Chapter Seven
Max had stopped by to let Dan know he was driving into Frostburg, and to find out if he or Anki needed anything in town.
But he had another reason for his visit too. Mostly, he wanted to ask Willa if Li’l Red had been giving her any problems. Anki shushed him before he had a chance to knock.
“Frannie is napping,” she said, “and Willa is out back, helping Dan in the shed.”
He might have asked how Anki was feeling if he didn’t already know. She’d sunk into another of her dark moods, as evidenced by the unemotional set to her face and her monotone words. After thanking her for the information, Max followed the flagstone path that led from the front walk to the shed. The flowers and precise cut of the grass that edged it were Willa’s work. How she managed to keep up with meals, laundry, house- and yard work while caring for Frannie and working for Emily was anyone’s guess. More amazing was the fact that long hours and hard work never seemed to dampen her pleasant spirit.
If he had to guess who’d arranged the yard tools in by-task order, he’d say that was Willa, too. Last summer, when Dan slipped from a ladder and sprained an ankle, Max had volunteered to mow the lawn; it had almost taken as long to untangle the mower’s handles from rakes, shovels, and broom handles as it had to get the job done. In the construction trailer, it never took more than five minutes for Dan to make a mess of blueprints, pencils, pens, and rulers. Yes, this systematic tidiness was Willa’s work, all right.
Smiling, he approached the shed, planning to compliment her on her organizational skills, but something he heard stopped him: Dan, asking Willa if she thought Frannie’s father might show up someday to claim what he believed was his. Max agreed with his partner. If she left Pleasant Valley, he, too, would be disappointed.
Their next few exchanges were too quiet and too murmured to understand. Something about the bishop. He took a careful step forward, leaned toward the shed just in time to hear her say, “He’s so good and decent. Vulnerable, too. So it’s only natural that those who love him are worried.” Then, Dan’s voice: “About what?” After a moment of silence, she replied, “That I might hurt him.”
Max turned, headed back the way he’d come, intent on making a lot more noise as he approached the shed this time. When she saw him in the doorway, her smile brightened the newly painted shed. Streaks of white paint crisscrossed her cheeks, and she said, “Well hi! What’re you doing here?”
It wasn’t easy, tearing his gaze from hers to look at Dan, but he managed it.
“Going to town,” he said, removing his hat. “Thought I would see if you or Anki need me to pick anything up while I am there.”
Dan’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Nothing that I can think of.”
“But how nice of you to ask,” Willa said. “Did Anki tell you that we’re out of coffee grounds?”
“No.” Because he hadn’t asked what she might need. “But I will get some coffee and drop it off on my way home.”
“You are going to Frostburg now? With a door in your truck?” Dan wanted to know.
“No,” he said again. “I will stop at the Bakers’, get it hung, and then make my way into town.”
“Once you finish with the door, their job is done, yah?”
Max nodded. “Yah.”
“They are pleased?”
Another nod.
“Why wouldn’t they be!” Willa said. “I was there just yesterday, and Emily showed me around. It’s beautiful, Max, just beautiful. My grandfather made furniture in his spare time and took great pride in his miters. He would have drooled over yours. Why, they’re almost invisible!”
“Thank you.” He spun the hat, like a steering wheel. “You need nothing else? Just coffee?”
“That’s it,” she said, taking a step closer. “What time do you expect to get back?”
He did the math in his head: an hour’s drive to town, thirty, maybe forty-five minutes to meet with the developer, fifteen minutes at the hardware store, an hour back. And a quick stop at the grocery store for coffee. “Three, four hours, at most.”
“Perfect. You’ll have supper with us, then. There’s just enough of a chill in the air that I thought chicken stew would be nice. With dumplings. And apple pie, afterward.”
Max looked at Dan. He’d paid for the food, after all, and the meal would take place at his kitchen table.
Something between a grin and a smirk lifted the corners of the man’s mouth. “You are a full-grown man,” he said, and went back to painting. “The decision is yours alone.”
“I hope you’ll say yes.” Willa wiped her brush’s bristles on a rag. “Because . . . Frannie would love to see you.”
