Your Dream and Mine (16 page)

Pride battered over three months of getting back to this moment factored into Trace’s hesitation. So let her make
the first move. She’d done it before, and would again when she was ready. Willing to be however patient it took to win her trust again, Trace bid her good-night and left her unkissed at the door.

T
race took Thomasina to Maxine’s for breakfast. It was his favorite diner, known for good food and down-home hospitality.

A big-boned woman with eyes as faded as the blue rinse on her hair brought them coffee. Trace introduced her as Pearl.

Pearl’s smile was all lines and creases as she looked Thomasina over. “Is this your girl?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Trace.

“You do that, hon, while I get you some breakfast.”

Pearl withdrew her knotty hand from Trace’s shoulder, and ambled away as he helped Thomasina off with her coat. But he didn’t ask her if she was his girl. A whimsy, Thomasina supposed, to think that he might. She reached for the menus caught between the napkin holder and the condiments.

“Too late for that,” said Trace as she offered him one. “Pearl’ll bring us something.”

“Something?”

“That’s service, Pearl’s style,” said Trace.

“Let me get this straight—
she
decides?” said Thomasina, certain she’d misunderstood him. “For
all
of her customers?”

“Just the ones she likes.” Trace chuckled at her bewildered expression. “Trust me. Whatever she brings, it’ll be good.”

Indeed it was. The sausage was perfectly seasoned, the waffles, the best Thomasina had ever eaten. “It’s delicious. But suppose you don’t like it?” she whispered. “Then what?”

“You don’t come back, I guess.” Trace grinned and watched as she ate a path through the sea of blueberries and whipped cream.

They
did
come back. Their breakfast dates became a respite amidst hectic schedules. Thomasina was working three mornings a week, Saturdays and every other Sunday plus attending afternoon and some evening classes. Trace was putting in mandatory overtime at the car plant, and finishing off his Church Street property. He had moved out to the farm a few days after his parents’ anniversary party, so his commute had increased by several miles. He had to kill a few predawn hours in town between the end of his shift and their six o’clock breakfasts. But it was the only time they could carve for one another.

As the days passed, Trace asked Thomasina frequently about school. Unwilling to admit that the more she learned, the more her camp ministry capabilities unraveled, Thomasina assured him she was doing fine.

“None for me, Pearl,” said Trace one morning, as the venerable waitress lumbered up to their booth with the coffeepot.

“You’re goin’ to need it to keep your eyes open on the
ride home, hon. Just let old Pearl top it off.” Pearl’s wrinkles mapped out a smile as she filled his cup.

“Mine’s tea,” Thomasina reminded her quickly.

“Wet is wet, hon,” Pearl said, and proceeded to pour.

Thomasina caught Trace’s glance and swallowed a giggle as Pearl ambled away. “Coff-tea,” she said, and lifted her cup. “To Pearl, the gentle tyrant.”

“I once heard her coaxing a guy to try the strawberry pie,” said Trace moments later as they stood at the curb beside Thomasina’s car, putting off that moment when she went her way and he went his. “The poor guy said he was allergic to strawberries. But the next thing I knew, there he sat, eating a piece.”

“And breaking out in hives?”

“I suppose that came later,” said Trace.

Thomasina chortled. Trace laughed, too. She loved the sound of it, and the way it lit his eyes even when he looked tired enough to drop. It was on the tip of her tongue to suggest he go home at the end of his next shift instead of waiting over to meet her for breakfast. They could both use the extra rest But that would mean she wouldn’t see him until Sunday, and she didn’t think she could go that long. Instead she said, “I’ll meet you here when you get off in the morning.”

“No,” he said firmly. “That’s too early for you.”

“No, it isn’t. I like getting up early.”

“You fibber, you,” he said. “Same time, same station.”

The tenderness of his tone as he lifted his hand in goodbye swept over her like a caress. But it wasn’t. There had been none, not since the anniversary party for his folks. A chance touch here and there as he held doors and helped her in and out of her coat and ate his breakfast beside her. But no caresses, no kisses. Was he just tired? Working too
hard? Was it the farm?
Or latent feelings for an unrequited love?

Thomasina refuted doubts and spent a little more time before the mirror the next morning, trying a new hairstyle. She donned a bright sweater over her nurses’ whites, accessorized with a scarf and gold jewelry, dabbed a new lavender scent on her temples, her throat, her wrists.

