Daniel’s first thought was that she was rejecting his declaration of love. Then he realized why Jo had broken away from him. The ground was rapidly covering over with a thin layer of pea-size hail. He knew as well as Jo did that a hailstorm could virtually destroy an entire harvest in a matter of minutes. He pulled on the slicker she’d wrapped around his shoulders and took off after her.
When he reached the bog, he saw Jo still running. Up one dike and down the next until, exhausted, she stopped in the middle of the ten acres and bent double, her hands resting on her knees, her howl a protest against the already waning storm.
As suddenly as it had begun, the hailstorm was over. But the damage was done. As the last gasps of lightning flashed across the sky and the storm settled into a steady rainfall, he saw that the vines nearest him had been stripped bare of their berries. Berries that now lay like drops of blood on a bed of white pellets.
He slid down the side of a dike into the nearest bed to take a closer look. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked.
It was worse.
Not only had the storm stripped the berries from the vines, it had ripped off the uprights that bore the new growth for next season’s crop. Insurance would pay for the damage to this crop, but next year?
What does next year matter? he wondered.
Daniel had always thought that this would be the last year for the bog. All Mother Nature had done was make that a certainty. So what’s your problem? he asked himself. This is what you wanted—needed—to persuade Ella.
But Daniel felt such sorrow, such a sense of loss. He felt as if he’d been kicked in his stomach. He felt as if a part of who he was had been taken. He sank to his knees under the weight of his grief and let his tears mingle with the relentless rain.
“Dad?”
Daniel let the melting, icy pellets and berries he’d scooped up trickle back to the ground as he stood up. “Over here,” he called, and saw Jazz and Matt hurrying toward him.
“How bad is it?” Matt asked as he offered Daniel a hand back up to the dike.
“I don’t know. I stopped here. Jo’s…” He motioned to where she had stopped and saw that she had retraced her steps.
“We’ll have to flood the beds and skim off the destroyed fruit,” she said.
“How bad is the damage?” Matt repeated.
Jo shrugged and took a moment to look out over the acreage. “Seventy-five—maybe eighty percent gone,” she said, and her voice cracked.
“At least the insurance…” Daniel began.
“Ella didn’t take insurance this year.” Jo refused to look at him as she headed back toward the cottage.
Matt and Jazz looked to Daniel for direction. “There’s nothing we can do tonight,” he said. “Might as well get some sleep.”
“I’ll round up a crew and be here first thing tomorrow,” Matt promised.
Daniel nodded but he barely heard the boy. His attention was on Jo. She was striding back to the cottage, her posture so stiff and straight that she looked as if she were made of wood.
“Go on up to the house, honey,” Daniel said. “I’ll get your things from the cottage.”
“Is Jo okay?”
“She will be,” he assured her. “We’re all going to be fine, Jazz. You go on, now. I’ll be up in a little while.”
But when he reached the cottage, Jo met him at the door. She was holding Jazz’s carry-on bag. “I packed up her things from the bathroom, her nightclothes and laptop. She can get the rest tomorrow,” she said.
Daniel studied her features under the low beam of the porch light. It was like looking into empty space. Her face betrayed no emotion, her normally lively and expressive eyes were clouded over.
“Jo?”
“Good night, Daniel. We’ll talk tomorrow.” She pressed the bag into his hands and closed the door.
Even as the light flicked off and he heard Matt drive away, he continued to stand there.
“Dad? Maybe if I stayed with Jo tonight?”
He handed Jazz her things. “Go on, now. Get some rest,” he said. “Jo just needs some time.”
Reluctantly, Jazz left and Daniel tapped lightly on the cottage door. “Jo?”
No answer, and yet he had the feeling she had heard him.
“You might as well open the door so we can talk about this.” He waited. “I’m not leaving. I’ll sit right here on this old, creaky swing until you let me in.” He sat down and pushed off with one foot to set the swing in motion and make his point. He saw that the window was open, and kept talking. “Maybe in the light of day we’ll see that it’s not as bad as we think. I remember one time when I was about ten and we had a hailstorm, there was a lot of bruised fruit we could still salvage. It’s not like Mom sells her berries to the fresh market from some roadside stand.”
