A Kiss in Winter Page 7

  After Mick bought their sausages and shake-ups, Caroline guided them to a picnic table beneath a string of bare white lightbulbs draped between two utility poles. The table’s unfinished wooden benches were silvered from weather, but there was a red-and-white-checkered vinyl tablecloth thumbtacked over the top.

  She sat across from Mick. Beyond him, twirling, blinking, flashing carnival lights brightened the nighttime background.

  He looked over his shoulder, pointing at the lighted Ferris wheel, and said, “Hey, it’s August.”

  It took her a few seconds to realize he was referring to her calendar. She had indeed taken that photograph at the county fair; the neon spokes of the Ferris wheel against a pitch sky, crescent moon slung low in the distant background.

  Plenty of people around here knew about her calendar. However, Mick wasn’t really from around here anymore. “You’ve seen it?”

  His knowledge of her work made her feel like when she was eleven and her pigmy goat had won a blue ribbon at the State Fair—pride swirled with panic, blended so fast and furiously that you couldn’t separate the two, like one of those ice cream treats at Dairy Queen.

  “You think I don’t have one?” He cleared his throat, as if readying to recite Shakespeare. “‘Caroline Rogers captures the heart and soul of the Bluegrass State.’”

  “Impressive,” she said.

  “You’re impressive. Raccoons. Cattle. Photographs… what else do you have in there?” He reached across and tapped her forehead.

  “If you only knew…” She shook her head dubiously.

  When he grinned at her, she suddenly felt as light as the wispy filaments of cotton candy being spun nearby. After having such a miserable couple of days, her cheerful mood caught her by surprise.

  The fair was working its magic.

  She batted away the bouncy little thought that her lightened mood might have more to do with the man than the fair. In truth, before she’d seen Mick, she’d been schlepping around the fairgrounds sinking deeper into her glum mood by the minute. At one point, she’d seen Macie and that California boy in line to buy tickets for the rides. She’d managed to keep herself from slinking around spying on them, but just barely.

  She said, “I was really surprised to see you in the cattle barn.”

  He looked puzzled. “Seems like a logical place to start to look for livestock.”

  She admitted, “I guess I’m having trouble getting past the doctor thing. Can’t picture you as a hands-on farmer.”

  He leaned back slightly and eyed her. “Now you’re insulting my sensibilities. Because I’m a doctor, I don’t have what it takes to run a farm? I think I’m too smart, I’m too worried about keeping my fingernails clean?”

  She backpedaled. “No. I mean… it’s just that…”

  “Oh, I see. You somehow got the impression that I want to be one of those ‘gentleman farmers’? Just cough up the money and let my ‘lessers’ do the real running of the place, the real work?” Unlike Caroline’s mock protest at his belittling of her art, he sounded truly insulted.

  She had to admit, it was a little hard to refute because that was almost exactly what she’d thought. “I like it better when we talk nonsense.”

  He let out a long breath that seemed to soften his entire body. “I’m sorry—parental issues leaking out again.”

  She released a pent-up breath of her own, then licked her lips. “Let’s start again.” She paused, shook her hair back from her face, cleared her throat, and arranged her face into bland curiosity. “So, are you looking to buy stock?”

  He played along. “Why, yes I am,” he said as smoothly as if the previous conversation had never been. “I’m figuring about forty, maybe fifty head.”

  She nodded approval. “Shouldn’t overtax the resources. We always kept right at forty-five.” She took a bite of her sandwich.

  He grinned and did the same. After he swallowed he reached across the table, toward her face.

  She eyed him warily, but didn’t move as his thumb settled at the corner of her mouth and his fingers along her jawline. He rubbed his thumb lightly over her upper lip. The sensuousness of the act gave her goose bumps in the hot, humid night.

  “Mustard,” he said.

  “Oh!” She pulled away and grabbed her napkin, feeling very silly for her starry-eyed thoughts.

