Guarded

by Angela Correll

  “Beulah, did you get that blouse at Penny’s? I declare they have the best end-of-summer buys going on right now.” Betty’s small eyes peered out from the fullness of her round face, admiring her shirt like it was a coconut cream pie.

  “I got it last year,” Beulah said. “I haven’t bought a thing lately and I reckon it’s all picked over now.”

  “I’ve been shopping for fabric and I wish it would go on sale. I was hoping to find something nice to decorate the tables for the wedding reception,” Evelyn said.

  “Terrible big job you’ve got.” Betty said, clucking her teeth and craning her neck to make eye contact from the front seat.

  Evelyn sighed, “I can’t get Mary Beth to make any decisions. She tells me whatever I decide will be fine, but it’s her wedding for goodness’ sakes. Scott’s the same way. They should go off to Gatlinburg and be done with it, but his family is all coming up from Alabama and they want the reception so everyone can meet.”

  “Surely you’re not hosting a wedding and a houseful of company,” Betty said.

  “It’s just his parents, his brother, and an aunt and her husband,” Evelyn said. “It’ll be fine.”

  “Well, I hope Scott and Mary Beth appreciate what all you’re doing,” Betty said, arching her left eyebrow at Evelyn before turning to face forward.

  Beulah shivered at the thought of planning a party and entertaining a crowd to boot, but she and Evelyn were cut from different cloths when it came to entertaining.

  Evelyn smiled and thought before she answered.

  “Honestly, I love it. With Jake and Suzanne being gone for the last several years, I haven’t had the opportunity to throw many parties for them. Of course, after Charlie died, I hadn’t really been in a party mood.”

  “Well, it’s a mighty good thing you do love it since you’ve bit off a chunk of hard work,” Betty said.

  Joe sat silently and drove, probably not even listening to the chatter. After being married to Betty all these years, and with her overabundance of words, he was likely thinking about cows, tractor engines, or crops—maybe even how to persuade Betty to sell the pink Cadillac. Anything but a wedding.

  The road to the Country Diner wound this way and that, up and down hills, until they finally arrived at the red metal building on the side of the road in Chicken Bristle. It was just after five in the evening, but the parking lot was filling up. Saturday night was all you can eat catfish, seasoned and fried, freshly reeled in from Lake Cumberland by the owner’s son.

  The air inside the diner had vastly improved three years ago when smoking was banished to the deck out back. Beulah was still surprised to see that day come to rural Kentucky, where most everyone she knew had made their living off tobacco. But times had changed and folks were aware of the harm it could cause. She did wonder if the buyout hadn’t come around, which put most tobacco farmers out of business, might there still be smoking allowed inside?

  Annie had gone with them one night to the diner. She had complained about the fluorescent lights, saying it needed more atmosphere, and the food was too greasy. It was all the atmosphere a body needed, but not the kind Annie liked. The food was a bit on the greasy side, but everybody knew a little grease made both man and machine function a bit better.

  They greeted friends as they passed through the room to their usual table. Patsy, the waitress, stopped by the table and said, “Same as always?” When everyone nodded, she swished off for the sweet tea.

  There was something very pleasant about a routine, she thought. No surprises, no disappointments, just pure comfort and familiarity. A few new faces appeared now and then, but overall it was the same crowd nearly every Saturday night.

  Betty leaned in. “Well, now we’ve got one wedding underway, any news on Annie and Jake?” The question was addressed to both Beulah and Evelyn, her bright eyes darting back and forth between the two of them. When she looked at Evelyn to answer, her friend simply nodded the question back in her lap.

  “It’s only been a few weeks,” she said. “And Jake’s gone back and forth to Cincinnati moving and getting his house ready to sell. I’m not sure they’ve quite settled in yet.” Betty looked at Evelyn.

  “I agree—it’s too early. Even though they grew up together, there’s ten years to catch up on while Annie was in New York and he was living in Atlanta and then Cincinnati.”

  “Seems time enough to me,” Betty said. The waitress brought their teas and small bowls of finely chopped coleslaw.

  “I’m sure she misses her life in New York City with all that fast pace and fast talk,” Betty said, as if she had some inside knowledge of Annie’s feelings.

  “She does, but she’s awful happy here,” Beulah said.

  “Well, she hasn’t landed a job yet, and I just wonder if she might be tempted to go back and work for the airline,” Betty said, looking from her to Evelyn as if they were the ones responsible for her granddaughter not getting a job.

  “It’s not for lack of trying,” Beulah said. “After her friend Janice comes for a visit in October, she said she would start looking in Rutherford, or maybe even Lexington.”

  “One of her old roommates?” Betty asked.

  “No, Janice is her married friend,” Evelyn answered, rescuing her from the hot seat. “Annie told me all about her. She’s Italian American,” Evelyn said.

  Joe reached for the saltshaker and made his only comment, surprising Beulah he was actually listening. “I had a good friend who was Italian when I was in Vietnam. He was from New Jersey and could tell stories that would make you cry laughing so hard. I liked him real well.”

  “You must have picked up some of your tales there,” Evelyn teased.

  “He give me some good ones,” Joe said.

