by Jill Jaynes
Chloe handed each girl two of the special treats she’d prepared for the team. Cake pops decorated in school colors, each adorned with a leaping dolphin, the school mascot.
“You’re the best, Mrs. Stone,” said a serious girl with brown hair and straight-cut bangs in her second year on Thomas’s team. “We’re all really glad you married Mr. Stone. He’s always been nice, but he’s extra nice now.”
Chloe smiled as she handed her a plate. “Well, thanks Emily. I’m pretty glad I married him too.”
Emily was the last girl in line, and as she walked away, Chloe scanned the room, looking for the girl in the number 12 jersey. Ah, there she was, standing near Emily’s table, lips pursed as she eyed the group of chattering girls. There was definitely a negative energy coming off of her.
“Something has your attention. Is it that old woman hanging around again?”
Chloe glanced at Thomas, who had joined her behind the counter, then returned her attention to the girls. “No, I haven’t seen her in weeks. I think she’s probably moved on.” She tapped a finger against her lips. “This is a new one. A teenager, actually. Kinda strange.”
Thomas put his arms around her. “Well, I’m sure she’s in good hands now that she’s on your radar. Just promise me you won’t over-do. You’ve got more than yourself to worry about now.”
“I won’t,” she said, pulling her gaze away from the back of the room to focus on her husband. “I’m too tired these days to worry about much more than taking care of you.” She pressed a kiss to his lips, then frowned at the shopping bag he’d set on the counter. “Another one? What did you get this time?”
Thomas grinned and pulled out a mini-foam basketball and hoop set. “Isn’t it great? Its Velcro, you stick it on the wall.”
“Thomas, the baby doesn’t come for another seven months. At this rate, we’re going to need a storage unit for all the toys you’re buying.”
“I know,” he said, clearly unrepentant. “I can’t wait.” His eyes lit with a mischievous smile. “Just think, if we had five kids, we could have our own basketball team.”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “Let’s see how one goes first, shall we?”
Thomas pulled her close in a hug. “I’m not even worried. As long as I’ve got you, everything’s already perfect.”
--- # # # ---
Jill Jaynes began her love affair with romance when she was a teenager growing up in Southern California, where she spent many a late night under the covers with a flashlight and a good romance novel.
This early addiction stuck, and she discovered one day that telling great stories was even more fun than reading them. Today she writes stories with happy endings her own way—with a dash of magic that means anything can happen.
You can find her at www.JillJaynes.com, where you can also sign up for her newsletter.
Or find her on Facebook at JillJaynesRomance.
Surprise Deliveries
by Shauna Roberts
Chapter One
“Do milk cartons ever feature missing fathers?”
Noriko Leonie Hamasaki addressed her poignant question to Puff and Slink, the store cats at Hamasaki Quality Pens and her only friends in Moonlight Cove, California. They looked up from where they sprawled in the sunlight, then yawned and closed their eyes again.
The cats weren’t worried, but she was starting to be. When Jake left, she had gotten the impression the father she had only recently met would be gone just a short time. Of course, she didn’t know him well enough to know whether four weeks was a short time to him.
It wasn’t to her.
Leonie also couldn’t shake the uncharitable thought that he was taking advantage of her. Maybe he had invited her here to run the shop while he took a long vacation.
The chimes rang a glissando in b minor, announcing a family of tourists. They strolled in, flip-flops snapping against the wood floor. Grateful for a distraction from the hollow in her gut, Leonie straightened up and smoothed down her red blouse. “Good afternoon,” she said, performing the Japanese bow her father insisted they greet customers with. She loved the ritual of that bow; somehow it softened the rough informality of California and made conversations with customers more gracious.
“How wonderful to hear a Louisiana voice!” the woman exclaimed, her pronunciation and intonation revealing she had grown up in southern Louisiana, just as Leonie had.
“Likewise. Some of the accents here are hard to understand.” Dozens of accents thrived in southern Louisiana, and Leonie knew most of them. She ventured, “St. Landry Parish?”
