Chapter Twelve
You are not dead! Ada Lou’s voice screamed at me.
I blinked a few times and scanned the room.
Ada Lou was right. I was alive, but was the dream an omen that I would follow in my mother’s footsteps and die at a young age?
I pictured the expression I had seen on Jackson’s face in the dream.
Tears welled up in my own eyes. I couldn’t bear to cause that kind of pain to anyone I cared about.
Stop being silly. I fell and hit my head. It was my expiration date and could have happened anywhere, my mother said, so clearly that she could have been sitting beside me.
My phone rang, and I almost sent up a prayer of thankfulness for anything to take my mind off the very vivid dream.
“Hello?” I said.
“Well, hello to you,” a man’s voice said cheerfully. “Where are you? I haven’t seen you in weeks. Did you fall off the face of the earth?”
I finally recognized the voice as Isaac’s, one of my poker buddies. “Not quite, but almost. I’m in northern Texas in the middle of a blizzard. I own a café now,” I blurted out.
He laughed so hard that I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “I don’t believe you. First, you’ve hated Texas after that game when you almost lost everything. And second, you are not made to settle down to normal work. So where are you really?”
“In Canada, and . . .” I checked the time on my phone. “I’m getting ready to go to a high-stakes game that has a fifty-thousand-dollar buy-in. Wish me luck. Where are you?”
“San Diego, about to go for a walk on the beach,” he answered. “Good luck, darlin’, and maybe I’ll see you soon.”
“Not if I see you first.”
“You always say that,” Isaac said with a snort. “Have a wonderful evening, and think of me sitting across the table from you. I’ll do the same here in sunny California.”
“Sounds good. Goodbye.” I ended the call and realized that, for the first time since I was a little girl, I had not shuffled my lucky deck of cards the night before. No wonder a blizzard had hit the area.
I was so deep in my own thoughts that I didn’t know Jackson was awake until he flipped on the light above the stove. I shoved the throw off me and stood up. “Good afternoon.”
“It looks like it’s about to quit snowing, but I’m guessing we have about eighteen inches on the ground,” he said. “We might not be able to get you out of here today after all. Did you sleep well?”
“I had a nightmare,” I answered.
“Want to talk about it?” he asked as he made a pot of coffee.
“Not really. How did you sleep?”
“I dreamed that we had a big argument about what we were going to name our first child. It was on our eighth date.” He didn’t crack even the faintest hint of a smile.
I was totally speechless for the first time in my life. I prided myself on nothing being able to shock me and never showing anything in my perfect poker face.
“Gotcha!” He chuckled. “I slept like a hibernating bear. If Henry hadn’t woken me up with a phone call, I would still be snoozing.”
I grabbed a handful of popcorn from the table and put a kernel in my mouth. It wasn’t nearly as good as it had been when it was hot, but it kept me from swearing at him for a couple of minutes.
“No comeback?” he finally asked and set a cup of steaming-hot coffee in front of me.
“I had my heart set on naming my first son Leroy Jethro after Gibbs on the NCIS television show. Or maybe Barney Huckleberry, after the purple dinosaur and Huckleberry Finn.”
“Well, darlin’,” he drawled, “I think that’s enough to warrant our big eighth-date fight right there.”
I took a sip of my coffee and held it in my mouth for a second before swallowing. I’d teach him to shock me like that. “Great! Now we have the foundation laid for our famous argument, and we don’t have to worry about it until summer.”
He sat down beside me and frowned. “Summer?”
“I don’t have a rule book, but that seems about right for an eighth date, don’t you think? We are both busy trying to settle into our new lives. A date every two weeks would be twelve weeks from now.”
“That’s spring, not summer,” he protested.
Ada Lou singing an old song about snow—off-key and out of tune—caused us both to stop and go to the door.
Jackson threw it open, and we found Ada Lou clearing a narrow path from her back door.
She finished with the steps to his trailer and then slung the shovel over her shoulder.
“Y’all put on your shoes and come over to my place.
I just took a pan of hot cinnamon rolls from the oven and made a pot of coffee.
We can have a midafternoon snack and play a game of Scrabble. ”
“You baked?” I gasped. “Does that mean you lost the bet? Did Nancy get a red velvet cake?”
“I did not lose. We called it a tie, so this is the first time I’ve turned on the oven in years. I’ll expect you in five minutes.” She turned around and followed the trail back to her trailer.
Jackson came out of his room wearing rubber boots. I looked down at my high heels and hoped I wouldn’t fall out into the deep snow on either side of the narrow pathway. The worry didn’t last long, because Jackson scooped me up in his arms like a new bride and carried me outside.
“Is this an omen?” I asked.
“I don’t want you to ruin your shoes. My sister says that the ones with red soles are not cheap,” he said.
“Instead of carrying me over the threshold, you are taking me away. Does that mean there won’t be another date?”
“Definitely not,” he declared.
He almost slipped when we reached the first step on Ada Lou’s porch, but he regained his balance and knocked on the door with the toe of his boot.
