Where Grace Appears

by Heidi Chiavaroli

  “What about the bookshop in the barn?” Josie asked. “Are we heading there next?”

  He tried to catch her attention to give her a warning look, but she already bounced down the stairs, talking to Kene about what section of the barn he thought they should build the bookshop. He could only pray Aunt Pris wouldn’t kick them all out of her house before then.

  Once outside, Bronson slid open the massive door to the barn and they stepped inside. The old equipment for harvesting the apples took up most of the room, but the potential for space was apparent.

  Kene nodded his approval. “There’s plenty of room for a decent size shop here. In fact, you’re left over with extra space. It could be perfect for holding events down the line if you’d like. People would pay good money for a barnlike reception area that was done well. Long, rustic tables, beautiful beams, the decoration options are endless. Weddings, corporate parties, and the like. Camden clientele would eat it up. Hannah could cater them if she felt up to it.”

  Josie grabbed her mother’s arm. “He’s right! That could be fantastic.”

  “We’re getting too ahead of ourselves,” Bronson said.

  “But it could really help create revenue, and draw attention to the business.”

  He loved Josie and her passionate ideas. He even loved how she tended to fly away with them from time to time. But the deer-in-the-headlights look on Aunt Pris’s face set off alarm bells clanging in his head.

  “You know, planning is hard. Sometimes, too many hands in the pot can make it difficult to get a vision. To tackle one thing at a time.” Tripp looked at Josie then Bronson, jerking his head toward the door.

  Josie raised her eyebrows high. No doubt he’d be the brunt of her anger later. But if Aunt Pris called the entire thing off, then where would they all be?

  Josie jutted her chin out. “Fine, then. I can tell when I’m not wanted.”

  Bronson sighed. “No use getting upset, Josie. Tripp’s right. This is Mom and Aunt Pris’s endeavor. You sparked it, and that’s great. But maybe we should leave them to it for now.”

  Hannah squeezed Josie’s arm, and she gave her mother a small smile, but Tripp didn’t miss the hurt behind it. Oh boy.

  Josie and Bronson left the barn, and Tripp turned back to Hannah and Aunt Pris. “The barn isn’t going anywhere. I say we focus on the kitchen and the second-floor guestrooms for now. This is about what you both want and making this pleasant—and feasible—for both of you. Aunt Pris, tell me what concerns you have and we can see how we can alleviate them, and then Hannah, we’ll do the same for you. Maybe we all go sit down inside?”

  Aunt Pris nodded, once again in control of herself it seemed. Tripp led them back inside, opening doors for the smaller crew. Once at the dining room table, he leaned back and listened to the older woman’s concerns, half his heart thinking how he might make up the snub to Josie.

  An hour later, Tripp approached the porch rail, where Josie looked out at Aunt Pris’s overgrown orchards in bloom. Her dark hair lifted in the slight wind, her figure illuminated by the falling sun, the fly-away look to her clothes somewhat tame this evening. With effort, he overcame the insatiable urge to come up behind her, push that soft hair to the side, lower his mouth to the skin of her delicate neck. To hold her, to make her love him somehow, someway.

  But he’d made that mistake before, and it wouldn’t do.

  He wondered how a man went about not loving a woman with the intensity he loved Josie. He’d thought absence could have been the answer, but indeed, it only proved the cliché correct, for if anything, his heart had grown fonder of Josie this past year—that newfound frightened look in her eyes sending him on a quest to make everything better.

  “You’re still here.” He leaned on the rail beside her and studied the white apple blossoms, like tufts of cotton on the trees as far as the eye could see.

  “Yeah, I thought I’d wait around. Hope that was okay.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it, Josie. Your aunt was getting overwhelmed. I was worried about her drawing a line through the entire plan.”

  She stared at her clasped hands, nails unpolished as always. “How’d it go?”

  “Good. Very good, I think. Once Kene draws up the plans, we’ll have something that will give Aunt Pris enough privacy, but enable your Mom to run a thriving business. And”—he wiggled his eyebrows—“I thought of a few surprises for your bookshop.”

