Blue Willow

by Deborah Smith

Last week Lily had sold it to Svenson’s Fine China and Crystal Shop, an elite Atlanta dealer, for five thousand dollars. Artemas had suspected she’d go to Svenson’s if she ever disposed of the teapot. His discreet inquiries into her life over the years had revealed that she’d bought all her china and crystal from the dealer. Not Colebrook china, no. She had never bought any Colebrook china.

  So he’d had Mr. LaMieux, who handled all such secretarial chores for him, leave word at the dealer’s that he’d pay top value should anyone ever bring in a piece of old Colebrook Blue Willow.

  He’d bought the teapot back.

  Artemas understood how much she needed the money. What hurt was knowing that she’d rather sell something of such sentimental value to strangers than ask him for help. Despite some of the things he’d said to her, he wanted to be part of her life. That need was a constant torment.

  Restless, he left the large, empty gallery with its high ceilings and mahogany bookcases waiting to be restored and opened one of the towering glass doors to a balcony. Pulling a heavy terry-cloth robe closer around his bare chest, he stepped onto smooth stone tiles. They were cold and damp with dew under his bare feet. The sky was salted with brilliant stars. He mashed the cigarette out on a wide stone balustrade, then carefully brushed the ashes off the edge and dropped the butt into a pocket of his robe. Abruptly he realized how ridiculous his concern was, considering the rough state of most of the mansion’s interior, the clutter of drop cloths, dust, debris, and materials scattered throughout three stories of rooms and hallways.

  He leaned against the balustrade and looked at the newly cleared terraces far below. Gardens had once stair-stepped down the hill toward the distant, starlit mirror of the lake. He remembered Lily writing to him once, as a teenager, that there had been trellises filled with roses. She had said that even after the trellises rotted and fell down, years passed before the roses were choked out completely by briers and pines. The last few clusters of pink and red blooming in the thickets had made her think of elegantly gowned ladies displayed in a prison. She had wanted to rescue them.

  Now, the terraces waited for her attention. He knew it could never happen, and that he shouldn’t put off hiring a landscapes With every day that passed, he would look at the cleared spaces around the house and only think of the impossible. It was reckless, like buying the teapot. For once in his life, he verged on losing control over selfish obsessions, a dangerous indulgence.

  He lit another cigarette. The pinpoint of red flared then disappeared, its invisible heat merging with the darkness.

  The man was a stranger. Strangers usually came to Hopewell’s door to sell, beg, or preach, all of which he despised. Well-dressed strangers stepping out of late-model foreign cars with leather briefcases were twice as suspicious.

  Hopewell moved quickly out of a rump-sprung armchair in front of the television. Anger was the only thing that made him move this fast anymore. He slapped at his creaking knees and stomped through a living room strewn with dirty clothes and the remnants of frozen dinners. He had the front door open before the stranger reached the porch.

  Hopewell didn’t bother opening the outside screened door. He waited behind it, glaring through fist-sized holes in the mesh. Beyond the stranger, a weedy meadow large enough for a baseball field stretched between Hopewell’s big clapboard house and the road to town. He liked his privacy and didn’t care for appearances, dammit. Couldn’t the stranger tell from this ailing, secluded house and the scowl on his face?

  “Mr. Estes?” the man asked. He had smooth, polished hair and nails.

  “I don’t want no insurance,” Hopewell retorted, and started to slam the inner door.

  “I’m not selling. I’m buying.” The man stepped closer, smiling without showing any teeth. “I’m buying your cooperation. In return, I can guarantee your son’s future.”

  Hopewell held on to the door. He couldn’t make himself shut it. “Who are you?”

  “I represent someone who has your son’s best interests in mind. Someone who wants to make certain he passes his parole hearing next year. Someone who’ll take care of him once he’s paroled, so he’ll have every chance to start a successful new life and make you very proud.”

  The door was opening wider. Hopewell couldn’t help himself. “What do you mean, exactly? Whose mouthpiece are you?”

  “That’s not important, Mr. Estes.” The man pulled a creamy, embossed business card from inside his coat and held it to a hole in the screen. Hopewell read a law firm’s name that meant nothing to him. “Who for?” he repeated.

