A Time Of Storms (The Foxglove Corners Series Book 8) by Dorothy Bodoin

Author:Dorothy Bodoin [Bodoin, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
Published: 2010-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

Evie had a little accident in the library this morning. She backed into Miss Eidt’s paperback carousel and knocked it over. Everybody was staring at her. Some older boys were laughing. Evie was almost in tears. I went to help her pick up the books, and there he was, helping both of us. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘These carousel displays are flimsy to begin with, and this one wasn’t assembled properly.’ That wasn’t true, but it sounded good, and Evie soon forgot about her tears.

He speaks with a foreign accent and has a nice, warm smile and brown eyes. He has a nice name too. It’s Stefan. Stefan came all the way from Bavaria to this country for a vacation, and he’s visiting family in town. Who could they be? I can’t think of anyone. We would have talked more, but Miss Eidt was frowning at us.

“How odd to come across your name in someone else’s old diary,” I said. “But finally Jerilyn’s writing shows a spark.”

“Meeting a new man can do wonders for a woman’s outlook,” Leonora added.

“If you’re free.”

“I met a man doesn’t sound like something a married woman would write. In the fifties, with children, she must have been widowed or divorced.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Maybe she didn’t consider her husband worth the ink or the effort. Stefan has two paragraphs.”

Leonora read on, skimming the pages. “There’s nothing more about Stefan here. The next day, she’s making fudge, keeping the girls amused with board games, wishing spring break would end. She tried to interest Emma and Evie in planting a little garden. They went back to the library for books on vegetables.” She turned another page. “But he wasn’t there.”

“That’s the way so many romantic meetings end,” I mused. “Well, he was on vacation. He must have been busy with his relatives.”

“How sad. Think what a good story it would have made.”

I listened to the summer rain splattering on the windowpanes while Leonora read about the weather patterns of a long ago spring. When nothing was happening in Jerilyn’s life, she liked to record temperatures and chart the progress of the buds on the trees. She watched the spring flowers bloom and worried about the possibility of their being killed by frost, but that didn’t happen.

It won’t be long now. We’ll have fresh vegetables for dinner. I bought five dollars worth of seed at the hardware.

The girls’ garden was planted, but they lost interest in it because the plants were so tiny. Inevitably it became their mother’s project to weed and water. One more tedious chore.

Jerilyn’s days appeared to be utterly devoid of color. After that unlikely meeting in the library, she sank back into a quagmire of domesticity: cleaning, cooking, baking, keeping the vegetable patch free of weeds, helping Emma and Evie with their math homework. One day was just like another, and none of them were enjoyable.

I’d love to have fun. Just simple fun. Something for myself. Is that asking too much?

There was a single

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