Meadow Falls, page 21
“I never knew that. But the news that my mother wasn’t close to me from the beginning doesn’t surprise me,” I said with a shrug.
“And me? Who named me?” Celeste asked.
“Roxy insisted that you be named Celeste Star,” Mandy almost whispered. “I thought if she chose a name for you that she might change her mind about leaving you behind. She told me just before she drove away with that boy that you are named after the stars that she and your father used to watch at night. Celestial beings, she called them. I really didn’t want to ever have to admit that to you, but I guess you deserve to know.”
Celeste let go of my hand, stood up, and began to pace around the floor. “Thank you, Granny. In your opinion, why didn’t she take me with her? If I belonged to that guy . . .”
Mandy breathed in deeply and let the air out slowly. “I don’t believe that he was your father. On the morning they left, she told me that she wanted you to be raised on Meadow Falls.”
Of course she did. That would be the ultimate punishment for my father, to have to watch his daughter grow up right under his nose. If he admitted that Celeste was his, all hell would break loose, both with Inez and my mother. He’d had a choice to make, and he chose the farm.
Mandy set the cat on the floor and stood up. “And that is enough of the storytelling for tonight. I’m going to bed now. I’ll leave the door cracked so Caramel can come into my room and sleep with me if she wants to.”
And I’d thought the cat was going to belong to me. Looked like Caramel was going to be a community kitty.
Chapter Seventeen
Mandy fussed about missing church two Sundays in a row, but she felt better about not going out in a blinding blizzard when Polly called and told her that services had been canceled that morning. Devon sent a text saying that he and Jesse were staying at their house for breakfast, and Mandy declared that she wanted oatmeal and toast, so that was an easy fix.
“I’m going to my room with Caramel. She likes to lay beside me while I read,” Mandy said when we’d finished eating. “We need to make her a bed to have her babies in soon. Maybe an old laundry basket with a towel in the bottom.”
“Where are we going to put her bed?” Celeste asked.
“In my bedroom, right beside my rocking chair,” Mandy answered as she left the kitchen.
“What’s on your agenda for today?” I asked Celeste as we started the cleanup.
“I’m going to read awhile, watch it snow awhile, have a snack, and then repeat,” she replied. “What about you?”
“I’m going to get files ready to send to the CPA,” I answered.
“Why?”
“I like to get all the documents to her early. I don’t know what will happen with my father dying right at the end of the year,” I explained. “Enjoy your read, watch, snack, and repeat.”
She followed me out into the foyer and went up the stairs. I went into the office and found Caramel curled up in one of the upholstered chairs on the other side of my desk. I stopped and rubbed her fur for a few seconds. She didn’t look nearly as scraggly as she had when she was soaking wet and half-starved. “So you do belong to me—at least part of the time,” I said with a soft giggle. “I bet Mandy fell asleep, didn’t she?”
Caramel purred an answer and then closed her eyes and tucked her nose under her paw. I tiptoed around the chair and turned on the computer. While it booted up, I stared at the four oak file cabinets lined up on the north wall. I’d always done everything on the computer, but I kept receipts filed away in the last cabinet—just in case cyberspace failed us.
“Victoria’s and Inez’s paperwork is probably still stored away in those,” I muttered as I crossed the room. Since I’d always worked on a computer and backed up everything on an external hard drive, I’d never been interested in old business receipts. But the ones from eighty years ago probably should be tossed after all these years. I opened the first drawer in the cabinet at the end of the row to find files in alphabetical order, starting with WYATT PERSONAL and going on to VICTORIA PERSONAL. I flipped through them until I found my name. I pulled out the folder and carried it over to the desk. I sat down in my chair and opened the folder to find my birth certificate, copies of the paperwork for my social security card, and other important documents. But tucked inside together with all that was an envelope with my name on the outside.
I recognized my mother’s beautiful handwriting and wondered when, where, and why she had filed that away. Rather than tearing into it, I carefully cut the end open, and with trembling hands, I slid the letter out.
For a long couple of minutes, I just stared at it, but then I gently unfolded it. I couldn’t take my eyes off the date or the first line:
May 15, 2005. To my dearest daughter, Angela Marie.
The letter had to have been written just weeks before she died, and she had called me dearest and recognized me as her daughter. Tears flooded my eyes and dripped off my jaw. I quickly grabbed a tissue and wiped them away so they wouldn’t blur the ink on the paper.
