It lit her imagination on fire, and sent her back to her and Danny’s construction site, with the rest of the town’s hearts breaking right alongside hers, and their hands and arms swinging right alongside hers, too. It had given them something to set their hands to in their grief—some way to fight for hope, one nail and one plank at a time. They’d nearly finished Danny’s house over the past few months in stolen moments between plantings and harvestings. If not for him, then for her.
And now here she was. So close to being done, but with planting season in full swing, she was hard-pressed for time. She’d taken on the job at the Feed and Dime to earn some money to fund the project, but truth was, she had enough on her hands helping her grandmother on their own farm, too.
So the nights were hers. Her only time to fight the dark, to make sure this house was finished, once and for all, even if it was just her pounding nails late into the night. With a fortifying breath and a nod at her papers, she marched off into the growing dark for the job that filled her nights and fueled her days. There, at the edge of her grandparents’ land, stood the silhouette of a building. A small one, but when she thought of what it did—or would one day do, if she could ever finish the thing—it seemed the grandest building in all the world.
Picking up a hammer from her brother’s old toolbox, she got to work.
three
Here y’are,” Jerry said, planting his feet in the Texas soil and looking proudly up a gentle hill. “The inn.”
Luke could feel Jerry’s study of him and was thankful for his well-practiced deadpan face from his missions. He couldn’t let on that the place before him was—well—how could he say it nicely? . . . It looked more like some of the war-ravaged farmhouses back in Belgium than a Texas inn extending the state’s famed hospitality.
“It’s . . .” Luke cleared his throat. “I could help with that,” he said, pointing at the crooked sign, which had come loose from one of its chains. Stepping closer, he read the words aloud: “The Kissing Tree Inn.” The sign swung in the light breeze, a weary welcome.
Jerry stroked his stubbled chin and work-weathered skin, lending the moment all the gravitas as if Luke had just read aloud a treatise.
“What’s that mean?” Luke asked. “The Kissing Tree.” He could feel his face burn as he repeated the words.
“That, over yonder,” Jerry said, gesturing down a hill to the left and beyond the inn, where a lone tree stood, “is the Kissing Tree. Or the Big Oak. Old Oak. Oak of Shame, depending on who you ask. Folks’ve been carving initials in its wood for decades now, and still it stands.”
“Can’t say as much for the inn, eh?” Luke said, beholding the place that was clearly once a prized property. But the windows were boarded up, the pale green paint peeling back to reveal—was that pink? Belay that. Bright pink—and what once was a gravel path was now a scattered vestige of a former byway.
“Fell on hard times, like most of this part of the country, the past ten, fifteen years,” Jerry said. “But it’s got itself a new owner, and that owner’s got hisself a new caretaker, and that’s yours truly.” Jerry stuck his thumbs under his suspenders, snapping them proudly. “Which means, you can stay here, far as I’m concerned, so long as you don’t mind it ain’t up to snuff, being that I just started working on the place.”
“I don’t want to trouble you,” Luke said.
“No trouble. You won’t find any other inns around here, so unless you want to set up camp outside somewhere, you’d best come with me.”
Luke followed. It’d only be for one night, after all, and after years of barked orders, droning plane engines, and Luftwaffe attacks, well, the man’s rambling ways were a welcome change.
Inside, Jerry set to work laying a fire in the parlor, where an old photograph hung of a silhouetted couple beneath a tree, keeping watch over the empty tables and chairs.
Something cracked inside him, along with the log that had just caught fire. This hollow place, in the face of what it—according to the photo—once represented. It felt . . . too real. Too close. He thought of his own story, one that was once supposed to have ended in marriage. That, too, had gone hollow and empty.
