Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
A Note from the Author
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DEAREST DOROTHY, HELP! I’VE LOST MYSELF!
Charlene Ann Baumbich is a popular speaker, journalist, and author. Her stories, essays, and columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Today’s Christian Woman. She is also the author of the first two books in the Partonville series, Dearest Dorothy, Are We There Yet?, and Dearest Dorothy, Slow Down, You’re Wearing Us Out!, and six books of nonfiction. She lives in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Learn more about Charlene at www.welcometopartonville.com.
ALSO IN THIS SERIES
Dearest Dorothy, Are We There Yet? Dearest Dorothy, Slow Down, You’re Wearing Us Out!
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Penguin Books 2004
Copyright © Charlene Ann Baumbich, 2004
All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Baumbich, Charlene Ann, 1945-
Dearest Dorothy, help! I’ve lost myself! / Charlene Ann Baumbich.
p. cm.—(Dearest Dorothy: bk.3)
eISBN : 978-0-143-03428-5
1. Older women—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction. 3. Illinois—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.A963D425 2004
813’.54—dc22 2004054262
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Dedicated to:
all the readers
who have told me they are just sure
I’m writing about their town—even though they admit
they sometimes
like the folks in Partonville better,
and
to the memory of
Jane Jordan Browne
Acknowledgments
Since you are reading this, let me first thank you because it hopefully means you’re going to read the rest of the pages. Perhaps you’ve already read the previous books in the series. (Triple thanks if you have!) Without readers there would be no market for books about Partonville. Simple as that.
And speaking of Partonville, thank you, Linda Pozanc, for asking me about “the Partons who surely must have founded Partonville.” It was a DUH! that had escaped me up until your question. Once I looked into their story, I was not disappointed.
And speaking of stories, thank you to Pastor Christine Robinson and the entire congregation of Homer United Methodist Church in Homer, Minnesota, for becoming a personal part of my real-life story. Not only did Pastor Christine help me understand how Pastor Delbert Junior became a UMC pastor in Partonville, but everyone who attends that beautiful little church on the Homer bluff—including the puppets—have helped me to understand the grace in welcoming strangers as their own.
And speaking of strangers, up until I briefly met Matt Niemeyer, a pressman for the Winona Post, I knew nothing about the Harris V15A web press that keeps the Partonville Press in business! Thanks, Mr. Niemeyer, for being another friendly Minnesotan who took time to talk to this Land of Lincoln gal who adores hanging out (and writing) in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
And speaking of friendly folks who are also efficient, energetic, smart, dedicated, hard working and FUN, a H-U-G-E thank you to every single person at Penguin Books who contributed to getting these books into your hands, from design, to sales and marketing (a special nod to John Fagan), to copy editors, to publicity folks (go Zaidee Rose!), to assistants, to Those Who Put Up With Me When I’m Panicked.
And speaking of Those Who Put Up With Me When I’m Panicked, Carolyn Carlson has gone above, beyond, round-and-round, sideways and extremely out of her way to direct, challenge and encourage me. She has been tender with my ego, gracious with her time and praise, entertaining when we’re together, potent when she uses her Editor Voice and, most importantly, she has become my dear friend.
And speaking of dear friends, Danielle Egan-Miller has kept me from FREAKING OUT, even when I’m FREAKING OUT! A good agent is always way more than a good agent, and Danielle is definitely way more. She is a valued, respected champion. To everyone at Browne & Miller Literary Associates, CHEERS!
And speaking of CHEERS, thank you, George John Baumbich, who keeps the home fires burning, even when I’m so welcome in Partonville that it sometimes must feel like I’ll never come home.
Introduction
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and
hopeful than to be forty years old.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
And now, welcome to Partonville, a circle-the-square town in the northern part of southern Illinois, where oldsters are young, trees have names and, for better or for worse, the band plays on.
1
All day, Mother Nature had brewed a delicious swirl of October warmth, even for the northern part of southern Illinois. Without warning, though, nippy evening breezes blew stinging chills through Dorothy’s flung-open doors and windows and right down her spine. She pulled her pink cardigan sweater tight around her chest and pinned it to her breastbone with her left hand as she hustled toward the front door to close it. “Winds of change,” she’d heard her mother proclaim many times before she’d gone home to meet her Maker, and Dorothy thought of her as she
repeated the phrase a couple of times with a sigh tucked in between.
