How Sweet It Is (15 page)

Glass shattered. My seatbelt snapped at the buckle and my head hit the dashboard. My body broke, but something deep inside me broke, too.

twenty-two

T
he kids want to go camping. Last fall they went for a whole weekend, funding their trip by mowing lawns for church members and holding a bake sale.

They are excited about the bake sale because they know that the more they earn there, the better food they can buy for the camping trip. Bobby wants lots of marshmallows and pancakes. Bubba hopes the hamburgers will taste like Burger King’s.

Charlotte seems a little uncertain about the trip. She wasn’t able to go last year due to a stomach virus, so while the others camped, she was at home being cared for by her sister. Charlotte doesn’t tell me this; Rainy lets me know when Charlotte leaves the kitchen to go to the restroom.

When Charlotte returns, she slinks up to me and asks, “What will cooking be like over a campfire?”

Lisa, with a strand of her brown hair in her mouth, shakes salt onto the diced potatoes we are preparing and says, “As long as the bears don’t get us and eat our food or us, we’ll be okay.”

Charlotte sinks back into her chair.

Great, I think. She finally comes out of her shell with something besides just asking to use the restroom and Lisa destroys her confidence. I want to shout lines from
Oh, the Places You’ll Go
. “Today is your day, Charlotte! Don’t let anyone stop you from living and succeeding at what you want to do.” But I don’t say this because the last thing I want to do is to embarrass her.

Suddenly the kitchen is filled with commotion about bears. Bubba says once he saw a man get his leg chewed off by a bear, and then Rainy says that she sees bears all the time because they live in her foster parents’ backyard. Bobby says that’s a lie, and then, calmly, I bring the class to order.

“First, we are going to talk about the bake sale,” I say. “What would y’all like to make for that?”

“We can make brownies!” Dougy says.

“Duh!” Bubba adds.

“From scratch.” Dougy smiles.

“Are you married, Miss Livingston?”

“No, dummy,” Dougy cries and hits Bobby’s large girth with a spoon.

“Of course she is. She makes white sauce for her husband for dinner every night, don’t you, Miss Livingston?” Lisa is at my side stirring the potatoes once before we put them in the oven. She uses her sweet smile.

“If we are going to make foods to sell, we need to work,” I say, hoping to change the subject. “What did y’all make last year for the bake sale?” I slide the baking tin into the oven and remove the oven mitt from my hand.

“Blueberry cookies.” Rainy offers this.

“Really?” I have never heard of blueberry cookies.

Rainy takes the sunglasses from her eyes and balances them on the top of her head. “They were squishy.”

“I liked them,” Dougy says. “I like the color blue.”

“Last year we didn’t have a cooking teacher.” Bobby pulls his shirt over his stomach. “Just some church volunteers came in to help us make those cookies.”

And after that experience with the kids, I bet they vowed never to set foot in here again.

“What are we making today again?” asks Dougy.

“Crispy potatoes.” Joy announces and then looks at the recipe card lying on the counter. “With spices.”

Bubba repeats what I stated at the beginning of class this afternoon. “The recipe is from a Spanish chef who has a fancy restaurant in Atlanta.”

“That’s right,” I say, hoping that the potatoes will turn out as good as Chef B’s.

“And we are going to
love
them,” says Bubba.

“Maybe even better than the fries at McDonald’s,” adds Dougy.

“Maybe even Burger King.” Bubba smiles at me, his round face looking like a potato.

Lisa takes a strand of hair from her mouth. “I just wonder why you aren’t married, Miss Livingston.”

Rainy pops her sunglasses over her eyes. “Really.”

————

Yes, I was once engaged. Engaged in June, with a wedding scheduled for sometime the following year. I wanted it to be in May, but Lucas hesitated. Now I realize that the hesitation came because of his uncertainty about marrying me, not because he couldn’t decide on the best month to wed.

June is now here; this is the month I would have been married. This is the time we would be taking off to California for our honeymoon as Mr. and Mrs. Beckley.

