Heart and Home (27 page)

Knowing he would be leaving
in the morning made it hard for me to sleep. It had only been a few weeks and
yet every time I looked into his eyes I felt like I knew exactly where I wanted
to spend the rest of my life. His actions and his words seemed to indicate he
was feeling the same way, but I didn’t want to trust the mayhem of emotion that
seemed to taint the reality of a new relationship.

All thoughts seemed to move
along a rollercoaster with drops of doubt and peaks of inexplicable euphoria,
and I let them roll at their will. I wondered what might happen if the feelings
started to wear off, if we grew tired of each other? What if I was
overestimating his emotional range, and only seeing what I wanted in him,
instead of what he was really trying to share? What if it became purely sexual?
What if we were lying to ourselves?
 

I lay awake for quite some
time watching him sleep, but despite my fretful reservations, mind and heart
combined to work double-time against me. I wondered what spending the rest of
my life with him would be like. Farming was a big enterprise, and it seemed to
take up most of his time. Would he let me help him if I were to marry him, or
continue to shoulder the monumental responsibility of his father’s burden
alone?

Then I thought about
children. We both expressed an interest in having children. If we had babies
together would like have eyes like his and those wayward curls? After seeing
him with Becky’s kids, I was sure he’d be an attentive and loving father. I
imagined his children not only adoring him, but worshipping the very ground he
walked on as a man. Had he once felt the same way about his own father? Would
they be strong like him, and so stubborn they might sacrifice all of their own
dreams just to please him?
 

Completely aware I was
losing my mind and my control over my emotions, I sunk into sleep beside him
thinking about little children with smatters of freckles and his mischievous
grin.

I found myself walking through the cornfield I’d dreamed of
while I’d been home for my mother’s funeral. Only now the stalks were green,
and great ears of unharvested corn made walking between the rows near
impossible. The rustle of leaves around me was accompanied by children
laughing, and whenever I turned in the direction of their voices they moved in
the opposite direction. Several times I thought about calling out, but then the
thickness of the leaves scraped against my skin, drawing little scratches that
immediately itched.

I had no idea where I was going or why I was even there, but
I continued to follow the sound of their laughter until, at last, I came out
along the edge of a vast crop circle. The flattened stalks lay neatly down in a
peculiar pattern, as though some great force stamped them down from the sky.

Standing in the center of the circle was my mother. I started
walking toward her, but the flattened stalks felt unstable beneath my feet.
When I looked down they were bare, and I became immediately aware of the jagged
edges under the tender skin of my feet. On each side of my mother there a
child, both of them disturbingly androgynous and faceless, and as I studied
them, it seemed from time to time their faces became clear, but as soon as they
did, they were blurred over again, making them seem like they were out of tune.

“There she is,” she patted them each on their shoulders, and
they rushed out to meet me, throwing their arms around my legs with such force
that I nearly toppled backwards. “I always thought about having another one,”
my mother said. “Two is a nice number, it provides balance,” she added. “Maybe
you wouldn’t have been so serious if you’d had a brother or a sister to set you
straight.”

“Mom? Where are we?”

“Don’t think I haven’t heard it all these last couple weeks,”
ignoring my question, she started toward me with her hands positioned
familiarly on her hips. “All the curses, your little blame games. My fault you
quit your job.” Her eyes arced upward while she shook her head. “It was the
first bit of sense you’ve made on your own in years. Why give me the credit?”

“I was afraid I was doing things all wrong.”

“There is no right or wrong way of doing things, Janice. I
have tried to tell you that your whole life. You can make all the plans you
like, but if they don’t fit into God’s plan they fall apart.”

“Well that’s just great, Mom. What else can I look forward to
falling apart?”

She shook her head, “I can’t tell you those things, babe.
That’s for you to work through in your own time.” She reached out and laid her
hand on my shoulder, her eyes, which were so much like mine it felt like I was
staring into a mirror, seemed to smile with reassurance. “I can tell you this.
A broken and weary heart has been laid in your hands,” her hand lowered and she
took both of my hands into her grasp. “Heal it, Janice.” She squeezed my
fingers inside her own. “You’re the only one who can.”

