by Rachel Hauck
“I keep asking myself that about the shop,” Haley said. “Do you know why she didn’t tell me? I-I can’t believe she didn’t talk to me about this. Of course, I was filling her ear with my woes.”
Was she so consumed with her fears and mistakes over Dax, how she felt betrayed, how she wept over the choice she had made that she didn’t hear Tammy?
“She didn’t feel good, Haley. I’d wondered if that’s why she called things off at first. She’d been fighting blazing headaches and all kinds of stuff for months.”
“It hurts to know how much she suffered in silence.” Haley brushed a cold tear from under her eyes. “So that’s probably how she felt about the wedding shop? Just a childhood fantasy?”
Maybe this whole wedding shop ordeal was a farce. She was only pining for something long gone—the innocence and hope of her youth.
“I don’t know. Just that she never said a word to me about it.”
“And she never said a word to me about walking away from the only boy she ever loved? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Looking back, I see how the onset of the cancer changed her. After the diagnosis, she really changed,” Cole said. “Guess I can say it now, but things had been strained between us. Got worse after we got engaged and the closer we got to the wedding. I thought it was just stress, but she was pulling away. Meanwhile, I kept waking up with dread, realizing I didn’t love her the way a man should love the woman he’s about to marry.”
“But you’d been together forever. How could you not have known?” She was one to talk. How her emotions had fooled her. She stuck with Dax far too long. She had no gavel to bring down in judgment here. “Why did you propose, then?”
He shook his head, tossing another snowball into the icy wind. Overhead, thick gray clouds rolled in from the northwest. “I never officially proposed.”
“What? Then how were you getting married?”
“I don’t know . . . We were talking about our relationship, the future, and the next thing I knew her parents were involved—you know how her dad can be—and they were pulling out calendars and setting a date. I left the house in a daze.”
“But said nothing. You went along with it.”
“Haley.” His voice spiked as he faced her. “I thought it was right. Tammy was beautiful, smart, talented, a good woman. Why wouldn’t I want to marry her? Whatever hesitation I had seemed stupid. I refused to let my fears and wounds hold me back. We’d dated off and on since high school . . . Well, you know. You were there. If Tammy and I weren’t meant to be together, why’d we keep coming back to each other? So I went along with it.”
“Wow. I don’t know what to say . . .” Haley started for the house, stopped, then spun around to Cole. “This makes me angry. I’m sorry, it does. Tammy was my best friend. I can live with the fact she wasn’t interested in the wedding shop, but breaking up with you? Being diagnosed with cancer? I wasn’t there for her. In any of it. Only at the end.”
She was so blinded and stupid with Dax. The world could’ve spun off its axis for all she knew or cared.
“Being sick changed her, Haley,” Cole said. “As for the shop, I don’t know that she wouldn’t have come around to the idea eventually. Five, ten years from now.”
Haley started away, her boots slipping over the solid snow, warm tears stunning her cold heart. Was she just chasing a sentiment? A faux childhood dream? Haley paused outside the garage doors, a reservoir of tears leaking to the surface, zapping her strength.
“It’s just . . . I don’t know . . . What’s the point . . .” Haley fell against him, pushed by the power of her sobs.
“Shh, shh, it’s okay, Haley.” Cole wrapped her tight, his strong arms holding in the heat of her tears. “It’s going to be okay.”
The broken pieces of her heart spilled out—her sorrow over Tammy, over Dax—and soaked Cole’s chest.
She molded into him, slipping her arms around his back, finding his steady heartbeat a calming reassurance. But when he drew her closer with an intimate, “Haley . . .” She pressed out of his arms, backing up, brushing her hand over her wet cheeks.
“I should go . . . I can’t . . .” The wind muscled up, slapping against her with an ice refrain. “Not again.”
Cole reached for her but she stepped out of his grasp. “What are you talking about? What ‘not again’?”
“Cole . . .” She shook her head, shivering from the cold, from her emotions, making her way into the garage. “I need to go.”
