Carry Her Heart (6 page)

I got up myself and headed inside, the journal clutched in my hand.

Maybe this small, leather-covered book was my bear trap. I’d climbed back into the trap and was now climbing out again.

And I hoped tomorrow, I’d feel better for it.

At least, until the next time.

Chapter Four

As I pulled my car into my driveway that following Sunday, I was reveling in a successful morning of house sales. I couldn’t help but think of my mom. She says I am a creature of contradictions. I love fine china, but my idea of fine clothing is a pair of jeans with no holes in the knees.

From the front, my brick house with its big porch and small white dormer jutting out from the roof is as neat and orderly as I can possibly keep it. There are immaculately trimmed hedges along the porch. And
on
the porch, white wicker furniture, a welcome mat, and an antique milk box that my paperboy leaves the paper in.

But my backyard is not neat in the least.

It’s overgrown and more than a bit wild looking. In a sea of well-kept lawns, my backyard was the neighborhood anomaly. I’d like to say I felt bad about that, but in truth, my yard is fenced in, so unless my neighbors are standing on something, I don’t think it bothers them. At least no one’s mentioned it to me if it does.

When I first moved in five years ago, there was a six-foot, solid wooden fence around the yard, but very little grass and no trees or bushes. That first spring, I went to a local nursery and went a bit crazy. I spent a week planting everything from serviceberry trees to raspberries bushes. Then I added a couple apple trees and a chestnut tree.

That fall, I put in hundreds of bulbs and added more in the spring, then threw three containers of wildflower seeds into any bare bits of earth that were left. Still, I added. Mints, chicory, milkweed, Queen Anne’s lace . . .

Sometimes one plant choked out a neighbor, and occasionally something totally unexpected popped up. But five years later, my yard is perfectly imperfect.

It’s a chaotic jumble of greenery.

If my front porch was my place to work, then my backyard was my place to dream.

One of the nicest perks about being a professional writer was that daydreaming was part of my job description, and my yard was the perfect place to do that.

I’d gone to a local estate sale. There are a lot in Erie on weekends. One of the guys who worked it helped me load today’s prize into my car, but there was no way I was going to pull it out of the car and drag it into the back on my own.

I glanced at the time on my phone. Ten thirty-five. That was a perfectly acceptable time to bother someone. Especially when the someone in question was Ned.

Although, even if I felt it was earlier than was acceptable, I probably still would have bugged him.

I texted him.

Need some help, if you have a minute.

He texted back within seconds.

Where are you?

Out front.

A few minutes later he came out of his house wearing mesh shorts and an FBI Academy T-shirt. He’d gone to the academy when he was still a cop. He’d been at Quantico for four months and from his tales he’d loved every moment of it.

He took one look at my open tailgate and sighed. “What treasure did you unearth now?”

He didn’t really need me to answer as he was already in view of my prize.

“Another garden bench, Pip?” He shook his head, clearly not understanding what a true winner I had this time.

“This one’s solid iron,” I said. “And you can’t buy a patina like that.”

“Who’d want to?” he groused.

“A lot of people. This bench is practically an antique. And you know what I say—one can never have too many benches.” I used my most proper tone.

He snorted as he reached for an end. I got the other end and we carried it alongside the house to the gate. Ned set his side down and opened the gate. “Welcome to Narnia,” he muttered.

“Oh, come on,” I said as we hefted the heavy bench. “You can come up with a better literary comparison than that.”

“Oz?” he tried.

“How about
The Secret Garden
?” I asked. Cooper read that book out loud in school every year. Last year, she’d brought her class to my house to visit afterward.

This year would be easier. She wouldn’t need to arrange drivers. The kids could walk across the street, through the gate at the side of my house, and into my yard.

Ned just snorted. “This garden’s no secret. The entire neighborhood knows about it. How about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?”

“Huh?” was my elegant response. Then I chuckled, sure this was another one of Ned’s jokes. He was famous for making things up.

“No, really, it’s a thing,” he said, then asked, “Where’s this going?”

