The Year of Luminous Love (45 page)

“I … I’ll pay you back.”

“No need. It may as well do some good after all the harm it’s caused.”

Ciana took the bills gratefully. “You’re a lifesaver.”

“It’s a pinkie-swear secret, you know. Not even your mother.”

Ciana hooked pinkies with Eden, then ran from the barn to find Clyde.

In June, Eden quit the boutique and devoted her energy to helping Ciana and Alice Faye with their giant home garden. She surprised them and herself as well, taking an unexpected interest in growing vegetables, in watering, harvesting, and even in pulling detested weeds. Every week some new food cropped up to pick and eat, each made more delicious because she’d nurtured it. She learned how to cook and how to can, putting up countless jars of tomatoes, squash, beans—a stash of food for the coming winter.

Eden liked helping Ciana, too, because seeing how hard she worked, how she fell exhausted into bed every night, also made Eden feel valuable and necessary and wanted. Eden didn’t hear from Gwen, could only hope she was safe wherever she was living with her illness.

July brought the rodeo, but Ciana didn’t ride in the opening
ceremonies. Not this year. The flag corps all wore black armbands in honor of Arie.

August came hot and airless, along with an amazing special concert from a top country singer, exclusively for Arie’s family and friends. Naturally, the crowd was large enough to fill the high school auditorium. The singer told stories about Arie between songs, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the place.

Sometimes Ciana drove out to the cemetery and put wild-flowers she’d gathered on Arie’s grave, sat for a spell in the quiet, and wept. Her memories of Arie were everywhere; there seemed no escape, no respite, when the fingers of grief unexpectedly grabbed her heart. She saw Arie’s face and sunny smile in the rising sun as she rode Firecracker across her fields. She heard Arie’s laughter over Eden’s childlike exuberance the time she ran into the kitchen from the chicken coop shouting, “Baby chicks! We have baby chicks!” Often when the long summer days were done, Ciana and Eden sat out on the veranda, sipping wine by candlelight, and reminisced about Italy. “I wonder where everyone is, all the people we met over there.”

“You mean Garret and Enzo,” Eden said. “Who else matters?”

They giggled. Ciana said, “I’m sure Enzo is bedding some countess.”

“Do you think he scored every time with every woman?”

“Probably. He
is
charming.”

“But not with you,” Eden said. “You’re the one who got away.”

“I’m the one who was too scared.”

“And in love with someone else.”

“Ancient history.” Ciana rested her feet on the porch’s rail. “Which isn’t the case with you and Garret. Have you given up looking for him?”

“I haven’t, but I’ve been doing something for myself before I resume the hunt. Something special.” Eden held out one of her arms so that the underside showed. “I’ve been going to a dermatologist in Nashville. He specializes in scar removal, and he’s minimizing my scars from my days of cutting. After treatment, the ugly raised lumps should be reduced to thin white lines. It’s a long process. When I see Garret again, I want my past to be as wiped away as possible.”

“But you said he knows about your scars and didn’t care.”

“
I
know,” Eden said. “And
I
care.”

Ciana touched Eden’s glass with hers in tribute. Beyond the porch, fireflies blinked coded messages, and a horse whinnied from the pasture. The night silence was broken by a cacophony of tree frogs calling to each other, underscoring the lost piece of their friendship circle. “I miss Arie.”

Nostalgia for what was gone brought a lump to Eden’s throat. “Know what she’d ask you if she were here? She’d ask, ‘Why haven’t you called Jon this summer? Asked him to come back?’ ”

“Phone works both ways,” Ciana said, spinning the glass between her palms. “He hasn’t reached out to me either.”

Eden had struck a very sore spot. Jon had not once contacted her since leaving. The slight stung until the truth dawned on her: he was content in his old life. Yet, try as she might, she couldn’t rid herself of his memory. The men she met on her and Eden’s occasional venture into Nashville clubs were pale reflections of him, inferior to Jon in every way. She kept this to herself, of course. One of the Beauchamp rules of life: Be content with what you have, and don’t bitch about what you don’t have. Yet in the dark of night, when she was alone or standing under a full moon, she missed him all the more.

Ciana raised her glass. “To Arie. And to friendship.”

“How about love?” Eden asked.

“A fool’s game.” Ciana rose, dumping the contents of her glass over the porch rail, and bounded barefoot onto the grass. “Have you ever caught fireflies, girlfriend?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Come here,” Ciana commanded.

Eden scampered onto the lawn. “Why do they blink?”

“It’s their language of love.” Ciana twirled, raised her glass, and scooped it through the air, snagging several blinking insects and slapped her hand across the glass’s open top. “Now your turn.”

Eden attempted the same procedure but failed to catch even one bug. “Empty,” she lamented.

“Practice!”

Eden captured two, but when she saw Ciana’s full jar, she said, “How illuminating!”

Ciana laughed. “Glowing!”

“Flashing!”

“Incandescent!”

“Resplendent!” Eden shouted after a few seconds of thought.

“Luminous!”

“Now what?” Eden asked.

“We let them go.”

“Why?”

