by John Muncie
“Did I?” she said as she turned her back to grab another bale. “Well, not today. I’ve got a lot to do here. Maybe another time.”
Tug looked at her, puzzled. “You okay?”
The answer came at him from over her shoulder. “Sure. Just busy.”
She turned to face him, a hay bale braced against her thighs, the orange baling twine pulling against her fingers. “Sorry, no coffee today. Ran out of it yesterday and haven’t had time to buy more.”
Tug gave her another puzzled look, then brought back the smile. “No big deal, I already tanked up at Limespring. Follies night was fantastic, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. It was a good show,” Alyssa said. “The audience liked it. Next year I’m thinking about doing a mystery. Maybe some Sherlock Holmes thing. What do you think?”
Tug didn’t know what to think. He was the Sultan, she was Scheherazade, and she was talking to him as if he were a Safeway checkout clerk. “Sounds promising,” was all he could come up with, and by the time he did, Alyssa had gone back to manhandling hay bales.
There was an uncomfortable silence. “Well,” he said finally, “I guess I’ll work out in the pastures today. You can’t have too many horse drawings.”
“All right,” Alyssa said over her shoulder. “See you later.”
Tug watched her push another bale off the end of the truck. “Did we wake up Darryl on Follies night?” he asked.
“No. No problem,” she said. “He was sound asleep.”
Tug turned away. Had he done something wrong? Had he insulted her? Or worse: Was he just another Limespring artist to her? He didn’t have any answers. All he knew, as he opened the pasture gate, sketchpad under his arm, was that the magic of Follies night had disappeared in a puff of hay and dust.
But if he had turned around just then, he might have understood. He would have seen Alyssa standing in the back of the truck watching him walk away, trying to focus on the baling twine cutting into her fingers, to stop herself from calling out after him.
CHAPTER 26
For the next few days, Alyssa welcomed Tug each morning with the brusque reserve of a motor vehicle department clerk. She never made coffee. She never sat down next to him as he drew. Twice her blue truck was gone by the time he arrived.
He’d almost gone up to her and asked what caused the change. Had he imagined that there’d been something between them? But she came in and out of the barn so quickly, she made it clear that “hello” and “good-bye” were the only words she wanted to exchange.
Unbeknownst to Tug, there was a whole drama being played out behind his back. For once, Abbi kept her mouth shut and told Tug nothing about the blowup between Alyssa and Darryl, or Alyssa’s conversation with her the day after, or her vow to do whatever it took to keep the farm.
Tug couldn’t have known that Alyssa had called Darryl at their D.C. home, leaving an apology on the answering machine. Nor could he have known that she’d called Darryl again, later that night, to apologize a second time.
“Did you get my message?” she said. “I said I was sorry for making so much noise when I got back from the Follies. It was inconsiderate. And I should’ve come home sooner. I’m sorry. I’m sorry we fought. It was pretty horrible, wasn’t it?”
If she expected a return apology, she didn’t get one. After a brief silence Darryl merely grunted, “Uh-huh.” She waited for him to say something more. Finally she asked, “Isn’t there anything else you want to say?”
“Not really,” he said, sounding like Roz in her most petulant teen years.
“Look, Darryl. We’ve got problems, and I think we need to deal with them.”
“We’ve got problems all right.”
“Maybe we should go to Dr. Levinson.”
“We did that before.”
“He might be able to help us talk things out.”
“I doubt it. He took your side the whole time.”
“Stop acting this way,” she said, struggling to keep her voice from rising. She knew his tone was meant to hurt her but she refused to take the bait. “At the very least, do it for Roz’s sake. She’s had enough in her life to deal with.”
“Only for Roz’s sake?”
Alyssa could picture Darryl’s face at that moment. The look of feigned nonchalance, the slight sneer playing about the lips. She knew it well, and knew that, at least for this afternoon, real communication was hopeless.
“Okay, Darryl, I’ll call you in a day or so. Maybe then we can have an adult conversation.”
She did call, the next day, and on Sunday, too. Each time they talked a little longer and a little more politely. Each time Alyssa fought to stay calm, but it wasn’t easy. On Monday morning she woke with the metallic taste of panic in her mouth.
