Bliss and the Art of Forever (A Hope Springs Novel Book 4)

by Alison Kent

  My stomach feels like it just plopped back where it goes. “Okay. I hope you like the chocolate. Daddy worked all night to make it and came to see me this morning at Grammy’s so I could bring it to you.”

  “Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get to see him last night.”

  “Oh, I saw him at supper before we went to Grammy’s. Then I played Crazy Eights with PopPop and I won three times but then it was eight-colon-zero-zero and time for bed. PopPop read some of Winnie-the-Pooh but just one chapter. He said we’ll read Harry Potter but probably not ’til I’m eight. I went to bed after that.”

  “I see.”

  Now Ms. Harvey looks like she wants to laugh, but that’s SO MUCH BETTER than when she looks like she wants to cry. I go back to my chair with Kelly Webber watching me the whole time and I take off my coat and then it’s not so hard to breathe.

  ADDY DRAKE’S OOEY GOOEY CAKE

  1 box pound cake mix

  4 eggs

  1 stick butter, melted

  8 ounces cream cheese, softened

  1 box powdered sugar (reserving ½ cup)

  Preheat oven to 350° (F).

  Grease or spray a 13 x 9-inch baking pan and line with parchment paper, coating with nonstick spray.

  Combine the pound cake mix with two of the eggs and the butter. Pat the cake mix “crust” evenly into the bottom of the prepared pan.

  Mix the cream cheese with the remaining two eggs and the powdered sugar. Spread the cream cheese mixture on top of the cake mix “crust.”

  Bake 35–40 minutes. While warm, dust the top with the reserved ½ cup of powdered sugar. Let cool completely before cutting.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The box Callum had sent to school with Adrianne sat on Brooklyn’s desk blotter all day. The blotter was a calendar, littered with colorful art representing her vocation and the season, with any appropriate holidays given their due.

  Apples and pencils and falling orange leaves and green grass and the alphabet in bright block letters and numbers, too. Since the current month was February . . . hearts, of course. Dozens of them. Tiny ones in clusters. Puffy ones. Patterned ones and solids in pink and red and white.

  The calendar had come with a laminated sheet for each month, and she’d used them every year she’d taught kindergarten in Hope Springs. She jotted notes and appointments with a dry-erase marker to keep her days on track.

  She left herself reminders of things to discuss with her students’ parents: their child’s interest in a particular subject and how to encourage it, emotional reactions that seemed unprovoked and worried her, classroom incidents that might be blown out of proportion over the dinner table at home.

  Each afternoon before leaving, she read over the scattered comments and wiped away the ones she’d taken care of, or that no longer required her attention, or those that by the end of the day had lost their pressing nature.

  Today all she could focus on was the box. None of the words she’d written for herself made sense. Oh, she tried reading them, eraser in hand, ready to clear them away, but her gaze strayed to Callum’s gift again and again.

  The box was a three-inch cube with a fitted lid. The paper made her think of the signature Tiffany & Co. robin’s-egg blue, but Callum’s design was almost iridescent, a shimmering sort of pearl over a deep chocolate brown.

  She’d seen dozens of similar boxes in his shop, sizes to hold four candies, to hold twenty, to hold six. To hold one. And that’s what this was. Without opening the box, she knew. A single chocolate specifically for her. Because he’d listened to her and he’d learned something about her. Something he thought important, when nothing she’d told him mattered enough for this.

  She knew that because she was getting to know him, the type of man he was, the business owner, the father, the son. His tats told her things, too. About what he considered important. He wouldn’t put what he wanted to tell her into words, he wouldn’t write a poem or a song. He wouldn’t give her a purchased gift, though he might pick up a stone, or a leaf, or an acorn.

  Her fingers shaking unaccountably, she lifted the lid, catching a glimpse of the underside as she did and looking closer. It was Callum’s signature, and illegible, which made her smile, and she pressed her fingertips to the hollow of her throat, feeling her pulse there, as well as an unexpected sensation of choking. Of being unable to breathe, which was absolutely not okay.