“What do you mean, Mom? A broken and weary heart?”

The wind stirred cold behind me as she dropped my hands.
Everything moved in slow motion, even the two children, who were holding onto
me reluctantly let go to follow her. All around the stalks were no longer
green, but dried out and brittle gold with hints of black mildew growing along
the leaves.

“Mom, what does it mean? Please? Just tell me what to do,
Mom!”

I was surprised to wake then
to the sound of Troy’s voice quieting me in the dark with the reassurance that
it was nothing more than a dream. I held tight to him in the dark, burying my
face into the curve of his neck while trying to make sense of the dream.

The familiar scene reversed,
I realized, and it was his turn to save me from the demons in my dreams. Her
words echoed beside his promises of comfort, and I wondered if it was Troy she
meant? Was it his broken and weary heart I was meant to heal, and if so, how?

Chapter Twenty-Six

I only traveled back to
Sonesville once before the Thanksgiving holiday, which stretched my time
without Troy to the limit. By that Wednesday I was up and on the road before
six a.m., and after stopping to drop my bags off at Troy’s apartment, I drove
to Becky’s to help her prepare for Thanksgiving dinner. She insisted during my
last visit Troy and I bring our parents to join the Kaufman family around their
table, and being our first holiday without my mother, convincing Dad was easier
than I thought.

I sat at the kitchen table
weaving a lattice-top pie crust over the blueberry filling she’d canned in the
summer while Becky sorted through fresh cranberries, tossing out any with
damage.

“I’m surprised you’re here
so early,” she admitted.

“I didn’t even eat breakfast
before I left this morning,” I noted at the sound of my rumbling stomach
alerting me to its emptiness.

“Good thing I made these
then,” she reached behind her and brought around a fresh plate of chocolate
chip cookies. “Dig in.”

I grabbed a cookie off the
top of the pile and savored the first bite. “God, if I keep hanging out with
you, I’m going to wind up weighing three hundred pounds.”
 

“No way,” she bit into her
own cookie. “We’ll laugh off the calories, I promise.” A small snort escaped
me, and she giggled at the sound. “See, laughing them off already.”

“So are you going to be able
to get a babysitter for Friday?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, Marty’s sister is
gonna spend the night so she’s here when they wake up in the morning,” she rose
and walked across the kitchen, pulling a sauce pot down from the stainless
steel rack and setting it over a burner. She dumped the berries in and poured
orange juice over top, then added a cup of sugar to let it simmer. “You know,
Marty is really excited about hunting with Troy this weekend.”

“Troy likes Marty,” I noted.
“I’m glad they get along, it gives you and me a chance to see each other more.”

“How about it?” She grabbed
celery and onion and came to chop at the table. “So where is Troy this morning?
No offense, but I figured his place would be your first stop after two weeks
apart.”

“I dropped my stuff off at
his apartment when I got to town, but Lottie had a doctor’s appointment this
morning to see if they can’t change one of her meds. She’s been having anxiety
lately.”

Becky shook her head. “She
is such a sweet woman. It isn’t fair when bad things happen to good people.”

“No, it isn’t.”

I only recently learned that
on top of suffering from aggressive Multiple Sclerosis, Lottie had intense
anxiety that sometimes made it impossible for her to leave the house. She often
experienced good days, during which you could hardly tell she was sick, but
Troy mentioned recently she started to show mild signs of memory loss.

“I worry about Troy too,” I
admitted. “If he’s not there when something happens he blames himself.”

Saying those words out loud
reminded me of the dream I’d had about my mother. I’d thought about it often
since that night, but the more I thought about the aspects of Troy’s broken and
weary heart, I couldn’t begin to imagine how I might be enough to heal the
damage he suffered and continued to inflict on himself. From the outside, it
might have seemed like an easy task, but the deeper things got between us, the
more I realized his heartache went well beyond giving up on a dream.

“Maybe as things get more
serious between you guys you’ll be able to help him out with his mom, let off
some of the burden he lets weigh him down.”

