by Lynn Shurr
Surely he didn’t mean it, but Winnie pushed off from the wall closer to his broad, brown face. Adam leaned in, so close she could feel his body heat and the tickle of his soft curls touching her cheek. Nell came trotting down the hall. They moved apart.
“I wanted to see how Teddy managed tonight.”
“Already asleep. He had long, hard day,” Winnie reported. “I think Anastasia is still up.”
“Yes, ready or not, I should check on her, too. Something tells me she isn’t going to like our lights out at nine rule. Adam, you’d better get going. Corazon has the cottage ready for you, and Joe wants to set the alarms. Ever since Tommy was kidnapped, he is really careful about locking up every evening.”
“I understand, Mrs. Joe. I’ll take the stairs and meet him by the front door. Sleep well, Winnie.”
Sure, sleep well. No matter how pretty and airy the room the only thoughts on her mind were of the little boy who needed her help, and the big, strong man who probably only wanted a roll in sand—and she was perfectly fine with that.
Chapter Ten
At breakfast, Winnie marveled at Nell’s precision in getting her family of eight off to school. Corazon had a hot breakfast of oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar ready to serve, pitchers of milk and orange juice on the table, and bowls at the ready as each child appeared at the table. The eldest came first while Nell who rousted them stayed upstairs to help the triplets dress. School uniforms made that just so much easier. Compared to this regimen, getting Teddy into the bathroom, strapped into his braces, and dressed seemed almost easy. The boy tried to be as independent as possible and helped in any way he could.
After breakfast, the Billodeaux kids boarded the white van, girls in back, boys in front since they were dropped off first at the parochial school in town, and the girls at the Episcopal country day school farther out of town. Knox Polk made sure each and every one had their backpack and appropriate attire down to belts and the right color of socks. Being a former military man, the task suited him eminently. He added his own son to the load. Away they went.
That left Adam and Joe in peace putting away man-sized portions of oatmeal and a stack of whole wheat toast slathered with strawberry jam. Nell nibbled plain toast and coffee while Stacy played with her food and voiced her preference for croissants in the morning. Brinsley refused to sit down until everyone else had eaten. With some coaxing, Winnie got Teddy to eat a piece of toast and some of his oatmeal before escorting him to the gates to wait for his bus. From social worker to Nell, all agreed for the time being he would be better off with his regular routine and an aide at the public school who knew him.
Winnie warned him in the afternoon, she would meet him with his crutches and expect him to walk at least half way back to the house using them. Noting his worried expression, she brushed the fine, blond hair out of his eyes and gave him some reassurance.
“Never fear. No one is going to kick you out. You have a home here as long as you need it.”
She watched him safely board the bus and turned to go back to the house. Joe’s farm truck, the one he had reclaimed in Mexico five years ago, pulled up beside her. Adam leaned out from the open window. “You ready to help me find some lava rocks?”
“Sure, if Nell doesn’t need me.”
“She’s taking that Stacy over to the day school for admission testing. The girl had a private tutor, if you can believe that. They don’t know exactly what she learned—except whining, complaining, and lording it over everyone else. In Samoa, I was grateful to sleep on my auntie’s screened porch in Pago Pago in order to go to school in the city, me and Sammy Tau and four other boys, too.”
Winnie climbed into the high cab of the once silver truck. The finish had worn down to gray, but Knox Polk kept it in good running order and used it for the dirty work around the ranch. She knew the harrowing story of its recovery and always had the urge to look for bullet holes in the chassis. The iron gates of Lorena Ranch opened and closed behind them.
“Sounds like a rough way to get an education.”
“Not so bad. Only the smartest and most athletic boys got the chance to leave the village. If we did well, we got scholarships to the mainland colleges, guys like me to big universities with football teams, the others to church-run colleges maybe, to become ministers, doctors, teachers, the kind of people who get a lot of respect back home.”
“And football players?”
“Not as much as you’d think. Now a nurse, she has some prestige.”
“Really? All I’ve heard for years is that I should have been a doctor.”