The complete stillness within the house told him she was there and she was listening so he kept talking. “Look, we’ve all been wondering how to work things out for the best. Maybe this is God’s way of showing us a direction. Maybe…”
The door opened with a bang and Jo stepped onto the porch, her fists clenched, her feet bare. “Don’t you dare make light of this, Daniel,” she ordered, and he saw that her grief had evolved into the inevitable anger that comes with dealing with a disaster you did not cause and cannot fix.
“I’m not making light of it at all. I’m serious.”
“You think God did this? You think He made Ella fall and then have the stroke and now this? What kind of God do you believe in?”
“A loving one,” he replied. “Same God you and Mom believe in. Same one I hope Jazz has faith in. Why are you so angry? This wasn’t anyone’s fault. Certainly not yours. There was nothing you could have done.”
“I promised Ella,” she whispered and covered her face with both hands. “And we were almost there. Because she knew…she understood…”
Daniel was off the swing instantly. He pulled her stiff, unyielding form into his arms and held her until he felt the beginnings of her letting go. “Understood what?”
Jo sucked in a deep breath and raised her face to look up at him. “When I first came here and took the job, Ella told me that this might well be her last harvest. Not that she was planning that, but at her age she felt it was prudent to think of every season as potentially the last. She wanted it to be the best. I promised her it would be.”
“But Mom knows…”
“I wanted this to make up for…” Jo said at the same moment.
“For what?”
She stilled and then shook off the question. “It doesn’t matter.” She pulled away and sat on the edge of the swing.
“Tomorrow we’ll flood the bog and get this cleaned up. Then we can see what’s left to salvage.”
“Then I’ll wait to tell Mom. No sense coming at her with this on top of everything she’s already dealing with until we know the whole story.”
“How do you think she’ll take it?”
Daniel sat down next to her. “Like she takes everything—in stride. Mom is amazingly resilient in the face of any calamity. I remember when Dad died, her sisters came rushing up here, making all sorts of plans to stay with her and eventually have her move closer to them. She was having none of that. ‘Star Pond is our home,’ she told them, and that pretty much ended any discussion.”
“But now, with this on top of the stroke, how can she stay here?”
“She has me and she has Jazz. Surely between the three of us we can figure things out.”
Jo leaned against him and rested her head on his shoulder. “And she has me—for as long as she needs me.”
Daniel wrapped his arm around her and kissed her forehead. “That may be the best news she’s going to hear.”
In spite of Daniel’s assurances, Jo could not seem to think about anything other than the ruined crop. Through the long night she would fall into an exhausted sleep, dreaming of Daniel’s arms holding her, and then come awake. Wide-eyed, she thought of the unbelievable joy she’d felt when Daniel had announced, “I love you.” And then, as suddenly, her spirits plummeted into the depths of the despair she’d felt when those drops of rain had frozen into pellets that stung her face and bounced off the surface of her slicker like so many marbles.
She lay there reliving the run for the bog, the race to will the damage undone. And finally the reality that not just this crop was ruined but probably next season’s as well, and Ella had no way of recovering even a fraction of her losses. Jo willed herself to focus on those glorious, thrilling moments before the storm had come. He loved her.
But what does that mean? she wondered. What kind of life could we ever possibly share?
And once again joy would turn to sorrow. The storm had changed everything, although she was not at all clear how. It was a feeling—a certainty that whatever chance she and Daniel might have had had been destroyed by the hail.
Oh, dear Father, I don’t understand what You want of me. I don’t know how I can keep disappointing the people I care most about. How can I confess my love for Daniel when we have no future? How can I ever face Ella again? All she wanted was this one season—and if You were so inclined—perhaps more. But she would have settled for this one. Why take that from her?
Jo fought against her frustration and anger. The same anger she had felt when she realized her mother had died so needlessly.
“Don’t think of this as the end, Jo,” her father had counseled. “God has a plan for all our lives and you don’t yet have the entire picture for what He has planned for yours.”