“Haley,” he said. “Come inside. Warm up. Have some hot chocolate. We can talk more. Tell me what’s going on.”
“I really need to go.” Being in his arms, being with him, felt like a place she’d wanted to be for a long time. But he wasn’t hers. Never had been. More concerning was she’d barely washed the stench of Dax from her soul. Romance was the last thing Haley Morgan wanted or needed.
Inside the garage, she dropped her gun and gear on Cole’s workbench, slipping from his fleece and his brother’s camo pants. On her way out, she paused for one last thing. “Tammy really never spoke of the shop?”
“She didn’t.” Cole held her arm with a light touch. “However, you should follow your heart, Haley. Forget what Tammy would or wouldn’t have done. Go for what you want. If she were alive today, you know that’s what she’d tell you.”
Haley raised her gaze to his, finding there all kinds of unspoken sentiment. “Do I? Because after today, I’m not sure.”
CORA
August 1931
August came with a rainless heat. Dust rose from the ground, thirsty for a taste of heaven. In the evening, the crickets’ dirge saturated the stale air and Cora imagined their song begged God for relief.
Sitting on the back porch Birch built, she cooled herself with a Main Street Baptist Church fan. She’d heard tell of a newfangled device that cooled a home in the summer, an air conditioner. One day when things turned around in this town, Cora thought she’d find out how to install one of those contraptions in the shop.
The summer brides were sticky with sweat by the time they descended the stairs—even with the ceiling fans whirring.
“I’m having second thoughts,” Mama said, coming to the porch with two glasses of iced tea. “I’m not sure I should leave you. Or my garden.” She handed Cora a glass as she sat in the adjacent rocker.
“Mama, it’s been discussed and decided. You’re to go to New York. Besides, Aunt Marian went out of her way to find you a position in the secretarial pool. You can’t sully her reputation by changing your mind.”
“People change their minds all the time. You’re just trying to get rid of me.”
“Yes. You came up with this idea to move to New York and, frankly, I think it’s a good one. I’m helping you stick to it.” Cora reached across the little table for Mama’s arm. “But I’m going to miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too, darling. But oh, won’t it be good to earn a salary? My own money. I don’t believe I’ve ever had my own money. First it was my daddy’s, then my husband’s. What times we live in.”
Right after Birch built the back porch and Cora started using it as a living space, setting meals on the table, sitting out in the evening reading, something changed in Mama. She started batting around ideas of moving on with her life.
So she wrote to her sister in New York, who was married to a prominent insurance man, and asked about a job. Marian approached her husband’s boss about an opening in the secretarial pool and, well, Mama was booked on the noon bus tomorrow.
“What are you going to do with your first paycheck?” Cora said, keeping Mama’s thoughts forward-thinking.
Mama sipped her tea, her face creased with concern. “I thought I’d send some to you. I’ll be living with Marian and George, so I won’t need much.”
“Keep your money, Mama. I have plenty.”
“You have plenty to run a business, but you need to hold on to that, Cora. Who knows how long this Depression and drought will last? Or wha
t it will take to recover? Who knew any of this would ever happen? Besides, why can’t I help out? You’ve been taking care of me since your da—well, since everything.”
“You’ve helped me more than you’ll ever know. The best hostess this shop could ever have, all as a volunteer.”
Mama waved her off. “We’re family.”
“Why don’t you go shopping with your first paycheck?” Cora said. “Buy a new dress or two.
“Well, I would like to update my wardrobe. Most likely I’ll be out of date with New York fashions.”
Cora more than heard Mama’s sigh. She felt it. Less than a year ago she was a bank president’s wife, a pillar in Heart’s Bend society. Now she lived on the third floor of her daughter’s shop. Tomorrow she’d leave town on a bus, alone, to a strange city, taking on a job she’d barely been trained to do in high school over thirty years ago. To be nameless and faceless in a secretarial pool.
