Dakota Home by Debbie Macomber

• Table of Contents
• Forewords & Introductions
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Forewords & Introductions

Welcome back to Buffalo Valley, a town in North Dakota not unlike the real towns that are part of my family's history. You'll find that the spirit of hope is ever strong in Buffalo Valley, and the people here—many of whom first appeared in Dakota Born—have reason to feel optimistic these days. In Dakota Home, their stories continue and evolve. So whether this is a return visit to Buffalo Valley or your first—make yourself at home!

Read an Excerpt

"We're doomed," Jacob Hansen said in sepulchral tones. He marched into the room, shaking his grizzled head.

"You might as well board up the entire town right now." Marta Hansen followed her husband into the dining room at Buffalo Bob's 3 OF A KIND. With the energy that so often accompanies righteousness, she plunked herself down at the table with the other members of the Buffalo Valley town council.

Joshua McKenna figured this kind of pessimism pretty much ensured that they wouldn't accomplish anything. Not that he blamed the couple. For nearly twenty years the Hansens, along with everyone else in Buffalo Valley, had watched the once-thriving farm community deteriorate, until now the town was barely holding on. The theater had closed first, and then the beauty shop and the florist and the hardware store… It hurt most when the catalog store pulled up stakes—that had been six years ago—and then the Morningside Café, the one decent restaurant in town, had closed for good.

Even now, Joshua missed Melissa's cooking. She'd baked biscuits that were so light and fluffy they practically floated into your mouth. Joshua got hungry just thinking about those biscuits.

Businesses survived as long as they could on their continually diminishing returns—until they were driven to financial ruin and finally forced to close up shop. Families drifted away and farmland changed ownership, the bigger farms buying up the smaller ones. Large or small, everyone struggled these days with low agricultural prices. He had to hand it to the farmers, though. They were smart, and getting smarter all the time. Over the years, agricultural research andhardier strains had made it possible to urge a larger yield out of the land. Where an acre would once produce a hundred bushels, it was now possible to harvest almost twice that. Somehow, a lot of the farmers had managed to keep going—because they believed in their heritage and because they trusted in the future, hoping they'd eventually get a fair price for their crops. Since they stayed, a few of the businesses in town clung, too.

Joshua's was one of them, although he'd certainly been struggling for the last while. He sold used goods and antiques, and did repairs; in that area, at least, business was steady. It was his gift, he supposed, to be able to fix things. With money tight, people did whatever they could to avoid buying something new. He just wished his talent extended to fixing lives and rearranging circumstances. If it had, he'd start with his own family. Heaven knew his son needed help. His daughter and granddaughter, too. He didn't like to think about the changes in their lives during the past few years, and he hated the helpless feeling that came over him whenever he did.

His wife, Marjorie, had always dealt with the children, but she'd been gone ten years now. He often wondered if she'd recognize Buffalo Valley these days and wished he had her wisdom in dealing with its problems. She would've been shocked to learn he'd been elected president of the town council. A position he hadn't sought, but one he'd assumed by default when Bill Wilson had to close his gas station and move to Fargo.

"We're doomed this time," Marta repeated, daring anyone to argue with her.

"This town's survived all these years. We'll hold on now." Hassie Knight, who owned Knight's Pharmacy, said emphatically.

Hassie was a born optimist and the one person in town who was sure to see even this situation in a positive light. If anyone could come up with a solution, it'd be Hassie, God bless her.

Like him, Hassie had experienced her share of grief. She'd buried her son, who'd been killed in Vietnam nearly thirty years ago, and not long afterward, had lost her husband. Carl Knight had died from complications of diabetes, but Hassie had always maintained that the real cause of death was a broken heart. Her daughter lived in Hawaii, and Joshua knew Valerie would like nothing better than to have her mother retire nearby. Thankfully, Hassie had resisted Valerie's efforts. The old woman was long past the age of retirement, but she did much more than fill prescriptions. Hassie was the closest thing the community had to a doctor, and folks from miles around came to her for medical advice. Yes, Hassie Knight was a popular woman, all right. It didn't hurt any that she served the best sodas he'd ever tasted. The old-fashioned kind from the fountain in the corner of her store. Chocolate sodas and good advice—those were her specialties.

"We've hung on for so many years, we're already dead and don't even have the sense to know it," Marta said caustically as she crossed her arms over her hefty bosom.

"Will you stop!" Joshua pounded the gavel on the tabletop with so much force, the ice in the water glasses danced. He sat back down and motioned to Hassie. "Would you take roll call?"

