Solid Gold Cowboy

by Maisey Yates

  Read on for a sneak preview of Maisey Yates’s emotionally compelling new novel for HQN

  Confessions from the Quilting Circle

  Confessions from the Quilting Circle

  by Maisey Yates

  March 4th, 1944

  The dress is perfect. Candlelight satin and antique lace. I can’t wait for you to see it. I can’t wait to walk down the aisle toward you. If only we could set a date. If only we had some idea of when the war will be over.

  Love, Dot

  Present day—

  Lark

  Unfinished.

  The word whispered through the room like a ghost. Over the faded, floral wallpaper, down to the scarred wooden floor. And to the precariously stacked boxes and bins of fabrics, yarn skeins, canvases and other artistic miscellany.

  Lark Ashwood had to wonder if her grandmother had left them this way on purpose. Unfinished business here on earth, in the form of quilts, sweaters and paintings, to keep her spirit hanging around after she was gone.

  It would be like her. Adeline Dowell did everything with just a little extra.

  From her glossy red hair—which stayed that color till the day she died—to her matching cherry glasses and lipstick. She always had an armful of bangles, a beer in her hand and an ashtray full of cigarettes. She never smelled like smoke. She smelled like spearmint gum, Aqua Net and Avon perfume.

  She had taught Lark that it was okay to be a little bit of extra.

  A smile curved Lark’s lips as she looked around the attic space again. “Oh, Gram...this is really a mess.”

  She had the sense that was intentional too. In death, as in life, her grandmother wouldn’t simply fade away.

  Neat attics, well-ordered affairs and pre-death estate sales designed to decrease the clutter a family would have to go through later were for other women. Quieter women who didn’t want to be a bother.

  Adeline Dowell lived to be a bother. To expand to fill a space, not shrinking down to accommodate anyone.

  Lark might not consistently achieve the level of excess Gram had, but she considered it a goal.

  “Lark? Are you up there?”

  She heard her mom’s voice carrying up the staircase. “Yes!” She shouted back down. “I’m...trying to make sense of this.”

  She heard footsteps behind her and saw her mom standing there, gray hair neat, arms folded in. “You don’t have to. We can get someone to come in and sort it out.”

  “And what? Take it all to a thrift store?” Lark asked.

  Her mom’s expression shifted slightly, just enough to convey about six emotions with no wasted effort. Emotional economy was Mary Ashwood’s forte. As contained and practical as Addie had been excessive. “Honey, I think most of this would be bound for the dump.”

  “Mom, this is great stuff.”

  “I don’t have room in my house for sentiment.”

  “It’s not about sentiment. It’s usable stuff.”

  “I’m not artsy, you know that. I don’t really...get all this.” The unspoken words in the air settled over Lark like a cloud.

  Mary wasn’t artsy because her mother hadn’t been around to teach her to sew. To knit. To paint. To quilt.

  Addie had taught her granddaughters. Not her own daughter.

  She’d breezed on back into town in a candy apple Corvette when Lark’s oldest sister, Avery, was born, after spending Mary’s entire childhood off on some adventure or another, while Lark’s grandfather had done the raising of the kids.

  Grandkids had settled her. And Mary had never withheld her children from Adeline. Whatever Mary thought about her mom was difficult to say. But then, Lark could never really read her mom’s emotions. When she’d been a kid, she hadn’t noticed that. Lark had gone around feeling whatever she did and assuming everyone was tracking right along with her because she’d been an innately self focused kid. Or maybe that was just kids.

  Either way, back then badgering her mom into tea parties and talking her ear off without noticing Mary didn’t do much of her own talking had been easy.

  It was only when she’d had big things to share with her mom that she’d realized...she couldn’t.

  “It’s easy, Mom,” Lark said. “I’ll teach you. No one is asking you to make a living with art, art can be about enjoying the process.”

  “I don’t enjoy doing things I’m bad at.”

  “Well I don’t want Gram’s stuff going to a thrift store, okay?”

  Another shift in Mary’s expression. A single crease on one side of her mouth conveying irritation, reluctance and exhaustion. But when she spoke she was measured. “If that’s what you want. This is as much yours as mine.”

  It was a four-way split. The Dowell House and all its contents, and The Miner’s House, formerly her grandmother’s candy shop, to Mary Ashwood, and her three daughters. They’d discovered that at the will reading two months earlier.

  It hadn’t caused any issues in the family. They just weren’t like that.

  Lark’s uncle Bill had just shaken his head. “She feels guilty.”

  And that had been the end of any discussion, before any had really started. They were all like their father that way. Quiet. Reserved. Opinionated and expert at conveying it without saying much.

  Big loud shouting matches didn’t have a place in the Dowell family.

  But Addie had been there for her boys. They were quite a bit older than Lark’s mother. She’d left when the oldest had been eighteen. The youngest boy sixteen.

  Mary had been four.

  Lark knew her mom felt more at home in the middle of a group of men than she did with women. She’d been raised in a house of men. With burned dinners and repressed emotions.

  Lark had always felt like her mother had never really known what to make of the overwhelmingly female household she’d ended up with.

