Wildflowers from Winter (14 page)

“C’mon, Bethany. What would there have been to talk about?”

“Dominic, just last month you asked how I felt about moving in with you.” Sure, they entered the relationship with the understanding that their careers would come first. No strings attached, they’d both said. Bethany never wanted to become a needy girlfriend. But this? Dominic accepting a job several states away without saying anything to her?

“That’s because your lease was coming up. I had no idea I was going to move.”

“Well, my lease is still up.” It was creeping past the middle of December. Her lease expired on the thirty-first. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Can’t you renew it?”

She leaned her forehead against the steering wheel and closed her eyes. “I don’t even know if I’ll find a job in Chicago.”

“You could room with Lisa for a while.”

Bethany groaned. “I’m not rooming with Lisa.” They might be friends, but Bethany could never live in those conditions—with cats and canvases and dirty cereal bowls lying about in every nook and cranny.

“What about your friend in Peaks? Robin something or other?”

Bethany rolled her forehead back and forth on the steering wheel. “No. No way.”

“You have to figure out what to do with the farm, right? I’m willing to bet selling it won’t be as easy and quick as you seem to think.”

Especially when she didn’t own the farmhouse. But she refused to share that tidbit with Dominic. He’d only make her feel worse. Start talking about all the legal problems that came attached to that minor caveat. “I don’t want to stay in Peaks.” The place elicited too many memories. Everywhere she turned, she ran into her past.

“You could come to Atlanta.” He paused. Too long. “If you wanted.”

“I’m not going to follow you to Atlanta.” Her mother dropped out of college to follow her father and look where that landed her. Working third shift at an aluminum plant in a small, stifling town.

“So what does this mean?” His voice hummed in her ear.

Somehow, the swirling outside her car turned into swirling inside her body. And she had no idea what to do with it. “Look, Dom. You dump this on me while I’m stuck in a car in the middle of a blizzard. You’re the one who made plans for Atlanta. Without me. So why don’t
you
tell me what this means.”

“C’mon, Bethany. The opportunity fell into my lap. It’s not like I planned it.”

She wanted to scream but kept her fury checked. “What is your plan, then?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking every other month one of us could fly to the other for a weekend. It might be sporadic at first. You know how it is starting at a new firm.” His invitation didn’t inspire confidence. “But I’m not ready to say we’ll never see each other again.”

Yet he was completely okay with seeing her once every other month. He cared about her only as much as she fit into his life. She thought she was okay with that. But maybe not. Bethany curled her fingers around the back of her neck, then combed them through her hair, unsure what to say. How to respond. She was being downsized. First at her job. And now in her relationship.

Another gust of wind whistled against her windows. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against her seat. Her life was being pulled out from under her. She’d lost her job. She’d lost her grandfather. She’d lost her boyfriend. She’d gained a farm. In the span of one week, everything tying her to Chicago had unraveled. And like a noose, Peaks had looped itself around her neck, determined to choke her dreams.

FOURTEEN

W
hen I was eight, my best friend was a cow. I named her Mrs. Frisby after a widowed mouse in a chapter book my mom read to me each night before bed. That was back when Dad’s hands and legs still worked, and he and Grandpa Dan had a whole barn full of dairy cows.

As spring break approached, my classmates would sit in the cafeteria eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, talking about their upcoming trips to Disney World or the Ozarks, or in Bobby Fenway’s case, Graceland.

“Where are you going?” they’d ask.

“Nowhere,” I’d say. “I’m staying on the farm.”

They’d stop chewing, triangular sandwiches frozen in front of their lips, faces lengthening with visible pity. I’d smile back and shrug. The kids who lived in town might be able to go on vacations, but they didn’t have a whole barn full of cows that needed milking twice a day. And I wouldn’t have traded those cows for all the Disney trips in the world.

David felt differently.

He told Dad he wanted to go fishing in Canada. Some mysterious place called the Boundary Waters. Dad would remind David about our cows and how they’d get mastitis if nobody milked them. For some reason I pictured udders exploding like water balloons, while David grumbled and trudged off to the creek with his fishing pole.

