Why the Sky Is Blue (22 page)

30

That fifteen-minute conversation I had with my mother on the ninth of September would end up weaving itself in and out of my mind for weeks afterward. My doubts about trusting God and loving my sister filtered their way into every private moment, whether I was doing the dishes, painting a bowl of fruit, or staring at the sky at two o’clock in the morning.

I tried praying for wisdom, reassuring myself that the Bible promises that whoever prays for wisdom will get it. If I really was becoming wiser, I wasn’t aware of it. It seemed to me that the more I tried to reconcile my conflicting thoughts, the more I realized I had no real desire to trim back the hedge of protection I had built around my heart. I wasn’t going to trust God fully, and I wasn’t going to love Lara fully. That’s just the way I was, and I didn’t think I was capable of changing.

Most of my waking hours I spent in the company of others, so I wasn’t forced to wrestle with my private thoughts at every turn. The shop stayed busy during the autumn months. A new book club for young girls began—Lara’s idea—and I began helping the mental health clinic in the next county with some kids who seemed to reveal their troubled thoughts only while painting in my studio. As November eased into December, Lara and Nicole fell into a decorating frenzy and turned the Table into a scene from
A Christmas Carol
. It was quite festive. Mom found all kinds of old editions of the Dickens classic and placed them on all the tables in the coffee shop. We turned off all the electric lights downstairs and instead used kerosene lamps all month. Nicole changed the whole menu in the coffee shop to include only nineteenth-century English delicacies. She and Trish and Lara decided to speak with an English accent whenever waiting on anybody. The contemporary Christmas CDs we usually had piped into all the rooms were replaced with music that would have been around in Ebenezer Scrooge’s day.

Lara still kept the kids for me every afternoon. She and Seth did a lot of outdoor activities with them. They went sledding and ice skating, built snow forts, and shoveled the walks of elderly neighbors. Mom still worried about Lara and Seth spending so much time together, even after I told her about my conversation with Lara back in July. Lara had even told Mom she had no romantic feelings for Seth, that they were just good friends.

But Mom and I both feared that Seth was developing deeper feelings for Lara. How could he not? Lara was attractive, smart, fun to be with, and exceptionally compassionate. If Seth fell in love with Lara but she didn’t return that love, it could prove to be disastrous. Seth had already been rejected—many times. He seemed to have tackled his drinking problem at that moment; at least there were no calls from the school or his social worker. But I worried that it could all come crashing down around him if Lara continued to want only his friendship.

For my birthday, just a few days before Christmas, Lara, Seth, and the kids decorated the house with balloons and streamers and baked me a cake. It was probably the sorriest looking cake ever made—Lara and Seth gave Olivia and Bennett free rein in decorating it—but it was special nonetheless because they had made it just for me.

Two days before Christmas Mom called me at home and asked if I could do her a favor. She was going to be tied up at a retailers’ meeting in another town and wanted me to go with Lara to pick someone up at the bus station.

“Sure,” I said. “But who’s coming here on a bus?” I said. I had almost forgotten the bus even made a stop in Blue Prairie.

Mom paused for a moment.

“Cleo,” she said.

I could hardly believe it.

“Cleo is coming here? For Christmas?” I said.

“It means a lot to Lara,” Mom said, and I could tell she had rehearsed this speech. She had probably already used it on my dad. “Cleo has no one to spend the holidays with, Kate. Her only son and his family live in Texas, and they’re spending Christmas with his wife’s family.” I let out a little sigh.

“So you will go with Lara?” she said. “I don’t want Cleo to think we’re not happy that she’s coming. I want one of us to be there with Lara when the bus drops her off.”

“What are we supposed to do with her?” I said.

Mom paused for a moment.

“Just bring her back to the shop. I’ll try and get back there as soon as I can.”

At ten minutes to two, Lara and I pulled into the service station just off the highway where the bus from the Twin Cities stopped every afternoon at two o’clock. Every day, that is, when someone wants to get off in Blue Prairie. I didn’t think that happened very often.

The bus arrived a few minutes early. The doors opened, and one solitary figure got off the bus. Cleo looked as tall as ever and carried her two black bags like they were filled with government secrets.

Lara ran to her, and Cleo hugged her with her bags still in her hands.

“Merry Christmas, Cleo,” I said as cheerfully as I could.

“Thank you, Kate,” she said, politely.

“Can I help you with those?” I mistakenly asked, reaching for a bag.

“I’ve got them,” she said, whipping the bags from my reach.

Lara slipped her arm through Cleo’s, and we walked toward the car as the bus pulled away. During the five-minute ride to the Table, Lara chattered about her new school, the new friends she had made, and the colleges she was interested in.

I drove in silence like a professional chauffeur. I dropped them off at the Table and then went to get Olivia from a friend’s house. On the way I stopped at the grocery store to get a few last minute things for Christmas, taking my time because I wasn’t too anxious to get back to the Table.

When we finally got back to the shop, Olivia and I came in through the back to avoid being noticed. I was hoping Cleo was sitting in one of the front rooms, drinking a cup of hot cider, and waiting for my mother, and that I could sneak back to the studio and put things away for the four days we would be closed.

But Cleo wasn’t in one of the front rooms. She was wearing an apron, standing over a trio of elderly ladies at a little table in the dining room and was serving tea from a Royal Doulton teapot.

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Nicole, motioning toward Cleo.

“Lara put her to work,” she said casually.

“And you just let her?” I said, laughing, but not in a humorous way.

Nicole shrugged and opened a bag of whole coffee beans.

“She makes good tea,” she said.

“Anybody can make good tea,” I whispered, taking off Olivia’s heavy coat. “You just put boiling water into a cup and put a teabag in it.”

