Bluegrass Blessings

by Allie Pleiter

  Emily’s wedding cake. That was the hardest of all. She’d been up half the night the other evening, trying to think of a way to still make Emily’s cake. There were ways to do it—to fly out a day or two early and do all the baking at the last minute or to hire out the layers and base frosting, swooping in to do the decorating the day before the wedding. But Emily didn’t deserve compromises. The only true solution was to let someone else do the cake. They’d agreed when they talked about it yesterday, but it had made both her and Emily cry. She was giving up so much to go back east. She was feeling full-to-bursting with loss, which is why Cameron’s act of kindness had touched her so. He’d given her what he could, for no other reason than it was a kind thing to do.

  “I got another baker from Lexington to take the job.” Dinah tried to say it calmly, but her pain clipped her words short.

  “It’ll work out,” Janet said, sounding a bit choked up herself. “It has to. You’ve had enough pain already.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was a sheet of paper. Of course, as a broker Cameron was well aware of the power a sheet of paper could hold, but he had mostly been on the sending end of that power, not the receiving end. Why should he be surprised that the crisis didn’t stay, behind him, in his past?

  The hysteria of running the bakery for two days had consumed his attention—running Taste and See had been a flexing of new muscles, a novel use for old organizational skills. Dinah’s request to leave hadn’t taken him by surprise, either; he’d been fully aware that once she’d worked up the nerve to visit her mother, she more than likely would go back and see her through this illness. Even before she’d returned, he’d decided to offer to let her out of the lease. It was the decent thing to do. Compared to all the other financial risks he was undertaking, going without a little rental income seemed a minor obstacle.

  But this…this was a huge new obstacle. Or an old obstacle, depending on how you looked at it. When he’d first been fired, Cameron had contacted an employment attorney to sue Landemere Properties for how he’d lost his job. As he went through the initial process, discovering how lengthy and painful it would be, he’d opted out. He’d had moments of anger and betrayal, of course, but he thought he was done with that. He mastered that darkness—or so he thought—by distancing himself. Walking away without suing proved his nobility. Proved him to be the “bigger man” and let him get on with his life.

  That same attorney had written now, reminding Cameron that the window of opportunity was drawing to a close. This was his last chance to change his mind and sue.

  The possibility sent Cameron reeling. He could still sue. He had a strong civil lawsuit against his former employer, but it was getting close to his last chance to file.

  It should have been a formality. A final double-check before closing the case. Instead, Cameron found himself knocked off his feet by an astoundingly dark hunger for revenge. As if the challenges of moving out here to Kentucky and the grief of all he’d left behind had been lying in wait, coiled to strike. He was overcome by the chilling urge to change course and get back at everybody before he lost his chance forever. To take his final shot at making them all pay.

  Clutching the letter, Cameron seemed powerless to stop the catalog of offenses now building in his head. Even before things got really bad, Cameron realized he’d been nothing but a freak of ethics at that firm. All the looks. The good leads going to other brokers. When it came right down to it, he’d always felt like the only guy not out to make the largest buck possible in the shortest amount of time. But after he called the authorities, things got worse. Financing for his buyers started being turned down for idiotic reasons. Customers suddenly found themselves drowning in unreasonable requests or repeatedly “lost” documentation.

  As he sat stunned at his kitchen table, Cameron knew what he ought to do. A man of faith should turn to prayer at a time like this, but Cameron felt as if that was impossible. These horrible, dark urges were not the impulses of a man of faith. These were not things to be shared with God. This felt more like Cain, avoiding God with Abel’s blood still crying out from the ground at his feet.

  He didn’t even want to be in the room with himself. A fidgety itch hit him to go somewhere—anywhere but here. Hastily stuffing the letter into his pocket, Cameron pushed back his chair and left the apartment. I’m not this man, am I?

  He paid so little attention to his movements that he nearly tripped down the stairs on his way outside. Outside seemed the best place to be, although he couldn’t really say why. He toyed with the idea of going for a long run, just for the sensation of leaving his disturbing emotions behind, but ended up sitting on the park bench, instead.

  He must have been there long enough to attract attention because he heard the distinctive slap of a pair of flip-flops behind him. “I haven’t seen you move in the last fifteen minutes. I’ve got some paperwork to do about the apartment, so I brought you some coff…” The nervous but friendly tone in Dinah’s voice faded as she came around to face him with two steaming cups of coffee. “Whoa, what happened to you?”

  He’d wondered what he would feel when he saw her again. Perhaps this was a blessing, for he was so engulfed in feeling lousy that he hardly had space to even think about their last encounter.

  She sat down next to him. Some small part of him noticed she smelled as good as she did the other night. “Are you sick?”

  Metaphorically speaking, that could be true. But as fond as Dinah was of her metaphors, Cameron lacked the energy for creative discourse. “I got a letter.”

