High Plains Hearts

by Janet Spaeth

  A young blond girl touched Lily’s hair. “I like that name. Lily. Are you named after the Easter flowers? We have them in church every Easter.” She frowned. “Except maybe this one, on account of the flood. We missed Easter, sort of.”

  “No, we didn’t,” interrupted another child. “The flood wasn’t until after Easter.”

  The little girl smiled shyly at Lily. “Then maybe we didn’t miss it, and I just forgot about it. I think I maybe remember it now. I had a new pink dress with a swirly thing in my hair.”

  Lily hugged the girl. “I bet you looked very pretty. I’d like to see that dress sometime.”

  Her smile evaporated. “I don’t have the dress anymore. It went away with the flood.”

  “My mom will make you a new dress,” Todd volunteered. “And a swirly thing for your hair, too.”

  Lily laughed out loud. “Todd, you nut. I can’t sew anything. I’m not a seamstress, I’m a seam-less. Don’t offer me up for anything more complicated than sewing a button back on!”

  She turned back to the girl. “What’s your name, honey?”

  “Corie.”

  “Corie, I’m very sorry you lost your dress in the flood. It sounds beautiful, right down to the swirly thing for your hair. Next Easter I’m sure you’ll have a dress that is just as pretty, and you know why?”

  Corie shook her head.

  “Because you’ll be inside it. No matter what your dress will look like, you will make it beautiful.”

  Corie smiled and turned to Todd. “I like your mommy. She’s really nice.”

  Eileen returned with lunch trays, which she wheeled in on a cart. “Okay, everybody, have a seat. Yes, Todd, you may sit by your mother.”

  The food was delicious. Lily and Ric got larger portions of the meatballs and vegetables, although Todd warned them not to expect extra desserts. “Eileen lets us have more of everything except dessert,” he said in a loud whisper. “And today it’s cherry bubbles, so I know we won’t get seconds.”

  “What’s cherry bubbles?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s good and don’t ask for more.”

  “Is Ric your daddy?” the little boy across the table from Todd asked.

  Todd shrugged innocently and continued to chase a meatball around his plate. “Not yet.”

  Ric’s eyes flashed over to meet Lily’s, and she almost laughed at the cornered expression on his face.

  Eileen intervened again with the arrival of the dessert Todd had been anxiously awaiting. Lily was relieved to see that “cherry bubbles” when translated into adult English meant “cherry cobbler.”

  The much-loved “cherry bubbles” diverted the children’s attention, but it didn’t do much to settle her heart.

  Ric walked back to the office with Lily.

  “I think I need to apologize for Taylor,” he said. “He’s the kind of kid who thinks something and then says it.”

  “Taylor is the one who asked if you were going to be Todd’s dad, I gather.”

  Just the thought of it made his breath catch in his chest, but he pushed it aside. The time had come to broach the question that had been nagging at him. It wasn’t any of his business, but he wanted to know. He needed to know. “Todd has a father, of course.”

  “Well, Todd had a father. He died before I even knew I was pregnant.” Her face was unreadable.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, automatically reaching out to touch her arm.

  She smiled at him, and it was like the sun breaking through clouds. “I appreciate it. If he gets too clingy, just let me know and I’ll try to pry him off you.”

  He laughed. “Oh, I don’t think that would be a problem.”

  “If you heard how often your name comes up in his conversations—Ric says this, Ric said that—you wouldn’t dismiss this so blithely. He really thinks the world of you.”

  His heart beat a bit faster. “I’m honored, really I am.”

  “As a youth minister, you’re probably used to it though, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I don’t exactly have a fan club, but so far none of them have started an I-Hate-Ric group—at least not that I know of.”

  Lily leaned a bit closer and in a conspiratorial whisper asked him, “So do you think we were wise to be seen in public, having lunch together? In front of the children?”

