Bluegrass Blessings

by Allie Pleiter

  She stumbled in the darkness on a basket filled with Christmas cards by her mother’s couch. A plump, glowing baby Jesus looked out from the top card, reaching toward a maternal hand.

  He did know. The realization nearly knocked the wind out of her, making her suck in a breath that was more of a sob. Of course God knew what it was like to lose something so dear you thought you wouldn’t survive the loss. And really, she was being selfishly short-sighted—it wasn’t like Middleburg was going to suddenly fall off the face of the earth. The weeks, months or years it took to walk Mom through this ordeal wouldn’t stop her from picking up where she left off. If, at the end of all this, that’s what she still wanted to do. She’d fought for years to bake—that drive and desire wouldn’t go away with so important a detour.

  Dinah picked up the card, one of the dozen classical Madonna and child Christmas card paintings. Who ever does family on their own terms? Mom had been candid about her early years of marriage in the many “you never really meet the perfect man” lectures she’d given Dinah over the years. Dinah knew things hadn’t been wonderful between her mother and father when she was conceived. It hadn’t been the right time to start a family. They’d been young, money was tight, her mom had just started a new job and both sets of parents were either too unhealthy or too far away to be of much help. And they’d just moved into town and hardly knew anyone.

  They’d accepted those challenges. Now, perhaps, it was her turn. Dinah held the card to her chest. “Oh, Father,” she whispered, sinking onto the couch with a terrible combination of peace and dread. “I’ve been an idiot. I have to do this. There’s something really important in my doing this. But…”

  She almost didn’t dare give voice to the thought. But this was no time to hold back, no time to gloss things over. Life was about to get down to the nitty-gritty details. “What if we end up worse than ever? We couldn’t stand each other on a good day. How are we going to handle the worst possible days?”

  What if?

  Perhaps, Dinah thought as she curled up on the couch, I’m about to find out just how big a God I really have. Maybe that old saying was true: there’s no such thing as cheap grace.

  “Morning, Bug,” her mother said. She didn’t look as if she’d had much more sleep than Dinah. “Don’t like that bed upstairs?”

  Dinah rolled over on the couch to find her mother sitting in the other chair, staring at her. Dinah was still in her jeans, the baby Jesus Christmas card crumpled against her shoulder where it had fallen as she slept. All the tumult was gone, replaced by a quiet resolve. The legendary Hopkins stubborn streak had a new focus and it felt this morning as if that focus had settled into her bones. She probably hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours, but she was ready to face the day. Dinah stared at her mother, trying to think about how on earth they were going to survive the next few months.

  The thought sliced through her, new and sharp. They weren’t. Only she would. And while that seemed worse, it was in fact the thing that now held her here. She got to live. The least she could do was stick around, no matter what it cost her.

  Dinah slid upright, feeling a collection of kinks two weeks of massages wouldn’t undo. “I had trouble sleeping.”

  Her mom let her head fall against the side of the chair. She brushed aside the thick blue draperies to let in the first pale light of dawn. “I hardly sleep well ever anymore. It’s partly all the little aches and pains, but I think I’m afraid of missing any more time.”

  She could say stuff like that so calmly. How does anyone ever make peace with something so terrible? What was that ad campaign, “Life Begins at Fifty”? It seemed like the worst joke in the universe at the moment. Dinah swung her feet to the floor. “You got any coffee in the house?” She’d gone out for coffee on their way to the doctor’s office yesterday. “Do they even let you drink coffee?”

  A tiny spark lit up the corner of Mom’s eye. “I figure I can pretty much have anything I want now. I may just make a perfect pig of myself while I still have an appetite. Do they still make Funyuns?”

  Again, how could she say that stuff?

  Dinah’s face must have registered the reaction, for Patty waved her hand dismissively as she hauled herself out of the chair with a groan. “I went and got some coffee Thursday. That horrible, strong stuff you used to choke down.” She readjusted her thick pink bathrobe. “The acid in that will give you ulcers if it doesn’t kill you first.”

