Dirty Dancing at Devil's Leap

by Julie Anne Long

  “My mom donated this stuff to me.”

  She realized that raised a lot more questions than it answered, so she hurriedly added, “How’s your mom, Mac? What does she think of your farming and groundskeeping career?”

  “Who knows?” He shrugged with one shoulder, indolently.

  But then he looked away from her.

  The indifference threw her. He didn’t talk to his brother and he didn’t talk to his mom. He could have good reasons. But she had no vocabulary, she realized, with which to discuss someone who seemed to have severed himself from his family.

  He turned back toward her again, and he suddenly looked weary.

  “For crying out loud, Harwood,” he said gently, almost exasperated. “Get a pet. It’s pretty isolated out here. You should get a dog. A really big one. The kind that barks loudly at predators and prowlers and fetches the sheriff when you do things like fall down wells.”

  Just the very notion of a pet made her go silent against a swoop of yearning.

  He reached into his mailbox then and retrieved a flyer he must have missed yesterday.

  “I’m not going to fall down a well,” she said finally. Sounding nine years old.

  “I won’t hold my breath,” he said absently. He ducked his head to read the flyer, then he turned to walk away without saying another word.

  She turned away, too, and sighed heavily, and the next intake of breath was richly redolent of manure.

  Maybe she’d get used to it.

  Damn, but it was practically a coup de grace. It was brilliant. And she ought not to admire it, but she was nothing if not fair.

  And she was nothing if not a competitor.

  Her trip back to the house was a little more leisurely than her initial bolt from it. Suddenly her phone erupted into The Plimsouls’ “A Million Miles Away.” Her sister. It was kind of nice that she wasn’t actually a million miles away now. She was just about twenty minutes away.

  “Hey, Edie. What’s shakin’?”

  “Avalon, I have to hit you up for a favor, and it’s a big one.”

  Ah, siblings. Formalities like “how are you?” went right out the window in favor of expediency.

  “Well, you know me. Go big or go home. Or go buy a big home. Ha ha. Ha.”

  “Yeah. Ha! I’m so sorry to dump this on you, but I can’t believe I forgot it was my turn to host the Hummingbird meeting at my house today! We’re supposed to make friendship bracelets and plant seedlings in egg cartons or some such shit, because they need their gardening badges and I have to feed them lunch. I have all the egg cartons and the dirt. But a big order for a Saturday funeral came into the shop and my supplier sent me daisies instead of lilies and do you have any idea how ridiculous it will be to cover the scion of an old Sacramento family in Gerbera daisies? And now I have to scramble to find the right flowers and drive to Black Oak to beg Cheryl at ‘Coming up Roses’ for her supply of flowers or I could lose the funeral business and I can’t let this happen. Do you think you can fill in for me for at least an hour? I can get them all set up for you and I’ll be back as fast as I can. Probably inside an hour.”

  Eden made it sound as though she’d forgotten to lock the lion cages at the zoo.

  But Eden was burdened with perfectionism. The prospect of failure was probably torture, not to mention letting people down. Avalon wanted to save her, because she really hated it when Eden suffered.

  Also, she knew she could bank the favor. Because that was the law in the world of siblings.

  “Wait—the Hummingbirds are Annelise’s scout troop, right?”

  “Yes. About eight little girls. Smart ones. Darling girls. So sweet and good and just a dream.”

  Eden oversold it. Avalon was suspicious now. “Didn’t you tell me one of them is mouthy? The one who has a brother with a sad mustache and a skeevy vocabulary?”

  “Yeah. You should get along great with her.”

  Avalon snorted.

  She could only imagine what the others were like.

  She loved kids. She was, by nature, whimsical and energetic and prone to non-sequiturs even as an adult, and she wasn’t particularly daunted by the prospect of wrangling a whole passel of little girls. It sounded like a blast.

  In that little pause she could hear goats bleating.

  And the metallic, rhythmic clang of some kind, reminiscent of weekend mornings and her dad attempting to whack their old lawn mower back into life.

