Bluegrass Blessings

by Allie Pleiter

  “Funny,” Howard replied. “Sounds more like ‘go get some concrete’ to me.”

  At that moment, it struck Cameron that he liked Howard. Who’d have ever thought such a thing possible?

  Chapter Nine

  “How much?” Janet looked shocked.

  Dinah sat back in her chair. She, Janet and Emily were discussing Cookiegram details after church when Dinah informed them of the new goal Howard had set for the fund-raiser. “You heard me. $15,000.”

  “Did he bother to find out what anyone else thought of this?” Emily asked.

  Janet and Dinah just stared at Emily as if to say “What do you think?”

  “This is Howard,” Dinah said sharply. “Consensus isn’t in his vocabulary. He put it in the paper this morning. Told me after he gave his son the news.” Howard’s son Peter was a reporter for the local paper and Howard had been known to make extensive use of that connection.

  “Just because he told the paper doesn’t make it true. That’s a high number. Wouldn’t we be better off setting a lower goal and exceeding it than setting one that’ll be so hard to pull off?” Janet was already punching numbers into her calculator. “That’s a thousand boxes of cookies, Dinah. Middleburg’s only got four thousand people. And we haven’t even deducted our costs yet.”

  “Even if we get supplies donated,” Emily suggested, “we’re still going to need all the help we can get.”

  “You’re going to need all the help you can get,” Janet said. “You can’t make…” she punched a few more buttons, “five hundred dozen cookies the week of the fund-raiser. You’re going to have to make some ahead of time and freeze them or something.”

  “My wedding cake…” Emily said, slightly panicked.

  “Is still my top priority, honey. Your wedding’s more than a week after the Cookiegram thing—that’s more than enough time. You can’t make a cake ahead of time like you can cookies, anyhow.” Dinah reached out and grabbed Emily’s hand. “Don’t you worry about that cake one bit. It will be lovely and it will be there.” Dinah turned to Janet. “I’ve already thought about the logistics of making all the cookies, even before this exploded into Howard’s personal cookie triumph. I’ve been collecting recipes that freeze well before and after baking. If we have any problem, it’ll be finding enough freezer space to hold all those cookies.”

  “Gil has a big freezer out on the farm. I bet we could use that,” Emily chimed in.

  “Gina’s got to have one down at the Grill, too,” Janet added. “Maybe we can find someone else to donate use of their big freezer.” After a moment, she shook her head. “$15,000. Where’d he come up with such a pie-in-the-sky number like that anyway?”

  “You know,” Dinah replied, “I asked him that and he said the oddest thing.”

  “What’d he say?” Janet put her calculator back in her handbag.

  Dinah leaned in on her elbows and stared at her friends. “He said to ask Cameron Rollings.”

  “How on earth should I know?” Cameron asked as Dinah burst into his apartment. The woman barely waited for him to open the door—she just waltzed in the moment he turned the knob. Rather like Aunt Sandy. He did have an idea what Howard meant, but he sure wasn’t going to have any conversations about “listening to God’s plan for the town” with Dinah Hopkins.

  Dinah spun on her heels. Cameron wasn’t quite sure how she pulled off the maneuver in flip-flops. “Why would he say something like that unless he felt you could tell me?”

  “He’s an enigmatic, mysterious old coot?”

  “He’s Howard,” Dinah shot back. “Get real.”

  “He’s not so bad. A little self-absorbed, but essentially he’s a good guy.”

  Dinah stilled, staring at Cameron as if he’d just declared the sky green. “Howard? They’ve done something to you in that Bible Study. This is Howard Epson we’re talking about. Pompous. Unreasonable. Imperial.”

  “Imperial?”

  “I’m sure he thinks he’s king. He’s certainly not heading a democracy.”

  “I’ll admit his vision can be a bit off-kilter, but…”

  “‘Can be?’”

  “Essentially, there’s a good guy under all that grandstanding.”

  “Howard Epson? You’re taking Howard Epson’s side?”

  Cameron reached into his fridge for a bottle of Ale-8. Vern had introduced him to the local soft drink at their last “Coots” Bible Study meeting and Cameron was hooked. “There are sides?”

