Summer Breeze by Nancy Thayer Read Free Book Online Page A

here, with a special “Cow Jumped over the Moon” set for children. Elizabeth Lodge’s handmade, embroidered, and smocked children’s clothing shared a case with Lorelei Jenkens’s hand-knit cashmere blankets and soft cotton baby clothes. Jim Harrington built cradles for real babies and smaller ones for dolls; he carved hearts and flowers and other designs into them and sold them here along with high chairs and stools. A sweet older woman named Lucy Lattimer made stuffeddolls with stitched faces and Victorian milkmaid dresses. These seldom sold. Louise had no idea why, and she felt so bad about it, she always bought two or three a year to give as gifts, and told Lucy customers had bought them. In one corner was a playhouse complete with table, chairs, sink, stove, and tea set, where customers’ children could occupy themselves while their parents shopped.
    Bella dropped her purse in the back room, grabbed a spray container of glass cleaner and a roll of paper towels, and began to polish the display cases. Outside, the day was golden with sunshine. She’d be surprised if she had any customers. Everyone would be out enjoying the good weather.
    Bella didn’t mind working. Her mother had made other plans, and Bella was glad Louise could take a break. Anyway, Bella had always enjoyed running the shop. It allowed her a chance to dream a bit, to remember. She was not drawn to the dolls or blankets or even the Lake Worlds. No, it was the furniture displaying the objects for sale that drew her eye and filled her with an enigmatic pleasure.
    Her father’s family, the Barnabys, had come over from England around the turn of the twentieth century, bringing with them most of their furniture. As a child, Bella had spent her happiest hours roaming through her grandparents’ house, hiding inside the gargoyle cabinet when playing hide-and-seek with her older sister and brother, or reclining on a velvet, claw-footed settee, reading Sherlock Holmes while rain streaked down the windows. A magnificent “bench” stood in her grandparents’ front hall, soaring almost to the ceiling, built from dark walnut; intricately carved with scrolls, leaves, and berries; inlaid with ivory cherubs floating upward along the back of the bench and around a beveled glass mirror. Her grandparents had perched there to remove their rain or snow boots, then lifted the bench’s lid and stashed the boots inside. That had been a good place for hide-and-seek, too. Armoires, desks, vanities, chairs—all the furniture in the house had a Secret Garden kind of feeling about it that Bella loved.
    And that was what it was—for Bella, each piece of antique furniture was like a novel, rich with layers of history, the patina, chips,and scratches all bearing witness to lives full of adventure, mystery, desire, and drama played out by people she’d never met. Bella daydreamed about what those drawers had once held: lace handkerchiefs, lawn “waists,” cravats and watch fobs, straw boaters, tiaras, jewelry, face powder, and tucked beneath it all, she was certain, love letters. With just one piece of antique furniture in a room, the room was connected to endless histories.
    Long ago, when Louise started her shop, she’d asked her in-laws if she could use a few pieces for display purposes, and they had readily agreed. “Old elephants gathering dust,” Bella’s grandmother called them. When her grandparents died, they left everything to Bella’s parents, who promptly put most of the antique furniture into a storage unit, sold the old Victorian in Northampton, and used the money from the house to pay for college tuition for their three oldest children.
    Her parents thought the furniture was too dark and impractical. They filled their own home with light, bright, easy furnishings that children could bump their plastic fire trucks into without Louise worrying about damage. In Barnaby’s Barn, Louise had mixed a few pieces of the most useful old furniture with