More tears flowed as I read the first line:
Angela Marie, first let me say that I’m very proud of the good woman you are becoming in spite of this farm.
“A good woman . . .” I thought of the discussion we’d had earlier. “Why couldn’t you tell me that while you were alive?” I whispered and then went on to read:
I don’t even know how to begin this letter, and to explain everything would take more ink than there is in this pen, but I will try. The relationship, or lack of one, I had with your father isn’t a nice story, but it is the truth. He was in love with another woman, and according to him, I could never take her place. By the time you were born, I had figured out I didn’t love him, either, and that this place was toxic. I couldn’t go, and I would be miserable if I stayed—almost as unhappy as he was. I would have left and taken you with me, but when I was packing to leave, he reminded me of the prenup I had signed. If I left, I would receive only ten thousand dollars, and I could not take you with me.
That night, I had found two pictures in the drawer of his dresser. One woman was his first wife. The other was Roxy. They had both left Meadow Falls before that time, but I recognized Roxy, and my temper went through the roof. I asked him if her baby belonged to him, and he refused to answer. We were both angry and said mean things to each other. He had never yelled at me before, but he did that night. He said that he’d just had a child with me so that a Duncan would always live on Meadow Falls like his mother wanted. If she would have let him, he would have taken his inheritance, moved far away, and had children with his first wife.
I couldn’t leave you behind, so we settled into our roles and pretended that we had a happy marriage. Now that my time is coming to an end, I realize that we were each married to the security of this farm, not to each other. I didn’t realize until it was too late that my decision would determine the course of your life as well as mine. Harrison needed a good woman, one to fit in with his world as boss of Meadow Falls. I was true to him because of my faith—not out of love—and that made me a doubly good woman in his eyes. He was drawn to other women of a wild nature, and I didn’t care—not after I figured out that he didn’t love me. No, that’s not right—he couldn’t love me because he couldn’t let go of Summer Rain—so he was constantly looking for someone to give him the excitement that she had.
I stayed so that I could, hopefully, have a little influence on your life. But Harrison had other ideas for you. The only time I got to go anywhere alone with you was church, and he drove us both there and brought us back to the farm. I never was a good mother, but I just want you to know that since my journey in this life is coming to an end, I wish I had done things differently. Rather than throwing myself into showing him that if I couldn’t have you, then I would stay and make his life miserable, I wish I had stolen you away and gone to a place where he could never have found us.
I hope you find this letter and accept my apologies for being as bad a mother as Harrison was a father. We both married for the wrong reasons—I didn’t want to go to a foreign country with my brother, and marrying Harrison was a quick fix. He wanted a wife that his mother could be pleased with, so he courted the religious woman who did not know much about his past.
Neither of us did right by you, but Mandy did a fine job of raising you. For that I will always be grateful to her.
Love,
Mother
I laid the letter to the side and let the words sink into my heart and soul. My mother had apologized—maybe not on her death bed to me directly, and it was years later, but there it was.
When the initial shock wore off, anger washed over me. Why couldn’t she have told me all this while I was sitting beside her bed all those days and nights? I paced the floor for what seemed like hours, but when I checked the big clock on the wall above the file cabinets, it had only been five minutes. I couldn’t stay in this toxic house another minute, but where could I go? Why had my mother thought she had to choose between going to a foreign country with her brother and marrying my father? The more answers I found, the more questions I had.
I didn’t even realize I had put on my coat, gloves, hat, and boots until I was opening the back door. I remembered to grab the keys on my way outside but realized after I was on the porch that I was holding my father’s pickup keys. Even if I drove away from the farm in his vehicle, common sense told me that driving a big white truck in blizzard-like conditions would be asking for an accident.
Usually, I could see Mandy’s—now Devon’s—house and the barns from the backyard, but that morning, they were obliterated by what seemed to be a solid sheet of white snow that the howling wind was blowing every which way. Snow had drifted halfway to the first-floor windows, and what was on the ground came up to the top of my work boots. I braced myself for the cold and headed to the workshop. Luis had told me more than once that hard physical work would get rid of anything on my mind. We didn’t have a tractor in the barn, but the supply room where we kept cases of oil, transmission fluid, and even a couple of sets of tires could always use a cleaning.
