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Finding Our Way Home: A Novel (Snowglobe Connections) - Softcover

Buch 3 von 3: Snowglobe Connections

Baumbich, Charlene Ann

 
9780307444738: Finding Our Way Home: A Novel (Snowglobe Connections)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307444732 ISBN 13: 9780307444738
Verlag: Waterbrook Press (A Division of Random House Inc), 2012

Inhaltsangabe

When the road home becomes daunting—sometimes a very capable girl on a bicycle can help find the way.
 
“Charming, surprising, familiar, and just downright wonderful.”
—Allie Pleiter, author of Yukon Wedding and Bluegrass Blessings
 
When principal ballerina Sasha Davis suffers a career-ending injury at age thirty-eight, she leaves her Boston-based dance company and retreats to the home of her youth in Minnesota. But Sasha’s injuries limit her as much as her mother’s recent death haunts her. Concluding she can’t recover alone, Sasha reluctantly hires a temporary live-in aide.
 
Enter the übercapable Evelyn Burt. As large-boned as Sasha is delicate, Evelyn is her employer’s opposite in every way. Small town to Sasha’s urban chic, outgoing to Sasha’s iciness, and undaunted where Sasha is hopeless, nineteen-year-old Evelyn is newly engaged and sees the world as one big, shiny opportunity.
 
Evelyn soon discovers Sasha needs to heal more than bones. Slowly, as the wounds begin to mend and the tables tilt, the two women form an unlikely alliance and discover the astounding power of even the smallest act done in the name of love. Finding Our Way Home is a story of second chances and lavish grace.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charlene Ann Baumbich is the author of the Dearest Dorothy series, Stray Affections, and Divine Appointments, as well as several nonfiction books of humor and inspiration. She is also a popular speaker, an award-winning journalist, and lives with her husband in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

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Sasha readjusted the multicolored shawl until it was high and tight around her neck. As she secured it in place with her palm, the tip of her long, slim index finger landed on one of the dozens of glass pearlescent beads hand-worked into the elegant crocheted gar­ment, complete with satin trim. She repeatedly tapped the bead with her fingernail. The sound, very close to her ear, reminded her of the familiar tick of a metronome.

No, it sounds more like the ticking of clock, counting down to death by regret.

She shook her head to dismiss the dark thought and stared at the snowglobe on her side table, on which she set her ever-present cup of hot tea. It didn’t matter if the outdoor temperature was twenty-five or ninety-five: “Hot tea, please. That will do.” On this midsummer Saturday in Wanonishaw, Minnesota, even though it was a humid eighty-seven degrees outdoors, Sasha did not turn on the air condi­tioning, and still she felt a slight chill. 
 
Pinning her eyes on the ballerina in the snowglobe, she slowly rolled the bead between her thumb and index finger, as if fine-tuning a memory on a radio dial. She rocked back and forth in the rocking chair, the only chair in the house that, for the most part, didn’t hurt her back. She nearly lived in it since she’d moved back in. It had been her mom’s favorite chair, the one she used to rock in while nursing Sasha.

Her mom loved to tell the story about how Sasha often fell asleep while she fed her, how she had to tap the arch of her tiny bare foot to wake her. Sasha could hear her mother’s gravelly voice, see the spark in her Paul Newman–blue eyes. “You were such a tiny little bird, yet from the get-go, you were so uncommonly strong.”

On the rare occasions Sasha visited home, her mother always proudly showed her the most recent clippings and photos she’d added to the latest scrapbook. She had started the scrapbooks when Sasha was a child, the program from her first dance recital leading the way. Across the top of one of the pages of that first scrapbook, in her loopy handwriting, her mother had written, “‘I could twirl forever!’ The first words out of Sasha’s mouth this morning.”
Quickly the scrapbooks began to document the life of an emerg­ing professional ballerina. “Seems impossible,” Sasha’s mother would say, “that such a tiny little bird could grow into such a majestic swan.” She’d point to the recent pictures and the lean muscles in Sasha’s calves, marvel at her balance, revel in her glorious costumes and top­flight billing.

