Chapter Two #2
Abigail enjoyed his company; Mel was a good soul, friendly, compassionate, and patient.
He listened when she talked, and he made connections between their experiences so they braided into a shared story.
He had a ready smile, and it was one of the most beautiful, welcoming, comforting smiles she’d ever seen.
His aura was a lovely soft blue, so clear and strong it nearly sparkled.
The aura of a truly decent, warm-hearted man.
She didn’t mind his company at all.
Earlier in the week, he’d changed the oil on her truck and rotated the tires on that and on her trailer. She’d given him a few loaves of fresh bread and some honey butter (made from the Morgans’ honey; she didn’t have a hive of her own—not yet, anyway), and he’d taken a raincheck on dinner.
He was due anytime now. Abigail set the table for two and went back to finish making dinner.
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~oOo~
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A bigail knew Mel had arrived before he’d cleared the big turn and low rise of her driveway—the dogs both rose from their fluffy beds and strolled to the back door, ready to greet their guest. Bogie and Mitch were better than any alarm system she could buy because she could tell not only that someone had arrived but whether they were friend or stranger.
When the boys recognized the vehicle, they strolled calmly to the back door, in no particular hurry, as they had now.
When they didn’t recognize the vehicle, they went with purpose, first to the front windows and around to each window until they reached the door, then they stood there at full attention, ready to protect if needed.
She heard his step on her deck while she was bent over, checking the chicken. On the stovetop, she had potatoes boiling and gravy starting; on the ledge above the stove sat the loaf of rosemary bread, wrapped in a towel and snugged in a basket.
Three raps on her screen door. “Hey, pretty lady,” Mel said.
Still bent over at the stove, presenting her whole rear end to the back door, Abigail grinned. What a ridiculous compliment to make at this moment.
She closed the oven door and straightened as she turned. “Hi there, hon! C’mon in!”
He opened the screen door and stepped in—and immediately crouched to love on the dogs, whose own big butts swung back and forth with happiness. There was no better seal of approval than a dog’s love.
Abigail knew better than to get swoony over a man at this point in her life.
Great glory, she’d be forty-three come Thanksgiving, and she hadn’t been anywhere near a man in a romantic way since her twenties.
Also, while she was perfectly comfortable in her own skin, she was perfectly aware that she was not and never had been widely considered a great beauty.
She’d been plump her whole life and had given up all that starve-yourself-skinny silliness not long after high school.
It hadn’t been anything but stressful, anyway; her body resisted dieting like it was perpetually preparing for hibernation.
As her grandmother had always insisted, a body that didn’t lose weight on a diet was a body that was not meant to be skinny.
When Abigail finally tossed out the fashion magazines and accepted—nay, welcomed—that truth, her whole mindset about herself and her life changed.
A body was not a fashion choice. It should not go in and out of ‘style.’ A body was the soul’s house, meant to shelter and protect the person within it.
As Abigail’s actual house could attest, Freeman women were not minimalists.
As soon as she was old enough to understand her own mind, she’d stopped bothering about how other people said she should be, or look, or do.
Just as Granny Kate had always counseled her: be true to yourself, and the people who are drawn to you will be those who belong with you.
Be false to yourself, and your friends will be false as well.
Abigail had never really had friends, and few beaus, but her life and heart were full even so. She was content, through lows as well as highs.
And yet. Lately there were some flutters in the deep parts of herself when Mel Lind was close, smiling at her like he was now.
And he was holding a big bunch of wildflowers in his hand.
“What’s that you got?” she asked, setting the potholders on the counter beside the range.
Mel—in his late forties, at least six feet tall, broad at the shoulders, and strong as a bear—glanced at the flowers he held and blushed like a little boy caught doing something naughty.
“Uh ...” He held out the bunch. “Flowers.”
“Well, yes they are, and they’re lovely. They for me?”
“Yeah, yeah. I ...” While confusion danced across his brow, he watched Abigail take the flowers from him. “Sorry, they’re nothin’ special. Not from the florist or nothin’. I got these growing along my garage.”
“If you ask me, flowers picked from your own garden are a sight more special than anything you can buy in a shop. Thank you, Mel.”
She went to a shelf at the other side of her kitchen and pulled down a large Mason jar. As she filled it with water, Mel came over, ducking the cords of drying herbs she had strung across the room.
He leaned back against the drainboard, six inches from her shoulder.
He did not smell like a man who worked on a construction site all day, which she would expect to be something like wood shavings, paint, machine oil, and sweat.
He smelled like rosemary and cedarwood, a soap she’d given him, and the combination slipped up her nose and made her brain a wee bit muzzy.
“Everything smells amazing, Abs,” he said, and for a flash, she’d wondered if he’d heard her thought—but no, he meant her cooking. “I really appreciate you doin’ this.”
She wasn’t sure when he’d started, but somewhere in the past few weeks, he’d taken to calling her ‘Abs.’ She’d been ‘Abby’ briefly in school, when there were two Abigails in fifth grade and the teacher decided there couldn’t be, but otherwise no one had ever called her anything but her full name.
Granny Kate had had a spate of endearments for her, but they were things like ‘honey girl’ and ‘sweetie pop,’ not a true renaming.
She wasn’t sure she’d noticed when he’d first done it; when she had noticed, it seemed somehow familiar, as if he’d been doing it awhile already.
She wasn’t sure what she thought of being ‘Abs’—to anyone, or possibly specifically to Mel.
But it seemed both too small a thing and too fraught a thing to mention.
“Well, I really appreciate all the help you been givin’ me ‘round here—and the supper company’s pretty nice, too.”
With the flowers—a delightful medley including lupines, daisies, Jacob’s Ladder, Star Tickseed, Blue-Eyed Mary, Snow-on-the-Mountain, Evening Primrose, Queen Anne’s Lace, Wild Bergamot, and Beeblossom—arranged in the jar, she opened a drawer in the hutch and withdrew a length of pink calico ribbon.
After she tied it around the threaded top of the jar and made a pretty bow, she handed the arrangement to Mel.
“Do me a favor and set this in the middle of the table? And light the candles, too, if you don’t mind? Supper’ll be ready in just a tick.”
He took the Mason-jar vase from her with a grin. “Well, you took these silly weeds I brought you like a present and made ‘em into something real pretty.”
“Hey, hon.” She set her hand on his arm to pull his attention back to her as he began to turn toward her dining room. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Call your flowers weeds. In the first place, there’s no such thing as a weed. A plant growing where Nature wants it to grow is right where it’s supposed to be. And in the second place, that’s a gift you’ve given. Why would you devalue a gift from your own hand?”
He blinked at her silently for a few ticks. Then he grinned broadly. “Damn, Abs. Sometimes I wonder if you’re not a thousand years old.”
With a grin, she dropped a hand to her hip. “Well, if I were a different woman, I think that might hurt my feelings! I hope I don’t look a thousand!”
He blushed again and then laughed. “ No , that’s not what I mean! You’re beautiful, and you don’t look a day over about thirty. But I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody as wise as you. It’s like you’ve always been here, learning the right ways of things.”
She’d only been teasing; she’d figured he meant wisdom, not elderliness. It was an excellent compliment, and she smiled at him. “Well, thank you, kind sir. Now git on and finish the table, ‘cuz once I mash the taters, we’ll be ready to eat.”