“I need help bleeding the fuel line. Can you rip the pull cord while I bleed it out?”
He nodded and she picked up a rag, holding it at the end of the fuel line. Good thing Gordy had spread out old sheets in the room, although bringing the engine inside had certainly warmed the fuel, turned it less viscous.
Gordy stood over the engine, grabbed the handle, and pulled. Bubbles emerged from the end of the hose as air forced through it. “Again.”
“How did you know to bleed the lines?” Gordy asked as he pulled.
“We had to do it every time the tractor ran out of gas.” More bubbles emerged.
“Your father taught you?”
She nodded, as fuel finally spurted out of the hose. “That’s enough.” She reconnected it to the engine. “And, I got pretty good at it in the military.”
He stood up, wiping his hands, frowning. “You were in the military?”
“Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. I worked in the motor pool.”
She waited for his frown, even the look of disgust.
“Well, I’ll be,” he said. “Maybe after we get dug out, you can come over and take a look at the Ford. It’s got a sticky starter.”
She stared at him, nonplussed.
He smiled.
She found one inside to match it. “Can you carry this outside for me? I need to start it.”
He hefted it up, marched through the kitchen. Dottie was cutting up ham.
“What are you making?”
Dottie looked up at her. “I haven’t a clue.” But she winked as Violet trekked through the kitchen on Gordy’s tail.
They threw on their coats, their boots and hats, and he carried the generator out to the barn. “Dottie’s father wired the barn for electricity after the 1933 World’s Fair. He bought this generator there and thought he would be the first to have electricity in Frost. He was.”
He bent down, ripped the cord. The engine sputtered, but Violet thought she heard life. “Try it again!”
“There’s a plug out here that extends to the house, but it’s not going to run the entire house. You’ll have to turn off the switch, isolate just the lights in the house.”
“Can you do that for me?”
He nodded then pulled the cord again. The generator rumbled and sputtered to life, coughing twice before it died.
Gordy grinned at her as he pulled it yet again. This time the engine caught. “I’ll go throw the switch in the house.” He disappeared first into the utility room of the barn, emerging with what looked like a tree stand. Then he barreled back out into the cold.
While she waited, she wandered the barn, running her hands down the mane of the horse. In a back stall, an old sleigh, the runners rusty and dug into the dirt, suggested a more romantic era. She unearthed the roadster in yet another stall, covered by a blanket. A faded, red 1929 Ford roadster that, with the right touch and someone to believe in it, might be beautiful.
She was fiddling with the hood cover when movement caught her eye. There, in another stall, a foot—
Jake’s foot.
Had he fallen? “Jake?” She found him sprawled on the ground, his eyes closed, holding his chest, his breaths quick, wheezing.
“Are you having a heart attack?” She dropped to her knees beside him. “What’s wrong?”
“He’s having an asthma attack.” Gordy appeared behind her. “Let’s get him in the house.”
An asthma attack?
Gilmore Jenkins had died of asthma when he was ten years old. She could still remember the funeral, the story of how he’d stopped breathing while working in his daddy’s field, turned blue, then white, suffocating while they tried to help him breathe.
Jake had asthma? He’d turned a sort of ashen color in the wan light. He seemed to be gasping now, and as Gordy went around one side of him, to lift him, he opened his eyes.
What looked like horror filled his eyes. His breath—shallow as it was—hiccoughed, then sped up.
“It’s going to be okay, Jake. We’ll get you in the house.”
“Suit…case.” He barely whispered the word, but she heard it. His suitcase lay open at his feet, and in his hand he clutched what looked like a cigarette. She took it from him, pocketed it, then closed the suitcase and picked it up.
Gordy wrapped his arm around him and headed toward the house.
The wind seemed even more violent, scraping ice into her eyes as they wrestled their way to the house. They got him inside, peeled off his coat, and Gordy half dragged him into the kitchen.
“Dot—he’s having an asthma attack. Get a towel.”
She nodded and darted out of the room.
“Violet, in his suitcase—he’s got a tin of Elliot’s Asthma Powder. Find it. We need to burn it and get him to breath in the smoke.”