One step at a time, I followed the path to the barn with my shoulders hunched and my every breath coming out in a fog. My anger was hot enough that I could hardly even feel the bitter cold snow slapping me in the face with every step I took. The barn came up so quickly that I almost ran smack into the side of it before I realized it was there. Snow had drifted up against the door, making it hard to open, but my frustration fueled enough energy that I flung it open without much trouble.
I tried to slam the door, but it wouldn’t cooperate.
“Sometimes it’s too late to say you are sorry,” I muttered as I stomped the snow from my boots and hung my coat on a hook.
A yellow five-gallon bucket got in my way on the way to the supply room, so I kicked it with enough force to send it rattling across the barn. When the thing hit the wall, it flipped over and rolled right back to me. I kicked it again, and this time, it learned its lesson and landed in front of the pegboard that held all the tools.
I stomped all the way over there and picked up a hammer in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. I was on my way to beat and stab out my frustrations on the workbench when a picture of Luis flashed through my head. I could see him sitting on his stool as clearly as if he’d really been there. I could never destroy something that reminded me of Luis. I turned around and put the tools back where they belonged and headed to the supply room.
I switched on the light and glared at the old brown-and-gold sofa that sat against the back wall. I could see my father sitting there with his empty glass. “Oh my God!” I gasped when the picture became firm in my memory. “There were two glasses that night. One in his hand and one sitting beside the half-empty bottle of whiskey.”
Everything snapped clear in my mind in less time than it took me to blink. The shadow I’d seen had been someone leaving the barn, not someone who had just been out for a walk. The sweet scent that blended with the whiskey had been cheap perfume. My father had just had sex on that sofa while my mother lay dying in the house.
I picked up a box cutter and attacked the sofa like a woman on a mission. My right arm was aching when I’d finally sliced through my anger. I hurled the box cutter across the room and glared at the completely destroyed sofa. “As soon as this storm is over, I will drag you outside and burn you.”
“What did that sofa do to you?” Devon asked.
I whipped around, expecting to find that he, like the visions of Luis and my father, was nothing more than a figment of my imagination. But he was there with a frosting of snow on the rim of his hair that his stocking hat had not covered.
“It brought back a horrible memory,” I answered and then burst into tears.
He took a couple of steps and wrapped me in his arms. “Let it all out. Tears wash away grief.”
“I’m not grieving,” I protested. “I’m mad.”
“Then maybe the tears will wash that away, too,” he said as he switched off the light and walked me backward out into the shop. He sat down in one of the two lawn chairs and pulled me down into his lap. I rested my cheek against his chest and sobbed until I got the hiccups. Devon took a red bandanna from his pocket and dried my tears. The handkerchief made me think of all the times Luis had wiped sweat from his brow with one just like it, and it set off another bout of weeping.
“What are you even doing out in this kind of weather?” Devon asked.
“I might ask”—the lump in my throat made my voice come out high and squeaky—“you the same thing.”
“I got stir-crazy in the house and thought I might take stock of the supply room and make sure we’ve got what we need when spring gets here,” he answered.
“Right now, I don’t care how . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Are Celeste and Mandy all right? Are you angry because something happened to one of them?”
“I wouldn’t be out here if something like that happened—and I would be grieving, not going crazy on a rotten sofa,” I snapped, then cried harder because he was just being kind and I had been hateful.
“Okay, then.” He pulled me closer. “Just let it all out.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing would come out. How could I ever explain to him how I felt with mere words when I couldn’t wrap my mind around the anger?
“I found a l-letter . . .” I stammered. “My mother . . . wrote it . . . when . . .” I stopped and looked around for a tissue.
Devon reached over and grabbed a roll of paper towels from the worktable. “Your mother wrote you a letter, right?”
I took a deep breath and nodded as I peeled off several of the sheets and wiped my cheeks, then blew my nose. I didn’t even try to be ladylike, and Celeste and Mandy probably heard the noise all the way back at the house.
“She wrote it when she was dying and hid it in a file,” I answered. “I was probably supposed to find it when I needed my birth certificate for something, but . . .”
“But you haven’t needed it?” Devon asked.
“That’s right, and . . .” A lump caught in my throat. “She loved me, but she never showed it much, and I can’t forgive her.”
Devon pushed my hair back behind my ear and said, “She’s your mother, darlin’. She is supposed to love you.”
I threw the paper towel on the floor. “I wanted to know that before she died, not all these years later.”