Maybe Dad was right, God, but I have to say that I amstruggling mightily with finding some positive in all of this. I assume You had some solid reason for bringing Daniel into my life. Although I have to admit I don’t understand Your purpose at all. He has a child who needs his guidance—not to mention an aging mother. Or what if it’s not that You brought Daniel into my life but rather brought me to him? To help him with Ella and even Jazz, and that’s the point? But then, why let me get all romantic and involved?
She squeezed her eyes closed and then opened them wide. I could use some insight here. Please?
Daniel tossed and turned in the single bed where he’d slept through all the years he’d spent on the island. He hoped Jo was getting some rest. He knew Jazz was sleeping because he’d checked on her twice now. Surrendering to his insomnia, he kicked off the covers and sat up.
The level of grief he was experiencing was so out of proportion to the events of the evening that he struggled to put it in perspective. Of course, part of it was the fact that he understood how this would hurt his mother. He hated that her dreams had been wiped out in five minutes of hail and wind. On the other hand, at least now he could put aside the guilt he felt every time he brought up the idea of assisted living. Every time, Ella looked at him with those eyes that were far more expressive than words could ever be. A look that said he was not only betraying her. He was betraying his heritage.
Is that it? he asked himself. Am I feeling this depth of depression because of the past? My childhood spent here on Star Pond?
Daniel walked to the narrow window. He stared out through the branches of the maple tree his father had planted when he was born. How many times as a teen he had climbed out this window and down that tree to hitch a ride into town to meet his friends after curfew. He smiled at the memory, for somehow his mother always knew but never said a word to his father. “You should take a nap,” she’d say. “You were mighty restless last night.”
Restless. That had been her code word to let him know he wasn’t putting anything over on her.
And after he’d met Gloria, how often had he stood at this very window, imagining the life they would share? Coming here in every season—autumn for the harvest so his children understood his side of their heritage. Holidays and winter nights spent ice-skating on the frozen pond. And spring. There was no lovelier place on earth than Nantucket in the spring as its heavy, gray morning fogs gradually gave way to sunshine. An awakening.
Daniel saw the flicker of a light in the cottage and wondered if Jo was also struggling to sleep.
I love you.
The words had surprised him almost as much as they must have shocked her. And yet when he saw her running to him, the slicker in hand, her face wet with rain but alight with welcome, the words had come with such certainty that he would not have taken them back even if he could have.
And now?
Again that nagging feeling that somehow the storm had changed everything. Then, as if yet another bad omen, the light in the cottage went out.
Shortly after dawn Jo stood at the edge of a dike and studied the crop. She had hoped that with the coming of a new day, perhaps things would not be as bad as she had thought.
They were worse. With no more tears to shed, she sipped her coffee and stared dry-eyed at the devastation. Then she dumped the last of her coffee on the soaked, sandy ground and headed for the farmhouse.
“Good morning,” Daniel said, his eyes uncertain as he tried to read her mood. He looked like she felt. There were shadows of sleeplessness beneath his eyes and his forehead seemed permanently creased by worry lines. “How are you?” he added.
Jo shrugged and refilled her coffee mug from the pot on the counter. “Have you called the hospital?”
“Not yet.”
Jo frowned. “She’ll see the news, Daniel. You know how the media likes to play up any freak weather situation. By now somebody’s probably posted pictures on the Internet.”
“How can I tell her over the phone?”
“Then go back there and tell her, but do it today.”
“Will you come with me?”
“I have work to do here. Somebody’s got to clean up this mess. Hopefully we can salvage at least five or ten percent of the crop. At least I can give her that.” She turned her back to him, unable to face him or her defeat.
After a long moment, Daniel cleared his throat. “Jo, last night before the storm came, did you hear what I said?”
“I heard.”
“And?”
She whirled around. “Oh, Daniel, you don’t even know what you’re saying. You’ve gotten caught up in some whimsical summer romance—we both have. But it’s not real. This…” She motioned out toward the bog. “This is real.”
“Are you saying that you don’t have feelings for me?”