  She set down her coffee on the bench and zipped up her jacket. Again, he thought of the absurdity of her bare toes and winter coat. But how was that any more absurd than the supposedly noble man who now found himself out for blood? “Letters,” she sighed. “I know a bit about getting letters.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “So,” she said after a moment, “this might be the part where you tell me what kind of letter has you so worked up.” She looked at him as if an idea just dawned on her. “Oh, no. Did you just get a ‘Dear Cameron’ letter? Your chic urban girlfriend back in New York just dumped you, didn’t she? Man, that’s nasty.”

  Nasty. What an unsavory choice of words. For a moment he considered going with that story. It’d be so much easier. Instead, he slid the paper from his pocket and handed it to her.

  She tucked one foot underneath her and skimmed through the letter. “I don’t speak lawyer; I’m going to need a translation.” Something in the text must have caught her eye though, because she got a more serious look on her face, put the paper down and turned to face him. “Wait a minute—are you being asked if you want to sue the guys who booted you out?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “It’s legal. That’s a given.”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it.” Cameron felt like he wanted to go yell it from the top of a mountain. As if putting it into words would somehow force it to make sense.

  “And you know how well that’ll stop me. What’s up?”

  At that moment, he was insanely grateful for her annoying persistence. Dinah would drag it out of him and he needed it dragged out of him. Purged. Soon she’d be gone, so there was no harm in letting her in on his own private torment. He turned to her. “When I was still in New York, I started the process of suing my former employer. Not for financial scheming—they’re already guilty of that—but a civil suit for how they treated me. For what they did to me professionally once I blew the whistle. And, I suppose, for the way they treated me before that, too. Me, and some other people.” It sounded so simple when put that way. Like making a child apologize for calling someone a bad name. Nothing complicated like “punitive damages” or “class action settlements.”

  She looked back over the letter. “But you didn’t?”

  “I thought it would be best for everyone if I just walked away. The suit would be long and involved and probably very nasty. So I decided to pull the plug and just le
ave.”

  “And now?”

  “I’ve got one last chance to change my mind and take them all down. I can still make them pay for what they did to me, if I act now. In a few weeks, that shot will be gone forever.”

  “I thought that’s why you left, because you were all done. But you’re not?”

  “Not if I don’t want to be.” And that was the crux of it, wasn’t it? Did he want to be done with it? Or did he want all the blood to be spilled?

  “Were they that awful?”

  “Yes,” he said entirely too quickly. It was like all the anger came back in seconds. “No one had any illusions about my being able to stay on board after Frank was convicted, but I thought I’d at least be able to stay in NewYork.”

  “Frank. Was Frank your boss?”

  “Yes and no. Frank was the head of the sister company, Landemere Finance. So he wasn’t actually my boss, but he knew how to put the pressure on my boss. And my boss’s boss.” Frank was an orchestrator, a string-puller, and he’d given new life to the old phrase “You’ll never work in this town again.” There were days Cameron felt like he’d been marked by the Mafia, not one well-connected executive. The number of times he heard the sighed phrase “I’d like to help, but…” Even associates in his home state of Massachusetts had quietly considered him “too hot to touch.” He could have found a position, played off his parents’ connections for a mid-level management office somewhere safe, but the prospect felt sour to him. He didn’t want that kind of personal or professional pity—not from associates or his parents. Their proud-but-worried attitudes suffocated him in the first days after his firing. As if they knew he’d done the right thing, were proud of him on some level, but would rather have had someone else’s son take the noble fall. Cameron and his parents had a good relationship, but this was too much strain for everyone at the moment and Aunt Sandy’s inquiry had felt like the perfect escape into a fresh start.

  “So you’d be suing Frank now?” Dinah’s question brought his thoughts back to the present.

  “Sort of. He’d be personally named, but the company would be liable for allowing him to act the way he did. He was a snake, Frank. A real operator. I only stumbled on the evidence that he’d been in cahoots with a condo developer, skimming off money that new owners paid as ‘assessments’—you know, payments for common costs like furnaces and roofs and such—and pocketing the funds instead of transferring them to the condo associations. I think I realized, on some level, that Frank was skimming off the top long before I went to anyone. And we all still did business with him. He hated me from the beginning, always treated me badly, but my boss always pushed the deals toward his finance office. I wasn’t surprised customers started coming back with weird gaps in condo associations accounting or maintenance fees that we thought had already been covered. Frank and the condo developer were skimming off the assessments they’d inserted into the closing statements when people bought the properties, taking the money for themselves instead of sending it on to the condo associations to pay for things.”

  “But surely you must have known they’d slice you to ribbons once they found out you were on to them? Why on earth did you stay? If you knew they were so corrupt, why didn’t you go find somewhere else to work?”

  “I knew something wasn’t right for years, that sneaky deals were being done, but dumb me thought I could do the whole ‘light into the darkness’ thing.” He laughed weakly. “I had a high opinion of myself. You know, out to change the world, captain of the nobility team and so on. I told you, it’s complicated.”

  Dinah sat back on the bench. “Yeah, I use that line, too.” She tucked her other foot underneath her, so that she was sitting Indian-style on the bench beside him, as if it were a perfectly ordinary day. Go back inside, he thought. Bake things. Put some socks on before your feet freeze to death. Leave for New Jersey. Leave me alone.