As the sound of her mother’s voice faded away, the rhythm of Sasha’s rocking and the roll of the bead between her fingers began to fuse with the arpeggio of orchestra music rising within her. She closed her eyes, rested the back of her head against the support pillow, and envisioned the ballerina in the snowglobe—elegant neck extended, feet in perfect fifth position—suddenly lengthen her ankles and elevate to pointe. The dancer, a perpetual and wonderful smile on her face, floated her arms to shoulder height. She tilted her delicate head and demure eyes toward the floor, slightly stage left. At the swell of the vibrating string section, in one velvet-smooth motion, the dancer lifted her chin, elongated her neck, raised her chest upward, and leaned toward the audience as she extended her right leg high up behind her and reached her left arm forward. Only her agility, strength, and the tip of her pointe shoe on her arched left foot anchored her to the floor as she performed a stunning penché arabesque. 
 
The dancer was acutely aware that the stage lights brought to life the sparkles sewn into her pink, three-quarter-length tutu, flared like an elegant fan between her legs. She rejoiced in knowing she looked as stunning as Maria Tallchief, the prima ballerina in the picture she had, as a child, tacked to her bedroom wall, right above the ballerina snowglobe she kept on her bookcase headboard.

With perfect timing, Sasha’s partner’s large, warm hands sur­rounded her waist as he lifted her like a plume readied to fill the air with poetic movement and words. Her spirit and body sailed with the rising crescendos and quieting lulls of the melody as together she and Donald soared across the stage, his strength repeatedly lifting and lowering her, the box of her pink satin pointe shoe barely tapping the floor, her tutu flaring during each quick descent of their grand pas de deux, and… 
 
CRASH!

With a lightning fast series of tumultuous thuds, Sasha and her partner fell to the floor. Disoriented, Sasha darted her eyes from here to there to lock in her bearings. Excruciating pain riveted her tail­bone, hip, and leg. Please, God, don’t let either of us be injured! We have three more stops this tour!

It wasn’t until her vision focused on a pair of young hands pick­ing up china shards and the dish towel soaking up a spreading circle of tea that reality sank in, yet again. She was no longer Sasha Davis, glitterati, principal dancer at Mid-Central Festival Ballet in Boston, one of the largest and most prestigious ballet companies in the United States. She was no longer traveling the world, performing to standing ovations. She was simply Sasha Davis. A near invalid living in her deceased mother’s home, the home she grew up in, with shelves full of scrapbooks in an upstairs bedroom she could neither get to nor stand to look at.

She was back in Wanonishaw, Minnesota, a town—a life—she’d left when, at age seventeen, she’d been accepted into Juilliard.

She put her hands on the arms of the rocker and leaned forward. The shawl slid down behind her back. “I’m sorry,” she said to the top of Evelyn’s head. Evelyn, nineteen, was on her knees, cleaning up the mess. “I can’t believe I spilled again. How many teacups have I gone through in the two months since you’ve been with me?”

Evelyn looked up and chuckled. Beads of perspiration dotted her forehead, dripped off her nose. “Your share of them,” she said. She carefully set pieces of china in the metal garbage can she’d brought from the kitchen. “But no worries, Ms. Davis. Your mom had so many teacups and saucers in this house, you could break one a day, live to be a hundred and fifty, and still not run out! I haven’t seen so many cups and saucers since the last time I went to the cities and dreamed about setting up my bridal registry at Macy’s. I bet there isn’t a china department in any store in the whole world that has as many unique teacups as your mom!” Evelyn swiped at the remaining pud­dle of tea with the towel, which she wrung out in the garbage can. She dabbed at a few drops splattered on the fringe of the nearby area rug. 
 
Sasha noticed the way Evelyn managed, at regular intervals throughout the day, to maneuver her hand in order to catch another glimpse of her own engagement ring. At least that’s what Evelyn had called it when she jutted her finger in front of Sasha’s face during her interview for this dreadful job. “My engagement ring from my fiancé,” she said dreamily, as if the diamond could rival one of Elizabeth Tay­lor’s. If there was even a chip of genuine diamond in the middle of that thin band, Sasha would be surprised.

“I’ll bring you another cup of tea,” Evelyn said, startling Sasha as she sprang to her feet and headed toward the kitchen. “The water’s still hot in the kettle,” she said over her shoulder. “Sit tight for a minute.”...

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Verlag
Waterbrook Press (A Division of Random House Inc)
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307444732
ISBN 13 
9780307444738
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
321
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