by Nora Roberts
“Well then, you just think of me when you’re sliding off to dreamland tonight.”
“I know it cost you some time. Oh, you said something about lunch?”
Baffled, he shook his head. “Lunch?”
It was just enough. “Yes, your lunch today. Half a ham sandwich with Swiss and brown mustard. You gave the other half to that skinny black dog who comes begging in the fields when he sees you.” She smiled now, stepped away. “You ought to be ready for supper soon.”
He pondered a minute, then decided to go with instinct. “Tory, why don’t you come back here and tell me what I’m thinking now.”
She felt something like a laugh rumble in her chest. “I believe I’ll just let you keep that to yourself.”
She let the screen door slam behind her.
7
It was the flowers, Margaret always thought, that kept her sane. When she tended her flowers, they never talked back, never told her she didn’t understand, never yanked up their roots and stalked away in a huff.
She could prune away the wild parts, those sudden growth sprigs that thought they could go their own way, until the plant was shaped as she intended for it to be shaped.
She’d have been much better off, she imagined, if she’d stayed a spinster and had raised peonies instead of children.
Children broke hearts just by being children.
But marriage had been expected of her. She had done, for as long as she could remember, what had been expected of her. Occasionally she did a little more, but rarely, very rarely did she do less.
And she had loved her husband, for surely that had been expected as well. Jasper Lavelle had been a handsome young man when he’d come courting her. Oh, and he’d had charm as well, the same slow, sly grin she sometimes saw cruise across the face of the son they’d made together. He’d had a temper, but that had been exciting when she’d been young enough to find such things exciting. She recognized that same temper, the quick flash of it, in her daughter. The daughter who’d lived.
He’d been big and strong, a dramatic kind of man with a loud laugh and hard hands. Perhaps that was why she saw so much of him, and so little of herself, in the children who had been left to them.
It angered her, when she took stock, how vague and blurred her imprint was on the clay of those lives she’d helped create. She had opted, sensibly she was sure, to concentrate on leaving her mark on Beaux Reves instead. There her touch, her vision, ran deep as the roots of the old oaks that lined the drive.
And that, more than son or daughter, had become her pride.
If Hope had lived, it would have been different. She snipped off the faded head of a dianthus without sentiment or regret for the loss of the once fragrant bloom. If Hope had lived, she would have reflected, and realized, all the hopes and dreams a mother instilled in a daughter. She would have given a new luster to the polish of the Lavelle name.
Jasper would have stayed strong and stayed steady and never have disgraced himself with loose women and casual scandal. He would never have strayed from the path they had both started on and left his wife to rub the smudges from the name they shared.
But in the end, Jasper had been a storm, and when he hadn’t been crashing, he’d been brewing. Life with him had been a series of events, she supposed. His last had been the poor taste to suffer a fatal heart attack in the bed of his mistress. The fact that the woman had had the sense and the dignity to step back while the incident was hushed up sat in Margaret’s craw like a jagged bone.
Still, all said and done, it was so much easier to be his widow than it had been to be his wife.
She couldn’t say why he was so much on her mind just now, on this blissfully cool morning when the dew lay wet kisses on her blossoms and the sky was the soft and gentle blue of spring.
He’d been a good husband. For the first stage of their marriage, he’d been a strong and solid provider, a man who’d made the decisions so she didn’t have to mind the details. He’d been an attentive father, if perhaps a mite too indulgent.
The passion between them had quieted by the first anniversary of their wedding night. But passion was a difficult and distracting element in a life, such a demanding and unstable emotion. Not that she’d ever refused him, of course, never once since their wedding night had she turned from him in their bed.
Margaret was proud of that, proud she’d been a good and dutiful wife. Even when the idea of sex sickened her, hadn’t she lain silent and allowed him his release?
She clipped off more deadheads with a sharp clack of blades, placed the faded flowers in her discard basket.
It was he who had turned away, he who had changed. Nothing had been the same in their marriage, in their lives, in their home since that terrible morning, that hot, sticky August morning when they’d found their Hope in the marsh.
Sweet, good-natured Hope, she thought, with a grief that had become both duller and more heavy through the years. Hope, her bright little angel, the only one of the children who’d come from her who had seemed truly connected. Truly hers.
There were times, after all these years there were still times she wondered if that loss had been a kind of punishment. The taking away of the child she’d loved most. But what crime, what sin had she committed that had merited that kind of punishment?
Indulgence perhaps. Indulging the little girl when it would have been wiser—it was so easy to be wise with distance—to have discouraged, even to have forbade her sweet, innocent Hope from associating with the Bodeen girl. That had been a mistake, but surely not a sin.
And if it had been a sin, it had been more Jasper’s. He’d brushed away her concerns when she’d voiced them, even laughed at them. The Bodeen girl was harmless, that’s what he’d said. Harmless.
Jasper had paid for that misconception, that mistake, that sin, the whole rest of his life. And still it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.
The Bodeen girl had killed Hope as surely as if she’d choked the life from her with her own small and dirty hands.
