A Year on Ladybug Farm #1

by Donna Ball

  “Good,” said Ida Mae. She stacked the cake plates on the corner of the table and folded her hands across her stomach. “ ’Cause I got something to say. I ain’t getting any younger, you know, and I have a mind to take it easy in my remaining years. I can’t be running up and down them stairs changing your beds every day, or hanging out your linens to dry or doing your ironing, either. So if you want your sheets changed more than once a week, you need to do it yourself.”

  Her eyes went from one to the other of them, and they said not a word.

  “And another thing,” she went on, “I can’t keep up with all this cooking at my age. I figure Sunday dinner in the dining room is about all I can manage, but during the week, you’re gonna have to do for yourselves. Now, I don’t mind helping out now and again, keeping the place tidy, peeling potatoes and the like, for my room and board. But I ain’t no machine, you know. You all are just going to have to learn to do for yourselves, and if you don’t like it, now’s the time to say so.”

  There was an immediate chorus of understanding and agreement from Lindsay and Cici, but Bridget didn’t say anything at all. She simply stood up, walked around the table, and hugged Ida Mae. At first Ida Mae looked startled, even embarrassed, as though she didn’t know what to do with her hands. But Bridget did not back away, and eventually Ida Mae lifted her arms and patted Bridget uncertainly on the back.

  “Thank you,” Bridget said again, softly.

  Ida Mae grasped Bridget’s shoulders and stepped away. “Well,” she said gruffly. “How about doing up them dishes, then? I got to get to my resting.”

  “I’ll be happy to,” Bridget replied, smiling. “But first, we were going to have a glass of wine by the fire. Maybe you’d like to join us—for a sip of sherry?”

  Ida Mae looked at her for a moment, her eyes narrowed fractionally. And then she smoothed out the folds of her apron, tilted her chin, and pronounced, “I don’t mind if I do . . . just this once.”

  Winter

  Home

  18

  In Which an Ill Wind Blows No Good

  It got cold, and then it got colder. The brilliant cobalt days and vermilion sunsets gave way to lead-streaked skies that spit icy particles of snow. Almost overnight the last of the yellow and orange leaves shuddered off the trees and left nothing but bony protrusions along the spine of the mountaintop. The lawn turned brown with dead leaves that accumulated faster than they could rake them, and the ragged, withered seed heads of a few forlorn flowers were all that remained of the perennial beds.

  “Why didn’t anyone tell us how much colder it is in Virginia than in Maryland?” Lindsay complained, shivering in a turtleneck, sweatshirt, jacket, wool hat, and gloves as she came in from packing the last of the mulch around the roses—now so bleak and forlorn-looking it was hard to imagine they would ever bloom again.

  “I just wish the sun would shine again,” Bridget said, searching through a book on horticulture. “It’s the grayness I can’t stand. Do you know if we’re supposed to do anything to the raspberry bushes for the winter?”

  If they had thought about it at all, they had all imagined winter as a time of rest and respite, of baking brownies on a snowy day, sitting before the fire with a book, soaking in a bubble bath, and curling up in bed beneath a downy quilt while the big old house stood sturdy against the storms that raged outside. In reality, it took a lot of wood to keep the fireplaces cozy, even with the gas heaters, and someone had to haul in the wood and sweep up the ashes. Brownies would have been nice, but Ida Mae had confiscated the kitchen in order to make her fruitcakes, and they didn’t dare complain because with all the fruitcake batter they sneaked during the day no one had much interest in brownies. The house was indeed sturdy, but it was big and the windows were only single-paned, and bubble baths weren’t nearly as much fun as they might have been in a house with a little more insulation and few less cross-drafts.

  And then came the morning when Bridget turned on the burner to heat the pancake griddle, and nothing happened. After a frantic check of all the house’s various switches and gauges, Cici came in from outside, blowing on her fingers, and reported, “The propane tank is empty. We’ll have to get someone out to fill it today.”

  Bridget stared at her, aghast. “We just had it filled last month!”

  Cici nodded. “Good thing we can still heat with wood.”

  “But that cost us two thousand dollars!”

