Beneath a Southern Sky (8 page)

By the time Daria picked Natalie up from her parents’ and fixed herself a sandwich for supper, she was utterly exhausted. She wasn’t sure how she was going to do this all over again tomorrow, but she was strangely excited at the prospect.

The following morning found her under Carla Eldridge’s tutelage again. Carla, the clinic’s lone technician, was a single mom herself, with two boys in elementary school. With her petite figure and her pixie haircut, she would have been perfectly typecast as Peter Pan.

“So your first day wasn’t exactly a breeze?” she said to Daria as the two grabbed a quick lunch behind the reception counter.

“Not exactly—I don’t mind telling you I was scared to death.”

“Cole said you did a great job.”

“Cole?”

“Dr. Hunter.”

“Oh. Is everybody on a first-name basis here?”

Carla nodded and mumbled over a bite of celery, “Oh, don’t even try to call Cole ‘Dr. Hunter.’ He might let you get by with just plain ‘Doc,’ but he asks everybody to call him Cole. I’m surprised he hasn’t corrected you yet.”

“Well, I haven’t exactly
called
him anything yet.” She smiled. “So… he said I did all right?” she asked coyly, fishing.

“He said you were great.”

“Well, surgery sure wasn’t in the job description. But to tell you the truth, I did kind of enjoy it, at least when it was all over and I saw that everything came out okay.”

“I don’t want to scare you off, but you’ll be surprised what a receptionist-slash-bookkeeper does around here.”

Carla’s wry grin worried Daria a little, but she chose not to ask her coworker to elaborate. She supposed she’d find out soon enough.

“You haven’t met Travis yet, have you?”

Daria shook her head.

“You’ll like him, too. He’s very patient, like Cole. They never try to pull the ‘we’re the big bad doctors and you’re the lowly peons who work for us’ routine. Even though we
are
the lowly peons who work for them.” She laughed.

While Daria finished her sandwich, Carla filled her in on the office politics and small-town gossip. Their lunch was interrupted several times by customers calling to make appointments or coming in to buy supplies.

The day flew by and then the week, and before she knew it, she had settled into a comfortable routine. Because her off-duty hours were taken up with caring for her daughter, the clinic was really Daria’s only social life. She and Natalie attended worship services with her parents each Sunday morning, but she’d felt so uncomfortable the one time she’d attended the singles’ class there that she’d never gone back. Yet she couldn’t have chosen better friends than her coworkers at the clinic. She genuinely liked everyone she worked with, and there was an easy rapport among the staff. Day by day, she was feeling more confident in performing her duties—even when they sometimes included very un-receptionist-like tasks.

Natalie was growing like a Kansas sunflower and seemed to be thriving under her Grandmother Haydon’s care. Daria’s parents had adjusted to her and Natalie moving out. She even thought they were secretly happy to have their house back to themselves. Her mother helped her sew new curtains for the apartment—no small feat since there were fourteen large windows to cover. Together they also sewed slipcovers and plump pillows for an old sofa her brother had found at a garage sale. Between her family’s generosity, flea-market finds, and several castoffs on loan from the Janeks’ attic, she managed to assemble a cozy mishmash of furniture and dishes. In no time, the apartment had become a warm haven to come home to each evening. The ache of loneliness was abating and, though Nate still seemed very real to her in many ways, Bristol was slowly becoming her world, her reality. There were times when it seemed as though her life with Nathan in Colombia had been nothing more than a pleasant dream.

Seven

A
s Daria pulled into the driveway one sweltering June evening after an especially exhausting day at the clinic, she spotted her elderly landlady waving from the garden behind the house.

“Yoo-hoo! Daria!”

Daria cut the engine and removed the keys from the Toyota her father had found for her at auction. Going around to the passenger door, she released Natalie’s seat belt. Then scooping the little girl up from the car seat with one arm, she returned Dorothy Janek’s greeting.

“Can you smile for Dorothy?” she asked Natalie. “Come on, give us a smile.” Smiling was a recently learned social skill, but one that she didn’t always perform on demand.

Dorothy brushed the garden dirt from her hands and bustled over to the car. “Why don’t you have supper with us tonight, sweetheart? I’ve made a pot roast that is more than Kirk and I can ever eat ourselves.”

Supper had become a frequent invitation and one that Daria usually accepted with deep gratitude and more than a little guilt.

“Are you sure, Dorothy? You just fed us Monday night—”

“Oh, nonsense,” Dorothy argued. “You work all day. You don’t want to come home and cook every night too, now do you?”

“You’ve got a point there,” Daria told her, smiling. “Thank you, Dorothy. We’d love to. Wouldn’t we, Natalie?”

The little girl rewarded them with a wide, toothless grin and a vigorous kicking of her pudgy feet.

Dorothy laughed and clapped her hands together, delighted.

With Kirk and Dorothy Janek living right below her, Daria felt completely safe in her little apartment. The elderly couple had adopted her and Natalie as family, and they were as proud of Natalie’s latest accomplishment as any grandparents would be.

“Come down around six and help me set the table,” Dorothy’s voice brought her out of her reverie.

Daria gave her landlady a quick hug, sandwiching Natalie between them. “Thanks. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Ah, you’d get along just fine and dandy! But since you do have me, you may as well take advantage of me,” the old woman added with a twinkle in her eye.

“Natalie Joan!”

Daria’s shriek brought her daughter to an abrupt halt at the edge of the stairway. Barely six months old, Natalie had recently mastered an odd belly-flop crawl that had her scooting across the apartment’s hardwood floors like a little lizard.

