by Maren Smith
She’d come here expecting to get paid; not to get offered what amounted to…well, a job. She blinked once, a little taken aback. “People are going to get awfully tired of marmalade and apple butter eventually, don’t you think?”
“Blackberries will be coming into season in the next month or so,” Robert said.
“It doesn’t have to be preserves,” Billy added. “Pies, cookies, cakes, bread; you bake it, and I’ll bet you a nickel to your penny that I can sell it. And for more than what you’re asking on your fruit stand, I can promise you that. I’ve been here twenty years, and I do a good business, even with the war on and especially over weekends. We’ll do a split of the profits. Fifty-fifty. What do you say?”
“Billy?” the waitress called, waving a ticket with a fresh order that needed his attention.
He got up immediately. “I’ll be back in half a shake, but you think about it. And while you’re waiting, go on and order something. Anything you like.”
Kylie glanced at Robert and perked a little. “Can I have a sandwich?”
“Can you have a sandwich,” Billy chortled graciously. “What kind, love?”
“Ham and cheese?”
“You don’t need a sandwich,” Robert said, leaning back in his seat and watching her suspiciously.
“Please,” Billy interrupted, holding out his hand. “It’s on the house. She’s cooked for me, now it’s my pleasure to cook for her. One ham and cheese sandwich, coming right up.”
Billy returned to his grill and Kylie straightened on her seat, glancing once back out the window before she noticed Robert watching her, one corner of his mouth curling into a knowing smile. “That sandwich had better get eaten by somebody on two legs.”
“Of course, it will.” She straightened, affronted. “I haven’t eaten since breakfast. I might actually be hungry, you know.”
“Uh huh.” He didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t argue either. Instead, he ordered two lemonades from the waitress and settled in to wait for Billy’s return. “What do you think about his offer?”
Kylie shrugged, flattered but not really excited. “We don’t exactly offer a variety, Robert. Summer’s half over, so we can’t plant anything before winter sets in. Maybe next year we might be better able to…” Shaking her head, she then echoed Billy, shrugging with her hands as she looked at him. “I honestly don’t know what we’ll be able to do. Where I come from, milk costs $2.50. I have no idea what to price things at, what’s fair. I don’t even know what we’ll be able to afford to do next year, or even once the war is over. Why don’t you tell me, is this a good deal?”
Robert inclined his head in a kind of nod. “I think it is. If you’re worried about variety, Mrs. Potts down the road has a peach orchard and a field full of blueberries. Agatha Crestwood and her husband grow figs and chestnuts. Martin Greene used to have the biggest strawberry and rhubarb fields in four states before he joined the war. His wife’s got three young kids and her father’s a drunk, so while I know she’s offering some produce at the grocery store, I don’t know how well she’s been able to keep up with things, especially since the factory shut down. Still, there’s no harm in asking.” He raised his eyebrows. “The real question here is, do you like baking enough to want to ask? I can help you if you do, and I won’t push if you don’t.”
“Here you go,” the waitress said cheerfully, bringing two plates to the table, each one crowned with a massive ham and cheese sandwich, grilled to sloppy, cheesy perfection, and a mound of fresh cut steak fries. She winked at Kylie. “Extra ham and cheese.”
By the time Billy came back out of the kitchen, Kylie had eaten all her fries and scooted out to the very edge of her side of the booth. “Mr. Owens,” she reached out to shake his hand. “I think I’d love to give this a try. Um…” She stood up to let him sit down and gestured for the two of them to continue on without her while she picked up her sandwich. “Why don’t you business-minded guys talk over the details. I think I’m going to go outside and…eat my lunch in the sunshine and…think about pie recipes.”
Billy grinned, Robert not so much. “We don’t need any more strays,” he called after her.
Her hand on the door, Kylie flashed him an overly-exaggerated look of both wounded and wide-eyed innocence. “Of course not, honey. Dogs don’t eat on two legs.”
“What dog?” she heard Billy ask as she pushed her way outside.
