Page 21 of Sugarplum Dreams
Charity laughed and shook her head. “No. It was? I must have been too nervous to pay attention.”
“Yeah. I tried to suck it in to stop it, but that’s not exactly something you can shush. It wasn’t like I yawned.”
“No. A yawn probably would have been worse,” she said, appreciating the fact that Wilson was so easy to talk to.
“Do you have a preference about which restaurant you’d like to eat at?”
“I was serious when I told Pastor Connelly that I haven’t eaten out in years, maybe even a decade. I’ll go anywhere that will cook my food for me, serve it, and clean up after me.”
“All right. Then let’s go here. Maybe because it’s first and fastest,” Wilson said, again causing her to laugh. She appreciated his humor more than she could say. Definitely withthe life that she led, a person had to have a sense of humor, otherwise it would be almost unimaginably bleak.
They went in and were seated right away at a cute little table near the window.
“Goodness. It’s been so long since I’ve been in a restaurant, I just feel like I need to sit here and enjoy it for a minute,” she said as she put her hand on the menu, just imagining all the good food that was in there waiting to be cooked just for her. When was the last time somebody made something for her to eat and she didn’t have to do it herself? Or cleaned up after her? Normally she didn’t just cook for herself but for her kids, and she cleaned up after everyone as well.
“I didn’t realize something this simple would make you so happy,” he said, smiling at her.
She was a little embarrassed because she was acting like a child, getting so excited about eating out. But it was a big deal to her. “I’m sorry. I’ll try to be a little bit more mature.”
“No. It’s fine. I’m enjoying watching you.”
She smiled but tried to curtail her enthusiasm. She opened her menu and looked for something she couldn’t make at home herself.
The waitress came and took their orders, and maybe there was a little bit of surprise on her face to see the two of them together, but there was no comment.
That was something Charity was a little nervous about. The townspeople would see that there was a huge discrepancy between herself and Wilson. Wilson was successful and well respected, well-off, and a pillar of the community. She, on the other hand, was the wife that her husband didn’t want, left saddled with five children, and she was barely keeping her head above water, and in fact she was on the verge of losing not just her house but her kids too. She was hardly a respected pillar of the community, although she did have her integrity intact. Shewasn’t the one who cheated, she wasn’t the one who broke up her family, and she wasn’t the one who caused it, although her husband had blamed her. That hardly seemed fair, but she didn’t want to think about that now.
“So, tell me about you? You’re a farmer. Is there something else you do too?” she asked as the waitress left to get their drinks.
“Well, I started a business in college. It was a cleaning company that morphed into a handyman-type thing. It grew, and grew, and grew some more, and eventually I hired people to run it, went public with it, selling the stock on the open market, and I make a tidy little profit on it, without the headache of managing it.”
“I see. Wow. So you do that in addition to farming?”
“There’s really nothing for me to do. It’s just a company that I own the majority of the shares in and makes a nice profit every year, and I don’t have to lift a finger. Plus, I have the money I sold it for, but I mostly used that to buy the farm.”
“It’s neat that you came back here to Mistletoe Meadows. You must really love it here.”
“I do. No doubt about it. But this is where my family is. I probably would have come back anyway, just because I wanted to be around them. That’s one thing I learned when I went to school. You can’t replace your family. And I wouldn’t want to.”
“I wonder if that’s because you had so many siblings? Do you think larger families tend to be closer?”
“Maybe. Are you not close with your family?”
“I barely talk to my older sister. I’ll probably get a card from her here today or tomorrow, and she may call on my birthday. Otherwise… There’s no contact.”
“What about your parents?”
“Same. They go scuba diving in the Caribbean on Thanksgiving. So obviously we don’t have a family Thanksgivingdinner, and this year for Christmas, they’re spending it in Jamaica. I guess it’s nice and warm down there. So yeah. I’ll probably talk some when they get back, but it’s not going to be a close family Christmas or anything.”
“What about their grandkids? Don’t they want to see them?”
“I’m not sure they can even tell you their names.”
“I need to learn their names. I know you told me the little dude I was holding was Evans, but there are four other ones, and I need to figure those out too.”
“Well, I can run them through for you, but I don’t expect you to learn them all at once in like two minutes. I had them over eight years, so it’s a little bit different.”
“But I want to.”