  “What were we thinking?” He made light of it, but he knew what he’d been thinking—his thoughts were filled with what a loving mother she was, how her voice was low and melodic, and how her perfume smelled so good, like flowers and clean clothes and vanilla cake.

  Lily leaned even closer so that her hair brushed against his cheek. “We were thinking of cherry bubbles.”

  “Ah,” he said. “That explains it all.”

  After she went to her tiny office, he stood in the hallway then headed into the sanctuary. He sank onto his knees, his head on his folded hands, and poured out his heart to his Lord.

  When he rose several minutes later, he knew he had to slow his heart. Lily was a wonderful woman, and Todd was a charming child, but he was an ordinary man whose days and nights were given to the Lord’s service. Maybe in time it would come, but for now the message he had received told him to move carefully.

  Again. The message was the same as it had been at the orphanage: Not now. Not yet.

  There would be time for love, if it came to that end. But for now the answer was no.

  At last it was done. Lily stood at the mailbox, the sealed envelope in her hand, and she simply opened the slot and dropped the application in.

  After much thought, prayer, and an incredibly long sleepless night, she had summoned all her courage and checked YES, giving the agency permission to check her references.

  After all, she realized, this would give her the answer she’d been agonizing over. If Douglas Newton stood in her way, at least she knew what she was up against and could take appropriate steps, whatever those might be. At the moment, she didn’t want to think about it.

  On the other hand, her worries might be for naught. He may have simply considered her nothing more than a fly speck on the ledger.

  Life became too busy for her to think about much of anything else except the day care and Todd. Even Ric was delegated to a tiny corner of her mind, pushed far into the back where he wouldn’t be any trouble to her as she concentrated on what she was doing at the moment.

  Ric continued to stop by her office—although that was strictly business, she told herself. He hadn’t asked for her and Todd to join him for dinner again—perhaps he was being cautious now that she had told him about how Todd had elevated him in his mind.

  Whatever she wrote on the application seemed to have worked. Approval was returned immediately, and she felt herself relax, even allowing herself to go up and sit with Marnie for a coffee break.

  Pastor Mike was back weekly for short visits, and she felt comfortable with the portly minister immediately. He was jovial, and Lily’s heart went out to him as she realized what a burden he was bearing at the moment, yet willing to take the time to make her feel comfortable.

  July sped past in a flurry of fireworks on the banks of the now-tamed river, picnics in the park, and files and more files on her desk. Late one August night, Lily and Todd drove through Wildwood’s residential streets. The rubbish heaps were long gone, and the grass had grown back in places where the debris had been piled. Inside the houses, the bare basement walls, stripped of the flood-damaged drywall, had dried enough to begin reconstruction. Homeowners had been advised to wait several weeks to let the walls and floors dry out completely before rebuilding, and a number of the houses were done already.

  “Look, Mom!” Todd pointed to a small brick house with a FOR SALE sign on it. “Let’s buy it!”

  “Oh Todd, we can’t buy a house.” Her mouth spoke the words, but her heart agreed with her son. She’d never fallen in love with a house quite as quickly as this.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, becaus
e we’re not here forever. Just long enough to do our work.”

  “And then what, Mom?”

  His question brought her back to reality. And then what?

  “I don’t know.” She looked at his face and saw the uncertainty settle back in again. She relented and pulled over to the side of the road. “Let’s get out and take a look.”

  The house was empty, and through the curtainless windows, she saw a fireplace with a mantel, perfect for placing those family photographs that she treasured. And the bedrooms were large enough for their needs, and the kitchen was spacious and airy.

  She knew she couldn’t leave it without learning more. She wrote down the Realtor’s name.

  “I’m not promising anything, Todd,” she said, “because there are lots of reasons we wouldn’t buy it. It might be too expensive, or it might have some major problems we can’t see from out here, like a bad foundation. And I don’t know—”

  A swing. There was a swing in the backyard. Not one of those little aluminum jobs, but a full-bore, heavy-duty thing, like the one at Shiloh. Her mind re-created the image from the camp, and she realized that in the swing she was picturing Ric.

