Julia's Chocolates (35 page)

She smiled at me from her bed and nodded with approval, her bald head gleaming in the light. “Good for you, girl!” she said, nice and loud. She was having a good day, her old energy back. “Dean Garrett is a real man. He’s like your chocolate fudge batter. Delicious to feel, nice and silky and warm. Delicious to taste. And when you leave it alone, it hardens up perfectly. Plus, it’s got a good shelf life.”

I nodded. Yes, Dean was a bit like my chocolate fudge.

“I’ve told you before that he has tapped your inner womanly power source. But you have something that you must banish from your life! Banish it!” I had made Shawn and Carrie Lynn buttermilk pancakes before school, and Aunt Lydia was eating a stack of them now. She brought her fork and knife up to punch the air with conviction.

“What? What is it that I have to banish?”

“Fear! You have fear. You’re scared of Dean Garrett, scared of yourself, scared of your past and your future. Fear runs rampant, like raging she-dogs, through your body.”

I thought about that. But not for long. Those raging she-dogs were yapping and barking at me in alarm that I had to finish icing a bunch of cakes down at Sophie’s Bakery, and, raging dogs or not, I was going to get it done. “You’re right, Aunt Lydia. I do have fear running like raging she-dogs through me.”

She dropped her fork and knife, hugged me close. She smelled like buttermilk and vanilla and coffee and a bit of pot. I hugged her back. “And I don’t blame you one bit, Julia. Your childhood consisted of one nightmare after another.” She kissed me on the cheek, then spoke, for the first time, at less than full volume. “Dean Garrett is a good man, Julia. I’ve known him for years, I’ve watched him, I’ve listened to him. He loves you. He can’t take his eyes off you when you’re in the same room with him. He won’t ever hurt you.”

I nodded, my throat closing up as emotions threatened to turn me into a ball of tears.

God, how I love my Aunt Lydia.

“And he looks like he’s got big
cojones
,” she whispered. “That’ll be fun in bed.”

I had a zillion errands to run for the party, and I didn’t have time to cry. So I wiped my eyes on the way out the door and told myself to buck up.

“Do I look like a cowgirl?” Carrie Lynn tipped her little face up to mine. With a red cowboy hat, a plaid shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, all bought for her by Ms. Cutter for the party, I had to admit she was a dead ringer for a cowgirl. Ms. Cutter had embroidered on the brown vest, “Smart Cowgirls Read Books.”

“You sure do, honey,” I told her, setting her up on one of the bales of hay that had been placed strategically around the barn for the party. “So does your brother.” I picked Shawn up and set him right next to Carrie Lynn, then snapped a photo. They both smiled without being asked.

At first, they had been stiff and uncomfortable when Stash or Aunt Lydia or I took their photo. No one ever had in the past. But they had gotten used to it.

They had not gotten “used to” their past. They still had nightmares, and it often took all of us—me, Stash, and Lydia—to calm them down. They refused to sleep in separate rooms, so they were in two twin beds in one room. Carrie Lynn still reached to hold Shawn’s hand all the time and was prone to pulling her blanket over her head. They both started at loud noises and seemed to shrink when large men were in the room.

Although their physical injuries were gone, both often seemed nervous, wary, scared. When they went to their bedrooms, we would give them a few minutes, then go in and comfort them as they were inevitably under their covers, arms wrapped around their little bodies, and crying.

They still had scars on their backs from being whipped with a belt by their mother’s boyfriend, but the doctors said they would fade. Lydia used a combination of herbs and honey, massaging it into their skin every night. On the nights that she couldn’t do it because of how the chemo had made her feel, I did it.

But they had learned to trust Stash and Aunt Lydia, Katie, Caroline, Dave and his wife, Marie, and Scrambler. Scrambler was as kind to them as he was to Katie’s kids. He always got out his guitar and sang to the kids when he saw them, making up silly songs. His singing voice was incredible, and the kids loved him.

I snapped another photo. They were so darn cute.

I took a deep breath as I looked around Stash’s barn later that afternoon.

We were ready for a great big hoedown.

