Bluegrass Courtship

Janet stared at the check, filled—except for the “in the amount of” line—with Downing’s large, flamboyant handwriting. He’d signed his name so large it overshot the signature line on either side.

“I was raised to be a man of my word. I believe in what I do. I’m the real deal, Janet Bishop, and I mean to prove it to you.” He extended his hand with something near fire in his eyes. “Will you let me?”

Chapter Four

“Can you believe it?”

“Hi, Mom.”

Barbara Bishop, “Bebe” to her close friends, rushed into the store. “I saw the bus out front even before Sandy Burnside called me at the library.” Janet’s mother read books for the preschool story hour every Wednesday. It didn’t take much imagination to picture Goodnight Moon coming to a screaming halt once word of Missionnovation’s arrival hit the streets. Bebe Bishop was a big fan, and part of the reason Janet ended up watching the spectacle every other Thursday when they had dinner together. Before she heard Howard own up to it, Janet half-suspected her own mother of sending in a tape. “Can you believe it?” Her mother’s breathless excitement bounced the words out in short spurts. “I mean, can you really believe it, Jannybean?”

“With that huge bus parked right in front of the store, it’s a little hard to ignore.”

“I heard he came right in here. Did you meet him? And anyone else? Did you meet Kevin Cooper?” Her small, lean frame was practically vibrating with excitement.

Kevin Cooper was the landscaping expert of the Missionnovation team, and a personal favorite of Janet’s mother, who was close to her pruning shears and potting soil herself. The trellis of blooming flowers that graced Janet’s back deck this summer was copied directly from a Missionnovation episode. Janet had the misfortune to mention to her mother during said episode that she had “some spare lumber just like that lying around the shop.” Before she knew it, Janet’s back deck had its own Missionnovation-inspired garden trellis.

“No.” Janet hadn’t yet seen any of the people she saw on TV except for Downing. Despite her “Shenanigan” title, Annie must be a producer or some such thing because Janet had never seen her on the show. “But Drew Downing was in here.”

“I got to meet him,” her mother boasted as she unzipped the dark blue canvas Bishop Hardware windbreaker she always wore. It had been Janet’s dad’s and she had to cuff up the sleeves more than a few times in order to make it fit. “He seems just like he is on the show. A nice fellow. Bit high energy, but of course I knew to expect that. He invited me to the prayer meeting at the bus tonight.” She pulled a Missionnovation Daily Devotional booklet out of one of the jacket’s interior pockets. “They don’t ever show those on TV, but I read about them. And now we get to be part of it. It’s just amazing. Even you have to think this is amazing. After all we’ve been through trying to raise enough money to fix that preschool?”

“It’s gonna be something, that’s for sure.”

Her mother shot her one of her looks. That “oh, stop being such a wet blanket” look she always gave Janet when she got all worked up about something church-related. Janet no longer did the bubbly religion thing. She told herself she respected the Almighty enough not to try and fake Him out after all she’d seen.

“No prayer meeting,” Janet said before her mom even had a chance to ask. “I’ll see enough of those folks during the day.”

“They’re ordering through the store, aren’t they? I hadn’t even thought about that. Should be a whole lot of business. God’s been kind to you. You think about that.” She tapped her green brochure on Janet’s arm. “You may want to think about giving Him another chance one of these days.” Another look.

It was an exchange they’d had far too often. A few years back, Tony Donalds, the son of Middleburg Community Church’s pastor at the time, had pulled Janet into a serious relationship. It had been a whirlwind of newly energized faith with the promise of future adventure. And it had opened up facets of Janet’s relationship with God she’d never discovered before.

It just hadn’t been real. Because Tony hadn’t been real.

Janet didn’t blame Pastor Donalds—now the former pastor, of course—for not seeing his son’s true nature. Tony’d fooled them all. He’d been traveling to raise funds—and then home to raise Janet’s hopes—for a mission project that never existed. To capture it in a tired cliché, Tony took the money and ran.

They’d been ring-shopping, hoping to announce their engagement within the month, when it all unraveled. While her mom thought of it as God saving Janet in the nick of time, Janet saw it differently. She’d seen how false “the God’s honest truth” could be, and she had every right to put permanent distance between herself and the church.

