Heart and Home (9 page)

“No, Janice, I couldn’t.
She’d probably want you to have those things.”

A short chuckle escaped me.
“Becky, my mom knew I was probably the last person on earth who’d want any of
that stuff. I am probably the least crafty girl in the world.”

“But don’t you think you
might like to try it someday?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I shook
my head quickly. I’d never been into crafts, not like my mother was. The real
truth was I didn’t really even know if I was crafty because on several
occasions when she offered to teach me to crochet or stitch needlepoint with
her, I hid my face in a book. “I really don’t think I’ll have time, and
besides, I really have a strong feeling that she would want you to have those
things.”

Her face was a mixture of
confusion and gratitude, and for a moment I thought for sure she was going to
start crying. “You really think so?”

I nodded.

“Well, I guess I could. I
mean, what if I just hold onto it, you know, and if you ever changed your
mind…”

I could tell I wasn’t going
to get away as easily, so I agreed. “You could do that, and if I ever get a
hankering to do some creative memory keeping you’ll be the first person I
call.”

It felt good when we both
started to laugh again, and I understood why my mother spent time with Becky.
Becky was a good person, the type of person you’d want to laugh with, and
though spending an hour with her having coffee didn’t exactly make me an expert
on her, she definitely had a knack for getting me to open up in ways I hadn’t done
in years. When she rose and went to the stovetop to cut a pan of brownies, I
worked up the courage to ask her a couple of the things gnawing away at me.

“Becky, I do have one
question, but you have to swear the fact that I even asked doesn’t leave this
kitchen.”

Her face became serious when
she turned toward me, and if she hadn’t been carrying that plate of brownies
she probably would have crossed her heart and hoped to die. “Sure, anything.”

I chewed the corner of my
mouth for a minute, and tried to figure out why I even wanted to know. I felt
her prodding gaze on me, but didn’t look up when I asked, “What’s the deal with
Troy Kepner these days?”

She placed the brownies in
between us and said, “Help yourself.” As I reached for the plate I noticed her
expression shifted from serious to playful, eyes shining with excitement as she
asked, “What do you want to know about him?”

“Well, for starters, did he
ever marry old Sonya Whatsherface?”

Becky took a brownie and sat
back with wide, smiling eyes. When she shook her head the loose tendrils of
hair jostled around her face. “Sonya Hardy went off to college in California.
Last I heard she hasn’t been back since, not even to visit. She and Troy broke
up long before graduation. In fact, I think she went out to California with
Lance Lyons, but he came back before the end of that summer.”

“Did he marry at all?”

“Troy? Nah,” she shook her
head. “He pretty much keeps to himself. Don’t get me wrong, he shows up at all
the carnivals and festivals with his mom, and he helps out around town quite a
bit, always lending a hand with big volunteer projects and stuff.” She pinched
off a piece of brownie and tossed it into her mouth. “He’s always got a smile
for everyone, and all that, but I haven’t seen him with anyone for years.”

“Oh,” I nodded. “That’s too
bad.” I thought of him standing above me and tending to me with such gentleness
after I fainted, and for a moment I felt incredibly sad knowing someone so
gentle was alone. On the other hand there was a sense of excitement inside of
me when I realized if I ever considered sticking around, I might actually take
a chance on someone like Troy.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “He’s
been a bit of a loner, I guess.”

“You mean since his father
died?”

“Yeah, and no,” she shook
her head. “He did come home for the funeral, and he helped get some things in
order. He actually hired some guys from out of town to take care of the farm,
but his mom had an accident and all I know is she nearly died. That was when he
came back permanently, and I think that was when he really just sort of took to
himself.”

Guilt tingled inside as I
revisited earlier thoughts I’d entertained about my dad. He was still young,
yes, but the work he did was painstaking, and my mother took good care of him
for over thirty years. What if something happened to him? Sure, he could tell
me things would be all right, he’d get on fine, but how could he know that for
sure?

“Janice?” Becky turned her
head to look into my face. “Are you okay?”

I shook my head, not sure if
anything would ever be okay again. “I was just thinking about something my dad
said yesterday.”

She allowed me silence, and
didn’t pry, but after a few moments curiosity seemed to get the best of her.
“So, what made you ask about Troy?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged.
“I’ve run into him a few times since I’ve been back. I was just a little
curious.”

“You’d be crazy not to be
curious,” she grinned. “I mean, he was cute when we were in high school, but
now…” She didn’t need to finish her sentence. I knew exactly what she meant.
There was something incredibly sexy about Troy Kepner, and the more I thought
about him, the harder it was to keep from wanting to get to bottom of that
mysterious appeal.

