High Plains Hearts (46 page)

She turned on the radio and smiled. The teenager had some priorities. The truck had satellite radio.

She hit a bump and the book on the seat beside her slid onto the floor. She’d bought it in the Indianapolis airport—or maybe it was Detroit—and read it eagerly.
The Complete Guide to Home Construction and Repair
. She’d had some doubts about how thoroughly the topic could be covered in 249 pages, but it had been enlightening.

Something alongside the road moved, and she slowed to a stop. A family of deer watched her curiously, and she spoke to them from inside the truck. “You’re wondering what I’m doing here, aren’t you? Well, so am I.”

She wasn’t the kind of person to be impetuous, but here she was, on a gravel road in North Dakota. Just two weeks ago, she’d been sitting in traffic in Boston, reaching for that stray newspaper. If it hadn’t blown up against her car, if she hadn’t picked it up, if she hadn’t been stuck in traffic, if she hadn’t lost her temper with Mr. Evans … It was an amazing chain of sequences.

She got out of the truck and stretched. The deer took one last look at her and bounded away, and she was alone, except for the warbling melody of a bird.

Along the western horizon, jagged peaks sprouted up. The colors were wild. Russet and brick with terra cotta and cinnamon. The Badlands.

Beside their wonder, under a sky that was the purest blue she’d ever seen, she felt suddenly a part of it all. A tiny part, but a part nevertheless.

Praying hadn’t been something she’d done a lot of lately, unless she counted urging God to let her car start on a cold morning, or pleading with Him to let there not be a long line at the drive-up coffee place.

Now though, when it was just her, the deer, and the Badlands, it became important to recognize God’s handiwork and to put herself in His mighty hands.

“God, I don’t know what I’m doing here, but I’m going to need some help. You’ve put me here for some reason, I’m sure, and I want to thank You for choosing such a spectacular setting.” She paused. “Amen.”

She got back into the truck, and after several noisy tries, got it to start.

This was an amazing trip. Here she was, Livvy Moore, in North Dakota, on a gravel road in a pickup truck with a gun rack in the back, headed for a place she’d been drawn to by the sheer appeal of a windblown ad.

Amazing.

“Ready for a break?” Hayden stopped sorting through the lumber pile and stood up, his back protesting vehemently.

“Yup.” Gramps pulled his straw hat off, ran his hand over his nearly bald head, and stuck the hat back on again.

The two of them had tackled yet another outbuilding. This one held smaller pieces of wood, salvaged apparently from the old boathouse.

“Look, Gramps.” Hayden handed him a sign that was in the heap.
BUDDY
S
YSTEM
S
WIM—

“Remember that? You had the buddy system rule over at the swimming beach.”

“Save it,” his grandfather said, taking the sign and laying it aside. “We’ll fix it and use it again.”

“But there’s no swimming beach anymore. Remember, Gramps?”

Gramps frowned a bit, and the veil came over his eyes that Hayden was seeing much too frequently. His grandfather got confused more and more, and details didn’t stay with him.

Hayden put his arm around his grandfather’s shoulders, trying to ignore the clutch of fear that assailed him whenever he felt how thin his grandfather had become. Under the red flannel shirt he could feel every angle of the old man’s bones.

“Let’s go inside and have a root beer,” he said gently, guiding Gramps back to the house.

Once inside the cool kitchen, he uncapped two brown bottles of root beer. “Just like the old days, right, Gramps?” he asked as they took deep sips of the icy sweet drink. “Remember how we used to come into the canteen and buy root beer and those candy ropes? We’d eat them until we were sick.”

Gramps laughed, his gaze bright and snappy again. “Everyone was covered with sand and the flies came in because you kids couldn’t remember to shut the screen door.”

“That screen door never shut anyway. Those were some good times, weren’t they?”

“You know what was my favorite?” his grandfather asked. “The bonfire.”

Hayden smiled, transported back to those summer evenings at the bonfire his grandfather built each night. The kids had their favorite marshmallow-roasting sticks, and dodging the sparks to get your marshmallow done perfectly was part of the fun. “Does anything taste better than a marshmallow cooked over a bonfire?” he asked. “So hot you can’t eat it, and so gooey you can’t help yourself. Of course, the best ones are the ones that catch fire and turn black. Yum!”