“So they can live,” Ciana said, removing her hand covering the glass. She lifted it high over her head, and together the two friends watched the fireflies slip from their prison in slow upward spirals one by one, to mingle with the stars.

I have lived most of my life in the South. Honestly, I enjoy the slower pace of life here. I like the South’s sense of tradition, family, and history. I like the idea of inheriting land and place, of holding on to both, and of passing them along to future generations.

My new Windemere series is a deepening of my own Southern generational roots. The series is filled with imagined characters living in the fictional town of Windemere, Tennessee, not too far from Nashville, a place of plentiful farmland and beautiful horses, of seasons measured not only by sun and rain, but by a sense of ownership and respect for the past.

This first novel,
The Year of Luminous Love
, depicts love
of
people and
between
people, a love for the land, and a way of Southern life still embraced in a fast-moving, ever-changing world. It focuses on friendship, family, and heartbreaking love, on choices made and on pitfalls that cause people to stumble but also to overcome. In this book I launch three young women, best friends from high school, into the bigger world,
each with hopes, dreams, and plans for their futures. They often face complicated, even controversial, situations. They have troubles with money, health, love, family. But through every crisis, they have each other.

You will share their struggles. One girl must fight to hold on to her beloved land, one must escape the stranglehold of a love relationship gone bad, and one must confront death. When given the chance to travel across an ocean, each girl leaves her familiar life and comfort zone for an adventure that helps her to understand her own needs and wants and to determine what she most values.

The Year of Luminous Love
begins their journey.
The Year of Chasing Dreams
will continue it. I think of these two books as a love letter to my Southern roots and to you readers, who encourage me. As a bonus, I’m also writing two e-original short stories about these friends and their families. Watch for them online or check my website,
LurleneMcdaniel.com
.

I hope you will love Windemere, its past and present, its people, and their stories. Please come into their world with me and live their dreams with them.

My thanks for agricultural expertise for this novel go to John Goddard, Loudon County, Tennessee, Agricultural Extension Agent; Bart Watson, Loudon County, Tennessee, Farm Bureau Agent; and Jim Farley, a dashing young insurance man, and Martha Farley, his wonderful wife.

Lurlene McDaniel began writing inspirational novels about teenagers facing life-altering situations when her son was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. “I saw firsthand how chronic illness affects every aspect of a person’s life,” she has said. “I want kids to know that while people don’t get to choose what life gives to them, they do get to choose how they respond.”

Lurlene McDaniel’s novels are hard-hitting and realistic, but also leave readers with inspiration and hope. Her books have received acclaim from readers, teachers, parents, and reviewers. Her bestselling novels include
Don’t Die, My Love; Till Death Do Us Part; Hit and Run; Telling Christina Goodbye; True Love: Three Novels;
and
The End of Forever
.

Lurlene McDaniel lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

A LONE HORSE AND RIDER stood at the top of Bellmeade’s long tree-lined driveway. Ciana Beauchamp had noticed the figure as she passed a window inside her house but hadn’t paid it much mind. Horseback riders often passed her property on the road fronting her land. Yet this one had been motionless at the entrance for what seemed too long.

She couldn’t see the rider clearly. Gloom from the darkening cloudy overhead sky had gathered from the west, promising autumn rain. She had been in a funk all day. It was October twenty-fourth. This would have been Arie Winslow’s twentieth birthday—if she had lived.

Ciana’s friend Eden McLauren had gone into town, and her mother, Alice Faye, was banging around in the kitchen. The final harvest was completed, and Ciana should have felt peaceful satisfaction, but she didn’t. She was sad and on edge, and the horse and rider were adding to her tension.

She’d thought about Arie all day, remembering her trip to Italy with Arie and Eden the summer before, concentrating
on the good times, glossing over the hurts. She missed Arie as much now as she had on the day she’d left her earthly life. What she wouldn’t give to see her, talk to her one more time.

Through the window, Ciana saw the horse stamp, growing restless. She squinted, trying to see the rider more clearly. Exasperated, she stepped out onto the wraparound veranda of the old Victorian house. The rider urged his mount forward and the horse came up the drive under tight rein, almost as if it knew where it was going. The rider, a man in a cowboy hat, sat tall in the saddle, and as he drew nearer, Ciana saw that the horse was a buckskin, toffee-colored with a black mane and tail. Ciana’s heartbeat picked up, and her lungs seemed to tighten in her chest.

At the front steps, the cowboy removed his hat and hung it on the horn of the saddle. He slid off the horse, grabbed a leather bag, and laid it on the top step. Ripe red apples rolled from the pouch, stopping at Ciana’s feet. “Here’s a gift,” Jon Mercer said.

Almost overwhelmed by the sight of him and the gesture, Ciana felt her chin tremble. She kept her composure, squared her shoulders, and asked, “Who told you about the apples?”

“Arie. It was one of her favorite stories about your grandparents. She said it was how Charles came to court Olivia. Fresh apples were all he had to offer.”

Ciana saw instantly that Arie had shared the story in a final act of kindness when she had realized the truth about Ciana and Jon. “Arie died in April,” Ciana said stoically, feeling old resentments toward Jon rise.

“Abbie let me know. I had asked her to call when … after it was over.”