“You can pick any room you want,” Jerry said. “I’ve got the downstairs one, keepin’ it for me and my grandson, Arnie. He’s coming out here to live with me, if I can get the place fit for a kid. He’s stayin’ with an aunt right now who’s none too keen to have him, so by George, I’m making a place for him here. A kid needs room to roam, you know? Fresh air and sunshine and a place for life to get back inside him, after all he’s lost.” Jerry didn’t elaborate, but the way his stubbled chin trembled and he shook himself out of that thought, Luke hoped his grandson would find his way here very soon. It seemed the two needed each other. “Anyhow, grab any other room you like. Have a look.”
Luke did, mounting the creaking stairs. He passed the first room—Maiden Faire, the brass plate on the door declared it—and felt he’d be an imposter in there. The next room’s plaque called it Oakhaven, and Luke ducked inside, where muted tones of hunter green hushed the world around him.
He deposited his kit bag on the bed, ignoring the cloud of dust that rose in response, and took himself to the window. May as well earn his keep. Finding a shoehorn in the dresser drawer, he used it to pry off the wood that boarded the window and discovered that the view overlooked the sprawling old oak. He could see why it had taken on such a life, so much lore and legend to it. It seemed to lay its branches upon the ground like unfolding fingers, inviting one to climb up inside and stay awhile.
He unzipped his bag, unfazed by the scant number of belongings inside. He’d learned to travel light, and he’d needed to leave room for the rather awkward, spindly yet bulky bundle he’d hauled all this way to deliver to one Hannah Garland.
Still, for all the places he’d been, there was one possession he always took with him. He pulled it out now, unwrapping the bundle from a scrap of old canvas.
Letters. For a man who’d gone so long in the war with no word from home but that fateful “Dear John” letter, he hadn’t known where to begin when he’d taken up writing to Hannah Garland. So his letters had always been short. When her first letter had arrived, he’d not opened it for three days, not knowing what to make of it. He had no family. No home or history, other than the Chatham home for boys back in New Jersey. He had thought he would have all of that one day, but that hope had been crushed to bits. And so for Danny’s sister to write him out of the blue, he felt like a big fake—undeserving of her words. But he’d opened that envelope and found a simple thank-you. Short, but kind, written from a broken heart. Thank you for the drawings, it said. They mean the world.
So he’d kept them coming, and she’d kept her letters coming. Always short, sometimes newsy about plantings and harvests, and always a hearty thank-you.
And at the bottom of the stack . . . was the other letter. Caroline’s. Like always, he shoved it back into the dark of his bag, closing the door on that part of his life.
Opening the window and leaning out to fill his lungs with the sweet air of farm country, he inclined his ear. What was that he heard, reverberating so sharply? It stopped, and after a beat an owl hooted somewhere in the tree. Then it started again. A thwack and an echo, a thwack and an echo, again and again. Someone was building now, with so little light? Surely that wasn’t good for the eyes.
A cry of pain sounded, confirming his fears but bowling him over in surprise. It was the voice of a woman. And not just any woman. There was no mistaking the voice when it piped up again with all the frustration in the world: “Jumpin’ gumdrops!”
He was out the door with a quick “I’ll be back” to Jerry before he could think better of it. Long strides carried him swiftly up the old gravel path, beneath the tree whose branches created a tunnel of sorts, and out the other side to the pasture beyond. With the moon rising now, he paused to catch his breath and take in the sight before him.
&n
bsp; A small two-story white house—or most of one, anyway. A ladder leaning against it, and perched at the very top, the same kerchiefed, overalled Hannah Garland he’d seen earlier. This time sporting a headlamp and a hammer in the dusky pink sky. She paused hammering to lean in and examine something, muttered a few words, and clambered down the ladder at a speed that made even him nervous—he, who was used to soaring thousands of miles above the earth.
She disappeared up a hill beyond. In her absence, he closed the distance between himself and the house. When he drew close enough to touch it, he stopped in his tracks, jaw dropping.
This was—what? Words pounded in succession for trial, none of them quite enough. Incredible. Creative. Singular. Heartbreaking. Healing. It was—it was—
“Impossible,” he said out loud. He stepped closer, the structure drawing him. It was, at first glance, no different from many a country farmhouse. But the gable on the left corner of the house was no gable at all, but rather a turret in miniature. Plucked right out of the castle he’d seen in Clydebank before the Luftwaffe descended upon Scotland.