She opened the suitcase on the table. Clothes, a manila package, shoes, a wrapped package—there, in a tin on the bottom.
“Open it, shake some of the powder into the lid.”
Jake sat in the chair, his eyes closed, as if trying to concentrate on breathing. His breaths came shallow and quick.
Dottie returned with the towel. She draped it over his head as Gordy swiped the matches from the stove, grabbed a candle off the table, and lit it. Then he moved it in front of Jake and held the lid over it.
“Breathe, son.”
Jake draped the towel over his head, began to breathe in the smoke of the powder.
Violet sank into a chair, her heart clogging her own breath as he inhaled.
“How did you know what to do?” she asked Gordy.
“He told me. That first night. He was trying to find his suitcase.”
She wanted to cry for him, watching him struggle to breathe. “How long has he had it?”
“He had it as a child, and it came back when he got sick in the war—pneumonia.”
Arnie had come into the kitchen, and Violet put her arm around him, holding him.
“Is he going to be okay?”
“We think so, honey,” Dottie said.
She watched Jake as he began to slow his breathing, as it seemed the smoke, which teared her eyes, began to seep into his lungs. Finally, as the powder burned out, he leaned back. Removed the towel and opened his eyes.
Met Gordy’s. “Thank you.”
“Don’t scare us again like that,” Gordy said, his voice ragged.
Dottie got up. “I have some tea left.”
Gordy reached for Arnie’s hand. “Help me put the tree up, little man.”
Violet stayed at the table, staring at Jake. She wanted to reach out, hold his hand, but it felt so feeble in the shadow of what had just happened. “I’m sorry about your illness. Alex told me that he’d had asthma too, and how terrible it was not to be able to breathe—”
“Alex didn’t have asthma,” Jake said quietly.
She stilled.
Jake met her eyes, something dark in them. “Alex never had asthma. Never gave anyone oranges for Christmas, never watched his brother die. Alex stole my life, okay?” His jaw tightened. “He concocted an identity out of my life. One that turned him into a hero in your eyes. Apparently, however, he left out the part where at any moment, he could keel over and die on you on the dance floor.” He shook his head. “I don’t really blame him for that part, I guess.”
Oh, Jake. It was as if she were watching him suffocate all over again, but this time on some wretched lie that he’d worked up inside his head.
Because, as he spoke, his words clicked inside her. No wonder he felt so familiar to her. No wonder she’d had an immediate affinity to him. No wonder she’d wanted to walk into his arms this morning.
He stood up. “The worst part is, you would have really liked Alex. And the Jake he created for you was only the good half of the story. I’m really sorry that neither of them exists.”
Then, as he left to join Gordy in the parlor, he dropped the towel into her lap. “And by the way, you have grease on your face.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“When Alex stole your life, he also left out the fact that you’re an idiot.”
Jake winced at Violet’s words but didn’t turn. Not when he knew he had pain etched in his eyes, his face. The last thing he wanted her to see was the shame of her finding him in the barn, gasping his last breath.
Indeed, he wished the life Alex concocted for her had been true. All the strengths, none of the paralyzing weaknesses. He might have conjured up the same lies if he’d been in Alex’s shoes.
Violet’s hand on his arm turned him. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes. I’m an idiot. Got it.” He went to turn away but she wouldn’t let him.
“No, you don’t. Do you really think I would be angry at you for Alex’s tall tales? That you’re to blame for what Alex did?”
She was so beautiful it hurt, right down the center of his chest. Those violet-gray eyes, now shimmering, burrowing their way through him, that streak of grease on her face that he longed to wipe away. “I just know that I’m not Alex. I never will be. When I was a child, I was diagnosed as depressed, called weak. But the fact is…I am weak, Violet. You have no idea. So…let’s just leave it. I’m sorry I’m not Alex.”
“You think I want Alex?”
“Wasn’t that why you kept writing to him for the last four years, when all you got back was postcards? I’d say you were holding out for something, yeah.”
His words stung, he knew it by the wince on her face. “Thank you for that reminder, Jake. And, you’re right. I had hoped that even though Alex knew the real me, he liked me anyway.” She reached up and wiped the grease from her face.