“Mama.” Cora squeezed her arm. “I know this is not what you expected of your life—”
“I expected to be entertaining my grandchildren, having large Sunday dinners with you and EJ. I planned to work my garden and tend to your father, being the good wife of a prominent man. It was a good plan, Cora. And for a long while, it worked like a charm. Now look at me.” She rubbed her thumb against the top of her hand. “A charity case. Leaving town in shame.” She glanced back at Cora. “Leaving you to face it all alone.”
“Lots of men have left their families. Remember Avril?” Word whispered through town of more and more men leaving, the desperate times forcing them into unthinkable actions.
“Yes, well, a lot of men did not leave their families too. They faced the difficulties like real men.”
“Daddy is a real man, Mama.” She couldn’t help but defend him. Her heart always hoped. “As for me, I won’t be alone. I have Odelia. My friends. Rufus.”
“Rufus. Well, I have warmed to him some, but, Cora, be careful. Please. He reminds me too much of your daddy. So handsome and charming, but saying one thing and doing another.” Mama faced away. “I’d like to know what sins I committed to bring this ruin down on me.”
“You know better.”
“Do I?”
“So the Jesus you taught in Sunday school to half of Heart’s Bend citizens is not the God you believe in? Not the One who is good and kind, whose love and faithfulness never ends or fails?”
“How can you be so pious? Look at our plight.”
“What plight? I have a roof over my head and food on the table. Clothes to wear. We lost our house and our land, but so what? We still have each other and our health. You may have lost hope in Daddy, but I have not.”
Mama shook her head. “He wrote, Cora, the day Birch built the porch.”
“What? You didn’t tell me.” Cora bent forward to see Mama’s face as she brushed her trembling hand over her wet cheeks.
“He’s not coming back, Cora. He’s too ashamed.”
So that’s what caused her to change. “Tell him that’s too bad.” Cora moved in front of Mama, taking hold of her shoulders. “Tell him to come home anyway. Everyone is dealing with some sort of shame and failure. Where is he, anyway?”
“In Georgia, or Florida. He can’t decide.” Mama broke forward with a sob, burying her head in her hands. “He’s gone. The man I knew and loved since I was sixteen is gone. Even if he came back, he’d not be the same. Not this time. How could I ever trust him?”
Cora slipped her arms around Mama’s shoulders, holding her while she wept, her own tears blocked behind a barricade of anger.
Mama lifted her head, pulling a handkerchief from her pocket to dry her eyes and blow her nose. “I shouldn’t burden my girl with my troubles.” She whirled around with a fixed smile pressed on her lips. “I’m the mother, the one who should bear the family burdens.”
“No one can bear burdens alone.” Cora slipped back into her chair. “W-what did Daddy say in his letter?”
“He feels he’s done me a great injustice, and he cannot bear to see my disappointment.”
“But it was all about money . . . things . . . Things we can do without. Yet we can’t do without him.”
Mama pressed her hand to Cora’s arm. “You said it yourself. Daddy can’t separate his role as a provider from his role as a bank president, as a money man. If he can’t be and do those things, then he can’t be who he needs to be . . . for you and me.” She brushed her handkerchief under her nose. “Listen to me making a defense for him.”
She disappeared into the house, and the sound of the closing door resonated through Cora as the final note in a long song.
Life had changed, was changing, and very possibly would never be the same. The only constants in her life were the shop and Rufus. She refused to give up her own hope of a happy ending.
“Cora?” A tender voice called from the edge of the porch.
“Millie?” Cora shoved open the screen door, inviting the woman in. “Millie Kuehn? How are you? I’ve not seen you in a good long while.”
Millie Kuehn, another shop alum, a few years older than Cora, stepped tentatively onto the porch.
“How long’s it been? Ten years?” Cora said, offering her mama’s rocker.
“Twelve.” She clicked her fingernails together, a vacant, haunting shadow in her eyes. “I still remember it like it was yesterday, though.” Her eyes welled up, a reflection of these hard times.
“Please sit, Millie,” Cora led her to the chair. “What’s on your mind?”