“Did you hear?” Dinah Hopkins’s voice pulled Janet from her thoughts. Dinah owned the Taste and See Bakery just up the street, and she had become Janet’s close friend since moving in just over a year ago. It had started out over Dinah’s outstanding chocolate chip cookies and grown into a close friendship between the two businesswomen. And even though Dinah was as “bubbly churchy” as Janet’s mother, somehow their differences never came between them. Janet was glad for the diversion—until she saw the green-and-white bandana tied around Dinah’s wrist.

“Dinah,” Bebe cooed, “you been prayin’ for God to send you the man of your dreams? I know you’ve got a thing for that wild Drew Downing—and now he’s right here in Middleburg.”

“I took one look at that fine lookin’ man and thought ‘my stars, but he’s a blessin’ to the universe.’” Dinah sported the remains of a fierce Jersey accent, so such southernisms sounded ridiculous the way she said them. It always made Janet’s mother laugh, which is why Dinah fired up the Southern twang every time she was with Bebe. Dinah and Janet’s mom were too much alike. Janet, Dinah and Emily Montague, who owned the bath shop up the street, were Middleburg’s three single female shopkeepers. Although with Emily’s new engagement to horse farmer Gil Sorrent, it’d be down to two single shopkeepers soon.

While Dinah often scouted potential mates, being single didn’t really bother Janet. Lots of women were happily single well into their forties, much less their thirties. Life was much kinder to an independent woman now than it had been in her mother’s day.

“You didn’t already take Drew Downing a plate of cookies, did you?” Dinah wasn’t exactly known for her shy, retiring nature. While she’d never admit it openly, Janet liked the many crazy adventures Dinah made for the shopkeeper trio. Dinah didn’t always, however, know where to draw the line. “You’re not that shameless.” Janet lowered one eyebrow. “Are you?”

Dinah winked. “What do you think—‘Drew may dig Dave’s, but he’ll die for Dinah’s.’”

Janet rolled her eyes while her mother erupted in a laugh. “Dinah, you didn’t.”

“I didn’t. But I might.”

“Don’t. I’ve been in that bus and it has more chocolate chip cookies in it than you’ve seen in a week. They’re in no need of cookies, even yours.”

Dinah’s eyes grew wide. “You got in the bus? What’s it like?”

Janet leaned forward. Her mother and Dinah drew close. Janet waited for dramatic effect, as if choosing just the words powerful enough to describe the iconic Missionnovation bus. “It’s a bus. It’s big. It’s green. It rolls. It blocked my front window all afternoon.”

Her mother frowned at her. “It’s the most exciting thing to happen to Middleburg since I don’t know when, they’re buying a truckload of lumber and supplies from you and you still can’t let yourself get into the spirit of the thing. Honestly, Janet, I wish you’d find a way to stop being such a cynic.”

Dinah deepened her voice and flexed a bicep. “It takes a hard woman to run a hardware store in hard times. Good thing you’ve got me to put a little buzz in your beehive.” Dinah had a habit of seasoning her speech with odd little metaphors.

“Are we done yet?” Janet walked back toward her office. “I suddenly have eight colors of ceramic tile to order.”

“That church has needed new bathrooms since the dawn of time,” Bebe said to Dinah as they followed Janet down the aisle.

“You know it. Wow. Drew Downing and Missionnovation, right here in Middleburg. I may have to start liking Howard Epson now. Didn’t see that coming. So, Mrs. B., you going to the prayer meeting tonight?”

Janet turned. “I thought we were going to the movies tonight, Dinah.”

“Yeah, well, that was before Drew Downing rolled into town. I got all the entertainment I need live and in person. Did you know he plays the guitar? Musician, craftsman and hunk. Mercy!” She winked at Bebe. “Do you think he leads the singing at these things?”

“We’ll find out.”

Janet watched her friend gab away about the virtues of Missionnovation as Dinah walked out of the store with Bebe. Leaving her alone. And now Janet would be going to the movies alone, too. The day was just getting better by the moment.

Chapter Five

Drew waved to the audience after he closed the final prayer of the worship service. “Good night everybody, and God bless. We’ll see you in the morning. It’ll take a truckload of hands to pull that building apart, but you’ll love it when we put it back together.”

