Carolina Mist

by Mariah Stewart

  It could be beautiful again. It might even be fun. And, if nothing else, surely the restored garden would enhance the value of the property when selling time came around. She’d read somewhere that most real estate purchases were made first on an emotional level. Who, she mused, could resist such a lovingly renovated house, one that boasted so lovely a garden?

  For the first time, she tried to picture what the new owners might be like. She prayed the new mistress would not be a pert little blond thing with a turned-up nose.

  28

  “Abby, for crying out loud, what did you do?” Having responded to Abby’s frantic phone call just as the supper hour concluded, Naomi now stood, hands on her hips, before the chair in which a miserable Abby sat and scratched at her burning arms and legs and everywhere the burning itch had spread like wildfire. “You were weeding in the herb bed, weren’t you?” The question bore the distinct ring of an accusation.

  “And you had your face in the tansy.” Naomi leaned over and peered at Abby’s lips, which had swollen to twice their normal size. “Didn’t I tell you to leave that bed alone until I could work with you?”

  Abby nodded in the affirmative. “I thought it was because you were afraid I’d weed out the wrong things,” Abby wailed, “but I found Aunt Leila’s book and used the pictures as a guide. I only pulled out the grass and the dandelions.”

  “And stirred up the chiggers, by the looks of your neck and arms.”

  “Chiggers?”

  “The scourge of the Southern gardener,” Naomi told her. “Little red bugs—mites, actually—that hatch in the ground and wait for some unsuspecting host to come along and offer them dinner. That’s what raised those itchy welts all over you. Burn like nobody’s business, don’t they?”

  “How do I get rid of them?”

  “They’ll drop off when they’ve had their fill.”

  “Oh, that’s encouraging. So, meanwhile, I just sit here and play lunch counter to a flock of bugs I can’t even see.”

  “Go take a shower, then rub this on the welts.” Naomi handed Abby a dark blue glass jar half-filled with a pleasant smelling ointment. “My, you do have a lot of them, don’t you?”

  “Do I put this on my lips, too?”

  “No, sugar. You owe your fat lips to sticking your face into the tansy. If you are one of the unfortunate ones who are sensitive to it—and, obviously, you are—it can cause a nasty contact dermatitis. I’ll have to bring you something special for that. In the meantime, run up and get out of those clothes, and take a warm shower. Dab the bites with the aloe”—she pointed to the jar—“after you have dried off. I’ll be back in half an hour, and we’ll try to work on those lips.”

  The warm water felt good, but Abby emerged from the shower every bit as itchy as she was when she went in. The light gel Naomi had given her did, however,, soothe the sting. She put on a nightshirt and went downstairs to wait for Naomi’s return.

  “I will never forget the one and only time I got that close to tansy,” Naomi told her as she put a tea kettle of water on the stove to boil. “My bottom lip blew up so big, I scared the bejesus out of Meredy. She thought I looked like a circus clown.”

  “Why would anyone grow that stuff if it does this to you?”

  “Everyone doesn’t react to it. Now, my sister can go all day with her face right in it and never have a problem. Of course, she doesn’t get poison ivy, either, now that I think about it.”

  “Well, my lips are throbbing, so whatever cream you brought with you, give it to me now, please,” Abby begged, “and we’ll worry about making tea later.”

  “Abby, I am not making tea. I am boiling water to make an infusion.” Naomi pulled an envelope out of the pocket of her jeans and dumped some gold and green dust into a bowl.

  “Oh, wait, let me guess. An herbal cure?” Abby looked horrified. “Thanks, but no thanks. I think I’ve had enough close encounters with the plant world for one day.”

  “Abby, there is only one treatment I know of for the reaction you have had, and it’s in this bowl.” Naomi tapped the blue and white pottery bowl with her index finger.

  “I think I need a dermatologist.”

  “Abby, you need what’s in this bowl.”

  “What is it?” Abby sniffed suspiciously.

  “Myrrh and golden seal.”

