Bliss and the Art of Forever (A Hope Springs Novel) (14 page)

Ms. Harvey has a lot of rules for kindergarten. A lot, a lot, A LOT. Some of the rules are for all day long. Like:

• Talking stays on the playground. (
  Unless we raise our hand.
  )
  
• Other rules are only for mornings when we first get to school and are VERY IMPORTANT. Like:
  
• Walk to your seat with classroom steps. (
  This means no running.
  )
  
• Put your gloves and your hat in your coat pockets. Hang your coat on the hook in the cubby with your name. (
  It’s okay if you don’t have gloves. And this is only for winter. NO ONE wears coats in summer.
  )
  
• Put your snack in your cubby box, and your lunch if you brought it.
  
• Put your papers in your cubby sleeve.
  
• Put your backpack on your cubby floor.
  

But Daddy has rules, too. Lots and lots and LOTS of them. Like:

• Bedtime when the little hand is on the eight and the big hand on the twelve. (Or when there is an eight, two dots called a colon, and two zeroes. He says I have to learn both kinds of clocks to be smart.)
  
• Only one drink of water after teeth-brushing.
  
• Only one story before lights-out. (This rule is NOT FAIR though he’s nice and lets me keep extra books under my extra pillow.)
  
• No sugar at breakfast.
  
• No TV at breakfast. (Daddy really doesn’t like TV except for teaching TV since it’s my job to learn EVERYTHING, he says.)
  
• Only THREE books at a time when we go to the bookstore.
  
• No toys left in the big room when I’m done playing.
  

Even Grammy follows Daddy’s rules. She always gives me scrambled eggs and ham or bacon and orange juice and toast with grape jam, but she says the juice and the jam are okay because they are made out of fruit sugar, and if Daddy has a problem with that he can take it up with her.

I don’t know what that means, but I hope it’s not bad, because Daddy told me to do something when I got to class and when I told him it would break Ms. Harvey’s morning rules he said if she didn’t like it she could take it up with him.

My stomach feels like a big ache is inside it and I want to burp, but I go to my chair and put my backpack on my table and unzip it. I’m supposed to hang up my coat now but Daddy says I have to obey him first this one time.

I hope Daddy’s right. I don’t want Ms. Harvey to be mad. And I really don’t want to have to sit in the time-out chair and think about what I did wrong and how to not do it again. That is the WORST. Kelly Webber told me so and she should know. She sits there ALL THE TIME.

It’s very hard to walk to Ms. Harvey’s desk but I do it anyway and Kelly’s eyes get all wide because I’m breaking the rules. My eyes feel like they’re extra big, too, and when I look at Ms. Harvey’s, hers are NOT HAPPY.

“My daddy told me it was okay to give you this before I took off my coat so I wouldn’t forget and leave it in my backpack all day and ruin it.”

Ms. Harvey takes the little box and holds it like she thinks it might break but that’s silly because it’s made out of paper even if the paper is sparkly like glass. “Thank you, Adrianne.”

“It’s okay it won’t hurt you it’s just some candy Daddy made and it won’t break but he didn’t want it to melt so am I in trouble for not taking off my coat?”

“No.” She sets the box on her desk very carefully and looks at it while she’s talking to me and I think she might cry and I wonder if she’s afraid of Daddy. A lot of people are afraid of Daddy. Which is just SO silly.

“You’re not in trouble,” she finally says, looking at me and trying to smile, then looking at the box again. “But now that you’ve done what your father asked, you can hang your coat in your cubby and put your things away.”

My stomach feels like it just plopped back where it goes. “Okay. I hope you like the chocolate. Daddy worked all night to make it and came to see me this morning at Grammy’s so I could bring it to you.”

“Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get to see him last night.”

“Oh, I saw him at supper before we went to Grammy’s. Then I played Crazy Eights with PopPop and I won three times but then it was eight-colon-zero-zero and time for bed. PopPop read some of
Winnie-the-Pooh
but just one chapter. He said we’ll read Harry Potter but probably not ’til I’m eight. I went to bed after that.”

