Bluegrass Blessings

by Allie Pleiter

  “Yeah,” she said, unsteadily. She plucked a dish towel from the oven handle behind her and dared to dab at her eyes. “Just a bit.” Something in his heart tugged him toward her, pulled by her desperate attempt to stand straight. He was somehow keenly aware that she probably would have sobbed and thrown more things had he not arrived. Usually he avoided such emotional scenes, but he might be capable of some compassionate diversion. “Is there any coffee left out front?” The bakery closed a while ago, but maybe she hadn’t emptied the big self-serve carafes yet.

  She nodded, shifting her weight, and he noticed some papers hastily stuffed into the back pocket of her jeans. Had she just gotten some very nasty news? “How about I go pour us a couple of cups? I think we both could use a break.”

  “Sure.” She sniffed again and pointed to the small collection of ceramic mugs lining her back counter. “I’ll just finish up in here.”

  She needed a moment alone to collect herself. He wasn’t sure how he knew—it wasn’t like he had sisters or a long string of girlfriends on which to base his intuition. He just recognized a kindred spirit in someone else who didn’t like to get caught feeling out of control. Sometimes you can get yourself just enough back together as long as nobody has to watch. Like the human resources official who, even though he had been ordered to stand over Cameron as he emptied out his desk, simply said that he’d wait outside. It was such a subtle act of kindness—to leave a man one shred of dignity before he was paraded out of the building with half the division watching.

  She had fixed her hair when he came back into the kitchen with two cups of coffee. Her face was still blotchy and it looked as if she’d splashed water on it. Two more baking pans—each with dents—sat lined up next to their wounded companion on the counter. Cameron set down the coffee cups and pointed at the largest of the trio of pans, now pushed out of shape into almost a triangle. “Good arm. Ever thought about a company softball team?”

  She didn’t laugh, but one corner of her mouth turned up slightly. “I’m more the basketball type, remember?”

  He picked up the pan, admiring it from different angles. Whatever was on that paper in her pocket, it had made her good and mad. “Want to talk about it?”

  She sighed and took a long drink of coffee. “Not really.”

  He sat down on the stool, admittedly relieved. “Okay.”

  A minute went by. She put her coffee down. “That’s it? Okay?”

  Cameron looked up at her, puzzled.

  “No negotiating, no argument, no trying to pull it out of me, or words of concern—just ‘okay’? Where do you guys learn this stuff?”

  Cameron sat very still for a moment, wondering what in the world had just happened. He had thought he was doing really well. Cameron realized his attempt at diversion had just veered off into the realm of the emotional landmine.

  “Do I look okay?” She flung her arms wide. “Do I look like I’m all fine and I don’t need to talk about it? Like I don’t need to try to make sense of the master of emotional blackmail I call my mother?”

  Oh boy. Go slow. Big trouble ahead. “No,” he said very carefully, “you don’t look okay.”

  She pushed her coffee away and stood up. “Who could be okay after the letter I just got? I mean, really, what human being could possibly be calm after something like this?” She began walking around the kitchen, opening and closing cabinet doors, shifting containers.

  Cameron wrapped his hands around his coffee mug. He prayed for protection like a man going into battle. Cover me, Lord, I’m going in. He tried not to let her see the deep breath he took before saying, “What kind of something?”

  He figured she would whip the letter out of her pocket. He didn’t suspect she would slam it down onto the counter with the force that she did. He grabbed both their coffees before they spilled. “‘Come home,’ she writes. Of course, she’s been writing ‘come home’ since Christmas, and I knew something was up. I just couldn’t figure out what. So now she pulls out the big guns. ‘Come home because I’m dying’ qualifies as a really big gun to me. Why didn’t she tell me earlier? In person? Maybe use a phone? Who dumps that kind of news in a letter? That’s the kind of conversation you have face-to-face with people you love, right? The kind of stuff you share before you get to the dying part. She didn’t even tell me she was sick. How can you not talk to someone for a year and then tell them this?”

  Cameron knew, just by the way she rushed her words, that her anger was there to hold her fear in check. “Maybe that’s why she wants you to come home. So you can talk about it.”