  And just like that, an evil little lightbulb pinged on above her head.

  “Hey, Eden—you know what? You should bring them up here! We’ll drag a picnic table out front and do the crafts there. Plenty of room for them to run around and have a good time and tire themselves out.”

  “That’s a fantastic idea!”

  “And hey, do you think you might have any old clothes you can spare that might fit me?”

  “I’ll look. And I swear I’ll only be gone and leave you with the girls for an hour or so. You’re the best!”

  “I am,” Avalon agreed placidly, turning around and looking in the direction of Mac’s cottage, as if she was addressing him. “I am indeed.”

  Chapter 11

  A gorgeous heap of manure was mingling with the turned earth in his garden now, and Mac was feeling cheerful. He liked the beginnings of things. And he’d grown to love doing things from the very beginning to the very end. It had been his salvation, pretty much.

  He’d kind of lost his knack, if he’d ever possessed one, for fielding ambiguity. Or for addressing an onslaught of equal but incompatible feelings, like lust and hilarity, or affection and fury, like yearning and a sense of brutal competitiveness, like admiration and impatience. Avalon Harwood was a whole freaking noisy symphony of those things.

  Taking refuge under a tractor that needed fixing seemed like a restful way to spend the next few hours.

  He crawled beneath, happily tinkering, not thinking about much, until he slid partially out from beneath the tractor to reach for a different wrench.

  A pair of little blue eyes were peering right down into his.

  He jerked in shock and banged his head on the metal so hard it rang.

  “Ow! Shit! Sorry!”

  The eyes belonged to a little girl, wearing a green beret. She took a step back.

  “Hi!” whoever this sprite was said brightly.

  “Uh, hi yourself. Sorry about the swearing. You startled me. Whoever the he . . . whoever you are.” He rubbed his poor head.

  “That’s okay. My grandpa swears a lot. He puts a nickel in the jar every time. My grandma says they almost have enough in that jar for an above-ground pool.”

  Realization dawned. “Ah, you must be Avalon’s niece.” He knew Eden Harwood owned the flower shop downtown.

  “Yep. My Auntie Avalon owns this big house here. I’m Eden’s daughter, and Glenn and Sherrie’s granddaughter, and Jude’s niece and Jesse’s niece, too.”

  “That’s quite a family you got there.”

  “I know!”

  He couldn’t help but smile at her unfiltered delight in her good fortune to be loved by a lot of people. Even if his head was still ringing like one of John Bonham’s cymbals.

  She bent down to peer under the tractor with a frown. “What seems to be the trouble?”

  “Know a lot about tractor motors, do you?” He gave the lug nut a good twist.

  “Nope, I just like to know stuff.”

  “That sounds a lot like your Auntie Avalon. She thinks she knows eeeeeverything.” He gave a bolt a ferocious twist with a wrench.

  “Auntie Ava is really smart. She’s got a head for business.”

  “Don’t I know it,” he said grimly.

  “I can play guitar. I can play G, C, and D now.”

  Children and their non-sequiturs.

  “I bet you can make a lot of songs with those three chords.”

  Why was he making conversation? He gave the nut another ferocious twist.

  “You wouldn’t believe how m
any! What’s your name? I’ll make up a song about you.”

  “Mac,” he said. He knew it was a mistake but was frankly curious about what would happen next.

  “Mac took a snack out of the shack and he told all the girls they betta jump back! Holla!”

  He laughed. She was quick. He slid all the way out from under the tractor and pushed himself to his feet. “Not bad, Annelise. Hey, um, sweetheart, I’m kinda busy right now, so . . .”

  He turned around.

  And froze.

  “What the . . .”

  He was surrounded.

  He counted eight little girls in green dresses, knee socks, sashes, and little green berets. Sixteen bright eyes, ten sets of braids, two ponytails extending vertically from her head, like handlebars on a tricycle, one shining bob, one woven with a festival of colorful beads.

  They might as well be Martians. Because he knew exactly as much about little girls as he did about little green men, and was just as pleased to see them. Absurdly, he was tempted to turn around and run exactly as if they were aliens. (“There were eight of them, officer, with these little beady eyes . . .”)

