Stephanie Bond - Baby, Come Home

Green enough on its own, she remembered, with trees as far as the eye could see. But the slogan was a play on the fact that the Armstrong brothers were rebuilding the town on the industries of recycling and alternative energies. She skimmed the pages of description. The pictures showing the devastation of the tornado still rocked her to the core—those were all places where she’d once walked. The “before” and “after” slide show featured pictures of the overgrown wasteland the town was when the Armstrong brothers had returned to reclaim it, and pictures of the progress that had been made. Nikki was in one of the photos, standing beside the sign for the Sweetness Family Medical Center, next to a short bespectacled man who, from his white lab coat, appeared also to be a doctor. Rachel Hutchins, the busty blonde who used to be the receptionist for the dermatologist Amy used in Broadway, was in several of the photos, flashing her Miss America smile. Nikki said the woman would probably be mayor when the first elections rolled around.

There was a Lost and Found page listing hundreds, maybe thousands of items that had been found after the tornado and warehoused until they could be returned to the rightful owners. Former residents of Sweetness were encouraged to sign up on an email list to be kept apprised of developments. A social network site for the town had also been established.

On the About page, Amy found what she’d been looking for. A picture of the three Armstrong brothers standing outside, dressed in dusty work clothes. Amy instantly recognized each one of them. Porter, always the ham, was grinning at the camera. Marcus, the stoic one, looked highly inconvenienced at having his picture taken. And Kendall…

Her heart stuttered. Kendall had grown from a beautiful boy into a devastatingly handsome man, his shoulders wide and muscled, his skin tanned, his brown hair streaked by the sun. He wasn’t quite smiling and he wasn’t quite scowling. As always, he was square in the middle of his brothers’ temperaments. He had the same deep blue eyes as Marcus and Porter, but where Marcus looked stern and Porter, mischievous, Kendall was the calm one.

The cautious one. The one who couldn’t commit.

With a sigh, she closed down the page and reopened the CAD drawing, hoping to lose herself in the details of the diagram. But her mind kept wandering and she kept making mistakes. Then she inadvertently pressed a key that undid an hour’s worth of work.

“Dammit!” she muttered.

The ring of the phone offered a welcome distraction from her burgeoning frustration. Out of habit from the past few weeks, she crossed her fingers and picked up the receiver.

“Amy Bradshaw.”

“Ms. Bradshaw, this is Michael Thoms from the Greater Michigan Water Commission.”

Her pulse spiked—the phone call she’d been waiting for. She strove for a calm tone. “Yes, Mr. Thoms…I’ve been expecting your call.”

“I have to apologize for the delay. Funding for the Peninsula Reservoir was held up in legislature, so we were holding off on filling positions on the project team.”

“I understand,” she said, her chest tightening with anticipation.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Bradshaw. The project manager position went to another engineer who had slightly more experience.”

Her shoulders fell in disappointment, but she rallied her voice. “I understand.”

“If it’s any consolation, you were in the top three and the decision was close.”

She smiled. “That’s very kind of you to share, thank you.” After a few more minutes of small talk, Amy returned the receiver and tamped down the panic that licked at her. She’d been counting on that contract to stabilize her work hours and finances for the next two years. With the economy in the hard-hit manufacturing state still struggling to its feet, those kinds of public works projects were few and far between. She looked back to her computer screen. It would take a lot of wheelchair ramps to make up the difference.

Or you could go build a bridge, her mind whispered.

She pushed to her feet and walked over to a bin that held tubes of rolled up blueprints. She flipped through them until she located the cardboard tube she had in mind. It was soft and shopworn from so many moves over the years. She opened the tube and withdrew several yellowed pages, then unrolled them on a drawing table and used paperweights to hold down the curled edges.

Building plans for Evermore Bridge, Sweetness, Georgia, 1920. Official copy, do not remove. She had removed them from the courthouse, though…stolen them, to be more precise, as she was inclined to do in those days when something caught her fancy.

And now it seemed that things had come full circle. Amy released a bittersweet laugh. It seemed as if the universe was telling her she should go home to Sweetness.

Before she could change her mind, she picked up the phone and scrolled back to the number Marcus had called from, then pushed a button to connect the call. As the phone rang, she wondered nervously if Kendall would answer and if he did, what she might say.

But to her relief, Marcus’s voice came on the line. “Marcus Armstrong.”

“Marcus, this is Amy,” she began, but her voice petered out. She cleared her throat, then rushed ahead before she lost her nerve. “Is that offer of designing your new bridge still open?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Then…I’ll take it.”

“Great. I’m glad you changed your mind. How soon can you get here?”

Tony would not be happy about her leaving. “Um, I need a week to tie up some loose ends. Will that work?”

“Sure. I guess I don’t have to tell you that you’ll be working with Kendall.”

She swallowed. “I assumed so.”

“Would you like to talk to him? He’s not here, but I can give you his cell phone number.”

“No, thanks,” she said. She needed to get her story straight before she faced Kendall Armstrong again. “I’ll see him soon enough.”

The more familiar the surroundings became, the tighter Amy’s hands gripped the steering wheel. The passenger seat of her SUV was littered with candy bar wrappers and an empty box of chocolate donuts. In hindsight, sugar and cocoa hadn’t been the wisest stimulant for the long drive. She was wired, and every sense seemed to be firing on all cylinders.

Despite the winter month, the north Georgia mountains were plenty colorful, with soaring evergreens thriving in red clay, and banks of snow high on rock ledges. Cottony clouds hung in a sky of the clearest, deepest blue…the color of Kendall Armstrong’s eyes.

She was, she conceded, a nervous wreck about seeing him again. For a week she’d been giving herself pep talks to steel herself against the onslaught of emotions she knew would hit her, but she wasn’t sure the mental gymnastics had done any good. Tony, as she’d expected, wasn’t happy about her leaving. Of course, he wasn’t happy about many things these days, so it was hard to pinpoint if she was the cause of his discontent or just a target.

When she turned off the state road onto the more narrow one that would take her to Sweetness, a hot flush climbed her neck. When she’d left this place, she hadn’t planned on ever coming back. Now, it felt as if the years away were collapsing. The landscape had changed somewhat, had suffered from the decade of neglect after the tornado. Kudzu vine encompassed entire copses of trees and hillsides. She knew from industry journals just how concerned civil engineers in the South were over the encroaching plant. It was referred to as the “mile-a-minute vine” that could consume bridges and overpasses in a matter of weeks.

But the surroundings became more cultivated as she entered the outskirts of the small town. The road was newly paved, she noticed, and wider than before. The fluorescent center and shoulder paint lines looked freshly applied. A low guardrail might seem unnecessary to newcomers, but she knew the railing would keep weeds at bay, and serve as a hindrance for wild animals to wander onto the road.