  “My bookshop, now is it?”

  “Your mom mentioned you’d be in charge of setting it up, ordering product. She’s super excited, Josie. You’re making her dream come true.”

  That earned him a small smile. “She deserves it after…everything. And yet, it’s kind of sad, you know? While I can say this honors Dad, I’m not sure it’d be actually happening if he were still alive.”

  “How come?”

  She shrugged. “He’d probably turn it into a house for the homeless or something along those lines. Maybe that’s a more worthy thing to do.”

  “That would be worthy, can’t argue with that. But that’s not what Aunt Pris agreed to, and that wasn’t your mother’s dream, was it?”

  “How can we tell, Tripp? How can we tell what’s most worthy in the grand scheme of things?”

  He couldn’t resist tapping her nose. “Such deep thoughts for you tonight, Josie-girl.”

  “Well you’re the one actually listening in church. Don’t you have any answers for me?”

  He grew somber. “I wonder if I haven’t learned more from my time in your home than I have in church.”

  She gave a soft snort. “At least one of us did.”

  Her bitter tone caused something to come undone within him. Something he very much wanted to fix. He gathered a breath, hoped for the right words in the face of her vulnerability. “I think all our attempts of worth are futile if not done with the right heart. Is it worthy to feed and shelter the homeless? Sure. Is it worthy to pamper paying guests? I suppose it could be. Most of all, I think it’s about loving others in whatever we’re doing. God’ll show us the path He wants us on. And if I know Hannah, she’ll make room for the needy in whatever she’s doing.”

  Josie grinned. “I think the couch has been empty only two nights since I’ve been home.”

  “The Hornwells?”

  She nodded. “They’re old enough to be out of foster care, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still need help.”

  Liam and Rose Hornwell had been in foster care since their mother died a few years ago. The Martin family had become acquainted with them when Lizzie stayed in the hospital to have her thyroid removed to stop the spread of cancer. At the time, Rose had been battling Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and had lost all her hair. Tripp could still remember his horror at Josie shaving her head bald and donating the hair to Locks of Love in a show of support for both Rose and Lizzie, who fortunately, had never had chemotherapy or lost her hair. Both girls had been cancer free for more than ten years.

  “I’m guessing there’ll always be a couch for them at Aunt Pris’s,” Tripp said.

  “Who knows? Maybe an entire bedroom.”

  He poked her in the arm. “See? That’s loving others no matter where we’re planted.”

  “You’re so good. It’s really hard to like you, you know.”

  “I’m not good. In fact, if you only knew some of the unholy thoughts I’m having about you right now, you’d think me downright wicked.”

  She punched him, but he enjoyed the blush that rose to her cheeks. “You are incorrigible.”

  They grew silent before she spoke again. “I’m not feeling like loving God with all my heart lately, and I don’t know how to fix it.” Her bottom lip quivered, and this time, he didn’t hesitate to wrap his arms around her. When she sank into them, he felt like the richest man in the world. He leaned his chin on her head, inhaling the scent of coconut shampoo, and ran the back of his fingers down one smooth arm.

  “I know you miss your father, and I can stand here all night and
tell you that him having a heart attack isn’t God’s fault, but when it comes down to it, the Lord could have stopped it, and He didn’t.”

  Her warm breaths fanned the front of his shirt. “Why didn’t He?”

  He circled a thumb over her shoulder. “I don’t know, Josie. I’m so sorry. But He didn’t leave you alone. You have so many who love you. Your mother, your siblings, Aunt Pris. Me. Don’t give up on your dreams, okay?”

  She pulled back. “Lately, I can’t tell if becoming a psychologist was my dream or Dad’s. I’ve been so confused.”

  “That’s why you’re thinking of not going back to New York in the fall?”

  “Partly,” she whispered.

  He lifted a finger to her chin. “What happened in New York? You can tell me anything. You know that, don’t you? I used to be your best friend and I’m going to love you no matter what. I want to help.”

  She pulled away from him, her mouth in a forced smile. “Handyman Tripp, always willing to step in and fix things.”