  “May I come in? This will only take a minute. And I assure you, you’ll want to hear my proposal, for your son’s sake.”

  Hopewell clutched the door. For Joe’s sake. That was the whole measure of his life, and of his poor Ducie’s dying wishes. “Come in.”

  The lawyer sat on the edge of a couch that smelled of stale cigar smoke and sweat. Hopewell loomed over him, waiting. Opening his briefcase, the man removed a slender stack of pages divided by stapled corners into three sets. He shut his briefcase and laid them on it, then looked up at Hopewell. “The client I represent will do everything possible to ensure Joe’s release next year. Assuming that’s accomplished—and I believe it will be, since Joe has been a model prisoner—my client will arrange money, a job, a fine house, and a powerful amount of discreet intervention should Joe ever have any more, hmmm, shall we say, difficulties.”

  “Joe wants to race cars. That’s what he was spending that damned drug money on. Mario Andretti—that’s who he wanted to be.”

  “Then my client will spend whatever is necessary to sponsor him and help him achieve that goal.”

  His mouth open, Hopewell slumped in an armchair padded with dusty newspapers. “Why? What’s the catch? What does your ‘client’ get out of this?”

  The lawyer spread his hands on the paperwork, like a TV evangelist getting ready to perform a healing. “All my client asks in return is that you evict Lily Porter from the property you own.”

  Hopewell strangled on the dilemma. It was as if those pale, healing hands had gone around his neck, and they were squeezing so hard that self-respect and disgust kept trying to get past them but got pushed down. “I … I can’t,” he said.

  “You and she have signed a formal contract?”

  “Yeah. She drew one up. A year’s lease. February to February. I’m not gonna break it. I’m just not. Don’t ask me to.” There. A good show of honor.

  “Hmmm.” The lawyer frowned mildly. “Then the term of the lease will end at about the time of your son’s parole. I suppose that will have to be acceptable. You’ll agree not to renew Mrs. Porter’s lease, and prohibit her from remaining on the property in any capacity.”

  Hopewell leaned forward. His ears buzzed. He felt in a shirt pocket for the blood-pressure medication he took whenever it damn well suited him to care, and popped a tablet into his mouth. The lawyer watched him with a patient stare. “It’s him, isn’t it?” Hopewell said, his voice tinny “It’s Artemas Colebrook. He’s behind this.”

  “I can’t reveal my client’s name. But your guess is mistaken.”

  “Liar.” Hopewell put his face in his hands. Joe’s future or revenge. Joe’s future or self-respect. Joe’s future. Joe was weak-willed. Hopewell had suffered agonies thinking about the new trouble he’d probably get into once he left prison. Here was a way, maybe the only way, to give Joe a chance to do right. Maybe it was revenge enough to make Artemas Colebrook spend money on Joe.

  As for Lily, well, she’d brought Colebrook’s meanness on herself, hadn’t she, by coming back to the old place when she knew it would only cause trouble, and by being married to a criminal?

  No, this is wrong, this is shameful, what you’re thinking of doing to her.

  This was for Joe. Joe was his blood. Lily wasn’t.

  The lawyer had a gold pen out. He was adding precise little lines of script to his papers. Waiting for the inevitable.

  Hopewell ros
e to his feet unsteadily “You get your ass out of my house, and don’t come back.”

  The lawyer laid two more of his business cards on a coffee table littered with crumbs and empty soft-drink cans. “You’ll have almost a year to decide. My offer will remain open.” The man stood and smiled. Again, no teeth showed. “Have a good day, sir.”

  Hopewell swayed in place, trapped by desperation, as the visitor walked out. Staggering to the front door, he shut it hard, then stood for a long time, paralyzed, looking at the cards without touching them. Finally, he picked them up by the edges and moved leadenly to a battered old desk in one corner of the living room. He wavered over the trash can beside it. Slowly, as if carried by the pointer on a Ouija board, his hand moved to a half-open desk drawer, and dropped the cards inside.

  “James?” Alise moved through the darkened rooms of their private wing, searching for him, a robe wrapped around her nightgown, shivering. It was like this almost every night—she woke to find him gone. She followed him each time and discovered him sitting in the dark somewhere, either inside or out on the lawns that fronted the Chattahoochee’s vast, gleaming ribbon of water.

