A Family for the Farmer

by Laurel Blount

  This time, though, nobody was there to steady her.

  * * *

  Out in Mrs. Sadie’s vegetable garden, Abel ruffled the soft green leaves of the last plant in the row, easily finding the cluster of slim beans dangling underneath them. He snapped them upward off their stems and tossed them into the brimming plastic bucket beside him before standing and straightening his aching back. He’d been working in the garden ever since he finished with the barn chores just after dawn. He was tired and sore from bending over, but hard physical work always cleared his mind, and he’d been sorely in need of that.

  The refreshing coolness of the July morning had given way to the muggy heat of a Georgia summer day, and he was drenched with sweat and thirsty. But the garden was picked and weeded clean, and the animals were fed. Beulah was milked, and her barn had been mucked out and spread with clean straw. Goosefeather Farm had a contented, well-tended air about it. That gave him a small sense of satisfaction, and nowadays he was finding satisfaction pretty hard to come by.

  But now his work here was done. Whether he liked it or not, it was time to go home and either wander around his workshop or go stir-crazy in his cabin. He didn’t seem to be able to do much else these days.

  Abel hefted the two buckets that were brimming with green beans, squash and tomatoes and started back toward the farmhouse. He would set them on the screened porch, poke his head in the door and let Emily know he was gone until the evening.

  That had been his routine ever since the blowup about the horse. He and Emily had been circling around each other like two unacquainted cats. When they’d spoken, it had been about the farm work, nothing else, and they were both painfully polite. The chilly silence was driving Abel crazy, but he couldn’t think of a way to fix it. He’d been spending some sleepless nights mulling it over as he carved in his workshop.

  He’d already finished enough pieces to keep most of the shops on his roster supplied for a month or two. They were what he called filler pieces, simple carvings that were easy and mindless to make. They weren’t particularly satisfying to carve, and once he finished them he chucked them in a box and never glanced at them again. Unfortunately they seemed to be all he was capable of making at the moment.

  For once in his life, his heart wasn’t in his carving. His workshop had always been the one place he felt whole and peaceful, and he’d always relished the solitude he’d had there.

  That had all changed. Now as soon as he finished a carving, he found himself wanting to show it to Emily and the twins. He wanted to hear that soft awe in her voice as she turned the piece over in her hands and traced the grain of the wood with her finger. He wanted to hear Paul’s and Phoebe’s squeals of delight. His own approval had been all he’d ever needed for his work, but now it didn’t feel like enough.

  He was miserable. And what was worse, he had nobody to blame for it but himself.

  Emily was right about the whole horse thing. He’d overstepped and pushed in where he hadn’t been invited. That was the kind of thing that happened when a man let his dreams get the best of his common sense.

  As long as he could remember, he’d dreamed about having what he’d experienced sitting at Emily Elliott’s supper table. And ever since Danny left and Miss Sadie passed on, Abel’s hunger for family had sharpened considerably. The time he’d spent with Emily and the little ones had whetted that appetite even more.

  It was a hard thing to be given a taste of something you’d been hankering after all your life. It made a man reckless. That was the only excuse Abel could come up with for the way he’d acted. He’d grabbed with both hands for something that wasn’t his, and he’d gotten smacked for it. He figured it served him right, but that didn’t make it hurt less.

  As he neared the farmhouse, Glory popped out from her hiding place in the moist bed of spearmint beside the back porch and honked loudly at him, jolting him out of his thoughts.

  “Yes, I see you, and no, I haven’t forgotten your treat,” Abel told her as the goose extended her long neck in his direction, swiveling her head up to glare at him with one beady eye. He set his buckets down and reached into his pocket for the handful of sweet feed he always tucked in there. He sprinkled it in front of the goose, who gobbled it up as fast as it hit the ground.

