The Three Miss Margarets

by Louise Shaffer

  “You were swishing your tail around. . . .”

  “They’ve been wanting to tell him for years.”

  “You were asking for it. . . .”

  “That’s all three of them: Dr. Maggie, Miss Li’l Bit, and Miss Myrtis. Do you really want to go up against them?”

  He wanted to hurt her so badly she could feel it. But there was something else in his eyes too. The beginning of fear.

  “I don’t care who you get to lie to him!” he burst out, but then he quickly lowered his voice. “He won’t believe it because he won’t want to. That’s how it works. Dalton Garrison doesn’t believe what he doesn’t want to believe. I’m his son, and he won’t want to believe that about me.”

  Suddenly she didn’t need the coffee cup anymore. She let it go and stood up. “But he will want to believe anything I say, because I make him feel young. And he doesn’t want that to stop. If I’m lying, he’ll have to go back to feeling old and alone. I’m ready to see which one of us he’ll believe. What about you?”

  He looked at her, and she had to work to keep standing. But in the end he wasn’t quite stupid enough to do anything to her. He turned and walked out. She sat back down and held the coffee cup for dear life.

  Dalt was devastated when he got home and found out Grady was gone.

  “I wanted to make it up to him,” he repeated over and over during the next few days. “I didn’t want him to feel like he was run out of his home again.” Since Grady had moved in to one of the most expensive villas the resort had to offer, he hadn’t gone very far, but Peggy didn’t point that out. Dalt was disappointed, and she was learning fast that when Dalt was disappointed it had to be someone’s fault.

  “Did you have words with Grady?” he asked.

  She shook her head and looked as tragic as she could. “It was as much of a surprise to me as it was to you,” she said.

  “I shouldn’t have gotten married so fast. I’m not blaming you, sweetheart, I know it’s not your fault.” While he might have thought he meant that, she knew she’d lost some of her luster for him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  MAGGIE LET HERSELF INTO THE KITCHEN and then locked the door. This was totally unnecessary, but it gave her enormous satisfaction. It felt like she was locking out the world, especially Li’l Bit and Peggy. She loved them both, but right now they were making her weary.

  Laverne was snoozing on her bed, not having heard her come in. Maggie walked past her quietly. The dog took her duties very seriously, she’d be upset if she knew she’d slipped up on one of the basics of her job, the ecstatic greeting of the mistress.

  “All that bouncing around and barking has to make you feel like an idiot at your age,” she said to the top of the dog’s head. “I wouldn’t do it for love or money. Stay right where you are and sleep.”

  She was worried about Li’l Bit and Peggy. Li’l Bit was carrying such a load of anger, Maggie couldn’t imagine what it felt like to lug around that kind of burden. Peggy carried a burden too, a wad of guilt she lightened with her Gentleman Jack. How much longer could she keep that up? For that matter, how much longer before Li’l Bit’s blood pressure went straight off the charts? Medication could only do so much.

  The hard part was, they went back so far. It was hard to trace who was where when. Friendships that had been around for a while had an ebb and flow, times when you were in one another’s pockets, and times when you were all involved in your own lives. You kept in touch, but you weren’t as close as you had been. That was what had happened to them after Peggy married Dalton. Not necessarily because she married him, although that played a part. Both Peggy and Li’l Bit had been going through a lot at that time, but neither seemed to want to talk. And the one immutable rule of their friendship was Thou shalt not push.

  FOR MAGGIE, those years could best be summed up by the word contented. She discovered there was an unexpected bonus to the role she’d taken for herself, the one she privately thought of as Nun Without the Habit. She was at peace. Not wildly, mindlessly blissful—she’d given up on that; she worked hard, didn’t expect anything, and was surprised at how pleased she was with her life. Even when both her parents died within months of each other, she managed to say—and meant it—that she was glad neither one of them had had to live too long without the other.