  She saw a light coming from the study down a hall and felt her way along by a wall covered in a tapestry depicting some violent scene from medieval England—sharp-faced warriors on prancing horses, lances extended. His affection for the pageantry of ancient wars mingled uncomfortably with her insistence on soft pastels and abstracts, giving the mansion a peculiar division of personalities. When they’d designed it, she’d thought the contrast exciting; now, it contributed to her anxiety, and to the sense of separation she felt even when he touched her.

  He was lost in thought at a heavy dark desk under the light of a small lamp, one fist curled under his chin, his face, in profile, as sharp and fierce as those of the knights on the hall tapestry. A burgundy robe was loosely tied at his waist, revealing the lush mat of dark hair and heavy muscles of his chest. Along with daily therapy sessions for his leg, he had returned to his former routine of working out with weights an hour each day. Watching his weak, determined struggles in the early months had agonized her. Telling him that he was pushing too hard, too soon, had infuriated him. He didn’t want her advice or her sympathy.

  One end of the robe had fallen away from his leg, propped on a cushioned footstool. Scars scooped out long dents in the muscles of his thigh, and the most recent skin grafts made crazy-quilt patches. His knee and ankle were misshapen bulges.

  She padded into the study’s towering, richly carved shadows and halted, despair clawing at her throat. Nothing she said ever made any difference. James looked at her with his eyes half-shut, then leaned back in the tall-backed, upholstered chair as if it were a throne. He flipped the robe over his leg as he did. She wanted to scream at him that she was no prying, morbidly fascinated stranger.

  Alise went to him and climbed into the chair, her knees sinking into the thick cushion on either side of his thighs. She held his brooding gaze as she lifted her robe and gown, daring him to reject her and what passed for intimacy between them these days. He didn’t. Wordless hunger flashed in his eyes. He grasped her hips and guided her into place as she put a hand between their bodies. Together they accomplished the blunt joining.

  Rocking against him, her arms around his neck and her face pressed to his hair, she mourned for their serenity and tenderness. When he finally, convulsively, embraced her and groaned against her shoulder, she clung to him, tears sliding from under her closed lids. They sat there in dreary silence, his arms squeezing her, one hand rising to cup the back of her head. She muffled her anguish against his dark hair.

  He wouldn’t be happy until he punished someone for what had happened to his family and himself. But there was no one left to punish except Lily Porter, who didn’t deserve it. And James wouldn’t stoop to ruining an innocent person’s life. Alise would never think him capable of that.

  Twenty-one

  Lily found a retired farmer over in Victoria, which had turned into a tourist town full of bed-and-breakfasts and antique shops, and bought his tractor. It was forty years old, made to last a thousand more, but a bargain because the transmission was stuck in second gear. Unless a miracle occurred, it would spend the rest of its days chugging along at five miles per hour, popping wheelies whenever it wasn’t weighed down with a harrow or plow, permanently denied the pleasure of first, third, or reverse.

  It came complete with its own toolkit, contained in a green army-issue ammunition box bolted to one rusty fender, and a specially cut length of two-by-four, to wedge on the clutch pedal whenever she wanted to hop off and push the tractor backward. Probably because he felt sorry for anyone desperate enough to buy his tractor, the owner offered to customize it. He bolted a square of plywood onto the frame, just behind the hard, springy metal seat, so Lupa could travel with her.

  When she, Lupa, and the tractor chugged up the paved road beyond the farm’s driveway, they met one of the estate’s guards in his Land Rover. The man stopped to watch and almost laughed himself silly. Lily gave him a curt nod and drove past, halted in the weeds on the far shoulder, hopped off, dug with her long-handled posthole diggers for a few minutes, then set a pine post into the ground, onto which she’d already bolted a large black mailbox with BLUE WILLOW GREENHOUSE AND NURSERY in gold stick-on letters across both sides. She poured a bag of concrete into the hole, then chased it with a bucket of water. The mailbox could take a hit from a tractor-trailer without budging.