Hassie Knight's bones creaked audibly as she stood. "Roll call? Now that's gonna be useful," Marta Hansen muttered. "That's like what's-his-name, that emperor, fiddling while Rome burned."

She was obviously mighty pleased with her classical allusion. Must've been on Jeopardy last night, Joshua thought.

"Nero. The emperor was Nero," he couldn't resist adding. Still, he hated to admit it, but Marta was right. Roll call was a waste of time; all they had to do was look around the table to know who was present and who wasn't. Hassie, the Hansens, Dennis Urlacher and him. Absent: Gage Sinclair and Heath Quantrill. Joshua stopped Hassie before she had a chance to start.

"Fine, we'll dispense with the usual formalities and get on with the meeting."

"Thank God someone in this town is willing to listen to reason," Marta said, glaring across the table at Hassie.

It was only natural that the town pessimist and the town optimist would be in constant opposition. "You and Jacob have as much to gain or lose as the rest of us," Hassie snapped. "A positive mental attitude would help."

"I'm positive," Jacob said with a nod. "Positive that Buffalo Valley is as dead as Eloise Patten."

"If she was going to up and die unexpected like that, the least she could've done was tell someone she wasn't well," Marta said in her usual righteous manner.

"That's the most ridiculous thing you've ever said—which is really saying something." Hassie's face reddened, and Joshua could see she was having difficulty restraining her temper. The truth was, the Hansens exasperated him, too. How they'd managed to run the grocery during these hard times when they had such a negative outlook toward life was beyond him. Still, he was grateful their store had survived. Joshua didn't know what would happen if they ever decided to leave Buffalo Valley. "All right, all right." Joshua wiped his brow with a stained white handkerchief. "We'll move on to new business."

With obvious reluctance, Hassie reclaimed her seat. "We all know why we're here," Jacob said. "The school needs a teacher."

"Does anyone mind if I sit in?" Buffalo Bob asked, pulling out a chair before anyone could object.

Marta and Jacob glanced at each other and seemed to understand that if they raised a fuss, Hassie would make a point of asking Marta to leave, since she wasn't officially a member of the town council. Joshua suspected the only reason she attended the meetings was to advise Jacob on how to vote.

"We'd welcome your help," Joshua assured Bob.

Without a word Dennis Urlacher, who owned the Cenex Gas Station, shoved his chair aside to make room for him. Bob Carr was an ex-biker who'd settled in the town a couple of years earlier after winning the bar, grill and small hotel in a poker game. He'd immediately rechristened himself Buffalo Bob.

Joshua looked down at his notes. "As you all know, Eloise Patten is gone."

"She's more than gone," Marta Hansen interrupted. "She's dead!"

"Marta!" Joshua had taken about all he could from her.

"The point is we don't have a teacher."

"Hire one." Buffalo Bob leaned back on two legs of his chair, as if he figured they were all overreacting to this crisis.

"No one's going to want to teach in a town that's dying," Jacob grumbled, shaking his head. "Besides, I never did think much of dividing up the schools. Bussing our grade-schoolers over to Bellmont and then having them send their high-schoolers to us was a piss-poor idea, if you ask me."

"We already did ask you," Joshua barked, no longer making any attempt to control his impatience. "It won't do any good to rehash what's already been decided and acted upon. Bussing the children has worked for the last four years, and would continue to do so if Eloise hadn't passed on the way she did."

"Eloise should've retired years ago," Marta complained under her breath.

"Well, thank God she didn't," Joshua said. "We owe her a lot." Eloise Patten had been a godsend to this community, and if no one else said it, he would. The schoolteacher had been the one to suggest splitting up the elementary and high-school students between the two towns. The Hansens' attitude was typical of the thinking that was detrimental to such progressive ideas. The small farming communities, or what remained of them, needed to rely on each other. It was either that or lose everything. If Buffalo Valley was going to survive when so many towns on the prairie hadn't, they had to learn to work together.

"We've got to find us a new teacher, is all." Dennis could be counted on to cut to the chase—to state the basic, unadorned facts. He owned and operated the only gas station left in town and wasn't much of a talker. When he did speak, it was generally worth listening.

Joshua knew that his daughter, Sarah, and Dennis had some kind of romance going between them, despite the decided efforts of his daughter to keep it a secret. Joshua didn't understand why lationship. After her disastrous marriage, Joshua would've welcomed Dennis into the family. He suspected that Sarah's reluctance to marry Dennis had to do with her daughter, Calla, who was fourteen. A difficult age—as he remembered well.

"We could throw in living quarters, couldn't we?" Buffalo Bob was saying. "For the teacher?"

"Good idea." Joshua pointed the gavel at the hotel owner.

