead of the sparkles she always saw. Little ones shouldn’t be taken from their mamas. Not even sheep mamas.

  “I can’t sell them. The lambs, I mean. I’d have to sell the ewes with their lambs so they wouldn’t be separated, and I couldn’t bear to lose the girls.”

  Emily put down her knitting. “Audrey, you’re the sweetest person I know, and I adore you, but I’m sorry, honey—it has to be said. These are sheep we’re talking about. Farm animals. I’m not even sure they’d know if you separated them.”

  “I’d know.”

  “You said it yourself. You don’t have what you need to take care of all those sheep. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m stumped.”

  Dinah Rollings, owner of the bakery, and the only person Audrey had never been able to teach knitting—mostly because Dinah never sat down for more than ten seconds at a time—sauntered over to the little bistro table where the tea-and-knitting session was taking place. She’d been popping in and out of the conversation while tending to the bakery. “Maybe you don’t have to know just yet.” Dinah hooked a chair with her foot and pulled it over to sit on it backward as it faced the table. “Oh, Audrey, adorable just does not even begin to cover it. I don’t even like pink and I can’t take my eyes off those itty-bitty little booties.”

  “You just work your wonders with frosting, that’s all,” Audrey offered.

  “How are the girls holding up?” Audrey loved that Dinah had taken to calling her flock “the girls,” as well. “Ready for the Seven Wooly Wonders of Audrey’s World?”

  “The Seven Wooly Worries of Audrey’s World, more like. My vet confirmed it—three of the girls are having twins. Come to think of it, the only one not having twins is the one who was supposed to be pregnant in the first place.”

  Dinah fingered the tiny ruffles that formed the bottom edge of the baby sweater. “Does make you wonder what God’s up to, don’t it?”

  “This is my mistake, not an act of God. My oversight. My stupidity.”

  “You didn’t know Dusty had jumped the fence? Didn’t you find him in the other pen with the other ewes?” Dinah leaned her elbows on the chair back, hungry for a juicy story.

  “The sneaky little fellow jumped back over, it seems. I mean, really. You just don’t count on that level of deceit in an animal.”

  “Obviously,” Emily said, rolling her eyes, “you’ve never owned a cat.” Audrey had forgotten that Emily’s cat, Othello, had given her and Gil no end of trouble when Emily moved out to Gil’s Homestretch Farm. Still, it was a long way from “mouse presented at bedside” to “six surprise mouths to feed.”

  “Good thing you’ve got a vet right next door, though. That’s got to be a blessing.” Dinah offered.

  “You’d think,” replied Audrey as she resumed knitting. “But he’s ‘on leave’ from his vet practice. The only help he’s offered so far is admitting he suspected the girls were pregnant when he saw their bellies and confirming my shearer’s opinion. The moment he announced it. Really, how embarrassing is it to have a whopping slipup like this revealed to you in front of a vet? He’s been very nice and all, but I’m sure he doesn’t think too much of my animal husbandry.”

  “Wait a minute,” Emily said. “You said even your own vet didn’t know, right? What makes you think you’d have figured it out earlier if no one else could? You should cut yourself a little slack, Audrey. And Paul, too. Maybe he’s just waiting for you to ask for help. You know, trying not to intrude. My doctor friend says she never offers advice until she’s asked. He might be the same way.”

  “I sat in his kitchen hysterical over the whole thing. How much more direct do I need to be?”

  Emily turned her needles, smiling at the satisfaction of having completed another row. “This is a man we’re talking about. The blunt instrument species.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Dinah teased. “Cameron would have offered twelve times already to come in and draw you up an action plan with charts and tables.” Dinah popped off the chair, her eyes growing wide. “In Paul Sycamore’s kitchen, hmm?”

  “Asking him if I should fire my vet, thank you very much.”

  “Well—” Dinah twirled a lock of her bright red hair “—you did say husbandry.” Her teasing look was replaced by one Audrey knew too well—the unmistakable expression of Dinah Rollings getting a wild idea. “Hey, wait a minute, that’s it.”

  Emily and Audrey exchanged looks. “What?” they said with simultaneous displays of trepidation.

  “Have Cameron do his chart thing. Paul’s in the same church Bible study as Cameron, right? Why don’t we have Cameron do his math projection thing to see what you’d really need to deal with keeping all the sheep? If he gets Paul’s input, then you can sort of gauge how willing he’d be to help without actually asking. He’s just helping Cameron help you, not helping you personally. It’s kind of like baking a pie with someone else’s crust.”

  Audrey furrowed her brow. Dinah’s crazy baking metaphors were the stuff of Middleburg legend. “That makes no sense, you know that.” She moved her gaze away from Dinah while she executed a complicated stitch. “I have lots of information. I’ve done my own ‘chart thing’ you know, I don’t go into ventures unprepared.”

