“Oh, hi,” Linda said as she stepped out from the back kitchen.
Linda had her white chef’s apron on over her jeans and there were red tomato spots on it. Her hair seemed to be falling out of some kind of a band at the back of her head and there was a streak of flour on her left cheek.
“I can come back later,” Doris June said. “I thought you were open, but I don’t really need anything.”
“No, come on in,” Linda said as she pulled one of the chairs. “I’ve been wanting to ask your advice anyway.”
“Really?” Doris June said as she walked over to the table where Linda was sitting and pulled a chair down for herself.
Linda nodded. “It’s about all this fuss over the spaghetti special Aaron wants me to put on the menu.”
“Oh, yeah,” Doris June said. “That was one of his better ideas, I thought. I remember people used to love your spaghetti sauce. Aaron suggested it because of the Jazz tie-in, but I think people would love to see it on the menu again anyway.”
“I can’t remember the sauce,” Linda said in defeat. “I’ve been in the back since I opened and I’ve been trying to put together the sauce and it doesn’t work. The last batch I made tasted like ketchup. Burnt ketchup.”
“Well, I remember you used to make that sauce all the time.”
Linda nodded and looked at Doris June. “I think I have a mental block. I haven’t made it since Duane left, you know?”
“Oh.”
“I was hoping you could help me. On account of you got over Curt and never seemed to forget anything important like this.”
Linda looked as if she was ready to cry so Doris June patted her pockets to see if she had a tissue. It seemed she was no better at carrying tissues around in her jeans pockets than she had been when she was wearing a suit. She pulled a napkin out of a dispenser on a nearby table though and gave it to Linda.
“Don’t worry. I’m sure you haven’t really forgotten the recipe,” Doris June said. “It’s just the stress of this concert and starting to think about Duane again. The recipe will come back to you.”
Linda dabbed at her eyes with the napkin. “I’m a chef. How can I forget my grandmother’s special recipe?”
Doris June patted the young woman’s shoulder. “Maybe you wrote it down somewhere.”
Linda shook her head. “I didn’t need to write it down. I knew it like I knew my own name.”
“Well, then, it’ll come back to you. Maybe we should just look at your spices and think about how much of each you used.” Doris June thought it would be good for Linda to get up and move around. Exercise was always good when one was discouraged.
“How did you ever do it?” Linda looked at Doris June. “When Curt got married to that other woman, you just seemed to take it all in stride. I know I’d cry for a week if I heard Duane got married, even though I haven’t seen him for a good two years.”
“I’m sure you’d cope fine if the day came,” Doris June said.
“Yeah, I know, God is supposed to see me through the hard times,” Linda said as she folded the napkin and put it in her pocket. “I just hope I do as good as you did when my day comes. I really admire you for that.”
Doris June closed her eyes for a second and then opened them up. “Don’t admire me. I was so mad I stopped going to church when Curt got married.”
“No,” Linda said. “I saw you in church back then.”
“Oh, I went to church in Dry Creek,” Doris June agreed. “I wasn’t about to deal with my mother on that one. But I didn’t go up in Anchorage. It took me a long time to accept that God hadn’t brought me and Curt back together.”
“I didn’t know,” Linda said softly as she put her hand on Doris June’s arm.
“I still don’t understand it,” Doris June said. “So don’t admire me.”
Linda smiled. “I admire you even more for being honest with me about it. If I ever do get word that Duane has gotten married, I’m going to call you up and have a good cry with you on the phone.”
“You do that.”
The two of them sat there for a while.
“Garlic,” Linda finally said as she got up. “I’ll need to get some fresh garlic. I remember I need to sauté that with some onion. That’s the first step. I’ll need to go into Miles City for supplies this afternoon if I’m going to make the sauce the right way.”
Doris June reached into her pocket and pulled out two twenty-dollar bills. “If you’re going to Miles City, could you get some cookies for the concert on Saturday? My mom thinks we need to bake the cookies, but I don’t think we’ll have time to do that and get the pansy baskets ready for Mother’s Day.”
“Nobody bakes cookies anymore, especially not for a crowd like that,” Linda said as she took the two bills. “What kind do you want?”
“Something with chocolate in them. Teenagers always seem to like chocolate.”
“Well, who doesn’t?” Linda said, and then gave a whoop. “That’s it. Chocolate. I put a little chocolate in the sauce.”
“In the spaghetti sauce?”
Linda nodded with a grin. “My grandmother used to call it her secret ingredient. She didn’t use much, but she said it made the tomatoes taste a little more mellow.”
Doris June stood up. “Well, I’m glad you’ve solved the problem.”
“Now if I can only remember where Duane kept that old guitar of his. Aaron thought it would make a great decoration to hang on the wall. You know, the guitar that the Jazz Man used to play when he was a nobody.”
“You should be proud of him,” Doris June said. “I’ve heard he’s become very well-known. As I remember, you were the one who encouraged him to do his first performances here.”
Linda nodded. “He always had talent, Duane did.”
“Maybe, someday…” Doris June began.
Linda shook her head. “He invited me out to visit him a while back and I went. He lives in a whole different world now. I couldn’t live in that world even if it meant being by Duane. Which it wouldn’t really—he had so many other people around him.”
