Chapter 23
Only They Who Walk With Dreams
Daniel Greene washed his shovel. Again. He checked his cell. Again. The shovel was as clean as new and there were no missed calls or texts from Benny. She hadn’t been at Savvy’s, or at home. Neither was Clarice, so that was something. He imagined Benny so angry or upset her mother took her out of town for the day, to get away from him. He wouldn’t consider he’d blown it completely, even if he kicked himself over and over for the way he bolted. Dan didn’t even know why. He saw the sonogram picture stuck to the refrigerator door and it was all a blur from there, right up until the moment he sank the slab of concrete into the ground covering August and Katherine Fiore’s graves.
The calm, then, had been serene. There in the cemetery, during those ghosting hours when most of Bitterly slept and only crickets sang their songs, Dan had sat on the edge of the tombstone and laughed. Softly, at first, then great lungsful of joy that might have sounded mad, coming from the cemetery after midnight. He almost went back to Benny’s, but it was late and all they had to say to one another would wait until morning. Dan was exhausted, both mentally and physically. Instead of going home, where Paul and Evelyn were, he parked his truck behind the old cottage currently serving as the cemetery office, found the key under the frog sculpture where Charlie had been hiding it since it was a secret they all kept from his parents, and let himself in. He fell face-first onto the cot in the back room, and was asleep before the dust settled.
It was late when he woke, after eleven in the morning, and he only did so because Charlie kicked one of the cot legs out from under him.
“You’re an idiot,” Charlie said when Dan told him why he was there. “Get over there now and ask her to marry you.”
And that’s what Dan did, but she wasn’t home. Neither was Clarice or Peadar, but Peter pulled up as Dan was coming down from the second floor, having left a note there for Benny.
“Any idea where your sister is?”
“I’m just getting back from Cape May, so no.”
“Oh, right. How was it?”
“Great. It would have been better without Charlotte’s new boyfriend. Asshole.”
“Tough break, Pete.”
Peter shrugged and Dan left, and now it was after eight o’clock and Benny had still not returned his call or responded to his note. The certainty he’d earlier felt was beginning to flag.
“Hey, didn’t you hear me calling you?” Evelyn’s voice startled the rag from Dan’s hand.
He bent to pick it up.
“Apparently not.” She moved closer. “You okay? You angry with me?”
Dan hung the wet rag on a peg to dry. He put the shovel back in its place. Finally, he looked at his sister. “No. I’m happy for you. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I’m completely clueless,” she said. “But I’m happy. This feels right. I have to try, you know? We have kids, and we still love one another.”
“He seems different. Paul.”
Evelyn smiled a dreamy smile. “This is who he’s always been behind the costume he wore for his parents and the business world. He reminds me a lot of Henny, actually.”
Dan scrunched up his nose. “I thought he reminded you of me.”
“Both of you. More surfer-dude than wildman-biker, but easy-going at the core.”
“I’ll take your word for it. If this is what you want, you know it’s what I want for you.”
“What will you do?”
“About?”
“You going to keep the house? Stay here in Bitterly.”
“To the bitter end.” Dan grinned. “I’d like to keep the house. We’ll come to some kind of buy-out arrangement. But…”
“But?”
Dan took a deep breath, let it go. The joy wiggling in his gut made it quiver. “I’m going to be a father, Ev.”
She paled.
“What? Who?”
He rolled his eyes.
“Okay, dumb question. Details, fella, and I mean now.”
He told her everything from that blissful week in February to his amnesiatic freak-out after finding the ultrasound picture on Benny’s fridge, except for making love to Benny in the cemetery instead of actually watching the fireworks. There were some things he would keep to himself.
Evelyn listened without saying a word until his story was finished. “It’s like a movie. On the Hallmark channel. Give it a Christmas theme and you can sell it for the holiday season.”
“Thanks. Your compassion really touches me.”
“It’s a lot to take in.” Evelyn bit her lip. “You watched the fireworks with Mom every year?”