Stash’s farmhands had set up tables and chairs. Katie had spread yellow tablecloths on the rented tables. The centerpieces were pumpkins, gourds, Chinese lanterns, wheat, and fall leaves. She had made scarecrows and propped them up in the hay. Giant pumpkins were mounted around the wooden stage that Stash’s workmen had constructed. Orange and yellow streamers drooped through the rafters. A hundred strings of white tiny lights wrapped around posts and beams. A poster Shawn and Carrie Lynn and Katie’s kids had painted hung from the center of the barn:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
,
LYDIA
!

I had only two problems. One was that Scrambler had said he would handle the music, but I had seen not hide nor hair of him. The second was that I had not talked to or seen Caroline for three days.

Katie read my mind. “Where the heck is Caroline?”

I shook my head. And then we heard it. The wheezing and coughing and burping of Caroline’s car.

We rushed out to meet her. Behind her she was pulling a small trailer.

“Whew! I’m here in the nick of time,” she said, her face bright and cheery. She wore a red dress, cowboy boots, and a cowboy hat. “Come back and see what I got for party favors.”

I looked at Katie, and she looked at me. Katie had on one of Scrambler’s cowboy hats, jeans that showed off her newfound figure, and a plaid shirt. I was dressed about the same, only I had let just one more button go on my shirt. After all, I did have a date tonight.

Katie leaned in to whisper, “I hope she didn’t spend her life savings on this, Julia. I am so worried about this. Caroline does not have money to throw around at all. Not one cent!”

And, if Caroline had had any money to throw around, she surely couldn’t have any now. Piles and piles of yellow T-shirts were inside the trunk. Imprinted on the front was “Happy Birthday Lydia!”

Caroline swung around to the trailer, her skirt swishing behind her. “Now come look and see what else I got.” She swung open the doors. Out poured hundreds of cowboy hats, all yellow. Imprinted around the edge, “Best Damn Poker Player West of the Mississippi.”

“What do you all think?” Caroline asked.

Katie couldn’t speak.

I couldn’t, either.

But we could laugh, so we did. We laughed when we watched Caroline pull on a T-shirt and hat, we laughed when we pulled on our own, we laughed when we got Shawn and Carrie Lynn and Katie’s kids in their shirts and hats, and we laughed when Dave and Marie and a bunch of ranch hands put theirs on, too.

“This is going to be one shit-kicking good party,” Dave said, smiling. “One shit-kicking good party.”

Dean showed up later looking so good and tasty in jeans and boots and a denim coat I thought I would soon dissolve into liquid heat. He pulled me behind the barn, then picked a few pieces of hay out of my hair, smiling that yummy smile at me as if I were the only person who currently existed in the galaxy. He hugged me close, kissed my cheek. “Hi, honey.”

Honey
. You had to love that word.

“Thanks for coming.”

“Thanks for inviting me.” He kissed me on the lips, warm and gentle, then with more passion. He sighed heavily, lifted his lips from mine. “I’ve missed you.”

I had missed him like I would miss my liver or my kidneys or my heart or my guts, but that didn’t sound too romantic, so I settled on, “I missed you, too.”

“I’m getting tired of living in Portland.”

I was not expecting that, so I just told the truth. “I’m tired of you living in Portland, too.”

He nodded, his blue eyes sparkling. “We’ll have to fix that soon.”

So what’s a girl to say? “The air here is better.”

He laughed.

“Would you like a shirt and hat?” I held up the shirt and hat I’d grabbed when I saw him. My words came out shaky and nervous, but I was too happy to see him to feel like a gooey fool.

“Yes, sweetheart, I would,” he drawled, looking right down at me with those blue eyes of his, so intense, so all-seeing. “Why don’t you help me get this shirt on?”

I smiled and tried to leave, because the very thought of Dean Garrett half naked was—oh—too much yum all at once, but he yanked me into his chest, and I couldn’t help myself. I let him mold every curve of my body to him and I kissed that man like I have never kissed another man in my whole life. And when he pulled off his shirt so he could put on Aunt Lydia’s yellow Happy Birthday T-shirt and hugged me to him again, I felt like I’d found home against that truly splendid and muscled and hairy chest.

