Janet Tronstad - A Match Made in Dry Creek

Curt had not realized that he hadn’t really seen Doris June since she’d been home. If he had thought about it, he would have assumed her face would have softened over the years with wrinkles and the slight paleness that comes from getting older. He would have been wrong.

She did not glow like the young girl she used to be, but she had a confidence that made her seem even more alive. She was beautiful.

Last night he thought he knew who she was in her conservative pantsuit and sensible shoes. But the vision before him made him forget all his assumptions. He’d been ten kinds of a fool to have spent the day thinking to mend Doris June’s broken heart. She’d obviously mended that heart of hers and moved on past him. For all he knew, she didn’t even remember that years ago they had packed their bags and headed out for an elopement.

grew up on a small farm in central Montana. One of her favorite things to do was to visit her grandfather’s bookshelves, where he had a large collection of Zane Grey novels. She’s always loved a good story.

Today, Janet lives in Pasadena, California, where she is a full-time writer. In addition to writing novels, she researches and writes nonfiction magazine articles.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

—Exodus 20:12

Dedicated with love to my younger sister, Doris, who shares her name with Mrs. Hargrove’s daughter, but who is her own person. If there is any resemblance in character between my Doris and Mrs. Hargrove’s daughter, other than the name and the faith they both share, it is coincidental.

Of course, I have no objection if my Doris were to meet her Curt and have a happily ever after, but that will be her own story.

Dear Reader,

When I picture Dry Creek, I often also picture my hometown of Fort Shaw, Montana. I particularly thought of the church in Fort Shaw when I wrote about the Mother’s Day tradition of giving pansies to all the mothers in the church. This is a tradition that has been upheld in the Fort Shaw church for decades—thanks, in particular, to the efforts of a longtime church member, Norma Olsen.

Norma, like Mrs. Hargrove, decided long ago that mothers need a thank-you, and for years she has supplied the church with enough pansies so that each mother attending receives one. As a child, I remember the pansies being passed out in church and my mother later planting hers in a flower bed beside the house. I know how special these flowers were to the women in the church back then and still are today.

I hope there is someone like Norma in your home church who helps you honor the mothers around you. If not, maybe you could be that person. It’s good that we spend one day remembering how important mothers are to our world. I hope that, in some small way, this book will be a reminder to us all of the value of the mothers in our churches.

If you are a mother, have a happy Mother’s Day this year. If your mother is not living, adopt a mother for the day and wish her a happy Mother’s Day. May we all be blessed as we do this.

Sincerely yours,

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Questions for Discussion

Winter and guilt didn’t go well together in Dry Creek, Montana. Not even for Mrs. Hargrove, who, after decades of living in the small town, was used to the icy snow that sometimes trapped a person alone inside her house for days with only her own thoughts for company.

Mrs. Hargrove had lived her life with few regrets, so she generally spent the snowy days peacefully chopping vegetables for soup or putting together thousand-piece puzzles. This past winter she hadn’t been able to do either of those things, however. Her conscience was troubling her, and she lacked the focus needed to figure out a puzzle or decide what to put into a pot of soup.

Instead, she sat and stared at the pictures on the mantel over her fireplace. There was the picture of her and her late husband, taken on their wedding day. And then there was a picture of her daughter, Doris June, taken when she graduated from high school. It wasn’t a particularly good picture because, even though Doris June was smiling, she had a certain stiffness in her face that Mrs. Hargrove hadn’t noticed until recently.

The graduation picture had been a last-minute idea and had been taken in a department store instead of at the high school like the pictures of the other students. Doris June hadn’t seemed to care about a picture, but Mrs. Hargrove had wanted one even though, for years now, she had expected to exchange that graduation picture for a glowing picture of Doris June on her wedding day.

The wedding picture was going to be the real picture on the mantel place. It was what Mrs. Hargrove was waiting for.

But that wedding day never came. This winter, as she sat on her sofa looking at the picture she did have, Mrs. Hargrove finally accepted the truth. Doris June was not going to get married. The one huge miscalculation Mrs. Hargrove had made in her life had come back to haunt her and she couldn’t stop fretting about it. She had unknowingly pushed away the only man Doris June had ever loved. For years, Mrs. Hargrove had hoped God would take care of everything in His own time, but He had not.

It had all come crashing back into Mrs. Hargrove’s awareness in early January when she and Charley Nelson had sat down at her kitchen table to begin writing a history of their small town. The two of them were the oldest of the two hundred some residents of Dry Creek, and, when the state tourism board asked the town to write a section for an upcoming guidebook, everyone said she and Charley were the natural ones to write it. Both of them agreed to do the work, thinking it would be a good way for them to pass the cold winter months pleasantly.

It didn’t take them long to realize what kind of trouble they were in, however. They knew it as soon as they opened the large white envelope the state tourism board had sent in care of the local café. Mrs. Hargrove and Charley had not known until then that the guidebook was being called Stop at One-Stop-Sign Towns in Southern Montana. Each town was supposed to begin their two pages of history and visitor attractions with an opening paragraph telling what made their particular old red stop sign unique.

It was a clever advertising idea and the state had invited several high schools in the area to help them with the tourism guide so the whole thing was a worthy project. Some art students were even going to take pictures of the signs and make a collage. Mrs. Hargrove and Charley were both one-hundred percent in favor of anything that helped students learn.

However, the stop sign in Dry Creek was the last thing either one of them wanted to write about.

Mrs. Hargrove wished people would just forget about that old sign.