Max thought of what she’d said to Dan, just before he made his presence known. Did he dare hope that she’d accented her little girl’s name to mask the fact that she wanted to see him, too? Smiling, he put on his hat. “Yes, that sounds good. Very good.”
He started for the door, then stopped in the opening. “But if traffic makes me late, please, eat without me.”
Dan chuckled. “You need not worry about that, partner!”
Max left them, so eager about the chance to spend time with Willa again that he nearly overshot the Bakers’ driveway.
* * *
As he hammered the nursery door’s hinge pin into place, Emily said, “Everything looks wonderful, Max, just wonderful. Nicer, even, than we expected.” She switched Rafe from her left hip to the right. “You’re such a good friend. A talented one, too. Thanks so much!”
“Just doing my job.”
And it was true. Other than adding a few hours to the end of each workday to complete the addition ahead of the deadline, he hadn’t treated the Bakers’ job differently from any other.
“Gabe loves his new room,” Phillip said. “Told me just the other day how much he enjoys looking out those big windows and seeing the mountains.” He tweaked the baby’s nose. “Rafe will love his room, too . . . if his mother ever lets him move into it.”
“Now, now,” she said, “he’ll be a big boy soon enough. Let’s not rush things, all right?”
Phillip met Max’s eyes. “Women,” he said, winking.
He heard love in the words and envied his friend. Just a mile or so up the road, he had a house, too. A good investment, he’d told himself during the building phase. Once, while wandering the nearly empty rooms, he’d remembered the welcoming touches his mother had given the old family home ... tablecloths, doilies, flowers on the porch. Remembered, too, laughing and roughhousing with his siblings. What were you thinking, building a house this big? he’d demanded of himself. A one-room cabin would have been more than sufficient for a man such as he, who’d spend the rest of his days alone.
“I wonder if you could stop by the clinic in the next day or so,” Emily was saying. “That last storm blew a few shingles off the roof. Phillip could do it, but he’s swamped.”
“One of those good things/bad things scenarios,” her husband said. “I can’t remember being busier, thanks to the rumor that’s going around about an early winter. Farmers scrambling to harvest earlier than normal, everyone else determined to winterize everything with a motor.”
Max understood, perfectly. “Extra business is a blessing. Especially when you have two healthy young boys to feed.”
Phillip nodded toward the Alleghenies, where angry gray skies shrouded Backbone Mountain. “People are saying it’ll be like the blizzard of seventy-eight. Thirty to forty inches of snow, with twenty-foot drifts.”
“We will pray they are wrong. But just in case, I need to line up some indoor work.” Facing Emily, Max added, “How about if I fix that roof tomorrow morning, first thing?”
“I’ll be there by eight o’clock, so any time after that is fine.”
Max returned the hammer to his tool kit. “Perfect. I can check out the roof and go straight to town from there.”
“One of those inside jobs you were talking about?” Phillip asked.
“No, God willing, that contract will keep us busy through next fall. If the weather does not interfere, that is.”
“Why’s that?”
“The housing development is near Frostburg.”
“Oh wow,” Emily said. “Definitely not an easy trek on mountain roads . . . in snow and ice. And speaking of roads, Willa is on the schedule tomorrow.” She smiled. “That girl is something else. Two jobs. A baby. Nursing classes. If I had half her energy, I might just complete a to-do list once in a while!”
Nursing classes? It was the first Max had heard about them.
Laughing, Phillip said, “Help me understand how one thing has anything to do with the other.”
She grinned. “Well, thanks to Max’s loaning her the truck, Willa will be on the road, going and coming to the clinic, anyway.”
“Oh yeah. It makes complete sense now!”
When little Rafe heard the adults laughing, he threw back his head and joined in, which invited a hug from both of his parents. Yet again, longing closed in on Max.
“Which school does Willa attend?”
“She’s enrolled in an online class. Once she passes the test, she’ll work for me to finish up her hourly requirement. And then, our Willa will be a certified nursing assistant.”
Not sure how he felt about that, Max pointed out several faint scrapes on the door he’d just hung. “After I see about your roof, I will touch them up.”