  As she got back into the car and drove back to the mobile home, listening with only half her mind to Todd’s chattering, she realized there was one part of her that was coming to life again.

  It was the part that imagined, that thought about the future, that spun hopes into dreams.

  She’d gone to Chicago with dreams. She could help these young mothers, she knew it. She felt it in her bones and in her blood, and it pulled her and pushed her through days when she thought she couldn’t go any further but she did.

  And those dreams had flourished, and she had felt good about herself. Then one day, it all came down around her head like a house of cards.

  She’d gone into Douglas’s office, looking for a file that perhaps he’d taken from her desk, and when she opened it and saw what he had done, it was as if all the oxygen was taken from her body. She’d had to sit down to avoid falling.

  The file was that of a young woman whose schooling required her to be at the college at night twice a week. Because the woman’s daughter was so young, Lily had asked for and received permission to qualify the woman for an additional night of assistance so she could go to the library and leave her daughter with a well-qualified babysitter.

  The woman had only used the extra night of service once, but in front of her Lily saw vouchers dating back six or seven weeks—and all with the initials L.C. on them.

  Yet she hadn’t even seen these vouchers. They certainly hadn’t been in the file when she’d had it on her desk earlier in the day.

  With shaking hands, she’d replaced the file and checked the other ones. And in each case, there were vouchers, all apparently initialed by her and filled out in her handwriting.

  There was only one possibility. Douglas Newton was forging them. She and Douglas were the only people in the office. No one else had access to the files.

  She’d checked the paper trail of the payments and found that the checks had been issued to a single babysitter, someone named Tammy Novak. Yet in her care-providers file, there was no one by that name.

  When Douglas came back, he looked at her curiously. Her face must have given something away because he went into his office and shut the door. When he emerged a short while later, he asked if anything had happened while he was out.

  Oh, not much except for the world caving in, she’d thought, but instead she’d just said, “No.”

  “Mom? Mom?” Todd was shaking her elbow. “Can we? Please?”

  “Can we what, honey?”

  “Can we get some ice cream at the Bright Spot?” He looked at her pleadingly.

  The Bright Spot was owned by Marnie’s husband, Sam, and Todd adored him as much as he did Marnie. It had reopened just in time for the late summer heat to bring in a raft of customers.

  “Sure. An ice cream cone sure would feel good on a hot night like this.”

  Both Sam and Marnie were at the Bright Spot, and Todd rushed to them with open arms for hugs.

  “Guess what! Guess what!” he shouted at them. “We’re going to buy a house, and it’s got a big gigantic swing set, like at Shiloh, and there’s a fireplace, and a yard big enough to plant carrots in and everything!”

  Marnie looked at her with delight. “That’s wonderful news, Lily! Where is the house?”

  Lily quickly tried to correct what her son had said, but she found herself getting excited as she told Marnie about the house. “I like it, Marnie. Of course I haven’t seen the inside yet, and I don’t have a clue how much it’d cost, but I do like it.”

  Marnie had her explain where the house was, and then she nodded. “Oh, that’s the Martinson house. You should be able to get it for a song. The Martinson kids—Darcy and Ned—have been gone for years and have been renting it out, but I’ve heard they’re tired of it and want to unload it as soon as possible.”

  Sam rubbed his chin. “If you want to see what it looks like inside, I know a really good real estate agent, sings bass in the choir, so maybe you’ve seen him, Wilson Jones, who could show it to you.”

  “Let’s not jump the gun,” Lily said. “I don’t even know how long my job lasts here.”

  “You’re kidding me.” Marnie looked at her, aghast. “Hasn’t Ric told you?”

  “Told me what?”

  “Well, dearie, I don’t want to steal any of his thunder, but I don’t think you have to worry about this job being temporary.”

