Hard Row

by Margaret Maron

  CHAPTER 14

  In the country, we can wear out our old clothes and go dirty sometimes, without fear of company. A little clean dirt is healthy; city folks wash their children too much and too often.

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  When he first suggested marriage, back when we agreed it would be a marriage of convenience and for pragmatic reasons only, Dwight said he was tired of living in a bachelor apartment, that he wanted to put down roots, plant trees.

  I thought that was just a figure of speech.

  Wrong.

  No sooner was his diamond on my finger than he borrowed the farm’s backhoe and started moving half-grown trees into the yard from the surrounding woods. I had built my house out in an open field. The only trees on the site were a couple of willows at the edge of the long pond that sits on the dividing line between my land and two of my brothers’. Now head-high dogwoods line the path down to the water. Taller oaks and maples would be casting shade over both porches this summer. Pear trees, apples, two fig bushes and a row of blueberry bushes marked the beginning of a serious orchard. He had built a long curved stone wall to act as extra seating for family cookouts and we had planted azaleas and hydrangeas behind the wall. The azalea buds were already swelling despite Tuesday night’s freezing rain.

  Saturday’s warm sunshine and soft western breezes had brought everything along, and in a protected corner on the south side of the house, buttercups were up and blooming. Flowering quince and forsythia were showing their first flush of pink and yellow and if the weather held, they would explode into full bloom by the middle of the week.

  It was a jeans and muddy workshoes weekend. Dwight and the children and I spent most of it out in the yard, and some of my brothers and a couple of sisters-in-law stopped by to help set out a row of crepe myrtles on either side of the long drive out to the hardtop. Their twigs were bare now but Dwight promised that by late July we would be driving in and out through clouds of watermelon red.

  It wasn’t all work. The year before, my nephews and nieces had installed a regulation height basketball hoop at the peak of the garage roof so that they could use the concrete apron in front for a half-court. Dwight lowered the hoop from ten feet to eight, inflated four of the collapsed balls stashed in a bushel basket beneath the work bench, and showed the kids the hook shot that could have let him play for Carolina had he not joined the army instead.

  Cal and a chastened Mary Pat were on their best behavior with Jake. Being outdoors in the milder weather helped, of course. Running, jumping, digging in the dirt, riding their bikes, or using the hose to water in the new plants doesn’t take fine motor skills and there’s no squabbling over balls when every kid has one. It also helped that Robert had brought his grandson Bert along and that Bert was the same age as Jake. It took a lot of pressure off the two older children.

  Some of the farm dogs showed up and there was a flurry of snarls and growls and bared teeth before they backed down and acknowledged that Bandit did indeed own the territory around the house, territory he’d spent the last few weeks assiduously marking.

  Will and his wife Amy came out from town and Will got sucked into work while I stomped the dirt off my shoes and went inside with Amy. Will’s three brothers up from me; Amy is his third wife. She’s also the head of Human Resources at Dobbs Memorial Hospital and she was in the process of writing a grant proposal to fund a pilot program for servicing their Hispanic patients. I had told her that I would vet the proposal and that we could use my Lexis Nexis account to look up pertinent case law as it pertains to undocumented aliens.

  “Documented or not, we’re getting so many people in our emergency room and at the well-baby clinic that we need more translators to work every shift,” she said. “It scares the bejeebers out of some of the doctors and nurses when they’re trying to explain a complicated drug regimen and the only translator may be the patient’s first-grade child. How can they be sure that a six-year-old understands enough to tell her mother that she needs to take the pills in increasing and decreasing dosages? And don’t get me started on ID cards. We almost killed a man the other day. The record attached to that particular ID card said that he wasn’t allergic to penicillin, but guess what? The man who presented the card that day was deathly allergic. We almost lost him.”

  I showed her how to get into the site and suggested key words that might pull up the info she was after.