And the doorknob in the middle of the door was distinctly un-Texas-farmhouse-like, and very distinctly European. He had drawn one such from a sketch he’d sent from the Netherlands, after Rotterdam had been blitzed and that bright blue fallen door had reached out from the rubble, with its plucky tarnished brass knob in the middle.
Though Hannah’s pounding hammer had silenced, it seemed to take up residence now inside his chest. He stepped up the makeshift porch steps—placeholders, he assumed, for something more permanent to come, and reached a hand out to feel for himself what his eyes could not believe: etched letters, deep in the wood, as they had been in their original stone back in France. Bienvenue.
Welcome.
A home, welcoming him, when he had no home to speak of.
“Hey!” said a voice, in a less-than-welcoming tone.
He turned, his hand lingering on the carved word. “I-I’m sorry, Miss Garland. I didn’t mean to intrude. I just came because—”
“It’s you,” she said, her voice softening. “From the Feed and Dime. Listen, I owe you an apology. I was all addlepated today—you just took me by surprise is all. Standing there in uniform, fresh out of the air from heaven-knows-where, and I was late in closing, and I’m all thumbs and two left feet as you saw, and it flustered me something awful and I—there I go again, railroading you with my words. Gran says I get to ramblin’ more than a tumbleweed when my words go. Like a full-force faucet, she says.”
If she was a full-force faucet, he was a stone wall, all the words caught somewhere deep and silent inside. “I, uh—”
She picked up a hammer from the steps, disappearing around the side of the house. Grabbing the tin can of nails, he followed.
“So if you’ll forgive me for my abysmal behavior, mister, I’ll let you be on your way. Where you heading to, anyway?” She held a hand out for a nail.
“New York,” he said, handing her three. She stuck two in her mouth and climbed halfway up the ladder, pounding a nail into a piece of trim with remarkably swift accuracy.
“Roo Rork,” she said around the nails, eyebrows raised. She removed the nails. “What’re you doing way up there?”
“Flying.” Why was his vocabulary suddenly limited to one-word answers?
And yet that one-word answer halted her as if he’d just delivered astounding news. She clambered back down the ladder and pointed at him.
“You’re a pilot,” she said. “What’s it like up there?” There was a thirst in her words. “I always imagined it’d be like one great big reverse-falling into the most beautiful place in the world. Like swimming in the sky, or breaking into some sort of other world up there.”
He thought of the war-torn skies, rent with blitzes and falling planes. Of sitting near-freezing on Christmas Eve alone in a field in Belgium.
He thought of the toy biplane he’d soared as a kid, skipping it over the rock walls surrounding the tiny yard of the boys’ home, and how his very soul took flight at the thought of piloting a plane one day.
There was a disconnect there . . . and this girl’s vibrant blue eyes, so eager for a hope-filled answer, seemed to bridge it. To remind him of the promise of the skies.
“It’s . . . remarkable,” he said. And meant it.
“I knew it. Danny said so, too. My brother,” she said.
He nodded slow, about to speak. To tell her he knew exactly who Danny was, how he’d pulled Luke up out of the mire when his future looked so dark he couldn’t see his way forward. To relish speaking to another soul who thought of him—well, in her case, who truly knew him—as a brother.
“Well, mister, I don’t mean to keep you here, and you must be needin’ to get someplace. I’ll say good-bye, then.” She stuck her hand out to shake it.
He, tongue-tied yet again, cleared his throat and took her hand, holding it as he locked eyes with her, inviting her to hear him. Hear his heart.
“I’ll see you tomorrow. Keep well, Hannah.”
As he retreated, his footfalls in the tall grass were the only sound. This time, she was the one rendered speechless.
four
I’m a fool,” Hannah said, flipping a fried egg with more force than she intended. Its yolk splatted in the skillet with just as much gusto and failure as she had shown, prattling away last night.