“I can’t complain.” She sat gently, folding her hands in her lap, setting the rocker in motion. “We ain’t got no troubles no one else has, though Charles is still angry about the bank’s closing and losing all our savings.” She swiped a bit of perspiration from her brow. “Don’t help, this heat . . . He’s afraid we’re going to lose the corn crop.”
“Reverend Clinton is calling for a meeting to pray for rain. I’m planning on going.”
“Well, if ’n God cared, I suppose He’d be the one to ask for rain,” Millie said.
How did Cora find herself the arbitrator of faith this morning? She’d certainly had her doubts. But that’s why she fought to believe, why she held on to Rufus. To be faithful to the end.
“My girl Annie just turned ten and she found my wedding dress. Begged me to try it on.” Millie’s watery laugh joined the song of the birds slipping through the screen. “She swam in it. She’s such a little bit of a thing, but she said, ‘Mama, I’m going to wear this someday.’ I said, ‘Annie, I’d be honored, but don’t you want your day at the wedding shop? Walk down those grand stairs, all dolled up and beautiful in your own gown, us women gazing up at you, fawning over you?’ ” Millie inhaled, pressing her hands over her heart. “I never wanted to lose the feeling I had when I came down the stairs, so hopeful, so full of love. Then, when I walked down the aisle to Charles, I just knew everything was going to be grand and lovely.” Her fingers fluttered against her lace collar. “But I can’t . . . I can’t feel it . . . It’s fading, Cora. Time is so cruel that-a-way.”
“But we have our memories plus the faith in times ahead. Think of your Annie walking down the stairs in your gown, Millie. What a grand day that will be. We can alter the dress for her any way she needs.” In a small town like Heart’s Bend, there were few debutantes. The community didn’t have much room for social stratospheres. Getting married was a girl’s debut. “I remember how lovely you looked. Aunt Jane and I declared you had the best trousseau that year.”
“Did I?” Her smile wavered. “I lost it all, except my gown, in the fire our first year.” Millie absently rubbed the pink scar along the side of her arm. “I think I mourned that leaving suit more than losing half the house.”
“We can make Annie a nice suit. Or order one from New York. And get a nice mother’s gown for you. You’ll see. It’ll be right again, Millie. Things for brides changed so much after the war. A girl has so many options. Used to be all bridal fashion came from Europe, but thes
e days New York is all the rage. More affordable. By the time Annie gets married, who knows what a working family will be able to afford.”
“Well, she ain’t getting nothing if times don’t change.”
“She’s only ten, Millie.” Cora’s voice buoyed with hope.
“If Charles has his way she won’t marry until she’s an old maid of thirty.” Millie sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh, Cora, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Better to be unmarried at thirty, waiting for the right man, than married at twenty to the wrong one.”
“Truer words were never spoken. I was blessed. Married me a good one.” Millie tipped her head back, resting it on the top of the rocker, and closed her eyes. “I just wanted to be someplace happy. Take a load off my mind. I remember the tea your aunt served, sitting in the big salon with my mother and grandmother, my sisters, and my cousin, excited, so very excited. It was the best day, simply the best.”
“Would you care for some iced tea now?”
“Wouldn’t that be lovely?” Sitting back, rocking slightly to and fro, Millie drifted away, her eyelids fluttering with sleep.
Cora shoved out of her chair and tiptoed inside. Mama met her in the mudroom wearing her hat and gloves, an envelope in her hand. “I was just coming to find you. I’m off to run errands before my bus trip. And this came for you by special messenger.”
Cora glanced at the plain white envelope with nothing written on the outside. “Millie Kuehn is on the porch.”
“What does she want?” Mama moved aside the lace sheer at the window.
“Same thing as Avril Kreyling and the others who’ve stopped by. To remember happy times.”
“We all cling to what good we can.” Mama stepped into the small salon. “Also, Gwen Parker was just here. She got engaged and wanted to set an appointment. She’s been saving her money since she was eight to get her dress here. I set her up for Monday.”
“All right. Thank you.” The unspoken words shouted between them. Mama wouldn’t be here Monday.