Cameron chose to say nothing and let her talk more. After half a minute of reordering a row of glass-and-copper containers on her counter, she turned to face him. “Besides, I haven’t even decided if I’m going.”
Actually, she had; he could see it in her body language. Her fierce independent streak was just still fighting it. “You should go,” he said as gently as he knew how. “This will just make things easier.”
Dinah looked at him for a moment and he wondered if his tone of voice had surprised her. She hiked herself up to sit on the counter, her turquoise flip-flops kicking toward him. The sparkles in them matched the design of the studs around her jeans pockets. Despite an effort not to notice, he hadn’t seen the same pair twice in his two-week residency in Middleburg. Maybe she really did have three dozen pairs of the things.
“Exactly how,” she leaned toward him, running the tip of one finger down the chrome edge of the counter beside her, “will having a horde of volunteer do-gooders invade my kitchen make things easier?”
If his tone had surprised her, her tone now did the same to him. The edge bit just as intensely as her tirade in the kitchen the other night, only darker. Please, Lord, I’m in way over my head here. He drew guidance from his only reference: negotiation. Cameron was somehow aware that he was in this prickly situation because of his negotiating skills. And he knew—with what Aunt Sandy would have surely called intuition—that God placed him here to negotiate Dinah’s acceptance. He had the skills to get her to say “yes,” even if this had nothing to do with real estate. Purposely mirroring her body language, he leaned in, his elbows on his knees so that his face was below hers. One key to successful negotiation was to get the resistant party to reframe the situation.
“Well, now, you can’t look at this like charity.” He looked up at her, watching her eyes narrow slightly at that word. His instincts were right. Dinah was like Aunt Sandy—Uncle George always said she’d help anyone out, but you had to practically hog-tie her to accept any help for herself. “You need to look at this as marketing.”
Dinah leaned back and crossed one knee over the other. “Marketing?”
“Middleburg citizens just love to get into each other’s business. They love to help out, meddle, all that small-town stuff. People will come in to buy things while you’re gone just because it’s helping out. It’s sort of a twisted-up bake sale. Your friends will take care of your shop. Your loyal customers will come in and buy twice as much just to lend a hand. You’ll get new customers who’ll come back to see how much better your own baking is when you return. You’ll become the talk of the town even before this Cookiegram thing starts. You couldn’t buy this kind of publicity. Everybody wins.”
“You really think,” Dinah jumped down off the counter, “that I believe one word of that? That’s the biggest load of…”
“Howard will love me if I pull it off,” Cameron interrupted, having saved his trump card for last.
“What?”
“This was his idea. Well, I think it was actually Vern’s, but you know Howard. They decided we should help you out and that I should head it up.” Cameron stood up and took a step or two toward the counter. The room smelled of cinnamon and something exotically floral. He had saved the remark about Howard’s favor as a way to convince her, to make her feel as if she were helping him out instead of the other way around, but the moment he said it he suspected it to be a deeper truth—that he really did just want to help. “But Howard’s right. It is a good idea. This is your mom and even if things are all mucked up between you two, I think you should go. And I think it would be great if it didn’t cost you customers and income to do it.” He picked up the pink potholder lying on the kitchen table and fiddled with it awkwardly, needing something to do with his hands.
Dinah didn’t say anything. “Look,” he went on, somehow thinking more words would help, “I don’t know half these people, but I do know you’ve said this is your home. People want to help you out. Howard may just want his cookies, but everybody else just wants to be nice. This may be a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing—I know I’ve never seen anything like it—so I say go for it.”
“You’ve never seen people being nice before? You mean New York really is as bad as everybody says?” Under the veneer of humor, her face showed a storm of emotion. Cameron understood, at that moment, that the liability of leaving the business was the one last defense she had against making the trip to see her mother. And he had just offered to remove it. It took the conversation past uncomfortable, too far into personal, as if he were stealing his way into a moment where he didn’t belong.
“So it’s your business opinion that I should go?” She circled around the kitchen to end up wedged into one corner, just as she had that night at the bakery.
“It is.”
“And personally, you think it’s a good idea.”
“Yeah, actually, I do.”
“Well, I don’t have to listen to your advice, now do I? I mean, you’ve got no authority over me, even if you are my landlord.”
She’d never accept this as someone’s advice, this had to be her decision. A move she had to own entirely. He could see that. “Dinah, you don’t have to listen to a word I say. You can do whatever you want and no one can judge you for it. It’s your family, your bakery, your life.” He held her eyes for as long as he dared. “But I’ll help if you want me to. We all will.”
The word “we” sunk a single, tiny root in his heart and held fast. He’d used it without thinking, felt it without meaning to. He pulled his eyes away from hers, off-balanced and startled.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
“Okay,” he repeated, unable to say more.
He bumbled his way out of the apartment as quickly as courtesy would allow, feeling disturbed and exposed. He got all the way back to his own apartment and had been sitting there a full ten minutes before he realized he still had the pink potholder in his hand.
Chapter Eight
Dial the seven.