  Dinah leaned against the counter. “You know what I mean.”

  Cameron held a bottle out to her, but she made a face—obviously, it wasn’t her favorite. “Look, I know it’s a really high number and I would have chosen something a little more realistic, but who knows? Maybe Middleburg will step up to the plate and we’ll all be thanking Howard for his boldness.”

  “Oh, Howard has boldness in spades, you can be sure of that. But I ain’t been thankful for it yet,” she fired up her trademark artificial twang, “and I’m not fixing to start anytime soon.”

  Cameron changed the subject. “I looked over the table you drew up.” He’d asked her for a detailed task schedule for the days he’d be organizing the bakery staff. He’d had another conversation with Howard about the wisdom of putting a clueless NewYork broker in charge of a Kentucky bakery, but Howard insisted. Aunt Sandy had started compiling a list of volunteers, but the roster was already filled with confidence-busting commentary such as “not good with money” and “foggy before noon” beside many of the names. I used to manage a staff of eleven. I can handle forty-eight hours of baking, he’d told himself. I don’t even have to bake, just supervise. Cameron had handed the list back to his aunt, asking her to add to it—preferably people with actual baking skills and the ability to be coherent at dawn.

  “Thanks, by the way.” Dinah’s eyes were on her feet.

  “You’re welcome. It makes for a good study break from all this boring exam stuff, anyways.”

  “Liar,” she said, half a smirk creeping across her face as she brought her eyes up to meet his. “But thanks anyways.”

  “Howard doesn’t like the idea of changing Lullaby Lane, you know. I’ll expect your full lobbying support as payback. I’m going to have to change that man’s mind.”

  “Now who’s setting a sky-high goal?” she asked, feeling the playfulness return to her voice.

  “Shouldn’t you be packing?”

  Of course she should be packing. But packing meant getting ready to go see her mom and the last thing she was at this moment was ready to see her mom. It was so much easier to worry about the bakery than to contemplate the emotional roller coaster that was to come. “It’ll take me five minutes to pack,” she lied. She’d actually packed—and unpacked and repacked—four times already. What, exactly, does one wear to confront one’s maternal mortality? Which color goes best with oncology and intergenerational trauma?

  Dinah’s mother was forever pushing “tasteful” clothing on her, hinting with those subtle looks and occasionally devastating comments that she ought to “tone things down a notch.” One of her favorites was “go for a more effortless look,” which Dinah found hysterical. Shouldn’t a woman put some effort into her looks? To Dinah, effortless was sweatpants and no makeup. The kind of thing you wear on your couch watching romantic comedies the week you break up with your boyfriend. The look best accessorized by a pint of Extreme Peanut Butter Fudge Chunk.

  No, what Mom really meant to say was “stop trying so hard to stand out,” because to Mom, “standing out” meant “getting desperate for a man.” And really, the only “desperate” in this duo of a family was Mom’s thinly veiled desperation for grandchildren and a son-in-law whose résumé played well at dinner parties. And now Dinah was venturing home to see if it was humanly possible to love this woman through chemotherapy. Or worse. Who wouldn’t rather worry about whether three members of the choir’s alto section could pull off four batches of sticky buns?

  Suddenly, Came
ron’s hand was waving in front of her face. “Dinah!”

  She flushed. “Sorry, wandered off there for a moment. I’m just a little stressed, you know?”

  He put down the papers. “Would you like to go humiliate me in basketball? Might work off the nerves.” He ran a hand through his hair, which Dinah noticed was just starting to grow out of its precise office cut. The ends flipped up just a tiny bit behind his ears, miniscule rebellions to the neat edges of the style. It made her wonder if it would wave if he grew it longer. Would his beard be darker or lighter than his hair if he grew one? The vision of clean-cut Cameron Rollings with tangled hair and stubble simply would not materialize in her head—as if his hair was incapable of that kind of mutiny. Had he been a radical as a teen? Or one of those scrubbed-faced, clean-cut golf caddy types?