  “What?” Lily resisted the urge to shake the words out of the other woman. “What do you know?”

  But Marnie drew an X over her mouth with her forefinger. “My lips are sealed. If Ric hasn’t told you anything by tomorrow night, then let me know and I’ll make him tell you.”

  Todd had totally lost interest in the conversation, and Lily had to look for him. She found him deep in conversation with another little boy who looked to be about the same age.

  “Yup,” Todd was saying, “we’re buying a house here that has a fireplace and a swing and a garden, and we’re going to live here forever and ever and ever.”

  His new friend grinned. “Cool. Where’s the new house?”

  “Um, over by some trees.”

  His friend considered that and then nodded. “I know where it is. I think it’s by my house. We have trees at our house. And one has a tree house. Do you have a tree house?”

  “Not yet,” Todd said, clearly mulling that over. “But there are some trees that’ll make great tree houses. Ric and I could make a tree house in one of them. Ric could do it. He can do anything.”

  “Who’s Ric?” The boy pushed his ice cream back on top of the cone with a grubby finger, and Lily winced.

  “Ric is cool. Very cool.” Todd’s small chest swelled with pride.

  “Is he your brother?”

  Todd shook his head.

  “Your dad?” guessed the boy.

  “Pretty soon,” Todd said.

  Lily rushed in and grabbed her son by the hand. “Hi, nice to meet you.” She sped through the introduction that Todd tried to give her.

  She pulled her son back to the car and quickly buckled him inside.

  “Todd, you are a walking, talking garden of misinformation.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “It means that we are not necessarily buying the house. It depends on a lot of things, like the interior of the house, the furnace, the plumbing. And whether or not I even have a job after the town’s recovered from the flood. Oh, and the price. I don’t know if we’ll be able to afford it.”

  His face crumpled. “Are we poor again?”

  “We were never poor. No, we’ll be fine. But I don’t know how much longer this job lasts. Before we can decide to buy that house, or any house, we have to know a lot more than whether it has a fireplace and a swing set and a place to grow carrots. Tomorrow I’ll talk to Ric about the job, and I’ll talk to the rea
l estate guy that Sam referred me to, and then we’ll see.”

  He visibly relaxed, and his eyes got that daydreamy look that she’d come to know all too well. “And before you start planning who all’s going to live in that house, you might want to consult with me. There’s no way that Ric is going to be there, too. We’re not getting married, tiger. We work together, that’s all.”

  Todd shook his head slowly. “You’ll get married to him, Mom.”

  She sighed in exasperation. “What makes you think so, Todd?”

  He beamed at her. “I heard Marnie and Eileen talking about it.”

  She added one more item to her mental list of things to do: Gag Marnie and Eileen.

  Chapter 7

  Ric sat in front of his computer in his office, staring at it. On the monitor, a screen saver of a family of ducks wearing sailor hats swam back and forth, back and forth, but he didn’t pay any attention to them.

  He had other things on his mind. What if she said no? What if she said she didn’t want to stay? What if—

  “So do you like it?”

  Marnie leaned against the doorjamb, watching him.

  “Like what?”

  “The screen saver.”

  “The what?”

  She sighed and crossed the room. “This,” she said, jabbing her finger at the computer monitor. “The ducks.”

  “Ducks? Why on earth would you—and why are they wearing sailor hats?”

  “Ah, just noticed, did you? I thought they were cute. And definitely more interesting than that dot thing you had on there before.”

  “They weren’t dots. They were stars.”

  “And you’re going to tell me that was more interesting than ducks wearing sailor hats?”

  He sighed. Past experience told him that he’d have to get used to the ducks. If he removed them from his computer, she’d probably put flying snails or horses in sneakers in their place.

  “You’re worried she might say no, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not worried—,” he began, but she shook her head. “Okay, I am worried. A bit. I do know that God has this all in His control, and whatever He has planned is for the best. I guess I’m hoping that He and I are on the same page here.”