Easter Promises

by Lois Richer

  “They shouldn’t get drenched. There’s a difference. She looks in fine shape. If you’re following the percentages you gave Cameron for his tables, you’re doing fine.”

  “I don’t want any of them stressed.”

  “They look happy to me,” Lilly said. “Which one’s this?” She pointed to the largest of the sheep.

  “That’s Martha.”

  Lilly scrunched up her face. “How do you know?”

  “There are twelve girls in your second-grade class. How does your dad pick you out of all the little girls?”

  “That’s silly. He knows me. And only half of us have yellow hair. All your sheep have the same hair color.”

  Paul hunched down next to Lilly. “Look at Martha. Her eyes are very big and her ears stick out flat most of the time.” He pointed to Ruth. “Her face is wider, and her nose has that funny tilt to it.”

  Lilly pointed to Mary. “Her nose is pinkier.”

  “More pink,” Paul corrected, laughing. Audrey couldn’t help but notice the way his face changed when Lilly amused him. An unconscious flood of tenderness that his normally quiet expression couldn’t contain. “Now you get it. Audrey knows her sheep the same way I know you.”

  The verse stating He knows His sheep and His sheep know Him ran unbidden through Audrey’s thoughts.

  Lilly turned to Audrey. “So you’re like Grandma. Your sheep are going to have grandlambies.”

  Audrey was too charmed to be insulted. She opened her mouth to correct the very disconcerting thought of her being anyone’s grand-anything, but shut it again.

  “Not really,” Paul said, looking appropriately embarrassed. “Look, Audrey, your sheep are fine. Unsettled by the weather, yes, but honestly, there’s nothing here that leads me to believe you’ve got any reason to worry. Sheep have been lambing for centuries, most of them without the benefit of veterinary medicine. God knows what He’s doing and creation knows the ropes.” He slipped his stethoscope back into the bag. “Quite frankly, the person who looks in the worst shape in this barn is you. You’ve got to calm down or you’ll never make it through this.”

  For a guy who said he didn’t want to be involved, that was pretty well over the “butting in” line. Trouble was, Dr. Vickers gave her exactly the same speech the last time she called. “I’m worried about them,” she offered, trying not to sound as defensive as she felt. “I can’t seem to stop worrying about them.”

  “Do you pray for them?”

  Audrey wasn’t expecting that. “Well…”

  “I would. Even Lilly knows God cares about the things we care about, and you really care about your sheep. You need a heaping dose of peace, and I don’t know too many other ways to get it than praying.”

  Audrey realized, by the dark shadow that passed over his eyes, that he spoke from experience. And why wouldn’t a man who needed to get himself and his daughter through the death of the woman they both loved know about needing “heaping doses of peace”? She suddenly felt foolish making such a fuss. About calling him out into a rainstorm just to calm her unreasonable nerves. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said, “just be calmer.”

  Lilly tugged on Paul’s sleeve. “She needs cocoa, Dad. I do, too.”

  Audrey raised an eyebrow. “I make Lilly cocoa when she needs to settle down,” Paul explained. “It works.” He shrugged.

  The least she could do was make hot chocolate for these two. And, if she did say so herself, Audrey made a wickedly good cocoa. “I have a special recipe, you know,” she declared. “People say I made the finest cocoa in the county.”

  “Nope,” Lilly said. “Dad makes the best.”

  Audrey adopted a Texas-size drawl and planted her hands on her hips. “Them’s fightin’ words, young’un. Your daddy use whipped cream?”

  Lilly planted tiny pink fists on tiny yellow hips. Calamity Jane in ducky boots. “Yep. Lots.”

  Audrey remembered some ice-cream toppings at the back of her spice drawer. “Sprinkles?”

  Aha, superiority achieved. Lilly looked back at her dad as if to say, “you never told me we could put sprinkles on cocoa.”

  Now, Audrey was not normally a “sprinkles” kind of person. As a matter of fact, she couldn’t remember why it was she even had the sprinkles in her kitchen in the first place. And she definitely didn’t think of herself as the “good with kids” type, either. But the swell of satisfaction at besting Paul Sycamore in cocoa creation, the look of startled surprise in Lilly’s eyes, did something to her she couldn’t explain and didn’t expect. Something that seemed like a very good antidote to all the anxiety wrapping itself round her lately.