“Of course I do. How could I not? You and Ella and Jazz have been…”
“I’m not talking about my mother or daughter at the moment. I’m asking about your feelings for me…for us.”
I love you, she wanted to scream. Instead she turned to him and said, “There is no us, Daniel. We live in very different worlds. I will always treasure this summer and knowing you, but…”
“But what?” His voice was the one she’d heard him use when he was talking to a vendor who had not delivered what he expected.
“But other than a mutual admiration for one another, what do we really have in common, Daniel? My life is here—well, not here precisely, but with the land. The city is where you thrive. How can that work?”
He opened his mouth but nothing came out.
“And that doesn’t even begin to address the fact that Jazz is part of you. What about her needs? Her life?”
“She likes you. You’ve made a real difference to her over just a few months. Think how you might impact her life if…”
“If what?” Jo forced herself to remain calm. She felt a little as if she were back on her high school debate team, assigned the task of arguing the exact opposite of what she truly believed. “We had this summer, Daniel. Up until last night it was a wonderful time for both of us. But summers end and it’s time to move on.”
“I told you I loved you last night,” he reminded her.
“I heard you,” she said, her voice softening to barely a whisper. And as if she had willed it, the phone rang, relieving her of the need to say more.
When Daniel didn’t pick up, Jo reached for it.
“Leave it,” he growled.
“What if it’s the hospital?” Jo didn’t wait for an answer, but lifted the receiver and handed it to him, as Jazz stumbled into the kitchen and slumped into a chair.
While Daniel held a terse conversation on the phone, Jo prepared Jazz a breakfast of toast, scrambled eggs and cocoa. All the while she listened to Daniel’s end of the conversation. The caller was someone from the hospital. That much was evident.
“And you say she’s had no television news this morning?”
Jo heard the garbled reply.
“But she’s agitated? Not in pain?”
The voice on the other end became more impatient.
“What does her doctor advise?”
Short response.
“Well, try to calm her until you can reach him. Tell her I’m on my way. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
He replaced the receiver and turned to face Jazz and Jo. “Mom’s been trying to get out of bed all morning. She’s determined to get up and go somewhere but won’t give them any explanation.”
He took out his cell and started punching in numbers. “Greg? It’s Daniel. Have a car meet me at La Guardia at ten. What? Oh, yeah, I forgot. Well, make them as comfortable as possible—upgrade all the rooms and comp them some meals.” He sighed wearily. “I’ll get there as soon as I can, but I have to go to the hospital first.”
“Daddy? Is Grams okay?” Jazz asked after he ended the call.
“I’m sure she is, honey. You know how she gets when there’s unsettled weather within a fifty-mile radius. Her radar goes on high alert. I’m sure that’s it.”
“I’ll come with you,” Jazz said as she gobbled down the last of her eggs.
“No. Stay here and help Jo. I’ll call you later.”
This last comment was directed as much to Jo as it was to Jazz. Daniel kissed the top of his daughter’s head, then squeezed Jo’s hand as he headed out to the rental car.
As if her feet had a mind of their own, Jo followed him. “Daniel? She’s a strong woman. Tell her the truth and she’ll deal with it,” she advised.
He nodded and then pulled her hard against him and hugged her as if he might never let her go. “I love you,” he whispered against her temple. “I’m a grown man and I know real love when it hits me. If you love me, then we can make this work.” He gave her another squeeze and then let her go.
As he drove away, Jo placed her fingertips to her lips and blew him a kiss, but he was already gone.
The best thing about the following week was that after long hours in the bog, Jo was exhausted and had little trouble falling into a dreamless sleep. Jazz had moved back into the cottage and had been surprisingly innovative in finding ways to make herself useful.
Rather than join the rest of the crew in the bog, she spent her time in her grandmother’s kitchen, stirring up soups and casseroles from Ella’s recipes. She made cornbread to go with chili. She tried her hand at roasting a turkey breast. She invented colorful salads from the bounty that neighbors and church members shared from their gardens. And when her first attempt at making a cake from scratch turned out to be more like pudding, she laughed it off, renaming the concoction her “volcano” cake.
