“Hey, Dad, are you busy?”
“Just doing a hike. About forty kids, halfway through. What’s up?”
“Oh. Nothing. At least nothing you’d have to stop a group for. It wouldn’t be easy for you to come right now, huh?”
Tucker frowned again, his paternal instincts on alert now. “I can come in two shakes if you need me. What’s going on?”
“Nothing, really. There was just this copperhead. And Garnet doesn’t let anybody in the vanilla greenhouse but her and me. So I don’t know how the snake got in here, maybe it just likes the heat, you know? Anyway, I got a bucket on it. I figured I’d go find a pitchfork. But I wasn’t sure if I should lift the bucket, because the snake was pretty mad, and if it got loose, there’s a lot of places for it to hide in here. And then there’s the other thing.”
“The other thing? There’s worse than the copperhead?”
“Well, not exactly. It’s just Mrs. G. Normally she’s pretty cool, you know? She’s no sissy. But I guess she isn’t so good around snakes. I told her to sit down, put her head between her knees. You know. Like we talked about when people feel dizzy and stuff. Actually I’m not sure she was dizzy. She was screaming pretty loud for a little bit. I think she could have just run out of breath.”
“But she has employees right there, doesn’t she?”
“Dad, I told you. She doesn’t let anybody in the vanilla house. Except for me. Because she trusts me. And it’s all secret, what she does in here.”
Tucker wiped a hand over his face. “Okay. This is what I want you to do. Leave the snake under the bucket. Don’t touch it. And you get Garnet out of there, lock up the greenhouse so she won’t worry, then make her sit down in the shade—preferably at her place. Get her something to drink with sugar. Like lemonade or pop or whatever she’s got around. Make her sit.”
“Dad, I can’t make her do anything. She’s the grownup, remember?”
“Try.” Tucker squinted. “I’ll get there. It’ll take a little more than two shakes. I’ll have to get a couple staff members up here, get them organized, pick up Petie from the office. So know I’m coming—but still, call me again if the snake gets loose or Garnet gets sick or something worse happens, okay?”
“Yeah, okay. ’Bye, Dad.”
It was darned hot to have to move mountains, but Tucker put it in high gear, shifted personnel so he could bring his best summer staff to take over the hike—there were other groups on the mountain, but not many counselors who could handle girls this age and survive it. Still, picking up Petie was harder than rearranging schedules affecting more than four hundred people.
“I’m right in the middle of the website rebuild, Mr. Tucker. I can’t leave right now.”
It was cool and quiet in the office, and the darn kid looked more like an adult than he did. Tucker’s desk was clean. The trash bin wasn’t overflowing. The usual messages were displayed with thumb tacks on the cork board—naturally, in timed order, and then alphabetized.
“Pete, it’s about your mom and a snake. The website can wait.”
“Trust me. I can’t help her with a snake. So I might as well just stay here and do this.”
“Pete, if I have to drive there once, it just makes the most sense for you to come with me.”
“But I could stay here. And Will could stay there. We already talked about it. We’re okay with it.”
“What do you mean, you two talked about it? You talked about what?”
Pete’s cheeks suddenly bloomed rash-red. “I dunno. I was just mumbling.”
It came out on the ride down the mountain. Tucker considered himself occasionally gifted at pulling needles out of haystacks, but finally Pete hunched over by the window and started talking.
“The thing is, Will loves his mom. But he said he likes my mom better than he likes his mom. Which seems obvious to me, because my mom is pretty awesome. As moms go. She loses stuff all the time and sometimes forgets to pay bills. She threw a cup against the wall the last time my grandma gave her a hard time. It broke.”
“TMI,” Tucker said firmly.
“But Mr. Tucker, you asked. So I’m just trying to explain.”
“I wasn’t asking about your mother’s private business. I was asking what you and Will talked about.”
“Oh, yeah. That. Well, I told Will, I hear the women in the shop always trying to talk Mom into going out. You know. Like for an evening. Like a date or something. And she says to Sally, ‘I will, I will,’ but she never does. I don’t remember my dad very well.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Truth is, I don’t remember him at all. I think I do. When I look at a picture of him in a uniform, the one that’s in my room. Then I think I’ve seen him looking like that. But I’m not sure if I’m imagining it.”
“Pete—” Tucker made his voice stern, making Pete give one of those world-weary sighs again.
“I know, I know. You want to hear what Will and I were thinking. We were just talking, you know. Sometimes we call or email each other. Like after the kayak race. How much we liked doing stuff like that. And how maybe it would be a good idea to let you and my mom have a little time together. So Will called his uncle—”
“Ike was in on this?”
“Well, yeah. How else could we have gotten you two together for time by yourselves? We had to have a reason. So Will thought up his Uncle Ike, and we both thought up a plan to just spend the night on the mountain—but inside. Not where there are bugs and stuff. Anyways—”
“You and Will get along pretty well, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t we?”
“Well…you’re pretty different.”
“Like, yeah. But Will’s okay that I’m smarter than him. And I’m okay that he’s more popular than me. Everyone likes Will. I think that’s good, though. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m okay by myself. I mean, I don’t want anyone to hate me, but—”
They were almost to Plain Vanilla. Tucker had to corral the conversation back to the point.