  “Mom,” Dinah groaned. “Could you make an effort here?” She padded toward the kitchen before her mother could come up with another macabre reference.

  “And bacon. When’s the last time you had a really good slab of bacon? All that sodium, all that fat. That turkey bacon tastes no better than the box it came in, if you ask me. Let’s go out for a real breakfast today and eat something like that.”

  “Coffee first.” Dinah combed her fingers roughly through her hair as she surveyed the kitchen for the coffeemaker. Her mother drank tea—maybe she hadn’t even set it out yet. She turned to find her mother holding up a percolator coffeepot that looked like it hadn’t seen the light of day since the Kennedy administration.

  “Still works,” her mother said, answering Dinah’s raised eyebrow. “I had some friends over last week and we used it. ’Course I just fill the thing with instant and let it bubble away, but no one says a thing like they notice.”

  Dinah narrowed her eyes at her mother. Maybe not to her face, but most people Dinah knew could tell the difference between instant coffee and brewed coffee. Especially when a tea drinker made it. She imagined the resulting beverage and winced.

  “I do still have friends, you know. Here.” With great drama, she handed Dinah a package of gourmet coffee from a local coffeehouse chain.

  Yes! thought Dinah. Serious coffee and boy, do I need it. She had considered packing a half pound of her own brew from the bakery, thinking she’d need all the fortification she could get on this trip and not trusting her mom to stock up. With a hint of guilt at underestimating her mother in yet another way, Dinah undid the seal to inhale in the blessed aroma…

  …and stared down at beans. Whole beans.

  “Um…I’m guessing you don’t own a coffee grinder, do you, Mom?”

  Patty put the kettle on the stove. “What do you need one of those for when you buy it ground at the store?”

  Dinah held out the bag to her mother. “Because you can also buy whole beans. To grind at home. Like you just did.”

  Patty blinked, reached into her robe pocket and fished out a pair of reading glasses, and then peered into the bag. “Well what fool would sell coffee you couldn’t put right into your pot?”

  Don’t answer, Dinah told herself, just don’t answer that.

  “I guess you’ll just have to settle for instant until I can take that back.” Mom reached into the cabinet and pulled out an ancient-looking jar of store-brand instant coffee.

  Instant coffee. Oh, Lord, deliver me from instant coffee. “You know, Mom, I’m thinking bacon sounds really good.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Dinah had circled the room twice during her account of the trip to New Jersey. The woman was normally a bundle of high energy, but at the moment she was more like a bundle of nerves.

  That bothered Cameron. He’d guessed what she’d come to say ten full minutes ago. Did she think him such a heartless capitalist that he wouldn’t let her out of her lease to go home and take care of her dying mother? Is that the kind of image he really projected to the world? The kind of assumptions she made about businessmen?

  “So…” Dinah said as she shifted her weight yet again, twirling one strand of hair around her right index finger—a nervous habit he’d come to recognize. “I need to do this. It’s what I’m supposed to do. God showed me that so clearly while I was there. And I suppose under normal circumstances, I’d be able to give you more notice on the bakery and the apartment, but these aren’t normal circumstances.”

  “Dinah…” He tried to st
op the torrent of explanation. He’d expected this and had already decided what he was going to do. If he could only get a word in edgewise.

  “I don’t know what kind of penalties are in the lease and I’m not exactly swimming in extra cash to make this happen, but I can start looking for…”

  “Dinah…” She obviously didn’t realize she’d just paid this month’s rent.

  She hadn’t even heard him. “…and it’s not like you owe me anything—as a matter of fact I owe you so much, I mean you took over the bakery and you hardly even know me…” her voice was ramping up in volume and pitch as she went.