  “You’re making her worse.” Emily spoke from above him, and he glanced up to see her standing on the small screened back porch, considering the goose with a rueful expression. “And so are the twins. They come out here and feed her their bread crusts every time they can. She’s taken to hanging around in that mint bed so much that she always smells like chewing gum.” Her voice actually sounded affectionate, and Abel felt a stupid little flare of hope. If Glory was growing on her, maybe in time she’d start to see other things a little differently, too.

  He tamped his feelings down firmly and tried to get a grip on himself. He was reading a lot into a greedy, mint-scented goose. That just showed how desperate he was, and desperation made people stupid. He’d just about had his fill of stupid.

  “I’m done in the garden for now,” Abel said, hefting up the full buckets again. “I’ll just set these vegetables on the porch for you before I go. Bailey called and said she’d be along to pick up her share in an hour or so.”

  “I can get them.” Emily held out her hands from the top step, but Abel shook his head.

  “You’d better let me. These buckets are kind of heavy.”

  He expected her to stick out that chin of hers and argue. For a second she looked like she was going to, but then she nodded back at him and smiled. “All right. Thanks.” Emily reached over and pushed the screened door open wider for him. He had to pass right beside her to get on the porch.

  She smelled good. Not perfumey, but fresh, like clean laundry mixed with some kind of girlie shampoo. He sidled past her, doing his best not to brush against her clothes because he knew his own smell at the moment was a lot less pleasant. He felt suddenly very aware of the sweat that darkened the armpits and back of his shirt and the dirt crusted on his arms and neck. His boots were leaving clumps of muck and mud all over the porch floor, too.

  “Maybe I’d better just leave them here.” He set the buckets down on the painted floorboards close to the door.

  “That’s fine.” Emily didn’t spare the brimming buckets a glance. She kept her eyes fastened on his face. “Listen, I hope you’ve worked up an appetite because I made a huge pecan coffee cake this morning, and I just took it out of the oven.”

  “Thanks, but I’d better be getting along home.”

  Emily’s face fell. “Abel, we had a deal. You’ve kept on doing the chores after... Well, you’ve kept your end up, and I want to keep mine up. You haven’t eaten a mouthful of my food for days, and if that keeps up, I’m going to have to assume our deal is off. Is it?”

  She was looking at him intently, her gray-green eyes wide and worried. There were dustings of flour on her nose, and a tiny smear of batter on her left cheek. She had a faded rose-spattered apron of her grandmother’s tied over her pink T-shirt, and her honey-gold hair was pulled up in a soft little roll on the back of her head.

  She looked as heart-catchingly sweet as the first rosebud of the summer, and if he tried to sit across from her and eat right now, he’d choke on every bite.

  “Well?” She lifted an eyebrow at him. “I know you’ve got that whole strong-and-silent thing going on, but I’d appreciate an answer. Do we have a deal or not?”

  “I don’t know.” He hesitated and tried to think this through. As usual that was harder for him to do when Emily was within arm’s length. She needed him to do the chores, and she was way too stubborn to let him do them for nothing. Both Emily and the animals would suffer if he couldn’t get himself past this. Maybe she’d cracked his heart a little, but that wasn’t really her fault. He’d been the one pushing things. And none of it changed the fact that he
’d given her his word that he’d help her. “I’m pretty dirty today. I could take some of the cake with me, maybe.”

  Something flickered in her eyes. For a second Abel thought it was disappointment, but it was gone so fast that he couldn’t be sure. She nodded. “That’ll work, I guess. I’ll wrap some up for you.”

  She went into the kitchen, and he took the opportunity to clean up a little at the utility sink angled in the corner of the shady porch. The cold well water coming through the old faucet felt good as he sluiced it over his face and the back of his neck. He cupped some of it in his hand and drank.

  As he dried off with some paper towels, he breathed in the familiar odor of the porch, a mixture of paint, mint and old wood. It wasn’t exactly a smell anybody would put in one of those air-freshener things, but it was a peaceful, homey scent.

  The smell of the coffee cake that was wafting through the open kitchen doorway wasn’t hurting things, either. Abel’s empty stomach rumbled loudly just as Emily came back carrying a hefty chunk of cake in a plastic baggie.