Natalie glanced up at her mother, oblivious to the cause of Daria’s alarm. Daria dropped the basket of clean laundry she’d been carrying on her hip and flew across the room to rescue her daughter from certain disaster.

Natalie immediately screamed to be let down, furious that her progress had been impeded. The child had a stubborn streak in her that Daria was certain had not come from her side of the family.

She swung Natalie in the air, trying to distract her with her favorite acrobatics routine. “Nattie, Nattie,” she cooed. “What is Mommy going to do with you? Now we’re just going to have to make a Wal-Mart run and get a gate for those stairs.”

Fortunately the staircase balusters were spaced closely enough to prevent her from slipping between them. A simple safety gate would keep her from tumbling down for now, but how she would cope when Natalie started walking—or heaven forbid, climbing—she couldn’t imagine.

She sighed. “Come on, sweetie, let’s go get your shoes on.”

Hearing her favorite word, Natalie bounced happily on Daria’s hip. To her,
shoes
meant they were going someplace.

Twenty minutes later, Daria was trying to keep Natalie’s hands inside the shopping cart with one hand and attempting to inspect the selection of child safety gates with the other. She stooped to pick up Natalie’s stuffed bunny for the third time.

“Natalie Camfield, this is not a fun game for Mommy!” Natalie gave her a toothless grin and tossed the bunny over the side of the cart again.

Daria checked her watch. How would she ever get everything done? She had three loads of laundry waiting for her at the apartment, this gate had to be installed immediately if she didn’t want to spend the rest of the week carrying her daughter on her hip, and on top of all that she was behind on the billing at the clinic. She’d brought the laptop home from the office, hoping to get caught up tonight. The chances of that happening were looking slimmer by the minute.

As much as she adored being a mother, sometimes she longed to be relieved of the financial burden of being the sole provider, to be able to stay home with Natalie and have time to run a simple errand without throwing her whole schedule out of whack.

Deciding on a safety gate, she balanced the unwieldy box across the top of her cart. She grabbed a package of disposable diapers and a few other items as she passed the baby department. By the time she got to the parking lot, packages were sliding everywhere. She made sure Natalie was safely strapped into the cart, then, using one hand to steady the bulky box that held the gate, she turned to open the trunk of her car.

She had just managed to get the key into the lock when she felt the box sliding out from under her hand. She whirled around to grab it and came face to face with Cole Hunter.

He held the box securely in his arms, smiling his boyish smile. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you, but you looked like you could use some help.”

Her heart started to beat faster. “Oh, hi Cole. I could use an extra pair of hands.”

He balanced the box between one knee and an elbow and wiggled ten fingers at her. “One extra pair of hands, at your service.”

She smiled. “Thank you.”

Cole helped her load the packages in the trunk, then went around to the front of the cart where Natalie sat in one of her rare patient moods, enthralled by the activity in the busy parking lot.

“Hey, little girl! What’s up?” Cole cooed, leaning down to the baby’s eye level. “Is your mommy teaching you how to shop till you drop? Can’t get started on that skill soon enough, you know.” He glanced up at Daria with a wicked grin.

“Very funny,” she said. But she couldn’t help smiling back.

“Here,” he said, inspecting the straps that secured Natalie’s infant carrier to the shopping cart. “If you’ll show me how this works, I’ll help you get her in the car.”

While Natalie jabbered loudly at them, they worked together to get her buckled into the backseat of Daria’s car.

“All fingers safely out of the way?” he asked before he carefully shut the door. “I like your new car, by the way,” he told Daria.

“Thanks. It’s not really new, but hey, it’s mine. Well, mine and the bank’s.”

“Yeah, don’t I know how that goes.”

After a moment of awkward silence, he said, “I’d better let you go.”

“Thanks so much for coming to my rescue, Cole. You didn’t have to do that.”

“My pleasure.” His mock salute turned into a full-fledged wave. “See you tomorrow.”

“You too. Thanks again.”

As she backed out of the parking space, she caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror and was embarrassed to realize that she was blushing.
Good grief. I’m worse than Jennifer
. She replayed her encounter with Cole over and over in her mind as she drove home. He was so sweet with Natalie. And so thoughtful to help her with her packages. The sound of his deep, gentle voice warmed her heart at the same time it made her ache for a voice she would never hear again.

Sitting in the quiet of her living room that evening with crickets chirping outside the open windows, Natalie tucked safely in bed in her nursery, and the laptop open in front of her, Daria’s life in Colombia with Nate seemed an eternity ago.

That first July anniversary passed quietly. The date of Nathan’s death. Sometimes it frightened her that she was forgetting him. She could still close her eyes and conjure up his face, but sometimes she knew that all she was seeing was the photograph on her nightstand. The camera had locked onto a tanned, blond man sporting a handsome cleft in his chin and flashing white, even teeth. But she knew that the camera had failed to capture the split second before the shutter released, when Nate had hammed a goofy grin, or the moment after, when his expression had turned serious, trying to explain to her how to set the shutter speed. She felt panicked sometimes that she couldn’t see his face clearly in those daily memories anymore.

And his voice. She was losing that, too. She knew there were some cassette recordings Nate had made in Colombia, documenting his findings about the dialect and customs—things he’d wished Evangeline Magrit, the former missionary to the Timoné, had left for him and Daria. The tapes were stored away with the few belongings she had brought back from Colombia, but she hadn’t had the courage to get them out and play them yet.

She desperately needed to do that. Because sometimes, to her dismay, when she sat in the quiet of evening and her thoughts turned to Nathan, the voice that came from his lips in her memories was the voice of another man.

She didn’t want to admit it, even to herself, but she knew to whom that voice belonged. Colson Hunter. And knowing made her feel like the worst kind of traitor.