  This was what a crush felt like. An ill-timed and ill-suited fascination, because that was all this was. Her attraction to a man. The first man to have stirred her emotions since Artie. And the way they were stirred . . . what she was feeling . . . oh, but this was so very different from then.

  It wasn’t the same sense Artie had provided of everything being right in her world. Of security, of being settled, being safe. Safe. The word made her laugh. Her fingertips tingled and her stomach clenched and there was a hole opening beneath her, a cliff’s edge inviting her to fall. Deep and dark and dangerous. Those were the sensations coiling through her as she ran her thumb over Callum’s name.

  She was so very tired of being alone.

  There. She’d admitted it. Two years of eating dinner alone, going to the movies alone, climbing into bed alone was getting to her. And even though she’d already begun shedding the past, it had taken Callum Bennett Drake lowering his big body into a tiny little chair and reading to her class about a chocolate-loving bunny to tug free the ribbon she’d wrapped around her widowhood so neatly.

  Enough. Four months and she’d be in Italy to scatter Artie’s ashes. She had to do this her way, this moving on with her life. She couldn’t let an Irish rogue slip into the opening she’d inadvertently made for him. That didn’t mean she couldn’t enjoy the fruit of his labors, so she took a cleansing breath and looked down.

  The shape of the candy made her think of a pod, or a bean. No, a cherry. A coffee cherry. It was the size of the other artisan chocolates on display in Bliss. She knew the shell was chocolate, even though the color was more a Radical Red with a Mulberry shimmer, and brushstrokes of Jazzberry Jam. That made her laugh. Who but a kindergarten teacher would think in Crayola crayon colors?

  Coffee. They’d talked about coffee at the park just yesterday. But nowhere in any of their conversations had he hinted at the sort of interest in her she would think necessary for this. Unless she’d missed it, which, sad to say, was not all that unlikely. Yes, she’d been moved by the way he’d looked at her, and more than once, but she’d never been good with signals; even when Artie had been the one broadcasting them, she’d never picked them up.

  If that’s what was happening with Callum . . . swallowing the nerves tickling the base of her throat, she bit into the candy, savoring the comfortable pleasure of warm coffee, like the first sip of her morning latte, though this one came with the added indulgence of chocolate.

  That had her smiling, as she licked her fingers clean. Had her, too, determined to pay better attention, to watch for signs and clues. Not now as much as in the future. The timing was all wrong for her and Callum, but it would be nice to get to know him better, to climb out of her rut with the help of a man who appreciated good coffee, whose taste in artwork mirrored hers, and who found meaning in well-chosen words.

  Hoping the Second Baptist Church donations center would still be open, Brooklyn headed there after school on Wednesday—finally—with the boxes she’d hauled to her car late Tuesday night before collapsing exhausted into bed. Who knew culling twelve years’ worth of clothes from her closet and drawers would end up taking her three days?

  She’d started going through her things on Sunday morning. Usually she went to church with Jean, but after Saturday night spent at Bliss with Callum, she’d failed to set her alarm; when Jean called at nine, she’d only just emptied the last of the milk into her espresso machine’s foamer and was still half asleep.

  She’d begged off; she didn’t have time to get ready, and she truly wasn’t feeling up to par, though tha
t she blamed on her state of mind, not her body. Having Callum show her his Tennyson quote, leaving her to guess at the rest of his tattooed sayings, had her musing over how fitting they were, how personal.

  Though really, she knew next to nothing about how he’d lived when he’d belonged to the club. What she knew about such groups came from the media, from books and movies; who hadn’t heard of Easy Rider? Or the Hells Angels? Even Sons of Anarchy?

  Strangely, she couldn’t picture him in any of those situations, but she only knew him as Adrianne’s father, who, on Monday, had crawled around the children’s section of Cat Tales to help her pick out her limit of books. Who’d allowed her to have one scoop of ice cream, not the ten she’d asked for, not the three she’d countered with, just the one.

  Who’d carried wet wipes to clean his daughter’s hands, then let her get as messy as she’d wanted, swinging and sliding and climbing, until she turned from a mild-mannered six-year-old into an unholy terror and had to be carried cuddled against his neck all the way to their truck. Monday had been an extraordinary day, and so much better than normal.