"There's two or three empty houses close to the school." insisted. "They're full of mice and God knows what else."

"We can always clean one up."

The others nodded.

"In case no one's noticed, there's a teacher shortage in this state." This came from Jacob, and as if on cue, Marta nodded.

"We could always advertise," Hassie began tentatively.

"Advertise? We don't have that kind of money," Marta said in a sharp voice.

"If we don't advertise, what exactly do you suggest?" Joshua asked.

Jacob and Marta looked at each other. Jacob got heavily to his feet and leaned forward, bracing his hands on the edge of the table. "I think it's time we all admitted the truth. Buffalo Valley is doomed and there's not a damn thing we can do about it." Marta nodded again, a satisfied expression on her face.

His announcement was met with an immediate outburst from both Hassie and Buffalo Bob.

"Just a minute here!" Buffalo Bob shouted.

"I raised two children in this town," Hassie cried, "and buried one. I'm not going to let Buffalo Valley die if it's the last thing I do. Any one of you who—"

"…invested my entire inheritance in this bar and grill," Buffalo Bob shouted in order to be heard above Hassie.

Joshua slammed the gavel down. "No one said anything about giving up."

"No teacher's gonna want to move here." Marta apparently felt obliged to remind them of this.

"We'll find a teacher." Joshua refused to let the Hansens' pessimism influence the meeting any longer.

"Look around you," Jacob Hansen said, gesturing at the greasy window that faced the main street.

Joshua didn't need to look; he confronted the evidence every day when he opened his shop. The boarded-up businesses. The cracked sidewalks, with weeds sprouting up through the cracks. The litter on the streets. Whatever community pride there'd once been had long since died.

"We aren't going to let the school close," Joshua stated emphatically.

"I second that!" Hassie said. A deep sense of relief showed on her face, and the determination in her voice matched Joshua's. He had lived his entire life in this place and he'd do whatever he could to save it. Come hell or high water, they'd find a teacher before school started up again at the end of August.

"I'll believe it when I see it," Jacob Hansen said just loudly enough for them all to hear.

"Well, then—prepare to believe," Joshua said grandly. There was more life in Buffalo Valley than either of the Hansens suspected, and Joshua was going to prove it.
Lindsay Snyder felt the anger churning in her stomach, anger at her own foolishness as much as anything. With her dogs sound asleep at her feet, she sat at her kitchen table and wrote in the pages of her journal. Whenever she was upset, she described her feelings; it helped her clarify them, helped her analyze what had happened and why. This time, though, she already knew the answers.

When she finished, she set the leather-bound book aside and stared sightlessly out her apartment window. But it wasn't the landscape she saw; it was her future.

Monte was never going to marry her.

She should have recognized it two years ago, and hadn't. She realized it was because she so desperately wanted to be his wife, wanted to have a family with him. She loved him, and wasn't marriage supposed to be the natural outcome of loving a man? But she'd allowed herself to see what she'd hoped to see. She'd allowed herself to believe she could convince him.

Monte hadn't lied to her, hadn't misled her. From the beginning, he'd told her he wasn't interested in marriage. He loved her, he said, but his divorce several years earlier had devastated him and he'd vowed not to repeat the experience. He'd never indicated in any way that he might change his mind. Lindsay knew there was only one person to blame for her unhappiness—and it wasn't Monte.

Soon—maybe six months—after their relationship had begun, she'd left him because he'd been adamant on the subject of marriage. He'd persuaded her to come back and she had, foolishly believing that eventually he'd change his mind and see things the way she did.

It hadn't happened.

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

It was the screaming that woke him.

    Jeb bolted upright in bed and forced himself to look around the darkened room, to recognize familiar details. Four years had passed since the accident. Four years in which his mind refused to release even one small detail of that fateful afternoon.

    Leaning against his headboard, he dragged in deep gulps of air until the shaking subsided. Invariably with the dream came the pain, the pain in his leg. The remembered agony of that summer's day.

    His mind refused to forget and so did his body. As he waited for his hammering pulse to return to normal, pain shot through his badly scarred thigh, cramping his calf muscle. Instinctively cringing, he stiffened until the discomfort passed.

    Then he started to laugh. Sitting on the edge of his bed, Jeb reached for his prosthesis and strapped it onto the stump of his left leg. This was the joke: The pain Jeb experienced, the charley horse that knotted and twisted his muscles, was in a leg that had been amputated four years earlier.

    He'd cheated death that day, but death had gained its own revenge. The doctors had a phrase for it. They called it phantom pain, and assured him that eventually it would pass. It was all part of his emotional adjustment to the loss of a limb. Or so they said, over and over, only Jeb had given up listening a long time ago.

