After awhile Ray settled down to business, his eyes focused on the work in front of him more than on Candy’s figure, and the booth began to take shape.
At around three thirty they took a break. Candy invited Ray into the kitchen for some fresh-baked blueberry pie. Ray’s nervousness made him fidgety and restless. In a moment of carelessness he knocked his water glass to the floor, shattering it, and tipped over a chair when he turned around too fast. Sweat began to break out on his forehead. He mumbled a lot, shifted his eyes this way and that, and even had to ask directions to the bathroom.
“Ray, you’ve been here plenty of times before. You know where it’s at,” Candy said, a note of frustration creeping into her voice. Struggling to hold back a sigh, she pointed him to the proper door. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings but she had too much to do today, and didn’t have time to deal with these kinds of delays.
Chastised, Ray dropped his head as he walked down the hall and closed the bathroom door behind him.
Once they were back outside, Candy decided Ray needed a few minutes alone to settle down, so she left him in the barn while she went out back to check on her chickens.
Ray had helped her build the chicken coop last fall, right after she purchased the “girls,” as she called them. She’d opted for bantam hens-mostly because she had been so taken with the small, squat black and white birds as she walked past them in the poultry shed at the Common Ground Country Fair up in Unity. She’d bought six hens on impulse that very day. Doc had grumbled a bit as he loaded the cage into the back of the truck, but he soon warmed to the idea.
Back home, Candy had been surprised to find that in short order she developed a strange affection for her little flock. She discovered that each hen had a distinctive personality and a little routine, and they seemed to listen to her when she talked to them, which amused her to no end. They were also surprisingly good egg producers. She had quickly increased her flock to a baker’s dozen and since then added two more-perhaps because having thirteen hens seemed to be tempting fate. Now they had more than enough eggs, which Candy gave away to friends or dropped off at a local bakery where she worked part-time. Lord knew Herr Georg, the baker, went through plenty of eggs, and he clucked over them almost as much as the chickens did.
The girls chattered and gathered curiously about her as she fed and watered them and collected their eggs in a wire basket-seven today so far.
Before she headed back to the barn to check on Ray, she walked out past the chicken coop and looked out over the blueberry fields that rolled like a choppy blue green sea back to a ridge of trees in the distance. A few years ago she would have been greatly amused to see herself standing here on a farm holding a basketful of eggs. She had been an urban girl, an up-and-comer working for a busy marketing firm that served the top high-tech companies in Boston. She’d had a killer wardrobe, a tight group of friends, a solid, happy marriage with a smart, handsome guy… And then it unraveled so fast she’d barely had time to come to grips with it all. Clark, her husband, lost his lucrative job as a software engineer when the company he worked for lost its financing and had to make cutbacks. When he had trouble finding another job, he invested a big chunk of their savings in a start-up venture, which went under in six months, making household finances even tighter. After that he became despondent, which seemed natural to Candy, who assumed it was because of his work situation. But she had the whole thing all wrong. He left her shortly after that, telling her he had fallen in love with someone else. He was out in California now, remarried with a child and a second one on the way. Even the thought of that still gave Candy pain; she and Clark tried for years to have children but had never been successful.
But that was not the worst of it. A few weeks after Clark left her, she had gone out to dinner with her best friend Zoe. They’d met in college, dated some of the same boys, and stayed friends after Candy and Clark married. Zoe married also, but it hadn’t lasted long; she’d been divorced for years. The dinner had been a time for them to commiserate with each other, and they even shared a tiramisu. They parted on what Candy thought was a positive note. But not more than a few hours later Zoe committed suicide, alone in her apartment. According to police reports, she had taken an overdose of pills.
Candy was devastated, not only because she’d lost her best friend but also because she, Candy, hadn’t even been aware of Zoe’s depression and had done nothing to save her friend.
After that the bottom fell out of her life. She became physically ill, took to bed for weeks, neglected her work, and stopped eating. She turned away from her other friends, unable to face them. She started drinking heavily. She wound up in the hospital and eventually lost her job. Officially she’d been fired, but in her heart she never had any intention of going back. She simply gave up on her old life.
That’s when Doc called, one dreary morning when she was feeling particularly down. He told her he was at the coffee shop around the corner and was coming by to pick her up and take her up to Blueberry Acres for the weekend. Five minutes later he knocked on her front door. She tried to put on a brave face but quickly fell into his arms, sobbing, and let him take her home.
Doc had discovered Blueberry Acres, a twenty-five-acre farm off the Coastal Loop just outside of Cape Willington, during one of his long drives along the coast a few weeks after Holly died. He and Holly had looked for a place just like this for years, and he knew as soon as he saw it that this was exactly what he had sought for so long. At first he had hesitated in making such a big change, which involved leaving teaching and taking up a career as a gentleman farmer. He questioned whether it was wise to make a decision of that magnitude when he was in such an emotional state. But in the end Candy had convinced him that it was the right way to go. He loved the farming life immensely-but he realized only after he moved in just how much work the place needed, and had been picking at it as best he could ever since. Still, at times it seemed to overwhelm him.
Candy had visited the farm many times before, but during that weekend stay after Doc had come down and rescued her, she began to see the place in a new light, and the idea of a permanent change for her as well took shape quickly in her mind. She knew Doc could use her help. She knew she could use a change. It hadn’t been a difficult decision.
So Doc drove her back to Boston, they cleaned out her apartment, and without looking back, she moved to a blueberry farm in Downeast Maine.
Now they had just over fifteen acres of the lowbush wild blueberries that were native only to this farnortheastern corner of the country, and they were planning, in the next year or so, to push back the thin piney woods that edged their property even farther to open up a few more acres. They also had half an acre of vegetables, a small herb garden, and various flower beds around the property, as well as the chicken coop behind the barn. They had talked about adding more-a few farm animals, a larger vegetable garden-but decided to keep things manageable, at least for the time being.
It was a good life, a simple life, and it had been her salvation, Candy thought as she headed back to the barn to check on Ray. She and Doc had been through a lot, but the farm had healed them both. Right now, she couldn’t imagine living any other place on earth than right here, on Blueberry Acres in Cape Willington in Downeast Maine, just a mile or so from the sea.
FIVE
When she walked back into the barn, Ray was cursing.
“What’s wrong?” Candy asked.
But he didn’t have to answer. She saw the problem instantly-he had put the hinges on backwards, so the sides of the booth folded the wrong way.
“I’m sorry, Miss Candy,” he said, his eyes bright with held-back tears and his hands trembling. “I just got ahead of myself and wasn’t thinking.”
Candy sighed and set the basket of eggs on a sideboard. “It’s okay, Ray. Come on, I’ll help you fix it.”
Working together, they unscrewed the hinges and got the sides on the right way. Then, while Ray set to work on the shelves on the back of the front piece, Candy took up Ray’s hammer to nail brackets onto the ends of the crossbeams, so they could be easily attached to the tops of the side pieces.
Candy wasn’t the handiest person on the planet, and she swung the hammer wildly at the nails, missing the flat heads more than a few times and swearing under her breath as she pounded away. But she got the damned nails down into the damned wood without hitting herself on the thumb or fingers, which was good enough for her.