  “It’s a big house,” agreed Cici, looking unhappy. “And trying to keep it warm isn’t easy.”

  “But—we can’t spend two thousand a month on propane! That’s not even counting the cost of electricity for lighting and the water pump and—”

  Cici just sighed. “I know. I guess we didn’t count on that.”

  It turned out there was a lot they hadn’t counted on, not the least of which was how much preparation was required to winterize a farm. The leaves had to be raked and the constant rain of twigs and sticks that fell from the trees had to be gathered for kindling. Shrubbery and fruit trees had to be pruned. The flower beds had to be cut back and the vegetable garden plowed under (Farley: ten dollars). The roses had to be pruned and mulched and the concrete garden ornaments had to be sealed. The outdoor water system had to be drained, the faucets covered, and the pipes that led to the house had to be insulated and wrapped with heat tape. The wisteria had to be cut back, and the grapevines tied. And then, of course, there were the outbuildings.

  Cici was determined to get the barn weathertight for the livestock, despite the fact that the sheep had survived at least one winter with nothing more than the lean-to in the meadow, and the deer presumably had managed with even less. J&J Lumber delivered an alarming stack of plywood, six-by-sixes, roofing paper, and shingles, and Cici ran an extension cord for her circular saw from the workshop to the barn. Piece by piece, she replaced rotten siding, repaired sagging hinges and broken latches, and shored up fallen beams. Every night she gave a cheerful report about how well the work was coming and how much she enjoyed it, but Bridget and Lindsay were not fooled.

  Lori had not called, and every attempt Cici made to reach her daughter went straight to voice mail. Once upon a time, in another life, Cici had exorcized her anxiety with a cell phone and a BlackBerry. Now she did it with a hammer and nails.

  And then one day Lindsay came into the kitchen where the other two were warming their hands before the fire after a morning of dragging limbs out of the yard in a bitter wind. The expression on her face was strained. “That was Reverend Holland on the phone,” she said, with a vague, uncertain gesture back toward the foyer where the telephone was located. “He thought we’d want to know—since we’d asked before, and everything—that the trailer where Noah’s dad lived burned to the ground this morning.”

  Both women dropped their hands and looked at her, stunned. The wind-rouged spots of color on their faces suddenly seemed a stark contrast against paler skin.

  “He . . .” Lindsay cleared her throat. “The dad, that is, was found a few feet away, dead from smoke inhalation. It looked as though he tried to get out, but too late.”

  “Dear God,” said Bridget softly. “How awful.”

  Cici said, “Noah?”

  Again Lindsay cleared her throat. “Apparently he’s been living at a campground not too far away. The sheriff tracked him down to tell him about his father, and tried to get Noah to come to one of the shelters. But he ran away.” She stopped and shook her head fiercely as though trying to free herself of the images inside her head. “What kind of place is this anyway? Alcoholics left to burn to death in their trailers, children living in campgrounds . . .”

  Cici and Bridget enfolded her in their arms, but no one knew what to say. And when Lindsay, furiously scrubbing hot tears out of her eyes, muttered, “I hate this place,” they didn’t know what to say to that, either.

  Thanksgiving was fast approaching, but none of them was very interested. Bridget’s children hoped to make the trip to Virginia for Christmas,
but Kevin had to work and Katie really couldn’t afford it; they hoped she understood. In fact, Bridget was relieved. A small turkey, soaked in bourbon and served with sausage dressing, would be fine for just the three of them. Ida Mae had already made the pecan pies.

  Lindsay raked leaves and stacked kindling and pruned trees with a ladder. Bridget painted trim and tied up grapevines and spread bale after bale of hay over the frozen muddy meadow. The days were short and dark and filled, not with things they wanted to do, but with things they had to do. All of them were cold and tired, and in the backs of their minds, teasing and dancing like a playful imp, was the knowledge that, in little over a month, their contract would expire. Not that any of them seriously considered reneging on the deal.

  Not really.

