Pieces of the Heart (15 page)

Caroline looked over her shoulder and saw both Drew and Jewel studying her. “Pardon me for asking, but why are you in my house?”

Drew straightened, adjusting his tool belt. “Your mom asked me to make a worktable and benches for the living room. Jewel’s been helping me carry them over. They’re out on the porch, ready to bring inside, if that’s all right with you.”

Caroline’s stomach grumbled as she rinsed the last of the pancake batter down the drain. “Don’t let me stop you.”

After she finished washing, drying, and putting away the dishes, she walked into the living room, noticing that all the existing furniture had been pushed against the walls and an enormous pine table now stood in the middle of the room. As she had expected, it was a marvelous piece of work. A month ago she would have bet a large sum of money that she would never call a pine worktable art, but now, staring at Drew Reed’s handiwork, she was speechless.

All four legs of the table were different, she noticed as she knelt in front of the first one. The foot of each leg was a human foot, and the table leg was made up of short puffs of ocean waves, breaking into froth on the underside of the table. As Drew and Jewel brought the benches in, Caroline examined another leg. This one had the foot of a young girl, and the leg was a patchwork of different patterns like a wooden quilt.

She faced Drew as he arranged a bench under the table. “Please—let me just take a picture of this table and send it to my boss. I believe you’d be pleasantly surprised at what I think we can offer you.”

He glanced up at her face and something flickered in his eyes. After a pause that anybody else would have missed, he said, “No, thanks. And please don’t ask me again.”

Caroline opened her mouth to do just that when Jewel plopped herself on the bench and caught Caroline’s attention. “I read somewhere that sometimes people with organ transplants suddenly get a talent that they never had before and they find out that the person whose organ they have once had that talent. Isn’t that neat? Maybe the person whose heart you have was really musical or something. Could you find out?”

The coldness started at the top of Caroline’s head and stole down her body until she felt as if she’d fallen under ice and couldn’t find the hole to come up for air.

The front door opened and Margaret walked in, sparing Caroline from searching for an answer. Margaret greeted everyone, raising an eyebrow at Caroline’s appearance as she moved toward the table. “It’s beautiful, Drew—just like I knew it would be. Thank you so much for the rush order.”

“It was my pleasure.” He leaned down to allow Margaret to place a kiss on his cheek.

Margaret smiled. “Why don’t you two sit down and I’ll get you something cool to drink and Caroline can go get some clothes on.”

Everybody’s voices seemed to be coming from far away, as if muffled by the ice that seemed to surround her. She found her own voice. “Yes. I’ll go do that.”

As she walked toward her bedroom, she heard Margaret call out, “Did something burn? I definitely smell something burning.” And then, as Caroline reached the sanctuary of her room, Margaret said, “Caroline! Why is your oatmeal still in the microwave?”

Caroline’s response was the sound of her door snapping closed.

Jewel closed her mother’s diary and slid off her bed. Opening her door, she stuck her head out into the hallway and listened for sounds from her dad’s workroom. When the buzz saw started she knew the coast was clear, and she crept into the closed-off room that her dad never talked about.

The air always seemed different in here. It was almost like walking into an empty church before services, the silence itself holding its breath, the anticipation pushing at your back, making you move forward. Like all the people who had been there before were sitting there, invisible, waiting for someone to come in and breathe the life back into them.

She knelt by the trunk on the floor and opened the lid slowly, not sure what to expect from this trunk that smelled like her mother. Taking out the quilt on top, she draped it over the bed, then began to take everything out and spread it on the floor. The previous week she’d taken the quilt out of the box it had been in, and placed it in the trunk. It was easier to put it back that way, without struggling with retaping the box.

She found the piece of driftwood near the bottom, wrapped in a football jersey with the number 02 stamped on the front. She touched the dried wood, letting her fingers run along the lines and ridges, feeling her mother’s hand guiding her own as her short, clipped nails dipped in and out of the wooden crevasses. Gently she set it aside, then placed everything else back, but paused as she lifted the quilt, noticing again how the bottom half of it lay empty and unfinished. Who did it belong to and why was it stored in her mother’s trunk? She felt the urge to put it away, that somehow it wasn’t ready to be taken out. Maybe it was her mother talking to her again, the way she sometimes did in dreams.

