Songbird Cottage Read online

  She didn't answer.

  So he went back to work, and she watched while he covered every bit of the floor with the clay litter.

  "You know that thing you said before?" she finally asked when he had finished, and was slapping his hands on his jeans to clean them. She could see the dust rise up in the sunbeams, and it was as if a mist stood between them.

  He coughed and waved a hand in front of his face. "I guess I shouldn't have done that," he muttered. Then he added, "what thing? I say a lot of things."

  "That thing about me being the heroine of my own story," she said.

  "Oh. That thing. You are, you know."

  The dust dissipated, and she watched as he came into clearer focus.

  "Yeah," she said. "I'm thinking about that. The whole princess in a fairy tale thing."

  He smiled at that. And stood there. And waited. Silently. Patiently.

  The sun through the open windows glinted on the bit of silver in his curly hair, and she felt her breath catch in her throat at the sight of him.

  He stood there in the same spot where she had watched her mother cry all those years ago, and he was like the fulfillment of a promise made so long ago.

  Family. It was all about family. The one you were born with. The one who took you in when you were alone. The one who chose you purely from love.

  And he stood there and watched her with the faintest smile on his face. Calm. Accepting. Waiting without interruption or judgment for whatever she was working herself up to tell him.

  "So I've been thinking," she finally said, feeling nervous and uncertain.

  He came across the room to meet her then, until he was standing only a few feet away. "What have you been thinking?" he whispered.

  "I've been thinking that a fairy tale princess needs a Prince Charming."

  He took another step toward her. He was only two feet away now, and she had to tilt her head up to look him in the eyes. She saw a twinkle of humor in them.

  "What about an old, not so charming, slightly decrepit prince?" he asked.

  She took one step toward him. They were only a foot apart. And then, somehow feeling like it was the most natural thing to do, she found her head resting against his shoulder.

  His arms came around her waist and they swayed together, while he softly hummed in her ear. It was that same old song he'd sung to her before.

  It was a Crazy Little Thing Called Love. And it did feel crazy, and so very right.

  "I like older men," she whispered into his shoulder.

  "You do?"

  "Certain ones," she said.

  "Really?"

  "So…." She let it trail off.

  "So?" he asked.

  "So don't you think you should kiss me before I change my mind?"

  His lips brushed across her forehead. "I think I should marry you before you change your mind."

  "That sounds like a good idea, too," she said.

  "Yeah," he said. "I think it does."

  Epilogue

  Autumn, a year later.

  * * *

  Dylan put his hand on the final board in Songbird Cottage's exterior. This was the last one. Almost a year of work, inside and out, and he had reached the end.

  It had been a long haul. The little unfinished cottage had been forgotten out here, abandoned and unloved since the deaths of Jefferson Stockdale and Eugenia Johnson in 1967. It was a testament to Stockdale's craftsmanship that his work had survived at all.

  But it had survived. It had sat alone in an overgrown field of weeds for fifty years, patiently waiting for the right person to come along. The person who didn't just have the legal right to it, but who appreciated it for what it was.

  And what it represented.

  Family.

  He glanced out across the field, now cleared of brush and planted with wildflowers. At the far end of the property, a tiny twig of an apple tree had been planted next to the stump of the one that had been destroyed. It was just getting its bearings in the fertile ground.

  And learning, as everything growing along the coast needed to learn, how to stand against the sea winds that threatened to knock it down.

  But it would stand. It had roots to hold it strong in the soil.

  Like the woman who stood next to it, looking out across the strawberry fields toward the ocean.

  He turned back to the redwood board in front of him.

  He could have just power-washed the old building and slapped a coat of red stain on it, and from a distance it would have looked fine. Attractive, even, with its new turquoise roof tiles and freshly painted windows.

  But he hadn't been about to disrespect Jefferson Stockdale's final project like that. He had treated the exterior like he would a fine piece of furniture. He had taken the battens off one by one, and removed the heavy boards.

  He had put each piece in its turn up on his sawhorses and worked on it. He'd hand-sanded the wood, repairing damaged spots and buffing out imperfections, not resting until the board was satin-smooth. Then he had gone over every inch using a soft cloth to rub on a clear timber oil that nourished the wood and left it glowing with the distinctive red-orange color of coast redwood.

  Only then, when each individual board was perfect, had he put it back in its place in the wall and moved on to the next.

  Robin had teased him for taking so long at the project, but he was proud of the result. Songbird Cottage now looked much as it must have when new. When he stepped back to examine his work, he felt sure the result must be close to the artist's original intent.

  Only a few more things to do out here. There was one final siding board to fix. Then one of the copper downspouts was off-kilter. And the kitchen window had a gap in the frame where the ocean breeze whistled on windy nights. He'd get all that fixed this afternoon, and then could officially declare the exterior completed.

  Inside was a different story. He still needed to figure out how to hook up a dishwasher, which Robin insisted upon, without messing with the symmetry of the hand-built kitchen cabinets. And old Alonzo's bed in the niche by the fireplace still needed a coat of stain to match the cushion Robin had found for it.