  I like Amy. She’s small and dark and claims to have Latin blood somewhere in her background despite not speaking a word of anything except English. She has a firecracker fuse and gets passionate about causes, but she also has a raucous sense of humor, all necessary traits to stay married to Will.

  He’s the oldest of my mother’s four children and a bit of a rounder. Will’s good-looking and has a silver tongue that could charm birds out of the trees or dollars out of your pocket, which is why he’s such a good auctioneer and just the person you want if you’re selling off the furnishings of your grandmother’s house. He doesn’t exactly lie, but damned if he can’t make your granny’s circa 1980 pressed glass pitcher sound almost as desirable as a piece of Waterford crystal.

  While Amy roamed the Internet looking for factoids to bolster her proposal, I read over what she had so far, put some of her layman’s language into more precise legalese, and marked a few places where specific examples would help illuminate the point she was making.

  As she printed out the pieces she wanted to save, we talked about the migrant problem. Floods of undocumented aliens have poured into North Carolina in such a very short time and not all are “Messicans” as Haywood calls any Latino.

  “I heard Seth telling Will about y’all’s meeting last Sunday.” She grinned. “Ostriches?”

  We giggled about Isabel’s thinking hogs would be more natural and about Robert’s reaction to the idea of shiitake mushrooms.

  “Seth said something about giving the kids some land to grow some chemical-free crops?”

  “They won’t be able to market their crops as organic for a few years,” I said, “but it’s a start.”

  “And bless them for it.” Amy gathered up the printouts, blocked their edges, and pushed back from the computer. “It absolutely infuriates me to see how cavalier some of the growers are with pesticides.”

  “Well, Haywood and Robert can remember when they had to worm and sucker tobacco by hand,” I said as we moved into the living room. I added another log to the fire and we sat down on the couch in front of the crackling flames. “No wonder they love being able to run a tractor through the fields pulling a sprayer that’ll take care of everything chemically.”

  “Better living through chemistry?” Amy slipped off her boots and tucked her short legs under her. “Except that it isn’t. I wish they had to see some of the migrants who come into the emergency room, covered with pesticides, their clothes green with it. The rashes on their skin. The coughs. The headaches and memory loss and God alone knows how many strokes, cancers, and heart attacks have been triggered by careless handling. They’re not supposed to go back in the fields for forty-eight hours after some of those chemicals are used, yet we’ve had women tell us that they’ve actually been sprayed while they were out there working. Most times they don’t even know what they’ve been doused with. Birth defects are up. It’s criminal. We’ve called EPA and the US Department of Agriculture on some of the employers, but there’s not enough teeth in the laws to make the growers back off.”

  Her tirade broke off as the children came in, hungry and needing to use the bathroom. I had set out a tray of raw vegetables and sliced apples with a yogurt-based dip, but Mary Pat spotted the bowl of oranges and immediately asked if I’d cut a hole in the top so she could suck out the juice. The three boys thought that was a great idea and they all headed back outside, oranges in hand, noisily sucking.

  “She’s a pistol, that one.” Amy laughed. “Kate’s going to have her hands full.”

  “She already does,” I
said ruefully.

  We took the children back to Kate and Rob’s on Sunday evening, tired and dirty and ready for bath and bed. Kate, on the other hand, looked the most relaxed I’d seen her since R.W. was born. There was color in her pretty face and her honey brown hair had been cut and styled since yesterday morning. The haircut echoed her old glamour and reminded me that she had been a New York fashion model before she married Jake’s dad and switched from modeling clothes to designing the fabric for those clothes.

  “You could still be a model,” I said when we were alone together in the kitchen, putting together coffee and dessert while Dwight and Rob discussed the virtues of planting more than two varieties of blueberries.

  She made a face. “For what? Plus sizes? Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “You’re not fat,” I protested. “And you were way too skinny before. In fact, the first time Bessie Stewart saw you she told Maidie they could just stick two grains of corn on a hoe handle and use that as your dress form.”