  Wiping her mouth, she tried to appear composed and focused totally on cattle. “Since you were looking at that Simmental, you’re going with beef cattle?” She couldn’t keep the censure out of her voice.

  “You don’t approve,” he said flatly.

  “It’s just that it’s been a dairy-producing farm for… forever.” Of course, a doctor would choose beef cattle—so much less labor-intensive; her mind skipped right back into the track that got them on the wrong foot just seconds ago.

  “I know,” he said, becoming more animated, as if the prospect of farming really was the equivalent of the prospect of a cure for the common cold. “But my research shows beef will be the more profitable. The demand is up. Good market with fewer man-hours required.”

  “If you’re worried about the man-hours, maybe you should pick one career. As I said before, farming requires full-time attention. You don’t want to cheat your patients and the farm by spreading yourself too thin.”

  “This farm is my career,” he said sternly.

  By choice? He was always so grave at any mention of his medical career. Had something happened in Chicago that had cost him his medical license? Now certainly wasn’t the time to ask—if there ever would be such a time.

  She kept the focus on the farm by asking, “You’re going to let all of the dairy equipment go to waste?” It was almost as great a sin in her eyes as Ms. Stockton’s ignoring productive fields. Caroline’s father had been so proud of his operation. He’d invested a large portion of his limited resources in that dairy equipment.

  “I’ll probably sell it. Not sure where; lots of dairy farms are converting to beef.”

  “Really?” she asked skeptically.

  He looked her directly in the eye and said, “Really. The market is changing. In this competitive world, you have to change with it to be profitable.”

  “I see.” There was that word again, profitable. Caroline knew how hard it was for a small farm to make it, but having generations of tradition sold on eBay for the sole sake of profits… well, that just seemed heartless.

  She quickly reminded herself that her only interest in the farm was that it remain intact. That being the case, it was hard to argue against the logic of ensuring profitability, no matter how it bruised her sentimentality.

  She finished her sausage, puzzling over why she couldn’t just let the farm go. It seemed impossible to draw a line of demarcation between her adoptive parents and the farm. They were interwoven so tightly there was no separating the warp from the weave. Being around Mick dredged up many of the issues she’d managed to put to rest over the past five years.

  “What’s the matter?” Mick interrupted her thoughts.

  She glanced up; he was looking intently at her. She didn’t want to admit she’d been sitting there blaming him for undermining the solid ground she’d worked so hard to place under her feet.

  “Don’t mind me. My week’s just catching up with me.” And running me over, then backing up and doing it all over again.

  “Care to share?”

  “Is that the doctor asking?”

  He gave her a smile that spoke more of misery than humor and rubbed the back of his neck, as if massaging a sore muscle. “I left the doctor in Chicago.”

  “You know what they say, ‘You can take the doctor out of Chicago, but you can’t take… um… the doctor out of the man.’”

  “I can clearly see you’re a philosopher as well as a raccoon tamer. Very multitalented.”

  His deflection away from himself didn’t escape her notice. But calling him on it would only open a deeper conversation than she felt she could handle at the moment. “I t
hink I’d rather ride the Bullet than rehash my week.”

  He turned in his seat and looked toward the lighted arms that swung two bullet-shaped cages in higher and higher opposing arcs until they passed one another at the top. “You’re not serious—you want to swing upside down after eating Italian sausage?”

  “What’s the matter”—she leaned across the table toward him—“you too old, or too scared?”

  “Both.”

  She had to admire a man who would admit it, and even more so the man who boldly strode up to the ticket booth and bought them tickets.

  As they strapped themselves in a seat, she thought she saw sweat beading on Mick’s upper lip. He didn’t look at her when he said, “You know, they haul these things around on semis at seventy miles an hour and bolt them together in the dark.”

  “That’s part of what makes it so exhilarating—the fear of flying off into the night.”

  He groaned.

  She grinned.

  The ride started.