Dan shrugged. “It’s just something I do.”
“I’d like to think I’d have gone with you, if I knew.”
“But you wouldn’t have.” He smiled. “It’s okay. We deal with it differently, is all.”
“Did you ever think…?”
“Think what?”
“Never mind. It’s dumb.”
“Tell me. Come on.”
Again she chewed her lip. “I’ve always kind of wondered if she did it on purpose. Crashed the car, I mean. It was Dad’s side of the car that took the brunt.”
“Maybe she did it on purpose,” Dan said. “Could be, or maybe he’d already started smacking her and she lost control of the car. We’re never going to have any real answers, Ev. Let it go.”
“But you’ve thought it.”
“Sure.”
“Then you haven’t let it go, either.”
“Yes, I have. I can think a thought without it eating me up. Like right now, I’m thinking how great it would be to tickle you till you pee. But I won’t.”
“Well, thanks for that.”
They laughed softly together, old demons once again quelled in the old, familiar way. Evelyn took his hand and tugged him toward the garage door.
“I saved dinner for you. Come in and eat.”
“What did you make?”
“Fried catfish and corn on the cob.”
“Sounds like I’m hungry.” And he was. Dan was starving. Had he eaten all day? He had no idea.
Outside, the distinct whine of a four-stroke engine got louder, closer. His heart flipped and his belly tumbled. Then tires on gravel. The tinny engine struggling. A headlight coming up the driveway.
“Looks like your baby-mama is here to see you.”
“Looks like it.”
“You love her?”
“More than I ever imagined possible.”
Evelyn kissed his cheek.
“You’re going to be an amazing father, Danny.”
He might have nodded, or said words of thanks. The blur he’d flown through descended again, but this was not the prior night’s mad dash. It was slow. Torturously slow. Yet Dan found himself standing at the top of the driveway, completely incapable of doing anything else.
His mouth went dry.
His heart hammered.
In his mind’s eye, he pulled Benny from her scooter, into his arms, and kissed her until any doubt she might still have vanished.
* * * *
Her scooter didn’t want to make the climb. It was never good on gravel, and not great on a steep incline. Benny gave up about halfway to the house. She killed the engine, pulled off her helmet. Dan stood at the top of the driveway, still as one of his Casablanca lilies on a windy day.
Benny’s heart flipped, a glorious feeling she remembered so well. Henny made her heart flip. She remembered now, without grief. Peter had been right. Love didn’t vanish. It made room for more and more if allowed.
She walked the rest of the way up the driveway, only slightly nervous that Dan didn’t meet her halfway. His terrified expression said it all. Benny would not balk. She would not let even a smidgeon of doubt rob her of the words she’d been practicing the whole ride over. She plucked the wilting forget-me-not from her buttonhole, and held it out for him. �
��Well, Daniel Greene, now you know you knocked me up. You going to marry me, or do I get my dad here with a shotgun?”
“He a good shot?”
“Very. I wouldn’t chance it.”
“Then I guess I have no choice.” Dan took the flower from her fingers, then her hand in his. He pulled her to him and kissed her softly.
Benny wrapped her arms around him, kissed him breathless. “I’m sorry it took so long to tell you,” she gasped. “I’ve been a mess.”
“I know.”
“I felt like I was betraying Henny, falling in love with you.”
“Me too, but…”
Benny leaned back just enough. “But?”
“I was okay with it, Benny. We aren’t betraying him, even if that’s what it felt like. I can’t live in the past. Some of it is great and some of it sucks, but there’s no changing it. You were Henny’s wife. He was my best friend. It was great while it lasted. Now you’re going to be my wife, we’re going to have a baby, and I’m going to love you both without thinking about him.”
Before watching fireworks from his mother’s grave, Benny might have believed his words’ bravado. Now, in this new moonlight looking up at the man she loved, she understood his courage, his determination to live the best life possible, no matter what the demons of his past had to say about it. She wanted that too, for herself and for her child. Their child. Changes were coming, and not just in her figure or marital status. It was time, long past time, they did.