  “Oh, no,” she refuted, fiddling with a pitcher that had a collection of wooden spoons in it. “That kind of ‘come home’ I could maybe handle. This is the bigger kind of ‘come home.’ This is move home. Stop this silly Kentucky nonsense and come back…” her voice caught for a moment. She was backed into a corner of two counters, looking trapped and scared. He took a step toward her.

  She stiffened. “I love it here,” she said defensively. While her voice screamed for help, her eyes told him to come no farther.

  He stilled. “I can see that.”

  “But she’s sick. Really sick. What if she’s really…She needs me.” Dinah hugged her arms across her chest. “I love her—sort of. Well, I know I do. I mean, you always love your mother, right? Even when you don’t. We make each other so nuts, we can’t understand each other, but I love her. And I love it here. This place is so much my home now. Would God make me choose between the two?”

  If there were ever a question that Cameron Rollings should be qualified to answer, it would be that one. He’d asked it of himself enough times. God had made him choose between the career he loved and the principles he held. But he hadn’t any wisdom to offer on the subject. He still didn’t have any idea what the point was of such “no win” situations. Why choose between two painful consequences when all it really got you was the pain of both?

  “I don’t know, Dinah.” It was the first time he’d spoken her name.

  “It’s lousy, isn’t it?” she said, shifting her weight as her eyes roamed around the room. She was trying not to lose it. “I mean, the timing is so awful. Just now when everything’s picking up here. She’s young. She’s healthy. She can’t be sick. She’s so bad at all that medical stuff—it’ll scare her to…” She swallowed the unfortunate end of that phrase and gripped the counter on either side of her as she leaned back against it. “I’m not a heartless beast, you know. I know she’s desperate and panicked. Anyone would be.” She was gulping in the words and the tears threatening behind them.

  He took one careful step toward her, watching her reaction. She was backed up against the far side of the room as it was. When she didn’t flinch, he took another small step.

  “Life just knocks it out of you sometimes. It’s lousy, and it’s not fair, and I could think of a few other New York adjectives I’ll skip. You got any good Kentucky ones for something like this?”

  She took a deep breath. “Eddie Matthews down at the garage could probably string a few colorful phrases together to fit the situation.” He took another step toward her, watching her fingers loosen their white-knuckle grip on the counter. “That boy swears like a sailor.”

  “We had a guy like that in our office. Gutter mouth. The day they fired me, some part of me wished I had access to that kind of vocabulary just for the day. You know, a one-day leave of absence from clean Christian language kind of thing. So I could say ugly words to match an ugly situation.”

  Cameron was near enough to put a hand on her shoulder now, and his heart twisted at the tight knot he found there. The touch undid her—he knew it would—and she sagged into him as she lost her battle with the tears. “I thought you said you weren’t fired,” she said while crying on his shoulder.

  He forced himself to wrap his arms around her, finding it all too easy to do once he’d started. “I thought you said you didn’t need to talk about it.”

  Chapter Seven

  “
He’s right. This isn’t the kind of thing you can work out on the phone. You need to go out there.”

  Janet Bishop sat on Dinah’s couch as they talked through the current dilemma a few days later. Having come home from college quite a few years back to help her mom run Bishop Hardware and care for her ailing dad, Janet was both a sympathetic ear and the voice of experience.

  “Part of me doesn’t want to go,” Dinah moaned, sinking into the couch. “I know it’s not Mom’s fault—she didn’t choose to be sick—but how come this feels like emotional blackmail?”

  Janet tucked one foot up underneath her. “I think it’s perfectly natural to feel blindsided. You two don’t have the best relationship. Usually, you start with something small, like ‘call me on Sundays’ and work your way up to ‘see me through cancer.’ This came out of the blue for you.”

  “But you did it,” Dinah said, meeting her friend’s gaze. “I can’t believe you’re even letting me talk like this. I must sound so…selfish, so disrespectful to you.”

  “You’re a bit of a renegade.” Janet gave a lopsided smile. “Disrespectful sort of comes with the territory. Conciliatory isn’t the word that comes to mind when I think of Dinah Hopkins, you know.”