The woman nodded and switched to Cajun French. “You’re from down the bayou, I think. Are you Choctaw?”
“No, Houma. From Bayou Cane. I’m staying by my father now. This is his shop.”
“I have cousins in Bayou Cane! Do you know—”
“Darlin,’ we don’t have time to compare cousins. My parents are expecting us,” the husband interjected in English. He turned to Leonie. “We had coffee at the Honey Bee, and the waitress recommended we come here for postcards.”
“We do have the best selection in town.” Leonie guided the family to the racks she had put up the previous week. “One day when I was taking tea at the Honey Bee, Chloe introduced me to Erika Archer, a photographer. After I saw her work, I commissioned some postcard shots of Moonlight Cove.”
“These are impressive.” The man plucked three postcards from the rack—each showing the cliff face at different times of day—and compared them. “Archer has an incredible eye for light.”
“These are a hundred times better than the pictures you took, Papa,” the teenaged son said.
The father scowled at him, but his eyes twinkled.
“For real,” the boy said. “We could buy one of each postcard. Then you could put the camera away and stop complaining about the angle of the sun and how crowded the beach is.”
“Zachary has the right of it,” the mother said. “These would look great in our scrapbook, and you could pass a good time here instead of always trying to get the perfect shot.”
“Some of the postcard scenes are also available as prints.” Leonie walked to the bin where the prints stood, each in an envelope of archival-quality Mylar film. “All are exclusive to us.”
“Darlin,’ pick out what you like. I won’t complain about a break from picture shooting.” The husband wandered over to the glass case that stretched across the room and held pens and a few pieces of enamelwork.
Leonie kept an eye on him in case he showed any real interest in a pen and made conversation with the wife and son in French. “So you’re on vacation in Moonlight Cove. Are you having fun?”
“No.” Zachary said, with no sugar coating or soft-pedaling. “Every day the traffic is like an evacuation. The sky is brown. The ocean stinks. The food has no flavor.”
Leonie nodded. “That’s what I thought when I first got here.”
“And now?” the mother asked.
“I’m pretty new here myself, but the longer I’m in California, the harsher and more alien it seems, all thorns and hard angles and sharp sunlight. And much, much traffic, of course.” Leonie shook her head. “I’m a traiteuse, but few of my usual healing herbs grow here. I’m always collecting unfamiliar plants and researching them online.”
“A traiteuse! Now we know where to go if one of us gets hurt or sick here.” The woman added more cards to the stack in her hand and moved to the prints. “What do the locals do for fun?”
“Many like to surf and hang out at the beach. Customers tell me vacationers come to Moonlight Cove to relax because they have fast-paced city jobs.”
“If we wanted to relax, we could have stayed home,” Zachary complained.
“Hush, boy!” said his mother. “What good fortune you have to spend this time with your Mamère and Papère. Family is the most valuable thing you can ever have.”
Leonie’s stomach clenched, and she put her arm across it protectively. Her throat clogged with tears she
dared not shed in front of customers, neighbors or not. She drew a deep breath and said in English, “True dat. I came all the way out here after my mama passed so I could make a new family with my father.”
Leonie had known her father only from Mama’s stories. She had never even seen his picture. But everyone needed a family, and he offered one. She wanted to get to know him as much as he claimed he wanted to get to know her and to teach her about her Japanese heritage. Although she would always consider herself first and last a Houma, most Houma folk had a gumbo of ancestries, and she was eager to learn this unknown side of herself.
At her father’s invitation, she had sent a delivery truck ahead with her Mamère’s dining room furniture, packed some suitcases, and made the long, long drive on Interstate 10 with high hopes.
Her father had called her “Noriko” from the start. What a jolt, answering to her first name after twenty-seven years as “Leonie”! Then after a couple of weeks he put her in charge of the shop and left on business. Secret, secret business. He didn’t say when he would be back or how to reach him in an emergency.