    After he'd dressed, he made his way into the kitchen, eager to get some caffeine into his system and dispel the lingering effects of the dream. Then he remembered he wasout of coffee.

    It didn't take a genius to realize that Sarah had purposely forgotten coffee when she'd delivered his supplies. This was his sister's less-than-subtle effort to make him go into town. It wouldn't work. He wasn't going to let her manipulate him—even if it meant roasting barley and brewing that.

    Jeb slammed out the back door and headed for the barn, his limp more pronounced with his anger. His last trip into Buffalo Valley had been at Christmas, almost ten months earlier. Sarah knew how he felt about people staring at him, whispering behind his back as if he wasn't supposed to know what they were talking about. He'd lost his leg, not his hearing or his intelligence. Their pity was as unwelcome as their curiosity.

    Jeb hadn't been particularly sociable before the accident and was less so now. Sarah knew that, too. She was also aware that his least favorite person in Buffalo Valley was Marta Hansen, the grocer's wife. The old biddy treated him like a charity case, a poor, pathetic cripple—as if it was her duty, now that his mother was gone, to smother him with sympathy. Her condescending manner offended him and hurt his already wounded pride.

    Jeb knew he made people uncomfortable. His loss reminded other farmers of their own vulnerability. With few exceptions, namely Dennis, the men he'd once considered friends felt awkward and uneasy around him. Even more now that he'd given up farming and taken up raising bison. For the past three and a half years he'd maintained a herd of fifty breeding animals. He'd learned mostly by trial and error, but felt he'd made considerable progress.

    Genesis, his gelding, walked to the corral fence and stretched his head over the rail to remind Jeb he hadn't been fed yet.

    "I haven't had my coffee," he told the quarter horse, as if the animal could commiserate with him. He hardly ever rode anymore, but kept the horse for company.

    He fed the gelding, then returned to the kitchen.

    Cursing his sister and her obstinate ways, he wrote a grocery list—if he was going into town he'd make it worth his while—and hurried toward his pickup. The October wind felt almost hot in his face. A few minutes later, he drove out of the yard, sparing a glance for the bison grazing stolidly on either side. He moved the herd on a pasture rotation system. Later in the day he'd separate the weanlings and feeders from the main herd.

    Buffalo ranching. He'd made the right decision. They were hardy animals, requiring less care than cattle did. The demand for their meat was growing and often exceeded supply. Business was good. Currently his females were worth more as breeding stock than meat: just last week, Jeb had sold one of his cows for a healthy five thousand dollars.

    To his surprise, he enjoyed the fifty-minute drive to Buffalo Valley, although he rarely ventured into town these days. Usually he preferred to drive with no real destination, enjoying the solitude and the changing seasons and the feel of the road.

    When he pulled into town, he was immediately struck by the changes the last ten months had brought to Buffalo Valley. Knight's Pharmacy was and always had been the brightest spot on Main Street. Hassie Knight had been around as long as he could remember and served the world's best old-fashioned ice-cream sodas. He'd loved that place as a kid and had considered it a special treat when his mother took him there on Saturday afternoons.

    Like Marta Hansen, Hassie Knight had been a friend of his mother's; she was also the one woman he knew, other than Sarah, who didn't make him feel like a cripple.

    3 OF A KIND, the town's only hotel, bar and grill, was down the street from the pharmacy, Jeb had briefly met Buffalo Bob a couple of years earlier. He never did understand why a leather-clad, tattooed biker with a ponytail would settle in Buffalo Valley, but it wasn't up to him to question. Bob had lasted longer than Jeb had thought he would. People seemed to like him, or so Calla, Jeb's niece, had informed him.

    The Pizza Parlor was new, but now that he thought about it, he remembered Sarah telling him Calla had started working there part-time. Good thing—the kid needed an outlet. She was fifteen and full of attitude. Jeb suspected that Dennis and his sister would have been married by now if it wasn't for Calla.

    Sarah's quilting store came into view next and despite his irritation with her, he couldn't squelch his sense of pride. Her quilts were exquisite, crafted from muslin colored with various natural dyes that Sarah derived from plants, berries and lichen. She managed to make something complex and beautiful out of this hand-dyed muslin, combining traditional methods with her own designs. The store was a testament to her talent and skill. She took justifiable pride in her work, displaying quilts in the front window of what had once been a florist shop. The Spring Bouquet had been closed for at least fifteen years. Folks didn't buy a luxury like hothouse flowers when it was hard enough just getting food on the table.

(Continues...)