As the chewy fudge flavor of
brownie melted in my mouth, I remembered having read somewhere about chocolate
releasing the same kind of chemical into the brain that was released when a
person experienced the sensations that came with falling in love. For a moment,
the chocolate made thoughts of Troy even more exciting, but I kept that to
myself.

“Well, there is no denying
it. He is attractive.” I admitted. “But I am not in a place right now where I
could even allow myself to get close to anyone, especially someone who lived so
far away from me.”

She was quiet a moment, as
if lamenting. “So when are you planning on going back to the city?”

“Probably Sunday morning. My
boss is already hammering the voodoo doll for me calling in my vacation time
this week.”

“Well, we should get
together again before you go back,” she straightened up in her seat. “Maybe you
could go out for drinks with us tomorrow night.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the
thought of a night out on the town with a bunch of people I hardly knew felt
like lead in my stomach. “I have a lot to do.”

“Come on, Janice. It’ll be
fun. There are four of us from my scrapbooking group that meet up every Tuesday
night for drinks over at the Classic Cat’s Café just outside of town.”

I started to protest again,
but I was learning firsthand what marriage and family had done to shy little
Becky Kaufman’s personality. “I don’t really know anyone around here anymore.”

“What better way to
reacquaint yourself than getting out?”

“I’d feel weird.”

“No, you won’t! I promise
you will have a great time. Come on.” There was a touch of hope in her
insistent plea, and I could tell that no amount of argument would deter her. I
envisioned her showing up at the house anyway and insisting I tag along in
front of my dad, who would immediately tack himself onto her campaign and shove
me out the door.

I hesitated for a moment,
and then decided I could always cancel at the last minute if I felt too weird.
“All right, I’ll tag along.”

Becky clapped her hands
together, which made me laugh as she said, “Yay! You won’t regret it, I
promise. We always have a great time.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

“Girl, we’re going to have
so much fun that you’ll never want to go back to that lonely old city again!”

On top of my reservations
about leaving my father alone, Becky’s promise to make Sonesville appealing
should have scared the hell out of me, and maybe it did just a little bit. I
knew though that my job was my life. It had been that way for over three years.
It would only be a matter of time before the journalist within started to draw
me back to the action of the city.

Chapter Nine

It was just going on three
o’clock when I finally left Becky’s house and headed for home. I don’t know why
I was so shocked by the good time we had getting to know each other again, and
while I was skeptical when she first invited me out with her friends Tuesday
night, I knew it was going to be a great time. I hadn’t laughed or enjoyed
myself that openly since college, and even then it had been the moment more
than the company I’d kept.

From inside my purse I heard
the chirp of my phone, and I reached in to bring it out. I was just nearing the
Sonesville Standard
building, and so
I slowed down and pulled up alongside the curb. The screen didn’t reveal the
phone number, but I flipped it open anyway and lifted it to my ear. “Janice
McCarty?”

I waited for a response as
static crackled through the speaker. Rolling my eyes, I repeated my hello and
glanced up at the opposite end of the marquis in front of the old building. It
once read the same on both sides, but someone clever had gotten to the other
side. They even brought in letters from another sign that were smaller than the
originals. The end result read: LOOC INTO UR SOLE, and the mediocre spelling
made me roll my eyes.

“Hello? Look, the static is
making it impossible to hear you, I’m hanging up.” I snapped the phone shut and
leaned back to stare at the sign for a moment. I was surprised when I felt the
same numbing dizziness that knocked me for a loop at my mother’s funeral start
to creep across the top of my skull. I blinked a few times to try and shake it
off, but it only increased until the letters on the sign seemed to dance around
on the marquis in front of me.

My face started to tingle,
and I was glad that I already pulled over before the strange sensation started
to overtake me. The last thing I needed was to faint again, especially while I
was driving. Reaching up to touch my face, I pressed fingertips into my temples
and willed myself to stay focused as I dropped my head back against the
headrest and closed my eyes.

Maybe I was coming down with
something, or maybe it was an allergy of some kind, I reasoned. I clenched my
back teeth tightly together and ignored the feeling of being watched as a car
passed by on the street. It was worse than fainting, I realized, because it
just felt like I was going to, but nothing else seemed to happen. It was like
all my senses spun on some strange axis inside of me, out of control until I
felt like I was going to be sick. Blinking my eyes opened, I glanced sidelong
as another curious passerby strained their neck to see who pulled over in front
of the
Standard
building

I won’t lie. There was a
huge part of me that wanted to start them all talking with a flip of the bird.
In the city, I could have died in my car and not a single person would have
dared to bother me. In Sonesville, it was like some chivalric code was embedded
into the DNA of every citizen that prompted them all to stop and make sure you
didn’t need help if you were pulled over alongside the road.