“Back by the milkweed.” I would never be a master gardener and there were a number of plants in my garden that I couldn’t name, but every year I tried to add something and last year, it was milkweed. I hoped I’d have monarchs soon.

“Be more specific,” Ned said.

I nodded toward the back corner of my larger-than-average backyard. “The back right-hand side.”

“Better. And what you’re saying,” he started, then dodged a cluster of raspberry bushes, “is you’ve never heard of the Hanging Gardens?”

Sometimes, it was hard to tell if Ned was teasing. He could do it with an utterly straight face, which probably made him good at his job, but made it impossible to tell if he was being truthful.

“No, I’ve never heard of them,” I said slowly.

He laughed. “It’s rare that I know something you don’t know.”

“Speaking of things I don’t know,” I said. “Have you noticed how unfair it is that you are willing to call that new attorney at your firm—”

“It’s not my firm,” he interrupted in order to correct me.

I started again. “You called that new attorney
at the firm you work for
Anthony, not Tony. Why won’t you call me Piper?”

We nestled the bench against the fence, right next to the corner of milkweed. After a bit of wiggling it seemed rather level.

I stepped back to look at it and nodded.

I sat down to try it out. My house was virtually hidden by the greenery that separated this seat from it. This would be the perfect place to lose myself in a daydream.

Ned sat next to me and answered my question. “After all that talk about names and their meanings, did you know that
pip
can be short for pipperoo, which can mean
something wonderful
. It’s slang, but it’s British slang, so I thought you—my proper-teacup friend—would appreciate it.”

I gave him a questioning look. Was he teasing about this as well?

He made the childhood symbol for truth by crossing his heart with his index finger. “I looked it up. A couple days after we met. You are most definitely a pip, which is why I call you that.”

He said the last bit with a seriousness that made me feel . . . odd. So I snorted, which made him laugh and things were back to normal between us.

And we sat silently in the back of my yard enjoying the view, until Mela called Ned from his back door like some mother calling a child who was late for dinner. “Ned?”

“See you later,” he said, already hurrying toward the gate. “You were right to buy the bench,” he called over his shoulder. “It fits right there.”

Half an hour later, I got a text message from Ned. It was a link to a site devoted to the mysteries of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

I laughed.

Dear Amanda,

I’m sitting and writing this on my new bench—well, an old bench I rescued from an estate sale. I rarely write in the garden, but today, I felt compelled.

I’m looking at my milkweed plants. I gave them this entire back corner of my yard. They aren’t as pretty as a lot of my flowers, and they aren’t edible . . . at least by humans. They actually can burn if you get the sap on you, and if you inadvertently ingest any of the plant, it can make you sick.

So why did I plant them? Because milkweed is the monarch butterfly’s only food. I read an article about how necessary it is to the species’ survival.

People dug up most patches because they consider it a weed. That’s how I thought about them, but this year I had flowers and they were beautiful. Different, but stunning in their own right.

I think it will be fascinating to see the caterpillars munching away on the leaves. Monarch caterpillars eat something that’s poisonous, then curl up in a chrysalis and emerge as a butterfly. Frankly, the caterpillars are rather ugly, but they turn into something beautiful. Then they begin the process all over again.

The last generation of butterflies each season migrates to Mexico in the fall. Something that fragile looking can travel such a huge distance.

The butterflies will winter there, then fly back and start the process all over again. I saw a picture of a swarm of butterflies on a tree in Mexico. It was amazing.

Sometimes I think there’s a correlation between the monarchs and me. Losing you was bitter, but rather than poison me, it gave me purpose. I started out as a nurse, and I emerged a writer.

But maybe people are like monarchs in more ways than that. Maybe we all repeatedly curl up in a chrysalis and emerge as something else entirely.

I was a child; for that brief hour, I was a mother . . . then a nursing student, then a nurse, then a writer, then a . . .

Maybe we live our lives constantly becoming and rebecoming.

Maybe we’re always in the process of metamorphosing into something new.

