Love Letters from Ladybug Farm

by Donna Ball

  A quick glance between the women. Bridget said, “Why didn’t you just tell us that?”

  He shrugged, still not meeting their eyes. “I didn’t think you’d understand.”

  “Understand,” suggested Lindsay, a bit sharply, “or approve?”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets. A stubborn insistence came into his eyes, which they all knew from experience was the first sign of a conversation that was about to stumble to a pointless end. “I was home before dark. I didn’t lie. I told you I was going to be late for supper. I didn’t break any rules.”

  Cici heard Lindsay’s sharp intake of breath and she spoke above her, calmly. “Noah, you’re the one who wanted to take a part-time job. We agreed you could work as many hours as you wanted as long as your schoolwork didn’t suffer. But letting us think you’re working when you’re not is wrong and you know it. We need to know where you are. What if there had been an emergency?”

  “I’ve got a phone,” he replied, too easily. “That’s what it’s for.”

  “Which has nothing to do with the fact,” Lindsay said firmly “that you led us to believe you were working when you weren’t. And we still don’t know where you were all day.”

  “And that’s the same as a lie,” Bridget said.

  He scowled. “It’s not a lie.”

  They were silent.

  “All right.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, glaring at the ground. “I shouldn’t have tricked you.”

  “Thank you,” Lindsay said.

  Cici softened a bit. “You know we want to meet your friends, Noah.”

  “She’s not from around here.”

  Bridget said, “We still want to meet her, and let her parents know who we are, if you’re going to be spending time with her. Why don’t you invite her out here on Sunday?”

  “We can’t, Sunday” Lindsay pointed out. “Dominic’s coming out to help us fertilize the vines.”

  Noah looked relieved.

  “Next weekend then,” Cici suggested. “And we’ll need her parents’ names and phone number before you see her again.”

  He muttered, “Maybe I won’t see her again.”

  “That’s up to you,” Lindsay said mildly. “But those are the rules. And we’ll let you know tonight what your punishment is for breaking the rules and deceiving us. Change out of your school clothes before you start on the chicken yard.”

  “And I hope you don’t have any plans for the weekend,” Cici added, “because we’re going to need you to help us set up for the wedding menu tasting, and to help with fertilizing the vineyard on Sunday.”

  He scowled. “I thought you hadn’t decided my punishment yet.”

  There was a warning edge behind Cici’s pleasant smile. “I’m starting to get some ideas.”

  “This wedding business is for girls,” he said sulkily, his hands thrust into his pockets. “I’d rather build the goat house.”

  Lindsay said, “The wedding business is for everyone. There’s a lot of money involved, and it’s money we need.”

  “You’ve got money” Noah countered reasonably, for the topic of finances—particularly his own—was one in which he always took an active interest. “You got the loan for the wine-making business, and you’ve got a brand-new barn to store it in. As soon as you start selling it to those fancy hotels in Washington you’ll be rolling in dough.”

  Bridget said, “I’m afraid it’s not exactly that easy, Noah. And even if it were, there are a lot of major expenses coming up before we sell the first bottle.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like college,” Cici said.

  “Lori told me her dad paid for her college.”

  “Your college,” Lindsay said, with a touch of exasperation. “And let’s not have that conversation again about whether or not you’re going because obviously you are.”

  “And John Adams isn’t exactly free,” Cici added. “I know you’ve applied for another scholarship but that only covers seventy percent of the cost.” She shrugged. “We have a lot of expenses coming up, Noah. And when you have expenses, you work. It’s as simple as that.”

  The women had gone three or four steps before they realized they had left Noah behind. When they turned he was standing with his feet planted and his balled fists visible in his pockets, his face a tornado of emotions.

  “What business is it of yours?” he exploded, completely without warning. “Why do you care? I’m not even your kid!”

  And, as they watched in astonishment, he shoved past them and bounded up the back steps, banging the screen door hard behind himself.