“I see.”

Now Ms. Harvey looks like she wants to laugh, but that’s SO MUCH BETTER than when she looks like she wants to cry. I go back to my chair with Kelly Webber watching me the whole time and I take off my coat and then it’s not so hard to breathe.

ADDY DRAKE’S OOEY GOOEY CAKE

1 box pound cake mix

4 eggs

1 stick butter, melted

8 ounces cream cheese, softened

1 box powdered sugar (reserving ½ cup)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees (F).

Grease or spray a 13 x 9-inch baking pan and line with parchment paper, coating with nonstick spray.

Combine the pound cake mix with two of the eggs and the butter. Pat the cake mix “crust” evenly into the bottom of the prepared pan.

Mix the cream cheese with the remaining two eggs and the powdered sugar. Spread the cream cheese mixture on top of the cake mix “crust.”

Bake 35–40 minutes. While warm, dust the top with the reserved ½ cup of powdered sugar. Let cool completely before cutting.

The box Callum had sent to school with Adrianne sat on Brooklyn’s desk blotter all day. The blotter was a calendar, littered with colorful art representing her vocation and the season, with any appropriate holidays given their due.

Apples and pencils and falling orange leaves and green grass and the alphabet in bright block letters and numbers, too. Since the current month was February . . . hearts, of course. Dozens of them. Tiny ones in clusters. Puffy ones. Patterned ones and solids in pink and red and white.

The calendar had come with a laminated sheet for each month, and she’d used them every year she’d taught kindergarten in Hope Springs. She jotted notes and appointments with a dry-erase marker to keep her days on track.

She left herself reminders of things to discuss with her students’ parents: their child’s interest in a particular subject and how to encourage it, emotional reactions that seemed unprovoked and worried her, classroom incidents that might be blown out of proportion over the dinner table at home.

Each afternoon before leaving, she read over the scattered comments and wiped away the ones she’d taken care of, or that no longer required her attention, or those that by the end of the day had lost their pressing nature.

Today all she could focus on was the box. None of the words she’d written for herself made sense. Oh, she tried reading them, eraser in hand, ready to clear them away, but her gaze strayed to Callum’s gift again and again.

The box was a three-inch cube with a fitted lid. The paper made her think of the signature Tiffany & Co. robin’s-egg blue, but Callum’s design was almost iridescent, a shimmering sort of pearl over a deep chocolate brown.

She’d seen dozens of similar boxes in his shop, sizes to hold four candies, to hold twenty, to hold six. To hold one. And that’s what this was. Without opening the box, she knew. A single chocolate specifically for her. Because he’d listened to her and he’d learned something about her. Something he thought important, when nothing she’d told him mattered enough for this.

She knew that because she was getting to know him, the type of man he was, the business owner, the father, the son. His tats told her things, too. About what he considered important. He wouldn’t put what he wanted to tell her into words, he wouldn’t write a poem or a song. He wouldn’t give her a purchased gift, though he might pick up a stone, or a leaf, or an acorn.

Her fingers shaking unaccountably, she lifted the lid, catching a glimpse of the underside as she did and looking closer. It was Callum’s signature, and illegible, which made her smile, and she pressed her fingertips to the hollow of her throat, feeling her pulse there, as well as an unexpected sensation of choking. Of being unable to breathe, which was absolutely not okay.

This was what a crush felt like. An ill-timed and ill-suited fascination, because that was all this was. Her attraction to a man. The first man to have stirred her emotions since Artie. And the way they were stirred . . . what she was feeling . . . oh, but this was so very different from then.

It wasn’t the same sense Artie had provided of everything being right in her world. Of security, of being settled, being safe. Safe. The word made her laugh. Her fingertips tingled and her stomach clenched and there was a hole opening beneath her, a cliff’s edge inviting her to fall. Deep and dark and dangerous. Those were the sensations coiling through her as she ran her thumb over Callum’s name.

