The Book Charmer

by Karen Hawkins

  “Apparently it’s time you learned to make your own.”

  “Or make them for Daisy.” Sadness flickered over Grace’s face as she added, “Mama G always said she’d teach me, but she can’t now.”

  Sarah hated the sadness that rested on Grace’s face. “Try the book. It can’t hurt. All the knitters in Dove Pond have had it at one time or another.”

  “You really think I should learn?”

  “Yes. And when you’re done, you can teach Daisy.” Sarah smiled. “Now that the festival is over and Mayor Moore has caught up on the data entry, you’re going to have a ton of free time.”

  Grace laughed. “True.” She patted the book. “I guess I’ll keep this. I didn’t think I’d have any use for the first book you sent me, but I was wrong.” Her gaze grew searching. “I was never sure why you sent Little Women to me, but I have to admit, it reminded me of all the things I used to want as a child—a close family, friends, a simple but full life. Was that why you sent it?”

  “I sent it because it asked me to. I don’t get to pick the books. They pick the readers. That book picked you.”

  “And Daisy.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “Part of me thinks you’re kidding when you say things like that. And part of me hopes you’re not.”

  “I never kid about books,” Sarah said solemnly.

  Grace smiled. “What are you going to do now that this madness is over?”

  “Sleep. Maybe soak in a tub for a week.”

  “And after that?”

  “Ava and I were talking about visiting a cousin of ours in the Berkshires.”

  “In Massachusetts?”

  “That’s where the Doves originated. Our cousin owns a Gilded Age mansion called Blantyre. He seems to think he’s got a ghost problem.”

  Grace shook her head. “A pity Mama G can’t go with you. She loves a good ghost.”

  “Miss Grace?”

  They turned to find Lenny, Ricky Bob, and Tommy standing beside the grandstand, the half-filled flatbed truck parked not far away. “All we have left to do is the grandstand,” Ricky Bob announced.

  “I guess that means we should go.” Sarah stood.

  Grace joined her. They went down the stairs and moved out of the way. Together they watched as the men put away the chairs and then took down the stand, folded it up, and tied it down on the flatbed. With a deep roar, the truck pulled out of the parking lot.

  All too soon, the park was empty except for Grace and Sarah. Overhead, the streetlamps flickered on as, in the distance, the first strum of the band could be heard, followed by a joyous yell.

  “And that’s that,” Grace said.

  “That’s that,” Sarah agreed. “For now.”

  Smiling, they walked arm in arm toward the music.

  EPILOGUE

  Just as the first snow fell softly to the ground in late January, Mama G passed away quietly in her sleep.

  The entire town of Dove Pond came to the funeral. Preacher Thompson and Preacher Lewis forgot their differences long enough to give a joint eulogy. At the graveside, Grace wept so much that Sarah wondered that a body could hold so many tears and not drown. But Grace had Trav and Daisy and Sarah, who all stayed nearby. Love can’t cure a broken heart, but it can hold the two sides together while they heal. It took all three of them, but that’s what they did for Grace.

  A few days after the funeral, Daisy showed an astonished Grace Mama G’s garden. In each row, there were items—a bent spoon, a broken watch, a brooch missing a garnet. Nothing of value, and yet each one held a memory that made Grace wet the ground with fresh tears. The next spring, roses bloomed where Grace’s tears had fallen—large, red, lush, vibrant roses that were so beautiful, Ava asked for some to add to a special tea she called Giano’s Red Gold. It was said that the spicy scent of the tea caused people to remember things they’d long forgotten—a special Christmas or birthday, the smell of freshly made bread from the oven of a long-gone loved one, and even the whisper of a favorite but lost sweater.

  To Sarah’s huge relief and Trav’s eternal happiness, Grace stayed in Dove Pond. And while she and Daisy never stopped missing Mama G, with the help of their friends, and the time they spent together learning to knit from a very special book, they became a family.