The question was followed by Robert’s darkly muttered, “Crap. The mutt’s coming home with us, I just know it.”
“I ended up with six cats that way, once,” Billy said. “Trust me, it beats sleeping on the couch.”
Kylie walked back to the truck smiling. She had one bite of the sandwich just so she wouldn’t be lying when she said someone on two-legs had eaten it. Then, breaking off small, tantalizing bits, she tossed them out into the grass for the dog, who gobbled the first mouthful the instant it hit the ground and caught the second straight out of the air. Licking its chops, it whined and came a few steps toward her when Kylie hunkered down on her haunches to hold out the next little piece.
“Come on,” she beckoned. Sunken belly nearly dragging the ground, the dog waddled in close enough to snatch the food from her fingertips, retreating just as quickly back out of reach before gulping the bit of sandwich down. “Good boy.” As she broke off another piece, she ducked her head low enough to check. “Girl, I mean. Good girl.”
Talking softly, careful to keep her motions as non-threatening as possible, she fed the skinny stray piece after piece, pleased to note the dog retreated less and less after each mouthful until she noticed, as she fed the last bite of crust off the first half of her sandwich, the dog wasn’t retreating anymore at all. She simply stood there, head bowed, tail ever so timidly wagging, then pausing, and then wagging again while Kylie gently stroked the top of its head.
“You used to be somebody’s baby, once upon a time, didn’t you? At least you know what ear-skritches are, huh?” She broke off a piece from the second half of her sandwich and shifted her hand to test that theory with a few well-placed scratches behind the long, drooping ears.
Now it was Kylie’s turn to retreat, backing up a few steps at a time and rewarding the dog with more food and long sessions of gentle petting and scratching when she followed. By the time Robert came out of the restaurant, Kylie was waiting for him in the truck, the skinny stray sitting on the floorboards practically on top of her feet, she was so nervous. The dog ducked her head when Robert opened his door, and she would have crawled meekly away but for Kylie’s gently restraining arm around her neck.
Robert looked from her to the dog and then, with a sigh, back again. “Right,” he said, without rancor. Grudgingly, he climbed into truck. As he started it, he turned sideways to pin Kylie with a darkly humorous, semi-severe glare. “Okay, so we’ve got a dog. Fine. But I’m telling you now, woman, and I mean it: No cats allowed!”
* * * * *
Kylie and Robert sat at the dining room table and looked at one another. They were tired. The sun was going down. There was a dog lying uneasily under the table near Kylie’s feet. So long as neither of them moved, then neither did the dog, but now and then Robert shifted his feet or clasped and unclasped his hand and then the animal flinched and shied, and it would take several long minutes before the stillness coaxed her back to Kylie’s side again.
“Well,” Robert said, and picked up the single sheet of paper lying on the table between them. “We’ve got raspberries, figs, strawberries, lemons, peaches, oranges and cherries. We’ve been promised eggs, milk, flour, all the sugar that can be spared, plums, pears, gooseberries, and grapes. The Piersons have walnuts. The Martins on the other side of the valley have pecans. Mac Granger has all the blackberries we could ever hope to pick, not to mention he grows one hell of a pumpkin patch, which he then leaves to rot every year. But he’s also got a Winchester repeating, excellent aim and a dislike of unexpected visitors. I think I’ll wait until Friday to go and talk to him.�
�� Laying the note on the table, he looked up at her with that crooked, slightly overwhelmed smile of his. “So…What do you want to do first?”
“Sleep,” she said honestly, and then laughed because although it was close onto midnight, they had buckets upon boxes upon crates of fruit stacked shoulder high on the front porch and the back porch and on very nearly every available square inch in between. She had been loaned an extra canner and given two others, along with all the empty canning jars, both pints and quarts that the Woody could hold. She had a handful of favorite recipes and a small army of helpers both bored and willing enough to come over tomorrow afternoon and give her a hand. So, while her eyes were burning she was so incredibly worn out for the day, she somehow doubted if she’d ever have the time to sleep again.
