Falling for Hope (6 page)

Maybe it was the grayness of the
morning—at least it was no longer raining, Amy reflected dimly—coupled with the
fact that Hope wasn’t there, but Amy’s mood was somber as she rose and dressed
before standing in front of the tall windows in Hope’s bedroom and gazing out
at the mountains that loomed around the cabin.
 

“Hey, Hope?” came a voice from the
other side of the door, followed by a short knock.
 
Lindsey.
 
Amy crossed the
room and opened the door, trying to summon a smile.

“Hope’s not here.
 
She went for a hike, said she’d be back
around noon,” said Amy, crossing her arms against the chill of the rest of the
cabin.
 
It was a cool day, odd for the
summertime.
 

Lindsey nodded, hitching her purse
up higher on her shoulder as she grinned at Amy.
 
“She does love her hikes.
 
Listen, I was heading into town to get some more marshmallows.
 
We finished them off last night.
 
Want to tag along?”

Amy nodded, grabbing her jacket
from the peg behind the door.
 
“I’d love
that.”

The little gravel lot that the
women parked in was flooded.
 
Amy and
Lindsey sloshed through the puddles toward Irene’s truck.
 
Lindsey unlocked the cab, and both women
climbed up and in, the early morning mist making the woods surrounding them
seem, to Amy, strange and ominous.
 
Perhaps, if Amy had been in a better mood, she might have described the
effect as magical, instead.
 
But now she
stared out at the trees, worrying at the hem of her jacket.

“Did Chris come out of the bedroom
yet?” asked Amy.

Lindsey shook her head as she
started the truck.
 
“But it’s nothing to
fret over,” she said quickly, backing the truck up.
 
“You know how she likes to sleep in…”

“Yeah.”
 
Amy’s stomach turned as they began to make a very slow descent
over the gravel road circling down the mountain.
 
“But…
 
You know, this is
ridiculous,” Amy spluttered, running her hands through her hair.
 
She’d swept her hair into a messy bun, but
it had fallen loose.
 
She smoothed a
stray lock behind her ear.
 
“Hope and I
haven’t done anything wrong!”

“You haven’t,” agreed Lindsey,
pressing down on the brakes as a deer bounded in front of the truck.
 
They’d been coasting at twenty miles an hour
or so, but Lindsey slowed down even more to watch as the doe paused on the
other side of the road, glancing over her shoulder and staring at the invasive
vehicle, nose twitching.
 
Then, in the
next instant, she leapt to the side, white tail flashing as she dove into the
underbrush.
 
“Chris has a lot of
feelings about all of this, and they’re just not resolved yet,” said Lindsey
with a shrug, easing the truck around a bend.
 
“Everyone grieves in their own time, in their own way.
 
And love can be funny.”

Amy folded her arms and leaned back
in her seat, gazing out the window at the rocky terrain.
 

The nearest “town” was comprised of
a gas station/convenience store, a post office, and a very rundown mobile home
park.
 
Few people lived on the mountain,
since most of it was a national forest park with campgrounds and campsites
sprinkled over the acreage.
 
Lindsey
parked under a sprawling oak tree that stretched out behind the convenience
store and turned the truck off.
 
As Amy
got out, she held onto the truck door and glanced back up at the mountain.
 
The summit was shrouded mostly in clouds,
and—from here—it looked menacing.
 
Amy
exhaled a long sigh.
 
She was just upset
about Chris.
 
There was nothing ominous
about the mountain.

But her stomach was still unsettled
as she shut the truck door, dug her hands into her jean pockets, and followed
Lindsey into the convenience store.

The fluorescent lights overhead
made the cans, bottles and boxes on the beat-up metal shelves look like they
were from the seventies—which, depending upon how many customers this little hole-in-the-wall
store got, might actually be true.
 
The
older woman behind the counter (who’d owned the place as long as they’d been
coming there), Doris, had drawn her graying hair back with a bandana, and her
face—the sort of face that looked as if it never stopped smiling—brightened
even more at the sight of Amy and Lindsey.
 
Doris placed her plaid-covered elbows on the counter and grinned at her
customers.
 

“Hey, ladies!
 
We’re having a special on pop today—buy one,
get one fifty percent off!” she regaled them cheerfully.

“Thanks, Doris,” said Lindsey with
a smile, heading down the aisle toward the back coolers.
 
But Amy stopped in the middle of the aisle,
surprised, and cocked her head to the side.

There, poised on one of the shelves
at about nose height, was a bedraggled kitten.

The kitten sat still as a statue,
blinking large, wet eyes slowly at Amy.
 
It was a calico, which meant it was a female, Amy knew.
 
And though the kitten was
tiny
, she
had an air of dignified importance about her.
 

Again, she blinked at Amy, and then
she let out the smallest, most adorable
mew
.
 
As a veterinarian, Amy had heard a few trillion adorable
mews
throughout her career.
 
But this mew in
particular touched her heart.

“Oh, drat.
 
The kittens got back in,” Doris muttered,
moving away from the counter and down the aisle.
 
The kitten rose quickly, back arched.
 
“Hey, do you want a kitten?
 
I’m giving away the whole litter,” Doris told Amy, then, scooping up the
kitten in her big hand and holding her before Amy’s eyes.

Amy stared at the tiny ball of fur,
and the tiny ball of fur stared at Amy solemnly.
 

Amy had never been a cat
person.
 
She’d grown up with dogs, and
it was her love for them that had inspired her to get into veterinary medicine
in the first place.
 
Obviously, she
loved all animals, but cats were on about the same level as horses for
her.
 
Nice, lovely creatures, but not
main characters in her personal life.

The last dog she’d had, Beau, had
passed away about two years ago.
 