Drew, Kevin and the two other on-screen members of the design team—electrics and utilities expert Mike Overmayer and furnishings guru Jeremy Sutter—stood around for a few minutes, shaking hands and signing autographs. Drew introduced everyone he could to Annie and some of the other offscreen staff no one ever saw. Annie ran from the cameras, but Drew knew it was tiring to be the team member without celebrity status. He couldn’t do what he did without Annie, and he liked to see her get credit. Even if she did blush mightily as she signed her name to the back of someone’s devotional booklet. As opposed to Jeremy, who offered to sign everyone’s.

It was almost ten, but it felt like two in the morning. He recognized the usual first-day combination of jazzed up and worn out. So, while he’d encouraged the town to go home and get a good night’s rest, Drew doubted he’d do much more than grab sleep in fits and spurts tonight.

Kevin, no stranger to the nocturnal challenges of Night One, as it was known around the bus, walked up to Drew as the crowd thinned and handed him a travel mug of coffee. Caffeine had long since lost any effect on the pair—it had become more sustenance than stimulant. Annie always joked that coffee and chocolate chip cookies were the official dinner of Missionnovation. “So, who is it?” Kevin said under his breath as they waved good-night to the last of the fans and turned toward the bus.

“The octopus?” Drew nodded in thanks as he took a long drink of coffee. “Howard Epson. He showed up within the first hour—I’m amazed he hasn’t asked you to let him sod the lawn himself yet.”

“Howard, I’ve met. Definitely one of our finer octo…” He searched for the proper plural noun. “What’s the plural of octopus?”

“Ask Annie—she’d know. Octopi?” Drew guessed as the bus doors slid open.

“Yeah, but who is it?”

“Who is who?”

“Who is whom? And it’s octopoda.” Annie corrected as they walked past her head poking up from a box of files.

“The hostile. The person you kept looking for in the crowd tonight—” he nodded toward Annie “—whom I’m pretty sure you didn’t find. When are you going to stop that? Don’t you get that by definition, the hostiles aren’t going to show up to the Night One prayer meeting?”

Drew winced. “Was I that obvious?”

“Only to me,” Kevin replied.

“And me,” Annie added, now triumphantly holding the file she’d evidently been seeking in the enormous box. She straightened up and grabbed her coat. “Y’all can stay up all night and plan your brains out, I’m out of here.” Annie, while a bedrock of calm during the day, knew her limits and disappeared at night whenever possible, generally to a local hotel or, in this case, the local bed and breakfast. Kevin and Drew always had the bus, while Jeremy, Mike, and the others slept on-site in a collection of rented trailers. Drew gladly approved Annie’s off-site lodging budget—if she came unglued, the rest of them would fall to pieces within the hour.

And they were, officially, on-site. The bus had been moved to the block just south of the church, beside the firehouse just off Middleburg’s main road. Close enough to Ballad Road for them to run over and get something when needed—which Drew imagined would more often than not be something from Bishop Hardware—but not enough to become a logjam for local businesses. The fire station was more than happy to have a little of the limelight, and Missionnovation had long since learned that strong firefighters came in mighty handy on demolition and move-in day.

Kevin collapsed onto the bus couch. He hit a few buttons on the stereo in the wall beside him, and country music began to play over the bus’s sound system. “You still haven’t answered me.”

“The hardware store owner,” Drew said, sitting at the table. “Our hostile is the hardware store owner.”

A frown creased Kevin’s face. “A bit of a challenge, but you ought to be able to bring him around by the end of the week if not sooner.”

“No chance. This is one situation where I cannot bring him around.”

Kevin propped himself up on one elbow. “Drew Downing, admitting defeat on Day One? Why?”

“Because he is a she. Janet Bishop, owner of Bishop Hardware and not, it seems, a big fan of Missionnovation.”

“Oh, well at least we know it’s not genetic,” Kevin laughed. “Now I know why Barbara Bishop introduced herself as Janet Bishop’s mother like it ought to mean something. Janet may be your hostile, but her mom is definitely a big fan.” A smug grin played across Kevin’s face. “I’m her favorite member of the design team. Plants rule!”

