Bluegrass Courtship by Allie Pleiter

Author:Allie Pleiter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steeple Hill
Published: 2009-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Janet stood in her workroom and looked at the eight birdhouses that sat on the shelves. They did seem hoarded back here, sequestered away like a hidden neighborhood. Only they weren’t a little neighborhood. Birdhouses aren’t birdhouses unless birds are living in them, are they? That was the thought that enabled her to change her mind back there in the garden. When she saw Drew so clearly in the role he was born to, it struck her that her birdhouses weren’t living the life they were made for: outside, housing birds.

She picked one of her earliest birdhouses, one that was styled after a Baltimore row house. That was the life she thought she’d been born to—finishing her architectural degree while helping Tony run his social service mission on the East Coast. Only that mission—and, when she thought about it, that Tony—never existed. The birdhouse left a footprint on the dusty Bible underneath it. She didn’t remember she’d hidden her Bible up here—and hadn’t picked up a Bible since that whole fiasco. She stared at the worn leather volume a long time before she touched it.

It felt like it had been waiting for her. Which was foolish—books didn’t have emotions. And yet, as she looked at the birdhouses surrounding her, they seemed to be waiting as well. Waiting for the chance to be birdhouses instead of, well, coping mechanisms. Somehow, constructing these tiny houses, the exact science of it, the carefully controlled art of it had been her survival. That’s why they felt so precious to her. Taking them out in the world would be like putting her crawl back from the pain on some kind of display.

Or setting herself free from it.

She’d have to think about that. A lot. But as she remembered the look on Drew’s face when she’d given him the birdhouses, part of her knew she’d already decided. As she stared around the shelves, she could picture them on the posts around the garden. And they belonged there, in the garden. Maybe it was time to move a few things around in her life.

Janet brushed the dust off the Bible, and while she didn’t open it, she moved it to a corner of her worktable to sit beside her as she opened some revised orders Mike had dropped off this afternoon.

What she saw made her heart sink.

They’d done it. There, in black and white under the very ordinary guise of a revised materials order, Missionnovationhad cut corners. On the roof. Probably the most important, lasting renovation Drew was doing, and the thing they hadn’t even requested.

Janet sucked in a breath, reeling from the information as physically as if someone had slapped her. They weren’t ordering the roof supplies from Bishop Hardware anymore. A hand-scrawled note from Drew said they were going with an exciting new product supplied by HomeBase. One she’d never heard of—and certainly not something from the list of suggested materials from the rainwater system manufacturer. This was wrong. This was everything she didn’t trust about Missionnovation wrapped up into one convenient substitution.

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