Dreaming August (25 page)

His mouth went dry.

His heart hammered.

In his mind’s eye, he pulled Benny from her scooter, into his arms, and kissed her until any doubt she might still have vanished.

* * * *

Her scooter didn’t want to make the climb. It was never good on gravel, and not great on a steep incline. Benny gave up about halfway to the house. She killed the engine, pulled off her helmet. Dan stood at the top of the driveway, still as one of his Casablanca lilies on a windy day.

Benny’s heart flipped, a glorious feeling she remembered so well. Henny made her heart flip. She remembered now, without grief. Peter had been right. Love didn’t vanish. It made room for more and more if allowed.

She walked the rest of the way up the driveway, only slightly nervous that Dan didn’t meet her halfway. His terrified expression said it all. Benny would not balk. She would not let even a smidgeon of doubt rob her of the words she’d been practicing the whole ride over. She plucked the wilting forget-me-not from her buttonhole, and held it out for him. “Well, Daniel Greene, now you know you knocked me up. You going to marry me, or do I get my dad here with a shotgun?”

“He a good shot?”

“Very. I wouldn’t chance it.”

“Then I guess I have no choice.” Dan took the flower from her fingers, then her hand in his. He pulled her to him and kissed her softly.

Benny wrapped her arms around him, kissed him breathless. “I’m sorry it took so long to tell you,” she gasped. “I’ve been a mess.”

“I know.”

“I felt like I was betraying Henny, falling in love with you.”

“Me too, but…”

Benny leaned back just enough. “But?”

“I was okay with it, Benny. We aren’t betraying him, even if that’s what it felt like. I can’t live in the past. Some of it is great and some of it sucks, but there’s no changing it. You were Henny’s wife. He was my best friend. It was great while it lasted. Now you’re going to be my wife, we’re going to have a baby, and I’m going to love you both without thinking about him.”

Before watching fireworks from his mother’s grave, Benny might have believed his words’ bravado. Now, in this new moonlight looking up at the man she loved, she understood his courage, his determination to live the best life possible, no matter what the demons of his past had to say about it. She wanted that too, for herself and for her child. Their child. Changes were coming, and not just in her figure or marital status. It was time, long past time, they did.

“Let’s go to Bermuda and get married,” she said. “Tonight. Okay, it’s too late tonight. But tomorrow. And let’s not tell anyone until we’ve left. What do you say?”

“I say I hope you have a passport.”

“Damn. How about North Carolina, then? To see Tim. I kind of promised him a visit. He’d be really surprised and happy to see you.”

“Okay.”

“Really?”

“I don’t care where I marry you, Benny, as long as I do. I have a reputation to think of, you know.”

“I’ll make an honest man of you, I promise.” She nudged him. “And when we come home, I don’t want to live in my parents’ house anymore. Not because it’s where I lived with Henny, but because it’s time I left home.”

“That works out well, because my sister is moving out and I’m buying the house. You…you do want to stay in Bitterly, don’t you?”

Benny held him closer, grinned sweetly up at him. “And if I don’t?”

“Then I’ll have to convince you, somehow.” Dan kissed her grin away.

“Not convinced yet,” she teased. “Try again.”

Dan lifted her into his arms, started for the house.

Benny squealed and wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him with every bounce. Cricket kicked then, good and hard.

Dan stopped dead in his tracks. “Was that…?”

“It was.”

Dan set her onto her feet, kneeled in the grass. He placed his hands where the baby had kicked, and Cricket obliged him with another. Kneeling there, his hands still spread across the just-visible mound of their child, he pressed his lips to Benny’s skin.

“Boy or girl?” he asked without looking up.

“A little girl. I’ve been calling her Cricket, because she jumps around so much.”

Dan rested his cheek to Benny’s belly, waiting. The baby squirmed but she didn’t kick. His hands twitched. He kissed her again, and rose to his feet.

“Cricket, huh? Got anything else in mind?”

She hadn’t. Not until this moment. “Irene,” she said. “For our mothers. What do you think?”

His eyes might have welled, or it might have been the moonlight on his pale and eerie eyes. “Irene Greene,” he said. “It rhymes.”

“I like that sort of thing.”