Then, that night, Darryl called her. After a while, the word “overreaction” was mentioned. Eventually, both agreed on the need for civility toward one another. It was a first step. The conversation lasted fifteen minutes. They talked about their upcoming July Fourth party, Roz’s internship with her uncle, the possibility of a new furnace for their D.C. home. They avoided the subject of lawyers and real estate agents. The names “Tug,” “Bug,” or “Doug” never came up.
By Wednesday morning, Alyssa’s feelings of panic had begun to subside. Then Tug knocked on the farmhouse door, and, for the first time, he wasn’t carrying a sketchpad.
CHAPTER 27
“Hello, Alyssa,” he said. It was far too formal a greeting. Tug usually said, “Hey, Princess,” or “Blondie, can you come out and play?” She knew immediately he was there to say good-bye. And why not? She’d all but pushed him out the door.
“Look,” he said, “I just came by to tell you that I’m pretty much done here. At least for a while. There are a bunch of tumbledown farms along the Shenandoah River that Charisse told me about. You remember her, the writer from Atlanta? She wanted to explore them for possible essays and thought they’d be good subjects for a series of drawings. Anyway, we’re going to check them out today. So I probably won’t be by in the mornings anymore.”
He hesitated, waiting for Alyssa to say something, but all she could get out was a strangled, “Oh.”
“Anyway,” he continued, “I just wanted to stop by and tell you thanks. Thanks for everything. Showing me the horses, the farm, the cow piss story. Everything.”
Alyssa could only manage a weak joke. “So you’re trading me in for another farm because I ran out of coffee? If that’s the case, you should know I bought a new can yesterday.”
“No, no,” said Tug, forcing a smile. “But thanks for doing that every morning. It was great. Really, everything here was great.”
There was another awkward silence. Each hoped the other would fill it. Neither did. “Well, anyway,” said Tug. “Thanks again. I’m sure I’ll see you around Limespring.”
For the second time in a week, she watched him turn and walk away.
She bit down hard into the fleshy pad of her lower lip and stared at his back as he became smaller and smaller. She felt incapable of moving or saying anything. She just stood there, holding open the porch door, watching Tug walk out of her life and into the horizon.
Who knows what broke the spell. The sharp pain in her lip? The nearby squawking of an angry cardinal? Whatever it was, suddenly the porch door slammed behind her and she was running out to the barn. She grabbed two saddles from the tack room and threw them on Roy and Theo.
“Sorry guys, no time to brush you down,” she said.
Tug was walking along Limespring Hollow Road when he heard the rapid clopping of hooves behind him. He turned to see Alyssa atop Theo. She had the reins in one hand and a rope tied to Roy’s halter in the other.
“Hey there, I just happened to be out for a trail ride and I just happened to have a spare horse along . . .” She nodded Roy’s way. “So what do you think? Time for your first riding lesson? Couldn’t have a more beautiful day.”
Tug felt like doing a victory dance. Alyssa was inviting hi
m back into her life. Now all he had to do was mount that big behemoth in front of him.
“You’ll never know how much I’ve been looking forward to this,” he said and swallowed hard.
As June ended and July began, things were as they had been, and more. In exchange for learning how to plod around the fields on top of Roy (which wasn’t as terrifying as he expected), Tug helped Alyssa muck out stalls. Later, riding lessons were expanded to tractor-driving lessons, in exchange for which Tug helped Alyssa change the oil. A dinner for two was exchanged for help mulching her garden.
And the morning drawing sessions continued. Tug brought his sketchpad each day. Each day the lines grew more confident, the figures bolder. An art critic might say one could feel the tension in the hay-bale twine, see the pulse in the horses’ necks. A lover might say he was drawing with his heart.
And Alyssa? She argued with herself—It wasn’t a crime. She wasn’t cheating on Darryl. He had friends of the opposite sex, why couldn’t she?—and she won every time. What was beyond dispute was this: She was happy.
