Wildflowers from Winter (33 page)

While the construction forced Bethany to keep in regular contact with Evan, she recaptured the cool indifference she’d lost over the course of her stay in Peaks and did not allow their conversations to slip anywhere beyond business. She buried whatever attraction she felt toward him and focused her efforts on bringing her vision to life.

The café would be finished well before Robin delivered her baby. While Bethany rejoiced over their accomplishment, part of her mourned its completion. Robin’s due date crept closer. And soon she wouldn’t have any more
excuses for sticking around. With the café finished and Robin no longer pregnant, it would be time for Bethany to say good-bye to her odd, unexpected time in Peaks. She tapped the handle of the paint roller against her palm.

Gavin, Amanda, and Bethany finished slathering on the first coat of paint, and Robin surveyed their handiwork from the door. She smiled her approval. “I can’t believe how much you got done!”

Gavin sat back on his heels, wiping the beads of sweat trickling down his temples. “We did a pretty fine job, if I do say so myself. I think we ought to celebrate. What’s everybody doing tonight?”

Bethany pressed the back of her hand against her forehead and shrugged. It was a Saturday night in Peaks. What was there to do?

Amanda groaned. “Gavin, we’re not going to the fair.”

Gavin turned to his sister. “What’s your beef with the fair?”

“Every year you somehow rope me into going. And every year, I somehow manage to step in a pile of horse—”

Gavin held up his palm. “Let’s keep this G-rated, little sis.”

Amanda smirked. “I was going to say manure.”

How could Bethany forget about the fair? The town hosted the event every year, the week of the Fourth of July. When she was a kid, it was one of the few things she looked forward to. Grandpa Dan would let her and David go on some rides that made their insides wobble, buy them each a stick of cotton candy, then take them through the petting zoo. When she was seven, they had a white baby llama, and Bethany couldn’t stop laughing while she petted the animal’s long neck.

“What do you say, Bethany?” Gavin said. “Are you in for some fun?”

Corn dogs and funnel cakes didn’t exactly fit her current definition of fun. Still, taking a night away from her disappointing job search to celebrate their accomplishments—even if it was at a small-town, Podunk event—did carry a certain appeal. She looked at Robin. “Do you want to go?”

Robin placed her hands on top of her belly. “I can’t exactly go on any rides.”

“We can sit out together. You know I can’t stand being dizzy.”

Gavin grabbed his phone from his back pocket. “I’ll call Evan. The man works too hard. He needs to get his butt away from the farm for one night and have some country fun.”

The evening sun refused to look away. It glared at them over the horizon. Bethany moved her hand to her neck, twisted the loose tendrils together, and brought them up to her ponytail. She, Robin, and Gavin stood inside the fairgrounds waiting for Evan, who had agreed to come out and celebrate.

Bethany forced her shoulders to relax. Tonight was about fun. Celebration. Enjoyment. Although those things would be harder to accomplish with Evan tagging along, she wasn’t going to let his presence ruin her good intentions. She took a deep breath and attempted to see the fair through a fresh pair of eyes, because hers had grown far too critical. She wasn’t going to be that Bethany tonight. Although it was too hot to let her hair down in the literal sense, she intended to do so in the figurative.

Gavin leaned against the fair gate. “Hey, Number Two!” he said, calling through the wrought-iron bars. “It’s about time you showed up.”

Bethany spotted Evan walking toward them with an easy gait—his shoulders back, his large hands swinging by his sides. He wore sandals, cargo shorts, and a navy blue St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt that hugged his broad chest and slim waist, the converse of Dominic’s tailored suits, which boasted of his impressive career. These two men couldn’t be more opposite. While she’d claimed to love one for three years of her life, she couldn’t remember her chest pulling as tight as it did now.

He handed the lady his ticket and joined them to meander through the crowded thoroughfare. Booths and beer tents lined both sides of the blacktopped road. But the sights and sounds didn’t distract her from Evan, so close by her side that their arms bumped together as they wound their way through the crowd. Each time it happened, heat would burst against Bethany’s skin and she’d lurch away.

Gavin led them down a lane filled with kids and adults who forked over money, hoping to shoot bottles off pedestals, toss rings over rubber ducks, or shoot oversized balls through undersized hoops, all for the sake of winning a stuffed bear.

“What do you say, Ev? Want to win these two pretty ladies here a little something?”

Evan turned to Robin, who hadn’t said much since they arrived. “Is that what you’d like to do?”

It shouldn’t have bothered Bethany that he addressed only Robin, but it did.

“Micah and I always looked at the animals first. He had a soft spot for the 4-H kids and their shows.” Her faraway expression flickered, then cleared. “But some games could be fun.”

As they turned down the carnival lane, Bethany second-guessed their plans. The fair was something Robin and Micah used to go to together. The man had been on the fair board, for crying out loud. Why hadn’t Bethany thought about that? Or why hadn’t Evan or Gavin? She was about to share her concern with Gavin when she saw two familiar faces several paces ahead.

Pastor Fenton stood behind a booth. And next to him, her mother collected bills from a girl’s outstretched hand. Bethany stopped midstride. Evan bumped into her from behind, but she ignored his mumbled apology. She’d kept in sporadic contact with her mother while staying in Peaks. She found she could handle her in small doses as long as they stuck to safe topics, like
David. But handling her with Fenton was an entirely different story.

She pried her eyes away from her mother and noticed three other women, all from First Light, crowded inside the booth. A red banner that read Project MAC rippled in the muggy breeze. Before Bethany could duck undetected into the mass of bodies, her mother looked up from the overflowing canister of money. Bethany jerked back, but too late. She’d already been discovered. Her mother came out from the booth. “Bethany, I’m so happy you’re here. I’ve been thinking about you. It seems you are making great progress on the café.”