  Bessie Stewart is our mother-in-law’s housekeeper and a plainspoken country woman.

  Kate laughed. “I know. She’s still trying to fatten me up. You certainly don’t think I made this custard pie, do you? Skinny or fat, I’m comfortable where I am, though, and I appreciate you and Miss Emily giving me this weekend to put it all in perspective. I’m not superwoman and I’ve been hovering over the kids too much instead of letting them work it out. I’m sorry I snapped at you yesterday.”

  “No, you were right to. It doesn’t hurt to teach older children to be patient with younger ones. All the same, Kate, you need to understand—”

  “You don’t have to say it. Rob admits that he was a pain in the butt to Dwight and Beth, and that Nancy Faye used to irritate the hell out of all of them in turn. I never had brothers or sisters, so I never saw that give and take. Anyhow, things are going to get better. Rob’s finally convinced me that the children won’t grow up to be axe-murderers if I get back in my studio and work on some designs I’ve been mulling around in my head.”

  She filled the cream pitcher with half-and-half and added it to the tray.

  “We haven’t touched Lacy’s room since he died last year.” A shadow flitted across her face for that cantankerous old man, her first husband’s uncle.

  Lacy Honeycutt had initially resented Kate as an interloper who bewitched Jake and kept him in New York almost against his will. It had been hard for Lacy to realize that it was Jake’s competitive zest for the New York Stock Exchange and not Kate alone that kept him away from the farm. When Kate inherited the place after his death and came down to await little Jake’s birth, she had needed all her persuasive charm to bring Lacy around. He had approved of Rob, though, and so adored his infant great-nephew that he continued to live in the room he’d been born in, even after Kate and Rob were married.

  “We’re going to fix up Lacy’s room and hire a live-in nanny,” Kate said. “Mary Pat’s trustees have already agreed to kick in with part of the cost.”

  “Great!” I said. “But does this mean that we have to find another place for Cal after school?”

  She shook her head and gave me a mischievous smile. “Nope. It does mean that I’m going to bill you and Dwight for a prorated share of her salary, though.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  We solemnly shook hands on it, then carried the pie and coffee out to the living room.

  Cal went to bed soon after we got home, but before Dwight and I called it a night, we let Bandit out for a run and walked outside ourselves to admire what we’d accomplished that weekend.

  The night breeze lacked the bone chilling edge it had carried only two days ago, yet the cool air still required jackets and gloves. A quarter moon gave enough light to see where we were putting our feet and I could almost smell spring in the air.

  In one of our few quiet moments the day before, Dwight had explained why he was so late getting back Friday night.

  “I can’t believe we’ve had this whole weekend without somebody finding another body part,” I said. “I was sure you were going to get called out for the missing head.”

  “I just hope the ME’s preliminary report’s on my desk tomorrow morning and that it says they’ve found a tattoo or a prominent scar or anything that’ll help us make a positive ID. The only thing halfway unique to this guy is that an X-ray of his right arm shows that he broke the ulna about ten years ago. I bet at least twenty percent of the guys in this country have broken a right arm sometime in their lives.”

  He told me that the Alzheimer patient’s family had been notified and yeah, he’d heard that they’d retained Zack Young to file a civil suit against the nursing home.

  I told him that Kate and Rob were going to hire a live-in nanny and that we’d need to share the cost. “It’ll still be cheaper than putting Cal in formal after-school care. Better for him, too.”

  “You ever gonna say what yesterday morning was all about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “C’mon, Deb’rah. I may not have been a full-time dad after Jonna and I divorced, but I got up there at least twice a month and I know my son well enough to know he wouldn’t pass up a Canes game on his own.”

  I was silent.

  “He’s not giving you a hard time, is he? Talking back when I’m not around? Disobeying?”