  “Is that bad? I mean, what do you want from me? You don’t want me for a husband, but when I offer my friendship, you shun that too. It’s like I can’t win with you.”

  She lifted that stubborn chin, set her jaw. “Some things you can’t fix. Some problems we need to figure out on our own.”

  “And sometimes help is as simple as opening ourselves up and letting another person in.”

  She closed her eyes, her chest rising and falling with a single deep breath. “I can’t, Tripp. You don’t deserve the mess I’ve made.” She sniffed once, swiped the back of her hand across her nose. “I’m going to see if Mom and Aunt Pris are done in there.”

  “Yeah, of course. Sure.”

  He watched her disappear inside the old house, but couldn’t summon the strength to follow her. Something about her words, her posture of defeat, struck a chord of fear in him, but it didn’t scare him away.

  It made him want to dig in his heels and love Josie Martin all the more.

  11

  Though Maggie claimed she could have made us dinner at her place while Josh took the twins to baseball practice, I insisted on taking my sister out.

  We chose a local favorite, Fresh & Co., and sat outside the quaint restaurant at a table with a wide wooden bench on each side.

  Maggie looked over the simple menu. “Thanks, Josie. It is nice to get away for a little. I feel like we have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “I practically had to sneak out of the house, though. Lizzie would have understood, but I’m still on Amie’s bad side, I guess. I think she would have been hurt not being invited.”

  Maggie swirled her straw in her lemonade. “Amie still has some growing up to do, I think. She’s not as mature as we were at her age, and I think Dad’s death affected her harder than she lets on. She is the baby, after all.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “With all the preferential treatment to go with it.”

  “Josie…give her a chance, okay?”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. This isn’t about the girls, anyway, it’s about us. “How’s things going with the ready-made family? Any better than when I left?”

  Maggie’s face softened into a smile. “The boys have completely captured my heart.”

  I noticed how Maggie’s first sentence wasn’t about her husband, but I stayed quiet. “They still dream about their mother?”

  Maggie nodded. “It’s getting better. I think my appearance into their life stirred some memories.”

  Josh’s ex-wife had been a recovering alcoholic when a relapse one winter night had her driving drunk on icy roads with the boys unbuckled in their car seats. Though the twins had been little more than infants and miraculously survived unscathed, something within them remained scarred. Maggie had told me they often had nightmares of their mother’s death, and suffered an insatiable fear that Maggie would leave them just like their birth mom did.

  I squeezed my sister’s hand. “You’re amazing. You love those boys so well. It can’t be easy.”

  “It isn’t. But they’re worth it.”

  Once we ordered, Maggie slid a paper from her purse and pushed it across the table to me. “What do you think?”

  I scanned the brochure. For some reason, seeing it in print made it all the more real.

  “It’s just a rough draft really. We’ll have to adjust things as we decide, but it’ll give Aunt Pris an idea about what we’re aiming for.”

  “Maggie, you did this?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s incredible.”

  The elegant and romantic font she’d chosen for The Orchard House Bed and Breakfast, the picture of Aunt Pris’s home and the orchard, the brief descriptions of the estate, the luxurious yet-to-be-finished rooms, and the gourmet five-course breakfast was enough to make me dizzy with pleasure.

  I grasped my sister’s hand. “We’re really doing this.”

  She grinned. “I think so.”

  “And now I know what our secret weapon is.”

  Maggie shook her head, forehead wrinkled. “What?”

  “You. If you can accomplish this in a couple days while managing all you do, imagine what you can do with a website. And marketing? This copy is fantastic, I can’t think of one word to improve it. The entire layout and design is gorgeous. I didn’t realize all you got out of that business degree.”

  She sat straighter. “I had fun doing it. It’s nice to feel creative again, you know? To do something not just for the family, but for myself.”

  “And you clearly have a gift for it. I promise once we get things swinging, you’ll be on the payroll.”

  “Let’s just worry about getting Aunt Pris’s go-ahead before we start thinking about payrolls.”

  I waved a hand through the air. “She’s sold on it.”

