Solomon's Oak: A Novel - By Jo-Ann Mapson Page 0,2

Since his death from pneumonia last February she’d been forced to take a part-time job at a chain discount store. Four days a week she drove the freeway to work five-hour shifts for minimum wage. Her supervisor, Larry O., was nineteen and had atrocious grammar. He was authorized to tell her how to stack the merchandise, how to speak to customers, and when she could duck out to the restroom. She was old enough to be his mother.

Dan’s life insurance policy, through Horsemen’s Practical, a California carrier just about every rancher and farmer in the area subscribed to, paid out $50,000 upon his death, which seemed like a fortune while the Solomons were paying the premiums. But they had no health insurance and hospital bills had gobbled up much of it. By Christmas her savings would be gone.

The pirates wanted to pay Glory $3,000 to use the chapel and to make their reception food. She had chickens, horses, goats, and dogs to feed.

“Okay, Angus. Consider your wedding on.”

“Thank you! I can’t wait to call the Admiral!” He jumped up from the table and thanked Glory in the nicest way possible—he took out his checkbook.

Over her rickety kitchen table among the crumbs of coffeehouse pastry, an unlikely business was born:

SOLOMON’S OAK WEDDING CHAPEL.

PIRATES WELCOME.

The chapel had been Dan’s final project. One summer morning over his oatmeal he’d said, “I’ve got a bug to build myself a chapel. Nothing fancy, just a place to worship out of the rain.”

Glory wasn’t a believer, but she supported his efforts, bringing him lunch and admiring his carpentry, the work he’d done all his life. He’d finished the chapel just before Labor Day 2002, and darned if they didn’t have rain that very weekend. The small building could seat forty on the hewn benches, fifty if you held a child on your lap. It had a pitched, slate roof, exposed beams, and stained-glass designed by an artist with whom Dan traded finish carpentry on her Craftsman-style house in Paso Robles for the windows.

Six months later he would be dead.

Behind the last pew where Glory now stood checking decorations, she’d often brought her husband ham sandwiches and lemonade for lunch. When the summer sun beat down, Dan could drink an entire pitcher of lemonade. He’d take a sip, smack his lips, and say, “I am the luckiest man on the planet.”

Glory thought he still was because he saw the good in everyone he met. He just wasn’t on the planet anymore.

Just two days before Angus’s pirate wedding, Glory stood in her bedroom closet, staring at her husband’s shirts. So far as she knew, there was no etiquette/timetable regarding boxing up your late husband’s clothes, but the day seemed as good a time as any. In a little over three months, February 28, she would have lived an entire year without Dan. She had folded his blue jeans and flannel shirts into a cardboard box. His neckties, given to him by their foster sons over the years, she kept. Maybe this winter she’d use them to piece a log-cabin quilt. His lined denim jacket would keep someone else warm. His Red Wing boots were practically new. She wrapped them in newspaper and set them on the closet floor. Soon all that remained was his starched white shirt. She pressed it to her mouth, inhaling Irish Spring soap.

“I sure could use your help right now,” she whispered. “I have no idea what I’m doing. What if someone loses an eye in the sword fight?”

Once a day she allowed herself ten minutes of closet time. The idea was to restrict her tears to that private place in the house. After she wiped her eyes, she forced herself to recall happy times. The summer evenings they’d ridden the horses to the top of the hill. The dogs racing ahead, flushing birds from the dozens of trees that fringed the property. At the fence line, Dan would reach across his horse to hers, take her hand, and they’d watch the sun go down. Because there were never enough adjectives to flatter a California sunset, he’d say something funny. One time he’d quoted Dylan Thomas in a terrible Welsh accent: “ ‘Like an orr-ange.’ ‘Like a to-mah-to.’ ‘Like a gowld-fisssh bowl.’ ”

Glory gathered eggs to sell at the farmers’ market, trained her “last chance” dogs, and kept the checkbook balanced. One time she’d forgotten to latch the grain bins, and now generations of mice were convinced they’d reached the promised land. On the