  It was plain. It was utilitarian. It was out of place. It was a statement. She climbed back on the ancient tractor, slipped the clutch off, and held Lupa by the ruff as the tractor gave a little leap. They went rumbling back down the graveled road into the woods, with the guard staring after them.

  This would be reported immediately, she suspected.

  It was. The next day there was a faxed memo from Artemas, in her new box.

  Still throwing those rotten apples, aren’t you?

  “What happened to my lawn jockey?” Hopewell demanded, pointing to the vacant spot where it had been when he’d left it, then glaring at Little Sis, who strolled out of the new greenhouse with her hands latched behind her back. He hadn’t expected to get out of his truck and find her here. She halted in the middle of the graveled area that had just been finished. Lily wanted to keep the entrance to the greenhouse and nursery separate from the driveway to the house. Hopewell was trying to give Lily everything she asked for. Guilt gnawed at him. And looking at Little Sis only made him feel worse.

  “Your little grinning black lawn jockey?” she echoed, tilting her head to one side. “It had an accident.”

  “What?”

  She sighed. “I shouldn’t have bought that new Cougar. Too much car for me. I stepped on the gas, and wham. Before I knew it. I’m sorry.”

  Hopewell threw his hat on the ground. The June sun was no hotter than his temper. “That jockey wasn’t hurting nothing!”

  “It was a redneck ornament. I hated it. What’s more, Lily hated it. You carried on about it so much that she quit arguing, just to make peace. She was going to paint it white. I took matters into my own hands.” She smiled sweetly and ambled up to him. “You’re no redneck. You’re just a moody old bear who needs a hug.”

  She looked as if she might give him one. He cleared his throat and said, “Lily hated my lawn jockey?” His voice squeaked.

  “Yes. She tried not to hurt your feelings about it, but you’re denser than a rock. I’ll just keep chipping away at you until I find a crack.” Little Sis stepped closer. She lifted one hand and toyed with the collar of his thin cotton shirt. “And then I’ll slip inside.”

  She smelled of cinnamon. Or maybe it was just the residue of that damned incense she sold at her store. Either way, she smelled good. She liked him. Why, he didn’t know. But he knew she wasn’t going to like him next winter, when he told Lily to leave here. “Yes,” she purred, stroking his collar, “I’ll just slip right inside you, you big old rock.”


  “Like a damned kudzu vine,” he retorted, but he was frozen in place, feeling like a heartsick boy. She put her fingertips to her lips—God, the woman was too old to wear such bright red lipstick—kissed them, then touched a red tip to his cheek. “You hush about that lawn jockey,” she whispered.

  He finally found his voice. “If Lily hates it, I won’t say nothing more. But I have some ceramic deer in my basement—”

  “I think I might accidentally run them over too.”

  Hopewell backed away, swept his hat from the ground, and waved it at her as if she were a pestering yellow jacket. “Is there anything of mine you won’t try to run over?”

  She buzzed forward, slipped an arm through his, and looked at him from under long gray eyelashes coated in black mascara. “Lily’s like a daughter to me. I want to help her.” She paused, and her coyness faded. “But I’d like to be friends with you, Hopewell.”

  He could have resisted anything but the serious, yearning expression on her face. Friends. Maybe, maybe, if he tried to be sweeter to her, she’d forgive him when the time came to sacrifice Lily’s trust for Joe’s sake. He stared at her wispy, liver-spotted hand curled around the crook of his bare arm. Her long red nails were the sexiest damned things. “I guess we’re friends, whether I want to be or not.” Tugging her hand off his, he clasped it gently for a second. Her face lit up. Hopewell let go quickly and walked back to his truck. His eyes burned. Suddenly he knew that losing Little Sis’s crazy affection was going to hurt more than he’d ever thought.

  Timor Parks was a leather-faced, middle-aged little man who’d gone to high school with Lily’s daddy. Even though he was old enough to be her father, he was too shy to say more than a few words to her. His sons were her age and older, and they didn’t speak either. As she recalled, the one who’d been in her class in high school hadn’t had much to say then. Since she didn’t want companionship or conversation, she and the silent Parks men got along comfortably He and his sons said hello, good-bye, and not much in-between.