Bluegrass Blessings

by Allie Pleiter

  “You get along well with your family?”

  “Actually, yes. We’d bore you—all office types from New England who golf on the weekends and eat ham for lunch on Sundays after church.”

  “You mean Sunday dinner,” she offered.

  “Not in Massachusetts, we don’t.” He chuckled, thinking of his mother attempting a “y’all” in her broad Boston accent. He really couldn’t have asked for a more stable, more solid upbringing. “Everybody back home does what they’re supposed to, gets good grades, goes off to college to major in important things like finance and marketing and the occasional foreign language. Really, my exodus from New York was the most exciting thing to happen to my family in ages.”

  That brought a tiny laugh from her. “You couldn’t say that about my family. I mean, we had all the trimmings, but the friction under the surface could shred you in seconds. My grandmother—my dad’s mom—used to say ‘from your mouth to God’s ears’ all the time,” she continued as they headed back toward the bakery and his apartment next door. “She was more like Sandy, my grandmother. Mom is a bit more on the…unbubbly side.”

  Cameron couldn’t quite picture the Hopkins family having an “unbubbly side.” “Did you have something you said you needed from me?”

  “Oh, just a letter stating you’ll let me out of my lease. Janet said I ought to get it in writing just to dot all my I’s, that sort of thing.” She pulled a folded piece of paper out of her jacket pocket. Two corners were smashed and it had a coffee stain on one side.

  Cameron laughed. Where he came from, legal documents didn’t get folded in quarters and stuffed in pockets. They came in imposing envelopes delivered by serious couriers. He was starting to like the coffee-stained version better. “I’ve already drawn up a letter for you, Dinah. And Janet’s right—it’s always good to get those kinds of things in writing. Even here in Kentucky.”

  She stopped walking and looked up at him. “You’re a good guy, Cameron Rollings. You know that?”

  The woman did have a knack for asking just the wrong question at just the right time.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I didn’t know I owned that much stuff, Dinah thought as she stared at the sea of boxes around her. Emily had offered to store some of her belongings up at their farm, kidding she’d hold it hostage until Dinah returned, but Dinah didn’t have the strength to let herself believe she might get to come back. If she was going to leave, it had to be as if it were forever. She couldn’t possibly know what the future held for her and her mother. Uncle Mike had called late last night to say Mom wasn’t doing well, that he had offered to take her to the hospital, but she had asked to wait until morning. How long did they have? How bad would it get? Could she be strong if things got messy? What would she feel like when it was all…over?

  Uncle Mike had called again very early this morning to say Mom had finally given in and they were heading over to the ER. He called half an hour later with an update. The doctors “didn’t like the look of her” and were admitting her for observation. The storm outside this morning seemed to mirror the one in Dinah’s heart.

  “This isn’t the first time this has happened,” Uncle Mike had said. “I think we’ll all be glad when you get here.”

  And she was leaving—really—soon. Someday soon she’d finish her last batch of sticky buns. Even though thunder and lightning slashed their way across the valley, Dinah had relished the numbered last mornings in the sanctuary—and that really was the right word for it—of her bakery at dawn. Some part of her still couldn’t believe she was closing her bakery. Someday, all too soon, all her friends would help her load the rental van. Then she’d get up early one morning, only it wouldn’t be to turn on the ovens—it would be to turn onto the highway.

  The phone rang just as the last of the thunder rolled over the mountains. “Dinah,” came Uncle Mike’s tense voice, “how quickly can you get on a plane?”

  Cameron was shaving when the doorbell rang. Followed by an insistent knock. Too nice to be Dinah, but he wasn’t sure who else would be banging on his door at eight in the morning. When he opened it, Janet Bishop stood on the other side, an unmistakable look of alarm on her face. “Got a minute?” she asked.

  “Sure. Everything okay?” Cameron toweled the last of the shaving cream off his face as she walked a few steps into his apartment.

