Blue Willow

by Deborah Smith

  He wanted to take her in his arms again, and tell her the damning details of his life, and why nothing was more important than the fight to rise from his family’s legacy of disgrace. He wanted to close up the gaps in all the years since a troubled little boy had devoted himself to a newborn baby girl and vowed that she belonged to him. He wanted to learn everything about her that she’d never said in her letters, and know all that she’d become.

  But he could only look at her without softening and say, “Either way, I’m your only hope.”

  “I don’t want any more sympathy from you,” she told him. “I don’t want to waste time looking for miracles.”

  “Lily, dammit—”

  “I just want you to stay with me until I have to move to Aunt Maude’s.” Shock filled the silence. She felt his gaze on her and returned it. His eyes narrowed; he seemed capable of piercing her facade with the intensity. Sorrow and wariness were stamped on his face. “Why?” he asked in a low voice.

  He hates being asked to stay. Humiliation stabbed her. She looked at him with merciless demand. “So I’ll have something to remember. So I’ll get to know you, really know you. That’s something I’ve wanted all these years. I won’t write to you anymore. I’ll never ask you for help again. I’m not going to count on anyone but myself from now on. But when you go back to New York, to the people who are really important to you and to all the important responsibilities you have, I’ll have this little piece of your life nobody else can ever own.”

  His expression slowly softened. There was a kind of harsh tenderness in it. “All right.”

  She had what she’d wished for. It was both frightening and satisfying, like realizing she had the courage to jump off a cliff without knowing whether she’d survive. Lily covered her confusion by giving him a brusque nod. She tried to think what to do next. “We’ll go see Aunt Maude,” Lily announced. “So she won’t hear someone’s at the farm and think I’ve taken up with a stranger.”

  Artemas arched a black brow in rueful acceptance. The masculine scent, the size, the dangerous feel of his presence sent chills up her spine. They had been together less than ten minutes.

  She had taken up with a stranger.

  Twelve

  Aunt Maude and her sisters were playing croquet on the front lawn—Little Sis traipsing around in a tank top and tight jeans, with her graying hair stuck up in a ponytail, Big Sis leaning on her mallet like a cane, with a print dress billowing around her bony knees, Aunt Maude kneeling on the ground to line up a shot, her big hips and stocky torso draped in a brightly colored caftan. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s and three full glasses adorned a white wrought-iron lawn table they’d brought from the backyard. A dozen odd-looking tan balloons drifted above it, tied to pieces of string.

  Lily cut the Jeep’s engine along the sidewalk. The yard was fronted in beds of purple irises, a cheerful spring place with shadowy trees and green grass. “You remember my Aunt Maude and the sisters?” she asked Artemas, snapping the words off like brittle tree branches. “I’ve written you about them a few times.”

  Little Sis saw Lily, raised her mallet in salute, and staggered drunkenly. Big Sis spit a stream of tobacco. Aunt Maude sat back on her heels, her caftan making a tent around her. She looked like a large, flowering shrub.

  “How could I forget?” Artemas said dryly.

  When he and she walked into the middle of the staring trio—mostly they were staring at Artemas—Lily introduced them. They gaped at him, as motionless as hens laying eggs. Lily felt bleak victory. See? He did come back.

  He went to each and shook hands. Maude pushed herself to her feet, clasped him by the shoulders, and scrutinized him. “I remember the day you came here to use my phone. I thought you were the most solemn youngster I’d ever seen. You still look solemn as a judge.”

  “I came here to help Lily get her farm back.”

  Aunt Maude lowered her hands, shot a slit-eyed look at Lily, and a mask dropped over her expression. It was the same poker face she used when she presided at city council meetings. The sisters gaped at him. “You been to see Mr. Estes yet?” she asked.

  Lily shook her head.

  “It won’t do any good.”

  “Money talks,” Artemas interjected.

  Little Sis snorted. “Not to him. He’s an Aquarius. I asked him about his birth date when he offered to buy Lily’s place. Had to know if he was worthy.” She went to the table and downed a glass of amber bourbon in one long swallow. She wandered back to them with a few loose steps and added, “Aquarius men are high-strung and stubborn. Of course, men in general are that way.” She sat down, cross-legged, on the lawn. “What are you?” she asked Artemas.