Love,

Piper

Chapter Five

The Friday after the fund-raiser was one of those perfect autumn afternoons. As summer drifted into memory, the sun hit my porch at a different, lower angle. It came later in the morning and sank under the western horizon earlier.

There was a crispness to the air as a light breeze gusted. It carried the smells of apples and leaves. And though I knew it wasn’t so, I would have sworn that I smelled cinnamon.

I had on new jeans that I’d washed three times before putting on this morning. Not a holey knee in sight.

I was trying to work, but it wasn’t going well. I had a date with Anthony and though I tried to ignore it, it skittered at the edge of my thoughts all morning.

Thankfully, I had a built-in distraction for the afternoon. I had to go across the street to Cooper’s class.

Her eighth graders were writing their own novels. I was Coop’s guest
expert
on the matter. I didn’t feel like an expert, but she felt I was.

Working with thirteen-year-olds was much different than reading to five- or six-year-olds.

I tried to focus on my work. When I wasn’t admiring my holeless knees, I’d been staring at my laptop’s screen, waiting for inspiration to strike—it hadn’t.

A brown UPS truck slid in front of my house.

I was saved from going through the motions by a delivery.

I closed my laptop and waited with the breathless excitement of a child at Christmas.

I think I love deliveries because there’s always a sense of possibility when something arrives. I may be pretty sure it’s the box of bookplates I’d ordered, or maybe the new filters for the furnace, but it was just as possible it was something else entirely.

Maybe there was a mysterious letter from an attorney informing me I was the sole heir of a reclusive millionaire. Or maybe I’d won some sweepstakes and they were delivering a prize. Or . . .

I normally knew what a delivery held, but I hadn’t ordered anything online lately, so although the UPS man could be bringing me that letter about a massive inheritance, the chances were more likely that he was bringing me something else entirely.

Dave got out of the truck with a large box, which, judging from the way he was carrying it, weighed a lot.

I was pretty sure it wasn’t an inheritance, but I was equally sure this was better.

“There’s another one in the truck, Piper,” Dave said.

“Thanks, Dave,” I said.

I was on a first-name basis with my UPS guy, my FedEx guy, and my mailman. I worked alone at home all day. Other than Ned, who worked crazy hours and was sometimes home during the day, my most constant visitors were my delivery people.

Dave went back to the truck and soon plunked a second box down next to the first. “Pretty soon you’re going to have to work inside again.”

I breathed in deeply. I still thought I caught the faintest scent of cinnamon.

I loved this time of year, but Dave was right, soon enough it would be winter and I’d have to move from my porch to the chair by the window. “You’re right. But I’ve still got a few more porch days.”

“I never understood why you write outside so much,” he said.

“Okay, this is going to sound totally narcissistic, but I like to work outside in view of the school and anyone who is simply passing by because I feel like if I’m not typing, people are judging me.” I laughed. “Yeah, I know, no one is actually noticing me, but still, it keeps my fingers moving across the keyboard.” Most days. Obviously not on days I had first dates.

He laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind next time I pull up and your fingers aren’t flying. I’ll judge you.” He laughed harder. “Oh, yeah, I’ll judge you good. And I’m going to ask my wife to do drive-bys on occasion, and I’ll tell her to judge the crap out of you if you’re not typing.”

“You are a good man, Dave,” I assured him.

He was still laughing as he walked back to his truck.

As soon as the brown truck pulled away with a friendly beep good-bye, I opened a box. There it was.

Couch Couch’s debut book,
Felicity’s Folly
.

I pulled the top book off the pile and admired the cover. Oh, I’d seen it before, but it was always different when the cover was attached to the physical book. I opened it and lost myself for a moment in the smell. It obliterated my fantasy cinnamon and replaced it with the smell of new book.

I wish they could bottle that scent.

As always, I checked the dedication.

And as always it read,
For Amanda.

I reached back into my ponytail twisty and pulled out a pen I’d shoved there that morning. I scribbled an inscription in the front of the book, then skimmed through it and found the passage on page twenty-seven. I dog-eared that page.