“Maybe you better start at the beginning of this story,” he suggested.
“It’s like this . . .” I went on to tell him about my parents’ loveless marriage and the circumstances of my birth. “And now, I’m almost convinced that Celeste is my half-sister.”
“That’s easy enough to prove or disprove. Just send in a familial DNA test. You can get one of those back in a week or less,” he said.
“We’re going to do that—but do I tell Celeste what I suspect now or wait for proof? How’s it going to affect her, knowing that she was raised right here on Meadow Falls with a father who didn’t even acknowledge that she was his child?”
“You can cross that bridge when the results come back,” he said. “And from what you just told me, you were raised by a father who didn’t want you, either.”
He tipped my chin up with his free hand and gazed right into my eyes. I barely had time to moisten my lips when his mouth closed over mine, and suddenly, nothing seemed to be so terrible anymore. The temperature seemed to get hotter and hotter with each kiss until, when I finally pulled away, I was panting.
“Did that take your mind off your troubles?” he asked.
“This is not a joking matter—but yes, for a minute, it did.” I remembered what Mandy had said about love and hate not living in the same heart. Evidently, neither could anger and a flaming desire for more than kisses, but I wasn’t going to admit that to my pretend boyfriend.
“Your lips are all puffy, and your eyes are dreamy now, instead of filled with anger.” Devon chuckled.
“I guess that means I should wait awhile before I go back to the house?” I was shocked that my hissy fit had ended with the kisses and was all gone, but even more so that I could flirt with Devon.
But I did not regret slashing the sofa into rags.
Chapter Eighteen
DNA kits were paid for, and extra money added for rush delivery by bedtime that evening. Keeping the news of the letter and of my suspicions from Mandy and Celeste wasn’t easy. Not telling them about my memory of my father and how I had destroyed the old sofa was even tougher. Keeping quiet about the make-out session with Devon was no problem at all.
When I awoke the next morning, I got out of bed and pulled back the drapes covering the french doors that opened out onto the balcony. A blanket of white covered the ground, and even my footprints from going out to the workshop and back had been filled in and erased. The sun wasn’t even a tiny sliver of orange on the eastern horizon yet, but the quarter moon and stars did what they could to lighten the day. The storm had passed—at least the physical one.
“And me? Who named me?” Celeste asked.
“Roxy insisted that you be named Celeste Star,” Mandy almost whispered. “I thought if she chose a name for you that she might change her mind about leaving you behind. She told me just before she drove away with that boy that you are named after the stars that she and your father used to watch at night. Celestial beings, she called them. I really didn’t want to ever have to admit that to you, but I guess you deserve to know.”
Celeste let go of my hand, stood up, and began to pace around the floor. “Thank you, Granny. In your opinion, why didn’t she take me with her? If I belonged to that guy . . .”
Mandy breathed in deeply and let the air out slowly. “I don’t believe that he was your father. On the morning they left, she told me that she wanted you to be raised on Meadow Falls.”
Of course she did. That would be the ultimate punishment for my father, to have to watch his daughter grow up right under his nose. If he admitted that Celeste was his, all hell would break loose, both with Inez and my mother. He’d had a choice to make, and he chose the farm.
Mandy set the cat on the floor and stood up. “And that is enough of the storytelling for tonight. I’m going to bed now. I’ll leave the door cracked so Caramel can come into my room and sleep with me if she wants to.”
And I’d thought the cat was going to belong to me. Looked like Caramel was going to be a community kitty.
Chapter Seventeen
Mandy fussed about missing church two Sundays in a row, but she felt better about not going out in a blinding blizzard when Polly called and told her that services had been canceled that morning. Devon sent a text saying that he and Jesse were staying at their house for breakfast, and Mandy declared that she wanted oatmeal and toast, so that was an easy fix.
“I’m going to my room with Caramel. She likes to lay beside me while I read,” Mandy said when we’d finished eating. “We need to make her a bed to have her babies in soon. Maybe an old laundry basket with a towel in the bottom.”
“Where are we going to put her bed?” Celeste asked.
“In my bedroom, right beside my rocking chair,” Mandy answered as she left the kitchen.
“What’s on your agenda for today?” I asked Celeste as we started the cleanup.
“I’m going to read awhile, watch it snow awhile, have a snack, and then repeat,” she replied. “What about you?”
