Heartwarming and delightful and full of love in varying degrees, Kat Martin has written one of those stories you just don’t want to miss. Emotion-packed, fun, and romantic, these characters of Dreyerville will steal your heart.
Summary:
Years after running away with her boyfriend in her junior year of high school, Marly Hanson returns to Dreyerville at the request of her daughter, Katie, who has recently been treated for brain cancer. Katie has never met her grandmother, Marly’s mother, Winnie. But Marly and Winnie have been estranged for years and confronting the past for each of them is painful. The homecoming is bittersweet, but revisiting the conflict between them is crucial if Marly and her mother are ever to find the bond they shared before Marly left Dreyerville.
To complicate matters, living next door to Winnie is handsome sheriff and widower Reed Bennett, and his son, Ham, who is close to Katie’s age. Ham and Katie become fast friends, while their parents find their attraction to one another going deeper than mere friendship. But Marly’s time in Dreyerville is limited and risking her heart isn’t something she’s willing to do.
As the days slip past, and though she tries to avoid it, Marly and Reed become more deeply involved. Can she risk loving the handsome sheriff and give up the the futer she worked so hard to forge for herself and her daughter? Can she make a life in Dreyerville after what happened all those years ago?
Will Marly finally realize that her true destiny and ultimate happiness lie in coming to terms with her past?
~1~
Dreyerville, Michigan
April 1995Marilys Hanson didn’t want to go home. It was Katie, her ten-year-old daughter, who wanted to visit Dreyerville, the small Michigan town where Marly had been raised. Katie had begged for months to finally meet the grandmother she had never known. Marly had finally agreed.
The day was cool but sunny, a light breeze blowing over the fields and whispering through the verdant forests at the edge of town. Main Street loomed ahead. Unable to resist a look at the place she had left behind twelve years ago, Marly pressed on the brake, slowing her old blue Ford sedan to make the turn. It was a beautiful little town, like something out of a picture book with its sycamore-lined streets, old domed courthouse, and ornate clock tower in the middle of the square.
She remembered Tremont’s Antiques in the block to her left, and next to it, Brenner’s Bakery. She and her mom had made it a tradition to go to the bakery on Saturday mornings. Marly could almost see Mrs. Culver standing behind the glass counter in her pink-and-white uniform, her gray-blond hair tucked neatly beneath a matching pink cap, smiling and chatting as she took their order. The place smelled of yeast and cinnamon, and patrons sat at little round, white wrought-iron tables.
Of course, that was all before.
Braking again, she turned the car onto Fir Street. This time of year, the entire town was a lush garden of shrubs and plants, the trees all leafed out, the grass so green it made your eyes hurt.
She drove a couple of blocks and pulled up to the curb in front of a gray-and-white, wood-frame house built in the twenties, the paint a little faded and in places starting to peel. Katie slept in the passenger seat, her head tilted against the window. Looking at her daughter, Marly felt a tug at her heart. Katie was the best thing that had ever happened to her. She was sweet and smart and loving.
And Marly had almost lost her.
Reaching down, she turned off the engine, sat for long moments just staring at the house that had once been her home. The house she had fled that awful night.
After so many years, just being in Dreyerville made her stomach churn. Where she gripped the steering wheel, her palms were sweating. Her pulse thumped dully. Years of emotional turmoil threatened to surface. Marly took mental hold of herself and firmly tamped it down.
She had made the decision to come. Now she was here. For Katie, she would handle it.
She took a deep breath and slowly released it. She hadn’t seen her mother since the night she had left twelve years ago, the night she had run off with Burly Hanson, one of the town bad boys. Even when they were dating, Burly drank too much and flirted with other women, but she wasn’t afraid of him and Marly was desperate to escape. When Burly offered to marry her and take her out of Dreyerville, she had jumped at the chance.
She had sworn that night she would never return, but she had a daughter to think of now, a child who had just survived a series of brutal radiation and chemotherapy treatments for brain cancer. Still fast asleep, Katie breathed softly, her bald head gleaming in the sunlight slanting down through the window.
Marly had considered shaving off her own shoulder-length blond hair the way people did when a loved one was fighting the disease, but Katie had begged her not to.
“Please don’t do it, Mom. It’ll only remind me how ugly I look.”
So instead, Marly had tamed the soft curls that were her secret vanity into a modest French braid and silently thanked her brave little girl.
She glanced again at the child sleeping peacefully next to her. The prognosis was good, the doctors said. With luck and time, Katie should recover. Marly clung to those words, refusing to consider any other outcome. She couldn’t imagine a life without Katie. She couldn’t stand that kind of pain.
Still, it was too early to be certain the treatments had succeeded.