Every day over spring break, I’d wake up with Dad at 4:30 and, depending on the weather, ride the four-wheeler or the snowmobile with him to the cow barn. While Dad milked, I’d do my best to help, but mostly, I’d talk to Mrs. Frisby. She had intelligence in her great big eyes, a funny-looking left ear, and a giant black patch the shape of Africa on her withers. One of the mornings, I noticed her eyes looked dull and her left ear sagged lower than usual. Even her Africa spot looked a bit off.

I turned to Dad. “What’s wrong with Mrs. Frisby?” I asked.

“She’s got pneumonia.”

My already big eyes grew even bigger. She dropped her calf a few weeks before, and ever since, she’d done some struggling. I’d taken to worrying about her like a regular mother hen. “What’s pneumonia?”

“A sickness in her lungs. Like a cold with a cough. Only worse.”

“Will she be okay?”

Dad glanced over his shoulder and smiled that special smile of his. Mom used to call it crooked. And devilish. My father was a very handsome man. I knew so just by looking, but also because I’d hear other ladies whispering and giggling about him in town.

“She’ll be fine, honey. We have her on antibiotics.”

So I sat with Mrs. Frisby, petting her head, talking to her about Mom’s poor attempt at pie making the night before, until Dad finished the milking and came over to join us. He stood next to me, tall and strong, and petted Mrs. Frisby’s head.

“Dad?” I said.

“Yes?”

“When I grow up, I want to be a farmer.”

“You do?”

“Yep.”

His brown eyes twinkled. “I don’t know. Farming’s hard work. Might be easier if you choose something less demanding.”

“But you’re a farmer.”

“I am.”

“And I like getting up early.”

“That’s true.” He moved his hand to Mrs. Frisby’s Africa-shaped patch, gave her a firm pat, and eased onto a nearby stool. “Now, that brother of yours. I’m not so sure he inherited the early-bird gene. I don’t think he inherited the farming one either.”

“That’s because David’s stupid.”

“Hey, now.”

I ducked my head, properly remorseful. “He says he wants to invent things and get rich off the royalties.” I didn’t know what that meant, but David said it so much I did a perfectly fine job parroting the words. “Not me. I’m going to marry a farmer and we’re going to live right here, so I never have to leave you or Mrs. Frisby.”

Dad put his large hand against his chest. “That warms my heart straight through.”

“I’m not afraid of hard work,” I said.

“No, you’re not.” He smiled again and his eyes crinkled in the corners. “I have no doubt you’ll make a fine farmer one day, Bethany.”

I set my small hand between Mrs. Frisby’s eyes. “You promise she’ll be okay?”

He put three fingers together in the air. “Scout’s honor.”

Five months later, Dad fell from the silo. And I stopped worrying about Mrs. Frisby.

FIFTEEN

E
van threw open the door and stomped inside, shaking snow from his hair. He’d just returned from the barn, where he’d put Storm after retrieving her from the pasture. Their other mare had died last spring, and this one was getting on in years. Too old to be out in the middle of a blizzard.

Tomorrow morning, he’d have to start hauling hay out to the cattle now that snow threw a thick cover over the stalk fields. Maybe he’d round up the herd and drive them into the nearby corral. From local banter and his trusty Internet almanac, he’d planned for a brutal winter. He just hadn’t expected it to hit so early in the season. He made a mental note to put chains on the tractor tires. Even though the snow started a few short hours ago, the drifts already reached past his knees. Getting hay out to his herd and keeping tabs on the water tanks would be a pain.

It might not be a pain much longer. Not if Bethany sells …

The thought speared him. Losing Micah, Dan, and now the land he’d farmed and loved over the past five years milled his guts into silage. The wind whistled past the windowpanes and slammed the kitchen door behind him. He shrugged off his coat and tossed it over the back of a chair.

He couldn’t let some high-and-mighty country girl turned city slicker steal away Dan’s land. Obviously, Bethany had fooled her grandfather. If Dan knew Bethany’s plans—plans to sell and destroy the land he’d sweated
over for more than fifty years of his life—he wouldn’t have given her a single acre. Of that, Evan was sure.