  Dinah narrowed her eyes. “Great. Are you about to tell me God’s got a character overhaul in the works? That’s your guy in the overhaul business, girlfriend, not me.” Janet had met Drew Downing when his renovation television show came to repair MCC’s preschool from storm damage. Janet was the reason Drew was still here—they’d fallen hook, line and sinker for each other. The Ballad Road Bachelorettes, as Dinah used to think of herself and her two single shopkeeper friends, were becoming an extinct species.

  “You could think of this as a recipe. You’re adding a new ingredient to your life.”

  Dinah shot her a look. Metaphorical thinking wasn’t helping. “You came home when you were needed.”

  “Yes, I left school to help run the store. But you have to remember, my relationship with my parents was a bit…warmer than yours. And I have to say, I was asked very gently if I wouldn’t mind taking a year off school. I didn’t get a letter out of nowhere demanding I ‘stop this nonsense and come home.’” She pointed to the letter in question, now sitting on the coffee table between them. “That letter’s a piece of work. I can’t say I blame you for thinking you’re walking into a storm.”

  Dinah reached out and touched the letter. “She’s sick. She’s scared. Who handles things well when they’re sick and scared?”

  Janet stood up. “Which is exactly why you should go see her. Take a few days for everyone to make sense of things. You know, if she realizes you’re not going to ignore her, maybe she won’t get quite so demanding. You might find a compromise.”

  Dinah stood as well, picking up the two coffee mugs and the letter off the table. She walked with Janet to the kitchen. “You don’t know Patty Hopkins. She doesn’t do compromise.”

  “You know,” Janet said as she pulled Dinah into a big hug, “I used to think the same thing of you.”

  Dinah teared up and hugged her back hard. Janet had become such a good friend here in Middleburg. Dinah had lots of good friends here. She had a life far richer than the one she’d known in New Jersey and the thought of leaving it to go deal with a traumatized, demanding cancer patient made her almost ill herself. “I just hate it when friends love you enough to be honest,” she moaned into Janet’s shoulder. “The nerve.”

  “What?” Janet pulled back to look at her, blinking back a tear or two herself. “Don’t they have nerve in Jersey?”

  Dinah sighed and opened the door for her dear friend. “Maybe I better go see.” Oh, Lord, I’m so afraid if I set foot in New Jersey I’ll never be able to come back here. This is my home, Lord. Don’t make me leave it.

  “Any prayer requests?” Pastor Dave asked, wrapping up Cameron’s first meeting with the Old Coots’ Bible Study. Make that the MCC Tuesday Night Men’s Bible Study. Cameron was so afraid if he didn’t stop thinking of them as the Old Coots, he’d call one of them just that to his face. They might laugh and enjoy it—after all, they’d called him the Young Coot four times already tonight. Then again, they might not.

  “I’d like prayers for my upcoming exams,” Cameron said. “I’m pretty sure I’ll do fine, but it’d make my life much more complicated if I botched these and had to wait longer to get my real estate license transferred to Kentucky.” He watched as a few of them wrote it down on the index cards Pastor Dave had passed out. These guys took their prayers seriously. He liked that. With his church friends from back in New York, “I’ll pray for you” was always meant with good intentions, but didn’t always result in actual prayers. And he was as guilty of it as the next guy. “And I think we should pray for Dinah Hopkins and her mom.”

  “I heard,” Vern said sadly. “Tough going. Janet told me those two weren’t close before and that kind of stuff’s hard enough as it is. I love Dinah’s goodies, but she don’t strike me as the nursemaid type.”

  “Yeah,” said Howard, nodding. “I’ll miss those sticky buns while she’s gone. And I am concerned about the impact on our Cookiegrams. It’s a serious setback.”

  Only Howard could see hampered Cookiegrams as a serious setback compared with a life-threatening illness. “I’m sure a day or two with the bakery closed won’t be that bad.” Cameron hadn’t even thought about Dinah having to close the shop.

  “I’ll talk to Janet.” Vern scratched his chin. “Maybe she and Emily can pull something together. Emily’s kind of busy with the wedding and all, but I’m sure they’ll make time.”

