“Jacob Henry Wetstra! I will not have you talking about my friend like that. I simply will not.” Dorothy launched up out of her chair, then with determination, lowered her voice and continued. “God brought Katie Durbin into my life when I most needed answers. Somehow I just could not trust that the Craig & Craig Developers’ land offer was fair, not to mention the decision itself. I was nearly beside myself fretting about whether to sell or stay…considering the fact that progress will one day come to Partonville, ready or not.
“Son, don’t you know I’ve prayed long and hard about all this? And there, by the power of God’s grace and His almighty ability to have something good come out of the death of Tess Walker, came Katie Durbin to my rescue. And don’t you think for a moment God isn’t doing a mighty work in her life, too, not to mention His healing balm I see being spread between her and her son, Josh!”
Her voice had escalated in urgency, volume and pitch. She once again regrouped herself and reached across the table for her son’s hand. “Jacob, I know you sometimes wonder about God. But let me tell you something, God never has to wonder about you. He knows, son. He KNOWS!”
Jacob’s serious eyes began to flick around from his mom’s eyes to her forehead to the kitchen cabinets, then out the window. Dorothy knew it was time to change the subject. Never did she want to be one of those people who made others uncomfortable by diatribing about her Lord and turning them off rather than simply letting her light shine all over them, beckoning them to draw nearer.
“Speaking of May Belle,” she said, circling back into her own conversation, “she’s invited the entire lot of us over for dinner tomorrow evening—you, me, Vinnie and the boys, and Katie and Josh. I imagine the boys will surely get along swell!”
“I thought Miss Durbin and her son were back in Chicago,” he said flatly.
“Well, they’re coming back tomorrow for a little visit. Once Jessica Joy phoned Katie about my accident, she and her son, well, they just wanted to come give me a hug, is how they put it. And I’ve surely never been one to deny anyone the opportunity to do that! Anyway, I’m so glad you’ll all have a chance to meet them. Get to know them a bit. Maybe, maybe even get to like them,” Dorothy said, with a wink. “Don’t you want to meet the people who will soon be caring for Crooked Creek Farm?” She didn’t wait for an answer.
“May Belle said an early dinner would be waiting for us around five-thirty, so I told her that’s just when we’d arrive. Do you reckon we can all squeeze into your rental car?”
“I guess,” he said flatly. “It’s a roomy SUV like the one I drive at home.”
“Sounds like Katie…” Dorothy cut herself off, realizing she needed to back down for the time being from mentioning her name every other sentence.
“Right,” Jacob said with sarcasm in his voice. “Sounds like we could be twins.”
“Oh, child of mine. Give yourself a chance to be happy, son. Happy feels so good.”
Jacob headed down to the creek to find his brother and nephews, leaving Dorothy alone in the house. About forty-five minutes after his departure there was a sturdy, three-bang knock on her kitchen door. Dorothy figured it was the gang returning, so she just hollered, “For goodness sakes! Just come on in!” Arthur appeared and stood before her, just inside her kitchen door. He was twiddling his thumbs out of nervous habit. “Dorothy, what I have to tell you is not going to make you happy. No, not one bit.” The air crackled with doom. Dorothy could count on one hand the number of times Arthur had stopped by her house unannounced. Surely she was about to hear something truly horrible.
“I’m afraid The Tank’s sick. Terminal-like sick.”
“No,” Dorothy said in a hushed whisper.
“Yes,” Arthur replied, matching his voice to her tone. A moment of staring passed between them as Dorothy searched Arthur’s face, hoping he’d break into laughter at any moment.
“It can’t be!” she finally said, realizing Arthur wasn’t kidding.
“Well, it is.”
“You mean to tell me I broke her for good with my latest trick?” Dorothy’s heart felt as if it were jumping into her throat. She had to think a minute whether she might need a nitroglycerin tablet, then she realized she was just nervous, not dying—although with this kind of news, one could hardly tell the difference.