  “Of course. The miracle drugs for the next millennium.”

  “Scoff now if you must.” Naomi poured boiling water into the bowl, then added cold tap water to cool it down. “But you’ll thank me in the morning.”

  “If I live till morning,” Abby muttered. “If I haven’t scratched myself to shreds clawing at the chigger bites. Or ripped my bottom lip right off my face.”

  “Are you finished whining, Abigail?” Naomi asked with all the patience of a mother of two small children.

  “I guess.” Abby grunted. “What are you going to do with that stuff?”

  “First, we make a compress.” Naomi dipped a cotton pad into the liquid.

  “And then what?” Abby asked, her head tilted back as Naomi spread the warm, soothing compress on her hugely swollen bottom lip.

  “Then you drink what’s left over.”

  “Ugh!” Abby groaned at the thought of swallowing the watery, pea-green substance.

  “Trust me.” Naomi laughed at the face Abby made. “It works. I swear it does. You’ll feel one hundred percent better in the morning.”

  And actually, she did. Although Abby’s bottom lip was still swollen, the compresses she made with Naomi’s herbal powder soothed the discomfort. And the chigger bites, while still a distinct presence, had lost a lot of their sting with the application of the aloe gel.

  “I told you you’d thank me in the morning.” Naomi chuckled as she placed a peace offering of still warm banana bread on Abby’s kitchen table.

  “I can’t believe how much better I feel,” Abby admitted. “But I also can’t understand how—or, for that matter, why—anyone gardens around here, with those damned little bugs lurking in the leaves.”

  “Chiggers lurk in the dirt, actually. Before you venture out into the garden again, cover yourself with this.” Naomi handed Abby a plastic bottle of bath oil spray. “And I mean cover yourself. That should take care of the chiggers. And as far as the tansy is concerned, now that you know how you react to it, keep your face out it. Once you know what to avoid, you can garden to your heart’s content and not have to worry.”

  “I think my heart would be more content if I stuck to the inside jobs.”

  “Nonsense. You’ll learn how to protect yourself, and you’ll go about your business.”

  “I don’t know, Naomi. I’m starting to think if God had wanted me to garden, he wouldn’t have had me living in cities all these years.”

  Naomi laughed. “As soon as the swelling goes down and your bottom lip returns to its normal size, you’ll forget all about it.”

  “I doubt it. And how long before you think this will go away?”

  “The swelling? A few days.”

  “A few days?” Abby bellowed. “It’s Thursday. Alex will be here tomorrow night.”

  “Sorry, sugar. Just keep using the compresses…”

  “I’ll bet if I called a dermotologist…”

  “It would take you a week to get an appointment, and he’d charge you next week’s grocery money to tell you that you’ve had an allergic reaction, topical in nature, to avoid contact with the subject plant…”

  “Okay, okay,” Abby grumbled. “But I should report you for practicing medicine without a license.”

  “What’s wrong with your face?” was the first thing Alex said when Abby opened the front door on Friday night.

  “I had a little run-in with some unfriendly specimens in Aunt Leila’s herb garden,” she muttered, tucking her chin into her chest to obscure, as much as was possible, her reddened neck and cheeks and her still swollen lips.

  Certain she resembled Quasimodo, Abby resolved to stay out of Alex’s line
of vision as much as possible for the weekend—or at least until the swelling of her mouth subsided somewhat. She ate dinner with her head down and made herself an extra-early breakfast so she wouldn’t have to face him across the table. She would skip lunch, she told herself. Then, maybe by dinner, the swelling would be that much less apparent.

  Abby had dragged the ladder into the alcove in the bedroom where she’d been working for the past week and set up to scrape the section of wall above and around the windows, the last bit of scraping in this particular room. Naomi had been exactly right, she thought. The ivory she had suggested would just perfectly reflect the light, and when the sun began to set…

  The tap-tap-tap on the window, somewhere around her midsection as she stood upon the ladder, drew her attention downward. She leaned over and found herself face to face with Alex, who, atop his own ladder, was preparing to scrap the frayed paint from the outside the window frames.