  “Well, that was fun,” Cici said in a slightly lowered tone when he was gone.

  Bridget looked troubled. “We shouldn’t have mentioned the tuition. Children shouldn’t worry about things like that.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Lindsay said, but she looked uneasy, too. “The latest thinking is that kids should be involved in family finances as much as is practical. That’s how they learn responsibility.”

  “Where did you read that?”

  “I’m a teacher. I keep up.”

  “But you know how seriously he takes things,” Bridget said. “He would have rebuilt that barn all by himself if we had let him, every stick and nail.”

  Cici said, “Something is definitely going on with him.”

  “It’s a girl,” Bridget speculated.

  Lindsay gave her a dry look. “Do you think?”

  “Maybe we should have the Reverend Holland talk to him,” Bridget suggested.

  “Whatever he’s done,” Cici said adamantly “he doesn’t deserve that. Maybe we should make an appointment with the school counselor.”

  “Oh, great.” This from Lindsay. “How special is he going to feel when his three mommies show up at school? Things are hard enough for him as it is.”

  “We have to ground him,” Cici said.

  “That seems redundant,” Bridget argued. “All he has time for now is chores, school, and work.”

  Lindsay said unhappily “Apparently not. And you know as well as I do this entire relationship is based on trust. If he can’t be trusted to be where he’s supposed to be, we have a big problem. ”

  “And if he can’t be honest with us,” Cici added, “we have a bigger one.”

  “A week?” suggested Bridget.

  “Two,” said Lindsay grimly.

  “That’s practically the rest of the school year!”

  Cici shrugged. “You do the crime, you do the time. We’ve got to be united on this, Bridget.”

  “Besides,” Lindsay added practically, “we’re going to need his help around here for the next couple of weeks.”

  Bridget gave a shake of her head. “You guys are tough. Remind me never to get on your bad side.”

  “Come on,” Cici said to Lindsay. “I finished the table rounds you wanted. Help me carry them around front and we can set them up and see how they look.”

  From inside the house, the telephone began to ring. Bridget glanced at her watch and sighed. “It’s not five yet. I guess we have to answer it.”

  “Maybe it’s someone about the goat,” Cici suggested hopefully as Bridget started up the stairs. “Hurry!”

  Lindsay and Cici turned toward the workshop. “He probably hates us,” Lindsay said unhappily.

  “It can’t be easy,” Cici agreed somberly “a teenage boy living with three old women...”

  “We are not old!” Lindsay exclaimed indignantly.

  Cici grinned, and bumped her friend’s shoulder with her own. “Come on,” she said, “relax. Parenting would be no fun at all if you couldn’t torture the kids once in a while. Besides, Noah should count himself lucky. He skated on a technicality. We would have been perfectly within our rights to take away that motorcycle. That’s what the good Reverend Holland would have done.”

  “Maybe he would have been right.” Lindsay sighed. “At least when Noah’s without wheels we know where he is.”

  “Cici!” Br
idget was at the back door, telephone in her hand. “It’s for you.”

  Cici rolled her eyes. “I don’t suppose she could take a message.”

  “It wouldn’t matter. You’d have to deal with her sooner or later.”

  “Catherine?” Cici inquired of Bridget as she took the telephone.

  Bridget shrugged. “Believe it or not, no.”

  She went to help Lindsay with the table rounds as Cici spoke into the phone. “This is Cici.”

  The table rounds were not heavy, but they were cumbersome, and it took the two of them to maneuver one around the house to the front porch. Bridget and Lindsay reached the steps just as the screen door slammed and Cici came out.

  She was dressed as they had last seen her, in rolled-up jeans, sneakers, and an untucked T-shirt, her hair escaping from her attempt to pull it back with a clip, her face devoid of makeup. What was different was that she had her purse over her shoulder and her car keys in her hand. Every freckle on her face stood out in stark relief, and her eyes had a stunned, blank look to them.

