I didn’t actually need to visit clients on my way to my sister’s wedding. But I needed the car to transport her wedding present, draped across the backseat.
Anyway, I loved walking into a store and seeing my bags, my brand, displayed on the gleaming shelves. #bagsinthewild #ownit I loved the expensive smell of the boutiques, citrus, sandalwood, jasmine, the fragrant scent of bergamot oil. The accounts were always happy to see me, flattered I’d gone out of my way to visit.
Not like going home at all.
Not that my family didn’t love me, I told myself as I left the last client store in Raleigh and hit the highway for my mother’s farm. They did. All of them, even Jo. But my sisters were too busy with their own lives to care much about mine.
Our mother, who never took a day’s vacation in her life, had encouraged all of us girls to work hard and follow our dreams. Meg was the perfect mother to two perfect children. Jo was a bestselling author. Beth was a budding country star. And I... I made accessories. It didn’t matter how many Instagram followers or employees I had. In my family’s eyes, I was still little Amy, playing with scraps from Miss Hannah’s quilting bag.
And yet... There was comfort in the familiar landscape rushing by, the tall pines stretching to the wide blue sky, the sunlit ditches full of cattails and turtles, the poppies blooming by the side of the road. I turned up the gravel drive markedsisters’ farm, the stones spitting beneath my tires. The square frame house, the old mule barn turned creamery, the child’s playset in the baby goats’ paddock.
Home.
Too bad nobody was there. No car. No truck. Nobody.
I got out of the car and took a deep breath of country air scented with hay and the river. Also... goats. Brown goats, black goats, striped and spotted goats, all sizes, smelling like cheese left out on the counter too long. They crowded to the fence, bleating and bumping for attention, the babies skipping around the paddock like they were auditioning for YouTube. Cute, if you liked that sort of thing.
Our mother loved them. Not more than she loved us girls, of course.
Our mother, Abigail March, could do anything—drive a tractor, make a pie crust, refinish a table. Find anything—toys, shoes, missing homework. Fix anything, except a broken heart. She made sure we got our shots and permission slips on time, taught Meg to cook and me to sew, and came to all our school performances. But her time and attention were always rationed between us and the farm.
Meg said things were different before Daddy quit his job as a minister and went to Iraq as an army chaplain. I remember I cried when we left the parsonage and all my friends in town. But I was only tenwhen our mother moved us girls out to the farm. Most of my memories were of her working.
It wasn’t like her to be gone in the middle of the day.
I didn’t expect to see our dad. Mom had asked him to move out almost three years ago. But I felt his absence like poking at a missing tooth with your tongue.
Stupid. Meg and Jo were grown and gone when I was still in high school. I should be used to coming home to an almost empty house by now.
I leaned against the front fender as I called Momma’s cell. She didn’t pick up. Typical. “Why would I ignore somebody standing right in front of me to answer the phone?” she liked to say. But I could call Meg, my oldest sister. Meg was busy, too—her twins were about to turn five, and she kept the books for several farms and businesses in town. But she always found time for me.
A guy walked around the corner of the barn. Tall and rough-looking, his face seamed with sun and hard living behind a don’t-mess-with-me beard.
I kept a hand on my phone just in case he turned out to be, oh, a serial killer or something. Living in New York had taught me caution. And out here in the country, nobody was around to hear me scream. “Hi.”
He nodded in greeting. The strong, silent type, obviously. Beneath the beard, he looked vaguely familiar. Which... Yeah. Everybody looked familiar in Bunyan. Because of inbreeding, Jo said. But it was more that everybody had a cousin who used to go to your daddy’s church or went to school with your sister, strands of connection twined and knotted like macramé.
I tried again. “Do I know you?”
He looked at me, no expression at all, like a New Yorker. Or a Frenchman. “Dan Harkins.”
I smiled encouragingly, waiting.
“I work for your ma.”
So he knew who I was. Or at least that Momma was expecting me. I relaxed my grip on the phone.
Our mother came from tough Scottish stock, too proud—or too cheap—to pay somebody else to do her work. But after she was hospitalized a couple years ago, she’d hired some of Dad’s vets to do the heavy lifting. Mom was better now, but as her herd and business grew, she’d kept on some of the new hires.
“Where is my mother?” I asked.
“Over at Oak Hill.” A pause. “Helping your sister.”
Jo, being Jo, had taken a casual approach to her wedding. She and her love, Eric Bhaer, were already living together, dividing their time between New York and North Carolina. They had three kids—baby Rob and two teenage sons from Eric’s previous marriage. It was only now that Eric’s ex-wife was deployed and his younger son Alec was coming to live with them that Jo decided it was finally time to get married. “I don’t need a poofy dress and a big, fancy wedding,” Jo said when she called me. “I just want to marry him.”
So. No poof. No bachelorette parties, no bridal showers, no save-the-date cards or hair and makeup trials. It wasn’t quite an elopement—our great-aunt Josephine had offered her big old house at Oak Hill for the wedding, and all the family would be there—but it was pretty close.
I thought of the garment bag in the backseat, hung from the hook on the passenger side. I had to give it to Jo sometime. And there must be a million things to do before the ceremony on Sunday. Food. Eric was a chef. Maybe I could help with the flowers or something.
