“How can it be morning? I’ve barely begun,” she groaned aloud and looked at her watch. She wiped her hand over her face and tried to bring herself back to reality.
She remembered she’d made only one pot of coffee in her French press, and had consumed it early on in the evening. Around two in the morning, she’d gone downstairs for an apple and a handful of walnuts, but glancing at the side table, she realized she hadn’t touched her fruit.
Sitting on her high-backed stool with the pink-and-green-candy-striped cushion her mother had made for her when she’d gone off to college, she looked at the large pile of crumpled papers at her feet. She rubbed her eyes and glanced at the drafting table.
Lying before her were twenty-nine depictions of the renovations she knew the church would need. And she didn’t remember creating half of them. When did I do all this?
When she’d worked on a particularly demanding project back in Indianapolis, she’d gotten into her creative zone and lost track of time, but she’d always kept a sharp bead on her progress.
Something about this experience was different. Very different.
She vaguely remembered opening all the tubes of oil paints. She remembered the acrylics and then throwing those drafts into the wastebasket. She remembered throwing some pen and ink drawings away, but she was at a loss as to how many drawings she’d completed.
Could this be real artistic inspiration?
Sarah, girl. You are really losing it, she chastised herself. Then picked up the first drawing. Or...could you possibly be getting it?
Sarah went through the first stack of sketches, which were all done in charcoal pencil. These were for the construction work she knew had to take place before any other changes could be executed. The largest and most costly alteration would be the removal of the old glassed-in “cry room,” which sat off to the left of the altar. Sarah wanted to rip it out and make a new area for the choir. She would keep the choir section on the right-hand side of the altar as it was, but refurbish the pews. The addition of the extra choir area was for the children’s choir. She knew it would be a mainstay for years to come.
Sarah saw a new electric piano and an electric organ in the left area, as well. They would need amps, a very good sound system and someone to run it. Music brought joy to everyone’s lives. She couldn’t help thinking of little Annie and the joy Sarah had felt throughout her body just listening to the child sing.
In the back of the church, where the vestibule flowed openly into the main area, she would partition the vestibule off with columns, wood arches and soundproof glass windows. Fifteen-foot-high, massive, wood doors with brass handles would open to the center aisle. There were matching but smaller doors on the far right and far left where people could enter through the side aisles.
The vestibule would double as a greeting area and as a new cry room for parents with babies and small children. Two rows of comfortable, stackable chairs would be placed in this area, and could be removed for weddings and gatherings when seating was not required.
At some point in the seventies, someone had decided to cover the dull, concrete columns that ran up and down the side aisles of the main area with an even duller beige grasscloth. Tearing out the columns and replacing them was senseless. In addition, the columns accented, though they did not support, the twelve arches in the lower left and right aisle ceilings. Sarah planned to remove the grasscloth and have the columns painted in a dramatic and rich-looking dark green with gold marble veining. She realized she would need an expert artist to execute the complicated veining process that would make the columns resemble real marble. If the painting was not executed with precision, a very good eye and steady hand, the result would look more like graffiti than faux marbling.
Around the far back wall of the sacristy and altar area, she designed the faux-marble wall decor that would resemble panels, but would require no wood and thus keep costs down.
The costs! Sarah looked at her work, and for the first time since she started her drawings and plans over twelve hours ago, she felt depressed. She knew enough about construction and design work—the materials and the labor—to realize that her initial proposal would cost upwards of three-quarters of a million dollars.
“Buck up, Sarah. You can do this,” she said to encourage herself.
She flipped through the drawings again. She reached over to her paint sample fan decks and started choosing the colors she imagined. Sky-blue for the barrel ceiling. Gold leaf for the arches. Butter-yellow for the side walls, choir areas and the vestibule. A deeper sunflower-yellow for the accent curves. The windowsills and window insert walls would all be that dark blue-green. Jamaican Sea. She paused and looked at the paint swatch. That’s the color of the columns and the new carpet.
With a deep frown, Sarah wondered how they would repair the rose, gray, beige, black and white terrazzo floor. Suddenly, the phone rang.
“Are you still in your drawing room, pumpkin?” Mrs. Beabots asked.
“How do you know that?”
“Your lights were on all night.”
“I was working.”
“Sounds intriguing,” Mrs. Beabots said. “I just wanted to remind you about tomorrow night. The Arts in the Park.”
Sarah scrounged through her brain, barely remembering anything besides her drawings. “Right. I’m driving us.”
“That’s right, dear. It’s the first concert of the season. It will be a virtual festival.”
A festival?
Sarah felt as if the clock had stopped.
A festival.
The word conjured whirling visions in her head. Festival evoked a scene of Renaissance tents and food wagons, Harlequin clowns and jugglers, puppeteers and actors bellowing lines from Shakespeare. A Midsummer’s Eve festival would attract hundreds, possibly thousands of people who would spend money freely in a fantastical setting, Sarah thought.
“Sarah? Did you hear me?”
Sarah snapped out of her reverie. “Yes. We’ll leave at six-thirty. Maddie said she’d be here at six. I’m making stuffed green peppers for dinner beforehand.”