  “An Aquarius.”

  “Oh, goddammit to shit.”

  Aunt Maude looked at Lily apologetically. “She’s divorcing Marshall.”

  Lily knelt in front of Little Sis and put her arms around her. “I know things weren’t going real well, but I’m sorry.”

  Little Sis waved a hand in the air. “He’s sleeping with one of his bank tellers. I found out yesterday. The slut’s no older than our daughters.” She tilted her head back and gazed up at Artemas, who looked too distressed by everything to be amused. Little Sis scrutinized him shrewdly. “Gimme your palm, boy.”

  He came to her, knelt down on one knee, and held his hand out. She grasped it and squinted at the lines. “Yes, yes,” she said finally, patting his hand and giving it back to him. She looked at Lily, grabbed her hand, and studied it, swaying in place as she did. “Yes, yes.”

  Big Sis hobbled over and poked her younger sister with the business end of a mallet. “Leave ’em alone, you drunken fool.”

  “It’s fate,” Little Sis answered belligerently. “Can’t change it.”

  Lily rose quickly, tugging at Artemas’s arm. He stood also, frowning from Little Sis to her. Lily shook her head. “Don’t pay any attention.”

  “You know what those are?” Little Sis said, swinging an arm toward the table festooned with balloons. “Condoms. We’re using ’em the way they do the most good. Full of hot air.”

  Big Sis made a strangled sound of embarrassment and tottered to the table, then pulled a penknife from a big pocket on her dress and began puncturing the obscene decorations.

  The loud popping made Lily’s nerves jump. Artemas had an expression of benign amazement on his rugged face. Aunt Maude stepped between them and Little Sis, who was scowling at Big Sis, distracted. “Stay for dinner,” she said, shaking her head in defeat. “It’s almost ready. We were just having Little Sis’s divorce party first.”

  “Mr. Estes—” Lily began.

  “His son is tearing his folks’ hearts out. I don’t know what it’s all about, but I suspect Hopewell and Ducie are desperate to keep him out of trouble. I’ve heard he’s already running with a bad crowd again.”

  “He can’t have Lily’s home,” Artemas said.

  Aunt Maude leveled a hard but sympathetic gaze at him. “He already owns it.”

  Lily’s anguish reached new heights. “You can’t talk to Mr. Estes for me? Try to change his mind?”

  “Oh, I’ll talk to him. But I already know he sees your old place as a godsend. I don’t understand why, but that’s the way it is.” She put an arm around Lily’s shoulders and shook her gently. “You’re going to college this fall, honey. Even if you could get the farm back, what would you do with it?”

  Lily’s head drooped. “That’s like asking why someone wants to breathe. It’s part of me.”

  Artemas had been watching them in strained silence. Now, he said, “I’m sure I can convince him to sell. If Lily wants to live there, she can find a local college to attend.”

  Aunt Maude’s stony expression became even harder. “Lily’s not going to sit in the shadow of your old estate and daydream about you coming back to stay for good. She’s done that all her life, and you encouraged her, and that’s wrong.”

  Lily wanted to sink into the ground with shame. “This has n
othing to do with Artemas.”

  Little Sis snorted loudly and staggered to her feet. She came to him, reached up and patted him on the jaw, then wagged a finger at him. “Your life course lies in another direction.” She held up her other forefinger, making a partner to the first. “Parallel to Lily’s, but separate. But not always separate. Click.” She pressed her fingers together. “Like this, someday. But not now.”

  Lily pressed her hands to her head. “Oh, God, y’all are twisting everything.”

  “Where were you a few months ago?” Big Sis demanded, tottering up to Artemas and shaking her cane.

  He scanned the sisters with frowning, polite restraint, a muscle popping in his jaw. “I didn’t know Lily needed me. That was my mistake. I’m here to fix it.”

  Aunt Maude sighed. “She doesn’t need you. She’s been half-crazy with grieving, and she’s still reckless. I don’t want her confused and hurt any more.”

  “I’m not a croquet ball,” Lily protested. “Stop talking about me like you can knock me around the lawn anywhere you want. I know what I’m doing.”