  “No,” she replied, not liking where that train of thought led. “I really should pack. Look, are you sure you want to take this on? You don’t know half these people and my ticket is nonrefundable, but everything can be negotiated and—”

  Cameron put his hand over her mouth, silencing her. The contact was obviously meant to be a joke, a tussle between friends, but it startled her. They hadn’t touched since he held her when she broke down that other night, the night of Mom’s letter. Even then, she’d pulled back as soon as she could bear to stand upright on her own. His touch was more difficult to bear somehow; it seemed to make her feel as though she owed him something. Which was ridiculous because Dinah touched people all the time—too much, in fact. She hugged customers, wrapped an arm around anyone from church and blew kisses to everyone at Christmas.

  Cameron was different. Touch didn’t come to him as naturally or as casually, which made it valuable and even safeguarded somehow. Now with his hand touching her face, it was as if something far too intimate had shown up far too early.

  He pulled his hand away, as if embarrassed by the impulse, replacing it instead with an awkward pat on her shoulder. His eyes told her this was the best he could manage under the circumstances. The most he would allow himself. And probably the most she should allow him.

  “Hey,” he almost stuttered, “it’s going to be fine. You’re going to be fine. You’re strong enough to do this.”

  He’d given voice to her deepest fear. “No,” she gulped out, “I don’t think I am.” She didn’t like what his voice did to her. “Besides,” she said, stepping away from him, “how on Earth would you know, anyway? You haven’t been around long enough to see the real Dinah Hopkins. It’s all just bravado, you know. Smoke and mirrors. Tricks with frosting and sprinkles.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “You’re right. You often see damsels in distress whacking ovens, threatening them in the middle of the night, giving unsuspecting brokers a pounding on the basketball court. You, Dinah Hopkins, are no cupcake. You’re a whole lot of something, but no cupcake. If you’ll excuse the bakery metaphor.”

  “Use ’em all the time.” She smirked. “Handy, those baking metaphors.” They were grasping for a dignified way out of this conversation.

  Whatever connection strung between them a moment ago had faded into an embarrassed discomfort, but not without a lingering echo of warmth. “I’ll remember that,” he said a bit stiffly, as if trying too hard. “When I’m manning the fort, surrounded by the MCC women’s choir.”

  Chapter Ten

  Dinah had played this moment over in her head so many times it was difficult to believe it was actually happening. Difficult to believe the key that she could never bring herself to take off her keychain was now in the lock that opened Mom’s door. Or, given their year of estrangement, should she knock? She felt a surge of guilt over the incredibly preventable chasm now yawning between her mother and herself—it should never have had to be this way. This couldn’t be how God designed mothers and daughters to make their way through the world. And yet, Dinah and her mother somehow seemed powerless to stop the cycle of annoyance, irritation and misunderstanding between them. Again she waffled: Open the door with her key like a member of the family, or knock like the guest she’d become?

  She was still standing there, holding the tarnished gold key in her hand, when the door swung open and removed the question entirely. Mom.

  And yet, not Mom. The face before her held the bones and eyes of the mom of Dinah’s memory, but the skin and hair of a weary, weaker woman. An unwell woman’s sunken cheeks and an older woman’s frail, spotted hands. As if she’d aged a dozen years in the time since they last stood arguing in the driveway, when Dinah had driven away with the sting of angry tears in her eyes. It had been no way to leave. There had been no way but to leave. Dinah had left not only to find her own identity away from her mother’s expectations, but in hopes that distance might allow them to relate again one day. She’d once planned this reunion so differently—coming home the victorious entrepreneur, the well-adjusted daughter returning on her own terms.

  “Well, hello there, Bug.” Even her mother’s voice sounded frayed around the edges. One thin-skinned, blueveined hand clung to the open door. The rings her mother always wore seemed to dangle loosely on her fingers, her perfect nail polish an odd counterpoint to the unhealthy pallor of her hands. It seemed a decade since anyone had called Dinah “Bug.” Back when she was small, her dad used to joke about her enormous brown eyes, saying she could stare at him “like a bug.” She used to hate it.

  She didn’t today. Her heart seemed to ball up in her throat behind the single word, “Mom.”

