Cedar Creek Seasons (3 page)

A stampede descended unseen stairs. Were there more than three? And all without a husband? What had he gotten himself into?

“They don’t seem to be afraid of your chili.”

“They get only bread and water in between chili experiments.” She set a sour cream carton on the table. “Makes anything yummy.”

Wilson laughed—a startle reaction. Her deadpan statements followed by that sudden smile were disorienting.

The boys landed, breathless, in the chairs across from him. Star walked coolly and gracefully into the room with a large portfolio under her arm.
Oh no
.

“Good.” Willow pulled a loaf of savory-smelling bread from the oven. “I was hoping you’d bring your sketches down.”

Oh
no
. Wilson swallowed hard, forcing down the dread. “You draw?”

Star shrugged. “I paint a little, too.” Her cheeks pinked. “I love your work. I go to every one of your shows at the Cultural Center and I took crazy notes when you spoke on pigment washes.”

“Huh?” Ralphy’s freckled face scrunched like a wrinkly shar-pei. “How do you wash a pig tent?
Why
would you wash a pig tent? Pigs don’t sleep in tents anyway.”

Star launched a straw at him. Del dropped his head back, mouth wide open. “I don’t be
lieve
. How can you be my brother and still be so stu—”

“Del.” Willi slid into a Shaker chair. “Would you give thanks for this food and our guest
and
your little brother, please?”

“I guess.” Tangled curls bounced as his head rebounded, chin to chest. “Lord, thank You for whatever it is we are going to eat and thank You for a real, live artist in our house, and thank You for taking such good care of us all the time. Amen.”

Willi cleared her throat.

“And thank you for Ralphy even though sometimes he can be a real—”

“Del!”

Willow held her breath and poured a second cup of coffee for the man who sat on her plaid couch leafing mutely through her daughter’s sketchbook. Star sat across from him, twirling her thumb ring like she was winding an alarm clock. Streaked and choppy blond hair tousled over her shoulders, half shielding her face.

Please, please say something positive
.

He wasn’t a very talkative person. Granted, when the talk at the table turned to the video game she’d found on eBay, Wilson Woodhaus was a bit out of his element. The boys had done their best to explain Flobgobbers IV to the poor clueless man, but the more they laid out strategies of Whipplestops versus Pollyworgs, the gigglier they got. She’d finally had to step in and distract them with do-it-yourself sundaes.

Apparently, professional artists weren’t all that into food fights.

She eyed the chocolate smear above his right knee and the strawberry sprinkle clinging to the collar of a shirt with creases that had to have been ironed in. People still did that? If the guy could iron, he probably knew how to pretreat chocolate stains. To be on the safe side, she’d tuck a stain stick in the bag with the chili she’d send home with him.

His lips puckered. His mouth squinched to the left. What was going on in that handsome head?

How did that adjective squeeze in? She scurried the coffeepot back to the kitchen and analyzed from the safety of her butcher’s block. He was tall, but not muscular. There was a softness about him she supposed some women would see as teddy-bearish. A slight paunch. Smaller than hers. A few grays mingled with a full head of thick black hair. So what, out of all of that, made “handsome” enter the picture?

The eyes. Did God use that shade just this once and then throw out the formula? She’d never seen such a startling combination of ocean blue and … what? Silver, maybe. The color of moonlight, if moonlight had a color.

Heat surged from a furnace in her chest.
Happy forty to
me. But what had triggered this one? Up to now, she’d only experienced spontaneous combustion while drinking hot tea or blow-drying her hair. She glared at the artist on her couch. No, it couldn’t be.

Wilson Woodhaus closed the book. He raised his eyes to Star, face devoid of hints. Willow padded into the living room. His head turned slightly right, slightly left, then back to center. Star ceased winding her thumb.

“You have … an exceptional gift.”

Star stared. Tears gathered. Willow gasped.

“What are your career goals?”

Career goals?
He was talking to a girl who, most days, had to be rolled out of bed like a felled log. A girl who listened to death metal and wrote poetry so dark it sucked the light out of a room.

“I’m planning on going to the Art Institute in Milwaukee for advertising.”

You are? Since when?

Wilson shook his head. “Don’t.”

Say what?
The girl verbalizes her first-ever life goal and the guy says “Don’t”? Willow bit her knuckle and waited for him to squirm out of the hole he’d dug.

“Don’t go for advertising. You have something extraordinary, Star.” He opened the book to a pencil-and-watercolor picture of Cedarburg’s covered bridge at sunset. “You understand light.”

His voice, hushed yet infused with passion, loosened the tendons in Willow’s knees. She sank onto the deacon’s bench.

Tears, the happy kind Willow hadn’t seen in years, eroded riverbeds in Star’s makeup. “Thank you.”

“I’d love to take you on as a student.”

Star’s face elongated. All ten ringed fingers flew to her mouth. “You would?”

The teddy bear artist nodded.

“How … much would it cost?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Willow rose on unsteady legs and sat next to Star. “I’ll paint a few more chairs and clean a few more houses. Just say yes.”

Half laugh, half sob, the sound engulfing Star’s “Yes” processed in Willow’s brain as a sweet melody.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you. Both.” Star gripped Willow in a magic-filled hug. “I love you. I have to call Shel.”

Willow swiped a shirt cuff under her nose. “Go. Call.”