Yes, a great big, warm, secure home.

Right there, right in Dean Garrett’s arms.

It is difficult to hide five hundred people in a barn. Even more difficult to get them to be quiet when they’re all ready to party and wearing new bright yellow T-shirts and hats, but we did it.

We heard Stash’s truck, and I shushed everybody, and everybody shushed everybody else, and, finally, when those car doors slammed, everyone was quiet and we could hear Stash and Lydia come into the darkened barn.

The last thing I heard was Aunt Lydia saying, “Oh, you old Stash. Whatever are we doing out here? Did you buy me a tractor?”

And then someone plugged in those sparkling white lights, and someone else hit the drums, and hundreds of people leaped up and yelled, “Surprise!”

It was priceless.

Aunt Lydia’s mouth dropped practically to her shoes. She stood there, staring at all of us in our bright yellow Happy Birthday shirts and yellow cowboy hats, proclaiming her the boss of all things poker.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said, tears flooding her eyes. “I’ll be double damned.”

And damned or not, we all sang, “Happy Birthday” to her, not once, not twice, but three times for good luck, as she had sung to me every summer when I came out to see her.

She threw her fists up in the air, shaking them in victory when we finished, and cried some more. And then, like a giant yellow blob, hundreds of people rushed to wish Aunt Lydia a happy, happy,
happy
birthday.

“Where is Scrambler?” Katie asked, a worried look in her eyes, as she scanned the barn, filled with people already having a shit-kicking good time. “This is not like him, not at all. When he says he’s coming over, he comes. He’s the most reliable person I’ve ever met.”

I was getting nervous, too. Not because I was worried about the music. We had CDs, great country music, already blaring through the barn, but Katie was right. When Scrambler said something was going to get done, it got done.

But then again, timing is everything, and Scrambler knew that, too.

In a large barn, filled with hundreds of people it would be almost impossible to get their attention, but one by one they froze as those barn doors slammed open not two seconds later.

No one recognized Scrambler at first. He had a cowboy hat pulled down low over his head and dark glasses for effect. Behind him were eight people. Five of them later made up the band; three were backup singers.

Now, we all knew Scrambler had secrets. And one of those secrets happened to be that he had grown up with a best friend in Idaho named Bryce Williams, although Scrambler knew him as Duncan Davis. Anyhow, Bryce liked to sing, and pretty soon Bryce had a recording contract and a few hit songs, and now he sang them like there was no tomorrow right there in that barn for Aunt Lydia, and we danced that night away.

Old Agnes pulled her sister Thelba’s wheelchair out to the middle of the dance floor and danced around it while Thelba danced with her arms. Dave danced with Marie. The kids danced with each other. Katie stole a couple of dances with Scrambler when he himself wasn’t singing along with Bryce. I danced with Dean, his blue eyes rarely straying from mine. Men did the hoedown together, women swung each other around. People danced in groups and pairs and alone. And everyone danced with Aunt Lydia. In fact, she led the bunny hop, her special pink cowboy hat bouncing right around that barn.

And at 10:00, when Stash stood on the stage, we had all determined, like Dave had said, it was the best shit-kicking party any of us had ever been to.

Stash took Lydia’s hands in his own. He towered over her, his shoulders huge, his back ram-rod straight, and his face more serious than I had ever seen it.

“Lydia Jean Thornburgh, I have loved you since the moment I met you twenty years ago. And even though you are stubborn and have never thought it right to keep even a single opinion to yourself, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever met. And tonight you are more beautiful than you have ever been.”

“Oh, Stash, you old fool,” Lydia croaked, whacking him on the arm, then readjusting her hat.

“I am an old fool, Lydia, and I love you. We’ve walked through life together for twenty years, and they have been, by far, the happiest twenty years I have ever had. I cannot imagine life without you because it wouldn’t be worth nothing. I have asked you to marry me once a year since we met, and you have always turned me down because you are so damn feisty and independent. But I want to ask you one more time. Here. In front of all of our friends and your niece, Julia.”