by Susan Kirby
“The girls are coming today,” said Milt. “Flying in. One from the West Coast, the other from the East”
“How nice,” said Thomasina, wondering who had empowered him to smite her with a single look.
“We’re having a pow-wow on the farm,” Milt confided. He pleated the folds of his lap robe between his fingers and asked, “Get all your stuff moved, did you?”
“Thanks to a lot of good help—Antoinette, some friends from my old neighborhood. Trace, too,” Thomasina threw his name in with a studied ease.
“Antoinette?”
“Yes. She mopped my kitchen floor while I put things away.”
“You might want to steer clear of that gal, Tommy Rose,” advised Milt, as Mary came in. “She’s got a hot temper and isn’t afraid to use it.”
“Milt Chambers, you don’t even know the girl,” scolded Mary.
“I’ve got my sources,” claimed Milt. He winked at Thomasina and whispered behind his hand, “They call her the merry widow down at the store. ’Course what they mean is…”
“Never mind what they mean. Their wagging tongues speak for themselves,” inserted Mary. She patted Thomasina’s hand. “I’m glad you’re taking notice of Antoinette. She could use a friend like you.”
“Bosh! She’ll eat poor Tommy alive. She hasn’t had a decent word for anybody since her husband died running off with another woman.”
Thomasina darted Mary a questioning glance. “I thought he died in an traffic accident.”
“He did,” said Mary.
“And the gal with him was another fella’s wife. She died, too. Didn’t leave Antoinette anyone to take vengeance on, so she’s taking it on the world at large,” said Milt. He shook his head. “I feel sorry for those kids of hers. Why, they don’t stand a chance growing up under that sharp of a tongue.”
“God doesn’t leave his lambs to chance.”
“Mary’s right,” chimed Thomasina.
“Bring in the soap boxes, we’ll have a derby once you girls are done sermonizing.” Milt grinned as Will came through the door with his breakfast tray. “About time! They were ganging up on me, son.”
“I wonder why,” said Will mildly.
Mary tucked a napkin under Milt’s chin. She took his hand to offer a blessing. Milt echoed her “Amen.” Watching them together gave Thomasina a lonesome twinge for Nathan and Flo. Hopefully, she’d have a house phone before the day was out and could share in detail her aspirations for Milt and Mary’s farm. Or was that premature? Despite Milt’s high spirits over his daughters coming to visit, Thomasina sensed she wasn’t the only one in the room with unsettled nerves.
“Did you make it to the soup supper last night, Thomasina?” Mary asked.
“Yes. We had a nice time.”
“I sold your landlord a couple of tickets. Did he show up?” asked Milt.
“No,” Thomasina said. “The boys who helped me move had some trouble with their truck. He fixed it for them instead of going to the supper.”
“Snow job.” Milt sighed. “What’s Trace mean, letting a little half-pint like Deidre scare him off?”
“He didn’t look all that scared Saturday night,” said Will. “I stopped by just as he was leaving to pick her up for their dinner date.”
“Dinner date?” echoed Milt. “Really? That’s more like it! Deidre’ll know our boy’s worth this time, or I’ll eat my hat.”
“You better keep your hat on your head where it belongs, and your nose out of other folks’ business,” Mary warned.
“Anybody home?”
“Back bedroom, Trace,” Will hollered back. Mary narrowed her eye at Milt in silent warning. “Bring a chair, Trace.”
Thomasina heard his footsteps returning. Her nerves tweaked as she measured the steady, deliberate movement that gobbled up the safety zone. He set his chair down beside her, greeted the others by name and at Mary’s invitation, crossed to the dresser for a cup of coffee. Scuffed boots, faded jeans, short-clipped hair curling ever so slightly, she took stock with a covert glance.
“Hi again,” he said, catching her at it
Thomasina acknowledged the greeting with an upsweep of lashes. For a moment, it was as if they were alone in the room. Her heart stirred at the grace in his eyes and the contrite tilt to that long upper lip. His chair creaked as he folded himself into it, stretched his legs out in front of him and cradled his coffee cup in his lap. As easy as breathing, he shifted his attention to Will. “Thought we were cutting a tree down today.”