  She screamed when the pendulum arm finally swung all the way over. Mick squeezed her hand as they arced over the carnival grounds upside down. An animal-like noise came from between his clenched teeth as they raced back toward the earth.

  They were back on solid ground before his Italian sausage made a reappearance.

  For over an hour, Caroline and Mick alternately looked at livestock and sat on the straw bales in the barns talking. Mick’s equilibrium seemed very slow in returning. He bumped repeatedly against Caroline as they navigated the crowds and the shovels, water buckets, grooming tools that cluttered the walkways near the stalls. She hated that she’d begun to look forward to this accidental contact—and not just because she was responsible for his condition. She felt herself in a slow slide down a muddy slope, and Mick was the only thing waiting at the bottom. Interest in a man was the last complication she needed right now—especially a man anchored to a place she’d soon be leaving.

  She was studying him when he moved his head as he pointed out a massive Angus bull; he did it in a sluggish way that immediately reminded Caroline of her early childhood and her natural mother when she’d been half-drunk. The fact that the memory was still so powerful and close to the surface made her go clammy. Almost twenty years… would those horrors ever be truly banished?

  “Hey, you look like I feel,” Mick said, putting a hand on her arm and guiding her to a hay bale that sat in front of a large fan. He forced her to sit. “You okay?”

  She did what she’d perfected all those years ago. She straightened her back, put a cheerful smile on her face, and said, “I’m fine… really.” Before he could question further, she said, “So you’re thinking strictly Simmentals, or are you mixing your herd?”

  As they talked about the advantages of different cattle breeds, her mother, the smell of booze, and the apartment over the dry cleaners sank back into the quicksand of Caroline’s memory.

  As Mick spoke, she discovered the man had done his research. Even so, a couple of times she had to point out the difference between practical application and textbook examples. She feared it was just possible that he could fall into that category of knowing just enough to be dangerous. The last thing she wanted was for him to make mistakes right out of the box, get frustrated, and sell the farm to the vultures that were always circling prime land.

  She’d have to keep an eye and ear out. She was sure the entire farming community would be doing the same—a Larsen farming; completely unheard of.

  As they sat in front of the big fan, Mick’s color improved and his eyes finally lost the semiglazed appearance they’d had since he’d stepped from the Bullet back onto solid ground.

  He said, “You must have spent a lot of time working with your dad to know so much about stock.”

  Caroline smiled as she remembered the hours she and her adoptive father had spent together. From that first full day on the farm, Christmas Day, she’d moved like his shadow, always anxious to trail after him, even on crutches after she’d fallen down the stairs and broken her leg.

  She said, “When I was a kid, I always thought I’d grow up to be a farmer—not a farmer’s wife, mind you.”

  “You miss the farm then, not just the home,” he said, looking at her thoughtfully.

  “Can’t seem to separate the two.”

  He looked at her directly then. “Would you have tried to buy it back—if it had gone on the market?”

  “Are you asking me if I feel like you pulled it out from under me?”

  “I guess I am.” He was man enough to hold her gaze when he said it.

  She sighed. He’d been honest with her; she needed to show him the same respect. “Maybe a little—right in the beginning, when I saw the moving van there. I guess I’ve always felt like I made a decision I had no right to make, to let go of Sam and Macie’s birthright.”

  “I lost track of a lot of things back here while I was in Chicago,” he said in a voice tinged with regret. “How old were you when you sold?”

  “Twenty. I’d just had my twentieth birthday the day before I signed the sale papers.”

  “So you were twenty-one when your parents were killed. No warning. You were in shock. You had to take on two kids alone. And, you said it yourself, the farm is a full-time job. I think you did what any responsible person would have done in your shoes.”

  No warning? She looked at him. “How do you think my parents died?”

  “I’d heard it was an auto accident.”

  “My dad was killed in an accident. His truck slid off an icy road and hit a utility pole.” She gave a sad half-smile as she remembered her parents’ frequent battles over seat belts. “Mom never could get him to buckle up.”