“You smell nice,” said Trace a while later when Pearl had taken their breakfast plates.

So did the coffee. Thomasina sipped a third cup, and sat chin in hand as an icy rain spit at the plate-glass window. Trace stirred beside her. He was saying something about interest rates and a meeting with a banker.

“Guess I better go,” he finished.

“Already?” Thomasina batted her lashes at him, so flagrantly flirtatious, he laughed and bumped her with his leg.

“Let me out, Tommy. I’m supposed to meet Antoinette at the bank. We’re closing on her house today.”

What a temptress she was, bringing boyish nicknames, houses and other women to mind.
Thomasina stirred herself to acknowledge his finer points. “That was nice of you to keep the price down where she could afford it,” she said.

“No more’n what the Realtor’s fee would have been if I’d listed it.” Trace brushed aside his good deed.

“Speaking of Antoinette, I invited her to church again.” Thomasina confided what was to her an ongoing concern. “She said she’d intended to get the children started back again. But with working in town, she hated making that drive to Bloomington on Sunday. And since I’ve been going with you…” Thomasina wrinkled her nose and admitted, “It does get tiresome.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Thomasina giggled at his injured grin. “I meant the drive. Try to follow along, would you?”

“I am,” he said, and grinned. “Trying, I mean.”

“Yes, you are,” she teased. But when the laughter faded, she admitted that she was feeling guilty about having so little time for Antoinette and the kids. “The same with Ricky.”

His exaggerated sigh and twinkling blue eyes brought Thomasina’s fractured thoughts back to the point of embarkment. “What I’m trying to say is I’d be content going to church here in Liberty Flats if I thought…”

“Full-time?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why? Because you think your chances of getting Antoinette and the kids there have improved?” he asked. “Or because you’re running yourself so ragged you can’t finish a sentence without getting sidetracked?”

“Hey! I object!”

“So do I,” said Trace, helping her into her coat. “Where do I fit into your plans?”

Everywhere.
Thomasina angled him a flustered glance from beneath lowered lashes. Though she hadn’t said a word, he threw her a pacified grin. “What’s on for tomorrow? Or did they ask you to work?”

“They asked,” admitted Thomasina. “But I ran screaming from the room, my fingers in my ears.”

“Good for you,” he said. “Want to come out to the farm after church?”

“Just us?”

He grinned. “Hey, I’m harmless.”

Thomasina was beginning to believe it!

Thomasina pulled a double shift with a critically ill patient from seven Saturday morning until midnight. She zonked out the moment her head hit the pillow and dreamed she’d lost her way in the jungle while trying to lead a childlike
Pearl to safety. Milt and Mary were there, too, huddled together on Milt’s electric scooter as strangling vines and hungry undergrowth and menacing creatures threatened on every side. Pearl’s slip was showing. “You’re slipping,” Thomasina warned her, for she’d taken a class on crocodiles and knew of their weakness for petticoats. About that time, a log opened and snapped and caught Pearl’s slip and sucked her inside.

Thomasina awoke with a start. The crocodile log in her dream had a smile like Deidre’s. She swung her feet to the floor, and told herself it was worship, not a territorial response that drove her to the tub with a lavender-scented body wash, to the closet for her most becoming dress and on to church where Trace was waiting with Ricky at his side. Antoinette and the children, to her disappointment, had not made it. But Deidre was there. She sat in the choir loft with autumn sunshine coming through the window like a heavenly spotlight, and sang as sweetly as a wren.

Knowing what Trace and Deidre had once been to one another, Thomasina supposed it was only natural she would have trouble coming to grips with their continuing to share the youth group sponsorship. Still, being jealous over it seemed childish, and unbecoming. She wished she could talk it over with Trace. But how? To do so was to bring out into the open the secret concern that she was and would always be second best to his first love.

Had it been a mistake, committing herself to Liberty Flats Church full-time?
Or could she, with God’s help and a better knowledge of Deidre, cure her uncertainties? The end of worship service brought Thomasina no closer to an answer.

When morning worship was over, they walked out the glass doors to find the sun had sneaked away. The sky was spitting light snow, the first of the season. Ricky went home
with Jimmy Jordan, a friend he’d gotten to know through youth group. Thomasina stopped by her house, changed into warmer clothes and rode out to the farm with Trace.