  Tense silence closed in. Little Sis leaned over to Aunt Maude and whispered at the top of her voice, “She has to get burned so she’ll learn to stay away from the fire.”

  Aunt Maude exhaled and flung up her hands. “I won’t say any more.”

  Big Sis spit tobacco juice violently. “Thank God. You and Sissy shut up. Both of you.”

  “Stay for dinner,” Aunt Maude repeated. It was an order. “Come on. Artemas, you get Little Sis by the arm. Let’s take this scraggly group inside.”

  Lily looked at him as he looped a broad hand under Little Sis’s elbow. He’d been shell-shocked.

  Dinner was an awful masquerade of Little Sis’s slurred speeches about the uselessness of men, Big Sis’s blunt sarcasm, Aunt Maude’s baleful staring at Artemas and Lily’s attempt to eat when all she wanted to do was crawl into a hole where Artemas couldn’t watch her suffer.

  He sat beside her, pushing food around on a delicate china plate of pure white porcelain with raised scrollwork on the edges. “Colebrook,” Big Sis announced, leaning over from the end of the table and rapping her fork on the piece. “Maude gave it to me for my forty-fifth birthday. Twenty years ago. Holds up nice. You ought to be proud.”

  “I knew it was a Colebrook setting,” Artemas answered, giving her a pensive smile. “We have a new one coming out—an updated version, with a contemporary design on the rim.”

  “Good. Good.” Big Sis chewed on a piece of creamed chicken and studied him. “How long are you going to be in town?”

  “A few days.”

  Lily took a deep breath. “He’s staying with me. At the farm.”

  Silence descended. She glanced around the table, noting Big Sis’s beady, intrigued glower, Little Sis’s groggy stare, and Aunt Maude’s frown. Artemas said carefully, “If I ever hurt Lily deliberately, you all have permission to put a curse on me.”

  “Maybe we already have,” Little Sis answered. “And we’re waiting to see how well it works.”

  • • •

  Little Sis ambushed Lily as she was returning from the hall bathroom, where she’d gone after dinner to soak her face in cold water. They were alone in the hall. “Here,” Little Sis hissed, and thrust a small package into Lily’s hands. “If you need ’em, use ’em. If you don’t know how—read the instructions.”

  Lily stared at the open box of condoms. Her head swam. “I don’t need any balloons,” she joked numbly.

  Artemas stepped into the hallway from the parlor, where she’d left him to fend for himself between Big Sis’s questions about china and Aunt Maude’s baleful silence. He looked at Lily with the kind of exasperated relief that made the condoms suddenly feel like a red-hot brick in her hand. She clamped her fingers over the logo and furtively shoved them back at Little Sis.

  Little Sis pursed her lips like Mick Jagger in concert, stuffed the box into the hip pocket of Lily’s shorts, then darted away, leaving the lure of disaster firmly in place.

  The old farmhouse was pitifully empty of the small trinkets and personal touches that had made it so warm, so inviting. Artemas walked through the downstairs room brushing his fingers over the furniture, looking at the bare walls, the empty bookcases, the packed cardboard boxes stacked in corners. The soft light from aged white wall sconces gave false promises of the comfort he remembered.

  He heard Lily moving around in the downstairs bedroom. She’d disappeared in there to ready the place for him. The idea of sleeping in her bed made him restless, gnawing at the fragile barricade between what he wanted to feel for her and the intimacy he could never indulge. He went into the main room, leaned on the fireplace mantel, and stared at the empty, cold grate.

  A door opened from the room off the back hall. He listened to her footsteps on the bare wooden floor, his senses strained with awareness of every movement. “I put an extra pillow on the bed,” she said, coming to the hearth and sitting on its edge, her elbows propped on her bare knees. Her throaty, drawling voice curled through his blood. “You’ll probably have to lay it across the foot rail, because your feet’ll stick over. Mine hit the rail when I stretch out, and you’re taller. You could have Mama and Daddy’s queen-sized bed upstairs, but I’ve got boxes stacked all over it.”

  “Where do you sleep?”