  The memory no longer ripped at her insides like razor wire. The bloody gashes had scabbed over; the cold sting had lost its bite. She felt a little like she was recounting something that had happened to someone else’s family, not giving the details of a death that had torn a hole in the fabric of her life. People said, “Time heals all.” But this didn’t feel healed. It merely felt… distant. Insulated, buffered by the slow accumulation of scar tissue.

  She swallowed dryly. “He was on his way to the hospital to see my mom. She died eight days later—liver cancer.”

  “Jesus,” Mick breathed quietly. “Jesus.” He reached out and took her hand.

  For the first time in her recollection, someone heard the facts and didn’t immediately spout out words of consolation that came quick to the lips and fell like so much muffled chatter to the grieving ear. He simply sat in that cattle barn, in the midst of hay and manure and shuffling hooves and held her hand tightly in his. Compassion radiated off of him like body heat; he didn’t muck it up with a bunch of meaningless platitudes.

  Caroline hadn’t been this close to crying in a very, very long time. His silent understanding reached right into her chest, took her heart in its sympathetic grip, and squeezed her grief back to life.

  Pulling her hand free, she stood abruptly. “I’d better be going.” She sniffed, which only made her angry with herself. Tears. Damn it, damn it, damn it.

  He stood, put his hands on her shoulders. “Caroline, I—”

  She stepped backward, away from his touch, and his sympathy, and his comfort, and all of the other things about him that buffeted and pulled her emotions from the safety of their anchors. “Good luck selecting your cattle.”

  She hurried away, feeling the heat of his stare on the back of her neck.

  Chapter 7

  Caroline entered through the back door of her house after cutting her evening at the fair short. She had fled the fairgrounds like a criminal. Mick had lifted her out of her blue funk—and then dropped her right back there again. Only this time she sank deep and, no matter how hard she struggled, she couldn’t break the surface again. Six years. For six years she’d held herself together. And now, just when things should be getting easier, she found herself drowning in an angry sea of emotion.

  Memories rained d
own and, for the first time since her adoptive parents’ deaths, she didn’t hide under an umbrella of practicality and purpose. She turned her face to the sky, opened her arms wide, and let them wash over her: Caroline sat on the lumpy couch, her eight-year-old legs too short for her feet to touch the floor. She picked at the dried Elmer’s glue on her fingers. The paper Christmas tree she’d been working on (since they didn’t have a real one this year) sat half finished on the coffee table. Several old buttons and aluminum-foil stars sat ready to be glued onto the green construction paper her teacher had let her bring home from school.

  Two policemen were in her mommy’s bedroom with the door closed, like they didn’t want Caroline to see—even though she knew; she’d been standing beside her mommy’s bed an hour ago when Mrs. Christensen from the dry cleaners downstairs had knocked on the door.

  She’d brought a plate of Christmas cookies. When she asked to see Caroline’s mother, Caroline had told her that she was asleep, that sometimes Mommy went to sleep for a really long time (which was true), but she’d be okay when she woke up (which was a lie). Caroline had just figured out that Mommy wasn’t ever going to wake up again when Mrs. Christensen knocked. Caroline was sad, sure, but she was going to have to wait until later to cry. She needed time to plan. Kids without parents went to orphanages. She’d seen movies about orphanages.

  Mrs. Christensen didn’t believe the lie. She said she’d just stay and have a cookie with her until Mommy woke up. That was the end of Caroline’s lies.

  Now Mrs. Christensen was gone and the lady from the police looked like she was really, really mad. She had on a red sweater with a Christmas tree on the front, not a uniform; but she’d said she really wasn’t a policewoman, she was a services person. Caroline didn’t know what a services person did, so Caroline guessed wearing regular clothes made sense. The lady had said her name when she first came in, but it was a funny-sounding name that Caroline didn’t remember.

  Caroline stared back at her. “I won’t go to an orphanage. I’ve been taking care of Mommy by myself. I can take care of just me.”