It was only a matter of time
before there was a knock on my window. I needed a moment to pull myself
together, so I drew in a deep breath and held it for a moment. I released the
breath and repeated the whole process again, but total relaxation was
impossible against all the thoughts scurrying through my mind. I couldn’t stop
thinking about what everyone was going to say, what they were all thinking as
they drove by and saw me sitting on the roadside like that. If it kept up, I’d
wind up at the doctor, and the last thing I needed was to visit a doctor while
still in Sonesville. My entire medical record would be a matter of public
chatter before I ever got a diagnosis.

I could just make out the
shape of another car coming down the street and I got the feeling that this was
the one curious do-gooder who would pull over to check on me. It was a
dangerous move and under the circumstances I probably shouldn’t have driven,
but I put my signal on and willed myself to stay conscious at least until I got
home. The turn signal was enough to deter the couple in the Subaru Outback from
stopping, and though against my better judgment, I pulled out behind them and
tried to ignore the eerie numbness that crawled along my face.

It took all of my
concentration to stay on the road, and I hadn’t even noticed that the more time
I spent driving, the better I started to feel. By the time I turned onto Maple
Drive, there was nothing left but a subtle tingling sensation in my face. My
family’s house loomed in the distance, and I crawled toward my parking space at
the edge of the curb. I steadied myself, and then got out of the car. Fresh air
filled my lungs, and as I started walking toward the front porch, the dizziness
ebbed completely. I paused to grab the mail from the box, and with one hand
turned the key in front door to let myself inside.

“Dad, are you home?” He was
probably in the kitchen fixing himself a sandwich, as he often did after work,
only there was no trace of him at all as I ducked in to check. I scanned the
room for his lunchbox, but before I noticed whether it was there or not a heavy
thud sounded upstairs above where I stood.

I darted toward the
staircase and called out, “Dad? Are you all right?”

Panic spread through me as I
took the stairs two at a time. I began checking each room, starting at my
bedroom first, moving on to the bathroom, then my parents’ bedroom and finally
pausing outside the door to my mother’s sewing room. I didn’t know if my dad
cleaned up the glass from Saturday night, so I opened slowly and scanned the
floor for shards. The floor was spotless save for the piles of totes she kept
her materials and crafts in. In fact, I stepped into the room, and quickly
discovered that was what toppled over. A stack of totes were uneasily balanced
and the top one, filled with swatches of fabric, tumbled down and spilled out
onto the floor.

As I walked in to start
picking up the pieces of fabric, I noticed an eerie, electrical hum, and
scanned the room for its source. Her sewing machine was covered in its case,
but as I neared the sewing table I knew the sound was coming from within.
Unlatching the cover, I lifted it slowly, a gasp catching in the back of my
throat when the lights on the dial revealed themselves. The needle arm moved
slowly downward, only a fraction of movement, but both the humming and the
movement stopped when I pulled the chair out from the table. My only thought,
as I turned off the power and unplugged the pedal, was that Dad must have moved
the chair onto the floor pedal when he was cleaning up the glass, but how could
he have not heard the motor start to hum?

“Mother, if you’re trying to
tell me something,” I muttered under my breath, “you’re going about it the
wrong way.”

As if in answer, another
tote tumbled from the top of the stack, spilling out pre-cut quilt squares in a
fan of twisted diamonds. All of the hair on the back of my neck rose as chills
shot through me. I began backing toward the door, and let out a shriek when my
body came in contact with the form of my father, who managed to sneak up the
stairs without making a sound. We both tumbled backward into the wall in the
hallway.

“My god!” I clutched at my
chest. “What is wrong with you, sneaking up on people like that? Are you crazy?
Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“Who the hell’s sneaking?”
He shook his head, a mischievous grin apparent at the corners of his mouth. “I
clomped up those stairs just like I do every day, and in these boots, who can
be quiet?”

“Well, I was already on
edge,” I explained. “When I came in, I thought you were already up here because
there was all kinds of racket up here. So I came up to check it out and found
Mom’s sewing machine running.”

“Huh,” he glanced over my
shoulder toward the sewing room, his curious eyes narrowed over the side of the
room where her machine was. “That’s odd.”