“Let’s go to Bermuda and get married,” she said. “Tonight. Okay, it’s too late tonight. But tomorrow. And let’s not tell anyone until we’ve left. What do you say?”
“I say I hope you have a passport.”
“Damn. How about North Carolina, then? To see Tim. I kind of promised him a visit. He’d be really surprised and happy to see you.”
“Okay.”
“Really?”
“I don’t care where I marry you, Benny, as long as I do. I have a reputation to think of, you know.”
“I’ll make an honest man of you, I promise.” She nudged him. “And when we come home, I don’t want to live in my parents’ house anymore. Not because it’s where I lived with Henny, but because it’s time I left home.”
“That works out well, because my sister is moving out and I’m buying the house. You…you do want to stay in Bitterly, don’t you?”
Benny held him closer, grinned sweetly up at him. “And if I don’t?”
“Then I’ll have to convince you, somehow.” Dan kissed her grin away.
“Not convinced yet,” she teased. “Try again.”
Dan lifted her into his arms, started for the house.
Benny squealed and wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him with every bounce. Cricket kicked then, good and hard.
Dan stopped dead in his tracks. “Was that…?”
“It was.”
Dan set her onto her feet, kneeled in the grass. He placed his hands where the baby had kicked, and Cricket obliged him with another. Kneeling there, his hands still spread across the just-visible mound of their child, he pressed his lips to Benny’s skin.
“Boy or girl?” he asked without looking up.
“A little girl. I’ve been calling her Cricket, because she jumps around so much.”
Dan rested his cheek to Benny’s belly, waiting. The baby squirmed but she didn’t kick. His hands twitched. He kissed her again, and rose to his feet.
“Cricket, huh? Got anything else in mind?”
She hadn’t. Not until this moment. “Irene,” she said. “For our mothers. What do you think?”
His eyes might have welled, or it might have been the moonlight on his pale and eerie eyes. “Irene Greene,” he said. “It rhymes.”
“I like that sort of thing.”
Dan nodded and offered his hand. Benny took it and squeezed. Together they went inside to begin forging a new life on the foundation of the old, despite the sorrows, because of the joys. In Bitterly, where they both were born. In the house that Augie built.
Meet the Author
Terri-Lynne DeFino lives in a log cabin in Connecticut, but she's a Jersey girl at heart. Writer, mother, cat wrangler, and self-proclaimed sparkle queen, Terri began writing when she was seven. Though that first story remains locked away in her parents’ attic, some of her works include Finder, A Time Never Lived, and Beyond the Gate. Visit her blog at: Modestyisforsuckers.com, or contact her at: [email protected].
Read on for a snippet of Book 3 in Terri-Lynne DeFino’s Bitterly Suite
WAKING SAVANNAH
Some memories are best left behind; some refuse to be.
Determined not to let the past define her, Savannah Callowell left all that happened and all she’d been in Georgia for an old farm in Bitterly, Connecticut. Savannah finds peace, friends, and a new life, but she keeps her secrets to herself, and her friends at a distance. But when her foreman retires and offers his son as a replacement, Savannah gets more than she bargained for. Adelmo Gallegos is not the college kid she was expecting, but a grown man running from his own past.
A Lyrical Shine romance coming April, 2016
Learn more about Terri-Lynne at
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com/author.aspx/31624
Chapter 1
Memories of other days
I didn’t like fireworks when I was a squirt. That boom. Ugh. It made my stomach swish. Having to sit through them ruined the Independence Day picnics for me. I always wished Mom and Pop would let me go home instead of making me stay. Though, really, our house was too close to town for it to have made a difference.
I can’t count the Independence Days that’ve come and gone since then. Time doesn’t pass the same way it used to. One minute it’s high summer and the fireworks are booming, the next I’m leaving pebbles in a shoe by the light of the full Hunter Moon. Maybe that’s why I’m still here in this Nowheresville of Nowheresvilles having conversations with myself as if someone’s listening. As if I’m telling a story.
