Presley was spending the day with Makayla at her farm, and the twins were spending the day with Bobby Foster out at the Foster Ranch.Tessa and Jenna had both promised to return her offspring to her this afternoon both fed and exhausted.
She’d ridden in the front seat of Hank’s pickup, while Chloe’s car seat and Madison sat in the back.
Sunny had spent forty minutes of mountain highway pretending she didn’t notice everything about the man beside her.The way he drove with one wrist hung over the top of the wheel as if he had all the time the good Lord ever made.How he smelled like coffee and clean soap with a hint of cedar underneath, which was unfair because she’d just that morning decided cedar was her favorite smell.
You’re thirty-five years old and behaving like a teenager,she lectured herself.She stared fixedly at the mountains, which were stacked in receding blues and had the decency not to have tanned forearms revealed attractively by the rolled up sleeves of a flannel shirt.
Chloe slept the whole way and woke up furious about it.She was restored to civilized behavior only by the discovery of an entire bin of brass doorknobs she was permitted to put her hands into up to the elbow.
“I’ll watch her while you and Dad make a preliminary pass to find the mantels,” Madison volunteered.
“Don’t let her eat a doorknob,” Sunny told her.
“She can’t fit a doorknob into her mouth,” Madison said with the confidence of someone who hadn’t known Chloe long.
“She’ll die trying,” Sunny replied dryly.
Madison grinned and waved them away on their search.
Sunny was coming to understand that, if she gave Madison a thing to be responsible for, she steadied like a level finding plumb.She’d been somebody’s keeper too young, same as Presley.It was impossible to take the pattern out of them.She could only hand them something worth keeping.
She and Hank found the mantel in the third aisle, leaned against a horse stall with four others.Sunny knew it the way she always knew with fast certain recognition under her breastbone, the restorer’s version of love at first sight.It was oak with a deep dentil cornice and columns worn smooth on their front edges where decades of hands had rested as fires burned down.
“This one’s telling the truth,” she said, running her thumb along the worn edge of the mantel shelf.
“What does truth feel like?”he asked quietly.
“Real wear collects where the hands go.You can’t fake where people touched a thing for a lifetime.”
Hank laid his hand flat on the cornice.It took a moment but understanding dawned on his face.She watched him learn something about his own house that she hadn’t yet found the words for.
“It feels right for the room,” he said quietly.
Sunny fetched Madison and Chloe to show them their find while Hank pulled the mantel out and leaned it by itself against the next stall door.
Madison froze as soon as she turned the corner and spied the mantel.“That’s it,” she said softly.
“I do believe you have the instincts of a good historical decorator,” Sunny told her.
“Did the original mantel in our house look like this?”Madison murmured as she stepped forward and laid her hand exactly where Hank had laid his.
“The first one was probably plainer,” Sunny answered.She crouched to check the joinery and tilted it to look at the back.“This came out of a beautiful home.Somebody let a fine house die.”
Hank went down on one knee, working a loose return board with his thumb, testing the give of an old glue joint.“This corner’s let go,” he said.“And there’s a check running up the left column.Hairline.It’ll open if you hang it wet.”
She blinked at him.“You know joinery?”
“Our granddad taught all us boys how to work with wood.Dillon’s the really talented woodworker of the three of us.I find that wood’s not so different from people.You learn where a thing wants to come apart, and you don’t ask it to do a thing it can’t.”
It occurred to Sunny that he could be talking about a good many things that weren’t mantels.
“I can fix this corner.Clamp it, let it set, re-glue the return.The check I’ll fill and leave be.”He added in a rather intimate murmur to her, “If you don’t mind it having a scar.”
“Not at all.Gives it character,” she murmured back, her heart inexplicably fluttering.
Madison found the perfect light in a dim corner.It was a brass pan light with five arms and milk-glass shades, every one of them intact, gone the soft brown of an old penny.
“This one,” she said with absolute certainty.Just a few days ago, she would’ve phrased it as a question and watched Sunny’s face for permission.Now she just stated it as a fact.