  But those were tomorrow's tasks. Today's was removing one last plank, which had a stubborn black mark on its face. He was hoping the reverse side would be unmarred.

  He had already pulled off the batten pieces and taken them over to the patio to set them up for sanding, when she said:

  "You're not taking the house apart again, are you?"

  He turned to find she had left her spot next to the fledgling apple tree and come back to the house.

  Chaussette had followed, and now the fat cat was rubbing on his legs, begging for a treat.

  "Go inside, ma petite," Robin said in her musical voice that still set his heart to aching. The cat ignored her, of course, and instead jumped up into one of the lounge chairs on the herringbone brick patio and began to wash its round white belly.

  Robin carefully sat down in the other chair, and then stared up at Dylan over her sunglasses. "Please tell me you're not going to take the whole thing apart and start over again." She was grinning, and he grinned back.

  "Didn't I tell you?" he said. "I thought I would turn the whole house around, so the north side faces south. It just seemed like a good idea."

  She laughed. She was laughing a lot lately. "I knew you were a perfectionist when I married you," she muttered, then picked up a contract on the table next to her and began to read it over.

  He laughed. He was doing a lot of laughing lately, too.

  He went back around the far side of the house and carefully fitted the crowbar in the gap to gently pry off the last board.

  It finally came loose, and he pulled it out from the wall in a shower of 50-year-old dust. He turned it around. Yes! The back side was perfect. A bit of sanding, a bit of timber oil, and it would be good to go.

  He looked into the gap left in the wall, and had to keep himself from shouting.

  He was a perfectionist
, that was true, but he'd had another purpose in his painstaking work at dismantling the house. A purpose he hadn't dared to tell Robin because he hadn't wanted to get her hopes up. And in the months of work, he had given up on that goal, believing it was impossible.

  But now he stretched up on his tiptoes and reached into the gap the missing board had created. He pulled at the bright orange bit of vinyl he could see stuck behind a support beam, about seven feet up inside the wall. It was stuck tight, and so covered with dirt he almost wasn't sure it was what he was looking for, but he kept working at it, and finally got it loose.

  When he came over to the chair, she didn't look up. "You're blocking my sun," she said. "I think I'm going to have to go into the office and research this contract. They are asking for some odd stipulations—"

  He dropped the diary in her lap.

  She froze, then put her hand on it, as if to assure herself it was real. "You found it?" she whispered.

  "And I'm glad I did," Dylan said. "I really didn't want to take the whole house apart a second time."

  Late in the afternoon on that same crisp autumn day, Robin sat on the ground next to the baby apple tree, trying to absorb everything she'd learned in the last few hours.

  As the clouds blew in from offshore, foretelling a storm tonight, the last few leaves the little tree possessed were falling, and they were scattered on the clipped grass all around her.

  She sat on a quilt of mauve and turquoise her mom had found in a junk shop in her beloved Paris. The blanket was cozy and worn, and would soon be draped over the purple velvet chair she'd placed in the attic bedroom. But for the moment, the quilt made a wonderful napping place out on the grass.

  She touched the quilt. Her mom planned to be back before the month was out, to be home for upcoming events in the family.

  Below Robin, Ava's strawberry field flowed off in a sea of green, planted as it was with a cover crop of clover. She could see Ava out on her tractor far in the distance, working furiously to make the farm something to be proud of, determined to create something positive from the fate she'd been so cruelly dealt.

  Beyond the field, the ocean stretched out to the horizon, dark teal today as it reflected the clouds hovering in the sky above.

  She turned to look inland, and there was Songbird Cottage, its little form nestled into the meadow, cozy and warm-looking, glowing in its reddish siding, and echoing the turquoise of the sea in its glossy barrel tile roof. The cottage was almost finished, and just in time.

  Dylan was standing at the work bench he'd set up on the patio, and he was using a hand awl to carve a board into a curve to match the gaping window opening in the kitchen wall behind him.

  He could have just caulked the gap in the window frame, but he was determined to use the same techniques Stockdale had used, so he had found a scrap of old redwood to match the rest of the framing, and was carving it to fit.

  She wrapped her Aran wool sweater closer around her, and looked down at the little diary in her lap.

  "Look what I found," he had said to her that morning. As if it were a random chance, and not something he'd hunted for all this time. As if she hadn't known what he had been up to, and had almost cried with pride as she watched him silently searching for the thing she'd wanted most of all.

  Her grandmother's diary.

  The cheap orange vinyl diary from a dime store that her grandmother had kept.

  The one that had been lost when Robin had escaped with tiny Chaussette from the fire threatening the little cottage.

  The one from which she'd read a single entry, and assumed Birdie Johnson had been talking about the loss of her husband, the still-elusive Lewis Smith.

  She turned back in the diary to the page she'd first read over a year ago: The grief I still feel every day is difficult to bear, but I will persevere.

  Robin had totally misunderstood what all this was about. Everyone had. And that had been deliberate. A deliberate deception, first by Birdie Johnson herself, and later, by Ramona Robles Stockdale. The truth had been hidden for over fifty years. Deliberately hidden by two women who were bound together in a legacy of love and loss.