  Don’t leave me alone.

  “What he did was wrong. They should pay for it.” After that declaration, she was silent for a long time, sipping her coffee. “Revenge looks so attractive, doesn’t it?”

  He started. Her voice was smooth and silky, as if she were one of those cartoon devils sitting on his left shoulder and whispering into his ear. “What?”

  She turned and looked Cameron, spending a moment staring into his face. For a crazy second he felt like all those dark urges were visible to her, as if she had the ability to see the loathsome things he was feeling. Everyone in Middleburg thought he was such an upstanding guy, but she seemed to be able to tear off the sheep’s clothing to see the wolf inside. “There’s a big fat part of you that thinks you made a mistake back there in New York. That you should take ’em down, and make ’em pay. Isn’t there?”

  He shot off the bench. He didn’t like her voice—that alto voice that slid into his thoughts—giving words to the things he was trying not to think.

  “Hey, I’m not judging, I just wanted you to know I understand.”

  “Maybe,” he said, not even looking at her.

  He felt her pull on his jacket sleeve. “Sit back down.” He resisted. “Cameron, sit down.” It was the first time she’d said his name. It shone a clear beacon through the fog in his head. She yanked on him, hard. “Cameron Rollings, you big jerk, park it right now.” He thought, at that moment, that she could easily be the little sister to eight burly big brothers, the way she could boss people around. He sat.

  She waved the papers he didn’t realize she was still holding. “You are not a monster. Wanting to get back at people for what was done to you? That’s just human. Itching to take down some jerk because you’ve been given a golden opportunity to do it? That doesn’t make you as bad as they are.”

  “Doesn’t it?” he asked. He used to be better at keeping a lid on his emotions.

  “The knee-jerk reaction isn’t who you are. It’s the choice you make with that emotion—that’s who you are.”

  “You really like sticking your nose in other people’s business.”

  “You really like changing the subject.”

  “No offense, but don’t you think you’ve got enough on your plate without prying into my life?”

  Now it was she who stood up. “You really don’t get it, do you? No wonder Middleburg seems like a foreign country to you. We are in each other’s lives out here. Because that’s what caring is, what community looks like. You care about the guy next to you and he looks after you. It’s a team sport, Mr. Basketball, that’s what life here is like. I’m not prying, I’m trying to help. Trying, if that’s okay with you, to give back a little of the whole lot you’ve already given me. If you want to sit here and refuse it, well, I suppose that’s your choice.” She sat back down again, finished with her rant. “Really, though, you’d be dumb to refuse it. People really like you here. You’ve made a great start of it. ‘Tycoot’ and everything.”

  She got that look on her face, the one as if another thought just struck her. “You,” she said, pointing at him. “You’re frightened of how much you like it here, aren’t you? You just wanted to run off somewhere and hide, and we like you too much. We’re in your face and it bothers you that you like it, doesn’t it?”

  “Do you analyze everyone like this? The town armchair therapist?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “Again, you’re avoiding the question.”

  “How did we get from my legal future to my psychological health?” Cameron remembered he’d prayed for distraction, but he was shooting for something a little more peaceful than Dinah Hopkins, Therapist-Baker.

  “They’re connected. That’s just it, Cameron, it’s all connected. We’re all connected.”

  “Forgive me, but you sound a bit like a greeting card.”

  “See, that’s what living in a humongous city can do to you. You get sucked into the cynical anonymity of the crowd. Here, you’re a unique person, with distinct contributions. No cookie-cutter junior executives here, just God’s amazing creation, each one of us.”


  He looked at her. “You just don’t give up, do you?” He did, however, feel a shred better. He was going to miss her particular brand of lunacy. Her invasive energy. Her wicked left-handed layup shot.

  “When do you have to decide what you’ll do about the lawsuit?”

  He looked over the letter, realizing he hadn’t thought about that until she asked. When he’d first opened the letter, it felt like the whole decision had attacked him with urgency. “Next month.” He didn’t have to know what he was going to do about it now. He didn’t even have to know what he was going to do about it tomorrow. He had time to work it out. Pray it out. Maybe even talk it out with someone like Pastor Dave. “I suppose I could figure out a lot by February.”

  “You could.” She paused for a moment. “I’ll be gone by then. Wow.” It was like all the sparkle drained right out of her. She sighed heavily, looking out over the park. “Wow,” she repeated more softly.

  “You love it here, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “You will, too,” she said after another shuddering sigh. “It’s the most amazing place.”

  “Do you think you’ll come back?” After a moment, he added, “That was a friendly question, not a landlord question, by the way.”

  It was a long time before she looked at him, her long lashes framing such sad eyes, and said, “I want to.” She hugged her knees and tried to smile. “We don’t always get what we want, though, do we?”

  The wind picked up and Cameron realized they’d been out here a long while. He stood and extended a hand to help her up as well. “I have a feeling you’ll be back someday.”

  “Oh,” she practically breathed the word, “from your mouth to God’s ears.”

  He chuckled. “I have an aunt who says that, too. Not Sandy, my other aunt. The calmer one.”