“We are, just as soon as Dad finishes his breakfast,” said Will. “He wants to watch.”
Milt put his nose in the air. “I smell gasoline.”
“I ran out of gas,” said Trace. “Didn’t Thomasina tell you?”
Thomasina ducked her head and sipped the last of her coffee. “Used the chain saw gas, and had to go back to town for more,” Trace finished.
“Careless of you. ’Course sometimes a guy gets distracted, and doesn’t notice he’s sitting on Empty,” added Milt with a cagey grin. “Hear you missed the soup supper.”
“Yep, and my belly’s been complaining ever since.”
“Get you a wife, and your belly can find something new to complain about.” Milt ignored Mary’s censoring glance, cackled and defied it, saying, “What’s this I hear about you and little Deidre O’Conley?”
“Avery,” Will supplied Deidre’s married name.
“There’s oatmeal on the stove and more fruit in the refrigerator if you’re hungry, Trace.” Mary talked over both of them.
“No thanks, Mary. I would take some sugar for my coffee, though.”
“I’ll get it,” said Thomasina. She jumped up and away.
Trace waited a moment, then patted his stomach. “On second thought, that oatmeal sounds pretty good. No, no. Stay where you are, Mary. I can wait on myself.”
He whistled his way down the hall, through the living room and into the kitchen. Thomasina turned from Mary’s hutch with the sugar bowl in hand. The cereal dishes were in the hutch, too. Trace caught the door before she could close it and reached for a dish. “Where’s Mary keep her spoons?”
Thomasina’s brown velour gaze rose as high as his chin as she pointed out the drawer. He crossed to the stove, and spooned cereal from the pan on the stove, then lifted his eyes to hers with slow deliberation. “Glad you could make it.”
His voice was so low, Thomasina wasn’t sure she heard him right. She lifted her face and saw that she had not misunderstood. “A deal’s a deal.”
“In that case, let’s make another deal. Want to? You keep being sweet and I’ll quit being cantankerous.”
“You’re cantankerous?”
He shot her a sheepish grin, and reached to take the sugar bowl, miscalculating just how fast she’d let go when his hand brushed hers. He fumbled, scattering sugar over Mary’s counter.
“Careful!” she cried, hands tangling with his.
They caught the sugar bowl. She sweetened his morning with a smile that matched the shade of the note on the doughnut sack. He wondered if that pearly lipstick and the lips beneath were as moist and peaches and creamy as they looked.
As if sensing the direction of his thoughts, she slipped past him, opened the refrigerator door and turned, a bowl of fruit in hand. “You want it on your cereal, or in a separate dish?”
“None for me, thanks.” Trace set his cereal aside.
Thomasina frowned over the top of the yawning refrigerator door. “That’s not much of a breakfast.”
“Close the door. You’re letting all the cold air out.” He crossed the kitchen.
The kitchen seemed to shrink with the closing of the refrigerator door until Thomasina couldn’t move without touching him. His eyes held hers as he traced the line of her jaw with his finger.
A touch so exquisite. Why so difficult to bear? Skin tingling beneath the impression of his palm as his hand spread to cup her chin, Thomasina closed her fingers around his wrist, torn between wrench
ing it away and cleaving tighter. She felt his racing pulse beneath her fingertips, and the answering surge in her veins.
Trace canted his head. Thomasina’s heart tipped as his mouth drew near. So near she felt the slight draft of his indrawn breath. The silence amplified a dripping faucet, a ticking clock and the whispered warning to shrink back, take cover. Instead, she tilted her mouth to meet his. In slow motion, a hairbreadth between them. Trading glances. Half a hair. Seeking. Eyes closing on slow-motion discovery as his lips touched hers and set off a trail of sparks like bottle rockets shooting for the heavens.
Thomasina leapt away from him at the sound of the ringing phone and approaching footsteps.
“Jumpy,” he said with a soft laugh.
“Answer that. Would you, Trace?” said Mary, bringing Milt’s empty breakfast tray into the kitchen.
Thomasina grabbed a dishcloth from the sink to wipe up their sugar spill and caught Trace drawing xs and os in the sugar sprinkles as he answered the phone. Catching her eye, he grinned and added a heart to his doodles.