“No need for that,” Phillip said. “You left paint out back. I’ll take care of it, right now, before the sun sets.”
Good, Max said to himself, because he did not want to be late for dinner.
He thought about Willa during the drive to Frostburg, and as he walked the aisles at the hardware store. It was all he could do to keep his mind on the meeting with the foreman in charge of the housing development, because the image of her happy, paint-spattered face seemed stamped onto his brain. She filled his mind at the grocery store, too, as he picked up a three-pound can of coffee for her, and on the way home, he could almost taste the chicken stew that would be waiting when he arrived at the Hofmans’.
“You will help with the dishes,” he told himself. “And when the work is done, you will ask her to take a walk.”
Max glanced out the driver’s window and saw the female passenger in the car beside him lean forward, trying to look around him to see the person he was talking to. Chuckling under his breath, he stared straight ahead. “She thinks you are krankzinnig.” And maybe he was just a little crazy ... over Willa.
The hour-long ride had felt more like four. Even the walk from the end of the driveway to the porch stretched ahead like a mile. Now, reaching over the console, Max grabbed the brown paper bag that held her coffee. And the box of fudge he’d bought on the spur of the moment.
“Hope she likes chocolate,” he muttered, stepping onto the porch.
“Who doesn’t like it?”
The quiet voice startled him. “Anki. I didn’t see you there.”
“I needed fresh air.”
Threatening clouds had moved in from the mountains. A blast of cold wind spun new-fallen leaves into mini-tornadoes that skittered across the floorboards. She shivered as they hopped into the flower beds below.
Max put down the grocery sack. “How long have you been out here?” he asked, pulling the patchwork quilt higher on her shoulders.
“An hour? Two?” She shrugged.
He remembered the Anki who’d enjoyed life, who smiled and teased Dan, and loved visiting with the locals and tourists who browsed in her shop. When had she turned into this quiet, unhappy woman? The better question was why?
“I will go inside, see if Willa needs help setting the table. Can I bring you anything? Hot tea, maybe?”
She stared into the distance, looking as gloomy as the sky. If only he knew what to do or say to lift her spirits, for Dan’s sake as much as hers.
Max opened the screen door, rapped softly on the windowpane.
“It’s open,” Willa called out.
Her voice was music to his ears, especially after listening to Anki’s sad monotone.
He plunked the bag onto the counter. “Your coffee . . .”
“Oh, you’re a lifesaver. Thank you. We’ll thank you again in the morning!” She reached into the bag. “I’ll put the can away, and then—”
A soft gasp escaped her lips as she removed the box of fudge.
“That is for you,” he said. “A thank-you gift for inviting me to supper.”
Before he knew what was happening, she was in his arms, punctuating every “Thank you!” with a tiny kiss, pressed to his cheeks.
All too soon, she stepped away, still hugging the box to her chest. “You’re something else, you know that!” She slid off the curlicue blue ribbon that held the lid in place. When Frannie saw the bright color, she let out an excited squeal.
“Aw, sweet girl, you can’t have this. It wouldn’t be safe.” Now, she opened the box and pinched off a corner of the fudge. “How about if we share a little of this, instead?”
Like a baby bird, Frannie sat flapping her hands, openmouthed and waiting to be fed. Willa put a second small piece on the high-chair tray, then broke off a larger piece, and Max found himself watching closely, to see if she’d enjoyed it as much as her baby girl.
She surprised him yet again by walking right up to him.
“Say ahh . . .”
He held up a hand. “No, no,” he said, laughing. “The fudge is for you!”
“There’s more than enough to share. C’mon now, open wide . . .”
. . . and for a reason he couldn’t explain, that’s exactly what he did.
She stood on tiptoe and fed him the candy, staying put until he closed his mouth. Nodding approvingly, Willa said, “My turn!” and bit into a piece. Then, eyes closed, she exhaled a dreamy sigh. “Oh. My. Goodness. It’s . . . it’s delicious.”