The
golden retriever had died of extreme old age, and she still missed him on a
daily basis.
 
And Amy had been waiting
ever since he died for that perfect moment when the pet she was meant to have
next showed up.
 

And now, here was this kitten.

There were a million reasons not to
adopt her.
 
Amy was not a cat
person.
 
She was going to be spending a
few more days at the cabin, and imagining this kitten in that large, rambling
place, most definitely getting herself lost, made Amy frown and shake her
head.
 
What would she feed her?
 
How would she take care of her until she got
back to her apartment?
 

The tiny kitten continued to stare,
serious and still, blinking slowly at Amy.

“Sure,” said Amy then, and she
scooped the kitten out of the woman’s hands and held her close against her
chest.

The small ball of fur began to purr
as noisily as a diesel engine in dire need of repair.
 

“I got the marshmallows and some
pop,” began Lindsey from another aisle, coming toward Amy.
 
Amy turned as Doris beamed, and Lindsey
stopped dead in her tracks.
 
“I left you
for, like, a minute…” muttered Lindsey, hefting the six-pack of pop onto her
hip as she reached out with her free hand to stroke the top of the tiny
kitten’s head.
 
The purring intensified.
 

“Do you sell kitty litter or kitten
food?” Amy asked Doris, without much hope.
 
But the woman nodded and wandered away down another aisle.

“I thought you didn’t like cats,”
said Lindsey, one brow raised as Amy shrugged, continuing to pet the kitten,
nuzzling the small animal with her chin.

“We find the ones we need, and who
need us,” she said cryptically.
 
Lindsey
raised a brow and grinned.

Doris did, indeed, have one bag of
kitty litter in stock, and it had probably been manufactured in the eighties,
at the latest.
 
The bag of kitten food
was less ancient, not even dusty, as were—hopefully—the bag of marshmallows and
the pop.
 
Lindsey paid for everything,
despite Amy’s protests, and carried it all out to the truck as Amy held tightly
onto the kitten and followed her.

If the mountain had looked ominous
before, it was looking downright deadly now as both women stared up at it.
 
The gathering thunderclouds rumbled.

“Best get back as soon as you can!”
called Doris from the porch, holding onto her bandana as the wind began to pick
up.
 
“They’re predicting some of the strongest
storms we’ve seen in years, heading on through the week!”

Amy, holding the kitten with one
hand, glanced at her watch.
 
It was
10:30.
 
They’d been away from the cabin
for longer than she’d thought.
 

“Do you know when the storms are
supposed to hit again?” she called to Doris, who nodded her head, pointing up
toward the mountain.

“By noon!” she called out.
 

“Hope will come back sooner, I’m
sure.
 
She’ll have seen those
storms.
 
She’s not stupid, you know,”
said Lindsey, as they began to drive back up the road toward the cabin.
 
Amy stroked the tiny kitten, who sat calm
and alert upon Amy’s lap, watching the tree branches that whipped past the
window.

“I just have a bad feeling,” Amy
explained, staring down at her hands on the kitten’s back.
 

“Don’t worry.”
 
Lindsey reached out and patted Amy’s leg
with a grin.
 
“So, what’ll you name
her?” she asked, nodding toward the kitten.
 
It was an abrupt and obvious attempt to change the subject, but Amy
sighed, grateful for the distraction.

“Goodness, I don’t know.
 
I’m terrible at naming things.
 
My last dog came with his name from the
shelter, and the one before that, my parents named.
 
I had a stuffed animal when I was a kid, a stuffed dog.
 
I named him Stuffie.”
 
She chuckled and shook her head.
 
“So I’ll probably just name her Kitty.”

“That’s a good name,” said Lindsey
in a tone that clearly indicated that Kitty was, in fact, one of the worst
names she had ever heard.
 
“Well…
 
Why don’t you ask Hope for some ideas?”

Amy bit her lip, considering the
implications.
 
“Um.
 
Are you saying she would be…
our
cat?”

“Not exactly,” said Lindsey, though she was grinning
as she stared out of the windshield.
 
“I’ve just seen how Hope looks at you, and this thing’s heading toward
Seriousville pretty darn fast.”

Amy rubbed her knuckles gently over
the kitten’s head and felt the butterflies in her stomach flutter.
 
She hadn’t lived with anyone since…
 
Well, she didn’t want to think about her ex.
 
Amy was set in her routines now, after
living alone for so long, and normally the thought of sharing her space with
anyone (or moving into anyone else’s space) made her feel anxious.
 
She liked things the way they were.
 
But when she considered Hope, considered
sharing her
life
with Hope…
 
Then
her feelings changed.
 
It was strange, really.
 
Amy considered this realization as the
kitten curled up in her lap, made a tiny sigh, and fell fast asleep.

The sky darkened further, and it
began to rain.

The rainfall was slow, at first;
the big, fat drops
splatting
against the windshield were almost
rhythmic.
 
But as they hit the gravel
road and crunched beneath the trees, the rain began to come down harder,
falling through the leaves and obscuring the view out of the windshield.

“Shit,” muttered Lindsey, slamming
on the breaks as the windshield wipers worried at the rain.
 
Amy peered through the mist and downpour and
saw what had made Lindsey stop: there was a fallen tree blocking the road that
led back up to the cabin.

“What do we do?” Amy asked,
swallowing.
 
They had driven this way on
the trip down the mountain, and the tree had been standing then.
 
The wind buffeted against the side of the
truck with a
whomp
, making the hairs on Amy’s arms stand to
attention.
 
The storm was descending,
and it was much, much more powerful, more angry than yesterday’s storm.
 
Amy could feel it in her bones.