“I’ll bring the wine,” Mrs. Beabots said. “Something special, I should think. After all, it’s the beginning of summer.”
As soon as Sarah hung up the phone, she realized Mrs. Beabots had given her the perfect idea for raising the money for St. Mark’s.
“I can do this,” she said to Beau, who was watching her with rapt attention.
She would organize a summer festival on the church grounds, and all the proceeds would go to the building fund. She needed a huge extravaganza, which was not hard for Sarah to conjure. She always worked best with large concepts. Skyscrapers. Huge shopping malls. Civic centers. That’s the kind of work she’d accomplished in Indianapolis. No wonder she hadn’t produced a good design for Charmaine on her last assignment. It was too small. Too utilitarian. She couldn’t make her head lower the bar that much. No, a project like St. Mark’s was her forte. She liked tackling the big whale.
In less than an hour, Sarah had jotted down all the basics for the summer festival. She would hold it on the 4th of July, when Indian Lake was host to an extra twenty to thirty thousand tourists for the weekend. She would start the festival right after the huge downtown parade, which boasted bands, fire engines, dressage and Western horse teams, antique cars and over a hundred floats. It was not unusual to have the governor of Indiana come to the parade. There was always a flyover by F-16 jets from the Grissolm Air Force Base at precisely eleven o’clock. People would stream to her festival. She would cajole all the best retailers in town to purchase booth space, starting with Maddie Strong. She’d also ask Scott Abbott, who owned the the Book Shop and Java Stop. The competition would be good for them. Liz Crenshaw could advertise her wines, even if she couldn’t sell them directly to the public.
And Sarah would plan a chi
ldren’s freedom pageant, which would entice parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents to attend, boosting numbers through the gates. Sarah envisioned the children’s choir onstage, each of their eager faces belting out patriotic songs. She would feature Annie Bosworth as the star. Annie had said she was practicing “America the Beautiful.” She would be perfect.
Suddenly, Sarah remembered what Annie had told her about Luke not allowing Annie to sing. Sarah dismissed the possibility. Sarah believed she knew Luke well enough by now to discuss Annie’s participation in the choir and her idea about the summer festival with him.
Her mind reeling with one idea after another, Sarah didn’t hear Miss Milse as she came to the front door and let herself in. Not even Beau’s barking had broken through the tornado of creativity in Sarah’s mind. Her feelings of helplessness floated away like foggy vapors. Her energy spiked. She felt as if an ethereal magician had whisked away the cloak of depression that had wrapped itself around her for months. For the first time since her mother died, Sarah was Sarah again.
Something was happening to her and it was all good. She couldn’t put her finger on the exact moment of the alteration. She didn’t know if it was the haunting voice of a little girl singing in a church, or a zing from a man’s touch on her chin, or the spark of an idea that ignited her natural creativity. Sarah was moved to wonderment.
“First things first,” Sarah said to herself, gathering up her drawings for the church improvements. She needed Father Michael’s permission. She swallowed hard and paused. Then she shoved her cost calculations into her father’s portfolio. I can do this. And if I don’t do this... She shuddered. The idea of false starts or failures turned her blood cold. She was coming back to life and she didn’t want to lose this new excitement.
She would find a way to make this happen. She had to.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LUKE PULLED A bag of frozen vegetables out of the freezer and put it in the microwave.
“They take six minutes,” Annie said without looking up from the roasted chicken breasts Luke had bought at the supermarket deli. She placed a chicken breast on each of three plates. Timmy poured two glasses of milk for him and Annie and one very tall glass of water for his father.
When the microwave beeped, Luke divided the vegetables among the three plates. Annie carefully put out three red-and-white-checked placemats on the round kitchen table, then folded paper napkins and put them under the forks the way her mother had taught her.
They all sat down, and just as Luke was about to cut into the chicken, Annie said, “Can we say a prayer for Father Michael? He’s very sick.”
“Yeah,” Timmy said. “He’s got pneumonia. He’s going to die.”
“He is not!” Annie argued.
“That’s what Miss Sarah said,” Timmy rebutted.
“Sarah said he was very sick. Not that he was going to die,” Annie shot back at her brother, then put a pat of butter on his vegetables.
Timmy shut his eyes, pursed his lips and shook his head vigorously. “You don’t know anything. I heard Miss Sarah tell Mrs. Cook that Father had pneumonia and his heart wasn’t working.”
“She did not!”
Luke put his fork down, not hearing a whole lot past the mention of Sarah’s name. “Hold on, you two. Let’s get the facts straight here before we jump to the wrong conclusions. Now, Annie. Who exactly are we talking about? Sarah who?”
“You know, Miss Sarah. She helps at Bible School with Mrs. Cook. And I saw you talking to her at the marina.”
“She’s Beau’s mom,” Timmy said, carefully moving the peas away from the carrots and corn on his plate.
Luke nearly dropped his fork. Sarah from his counseling sessions was also his kids’ volunteer Sunday school teacher. The woman really got around. “I know who she is,” he said.