CHAPTER 28
On July 3, the morning’s sketching session was brief. Alyssa had buzzed around preparing for her annual Fourth of July party and Darryl’s early-afternoon arrival. Tug halfheartedly offered to help and was glad when Alyssa turned him down. He thought of Darryl as a splotch of lime green paint on a black-and-white drawing. He knew it was unreasonable. Alyssa was no less married on July 3 than she had been on June 6 when they first met. But that didn’t ease the resentment.
He was halfway back to Limespring when he realized he’d left a set of colored pencils at the farm. He’d only begun using them the day before, shading earth tones into earlier barn sketches and experimenting with exclamation points of primary reds and yellows. He looked at his watch, it was just 9:45. Plenty of time to retrieve the pencils before the husband showed up.
The husband. Tug was sure Darryl was a jerk. Of course, he’d never met him. Still, Abbi had told him plenty.
“He thinks her monitor’s turned too bright,” Abbi had said the other night when Tug pressed her for information about Darryl. “And once when she mentioned that his brother was a great husband, Darryl said it was because his brother’s wife was organized. Organized! That’s his idea of an aphrodisiac.”
How could Alyssa have hooked up with someone like that? The husband. Her husband.
As he walked back to the farm, he saw her atop one of the two hills that backed the pond. She was on her knees, contemplating something on the ground before her. It was a surprising pose considering that just a half hour before she’d been as hyper as a mosquito.
He went into the barn and searched for his pencils. He thought he’d left them by the folding chair he’d propped against the wall. But the folding chair was gone and so were his pencils. She’d obviously been ridding the barn of his presence in preparation for Darryl’s visit.
The last time her husband had come out, she’d said he was “a little bit touchy about the Limespring fellows.” Apparently one Limespring fellow in particular. Him. And earlier that morning she’d said it again. “You should probably lay low tomorrow at the party. It’d be better if Darryl didn’t see us together much. He’s just kind of touchy.”
“Touchy,” he muttered, his irritation growing the more he thought about being erased from the barn. He walked down the aisle, scanning for places Alyssa might have tucked away his box of pencils. Then he tried the tack room, which is where Alyssa found him, rummaging through a shelf of jars and bottles of smelly horse unguents.
“Tug?”
His mood lightened immediately. “Hey there, cowgirl.” Then he put his fingers to his nose. “Yuck, there was some black slime on the side of that jar.”
“And now you smell like a road, right? Icthamal, it’s made from tar. It’s disgusting, but it works. I thought you went back to Limespring.”
Tug explained about his pencils and Alyssa opened a drawer in the desk by the phone. “I put them here for safekeeping,” she said.
He wanted to say, “Whose safekeeping?” but he didn’t.
“By the way,” he said as he was leaving, “I saw you sitting on top of that hill a few minutes ago. Were you meditating or something?”
A strange look crossed Alyssa’s face, but it was gone so quickly he thought he might have imagined it.
“Me meditate? I could use it, but no, I was just looking for a spot to shoot off the fireworks tomorrow.”
“Oh,” Tug said. It was a lie and he knew it. She’d already told him last week that they always shot the fireworks from the front pasture. As he walked back to Limespring, Alyssa’s fib puzzled him. It seemed like such a stupid thing to lie about.
Maybe Abbi had some answers. He knocked on her door and got a cheery, “It’s open.” Inside, he found her propped up in bed, her fingers running across the keyboard of her laptop.
“Hey, Tug,” she said. “Thanks for saving me. I’ve been struggling with this stupid scene all morning. I’m so sick of Scheherazade, I’m ready to behead her myself. What’s up?”
Tug sat in the same green corduroy chair that Alyssa had occupied a week before. He started to tell her about Alyssa kneeling on the top of the hill, but Abbi made him back up. The last she’d heard of the Alyssa-Tug saga, Alyssa was making unconvincing noises about keeping him at arm’s length. So Tug had to give her the full story, everything—from the post-Follies freezeout, to the big thaw, to Alyssa’s blatant lie about something so innocuous.
“I can’t figure her out sometimes,” he said.
“Boy, you’ve got it bad for her,” said Abbi. “Don’t bother to deny it. You guys are a great match. Unless, of course, she’s secretly a wacko or a closet fundamentalist. She was praying up there?”
