“I saw on the news last week that just about anyone can get a degree off the Internet nowadays. But I’m sure you went to school for this. It’s never bad to have family connections, is it?” Her tinkling laugh sounded just like the bells over the door. Internal memo: Remove bells before post-traumatic stress disorder sets in.
“Shampoo chair,” I managed to gasp. Although maybe asking her to put her head into a deep sink wasn’t a very good idea at the moment.
In the six steps it took us to walk across the room, she told me it was too bad that young women today weren’t concerned with modesty and, just out of curiosity, where had I bought my skirt?
It continued downhill from there. By the time the clock on the wall assured me it was closing time, I’d gotten over my initial shock and in one of those weird out-of-body type of experiences, I was a bit awed at the way Florence Kirkwood could simultaneously smile and cut someone off at the knees. It reminded me of a handy little kitchen gadget Mom had affectionately dubbed “the chopper” because it could take a whole onion and reorganize its molecular structure in seconds. When Florence Kirkwood finally left the salon, I knew exactly what that onion felt like.
Fortunately Dex wasn’t asleep on the couch again when I slunk up the back stairs to the apartment. I could melt into a puddle without witnesses.
“Snap!” I wailed. “I need pet therapy.”
Wherever she was hiding, she wouldn’t come out. Right then I renamed her Miss Fickle. All right, if there wasn’t purring, then there could be bubbles. Or chocolate. Or both.
Except there was no longer a faucet in the tub. Someone pretending to be a handyman so he could get some extra sleep during the day had lopped it off.
I dialed Pastor Charles’s number. Dex answered the phone.
“Where is it?” I said.
There was a moment of silence. “I’m…I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” I counted to ten. Actually, I skipped five, six and seven because I didn’t think it would make a difference anyway. “How can you lose something that important?”
“It just disappeared. I think it planned to escape.”
“I hate to tell you this, but it’s only in your world that inanimate objects come to life. Faucets can’t plan anything.”
“Faucets? I thought you were talking about your cat.”
I sagged against the wall. “Snap? You let Snap out?”
“No. I think it snuck out when I propped open the door to clear out the…never mind. I left you a note.”
“Where? On the refrigerator?”
“The mirror. I figured you wouldn’t miss it there.”
And did I want to analyze that? I stepped over to the mirror and read the message on the piece of paper stuck to it.
“I can’t find your cat.”
“Dex, Snap isn’t my cat.” I felt the need to clarify that. “She’s Bernice’s cat and Bernice is very attached to her. Did you try to call her?” Because that works so well for me.
“Cats don’t come when you call them.”
I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the busy Main Street just outside. So maybe it wasn’t like rush hour in the Twin Cities but there were a lot of pickup trucks with really big tires and Snap was an inside cat, used to being fed and pampered….
Something brushed against my leg. I shrieked and jumped three feet in the air. When I crash-landed back to earth, Snap was in the bathtub, checking out the gaping hole where my faucet had been.
“Never mind. I found her.” Relief poured through me. “She must have been hiding from you.”
Snap flicked her tail and meowed, reminding me that only one of my problems was solved. The other one was big enough for a raccoon to crawl through.
“I can’t use the tub, Dex.”
“I know. I’ll have it done tomorrow. Scout’s honor.”
You better or you won’t get your Plumbing badge. “Dex, are you sure you know, um, how to do this kind of stuff?”
“I’m trying to raise support for the mission field.”
Oh, sure. Play the missionary card!
“Fine. I’ll see you tomorrow. Please put the faucet first on your list….” I was talking to dead air. He’d hung up on me!
“You’d think he’d be a teensy bit more grateful, wouldn’t you, Snap?” I shed the skirt Mrs. Kirkwood had implied was too short and reached for the pair of jeans I’d slung over the hamper that morning.
One day down. Fifty-six more to go.
“My name is Heather and I’m a hairstylist.”
“That bad, huh?” Bree met me on the front steps of the Penny farmhouse and waved a cheeseburger under my nose to revive me. We plopped down on the porch swing and I didn’t take a breath until I’d worked my way through half of it.
“Someone could have warned me about Mrs. Kirkwood,” I finally mumbled.
“You wouldn’t have believed us.”
That was true. “She hinted I was after Alex’s money, questioned the amount of experience I’ve had and insisted she’d seen my shirt—the one I bought in Paris—on sale at Kmart last week.”
Bree chuckled. “Try having her for home economics two years in a row.”
“She’s a teacher? How’d you end up so normal?”
“If you call breaking out in cold sweat whenever I see a sewing machine normal.” She raised an eyebrow at me and we both burst out laughing.
It was amazing how close Bree and I had become. The day I’d met Bernice for the very first time, she’d introduced me to Bree. On our way to the Penny farm for dinner that evening, Bernice had condensed her ten-year history with Bree while I tried to form a picture of the girl who must have received the bulk of my birth mother’s attention. She loved horses. She was dating a boy named Riley Cabott. She was an only child.
Did you ever wish you knew me that well, I’d wanted to interrupt. But I didn’t. The resentment bubbling up at Bernice’s obvious love for Breanna Penny had surprised me into silence. The only thing that prevented it from flowing out and staining our conversation was when I remembered my Grandma Lowell’s words.
“This woman you’re meeting has a life, Heather. And so do you. God has given you both a new starting point…a place where your lives are going to intersect again. It’s up to you where you go from there. I would make it an opportunity for grace.”
That was one of Grandma’s favorite sayings. Make it an opportunity for grace. It wasn’t the first time I’d applied it, although I can’t say it was always easy. When Bree and I came face-to-face, I took a deep breath and searched her eyes—expecting to see them full of anger that I’d dare to show up and turn Bernice Strum’s world upside down. But all I could see in them was warmth. And welcome. That’s how accepting Bree was. She loved Bernice. She’d love me, too. It was as easy as that.
It’s strange how someone can enter your life and instantly become such a part of it you can’t imagine there was ever a time they weren’t there. Over the past year, Bree and I had kept in touch and she’d been just as excited as I was that we were both coming back to Prichett for the summer.
Bree rose to her feet and stretched like Snap after a long nap. “Are you ready for your recovery group?”
“I thought that was the cheeseburger.” There was more?
“That