  And in the deep crack left by Mama G’s death, love found a home it would never leave.

  the

  Book

  Charmer

  By Karen Hawkins

  A BOOK CLUB GUIDE

  1. The first book to speak to Sarah Dove is an old journal written by her ancestor, fourteen-year-old Charlotte Dove, who moved with her family to North Carolina from Massachusetts in 1702 and founded Dove Pond. What did the old leather journal want to share with Sarah?

  2. Later on, as a librarian, Sarah Dove uses her gift to place the perfect book into the hands of the reader who needs it most. Has anyone ever shared a book with you that was particularly appropriate for that moment in your life? What book was it? How did it help? If you had the opportunity to give a book to someone that you love in the hopes it would help them, what book would it be?

  3. As children, Grace Wheeler and her sister, Hannah, bounced from foster home to foster home until finally landing at Mama G’s house. How did Grace cope with this uncertainty? How was it different from the way Hannah coped?

  4. Much of The Book Charmer centers around the definition of “family.” What was Grace’s view versus Sarah’s? How has your own view of family changed since you were a child?

  5. Eighteen years later, after the death of her sister, Hannah, Grace and Mama G move to Dove Pond with Hannah’s eight-year-old daughter, Daisy. They are all reeling from the changes wrought by Hannah’s death and Mama G’s newly diagnosed illness. Why does Grace view this move as temporary? Are her expectations based in reality? In what ways are they colored by the insecurities of her childhood?

  6. Veteran Travis Parker is healing from his own wounds, both inside and out. Over the course of the book, he and Mama G bond as she is losing her memory while his haunts him. What does Trav see in Mama G that appeals to him? Why do you think he finally lets her cut his hair?

  7. Until newcomer Grace arrived, the Dove Pond Social Club had come to believe that their goal was not to plan the best festival ever but to “check the boxes” and mimic the previous year’s effort. This sort of stale, as-is thinking isn’t a rare event for committee structures. Have you ever planned something as a group where this happened? Could a newcomer who didn’t know the rules change things?

  8. Because of Grace’s background in business, she instantly sees opportunities to sell Dove Pond to new businesses. But what does she fail to take into account? What does she learn when she visits the town archives?

  9. Sarah sent Grace the book Little Women. Throughout the story, this old book sparks various thoughts Grace has about her new situation. Why do you think Little Women was the right book for Grace? What lessons do you think that particular book could teach her?

  10. Sarah desperately needs to convince Grace to stay in Dove Pond, and eventually, with the help of the entire town, this happens. Are you a member of any community? What are the costs of becoming an active member of a close-knit community? What are the benefits?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A huge thank-you to Beth L., Lisa C., Jon F., and Mark C., beloved friends who spent hours and hours sharing their personal struggles dealing with mothers and fathers suffering from the devastating effects of Alzheimer’s, and who read my rough drafts to make sure I stayed true to their experiences.

  I listened to each and every one of you, and I wept with all of you. It’s one of life’s most unfair truths that sometimes love can hurt. To me, each of you are true heroes.

  Keep reading for an exclusive excerpt of

  Love

  in the

  Afternoon

  By KAREN HAWKINS

  A novella set in the magical world of Dove Pond.

  Now available onli
ne for $1.99!

  WELCOME TO DOVE POND, NORTH CAROLINA

  Three weeks after seventy-one-year-old Doyle Cloyd’s mysterious death, his daughter held a garage sale to beat all garage sales. Doyle’s friends and neighbors turned out in full force, anxious to glean any new information about the strange details of his passing that they might have missed in the course of their incessant whispering during both the funeral and wake.

  People came, they shopped for wonderful bargains, and they whispered even more. But Doyle’s daughter offered no new information. All she’d say was that she’d miss her gruff dad and his wonderful sense of humor just as much as she missed her beloved and kind mother, who’d passed away from cancer six months earlier.

  And so the people of Dove Pond returned home, their arms full of Doyle’s things, their curiosity unquenched.