  As they said goodbye to the sheep and put all their rain gear back on to head back out into the downpour, Paul caught her eye for a moment and muttered, “Sprinkles. You fight dirty.”

  And then laughed. Audrey thought it the most infectious laugh she’d ever heard, and the three of them were soaked and giggling by the time they made it to her kitchen door.

  Chapter Seven

  For a man who sang the virtues of chocolate milk, even Paul thought Audrey’s hot cocoa was overboard. And that was before the showering of sprinkles. He caught Audrey’s wince when Lilly dumped—and dumped clearly was the verb in play here—a load of sprinkles onto the mound of whipped cream that already graced her mug. While he’d thought Audrey a bit much when she insisted Lilly put a plate under the mug—wouldn’t a coaster be sufficient?—he didn’t blame her now. The thing looked more like a dessert than a beverage. He had to admit, though, that the drink was really very good.

  He was sipping the last of his now, feeling the sugar rush churn through him, watching Audrey teach Lilly to knit. Well, it didn’t look like knitting, at least not as he remembered. Knitting, as far as he knew, involved two needles, and the thing in Lilly’s hand looked like a spool with four nails on it.

  “This is the best thing for someone your age,” Audrey said as she had handed Lilly something she called a Knitting Nancy. True to the name, it looked more like a toy than a craft, and Paul supposed that was part of its charm. Basically, Lilly did something with yarn at the top, where the four nails were involved, and a “knitted” tube of yarn—sort of a giant, colorful shoelace—came out the bottom. It looked to Paul like a yarny version of sausage making, but he decided to keep that observation to himself, opting to watch the pair quietly.

  They were entertaining. It was easy to see that Lilly’s boisterous, easily distracted personality—standard eight-year-old issue as far as Paul could tell—confounded Audrey. All the same, she stuck in there, her obsession for knitting winning out over her frustration at having to teach the same step eleven times over. It was at once so different from Caroline’s natural maternal ease, and then again all too similar. He hadn’t counted on Lilly’s one-on-one interaction with another woman to unsettle him so.

  Lilly ate it up. She sat there, her little pink tongue stuck out in absolute concentration, using the small hook Audrey had given her to make whatever loopy steps transformed the straight yarn to the tube of knitting that emerged out of the gadget. When she’d managed—with no small amount of doovers and untangling from Audrey—to produce half a foot of tube, she held it up as if it were made of gold. “Look, Daddy! I knitted!”

  Paul was broadsided by the lump in his throat. “Spiffy,” he managed, hiding his emotion with a big gulp of hot chocolate, and getting a regrettable burn down his throat as a reward.

  His eyes met Audrey’s for a potent moment before she quickly busied herself with Lilly’s latest tangle. She’d caught it, seen the crack in him. It made him feel exposed, vulnerable that he hadn’t been able to sufficiently mask it. His grief was a highly private thing to him, something to be kept tucked away in a black box never to be publicly opened. Perhaps that was one of his motivations for moving—it was easier to keep the black box in hiding with people who hadn’t seen him holding back the sobs at Caroline’s funeral. Hadn’t watched his heartbreak
ing inability to throw that first handful of dirt on Caroline’s casket. He’d stood there for what felt like years, trying to launch her burial, utterly unable to do so. He’d felt as if his heart was ripped open for all the world to see when Caroline’s mother had walked up, kissed Paul on his wet cheek and thrown a handful in his stead.

  It helped that no one here knew that. Maybe it was necessary that no one here knew that. A survival basic of some sort.

  “Now, what you’ve made here is called an i-cord. Make about two or three feet of this, and there’s all kinds of things you can do with it. Next time, I’ll even show you how to change colors and make stripes. And they make yarn that changes color all by itself, so the stripes are built in, too.”

  “I like stripes. Can we make polka-dots? They’re my favorite.”

  Audrey laughed. “No, but you can wind up the i-cord into little spirals and put polka dots on things like sweaters or bags and such.” She pointed to the contraption. “Show me you can do four rounds without my help, and you’ll be all set.”