“There I was, Gran, just prattling away like Harry Granger’s old Ford, and blowing as much smoke from my head, too. Foolish talk about swimming in the sky and I don’t even know what. And all the time—it was him.”
Gran stopped her quick whisking of her cinnamon muffin batter and tilted her silver-braided head. “Who, darlin’?”
The woman had the patience of a saint. “Him. Luke Hampstead, of the 311th Photographic Wing. How is it that I can recite his address like it’s my own last name, but I can’t recognize him when he’s standing two feet from my own face?”
“Well, it was dark, certainly, right?”
“Yes, and truth is I’ve never seen a picture of him, but shouldn’t I have known, somehow? Shouldn’t I have—I don’t know, sensed those were the hands that had drawn those sketches? Made the cottage possible? And there I was, talking on about Danny, never thinking—”
Gran’s hand was on hers, stilling the flailing spatula. Hannah spoke with her hands, and Gran swore one of these days it’d end with putting someone’s eye out.
“Today is a new day,” Gran said.
Hannah breathed in her words. “A new day,” she said and pointed her spatula at Gran with conviction. “Right.”
Gran gently pried the spatula from Hannah, removing a smoking egg from the skillet and depositing it in the pail for the pigs.
“Right,” she reiterated. “It’s a new day, so go and seize it.”
She did. Hannah seized it while slopping the pigs, addressing them as if they were Luke Hampstead and she were a girl who actually kept her head about her.
“Why, hello, kind sir,” she said. Porky, the biggest of the lot, grunted back at her. “I see by your uniform that you have served our country with great honor and distinction. Distinguishment? Distinctionment. And I thank you, truly.” She swirled her hand in a bow. Ranger, Danny’s horse, who was as old as Methuselah and just as wise, hung his head over the fence. If Hannah didn’t know better, she’d have sworn he just gave a solemn and approving nod, which she returned gravely. “Thank you, Methuselah,” she said, using Danny’s old nickname for the horse. “Now that is how a hero should be greeted, and don’t you forget it.” She sloshed the remains of the buckets with abandon.
“Forget what?”
Hannah spun to face the voice. It was him.
“Distinquilment,” she muttered.
“Pardon?”
“I mean—hello,” she said, setting the bucket down, brushing her palms against her apron, and tugging at the sprigged green calico as if primping her ba
rnyard dress might somehow undo all her foibles. “You’re Luke. Luke Hampstead.” She stuck her hand out to shake his.
Something akin to mirth sparked in his gray eyes, and he appeared to be trying to keep back a smile. It dimpled his jaw somethin’ handsome. Somethin’ awful, she meant.
“And you’re Hannah.” He took her hand and gently shook it. “Hannah Garland.”
They beheld each other, shaking hands right there by the pigpen after introducing each other to themselves, until she laughed first. His laugh followed, deep and pleasant.
“Well, Luke Hampstead, you’d better come and see the cottage properly,” she said. “Since it’s all your fault. And I mean that in a good way.”
“I’d be honored. I don’t want to keep you from your work, but if I can help—”
“Help,” she said. “Sir, you already have. Come see.”
She led the way down the farm’s dirt driveway, through a pasture of growing cotton, and to the pasture’s edge where the cottage perched with the big oak rising beyond. He studied the house, and she studied him. The way his dark hair was so different from Danny’s blond. The way his demeanor was steady, serious, but with some current of buried laughter flowing somewhere deep within. She could see why the two had been fast friends. Danny would’ve been well-balanced by a friend like this.
“You did all this,” he said, shaking his head in what seemed to be wonder.
“Well, me and a whole army,” she said, leading him up the steps and into the structure. “Bill Clois built that stairway while I manned his livery. Elmer Longstreet put the windows in, in exchange for a couple pots of chili.”
“Must be some chili,” Luke said.
Hannah laughed. “Must be some nice people, more like,” she said. “Gran says my chili’s hardly fit for the chickens. I don’t have much of a head for the kitchen.”
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