Wet snow dripped from his flannel-lined jeans onto the floor as he leaned against the counter and surveyed the room. The ceiling sagged and the warped linoleum swelled and dipped in spots. It was an old house. But it was his. When Drew told him he’d inherited it this afternoon, a sudden possessiveness invaded him. Dan had loved this home. Evan would do no less. But his heart yearned for the farm.

Because farming ran in his blood. Whenever he and his family visited Uncle Manny in Missouri, his siblings would plug their noses as they drove up the lane leading past the pigpens. But Evan would inhale deeply. His uncle said it smelled like money. To him, it smelled like the future—his future.

He’d spent many summers in Missouri, rising early to milk the cows, cleaning the pigpens, and pitching hay while beads of sweat trickled down his brow. His uncle taught him how to drive a tractor when he was nine. The combine when he was fifteen. Driving such a powerful piece of machinery, suspended so high up above the cornfields, made him feel like he could reach up his hand and touch the floor of heaven.

Evan knew at a young age that he wanted to be a farmer. There was only one problem. One small hiccup to living out the dream he’d envisioned for himself. He was stuck in the middle of farm country with no land of his own.

He worked on his uncle’s farm after college, but Manny had two sons following in his footsteps, and back then Evan caused trouble. The night he drank himself silly and wrecked one of the tractors was the night his uncle kicked him out for good. With nowhere to go, he swallowed his pride and headed home. To Iowa. A vagabond, a farmer without a farm, determined to fix enough cars and farm equipment until he could rent some acreage of his own.

But God had other plans.

Five years ago, Robin told him about Dan’s farm and his need for help. Evan couldn’t resist the opportunity. At the time, Bryan and Amy and his parents still lived in Iowa, and they liked to pester him about his faith, or lack thereof. Dan was different. He let Evan continue his longstanding wrestling match with God and patiently answered whatever questions Evan hurled his way. Until Evan grew tired of wrestling and tired of his brokenness, and in the middle of Dan’s cornfield, recommitted his life to Christ. It made his connection to this particular land that much stronger.

Recently he caught himself imagining what it might be like to expand. Buy more beef cattle. Maybe some hogs too. He hadn’t thought much about what might happen if Dan were no longer around. Never considered that Dan’s heartless granddaughter might come along and steal his dreams out from under him.

Evan ran his hand down his chin. Too many things were changing, and God wasn’t letting him sit down to grieve. He kept throwing tragedies in his path, one after the other, and all Evan could do was toss one aside so his hands would be free to catch the next one. Well, he wouldn’t toss this aside. He’d hold on for all it was worth.

Outside the window, a white mess swirled. He couldn’t see the land, but he could picture it. The paddock. The cow pastures and fields that curved around the farmhouse like one giant horseshoe. He hated seeing cornfield after cornfield disappear, swallowed up by the expanding upper-class housing developments suffocating rural Iowa. And now Bethany wanted to sell, concerned only by how many zeros came attached to her profit. Dan and the farm had turned into a steppingstone. There had to be a way to convince her to reconsider.

Evan turned on the faucet and filled a cup. He gulped the cold liquid and set the cup on the counter. He was about to unlace his boots when he heard noise at the front door. He poked his head around the corner just as the door flew open. A gust of blustery wind swept through the house, and a dusting of snow blew across the wood floor.

He clomped into the living room, leaving behind a trail of slush. Bethany came into view, looking first at his boots, then at his face. She lugged her suitcase behind her and let it clatter to the ground. The storm slammed the door shut like an angry child.

“What are you doing?”

She righted her fallen luggage and moved her fingers through her hair, brushing away snowflakes, her expression cool. “I was hoping you’d let me sleep here.”

He cocked his head. Was she serious? She’d probably already called a Realtor, had a queue of land developers lined up to survey the farm, and she had the nerve to come to her grandfather’s—no,
his
house—and ask to stay? “I thought you were going back to Chicago.”

She made a sound—half sigh, half squeak—and pointed out the window. “In this?”

He closed his eyes and prayed for kindness. Because at the moment, he wasn’t feeling very kind. She kicked off her shoes and pulled her luggage toward the staircase.

“Hold on a second.”

“Please, can we not do this right now? It’s been a long day.” She played tug of war with her suitcase as she tried to heave it up the steps. Her luggage probably weighed more than she did.