  “Um,” she said, as though not quite sure where the next words were coming from, “I have to go.”

  “Go? Where?” They propped the table top against a hydrangea bush and started toward her.

  “Charlottesville.” Cici moved down the steps without looking at them, clutching the keys as though they had the power to unlock some magic door only she could find. “To Lori. That was the hospital. There’s been an accident.”

  For Better or For Worse

  April 13, 2005

  Sweetheart,

  It’s funny how, as time goes on, the things you used to think were so important are hardly worth remembering anymore, and the things you barely noticed suddenly seem like the most important things in the world.

  Important: The way the kitchen smelled on a winter morning and pancakes were cooking.

  Not Important: A pair of red leather boots I worked six months of nights to payfor. I don’t even know what happened to those boots now.

  Important: Your smile

  Not Important: My own laundry room

  Important: Being safe

  Not Important: Being rich

  Important: Watching you sleep

  Not important: A new car

  I wish I hadn’t made so many mistakes over things that weren’t important. I wish I could take them all back.

  Especially the one where I lost you.

  9

  Good in a Crisis

  Later they would think about that moment, and how everything changed from light to dark in an instant. It was not the first time for any of them. A child runs into the street. A husband clutches his chest. A parent doesn’t know you anymore. Light to dark. One moment they were talking about goats and weddings on a spring afternoon. And then everything changed.

  They knew this place, where the throat seized and the heart started flooding adrenaline and the world suddenly shifted, unmistakably and irretrievably, on its axis. They had been here before. But that did not make the terrain any less terrifying. Or navigating it any easier.

  But because they had been here before, they knew the choreography almost without thinking. Lindsay took Cici’s keys and got her friend settled in the passenger seat just as Bridget arrived with Lindsay’s purse and cell phone. Bridget packed an overnight bag for Cici, told Noah and Ida Mae what had happened, phoned the Reverend Holland and asked him to look in on Noah, and was on the road little more than half an hour behind Lindsay.

  Cici arrived just in time to drop a kiss onto her groggy daughter’s forehead before they took her to surgery. “I warned you about texting and driving,” she said shakily, trying to smile and fight back tears, and not succeeding very well at either one.

  “Texting and walking, Mom,” Lori assured her. Her speech was slurred, one eye blackened and swollen shut, the other slitted and unfocused. “You look pretty.”

  “So do you, sweetheart,” Cici said, smoothing back her tangled copper hair, and then the orderlies came.

  The emergency room doctor told them that, in addition to a few scrapes and bruises, the most serious injury was a fractured tibia, which would require surgery to set and stabilize. Cici was filling out the paperwork when Bridget arrived.

  “They say it’s routine,” Lindsay explained to Bridget. “The surgery should only take an hour and a half. She might be able to go home in five or six days. But she’ll be on crutches for the rest of the summer.”

  “Thank God,” Bridget said, her shoulders sagging with relief, “that it wasn’t more serious. Of course”—her gaze went to Cici, immersed in forms at the nurses’ station—“nothing is routine when it’s your baby going under the knife.”

  “They call it ‘pedestrian versus scooter,’ ” Cici informed them when she returned. And although her face was still tight and her eyes anxious, her expression was wry as she sank down into a hard plastic chair. “Apparently she was texting and walking, and she walked right out in front of an oncoming motor scooter. Can you believe that?”

  Both Bridget and Lindsay winced. “She is so lucky,” Lindsay said.

  “It could have been so much worse,” Bridget agreed.

  Cici nodded. “It happened on campus, where the speed limits are low. Still...” She trailed off with a subdued shudder.

  “Pedestrian versus moving vehicle,” observed Lindsay, “never turns out well for the pedestrian.”

  Bridget called home with the report, and Cici called Lori’s father in California. He did not answer, of course, so she left a message. Lindsay brought up the first round of coffee from the cafeteria, and they settled down to wait.

