Looking at Jake, even more handsome than he'd been in high school, it was hard not to feel for Rhonda, at least a little. I bet Jake Kaminski had all kinds of women looking at him all the time. And, now that I was used to it, I decided that the gla.s.s eye lent Jake a sort of roguish charm. He looked like a man who had lived hard and had stories to tell.

"One day when we were out to dinner, some woman I'd never laid eyes on sent a drink over to the table. I tried to send it back but before I could, Rhonda grabbed the gla.s.s and downed the whole thing, then started screaming at me. She went off her rocker and on a bender, drove off in my truck and left me to walk. The next day, when I was at work, she drove it right through the plate gla.s.s window of the store."

I winced. "Bet your dad loved that."

"Yeah. You can see why he wasn't excited about bringing me into the business. But we made our peace with each other before he died. After that, I went to the bank, got a loan, and bought the store from the estate."

"You mean he didn't even leave it to you in his will?"

"I've got two brothers and a little sister. He couldn't leave the store just to me. That wouldn't have been fair."

I looked at him, searching his face. He seemed to harbor no bitterness toward his father. That amazed me. In his shoes, I never could have managed that.

"So, what about the third former Mrs. Kaminski? Was she the jealous type too?"

"Nope. Beth was a wonderful woman. She had a good heart, but not a strong one. She died in my arms. The ambulance didn't get there fast enough."

"Oh, Jake. I had no idea. I'm so sorry."

"Yeah. So was I. We were very happy together. But," he said in a deliberate tone, "life goes on and we have to go on with it."

He looped the dish towel back through the handle of the refrigerator door and changed the subject. "Madelyn, I know you want to start painting, but I think we'd better do the floors first. I've got the sander out in the truck. Between the two of us, I think we'll be able to carry it inside."

"You brought me a floor sander?"

"You said you wanted one, right? It can be a little tricky, but you'll get the hang of it. I'll help you tape up the doors with plastic to keep out the dust, then teach you how to work the sander."

I didn't know what to say.

He frowned. "Unless you've changed your mind. Doing it yourself should save you some serious money, but it's going to take a lot of time and sweat. . . ."

"No, no! It's not that. It's just . . . this is just so nice of you, Jake. How can I thank you?"

He grinned and headed toward the back door. "Well, for starters, you can stay away from Home Depot."

26.

Tessa "She let you in? She actually let you come inside? And gave you coffee?"

Jake Kaminski nodded as he bagged up my canning jars and gave me my change. "And m.u.f.fins," he confirmed.

I stuffed the bills in my wallet and dumped the coins in the bottom of my purse. This is why my purse weighs fourteen pounds and my shoulder always aches.

"I've been over there a couple of times, helping her with the remodeling. When she'll let me. She likes doing things her own way," Jake said with a grin.

"Wow. When she saw me in the coffee shop, she turned tail and ran. Wouldn't say a single word to me."

"Running into you probably came as a shock. You should call her."

"I have. Five times." I held my hand up flat with my fingers spread wide. "She won't return my messages. I can't believe you were able to get her to talk to you, to invite you inside and make you breakfast!"

"m.u.f.fins," he said dismissively. "And she'd already made them before I showed up. She's experimenting with recipes to feed her guests.

"Look," Jake said, "she turned tail and ran the first time she saw me too. I don't think she's too happy about being back here. New Bern doesn't exactly hold a lot of good memories for her. Maybe seeing you reminds her of things she'd rather forget. Don't give up on her. She doesn't know it, but she could really use a friend right now. The only reason she talked to me is because I showed up on her doorstep unannounced and bearing gifts-twenty gallons of paint and a floor sander."

"A floor sander? You sure know how to charm a girl, Jake."

"Yeah, well. It's a gift."

"So, you think she'll really be able to turn Beecher Cottage into an inn? The house is such a wreck. I can't imagine anybody paying good money to stay there."

"It's a big job," he acknowledged. "But she's making progress. She's finished sanding the floors and is just about done painting the trim. I wanted to help, but once I showed her how to work the machinery, she insisted on doing it all herself. She's determined."

"You mean stubborn," I said. "Always was."