  Lottie continued to live in the cabin behind Maggie’s house with Nella, and that was a big factor in Maggie’s new sense of satisfaction. Lottie was back in her life, although the walls were up. Maggie accepted that they always would be, and kept her own up too.

  Lottie’s children brought about the new connection. Charlie Mae had died and there was no one to commiserate with Lottie as her babies were growing up and growing away from her.

  James Junior had finished high school in Detroit, but any hopes Lottie might have had for college died quickly. His uncle got him a job on the railroad, and he married a girl he described as “peppy.” Lottie said she had hard eyes and smoked cigarettes. Her name was Dora, and on her first visit to Georgia she announced that being south of the Mason-Dixon Line gave her the heebie-jeebies. She made it clear that she considered her mother-in-law hopelessly countryish. Lottie had to face it that James Junior had become a stranger who talked through his nose and dutifully showed up once a year on his momma’s birthday, without his reluctant wife and children. “He’s James’s child,” Lottie said to Maggie. And Maggie could see it; the boy had all the ambition and lack of sensitivity of his father.

  But Nella was hers, Lottie said. Privately, Maggie thought Lottie was wrong; if there was anyone Nella took after it was Charlie Mae. From the beginning the child was practical as dirt, competent in ways Lottie would never be, without a drop of Lottie’s imagination or intellectual curiosity. She stayed in school only because Lottie insisted on it.

  “She’s smart, I know she is. But she isn’t. . . .” Lottie searched for the words.

  She isn’t hungry the way you were, Maggie wanted to say, but didn’t. Your baby girl is not you, dear one. Nella would never cry because she couldn’t learn to read fast enough. Or because her best friend went to a better school and was getting ahead of her.

  However, Nella was lovely, although she didn’t have the fierce beauty Lottie had had when she was young. Nella was soft and pillowy, with big eyes and no sharp angles to her personality. At least, that was the way most men saw her, and they found her very attractive. It scared Lottie to death. The clashes between them started early.

  “Mama doesn’t understand why I like him,” said Nella at age fourteen, of her first boyfriend. “I think he’ll be a good daddy.”

  “That’s no way for a child your age to be thinking,” Lottie decreed.

  “I don’t like school,” said Nella, age fifteen.

  “I’ve got money saved up for your tuition and the list of colleges Miss Monross gave me,” said Lottie.

  “I want to have eight babies,” said Nella, age sixteen.

  “After you have a diploma, you can go anywhere in the world,” said Lottie.

  “I don’t want to leave home,” said Nella, age seventeen.

  “At least apply to Spelman!” Lottie yelled.

  “They’d never take me,” Nella cried.

  “There’s a place in North Carolina—”

  “I’d be homesick.”

  “Do it for me. Please,” Lottie begged.

  But for once in her placid, docile life, Nella dug in her heels. By the end of her senior year, she announced she was going to get married. He had left school two years ahead of her. His name was Richard.

  “He’s talking about moving to Atlanta—that’s something. She’ll have a better chance to make something of herself there,” Lottie said to Maggie, clutching at straws.

  The day after Nella graduated, they announced they’d be staying in Charles Valley.

  “Nella begged me,” Richard said with a laugh. “She said, ‘Do it for me, baby. Please.’ And I just couldn’t say no.”

  Maggie couldn�
��t look Lottie in the eye.

  So while Peggy figured out the ups and downs of being the wife of Dalton Garrison and Li’l Bit went on her own emotional roller coaster, Nella and Richard moved in with Lottie. And that was where they lived when Vashti was born.

  Chapter Seventeen

  LI’L BIT LOOKED DOWN AT HER HANDS. They were big, almost big enough to be a man’s, with rough skin and sinews so pronounced they looked like bones. The arthritis that was nibbling away at her knees had not touched them. Because of her gardens. Sometimes she thought most of what was good in her life had come from her gardens. She walked to the back porch and looked out.