“It’s Trace, Dee,” he said into the phone.
Deidre! The daisies on the table bobbed their fickle heads. Thomasina caught a tight breath.
“It’s good to hear your voice, too.” Trace turned his back to her and put a hand over his other ear as if to block all that would distract. “We’ve got a bad connection. You’re on your way? Well, that’s great! Yes, I’m going to be around awhile. Looking forward to it,” he said, and laughed.
Thomasina argued with a little girl inside, the one who had trekked from home to home, learning to protect herself from the pain of not being wanted when others so obviously were.
“She’s standing right here. Mary? It’s Dee,” Thomasina heard him say as she slipped quietly out the door.
Trace saw Thomasina let herself out, but he was coping with a bad connection. It was Deanna, Milt and Mary’s oldest daughter on the other end. She was calling from an airplane.
Mary took the phone. Torn between following Thomasina and returning to Milt and Will, he heeded instinct and opted for the latter.
“Guess you boys are wanting to get started,” said Milt. “Rev up the electric scooter, and I’ll come along. Make sure you two don’t drop that tree on top of us. Mary and I don’t run as fast as we used to.” He chortled and added, “Say, Trace. I’ve got a farm for sale.”
“So I hear,” said Trace. “Kind of sudden, isn’t it?”
“Not really. I’ve been thinking it over for some time,” claimed Milt as Will helped him out of the chair to the battery-powered scooter. “Mary and me are going to steal off to the wild blue yonder. Catch up on a lifetime of vacations we’ve missed, milking cows.”
“It’s a nice piece of property.”
“Are you interested?”
“You bet I am,” said Trace.
“That’s good to hear. I told Mary you would be, and I like being right.” Conspiratorial tone creeping in, Milt steered the scooter with a single hand, adding, “Nothing’d please me more to see you get it. Be almost like keeping it in the family.”
“Thanks, Milt. That means a lot.”
“I’d sell it to you outright except for Jeb Liddle.” They followed him down the hall, Will bringing his portable oxygen. “He’s farmed it for ten years now, and done a good job. Wouldn’t be right not to give him a chance to bid. You understand, don’t you?”
“Sure, I do,” said Trace. “What about the girls?”
“Don’t think the girls are going to rearrange their lives just to make their old man happy. They’ve put down roots with families of their own.” Milt shot Will a wistful glance. “As for sonny boy here—well, there’s some you just can’t keep down on the farm.”
“I’m here now, aren’t I?” said Will good-naturedly.
Milt conceded it with a watery nod. He ducked his head and squeezed the bulb on the bicycle horn Mary had clipped to his scooter. “Time’s a-wastin’, boys. Let’s get those saws to buzzing.”
“I’m afraid that’s going to have to wait.” Mary hung up the phone as Milt and his entourage rolled into the kitchen. “Deanna caught an earlier flight than she’d anticipated. Someone’s going to have to pick her up. Will, I hate to disrupt your day. But could you?”
“I’m feeling like getting out myself,” said Milt. “Let’s ride along to the airport. Want to, Mary?”
Will apologized to Trace for the inconvenience of rescheduling the tree cutting. He had no way of knowing Trace’s relief at having his morning handed back to him.
When he left the farmhouse, Thomasina’s car was still parked by the garden wall She couldn’t have gone far. Trace reached into the cab of his truck for the sack of doughnuts and set off to find her.
Chapter Twelve
Thomasina dodged cows as she cut across the pasture to a path between corn and bean fields, reasoning that she was in no danger just because she responded to Trace’s kiss.
The path ended at a tree-sheltered creek. The water was muddy brown from yesterday’s rains. The canopy of trees flung a blanket of green shade upon a short strip of beach. Thomasina found an empty clam shell in soggy sand.
A dead log lay across her path, its top branches reaching into the water. The trunk was stripped of bark and bleached white by the sun. She sat down and turned the shell in her hand. A hard shell with nothing to protect.