  “It’s Dinah. Her mom took a turn for the worse overnight—some kind of infection—and things got bad. She went downhill so fast. We were trying to get Dinah out of here on a plane, but the weather loused everything up.”

  Cameron thought he’d heard more commotion than usual down in the bakery. Dinah didn’t need this now.

  “We were just getting ready to leave for Louisville, thinking we could get her on a stand-by ticket, when…when the phone rang.” She paused and Cameron realized things were far worse than Janet’s calm let on.

  “What is it, Janet?”

  “Dinah’s mom…” Janet’s eyes welled up. “Well, she died…about an hour ago.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Dinah was able to talk to her one last time—they held the phone up to her ear and Dinah got to tell her she loved her, but…” Janet looked like she’d been crying, but she also had that no-nonsense, take-charge demeanor he’d seen over his weeks in Middleburg. “Emily’s been with her since the first call. I got here around seven. We’re sort of figuring out what to do from here. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “How can I help?” Cameron shook his head, the full brunt of the news coming to him. Dead. “Dinah must be devastated.”

  “She’s pretty messed up right now, but we’re calling in the cavalry. I thought maybe you could keep the apartment for her for another month, you know, until she figures out what to do. That way she can just fly out now to take care of the funeral and worry about the long-term stuff when she’s a little less stunned.”

  “Of course, yes. I hadn’t even started looking for a new tenant. Tell her I’ll hold both the bakery and the apartment for another month until she has a chance to figure things out.” He looked at Janet. “Do you think she’ll decide to stay?”

  Janet sighed. “I don’t think she should try to decide right now. She just needs her friends around her, taking care of the details on this end so she can do what she needs to do on hers. I just thought it might be nice to have that detail wrapped up right away so she doesn’t need to worry about it.”

  “Tell her not to give it a second thought.”

  Janet offered a small smile. “Why don’t you go tell her yourself in about an hour? She could probably use all the friendly faces she can get today.”

  “Count on it,” Cameron replied. “You’re a good friend to her.”

  “She’s a good friend to me. I’ll miss her something fierce when she goes.” She choked on the last two words, sniffing back the tears that threatened to return.

  Cameron put out a hand. People cared so much about each other here. If anyone’s world had to fall apart, Middleburg was a good place for it to happen, amongst such strong friends. “Maybe we can change that to ‘if she goes’—but not today. Today let’s just get her through the fire, and we’ll leave the fate of her sticky buns to God for the moment.”

  Dinah stood amid a maze of boxes, red-eyed and frail-looking. Janet was downstairs doing something in the bakery and Emily was making phone calls in the kitchen. It was the first time Cameron had ever thought of her as frail. Even when she was dealing with the “come home” command from her mother that afternoon in her kitchen, she’d never been frail. Even the tears she shed that night held a strength behind the sadness. Now her shoulders sagged and she looked pale and wan. She had the fight beaten out of her. “Um, hi,” she said unsteadily as he came into the room.

  “Dinah, I’m so sorry.” He walked straight to her—or as straight as he could, navigating through the boxes—and gave her a quick, heartfelt hug. “I’m just so sorry,” he said, holding on to her arm for a moment.

 
She pulled her arm from his grasp with a shaky sigh and wiped her eyes. “You know that vocabulary you wished you could have used?” Sniffing, she dug a tissue out of her pocket. “That day back in NewYork when they canned you?”

  While he wished she’d put it a little less bluntly, he turned up one corner of his mouth and said, “Yes, I remember.”

  “I think I know how you felt. It’s all just so…rotten. So wrong and horrible and…when I’m not crying I just want to scream and hit things.”

  That sounded just a bit more like the Dinah Hopkins he knew. “I’d say you’re entitled.”

  She began to wander among the boxes. “She had more time coming to her, you know? I know she may not have had much, but she needed more than this. She deserved more than this. I was moving out there. We deserved more time than we got.”