  She was working herself into a frenzy over getting out of this lease. From a business standpoint, it should have been inconvenient and annoying. Emotional outbursts generally made him uncomfortable. He liked his relationships clean and elegant. And yet, her bluster of anguish produced an unexpected surge of sympathy within him. He knew—acutely—what it felt like to be dangling at the end of your rope. She was getting it from all sides and he had the power to make one part of this a little bit easier. Not that Aunt Sandy wouldn’t have been as compassionate a landlord, but Cameron felt a deep, surprising satisfaction at being able to do this for Dinah.

  “Dinah!” He grabbed her hand, trying to stop her frantic rambling. She whirled around at his touch and for a split-second he felt the inappropriate wish that the timing of all this had been vastly different. “I’m letting you out of the leases. No penalties. No problems.”

  Her eyes widened. “You are?”

  Cameron still couldn’t quite figure out how her voice could do that thing to him in just two words. “Do you think I’m such a cruel guy that I’d make this even harder for you? Like it’s not hard enough already?”

  “But it could be months before you get another tenant in here.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “Cameron Rollings, you’re my hero.”

  It was like watching all the fear slip off the woman, all that dewy-eyed gratitude looking up at him like he was God’s gift to Middleburg. It was hardly going to cost him anything to help her out.

  She leaned in and kissed his cheek. Softly—and he was sure she never did anything softly—with something that was almost like a shiver when they touched. Cameron felt his eyes close as she lingered there a moment too long, the scent of her surrounding him.

  She was vulnerable. Frightened and unsure. Battered by her current storm of feelings. She needed to leave; he needed to let her go. Help her go. Because, despite the hint of attraction he’d been denying since that basketball game, her leaving was the right thing to do.

  He held his breath and stiffened his shoulders against her hug. She pulled back immediately, flushing and putting up her hands. It took him a second to realize she mistook his reaction and read his tension as offense rather than resistance. It wasn’t a revulsion to her kiss—it was an attempt to stop himself from kissing her back.

  Cameron’s first impulse was to let her know he wasn’t offended at all, but his logical side stopped him. It might be easier for everyone if he let her believe there was no interest. A few uncomfortable days, but that might help her to make a quicker, cleaner break of it.

  “Oh, wow…um…I’m so sorry.” Her hands came up to her face, mortified.

  Cameron wiped his own hands down his face, both to hide his dumbstruck expression and to keep from saying anything that would give away what he was really feeling.

  “That was…really stupid…I’m um…I’m gonna go.” She fumbled out of his apartment and pulled the door shut behind her. He still hadn’t moved. He listened to the slap of her flip-flops, heard her chastising herself in punctuated shouts that grew quieter as she made her way down the stairs.

  As he heard the building door shut—slam actually—Cameron took stock of his sorry situation. He was jobless. He was now deeply in debt launching his new career as a developer—as an agent of change—in a community that hated change. Even if he won the name-change battle, there were still considerable challenges with the property soon to be formerly known as Lullaby Lane. He was behind on preparations for his exam in a few weeks because he’d somehow allowed himself to be wildly distracted running a bakery. He’d just been tempted to mix his business and personal lives—a peril he never would have considered in his former New York life.

  The only thing that could make things worse would be to fall for the wrong woman at the worst possible time.

  Dinah pretty much knew what kind of look she’d get from Janet when she told her the whole story of her last interaction with Cameron Rollings. And there it was—that half amused, half disappointed look perennially in-control people like Janet got when hearing about the antics of perennially impulsive people like Dinah. “You kissed him,” Janet said in the tone of voice one might use on teenagers out past their curfew.

  “On the cheek. Chaste. Completely appropriate for such a huge favor,” Dinah explained as they lingered in the lumber section of Janet’s hardware store Friday afternoon. It was tucked in a back corner, far from the cash register, and as good a place as any to have so private a conversation.

  Janet shot her a suspicious look while reshelving some long dowels. “Oh yes, I’d describe your current expression as ‘chaste and appropriate’ all right.” Janet always did love to lay the sarcasm on thick. She turned and leaned in. “Why didn’t you tell me you had a thing for him?”

