A Match Made in Dry Creek

Mrs. Hargrove stopped moving hymnals and thought a minute. “It’s not a matter of shyness. We’d have to get them in the same place at the same time. That’d be the challenge. I’ve never seen two people more determined to avoid each other. Doris June won’t even visit me unless it’s the middle of summer or harvest season when she knows Curt is too busy to come into town.”

“I don’t think they’ve even talked to each other in all these years,” Charley said.

“Well, certainly not while Curt was married to that woman. Doris June was furious.”

“Did she say that?”

“She didn’t have to. I know my daughter.”

“Well, she doesn’t need to worry about the woman Curt married. She ran off with some man the day after she put Ben in kindergarten. The only time Curt heard from her after that was when he got the divorce papers. You’d think she’d at least contact her own son over the years, but she hasn’t and here Ben just turned fifteen last month. A boy like that needs a mother.”

Mrs. Hargrove bent to straighten another hymnal. She wouldn’t say it, but she knew Ben needed a grandmother, too. “He’s a good boy. I’m sure Doris June would like to get to know him better. I don’t know what would make her agree to be in the same room with Curt, though.”

Charley thought a minute. “One of us could pretend we were dying. They’d both come to see us then.”

Mrs. Hargrove stood still and thought a moment. She almost wished she could do it, but she knew better. “Nothing good ever comes of telling a lie.”

“Well, maybe we don’t need to be dying,” Charley conceded as he rubbed his chin in thought. “But we could still need some help—after all, we’re both in our seventies. That should be reason enough to give us some help if we needed it.”

Mrs. Hargrove started going down another row of pews. “I’ll not be asking Doris June for money. She already tries to give me more than she should.”

“No, money won’t work. Besides, it’s too easy to write a check. She wouldn’t even need to come home to do that.”

Mrs. Hargrove picked a hymnal up off a pew. “But what else do we need help with except money?”

Charley thought a moment. “Lifting. What we need to do is find something that needs lifting.”

“Doris June will just tell me to save the lifting until she comes in the fall.”

“Well, maybe it’s something that needs to be lifted before fall gets here.”

“The pansies,” Mrs. Hargrove said with a smile. “If I get some seeds in the ground soon, we’d have them by May.”

“A pansy’s not very heavy,” Charley said skeptically.

“They will be if we do pansy baskets this year,” Mrs. Hargrove said. Her eyes started to shine with excitement. “I saw some gardening show on television a few months ago and it showed these big beautiful pansy baskets. I thought at the time how impressed everyone would be if we could hand out baskets like that for Mother’s Day. And it’s not just the baskets. If we grow the pansies from seed there will be lots of heavy work. There’ll be bending and lifting—and digging. Besides, the pansies could be a tourist attraction, too.”

“Maybe so. That hillside used to be something to see when you grew the pansies in the past,” Charley said. “My wife used to call it a carpet of lavender. Pure poetry it was.”

“There’s nothing like the color of a pansy,” Mrs. Hargrove agreed. She was pleased Charley had noticed her flowers. Not all men did. “To fill up those big baskets, I’ll need to plant even more pansies than I used to plant. And the week before Mother’s Day, we’ll need to dig up hundreds of pansies and put them into baskets. Lots of dirt and shoveling. And me with my arthritis. How can Doris June not come?”

“And Curt would never let you do that kind of work, regardless of whether or not Doris June comes,” Charley agreed with a slow smile. “Of course, if she does come, they’ll have to see each other. A person can’t dig in a flower bed next to someone and not say hello. You know, this just might work—if Doris June comes.”

Mrs. Hargrove grinned. “Oh, she’ll come.”

“Won’t Doris ask why Curt doesn’t just do all the baskets for you? She knows he’s back on the farm.”

Mrs. Hargrove shook her head. “Oh, no, she’d have to mention his name to ask and she never does that—not even if I mention it first.”

Charley frowned. “You mean she’s never asked about him?”

Mrs. Hargrove shook her head. “Not even before he got married.”

Charley looked even more troubled. “Maybe that means she’s not interested in him. It was a long time ago.”

Mrs. Hargrove was silent for a minute. “Well, we don’t know if Curt is still interested, either.”

“He might not admit it, but he’s interested,” Charley said. “Ever since he moved to the farm three years ago, I’ve noticed that the month of June is torn right off the kitchen calendar every year—before the month even starts it’s gone.”

“Curt was the only one who used to call Doris June just plain June,” Mrs. Hargrove said. “Remember, he called her his June bug.”

“I’d forgotten about that,” Charley said. “He must have been six or seven when he started calling her that. He used to love to tease his June bug.”