Jewel picked up everything she’d put on the floor, then refolded the quilt and carefully placed it on top inside the trunk before closing the lid. Then she crept back to her room with the piece of driftwood, thinking of the best place to put it and hoping her dad wouldn’t notice.

Drew pulled up in front of Rainy’s store and turned off the truck’s engine. He supposed he should start calling it his own store, seeing as how the papers had already been signed and his name would soon be on the deed. He waited for a rush of satisfaction, or at least a sense of completion, but all he could feel as he stared through the windshield at the weathered boards and broad display window was bewilderment.

How did I get here?
He slowly got out of the truck and leaned on the door for a moment and thought of Shelby. She had always encouraged him to find his dream, to go where his heart led. It had taken him a while to understand why it was so important to her, and when he’d figured it out, the end result had to been to chase him further and further into his work existence as a lawyer, and away from her and the life he thought they’d had.

But now Shelby was gone, and he had Jewel to raise all by himself. He’d hoped that moving to Hart’s Valley would be the perfect solution—he could follow his dream of creating beautiful furniture, and he’d have more time for Jewel. Except he and Jewel seemed to avoid each other, and while he loved creating the furniture pieces he’d been making, there was still something else, another piece of the puzzle, waiting to be fitted into place. If only he could figure out what it was.

Leaving the truck, he was halfway up the wooden steps of the store when he heard a car pulling up behind him. Turning, he smiled his best jury-clinching smile as he faced Caroline Collier. It had been her idea to meet in Rainy’s parking lot so her mother wouldn’t have to panic over their hiking trip.

“Good morning,” he said, still smiling.

“Yeah, whatever,” she said, climbing out of her mother’s Cadillac.

“It’s so nice to meet another chirpy early bird like me. Don’t you just love mornings?”

Caroline only grunted, then reached inside the car and pulled out an enormous travel coffee mug and took a big gulp.

Drew’s gaze took in Caroline’s outfit, from the tank top and cutoff jeans shorts to her thin white legs with short ankle socks and . . . Keds?

His smile faltered a bit. “We’re going hiking, remember? Not taking a leisurely stroll around the lake.”

She looked at him with half-closed eyes and took another sip of her coffee. “This is all I have. Guess we can’t go. I’ll just go home and crawl back into bed.”

“Good try.” He motioned toward the front door of the store. “Let’s go in and have a chat with Rainy until the stores in Truro open. There’s a great sportsman’s warehouse there that should have what you need.”

She looked at him as if she hadn’t heard a word. “Do you have a cell phone I can use?”

“Nope. Don’t need one; don’t want one.”

“Great.” Gulping more coffee, she preceded him into the store.

They found Rainy in the back dining room. All the quilting supplies had already been carted over to the Colliers’ for Jewel’s quilting lessons—not that he believed that for a second. Jewel’s desire to quilt was about as believable as Caroline whooping for joy and doing cartwheels across the parking lot. He grinned at the thought, then grinned even more when he caught Caroline looking at him.

Rainy smiled up at them. Her lime-green headscarf matched the T-shirt she wore under her overalls. Rainy Martin was the only person he knew—besides Shelby—who had the ability to keep smiling even during the worst of times. He recalled the days following Shelby’s death when Rainy had come to stay with him and Jewel. He had been like a cracked piece of glass, and Rainy’s strong, capable hands had held him together so the pieces couldn’t fall out.

He kissed her cheek, noticing for the first time that the dining room table was now covered with pictures and articles torn from magazines and newspapers, all of them depicting a foreign locale or travel destination. “What are these for?”

“Oh, just ideas for my trip. I figure that the word
retirement
won’t sound so final if I have something to look forward to. Else I might as well have you start making my pine box.” She winked at him before picking up a postcard of the Sydney Opera House and fanning herself with it. “It always amazes me to see people retire from life long before their bodies are ready for it.”

Rainy looked at Caroline, who lingered in the doorway, appearing pinched and wary as she nursed her coffee. “Your mother called. She saw that you left looking like you were headed outdoors, so she wanted to make sure you remembered your sunscreen.”

Caroline opened her mouth to say something but Rainy cut her off. “And, no, you can’t use my phone.”

Caroline stuck her jaw out. “That’s okay. I have other sources.”

Rainy looked down at the table and began to rearrange the pictures. “Fine. Just as long as it’s not my phone. I don’t want your mother knocking me into next week. And she’d do it, too. She might look small, but she’s a bruiser.”