Doris June nodded. “I guess people change.”
“Although, it would be nice to have a wall of the café to remember him by,” Linda said. “It’d be nice to hear his name once in a while. Not a day goes by that I don’t wonder where he is and if he’s okay. I mean with drugs and everything, I wonder if he’s all right. At least you always knew where Curt was.”
Doris June nodded. She’d never considered that a blessing before, but maybe it was. She had always known Curt was safe and well. If he’d been seriously sick, she would have heard about it.
Doris June helped Linda put the chairs down before she walked back to her mother’s house. Her mother said Glory Becker was going to take her Sunday school class for her so she could just focus on the pansy baskets.
“That’s good,” Doris June said as they put their jackets on to drive out to the farm. “There’s no need to do everything yourself. I know you’re not used to asking for help, but it’s time for you to do it when you need it.”
“Well, I don’t always need help.” Mrs. Hargrove bristled. “It’s just all that’s going on this weekend.”
“I didn’t mean you always need help,” Doris June said as she opened the car door for her mother. “I mean there’s no shame in asking for help when you do need it.”
“Well, of course not.”
“What I really mean,” Doris June said as she held the door open while her mother arranged herself inside the car, “is that I would like to give you more help these days.”
“Well, that’s different,” her mother said with a pleased look on her face.
Doris June walked around to the driver’s side of the car and slid inside. “What would you think if I came home more often? Maybe every couple of months or so?”
“Why, that would be wonderful.”
“Yeah, it would be,” Doris June said as she started the car.
It was time she came ho
me, Doris June told herself. Even if it was only for scattered weekends every few months, it would be enough time for her to be more a part of her mother’s life and more a part of the life of Dry Creek, too. She’d be able to do things she hadn’t been able to do in her annual visits. It would give her a chance to see if she should make a permanent move to Dry Creek, too. She shouldn’t let the past bind her as it had. If it hadn’t been for her pride, she might have already moved back to Dry Creek. She surely would have researched doing it at least. She didn’t like the fact that she’d let the past determine her future. This whole concert thing might be just what she needed to let the past go. She surely hoped so.
Chapter Eleven
Curt had spent the morning carefully digging pansies out of the ground and putting them in his wheelbarrow. He wanted to have things ready to go when Doris June and Mrs. Hargrove got here. It was late Friday morning and he hoped, with the moss, that the pansies would be okay in their baskets until Sunday if they were kept cool and watered.
He hadn’t realized until this year that Mrs. Hargrove had chosen such a delicate flower for her Mother’s Day presentations all those years ago. As he thought about it he wondered why she hadn’t chosen a geranium or a mum. Those were two flowers that were strong enough to endure almost any kind of neglect. Then again, maybe she didn’t want these floral gifts for the church’s mothers to be too hearty. Maybe there was something about appreciating motherhood that required someone to pay attention.
The whole motherhood thing was a mystery to Curt. He knew, without being told, that Ben suffered from not having had a mother in his life, but Curt had never known what to do about it. Ben’s mother was nowhere to be found, and even if Curt did manage to find her, he knew she wouldn’t come back and be Ben’s mother. His ex-wife had never been fond of relationships where she wasn’t the center of attention and a child wasn’t just a reflector of happy thoughts.
Curt had wondered often over the years how he could have been so foolish when he’d married. He knew part of it was his impatience as a young man. He wanted quick results with everyone—his parents, God, and Doris June. He had not understood that a good life might require some waiting and that, just because Doris June wasn’t really ready to run away with him, it didn’t mean she didn’t love him.
The irony was that patience was the one big lesson God had taught him since then. He still had to watch himself to be sure that he didn’t get ahead of God, but, usually, Curt found he could slow his steps now and wait for things to develop. He wondered sometimes if his attention to his own lessons had resulted in Ben being too timid. It was as if his son had become the opposite of what Curt was like at his age.
That’s one of the reasons Curt was glad Ben was working on this concert. It would do his son good to get up and perform for people. Ben was due some applause in life and the teenagers around Dry Creek were good kids and would see he got it.
If doing the concert meant that Curt had to get up in front of the kids of Dry Creek and admit his mistakes, then so be it. Curt wasn’t proud of the mistakes he had made in his life, but he was willing to talk about them with others if it could save some other young hothead from doing the things he had done.
Curt had even looked in the hall closet this morning and found his old letterman jacket. There was the figure of a cowboy on the back for the Miles City basketball team. Throughout high school either he or Doris June wore that jacket. They passed it back and forth so it carried both of their scents. He’d left it in his room at home when he joined the army and his father had kept it for him until he came home. Curt figured Doris June would enjoy seeing the jacket, so he’d bring it to the concert.
Curt heard Mrs. Hargrove’s car coming even though he had his back to the road.
“Good morning,” Mrs. Hargrove called as he turned around. She waved to him from the car window.
Curt walked over to the car. “Why don’t you let me look at your car for a minute? I can hear there’s something wrong.”
“We can fix it later,” Mrs. Hargrove said as she opened her car door. “First, we need to get the baskets going.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Curt said as he watched Doris June get out of the other side of the car.