Kevin was a big, burly guy with a head full of dark brown curls, usually escaping from under a baseball cap worn backward. His role was landscaping and comic relief. If something goofy happened on the show, Kevin was usually behind it. Drew lost count of the number of arguments Kevin had diffused with some joke or prank. They’d split the Missionnovation viewer demographic right down the middle—girls loved Drew, moms and grandmas loved Kevin. Drew, of course, lost no opportunity to rub in Kevin’s “gray hair” appeal. Kevin, in turn, mocked Drew’s “hunk” status every chance he got. Mike and Jeremy wisely stayed out of the rivalry. Mostly because Mike didn’t care who liked him, and Jeremy was sure everyone secretly loved him best anyway.

“The hardware store owner, hmm?” Kevin hoisted his feet up on the couch. “That should make things interesting. How you gonna make this work without her cooperation?”

“She’s cooperating, just with suspicion.”

Kevin rolled his eyes. “Oh, you love the suspicious ones. They’re your favorite. You sulked for weeks over that last one.”

Drew found a Missionnovation bandana sitting on the table behind him and tossed it at his friend. “Don’t you have some roots to dig up somewhere? Something to weed?”

Kevin stuffed his hand into the open box of Dave’s cookies on the counter beside him. “I’ll put her on my prayer list,” he said. He yawned and pulled out a handful of cookies. “Trouble is, which one do I pray for…her or you?”

Chapter Six

Kevin had been snoring for an hour in the top bunk when Drew read Charlie’s e-mail one more time. Charlie had sent notes from the initial meeting with the network, and it seemed big things were in the works. HomeBase was considering kicking their sponsorship up to a whole new level, and Drew was staring at negotiations for a multi-season, major network deal. Just think of the lives they could touch. The witness they could be. It felt like God had told Drew to fasten his seat belt and hold on for the ride of his life. And it had been such a ride already.

Drew scanned all those complex tables, outlines and numbers, and gave a heartfelt prayer of thanksgiving for Charlie. Stuff like market share, ratings, brand exposure—all this was Charlie’s native tongue and he excelled at it.

Even though he knew Charlie prayed mightily over every move he made, Drew still felt antsy. As if he were holding a very large power tool he’d never used before with no manual in sight. Thrilling, but dangerous. Where are You taking me, Lord? Where are You taking Missionnovation? Keep me focused on You and Your plan, will You? We could have all the success in the world, and if You’re not in it, it won’t matter at all.

Sawdust.

Nothing on earth smelled like it, hung in the air like it, or stuck to things with the same airy weightlessness as sawdust. The scent struck a deep chord in Janet every time she caught a whiff of it. Sawdust meant Dad and things being built and Saturday mornings sitting on his workbench, still in her pajamas, sipping chocolate milk from a cup with a bendy straw. Watching Dad explain why you measured every piece of wood twice so you never cut it wrong. She practiced her alphabet by drawing letters in the sawdust with her fingers. She played with the curled yellow shavings from her father’s woodcutter, assembled leftover bits of wood the way other kids assembled blocks.

It was the smell of sawdust that came to Janet first as she approached the church grounds. And the sounds; sawing, hammering, drilling, the particular tone of wood clunking together. Those noises and smells created one of Janet’s favorite feelings. All too often these days, she was buried under inventory and back orders and bookkeeping. And yet she still loved construction. The texture of wood beneath her hands, the smell of shavings, the satisfaction when two things fit together the way they ought to—these things were at the very core of her love for Bishop Hardware. They were what drew her to her own little version of construction—building birdhouses. Janet had turned one of her bedrooms into a workshop to spend her free hours building artful birdhouses. Castles, lighthouses, English cottages and all kinds of buildings became birdhouse styles for her to miniaturize. She was always cutting photographs of interesting houses from magazines, storing up ideas for future birdhouses. Her workroom had half a dozen carefully crafted pieces—some of them taking months to get just right—lined up on a shelf. To cut and feel and shape and join—even on a tiny scale—fed something so basic in her she couldn’t even begin to describe it. Dinah always said she “baked to live.” Janet’s nature was too practical for such an esoteric sense of vocation, and besides, you really baked to eat, didn’t you? But when she finished a birdhouse, or on a morning like this, when she walked onto a job site and saw the raw materials coming together to make something so much more than themselves, she could catch a glimpse of what Dinah meant.