Now she was back. Back to Progress, back to the Marsh House, back to their lives. As if she had the right.
Margaret yanked out some bindweed, tossed it into her basket. Her grandmother had liked to say that weeds were just wildflowers that bloomed in the wrong place. But they weren’t. They were invaders and needed to be pulled out, cut down, destroyed however it could be done.
Victoria Bodeen could not be allowed to set roots and bloom in Progress.
She looked so pretty, Cade mused. His mother, that admirable and unreachable woman. She dressed for gardening as she dressed for everything. With care, precision, and perfection.
She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat to shade her head, the ribbon around it a soft blue to match the long cotton skirt and crisp blouse she protected with a dull gray gardening apron.
There were pearls at her ears, round moons of white as luminous as the gardenias she so treasured.
She’d let her hair go white as well, though she was only fifty-three. It was as if she wanted that symbol of age and dignity. Her skin was smooth. Worry never seemed to show on it. The contrast of that pretty, youthful face and the shock of white hair was striking.
She’d kept her figure. She sculpted it ruthlessly with diet and exercise. Unwanted pounds weren’t tolerated any more than the stray weed in her gardens.
She’d been a widow eight years now, and had slid so slickly into that slot, it was hard to remember her being otherwise.
He knew she was displeased with him, but that was nothing new. Her displeasure was most usually expressed in the same way as her approval. With a few cool words.
He couldn’t remember the last time she’d touched him with feeling, or with warmth. He couldn’t remember if he had ever expected her to do so.
But she remained his mother, and he would do what he could to close the rift between them. He knew, too well, how a rift could widen into a gulf with silence.
A small yellow butterfly flitted arou
nd her head, and was ignored. She knew it was there, just as she knew he walked to her with long strides along the bricked path. But she acknowledged neither.
“It’s a nice morning for being outside,” Cade began. “Spring’s been good to the flowers.”
“We could use some rain.”
“They’re calling for some tonight, and none too soon. April’s been drier than I like.” He crouched down, leaving an arm span between them. Nearby bees hummed madly in the hills of azaleas. “Most of the first cultivating’s done. I’ve got to go ‘round and check on how the cattle’s doing. We’ve got some bull calves ready to become steers. I’ve got some errands here and there. Is there anything I can pick up for you?”
“I could use some weed killer.” She lifted her head then. Her eyes were a paler, quieter blue than his own. But they were just as direct. “Unless you have some moral objection to my using it in my gardens.”
“They’re your gardens, Mama.”
“And your fields, as I have been reminded. You’ll deal with them as you choose. Just as the properties are your properties. You’ll rent them to whom you please.”
“That’s right.” He could be as cool as she when he chose. “And the income from those fields, and those properties, will keep Beaux Reves in the black, well into it. As long as it’s in my hands.”
She pinched off a pansy with quick, ruthless fingers. “Income is not the standard by which one lives one’s life.”
“It sure as hell makes life easier.”
“There is no call to take that tone with me.”
“I beg your pardon. I thought there was.” He set his hands on his knees, waited for them to relax. “I changed the way the farm’s run, started changing it over five years back. And it works. Still you refuse to accept or acknowledge that I’ve made it work. There’s nothing I can do about that. As for the properties, I do that my own way as well. Papa’s way isn’t mine.”
“Do you think he would have let that Bodeen girl set foot on what was ours?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or care,” she said, and went back to her weeding.
“Maybe not.” He looked away. “I can’t live my life asking myself what he would’ve done or wanted or expected. But I do know Tory Bodeen isn’t responsible for what happened eighteen years ago.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Well, one of us is.” He got to his feet. “Either way, she’s here. Has a right to be here. There’s nothing to be done about it.”
They would see, Margaret thought as her son left her alone. They would see what could be done about it.
His mood stayed raw throughout the day. No matter how many times he tried and failed to reach his mother, he felt the sting of that rejection as fresh as the first.
He’d stopped trying to explain and justify his changes to the farm. He still remembered the night he’d shown her charts and graphs and projections, still remembered how she’d stared at him, had stonily informed him before she’d walked away that Beaux Reves was something that couldn’t be put on paper and analyzed.
It had hurt, more, he supposed, because she’d been right. It couldn’t be put on paper. Neither could the land itself that he was so determined to protect, preserve, and pass on to the next generation of Lavelles.
His pride in it, his duty to it, were no less fierce than hers. But to Cade it was, had always been, a living thing that breathed and grew and changed with the seasons. And to her it was static, like a monument carefully tended. Or a grave.
He tolerated her lack of belief in him, just as he tolerated the amusement and the resentment of his neighbors. He’d dealt with countless sleepless nights during the first three years he’d been in charge of the farm. The fear and worry that he was wrong, that he would fail, that the legacy that had come into his hands would somehow slip through them in his eagerness, in the sheer stubbornness to do things his way.
But he hadn’t been wrong, not about the farm. Yes, it cost more in time, effort, and money to grow cotton organically. But the land—oh, the land thrived. He could see it bursting in the summer, resting in the winter, and in spring thirsty for what he would put into it.