  But a restlessness was rising within them like an arctic wind, fueled by disappointment, discouragement, and uncertainty. It was not something they could define or contain, or even understand most of the time. What had begun as a grand adventure was not so much fun anymore, and the cold, gray twilight came earlier every day. No one talked about it. But they didn’t sit on the porch anymore, and most nights, gathered around the fireplace, they were too tired to talk at all.

  And then, two days before Thanksgiving, something happened that changed everything.

  In the unwritten Rules of Sisterhood, there are very few occasions upon which it is acceptable to lie to your best friend. When she accidentally waxes off an eyebrow an hour before her dinner party, for example, of course you tell her that, as long as she combs her bangs down, no one will notice. When looking into the face of her newborn infant whose squashed-down features remind you of something from the cast of Alien, or after listening to her eight-year-old butcher the violin for two hours at his first recital, everyone can agree that discretion is always the better part of valor. However, Lindsay was almost certain that making a date to meet an old boyfriend for lunch was not among those Acceptable Occasions for Lying to Your Best Friends. And she was still not entirely certain why she had done it.

  Nonetheless, when Shep called, she had barely even hesitated. She put on a skirt, swept up her hair, dug out earrings from the bottom of her jewelry box. She used hand lotion and shaved her legs. She told Cici and Bridget that she was going to Charlottesville to get an early start on her Christmas shopping, and she even hid a pair of high heels in her purse so that she could change when she got in the car. And then she went to Staunton to have lunch with Shep.

  They met in a little street-front restaurant with chintz tablecloths and waitresses wearing Battenburg lace aprons, and were seated before the fireplace. Shep kissed her cheek in greeting, and told her how wonderful she looked. Lindsay hoped he wasn’t lying, because she had gone to a great deal of trouble to look like anything other than what she was—a woman who hadn’t seen a hairdresser in six months, who only wore lipstick on Sundays, whose hands were rough and calloused from digging in the dirt, fighting back undergrowth, and wielding tools that had nothing to do with a paintbrush or palette knife. Shep, of course, was as elegantly good-looking as ever, turning heads with his expertly barbered silver hair and his crinkled green eyes.

  “Not much to this town, is there?” he commented as he held her chair, and Lindsay had to laugh.

  “Are you kidding? This is the big city!”

  He had told her on the phone that he was driving through the Shenandoah on vacation, which was probably a lie because it was too early for the ski resorts to open and there were certainly more hospitable months than November for vacationing in the mountains. But she had pretended to believe him, because the alternative would have been not to see him at all. And she was glad she had done so. Because seeing him was like a sudden welcome breeze, bringing with it the taste and the smell and the feel of everything she had left behind . . . movie theaters, walks along the harbor, coffee shops, bookstores, symphony concerts, sailboat rides. They talked about the crab cakes at Finos, and tailgate picnics on Saturday afternoons, and they laughed over the escapades of her former students, and he brought her up-to-date on mutual friends and colleagues.

  “They miss you,” he told her, warm green eyes smiling tenderly as he reached across the table for her hand. “We all do.”

  She said, “I miss them, too.” She was surprised to find that was the truth. The simple, achingly genuine truth. “I miss a lot of things.” She let him hold her fingers atop the rose print tablecloth for a moment, then she returned her hand to her lap.

  “So,” she said with determined pleasantness, “how is Estelle? Didn’t she come with you?”

  He sat back, his gaze steady. “We’re divorced,” he told her. “As of June.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t know why she was suddenly so tongue-tied. “Well, I’m—that is, I hope . . . I’m sure it was for the best.”

  He nodded. “I guess you figured out I’m not really up here on vacation.”

  She reached for her water glass. “You didn’t really drive all the way out here just to tell me about you and Estelle?”

  “That was one reason,” he admitted. “The other one was . . .” A slight pause, and his eyes drew her in. “To offer you a job.”

  Lori called just as Bridget and Cici were finishing lunch—egg salad sandwiches and tomato soup from a cup that they ate leaning against the countertop because every other available surface was occupied by chopped candied fruit, nuts, bowls of eggs and brown sugar, and mounds of flour made the color of pale sand by the generous addition of spices. The kitchen smelled like mace and allspice and warm baking sugar as Ida Mae took yet another sheet of perfect brown loaves from the oven.