Which was the reason she was back in Dreyerville, sitting in front of the little house she had run away from all those years ago.
After what Katie had suffered, the child deserved her most fervent wish: to meet her grandmother, Winifred Maddox, Marly’s mother, one of the few relatives Katie still had. Burly’s mother, already an older woman when she had borne her only child, had died four years ago. Mrs. Hanson had no use for children other than her son, and Katie had only seen her once.
Grandmother Hanson was dead, and Burly and his good-for-nothing father were both in the wind. Marly had no idea where Burly had gone when he abandoned them, and she didn’t care. Burly had served his purpose and saved her. She had escaped her life in Dreyerville and started on a new path that held far more promise.
Distant memories surfaced, the trip east to Detroit, Burly landing a job as a trucker and Marly starting night classes. It took a while, since she was working as a waitress to help pay the rent, but eventually she had gotten her GED. By then she was eighteen and handling her new life fairly well—until she had gotten pregnant.
The thought stirred a faint thread of anger. A baby was the last thing Burly had wanted—as he’d told her in no uncertain terms. The bigger her belly grew, the later he came home. He took long-haul jobs that kept him away for weeks, and she knew he had begun to see other women. When she came home from night school early,
found a pair of red panties on the living room floor and a woman in the bed she and Burly shared, the relationship came crashing to an end.Marly divorced Burly—which wasn’t difficult, since she had never really loved him—and surprised herself by discovering how capable she was. With her job as a
waitress, she managed to take care of her newborn baby without Burly’s income, then put herself through two years of college. A student loan took care of the next two years. With a small grant and a lot of hard work, she had finally graduated with a teaching credential. For a while, she had worked as a substitute teacher, waiting for a chance at a full-time job.Then Katie had been diagnosed with cancer.
Marly looked up at the old wooden house. For a moment, she just sat there trying to work up the courage to get out of the car, to march across the uneven sidewalk and climb the front porch steps. She tried to imagine knocking on the front door, tried to guess the greeting she would receive.
Her mother knew they were coming. Winnie had cried when Marly had phoned after so many years. Only a few words were exchanged, just the information that Katie was recovering from cancer and that the child’s dearest wish was to meet her grandmother.
Winnie had simply said, “Yes. Oh, yes, please do come home.”
The memory of her mother’s voice on the phone made her chest feel tight. Older, but still as familiar as it had been when Marly was sixteen.
Her father was dead now. Over the years, she had kept in touch with a few of her friends, and one of them, a girl from Dreyerville High, had written to tell her that
Virgil Maddox had passed away. Marly didn’t send a sympathy card.The inside of the Ford was beginning to feel airless and warm. Reaching over, she gently shook Katie’s shoulder and the little girl came slowly awake, blinking her big blue eyes as she straightened in her seat.
“Are we there yet?”
Marly smiled at the phrase she had heard a dozen times along the road. “Yes, sweetie, we are.”
Katie stretched and yawned, reached for the soft pink knit cap she had been wearing, and pulled it on over her shiny bald head. The doctors had promised the hair would grow back, and though Katie had suffered the indignity of her baldness fairly well, she was still selfconscious. And she had always been shy.
“So are you ready?” Marly asked.
Katie nodded, but her small hand shook as she reached for the door handle. She was a pretty little girl, tall like her mother, blond when she’d had hair, with the same blue eyes as Marly’s, the same heart-shaped face. Their features were similar, except that at twenty-eight, Marly bore tiny creases from the corners of her eyes, and she was beginning to see a line or two across her forehead.
She took a courage-building breath, opened the door, and stepped out on her side of the car. Rounding the vehicle to Katie’s side, she helped her daughter climb out. They linked arms as they started up the sidewalk that cut across the lawn, which was a little too long and in need of mowing, but now brilliantly green after the end of the cold Michigan winter.
The front door opened before they reached it, and a gray-haired woman Marly almost didn’t recognize stepped out onto the porch.
Her mother’s lips trembled. “Marly? Oh, dear God, it’s really you.”
For an instant, Marly stood frozen. Time seemed to spin backward. For an instant, her mother was no longer wrinkled and gray and a little overweight. She was young and lovely with a stunning figure and laughter in her eyes. Drawn by the spell, when her mother reached out, Marly went into her arms and simply hung on.
For long moments, neither of them moved. It felt so good to be there, so good to be surrounded again by her mother’s love. Both of them were trembling. The thick
lump in Marly’s throat made it difficult to swallow.Another moment lapsed before the ugliness of the past began to intrude. Old memories rose up, bitter and dark. Memories that had her pulling away. Her mother wiped tears from her cheeks with the tips of her fingers and managed to smile.