Dinah had dialed the other ten numbers of her mother’s phone number but couldn’t seem to make her finger push the final button. It should be such an easy thing. People phone their mothers every day. People ought to phone their mothers. Well, yeah, but not after almost two years of “radio silence.” Hey, Lord, could You extend me a little grace and let me get her voicemail? Even if she did, Dinah knew that would be as much cheating as she had accused her mother of—cowardly delivering dire news in letter form instead of picking up the phone. Go girl, be the bigger woman here. Dial the seven.
Letting out something close to a yelp, she did. And listened, breathless.
“Hello?”
“Mom?” It wasn’t really a word. More of a gulp. Oh, Lord, this is so much harder than I thought it’d be. Save me!
There was an excruciating silence on the other end of the phone. “Dinah? Dinah is that you?” The relief in her mother’s voice wound its way around Dinah’s heart and squeezed tight.
“You got anyone else calling you ‘Mom’ these days?” It was a dumb crack, but Dinah thought if she didn’t make a joke she’d start crying on the spot. She hadn’t counted on the sound of her mother’s voice to do her in so fast. Not after all the bad blood between them.
“No.” And that was really the whole point, wasn’t it? They had only each other. She heard her mother pull in a halting breath on the other end of the line. “Just you.”
“How are you?”
“Well, it hasn’t been the best year in memory. I’m…I’m here, and I suppose that’s all that matters.” The for now went unspoken.
It should be easy to communicate, but somehow the words “I’m coming” tangled up in the back of Dinah’s throat. “I’m going to catch a flight Sunday. Come out for a few days so we can figure this out.”
“Come out.” So Mom noticed Dinah hadn’t said come home. “For a few days.” Her mother’s disappointment was so obvious Dinah could practically reach through the phone line and touch it. This
is what made her nuts about their relationship—there was no give and take at all. Either Dinah did everything her mother wanted or she was an utter disappointment. Come on now, Dinah, you knew this wouldn’t go smoothly. Stick it out. She’s sick and she’s scared. That’d make anybody difficult. More difficult.
Dinah made a fist and then released it, choosing that action over the long, loud sigh she’d rather have made in reply. “Sunday to Thursday. The weekend is busy at the bakery. This will give us time to talk over what’s going on.”
“What’s going on,” her mother said sharply, “is that I’m dying.” There it was, the melodrama that made Mom so hard to deal with, that made it so hard to figure out what was true and what was exaggeration.
“You didn’t give me any details. Or say how long this has been going on. Help me, Mom, give me more to go on.”
“What more does a daughter need? I’m dying. How can I tell you more when you won’t talk to me?”
“I’m talking…. I’m trying to talk now. Let’s just try and get through this first part without biting each other’s heads off. What is your diagnosis?”
“I told you, it’s cancer. You know it runs in the family.”
Every disease known to man “ran in the family,” according to Dinah’s mother. “I know you said that, but there are lots of kinds of cancer, Mom. What kind do you have?”
“The kind where you die at the end. What does it matter which body part it starts with?”
Dinah closed her eyes and counted to three. “It matters. Help me out, Mom. Just tell me some of the details.”
“You never wanted to know them before. How many times did I write you? How many since Christmas—the Christmas you weren’t here? My last Christmas. You weren’t here for my last Christmas.”
Can you guess why? Dinah thought. “I don’t think this is helping. I’m coming for a few days. That’s a good thing. Let’s just take it from there, okay? It’s going to be hard enough as it is.”
“It’s hard. Yes, it’s hard.” Oddly enough, that had given them something to agree on. Her mother’s voice softened a bit. “You’re coming this Sunday, are you?”
“Yes. Listen, can you get an appointment with your doctor Monday? So we can both get more details?” It had been Janet’s suggestion and a wise one. “It would help me a lot to be able to talk with him. Do you think he would see us on short notice?”
“He’s good. He cares. He’ll see us.”
Dinah couldn’t remember the last time she’d used a word like “us” to describe her mother and herself. “Vs.” was a little bit closer—they seemed able to argue about everything. How would they make this work? People needed calm when they were sick, not the nonstop battle going on between her mother and her. “That’s good. You should feel like your doctor cares about you.”
“I should feel like you care about me.”
“I’m coming in for a few days, aren’t I?”
“I had to beg you. My own daughter and I had to beg.”
“No, you just had to be honest with me and tell me what was going on. Can we not get into this? Look, I know now and I’m glad you told me and I’m doing my best to be there as fast as I can.” Dinah switched to something more practical. “You don’t have to have Uncle Mike pick me up at the airport. I’ll just get a cab, okay?”
“He’d be thrilled to see you.”
“I know, but a cab will be fine.”
“Dinah?”
“Yes, Mom?”
“I’ll be thrilled to see you. I’m…well, it’s hard.”
There it was, the soft voice that cut through all the arguments, all the difficult behavior. They really did love each other, somewhere under all that expectation, defiance and disappointment. Maybe they could get back to that, even if just for a little while. The lump in Dinah’s throat tugged at her words. “I know, Mom. I’m coming.” She did it again—stopped short of saying “I’m coming home.” A gap of silence stretched out between them.