“I think they might have always loved each other,” Mrs. Hargrove said. “And if Curt is still worried about a word on a calendar, there’s hope.”

Mrs. Hargrove smiled. It was time to plant her pansies. She’d wait until the seeds were sprouted to ask Doris June to come help her. She didn’t want her daughter to fret about this trip for any longer than necessary, and fret she would, especially when she realized that the pansies were being grown on land Curt was now leasing.

In the meantime, there were things to do.

It wouldn’t hurt for Doris June to do some shopping before she came. Of course, she’d never go shopping for herself if her mother suggested it. No, Mrs. Hargrove decided, the only thing to do was to ask Doris June to go shopping for something for her mother.

Doris June would love that. She had never liked the gingham housedresses that Mrs. Hargrove usually wore. Of course, the housedresses were perfectly fine. They were easy to wash and most of them had a zipper in the front so Mrs. Hargrove didn’t need to fumble with buttons when her arthritis was acting up.

Besides, in Mrs. Hargrove’s opinion, Doris June had no right to complain about the fashion of others, not when all she ever seemed to wear were business suits. It was a frustration to a mother when she had a daughter as beautiful as Doris June, who seemed determined to hide that fact from everyone.

To begin with, Doris June had good bones and good posture. She stood tall and confident. Her hair was a honey-blond and she didn’t make the mistake of bleaching it lighter, hoping it would become that Hollywood blond that actresses seemed to favor. Doris June’s skin was clear and her blue eyes looked straight ahead at life. She didn’t wear much makeup, but she didn’t need to.

Doris June was a classically featured woman. Sometimes, though, Mrs. Hargrove worried that her daughter didn’t look as young as she should. Before all of that elopement business, Doris June had looked like every other teenage girl. She’d bounced. She’d chattered. She’d even worn some kind of bright blue fingernail polish at the time. But after the elopement—well, Doris June just didn’t seem the same. She stiffened up.

She walked instead of bouncing. She was patient and long-suffering. Mrs. Hargrove couldn’t help but notice that her daughter had started to dress like an old lady. Not that she wore housedresses like Mrs. Hargrove did. She would never do that. But Doris June stopped wearing anything that seemed youthful. She still had all the looks she needed to grab the attention of any man she wanted. It’s just that, once she had their attention, they were more likely to think of her as a good neighbor or a good employer than a romantic partner.

Mrs. Hargrove decided it was too late to worry about the bouncing. At forty-two, Doris June would have outgrown that by now anyway. But Mrs. Hargrove figured she could do something about the suits Doris June always wore. She had suits in black, gray, and navy, and she wore them with white blouses. She always looked crisp, but even Mrs. Hargrove knew clothes like that encouraged a man to think of a tax audit rather than a candlelight dinner.

Mrs. Hargrove felt too guilty to ever talk to Doris June about the kind of clothes she wore, but a mother noticed certain things even if she didn’t know what to do about them. Maybe she could do something now, though, if she had Doris June go shopping for her. If she wanted to get Doris June to buy some new clothes for herself, she had to get her into different stores than the ones where she usually shopped, so she wouldn’t ask her to buy more gingham dresses. No, she’d ask Doris June to get her a spring dress or two that had some style.

While she was there, Doris June might even pick up some high heels for herself. It wouldn’t hurt to remind Curt that Doris June had nice legs.

Yes, Mrs. Hargrove thought, this just might work.

Chapter Two

Doris June Hargrove looked up from the contracts she had in front of her. She managed the advertising traffic in the main television station in Anchorage and she often had ad contracts on her desk. Usually, she knew exactly what contracts were in front of her, but ever since the telephone call from her mother two hours ago she hadn’t been able to concentrate.

She had suspected for months that something was wrong with her mother. After Christmas, her mother had sounded depressed in their twice-weekly telephone calls and then, in the last couple of months, her mother had sounded too cheerful. Doris June asked her mother if the doctor had given her any new prescriptions and her mother had said no, so Doris June decided her mother must have just had cabin fever and was growing happier as spring started to take hold in Dry Creek.

Doris June hadn’t spent a winter in Dry Creek for years, but she remembered the bitter cold well enough to understand how her mother’s mood might improve as everything started to thaw. Even Anchorage tended to be milder than southern Montana in some winters.

Of course, the winter wouldn’t explain everything. Her mother still wasn’t eating right. These days, if Doris June asked her mother what she’d had for lunch, her mother would say she had a can of soup; and she wouldn’t even know what kind of soup it was. That wasn’t like her mother.