“I’m having a hard time believing that you boys were actually trying to matchmake your mom and me.”
“I don’t know what matchmake means.”
“Getting your mom and me together. Like paired up.”
Petie gave another of his old-man sighs. “Look, Mr. Tucker. I don’t think we should get the cart ahead of the horse. I mean, it’s practically taken my whole life to get her to go out with a guy. It’s like one thing at a time, you know? Sometimes my mom just has to get used to something before she’s okay with it. Like the cat.”
“Is the cat inside yet?”
“Yeah. As of two days ago. I’m pretty sure it snuck in for a reason. Like that she’s about to have kittens, so she wants to make a nest somewhere safe. Anyway, when I went to the grocery store with my mom, I put some kitty litter in the cart. My mom acted like she didn’t see, but she saw. That’s how you have to do things with my mom. Go slow. Let her say no a few million times.”
Tucker pulled into the yard, turned the key. “That’s some serious advice you gave me, Pete. I appreciate it.”
“Thanks.”
“Now let’s go save your mom. Or…how about if you save your mom and I go see about the snake.”
“Works for me.” Pete was out the truck door in a flash…almost as fast as Will ran out from Garnet’s back door, banging the screen in his rush.
“Dad!”
If he wanted to mull over that impossible conversation about Garnet, there was no time or chance. Will was almost beside himself, both with importance and information. His son had to replay what happened with the snake so far, start to finish, from when Garnet spotted it, what he’d done, what she’d done, what happened after that, what happened after that…
The immediate thing he had to handle was t
he snake.
He could do it.
He’d done it a zillion times.
He just liked handling snakes like…well, it was hard to imagine anything he disliked more. He wasn’t a screaming meanies kind of guy. It was just…their eyes. The way they slithered. Snakes were a high ick factor. And although the reference books claimed copperheads were generally happy to avoid humans, Tucker’s experience was that it took very little to piss them off.
He pulled on boots—he always kept an old pair in the truck for situations just like this. This was no job for sandals. And then he told Will, “I don’t want you anywhere near this.”
“What? How come?! I can help—”
“I know you can, but you and Pete need to do something important. I saw customer cars in front of the shop, so people are in there, and so are her employees. For a couple minutes, we don’t want anyone outside, and especially not near the vanilla greenhouse. Your job is to make sure no one comes near until I call for you, okay?”
“Okay.” There. The kids had a job. They were now happier.
Tucker wasn’t. He edged the door open to Garnet’s infamously private vanilla greenhouse, readily saw the tall green bucket upside down right in the walkway. He wanted to look around—pretty damned amazing, what she had going on in there. But he pulled on elbow-length rubber gloves, which were real fun to wear in temperatures this hot, then grabbed a hoe, and then carefully, carefully lifted the bucket.
He was more than ready to spring…braced for anything…certain he’d have one mighty ticked copperhead on his hands. Instead, there was nothing.
The copperhead was somewhere in the greenhouse, but not under the bucket. Which meant Tucker had a real fun hunt ahead of him. He started swearing, low as a hum, and after locking the damned door so no one could conceivably get in the damned place by accident, he began snake-searching from the west side of the viney jungle. As he looked up, then down, using the hoe, moving slow, he added to his swearing vocabulary, using words he never used, and inventing a few more just because.
* * *
“I did not faint.” Sheesh, she was surrounded by nags. The shop was closed. Sally and Mary Lou had bullied her into the house, then onto the couch, and were still standing like sentinels, hands on their hips. The boys were sitting on the floor, backs against the far wall, playing some kind of game, but both within hearing distance.
No one was leaving her alone. Afraid she might faint again.
“I told you all. I just stumbled a little and happened to fall. I didn’t faint. I’ve never fainted and I’m not about to take up the habit now.”
“But you did, Mrs. G. I saw your eyes close,” Will corrected her, and then tried to retell the copperhead story again.
They’d each brought her something to drink—for shock, they all said—which meant she had Gatorade, tea, Kool-Aid and a pop, all dripping sweat on the coffee table in front of her. Mary Lou had brought her a blanket. Then Petie brought her an afghan. Even with the air-conditioning on, it was hotter than blazes—she didn’t need any covering, but every time she tried to sit up, four sets of hands pushed her back down again.
To add insult to injury, the cat—the damned cat that wasn’t hers—had taken up roost on the red velvet chair in the far corner. The chair and unique table were obviously her treasures. She obviously didn’t spend money frivolously. Her whole place was decorated on a dime. She just seemed to need a couple of things that were all hers, even if they were impractical and like nothing else she had. And now the fattest cat this side of the Smokies was purring from across the room, shedding hair on the gorgeous red velvet.
It was almost enough to make her cry.
And then Tucker walked in, like a hurricane blast of testosterone, all sticky-hot and stomping-energy. “It took a while, but the score was finally one for the humans, zero for the snake.”
“Did you kill it, Dad? Did you kill it?”