  But that line of thinking only served to remind Brooklyn of the rut she’d fallen into. It also served to distract her from finishing the clothes-sorting chore when she’d arrived home Monday night; she’d taken until last night to get it done. Not that it had gone any faster; she’d been thinking about Callum’s gift of candy the entire time.

  Now it was Wednesday, one day shy of a week since she’d met him, and he’d been constantly on her mind. The only other time she’d known this level of infatuation had been with Artie, and she could not let herself believe this was the same. Love was the last thing she was looking for, the last thing she had time for. Later. When she was herself again. She just wasn’t ready. Not yet.

  The donations center was in a small addition at the rear of the church’s main building, next to the youth annex, which included the nursery and the choir’s practice room. It was open late Wednesday for the convenience of members dropping off items before services. And it was manned with volunteers.

  Today those volunteers were Dolly Pepper, whom she knew only from Two Owls Café, and Shirley Drake. For the briefest second, Brooklyn hesitated near the door, then made her way to the counter, behind which both women were sorting items from several boxes onto long folding tables. “Hello, Mrs. Pepper. Mrs. Drake.”

  Callum’s mother looked up from checking the label inside a woman’s cream linen suit coat, her face nearly expressionless. “Why, Ms. Harvey. What a surprise. It took me a minute to place you outside of the school. Dolly? This is my granddaughter Adrianne’s kindergarten teacher, Brooklyn Harvey.”

  “Delighted, Ms. Harvey.” Dolly extended her hand over the counter, her smile genuinely kind. “I know your name, of course,” she said, leaving Brooklyn to wonder if she recognized it from the stories the Hope Springs Courant had run about the fire that had claimed Artie’s life. “I’m so glad to finally have the pleasure of meeting you.”

  “Brooklyn, please.”

  “Dolly and her husband, Mitch, do a lot of the cooking at Two Owls,” Shirley said, her gaze traveling from Dolly to Brooklyn and back as if making some sort of assessment.

  Unable to imagine what Callum’s mother would be assessing, Brooklyn simply responded, “Yes. I know. I eat there often.”

  “Have I seen you there with Jean Dial?” Dolly asked, pulling a pair of blue jeans from a now empty box and holding them up to examine.

  Brooklyn nodded. “She’s my next-door neighbor.”

  “Oh, lucky you.” Dolly tossed the jeans onto a table with what looked like items of children’s clothing. “Jeanie is an absolute saint. She’s the reason Rick, my son, survived third grade actually reading at a third-grade level. I’ve baked her pumpkin muffins at Thanksgiving every year since.”

  “I’ve actually eaten those pumpkin muffins,” Brooklyn said with a laugh. “You need to put them on the café’s buffet for the holidays.”

  “You know, I might just mention that to Kaylie. Not that we don’t already have more food than we know what to do with.”

  “I wonder how your daughter-in-law would feel about working with the church to make use of those leftovers,” Shirley said, having hung the suit and moved on to inspecting the labels on the blouses from the same box.

  “I believe she’s talked to the city about doing just that. Unfortunately, it’s more complicated than dropping off clothing, what with the health department regulating how food is dispensed to the public.” Dolly folded down the flaps of the box and set it near a door that led to the donation center’s warehousing area. “Anyway, Ms. Harvey. Brooklyn. Can we help you with something?”

  Gesturing behind her toward the parking lot, Brooklyn said, “I’ve got several boxes of clothes and small tools. Everything's in good shape, some of the items never worn or used. Before I give it all to Goodwill, could y’all use it?”

  “Oh, yes,” Dolly said. “Tools are welcome. My stepson-in-law is forever looking for good deals for his employees. Let me give him a call and see if he wants me to set anything aside. And let me find Grady to unload your car.”

  Brooklyn watched Dolly go, then turned and offered an awkward smile to Callum’s mother, who continued to check labels as she said, “Adrianne told me you went to the park with her and her father on Monday.”

  Tucking back her hair, Brooklyn nodded. “I ran into them at Cat Tales, though I guess it would be more accurate to say they ran into me. Jean and I swap paperback romances. Medieval-set. I was looking for anything we hadn’t yet read.” And why in the world was she explaining herself to Callum’s mother? It wasn’t like she’d kept her son out past his bedtime.

