Page 23 of A Recipe Called Home

“I won’t say no to that," Rosa said, lifting herself from her chair as she reached for the walker.

A pang of guilt flared in Jules. Going forward, she'd be a better caretaker and not let her grandma go that long without sitting again. It was too easy to get caught up in the moment and forget that her grandma was still healing.

Shame tugging at her, she grabbed her phone, in need of a distraction. It was still sitting in her purse, hanging on the back of the chair where it’d been since they’d gotten back home from the store. Forgetting about it was becoming a habit.

Only a few unread emails from her boss, Becca, waited for her. She’d read them more thoroughly later tonight in her room; she still owed Becca a response and signed papers, although it was the last thing she wanted to think about right now. It all seemed so distant. How had only a week and a half gone by? It was as if she’d been here for a year, her memories of D.C. fading into black and white.

Just as she clicked out of her email, the phone lit up with a new text from Miles:

Still on for our date tomorrow?

Does it qualify as a date?Jules wondered. Or was it more of an experiment to test whether they could handle a fling?

Date, huh? Yes, we’re still on.

It is a date. See you tomorrow at five. I’ll be the one in the convertible.

Convertible? Jules thought he drove a truck. An obnoxious truck. But maybe he had another car? The thought washed over her with relief. She hadn’t realized how much the truck bothered her. It just seemed sonotMiles. So much so that it made her doubt she still knew him at all; maybe their time apart had changed him. She knew the fear was unfair; she’d likely changed in ways that made her unrecognizable to him as well. But, then again, their bodies still responded to each other like they used to.

Before she could over-analyze it, Jules turned her phone to silent and shoved it to the bottom of her purse to keep it out of reach, returning her attention back to the dinner she was making for her grandma and the ladies at The Landing. She didn’t want to disappoint this group of posh, opinionated women.

***

The red sports car crawled up the drive right on time, top down. Miles smiled, wavy hair windblown and looking effortlessly sexy in his black V-neck t-shirt and retro Ray-Ban sunglasses. After admiring the view, Jules hopped up from her seat on the front steps where she had been waiting, like she had done many times as a teenager. It all felt too familiar, except for the expensive vintage car picking her up.

“Can I fancy you for a ride to the ball, my dear?” said Miles in an awful English accent. He had always been terrible at accents; time hadn’t made that any better.

The sports car looked like a classic, maybe from the ‘80s, and it was exactly what Jules had pictured Miles driving. Not some large, generic pickup truck. She slid into the white leather passenger seat, pulling her hair back into a loose ponytail to keep it out of her face so she could enjoy the short drive.

A few miles outside of town, they turned off a main road onto a grass and gravel side street which led to the open field where the festival took place each fall. It smelled of fresh-cut grass and damp earth. Off to the right, in an almost hidden clearing, sat an old picnic table Jules had hoped was still there. It looked the same, except maybe a little more weathered by age.

“This will be our place. A special spot we can escape to when life is too much,”she heard her Grandpa Lou say, lost in the hazy mist of a faraway memory.

When she was in elementary school, Grandpa Lou had made about a dozen picnic tables in his workshop, which he donated to the local park district to place around town. This table was the very last one he made, so as a surprise, he’d engraved it with Jules’ initials. On the weekends, he would pack a basket of bread, cheese, and jam, and they would often have lunch here, overlooking a field of wildflowers and old hardwood trees that buzzed with insects and birds. She loved running her fingers over the carving of initials as they sat and could still feel them as if it were just yesterday.

They passed the picnic table, turning into a makeshift parking lot in front of the festival grounds. It looked like half the town was here, but they got lucky, spotting an empty space where a car had just left.

The Heritage Days Festival had gone on for decades in Riverbend. Taking place in September after school started back up for the year, it ran for three days over a weekend. Jules used to look forward to it every year. Her grandpa would volunteer to role play as a seventeenth-century furniture maker, and she’d spend hours at his side in their booth, watching him dressed in period clothing, talk about woodworking in an old-timey accent she loved.

That’s what Heritage Days was all about, celebrating pioneer life. There’d be reenactments of all sorts, from Native American displays of teepees and leather tanning to homesteading pastimes like churning butter and axe throwing. All the sixth-grade classes took a field trip out to Heritage Days on Friday morning, before it opened to the public, to get a private tour of the reenactments and to learn to make bread and soup like they did hundreds of years ago.

Walking up to the ticket booth, they spotted Winnie and Emily already buying their admission and drink tickets. They hurried through the line and collected their first round of “Heritage Hops” beer, made by a local home brewer. Emily opted for a lemonade. Taking a sip, Jules enjoyed the light, crisp taste, surprising herself since it wasn’t her usual glass of chilled white wine. The late afternoon air smelled of cut grass and honey wafting in over the trees with a warm breeze. It had rained the day before, so the ground was moist but not enough to cake mud on their shoes. The tall trees loomed above them, still thick with leaves that had not yet turned colors. Everything seemed cleansed, waiting for fall to arrive.

They made their way around the field, stopping at a few of the market stands selling handmade soaps, jewelry, and various housewares which dotted the perimeter of the festival area. Winnie remarked at one point it had morphed into more of an art and craft fair than a festival aimed at recreating seventeenth-century life in the Midwest, but overall, the spirit of the festival still felt alive.

Grabbing Miles by the forearm, Jules led them over to the old log home situated in the middle of the celebration to watch a demonstration on quilt-making from a woman she vaguely recognized.

“Thinking about taking up a new hobby, huh?” Miles asked as they watched.

“You never know. It could come in handy when I leave D.C. to buy a farm and go completely off grid,” she joked.

“City slicker you, going off grid? Never.”

“I could say the same thing about you coming back to Riverbend. Never thought I’d catch you back here.” Jules casted a glance his way but quickly returned her attention back to the woman holding the large multi-colored quilt. He didn’t need to know how much she’d wondered what brought him back here.

“For a long time, I didn’t think I’d ever come back either. But things changed, and—” was all he got out before a hand clamped down on his shoulder.

A large, burly man stood just behind him, dressed in an intricate-looking costume with a fiddle dangling from his free hand.

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