Robert seemed inclined to try anyway. His crooked smile evened out as he held out his hand across the table. Kylie let herself be pulled up onto sore feet, sending the dog scuttling to get quickly out of the way, head down and tail twitching in nervous wags. Peering out at them from within the perceived safety of a ‘cave’ of stacked orange crates, she whined only once when Kylie preceded Robert around the corner and disappeared up the stairs to the second floor.
Robert glanced back at her, sending all but the very tip of the nose disappearing into the crates’ shadow. He pointed at her. “You,” he said, and gestured to the stacks obscuring his living room, “had better not pee on any of this.”
The dog sat down, and then lay down as Robert extinguished the light. Her head was once more quietly on her paws when he started upstairs, where Kylie patiently waited for him.
“The bed’s a mess,” she said through a sigh.
He slipped his arms around her, ducking to rest his head on her shoulder while he looked in at that mess through the open doorway. The blankets were still on the floor from where they’d been kicked both the night before and earlier that morning when she’d snatched his cover away and run laughing from the bedroom. She was so tired now, that seemed like a lifetime ago.
“Where’s the sheet?” he asked.
“Outside in the grass, I think.”
“Tsk,” he clicked his tongue against his teeth and shook his head once. “We really must do something about your housekeeping.”
The flat of his hand found her bottom once, a light slap that nevertheless made her jump and snap about, whirling out of his arms to confront him. Her mouth was smiling, but her eyes were flashing as she rubbing at her injured hip. “My housekeeping?”
She backed away, finding his smile decidedly roguish as he approached her. “It’s certainly not mine. I’m the man. I don’t do housekeeping; I do this.”
When she bumped against the footboard of the bed, he lunged forward, his arms swooping around her. Kylie threw back her head, both laughing and moaning as his fingers promptly found every tender spot her earlier spanking had left behind and dug in. He lifted her by her bottom, hauling her back up against him, giving her no choice but to cling to his shoulders and wrap her legs about his waist.
Tired as she was, come to find out she wasn’t quite that tired when he carried her over to the bed and gently lay her down underneath him.
“I guess I’ll just have to keep you warm,” he said, rising long enough to pull his shirt up over his head and carelessly tossing it onto the floor.
“How do you intend to do that?” she asked, running her fingertips playfully down over the hard lines of his chest, his stomach, his abdomen, dipping them into the waist of his trousers and hooking them there beneath his belt.
“Hm,” he said, his eyes warming as they wandered her. Ignoring the tug of her fingers, he let his own roam over the buttons that lined the front of her dress, unfastening them one by one until he peeled the cloth halves apart, revealing her skin and bra. His hand settled warm into the valley between her breasts. “I wonder.”
She lifted her chin to meet his mouth halfway, and wouldn’t you know, she really wasn’t that tired after all.
* * * * *
Kylie awoke the next morning with a gust of the foulest morning breath that she’d ever smelled billowing across her face. Her head reared back, and she clapped a hand over her mouth and nose even before she managed to peel her eyes open. Sometime during the night, the dog had crawled into bed between them and now lay on the blankets, breathing on Kylie but with Robert’s arm thrown around her middle. When Kylie raised her head, so did the dog. Her tail wagged twice, thumping softly against the mattress.
“Robert,” Kylie said and poked his elbow, putting a quick end to his slow snores.
“Mmph.” He didn’t move until she prodded his arm again, a little more insistently. Finally, lifting his head far enough to peek over the dog at her, he then looked down at what he’d been hugging in his sleep. He came awake surprisingly fast. “Oh, hell no!”
It was the fastest she’d yet seen him launch himself out of bed. He straightened impressively, his chest expanding even more broadly as he stood there, naked and yet sternly authoritative, pointing back at the door. “Out! Come on, you mangy, flea-ridden—out!”
Slinking, the dog crawled over Kylie to avoid his side of the bed and quickly high-tailed it out into the hall. Robert followed, but as he took hold of the door to slam it after her, a braying shout from outside stopped them both.