  “Because I don’t. I mean really—Mr. Hypercapitalist? I heard they called him ‘tycoot’—he probably thinks it’s a compliment.”

  “You know what they say about opposites.” Perhaps a woman in love was the wrong person to turn to for advice. Janet was knee-deep in her own case of “opposites attract” with Drew Downing. Dinah would have brought this problem to Emily, but she was caught up in her own romance as well with all those wedding preparations. Yep, Cupid seemed to be hanging around too much on Ballad Road these days and it was time she got herself well out of bowshot.

  “There will be no romance with Cameron. I’m leaving. Fast. Before the end of the month, even. He knows that and I know that. And even if I were staying, this is hardly the time for me to even think about a relationship. Life is about as full as I can handle right now.” She looked at Janet, suddenly aching for the strong friendships she’d made in her short time here. “I can’t believe I’m actually leaving. Oh, God’s gonna have to be really mighty here because I can’t stand to leave Middleburg.”

  Janet pulled her into a hug. “One trauma at a time, okay?” She put both her hands on Dinah’s shoulders and held her straight. “So you kissed him on the cheek.”

  “And I suppose you could say I lingered…a bit,” Dinah added, thinking complete honesty might be the best way to go.

  “And evidently it was a bit beyond the standard grand-motherly peck variety of a kiss on the cheek. Let’s take this one step at a time. Did he kiss you back?”

  Dinah scowled. “He didn’t. As a matter of fact, I think it made him pretty mad. I didn’t exactly stick around to take a survey.”

  Dinah could practically see the gears in Janet’s head turning, examining, collecting data. Janet was a champion problem solver—especially the emotional kind of problems—because she could distill things down to bare facts in a way Dinah never could. “So he’s not interested. That’s probably good. It would only make things worse.”

  “Of course it would.”

  “But he could still make things bad for you. He could go back on his word to let you out of the lease.”

  Dinah sat on the bottom rung of a ladder. “He wouldn’t do that.” She looked up at Janet. “Would he?”

  “I don’t know. He is Sandy’s nephew and all, but I still think you ought to get his offer in writing. Actually, I think he has to anyway. It’s a legal document, so if you change the details of the agreement, I think you have to do it in writing.” She stopped shelving the lumber for a moment, one round piece held midair. “He’s been extremely nice to you when you think about it. The oven,
overseeing the volunteers for the bakery while you were gone, letting you out of your lease. You sure he doesn’t…you know…expect any returns on his investment?”

  “No!” Dinah couldn’t believe she’d asked that.

  “Hey, I’m just watching out for you. I have to think the average New York executive landlord wouldn’t be such a softy. God set it up perfectly, when you think about it.”

  He had, hadn’t He? God had lined up all the details, clearing the path for her to go and do this huge thing that felt so beyond her capabilities. She had to keep holding on to that. God had provided all the logistical details—His provision wouldn’t stop when it came to all the emotional strength she’d need. “Yeah,” Dinah agreed, fighting the surge of that drowning, overwhelmed sensation that had threatened her nearly once an hour since deciding to move back home to New Jersey. “All except the part about leaving Middleburg.”

  “Home is wherever God plants you, maybe. It’s not about the zip code.”

  That was a funny sentiment from someone who’d lived her entire life in Middleburg and now ran the store her father owned. “Middleburg is my home. New Jersey is my exile, my forty years in the wilderness.”

  “I’m sure wonderful people live in New Jersey. And besides, it’s a seashore, not a desert, so it hardly counts as an exile.”

  “You haven’t tasted my mother’s coffee,” Dinah muttered. “You have any boxes I can use to pack?”

  Janet pointed to the storeroom. “I started saving the moment you called. Go talk to someone down at the bank and find out what you need to get in writing from Cameron. Once you’ve got it all down, the messy emotional stuff won’t be a bother and you can just concentrate on getting yourself moved. By the way, what are you going to do about Emily’s wedding cake? I’m assuming you’re just off the Cookiegram thing altogether, right?”