They stood nearly toe to toe, and the closeness scared him. Because if she kept standing there, looking pretty and sweet, he might just kiss her. Max licked his lips just as she opened her eyes. Something—he couldn’t define it—flashed across her lovely features. Affection? Gratitude? Willingness? Whatever it was only made him want to kiss her more.
“Mmm-mmm,” she said, crossing back to the stove, “can you smell those dumplings? I can’t wait to taste them. It’s a new recipe.” Looking at him, she winked. “Do you mind being my guinea pig?”
“Small price to pay for a good meal,” he said.
By now, Frannie had finished both pieces of fudge, and began impatiently slapping the tray. “Mo’e?” she said. “Mama . . . mo’e?”
Willa quickly handed her a cracker and told Max, “It isn’t fudge, but it’ll have to do. Can’t have her filling up on candy when there’s stew in the pot, right?”
“What can I do to help? Set the table?”
“You can let Dan know we’ll sit down to eat in just a few minutes. He’s out back, putting the tools back into the shed.”
“Happy to,” he said, meaning it. “What about Anki? Is she all right out there, all by herself? It’s getting pretty cold . . .”
Just that fast, Willa’s joy was replaced by a look of maternal concern. “I’ll get her.” She put the fudge onto a cupboard shelf and grabbed her shawl, and on the way to the door, she sighed. “Just between you and me? Tomorrow, I’m going to talk with Emily, see if she has any ideas. Because no one should go through life sad all the time.”
“You might want to run that by Dan first. He is a very private man.”
Willa, eyes narrowed and one hand on her hip, repeated, “Just between you and me? He had his chance. Years’ worth of chances.” She opened the door. “Will you keep an eye on Frannie while I talk Anki into coming inside?”
He glanced at the baby, who was staring at him and smiling.
“She won’t be any trouble. Anki, on the other hand . . .” Willa sighed again. “If the baby starts to fuss, just pick her up. She loves being carried from window to window, so she can look outside.”
The door had barely clicked shut when Frannie’s lower lip jutted out and tears pooled in her eyes. “Mama?”
A baby. Alone, in his care. What had he been thinking!
You weren’t thinking, Lambright. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He’d been thinking all right ... about Willa’s long-lashed amber eyes, the reddish-brown bun that usually hid under a cap, lips that had parted slightly, as if she’d known exactly how close he’d come to kissing them...
“Mama . . .” Frannie was on the verge of crying now. Oh, how he wished he’d paid closer attention to where Willa had found that cracker!
“All right, little angel,” he said, bending to inspect the high chair, “how do I get you out of this contraption, huh?”
She leaned right and left, following his movements.
“Ah-ha,” he said, grasping the metal pulls on the tray’s underside.
Frannie, sensing that soon she’d be free, giggled wildly. Max set the tray aside and unfastened the plastic belt around her belly.
“There we go,” he said, hoisting her onto his hip. “Your mama tells me you like peeking out of the windows. Let us find out if this is true.” He carried her into the parlor. “See there? See the big tree?”
Dimpled hands reached out, and she leaned forward, as if to grasp the fluttering leaves. As he tightened his grip to prevent her from tumbling from his arms, she faced him. The eye contact lasted only a second, but it told him that she understood: He’d pulled her close to keep her from falling. As if to prove it, she pressed a dimpled hand to each of his cheeks and treated him to a baby-toothed grin.
“Max,” she said, and rested her head on his shoulder.
Something stirred in his heart, and he found himself wanting to protect her, not just in this moment, but for the rest of her life, as any good father would.
“Ah, sweet Frannie,” he whispered. “You are a blessing from God.”
“God,” she echoed, and sat up, pointing outside.
“Yes, He made the trees. And the sky and the clouds.” Max moved from window to window, showing her the shed, the barn, and when he got to the chicken coop, she said, “Bawk-bawk-bawk!”
Laughing, he kissed her cheek. “Yes, sweet Frannie, that is what the chickens say.”
