15
A few days later Dalton finished the gazebo.
Harper filled the newly installed flower boxes with the roses and ivy he and Clara had bought. The morning sun shone down, her hair glittered, and the rays kissed the soft curve of her cheek as she patted each flower into place. The moment was beautiful, and he engraved it on his heart, knowing life’s beautiful moments were fleeting, evanescent as life itself.
“This all looks so amazing, Dalton. It’s like something straight out of a gardening magazine.” She smiled up at him, radiant. “Aunt Clara will absolutely fall in love with it. Thank you so much for doing this for her.”
“You don’t have to thank me, Harper. I loved bringing it back to life.”
And it was true. As June melted into July, he and Nicky talked and laughed as they worked together under the relentless Ohio sun to finish the gazebo in time for Clara’s birthday. And as he worked, each paint stroke and each drop of sweat reminded him that after the brutally hot day, evening would come. Evening. The sweet, magical time of day that was all their own, he and Harper, exploring the countryside in his convertible, holding hands, and talking late into the night under a canopy of stars. As the baby grew inside of her, Dalton’s love also grew, and he sometimes wondered how much more his heart could hold. He was alive again, renewed with hope for the future. Each new day seemed like something to celebrate.
“All done.” She brushed her hands on her garden apron, stood back, and surveyed her handiwork. “Should we go and get her?”
“Absolutely.”
When they led her outside for the reveal, Clara wept. “Oh, my heavens. I’ve never seen anything so lovely!” She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “It looks just like a little fairy house, just like I pictured it. Thank you so much, my dears.”
“You’re welcome, Aunt Clara,” Nicky said.
She turned to Dalton. “Remind me what I owe you when we go back to the house, and I’ll write you a check.”
He smiled at the old woman, knowing he owed her so much more than he could ever repay. “You don’t owe me anything, Clara. Consider it a birthday gift.”
“That’s very kind of you, but I insist on paying you for your work.”
“OK. Then you owe me one pan of iced cinnamon rolls.”
Harper’s mouth fell open and he winked at her over Clara’s head.
“Mister, you’ve got yourself a deal!” Clara beamed and turned her gaze back to the gazebo. “Now that it’s done, we’ll have to have a party to show it off. A very special party.”
“We can do that, Aunt Clara,” Harper said. “I have a graduation party to cater this weekend, and next week I’ll be set up at the Firefly Festival in Port Arthur, but when that’s over I’ll see what I can put together. Maybe we could make it a tea party and invite some of your friends from church. Would you like that?”
Clara flapped her hands at her niece. “You’re so busy, dear. Why don’t you let me make the arrangements. I’ll take care of everything.”
Harper shot Dalton an uncertain glance and he winked again.
“OK,” she conceded. “But let me know when you get your guest list made up and I’ll help you plan your menu.”
“I won’t hear of it. I don’t want you to trouble yourself about a single thing.” Clara gazed across the yard, a mischievous gleam in her eyes. “You just leave it all to me, dear.”
Later that night, as they sat in his car and gazed out at Lake Moonshine, Harper brought up the subject of the party. “Aunt Clara seemed so excited about it,” she sighed. “I just don’t know when I’ll have the time and energy to put another party together.”
“Let her have the fun of planning it for a while.” He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “In all honesty she’ll probably forget about it in a couple of days anyway.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Now, what do you need me to do to help with your events?”
“I’m pretty well set for the graduation party, except that Nicky asked if he could go camping with his friends this weekend.”
“So, you need me to hang out with Clara on Saturday?”
“Well, yes.”
“Done.”
“And the Firefly Festival is my biggest event of the summer. I’ll have Finley working the counter, but I’ll probably need Nicky on those days, too.”
“I’ll clear my calendar. Maybe I can get the ballerina’s room emptied out while Clara plans her gala event.”
“Right.” She laughed softly. “Good luck getting her to part with anything, though.”
“I have my ways.”
“I don’t know what I would do without you.”
He kissed her hand again, his mind and heart bursting with the words he wanted to say, but he held them back, knowing the next move was hers.
~*~
On Saturday morning after helping Harper set up for her graduation party, Dalton turned his attention to emptying out the spare bedroom upstairs. One by one, he brought down boxes for Clara to sort through.
“OK Miss Clara, let’s see if there’s anything here we can get rid of.”
“All right, my dear. Why are we getting rid of things, again?”
“We have to make room for the baby,” he reminded her.
“Oh yes, we have to make room.” She opened the flaps on the first box. It was filled with decades-old cooking and gardening magazines. Her brow furrowed. “I should probably keep these, do you think?”
“Nah.”
“There might be some good recipes in these magazines for the party, though. And some ideas for the back flower beds.”
“We can get all the recipes and gardening tips we need online. I’ll set up some folders for recipes and flowers on the laptop later and we’ll find the most up to date articles.” He rapped the box with his knuckles. “This is old news.”