“The real you? Like the one who could fix the radio and the generator? The one who worked in the motor pool?”
“You know?” Her voice fell.
A little of the heat went out of his chest then. His voice softened. “Yes, I knew. Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“For lots of reasons,” she said, her mouth tightening. “For every single time some solider made a crude comment. And the looks the other women in Frost gave me, the rumors I caught about what they thought women were doing overseas.” She looked away. “I didn’t want you to think those things about me.”
“I would never think those things, Violet.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gordy look up from where he was maneuvering the tree into the stand.
Now.
Tell her the truth now. The impulse filled his throat, burning as he drew in a breath, his chest bruised and aching from the effects of his asthma attack.
In fact, Violet, I know all about you—
“I can’t believe Alex told you I was in the motor pool,” she said.
“Alex was proud of you.”
And so am I.
And then, as if his arm had defected and decided to run on its own power, he reached up and rubbed the chaser of oil off her chin. “It’s kind of cute, actually.”
She stared at him.
Oh, he hated Alex then. “I hate that Alex stole from me all the good things you might have known about me. Now, my life is just a cheap replica of what he embellished.”
“But Alex can’t steal this.”
She surprised him, then. In fact, he might have even stopped her if he’d known, given the fact that little Arnie kept turning around to stare at them.
Or, maybe not, because at least she had the courage to do what he couldn’t. She stepped up to him, lifted her face to his, and kissed him.
Kissed him. And, like the idiot that he was—Violet pegged that well—Jake just stood there.
Then, something ignited inside him and he came to life. His hand slid around the back of her neck, his eyes closing as he kissed her back. All that he was dropped away, all the weakness, the shame, the could-have-beens, the was-nots vanished, and he became simply a man kissing the woman he loved.
And oh, how he loved her. Had loved her for years, really—loved her courage and her loyalty and her tenacity, but now, here, in his arms, smelling of gasoline and even the smoke from his asthma powder, he loved her kindness, the way she’d wanted to be for him the woman she thought he wanted.
But he wanted Violet. This one, with a soft but eager touch, the one who burned peaches and couldn’t dance. The one who was angry at Alex, not him.
The one who tasted like tea and sugar. She stepped closer into his embrace, wrapping her arms around his waist.
“Ahem.”
Gordy’s cleared throat stopped Jake from wrapping his arms around her. He leaned back, blew out a breath—he realized he’d been holding it—and smiled.
A blush was working up her face. “I’ve never done that before.”
He ran his fingers along her cheek. “I’m glad to hear that.”
She ducked her head. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t very ladylike.”
He lifted her chin, met her beautiful violet-gray eyes, and kissed her on the forehead.
“So, you weren’t the one who rescued Alex from the ice?”
“He rescued me. And nearly died.”
“But you were the one who got help.”
He lifted a shoulder. She raised an eyebrow. “And the oranges?”
“My Christmas present the year my brother died.”
“Influenza, right?”
He nodded.
“Alex taught you chess?”
“Apparently he liked to think that.”
Her face softened. “Whose mother died of TB?”
“Alex’s. Right before the war. She was our housekeeper.”
“The one who made the Russian treats.”
He nodded, but her words settled inside him. Russian treats… “I have an idea.”
“Please don’t say that word. It gives me hives,” Gordy said as he began to unravel the lights. The tree nearly brushed the ceiling in the parlor, where Gordy had set it up after moving the radio and the chairs. “Jake’s brainy ideas can kill a man.”
“Lights!” Arnie said, as Gordy plugged them into the wall socket.
Jake turned to Violet. “Was that the generator I heard running out in the barn?”
She made a face.
Jake ran his thumb down her face, wanting to kiss her again. “Maybe Christmas is on its way, after all.”
* * * * *
“Jake, I’m not sure if you’re trying to set the house on fire, or just creating a science experiment, but I believe if you continue to boil that can, we may have an explosion on our hands.” Dottie stood back, away from the stove where Jake had set the can of sweetened condensed milk, unopened in a pot, bringing the water to boil around it.
“Calm down, Dottie. You’ll just have to trust me a little.”
“Another Russian recipe?”
He grinned at her as he crushed her stale soda crackers into a bowl.