“There’s a note, Mom,” Emma said. “Tucked inside the bonnet.”
Deirdre’s heart skipped a beat. She couldn’t help but remember the last note she’d found in the cedar chest. Now, almost three years later, she could only bless the day she found it, as she rejoiced in all the love it had so unexpectedly brought into her life. Jake and their new baby, the Captain, all questions shoved aside, and Cade, relieved of the secret burden that had so changed him.
She’d even found her music again thanks to the recording Emma had sent out. Spent two Saturday nights a month singing in clubs while Jake sat at the nearest table, watching her, waiting to sweep her away to find magic again in the gazebo that now sheltered not only Cade and Finn’s love story but the most beautiful lines of Deirdre and Jake’s, as well. Maybe, Deirdre hoped, just maybe, someday Emma would add a chapter of her own. Deirdre thought of her gentle mother, so romantic, how she would have loved the flower-covered gazebo as much as they all did. Maybe even more.
Deirdre wished Emmaline McDaniel could be right here with them all to see how they’d healed. How they’d grown. The truth Emmaline had feared would destroy her family had made the McDaniel clan stronger.
Deirdre slipped the note from beneath the delicate cloth, ran her fingertips over her mother’s sweet lily of the valley stationery.
Dear Deirdre,
I tuck this in your hope chest with a full heart, praying that you will have forgiven me enough to find this by the time you have a baby of your own. Maybe right now you’re looking at a new life, have the chance for a new beginning.
I wish with all my heart I could be with you on this happy day, and that maybe the child in your arms would give us both a chance to love each other better. But the doctors say it isn’t likely I’ll live to see my wild girl all grown-up.
So, I make this for you now, as time slips like the thread through my fingers, and try to think what bits of wisdom I’d whisper in your ear if I was able.
Be just a little selfish. Don’t lose yourself as I did. Show your baby how to be a strong woman someday. Remember never to love anything that can’t love you back. Be it a china figurine like the ones you broke as a little girl or a ghost from your past. I spent your whole life, Deirdre, aching for a man I’d given up before you were born. Spent my life grieving for him, holding back love that should have gone to you.
If I had it to do over again, I’d do everything so differently. I’d pack away my foolish wishes for a daughter to share teacups and dolls with and I’d follow you out to the yard, let you show me who you are, not who I planned for you to be.
I loved you with all my heart, but you were out of control, my little girl. A renegade just like your father. In the end, maybe it was your strength that scared me, or chastened me because I had so little of my own.
Be happy, Deirdre. Love boldly. Be true to yourself. I know in the end that you will. Tell your baby, someday, about the grandmother who locked all her own hopes away in a cedar chest by the window, and never took them out where they could breathe.
Hope, scattered like the rainbows in the crystal vase you held up to the sun when you were such a little girl. You dropped the crystal, shattered it, and yet it only made more facets to shine, more hopes to glisten, more rainbows to fill the room. So maybe, even then, you were far wiser than I.
Tears filled Deirdre’s eyes. “Emma…thank you for this gift. I might never have looked. She must have been working on it all the time while I was right there in the same house, but I didn’t even notice.” Deirdre touched the delicate cloth, felt it brush her skin, like her mother’s benediction.
“I was so sure she thought I was hopeless,” Deirdre confessed. “But somehow, even when I was at my most impossible, she never lost faith that I’d figure life out somehow.”
“Isn’t that why they call it a hope chest?” Emma asked, sitting gently on the bed.
“I guess it is.” Deirdre smiled up at Emma, reached out a hand to Jake. He laid their tiny daughter in her arms.
“So, what are we going to name her?” Jake winked at Emma. “Your mom kept insisting the baby would tell us who she was when she got here.”
Deirdre looked from her new daughter’s wizened little face to Emma’s blooming beauty to Jake. “Her name is Hope,” Deirdre said, peering into her husband’s eyes. “Because that’s what you’ve given me.”
ISBN: 978-1-4603-6177-1
THE GAZEBO
Copyright © 2006 by Kim Ostrom Bush
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All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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Kimberly Cates, The Gazebo
(Series: # )
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