“Where’s Charley?” Mrs. Hargrove asked as she walked toward Curt.
“He’ll be here soon,” Curt said. “He wanted to make another batch of cookies. The first batch burned.”
“I didn’t think Charley knew how to make cookies,” Mrs. Hargrove said.
“Neither did I, but he’s doing it.”
“See.” Mrs. Hargrove turned to Doris June. “Even Charley knows that the cookies have to be homemade.”
“Mom doesn’t think we should buy cookies for the concert,” Doris June explained to Curt as she walked over to where he had the pansies in the wheelbarrow.
“Almost everything the kids eat anymore comes wrapped in plastic,” Curt said as he followed Doris June over to the wheelbarrow and then turned his head to say something to Mrs. Hargrove. “Don’t worry about the kids. They’ll appreciate anything.”
Mrs. Hargrove grunted. “Nobody bought cookies in my day.”
Curt grinned. “I’m sure they didn’t. That’s why my dad is back home mixing up his oatmeal cookies.”
“Well, we just want the concert to go well,” Mrs. Hargrove said as she picked up a shovel.
“The concert will be fine,” Curt said as he reached over and put his hand on the shovel. “There’s plenty to do with the baskets, you don’t need to lift a shovel.”
“That’s right, Mother,” Doris June agreed when she turned around from the pansies she was digging up. “There’s enough to do with those ribbons inside. Remember, we’re cutting thirty-inch lengths of ribbon to make bows?”
“And we still need someone to put the baskets in stacks of twelve,” Curt said. “That’s about how many baskets we can fill with the pansies in a wheelbarrow.”
“Fine, I’ll go inside and sit down.” Mrs. Hargrove put her hands up in a sign of surrender. “I was just trying to be helpful.”
“You’re more than helpful, Mother.” Doris June stood up straight and looked directly at her mother. “You’re the reason we’re here.”
Mrs. Hargrove brightened. “That’s right.”
“In some ways, you’ve already done your part,” Doris June said. “So relax if you want.”
Mrs. Hargrove nodded as she started to walk toward the old farmhouse. “I just might do that.”
Doris June watched her mother until she entered the house and then she looked over at Curt. “Give her two minutes and she’ll be scrubbing the windows in there.”
Curt nodded. “It’s hard to change your nature.”
Doris June nodded and then turned to push her shovel into the dirt again.
Curt knew this was a natural opening to talk to Doris June about the impatience that had driven him as a young man and how it had done so much to damage his life. She hadn’t been here very long this morning, though, and he thought he should wait and let them work shoulder to shoulder for a bit. He didn’t want to rush into any serious discussion unless he was sure the timing was right. He’d already made his mistakes with rushing Doris June and he wanted to be sure she was open to listening to him before he confessed his failings.
“Are you having a good time with your mother?” Curt asked after a couple of minutes of silence. “I can tell she’s happy you’re home.”
Doris June nodded. “I think she misses me more now that she’s getting older.”
“Yeah, things change.”
Together they finished filling the wheelbarrow with pansies, all in their own clump of roots and dirt.
“I bet your dad’s glad that you’re back,” Doris June said as she straightened up.
“Yeah, he is.” Curt tilted the wheelbarrow up and started to push it to the house. He looked over to be sure Doris June was coming with him. “My dad didn’t want to sell the farm and I don’t know what he would have done if I ha
dn’t wanted to come back and take over. Besides, Ben and I were both tired of Chicago and I didn’t want to keep raising Ben there.”
Doris June nodded as she put out a hand to steady the wheelbarrow. “I know my mom is glad that you’re back and want to rent the land on our farm. She’s not ready to sell the place, either.”
“Well, maybe you’ll want the farm someday,” Curt said.
Doris June just grunted.
By that time, they were on the porch of the farmhouse and they were ready to start putting the pansies into baskets. Curt figured he had done what he could to plant the thought in Doris June’s head. He’d have to wait and see if she took hold of it with any interest.
They had several baskets put together when Curt heard another vehicle drive up to the house.
“It’s Charley,” Mrs. Hargrove announced as she walked over to the door and opened it. “What took you so long?”
Mrs. Hargrove walked out on the porch to greet his father.
Curt could see out the window as his father held up a brown paper bag.
“I take back everything I said about store-bought cookies being okay,” Curt said as he winked at Doris June. She had just turned around to look at him. Curt pointed to where his father was walking toward the door. “I think we hit the jackpot.”
“Cookies,” Mrs. Hargrove announced as she led Charley into the kitchen.
“Oatmeal raisin,” Charley added. “The pick of the batch.”
“I thought you’d save the best for the kids,” Curt said.
Charley shook his head. “The workers need to eat.”
“I’ll go along with that,” Doris June said as she held up her hands. “Just let me wash up a bit.”
Doris June stood at the kitchen sink and let the water run over her hands. She’d used a bar of soap that sat beside the sink. She didn’t know what Curt was thinking about when he mentioned that she might want the farm someday. She wondered if he was repeating words he’d heard her mother say.
A Match Made in Dry Creek Page 12