  They’d had the first frost of the winter two days ago, and it was time to mulch. Her tulip bulbs were already in the ground, and she’d harvested her sunflower seeds, making sure she left some seed heads on the plants for the birds. She still had to finish cutting back her perennials, and she hadn’t yet prepared the bed for her early spring peas. She looked up at the sky. The winter sun was at its warmest of the day, and she could still get in a few hours of work. It would feel so good to get her hands dirty just for a little while. She went to her bedroom to change into her ancient overalls.

  WHEN SHE STARTED OUT she barely knew a shovel from a hoe. There were no gardens on the property. At least, they weren’t visible to her untutored eye. Later she would learn to spot the bones of old beds buried in forests and meadows.

  For all that he loved his home, landscaping wasn’t one of her father’s passions. He had inherited a house with shallow lawns, surrounded by forest. He kept his grass mowed, he pruned the holly in front of his porch, and he made sure there was a path cut through the forest so he could go for his nightly strolls to the pond. Beyond that he wasn’t interested.

  But he did have an oil painting of the back of the house, done in the days when the gardens around the old mansion had been the pride and joy of the Justine Plantation. The painting, in all its glory, hung over his desk in his study. When she was a child, it fascinated Li’l Bit.

  “Oh, yes, the old pleasure grounds, as they were called,” Harrison said, when she asked about it. “Impossible to keep them up today, much too time-consuming. And extravagant. I wouldn’t waste my money on such nonsense.”

  His wife rolled her eyes heavenward, but Li’l Bit understood. Her father lived uneasily in the skin of a rich man. He had achieved a fragile truce with his conscience by working for the public good and living simply—at least as simply as a man could in a house with five bedrooms and two parlors. Harrison’s sense of right and wrong could produce some fairly tortured loops of logic. So Li’l Bit dropped the subject of the gardens—until years later, when her father had died, the house was hers, and she had time on her hands. Lots of time.

  It was a period when her two friends were both busy. Peggy had just married Dalt and was busy trying to make a go of what had to be one of the most difficult unions ever. Maggie was working long hours at the clinic and seemed absorbed with Lottie and Nella. She and Maggie and Peggy still tried to get together on her porch at the end of the day, but it was difficult. And often Peggy or Maggie would have to cut the time short. It seemed to Li’l Bit that everyone’s life was full but hers.

  She knew she had a lot to give, but no one seemed to want it. For the first time in many years she found herself thinking about men. It hit her at odd times during days that had suddenly gotten too long and nights that were even longer, a vague stirring that stopped being vague and became embarrassing. She had stupid dreams of kisses and arms holding her that she knew came from bad movies and worse music. She saw beauty in men she had known all her life; her lawyer, the trust officer who handled her money, the postmaster, and even Mr. Lawless, who worked in the grocery store—all would have been stunned if they knew what she was thinking. Of course, she had money and a wealthy woman didn’t have to be alone, if she was willing to make certain bargains. But that kind of barter wasn’t her style. So she paid the price for having been born both proud and homely as a mud fence.

  She had trouble sleeping and took to wandering the house at night, often winding up in her father’s den. One night the old oil painting caught her eye again. As she looked at the colors, the pinks, greens, yellows, purples, blues, and reds rioting over the canvas, she knew what she wanted to do. She might be plain herself, but she would make something beautiful.

  She started in without knowing what the hell she was doing. She had no plan and had not asked anyone for advice. There was a long curved hump in the backyard that seemed to correspond to the terrace garden in the oil painting. Closer inspection of the hump revealed that it was actually a low stone wall buried under earth and grass. On a fine Monday morning, right after her breakfast, she began digging it out, armed with an ancient shovel she’d found in the barn.

  Noon found her in Jenson’s General Store, buying a new shovel, gardening gloves, a spade, a variety of gardening forks, overalls, a straw hat, and boots.