Bethany nodded toward the banner. “What are you doing?”

Her mother glanced over her shoulder. “Pastor Fenton came up with the idea. We’re raising money for the church.”

Bethany scrutinized the man doling out plastic balls and noticed a pallor in his face she’d never seen before.

“Do you want to play? The money is going to a great cause.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“Bethany, please don’t be so—”

But before Mom could ask Bethany to stop being whatever it was she was being, one of the women in the booth screamed. The sound of it pierced the air. Bethany looked past her mother and saw Fenton slumped over the booth at an odd angle. The three women scrambled, calling out for help, grabbing Fenton’s arms, while Evan and her mother raced to the booth.

The palpitation of Bethany’s heart did not increase. Her breathing did not come in shallow, sporadic bursts. No part of her panicked. With the indifference of a curious spectator, she observed the scene unfolding in muted slow motion. She watched her mother bend over the crumpled man, her twisted mouth shouting for help. She watched Evan crawl over the counter and grab Fenton’s shoulders. She watched Fenton shoo away the hands that tried to help him in an awkward one-armed bat, his contorted face drooping on one side.

Bethany retrieved her phone from her purse. With steady fingers, she dialed 911 and relayed the emergency with a coolness that might have confused the dispatcher.

“I’m at Peaks County Fair, and a man is having a stroke.”

THIRTY-FOUR

B
y the time the ambulance came, the sun had dipped toward the horizon. A crowd of onlookers parted and grew silent as a crew of paramedics scrambled out of the vehicle and got to work. They checked Fenton’s vitals and asked questions, all while loading him onto a stretcher. Mom and the other women stood to one side, hugging and wringing their hands.

Bethany stood close enough to see Fenton’s slack jaw and the fear nestled in his eyes as one of the first responders asked him questions. The right side of his mouth pulled downward in confusion, while the other remained slack and unmoving. He blinked, groaned, and turned his frightened eyes toward the EMT. A single tear leaked from the corner of one eye. It raced down his cheek and disappeared over the crest of his jaw line.

A furious heat pitched and rolled in Bethany’s belly. What right did he have to cry? What right did he have to turn weak now, when he was finally receiving the same judgment he heaped upon her father? Bethany closed her eyes, unable to see any more tears. She imagined Fenton behind the pulpit, preaching about God’s condemnation with a passion that made her shrink back in her seat. Her mother had watched in rapt awe, clutching the tops of her thighs, while Bethany stared over the rows of wooden pews, thinking about her dad. At home. In a wheelchair. No longer welcome at First Light.

After the accident, her father stopped attending church. Not right away.
But gradually. Pastor Fenton, it seemed, had a strong distaste for suffering and weakness. He didn’t want it inside his church.

Her young mind couldn’t wrap itself around the deterioration of her family unit. She only knew that Pastor Fenton rested at the core of their brokenness. Because ever since her father fell from that silo, the pastor hooked his claws into her mother and convinced her that the accident was proof of her husband’s sin. His paralysis was God’s punishment. According to Fenton, only sinners suffered.

But what now? What would the almighty Pastor Fenton say about this?

Flashing lights pulled Bethany from her thoughts. The paramedics loaded Fenton into the ambulance and left. As the siren wailed through the fairgrounds, Bethany made eye contact with her mother, then turned around and walked away.

She wound through the rides, past ticket booths, past barns lined with pig and goat pens and stalls for cows and enormous Clydesdales, and past kids and moms and dads and laughing teenagers. Her breath did not come until she escaped the crowd and found the shade of a large tree. She gulped in great heaping gobs of air and plopped down in the grass, her legs shaking.

The evening swaddled her in a blanket of chirping crickets and distant fair noises, but her mind was far from quiet. Her murky past stirred, and as hard as she tried, she couldn’t force it to sleep any longer. She grabbed a tuft of tall weeds and braced herself for the onslaught of suppressed memories.

At the age of nine, Bethany found her father submerged in their bathtub. His opened eyes stared like lifeless orbs from the bottom of the tub, unblinking. But as frightening as his eyes were, it was his lips that flooded her soul with hysteria. The color of ripe plums. Parted and frozen. A scream had bubbled in her throat and split the air, echoing off the chambered walls of the bathroom.

According to the autopsy report, her father drowned. With puffy eyes, her mother explained to her and David that his death was an accident. A terrible, horrible, unfortunate accident. Her father must have lost his arm hold on the bathtub bars and had slipped down in the tub. Since he couldn’t sit up on his own, or grab with his hands, he couldn’t pull himself out of the water.

People talked. Speculated. Bethany heard the murmurs and defended her father with matchless ferocity, convinced his death was exactly as her mother had said.

All the while, her life turned inside out. Not only did she lose her father, but her mom moved them into a dumpy trailer home—away from Dan and away from the farm. And every night, instead of tucking her and David into bed, Mom went away too. For the first time in Bethany’s life, her mother had to take a job. Third shift. Every evening at seven o’clock Mom would leave for the local Alcoa plant.

Bethany mourned two deaths. Her father’s and the life she loved. She spent many nights under David’s watch, wondering why everything had to change. It was something that always confused her.

Until three years later.

The summer she turned twelve.

Bethany pedaled her bike through the run-down trailer park and stopped in front of the heap of metal they called home. Fenton’s black sedan was in the driveway. He came over on Saturdays and drank coffee with her mom. Bethany knew she was to make herself scarce.

She stepped off her bike and crept to the front door, thinking if she snuck in real quiet, she could slip to her and David’s room unnoticed. But when she reached the door, Fenton’s voice carried through the opened window.

“The more you dwell on the past, the stronger foothold you give Satan.”

Bethany’s hand glued to the doorknob.

“I just feel so guilty.”