"Yeah," Jake said in a tone of undisguised admiration. "You should see what she's doing with some of that old junk she found up in the attic. She took a bunch of old, ugly paintings, ripped out the canvas, cleaned the frames, repainted them silver, then took an old wallpaper sample book I gave her, picked out papers she liked, glued them onto cardboard backings, and put them in the frames. She created about twenty brand-new pieces of artwork that cost virtually nothing. And they look great! She hung a group of six up on a big white wall in the dining room. I swear, it looks just like something you'd see in one of those expensive boutique hotels in Manhattan."

"She always had an eye for that kind of thing," I said. "But I have a hard time picturing Madelyn as an innkeeper. Warm and welcoming never seemed to be quite her style."

"People can change. Not that she has." He laughed. "But I think she wants to. Deep down, I think there's a finer Madelyn fighting to get out. I always thought so, even when we were kids."

"And running an inn is going to reveal that finer person?"

"Could be. She doesn't have a lot of other options. Beecher Cottage is the only a.s.set she has left, that and some money she'd saved before she got married. And she's using every dime of it to remodel the house. Other than that, she's dead broke."

Lee walked up to the counter carrying a package of hinges. "Who's dead broke?"

"Madelyn Beecher," I answered.

"Yeah. Sure she is." He snorted and pulled his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. "You can't make me believe that she doesn't have something stashed away, offsh.o.r.e bank accounts or something."

Jake took the five-dollar bill Lee handed him, put it in the till, and started to count out the change. "I don't think so. The government seized everything, from bank accounts and real estate to dishes and Madelyn's jewelry."

"That's right," I added. "They auctioned off everything on eBay, including a box of monogrammed stationery. It went for almost three hundred dollars. Isn't that crazy? Who'd pay that much for someone else's stationery?"

"Weird," Jake agreed.

"Well, I don't feel sorry for them," Lee said and shoved his change into his pants pocket. "That guy ruined the lives of hundreds of innocent people. It's only right they sell off the stuff and divide the money among the people he cheated. Maybe his wife didn't have anything to do with his scam, but she lived pretty well from it."

"For a while," Jake agreed. "Not anymore. All she got out of that marriage was a tarnished name and the clothes on her back. And she's selling those."

"She's selling her clothes?" Lee asked.

"The designer stuff-clothes, shoes, bags, luggage, what was left of her jewelry. She sent it off to a consignment shop in New York. She said she needed a new roof and a working furnace more than she needed Vuitton luggage."

Lee raised his eyebrows. "Huh."

27.

Tessa It's a nice day, cool and crisp but still warm for November. That early October snowstorm was a fluke. It snowed four inches and melted the next day. We haven't had so much as a flurry since.

When we got back from the hardware store, I decided to go putter in the garden a bit. Not that there's much to be done this time of year. The lavender was harvested early in the summer while the flowers were just buds, laid to dry in the sun on clean white sheets, then put into gla.s.s jars or alcohol tinctures to be used in potpourris, sachets, soaps, and creams. The rest of my summer herbal bounty-flowers, seeds, stems, and leaves-were similarly harvested long ago, back when the garden was lush and the sun shone warm every day.

Now the garden is brown and stark, trimmed back tight, the tender plants covered with sheets of opaque plastic or bell-shaped gla.s.s cloches. If I had my way, I'd use nothing but cloches, but I only have a few and they're expensive. The plastic does the job, though far less prettily. Because they're hardy enough to endure the New England winter, I left the rosemary bushes uncovered except for a generous blanket of mulch at the base. Rosemary is so strong a scent that I don't often use it in my products, but it rivals lavender as my favorite herb. It's got so many uses, both culinary and cosmetic, and I just love the smell. Something about that sharp, resiny scent wakes up my senses and makes me think that something good could happen soon.

I pulled a pair of garden clippers from the pocket of my barn coat, snipped off a few sprigs of rosemary, and thought about our conversation with Jake Kaminski.

Can people change? And I've decided to believe they can.

I've changed. I came to New Bern in search of a new lifestyle, but what I've found is a new life. Not an easier life, definitely not. So much of what I'm facing now is unexpected, even frightening. But I have to believe, I do believe, that these changes and this new life are leading me to something truer and better.

I pray now. When I began it felt awkward, forced, like those stumbling, start-and-stop conversations you have when meeting someone for the first time, full of uncomfortable silences as I racked my brain for the next question, the proper terminology. I picked up a book on prayer but found it just confused me.

