What Were They Thinking?
Prologue: Memorial Day
THE STONES FELT COOL on their old feet. They’d slowly made their way to the River of Life in the early morning fog for their Memorial Day gathering. The sun was just beginning to burn through the moist air and in the next two hours would send the temperature from a pleasant seventy to a sweltering ninety.
They helped each other out of their shoes and across the boundary between the gravel path and the smooth stones of the River. Each picked up a rake and silently went about the motions of drawing in the stones, occasionally stooping to pick up a stick or leaf that had been missed when their kids cleaned the River on Saturday.
No formal ceremony marked their gathering, but the soles of their feet joined with the souls of their lost family and friends. None of them felt so old that they should have friends dying. Some still had living parents themselves. It was too soon to be burying their contemporaries. But it had always been that way. The living gathered and remembered the dead and those they had lost.
Marilyn and Anna slipped up beside Sly and lay a hand on his shoulder as he looked down at the stone that bore the names of his youngest daughter and her mother. Both were cut down way too young. Lily by cancer. Her teenage daughter by a gunman on campus. At the edge of the River, a black walnut tree dipped its roots into the stones. On its trunk was a plaque with Hayden’s name. Scarcely a day had gone by in twenty years that the women didn’t stand before that marker and weep for their lost love.
Dinita Kimes joined them. She’d felt the loss of Hayden almost as deeply as his wives. Angela’s first baby was stillborn and they brought her ashes to the River. Dinita cherished the memory of her granddaughter, even though she never drew breath.
Jim and Jill Swift shared a rake as they thought about their son, Doug. His fight with Hodgson’s ended his life way too soon. In the odd way that such tragedies have, it brought his parents back to Indiana—if not full time, at least enough to become a significant part of their grandchildren’s lives. More significant than they’d been in the lives of their children.
John and Bea Clinton were in the stones with the other parents. They’d not lost anyone directly but had inherited the tribal leadership when Hayden died and Brian began to look to John as a father figure. Once considered the most conservative and religious of the parents, the Clintons had mellowed over the years and had been there to support every step of the development of Corazón, Indiana.
“Shall we go to the bakery and get sweet rolls?” Sly asked. His somewhat expanded girth suggested that he went too frequently to the bakery, but his grandchildren were keeping him active.
“It’s a holiday. Brian won’t open today, will he?” Bea asked.
“Maybe not but come up to the big house and I’ll almost guarantee something is in the oven,” Marilyn said.
“Don’t you have guests?”
“Just one room. Teresa is taking them to Brown County for a day-long trail ride. Debbie came up to make them breakfast so Anna and I could come out here this morning,” Marilyn said.
“Your place it is, then.”
By the time they’d made the trek from the River to the house, the ranch was waking up. They waved at Teresa and Larry Irving, getting the B&B guests instructed on loading horses into the trailer. When they filed in the back door of what had once been Casa del Fuego’s home and was now a bed and breakfast, they were greeted with the aroma of baking cinnamon rolls.
“Sorry the rolls aren’t out of the oven yet,” Brian said. “We didn’t dare start baking them until the guests were out of the house.” Debbie and Dani were finishing up the breakfast dishes.
“They had fresh-baked bread,” Debbie said. “They can’t ask for better than that.”
“Our boy still bakes bread for his moms,” Anna sighed. “It was worth sacrificing my daughter’s virginity to him.”
“Believe me, it was no sacrifice,” Brian laughed. “There’s fresh coffee. Why don’t you all go into the family room where it’s cool and we’ll bring you rolls as soon as they’re out of the oven.”
“I simply never pictured him like that when he came to pick my daughter up the first time,” John sighed as he sank into one of the comfortable loveseats with Bea. “I was determined to protect her from him.”
“The first time I met him, it was already too late,” Anna said. “Jennifer and Courtney came back from the Girl Scout outing at the dude ranch and were smitten. All Jennifer could talk about was the boy who rescued her.”
“Well, I never considered that the baby I bore was going to become a famous chef and baker…” Marilyn began.
“Or leader of a clan and despoiler of young women?” Sly inserted.
“Or father of a baker’s dozen?” Dinita added.
“Or that he would introduce me to a woman who would change Hayden’s and my lives with more love than either of us knew existed in the universe, or that I would end up marrying a woman,” Marilyn finished as she kissed Anna.
“So, I understand you finally got married,” Jill said. “I never did get the whole story about how that got started. We were so remote when the kids were in high school. I regret it to this day. How did you and Hayden cope with it all?”
“It was a surprise,” Marilyn said. “And I guess that Hurricane Betts had worn us down a bit by the time we realized Brian was… different.”
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