  “How many of those do you make every year, anyway?” Cici asked, watching as Ida Mae placed each loaf on the cooling rack.

  “Enough,” replied Ida Mae succinctly. “Wouldn’t be Christmas to some folks without my fruitcake.”

  Cici and Bridget exchanged a glance, wondering how many of those fruitcakes ended up being secretly shipped off to other deserving relatives by their recipients. And then Bridget said, with a sudden mischievous look in her eyes, “Ida Mae, would you mind making a couple extra for me? I’d like to send some to my friends in the city.” She grinned at Cici. “Wouldn’t Paul and Derrick get a kick out of that?”

  “Lotta work in a fruitcake,” Ida Mae grumbled.

  “I’ll help of course,” Bridget volunteered.

  “And they ain’t cheap.”

  “I’ll buy the ingredients.”

  Ida Mae added with a sly glance at the two of them, “But it’s the wine that makes them special.”

  Bridget’s eyebrows lifted. “Wine? Ida Mae, you put wine in your fruitcakes?”

  Ida Mae gave her a disparaging look. “Don’t you know nothing? It ain’t a fruitcake unless you wrap it muslin and soak it in wine for a month. That’s why you have to start baking them so early.”

  She went into the pantry and returned after a moment or two with a bottle of red wine, brushing the dust off of it with her apron. Cici said curiously, “Where did you get that?”

  “Mr. B always let me put some by every year for my fruitcakes, back in the day,” replied Ida Mae defensively, holding the bottle close as Bridget came to look at the label.

  “Good heavens,” she said, “this is Blackwell Farms wine. Ida Mae, can I see this for a minute?”

  Ida Mae surrendered the bottle reluctantly. “Don’t you go thinking about chugging it down,” she warned. “It’s for my fruitcakes, and I’m getting low.”

  “Don’t worry,” Bridget assured her. “Look at this.” She showed the label to Cici. “Blackwell Farms Shiraz, 1967. Can you imagine?”

  “I never claimed to be a wine expert,” Cici said, wrinkling her nose, “but doesn’t it go bad after forty years?”

  “I read somewhere that they found a goatskin of wine from ancient Greece in a cave and it was still drinkable,” Bridget said.

  “Well, I think the grapes of ancient Greece might have been a little more durable than the ones in Virgin
ia. This probably turned to vinegar twenty years ago.”

  Ida Mae snatched the bottle away. “It did not. People used to pay good money for this wine.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s fine for fruitcakes,” Cici said quickly.

  Bridget added, “I’d love to have the label when you’re finished with the bottle. Maybe Lindsay could frame it. It would look nice in the foyer along with the newspaper clipping and the landscape map, wouldn’t it?”

  Ida Mae shook her head and muttered something about city women hanging newspapers on the wall, and that was when the phone rang.

  Cici answered the phone. Her daughter, with the frank lack of guile that Cici so adored about her, said, “Mom, I’m really mad at you right now.”

  And Cici replied, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Daddy said he wants me to spend Christmas with you this year. He says he has to do business over the holidays and I wouldn’t have any fun if I stayed here. But I don’t think that’s it. I think you two had a fight, and I ended up losing. I always end up losing, Mom.”

  Cici winced. “Lori, you know I never meant—”

  In the background, Ida Mae started fussing about something to do with where Bridget had put the measuring spoons, and Bridget held up a hand for silence, her face turned in concern toward Cici.

  Lori said, “Didn’t it occur to you that I might want to stay out here? Maybe I have friends here, things to do, a life—even if I don’t get to go to Aspen for the holidays, thank you very much! What’s the point of going away to college if I don’t get to make my own decisions? I’m grown-up now, Mom. You’ve got to let go.”

  Cici ground her teeth together, and squeezed her eyes briefly shut. In a moment she managed, “Honey, I never meant to deprive you of a good time. I want you to have different experiences while you’re away. You’re right, that’s part of the point of going to college.” With the very greatest of efforts, she said nothing about Italy. “But the other part is learning how to make mature decisions, and I’m just not sure that you’ve been making very good choices lately.”