Now she was stuck here. When she wasn’t running the store or collecting plants, she was planning new ways to make the store more profitable. How her father’s business had survived selling only high-end pens to wealthy people from Los Angeles and Silicon Valley was beyond her. Since she had been in charge of the shop, most of the profits had come from the lower-priced necessities and impulse buys she had added.
Speaking of which…
“Miss?” The father stood by the inexpensive plastic fountain pens she had added to the inventory. “Are these any good?”
“They’re made for beginners, so the nibs are designed to suit any hand position and writing style. I tested each model when they first came in. All write smoothly without skipping.” She gestured toward the other end of the case. “Not everyone can afford a fancy fountain pen, but everyone can afford one that writes well. I love the fun colors! I got a purple one for myself and put purple ink in it.”
“Cool!” Zachary exclaimed. He crowded against his father, eyes caressing the pens.
“Go ahead. Try any of the pens you want on that pad of paper. There’s a different color of ink in each.”
Zachary didn’t need a second invitation. He tried each pen, and then so did his mother. Laughing, they drew doodles and wrote their names in huge swirly letters.
Leonie couldn’t hold back a smile. How wonderful it is that some things in life cost almost nothing but bring so much joy!
The father tapped her on her arm and gestured for Leonie to follow him. He pointed to a detailed cloisonné brooch depicting the Moonlight Cove lighthouse on its rocky cliff above crashing waves and to another, simpler brooch of a flower. “I want to surprise my wife and my mother. Could you wrap those up for me now? Add the price to what my family’s buying. I’ll pay for everything together.”
Both were beautiful pieces. In fact, all the enamelwork in the shop was so gorgeous that Leonie had a crush on the artist without ever having met him. Leonie slipped each brooch into a silk bag and nestled it in cotton in a red box.
The man had just hidden the boxes in his pocket when his wife and son joined him at the cash register. They had chosen a mix of Erika’s prints and postcards and several plastic fountain pens in different colors. Leonie rang everything up and dropped a couple boxes of colored ink cartridges into their bag as lagniappe.
As the family left, Leonie bowed. She made a mental note not to order any more standard postcards. She had sold almost none since she had put out Erika’s work.
The clock clicked then tolled its melody and seven strokes.
Leonie blinked. Time to close already? Puff and Slink padded out from wherever, pausing to stretch and yawn before beelining toward the door leading from the shop to the living quarters behind.
She shook her head and smiled. “Every evening, the same path. How can it be you two have not worn through the floor polish?”
The cats reached the cat flap in the door and paced impatiently in front of it, mewing and rubbing their chins against the door’s frame and her leg. They used the flap without fuss during the day, but at suppertime, they stayed in the shop, making sure Leonie could not forget them.
“Hold your horses, mes petits.” Leonie wrote a quick email to Erika to order more postcards. She added a postscript: “Would you like to put some of your framed and signed photos here on consignment? The tourists love especially your postcards with beach scenes and lighthouse scenes. Also the ones with sunsets.” She clicked “send” and savored the moment. She had liked Erika immediately. It was gratifying to offer her a chance to make extra money.
And of course, she was helping Jake, as her enigmatic—and truant—father, Kaito Hamasaki, had inexplicably asked her to call him. She sighed and ran her hand through her hair. How much her life had changed in such a short time! Life had been crawfish boils and Saturday night fais-do-does and paddling her pirogue through the bayous for so many years. Bourré and other card games on the kitchen table when it rained too hard to go out. Good times and good friends.
But after the economic downturn and the decrease in oil prices, her friends and cousins had scattered to find jobs elsewhere as so many other people of the Houma tribe had done. She had felt lucky the arts continued to be strong, ensuring the continuation of her job at a small company that provided marketing services for musicians, artists, photographers, and even dancers.
Then Mama got sick. Six months ago, she had died in the room where she had been born fifty years earlier. Before Leonie had composed herself enough to call 911, the phone rang. It was her boss, calling to fire her for having taken so much time off to care for Mama.