“Dorothy, ya know better than to think a little accident with a garbage truck could kill The Tank. If that was the case, you’d have plumb done her in about three wrecks ago. No, I don’t mean to tell ya that. I mean to tell ya all that buckin’ and kickin’ she’s been a-doin’ was more than the need for spark plug cleanin’ and wire adjustin’. I mean to tell ya she’s got herself what I feared most when I saw the little puddle in the dirt after ya left the last time, and that’s a cracked engine block. Sometimes those two can act alike, but eventually the sad truth reveals itself.” Arthur had removed his hat and was holding it in both hands, which hung down in front of him, as though he was paying his last respects.
“And you can’t replace a cracked whatever? I mean, you can’t weld it or something?”
“I mean, although she ain’t plumb seized up yet, she’s close to it. I ain’t gonna lie to you, Dorothy, she’s gaspin’ for breath, and there’s just not much more that can be done. And you know if there was, I’d be a-doin’ it!”
A long pause ensued, during which time they each stared at their own hands.
“You say she’s gasping but not dead? You reckon I could squeeze just a couple more years out of her, Arthur?” A hopeful tone had welled up from within her.
“I reckon you—and especially you, Dorothy—couldn’t squeeze but a couple more miles out of her before she froze up quick as a warm tongue on an ice-cold bumper.”
Again the atmosphere crackled with tension as voices slipped away into the deep recesses of foreboding silence and worried imaginations, wherein one’s worst fears play out. After a long while they heard the happy voices of hunters coming up from behind the barn toward the house. Dorothy straightened herself to her full five-foot, ten-inch frame, reared her shoulders back and said, “We’ll figure what to do later, Arthur. Goodness me, with all the changes I’m going through, I might just get me a shiny new SUV! Now, not a word of this to my family, Arthur. I don’t want to spoil their first day here fretting them with my latest dilemma. For now, let’s just keep this to ourselves. The boys will be driving me around anyway while they’re here.”
“You want me to tow The Tank out to the junkyard, Dorothy?” It almost looked like Arthur was about to cry. He asked the question with such reverence that it broke both their hearts. Dorothy’s eyes misted up a bit, but she swallowed down her rising vulnerabilities. The boys were almost to the back door.
“Goodness me no, Arthur! I haven’t had a chance to pay my final respects. Just leave her in the shed for the time being, if that’s okay.”
“Yup, I reckon that’ll be just fine…for now. We’ll talk later.” He turned to head for her front door, so as not to have to speak to anyone right now. Dorothy understood the soft heart behind this gruff man and didn’t even ask if he wouldn’t like to stay and say hello to everyone. She knew they’d have a chance to chat later. But not now. Now was the time for Arthur to be allowed to grieve in privacy, for after all, one of his very own, oldest, best and most personal patients was gasping for breath.
14
Jessica couldn’t remember ever having been this excited about the arrival of a motel guest. Coincidentally, her artistic side was finally beginning to reblossom, and a creative vision to add a few unique touches to what had now become known as Katie’s Room ignited in her muse. For the first time since Sarah Sue had been born, Jessica found herself with the motivation and the courage to take a mother-daughter excursion—without Paul’s assistance.
A few weeks before she delivered her baby, she saw some wonderful baskets in the Now and Again Resale Shop in Yorkville. Even if they were no longer there, she would still enjoy the exploratory prowling, as she l
iked to call it. “Feels like mining for gold when I dig through the piles in resale shops,” she once told Paul, who had, of course, just stared at her in amazement that she could be so easily entertained. Her enthusiasm was one of the things he most loved about her.
Sarah Sue screamed the entire time Jessica was buckling the squirmy little bugger, as her daddy often referred to her, into her car seat. It almost caused Jessica to bail on the entire idea. But she was spurred on by her vision of what she was going to do with those baskets. The moment she pulled out of the motel parking lot, Sarah Sue nodded off. Jessica wondered why it had taken her so long to test this tried-and-true mother’s trick she’d heard so much about. She’d also once heard a mother say that she put her baby on top of a running dryer to calm her down, whether she had clothes to dry or not. Jessica used to wrinkle her brow at moms who talked like that, but that was before she had become a sleep-deprived mother of a screaming baby. It now crystallized in her mind that she would try any and all suggestions given to her by mothers who had run the course.