Marly worked to find her voice. “Mother, this is Katie, your granddaughter. Katie, this is your grandmother Maddox.”
Katie smiled shyly. Marly could read the joy in her little girl’s face. “Hello . . . Grandma.”
More tears filled Winnie’s eyes. “Hello, dear heart. I am so happy to meet you.”
Katie reached up and self-consciously straightened her cap. “I usually look better. I lost all my hair, but the doctors say it’s going to grow back.”
Winnie enveloped her in the same warm hug she had given to Marly. “You look beautiful, sweetheart, just the way you are.” She managed a watery smile. “You’re as pretty as your mother.”
Unconsciously, Marly stepped backward. They had been so close once. But things had happened. Things she couldn’t forgive.
“Let’s get your clothes out of the car,” Winnie said to her. “I’ve got your old room ready. There’s a set of twin beds in there, remember? I hope that’ll be all right.”
Her stomach tightened. Staying in her old room was one of the things she dreaded. There were memories locked up in there. Memories too painful to recall.
She turned toward the street, saw her mother and Katie hauling suitcases out of the trunk of the car, and hurried to join them. Her mother and Katie rolled the overnight bags toward the house while Marly carried the hanging bag the two of them were sharing.
“It’s right this way,” Winnie said to Katie as they stepped into the living room.
The room looked the same and yet different. The old brown sofa and chair had been covered with a blue floral throw. Plump, light-blue pillows brightened the sofa, and a blue-and-brown fringed paisley rug had been placed beneath the maple coffee table. The brass lamps were the same, but the shade that had been broken during one of her father’s rages had been replaced.
She glanced toward the kitchen, saw freshly ironed, light-blue ruffled curtains at the windows. The blinds her father had mostly kept closed were gone, the windows now letting in the late-April sunlight. The old Formica-topped chrome kitchen table remained, but there was a merry little blue-and-white silk flower arrangement in
the middle.“It looks good, Mother . . . what you’ve done. It looks very nice.”
Her mother beamed. She was still pretty, Marly saw, just older and grayer and more weary.
“I gave it a lot of thought,” Winnie said. “After your father died, I wanted something cheerful.”
Silence fell. The invisible monster in the room had just reared its ugly head. A big, heavyset, beefy man, Virgil Maddox had dominated every inch of the house.
There was no place to hide, no way to escape.In the silence, his presence slowly faded.
“Well, you did a good job, Mother.” Not Mom, as she used to call her. Somehow the word was too friendly, too intimate for the relationship they now shared.
Her mother glanced away. Perhaps Winnie had caught the flash of remembered pain in Marly’s eyes, a reminder of the betrayal that stood between them.
“Come on, Katie.” Winnie reached down and took hold of the little girl’s hand. “I’ll show you where you and your mother will be sleeping.”
Katie grabbed the handle of her rolling bag and fell in behind the older woman. As Marly watched them walk away, she noticed a similarity in the way the two of them
moved.Except for the faint limp her mother carried that would never go away.
Her father had been in one of his tempers that day, and her mother had displeased him. She had broken the yolk on one of his eggs, Marly recalled. The fight that resulted had left Winnie with a broken leg and Marly with a broken heart.
She steeled herself, shook the memory away.
When she stood in the hallway and looked into the bedroom, her mother was showing Katie some of the trophies Marly had won when she had been on the Dreyerville High School tennis team. Her father had said tennis was for rich kids, but for once, she had managed to change his mind. She had a knack for the game, she had discovered, and in her sophomore year had won the girls’ singles competition.
Unfortunately, by the time she was a junior, things had deteriorated so badly at home that she had dropped off the team and, later that year, dropped out of school.
Marly paused just inside the doorway, unable to take the final steps that would carry her into the bedroom. Inside, nothing had changed. The twin beds were still covered with the same pink quilted bedspreads and matching ruffled throw pillows that had been there when she had lived at home. The nightstands and dresser that she and her mother had painted white, very stylish at the time, were still there, along with the white-painted headboards.She watched her mother proudly show Katie the framed high school report cards Marly had received, a string of straight As. Her honor roll certificates hung beside them, and her old grammar school science project sat on the dresser: a Styrofoam sun painted yellow surrounded by circles showing the orbit of each perfectly proportioned planet that rotated around it. She had gotten an A on that, too.
Her tennis racquet was missing from its usual spot, she noticed, then remembered that her father had smashed it against the wall in a fit of temper.
As Marly surveyed the interior of the room, a wave of nausea hit her. So much had happened, so many terrible nights spent there, lying in bed listening, waiting for her father to come home. Trying to block out the shouting and crying once he had.
Waiting for another awful night to end.