“I’m going to get files ready to send to the CPA,” I answered.
“Why?”
“I like to get all the documents to her early. I don’t know what will happen with my father dying right at the end of the year,” I explained. “Enjoy your read, watch, snack, and repeat.”
She followed me out into the foyer and went up the stairs. I went into the office and found Caramel curled up in one of the upholstered chairs on the other side of my desk. I stopped and rubbed her fur for a few seconds. She didn’t look nearly as scraggly as she had when she was soaking wet and half-starved. “So you do belong to me—at least part of the time,” I said with a soft giggle. “I bet Mandy fell asleep, didn’t she?”
Caramel purred an answer and then closed her eyes and tucked her nose under her paw. I tiptoed around the chair and turned on the computer. While it booted up, I stared at the four oak file cabinets lined up on the north wall. I’d always done everything on the computer, but I kept receipts filed away in the last cabinet—just in case cyberspace failed us.
“Victoria’s and Inez’s paperwork is probably still stored away in those,” I muttered as I crossed the room. Since I’d always worked on a computer and backed up everything on an external hard drive, I’d never been interested in old business receipts. But the ones from eighty years ago probably should be tossed after all these years. I opened the first drawer in the cabinet at the end of the row to find files in alphabetical order, starting with WYATT PERSONAL and going on to VICTORIA PERSONAL. I flipped through them until I found my name. I pulled out the folder and carried it over to the desk. I sat down in my chair and opened the folder to find my birth certificate, copies of the paperwork for my social security card, and other important documents. But tucked inside together with all that was an envelope with my name on the outside.
I recognized my mother’s beautiful handwriting and wondered when, where, and why she had filed that away. Rather than tearing into it, I carefully cut the end open, and with trembling hands, I slid the letter out.
For a long couple of minutes, I just stared at it, but then I gently unfolded it. I couldn’t take my eyes off the date or the first line:
May 15, 2005. To my dearest daughter, Angela Marie.
The letter had to have been written just weeks before she died, and she had called me dearest and recognized me as her daughter. Tears flooded my eyes and dripped off my jaw. I quickly grabbed a tissue and wiped them away so they wouldn’t blur the ink on the paper.
More tears flowed as I read the first line:
Angela Marie, first let me say that I’m very proud of the good woman you are becoming in spite of this farm.
“A good woman . . .” I thought of the discussion we’d had earlier. “Why couldn’t you tell me that while you were alive?” I whispered and then went on to read:
I don’t even know how to begin this letter, and to explain everything would take more ink than there is in this pen, but I will try. The relationship, or lack of one, I had with your father isn’t a nice story, but it is the truth. He was in love with another woman, and according to him, I could never take her place. By the time you were born, I had figured out I didn’t love him, either, and that this place was toxic. I couldn’t go, and I would be miserable if I stayed—almost as unhappy as he was. I would have left and taken you with me, but when I was packing to leave, he reminded me of the prenup I had signed. If I left, I would receive only ten thousand dollars, and I could not take you with me.
That night, I had found two pictures in the drawer of his dresser. One woman was his first wife. The other was Roxy. They had both left Meadow Falls before that time, but I recognized Roxy, and my temper went through the roof. I asked him if her baby belonged to him, and he refused to answer. We were both angry and said mean things to each other. He had never yelled at me before, but he did that night. He said that he’d just had a child with me so that a Duncan would always live on Meadow Falls like his mother wanted. If she would have let him, he would have taken his inheritance, moved far away, and had children with his first wife.
I couldn’t leave you behind, so we settled into our roles and pretended that we had a happy marriage. Now that my time is coming to an end, I realize that we were each married to the security of this farm, not to each other. I didn’t realize until it was too late that my decision would determine the course of your life as well as mine. Harrison needed a good woman, one to fit in with his world as boss of Meadow Falls. I was true to him because of my faith—not out of love—and that made me a doubly good woman in his eyes. He was drawn to other women of a wild nature, and I didn’t care—not after I figured out that he didn’t love me. No, that’s not right—he couldn’t love me because he couldn’t let go of Summer Rain—so he was constantly looking for someone to give him the excitement that she had.
I stayed so that I could, hopefully, have a little influence on your life. But Harrison had other ideas for you. The only time I got to go anywhere alone with you was church, and he drove us both there and brought us back to the farm. I never was a good mother, but I just want you to know that since my journey in this life is coming to an end, I wish I had done things differently. Rather than throwing myself into showing him that if I couldn’t have you, then I would stay and make his life miserable, I wish I had stolen you away and gone to a place where he could never have found us.