  He started to say something, then wondered if she didn’t just need to talk it out. “It’s stopped raining. Do you need to get some air for a minute, Dinah? My dad always told me sometimes the best thing to do in a crisis is to walk it out. I’ve got to take something to the mailbox. Want to walk with me?”

  “You know, I think that might be a good idea,” Emily said as she came in from the kitchen. She had a long list on one of those yellow note pads, the top third of which had been crossed off. The cavalry had indeed been called in. “You should get out of all this chaos and take a couple of minutes to catch your breath. It’ll be a long day no matter what you do.”

  “Have you eaten any breakfast?” Cameron asked, picking up Dinah’s jacket from where it lay on a stack of boxes near the door.

  “Janet made me some eggs and toast. I think I ate half of it.”

  “So we’ll just walk. We’ll cut through the park so you don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to. There’s a mailbox down by March Avenue. And we’ll come right back if that’s what you want.” He wanted to scoop her up and tell her it would all be okay, but just like his last day at the office, everybody knew there was no “okay” to be had right now. She was in the fishbowl of catastrophe, with everybody staring in. Wanting to help, but staring in just the same.

  “Okay,” she said in a monotone. “Sounds good.”

  He led her down the stairs and against his better judgment, he took her hand in his as they headed toward the park across the street. “Look up at the sky,” he said. “Look up at the storm clearing off and remember the world is bigger than the dark place you are in today.”

  She made a poor attempt at a laugh. “That’s awfully poetic for you.”

  He squeezed her hand. “It was something my dad said to me the day I was canned.” He used her verb. “Although I don’t think walking down Sixth Avenue in Manhattan is quite the same as enjoying this.”

  “I couldn’t see God without all this nature,” Dinah offered, her voice sounding close to normal for the first time that morning. “I think it’s one of the reasons I like it here so much.” She swallowed so hard he could hear it. “I like it here so much.”

  Cameron tightened his hand around hers in reply. They walked a minute or so in companionable silence, making their way through the patchwork of pine trees and slushy puddles that looked more beautiful than any winter Cameron had slogged through in New York. He waited a long time before he dared to say, “Maybe you can come back.” He wanted her to know she had someplace to go when all this trauma was over. “I mean, it’s impossible to say what will happen, but just know I won’t do anything with the bakery and your apartment until you’ve had a chance to make up your mind. Now’s not the time to worry about that, though. You’ve got enough on your plate.”

  Dinah took another deep breath, shrugging her shoulders and picking her way around a puddle the way she always had to in those insufferable flip-flops. “I don’t know.”

  He squeezed her hand again. “That’s what I’m saying. You don’t have to know. I’ve got your back. Hey, I’ll even water your houseplants—seeing as I don’t have any yet.”

  Something close to a laugh trickled out of her. “Janet’s got that covered. And she finally found me a flight out of Lexington. One-thirty this afternoon. She offered to get me a round-trip ticket—something called an ‘open-end return,’ but I’m flying one-way.” She shook her head slightly, her red hair tumbling around her face as she continued to look down.

  At first, he’d thought her hair color an affectation—rather like all of Sandy’s hair-sprayed updos. Now, he couldn’t imagine her in any other color or with anything less than that long, wavy storm of curls framing her face.

  “I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an open-end return,” she continued, pulling out of his grasp to run her hands over the bronze statue that stood at one end of the park. It was of a foal and a mare, reflecting the town’s deep connection with the thoroughbred world. “I don’t know lots of things anymore.” She grazed her hands over the knobby legs of the baby horse then turned to look at him for the first time since they’d stepped outside, pain in her eyes. “I don’t know where my faith is right now. I feel everything and I feel nothing. I know the belief is still in there somewhere, but I can’t feel it.” The corners of her eyes welled up. “How can I hang on to it if I can’t feel it?”

  Cameron wished he were a champion of faith, a spectacular man of God who could produce the perfect answer. He yearned for a powerful faith, so that he could somehow lend it to her, shore her up for the challenge ahead. But his own faith was feeling as wobbly as the newborn legs of the statue. He had nothing to give her. Nothing except his own history of having the rug pulled out from under him. And as traumatic as his loss had been, tanking a career paled against the sorrow of losing a parent so suddenly. He’d had a golden life compared to hers.

