Starry Night

with her or the wedding band Joan had asked her to deliver.
    “Did you give him the ring?”
    “I tried.” That should tell her what had happened without Carrie going into a long explanation.
    “Oh.” In a single word, her disappointment rang like a cathedral bell.
    Carrie lowered her voice for fear someone might be listening in on the conversation. “I spent two days alone with him at his cabin outside of Fairbanks. Well, his dog was with us, too.”
    “How is he?” Joan asked, with such longing that it nearly brought tears to Carrie’s eyes.
    Carrie hardly knew how to answer, knowing she meant more than Finn’s physical well-being. Joan hungered for information, and Carrie didn’t have those kinds of answers. “He’s doing well,” she started off. “He looks good. He has a big dog named Hennessey.”
    “Hennessey?”
    “Yes. When I first saw him I thought he was a wolf, interested in dinner and that meal was me.” She hoped the story would bring levity to their conversation.
    Joan laughed softly. “Paul must have named him. Hennessey was his mother’s maiden name.”
    Carrie remembered how the large dog had spent the night warming her and longed to see him again.
    Joan hesitated. “Finn wouldn’t take the ring, would he?”
    “No, but he did ask after you.”
    “He did?” How quickly joy flooded her words. “That gives me hope.”
    “It’s a positive sign. Given time, I think Finn will come around, I really do.” Carrie couldn’t leave the older woman without some positive news. Perhaps in time Carrie would be able to influence Finn to give his mother another chance.
    Joan softly sighed. “I hope you’re right. I really appreciate your efforts.”
    “He might not realize it yet, but one day Finn will figure out that he needs you, too.”
    “Thank you, Carrie.” Joan said, and she seemed to struggle to sound encouraged. “I won’t keep you any longer. I apologize for contacting you at your work.”
    “Joan, before I let you go I need to ask you something …”
    “Of course, anything.”
    “Finn mailed me a gift. It’s a toaster, a really old one. I asked him about it, but his answers have been vague. Is there some significance to it?”
    His mother started to laugh. “He gave you the toaster?”
    “Yes. I have it in my kitchen … I’ve been using it.”
    Joan exhaled and seemed to be gathering her thoughts. “Paul bought that toaster for me when we were first dating. My goodness, I had no idea he’d kept it. That toaster isnearly forty years old. It was the first sign I had that Paul had any feelings for me.”
    “Why do you think Finn would want me to have it?”
    “My dear, isn’t it obvious?” she asked, and appeared to get real enjoyment out of the telling. “My son is crazy about you. He’s repeating what his father did when he first fell in love with me. Finn is telling you the only way he knows how that you’re important to him.”
    “He’s important to me, too.”
    The line went silent for a moment. “Oh, dear. Are you in love with my son?”
    “I think so,” Carrie said, lowering her voice. She wasn’t sure why she hesitated. “Yes,” she said, plainly, distinctly. They’d known each other less than a month and yet her heart knew. No man had ever made her feel the way she did about Finn.
    “Proceed carefully, my dear,” Joan warned. “If Finn is anything like his father, and I suspect he is, then he doesn’t give his heart lightly; he loves deeply, completely, and when he’s hurt he’ll react like a wounded grizzly bear.”
    Carrie mulled over Finn’s mother’s words the rest of the afternoon. The conversation with her own mother lingered in her mind as well. She and Finn were very different people, living in entirely different worlds. She was a girly girl, just as her email address claimed, and he lived and worked in the Alaskan wilderness. The practical side of Carrie remindedher that they had little in common, but her heart was unwilling to listen.
    Carrie’s mother had referred to this as the honeymoon part of the relationship, when they were so caught up in the intensity of their feelings that they willingly ignored their differences. It was easy to do, which was exactly what her mother was trying to tell her.
    Finn’s mother, too, had issued her own dire warning. It seemed everyone she told about her and Finn was filled with doubts about the two of them. One reason Carrie hadn’t told Sophie about Finn was because she knew