I sat down at the table and Hambone jumped up in my lap. Though not yet fully grown, the young beagle was almost too big to hold anymore. He laid his head on the edge of the table and stared soulfully at Aunt Zell.
“A friend told me that the French call November le mois du mort,” I said, scratching the dog’s soft ears.
“Maybe things die back in France,” she said wistfully. “Here, they all seem to be catching their second breath. I saw a gardenia bud on that bush in the back corner. My spirea’s starting to bloom again and the hydrangea leaves are just as green as they were in August. Camellias are going to be blooming before the pecans finish dropping. And that reminds me.”
She crushed the stem tips of yellow, pink, scarlet, and white roses and arranged the mixed bouquet in a silver vase. “If you’re going out to the farm today, Kezzie said he’d send me a quart of pecans he’s picked out if I wanted to start on my fruitcakes.”
I’m probably one of only fifty people in the whole country who really like fruitcakes, especially Aunt Zell’s. Daddy’s one of the other forty-nine. Much as I wanted her to get started, too, I had plans for the weekend and they did not include a trip out to the farm. We were going to head over to Durham and do town things for a change.
“Sorry” I said, “but Kidd and I are—”
At that precise instant, the phone rang. Aunt Zell answered, smiled at me, and said, “Yes, she’s right here. We were just fixing to start talking about you.”
I made a face and pushed Hambone off my lap. Kidd knows I like to sleep in on Saturday morning and he would have dialed my private number upstairs before trying Aunt Zell’s. The only reason he’d be tracking me down this early was to say he was going to be late, right?
Wrong.
“I’m really sorry, Deborah, but you remember what it’s like to be fourteen, don’t you?”
If he hadn’t sounded so torn between duty and desire, I might’ve told him that I certainly did remember. That, yes, fourteen’s about the time when a girl figures out how to blend guilt and charm to get what she wants. And that what Amber Chapin wants is no other female in Kidd’s life.
Instead, speaking as graciously as I could between clenched teeth, I assured him that I could survive the weekend without him if his daughter needed his companionship more. “It’s okay. Honest.”
As I hung up, Aunt Zell and Hambone both gave me an inquiring look.
“So, Hambone,” I said. “How would you like to go for a ride in the country?”
His stubby little tail wagged furiously.
Nice that one of us was happy.
10
« ^ » The cause, then, that could induce a people of this cast, to forsake their native lands… and make them seek for habitations in countries far distant and unknown, must, doubtless, be very cogent and powerful.“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
By the time I finished running errands around Dobbs, it was after lunch before I got out to the farm.
Adam’s rental car was parked out back, but Daddy’s ancient red Chevy pickup was nowhere in sight. Neither of them was in the house either, so Hambone and I walked on down the lane to Maidie and Cletus’s little house.
“Adam’s out somewhere with the dogs and Mr. Kezzie went off this morning to get a haircut,” said Maidie, who was gathering dried marigold seeds from her dooryard flower garden. “I expect he’ll be back any time now.”
She tried to get me to sit on her porch swing and wait for Daddy, but Hambone was going crazy with all the smells and sights, and I decided to see if we could find Adam.
“Well, he might be burning some brush over by the creek,” said Maidie. “Seems like I smelled smoke coming from that way. Don’t know who else it’d be less’n that Gray Talbert’s burning off his weeds again.”
She chuckled at her own joke and her gold tooth flashed in the weak sunshine that was trying to break through the gray clouds.
Maidie came to the farm as a teenager to help Mother when I was just a child. It was supposed to be a temporary thing till the woman we called Aunt Essie came back from attending the birth of her first grandchild up in Philadelphia. But a loving-natured Aunt Essie met a widowed Philadelphia policeman with two motherless teenage girls and Maidie met Cletus Holt, one of Daddy’s best tenants, and both of them decided they’d landed in greener pastures.
Even though IRS irregularities were what had sent Daddy to prison before I was born, his farm workers preferred cash under the table and no Social Security deductions. Mother wouldn’t play those games with the people she hired, and she was always meticulous about paying into Social Security and a pension plan, too, for Maidie and Cletus. Maidie made him keep it up after Mother died.
I suppose if I were more politically correct, I’d bemoan this surviving remnant of old-time mutual dependence— white landowner, black domestic. Instead, I was grateful for the continuity.
“Where’s that good-looking man of yours?” Maidie asked me now. “Not run off with some pretty young thing, has he?”
“As a matter of fact, he has,” I said ruefully.
Instantly, her teasing smile faded into concern, but before she could offer me sympathy and start heaping scorn on Kidd, I quickly explained that the pretty young thing in question was his daughter. Maidie wasn’t completely mollified.
“She’s living right there in New Bern, ain’t she? How come they can’t see enough of each other through the week?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s her birthday or something.”
Maidie gave me a shrewd look. “Onliest child your boyfriend’s got and you don’t know when her birthday is? ’Pears to me you don’t like her much, do you, honey?”
“She’s the one doesn’t like me,” I protested.
“Which one of you’s the grown-up?” Maidie said, as she went back to gathering flower seeds.
I may have a law degree and I may be a judge, but seems like I never win an argument with her.
It was a good half-mile to where Maidie thought Adam was and when I got there, I saw a smoldering bed of embers, all that remained of a pile of brush. There were dog tracks and the imprints of a boot that could be Adam’s, but no other immediate sign of him.
I whistled and Blue and Ladybelle came loping up the cut that leads down to the homemade bridge across Possum Creek. Hambone gave one sharp excited bark when he saw them, then hurried over to me for protection, knowing he was the interloper in their territory.
The two older dogs approached in measured dignity. I assured Hambone that they were friendly and he took me at my word, frisking around the taller dogs, inviting them to romp. Ladybelle was too polite to raise her eyebrows at Blue, and both of them patiently endured the youngster’s enthusiasm, but their manner clearly questioned my judgment in requiring them to put up with such an unruly visitor without a nip to teach him some manners.
The four of us walked to the head of the cut. Across the bridge, at the opening into the far field, I saw Adam and another man standing beside a white pickup. At first I thought it was Reese, but as the dogs and I started across the bridge, the second man got into the truck. When he slammed the door and drove away, I saw a familiar logo on the door: Sutterly Homes.
“Was that Dick Sutterly?” I asked curiously as Adam met us halfway across the bridge. “Why’d he take off like that?”
“We were finished talking for now,” Adam said.
We got to the end of the bridge and Adam squatted down by the water’s edge to dip his left hand in the creek. I saw that his handkerchief was tied around it like a bandage.