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Great. That compliment felt more like . . . guilt.
Janie followed her mother’s lead back to the apples and set her knife to peeling again. This time without the record-breaking energy. But her heart still writhed in her chest.
Shedidlike Grady Briggs. He was handsome. He’d been polite and respectful—though a bit on the shy side. Maybe Janie liked shy. She couldn’t say for sure—there’d been very few opportunities when it came to single men who held an interest in her.
Maybe she’d flirted because she just liked the guy. Maybe she’d been upset with Hunter because he had sat there, right next to Grady, and scowled at her, as if she didn’t have any business liking another man.
How patriarchal of him. Hunter had no business telling Janie who she could like or not like. He had no authority to scowl at her flirting. He shouldn’t have even sat there in the first place. Hazel had taken the table by the front window, after all. Hunter should have sat with her, way the heck away from the bar and away from where Grady had parked.
As she went through the mental gymnastics that involved Hunter and her emotional response, Janie’s hands worked faster.
When Janie reached into the sink for a new victim to peel, Mama pinned a knowing look on her.
“What?” Janie huffed.
“Prayer. That’s what you need. It’s better than stewing. And it’d be a whole lot better than losing your thumb to an out-of-control paring knife.”
“There’s nothing to pray about.”
“Nothing?” Mama laughed.
“Nothing, when it comes to Hunter.”
“That may have been your problem these past years.”
“What?”
“That you didn’t pray about it.”
“That’s not . . .” True?
Janie stopped, her knife edge pressed against the sunny skin of a Ginger Gold. She’d prayed about her and Hunter back then, hadn’t she?
Surely she had.
But . . . she wasn’t sure. All she really remembered was that she’d been livid that he’d go do something as monumental as signing up for the navy without speaking with her about it. And that she’d been devastated that he didn’t change his mind when she’d told him she wasn’t going with him. And then she’d assessed him to be of the same ilk as her wandering, absentee father, which had been the death blow.
“Pray, Janie. And listen for an answer.” Mama’s instructions sank in deep.
As they went back to work, Janie stopped her mind from steamrolling over Hunter. But though Mama’s instructions were wise and best, Janie found that actually praying about Hunter—about her and Hunter and what their relationship should look like now that he was back—was a wall too high to climb.
Instead, she asked God to remove the yucky feelings she had about her former fiancé. And then she pretended like that was enough.
By Monday Janie had found she could smother most of those yucky feelings. Enough to convince herself that God had complied with her wishes and set her free. She slid the four pies she’d assembled—two apple, one using the last of her juneberry supply and a spiced pear—into her large oven, set the timer, and moved on to making the dough for tomorrow’s selection. Her food processor helped her make quick work out of creating eight more discs of dough, and she had them wrapped and placed in her refrigerator before the timer rang.
The warm aroma layered by apples, pears, cinnamon, cloves, and almond extract enveloped her kitchen with the sense of fall. Janie inhaled, delighting in the feeling of a job well done as the bell out front chimed. With a self-satisfied grin, she made her way to the door.
And her smile bloomed full at the good-looking man in a gray button-down ambling toward her pine counter.
“Good morning, Mr. Briggs.”
His slow grin came across shy but pleased. “Just Grady. If I can call you Janie?”
“That seems like a good deal to me.”
Stopping at the counter, he rested his hands on top, but he didn’t settle onto a stool. And he didn’t say anything further.
Janie pressed her lips together as the lull between them became awkward. “Can I get you some coffee?” she finally asked.