Middleburg Community Church, or “MCC” to its congregation, was what most people pictured when they thought of a small-town church. White siding, tall columns on either side of a china-blue front door, nestled up against a hillside with a parking lot that needed serious patching. The little fenced-in yard of the preschool was a muddy mess since the storm. The portion of the church that had housed the school had been a patchwork of make-do and as-we-get-the-funds repairs for weeks, leaving the church looking wounded and bandaged in a collection of tarps.

Janet looked up as she crossed the church lawn to see that the preschool wing of the church was now completely gone. Simply cut right off the end, like a corner off a sheet cake. That side of the building stood neatly swathed in blue plastic tarps nailed down to the remaining walls with strips of lumber so that the unpredictable winds of a Kentucky autumn couldn’t snatch them away. People clad in white hard hats swarmed over the site and clustered around members of the design team.

“Hey, look out there!” Janet’s astonished reverie was broken by a crew member’s hand grabbing her elbow just before she would have tripped over a wiggling black cable. It was then that she noticed the cameras. There must have been six of them, shouldered by a camera crew that poked in and out of the clustered workers. Three of them, naturally, were trained on Drew Downing. One cameraman was trying, as gracefully as possible, to get Howard Epson to move so he could shoot the rest of the community’s participation.

And participate they had. As she began to recognize face after face out of the green-shirted crowd, nearly everyone Janet knew in Middleburg was either helping on the site or watching from the sidewalks. The girls Downing had commissioned to recruit the high school had evidently been quite successful—Janet guessed she was looking at the entire senior class. High school seniors up at seven in the morning on a Saturday? Maybe Downing did have the power of the Almighty working on his behalf.

Or, more likely, the glare of the television lights.

As if he’d heard her thoughts, Drew Downing began walking in her direction. With two cameras in tow. I knew it’d get like this.

“Did you ever think you’d see a hardware spectacle?” Drew asked, pulling a measuring tape off his tool belt and depositing it on a table beside him with an unceremonious thunk. “I love demolition day. It’s more fun than anyone should be allowed to have on television.”

And that, Janet thought, is just the point. Demolition was serious, even dangerous business. She hoped Missionnovation took safety as seriously as entertainment.

“You’ve come just in time—this ought to be fabulous. Ever pull a wall down before?”

“Yes,” Janet said without any hint of excitement.

Drew pointed at her. “With your bare hands?” He thrust his hands into a large box to his left and pulled out a white hard hat with the green Missionnovation logo. He held it out to Janet.

“C’mon, lend a hand,” Downing said, offering the hat with a gigawatt smile. “You might have a bit of fun if you’re not careful. But don’t worry, we’re careful, too.” He motioned toward the line of people gathering across from a trio of ropes that were tied to the church’s remaining West wall.

“We’ve decided to replace the church’s entire roof for you, too,” he said as they began walking. “Kevin’s got an idea to create a garden outside the school windows. It’ll even have a miniature cistern to retain rainwater. You know, teach the kids about ecology and water preservation.”

Okay, perhaps it was a little impressive. The church had been in dire need of structural improvements even back when she was involved, and based on her mom’s conversation not much had changed in the years she’d stayed away. “Have you looked into a full system that feeds off all the roof gutters? If you’re going to replace the whole roof anyway, why not alter it into a rainwater retrieval system for the entire church?”

He stopped for a moment, taken aback by her suggestion. “We might take a serious look at that. How many other ideas do you have lurking in the back of that head of yours?”

Janet decided not to suppress the smile that crept across her face. “Probably more than you want to hear.”

He grinned as he settled a hard hat down onto his own head. “Let’s test that theory. After we yank this baby down, that is.”

Howard was getting in the way of things, determined to be at the head of the line until Drew handed Howard his megaphone and insisted that only the Mayor could give the command to pull. Now, one should always think twice before handing Howard Epson a megaphone, but he kept his speech down to an endurable thirty seconds before yelling, “One, two, three, pull!”

And, just like Jericho, the wall came a-tumblin’ down in what, Janet had to admit, was an enthusiastic but highly controlled manner.

A second team immediately slid a temporary wall into place that would protect the existing rooms while the framework for the new school wing was constructed. Kevin and Mike walked through the cheering crowd with a collection of bright green crowbars, showing volunteers how to dismantle the fallen lumber and remove the nails. Like happy ants in green T-shirts, volunteers began crawling over the wall, breaking it up and carrying it away. Janet permitted herself a smidge of admiration. They were doing it right.