  “Nothing like that. Honest. It was just a little bump in the road and we agreed that this is the way to smooth it out. If it was something serious, I’d certainly tell you, but I gave him my word and I don’t want to go back on it, okay?”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He looked down at me with a rueful smile. “Got more than you bargained for, didn’t you, shug?”

  “I’m sorry Jonna’s dead,” I said honestly. “And I’m sorry for the way this happened, but Portland and I had already planned on getting the custody arrangement amended so that you could have Cal here for holidays and summers.”

  He shook his head. “Poor Jonna. She wouldn’t have stood a chance with you two.” Then his smile faded. “I’m just glad we didn’t have to put Cal through a court battle, glad he didn’t have to choose between us.”

  I squeezed his hand and we walked down the drive to where the young crepe myrtles began. In this silvery light, they were a double row of pale slender sticks and leafless twigs.

  “I’ll probably be sore tomorrow from all the work we did today, but they’re going to be beautiful,” I said.

  Dwight turned and looked back toward the house. “I was thinking we could put more pecans on the south side. They’ll shade both bedrooms in the summer, but they won’t interfere with the solar panels or the power lines.”

  I smiled.

  “What?” he said with an answering smile.

  “I was just thinking how old we’d be before any trees get tall enough to interfere with the wires.”

  “Less than fifteen years if we keep them watered and fertilized.” He gave a contented sigh. “We really are married, aren’t we?”

  I laughed out loud. “It takes trees to convince you?”

  He stopped and I turned to look up into his face. What I saw there made my heart turn over.

  “Dwight? Sweetheart?”

  He put his arms around me and his voice had a sudden rough huskiness. “I used to try and imagine what it would be like if hell froze solid and I actually got you to marry me.”

  “And?”

  “And this is better than I ever imagined.”

  Our lips met in the moonlight.

  “Much better,” he said and kissed me again.

  Despite the cool night air, I began to feel warm all over.

  Dwight never needed to have a diagram drawn for him. “Why don’t we take this inside?” he murmured and whistled for the dog.

  CHAPTER 15

  We must take things as we find them, making a choice of such as seem to us, by the use of our best judgment, to contain the most good and the fewest evils.

&
nbsp; —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  FLAME SMITH

  MONDAY MORNING, MARCH 6

  Flame Smith was tired, angry, and fighting a dull headache, the direct result of driving east with the morning sun in her eyes for three hours. All weekend she had waited at Buck Harris’s mountain lodge, willing him to pull up in the drive and honk the horn exuberantly upon seeing her car there.

  It never happened and she was now so furious with Buck that had she met him as she drove down the winding private road, she would have rammed her Jeep into his BMW hard enough that the hood would be smashed all the way back to the steering wheel in such neat little even pleats that he would be playing it like an accordion.

  The image gave her a sour pleasure. So did the image of chasing him back down the mountain with the .357 Magnum she kept in the console beside her.

  In her forty-odd years, she had been chased by many men. Had even let a few catch her. Usually on her terms. Wasn’t that why God had given her a mane of fiery red curls, flawless skin with a light dusting of freckles across an upturned nose in the middle of a lovely face, a nicely proportioned body with a twenty-inch waist, and a low sexy laugh that men wanted to hear again and again?

  She had passed forty with every asset still intact, so why was she chasing around the state of North Carolina looking for this particular man? Yes, he had money and yes, she was tired of worrying about how she was going to pay the mortgage on Jackson House, her B&B down in Wilmington; but he was not the first man with money to want to put a ring on her finger and another one through her nose. He was not classically handsome, he needed to lose at least twenty pounds, he could be crude and rough, and like many self-made men she had known, he seemed to have the ethics of a polecat. But he was hung like a prize bull, he was surprisingly unselfish in bed, and he made her laugh.

  The older she got, the more important that was becoming.

  All the same, if he thought she was going to sit around cooling her heels while he took his sweet time to let her know why he’d broken both their date and his word, he had another thought coming, she told herself. It could have been fun for both of them, but c’est la damn vie. Enough was enough.