He refused to poison it, no matter how many told him that by that refusal he was dooming earth and crop. They’d called him wrongheaded, stubborn, foolish, and worse.
And the first year he’d met government standards for organic cotton, had harvested and sold his crop, he’d celebrated by getting quietly drunk, alone in the tower office that had been his father’s.
He bought more cattle because he believed in diversification. He added on more horses because he loved them. And because both horses and cattle made manure.
He believed in the strength and value of green cotton. He studied, he experimented. He learned. He stood by his beliefs enough to hand-chop weeds when it was necessary, and to nurse his blisters without complaint. He watched the skies and the stock reports with equal devotion, and he plowed the profits back into the land just as he plowed the cotton after harvest.
Other areas of the operation were necessary, the leases and rentals and factories. He used them, worked them, juggled them. But they didn’t own his heart.
The land did.
He couldn’t explain it, and had never tried. But he loved Beaux Reves the way some men love a woman. Completely, obsessively, jealously. Every year his blood thrilled when it gave birth for him.
Cool morning had become steamy afternoon by the time he finished the bulk of his chores and errands. He carried the list in his head, ticking them off systematically.
He stopped by the nursery two blocks off the town square to pick up his mother’s weed killer. The flats of flowers distracted him. He selected a tray of pink rosebud impatiens on impulse and carried them inside.
The Clampetts had run the nursery for ten years, starting it as a roadside operation to supplement their soybean farm. Over the decade, they’d done better with flowers than crop. The more successful the nursery, the bigger the burr that lodged in the craw of the Clampett men.
“Get another one of them for twenty percent off.” Billy Clampett puffed on a Camel, directly under the NO SMOKING sign his mother had tacked to the wall.
“Charge me for two then. I’ll pick the other up on the way out.” Cade set the flat on the counter. He’d gone to school with Billy, though they’d never really been friends. “How’s it going?”
“Slow but sure.” Billy squinted through smoke. His eyes were dark and discontented. He wore his hair in a vicious buzz cut that looked sharp as needles to the touch and was no particular color at all. He’d put on weight since high school, or more accurately, had lost the muscle that had made him a star tackle.
“You gonna plant those as another cover crop?”
“No.” Unwilling to get into a pissing match, Cade wandered over to study a selection of pots. He picked two in a verdigris shade, set them on the counter. “I need some Roundup.”
Billy pinched off the cigarette, dropped the butt into the bottle he kept under the counter. He knew better than to leave evidence his ma would find and scold him over. “Well now, didn’t think you approved of such things. When’d you stop hugging trees?”
“And a bag of potting soil for the impatiens,” Cade said easily.
“Might could get you some aldicarb, too; you in the market for insecticide?”
“No, thanks.”
“No, that’s right.” Billy gave a wheezy laugh. “You don’t go for insecticides and pesticides and that nasty chemical fertilizer. Your crops, they’re virgin pure. Got yourself wrote up in a magazine ‘cause of it.”
“When did you start reading?” Cade said pleasantly. “Or did you just look at the pictures?”
“Fancy magazines and speeches don’t mean squat around here. Everybody knows you just sit back and take the benefits from the expense your neighbors put into their fields.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah, that’s so,” Billy lashed out. “You’ve
had a couple of good years. Just dumbass luck if you ask me.”
“I don’t recall asking you, Billy. You want to ring me up here?”
“Sooner or later it’s going to cave in on you. You’re just inviting pest and disease.” It had been a long, boring day, and Cade Lavelle was one of Billy’s favorite targets. The pussy never fought back. “Your crops get infected, others will, too. Then there’ll be hell to pay.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Cade took some bills from his wallet, tossed them on the counter. “I’ll just carry this out to the truck while you ring it up.”
He kept a choke chain on his temper, much as he would a vicious dog. Unleashed, it was a cold and savage thing. Billy Clampett wasn’t worth the time and the effort it would take to yank it back in line once it was loose.
That’s what he told himself as he set the pots and the two flats in the truck.
When he came back, the Roundup and a twenty-pound bag of potting soil were on the counter.
“You got three dollars and six cents coming.” With deliberate slowness, Billy counted out the change. “Saw that sister of yours a time or two ‘round town. She sure looks good these days.” He raised his eyes, smiled. “Real good.”
Cade shoved the change in his pocket, kept his fist in there, as it wanted to plant itself on that sneering mouth. “How’s your wife these days, Billy?”
“Darlene, she’s just fine. Pregnant again, third time. I expect I planted another strong son in her. When I plow a field, or a woman, I do it right.” His eyes glinted as his smile spread. “Just ask your sister.”
Cade’s hand was out of his pocket and yanking Billy to his toes by the collar before either of them was prepared for it. “Just one thing,” Cade said softly. “You want to remember who holds the deed on that house you’re living in. You want to remember that, Billy. And you want to stay clear of my sister.”
“You wave your money around fast enough, but you haven’t got the balls to try your fists like a man.”
“Stay clear of my sister,” Cade repeated, “or you’ll find out just what I’ve got the balls for.”