  “Hospitals,” Cici said, sliding down in her chair so that her head rested against the back. She cradled the coffee cup against her chest, warming her hands. “They all smell the same.”

  “You’d think someone would invent something for that,” Bridget said.

  “Like that hotel scent,” offered Lindsay. “Hotels all smell the same, too—or at least the high-priced ones do. Why can’t hospitals smell like that?”

  Bridget wrinkled her nose. “Then no one would ever want to stay in a hotel, because it would smell like a hospital.”

  “Funny how that smell triggers such vivid memories,” Cici said.

  They were silent for a moment, each of them revisiting their own unhappy memories of hospital corridors, hospital beds, hospital smells.

  Then Bridget smiled softly. “Not all the memories are bad. Sometimes being in a hospital reminds me of my babies.”

  “Yeah,” Cici agreed. “When Lori was born, being in the hospital for three days was the first vacation I’d had in five years. Lying in bed all day watching soap operas, twenty-four-hour room service, three thousand calories a day ... I begged the doctor to let me stay over the weekend, but he wouldn’t sign off on it.”

  “I don’t know,” Lindsay said. “I think there’s something wrong with a society that makes women give birth in the middle of its most disease-infested population, like having a baby is such a high-risk behavior that mother and child have to be isolated from the healthy people.”

  “That’s why they send women home the next day now,” Bridget said.

  “Unless of course it’s more convenient for the doctor to slice the mother open to take the baby out.”

  Cici said uneasily, “Please, less said about slicing open?”

  “Sorry Cici.” Lindsay reached across and squeezed her hand.

  Bridget smiled and patted Cici’s knee. “Routine surgery,” she assured her.

  Cici managed a faint, but grateful, smile.

  Half an hour passed. They watched the minute hand on the clock.

  Bridget said, “When I called home, Noah was mowing the grass. Ida Mae said he had already finished the back and had the front half done.”

  Lindsay smiled. “He is a good kid.”

  “I love the way the air smells right after the grass is mowed,” Cici said. “Especially in the evening, when the dew starts t
o fall.”

  “I don’t love the gnats though,” Bridget said.

  “They’ll be gone by tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I hope Noah ate some supper,” Cici said.

  Bridget made a move to rise from her chair. “Do you want me to go down to the cafeteria and bring up some sandwiches?”

  Cici shook her head, sipping her coffee. “I was just thinking about the way the kitchen smells at suppertime. I like Ida Mae’s meatloaf.”

  “Especially when she makes apple pie with it,” Lindsay said.

  “And remembers to peel the apples,” said Bridget.

  “Either way, the kitchen smells wonderful.”

  Cici sighed wearily and closed her eyes, resting her head against the back of the chair. “I hate this place,” she said.

  Bridget and Lindsay sipped their coffee, and didn’t say anything else at all.

  The surgeon came into the waiting room precisely on schedule and reported that all had gone well, just as he had expected. Lori was in Recovery, and would be taken to her room in an hour, at which time they could see her. While Cici bombarded the doctor with questions, Bridget stepped aside to make telephone calls, and Lindsay went to the nurses’ desk to make certain that Lori’s room included a cot for her mother, and two comfortable chairs for those who would be staying by her side. When the nurse informed her that visiting hours were over at eight p.m., Lindsay just smiled and thanked her for the information. She then reminded her, firmly but pleasantly, to make certain the cot and the chairs were set up by the time Lori was brought to her room.

  Bridget persuaded Cici to have something to eat while they waited to see Lori, and the three of them went down to the cafeteria. The decor was orange and beige stripes, the tables and chairs were antimicrobial plastic, and the whole place smelled like cooked cabbage. Cici pushed around a salad and nibbled on crackers, and Bridget and Lindsay shared a tuna salad sandwich and a bag of potato chips. The tuna was oddly tasteless, no doubt due to fat-free mayonnaise and low-sodium seasoning, so they bought an extra bag of chips.