  “I wouldn’t be so cocky. The old lady has given us a surprise or two in the past. I wouldn’t be certain anything’s set in stone until she lets Colton Contractors onto her property. When—and if—she allows them to start putting hammers through walls, then we can consider ourselves safe.”

  “I think she’s ready for a change. And maybe she’s lonelier than we realize. Maybe she actually wants us around.” I sat back so the waitress could place our meals before us, filling the table with scents of seafood, garlic, and French fries.

  “Stranger things have happened, I suppose.”

  I forked a bite of lobster ravioli, my mouth watering, but caught Maggie staring at me. “What? Oh right, grace.”

  Maggie shook her head. “No, that’s not it. It’s just…you know, you really took us all by surprise proposing this whole bed and breakfast thing. I mean, none of us saw it coming. And you’re intent on seeing it through, aren’t you? Enough to take online classes in the fall?”

  “I think so.”

  She dipped a crispy fry in ketchup, studied me. “What’s going on, Josie?”

  I ignored her stare and forked another bite of moist lobster in pink sauce. “What do you mean?” I’d planned on confiding in Maggie, but not before I enjoyed my food. The thought of spilling my guts to my sister made everything more real—the first step in disappointing nearly everyone.

  “I mean how you’re suddenly willing to give up what you’ve been working toward all these years.”

  “Lots of graduates take online classes.” I spoke through a mouthful. “It makes sense with everything going on.”

  She forked a mussel off its shell, brought it to her mouth. “But have you made sure things were going on…so you wouldn’t have to go back?”

  I put my fork down. “Are you accusing me of having ulterior motives in starting the B&B?”

  “Something just doesn’t add up, that’s all. You’ve wanted to become a psychologist for as long as I remember. You’ve put your heart and soul into getting into the program at NYU. It’s your dream.”

  “Some dreams change, I guess. Didn’t you say that just last week?”

  “Josie…”

  I pushed
aside my plate, my appetite soured. “Okay, you’re right. I was going to tell you later, but since you’re intent on ruining my meal—”

  “We can eat first. I didn’t mean to rush—”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  Maggie’s face paled.

  “Maggie, say something.” But I couldn’t look her in the eye, too scared of the disappointment there, too frightened of the shame I’d brought upon our family. Instead, I stared at her fingers shredding the napkin in her hands.

  “How…is it Tripp’s?”

  “No! It’s—it doesn’t matter who the father is. He’s out of the picture. I’m—I’m scared, Maggie. I need help. I don’t know what to do.”

  Maggie came around and sat on my side of the bench, put her arm around me. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. We’ll figure this out. We will. Together.”

  I sank into her words, laid my head on her shoulder. “I know you’re disappointed in me. I’m disappointed in myself. But what’s done is done. I wish I could take it all back. I really cared for him…I don’t know, maybe I loved him. I thought we at least had a future.” I swallowed my emotions.

  “Josie, tell me. I’m your sister, and I love you. You need to let it all out.”

  “Professor Becker.”

  Her arm stiffened around me, then she pulled it away. “Dad’s Professor Becker?”

  I nodded, my misery compounded by the look of disbelief on her face.

  “But he’s...he’s almost twenty years older than—”

  “Fifteen,” I said weakly.

  Maggie shook her head, bunched her napkin again. “I have half a mind to go to New York and tell him to—”

  “This is just as much my fault as it is his.” As good as it felt to have my sister want to hang Finn upside down off his apartment fire escape, it wasn’t justified. “He didn’t hold a gun to my head. It just kind of…happened.”

  “But he knew Dad. How could he…it’s just despicable.”

  “Then I am, too.” My shoulders slumped. “You remember Finn, don’t you? He’s dynamic, handsome, intelligent. I’ve always been drawn to him—when Dad brought him home for Thanksgivings, when he taught my first psychology class…and this past year. We started talking and I got swept up in him, Maggie. He seemed like everything I’ve been striving for. I wasn’t thinking. I couldn’t think. It was like he sucked the air out of the room and I was content to drown in him forever.”