  “What about the old stone house?” Betty asked. “Did Randy come over and do the estimate? Sounds like good money to me. What about that Stella woman who burned it in the first place? She ‘ort to give you some money for the trouble of it all,” Betty said.

  Beulah finished her slaw and put her fork down.

  “She doesn’t have any money. It’s why she came running down here from Chicago. Jake’s been helping her get connected with a money counselor up in Chicago. She’s working on getting herself straightened out,” she said.

  “Talked to Woody the other day,” Joe said. “He was headed up to Chicago looking to buy a horse.”

  Betty cut her eyes at Joe.

  “Joe Gibson, you didn’t tell me! Why, you know Woody only has one reason to go up to Chicago. The sparks flew when he and Stella met after all that fire and missing persons ordeal. He hasn’t gone up there to buy no horse. Who would leave Kentucky to buy a horse when we’ve got all the horses right here?”

  Beulah saw Joe grinning into his iced tea, pleased with himself for holding out information Betty would have wanted to share herself. She brought her napkin up to her own mouth and acted as if she were trying to wipe something off so she could hide her grin while Betty’s full lips pouted.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice? Woody’s been a bachelor so long, I thought he never would marry,” Evelyn said. “Maybe there’s something in the water.”

  “If there is, I’m not drinking out of it,” Beulah offered. “One man was enough for me.”

  The waitress brought the fried catfish platters with hush puppies and an ear of corn and a container of homemade tartar sauce.

  “Me too,” Betty said. “If somethin’ ever happened to Joe, I mean. Some days, one man is too much,” Betty said and then cut her eyes over at Joe again before allowing him a faint smile. Joe grinned back, like someone would do with a wayward child.

  Beulah noticed Evelyn’s silence after both she and Betty had chimed in on not marrying again. Evelyn stared at her plate, cutting up the catfish with the precision of a surgeon.

  Surely catfish didn’t require so much concentration.

  Chapter Five

  ANNIE STARED AT the papers spread out in front of her. Preservation grants were availa
ble from different organizations, most outside of Kentucky, but none would be awarded until after the first of the year, and some not until spring. Just as Lindy anticipated: far too late for her grandmother’s timeline.

  She leaned back and twisted and untwisted her hair as she thought. If the history center gave her a shred of indication on the house’s age, anything to shed light on its history, it was well worth a trip to Frankfort. Her phone vibrated on the wooden table and Jake’s name popped up on the screen.

  “Are you awake?” Jake’s deep voice both soothed and excited her.

  “I’ve had enough coffee to keep me up all night. Where are you?”

  “Walking through the barn lot. I didn’t want the car to wake Beulah. Meet you out back.”

  Jake was home, sooner than expected. Annie jumped up and took a quick peek in the bathroom mirror, then dabbed on some powder and lip-gloss. She grabbed a sweater hanging on a peg in the back room before going out.

  Once her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw his shadow, silhouetted against the stock barn’s security light, moving toward her.

  A hug and a long kiss, and then he took her hand and led her around to the front porch.

  “I missed you,” he said. They sat on the old porch swing and she leaned into him.

  “How did it go?” she asked.

  “The closing went well. I ended up going out for an early dinner with the guys, and I couldn’t see spending another night there on somebody’s couch when I could come home and see you.”

  “Did you have a good time with your friends?”

  “Yeah. They messed with me about leaving town for Green Acres and old MacDonald’s farm. I actually think they were a little envious. One of my friends pulled me aside and asked if I needed any help on the farm,” Jake laughed. “I told him it’d be a while before I can pay myself, much less him.”

  She squeezed his hand, enjoying the sound of his voice and the warmth of his body next to hers.

  “Did Camille’s dad come to the dinner?” she couldn’t help but ask. He had been a mentor to Jake and wanted his youngest daughter to marry Jake. When the relationship broke up over the summer, her father was understandably disappointed. Jake’s relationship with Camille’s father seemed to be the real casualty, since Camille had apparently moved on to a New York real estate executive.

  “No, but he sent a note wishing me the best. It’s just as well.” He reached over and pulled a strand of hair away from her face.

  “I wonder … What if we had not ended up here last summer?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it was meant to be,” Jake said.

  “Grandma says that all the time. I wonder about it. Are things meant to be despite human choice? Or, are they meant to be because of human choice?”

  “Maybe it’s both,” Jake said. “I think entire theologies are formed around those questions.”

  “So when did you know you wanted to come back and live here?” she asked.

  “When Dad died,” Jake said, his voice just above a whisper.

  The answer surprised Annie and she sat up straight and turned so she could face Jake. “Five years ago,” she said.

  “It’s taken me a while,” Jake said.

  “Why then?”

  “Dad wanted me to come back to the farm after college. I’d had enough of dairy farming and I liked finance, so I took the banking job in Atlanta. The Cincinnati promotion came along after that. Everything was going my way until Dad got sick. I took a leave from work to help on the farm since the doctors said it wouldn’t be long. He was gone within a month,” Jake said.

  Annie remembered she was taking flights from New York to Dallas and Chicago at that time. Knowing what it was like to lose a parent, she had reached out to Jake and they talked two or three times during his dad’s short illness. When her grandmother called with the news that Charlie Wilder had passed, she was sitting on the edge of a bed in an airport hotel in Dallas.