The kitchen door opened and Willa led Anki inside. He thought surely Frannie would kick up a fuss, insist that he hand her over to her mother. Instead, in a voice barely more than a whisper, she said, “Max,” and snuggled against his shoulder again. And again, that unfamiliar something moved in his heart. Aside from time spent with kids Gabe’s age and older, Max knew little to nothing about children. He had a feeling that Frannie would put an end to his obliviousness.
He carried her into the kitchen as Willa said, “Anki! Your hands are like ice!” She settled Anki at the table. “The water in the teakettle is good and hot. I’ll brew you a cup of tea.”
Anki looked up, patted Willa’s hand. “You are a blessing from God.”
Frannie lifted her head and, taking his face in her hands again, forced him to meet her eyes. “God?”
“Yes, I believe you are right, little angel. He is here.”
Willa smiled. “I knew you were a natural.”
“Natural what?” Anki asked.
She placed the mug on the table. “Drink up, now, so it’ll warm you, right down to your toes.”
Willa was smiling when she said it. Smiling, and looking at him.
Frannie wiggled and whined. “Down,” she said, aiming a fat forefinger at the floor. “F’annie down.”
“Not yet, sweet girl. Mama needs to set the table, and you’d just be underfoot.” She lifted the high chair’s tray. “I’m sure your arms are tired. . . .”
“No, they are not.” He nodded toward the row of wooden pegs on the wall beside the door. “Is that her wrap? I will bring her with me, to let Dan know supper is almost ready.”
“You . . . you want to take her outside?”
“Unless you have a reason I should not . . .”
Willa grabbed the small pink cloak and quickly draped it around the baby’s shoulders. She tied a matching hat under her chin, too. “You won’t let her get down out there, right?”
“I will not,” he said, and made his way onto the porch.
Instantly, the baby’s mood brightened. “T’ee,” she said, pointing at the maple that grew beside the porch. She said it again, this time pointing at the oak that shaded the shed.
Dan stood in the doorway, a rake in one hand, a hoe in the other, grinning like a fool. “What is this? You are a nursemaid now?”
“Just helping out. Willa said to tell you supper is ready.”
“Where is Anki?”
“In the kitchen, sipping tea. She is fine.” Thanks to Willa.
Dan disappeared into the shed long enough to hang the tools, then stepped up beside Max. He threw a thumb over his shoulder and knuckled Frannie’s cheek. “Thanks to your mama, the place almost looks good enough to live in.”
“Mama,” the baby echoed.
Laughing, Max lifted her high, then put her onto his shoulders. She filled both hands with his hair and held on tight as delighted giggles rained down on him.
“Is my little angel big?”
“Big!” she echoed.
Dan climbed the porch steps beside them. Feigning a frown, he said, “I fear the net has been cast.”
“What does that mean?”
Dan held the door as Max ducked so Frannie’s head would clear the doorjamb.
“Something smells delicious!” Rolling up his sleeves, he stepped up to the sink, lathered his hands, and said over his shoulder, “Willa, you are a blessing from God.”
Max tucked Frannie into her high chair, fastened the protective belt and slid the tray into place, then removed her hat and sweater and hung them up. Dan cracked his knuckles and took his place at the head of the table. Anki sent a weak smile his way. And Willa placed the big stewpot in the center of the table, scooted the high chair closer, and pulled out the chair opposite Dan’s.
“Have a seat, Max,” she said, sitting beside him.
With no announcement or fanfare, all eyes closed, all heads bowed ... even Frannie’s. As they each silently thanked God for the meal and other blessings that made it possible, Max thanked Him for the newly awakened feelings churning in his heart: He’d sat in this very chair, dozens of times, but he’d never felt at home. That, he knew, was Willa’s doing. She’d warmed this once-stark house with rib-sticking food and the scent of fresh-baked pie. Potted plants lined the windowsill, and the bright blue-and-white tablecloth still bore the creases of her iron.
Was the awareness a sign? A message from God, telling him that with Willa at his side, his house, too, could feel like a home?
“Open your eyes, Max, or your first spoonful of stew is sure to miss your mouth.”
Dan’s voice brought him back to the here and now. More than ever, he wanted time alone with Willa. Time to see if she felt as he did ...
. . . about the years that stretched out ahead of them.