  She went back to the wall and dug until it was time for Peggy and Maggie to come sit on the porch. She was so engrossed in her project, she barely had time to cram her hair back into its net and change out of her overalls before they arrived. There was an impressive collection of blood blisters on both of her hands, and her back ached. She was very happy.

  It took her a month to clear the wall. Then she started digging a flower bed next to it. And she began reading books about gardening. But the advice in them was technical, and she was after romance and history. She dreamed of heirloom roses and pass-along camellias in old gardens reborn. She went into Atlanta to hunt for out-of-print books on landscaping and came back with a moldy tome written by Andrew Jackson Downing.

  “He was a nineteenth-century landscape artist,” she told Peggy and Maggie as she showed off her musty treasure. “He revolutionized gardening in America before the Civil War.” She read sections of his Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening to them.

  “Fascinating,” said dutiful Maggie.

  “Honey, do you ever think about going out on a date?” asked Peggy.

  And she kept on digging her long curved flower bed—without, as Peggy pointed out, having put one seed in the ground.

  The truth was, she didn’t know what to plant. It was as though she was waiting for direction, either from the earth or from the books, she wasn’t sure which. She just knew she had to wait. And dig.

  Peggy said she was getting strange. Li’l Bit argued that she always had been considered eccentric so it was nothing new. Peggy said this was different, and not quite healthy. Maggie said somewhat dubiously that she hoped Li’l Bit was having fun with her new hobby.

  She finally finished the bed early one afternoon in April. It spread out in front of her, a perfect semicircle of raw earth, waiting for her to make beauty happen.

  “What are you going to do with it?” a voice behind her asked.

  She whirled around to see a man standing in her backyard.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. He had thick black hair that fell over one eye so he had to brush it back. “Name’s Walter Bee.” He stuck out his hand to shake hers. His hands had the same kind of calluses she had recently acquired, and they were big, so her own big hand was engulfed. He was tall enough that she had to look up a little to see into his eyes. “I’m the new head gardener at the resort. Mrs. Garrison said to come over because you need help.”

  “You sure dug yourself one hell of a hole,” Walter Bee said. “What’re you putting into it?”

  “Roses,” she said, to say something.

  He looked up at the sky and down at the bed. “Well, your sun is right for them,” he said. He bent down and picked up a handful of the dirt and rubbed it between his fingers. She watched and wished she knew what he was feeling for.

  “Gonna have to do some work on your soil,” he said. “Roses aren’t gonna like this.” His hair fell into his eyes again as he talked. His eyes were very deep-set, a shade of brown so dark it was almost black. He could
probably shut you out fast with those black eyes. “Got to get enough peat moss and compost mixed in here, might could try Epsom salts too; that should make them happier. And you’ll have to raise the bed so they’ll have the drainage they like.” He was wearing a work shirt and blue jeans. He was waiting for her to say something.

  “That sounds very . . . complicated. Maybe I should start with something easier than roses.”

  “They’re not that hard. Just fussy, that’s all. They want what they want, and they get it ’cause they’re worth it.” He smiled. “Like the way you spoil a pretty girl.”

  She nodded solemnly. One thing she’d always understood was the power of being pretty.

  “What else do you want to plant?” he asked.

  “I thought, old-fashioned flowers. The kind that might have been there when the place was built.” She had spent the last few months compiling lists of flowers, but now here in the sunshine with this man looking down at her ever so slightly, it felt like every name had flown out of her head. She grabbed a few back. “Lilies, and . . . violets, daisies, camellias, gardenias, daffodils—not all together, of course. I have some books—”

  “Don’t need them. Walk me through the bed and show me what you want.”

  So she started. And the flower names came back to her as she took him on a tour of her fantasy garden. Sometimes he stopped her because she used a Latin name he didn’t know. And once in a while he’d say she shouldn’t plant this shrub in front of that one because it would grow too tall, or she was putting in too many perennials that would bloom and die at the same time, and he would suggest something else instead.