I nodded, “I hope so.”

I liked Lottie Kepner, and
she seemed to like me too, but would that change if things did get more serious
between her son and me?

The next afternoon the eight
of us crowded around the Kaufman’s dining room table. The kids filled the room
with excited chatter while Lottie boasted Becky’s perfect gravy, and among them
all I felt a real sense of home and family that I wished I could have shared
with my mother as well. She would have fit easily into the picture, passing her
maple-candied yams, which I actually managed to reproduce almost as well as if
she’d been there to make them herself.

As Troy leaned to pass Dad
the stuffing I was at once more reminded of what Becky said weeks earlier,
about fantasizing my future with the man I loved while visiting with friends. I
looked to his mother and my own father and realized that if I could stop my
life in its tracks right there and only move forward through the rest of my
life with Troy, I wouldn’t want anything else. I fantasized what it might be
like if Troy and I one day had such a dinner at our home, our children chasing
each other while family and friends gathered laughing around a perfect meal. I
ached inside just thinking about it.

After dinner the guys
crowded around the football game and Lottie entertained the boys with coloring
books, while Becky and I passed dishes back and forth in the kitchen, her
washing, me drying.

“Today has been perfect,” I
sighed and took the platter she just handed me into my waiting towel. “We woke
up this morning together and went out to feed the chickens. He showed me how to
look for eggs, and then on the way back we watched the sun rise over the field.
The sky was the perfect shade of orange just before it burst over the horizon…”

“Feeding chickens, huh?”

“I wanted to.” I admitted.
“He tends to sneak out of bed while I’m sleeping and then try to sneak back in
all cold from being outside, so I just went with him.”

“Did I say June for that
wedding?” She teased. “We might have to bump it back to May. Things are getting
serious now that you’re feeding the chickens.”

“Yeah,” another dreamy
breath escaped me. “I am so happy.”

“You deserve it,” she said.

And while I never really
thought too much about what it meant to deserve happiness, for the first time
in my life I wanted nothing more. I still had no direction when it came to my
career, but it didn’t feel as pressing as I’d expected it would.

Troy and I were only getting
closer every day, and the idea of moving back to Sonesville was growing daily
in its appeal.

“Hey, have you had anything
weird happen at your parent’s house lately? You haven’t really mentioned
anything, and I just wondered.”

“I haven’t really spent much
time there,” I admitted sheepishly. “Last time I was here I stayed with Troy
the whole weekend and we took Dad and Lottie out to brunch after church on
Sunday. I only went into the house for a few minutes to say goodbye.”

“Nothing happened once you
went back to your apartment?”

“Not a thing,” I said. For a
moment I recalled the phone call I’d discovered after quitting my job, and then
there was the dream. “Well, I did have this dream but I’m sure it’s completely
unrelated. It felt surprisingly real though.”

“What kind of dream? About
your mom?”

Before I could tell her
about my dream, Troy ambled into the kitchen in search of a beer. After
grabbing one from the refrigerator, he slid in behind me and wrapped his arms
around my waist. He started to grow a full beard in honor of hunting season,
which he paused to nuzzle gently against my neck knowing it gave me chills.

“Who are we gossiping
about?”

“You,” I pressed my cheek
into his and winked at Becky. “I’m telling her all your dirty little secrets.”

“Tell her about the one from
this morning,” a devilish grin lifted his cheeks. I felt my face grow warm at
the mention of that morning. Not only had we gotten up early and done his
chores together, but we’d watched the sunrise from the loft in the barn where
we’d made love on impulse despite the frigid temperature.

“She doesn’t want to hear about
that,” I assured him.

“Actually,” Becky cut in,
“we were planning that Black Friday trip to the mall while you Neanderthals are
out tomorrow murdering innocent deer.”

“A man’s gotta eat,” he
said. “And I sure as hell won’t complain when Marty picks off one of those
bastards that’s been feasting on my crops all year. It’s the circle of life.”