“I love you.” Mom was on the edge of tears. Dinah wasn’t far behind.
“I love you, too, Mom. We just have to figure out how not to hate each other so much in the process.”
Her mom gave a weak laugh. “Yeah, we do, don’t we? Think we know how?”
“God only knows.” And that wasn’t a figure of speech. Dinah was pretty sure God was the only one who knew how to get them through whatever was ahead.
Cameron stood with Howard Epson at the head of Lullaby Lane and stared. This road would someday be his neighborhood. There had been a house here once, an un-remarkable farmhouse and barn sitting on perhaps a dozen acres of horse pasture. Remnants of the typical black plank fence lay scattered across the grass like fallen twigs. The spot was a clearing of flat land surrounded by the rolling hills that still amazed Cameron—they looked so much like something out of a movie, all wintry and rural with horses feeding as though staged for a tourism commercial. Wonderfully old trees, thick-trunked and broad, stood sentry here and there. A few would have to go to make room for the construction, but most would be able to stay and witness the rebirth Cameron had planned.
The land was ready. It was a goofy sensation—something urgent and inexplicable. It was the flip side of the calling he’d felt to turn his coworkers in to the authorities after he’d realized the extent of corruption in his office. That was a dark, burning, Ezekiel-esque roaring of the bones that threatened to overtake him if he didn’t finally cry out despite the consequences. Which had been dire, as he knew they would be.
This was closer to an insistent child, tugging on his sleeve with an impatient yearn to grow up. The land wanted to be what it hadn’t yet been allowed to be. What, Cameron hoped, God was planning for it to be.
“You feel it?” Howard said, rocking back on his heels and tucking his hands into his coat pockets.
The question startled Cameron. He wasn’t yet ready to talk about the sensations going through his head as he looked at this land. It was just a little too weird. “Feel it?”
“I walk, early in the morning, through town. There’s only a few people up that early downtown—farmers might be up, but they’re out a ways from Ballad Road. I walk down the street and ask God to show me what the town needs. Not necessarily the people—although I care about them, too—but the town itself. I ask Him to show me the long view. The bigger picture. I think God calls men like us to see those things.”
Cameron stared at the man and found himself feeling a little leery of sharing any deep civic connection with Howard Epson.
“I know it sounds pompous, son. And I know what most people think of my motivations for staying on as mayor for all the years I have. Truth is I’m just doing what God and Middleburg ask me to.”
What God and Middleburg ask me to. Wasn’t that essentially what he was feeling? It was at once comforting and disturbing to hear his gut feeling explained by the likes of Howard Epson. Cameron couldn’t think of a better reply than, “I guess.”
“It’s good land, Cameron. It just lacks someone listening to what it needs.”
“I think it needs a name change.” Cameron had planned to be so much more subtle about it. To slowly bring Howard and the committee around to his way of thinking like Aunt Sandy advised.
Howard paused for a long time before saying, “Can’t say as I’m particularly fond of that idea.”
“It’s a tiny detail and you’ve already seen how it’s set back the sales of this place. It’s not worth it. Some changes are good.”
Howard shook his head. “I know you think it’s a trivial matter, son, but Middleburg’s reluctance to change is part of its strength. We’ve lit our Christmas tree on the first Wednesday in December since 1910. Our church door has been blue for seventy-five years. There’s a whole world banging on our doorstep to change and too much of it,” he looked at Cameron, “is just for change’s sake. We hang on to the small things because it helps us hang on to the big things.”
“Well, Howard, when I listen to what the lan
d says it needs, that’s what I hear.” He couldn’t believe he was admitting this aloud.
Howard glanced up at him, the hint of a wink in his eye. At that moment, he looked not so much the boisterous old mayor as he did an amused grandfather. “So you are listening. Hmm. Let’s walk around,” said Howard, buttoning up his coat. “Let’s see what else God has to say.”
And so they did. Cameron and Howard walked the land for a good twenty minutes. The conversation never returned to its initial philosophical level. As a matter of fact, it became mostly a list of Howard’s Cookiegram requirements peppered with the occasional remark about this shrub or that fence. Hardly the “listening” Cameron was expecting. Howard informed Cameron, during their wanderings, that he was raising the Cookiegram fund-raiser goal to $15,000.
“Do you really think it can raise $15,000? That’s a lot of money and you’ve never done it before.” Not only was it a lot of money, it was a whole lot of cookies. Did Dinah realize she was about to become a cookie factory? On top of everything else she was dealing with at the moment?
“Can’t miss,” Howard said with a confidence Cameron certainly didn’t share. “No reason not to—it’s the kind of thing everyone can get involved in, it’s a good cause and really, who doesn’t like cookies?”
“Well,” Cameron said as he pushed the leaning Lullaby Lane sign back up to a vertical position, “everyone likes cookies, but not everyone’s ready to pay a fund-raiser price to get them. Even Dinah’s.” The moment he took his hand away from the post, the street sign slumped back into its sad tilt. “See?” he ventured, throwing Howard a sideways glance, “that says ‘I want a new name’ to me.”
Bluegrass Blessings Page 7