  “That’s music to my ears,” she said with a quick, cautious little smile. “Means you’ll do justice to my cake.”

  “I always do,” he replied, accepting the cake. Their fingers brushed briefly, and she jerked back as if he’d poked her with a stick. Something dark shuttered down over his heart. He gave her a brief nod.

  “Thanks. I appreciate it. You have a good day, now. I’ll be back over this evening,” he said, and turned to go.

  “Abel?”

  He turned around. She was still standing on the porch, twisting her fingers in her apron and looking as twitchy as a jaybird balancing on a fence wire. He waited a second, but she just looked at him.

  “Did you need me to do something else?”

  Emily drew her lower lip into her mouth and nibbled. “Yes,” she said finally. “Well, no. Actually I’m the one who needs to do something... I need to explain about the other day. About the horse, I mean.”

  Abel winced. “That’s okay. You were in the right. I overstepped my bounds, and you set me straight, that’s all. I’ve got no hard feelings if that’s what’s worrying you.” He wished he had. Hard feelings would have been a sight easier to deal with than the ones he had flopping around inside him.

  “Then why have you been avoiding me? And the twins—they’ve been so disappointed not to see you at suppertime. They’ve asked after you every single day. I didn’t mean that we didn’t want to see you at all, Abel. Truly I didn’t. You’ve been a good friend to all of us, and we appreciate you. I’m really sorry if I made you think otherwise. I’m just...not looking for a relationship right now. That’s all. But I really do value your friendship, and I don’t want to lose that.”

  He shifted his weight from one muddy boot to the other, weighing the cake in his hand. He tried to think of something to say, some way to explain the knife twist he felt in his gut when he was around her and the twins now, but he came up empty. He couldn’t even explain it to himself, much less to anybody else.

  “Look,” Emily said after an awkward few seconds, “I’ve got an hour and a half before I’m due at the coffee shop this morning, and the twins are already at the church day care. Why don’t you come in? You can eat your cake with a nice cup of iced coffee, and we’ll talk.” He hesitated, and she reached across the space between them and put her hand on his forearm. “Please?”

  He could feel every finger of her little hand on his arm, could feel that she was shaking just a little bit with nerves. This rift between them was worrying her, and as uncomfortable as he felt around her right now, he didn’t like to think of Emily fretting. The protective wall he’d been building inside himself crumbled a little.

  Abel sighed. He might as well face facts. This particular woman could ask him for pretty much anything, and if there was any way for him to get it for her, he would. It didn’t make much sense, and given the way things stood, he was pretty sure it wasn’t going to turn out all that well for him, but that was how it was.

  “All right, then, if you’re set on it. Some coffee’d be good.” He didn’t know what iced coffee was, but that didn’t matter. He’d drink it.

  The warm smile blooming on Emily’s face halted when it was only half-formed and then turned into a frown as her eyes focused on something just past his right shoulder.

  “Somebody’s coming up the drive,” she said, “and it’s not Bailey. I can’t think who it could be. I’m not expecting anybody else this morning. Cute car, though.”

  Abel turned to look. When he caught sight of the little car inching over the gravel, he felt like someone had just splashed him with ice water. Pine Valley was a small town, and there was only one person in it who drove a car like that one.

  It had to be Jillian Marshall. Abel didn’t know much about her except that she had hair the color of ripe red apples and a face full of freckles to match. If what he’d heard around town was true, her temper matched that flaming hair. Word was she wasn’t a woman to be crossed if you could help it.

  He also knew that her job had something to do with the foster care department of the local Family and Children’s Services. That was the part that had him spooked.

  Unless he missed his guess, there was a whole lot more than just a cute little car coming up Emily’s driveway. That right there was big, scary trouble driving a bright purple Volkswagen Beetle.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Sit down and calm down, the both of you,” Jillian Marshall said as she settled herself on the prim sofa in the Goosefeather Farm parlor and pulled a fat notebook and a ballpoint pen out of her purse. “Let’s talk this out like rational people.”