She was so very tired of being alone.

There. She’d admitted it. Two years of eating dinner alone, going to the movies alone, climbing into bed alone was getting to her. And even though she’d already begun shedding the past, it had taken Callum Bennett Drake lowering his big body into a tiny little chair and reading to her class about a chocolate-loving bunny to tug free the ribbon she’d wrapped around her widowhood so neatly.

Enough. Four months and she’d be in Italy to scatter Artie’s ashes. She had to do this her way, this moving on with her life. She couldn’t let an Irish rogue slip into the opening she’d inadvertently made for him. That didn’t mean she couldn’t enjoy the fruit of his labors, so she took a cleansing breath and looked down.

The shape of the candy made her think of a pod, or a bean. No, a cherry. A coffee cherry. It was the size of the other artisan chocolates on display in Bliss. She knew the shell was chocolate, even though the color was more a Radical Red with a Mulberry shimmer, and brushstrokes of Jazzberry Jam. That made her laugh. Who but a kindergarten teacher would think in Crayola crayon colors?

Coffee. They’d talked about coffee at the park just yesterday. But nowhere in any of their conversations had he hinted at the sort of interest in her she would think necessary for this. Unless she’d missed it, which, sad to say, was not all that unlikely. Yes, she’d been moved by the way he’d looked at her, and more than once, but she’d never been good with signals; even when Artie had been the one broadcasting them, she’d never picked them up.

If that’s what was happening with Callum . . . swallowing the nerves tickling the base of her throat, she bit into the candy, savoring the comfortable pleasure of warm coffee, like the first sip of her morning latte, though this one came with the added indulgence of chocolate.

That had her smiling, as she licked her fingers clean. Had her, too, determined to pay better attention, to watch for signs and clues. Not now as much as in the future. The timing was all wrong for her and Callum, but it would be nice to get to know him better, to climb out of her rut with the help of a man who appreciated good coffee, whose taste in artwork mirrored hers, and who found meaning in well-chosen words.

Hoping the Second Baptist Church donations center would still be open, Brooklyn headed there after school on Wednesday—finally—with the boxes she’d hauled to her car late Tuesday night before collapsing exhausted into bed. Who knew culling twelve years’ worth of clothes from her closet and drawers would end up taking her three days?

She’d started going through her things on Sunday morning. Usually she went to church with Jean, but after Saturday night spent at Bliss with Callum, she’d failed to set her alarm; when Jean called at nine, she’d only just emptied the last of the milk into her espresso machine’s foamer and was still half asleep.

She’d begged off; she didn’t have time to get ready, and she truly wasn’t feeling up to par, though that she blamed on her state of mind, not her body. Having Callum show her his Tennyson quote, leaving her to guess at the rest of his tattooed sayings, had her musing over how fitting they were, how personal.

Though really, she knew next to nothing about how he’d lived when he’d belonged to the club. What she knew about such groups came from the media, from books and movies; who hadn’t heard of
Easy Rider
? Or the Hells Angels? Even
Sons of Anarchy
?

Strangely, she couldn’t picture him in any of those situations, but she only knew him as Adrianne’s father, who, on Monday, had crawled around the children’s section of Cat Tales to help her pick out her limit of books. Who’d allowed her to have one scoop of ice cream, not the ten she’d asked for, not the three she’d countered with, just the one.

Who’d carried wet wipes to clean his daughter’s hands, then let her get as messy as she’d wanted, swinging and sliding and climbing, until she turned from a mild-mannered six-year-old into an unholy terror and had to be carried cuddled against his neck all the way to their truck. Monday had been an extraordinary day, and so much better than normal.

But that line of thinking only served to remind Brooklyn of the rut she’d fallen into. It also served to distract her from finishing the clothes-sorting chore when she’d arrived home Monday night; she’d taken until last night to get it done. Not that it had gone any faster; she’d been thinking about Callum’s gift of candy the entire time.