  They stared back at him with that combination of unblinking, uncensored fascination and lack of self-consciousness particular to children.

  “It smells like poop out here,” Annelise noted, matter-of-factly.

  “Yep,” Mac agreed. “It’s for my garden.”

  “Do worms poop?” a skinny one sporting brown knee socks and short horizontal ponytails asked. She had mischievous little brown eyes.

  “Everything poops,” he said irritably.

  They all giggled. He definitely hadn’t been going for a laugh, but he was flattered anyway. Unless they were laughing at him.

  “Cows poop?” she persisted.

  “Oh, yeah. Big time.”

  “Horses?”

  “You bet.”

  “My dad?”

  “Hopefully.”

  This answer was apparently better than they ever dared dream. They erupted into squeals of hilarity and buckled over.

  “Do angels poop?” a little blond one asked slyly. A creative thinker, that one.

  “I’m not prepared to answer ecumenical questions, ladies.”

  At which point he took off at a brisk pace toward the main house.

  “Avalon!” he bellowed.

  She was nowhere in sight.

  “What does eckmechanical mean?” This was Annelise, scurrying along on his heels, demanding the answer in the manner of a prosecutor.

  “It, uh, means questions about angels,” Mac said, hoping if he lengthened his stride he could outrun them.

  “How do you spell it?”

  Uh-oh.

  “I-T,” he hedged.

  “I meant the other one!” Apparently she’d heard that joke before.

  “Er . . . E-C-U-M-E-N-I-C-A-L. Um, Annelise, I need to talk to your aunt. Do you know where she is? AVALON!”

  He heard his voice echo: “. . . valon valon valon.”

  There was no way Avalon would have let these little girls wander about unsupervised. He was certain she was lurking somewhere, hovering like a mad scientist observing an experiment.

  He walked faster. They seemed to have imprinted on him like ducklings and they were fast as hell. He picked up the pace; they scurried behind. He stopped abruptly and they collided with each other and nearly crashed into him, too. He’d stopped because he saw a flash of pink and gleaming chestnut hair: Avalon on the upper deck. She waved gaily, like she was on a cruise ship leaving shore.

  And disappeared rapidly inside.

  “I think you’re dodging the question,” said Horizontal Ponytails, clearly a future lawyer. “I asked, do angels—”

  “Angels poop feathers,” he said definitively.

  “They do NOT!” she crowed as if she’d laid that trap particularly for him.

  “See? Told you I didn’t know.”

  For some reason this made them fall all over themselves in giggles again.

  He’d never dreamed he was this amusing.

  He picked up his pace, heading around the patio beneath the balcony so he could peer in at Avalon through the French doors.

  They all broke into trots.

  “AVALON!” he hollered again. Like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Only more incensed than panicked.

  Oops. There she was!

  Craning her head to see him from the opposite window. He caught a glimpse of her mouth wide open in laughter.

  “Listen, girls, I need to get a lot of work done today, so . . . AVALON! AVALON!” He waved both arms at her like a man on a desert island spotting a lone biplane.

  She ducked back into the house like a gopher into a hole.

  Oh, she was a she-devil. A crafty, crafty she-devil.

  “Hey, Mac. Auntie Ava said she had a hunch you would show us what you’re planting and how you plant it and stuff. We need it for our badges.”

  “I’ll just bet she had a hunch. Wait, what do you mean, badges? Are you sheriffs?”

  How about that. He had to admit to himself that he was deliberately going for laughs.

  They obliged him by erupting into those now familiar giggles. Apparently being a child was not much different from being a drunk. Life was intoxicating.

  “Nooooooo!” most of them crowed.

  “We’re Hummingbirds,” Annelise corrected him, mopping her eyes of laughter tears.

  “There’s a surprise,” he said grimly. Hummingbirds were cranky, tireless, demanding little things that never stopped moving. Nevertheless, he kept two hummingbird feeders going because they were, in a word, enchanting. “Is that like a scout troop?”