  Lilly bent over the task, Audrey over her shoulder, and Paul used the quiet to look around Audrey’s kitchen. While it certainly contained much more than Paul’s barely furnished house, no one could call it cluttered. The entire place was so tidy he suspected her spices were in alphabetical order. Perhaps even cataloged. He guessed the spoons in her silverware drawer were nestled in perfect rows. The kind of order, Paul thought, Lilly could undo in thirty seconds. An archway revealed a small section of her living room, which looked as tidy as everything else. The books on the bookshelf were lined up precisely—smallest to largest down the four shelves of volumes he could see. No wonder this woman was traumatized by the unexpected near tripling of her tidy flock of sheep. He wondered if there were any free-spirited librarians, for all the ones he’d ever met seemed to have Audrey’s passion for order. Perhaps that was knitting’s attraction for her—it seemed like an orderly, almost mathematical craft wrapped around all the artistic qualities of yarn.

  Rather an esoteric thought for a guy chugging cocoa, he thought to himself. Maybe it was the writer finally emerging in him, this fascination with character and motive. Her long straight hair suited her no-nonsense attitude. Her lean face made the most of her enormous brown eyes and fair complexion. Audrey was a puzzle, a combination of expected and surprising characteristics he wanted to solve. He found himself paying attention to her interaction with Lilly in acute detail—the way she placed her hand on Lilly’s to show her a technique, how she whispered in her ear, the funny way one dark eyebrow shot up when Lilly said something outrageous—which was entirely too often.

  He was completely unaware of how much time had gone by until Audrey checked her watch and said, “Oh! It’s nearly four! I need to feed the girls and get ready for choir practice.” She popped up from the table and produced a neatly folded paper shopping bag from a cabinet. Paul mused she was the kind of person who folded and reused wrapping paper. “You take this home and let me know when you’ve got three feet made. Then we’ll make something fun with it and you can try stripes next. Got it?” She extracted—and that was the word for it, for Lilly was clutching the knitting thing to her chest—the yarn and supplies from Lilly and arranged them in the bag. “Don’t let them get wet on your way home, and don’t let the yarn get tangled.”

  “Thanks for letting her borrow the…whatever you call it,” Paul said, taking his own mug to the counter and fetching Lilly’s sloshy mug and plate, as well.

  “Knitting Nancy. And Lilly can keep it.” Audrey shrugged. “I own six.”

  “Five now.” Paul smiled. “That’s very kind of you.” He looked at Lilly. “What do you say?”

  “Can I come back tomorrow?” Lilly piped up, clutching her bag.

  “Start with ‘thank you,’ missy.” Paul used his “daddy voice.”

  “Thank-you-and-can-I-come-back-tomorrow?” Lilly mashed the sentence together into a single urgent word. Paul felt he was giving Audrey the hundredth “sorry about that” look of their short acquaintance.

  Audrey leaned down. “You may come back after you’ve made three feet. That’s our deal. You keep your part of the bargain, and I’ll keep mine.”

  Paul realized that if he was very fortunate, Audrey Lupine might just have given him maybe sixty minutes of a quietly occupied Lilly. That was worth running out in the rain to coddle sheep any day. He nodded at his new ally. “You make a mean hot chocolate.”

  “I never make a claim without the evidence to back it up.” Her words were serious, but her smile was close to joking.

  “Mizz Madison says you have the prettiest voice in Middleburg. Is that why you go to choir?”

  “I like to sing,” Audrey said, a blush tinting her pale complexion. “But as for that claim, well, you can just tell Ms. Madison I thank her for the compliment.”

  She sang. Very well, evidently.

  Paul couldn’t quite put his finger on why that stuck with him so. He found himself spending half the night—through dinner and homework and as Knitting Nancy was put through more of her paces—wondering what Audrey Lupine’s singing voice sounded like.