“Not praying exactly,” said Tug. “She was kind of kneeling there. And then when I asked her about it she got that faraway look on her face she gets sometimes. But just for a split second. Then she told me that stupid lie. All she had to do was say she went up there for peace and quiet or solitude, or just to look out over the fields.”
Abbi tapped her finger against the laptop keyboard. “You know I think Alyssa’s terrific,” she said. “She’s smart and fun and pretty. But even you have to admit, she’s a little odd about her farm. It’s like she’s got its dirt running through her veins. I don’t know, maybe she’s got a horse buried up there or maybe that’s where she first fell in love with the place. Or . . .”
She burst into a laugh. “Maybe she’s got Darryl buried up there. No one’s seen him since the Follies.”
“Well, that would solve things, wouldn’t it?”
The exasperation on Tug’s face told Abbi everything. She was dying to play Cupid, dying to tell him about her conversation with Alyssa. But she was stopped by the memory of Alyssa’s panicky voice saying, “You can’t say anything to Tug.” So instead she said, “Alyssa’s not the easiest person to figure out. I know exactly that faraway look you’re talking about. For all her ebullience, there’s a real melancholy to her. Once, in the middle of a dinner party—everybody was drinking wine and telling stories and laughing—Alyssa started looking off into space for a few seconds. I could have sworn her eyes welled up. But she’s nothing if not a hell of an actress, and the next minute she was back, telling a hilarious story about Marius with a dead-on impression of his Slavic accent. She’s like a dotted line; she’s got these gaps and I don’t know what’s in them. Maybe she just has to be alone sometimes. That’s not so unusual.”
“I guess not,” Tug muttered.
“Are you going to be okay at the party tomorrow? You going to be able to handle seeing Alyssa and Darryl together?”
“No,” said Tug. “But I guess I’ll have to, won’t I?”
CHAPTER 29
Finally Farm looked like a flag factory after an explosion. Red, white, and blue ribbons streamed from the branches of the big mimosa tree; bows of bunting looped from porch post to porch post; miniature Old Glories lined the dir
t drive; a mosaic of painted rocks formed a life-sized Uncle Sam, who waved to all from the front pasture.
“Wear red, white, and blue,” Alyssa’s party invitation had said, and almost everyone obliged. There were patriotic combinations of all kinds. Red-and-blue socks with white tennis shoes; blue-and-red-striped ties with white T-shirts. The tango teacher known as “the Bod” wore a red halter top with blue bikini bottoms under a sheer white sarong. Three men showed up wearing identical tricolored Hawaiian shirts. Two others had pulled out bright red gym shorts from some secret layer in their closets. Everyone was issued a plastic white boater encircled by an Old Glory hatband.
Alyssa’s guest list was expansive—excessive, Darryl had said—and, as usual, almost everybody showed up. Finally Farm’s July Fourth was a highlight of the summer in Markham, a town so small that it was marked only by the little yellow train station that hadn’t seen a train go by in thirty-seven years. Cattle farmers mixed with composers; horse fanciers, veterinarians, and blacksmiths mixed with writers and painters; performance artists and sculptors mixed with carpenters, fence men, old-money landed gentry, and Markham’s postmistress, Mary Kelly, who knew all the locals by first name and home address. A contingent from the Browns’ Washington life showed up, too, sprinkling the crowd with high school teachers from Emerson and biologists from the National Institutes of Health.
Guests began arriving around six. By seven-thirty, when Odie Watkins rang the dinner triangle, nearly eighty people lined up at the barbecue wagon for chicken, baked beans, and coleslaw. As the sky turned from bronze to lilac, children carrying sparklers began darting through the scene like hyperactive fireflies leaving a fuzzy trail of embers behind them. Soon after, the number of amateur guitar players on the front porch reached critical mass and a playalong, singalong began. The music—folk songs and medium-tempo pop tunes—impelled a handful of romantic couples and a few of the pleasantly inebriated to waltz gaily through the grass under the mimosa tree, while ribbons tickled their heads.