and you can think up lots of games that take three peo-
ple. You don’t have to play what she wants every time.
Isn’t there anything besides television that you like that
Jake can do, too?”
Again that shrug, but then he grudgingly admitted
that Jake was getting pretty good at Chinese checkers.
“He almost beat me last week. And when we played with
the blocks, his tower was higher than Mary Pat’s.”
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“There you go then. See? You guys are going to know
each other the rest of your lives and the older you get,
the less it’s going to matter that he’s four years younger.
By the time you get grown, four years won’t make a
smidgin of difference. Your dad’s six years older than
me and that doesn’t matter to either of us, does it?”
“What doesn’t matter?” asked Dwight, who came
into the kitchen yawning widely.
“That you’re an old man and I’m your child bride,”
I said as I got up to pour him a cup of coffee. “Rough
night?”
“Tell you about it later,” he answered. “You two look
awfully serious. What’s up?”
“Guess what?” I said brightly. “Your son’s giving me
his ticket for the next Canes game.”
“Really?” He looked at Cal and I could tell that he
was half pleased, yet half puzzled. “You sure, son?”
Cal nodded. “She likes them, too, and I heard
Grandma talking with Aunt Kate ’bout how y’all haven’t
been out together since . . . since” —his eyes suddenly
misted—“since I came to live here.”
I was stricken, knowing that he was thinking of Jonna
again and that he probably felt a stab of heartsick long-
ing for his mother, for the way things had been all his
life. Another moment and I might have weakened.
Fortunately for the cause, Dwight beamed and tousled
Cal’s hair. “Thanks, buddy. We really appreciate that,
don’t we, Deb’rah?”
“We do,” I agreed. “Right now, though, Cal and I are
on our way to pick up the others. We can swing past a
grocery store if you want something special for supper?”
“Don’t bother. By the time you get back, I’ll be
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dressed and they can ride with me to see if the nursery’s
got in those trees I ordered. I’ll pick up some barbecue
or something.”
Cal was quiet on the drive over to Kate’s, but shortly
before we got there, he said in a small voice, “I really am
sorry we were mean to Jake and got Aunt Kate mad.”
“You might want to tell that to Aunt Kate next time
you catch her alone,” I said, not being real big on pub-
lic apologies. As a child, I much preferred a few quick
swats on my bottom to the galling humiliation of having
to apologize to someone in front of everybody. There
were no cars behind us, so when we came to the stop
sign, I paused and turned to face him. “And just for the
record, Cal, as long as you try to do right by Jake, this
is over and done with so far as I’m concerned.”
“You’re not still mad at me?”
I smiled at him. “Nope, and I don’t hold grudges
either.”
His look of relief almost broke my heart.
“Look, honey. Stuff happens. I know you wish things
could be the way they used to be, but they aren’t and
there’s no way anybody can change it back. Your dad
and I know this isn’t easy for you. There’re going to
be times when you think you hate everybody and that
everybody hates you. When you make bad choices and
do things you know you shouldn’t, then yeah, I may get
mad for the moment. But you need to know right now
that I do love you and I love your dad and I don’t care
how mad we all get at each other, I’m not going to stop
loving either one of you. Okay?”
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It could have been a Hallmark moment.
In a perfect world, he would have leaned over and
given me a warm spontaneous hug while someone
cued the violins, and bluebirds and butterflies fluttered
around the car.
Instead, he stared straight ahead through the wind-
shield for a long moment, then sighed and said,
“Okay.”
Hey, you take what you can get.
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C H A P T E R
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 dog-
woods 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
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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 cor-
ner 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 low-
ered 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 be-
havior with Jake. Being outdoors in the milder weather
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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
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 pa-
tient’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 dos-
ages? And don’t get me started on ID cards. We almost
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killed a man the other day. The record attached to that
particular ID card said that he wasn’t allergic to penicil-
lin, 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 dol-
lars 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 le-
galese, 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 undocu-
mented aliens have poured into North Carolina in such a
very short time and not all are “Messicans” as Haywood
calls any Latino.
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MARGARET MARON
“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 print-
outs, blocked their edges, and pushed back from the
computer. “It absolutely infuriates me to see how cava-
lier 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 mi-
grants 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,
dling. 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
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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 im-
mediately 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.
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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 super-
woman 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 cantan-
kerous old man, her first husband’s uncle.
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Lacy Honeycutt had initially resented Kate as an in-
terloper 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