  “I’d lend a hand, but I’ve got inventory this month, and you wouldn’t believe the work that makes these days.” “We’re heading down to see the grandkids for two weeks.” “The Kentucky Mayor’s Conference has some very serious issues to deal with this year.” And on it went as the men, half of whom were retired, began a litany of how busy each of them were. Cameron thought most of them wouldn’t last one afternoon on his former schedule—“busy” here was a walk in the park by New York standards. Still, he had youth on his side. But none of that made him feel any better when all eyes turned to him. It became obvious he had a schedule too empty to gripe about with this crowd. Cameron watched Howard draw a breath and while he saw it coming, he knew there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it.

  “I bet you don’t have to know squat about baking to supervise a bunch of volunteer bakers, Cameron. A few phone calls with your persuasive skills and we’ll keep Dinah’s bakery up and running in her absence. It’d be the Christian thing to do and you’d get to know more folks in town, too.”

  “I…” Cameron felt he ought to at least attempt a defense.

  “Nonsense, m’boy. Phone up your aunt, pull Janet and Emily in on the deal and you’ll have it covered by sundown.” Howard’s beefy hand came down on Cameron’s shoulder like a stockade. “Unless you got better things to do with your time.”

  Cameron’s mom used to complain about how she got roped into volunteering for things down at church all the time. He never understood it. How hard is it for one intelligent woman to say “no” to an unreasonable request?

  He understood it now.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Cameron repented aloud in the hallway as he raised his hand to knock on Dinah’s door. Yes, this could have waited until morning at the bakery. But it was only eight-thirty (Pastor Dave wasn’t kidding about the Men’s Bible Study’s “early bird special” meeting hours never going much past eight) and this was rather like a dive in a cold pool—best to get it over with right away and start swimming. And honestly, he wanted an excuse to see Dinah’s apartment. After all, she’d seen his. He told himself this was about parity, but some part of him already knew this was more about curiosity than equity of information.

  She came to the door with her hair down. He hadn’t realized until just this moment that he’d always seen it pinned up. It was slightly wet, as if she’d been in the shower earlier, an
d it framed her face in various shades of red waves. Drier locks escaped into orangish wisps—the kind she was always blowing out of her eyes. Other locks still hung in damp, darker twists close to her neck. He had the oddly poetic thought that the hair was like the woman—complex, complicated and always changing. Cameron wasn’t sure how many seconds went by before he said, “Hi. How are things?”

  Her expression was as complicated as her appearance. “Okay, sort of.” She leaned against the doorway—she did that a lot, he noticed—but he couldn’t be sure if it was a nice-to-see-you casualness or a oh-great-you-again kind of impatience. “Trying to sort stuff out, I suppose.”

  “Got a minute?”

  She looked surprised, perhaps a bit wary. “Sure, come in.” He recognized the tense undertone as the same one his staff had used when making small talk. The constant awareness that for all the niceness, the pecking order hadn’t disappeared. He was her landlord, after all. And now, essentially a creditor as well, because they’d made the arrangement for the oven payment. A guy with a history of negotiation success should be more comfortable with holding all the cards, but he was unnerved. He needed to tread carefully here, for he was about to deepen the inequity and she wouldn’t take to it well.

  She didn’t. “Absolutely not!” she cried when he’d finished presenting his proposal. She pushed back from her kitchen table—a big wooden slab of a thing painted a riot of bright colors. “I can’t accept that kind of help.”

  “Why not?” He knew she’d balk first; she had to talk out her resistance before she’d even consider the idea.

  “Because it’s way too much. Closing for two days won’t put me under.” She stood up. “I hope you think better of my business skills than to assume I’d cut things that close to the bone. I’ve got a cushion.” She turned and began poking around her kitchen, which was just as much a storm of color and texture as everything else. Artisan pots stood next to art deco resale shop-ish containers. Beaded curtains framed kitchen windowsills filled with a collection of what looked like cheesy souvenir salt-and-pepper shakers. Next to the stove stood stoneware urns with bouquets of every kitchen utensil he’d ever seen—and some he’d never seen. It felt more like an artist’s studio than a kitchen. Which, knowing her, made sense.