Trace’s kitchen seemed utilitarian without Mary’s cheery bric-a-brac. Thomasina found a few pansies in the frostbitten flower garden. She arranged them in a vinegar cruet and put them on the table, along with two plain white stubby candles propped in soda bottles. They lunched on cold fried chicken and potato salad.

“You look tired,” Trace said over their candlelight luncheon.

For once Thomasina didn’t deny it. He made a pot of coffee. Over her second cup, Thomasina told him her dream, though not the identity of the crocodile.

With the auction only a week away, Trace credited her nightmare to anxiety over the farm and her aspirations for it. He had watched day by day as bottled stress drew her brow into furrows and traced shadows under her eyes.

“Let’s take a walk,” Trace said when they’d cleared the table.

The light snow was more crystal than powder. It stung Thomasina’s cheeks, invigorating, crowding out her weariness as they loped over shorn fields toward the pine trees.

The closely knit green giants offered reprieve from the biting wind. Thomasina tipped her head back and looked up through lacy fronds to the treetop pricking holes in the leaden sky. The roiling clouds made the earth move beneath her feet. Trace’s steadying arm closed around her waist, but only until she had her footing again.

Chagrined by how orphaned she felt when his arm fell away, she thrust her mittened hands into her coat pockets. “I’ll be glad when the auction is over.”

“Why?” he asked. “Are you starting to feel pressure?”

“Aren’t you?” she asked.

He shrugged. “God’s got it all worked out, one way or the other. It took a load off, realizing that.”

Thomasina knew that. Of course she knew that. But life had turned into such a mad scramble, she’d begun to feel like the little engine that couldn’t. Gratified at being reminded of her power source, she sat down on a stump and took a packet of candy from her pocket. Craving the act of sharing something with him more than she craved chocolate, Thomasina tugged her mitten off with her teeth. “I’ve got chocolate.”

Trace watched her peel open the box, deep in his own musings. He had a solution, a melding of dreams. He had postponed the subject for fear Thomasina would misunderstand. But as she stood up on the stump and fed him candy, courage coursed through him. He caught her hand before she could feed him another. “You want to share? Then let’s share. And I don’t mean penny candy!”

Color rose to her cheeks. She said nothing, just waited, breath caught.

“Milt’s farm,” Trace cleared up her doubt. “What do you think?”

“Share
the farm?
” she echoed.

Her lashes came down, but not before he saw doubt cloud her fine brown eyes. “It’s our best chance of outbidding Jeb,” he pointed out. “We could buy some equipment and farm the ground ourselves. You do your camp thing, I’ll do my cabins. Two heads, two pairs of shoulders to bear the responsibility.”

“Two pockets.” Thomasina put words to the obvious. “But our ideas aren’t the same.”

“Maybe not our ideas,” Trace conceded. “But are our objectives really so different?”

“Of course they’re different,” said Thomasina, surprised he had to ask. “The focus of the camp is to be on…”

“Building stronger families?” he inserted.

“I was going to say children.”

“Tommy, when kids and parents who might not otherwise get a vacation in a cabin or gathering around a campfire, everyone benefits,” said Trace.

Thomasina remembered the account he had shared of camping trips with his family. He spoke of what he knew. There was a clarity of purpose in his vision that she couldn’t refute. She sat down again and shoveled chocolate into her mouth, navigating rocky thoughts. Would churches agree to fund a camp that was partly a vacation getaway? Would paying vacationers get priority over at-risk children? Or would they muddle it all, trying to be everything to everyone?

“You know, it isn’t just poverty that puts kids at risk,” Trace said into her racing thoughts. “Prosperity does it, too, crowding families until there is no time to enjoy one another.”

Mending a crack, saving a dam.
Thomasina conceded his point.

Trace hunkered down in front of her, balanced on the balls of his feet. His hands hung loose, his forearms resting on his knees. “You could hire Ricky and others like him to work part-time at the camp. They could help build the vacation cabins, and with the farming as need be.”

“And keep the grounds in good shape,” inserted Thomasina, catching his vision.

He nodded. “It’d be good for them.”

“You’ve given this a lot of thought”

He didn’t deny it. Nor did he ask the question she most wanted to hear, the one that would drive away all the doubts and insecurities that had slipped in as days and
weeks went by with nary a kiss while he faithfully shared his Sunday-night commitment with Deidre.