I hope you find this letter and accept my apologies for being as bad a mother as Harrison was a father. We both married for the wrong reasons—I didn’t want to go to a foreign country with my brother, and marrying Harrison was a quick fix. He wanted a wife that his mother could be pleased with, so he courted the religious woman who did not know much about his past.
Neither of us did right by you, but Mandy did a fine job of raising you. For that I will always be grateful to her.
Love,
Mother
I laid the letter to the side and let the words sink into my heart and soul. My mother had apologized—maybe not on her death bed to me directly, and it was years later, but there it was.
When the initial shock wore off, anger washed over me. Why couldn’t she have told me all this while I was sitting beside her bed all those days and nights? I paced the floor for what seemed like hours, but when I checked the big clock on the wall above the file cabinets, it had only been five minutes. I couldn’t stay in this toxic house another minute, but where could I go? Why had my mother thought she had to choose between going to a foreign country with her brother and marrying my father? The more answers I found, the more questions I had.
I didn’t even realize I had put on my coat, gloves, hat, and boots until I was opening the back door. I remembered to grab the keys on my way outside but realized after I was on the porch that I was holding my father’s pickup keys. Even if I drove away from the farm in his vehicle, common sense told me that driving a big white truck in blizzard-like conditions would be asking for an accident.
Usually, I could see Mandy’s—now Devon’s—house and the barns from the backyard, but that morning, they were obliterated by what seemed to be a solid sheet of white snow that the howling wind was blowing every which way. Snow had drifted halfway to the first-floor windows, and what was on the ground came up to the top of my work boots. I braced myself for the cold and headed to the workshop. Luis had told me more than once that hard physical work would get rid of anything on my mind. We didn’t have a tractor in the barn, but the supply room where we kept cases of oil, transmission fluid, and even a couple of sets of tires could always use a cleaning.
One step at a time, I followed the path to the barn with my shoulders hunched and my every breath coming out in a fog. My anger was hot enough that I could hardly even feel the bitter cold snow slapping me in the face with every step I took. The barn came up so quickly that I almost ran smack into the side of it before I realized it was there. Snow had drifted up against the door, making it hard to open, but my frustration fueled enough energy that I flung it open without much trouble.
I tried to slam the door, but it wouldn’t cooperate.
“Sometimes it’s too late to say you are sorry,” I muttered as I stomped the snow from my boots and hung my coat on a hook.
A yellow five-gallon bucket got in my way on the way to the supply room, so I kicked it with enough force to send it rattling across the barn. When the thing hit the wall, it flipped over and rolled right back to me. I kicked it again, and this time, it learned its lesson and landed in front of the pegboard that held all the tools.
I stomped all the way over there and picked up a hammer in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. I was on my way to beat and stab out my frustrations on the workbench when a picture of Luis flashed through my head. I could see him sitting on his stool as clearly as if he’d really been there. I could never destroy something that reminded me of Luis. I turned around and put the tools back where they belonged and headed to the supply room.
I switched on the light and glared at the old brown-and-gold sofa that sat against the back wall. I could see my father sitting there with his empty glass. “Oh my God!” I gasped when the picture became firm in my memory. “There were two glasses that night. One in his hand and one sitting beside the half-empty bottle of whiskey.”
Everything snapped clear in my mind in less time than it took me to blink. The shadow I’d seen had been someone leaving the barn, not someone who had just been out for a walk. The sweet scent that blended with the whiskey had been cheap perfume. My father had just had sex on that sofa while my mother lay dying in the house.
I picked up a box cutter and attacked the sofa like a woman on a mission. My right arm was aching when I’d finally sliced through my anger. I hurled the box cutter across the room and glared at the completely destroyed sofa. “As soon as this storm is over, I will drag you outside and burn you.”
“What did that sofa do to you?” Devon asked.
I whipped around, expecting to find that he, like the visions of Luis and my father, was nothing more than a figment of my imagination. But he was there with a frosting of snow on the rim of his hair that his stocking hat had not covered.
“It brought back a horrible memory,” I answered and then burst into tears.
He took a couple of steps and wrapped me in his arms. “Let it all out. Tears wash away grief.”