Dan nodded and offered his hand. Benny took it and squeezed. Together they went inside to begin forging a new life on the foundation of the old, despite the sorrows, because of the joys. In Bitterly, where they both were born. In the house that Augie built.

Terri-Lynne DeFino
lives in a log cabin in Connecticut, but she's a Jersey girl at heart. Writer, mother, cat wrangler, and self-proclaimed sparkle queen, Terri began writing when she was seven. Though that first story remains locked away in her parents’ attic, some of her works include Finder, A Time Never Lived, and Beyond the Gate. Visit her blog at: Modestyisforsuckers.com, or contact her at:
[email protected]
.

Read on for a snippet of Book 3 in Terri-Lynne DeFino’s Bitterly Suite

Some memories are best left behind; some refuse to be.

Determined not to let the past define her, Savannah Callowell left all that happened and all she’d been in Georgia for an old farm in Bitterly, Connecticut. Savannah finds peace, friends, and a new life, but she keeps her secrets to herself, and her friends at a distance. But when her foreman retires and offers his son as a replacement, Savannah gets more than she bargained for. Adelmo Gallegos is not the college kid she was expecting, but a grown man running from his own past.

A Lyrical Shine romance coming April, 2016

Learn more about Terri-Lynne at

http://www.kensingtonbooks.com/author.aspx/31624

Memories of other days

I didn’t like fireworks when I was a squirt. That boom. Ugh. It made my stomach swish. Having to sit through them ruined the Independence Day picnics for me. I always wished Mom and Pop would let me go home instead of making me stay. Though, really, our house was too close to town for it to have made a difference.

I can’t count the Independence Days that’ve come and gone since then. Time doesn’t pass the same way it used to. One minute it’s high summer and the fireworks are booming, the next I’m leaving pebbles in a shoe by the light of the full Hunter Moon. Maybe that’s why I’m still here in this Nowheresville of Nowheresvilles having conversations with myself as if someone’s listening. As if I’m telling a story
.

* * * *

Thunder rumbled in the blue, July sky. Savannah Callowell understood New England storms well enough to know when the mountains would guide the black clouds beyond Bitterly, and when they’d let them in. Today felt like a welcome mat set out for the electric boom.

She stepped into the yard, shielding her eyes from the sunshine. The Fourth of July town picnic had, once again, been a raging success. In all the years since she moved up from Georgia, there had not been a single rainout. The produce was gone down to the last potato. The few soaps and jellies left were mostly back on the shelves in the farmstand store. Lambs in their pens, chickens in their coop, Savvy’s was as restored as it could be until the next harvest came in.

“Good morning, boss.”

She turned to Benny picking her way across the yard, her eight-month old daughter in a baby-sling strapped to her chest. Savannah waved and smiled and tried to ease the sudden pounding in her chest. Ever since her own life had gone from miserable apathy to marital bliss, Benedetta Grady-Hendricks-Greene had been on a mission to rid the world of unhappiness. Darling Benny. She had no clue, and Savannah wanted to keep it that way.

“Did you get a good rest yesterday?” Benny asked, hefting her baby higher and adjusting the sling.

“I did, thanks.” Savannah rubbed at her forehead. July 5
^th
’s typical banger of a headache had dulled back to the familiar throb. “Has Dan recovered from the tug-o-war?”

Benny shook her head, rolling her eyes. “My husband seems to think he’s still twenty. He’ll survive. Probably just a pulled muscle in his shoulder.”

“So, what brings you here this morning? You have the next two weeks off.”

“I was hoping you had some of that liniment Darla and Sandra make. Dan isn’t just delusional, he’s stubborn. He won’t go to the doctor about his shoulder even though he groaned all night long.”

Savannah laughed. “I think there might be some. Come on in.”

They went into the farmstand store. Savannah flipped on the lights. Rummaging around in the lone box as yet unpacked, she called, “Why don’t you make us a cup of tea?”