  All the reasons Dinah left home were still there, still festering. Yet, in the space of that single exchange, they deflated. Lost their force—even if only for that moment—behind a wave of love and compassion that Dinah was surprised to find still there.

  Dinah shrugged, unable to leave the moment gaping between them like that. She tugged her suitcase into the house, taking in the oh-so-familiar setting. The outdated, fussy doilies on the back of the couch—the ones she used to steal and turn into wedding gowns for her dolls. The collection of china angels in the curio cabinet. The way Mom propped up her throw pillows in pairs at either end of the sofa. There were changes in the detail—more angels, new pillows—but the house still felt the same. As if she could walk to the upstairs linen closet and still know where to find the guest towels.

  Mom’s hands stayed splayed against her chest until Dinah slid her suitcase against the living room wall, but then she reached out to cup Dinah’s face. Had Mom lost that much height in one year? It wasn’t possible that Dinah had grown, was it? When her mother’s cool fingers pressed against her cheeks, Dinah choked back a surprising sob of emotion. Frail. She looks frail. Everything looks frail. Oh, Lord Jesus, this is so much harder than I expected.

  “You’ve changed your hair.” Tears tugged at the edges of Mom’s words as she ran her hands along Dinah’s bangs. Dinah hadn’t remembered that she’d cut it into layers last fall. She flinched, unconsciously steeling herself for the surely critical assessment of that choice. “It’s different.”

  That was big. To anyone else, the neutral statement might have proven a disappointment. Neutrality, however, was foreign territory to Mom. “Different,” without the accompanying sharp tone Dinah would have expected, was almost a compliment. Almost. Different meant “you’ve changed and I’m going to try not to hate it.” Well, in as much as you could read that complex emotion into one hairstyle comment. It’s a start.

  They went out to a Sunday night dinner and fumbled through the rest of the evening, reaching for an ease that never quite came. Everything felt just slightly out of whack, which surprised Dinah, even though it couldn’t really be different under the circumstances. It bothered her how much her old bedroom felt like a guest room. Which was foolish, considering she hadn’t lived at home in half a dozen years. It had all the “empty nest” trappings—new drapes, pullout couch, desk, optimistic but little-used craft supplies…craft supplies? Since when does Mom do the scrapbook thing?

  As she took off her dinner clothes and slipped into je
ans and a sweatshirt, Dinah grimaced at her brown suede shoes. Why’d I wear those? she wondered. She’d been so sure that the deep-seated urge to fit in had long been silenced. Pulling a pair of flip-flops out of her suitcase felt like sticking her tongue out, but she did it anyway. Shaking herself, she went downstairs to the kitchen table to have the conversation they had been avoiding all evening.

  Mom had updated the kitchen here and there, nothing extensive but always the neat, conservative style Dinah associated with her mother. What stuck out most were the prescription bottles that now served as the kitchen table centerpiece. They were arranged—if you could call such a thing an arrangement—in a fabric-lined basket. As if encasing them in beauty hid the evidence. It was a very nice, expensive-looking basket, with all sorts of sections for organizing, one of which held one of those gigantic multiday pill sorters. The kind old people used.

  Mom was old.

  Of course Mom was old. All mothers were old, even when they weren’t. Dinah thought her mom was old when she was in the first grade, when Mom was the ripe old vintage of twenty-eight—one year older than Dinah was now.

  Fifty wasn’t old. Or shouldn’t be. Fifty should be a big birthday party and a long-postponed trip to Europe. Arthritis, retirement, reading glasses, but not…not “I’m dying, so come home.”

  It had been easy to dismiss Mom’s letters as theatrics on paper, as the seeds of truth but not the full truth. Dinah did expect her mom to be unwell. But Mom looked gravely ill.

  Dinah sat down and both of them wrapped their hands around the charming stoneware mugs of tea Mom had set out. Both of them tried not to stare at the medicines. The big ol’ elephant was in the room, lumbering now—as it had through the afternoon and at the restaurant—with stomps as loud as the present, yawning gap in conversation. Start. Just start.

  “So…what is it?” Dinah didn’t look up.