* * * *
Thunder rumbled in the blue, July sky. Savannah Callowell understood New England storms well enough to know when the mountains would guide the black clouds beyond Bitterly, and when they’d let them in. Today felt like a welcome mat set out for the electric boom.
She stepped into the yard, shielding her eyes from the sunshine. The Fourth of July town picnic had, once again, been a raging success. In all the years since she moved up from Georgia, there had not been a single rainout. The produce was gone down to the last potato. The few soaps and jellies left were mostly back on the shelves in the farmstand store. Lambs in their pens, chickens in their coop, Savvy’s was as restored as it could be until the next harvest came in.
“Good morning, boss.”
She turned to Benny picking her way across the yard, her eight-month old daughter in a baby-sling strapped to her chest. Savannah waved and smiled and tried to ease the sudden pounding in her chest. Ever since her own life had gone from miserable apathy to marital bliss, Benedetta Grady-Hendricks-Greene had been on a mission to rid the world of unhappiness. Darling Benny. She had no clue, and Savannah wanted to keep it that way.
“Did you get a good rest yesterday?” Benny asked, hefting her baby higher and adjusting the sling.
“I did, thanks.” Savannah rubbed at her forehead. July 5th’s typical banger of a headache had dulled back to the familiar throb. “Has Dan recovered from the tug-o-war?”
Benny shook her head, rolling her eyes. “My husband seems to think he’s still twenty. He’ll survive. Probably just a pulled muscle in his shoulder.”
“So, what brings you here this morning? You have the next two weeks off.”
“I was hoping you had some of that liniment Darla and Sandra make. Dan isn’t just delusional, he’s stubborn. He won’t go to the doctor about his shoulder even though he groaned all night long.”
Savannah laughed. “I think there mig
ht be some. Come on in.”
They went into the farmstand store. Savannah flipped on the lights. Rummaging around in the lone box as yet unpacked, she called, “Why don’t you make us a cup of tea?”
Savannah continued pretending to look for the liniment that had been sitting on top until she heard Benny clattering around in the office. This time of year left her feeling fragile, and unable to cope with the cheerful chattering her friend was famous for, the chattering that usually brought an affectionate smile to Savannah’s lips. Watching Benny’s transformation the year prior, from grieving widow to wife and mother, had been magical. For a time, Savannah thought, maybe, her joy would rub off. Honor. Determination. The ferocity that took her from temperate Georgia to finicky Connecticut. Such things gave her purpose, but they were not joy.
Tube of liniment in hand, she joined Benny in the air-conditioned office. Her friend was just pouring hot water from the kettle, and Savannah’s frazzled nerves became somewhat less so. She handed over the tube in exchange for a steaming mug. Snuggled against Benny’s bounteous chest, Irene slumbered as deeply as only a healthy, happy baby could. Savannah remembered the feel of soft, sweet breath on her neck, in her nostrils. She remembered the heft of not one but two contented little bundles on her chest. She remembered.
“Good.” She breathed in the peppermint scent. “Is this the chocolate mint?”
“My favorite.” Benny wrinkled her nose. “Dan nearly killed me when he found out I planted a patch out back.”
Savannah’s muscles bunched. Fight? Or flight? She shook it off. “Don’t say that. I bet he wasn’t even really angry.”
“True. But it did take over, and started threatening his precious lilies. I should have known better. Mint is so aggressive.”
“Did you sow them directly?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are they in the ground? Or in pots?”
“Ground.”
Savannah took another sip. “There’s only one way to keep mint from spreading. If you don’t want to container-garden, you have to dig up that whole patch and replant a few bunches in those clay chimney flues sunk in the ground. That’ll contain the root system. As long as you clip them before they flower and fall, your mint will behave.”
Dreaming August Page 20