Star danced out of the room. And Willow locked eyes on the hole digger who now stood on a snowcapped mountain. “You have no idea what you just did for that girl. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“She’s very talented. And very poised for her age. You’ve raised her well.”

Poised? The girl who called me an evil despot six hours ago?
“I can only take credit for half of it.”

“Of course, I didn’t mean to slight your … her … father.”

Willow flicked her fingertips. “Her father was,
is
, a bum.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. Sorry for the kids. They’re not mine.” Tucking her legs under her, she nestled into the chair and traced a cabbage rose on the overstuffed arm with her fingertip. “They were a gift.” She smiled at the confusion that did intriguing things to his face. “It’s a long story.”

Wilson picked up his coffee mug, cradled it in both hands, and leaned back on the couch. “I have no pressing engagements.”

Except ironing tomorrow’s shirt
. Willow licked away a smile. “I made a lot of bad choices in my twenties, ended up in debt and living in my van. And then I got a job working for a single mom who’d made even bigger mistakes. She’d been given a second chance, so she gave me one. She invited me to live with her and her three kids … right after I got arrested for spending the night in her furniture store.”

W
illow blew a flake of sawdust off the seat of the stubby-legged chartreuse “child chair” on her workbench. It had to be perfect. She was raising the price by two dollars a chair.

She reached for a foam sheet. “Two dollars times approximately three bazillion should just about do it.” She scanned the twenty-by-twenty cement block room, tallying her Popsicle-colored inventory. A dozen child tables, thirty-six chairs, ten potty step-up stools, eight rocking chairs, and body parts for a dozen rocking horses. If she sold out at each of the seven craft fairs scheduled for spring, replenished her stock in between, sold out at the Strawberry Festival, and repeated the process until her cardiac arrest at the Wine and Harvest Festival, she’d just about have enough to cover Star’s art lessons.

No prob. Easy-peasy. After nine years using a scroll saw, she could cut round holes in playhouse cubes in her sleep. Bound to come in handy.

“Lord, didn’t I hear You say ‘Yes’ before I told Star to say ‘Yes’?”

She hadn’t signed anything or scheduled the first lesson or handed over any money yet. She could still get out of it.
Right
. And watch that rare smile disappear? A smile which had lasted a day and a half already and was even peeking out at seven a.m. as Star walked out the door for school? Not a chance.

Willow wrapped the chair and its sherbet-orange twin, did a half back bend into her shipping department, and retrieved a box. Climbing onto a stepladder that swayed like a rope bridge, she stood on tiptoes and stretched toward a stack of unfinished stools. A wave of seasickness swept over her as she wobbled back down. It had dawned on her more than once that a person who worked with wood for a living could make herself a new ladder. It would be the first thing on her to-do list if she survived the cardiac event.

That, and updating the electric. She unplugged the space heater, making it safe to plug in her branding iron without blowing a circuit. She calculated the time by the slant of the light filtering through the ice-glazed window well cover. A good three hours had passed without a blown circuit.

The branding iron smelled hot enough. She tipped a stool and pressed the iron into its naked underbelly as slick and accurately as a seasoned cowpoke. No one would rustle this four-legged creature away from her at Strawberry Fest. Unless, of course, they bribed her with twenty-one—
make that twenty-three
—dollars. She inspected the burnt words and her rocking chair logo.

TLC
T
ENDER
L
OVING
C
HAIR
C
O
.
C
HILD-SIZED FURNITURE MADE
BY TENDER LOVING HANDS
.

As smoke wafted from the second stool, her phone dinged, announcing an incoming text. She set the branding iron down and wriggled her thumb and forefinger into the back pocket of jeans that had had far more phone room before she’d started training for the Great Chili Cook-Off. Her imagination added a cork-popping sound effect as it sprung free.

A three-word message banished a morning’s worth of worry.

L
UNCH
. A
NVIL
. N
OON.

Sleep she would sacrifice for the sake of the cause. This, she would not.

Spinning on her heel in the single square foot of open floor space, she grabbed the tape dispenser, spun back, teetered, and toppled backside-first into a bin of packing peanuts.

Her hips stuck, wedging her like a glass slipper on an ugly stepsister. Her feet didn’t touch the ground.

Rocking back and forth between her shipping department and her sanding area catapulted her body and her pride facedown into a pile of wood shavings.

Her business and her backside were outgrowing the space.

The icicles hanging from the Washington House roof were too blue. Not enough snow crowned the gold letters above the door of the B&B.

Wilson laid his paintbrush in the tray and walked away from the easel. The timer on his watch had beeped lunchtime minutes ago anyway. He maneuvered around canvases and easels, silently calculating the dwindling number of days he’d have to struggle with this crowded mess. In the bathroom, he washed his hands, wiped the splashes from the sink, and refolded the towel.

The dish drainer in his galley kitchen held four items. He set his plate, glass, knife, and fork on the counter. From the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, he pulled out two zipper bags labeled “Monday.”

But today was Tuesday.

Chocoffee Chicken Chili had tampered with his system. And not just the one for weekly menus. He glanced at the counter and the bottle of Tums he’d raided at two a.m.

Willow had sent home enough leftovers for four meals, but it was so good he’d scarfed down half for Monday’s lunch and half for supper. He put the Monday bags back and pulled out Tuesday’s bags.