Life turned pointless. Leonie went out every day for weeks in her pirogue, paddling and poling aimlessly through the marshes and bayous, slicing through the invasive, jade-green duckweed and making the black-green water underneath swirl. It had seemed a miracle when she received Jake’s condolence letter with its invitation to live with him in Moonlight Cove.
At first, she applied for art-marketing jobs in towns around Moonlight Cove, with few nibbles and no bites. The arts did not have the same respect and widespread appeal here as they did at home. As days and then weeks went by and her father remained missing, she gave up her job hunt and instead applied her marketing skills to the shop. Jake might be angry at her initiative when he returned, but he could not dispute she had increased his profits and his customer base.
If he returns. It’s getting harder to believe he will.
She was alone here, just as alone as if she had stayed down the bayou. Many nights as she lay sleepless, she debated returning to Bayou Cane and the empty cottage that was now hers. She longed for familiar smells, familiar foods whose ingredients she couldn’t buy here, a familiar landscape—lush, shady, and soft, always warm and welcoming. She longed for a familiar way of life. She understood the cultures in Terrebonne Parish in the marrow of her bones, and she spoke their languages—English, Cajun French, and what bits of Houma language still survived. She wouldn’t need to go back to marketing. As a traiteuse, she would never go hungry or be without shelter.
But she would not have a family at home, not with her cousins dispersed. She had expected to feel part of a family in California by now, but Jake had left while they were still strangers. Her “family” was only the two cats whining at her heels.
The tourists from Louisiana were the last straw. It was easy to understand what they said, and they had an eye for art that made her like them immediately. Already she missed the sound of their voices.
Waves of cold and emptiness rocked her so thoroughly that even her bones turned cold. Her hands clenched as her body shook. She hugged herself and rubbed the frissons pebbling her arms. It didn’t help that summers on the California coast were as chilly as late winter back home; the breeze through the window she had forgotten to close earlier brushed her with cold fingers.
Closing up will warm me
up. She gritted her teeth and grabbed the broom. After locking the door and shutting the window, she swept up all the sand that customers had tracked in. Then she swept the floor again because there was always, always more sand. She found it in the kitchen cabinets, too, and sometimes even in her bed.
She put away the broom and slipped her feet out of her shoes before going into the back. It was an odd Japanese custom Jake insisted on, but she would have done it anyway to keep down the sand in the living quarters.
The cats batted her legs with paws as if urging her to hurry. She opened the door to the rest of the house, and as she put on her waiting slippers, the cats raced to the kitchen.
“If it weren’t for you two, I’d leave this moment.” A warm feeling rose through her body, and calmness enveloped her. She had made a decision without realizing it.
He’s abandoned me a second time. I’ll give him one week to show up. Then I’ll go home.
Chapter 2
The next morning, kibble hit the ceramic cat bowls with a soft patter quickly drowned out by crunching, slurping, and hissing.
Leonie shook her head as she poured, more kibble now bouncing off the cats’ heads than landing in the bowls. “You two look just like our cats, Puff and Slink. But I know you cannot be, because you gobble and gorge yourselves like ones who are starved.” She set the bag on the cabinet.
Mon Dieu! I completely forgot. Where will I find someone to take care of the cats?
When she decided to go home within a week, she had not taken the two petits into account, and although she had been here for weeks, she had not yet made any friends.
She had tried. Saying “hello” or “good morning” to strangers on the street was plain good manners back home and often led to conversations and then to friendships. Here, though, women responded to her greetings with suspicion, and men, with leers. She had learned to keep her mouth shut and her eyes averted.
“Call vet about boarding cats,” she scrawled on a sheet of paper and stuck it to the icebox with a surfboard magnet. The name of the cats’ vet was another essential piece of information Jake had not given her. But given the high, high cost of real estate on the California coast, most people in Moonlight Cove had to rent. Surely the town had only one or two vets.