Before Nathan and Flo, she had been growing in that direction, trying by retreat to hide whatever it was that made her so dispensable her own mother would leave her behind. The string of foster homes that followed had reinforced the belief that she was irreparably flawed. But God used Flo and Nathan to show her that that wasn’t so, that she was dying inside, protecting what? Her right to shrink in mistrust and fear? It was a hard habit to quit, the urge to retreat when someone touched a nerve by kindness, by callousness, or by crowding her comfort zone. As was Trace.
He loves Deidre. Did he? It shouldn’t matter to her for she was not attached even to the idea of being attached. She had plans to pursue, goals in which he played no part. She heard him coming, whistling through the trees, and she turned, tummy tipping at the bluntness of his blue gaze.
“Want some company?” he asked.
“What about your tree?”
“Canceled again. Will’s sister Deanna called, needing a ride from the airport.”
Deanna? That was whom he’d called Dee? “She’s coming here?”
Trace nodded and held up the doughnut bag. “A little worse for the wear, but a chocolate fix all the same.”
She would not have Flo and Nathan if she had not gone over the fence, her mind said. Thomasina patted the log in wordless invitation. He sat down beside her, and resumed whistling as he opened the sack.
“What’s that tune?”
“Something I made up.” He inclined his head, voice dropping as he confided, “It’s a safety measure for jumpy people. Wouldn’t want you falling off your log.”
“Just for that, I’m taking those doughnuts back.”
“Careful!” warned Trace as she reached for the sack. “You’ll wrinkle my apology. I don’t get many. And never in peach lipstick.”
“Apricot Frost. I didn’t have a pen.” Thomasina ducked his smile, her cheeks warm. She helped herself to a doughnut and gave him the sack. “So when are you cutting the tree?”
“Can’t until I have a ground man.”
“Which is?”
“I tie off the branches before I cut them. Someone on the ground guides them down so they don’t stray off course and go through the roof.” Loose curls spilled over his forehead as he angled his cap farther back on his head. “Are you offering to help?”
“That would make me an accessory.”
He shook his head. “What was I thinking?”
Holding back a smile, Thomasina closed her eyes to savor the taste of chocolate. “Mmm. Emmaline’s wasting her talent in Liberty Flats.”
“Keep it under your hat. Wouldn’t want anyone st
ealing her away,” said Trace.
Thomasina noticed a razor nick on his chin as he chewed. The small, tear-shaped scar on his left temple dappled sunlight on the arch of prominent cheekbones. He turned, mouth curving as their eyes met. Suddenly the log seemed too short and the moment, too long. Thomasina narrowed her thoughts to the acreage surrounding them, and got to her feet.
“How big is the farm?”
“Two hundred and forty acres,” said Trace. “Some in cultivation, some in pasture and twenty in pine trees. Milt helped Will and me plant them as a 4-H project.”
Thomasina wondered aloud what that would be in city blocks. He smiled at the question, and translated it as best he could. She surveyed her surroundings, trying to envision a campground with cabins, a chapel and an assembly hall.
“The idea was to sell Christmas trees,” Trace explained about the pine trees. “But by the time they were big enough, we were in high school, and busy with other things. So the trees went uncut. Looks like a forest now.”
“It does? I’d like to see that,” said Thomasina. “Or do you need to get back to town?”
“I’m in no hurry,” he said.
They followed the creek a short distance, crossed on a log and skirted a freshly mowed hay field on their way to the pine trees. The pine branches were snugly innerlaced, the lower ones having been cut away for easier walking. Unlike the hardwoods lining the creek, Thomasina noticed that the trees were evenly spaced and fairly uniform in size. “There aren’t any seedlings,” she said.
“No. Takes a fire for them to reseed themselves.”
“They’d have to burn down to start over?”
“The heat burns off the resins and frees the seeds in the cones. Tough way of propagating, isn’t it?” said Trace.
Thomasina strolled along at his side, sifting his words. She stopped as he tipped his head and looked up through the trees.
“This is about the middle of the pine woods. Too small to get lost in.”
Was it? The sense of isolation beneath the towering pines made size irrelevant. What a wonderful place to bring children wounded in fiery circumstances not of their own making. She could tell them what Trace had just told her so that they might understand that by the Creator’s design, new life came of firestorms, and not just in trees.