“Come on in!” Ada Lou opened the door for us. “What a gentleman you are to not let Carla ruin her high-dollar shoes.”
Jackson set me down. “This place smells so good.”
“Yes, it does—and I want to hear what made you start baking again, Ada Lou,” I said.
She pointed across the room at the line of hooks on the wall.
“Take off your coats and hang them over there. I’ve already set up the card table and chairs.
When I heard y’all coming, I poured up some coffee.
So we can sit down right now, and y’all can tell me if I’ve lost my touch after decades of not baking. ”
I didn’t have to be asked twice, not when any kind of pastry was my greatest weakness. I was sure it was because we were in a cramped space, but when Jackson sat down, he seemed to be taller and even more muscular.
Ada Lou cut out one of the enormous rolls and set it on Jackson’s plate, then she served me and, lastly, herself. “I’m afraid to take a bite for fear I’ll be disappointed. So . . .” She pointed at Jackson. “You go first.”
“Oh, my God!” he said when he had swallowed. “This is amazing. You should put a bakery in Dell City. People would go crazy for these.”
She nodded at me, and I forked a bite into my mouth. “I will pay you to make these for the Tumbleweed.”
“I’m not going back into the business at my age, but I will teach you to make them,” she offered.
I cut off another bite. “Rosie won’t let me near her kitchen.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t make them at home,” Ada Lou said. “I had a dream last night.”
“So did Carla, but she said it was a nightmare,” Jackson said.
“What does your dream have to do with cinnamon rolls?” I asked, trying to deflect the conversation away from the shivers dancing through my body at the vision of seeing myself dead on the floor.
I had to swallow hard to get the lump in my throat to disappear when I thought of how broken Jackson had been.
“Everything,” Ada Lou answered, and retold the story of her daughter in a shorter form for Jackson’s benefit. “That said, Robin came to me last night. She looked like she did when she went off to college.”
“Is this the first time you dreamed about her?” Jackson asked and helped himself to a second cinnamon roll.
“No, but I haven’t done so in a long, long time.
She and I were taking a hike out to the mountains, and she fussed at me for not baking since I came to this area.
She told me to listen to Nancy, and . . .
” She paused. “That it was okay if Carla reminded me of her. Then she disappeared, leaving me alone out there in snow up to my hip bones.”
“How did you feel when you woke up?” Jackson asked.
“Freer than I ever have.”
I followed Jackson’s example by cutting out another cinnamon roll for myself. “Do I remind you of her?”
“In a lot of ways—but now let’s talk about your nightmare,” Ada Lou said.
Jackson saved me by saying, “I have a recurring dream. My team and I are on a mission, and I’m the team leader.
So I throw a piece of carpet over the top of a razor-wire fence so we can get into the prison and rescue an American scientist. When my feet hit the ground on the other side, I step on a land mine. ”
I could see the whole scene as if it were showing on a huge movie screen.
My chest tightened for the second time that morning, and I had trouble swallowing the bite in my mouth.
Tears welled up, but I blinked them back.
What did all these dreams really mean? Was the universe trying to tell us something?
“You look like you are about to faint,” Ada Lou said. “Do you need to put your head between your knees?”
“I’m good,” I lied. “I just swallowed some coffee with an air bubble.”
“You sip coffee. You gulp water,” she said with a smile.
“Now, before we start our game, you”—she pointed at me—“are going to go get a quick shower and change clothes. I’ve laid out a sweatsuit that is too big for me.
Wash your hair while you are there. We never know how long it will be until we can get out of here, or when the power might fail us.
You don’t want to have to live and sleep in them jeans for several days. ”
“Yes, Grammie,” I said.
“Grammie sounds old, and I’m not ready for that yet. You can just call me by my name, but when you have kids, they can call me G.G.”
“Why would you ever want to be called that? And what makes you think I’m having kids?” I asked.
“Because I want great-grandkids, and G.G. stands for Great-Grandmother, and it’s easy to say,” she answered.
Someone rapped on the back door. I peeked around the end of the short bar and saw Nancy coming inside without an invitation.
“Well, a fine howdy-do this is. You’re having a party, and you didn’t even invite me.” She sniffed the air. “Did you bake?” She stopped right inside the kitchen area and removed a pair of snowshoes.
“I did—and you leave those big old things on the porch,” Ada Lou said. “They’ll leak on my floor. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and bring it to the table. There’s half a pan of cinnamon rolls left. But be warned, I don’t want any back sass about my starting to bake from you.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Nancy grinned.
I finished off the last bite of my second roll, pushed back my chair, and headed to the other end of Ada Lou’s trailer.
I could hear them still bickering when I closed the pocket door between the tiny bedroom and the bathroom.
I could barely turn around in the shower, but I managed to get my hair washed.
She had even laid out a pair of bright red lacy panties for me.
I wasn’t about to guess where those had come from, or when she wore them—maybe to Woodstock, and she hadn’t had the heart to throw them away.