After putting the boxes and my laptop inside the door, I walked across the drive to Ned’s front door and knocked.

Mela opened it and in an unguarded moment she glared at me, before she remembered to kill me with kindness and pasted a smile on her face. “What’s up, Piper?”

I didn’t want to give her the book to give to Ned. I wanted to hand it to him myself. I was saved from having to ask if he could come to the door, which would have annoyed Mela, by Ned himself coming up behind her.

“Hey, Pip, come on in.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t lock the house up. I just got my author’s copies of
Felicity’s Folly
and . . .” I thrust the book at him. “Normally my mom claims the first book, but this one’s for you. I know that YA is not your normal genre of choice, but . . . well, read the inscription.”

I really didn’t want to do this in front of Mela, but she stood glued to Ned’s side and I’d already started, so I continued. “That first day when you pulled in the drive, I was working on this book. When you came over to the porch, I know I seemed distracted, but it’s because when I saw you, I suddenly had a character come to life in my head.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t sound crazy at all,” Mela said in a teasing manner, but I could hear her animosity bubbling among her forced laughter.

I ignored it and continued, “Couch Couch.”

“Couch?” he asked.

“Coach Divan. Felicity, the main character, mispronounces
coach
as
couch
. And she knows that a divan is a couch. As I was writing that first scene, you came over and introduced yourself. Ned Chesterfield. I dog-eared the page for you. Did you know that your last name is a name for a—”

“Couch. I did. My father considers it a source of pride and tells people our family invented couches.”

I laughed now, just as I had that first day. “Anyway, that’s why I laughed when you introduced yourself.”

I’d thought about dedicating the book to Ned, but in the end, I couldn’t. I wrote the books for Amanda and I couldn’t not dedicate them to her. Not even this once. So I settled for adding:

A special thank-you to Ned, who was an inspiration.

I’d written underneath those words:

Dear Ned, That day you moved in next door, you not only gave me the gift of inspiration for Couch Couch, you also gave me the gift of your friendship. Thank you for both. Pip

He opened the book and read the dog-eared page, then looked up at me with a grin. “Yeah, I’m going to work tomorrow and telling everyone that I’m an inspiration.”

“Don’t let it go to your head. I described you as an everyman sort of guy. I mean, I didn’t describe you—Couch Couch—as a male model or anything.”

He scoffed. “You’ve said before that your books are fiction. And they’re YA,” he added, tossing around the term he’d never heard until he moved in next door to me, “so you couldn’t really wax poetic about my rugged good looks.”

I snorted. “As if.”

“I think you’ve got rugged good looks,” Mela assured him.

Darn. We’d done it again. “I’ll let Mela salve your wounded ego,” I said, maintaining our banter while distancing myself. “When I get done at the school today, I’ve got to get ready for my date.” I threw that in mainly for Mela’s benefit.

She jumped on the tidbit. “You’ve got a date?”

She didn’t have to seem so . . . shocked. “Yes. With Anthony, from Ned’s firm. He was at the benefit last week.”

Suddenly she seemed friendlier than . . . well, than she ever had. “Oh, he’s cute.”

“It wasn’t so much the cute as the nice that attracted me,” I said. “And it’s just dinner.”

“That was our first date, too. Remember, Ned? He took me out on his friend’s boat and we had a picnic—”

Ned cut her off. “Anthony’s a nice guy.”

“Well, you did say you’d introduce me to someone.”

“I did.” And though he smiled, I could sense that something was wrong.

I figured that he’d finally noticed Mela’s barely hidden animosity. And because I didn’t want to be the cause of any friction between them, I said, “That first dinner for the two of you sounds lovely. Anthony and I are going to Alto Cucina.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Mela said and for the first time ever sounded almost friendly as she added, “Let me know how it goes.”

Maybe if I dated someone, she’d finally accept that Ned and I were just neighbors. Well, friendly neighbors.

I nodded. “I will. But before tonight’s date, I have a date with a roomful of eighth graders. My cup runneth over.”

Ned lifted the book. “Thanks again, Pip.”