  Dinah shrugged. “Leave it to me. I got it covered.”

  Audrey leveled a glare. “No.”

  “What do you have to lose? You need help—you said so yourself. Why stop me from seeing if I can get the handsome vet next door to lend a hand? It’s like God installed him right next door at just the right time, if you think about it. You know, there are no coincidences…”

  “Only God-incidences,” Emily said, right on cue, completing Dinah’s favorite phr
ase for her. “Dinah, don’t get all match-’em-up on her. He’s a widower. He’s still got healing to do.”

  That was a new one—Emily had a reputation as the community matchmaker, so this really was the pot calling the kettle black, to indulge Dinah’s love of metaphors. “Okay, so I have thought about it,” Emily admitted under Audrey’s glare. “It’s not like I said anything out loud.”

  “Emily…” In truth, Audrey was surprised Emily had held off this long. Which meant, hopefully, that she shared Audrey’s reluctance to consider any kind of relationship with someone coming off such a huge wound as the loss of a wife. It was a bad idea, plain and simple.

  “Well, don’t tell me you haven’t taken a good long look yourself. Handsome, professional, Godly, caring dad, twenty-five yards to the east—it is rather…”

  “God-incidental,” finished Dinah.

  “…convenient,” Emily continued.

  “None of your business,” Audrey declared, hoping that would be the end of it.

  “Oh, honey, you should know better than to try an old chestnut like that. This is Middleburg, where everything is everybody’s business.”

  Chapter Six

  Pastor Anderson put one hand on Paul’s shoulder Tuesday night at Bible study. “So, how did yesterday go?” Despite the fact that it felt like going too deep too fast, Paul had felt compelled to share with the men’s Bible study that Monday marked the two-year anniversary of Caroline’s death. Even though the church hosted three different men’s Bible studies, he’d asked to join the Tuesday-night group with older men because half of them were widowers, too. It was a bit hard to swallow that these guys referred to themselves as “the old coots,” so he decided to take up Cameron Rollings’s title and dub himself a “young coot.” At thirty-five, he was a “middle coot,” but that didn’t seem to roll off the tongue. His “not-so-young coot” status had become a running joke of sorts, and that helped to make him feel as if he belonged. He’d felt like a trespasser in his own world for so long lately.

  How did yesterday go? He wasn’t sure himself. It was a confusing tangle of mixed emotions. “Okay, I guess. Better than I expected, I suppose.” He fingered the spot where the wedding ring used to sit, which he often found himself doing when he talked about Caroline. He’d taken the ring off his finger on the first anniversary of her death, and not a moment before. “I thought I’d feel bad about not being back in Pennsylvania at the cemetery, but it seemed like a bad idea to pull Lilly out of school when she’d just settled in. My parents offered to watch her, but I didn’t want to be far from her yesterday.”

  “Did Lilly talk about her ma?” Vern Murphy, the oldest of the group, who should have long since retired from his job at Bishop Hardware but just couldn’t stay away, leaned in to ask.

  “She did. And we teared up a bit, both of us, at breakfast, but the rest of the day was just a sad sort of normal. Nothing major, actually.” Paul shifted in his chair. “You expect the big stuff to hurt, but lots of times it’s surprising little things that really do you in. I found Caroline’s sock in a box of Lilly’s summer clothes last week and I walked around clutching the thing, trying not to sob, for two hours.”

  “That’s when you should call one of us,” Pastor Dave said. “This is your hometown now, and we want to be there for you.” He sounded sincere, but Paul couldn’t help thinking Pastors were supposed to say those kinds of things.

  “Involvement is part of small-town life.” Howard Epson offered, sounding like the mayor he was. “We help you, and someday you’ll get the chance to help us.”

  “Funny you should bring that up, Howard,” Cameron said. “I got a little project I could use your help on, Paul.”

  Paul couldn’t possibly imagine what kind of help he could be to a real-estate broker, especially when that broker fished a piece of paper out of his pocket and spread a series of charts out on the table between them. Then he saw one of the headings—Sheep Feed.

  “I’ve been trying to help Audrey figure out what to do about her sheep,” Cameron explained.

  “Heard about that little surprise.” Vern chuckled.

  “Well, it’s not so little to Audrey.” Cameron came to her defense. “You know her. She doesn’t like things to get out of hand.”

  “Little late for that, ain’t it?” Vern chuckled again, until Pastor Dave silenced him with a look.

  Cameron leveled a businesslike gaze at Paul. “Audrey’s done her research, and she’s sure she can’t keep a flock that large. She won’t sell the babies without their mothers, and it’s breaking her heart. I’m thinking there has to be a way, somehow, to manage it. I’ve done a bit of research myself, but I was hoping you could look over my numbers.”