“I like her a lot,” Annie said. “She teaches us how to draw and paint. Well, not really paint, but about colors and fun stuff like that.”
Timmy never looked up from his task. “I like her ’cause she’s pretty.”
“Oh, Timmy,” Annie grumbled. “There’re more important things than being pretty.”
“Like what?” Timmy and Luke asked in unison.
Annie glared at her father and brother.
“I was just kidding,” Luke said.
“I wasn’t,” Timmy said.
All three instantly burst into laughter.
Luke took a long slug of his water and watched his children eat. He was amazed that Sarah Jensen kept turning up in his life as if she’d been plunked in his path by crazy circumstance.
On Saturday, while unloading his tools from his truck, he’d glanced over to the house next to Mrs. Beabots’s and had seen a very familiar-looking golden retriever run out of the house and race around the yard. The dog had stopped in his tracks and stared at Luke, but he had not approached or barked. Luke didn’t believe in anthropomorphizing animals, but he could have sworn the dog smiled at him in recognition. Luke had rubbed the back of his neck, feeling icy prickles as he realized Sarah Jensen lived next door to his new summer weekend job. It was as if he couldn’t escape the woman. Now she was giving his kids art lessons. What was going on? Why would he suddenly keep running into the same woman?
Or had Sarah been around town, in and out of places where he’d been, where he was, and he just hadn’t seen her?
Was that what was happening?
Though Margot was a great counselor, it was Sarah’s unbridled compassion that truly made Luke want to continue the sessions. She had a way of listening without judgment, speaking without criticism and reaching out to him, exposing her own flaws, that drew him to her.
She was thoughtful and generous—like the way she’d given him those cookies for the kids. She offered them without thinking. He hadn’t seen that kind of graciousness since Jenny.
Sarah certainly had a way about her that snapped him into awareness.
Luke had to admit he’d been caught in a time warp since Jenny’s death, and even if he’d run into Sarah prior to that day at the groomers, he honestly wouldn’t have remembered it.
Looking at his children, he was taken aback at how much they had grown and changed in the past two years. Some days, he almost felt as if he didn’t know them. Annie was nearly nine. Timmy was six and a half. While he had been trapped in a haze of pain and grief, they’d had to march on with their lives without him.
Luke had been chastising himself for being angry with his kids and other people all the time, but what was worse was that he had simply been absent. He went through the motions of everyday life with them, but he hadn’t really been involved. Even now, Annie and Timmy were chattering away about something and he wasn’t listening.
“I’m sorry, Annie, what were you saying?”
“Mrs. Cook just started a children’s choir and she asked if Timmy and I can sing in the choir. So can we, Dad?”
Their faces were filled with so much anticipation, he nearly winced from the force. “That would mean rehearsals,” he mused.
“Yesss...” Annie replied tentatively, already feeling his rejection coming on. She had to think quickly. “But you wouldn’t have to drive us or take time away from your job.”
“How is that possible?”
Annie folded her hands and placed them on the table, prepared for this rebuttal. “Practice this summer is going to be part of our Sunday school sessions. Timmy and I will just stay a half hour longer, is all.”
“So I would pick you up then and take you out to the marina.”
“Yes,” Annie said, glancing at Timmy. He kept his mouth tightly shut as Annie had instructed him to do when she was negotiating for them. Timmy only nodded.
“I suppose it’s all right,” Luke finally said. “I have this weekend job for Mrs. Beabots. It’s only a few blocks from the churc
h. You guys really want to sing in the choir, huh?”
Annie’s face lit up and Timmy grinned broadly. “We do!” they chirped.
“Then that’s decided,” Luke said and speared a piece of chicken.
Timmy scooped two carrots onto his fork. “Will you come and hear us sometime?” Timmy asked without thinking.
Annie immediately jabbed her brother in the ribs. She remembered her father’s vow never to cross the threshold of St. Mark’s church after their mother died.
Timmy’s eyes flew open as he realized his mistake. He slunk down in his chair.
“Don’t push it,” Luke replied sourly.
Annie bravely leaned closer to her father and asked, “Will you think about it? Just a little?”
Luke’s mind was filled with memories of taking the kids to St. Mark’s with Jenny. His gut churned with loneliness, and once again all he saw was the future looming dark, empty and endless in front of him. “I’ll think about it. Now eat your peas.”
* * *
SARAH PUSHED THE doorbell at the rectory at precisely nine o’clock when she was scheduled to meet with Father Michael. Amazingly, she wasn’t nervous or timorous. She was confident and excited.
Colleen Kelly, the housekeeper and one of Sarah’s favorite people, opened the door. The church council had hired Colleen to take care of Father Michael once it was apparent his health was failing.
Colleen was as thin as a rake handle and as feisty and as loud as a cattle drover. With six children all under the age of twelve, she told Sarah all she needed was one paddle, one bullhorn and a sack of hard candies to keep control of her brood.
Colleen answered the door holding her one-year-old baby, with her two-year-old clutching his mother’s leg so tightly Sarah wondered if poor Colleen was going to develop bruises.
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