  “Hi.” He grinned. “Missed you at lunch.”

  “I wasn’t hungry.” She pretended to concentrate on the business of spraying water on the last bit of paper clinging to the wall.

  “Hey, Ab.”

  “What?” She refused to look at him.

  “Nice lips.”

  Abby lowered the spray bottle and shot through the screen squarely into his laughing eyes.

  It had been an agonizing weekend, start to finish, she later confided to Naomi. Alex had progressed from being merely annoying on Saturday afternoon to being sarcastic on Saturday evening to being a downright pain in the butt by Sunday morning. He had seemed to latch on to the Drew thing, as Abby thought of it, and would no sooner let go than Mrs. Lawrence’s boxer would have dropped the Marshalls’ cat. For the first time since returning to Primrose, Abby had been glad to see his car pull out of the driveway to head back to Hampton.

  “Alexander called from the airport while you were in the shower,” Belle said pointedly as Abby set the table for dinner on Thursday evening. “He was on his way to Atlanta. For what’s-her-name’s sister’s wedding.”

  “That’s nice.” Abby shrugged, and Belle merely glared at her in return.

  Abby insisted to herself that she was, in fact, glad he would not be there to torment her that weekend. But as the day wore on, and Thursday slid into Friday, and Friday night approached Saturday morning, she found herself dwelling more and more on the goings-on in Georgia.

  Unable to sleep, Abby grudgingly got out of bed to look for a book she’d been reading earlier in the week. After climbing back into bed, she plumped the pillows up behind her and tried to snuggle into the mattress to make a cozy reading spot. Before too long, she realized, she had made herself all too cozy. Her eyes fluttered helplessly, and she nodded off to sleep. Soon some perversity of her subconscious had transported her, to her horror, smack into the wedding reception, where she, invisible, could view the lavish festivities without being seen. It was, she realized, just like being the proverbial fly on the wall.

  She could see them at the wedding reception, in the grand ballroom of some Southern manse completely decorated in white for the occasion. A thin, white, ghostly mist swirled around the scene. The tables were all adorned in white lace cloths which draped luxuriously onto the thick white carpet beneath the feet of the party-goers. Tall white centerpieces—lilies and stephanotis and roses—graced every table, and all the guests were wearing white. Among white-garbed relatives, a beaming Melissa wound her way, snaking through the crowd with a smiling Alex in tow. Her low-cut gown of white satin was buoyed by rings of hooped slips. All the relatives expressed their approval of Melissa’s catch by patting Alex on the back and stuffing large legal-sized envelopes into his white leather briefcase. Though no one spoke, it was clear from the smiling faces that the entire gathering was witnessing the silent announcement that Melissa and Alex’s wedding would be the next cause for such a gathering. The happy couple seemed to float in slow motion, and Abby could see every little crease on his face— the laugh lines around his eyes and mouth, the little valleys that ran across his forehead and deepened when he slipped into thought.

  Alex turned his head slightly as if looking into the lens of a camera, gazing past Melissa, past the crowd pressing in on him and his intended, to peer with piercing, deliberate eyes into Abby’s own, mocking her with a grim satisfaction. Soon, Melissa and the others spotted her, and, with open mouths from which no sound was uttered, like watching a television movie with the sound off, they all turned to Abby, who now was, in fact, a fly on the wall, and began to swat at her with flaying arms, driving her up toward the ceiling and through the first open window.

  She awoke with a start, her heart pounding and her body in a sweat of anger, the sheets tightly clenched and twisted in her fisted hands.

  “Damn you anyway, Alex,” she growled to the darkness, and she turned over fiercely, punching her pillow and wishing it was his face.

  She tossed miserably for the next hour, and when it was clear that there would be no more sleep that night, she got out of bed. She opened the window overlooking the backyard and leaned out, taking the still air into her lungs. In the moonlight, she could see the outline of the garden she would bring back to life, picturing it in June with roses winding over the fences and the flower beds alive with color. The image soothed her, as did the moment’s whiff of lavender that drifted into her room through the open window.