“No. I wanted to. We weren’t pals. It was quite a confrontation, and for a while, I wasn’t sure who was going to win out. But she’s removed from the greenhouse, removed from the property a good three miles from here.” He was still talking when he leaned around the cluster of bodies and finally spotted her. His frown was instant. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said immediately, only the swarm of boys and women immediately told them—all at once—how she’d keeled over and they’d had to watch her ever since because she wasn’t listening to anybody.
He parted the seas, loomed closer. He probably couldn’t hear over the caterwauling, but it only took three shakes before he’d planted a rough hand against the side of her neck, checking for heartbeat or pulse or temperature or something—who knew?—then removed the blankets and sat her up. The whole time he was looking at her. Not looking at her, the way he’d looked at her the night they made love. But just…looking. Like a scientist examining a specimen. Checking for skin color and eyes and sweating and any other annoying signs of illness.
“Okay,” he said to the crew. “Here’s the deal. Mary Lou and Susan—”
“Sally,” her employee corrected him.
“I’m sorry. Sally. I promise you both I’ll make sure she’s taken care of—including dinner and supervision to make sure she eats something. Does the shop need locking up?”
“No, we did that,” Mary Lou said, but she was sending him mistrustful glances. “It’s always Garnet who counts the money and sets all that to rights. And that’s still in the cash register.”
“I’m guessing Pete can be trusted to do that,” Tucker said.
“Well, yeah,” Pete said, as if that should have been obvious to anyone.
“There are things she wouldn’t let strangers do,” Mary Lou said sternly, standing like a marine sergeant, arms crossed.
“Then I definitely won’t do those things,” Tucker said. “But I’m guessing if Garnet’s not feeling her best, she could use some quiet and rest, and the faster we all get out of here, the faster that can happen.”
Garnet couldn’t believe how quickly he cleared the room. Mary Lou sent him a couple more warning glares, but she eventually let out her last “hmph” and aimed for the door. Sally was already there, glancing nervously at her watch—Garnet worried there might be trouble if Sally arrived home even a few minutes late. “Just call him,” she urged her quietly.
“Yeah, I will. But you quit fretting about all of us.” That was Sally’s last parting shot. When she’d become completely surrounded by so many bossy people, she had no idea.
Will and Pete swarmed Tucker, wanting to hear how he’d captured the copperhead, what danger he was in, how scared he was, how menacing the snake was and all that blah blah blah. The makings of bacon and peanut butter sandwiches ensued—apparently Tucker’s specialty, the pouring of milk and making of sandwiches—after which, the boys disappeared outside with their paper plates. Tucker finger-clasped the range of glasses on her coffee table, made them disappear and then returned to hunker down on the coffee table with their sandwiches.
Before he’d even said a word, the damn cat stood up, stretched, carefully leaped down from the red velvet chair and waddled over to the two of them. She’d leaped up to the coffee table before Garnet could scold her. Garnet decided she would simply ignore her altogether.
That wasn’t hard, when Tucker claimed all of her attention the instant he sat that close.
“Quit looking at me,” she said. “I haven’t had a chance to brush my hair or wash my face in hours.”
“You look breathtaking.”
“I wasn’t fishing for a compliment.”
“Okay, I’m so sorry I said that.” He cocked his head. “You’re really freaked by snakes, huh?”
“Yes. I admit it. I can do the occasional bear, lots of deer, skunks, mice, I’ve nursed hawks back to life, and one batch of motherless raccoons
—don’t ask. Pete made me. I had to. Anyway. Give me anything but snakes. I can’t help it. They just give me the willies.”
“Lots of snakes in South Carolina.”
“Thanks for reminding me of that.”
A wry grin. He’d finished his sandwich in about three seconds. “I’m just saying, you love being outside. I’d think you’d be used to snakes by now.”
“That’ll happen when it rains money.”
“Are we feeling a little testy?”
“I didn’t faint.”
“I believe you.”
“I just got a little sick to my stomach. And had to sit down.”
“That’s pretty much how Will told it. Just a couple details different.” He lifted his hands in an innocent expression, just as she was about to brain him with the paper plate. “You’re feeling okay? That’s all I was trying to ask.”
“I’m fine. And very sorry you got dragged over here in the middle of your workday.”
“You saved me from a couple dozen tweens. All females. I was sinking fast. In fact, when Will called me, I was so grateful, I almost cried—especially when I had such a righteous excuse about needing to save a damsel in distress. So please, please call me the next time—anytime—you run across another snake.”
Darn man made her grin. And then laugh. “Okay,” she admitted finally, “I know I’ve been a pill. Everyone was…hovering.”
“I don’t do well with hoverers, either. No need to apologize.” He scooped their paper plates and napkins together, set them aside, hunkered closer. “I do need to get home—and to get Will home. But I need to tell you something before I go—and before the boys charge back in.”
“What?”
“While we were driving here, Pete told me something.” Suddenly he was looking at her again. Not looking, as if examining her for bruises and scars. But looking the way he’d looked the other night. The night they’d made love. The night that kept replaying in her mind like a love song she couldn’t stop humming.
Little Matchmakers Page 12
