Love Sign

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His plainspoken logic nudged Shelby’s conscience. But it was his coaxing smile that tipped the scales. “You’re right, you know.” Capitulating, she followed him downstairs.

“You want to pitch?” he asked on the way outdoors.

“No, thanks. Words are the only game I have any success with. Anyway, I’m resting. Remember?”

Jake chuckled at having his own words fed back to him. He left her with his sisters, and joined his team of Jackson progeny waiting in the yard. Shelby shaded her eyes and watched from a wicker lounger a makeshift game of men and kids and elastic rules that stretched to accommodate the smallest among them.

“So tell us, Shelby. What is it you’re writing about?” asked Jake’s youngest sister, Wendy.

“Teens,” Shelby said.

“Joy’s twelve, and already, I feel like I could do a book on teens!” exclaimed Paula.

In the company of her sisters, Paula was just one talker among many. Shelby’s gaze returned to the game, and Jake, now hunkered down behind home plate with a catcher’s mitt in hand.

“Hey, batter, batter,” he chanted as a young nephew toddled up to bat. After the second strike, Jake dropped his glove and helped the pint-size batter swing.

The little guy was stunned when the bat cracked the ball. “Jimmy hit!” he cried. “Jimmy hit!”

“Run, Jimmy! Run!” hollered Jimmy’s father, Curtis.

Jimmy froze, clutching the bat. Jake scooped him up and ran the bases with him. Jimmy was still clinging to the bat when they crossed home plate. He beamed as Jake set him down amidst his cheering teammates.

“Jimmy hit,” he said again.

“Jimmy sure did!” Jake heaved Jimmy aloft and onto his shoulder and ran a victory lap.

“Jake needs a family of his own,” Wendy commented.

“Wendy hasn’t been married long,” Paula said to Shelby. “The blush is still on the rose.”

“But the kids do love Jake,” pointed out Jimmy’s mom, Christine. “Joy thinks the sun rises and sets on him.”

“She should. He’s always been there for us,” Paula stated.

“That’s all good and well. But it’s time he was thinking about a nest of his own.” Wendy turned a beaming smile on Shelby. “Say! Do you have any friends we could set him up with?”

“I could probably think of someone. But it would be a long drive for him,” Shelby replied, rising from her chair. She caught Paula rolling her eyes, and angled for the door, adding, “Excuse me, would you? I left my sunglasses upstairs.”

“That was real subtle, Wen,” Paula chided Wendy.

“What?” protested Wendy with feigned innocence. “All I said was, did she know anyone.”

Restless, Shelby retrieved her sunglasses, and on impulse, phoned her parents. No one answered. She wasn’t surprised. They were very busy. Even in childhood, it was a catch-as-catch-can proposition.

She left a message explaining the circumstances that had forced a change of plans, where she was staying and how to reach her. As she did so, she could almost see them trading benign and somewhat surprised glances at her bid to reassure them she was fine. It wouldn’t occur to them to think otherwise.

Ball game forgotten, Shelby let herself into Jake’s study, closed the door and turned on the computer. Time fell away as she polished her first chapter.

THE FIELD

Chapter One

The sun was rising as Cheryl gathered with half a dozen sleepy-eyed teens beneath the park pavilion. Yesterday’s rain had distorted the bill of her Weed Buster’s cap. Her sneakers were stiff with dried mud and the edges of her cutoff shorts were unraveling.

“So where’s the boss?” she asked one of the boys waiting there.

“Who cares? he said. “Waiting’s easy cash.”

Cheryl wished she could be so carefree. She looked up the empty street, then sat down on a picnic table to wait. As the minutes stretched into half an hour with no sign of Mr. Weedman, the rest of the kids picked up their lunches and hoes and ambled away, Dudley among them.

But Cheryl stayed, pacing now. He would be along anytime with a logical explanation. He would apologize for keeping her waiting. They would round up the other kids and go to the field.

Seven-thirty and still no Weedman. Where was he? Why didn’t he come? She needed to work. Needed the money. Needed to kill weeds and self-doubts. Blue-eyed dirt-track speed-demon Jack Cook, in not exposing her, had given her purpose. She wanted to be who he thought she could be.

Seven forty-five. Get a brain, Cheryl. He isn’t coming! She picked up her lunch cooler, her hoe. And yet…what harm was there in waiting a few more minutes?

Eight o’clock. No Weedman. Cheryl was angry now. And scared. She tried to reason away the fear. But she was cold inside. Cold with the growing conviction that something was terribly wrong. That she had seen the last of Wiley Weedman.

And she was dead right.

“So here you are! Why aren’t I surprised?”

Shelby looked to find Jake leaning in the door, a grass stain on one knee of his khakis and his baseball cap in hand. “Who won?” she asked, her eyes returning to the screen.

“Hard to say when it erupts into a brawl,” he said. “I called the game. Gram separated them as best she could, put them in their cars and sent them home.”

“Hmm,” Shelby replied, struggling against the gravitational pull of her story.