  “It’s what I want. When is Hannah getting in tonight?” Hannah, the middle child, had moved to Boston right after college, getting a position in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She had the summer off of concerts and had decided to come to Bear Creek to finalize the plans for their inherited properties before going back home.

  Once Hannah had found out when she could get time away from the symphony, Lark had set her own plans for moving into motion. She wanted to be here the whole time Hannah was here, since for Hannah, this wouldn’t be permanent.

  But Lark wasn’t going back home. If her family agreed to her plan, she was staying here.

  Which was not something she’d ever imagined she’d do.

  Lark had gone to college across the country, in New York, at eighteen and had spent years living everywhere but here. Finding new versions of herself in new towns, new cities, whenever the urge took her.

  Unfinished.

  “Sometime around five-ish? She said she’d get a car out here from the airport. I reminded her that isn’t the easiest thing to do in this part of the world. She said something about it being in apps now. I didn’t laugh at her.”

  Lark laughed, though. “She can rent a car.”

  Lark hadn’t lived in Bear Creek since she was eighteen, but she hadn’t been under the impression there was a surplus of ride services around the small, rural community. If you were flying to get to Bear Creek, you had to fly into Medford, which was about eighteen miles from the smaller town. Even if you could find a car, she doubted the driver would want to haul anyone out of town.

  But her sister wouldn’t be told anything. Hannah made her own way, something Lark could relate to. But while she imagined herself drifting along like a tumbleweed, she imagined Hannah slicing through the water like a shark. With intent, purpose, and no small amount of sharpness.

  “Maybe I should arrange something.”

  “Mom. She’s a professional symphony musician who’s been living on her own for fourteen years. I’m prett
y sure she can cope.”

  “Isn’t the point of coming home not having to cope for a while? Shouldn’t your mom handle things?” Mary was a doer. She had never been the one to sit and chat. She’d loved for Lark to come out to the garden with her and work alongside her in the flower beds, or bake together. “You’re not in New Mexico anymore. I can make you cookies without worrying they’ll get eaten by rats in the mail.”

  Lark snorted. “I don’t think there are rats in the mail.”

  “It doesn’t have to be real for me to worry about it.”

  And there was something Lark had inherited directly from her mother. “That’s true.”

  That and her love of chocolate chip cookies, which her mom made the very best. She could remember long afternoons at home with her mom when she’d been little, and her sisters had been in school. They’d made cookies and had iced tea, just the two of them.

  Cooking had been a self-taught skill her mother had always been proud of. Her recipes were hers. And after growing up eating “chicken with blood” and beanie weenies cooked by her dad, she’d been pretty determined her kids would eat better than that.

  Something Lark had been grateful for.

  And Mom hadn’t minded if she’d turned the music up loud and danced in some “dress up clothes”—an oversized prom dress from the ’80s and a pair of high heels that were far too big, purchased from a thrift store. Which Hannah and Avery both declared “annoying” when they were home.

  Her mom hadn’t understood her, Lark knew that. But Lark had felt close to her back then in spite of it.

  The sound of the door opening and closing came from downstairs. “Homework is done, dinner is in the Crock-Pot. I think even David can manage that.”

  The sound of her oldest sister Avery’s voice was clear, even from a distance. Lark owed that to Avery’s years of motherhood, coupled with the fact that she—by choice—fulfilled the role of parent liaison at her kids’ exclusive private school, and often wrangled children in large groups. Again, by choice.

  Lark looked around the room one last time and walked over to the stack of crafts. There was an old journal on top of several boxes that look like they might be overflowing with fabric, along with some old Christmas tree ornaments, and a sewing kit. She grabbed hold of them all before walking to the stairs, turning the ornaments over and letting the silver stars catch the light that filtered in through the stained glass window.

  Her mother was already ahead of her, halfway down the stairs by the time Lark got to the top of them. She hadn’t seen Avery yet since she’d arrived. She loved her older sister. She loved her niece and nephew. She liked her brother-in-law, who did his best not to be dismissive of the fact that she made a living drawing pictures. Okay, he kind of annoyed her. But still, he was fine. Just... A doctor. A surgeon, in fact, and bearing all of the arrogance that stereotypically implied.

  One of the saddest things about living away for as long as she had was that she’d missed her niece’s and nephew’s childhoods. She saw them at least once a year, but it never felt like enough. And now they were teenagers, and a lot less cute.

  And then there was Avery, who had always been somewhat untouchable. Four years older than Lark, Avery was a classic oldest child. A people pleasing perfectionist. She was organized and she was always neat and orderly.

  And even though the gap between thirty-four and thirty-eight was a lot narrower than twelve and sixteen, sometimes Lark still felt like the gawky adolescent to Avery’s sweet sixteen.

  But maybe if they shared in a little bit of each other’s day-to-day it would close some of that gap she felt between them.

  Lark reached the bottom of the attic steps, and walked across the landing, pausing in front of the white door that led out to the widow’s walk. She had always liked that when she was a kid. Widow’s walk. It had sounded moody and tragic, and it had appealed to Lark’s sense of drama. It still did.

