“You know, who’s gonna pay for all these things we’re supplyin’?” Dave asked her and Steve as Joey stood up. “Help in the barn, shovelin’ all that snow, those spark plugs, and now a busted pipe?”
“We haven’t charged you for your extra meals yet,” Steve pointed out. “Why don’t we call it services in trade?”
“You gotta admit, the food is worth it, Dave,” Joey allowed, hurrying to get into his winter clothes. Bella, ever willing to go out into the snow, was already pulling on hers.
“I’ll get the snow shovels,” Steve sighed.
Rachel caught his hands as he started for the mudroom. Tug-ging him close, she kissed him on the lips, then leaned back with a smile. “One problem at a time.”
“Yeah, but it’s one problem after another,” Steve muttered back, feeling the tension from earlier in the week returning to his shoulders. He hadn’t realized just how much he had relaxed in the last twenty-four hours, thanks to a nearly full inn. Having all these new troubles piling on top of him threatened to grind him right back down again.
“So think of our blessings. The power would have gone out, regardless…and we’d be without a functional generator, and the pipe would have frozen and busted anyway. But we’ve got a full enough house to pay the mortgage, a mechanic who had the spark plugs necessary, a plumber who can fix our pipes…and plenty of heating oil in the furnace, so long as we have the power to run it,” she reminded him. “And plenty of wood for the woodstoves here and in the kitchen, just in case.”
Bella poked her head into the front room. “Are you getting the snow shovels or not?”
Sighing, Steve nodded. He did spare a moment for another quick kiss with his fiancée, then followed their dark-haired guest back to the mudroom. Rachel watched him go, thinking of all the exercise he’d been doing. Deciding he needed rewarding, she started planning what could be done, once the latest problem was fixed.
Four
JOEY NOT ONLY HAD THE TOOLS AND THE PIPING TO MAKE the necessary repairs, he also had a roll of insulation, white on one side, shiny on the other, and fibrous in the middle. Steve and Rachel had pooled their resources for the renovations, even to the point of draining the money originally set aside for a wedding, but they hadn’t been able to insulate all the pipes in the basement. With the power lines buried underground, the electricity rarely went out in the winter; in fact, it was far more common for the Inn and its neighbors in that corner of the county to lose power in the summer from various repairs and construction projects.
The chance of a storm knocking out the electricity had been weighted against the presence of the generator and the fact that the basement rarely got cold enough to freeze. It was a gamble they had lost this time around. But with the pipe repaired and the now-functional generator helping the furnace to blow heat into the rooms once more, it was thankfully not as bad as it could have been. The furnace burned oil, yes, but it operated electronically, an irony not lost on anyone thanks to the storm.
Aware of how much these sort of repairs would cost normally in labor as well as materials, Rachel and Steve conferred quietly, then asked the young man what he would want in additional trade for the work and materials. He thought for a moment, then shrugged and said, “A wheel of your cheese. Mom and Gran are always going on about it, and I think it’d make a nice Christmas present for ’em.”
Considering the youth had managed to make his insulation roll stretch to cover three rooms of piping so far, Steve didn’t think that was adequate. “Two wheels of cheese.”
Joey grinned at the offer, pulling more binding tape from the roll in his hands while Dave held the insulation in place. “Well, now…if that’s the price you’re offerin’, I should have a look at all th’ washers and drainpipes in this place, make sure the seals are good and the U-bends are unclogged.”
“I won’t object to that,” Steve laughed, reaching out to shake the younger man’s hand as soon as he was done taping the latest section of insulation.
“I wouldn’t object to some of that hot apple crumble we were promised, neither,” Dave stated, climbing down the other half of the two-sided ladder.
“As soon as we’ve run out of insulation,” Joey promised his friend. “I’ll make a plumber’s apprentice out of you in the meantime, if you don’t watch out!”
“And I’ll make a grease monkey outta you,” Dave quipped back, helping him shift the ladder. He waited for Joey to measure off a manageable length of the insulation, cutting it into strips that would just fit around the pipes with a little bit of overlap. “Aren’t you done with that thing yet?”
“I’m still cuttin’ it out,” Joey retorted, working the shears through the material.
“No, I mean, haven’t you run out of it?”
Steve frowned in thought. Dave was right; the roll shouldn’t have been that bountiful, even with the journeyman plumber cutting it as economically as possible. It looked almost as thick as it had when he first started. Then again, the stuff was thin, especially when compressed into a tightly rolled cylinder like that. Shaking his head, he left the two to their work in the basement. Maybe it is the season for miracles…
He met a puzzled-looking Rachel in the hallway. She saw him closing the door to the basement and smiled, then frowned softly again, beckoning him into the kitchen. It was dark, with only the light from the hall to illuminate them; with the generator rumbling out in the lean-to, they had a measure of privacy. The dinner dishes had been washed by hand while he, Dave, and Bella had gone out to the truck. Rachel moved automatically to the drying rack to check if they were ready to be put back, and Steve followed her.
Sliding his hands up her arms, he kneaded the muscles to either side of her nape. “Is something bothering you?”
“Yeah…It’s the stove in the parlor. Every time I’ve gone in there to check on it since last night, it’s been burning merrily away, not needing any tending whatsoever. The one in here does, which I started when the three of you went back out to Dave’s car,” Rachel admitted, turning her head to look at the old-fashioned, cast-iron cookstove Steve’s great-grandmother had cooked upon when the Inn had first opened. She had started it to keep the house warm while they looked for spark plugs outside, and had put a quartet of water-filled milk pails on the stovetop to slowly heat. “Every time I ask the others, either they don’t know when it was last stoked, or they say they saw one of the others feeding it earlier. It’s nice to know they’re keeping it going for me, but…”
“But what?” Steve asked his love. “There’s something nagging at you about it. What is it?”
“There’s always this one log in there, whenever I go to check. It could be a series of them, since we did cut up the limbs of that old alder that came down in the tornado and put them in the woodpile, but…there’s always this one round log just burning away every time I go to look. Sometimes it’s to the front, sometimes it’s to the back, or sometimes it’s crosswise. But it’s always in there among the others.”
He laughed softly, half in amusement and half in wonder. “And here I was, just thinking as I came up the stairs that it’s a miracle Joey has so much of that insulation stuff he’s been putting on the pipes downstairs. By rights, he should be almost done with the roll, except it looks like he’s only used a quarter of it. Which makes me want to believe in miracles again. And…”
“And?” Rachel prompted him, turning around in her beloved’s arms.
“And it makes me remember how much I still love you, now that the burdens are being lifted from our shoulders,” Steve whispered, looking down into Rachel’s brown eyes. His smile faded, replaced by a sober look. “I forgot that, because of all our troubles. I didn’t stop loving you, but I did forget to tell you how much I still love you. And how much I appreciate you being here, working so hard right beside me. If there’s any miracles happening in this house, you are one of them. I don’t know how else to tell it to you, to make you believe…except…”