  “Are you kidding me? You can’t come out here and tell me somebody’s started a child abuse investigation on me and expect me to stay rational.” Emily was shaking like a leaf, but she couldn’t sit down, couldn’t stand still. She paced back and forth in front of the empty fireplace.

  This was beyond horrible.

  Jillian sighed. “I know. It stinks. But it’s happened, and we have to deal with it. Rationally. So please sit down, Miss Elliott. Do you want Mr. Whitlock to stay?” Her sharp brown eyes cut over in his direction. “Is he an...um...interested party in this?” She looked back at Emily. “I’m going to have to ask you some pretty pointed questions, just so you know.”

  “I don’t have anything to hide,” Emily responded through lips that had gone strangely numb. “From Abel or anybody else.”

  She felt Abel take her upper arm and guide her to her grandmother’s old plush rocker. Gently but firmly he pushed her down into the chair. Then he quietly pulled up an embroidered footstool and sat down beside her, his long legs bent up so absurdly high that if the situation had been different, she’d have laughed.

  There was nothing funny about what was happening here, though.

  She probably should make Abel leave. She knew that her refusal to do so had given the caseworker the exact impression she’d been trying to squelch all over town, that she and Abel were in some kind of romantic relationship. At the moment, though, she couldn’t have cared less. She needed Abel’s comforting presence beside her. He was in his sock feet wearing a frayed shirt with some smears of garden soil on it, but his quiet strength was the only thing holding her together.

  “All right.” The social worker fixed them each with a stern eye. “First off, some ground rules. Nobody yells at me. Okay? I’m just the messenger here doing my job. Even when the circumstances of the complaint are a little suspicious, I am duty bound to complete a full investigation to make sure that the children are safe and well cared for.”

  “Who made the complaint?” Abel spoke up. There was something about the calm, deliberate way he asked his question that made Emily’s spine straighten just a little. He meant business, and he was on her side. She wasn’t alone in this. Thank You, God.

/>   “Well, we often don’t give out that information, but in this case, there’s no reason I can’t disclose the person’s identity. It’ll come out anyway as the case proceeds. It’s—”

  “Lois Gordon,” Emily finished with her. “You should know that Mrs. Gordon and I have a history. Her late son was my children’s biological father. She was never happy about Trey having a relationship with me, and when I accidentally got pregnant, things got worse. She blames me for the problems Trey had after I left town, and she’s upset that I’m back in Pine Valley.”

  “I appreciate the information, but it’s not really relevant to my case, at least not at the moment. My only job right now is to make sure that the kids aren’t in any danger.” Jillian Marshall leaned back against the back of the sofa, crossing one long leg over the other, ballpoint pen dangling idly from her fingers.

  “What I’m trying to explain is that Lois Gordon has a pretty big ax to grind where I’m concerned. I think that’s plenty relevant. She’s not an unbiased reporter.”

  “I never thought she was.” The social worker made a couple of quick scrawls in her notebook. “I don’t come across that many unbiased reporters in my business. Most people have an ax to grind if you dig down far enough. I wish I could say that accounts like this were usually generated by people with a genuine concern for the children involved, but that actually happens a lot less than you’d think. However, Mrs. Gordon’s motivation for filing the report doesn’t make a whole lot of difference at this point. Once the complaint is made, I have to follow through until I’m satisfied that there are no grounds for further action.”

  “Emily’s an excellent mother,” Abel put in quickly. “Miss Lois is wasting your time and the taxpayers’ money with this grudge of hers.”

  “Mrs. Gordon pays taxes, too, you know,” the social worker responded mildly. “She’s perfectly entitled to have her complaints heard. But as it happens, I’m inclined to agree with you. The workers at the church nursery had no concerns, and the children looked healthy and happy to me.” She flipped back a couple of pages in her notebook. “No bruises, no suspicious injuries or scars of any kind, well nourished.”