Then one day, while I was in the shop, repairing some st.i.tching on Madelyn's quilt (quilting during business hours, I have found, helps me fill the sometimes long stretches of time between customers), I started praying. I prayed for Lee, for Josh, for Madelyn, for Margot, Virginia, Evelyn, and all the new friends I've made at the Cobbled Court Quilt Shop, where I am now a regular, and for myself, for all my doubts and worries, as well as all the things I'm grateful for.

Somehow, as I was praying, rocking that needle back and forth the way Virginia taught me, I forgot to be awkward. Prayer flowed from me naturally, in a plain and continuous pattern that mirrored the motion of my needle; simple, rhythmic, thought by thought, st.i.tch by st.i.tch, forgetting to be worried about the outcome, focused only on that st.i.tch, that inch, that curve, until I came to the end of my thread and myself, and pulled my gaze back to discover the bigger picture, the pattern that had emerged through the honesty of my prayers and workings of my needle-and I liked what I saw.

I doubt there are any books out there t.i.tled Quilting Taught Me to Pray, but maybe there should be. Praying-and quilting-has taught me that there's a little more to me, and a lot more to life, than I had realized.

I knelt down on the ground by the rosemary bushes, flattened my hands into shovels, swept the mulch up, and pressed it closer around the base of the bushes, like pressing damp sand into the shape of a castle, a fortress to protect these hardy but not invulnerable plants from the winter that is sure to come, feeling peaceful and so thankful for everything-the day, my garden, the smell of rosemary. Now that the pump has been primed it seems that everything I do brings forth a stream of prayer: quilting, gardening, breathing. And I've noticed that the more I give thanks for what I have, the more I notice how much I have to be thankful for. Strange how that works.

I clapped the mulch from my hands before running them along the silver-green branches and lifting my palms to my face, breathing deeply. Maybe something good will happen. Maybe soon.

As I rose from my knees, I suddenly knew how I was to help it happen.

I stood at the kitchen sink, washing my hands. Lee came in and grabbed an apple from the blue bowl on the counter.

"Lee, do you know where we put the pictures when we moved?"

"The alb.u.ms? They're on the bookshelf in the living room. Bottom shelf, right next to the atlas."

"No," I said. "I mean the box with the pictures. The old ones. You know, the box with my high school yearbook, my diploma, and that shoe box with all the pictures we always say we're going to put in an alb.u.m but never do."

Lee chewed a bite of apple and nodded as I spoke. "Guest room closet. Top shelf. It's pretty heavy. Do you want me to get it down for you?"

"Would you? Thanks." I dried my hands on a kitchen towel. "Hey, I need to run back into town. I won't be long, but dinner might be a little late. Is that all right?"

"No, it isn't," Lee said with one definite shake of his head. "I'm starving. I'll start working on dinner. We're having Glenda, right?"

"Sadly, yes. I'm feeling a little bad about that. Aren't you?"

"This is a farm, Tessa, not a retirement home for chickens past their prime. You can't think of the stock as pets."

"If you'd quit naming them maybe I could. Glenda was a good old girl."

"And now she'll be a good old dinner," Lee said matter-of-factly before taking another bite of apple and walking slowly toward me. "But if your conscience won't permit you to partake of the dinner I'm planning, the crispy fried chicken and gravy, potatoes mashed with cream fresh from this morning's milking, sauteed apples with cinnamon, baked acorn squash with rosemary, brown sugar, and pecans . . . well, I guess I can eat it all myself and make you a peanut b.u.t.ter sandwich or something."

I turned around and smiled. Lee smiled back and moved close, pressing his hips to mine.

"Didn't your mother ever tell you not to talk with your mouth full?"

"Uh-uh. I was raised by wolves. Here. You have some." He bit off another piece of apple, held it partially clenched between his teeth, and leaned down to feed me the other half, his lips touching mine.

"Mmm. Lee, you grow a good apple."

"Didn't your mother ever tell you not to talk with your mouth full?" He stopped my retort with a kiss, a long one, then buried his face in my hair.

"You smell good," he murmured.

"It's the rosemary. I was in the garden."

"Are you sure you want to go to town?"

No, I'm not. And you're just making that harder.

"I won't be long."

Lee sighed dramatically. "All right, but you don't know what you're missing."

"Oh, yes I do. That's why I'm going to hurry back as quickly as I can. Now," I said, rocking up on my toes to give him a quick peck, "would you be an angel and get that box down for me?"

28.

Madelyn With an expression that was almost a wince, Chico handed me a folded piece of pink paper, his bill.