“It tuckered her out, until it was all she could do to climb in the last car out the drive. She said don’t wait supper, she’ll make them feed her before she comes home.” Jake crossed to the window and lowered the blinds. “If you can find a stopping place there, we’ll go into town and rescue your homework. May as well eat while we’re at it.”

“Is it that time already?”

“Getting close,” he said. “If you’re not hungry, we could go for a walk.”

“After an afternoon of baseball?” Trying to talk words at odds with the words she was typing was too much. Shelby looked up just as Jake perched on the corner of the desk and reached for her hand-scrawled notes.

“Please don’t…”

“…read your stuff,” he finished, withholding the tablet.

Shelby restrained herself from leaping across the desk and wrestling her tablet away. His baiting smile triggered heat, which she strove to hide, even as she tried to divert his attention from her scribbled notes. “About this walk. Would it take us past Mr. Wiseman’s house?” she asked.

“I guess it could. Why?”

Shelby hit a key, watched the screen darken and pushed out of her chair. “Has he turned up yet?”

“Not that I know of,” Jake said.

“Do I have time to run upstairs and get my walking shoes?”

“Sure. No hurry. Aren’t you forgetting something?” he called after her.

Shelby turned in the door and caught the tablet as he pitched it across the room. “You’re a tease, Jake.”

He crooked a brow and countered, “Here I thought you had eyes only for your story.”

“You noticed?”

“That you weren’t hanging on my every word? Of course I noticed. What man wouldn’t?”

He spoke in jest. And still it gave Shelby pause, for until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to her that anyone but Patrick would find her preoccupation with her story objectionable. She mulled the thought as she climbed the stairs to freshen up. What good was a forward view if her future became a repeat of the same conflict she had had with Patrick? Hearing the phone ring, Shelby tucked away the thought with her tablet, splashed her face and combed her hair and returned downstairs.

“I thought she left with you,” she heard Jake say as she joined him in the living room. “No, she’s not here. Sure, I’ll send a carton with her if she turns up.”

“Who’s missing?” Shelby asked.

“Joy. She told her mom she would walk home. Paula thought maybe she could catch her before she left. She’s out of eggs.” He held the door for Shelby.

The air had cooled. It was fragrant with the neighbor’s freshly clipped grass and pine needles. A canopy of old trees shaded the crumbling sidewalk.

“Liberty Flats,” murmured Shelby when the silence grew heavy. “Kind of an odd name for rolling prairie, isn’t it?”

“I guess it is if you don’t know its story,” Jake replied. “The township was settled by abolitionist farmers from the east. Along with forty acres of land, each settler got a lot in a little town they called Liberty. Some men in the colony ran a station on the underground railroad. Thus, the name.”

Shelby listened as he explained that when the railroad bypassed Liberty a few years before the Civil War, the tiny village was doomed to return to the prairie.

“A guy by the name of Dan Flats came along and offered to sell the town fathers some land adjacent to the tracks, if they wanted to pull up stakes and relocate Liberty. He quoted a bargain rate with the stipulation that they name the new town for him,” Jake continued. “So when the ground was frozen, Liberty loaded their houses and sheds onto ox-driven sleds and moved east three miles. And Liberty Flats was born,”

“Interesting stuff,” Shelby said, silently appraising the easy pride he took in his hometown.

“It gets better,” Jake continued. “A few years went by, and come to find out Flats didn’t have clear title on the land he had sold. The public was put out enough at dapper Dan, they tried to change the town name.”

“To what?”

“That was the problem. They couldn’t agree. By then, Dan’s grown sons had put down roots in town. When it came to a vote, Liberty Flats got seven votes. The rest were split between a dozen other suggestions. So Liberty Flats carried the day,” explained Jake. “Dan was pleased enough, he nailed together a little hotel by the railroad tracks, and spent the rest of his life in Liberty Flats, trying to clear himself of any wrongdoing. Claimed he’d been taken in by a slick land agent.”

“Was that true?”

“According to Dan’s descendants, it is,” Jake said. But his grin left room for doubt.

Modern concrete gave way to quaint brick sidewalk. Flower beds dotted green lawns that unfolded toward the street. Jake paused beside a picket fence. “This is it. Wilt Wiseman’s place.”

Shelby stopped in front of the two-story clapboard of chipping paint and fading glory. The grass needed cutting, the newspapers were piling up and a garbage can at the back corner of the house was overflowing.

Shelby was about to walk on when she heard a clatter. Joy, still clad in her pink dress, darted into view without seeing them. She grabbed the garbage can by one handle and dragged it behind the house.

“Now what do you suppose she’s up to?” Jake opened the gate, took a beaten path skirting the house and disappeared around the far corner.

Chapter Five

Shelby’s nerves leapt as a young man came racing from the far side of the house. He was a dead ringer for the boy she had seen at noon in the alley by Jake’s sign building. As she stood watching, he jerked a bicycle out from beneath a bush, pedaled through the open gate, and tore down the street. A moment later, Jake returned with Joy, whining and dragging her feet.