  After the sale, no person in Dove Pond over the age of twenty could meet another without pointing out their garage sale bargains. Thus it was that five years after Doyle’s death, the citizens of Dove Pond found themselves thinking of him often as they went about their days sitting in chairs that used to grace his porch, using tools scratched with his initials, and serving jam from his mother’s vintage milk glassware.

  Doyle and his mysterious death were always at the forefront of the minds and hearts of the residents. Even after Ava Dove, the sixth of seven daughters of the Dove family, bought Doyle’s house and land and built greenhouses where she produced her specialty herbal teas, people still whispered about the odd circumstances surrounding Doyle’s demise, about how he’d been found in his bathtub wearing nothing but a long blond wig over his flattop buzzcut hair, electrocuted by a hot curling iron that had fallen into his bathwater. As Doyle had looked enough like John Wayne to be the actor’s younger brother, and had the same manly cowboy air, no one could picture Doyle wearing anything as ridiculous as a long, curly blond wig.

  Only one person wasn’t surprised about the state of Doyle’s dress on the day he died: his next-door neighbor, Jake Kaine. And Jake wasn’t about to tell anyone a darned thing, even after Doyle’s annoying ghost started hanging out in Jake’s tub. . . .

  CHAPTER 1

  Jake

  During the entire course of his forty-one-year-old life, Jake Kaine told only one person that he could talk to ghosts.

  It didn’t go well.

  When he was seven, he’d told his mother as she was tucking him into bed. She’d paused, her expression serious. He was a precocious child, socially awkward and far smarter than the other children in his class, which worried her. His mother used to say he was a “too” child—“too smart for his own good and too much of an introvert to care what that meant.” Even at that young age, he was already a serious loner and the object of some brutal teasing, which pained her far more than him.

  So when Jake had told his mother about the ghosts, her mouth had tightened and she’d said in a firm mom-tone, “Don’t call your invisible friends ‘ghosts.’ The other kids will laugh at you.”

  When he’d started to argue that he didn’t care about the other kids, she’d added sharply, “If you call them ghosts, they won’t come back.”

  He liked his “invisible friends” and refused to do anything that might chase them off. Being smart, he’d also learned his lesson, and he’d never told anyone else about his visitors.

  Later on, long after he was old enough to realize that his mother hadn’t believed a word he’d said but had attributed his comment to an overactive imagination, he’d realized how unfairly ghosts were portrayed in fiction, especially in the horror genre. In his by-then vast experience, ghosts were rarely angry, they were never mean, and they certainly weren’t scary. Instead, for the most part, they were occasional, drop-in-when-they-felt-like-it, nonjudgmental friends. They couldn’t have cared less about the current political state of affairs, were only mildly curious about what he thought or did, and rarely stayed longer than a few days.

  As friends go, he thought, they were rather perfect.

  Over time, the visits got to be such a part of Jake’s life that he didn’t think about them. They were as normal to him as having the occasional case of hiccups. Or rather, he didn’t think about them until Doyle Cloyd showed up in Jake’s tub still wearing the now-infamous blond wig, a small washcloth floating in the ghostly water over his nether regions. For some reason Jake couldn’t fathom, Doyle’s visit was unlike any of the others.

  For one, Doyle didn’t just linger a few days. Instead, he stayed for weeks. He wasn’t present every day, thank goodness, but he was around often enough that he was a total and complete bother.

  For another, unlike with the other, quieter ghosts who’d visited Jake over the years, death seemed to have loosened Doyle’s tongue. He now had an opinion about everything, and he wasn’t shy about sharing it.

  When Doyle was alive, Jake had thought the old man was the perfect next-door neighbor. He never had parties, rarely needed anything, and only spoke when he had reason to. Whenever he and Jake saw one another, they’d nod. And since Doyle liked to sit on his front porch after his wife, Barbara, passed away from cancer, he and Jake had nodded at one another often.