“And the vespers.” Gramps leaned forward. “Remember the vespers?”

“Of course. Every bonfire ended with a prayer. It was the perfect ending to perfect days.”

Gramps turned to him and wrapped his gnarled fingers around Hayden’s hand. “Grub, we had good times here. But we can’t keep Sunshine wrapped in a bubble. We’ve got to move on. You’re a grown man now, teaching math, no less, to those high school kids. And me? I’m an old codger who gets his nows mixed up with his thens.”

“You’re doing fine, Gramps, and you’re coming with me to live in Obsidian,” Hayden reminded him. “You’ve got to make sure I don’t do anything too goofy.”

Gramps chuckled. “And vice versa.”

A loud sound, like a gunshot report, broke the afternoon silence. “What was that?” Hayden asked, bounding out of his chair and reaching for the screen door.

A horn honked. And honked again. And again.

He tore out of the kitchen and across the yard. An old truck was parked there, with a woman trying to do something to the hood of it while the horn continued to honk.

“What are you doing?” he hollered at her.

“It won’t stop!” she yelled back. “And I can’t get this hood thing to open.”

“There’s a lever inside you pull first.”

“I know.” She held it up. “It came off in my hand.”

Fortunately there was enough rust on the truck to make opening the hood fairly easy, and Hayden disconnected the horn.

“Sorry about that,” the woman said, smiling at him. “And sorry about that bang. This thing backfires something fierce.”

She reached her hand out to him. “I’m Livvy Moore, and I want to buy Sunshine.”

T
he two men stared at her, and Livvy’s smile began to fade.

“This is Sunshine, isn’t it? I have the advertisement right here on the front seat.” She pulled the door of the truck open, and had to slam it twice to make it latch. “Sorry,” she added. “It’s not mine. A young fellow rented it to me.”

“It’s Trevor’s truck,” the older man said. “Boy has a fool’s heart but an accountant’s mind.”

“Excuse me?” The conversation had just started and she was already lost.

The younger man stepped forward. “I’m Hayden Greenwood and this is my grandfather, Charlie Greenwood. Please excuse our manners. We don’t get many folks visiting.”

“I’m not visiting,” she said. “Unless Sunshine is already sold?”

Behind Haywood, his grandfather grinned. “Nope.”

“Gramps and I were just sitting down to a root beer in the kitchen. Would you like to join us? We’ll be more comfortable in there, out of the sun,” Hayden said.

For a breath of a moment, Livvy paused. In Boston, she would never have gone into a house with two men she didn’t know, but on the other hand, she wasn’t in Boston. These guys didn’t look dangerous, and if they were, her fate was sealed anyway. What was she going to do? Leap into the rattletrap pickup truck that might or might not start?

Clutching the advertisement in her hand, she nodded and followed them. The house was a traditional two-storied home, plainly structured with no extra gingerbread features, slatted decorative shutters the only nod to adornment.

Why had she chosen open-toed shoes? The ground was a strange mixture of sand and tiny pebbles and loose red dirt, and it quickly worked its way inside her designer shoes where it ground away at the soles of her feet, and it certainly wasn’t doing her hosiery any good either.

She hobbled behind the men, trying not to wince as the debris dug even deeper into her feet.

At the door of the house, she surreptitiously slipped her feet out of the open sandals and shook the soil and stones out, vowing never again to wear those torturous things here.

The inside of the house was welcoming. In the open windows, light yellow curtains lifted and billowed in the afternoon breeze. An old-fashioned oscillating fan whirred in the corner, keeping the air moving.

“This is such a comfortable home, Mr. Greenwood,” she said as the older gentleman caught the screen door so it didn’t slam behind them.

His face crinkled into a smile. “Do us all a favor and call me Gramps. You use city words like
Mr. Greenwood
here and nobody’ll know who you mean. Right, Grub?”

“Grub?” she asked.

Hayden rubbed his grandfather’s shoulder. “Only Gramps can call me Grub. The rest of the world is forced to call me Hayden.”

She liked them already. The love between the two was clear.

She looked around the living room.

The floors were wooden—the original planks, she was sure, judging from the soft satiny patina and the slight dip in the floor leading from the front door to the kitchen, the worn path of many feet heading for a treat or a cup of coffee after coming from the outside.