I study the ring he gave me: two carats, gold band. He never asked for it back, and I never offered to give it back.

I’m standing over the sink in the upstairs bathroom and holding the ring as the sun streams through the tiny window and dances off of it. I remember how proud I was to first wear this ring, always adjusting my hand so that I could view it as I created desserts at the restaurant. In the evenings, I liked being at stoplights so I could have time just to watch the diamond catch the city lights. Sometimes it looked red or green or gold, depending on the light reflecting off it.

Suddenly, the ring slips from my hands and hits the inside of the basin. I gasp, reach for it, but I’m too late. The ring has gone down the drain. Gone. The ring is gone, Deena. So much for pawning it off to get money for a trip to Hawaii.

I stand at the sink. What do I care? I’m not engaged. I should have tossed the ring into the sink the minute I landed in this town.

The doorbell rings, and I hear Jonas’s voice downstairs as he opens the front door. “Deirdre?”

“I’m upstairs,” I say as I rush out of the bathroom and wave to him from the open loft. “Hi.”

“Hi. I came to check the pipes.” He twirls his wrench and smiles. His bandana is the color of apricots this afternoon.

An idea hits me. “Can you help me?”

Jonas looks perplexed. “Upstairs?” he asks, looking up at me.

“Yes.”

“Pipes?” he asks as he starts to climb the loft ladder.

Believe it or not, yes. Just when I need a plumber, along comes Jonas.

My bed is strewn with cotton shirts in all my favorite colors— amber, rust, light blue, pink. I was trying to see which summer shirts I can wear. My plan is to wear shirts that won’t make the scars on my arms look hideous. None of these looked right. They’re short-sleeved, so of course each one shows the
rivers
. Disgusted, I took off shirt after shirt and wondered if I could get away with long-sleeved shirts all summer. I envisioned teaching in a warm kitchen at The Center, sweat pouring off of me, and the kids asking why I’m wearing long sleeves when it’s ninety degrees. Conclusion of my shirt-trying-on: I may need to move to Antarctica. Forget the trip to Hawaii.

Jonas isn’t bothered by the mess. He enters the tiny bathroom and asks, “Which pipe?”

“Actually, it’s the drain in the sink.”

He gives me a confused look.

“I dropped a ring in there.”

“Why?”

I sigh. I was distracted, clumsy.

“Why did you do that?”

“It was a mistake.” And so, it turns out, was my engagement to Lucas.

“An accident?”

I nod.

After that clarification, Jonas sets to work, getting on the floor, opening the cabinet under the sink, using his wrench.

“Do you think you can find it?” I ask as the top half of his body holed up under the cabinet.

“99.9 percent sure I can,” he says, his voice muffled.

I watch his broad back, his shoulders and elbows moving, and then, the next thing I hear is a triumphant, “I got it!” As he backs out from under the sink and out of the cabinet, his head bumps against the cabinet door. “Ouch.”

The sight of blood makes me queasy. My friends work in the medical field; they deal well with this kind of thing. I fumble in the medicine cabinet by the mirror and find a chocolate cupcake Band-Aid. I place it on the cut above his left eyebrow, just below the fold of his bandana.

“Are you done?” he asks.

I smile at him. “Yes.” I pat the top of his head.

Then he opens his hand. In it is a mass of black slime. From the glob, he picks out a small object. “This it?”

Part of me is grateful he was able to get Lucas’s ring out of the drain; the other part of me wishes it was lost forever. I am amazed also at how filthy the drain of a sink can be. That thought actually makes my skin itch. I carefully take the ring from him and then head down the stairs to wash it in the kitchen sink. To keep from losing it again, I place it in a colander and run water over it until it is free from gunk.

I read a story once about a couple going through a divorce.

The wife threw a pair of Italian champagne glasses off her deck. They’d been a wedding gift, and I imagined that when she opened the box where they lay, all sparkling and new, she’d been excited. And then, the downfall, and instead of quietly drinking champagne with her adoring husband on their home’s deck, she tossed those glasses as far as her strength would let her.

