Bluegrass Courtship. Allie Pleiter

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      “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 СКАЧАТЬ