Savannah continued pretending to look for the liniment that had been sitting on top until she heard Benny clattering around in the office. This time of year left her feeling fragile, and unable to cope with the cheerful chattering her friend was famous for, the chattering that usually brought an affectionate smile to Savannah’s lips. Watching Benny’s transformation the year prior, from grieving widow to wife and mother, had been magical. For a time, Savannah thought, maybe, her joy would rub off. Honor. Determination. The ferocity that took her from temperate Georgia to finicky Connecticut. Such things gave her purpose, but they were not joy.

Tube of liniment in hand, she joined Benny in the air-conditioned office. Her friend was just pouring hot water from the kettle, and Savannah’s frazzled nerves became somewhat less so. She handed over the tube in exchange for a steaming mug. Snuggled against Benny’s bounteous chest, Irene slumbered as deeply as only a healthy, happy baby could. Savannah remembered the feel of soft, sweet breath on her neck, in her nostrils. She remembered the heft of not one but two contented little bundles on her chest. She remembered.

“Good.” She breathed in the peppermint scent. “Is this the chocolate mint?”

“My favorite.” Benny wrinkled her nose. “Dan nearly killed me when he found out I planted a patch out back.”

Savannah’s muscles bunched. Fight? Or flight? She shook it off. “Don’t say that. I bet he wasn’t even really angry.”

“True. But it did take over, and started threatening his precious lilies. I should have known better. Mint is so aggressive.”

“Did you sow them directly?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are they in the ground? Or in pots?”

“Ground.”

Savannah took another sip. “There’s only one way to keep mint from spreading. If you don’t want to container-garden, you have to dig up that whole patch and replant a few bunches in those clay chimney flues sunk in the ground. That’ll contain the root system. As long as you clip them before they flower and fall, your mint will behave.”

“Oh, really? That’s so cool. How’d you figure that out?”

“I didn’t. Until coming to Connecticut, I never even planted a flower in a pot on my porch. Edgardo and Raul taught me everything I know.”

“That’s crazy.” Benny tugged at a lock of long, dark hair caught in the shoulder strap of the baby sling. Cursing under her breath, she unslung her infant. “I finally got it to grow past my chin and I want to hack it all off again, but I refuse to do the new-mom-pixie cut thing.”

Savannah tried not to grimace when Benny set Irene down on the cot in the office. After all the years they’d been friends and co-workers, she still didn’t seem to get that there was a reason she gave all her workers two weeks off after Independence Day. Before last year, when Benny came awake again after too many years grieving, her oblivion was understandable. Now, her oblivion felt a little forced. A lot forced. Savannah wouldn’t rise to the bait. Not even if Benny asked her outright why she became a hermit for two weeks every July.

“Did Edgardo and Raul get off all right this morning?” Benny sipped, looking at Savannah over the rim of her mug.

“As far as I know. They left on time, at least. I heard them at around three this morning.”

“It’s so strange to me, them living apart from their families most of the year.”

“They must be used to it.” Savannah sipped. “They’ve been working for me for eleven years, and I’m not their first American gig.”

Edgardo and Raul Gallegos worked tirelessly from March, when the first seeds were planted in the greenhouse, through to harvesting the last of the pumpkins in the fall. They worked six days a week and took only the two weeks in July Savannah insisted upon to go home to their families in Ecuador.

“We’re lucky to have them.” Benny leaned in, whispering, “They’ve got to be getting old though, don’t you think?”

“They can’t hear you, Benny.”

She slouched back in her chair. “You never know who’s listening.”

“Well, the pictures tacked to the wall in the double-wide never change. Children? Grandchildren? I have no idea. Maybe both.”

“Grandchildren? You think? But they don’t have a gray hair between them.”

“No, but their faces are lined like road-maps. Why do men age so much better than women? Not fair. Not fair at all.”

Savannah relaxed despite herself, as the minutes ticked into a chatty hour. Benny laughed easily, drew the same out in her. Even the throbbing in Savannah’s head eased. Irene stirred, and then she whimpered. Before she could cry, Benny sat on the edge of the cot and nursed her happy again. The back of her tiny blonde head, thick with curls like her daddy’s, made Savannah want to twirl her fingers in the swirl at her crown. Baby hair, like baby breath, was the sweetest of things she could imagine.

Ginger’s hair had been dark and sleek. Sally’s had been dark and dense. One light-skinned. One darker. And she had loved them so much.