“My guess is, she must have
left it on the last time she used it, and when you cleaned up the glass
yesterday, you pushed the chair in on top of the pedal or something.”

“Hm.” He started to move
into the room. “Yeah, that’s strange,” he noted. “It was making a weird noise
yesterday, so I unplugged it.”

Once more, the hair on the
back of my neck rose in answer to the chills racing down my spine. “Don’t mess
with me, Dad.”

He turned a serious gaze
over his shoulder at me, “I’m not messing with you. I unplugged it.”

“Oh that’s too weird.” I
backed away from the doorway, holding my hands up in surrender. “That’s freaky,
Dad. The lights were on, the needle was moving.” I assured him. “I just
unplugged it myself.”

“Well,” he looked around the
room and swallowed unnecessarily. I don’t know which bothered me worse, his
uncertainty, or all of the conclusions my own mind was jumping to. “It could be
anything,” he finally decided. “Maybe I thought I was unplugging it and really
I plugged it in.” But the look on his face read differently, like he was only
saying whatever he thought I needed to hear to feel better about things. “It’s
been a long week. We’ve both been through so much.”

“Dad,” I started, but what
did I say? That I thought my dead mother was trying to communicate with us from
the great beyond? With sewing machine plugs and old totes full of fabric, it
hardly seemed likely, but then I thought about the odd writing on the bathroom
mirror and the face in the window during that storm the night of her funeral.
“Dad, we have to be careful,” I finally said. “Leaving something like that
plugged in could burn out the motor and start a fire.”

“I know,” he sounded far
away when he answered me. “I know.”

He started back down the
hallway as I bent down to start cleaning up the fabric pieces scattered all
over the floor. Alone there in the room, I closed my eyes and tried to see if I
could feel her. I know it was stupid, I mean if she was really there, wouldn’t
I know? Chills flashed across my chest, rippled down my back and the hair on my
arms stood up on end, but aside from that I felt nothing at all. I stayed that
way for a moment, hunkered down on the floor with my eyes closed, waiting for
another sign. When nothing came, I stood up and looked around the room one last
time before I backed out and closed the door.

Dad and I didn’t mention the
sewing machine incident again. Even at dinner it was like we were both thinking
the same thing, but didn’t want to make it reality by discussing it any
further. For the most part, my father had always been a practical person, a
non-believing in stuffy institutions like religion, he’d never have been caught
dead talking about or to God, or any of that other nonsense. I wondered if the
possibility of my mother reaching out to us would put a dent in his philosophy.
Stranger things had been known to happen, like his recent fascination with
church.

I started to protest when he
said he was leaving to go down to the bowling alley with some guys from work
that started a league, but in the end I realized it was probably better for him
to start getting out more. If I was going back to the city by the end of the
week, he was definitely going to need as much company as he could find.

He was pulling into his
flannel as I walked my plate to the sink. “Hey, what did you do with
The Standard
?”

“
The Standard
?” He chuckled. “You really are a city slicker, aren’t
you?”

I paused in mid-plate scrape
to look over at him, “What’s so funny?”

“Janice, the
Sonesville Standard
went out of
business over six months ago.”

“Seriously?”

He nodded as he stood up and
began toward me with this plate. “Yes, ma’am. The new owners couldn’t get
enough sponsors to keep the thing running, so they shut down.”

“That’s too bad,” I
lamented, suddenly feeling guilty about all those times I’d referred to it as
an inferior paper simply because it had been all I’d really known before moving
to the city. “I was going to clip Mom’s obituary out.”

“It was actually in the
Sun Daily
last week. I know a guy at
work that just piles ‘em up. I can ask if he’ll give me that day’s paper if you
want.”

“I would like to have it,” I
nodded.

“I’ll ask him tomorrow,” he
started for the door, and then turned back to look at me. “Are you sure you
don’t want to tag along? It’s probably been ages since you were bowling.”

“I’ll pass, Dad. Thanks
anyway.” Bowling. It was the big thing to do in Sonesville. Hell, it was one of
the only things to do in Sonesville.

“Suit yourself.” He
shrugged. “I’ll probably be back around ten or so.”

“Have fun.”

The moment he left, and I
was alone in that kitchen, I had second thoughts about not going with him. Even
though the majority of the afternoon’s shock wore off, I was still a little
shaken over the whole thing, and then there was the whole question of that
near-fainting episode while driving past the
Standard
building. That combined with actually fainting was
starting to concern me. If it happened again while I was in town, I’d have to
see a doctor, but if I could just make it until Sunday without another episode,
I could put off seeing a doctor until I was back in the city.