  “In the barn loft.” When he shot her a surprised look, she shrugged. “I slept out there on hot summer nights when I was growing up. I like it.” Her eyes held a stark, wounded aura he’d noticed before. Beneath all the bluster and determination was a shattered, lonely soul. “I can’t sleep in this house now. I go out to the barn every night. I tried not to, at first. But I’d hear little sounds when I was half-awake and think everything was the same as before, that my folks were still here.”

  Artemas watched with wordless sympathy as her shoulders hunched. She dropped her forehead to her hands and massaged the pale, tightly drawn skin. Her misery was like his own—a self-contained burden, not easily displayed to anyone else. When others might give up, pity themselves, or become bitter, she trudged on. He shivered because he understood that brand of pride so well. It was, in many ways, a prison as well as a savior, a merciless drive.

  And he was dangerously drawn to her because of it. He sat down beside her and took her hands in his. The contact was stunning, a swift merging of touch and emotion. Fighting the urge to pull her to him, he turned her hands over and pretended to study the callused palms. Her hands were blunt and strong, with graceful fingers. He rubbed his thumbs over the marks of hard work. “I’ve always thought I could have whatever I wanted,” he told her. “That it’s only a matter of knowing what I want and learning how to get it. But that’s not true. Because I can’t bring your parents back for you.”

  Her fingers curled over his and held tightly. “Don’t want what’s impossible,” she whispered. “You’ll always be disappointed.”

  The wistful despair in her voice sent shivers through him. He met her somber, troubled eyes. “It isn’t always easy to know the difference. Or to accept it.”

  They were talking about something else now—the future and the magnetic current between them that touch only intensified. She searched his face for a moment, and he struggled to keep his expression unpromising. The glimmer of hope that had come into her eyes faded just as quickly. She dropped her gaze to his hands. Slowly she drew hers away. It was as if life were being drained from his skin.

  Artemas forced himself to move away from her before regret overcame reason. Going to the old chintz couch across from the fireplace, he sank back in one corner and stretched his legs in front of him, a show of nonchalance that took all his willpower. “In the morning we’ll see Mr. Estes. We have to try.”

  Lily studied him in silent sorrow. The past had charged into her life and taken over, but not the way she’d dreamed of when she was little. It was full of contradictions—a war between pride and need, a threat that filled her with confusion. The Old Brook
Prince was no boyish romantic, eager to carry her to his gilded castle; there was no castle, only a dilapidated old mansion sinking into ruins, and she was no demure, patiently waiting princess.

  She got up and went to a box on a pine sideboard along one wall. Searching through the contents, she found the bundle of photos in a cigar box and sat back down. She felt his gaze on her as she sorted through them. When she found the one she wanted, she set the box aside and came to him, holding it out.

  Artemas straightened and took the wrinkled black-and-white picture, and his heart sank. “I couldn’t have been more than six,” he said, studying the boy standing beside a spindly calf, barefoot and wearing only baggy cutoff jeans, with one arm draped around the calf’s neck. He turned the picture over and looked at the inscription on the back. “Artemas and Fred,” he read, and realized he was smiling sadly. “I named him Fred. Yes. That was one of the happiest summers of my life. I asked your father if I could take Fred home with me when I left. But Fred had to stay here. I envied him.”

  Lily stood over him, watching. “I’m glad you didn’t name me Fred.”

  He laughed. The awkward tension between them, and the sorrow, broke into shreds. She began to laugh with him, then sank down on the couch and put her face in her hands. The laughter died. Her shoulders shook.

  “Lily,” he said with gruff anguish. He pulled her to him. She tucked her feet under her and hunched into a tight ball of misery next to his side. “I miss them so much,” she whispered.

  Trembling, Artemas kissed her hair. It was a harmless gesture of sympathy; self-restraint was his proudest asset, and he trusted it, even when the contact quickly fogged his mind with tenderness and greed. “I know you do. You don’t have to hide that from me.”

  She knuckled her hands to her mouth and bent her head to his shoulder. Deep, agonized sobs tore from her throat; her whole body convulsed with them. Artemas stroked her hair and the side of her face, murmuring low, anxious sounds meant to soothe but sounding tragic even to himself. He lifted her face into the crook of his neck, then rocked her. Tears burned his eyes and finally slid free. He hurt for her, for the people and dreams they had both lost at such young ages, for what they would probably never have together.