  Robin turned the page to read her grandmother's next entry: My mother's death, though it leaves an emptiness in my heart, also has set me free to return to my home town. I know I cannot go back to the past, but I miss the place so, and hope I can make a fresh start there—

  There the writing stopped, as if she had changed her mind about what to say, and then she continued on a new line: Who am I fooling? I know we have all moved on, but I still find myself wondering about how different things would have been if we had been allowed to marry.

  Robin turned ahead many pages, passing through months she'd already read with growing shock. She stopped at an entry from November of 1966:

  Today Jefferson worked like a man possessed, Birdie wrote. Though I worry about him, he continues to build and create until his legs shake and he goes home exhausted. I watch and I wait, knowing he must do this, must find a way through the grief and guilt and worry to some wholeness like we had all those years ago, when we were young. But I worry so about him.

  Jefferson Stockdale. The builder of all those wonderful cottages that bore his name. Ramona Robles Stockdale's husband and business partner.

  Robin flipped back to earlier in the diary, to re-read the passage that explained it all:

  We met again, after so many years of pretending that we had never loved when we were young. All those years of secrecy, keeping quiet about how we had, as innocent teenagers, fallen in love and wanted to marry. But when our parents were told, had seen our dreams crushed by the prejudice and lack of understanding. No one could be told of our love, our parents had said. We were from two different worlds. No matter how we tried to make them see the virtue of our affection for each other, it was a hopeless cause.

  Even after my parents dragged me to Los Angeles in an attempt to break the bond between us, some part of me still yearned for him, and it kept me from finding another, and marrying, and having a family of my own. When he wrote me that he had come back safely from World War II, I cried with relief. And when he finally moved on to marry another, I cried again. And then put aside all youthful dreams of love, and concentrated on work, and caring for my mother.

  I had thought I was free of my love for him after so long, but then he came to me at the dress shop yesterday. When I expressed my condolences for the loss of his son in Vietnam, he broke down. I held him while he cried like a child, overcome with the sorrow that any parent must feel when they lose their only son. And then, to my shame, we gave in to the feelings we had so long denied.

  Robin flipped ahead in the diary, a month, two: Today I told him. I carry his child inside me. I expected him to share my shame at this sin, but he swears he will find a way to do right by us both. He cannot leave Ramona. He loves her—of course he loves her—and she is in such mourning now over their son's death that it would be unspeakably cruel to even hint at what Jeff and I did during the weakness of his grieving.

  Then months later: Perhaps all those years in Hollywood have given me a flair for acting. I have invented a dead husband, a most convenient fellow who died just long enough ago to father the child who is now beginning to show when I wear a tight-waisted dress. And no one suspects. Not even the esteemed grapevine of Pajaro Bay sees through my charade.

  Jeff says it will all work out. He has a piece of land, long forgotten, where he will build a home for our child and me. And though we can never be husband and wife, he can know that his unplanned family is safe and cared for. He insists on doing this, and I have been unable to convince him it is unnecessary. I think in some way he needs this more than I.

  Robin turned to a date in early February of 1967, a date she had seen many times during her research into the Stockdale legacy:

  And then he didn't come. And the word spread through the village grapevine that the great man, the builder of the famous cottages, had fallen in the street, struck
down by a heart attack. And the child we made kicked in my belly as if it knew that its father had gone on to Heaven without ever seeing the life he'd helped to create. But my heart breaks so. And I know across the village another woman's heart is also broken. And unlike me, she has no son to cling to in her grief. I feel so for her. But it would be impossible to tell her that I understand her pain, for it would only further break her heart. The secret must go to my grave with me.

  Then the next entry, some time later: The cottage is unfinished, but I will finish it for him, and for our baby. But it will have to wait, because our child kicks often to remind me how close the birth is. Oh, what a joyous thing to come from such tragedy! I will make sure our child knows its father loved it, and wished only the best of life for it. And I will make sure that wish comes true.

  And Robin turned the page, and saw the next one, and all the pages that followed, were blank, a future unwritten by Birdie Johnson.

  She turned back to the final diary entry, and re-read the date. Only two days before Eugenia Johnson died giving birth to Genie Johnson Smith, who went on a long journey to find her way back here.

  She set down the diary on the grass next to her and started to get up.

  Dylan came running when he saw her struggling.

  He helped her to her feet.

  "My center of balance has changed a bit," she said. She put a hand on her stomach.

  He put one hand over hers, their simple gold wedding bands touching over the swelling in her belly.

  "I love you, you know," he said.

  "I know."

  He bent down and picked up the diary and handed it to her. "Anything interesting in it?"

  She nodded.

  They began to walk back to the house, arm-in-arm.

  She stopped to look at the cottage. The late sun had poked through the clouds, and as it glinted on the windows, she had to put a hand up to block the glare. "It's beautiful," she whispered.

  "Yes, it is," Dylan said. "I'll always be grateful that Ramona worked so hard to make sure her best friend's descendants got their inheritance."