Daniel called several times a day but most of his news came through Jazz. “Grams sent Dad to tour those assisted living places yesterday,” she reported. “Dad says they are beyond awful—beautiful lobbies and public rooms to impress the families but behind the scenes? Not so great.”
Then on the last day of the harvest to clear the bog of the fallen berries, Jo saw a strange car pull into the drive and watched as a man and woman mounted the porch steps at the farmhouse.
“I’ll be right back,” she told Matt as she waded through the flooded bog and climbed out. There was just something about the way the couple was dressed, the way they had looked around before going up to the door that made her uneasy. She was glad to see that Jazz had not allowed them inside the house, but had invited them to sit on the porch. She was coming across the yard toward Jo.
“Who are they?” Jo asked.
“A Mr. and Mrs. Waldon.” Jazz handed Jo a business card.
Waldon Estate Auctions.
“When somebody leaves an estate it means that person’s died, right?” Jazz’s voice quavered uncertainly.
“Oh, honey, not always. I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for all of this,” Jo said as she wrapped her arm around Jazz’s shoulders and they headed back to the house.
Just then another car turned down the drive.
“Dad!” Jazz shouted and took off at a run. The couple on the porch stood up but waited where they were. Jo shaded her eyes with one hand as she tried to see Daniel through the tinted windows of the car. Another man dressed in scrubs got out of the backseat and opened the trunk. He took out a wheelchair and brought it around to the passenger side of the car and helped Ella into it as Daniel greeted Jazz with a hug. Jo’s heart quickened. Surely if Ella had come home, everything was going to be all right.
“Ella,” she called as she rushed to the older woman’s side.
“Hello, dear. Jo, this is Howard. Daniel hired him to babysit me.”
“Now, Miz Armstrong,” the nurse said with a grin, “you know I just took this gig to get over here and see Nantucket.” He grinned at Jo and shook hands with her.
“Howie Johnstone. I feel like I know you. Miz Armstrong here and her son talked about you all the way here.”
Jo felt a flush of pleasure and smiled. “Pleased to meet you, Howie.”
“Well, let’s get down to business,” Ella instructed.
To Jo’s horror, “business” turned out to be making the final plans for auctioning off the property and household goods. Ella had persuaded Daniel to let her stay on the island in return for her assurance that she would move to the assisted living facility in town.
“Why, that’s wonderful,” Jo said in spite of her struggle against the thought that Ella would end her days anywhere other than here at Star Pond.
“It’s horrible,” Jazz corrected. “Grams, you don’t belong in some old people’s home. You belong here and…”
“Oh, sweetheart, I had hoped that one day you’d come to love this place as much as I do—as your father once did. But we must be practical. With the crop destroyed and no insurance, my funds are quite limited.” She looked determined to see this through. “I need the money from the sale of this place in order to live comfortably for whatever time I have left.”
“Don’t talk that way,” Jazz protested. “You’re young. People live into their nineties these days. You’ve got tons of time and…”
“And bills have to be paid,” Ella said as she took the girl’s hand with her one good hand and calmed her. “Under the circumstances I think I’ve come out of this pretty fortunate. Now, Daniel tells me you’ve turned into quite the little chef. How about putting together some snacks for us while we grown-ups talk business?”
While Jazz did as Ella asked, Jo sat in stunned silence as Mr. Waldon produced several copies of a contract and handed the papers to Ella to sign. She scribbled her name while Daniel held the papers for her and handed them back. In a matter of minutes it was over.
“We can hold the auction two weeks from Saturday,” Mr. Waldon announced. “That gives us the time to advertise it and put together the catalog.”
“We’ll need to make an inventory of the household items and the machinery and such,” Mrs. Waldon added.
“Jo can help you with that,” Ella said. “Daniel, you and Jazz and Howard here can help me in the house, gathering the things I’ll want to keep for the move into town.”
Daniel nodded but could not seem to look at either his mother or Jo. “Come on,” he said to the Waldons. “I’ll show you around.” And without waiting to see if they followed, he marched down the porch steps and started around the side of the house.