At first the sound hardly seemed human. Low-pitched and blubbery, it wasn’t until a fumbling of footsteps stormed up the outer porch that Kylie finally made sense out of the single word being wailed.
“Robert!” Braden didn’t bother knocking. He threw himself into the house, knocking over buckets and crates and running first to the kitchen and then to the stairs. “Robert!”
Robert barely got his pants on and all Kylie had time to do was yank the blankets up to her neck before their bedroom was invaded by the huge and near-hysterical man.
“Mama!” was all he bawled, but it was enough that Robert grabbed his shoes and quickly ran downstairs. Braden followed, leaving Kylie in the bedroom with one seriously freaked out dog. She scrambled for her clothes and tried not to trip on the animal huddling for protection around her feet as she ran after them.
Robert had the truck around front by the time she reached the porch. He and Braden bumped up onto the paved road, and she raced after them. They didn’t stop to wait for her, but thankfully, her neighbors weren’t that far away.
It was still the fastest that she’d yet seen Robert drive, and by the time she was halfway down Braden’s long driveway, cutting through the orchard toward the rundown house he shared with his aging mother, she was just in time to see Robert passing the old woman, carefully swaddled in an old patchwork quilt, up into Braden’s arms in the back of the truck.
“Is she okay?” Kylie panted, climbing into the front seat with Robert.
His face was drawn and frighteningly serious when he said, “I don’t know. Her lips are blue and she’s not waking up.”
The drive to the nearest hospital took nearly an hour and drew them across county lines. As they sat on uncomfortable straight-backed chairs in the waiting area, a nervous Braden fidgeting non-stop between them, it gave Kylie a lot of time to contemplate all the medical advances that she had so taken for granted. The reek of soap and ammonia was as overwhelmingly antiseptic as the stark white of the corridor. The nurses were similar, a small army of stern-faced clones in their colorless dresses and funny white hats, hurrying about their business, all grim and professional and not at all approachable for anyone waiting in the hall with questions about the progress of their loved ones.
The doctors actually seemed to outnumber the patients here, and yet two dead bodies were wheeled right past them on their way to the morgue. Braden visibly flinched each time he saw a sheet-covered gurney. In the end, it took Robert and Kylie each hanging on to one of his strong hands to keep the big man sitting in his chair, breathing hard and trembling, but at least not running up and down the halls screaming for his mother.
“Just relax,” Robert said
, patting his arm. “They’ll come out and tell us when they know something.”
The waiting period was every bit as long as she remembered its being in the twenty-first century. Tense, a little scary, but without the bonus of a television hanging in the corner to help distract them from the crawl of passing time. There was a water fountain down the hall, but no complimentary coffee pot. Hell, they didn’t even have a newspaper or magazines. And after about twenty minutes into their wait, Kylie was ready to kill for a Reader’s Digest. The only human comfort in abundance was cigarettes, dispensed from a machine next to the registration desk. Every other man in the sitting room (as well as some of the doctors and nurses walking briskly by) was smoking like as chimney.
“Mister Walkins?”
They all three looked up at the gray-haired man in a knee-length lab coat who had paused in the hall not far away.
Braden vaulted to his feet. “Me! That’s me.” He raised his hand high above his head for clarification.
Kylie stood up when Robert did. “How is she?” She folded her hands around one of Braden’s, weaving her fingers in between his, just in case.
“Sleeping,” the doctor said. “She had a heart attack and she’s not out of the woods yet. But if she makes it through the night, then she’s got a good chance of going home again. Maybe even by the end of the week; we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“Wait and see,” Braden echoed, but the look on his face was the same now as it had been before, and Kylie wasn’t sure how much that he understood of what the doctor said or even if he knew what a heart attack was.
“Can we see her?” Robert asked.
“She needs rest right now more than she needs visitors,” the doctor replied. “Perhaps later tonight. Or, even better, tomorrow morning.”
When he left them, Braden sank back down on his seat, wrapping his arms around his shoulders as he began to rock, looking for all the world as if he fully intended to wait right here until morning—and visiting time—came.