Once parked in front of Now and Again, Jessica attempted another first. She boldly began to strap on the baby gift she’d been given by Nellie Ruth at the church baby shower. The contraption held your infant to your chest or your back, depending upon how you rigged the thing. After several failed attempts to get it facing in the right direction and the straps adjusted to the right lengths, she finally nestled Sarah Sue to her chest. Although the wriggly babe looked a bit puzzled by it all, she made not a peep while her mommy began her prowling.
Within minutes, Jessica had retrieved quite the pile from the Crafters’ Corner of the shop: three baskets of varying sizes; two half-rolls of grosgrain ribbon, one red and one brown; one bolt of jute; two packages of brown pipe cleaners; and a swatch of fabric with barns on it. She had no idea how, but her artist’s eye had always had a way of pulling things together in the most pleasing ways. It crossed her mind that flying by instinct would be a wonderful attribute to have as a mother. Perhaps she would have to learn to approach parenting more like art. Perhaps.
Katie and Josh arrived in Partonville three hours later than they’d thought they would. There had been a multi-vehicle traffic accident on the Chicago outskirts, and they had sat at a complete stop for nearly an hour before their portion of the five-mile backup even began to move—and this after a late start. Katie just had not been able to get off the phone with one wheeler-dealer in commercial real estate development after another, each wondering if she was soliciting or accepting partners in her latest adventure. Mac Downs, who had been offering her a premium partnership for some time now, was relentlessly tickling her business prowess, phoning her at least once a week in his admitted attempt to wear her down, one time even sending her four dozen roses with a card saying, “Whatever it takes…name your price.” Once word had gotten out about her impending move, gossip quickly spread about her “land killing” in southern Illinois. Playing her cards close to her chest—and also, in her weakest moments, still occasionally waffling about her ability to live in the country, not to mention the never-ending lure of the Big Deal conquest—she neither confirmed nor denied her intentions about development. The only thing that was for sure beyond anyone’s belief was that Kathryn Durbin would be moving to the country for any reason other than money. She had, after all, spent the last decade cultivating and validating her reputation. Nobody believed for a moment she had helped some old lady donate—donate—land to a conservation district for a park because she felt sorry for her.
One thing was clear to her, however, and that was that she truly had found herself worrying about Dorothy and missing her open conversations with Jessica. For the first time in her life, she sighed with relief when she saw the WELCOME TO PARTONVILLE sign flash by. When they pulled into the Lamp Post lot, Jessica, with Sarah Sue strapped to her chest, literally bounded out the office door to greet them. Within a minute, Katie had exited her SUV, Jessica had run up, arms outstretched, to hug her and they had learned in a wink of a moment how to hug around a baby strapped to one of their midriffs. “Might as well be pregnant again!” Jessica said. Immediately, they both rippled with the familiar and knowing laughter of motherhood friends.
Dorothy and her sons and grandsons began the arduous project of sifting through their heritage. They were at it by 8:30 A.M., having gone to bed early the night before, after the traditional Wetstra bonfire. Just behind the barn was a fire pit encircled with field rocks and decades-old, hand-hewn benches made of log rounds with giant split branches laid across them. By the time the major constellations were identified—always a must on clear nights—and the last roasted marshmallow was down the hatch, everyone was yawning.
The plan of action established at a kitchen-table meeting over breakfast was to begin upstairs in the spare bedroom, since it had the most available floor space. As Katie and Josh had done when beginning to clear Aunt Tess’s place, so had the Wetstras tapped Your Store for boxes, each writing his name in Magic Marker across the top of his designated box.