“You’re welcome.” I added a, “Bye, Mela,” and beat a hasty retreat.

I called Mom to tell her that my copies of
Felicity’s Folly
were in. She wanted to come right over, but I explained I’d be out. I offered to leave her book in the door, but she decided to wait until after school. She knew about the date and probably wanted to help me get ready, hoping she could bump me from dressed to the sevens-ish to dressed to the nines. I hated to disappoint her, but I was pretty sure seven was as far as I could go.

At one, I headed over to Coop’s class.

Coop had thirty-two eighth graders this year. She’d taught all over the school district, and I was thrilled that this year she’d landed across the street from me. It was nice to have her stop by for a quick chat occasionally after school.

I’d been the story time lady for the younger grades for years. Generally kindergarten, but sometimes through second grade. I read stories, sang songs, and basically had a wonderful time with them. My singing voice is less than stage quality, but the wonderful thing about young kids is, they don’t care. Rumor has it, I sing a mean rendition of “
I Have a Rooster
,” and don’t even get me started on my expertise with “
Up on the Housetop”
at Christmas.

I would not sing around the older students because I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be as forgiving as the kindergarteners.

The office staff buzzed me in. I signed the required sheet and Mrs. Rose asked how the new book was coming. I’d given her my reason for working on the front porch a couple years ago, and ever since she always asked about my current book, as if to prove to me she was checking, though we both knew she couldn’t technically see my porch from her seat behind the counter. And since I’d never arrived and not seen her behind the counter, I doubted she was actually checking on my writing often.

“The new book came,” I said, holding it aloft. “I brought it to show the kids in Coop’s room.”

“They’ll be excited. And I’ll be adding it to my Christmas gift list. You’ll be signing it at the convention center for the expo?”

Once a year there’s a big expo for women at the convention center on the bay. All kinds of women-centric businesses come out, and one of the local bookstores has a table there and asks me to come sign.

I rarely did book signings, but this annual event was a great way to get out and meet local readers. The expo had added a Teen Scene Night last year. It had been a big hit with local girls, and I’d had a Question-and-Answer hour that had been fun.

“I’ll be there,” I promised.

“Good. I get most of my Christmas shopping for the grands done by stopping at your table.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Rose.”

I was unbelievably lucky to have garnered so much support in the community. It wasn’t just the expo and other events I was invited to. It was people like Mrs. Rose, who bought my books for their grandkids. And it was the kids themselves who bought my books.

I walked up one flight of stairs to the second floor and looked at the posters as I went. There was a school play for Thanksgiving. I knew I’d probably go because I knew so many of the kids.

There would be a science fair in November as well.

I remembered my award-winning science fair project. I’d studied the effects of sound on plant growth. The plant I talked to and played classical music for grew better than the plants I never talked to or played any music for.

Thinking about Bach, I entered Coop’s class.

And I felt a moment’s yearning for some soothing classical music.

There was nothing soothing about Cooper’s classroom.

“Just back from lunch,” she practically shouted as I came in.

When I graduated high school, I thought about being a teacher. The noise level in Cooper’s class made me decide that nursing had been a much better option, and writing even better yet.

“Okay, class, find your seats,” she shouted.

And while there was still an undercurrent of noise, it was in the tolerable range. “Ms. Pip is volunteering her time, so the least you all can do is pay attention. She’s not used to this kind of hullaballoo.”

The classroom settled. Although I would have sworn that there was still an undercurrent of sound floating just under the surface of their quiet. As if with the slightest provocation, the noise level would rise again.

“Miss Cooper’s right; writing is a quiet business,” I explained. “Most of the time, the only sound I hear comes from my fingers tapping on the keyboard and an occasional car driving by my house.”

The class finally settled. There was a different feel to the room. I leaned against Coop’s desk and started. “Now today, Ms. Cooper said she wanted us to start by discussing creating fictional characters. I thought I’d tell you how it works for me. And for me, it’s never the same way twice. Sometimes I have to work really hard to find my character, and sometimes . . .”