A large braided rug, its edges curled and mended, had also held its place of honor in the middle of the living room for at least two generations. She’d noticed similar ones at auctions in Boston, going for quite a fine price as what the decorators called “vintage Americana.”

A tabby cat, the biggest one Livvy had ever seen, was curled in the middle of the rug. It opened one eye and looked at Livvy with a deep golden gaze and then, apparently deciding that the newcomer was no one important, shut the eye again and began to snore.

“That’s the only cat left here. Got the last of the barn cats—or resort cats, most rightly—adopted out a week ago. No, this is Martha Washington,” Gramps said with a fond smile at the slumbering cat.

“Martha Washington?” she asked.

“She came pre-named.” Hayden knelt and stroked the cat’s back, but the animal was clearly unimpressed, and slept on. “We inherited her from a lady in Obsidian who let her granddaughter name her. Why she chose that is a mystery that is unsolved today. And the goofy cat doesn’t answer to anything else.”

“Critter doesn’t answer to anything,” Gramps said, shaking his head. “She has a brain the size of a peach pit.”

“Now, now,” Hayden said with a chuckle. “You love that cat.”

Gramps harrumphed. “By the way, Miss Moore, the cat comes with Sunshine. Don’t want her? That’s a deal-breaker.”

“Call me Livvy, and the cat is welcome.”

“No changing your mind,” Gramps warned. “But let’s get back to those root beers and see if we can cool ourselves off a bit.”

She followed the men into the kitchen, which was bigger than the living room. Cabinets lined three of the four walls, with breaks only for two large windows. The fourth wall was covered with framed photographs, plaques with mottos and Bible verses engraved on them, and a painting of the Last Supper.

“Root beer?” Hayden asked as Gramps pulled out her chair for her.

The table and chairs were from the early 1950s. The chairs were upholstered in red vinyl, patched and re-patched with tape, and the tabletop was a matching marbleized red plastic with a dented aluminum edge that ran around it.

“Root beer would be lovely.”

“Back in the good old days,” Gramps said as he stared at a photo on the wall, “we had a big cooler that we kept all different kinds of pop in. Green River, Yoo-hoo, grape Nehi—remember those, Grub? Your favorite was Green River. Or was that your dad’s?”

“Dad’s,” Hayden answered. “I was always a root beer fellow myself, just like you, Gramps.”

“Root beer is mighty good,” the older man said, “especially when you drink it out of a Sunshine glass.”

“Right you are,” Hayden said. “Coming right up.”

Soon they were pouring root beer into tall blue glasses with S
UNSHINE
, N
ORTH
D
AKOTA
, on the side.

“We used to have these by the boxful,” Hayden said. “Now we’re down to just a few.”

“You’d better order some more, then,” his grandfather said.

“We don’t need them,” Hayden reminded him. “Sunshine closed as a resort two years ago.”

“End of an era, end of an era.” The old man sighed.

“So,” Hayden said, looking directly at her with eyes that were an amazing light blue, “you’re considering buying Sunshine, Miss Moore?”

“It’s Livvy, please. If you’ll sell it to me, I’ll buy it.”

She heard her own voice speaking the words, but it all seemed like a dream. This was so out of character—but maybe she didn’t know what her own character was, having had it buried under the heavy thumb of Michael Evans for too many years.

“Why?” Gramps’s question was direct.

“Because I—” She faltered. How could she explain the series of circumstances that had led her there?

She looked at the two men sitting across from her, and began. When she had finished telling the story of the windblown paper, she said, “I think it was one of those God things. Do you know what I mean?”

In the Boston agency, with the people she usually dealt with, the answer would have been a benevolent chuckle, but here the reaction was different. After a moment, both men nodded. “We do know,” Hayden said.

“God works in mysterious ways,” Gramps added. “Very mysterious. Sometimes I wish I knew what He had planned for us, but this life is one long voyage to our reward. He’s given us a map, and we can stay on the road and enjoy the ultimate destination, or we can do like most of us do and meander all over the countryside, taking wrong turns and finding dead ends.”

“So you believe that God led you here,” Hayden said.

She swallowed. It sounded as if they had lived their lives as Christians. It wasn’t that she hadn’t, but she had taken many of those wrong turns.