“Cleo makes hers in a teapot with loose leaves and an infuser,” Nicole said, pouring the beans into the grinder.

“What? She just happened to bring tea leaves and an infuser with her?” I asked, pulling off my own coat and watching Olivia scamper off to find Lara.

“Yep,” Nicole said. “Orange pekoe.”

I shook my head.

“You don’t know her like I do, Nicole,” I whispered. “She’s as crotchety as they come.”

“Maybe, but she sure has made fast friends in those three,” Nicole said, winking at me and motioning with her head to the three women with whom Cleo was chatting. Hands on her hips, of course. “They’re having a wonderful time talking about their grandchildren, amaryllis bulbs, and health ailments.”

When Mom arrived a few minutes later, rushed and thinking she was terribly late, Cleo had made a fresh pot of her magical tea and was serving it to a second set of older women. Lara and Nicole stayed busy behind the counter, trying out a Cockney accent while serving up scones and clotted cream.

Before we knew it, it was time to clean up and close for the four-day break. Cleo insisted on scrubbing the tile floor in the dining room, saying, “It looks like it hasn’t been done correctly in a month of Sundays.”

Nicole gave her a mop and bucket and whispered to me as she walked past, “I like her!”

In no time at all the shop was sparkling clean, and everyone was sent to a different room to extinguish all the kerosene lamps. I overheard Cleo muttering that if people would take more care to pay their utility bills on time, they could avoid such trouble.

Nicole had to excuse herself to giggle in private. I followed her.

“We’ll have to find a way to keep her,” she said, wiping her eyes.

A gentle snowfall greeted us on Christmas morning—a beautiful beginning to the day. Michael, the kids, and I spent a quiet morning alone—just the four of us—opening gifts and putting together new toys. That afternoon we bundled up the kids and went to my parents’ house for Christmas dinner with the family. My grandparents from Ann Arbor had flown in a few days before, and I wasn’t surprised to see that Cleo and my grandmother hit it off rather well.

Grandpa sat in a leather chair by the fireplace most of the afternoon. He seemed to have aged considerably over the autumn months. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did anyway. I began to have the queer and unpleasant sense that this would be the last Christmas he would spend with us.

My mom seemed to think this too. She hovered over him and spent more time tending to his comfort than anyone else’s. I overheard her and my grandmother talking in hushed tones as I helped Bennett get a drink.

“It’s his heart,” Grandma was saying, but I didn’t want to hear any more.

When we began opening gifts around my parents’ tree, I was pleased to see so many gifts for Lara. She truly was one of the family. Olivia gave her a necklace of beads she made with modeling clay. Lara slipped it around her neck and gave Olivia a hug.

“I will treasure this always,” I heard her say to my daughter. Then Lara stood up and approached the tree.

From the back, she pulled out a pile of like-sized presents. They were all wrapped in brown paper she presumably stenciled herself using half an apple and brick-red paint. Each was tied with a plaid ribbon. She began to hand them out.

Inside each was a framed eight by ten black-and-white photograph that Lara had taken, most of them shot either at the Fourth of July party or at Jennifer’s wedding. My parents’ photo was of the two of them sitting on their own porch steps. Mom had her arm through Dad’s and her head rested on his shoulder. They were looking off to the west, unaware of any camera being focused on them, thinking about something known only to them. In my grandparents’ photo, the two of them were making over Noah, who lay in Grandma’s arms. Noah had one of Grandpa’s fingers in his grasp. Each one, including Noah, had a look of awe and adoration on their faces. Lara had taken Olivia and Bennett’s pictures in the barn with the new kittens. The looks on their childish faces were precious. Lara gave Michael and me a photo of the two of us looking at each other against the backdrop of the setting sun with our kids in the far background playing with our dog. It was a beautifully composed photo. She even had a photo for Cleo; a wonderful picture of Cleo and Rosemary taken the previous year when Rosemary’s cancer was thought to be in remission.

Everyone was in awe of Lara’s photos. Mom said she should start selling her work at the Table, and I wondered why we hadn’t thought of that before.

As we started to clear away the wrapping paper and prepare for supper, Lara bent down and asked me quietly if I could come upstairs with her for a moment. I nodded and followed her upstairs to my old room.

When we got there, she smiled and handed me another present.

“I didn’t want to give this to you downstairs because...well, because it’s kind of a special photo that really isn’t mine to give,” she said, clearly a little uncomfortable.

Interest piqued, I opened the gift. The framed black-and-white photo was the one I had taken of Lara and Olivia on the day of the wedding. It is hard for me to describe the beauty of that photo. Lara’s dark hair, Olivia’s blonde curls, their smiling faces, the sunlight framing them both in a halo of radiance—it all combined to create a photograph unlike any I have ever seen. I could hardly believe I had taken it.

I stood there completely transfixed by it, displaying neither awe nor gratitude, but somehow Lara knew I loved it.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “I am so glad you took it.”

“Yes,” I said, not taking my eyes off it.

We stood there for several moments in a silence that might have seemed awkward to someone else. But I was rather unaware of both the silence and the long moments, and Lara didn’t seem to mind either.

The sound of Olivia calling for Lara broke the spell, and Lara called down to her, telling her she would be right there. She started to walk past me.

I reached out and stopped her and she turned to look at me.

“Thank you,” I said, longing to communicate how much I was coming to appreciate her and wishing there was nothing to hold me back from returning her love completely. As always, she seemed to understand it anyway.

“You’re welcome,” she said, wrapping me in a hug.

We spent the next day with Wes, Nicole, and Seth. They had returned late that morning from a four-day stay in Iowa where Nicole’s parents lived. Nicole tried out a table full of new recipes, including several dishes that the kids flat-out refused to try.

Seth seemed moody and quiet, and when it seemed like a good time, I asked him how things were going.