Items that no one wanted would be moved to the hay wagon they had hooked up to the old John Deere and parked near the front porch for easy staging. When the wagon got full, they would haul it up into the barn—one grandchild hanging over each tractor fender—and unload. Since it had been determined that Katie now wasn’t moving in until after the auction, large furniture items earmarked for it could be left in place in the house. Undoubtedly, furniture displayed best in place and perspective anyway. Vincent thought up the idea of designating them as auction items by applying large yellow Post-it Notes with a bold A drawn on them; things Dorothy would be moving to her new home on Vine would have a blue Post-it with a V. In order to accommodate the masses of people who would be entering the farmhouse, however, all that could be hauled out to the barn would be.
The men in Dorothy’s life, as she took to calling the working band, were at first reluctant to stake claim to items and move them out of what often felt like sacred territory and into a box, feeling that they were picking clean the bones of their mother’s life while she was still among them. Dorothy finally convinced them that it gave her great joy and a true sense of peace to witness her heritage moving on to where it rightfully next belonged. “And don’t worry,” she’d told them with a tone of finality and authority, “if you’ve got your eyes set on something I still want to call my own, I won’t be shy about telling you so! Going about the business of life—and preparing for the day when the good Lord calls me home—in this manner sure beats a family having to go through what poor Katie Durbin endured after her aunt died and left all that chaos.”
“Gads, Mom,” Vinnie exclaimed, “is that what you’ve got us doing here? Preparing for the day you…you…”
“Die,” Dorothy said matter-of-factly. “Yes, and no, son. Yes, of course I’m going to die. We’re all going to die. But I’m also plumb ready to move on to what comes next before I do.” With that, she picked up the pad of Post-it Notes, drew a big A on it, ripped off the sheet and slapped it on the white headboard of what was now the guest bed, but which long ago used to be her daughter’s. “It’s time the energy of another little girl brought new life to this old wood.”
“Grandma, we’ll need a bed to sleep in when we come visit again,” Steven protested.
“Don’t you worry, honey. Grandma will have a place for you. I might just get me one of those phooey-tons. Isn’t that what you younguns like nowadays?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Or maybe I’ll just get me a new couch with a hideaway bed, or an air mattress that blows itself up like I’ve seen on TV or…who knows what I might just go and do!” She whirled on her heels and moved to the items across the room. “Next!” she yelped without batting an eye.
“You mean futon, don’t you, Grandma?” Bradley asked, after snickering under his breath.
“Of course I mean futon,” Dorothy said. “I just wanted to see if you were paying attention.”
When the first wagon-load was hauled behind
the chugging green John Deere into the barn, Dorothy played boss lady, assigning and directing which items she wished to be donated to the guild sale and which were to be set at the opposite side of the barn for her personal estate auction. Although her sons noticed she often sat down for this bossing process, neither mentioned to the other or to their mother that they’d noticed toward the end of the day that she’d been doing more sitting than standing.
“Jessica! You MADE THESE?” Katie held the baskets, one in each hand, high up in the air and turned them this way and that as she marveled at the craftsmanship.
“Yes, ma’am. All by my lonesome. Of course, Sarah Sue contributed her bits of drool here and there, didn’t you, Muffin?” she asked her awake yet content baby strapped to her chest as she stroked the top of her fine, slick blonde hair toward her forehead.
“Where in the world did you get such lovely baskets?”
“Now and Again Resale.”
“A resale store?”
“Yes, ma’am. And the fabric and the pipe cleaners and the ribbons and…everything but the twigs. The twigs I got along the roadside on my way back from Yorkville.” She had spent the entire afternoon after her arrival home arranging and rearranging, lost in the timeless bliss of creativity. Nearly as soon as one basket was all set she would begin the other, often scalping items from the first, envisioning how they’d better enhance and intertwine, blend and bend, perfect the lines.
“And how much did it cost you total to make these?”
“Let’s see, including the free sticks from nature and the goods I have left over, my total bill, as best I can recall, was about seven dollars.”
Dearest Dorothy, Slow Down, You're Wearing Us Out! Page 12