  She walked across the landing, to the curved staircase that carried her down to the first floor. The sun shone in the windows that surrounded the front door. Bright green and purple, reflecting colored rectangles onto the wall across from it. The Dowell house, so named for her mother’s family, had been built in 1866, and had stood as a proud historic home in the town of Bear Creek ever since.

  The grand landscape, yellow brick that had mottled and taken on tones of red and rust over the years, was iconic, and had appeared on many a postcard and calendar. It had been part of her gram’s family, but to Lark it had always been Grandpa’s house. When he’d died ten years earlier, it had surprised everyone that the ownership of the place passed to Gram, considering the two of them had been divorced for over forty years at the time. But it had been clear that however deep Lark’s grandfather’s bitterness had been, it hadn’t extended to making sure his former wife didn’t get the home that had been passed through her family for generations.

  But even after Lark’s grandfather had passed, Addie had never lived in it. A couple of times Lark’s uncles had stayed there when they’d come to town for visits, but for the past two years it had been largely closed up. And the attic had clearly been used as her grandmother’s preferred storage unit.

  It was The Miner’s House that her grandmother had called home. She had made a little candy shop in the front, and had kept a bedroom in the back. The yard had a small dining set and the porch had rocking chairs. That, she’d said, was all she needed.

  But as a result, The Dowell House was in a bit of disrepair, and in bad need of a good dusting.

  Lark walked through the sitting room, and into the kitchen. The two rooms were divided by a red brick wall with another stained glass window set into it, and a large arched doorway. At one time, it had been an external wall and door, the change just part of one of the many expansions and remodels that had taken place over the years.

  Another thing Lark had never given a whole lot of thought to. Because it was simply how Grandpa’s house had looked. Now, she saw it for the slight architectural oddity that it was.

  She could see her sister through the window, the pane cutting across her face, the top of her head green, and the bottom half purple. Lark walked into the kitchen, where her mother was already seated at the table, and her sister was in the process of wiping it off. She had brought... They looked like insulated bags, which Lark could only assume had food in them.

  “I figured you guys would be pretty hungry by now.”

  “I’m always hungry,” Lark said. “And hi.” She closed the space between herself and her sister and drew her in for a hug.

  “Good to see you.” Avery dropped a kiss on to her head.

  Lark took a step back. Avery looked tired, her blond hair piled on top of her head, an oversize sweater covering her always thin frame. She had on a pair of black leggings and a pair of black athletic shoes. She looked every inch the classic image of the supermom that she was.

  Avery had all the self possession and poise of their mother and the effortless femininity of their grandmother. She’d been popular and stylish with ease and Lark had envied her. When Lark had reacted to things it had always been big, and often messy. Until she’d learned to get a grip on herself. Until she’d finally learned her lesson about what could happen when you acted, and didn’t think it through.

  “But what food did you bring?” Lark asked.

  “I had a potpie in the freezer. I also brought salad and rolls. I figured Hannah would probably be hungry too, after flying cross-country.”

  Her sister had also brought wine, and sparkling water. Lark helped herself to the water. Without asking for assistance, Avery finished cleaning off the table, then produced paper plates. “I didn’t know what kind of a state the dishes would be in. And I didn’t know which appliances in the house were functional. I don’t hand wash.”

  “No. Why would anyone? It’s why God gave us dishwashers.”

  �
�Agree. Mom?” Avery asked. “How much potpie do you want?”

  “I can serve myself.”

  “No,” Avery said. “You don’t have to. Just sit. I’ll get you some wine.” Avery was a flurry of movement, and even when Lark and Mary had their food, Avery didn’t sit. She opened up the cupboards and looked in each of them, frowning. Lark could almost see an inventory building in her sister’s head.

  “What exactly are you doing?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Avery said. “Didn’t you talk to Hannah at all about what her idea was for this place?”

  “No.” Lark felt vaguely wounded by that. There was a plan, and Hannah hadn’t said anything to her?

  That made her feel more like the baby sister than anything had for a while.

  “Finally!” Laden with suitcases, Hannah pushed the door open with her shoulder, her bright red hair, a shade or two down the aisle from the color their grandmother had used, covering her face. “I couldn’t seem to get a car. I had to rent one.”

  Her suitcases were flung out in front of her, her violin in a black case slung over her shoulder. Lark didn’t see a purse. She was sure her sister had one, but the violin was obviously her most important possession.

  “Yeah, I don’t think ridesharing has really caught on around here,” Lark said.

  “Do you mean those apps? Aren’t all the drivers serial killers or something?” Avery asked. Everyone looked at her. “One of my friends shared a post about it online.”

  Hannah and Lark exchanged a glance.

  “Well, I’ve managed to use it for about five years now and not get serial killed. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed,” Hannah said. “It will be good to have a car, but I don’t really want to pay for a rental for the next three months.”

  “Dad said you could borrow the car,” Mary said.

  “Thanks,” Hannah responded.

  “I drove,” Lark said, only then registering that her sister had not in fact asked if she needed the car. “So I have my car,” she finished lamely.