“What stopped you?”
“My ex, he had to get his training first.” Winnie vowed not to mention Doug again in any way if she could help it. Just what a guy wanted to hear, stories about her ex.
“If it weren’t for mine, I’d be in Pago right now.”
“You have an ex, too?”
“Ex-fiancée. She wanted another man. Now I don’t feel like going home so much.”
“Hard to believe she’d want anyone else but you.”
“You think?” A grin wiped the momentary seriousness from his face.
They entered the small town of Chapelle and immediately left it, making a beeline for the highway and the sprawling Home Depot that sat at the intersection with the country road. Adam drove carelessly, one hand on the wheel, a heavy foot on the gas pedal pushing the old truck ten miles over the limit.
“Um, Adam. You’re speeding.”
“You see a cop?”
“No, but…”
“Then, no worries, lovely Winnie.”
Taking no risks, she always drove slightly under the speed limit. Despite her fears, they did get to Home Depot alive. Adam parked near several chicken wire pens of rocks and started looking them over. “Louisiana has lots of great stuff, but it doesn’t have good rocks,” he remarked as he held up a specimen. “Imagine having to import rocks. We need a bunch of lava stones the size of a coconut for the umu oven.”
Despite having dressed in white slacks and an emerald top she thought made her eyes look greener, Winnie joined in the search for the perfect rocks until they created a small volcano-shaped mound. Adam paid for the stones and heaved them one by one into the truck. She didn’t mind watching him one bit as his muscles bunched and his buttocks strained tight in a pair of jeans. Back in the truck, they stopped at the light preventing people from leaving the lot to carelessly stray onto the highway. Adam glanced left, then right.
“Palm trees,” he said and tore out onto the highway the second the light changed instead of heading toward Chapelle.
Winnie braced herself. “What?”
“Palm trees. Lorena Ranch needs some palm trees and a beach. Right over there, a nursery with palm trees, good-sized ones, too.”
“Are you sure Joe wants a beach and palm trees?”
“Doesn’t everyone? I’ll pay for them as my gift to Camp Love Letter—and to you.”
“I’ve been to the beach before. You shouldn’t do it for me.”
Winnie denied the grand gesture though her words were not entirely true. Her parents preferred learning vacations to big cities with streets full of museums and cultural opportunities on every corner. The couple of times she’d gone to north Florida with her college friends, a call from Nana preceded the trip. “Stay out of the sun. Mind you don’t make your complexion darker.” That advice sucked a great deal of fun out of the experience.
Adam took his hand off the wheel and made an expansive gesture. “Louisiana beaches are nothing. I do it for everyone who comes to the camp.”
He appeared to do everything with enthusiasm, whether running down a receiver or in this case cutting recklessly across traffic to reach the nursery. The rocks in the truck bed rolled and banged against its sides as they came to a crossover and turned sharply to gain access to a gravel lot rimmed with towering palm trees, their bulbous bases wrapped in burlap.
Winnie followed Adam in awe as he told an ecstatic nurserym
an exactly what he wanted: all the palm trees, large and small, sand fine as sugar to cover an acre of land, maybe some plantings of hibiscus for tropical color. Could the man draw up a landscaping plan and a cost estimate by Friday and have the whole project completed by Super Bowl Sunday? The owner nodded like a bobblehead doll that should have had little dollar signs for eyes and scribbled down all of Adam’s directions.
Back in the truck, Winnie sat dazed by Adam’s impulsiveness. She doubted she’d ever done anything without thinking it through first, even marrying the white college boy who told her she was smart as well as beautiful and the hardest worker he knew. That had turned out very well for Douglas Hopper, not so well for her, so why not throw all caution to the trade winds and have a fling with the big, happy, uncomplicated Samoan? She still pondered that question when Adam swung the truck into a burger place by the highway.
“You interested in an early lunch? That oatmeal really didn’t stay with me,” Adam said.
“I guess I could eat a salad with an iced tea, unsweetened.”