  “After he died and I went back to Cincinnati; I was in a weird place. I felt guilty about not helping him more, not spending more time with him. It was like being haunted with all the things I should have done for him. There was no way to fix it and I hated myself for it. There was a girl I was dating at the time,” Jake’s voice trailed off. “I didn’t treat her very well.”

  His blue eyes looked deep into hers, as if seeking her forgiveness for some past sin.

  “I understand. Guilt mixed with grief can do terrible things to your mind,” she said. They were silent for a few moments before she gently said, “Then?”

  “Camille’s dad helped me through it, meeting with me and encouraging me to take stock and decide where to go from there. Another guy from the bank lost his wife and went through something similar. Both of those guys helped me to see that you can’t change the past, but you can change direction. That’s when I realized I didn’t like what I was doing, even though it paid well. My idea of success changed. After reading books on sustainable farming, I decided I could farm in a different way than Dad. Build on what he started and take it another direction.”

  Annie’s back rested comfortably on Jake’s chest and she thought about the couple of times she reached out to Jake after his father died. The long distance made her unable to hear what he was truly going through; when Jake said he was doing fine, she had believed him.

  “What about you? When did you know you wanted to come home for good?” Jake asked her.

  Annie smiled in the darkness.

  “It was the day of the fight with Camille,” she said. “My attraction to you was getting harder to push down and the way she acted about knowing what was best for you made me want to put Camille in her place. When the gate slammed, Nutmeg spooked, and she fell off that horse, I suddenly got scared she was really hurt. It was so childish,” Annie laughed. “When I knew she was okay and she trounced off in her expensive boots, I felt victorious, as if I had defended my territory or something. There was more truth in that moment than I understood at the time. It was when I knew this place belonged to me and I belonged to it.”

  Annie felt Jake’s arm pull her closer into his chest.

  “It was a rough two-hour drive to Cincinnati for me after that, but I’m glad you had that moment. It’s the day I broke it off with her.”

  “I thought the opposite—sure I had pushed you together for good. When you left with her, I just knew you were going back to put a ring on her finger.”

  “I needed perspective,” Jake said. “When I saw Camille so uncomfortable in a place so familiar and comfortable for me, it made me pause, and when I did, the whole thing unraveled.” Jake kissed her on top of the head.

  Off in the far pond, the frogs croaked their evening lullaby. In only a few short weeks, they would be silent for the winter, making their melody tonight even more lonesome than usual.

  “My perspective has certainly changed. Last spring I was pushing Grandma to sell the farm, and now I’m the one trying to persuade her to save the old stone house. It makes me sick to think of losing it.”

  Jake pushed her off his chest and turned her to face him.

  “Look, I just sold my house and have cash in the bank, why don’t I lend Beulah the money?”

  She pulled back.

  “No, she would never let you do that.”

  “Then I’ll donate it,” he said.

  “She will really never let you do that,” she laughed.

  “Then I’ll help work on it when the time comes … I’m not bad with a hammer.”

  “You’re already so busy with the farm,” Annie said.

  “It’s what I want to do for the one I love,” he said, pulling her close again.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, I love you,” he whispered in her ear.

  She wrapped her arms around him and said the words softly back to Jake, her lips close to his ear, and feeling the rough stubble of his cheek on her face. They held each other for a long time. Over his shoulder, the harvest moon hung full and b
old in the night sky. The man on the moon was plain to see and she imagined for a moment she saw him wink.

  ***

  The morning light filtered through the kitchen window. Annie studied a grant application while sipping her coffee.

  “Booger is out by the back step, so be careful when you go out,” Beulah said, coming into the living room with a broom in her hand. “I’d say it won’t be long before he goes to hibernating.”

  “Do snakes hibernate? I thought only bears did that,” Annie said, looking up from the pile of papers in front of her. “I could’ve swept the porch for you,” she added.

  “I need the exercise.”

  Beulah carried the broom to the closet where they kept cleaning supplies. “He goes off every winter and finds a hole somewhere. I don’t know what it’s called, but he won’t come around again until spring. Ever since he showed up, I’ve hardly seen a mouse on the place. Booger does a much better job than the barn cats,” Beulah said and scanned the room. “Now where did I leave my coffee?”

  “Personally, I prefer cats,” Annie said as she left the room. She found Beulah’s coffee cup in the kitchen and refilled both of their mugs.

  “How you coming along?” Beulah asked.

  Annie sat back down at the table.

  “Right now, I’m narrowing down the grants we might apply for. Then, I need to do all the research so I can complete applications. Tom said there are tax credits, which help. Anyway, I’m working on pulling all this together so we can talk about it once I have all the facts.”

  Beulah nodded, her expression stoic.

  “Speaking of facts, I did get an estimate from the architectural salvage company,” she said. “Funny thing is, it came to Evelyn’s address but she brought it over to me.”

  “How much was it?”

  “Nearly as much as the insurance check,” Beulah said. “That makes a nice sum to bank for a rainy day.”

  ***

  Jake was bent over the engine of a tractor when she found him in his barn lot.