  “And then you went to the park.”

  “After we went for ice cream, yes.” Might as well get it all out on the table. “Adrianne invited me before Callum could stop her. But I have a feeling he doesn’t tell her no very often.”

  “Not as often as he should.”

  “He seems like a devoted father.”

  “Oh, he is,” Shirley said, shaking out a skirt she then held up to her waist as if she were shopping at Macy’s. “It’s one thing he’s managed to do right.”

  “Bliss seems to be doing well. He did that, didn’t he?” Defending Callum, whom she’d known but a week, to his mother, whom she’d come to associate with Adrianne’s education, left her feeling rather unbalanced. In fact, this whole conversation needed to be reined in.

  “Ask him sometime where he got the money.”

  Brooklyn crossed her arms, her purse swinging from its shoulder strap against her hip. “I don’t think that’s any of my business.”

  “I suppose not,” Shirley said, discarding the skirt onto the pile of blouses, still not making eye contact, as if Brooklyn weren’t really there. “But if you happen to run into him again, just keep it in mind.”

  “I’m sorry, but are you warning me away from your son?”

  “I’m saying that my son doesn’t always make the best choices.”

  Seriously? “And seeing me is a bad one?”

  “Now that’s just a silly thing to say..” She picked up a pair of pumps and checked the wear on the soles. “It’s just that he’s got his daughter to take care of and his business taking up the rest of his attention.”

  Meaning he didn’t have time for a woman in his life. Was that what she was saying? Or was that what she feared? That she’d lose her son for a second time, and along with him her granddaughter?

  “Mrs. Drake. I’m a friend of your son. Nothing more,” Brooklyn said, wondering if the words rang truer for Callum’s mother than they did in her own ears. “I teach his daughter. Those are the only relationships Callum and I have. Even Adrianne will tell you I turned down her offer to watch Frozen with them Monday night.”

  “I would think, as a teacher, you wouldn’t get personally involved with your students’ parents,” Shirley said, the shoes still in her hands
as she finally lifted her gaze to meet Brooklyn’s, her expression harsh and judgmental.

  “I don’t,” Brooklyn said, frowning. “As I told you, Adrianne and her father ran into me at the bookstore. The ice cream and the park . . .” Who is making bad choices now? “Those were one-time, spur of the moment things. I can’t imagine they’ll happen again.”

  The strange moment passed, leaving Brooklyn more wobbly than ever as she watched Shirley toss the shoes aside, then fold down the flaps of the empty box much as Dolly had done with hers. “I did tell Callum about the next parent-teacher conference. I’m happy to come along, or come instead, if it would be more conducive to the discussion.”

  Did the woman think Brooklyn was going to drag her son across her desk and have her way with him? “Since I haven’t had the chance to go over Adrianne’s work with her father, this will be the perfect opportunity for the two of us to do just that. But I do want to thank you for signing him up for the dads’ story hour. The kids adored him. Like you said, he knows what he’s doing with the kids.”

  It wasn’t exactly what Callum’s mother had said, but Brooklyn paraphrasing, or extrapolating, didn’t seem like such a sin. Until Shirley Drake came back with, “He knows what he’s doing with Adrianne. And I hope to heaven he keeps his expertise to that girl. The idea of him taking on more responsibility when he’s already up to his eyeballs—”

  “Here we go, Brooklyn,” Dolly said, her timing saving Brooklyn from saying something she knew she’d regret. “I’m so sorry that took so long. Brooklyn Harvey, this is Grady Barrow. He’ll unload your car for you.”

  Brooklyn shook the boy’s hand. He was as tall as she was, probably no more than fourteen, with dark brown hair that fell over his forehead, and sparkling blue eyes. “Are you the same Grady who’s been working at Bliss?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Me and Jo helped Callum pack shipments to go out for Valentine’s Day,” he said, though all Brooklyn could hear was Callum’s mother whispering, “Good Lord,” under her breath, as if she didn’t approve of her son’s choice of temporary help.