“You’re kidding, right? You
do know that Martin hasn’t shot a deer since he was fifteen years old. You’ll
be lucky if he even gets out of bed.”

“He’ll get one tomorrow,”
Troy promised. “I know where there’s a whole herd. I’ll make sure he gets one
with a nice rack.”

“A nice rack?” I wrinkled my
brow. “How many ways have you guys found to use that term?”
 

“The only two that count.”
He left a sloppy kiss on my cheek before backing out of the room at the sound
of raucous cheering from the living room.

“Did I say May?” she
started. “April weddings have their appeal.”

“Stop it,” I swatted at her
with the towel, but within seconds we were both giggling.

By the time we left Becky’s
house, Troy drank his share during the football game and it fell to me to drive
everyone home safely. A flourish of snow flurries danced to the howl of the
wind, whipping into the windshield before melting against the glass, but it
wasn’t enough snow to do more than whirl like dust clouds as the car ploughed
along the road.

Pulling around to the back
door, Dad hesitated and then asked, “Hey, Jannie, you think you can come in for
a minute. I have something I need to talk to you about real quick and we
haven’t really had a quiet minute together since you got here.”

“Sure, Dad.”

I looked to Troy in the
backseat, and he nodded. “We’ll wait out here.” He was reaching for the handle
to slip into the front seat.

I followed Dad up onto the
back porch and waited as he unlocked the door. A few flurries managed to slip
through the veil of my hair and sting like tiny kisses against my cheek just
moments before he pushed the door opened and a rush of heat from within surged
out to greet us.

“Today was nice,” I said,
closing the door behind me. “I’m so glad you wanted to come.”

“I had a nice afternoon,” he
admitted. “It was almost enough to keep my mind off of things.” He walked to
the refrigerator and took down an envelope that he’d tacked up with a magnet,
getting straight down to business before I could ask how he was doing. “Here,”
he handed it to me. “I wanted to give this to you while we were alone, and I
haven’t really seen much of you lately, so this is the first chance I’ve had.”

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I held the
envelope. “I’m spending too much time with Troy, I know…”

“No, no,” he shook his head
and laid a hand over mine. “You’re spending time where you belong, and that’s
all that matters.” His gentle understanding gave me the kind of chills that
come on like a warning of tears soon to follow. “He’s a good guy, and you two
seem right together. In fact,” he looked down for a minute, the silence drawing
my attention to the hum of the refrigerator behind him. “I think if she were
still with us your mom would approve.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” his nod was
reassuring. “Now, about what I just gave you…”

“What is it?”

“Open it.”

I pulled the folded lip of
the envelope out and peered inside at a check with my name on it and a rather
substantial amount written in the ledger. “Whoa,” I held it back. “Dad, what is
this?”

“Some of your mom’s life
insurance,” he explained. “She didn’t have a will or anything, but I know she
wanted you to have this. Thought that it would make a nice nest egg, or if you
were feeling ambitious, you might use it to break out on your own somehow. And
I don’t want to tell you what to do with it, but I had the damndest idea.”

The figure on that check
hadn’t quite sunk into me yet, but I couldn’t help feeling it was like a beacon
signal from the universe that I was following the right path, that what my
mother would have referred to without reservation as God looking out for me.

“Oh yeah?”

“Well, I know you’ve been
floating since you quit your job, not sure what you want to do, but if you’re
thinking of maybe coming back here, why not buy up the old
Standard
building and give this place a proper paper again?” He was
the second person to suggest that I take over the
Sonesville
Standard
, and
while I hadn’t really even given it much thought after Katy mentioned it, the
idea had an eerie sense of appeal.

“You know, that’s not a half
bad idea, Dad,” I nodded, closing the flap over the check. “I am going to
seriously think about that.”

He nodded, and patted the
top of my hand. “I know that whatever you decide, it’ll be right for you. You
always were good at getting what you wanted, and hopefully this’ll be a way for
you to bring something you want just a little bit closer.”

“Thank you, Daddy.” I leaned
forward and hugged him, grateful for the way he always seemed to reluctantly
reach up and pat me on the back.