  “Yep,” Annelise said firmly. “And we need to earn badges for gardening. Because Tiffany’s gang in Black Oak Hummingbirds already has them and we need to beat them. They keep beating us! It’s embarrassing! Appalling, really.”

  He blinked a little at her vocabulary. “Tiffany’s gang? You have factions inside the Hummingbirds?”

  His own reflexive sense of competition reared up.

  “What are factions? Like three fourths, one half, like that?” Annelise wanted to know.

  “Well, um . . . sort of.”

  “Because one half of the Hummingbirds have one half of their badges and I never get behind so I need my gardening badge. We always win.”

  Boy, did she sound like Avalon right then. Which only made it harder to resist her.

  “Pleeease help us.” She implored with folded hands, all limpid blue eyes. Arrayed all around her, all of the eyes, all those shades of blue and brown and hazel and long fluffy eyelashes, beseeched him.

  He craned his head toward the balcony again.

  No Avalon.

  He looked back toward the Hummingbirds.

  He was made of something like stone. But how did any human resist those faces?

  He heaved a sigh so exasperated it ought to have fluttered their ponytails.

  “Well, this is what I’m doing today, girls. I need to check my tomato plants for worms that can hurt the tomatoes. And then I need to pluck them off when I find them. And they’re so gross. I mean, grosser than poop. Really icky. They’re fat, and green, and they kind of have little diamonds on their sides, and horns.”

  “Real diamonds?” One of them was skeptical.

  “Real horns?” Another sounded hopeful.

  “It’s not nice to call something fat.” This was from a stern-faced little girl sporting the shining, symmetrical bob.

  “Diamond the shape”—he outlined this in the air with his fingers—“not the diamonds that you can wear in your ears or in tennis bracelets.” Too late it occurred to him that they might have no idea what a tennis bracelet was, as they weren’t old enough to date spoiled rich boys yet. “It has really little horns.” He demonstrated by propping two fingers atop his head. “And it’s squishy and plump and doesn’t mind being called fat, because it’s an accurate description and because it’s a worm.”r />
  They absorbed this, assessing whether they wanted to be involved, perhaps.

  “Because that’s what I’m doing. Today is all about worms. I’m pulling worms off the tomato plants.”

  He said all of this almost desperately. Hoping for at least a token “ewwwwww!”

  But they were all eyeing him with fascination.

  They were silent, he realized too late, because they could not believe their luck.

  “We can help you do it!” Annelise announced. “We can help you in your garden! We need to learn about worms and gardens for our badges. It’ll be perfect! Oh please oh please oh please.”

  And now they were pogo-ing around him with excitement.

  He closed his eyes briefly and tipped his head back as if beseeching a heartless God.

  How had this happened to his morning?

  Avalon freaking Harwood. Damn, she was good. And it was yet another thing she’d remembered: he’d claimed to loathe children, way back then.

  “What do you do with them when we find the worms?” Annelise was worried. “You don’t hurt them, do you?”

  “I . . . um . . . put them in a coffee can. And then I send them to live on a different farm where they have plenty of room to roam.” He crossed his fingers.

  “That’s what my dad did with our dog Rufus when he got old!” the bright-eyed Hummingbird named Emily told him.

  Poor old Rufus, Mac thought. “You don’t say.”

  “But aren’t other worms good to have around?” Annelise demanded.

  “Excellent! They certainly are. Just like people, different kinds of worms have different kinds of jobs. Earthworms help the soil. They eat stuff and poop it out and the soil becomes richer and more fertile and your vegetables become more delicious.”

  “So does that mean when we eat tomatoes and lettuce and stuff we’re kind of eating worm poop?” Annelise asked.

  He hesitated only a second. “Absolutely,” he intoned solemnly.

  If she never ate a salad again, that was his revenge on Avalon.

  “Awesome!” she breathed.

  They didn’t make little girls like they used to. Or maybe they did, and they just felt less obliged to be sissies for little boys, which was probably a good thing.