  “Shepherd with a laptop,” Howard quipped, squinting at the massive tables and spreadsheets Cameron had created.

  “He’s not so far off. I had several clients back East where the animals had GPS markers. And I’m betting most of you have seen the setups Gil Sorrent has out at Homestretch Farm.” Paul ran his eyes down the chart dealing with square footage of barn space. “Gil’s the man to look at this, not me.”

  “I had Gil look at it,” Cameron replied. “He said it looked sound, but he only knew horses. It was Gil’s idea, as a matter of fact, to ask you.”

  “Audrey’s threatening to quit the Easter Parade over this,” Howard warned in serious tones. “We’ve got to do all we can.” Paul was just thinking he wasn’t sure it was quite the crisis Howard indicated when the mayor pierced him with a glare. “If you can help, Middleburg needs you.”

  The fate of seven lambs did not spell Middleburg’s doom, but you’d never have known it by the look on Howard’s face. Cameron wasn’t too far behind. “I could use your expertise. I mean, you’re a vet and all. There must be something you can do to figure out a strategy.”

  “I’m here to write, not to practice.” Paul thought he’d need to have a sign made and posted in his front yard at this point.

  “No one’s asking you to deliver the lambs,” Howard said.

  Yet, Paul thought to himself.

  “Audrey has a vet already.”

  “Oh yeah, and you should have heard the two of them arguing at the hardware store yesterday,” Vern interjected. “They were there to order some special feed, and somebody over in the garden section made some smart-aleck remark about a ‘Ca-lamb-ity,’ and Audrey let him have it.” Vern broke into a snicker remembering the scene. “Ca-lamb-ity. Pretty funny when you think about it.” Howard leveled a glare at Vern, whose chuckle dissolved into a poorly disguised cough. “Or not.”

  “Dr. Sycamore,” Howard said, his gaze not lightening up much when it turned on Paul, “the fact is that we need you. I’d like to think that even though you’re new here, you’ll do anything you can to help out.”

  Now he was going to look like a selfish jerk if he didn’t at least look over a couple of sheets of paper. Only somehow, Paul knew it wouldn’t stop there. On some bleak level, he knew that with a single suggestion to improve even one figure on that spreadsheet, he’d set a process in motion that might very well end him up knee-deep in lamb muck. He started to pray, Lord, deliver me from…until he realized the unfortunate wording of that impulse.

  Audrey kept wringing her hands as Paul stood dripping in her barn Thursday afternoon. “I really appreciate this,” she said, for the fourth time. “Really. She doesn’t look right and Dr. Vickers hasn’t returned my call yet.” Audrey hung her soaked raincoat on the peg by the barn door and motioned for Paul to do the same. He did, but not before he helped Lilly out of the adorable duck slicker she wore—complete with matching galoshes and umbrella. Decked out in yellow and orange with huge blue eyes, Lilly was about as cute as a kid can get in a rainstorm. “Those are some amazing boots there, Lilly.”

  “They’re from my grandma. Is Ruth sick?”

  “I don’t really know. That’s why I asked your dad to come over.” She offered Paul another apologetic smile. “Thanks again.”

&n
bsp; He just nodded. She’d tried mightily not to call him since he’d helped Cameron with his charts. Cameron’s inconclusive charts that said Audrey might just be able to support the full flock on her pastures with supplemental feeds, but at considerable supplemental expense. “A doable stretch,” Cameron had said. Audrey did not do “a doable stretch” with anything. She hadn’t called Paul when Dr. Vickers told her Mary’s coughing wasn’t anything to worry about. Or when Esther didn’t eat enough. These ewes were driving her to an obsessive worry. She was two days late—not one, but two days late—on her report to the library board. She’d snapped at a volunteer page yesterday because she’d been up all night going over Cameron’s tables again. It had made her run straight to the Internet and look up all the diseases poor nutrition can bring to lambing mothers. Not to mention the dozens of things that insufficiently balanced nutrition could do to helpless lambs.

  Paul’s visit had become a matter of survival. Doctor Vickers wouldn’t come out, and Audrey couldn’t sleep if she wasn’t certain the girls were okay. Given the choice between annoying Paul and having a panic attack, Audrey opted to drag her neighbor out in the rain.

  “Well,” said Paul, picking up his veterinary kit and shaking the last of the rain out of his hair, “let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Paul spent about ten minutes going over every inch of Ruth—some of which the ewe didn’t mind, some of which she highly objected to—while Audrey tried not to hover. Lilly made that easy, because that child’s curiosity pulled her into everything. Audrey was running out of ways to politely say “don’t touch that,” and “stay out of there” before the first five minutes were over.

  “She’s edgy,” Paul said with a sigh that was just a bit too big, “but I have a feeling that’s more to do with the storm than anything else.”

  “I rushed them into the barn. The book says they can’t get wet.”