“No,” I say to the ring, now clear and bright. “I won’t throw you out. I’ll pawn you off.” I make a note to ask Jonas where the local pawn shop is.

When I return to the upstairs bathroom, he’s looking in the mirror. “Chocolate cupcakes,” he notes. “Pretty for a Band-Aid.”

I ask if he’d like some coffee.

“Do you have sugar?”

“I do.”

“You have sugar? Okay.”

He washes his hands, puts the drain back together, and comes down to the kitchen, where I’m pouring coffee in the Indian mug for him.

We sit at the table. He takes his coffee with six teaspoons of sugar.

“My brother was to be married, but she died. She died.”

This is the first time Jonas has ever mentioned a family member to me. I suppose I just thought he lived alone and had no other commitments, that he just appeared one day in Bryson City the same way he just appeared on my doorstep. “What happened?”

“Sick. She was sick.” A shadow looms across his face. “My brother prayed.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“She died.” Jonas lifts his eyes to meet mine. “We don’t know why there was no miracle.”

“That is so sad, Jonas.”

He nods, looks down at his hands. Silence follows, as though he’s honoring this woman’s memory.

Through the window I watch a blue jay perch on one of the deck railings. I wonder what it would be like to be free from the tangled emotions of life.

Jonas raises his head. “She was real nice, real nice. Like you.”

“Thank you, Jonas.”

He takes a gulp of coffee. “Who gave you the ring?”

Some guy, I forget his name. He would take my hand and kiss each fingertip as we sat together on the sofa watching videos in my apartment. We took Sunday drives with stops for coffee, talk of which house we’d buy—I liked brick two-stories and he preferred the ranch homes—and the promise of a future together. Once his loan was approved, he was planning to open a business in DeKalb County, selling home furnishings. Oh, I wish I could forget it all—Lucas, Ella, the accident, the 179 stitches. But each time I get over one hurdle, another one blocks my ability to keep running this race called life.

“The ring is pretty,” Jonas says.

I used to think so, too.

Dare I tell Jonas about my past? My fingers crunch into fists as though their tightness will keep me from speaking. Yesterday, when Regena Lorraine came over to bring a bushel of Granny Smith apples, she made a comment about my past and how sorry she was about what I’d gone through. I offered her nothing more than a nod and a slight smile. I know she wanted to know more, wanted me to tell all. I’m not sure what my parents told her when they went up to Pennsylvania for Grandpa’s funeral. I don’t know if they said much. My mother believes in keeping your problems to yourself. When Andrea got engaged to Mark, she told only me at first. “Do you think Mom will be okay with this?”

“Are you kidding? She thinks Mark is the best around.”

“She does?”

I laughed. “No. She doesn’t think any man is worthy of you or me.”

“Yeah, that’s what I remember about Mom.” My sister sighed. “Can you tell her, then?”

I shook my head. “Oh, no. I’m not doing your dirty work for you.” I liked Mark and knew he was interested in overseas missions, a perfect candidate for Andrea because since she was six and I was four, she had made me listen to her desires to explore the world.

Andrea and I both sat on the sofa in my apartment and looked sad. We realized most girls would be elated when they got engaged, excited to tell their parents. While our dad would be happy for us, Mom scrutinized everything.

But it is Jonas sitting before me. Jonas with his wrench. And he wants to know who I was engaged to. I’ll keep it brief. I’ll just say Lucas was in love with someone else. “My fiancé was in love with someone else. He wasn’t the committing kind.”

I expect Jonas to nod, finish his coffee, stand, start humming. I expect to watch him as he picks up his wrench and swings it as he walks around the cabin to check the pipes. I’ll wash the dishes, I think. I’ll fill the sink with hot soapy water and forget that I ever made the humiliating mistake of telling this man about my heartache.

He does finish his coffee, but then, folding his hands, he looks at me. “What was his name? How old was he? What was his job?”