He sent her to get a seat while he ordered for both of them. Minutes later, he returned bearing a tray crowded with two premium burgers, a super-sized sleeve of French fries, a sweet drink as big as a quart of milk, and of course, her salad and tea.
He attacked a half-pound burger and after swallowing a mouthful, remarked, “Did I tell you Samoans love their junk food?”
“No, but I think I could have guessed.”
Adam shoved the fries her way. “Here, share. My mother would say you are too skinny. Can’t I afford to feed you?”
“I’ve heard that remark before.” From Doug, but she accepted a few of the fries and fell silent.
“I think you are as lovely as a petal on a pale yellow plumeria blossom. Just saying what tin’a would think.”
“Thank you,” she said, flustered by the lavish compliment, and hastened to change to subject. “Teena, is that your mother’s name?”
“No, it is the word for mother or any older woman deserving of respect.”
“Interesting,” but she’d lost some of her joy in their outing.
Winnie looked down at her white slacks now soiled with dark marks from selecting lava stones. Not that her attire mattered here. An obese man downing a fried pie and a large orange drink in a corner booth wore a T-shirt that exposed an inch of flab between its hem and his belt buckle. A woman with a small child on her hip stood in line clad in a tank top, pajama bottoms, and slippers. Maybe the fat man and the slovenly mother wondered how a scrawny woman like her held the attention of a handsome hunk like Adam Malala.
“Nearly done?” Adam asked as she picked a cherry tomato from her salad with her fingers and bit into it. “We have an umu to build.”
A few pulpy seeds from the tomato squirted out and landed on her emerald top. Great, try to be ladylike and a little sexy and a girl ended up with stains on her chest that drew the eye to her small breasts. But not Adam’s eyes. Strange, he’d seemed interested in her only yesterday. He polished off the fries, and she pushed the rest of her salad aside. “I’m ready to make an oven.”
With Adam behind the wheel, they returned to Lorena Ranch in record time terrorizing only a few moms in minivans along the way. He drove the truck across the sparse grass under the oaks straight to the side of Joe’s barbecue pavilion. A quick trip to the barn and back yielded a shovel. Winnie sat on the open tailgate of the truck and dangled her long legs as Adam attacked the dirt packed down by lots of traffic for crawfish boils and weenie roasts in the screened building. She felt very much like a teenager watching her boyfriend show off in a feat of strength as the big Samoan cut through the hard earth and a tangled net of roots to carve out a shallow pit. His arm muscles bunched beneath bronze skin as he strained in the effort.
She liked the feeling. Her parents had frowned on high school dating except for one awkward night at the prom. Study hard. Be a credit to your race. Don’t even think about getting pregnant before you turn eighteen. No wonder she fell prey to a user like Doug Hopper when she had no experience at all to sift the phonies from the genuine men.
Whether genuine or not, Adam Malala was all man. The first week in February, albeit in Louisiana, and he’d worked up a sweat. He stripped off the knit shirt clinging to his pecs and tossed it into the truck bed. Winnie restrained herself from picking up the shirt and burying her face to inhale the pheromones.
“I thought a South Sea Islander would have tattoos,” she said almost to herself as she eyed his smooth, hairless chest.
Adam glanced up as he leveled the pit. “I have tattoos. If I wore my lava-lava, you would notice, but I think Mrs. Joe might not like it if I took off my jeans. Someday I will show you. Someday soon.” The broad smile, the twinkle in the depths of his dark brown eyes returned.
He had to be interested in her. He just had to be. Her eyes strayed to a dark band inked into his brown skin just above his belt buckle. “I’d like that.” Saliva gathered in her mouth, and she swallowed hard.
“We both would. Hand me the stones.”
Winnie got into the truck bed and tossed the lava rocks to him one by one. He placed each carefully until satisfied with the results. Dusting off his hands, Adam said, “All we need now is a bunch of firewood, a couple of pigs, and lots of banana leaves.”
“Good thing we had a mild winter, and the banana plants didn’t die back.” Winnie took his hand and hopped down from the back of the truck.