  In between patrons, Audrey spent Friday afternoon staring at the pile of applications in front of her. Applications. To march in a parade. Even with her love of organization, she’d thought the application process unnecessary at first. Sandy Burnside, a woman Howard had once called “a blond tornado” but who was actually the driving energy behind lots of what made Middleburg the charming town it was, wanted no process at all. “Why can’t we keep it at build a float, line up your folks and show up on Saturday morning?” she asked. That was the moment Howard chose to put Audrey in charge of the Easter Parade. Come to think of it, Audrey had absolutely no memory of Howard even asking her if she wanted to do it—he just declared her chairmanship on the spot. Back then, a part of her was flattered by the appointment. That part was quickly squelched by the tidal wave of detail Howard demanded, and his considerable lack of delegation skills. As in the man delegated nothing. Micromanaging was putting it kindly. Truth be told, Howard’s greatest mayoral talent was to dream up enormous projects and then tell other people exactly how to accomplish them.

  Her first victory was editing Howard’s four—yes, four-page—application draft to two sides of one sheet. In this case, however, Howard’s love of detail had actually done her a favor—she basically had the entire parade in front of her on paper. Howard had convinced her to look through the applications before she said no to organizing the parade.

  Howard was no fool, for as she studied the applications and sorted them into types of entries—musical groups, civic clubs, display floats and something which could only be classified as “other,” it seemed almost doable. The “other” section couldn’t help but pique her interest. Exactly what would Vern Murphy’s “precision riding mower brigade” do? And if Howard rode in the Middleburg Community Church float—as the application stated he would—then who would be Grand Marshal? Or—and Audrey shuddered at the irrational but highly likely thought—would Howard try to do both?

  After a half hour of sorting, re-sorting and just plain brainstorming, Audrey came up with what she hoped was a brilliant plan. She moved her lunch hour to 3:00 p.m., made two phone calls and walked over to the town hall in the afternoon to set it in motion.

  “I’ll do it,” Audrey pronounced as she settled herself into Howard’s mayoral office with Sandy Burnside beside her.

  “I knew you would,” Howard said, leaning back in his chair.

  “Well, I didn’t,” Sandy countered, looking relieved. “Honestly, I thought y’all called me in here to hand the whole thing over to me.”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” Audrey said. “I was going to say I’ll do it on three conditions.”

  “Am I gonna like what I’m about to hear?” Sandy narrowed her eyes.

  Audrey wasn’t sure. The only thing she did know was that Sandy was just about the only force that could keep Howard in check and
, conversely, Howard was just about the only thing that stopped Sandy’s enthusiasm from running rampant all over Middleburg. Audrey had often mused that, while the town would never admit it, Middleburg had two judicial branches: Howard and Sandy. Audrey was just going to use this system of checks and balances to her advantage.

  “Howard, I’ll run the Easter Parade, but only if Sandy is in charge of choosing the Grand Marshal.” This maneuver deftly assured that neither Sandy nor Howard could be the Grand Marshal, for neither one would let the other do something that would appear so self-serving. Sandy would lap up the whole selection process precisely because it would be filled with all the interpersonal stuff she loved, and Howard would be spending his energies trying to influence Sandy’s decision rather than ordering Audrey around. Plus, it simply had to be said: Sandy and Howard were such obvious choices that Audrey thought she’d find the whole process of figuring out who else should be Marshal vastly entertaining—provided she wasn’t in charge of it, which, in a few minutes, she wouldn’t be. It was brilliant.

  “Me? In charge of choosing the Grand Marshal?” Sandy looked surprised, but pleased. “I’d think you’d want to do that yourself.”

  “Seems to me this is really more your kind of thing,” Audrey said. “My strengths are in the details, not the big picture.”

  After a moment’s thought, Sandy planted hands—graced, as always, with long pink fingernails—on Howard’s desk. “I’d be delighted.”

  Now Howard was cornered. If he said no, it would be clear he was only objecting to Sandy—something he’d never admit. But by approving Sandy, he knew he’d not be Grand Marshal—something she’d never allow. Exactly as Audrey had planned it. Middleburg’s longtime mayor folded his hands across his midsection. “I don’t really see how I can say no.”

  Audrey found his choice of words interesting, if not downright satisfying, so she moved forward. “My second condition is that the fifteen-dollar application fee go toward the library’s literacy program. We need the money, and since no one’s given a thought where that money should go, I’ve decided.”