  “I think you’re in shock,” he offered. “Spiritually, emotionally and probably even physically. Nothing will be clear today. Today’s the day when you count on your friends to do the thinking for you. The only thing you can do today is get through it. I don’t think your faith has fled the scene. Think about all the people praying for you. Emily’s called Aunt Sandy by now for sure and you know how Sandy Burnside can call the faithful into action. You’ve got friends and faith and you’re the toughest redhead I know. You’ll come out okay no matter what.”

  “I do have friends,” she said as they reached the mailbox. She took another deep breath, this one less shaky than the last and held out her hand toward him. “I got me a few new ones, too.”

  He couldn’t help but smile. “Who’d have thunk it?”

  “Certainly not me when you first barged into my kitchen. That seems like years ago, now.”

  “And here I thought I’d be bored out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Oh, we’re lots of things here in Middleburg, but boring is never one of them. Did I ever tell you Emily tied a gift bag of soap from her shop to this mailbox once? She was helping Peter Epson woo Megan Walters. Megan was a mail carrier, and Peter and Emily came up with the idea to fix a bag of goodies and leave it waiting for her right here on her birthday, about a year ago. It worked. They’re engaged now, Peter and Megan. Imagine.”

  “No kidding?” It sounded crazy, but based on his short residency in Middleburg, it was easy to believe.

  “Yeah, we all got a kick out of it.” She pulled open the mailbox slot for Cameron as he fished the envelopes out of his coat pocket. “I was gonna spend so many afternoons telling Mom about all the kooky stuff that happens here. You know, take her mind off…the pain…and all.” Dinah lost her battle with the tears and Cameron lost his battle with his resistance to hold her. He pulled her into his arms. She melted there and Cameron sent up a silent prayer of thanksgiving for the privilege of holding her while she cried. And it felt like a privilege, a service. He realized, with a sudden solidness, that if one of the only reasons God had landed him in this odd little town was to hold Dinah Hopkins at this moment, then that was okay with him. He held her as tightly as he knew how and just whispered “It’ll be okay” every once in a while un
til she cried it out. You could never do this in Manhattan, he thought, but you can do it here.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally, pulling back to point at the dark patch her tears had left on his leather jacket. “I’ve left a spot.”

  You’ve left much more than that, he thought as he looked at her. She’d left something inside of him, something he’d be so sorry to lose if she never came back. “I’ll be fine,” he lied.

  “I should get back. Pack and all.” Still, she didn’t move from his embrace.

  He shouldn’t. It was the wrong time and a terrible place, but it didn’t seem to matter. Gently, Cameron leaned in and kissed her on the forehead. He felt his eyes close and his heart tumble in his chest, felt the curls of her hair tickle at his chin, felt a little tremble in her as he lingered there.

  “If you don’t come back…” he started to say and then realized he couldn’t finish the sentence. I don’t want to regret never having kissed you? I’ll not know why I’m here? I’ll miss you? None of those things was the slightest bit appropriate for the situation. He shouldn’t even have ventured to kiss her forehead in the first place. But oh my, he couldn’t remember when a tender gesture stunned him as much as this one did.

  She smiled softly, weakly, and Cameron thought the word “deflated” had never fit a human being more. It was like he was looking at an echo of Dinah, not the vibrant woman who had sneaked into his thoughts. “I suppose we’ll just have to leave that up to God,” she said. “Just…just keep praying for me, okay? Keep them all praying.”

  She turned back toward the bakery and Cameron thought how wrong he had been to kiss her when she was so extraordinarily vulnerable. Oh, Lord, he moaned in his heart as he watched her take a few steps away from him, don’t let me mess this up.

  She turned and looked over her shoulder. “Well,” she held out a hand in his direction, “are you coming?”