Once at the doorway, mesmerized by nature’s sudden onset of rowdiness, Dorothy stood shivering, watching the tree branches bob and weave, marveling at how severely tree branches—even some trees—were bending in the testing airstreams, yet not snapping. “Yup. Winds of change,” she said aloud. A gust rustled her hair and snatched the words right out of her mouth, sending them racing with the wind through all of Partonville, clear out of town and down the country roads. Dorothy’s spirit quickened and her body shuddered. “Oh, Sheba! That felt prophetic! Gives me the heebie-jeebies!”
At the sound of her mistress’s voice, Sheba’s ears perked forward. Curled up tightly on the new white carpet, her warm cocoon suited her just fine, no matter what the winds or world were doing. In response to Dorothy’s statement, Sheba opened her mouth and smacked it a few times before burying her nose further into her own doggie circle of contentment.
“I can barely stand to think yet more change might be coming our way . . . ,” Dorothy whispered, her voice fading under the weight of possibilities. Trying to snap out of it, she straightened up and for a good twenty seconds, willed herself to stand strong against the chill, deeply inhaling the wind’s crisp vigor into her eighty-seven-year-old body. “Almost as good as a splash of cold creek water to the neck,” she said to her smile before closing the door. “Almost.”
Not many people talk to their smiles, but Dorothy had talked to hers ever since the day her mother, who had had it with her nine-year-old’s, strong-willed contrariness, had steered her by the shoulders into the bathroom and stood her before the mirror above the sink. “Dorothy Jean, take a good look at that face. What do you see, child?”
“I see a girl who does not want to wear her dumb blue dress to church today,” Dorothy said with a humph of finality. “Look at me! I look perfectly fine in my pink sweater and dungarees,” she proclaimed, her face pinched into a wad of storm.
“Child of mine, you look perfectly fine in your birthday suit, too, but you’re not wearing that to church today either.”
“Oh, yes I am. I’m always wearing my birthday suit. But usually nobody can see it because I’m wearing clothes over it.”
Ethel tucked her lips inside her mouth, damming a torrent of sharp words ready to burst out of her. She stared at her daughter’s set face, then watched her cross her gangly arms across her chest, clearly reveling in her last statement, which was, at its root, inarguable—and they both knew it. Ethel had long ago learned, however, that neither diatribing nor debating would move Dorothy Jean toward Ethel’s intentions. No, you had to beat Dorothy at her own strengths, and that took prayer, creativity and unending patience. While Ethel engaged in mental gymnastics, she mindlessly crossed her arms against her chest as she studied her own midlife face in the mirror, as if appealing to it for answers. Her eyes scanned their framed reflections. Without a doubt, these two females were the shadow images of each other’s stubbornness. Lord have mercy on us both, Ethel prayed in silence.
Just then the old Register clock in the kitchen began its ten-gong pronouncement that church would begin in thirty minutes, barely enough time for them to finish dressing, pack up and get to town.
“Dorothy Jean Brown, we both look pathetic. Just get a good gander at us. I think we should talk to our smiles and try to coax them out of their hiding places. After all, if you were the pastor, would you want to look at these faces while you were preaching God’s word?”
Mother and daughter spent a few moments moving nothing but their eyes between their reflections. Pretty soon it became impossible not to giggle, which is exactly what they did.
“Look at us,” Ethel said. “Don’t we look like fine women when we smile?”
“We do,” Dorothy said, her heart erupting with love for her mother like an explosion of happy feathers.
“Let us determine right here and now,” Ethel said, resting her hands on her daughter’s shoulders, “that when we find we haven’t been smiling enough, we will talk to our smiles to encourage them, okay? We’ll talk to our smiles until we feel them rumbling around inside of us. We’ll talk to our smiles until they appear, so that when we look in the mirror, we can smile back at them.” Ethel then leaned over and kissed the top of her daughter’s fine brown hair, her warm breath melting Dorothy’s remaining resistance.
Without another word Dorothy Jean Brown quickly changed into her blue dress, casting a hurried eye into her dresser mirror each time she passed it, just to make sure she was smiling back at . . . her smile.
And now, nearly eight decades later, Dorothy Jean Wetstra talked to her smile yet again, realizing it had been hiding for several days. Although she had continued to enjoy decorating her new little home on Vine Street three blocks off the Partonville square, and she truly did relish living so close to her best friend May Belle, and May Belle’s dependent, forty-five-year-old son Earl, whom she loved like her own, her soul still pined for Crooked Creek Farm, the farm she had, just a few short months ago, left behind—lock, stock and crawdads. Not only that but her fierce independence had taken a severe knock when, during this same time, she’d scared herself driving and determined it was time for her to give it up, which now kept her from spur-of-the-thought visits to the miles-away farm, its land, the barn, her birthplace . . . the very home in which she had learned to talk to her smile.