“I’m not grieving,” I protested. “I’m mad.”
“Then maybe the tears will wash that away, too,” he said as he switched off the light and walked me backward out into the shop. He sat down in one of the two lawn chairs and pulled me down into his lap. I rested my cheek against his chest and sobbed until I got the hiccups. Devon took a red bandanna from his pocket and dried my tears. The handkerchief made me think of all the times Luis had wiped sweat from his brow with one just like it, and it set off another bout of weeping.
“What are you even doing out in this kind of weather?” Devon asked.
“I might ask”—the lump in my throat made my voice come out high and squeaky—“you the same thing.”
“I got stir-crazy in the house and thought I might take stock of the supply room and make sure we’ve got what we need when spring gets here,” he answered.
“Right now, I don’t care how . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Are Celeste and Mandy all right? Are you angry because something happened to one of them?”
“I wouldn’t be out here if something like that happened—and I would be grieving, not going crazy on a rotten sofa,” I snapped, then cried harder because he was just being kind and I had been hateful.
“Okay, then.” He pulled me closer. “Just let it all out.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing would come out. How could I ever explain to him how I felt with mere words when I couldn’t wrap my mind around the anger?
“I found a l-letter . . .” I stammered. “My mother . . . wrote it . . . when . . .” I stopped and looked around for a tissue.
Devon reached over and grabbed a roll of paper towels from the worktable. “Your mother wrote you a letter, right?”
I took a deep breath and nodded as I peeled off several of the sheets and wiped my cheeks, then blew my nose. I didn’t even try to be ladylike, and Celeste and Mandy probably heard the noise all the way back at the house.
“She wrote it when she was dying and hid it in a file,” I answered. “I was probably supposed to find it when I needed my birth certificate for something, but . . .”
“But you haven’t needed it?” Devon asked.
“That’s right, and . . .” A lump caught in my throat. “She loved me, but she never showed it much, and I can’t forgive her.”
Devon pushed my hair back behind my ear and said, “She’s your mother, darlin’. She is supposed to love you.”
I threw the paper towel on the floor. “I wanted to know that before she died, not all these years later.”
“Maybe you better start at the beginning of this story,” he suggested.
“It’s like this . . .” I went on to tell him about my parents’ loveless marriage and the circumstances of my birth. “And now, I’m almost convinced that Celeste is my half-sister.”
“That’s easy enough to prove or disprove. Just send in a familial DNA test. You can get one of those back in a week or less,” he said.
“We’re going to do that—but do I tell Celeste what I suspect now or wait for proof? How’s it going to affect her, knowing that she was raised right here on Meadow Falls with a father who didn’t even acknowledge that she was his child?”
“You can cross that bridge when the results come back,” he said. “And from what you just told me, you were raised by a father who didn’t want you, either.”
He tipped my chin up with his free hand and gazed right into my eyes. I barely had time to moisten my lips when his mouth closed over mine, and suddenly, nothing seemed to be so terrible anymore. The temperature seemed to get hotter and hotter with each kiss until, when I finally pulled away, I was panting.
“Did that take your mind off your troubles?” he asked.
“This is not a joking matter—but yes, for a minute, it did.” I remembered what Mandy had said about love and hate not living in the same heart. Evidently, neither could anger and a flaming desire for more than kisses, but I wasn’t going to admit that to my pretend boyfriend.
“Your lips are all puffy, and your eyes are dreamy now, instead of filled with anger.” Devon chuckled.
“I guess that means I should wait awhile before I go back to the house?” I was shocked that my hissy fit had ended with the kisses and was all gone, but even more so that I could flirt with Devon.
But I did not regret slashing the sofa into rags.
Chapter Eighteen
DNA kits were paid for, and extra money added for rush delivery by bedtime that evening. Keeping the news of the letter and of my suspicions from Mandy and Celeste wasn’t easy. Not telling them about my memory of my father and how I had destroyed the old sofa was even tougher. Keeping quiet about the make-out session with Devon was no problem at all.
When I awoke the next morning, I got out of bed and pulled back the drapes covering the french doors that opened out onto the balcony. A blanket of white covered the ground, and even my footprints from going out to the workshop and back had been filled in and erased. The sun wasn’t even a tiny sliver of orange on the eastern horizon yet, but the quarter moon and stars did what they could to lighten the day. The storm had passed—at least the physical one.