“There are many good things about this winter, especially meeting a beautiful woman. I could use a second lunch. You?”
Adam held her hand longer than necessary and seemed reluctant to let it go. She wouldn’t have minded if they’d remained united all the way back to the house, but with a final squeeze, he released her fingers. “Corazon probably has something for us.”
That assumption proved wrong. They entered into kitchen chaos. Nothing simmered except Corazon’s temper as she berated her employers. Not saying a word, Brinsley stood at martial attention near the hallway door.
“What, you no like my cooking anymore? My cousins don’t clean good enough? You go out and get a butler to watch me. Do I steal the silver?” Corazon’s plump arms wobbled in the air.
“Now, Corazon, after all we have been through together, you know you are like family,” Nell soothed.
“He opened the gate and let the delivery man in.” The housekeeper’s chubby finger wagged at Brinsley. “He answered the phone! This is what I do.”
“You do much more than that. You cook and care for a family of ten and all the extra guests we have in the house. You are a marvel!” Joe leaned toward her from his seat at the table, but stayed out of the way of flailing arms and pointing fingers. He tried one of his most appealing smiles to no great effect.
Brinsley took a cautious step forward. “Mrs. Polk, my intention was not to supersede you, but to relieve your day of petty interruptions while you are making meals and overseeing the staff. My stay here will be brief, only until Anastasia is settled. I merely sought to help.”
Corazon snorted through her nose so forcefully, she might have been shooting flames in the butler’s direction.
Adam spoke up. “What we need is a beach.”
All eyes and the perplexed expressions that went with them turned toward the big cornerback. “A beach, that’s your solution,” Joe said as if he questioned a play at a team meeting.
“Sure. Corazon must feel the stress of caring for so many and her own family, too. If Brinsley would take the calls and such, she might be able to leave the house for a while and stroll beneath the palm trees, feel the sand beneath her feet, listen to the wind sing through the fronds.”
Corazon’s round, brown face turned dreamy. “My village in Mexico had a beach. The children played there all day long.” She began filling mugs from the perpetually ready coffeepot on the counter. “Everyone sit. We talk about this beach. You, too, big-time butler. You not too good to drink coffee with us like you acted this mornin
g.”
“Generally, I do not sit in the presence of my employers.”
“They are not your employers. They are mine. Sit!”
Brinsley folded into a chair like a piece of stiff cardboard. Corazon plunked down creamer, a bowl of sugar, and a caddy of artificial sweetener. She urged the others to join Joe and Nell at the table. Adam and Winnie took their seats. The only one who didn’t was Corazon who moved to the industrial-sized refrigerator and began filling a platter with various cold cuts, three types of cheese, and bowls of sweet and dill pickles. She opened a bread drawer, took out a long French loaf, severed it into pieces along its length, and placed it into a basket. A heap of pumpernickel rolls topped the French bread, and a variety of condiments made their way to the table. Corazon passed out plates and cutlery, finally settled, and said, “The beach, tell me.”
Adam smiled broadly at her. The housekeeper beamed back as if only the two of them knew the true value of a beach.
“Today, when I went to get my lava rocks with the very lovely Winnie, I noticed some palm trees for sale. Lorena Ranch has no palm trees, which is a great pity. I bought all the trees, but now we need a beach to place them. Joe, you have an area full of scrub trees near the swimming pool.”
Joe nodded. “An old pasture leftover from the ranch’s dairy farm days.”
“We clear it and cover the dirt with sand. We put in the palm trees and maybe some other pretty plants.”
“Who is we?” Joe asked.
“Me and the landscaper I spoke to this morning. The beach will be my gift to Camp Love Letter, no cost to you. All children should be able to play in the sand.”
Always practical, Nell said, “Won’t the kids bring sand into the pool and clog the filters?”
Getting with the program, Joe answered. “We could put in sprinklers to wash their feet. The children would love to run through them anyhow. I can see it. Yes, I can, me.”