  People from town might have been shocked that Doyle had died wearing the long, golden-blond wig, but Jake hadn’t been the least surprised. In the months before the old man’s death, Jake had frequently caught sight of his neighbor through his den window, sitting in his big green recliner in front of his TV, wearing that very wig. Jake had no idea exactly when or why Doyle had picked up that particular habit and couldn’t have cared less. After all, a man’s home was his castle, and whatever he chose to do within his own four walls was his business and no one else’s. Thus Jake, respecting Doyle’s privacy, hadn’t mentioned a word about the guy’s odd TV-viewing garb.

  So it was a bit of a surprise when, five years after his death, Doyle’s ghost showed up in Jake’s guest bathtub, leaving Jake in a dour, waspish mood. To be fair, his normal mood was remarkably close to dour and waspish anyway. He’d grown from a precocious child into a taciturn, curmudgeonly man, so good-natured wasn’t a term that applied to him on a day-to-day basis. But Jake was particularly cranky in the months after his fiancée and self-proclaimed soul mate, Heather, had left him.

  Jake hadn’t been surprised at Heather’s departure. In his experience, women (especially pretty ones) rarely stayed with a work-from-home IT specialist and game developer who, while a programming genius, was more comfortable sitting in the silence of his own living room than making small talk over a meal out in public. But Heather had been different from the other women he’d dated. She’d talked a lot, but as she’d only wanted the occasional nod or murmured “Really?,” that had worked well for them both—she’d talked, and he’d pretended to listen, and she’d been content with that. She was also flighty, reveling in her lack of knowledge with a stubborn abandon he could only admire. She’d had a flair for the dramatic, too, and had liked being in charge. In fact, she’d planned her own proposal, buying her ring with his credit card and then making reservations for a fancy dinner so that all he had to do was show up and say the words she wanted to hear.

  Most men might have found that a sort of overreach, but Jake was perfectly happy to let her plan both their lives. In return for this unprecedented control, Heather had accepted his social liabilities and didn’t mind that he didn’t enjoy going out and thought bars were boring. In fact, she’d been perfectly happy to venture out without him and spend time with her friends, which had suited him just fine. He’d liked that she was so independent, and thought that one of her most attractive traits.

  What he didn’t realize was that Heather’s “friends” were really just one friend, an inked-up tattoo artist from Asheville named Klaus with a thick beard and a penchant for muscle T-shirts and craft beer. And so Jake had been unprepared when, one ungodly early morning, while he was still rubbing sleep from his eyes, Heather had stood up from the breakfast table and announced in the deathly quiet tone she res
erved for her more dramatic moments, “I’m leaving.”

  Jake didn’t really believe her at first, because she’d played this scene before. It wasn’t until he followed her to the driveway and saw the boxes and suitcases piled up in the front and back seats of her car that he’d realized that, unlike the two hundred and ten times other times she’d said the words, this time she meant it.

  She was really going to leave.

  While he was digesting that fact, she’d thrown open the car door, informed him that she’d be back as soon as possible to get her dog, Peppermint, and to please remember to feed the poor animal. And then, without another word, she’d left.

  It wasn’t the first time a woman had left Jake. To be honest, he was rather used to it. Once they got past his quiet demeanor, women tended to be attracted to his wry sense of humor, stay for his steady companionship and financial security, and then leave when he didn’t fall wildly, passionately in love with them. They never seemed to understand that he wasn’t that sort of man. Not once in his entire life had he been wild or passionate about anything, much less love.

  What was really, truly surprising about Heather leaving was that even though he’d been 100 percent certain that she would eventually do just that, and he was nowhere close to being wildly in love with her, he found himself lost. Deeply, utterly, and bone-chillingly lost.

  His mother told him it was for the best, that she’d never liked Heather, who’d had a tendency to dislike anyone who took his attention from her. His dad told him to “get back out there and find a real woman.” His two friends Nate and Conner, both of whom he’d met in college and who occasionally stayed at his house where they’d alpha test his latest game, breathed a collective sigh of relief and told him how much they’d not-so-secretly disliked Heather and her controlling ways.