  She rested both arms on the sill and watched as yesterday and tomorrow met in the briefest of passings before merging into the new day. The moon stood large and proud in the predawn sky, the sun still only the merest promise below the horizon. All below was still and silent as Primrose lay tucked in a snug wrap of predawn sleepiness. The thought of being here, in this house, in this town—miserable though she might be at this moment—comforted her. She would rather be miserable in Primrose, she acknowledged as she climbed back into her bed, than anywhere else on earth. There was no other place where anyone cared if she hurt or if she laughed, if she succeeded in a task or failed. There were no hands that reached to help her but those here in Primrose. Belle and Naomi cared deeply for her, and she for them. Even the house seemed to welcome her every time she returned from even the shortest errand. She drew the blankets up as if to hide from the very dearness of it all.

  For the first time in ten years, Abby felt at home. That it all felt so comfortable, so right, filled her with the greatest sense of peace and the most bittersweet sense of belonging. How, she wondered, would she say good-bye, once the time came, to those who had come to mean so much?

  29

  The sound of the car door drew Abby’s attention from the thin line of ivory paint she had just traced around the ceiling in the alcove. She poked her head out the window just as Drew rounded the back of the dark blue sedan parked in front of the house. In spite of the fact that company was the last thing she wanted, she did her best to put a trace of cheer in her voice as she called down a greeting.

  He stood on the grassy strip between the street and the sidewalk, shaded his eyes from the mid-afternoon sun with his right hand, and looked up to follow her voice and locate which of the many windows she occupied.

  “I’ll be right down,” she told him.

  After lining her tools up across the shelf at the top of the ladder, Abby wiped her hands on a paint rag and rested her brush carefully across the top of the can. She bounced down the steps and out the front door.

  “This is a nice surprise,” she said with a smile, realizing she did, in fact mean it.

  “Surprise?” he asked. “Does that mean that Belle forgot to tell you I called?”

  “You spoke with Belle?”

  “Yes. Last evening. She said you were outside with Naomi, and I told her not to bother to call you in but to let you know that I wanted to stop by and take you to dinner tonight. I left a number at my hotel room for you to call if you were unable to make it. When I didn’t hear from you, I assumed that it was a go.” He was clearly embarrassed. “I guess she just forgot to tel
l you.”

  “If Belle forgot, it was by choice.”

  Drew laughed good-naturedly. “Well, some people do become a bit absentminded when they get to a certain age.”

  “Belle’s absentmindedness appears to be strictly at her convenience,” Abby grumbled, “but it’s kind of you to stick up for her. Particularly when you’ve driven all the way out here and I’m a mess.”

  “Well, how long could it take to clean up? Would an hour be enough?”

  “That would be perfect. Are you sure?”

  “Positive. It’s not a problem. As a matter of fact, I’ll use the time to take a drive around and see if I can find a likely spot for dinner. Unless, of course, you have a favorite place.”

  “Please.” She laughed. “The only ‘dining out’ spot I’ve seen since I moved here is the Primrose Cafe. But Naomi mentioned a restaurant out on the Point—I could call her and get the name of it if you like.”

  “I’ve some time to kill.” He shrugged. “I’ll just drive out and see if we need reservations.”

  “Sounds great.” Abby smiled. “I’ll see you in an hour.”

  She took the steps two at a time and hurried into the house. First, she called Naomi and told her she’d be out that evening and Belle would be home alone for a few hours. Then Abby went into the kitchen, prepared dinner for Belle, and proceeded to serve her in the morning room.

  “Aren’t you joining me, Abigail?” Belle asked.

  “Now, Belle,” Abby said sweetly as she plumped the pillow behind the tiny woman’s back, “you know I’m having dinner with Drew tonight. Don’t you remember, we talked about it last night?”