Dorothy stretched her five-foot ten-inch frame and walked down the hall to her bathroom, reaching her arm around the corner to flick on the light. The cheery cobalt-blue paint that rimmed the mirror and the basketball-sized sun painted in the corner over the tub set the perfect stage for the upcoming drama.
“Come on, smile,” she said out loud to her face in the mirror. “I know you’re in there; I’ve seen you in many photos over all these decades. You know, it’s band practice tonight and Nellie Ruth will be here within thirty minutes to pick us up. Do you want her or Raymond, the director, who stands right in front of us so I can hear him with these old ears, to have to look at this face while I’m trying to muster enough air to blow through my clarinet?” She put her hands to her hips, cocked her head, bugged out her eyes, and lifted her brows in a challenging gesture. “I mean, think about all the friends and happy melodies we’ll be surrounded by. Think about the goodness the Lord has blessed us with by allowing me the privilege to even have a face—although Lord, I sometimes do wonder what You are thinking when letting it age into this!” She leaned toward the mirror and turned her head slightly to the left, then to the right, studying each crease; her ever-heightening forehead; the remains of her thin hair clinging to her pink scalp; her brown eyes, slightly hidden beneath droopier eyelids than she’d last remembered; her neck that revealed the folds of a well-seasoned, long-lived life.
Yes, that outward appearance was constantly changing. But the thing that disturbed her most was the lack of any evidence of a grateful smile for all that blessed her. “Come on, smile, I know you’re in there!” W’ll talk to our smiles until we feel them rumbling around inside of us, she heard her mother saying.
She closed her eyes, willing herself to examine what she was feeling. Sad? Lonesome? Lost? Old?
Then a subtle shift birthed in her gut. “Oh, my,” she whispered, goose bumps racing up her arms. What she could feel was her mother’s heavenly hands on her shoulders, her soft breath on the crown of her head. For a good fifteen seconds she stood motionless, receiving this gift of grace. When she opened her eyes, nearly expecting to see her mother once again standing behind her, only her own reflection appeared in the mirror. But so did her smile.
“There now. That’s better. What a fine woman you look like when you smile,” she said, wiping the joyful tears of love and remembrance from the soft wrinkles around her welcome and familiar grin. “Thank you, Lord, for the balm of sweet memories. Let the winds of change blow where they will; as long as I remember You and my smile, I believe life will go as it should.”
2
Katie Du
rbin sat slumped on a box in the Chaos Room, as she and her son Josh had taken to calling it. Her eyes, staring at an empty wall before her, were glazed over, as was her mind. The Chaos Room was the smallest of the three upstairs rooms in the old, two-story clapboard farmhouse, and there were piles of stuff everywhere. Katie was a woman of control and order, and this . . . well, this was so out-of-order it had momentarily struck her dumb. Anything she hadn’t known what to do with during the move had ended up here. What had she been thinking of when she had impulsively bought Crooked Creek Farm? Where would she put all this stuff she’d moved from their Chicago dwelling, plus all the odds and ends left from the home of her Aunt Tess, whose death had started this whole chain of events? She couldn’t fit any more stuff in the other two bedrooms without self-imposing a fire-code violation, her Realtor’s eye and mind—for better or for worse—never at rest.
The master bedroom was hers, although to call it “master” always seemed a joke to her since it neither had its own bathroom nor a closet big enough for half her business wardrobe, let alone her casual clothes (the rest hung on a wall-length rack in the Chaos Room); nonetheless, it was the largest of the three small rooms upstairs. The other room, the one that Dorothy used as her office, belonged to Josh. Of course, he had to have the second-biggest small room for his desk, his computer and a place for his sixteen years of accumulated guy stuff, as well as a place to sleep, which was, due to tighter quarters, now on a twin bed. Although she and Josh had moved in over a month ago, right after Dorothy’s auction, there were still a few pieces of furniture in the barn that just didn’t fit the way Katie had thought they would, like his old queen-sized bed, a few accent pieces and her exercise equipment.
Dearest Dorothy, Help! I've Lost Myself! Page 1