“It’s old news.” She closed the flaps. “Out it goes, then.”
She set the box aside and he handed her another. It contained skeins of musty smelling yarn in various colors.
“I could make a blanket for the baby with these.”
“A blanket is an excellent idea. I’m sure Harper would love that,” he agreed. “But this yarn feels a little stiff. How about I take you shopping in the plaza later for some new, soft yarn?”
“Oh, yes. That would be lovely of you.” She set the box aside. “A baby blanket needs to be soft as a cloud.”
There were boxes of flower vases, random trinkets and clothing Harper and Nicky had worn as children. By the end of the morning the room upstairs was half emptied. He’d lugged several of the boxes and all the broken furniture out to the curb and taken the things Clara wanted to keep down to the basement. He returned to find her looking through the last box.
“Should we take a break and go get some lunch somewhere?” he asked. “I could go for a bacon burger and a chocolate milk shake at Maddy’s Diner.”
She was gazing intently at a photo and didn’t seem to hear him.
“Clara?”
She glanced up. “I’d forgotten about this picture of me and Joe.”
“Joe?” His curiosity piqued; he held out his hand. “May I see it?”
She handed him the photo. Old and grainy, it was a black-and-white snapshot of a very young Clara seated beside a boy, clearly taken at Lake Moonshine. The young couple smiled from the dock, clad in swimsuits, Clara’s dark hair shining in the sun. She was breathtaking.
“Wowza, look at you,” he murmured.
“That was a magical summer,” she said wistfully.
He sat beside her. “Tell me about it.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore, dear.”
“It matters to me,” he coaxed, handing the photo back to her.
She smiled. “I’d known Joe my whole entire life. We were classmates together all through school, but I never really noticed him until that summer. It was the summer of 1965. I was twenty years old. I’d just finished culinary school and had gotten my first real job, working at the bakery. Joe planned to be a car salesman and take over his father’s used car lot someday. But he was drafted into the war. He was set to leave at the end of the summer, so his future was uncertain.”
“The war being Vietnam?”
“Yes.”
“He came into the bakery one day, walked right into the kitchen where I was working on a cake, and asked me out on a date. He told me he’d always wanted to take me out, and since he was leaving and might not be coming back, he decided to grab hold of his last chance with both hands. Of course, I was terribly flattered. And after he put it that way, how could I refuse? The very next Sunday, he took me for a picnic at the lake. We stayed the whole day, swimming and playing miniature golf and talking about everything there was to talk about. I had the time of my life that day. I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed how funny Joe was, how blue his eyes were.” She stopped for a moment, smiling at the long-lost memory.
“We were together every minute we could be after that. We went roller skating, and out to restaurants and to the movies. Mostly, we just talked. We talked and talked and talked some more, making up for all those years we barely spoke to one another. The week before Joe left, he asked me to marry him. He begged me, really, saying he needed to know for certain that I’d be here waiting for him when he got back.”
“But you didn’t marry him?” Dalton asked.
“Well, you see, I was head over heels in love with Joe, but I was just not sure it was real. My heart said it was, but ah, the mind is a devious thing. It plays tricks on you.” She tapped her forehead with her index finger. “ You never loved him in all these years ,” it whispered to me at night. “ How do you know for sure that you really love him now?
“In the end I promised Joe I would be here waiting when he got home, and we would see where our love affair went from there. I said I couldn’t marry him, not then, but maybe later. How many times over the years I wished I could go back to that moment, wished I had taken that chance.”
“He didn’t make it home?”
“Oh, yes, he made it home, but he didn’t come home alone. You see, things had changed considerably. He’d fallen in love with an Army nurse and married her on a furlough weekend. Later, he tried to explain it to me, how desperate times called for desperate measures, and all that. I understood. At least I tried to. But I was devastated.
“Joe and Linda were together until Joe passed away just a few years ago. More than fifty years they were together. They made a nice life. Joe took over the family business and Linda gave up her nursing career and raised their three children. Linda was a lovely woman, and I was happy for her and Joe. But I always secretly wished it could have been me. And knowing that it could have been, well…that just killed me.”
Her clarity was startling. It seemed to Dalton that as cloudy as Clara’s day-to-day memory could sometimes be, the windows into her past were crystal clear.
“Is that why you never married anyone else?” he asked.
“Oh, but there was no one else. Not for me. Not after the love I shared with Joe. The love I let slip away.”
“I’m sorry, Clara.”
She regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, and then asked, “Do you love Harper, Dalton?”
“Yes, I do.”
“More than anything?”
“More than anything.”
She gripped his hand, her eyes burning with an intensity he hadn’t seen in them before. “Then take your moment, dear. Grab it with both hands, before it slips away. Because when the moment is gone, it’s gone forever.”