Not this time. She hadn’t even mentioned the cane, just looked at it—and at him—with pity. So on top of her anger, there was also pity. What could be worse?
An ugly voice told him she was avoiding the obvious subject of his injury because the Red Meyer who wasn’t whole and healthy wasn’t the Red Meyer she wanted.
But why should that bother him, since he’d been thinking the same thing himself?
“Your mother has talked Edith and me into staying at the guesthouse a couple of days,” Bertie said.
He looked at her, nodded, looked away. At least she was being sensible about that, not staying at the farm.
“I’ll walk out to the farm later,” she said. “After Edith and I get settled in and I change my clothes. I need to get my bicycle out of the barn so I won’t have to depend on anyone else to get where I want to go.”
Ivan glanced over his shoulder at her. “I’d be glad to drive you wherever you want to go.”
Red scowled. Good ol’ Ivan, always helpful to a lady in distress.
“Thanks,” Bertie said, “but I’ve got two strong legs, and I need to—” Her voice broke off. As if against her will, she glanced at Red’s leg, and color crept up her neck and into her face.
If it hadn’t been so awkward, he’d have laughed. If it hadn’t been so painful, he’d have at least smiled. He could almost see the pity forming in her eyes.
“I’ll be fine,” she said quietly. She looked so sad all of a sudden. She leaned forward and touched Lilly’s shoulder in the front seat. “So, Lilly, you said you wanted to do some baking. Would this afternoon be good for you?”
His mother paused. “There’ll probably be a lot of visitors over to see you soon as they find out you’re home. I’ll spread the word you’re stayin’ with me. With that much company, doubt you’ll have time for much baking.”
“I’ll get to work on some cookies when I can today,” Bertie said. “That way there’ll be something to feed the visitors.”
“Let’s see how much time we have,” Lilly advised.
“I’ll deal with everything a whole lot better if I can keep my hands busy,” Bertie said. “Farming or baking, I might as well keep on the move, so if you don’t need me to help with the bakin’, I’ll hop on out to the farm and get to work in the garden.”
“Ought to stick to baking for the time being, then,” Red said, unable to keep his mouth shut about it, though he knew Bertie wouldn’t like what he had to say. “Leave the farm to the men.”
He wasn’t surprised when Bertie’s small, strong hands clenched together until her fingertips showed white around the nails. Good. The anger looked better to him right now than her pity.
“I’ve not been gone from the farm that long,” she said. “I still know how to take care of the stock.”
“Stock’s not what I’m worried about—though I can’t see you handling the hay fields all by yourself.” He wanted to put his hand over her bunched fists, remind her that this was him she was talkin’ to, not some stranger. But he didn’t want to push himself on her.
“I can hire help if I need it,” she said. “Lots of men coming back home to the area from the war.”
He winced at her words. “What do you think I am—” he snapped before he could think “—a goat?”
He heard her small gasp, saw his mother’s quick, warning look over her shoulder, and cringed when Ivan laughed. He’d as much as told Ma on Monday that he wouldn’t be much help on a farm, though he’d discovered since then that there were lots of chores he could still do, they just took him a little longer than they used to.
He realized Bertie was still looking up at him, gaze steady, as if she was searching into his very soul to see what was really going on with him. “I’d say that was a pretty fair description right now,” she said quietly.
Ivan laughed again, this time so hard he nearly ran the car off the road.
Chapter Sixteen
Bertie sat beside Red on the very short drive into town and listened to Lilly, Ivan and Edith chatter about Ivan’s funny experiences in the Pacific—only the funny ones. Edith asked question after question, drawing Ivan out, complimenting him on his poetry, and wanting to know what had inspired each poem she’d read.
Bertie was glad no one talked about the bad experiences.
Was she a horrible person for wanting to avoid the depressing stories right now? These men had risked their very lives for their country. Didn’t she owe them a listening ear if they felt a need to talk about the horrors they’d endured for her safety, her way of life?
Sitting so close to Red, forcing herself not to look at his leg, trying hard not to think about it, she didn’t feel she’d be able to bear to hear about what he had suffered. She would want to know later. Right now, with Dad not buried yet, she couldn’t face more.
Laughter once again bounced through the car. Was it as obvious to Ivan and Lilly as it was to Bertie that Edith was keeping Ivan talking to cover the silence between Bertie and Red?
Bless Edith’s kind soul.
And bless Ivan, too. He’d never liked dwelling on depressing things. Like Red, he’d always glossed over hardships or conflict with a distracting joke.
Bertie wanted to share in the laughter, but it caught in her throat.
She stole a glance at Red from the corner of her eye, and saw him staring out the windshield, his eyebrows drawn together in a grimace. Was he as painfully aware of her beside him as she was of him? Or was he off in another world entirely, remembering the experiences that had wounded him in the war?
From time to time, her insides seemed to spin like the belt on a lathe, and she couldn’t tell if it was her stomach or her racing heart. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She should be sitting here with Red’s arm around her, planning what kinds of treatments would best work to heal him. She felt as muzzled as a mad dog.
Oh, the countless hours she had daydreamed as she worked at the plant. She’d imagined her father’s smiling face when he welcomed her home, the feel of the humid Missouri air on her skin, the smell of the wildflowers that grew along the wooded section of the farm and the tart taste of one of Lilly’s gooseberry pies.
She’d also dreamed about the first time she and Red would see each other again, how handsome he would look, and how eager to catch her in his arms and promise never to leave again.
Not only hadn’t he caught her in his arms, he’d shoved her away from him, even before she’d come home.
She closed her eyes. Reality was nothing like those silly dreams. Yes, Red was alive. But this man sitting beside her wasn’t the same man who’d written to her, with whom she’d grown up, and teased, and dated.
That man held gentle laughter inside that came out with the slightest encouragement. This man was prickly and bossy.
She grieved the loss just as she grieved her father’s death.
From the corner of her eye, she studied Red’s grim expression, the firm tilt of his jaw, and she figured he was worrying this situation as she was, like a dog gnawing on a hard bone.
“Well, here it is,” Ivan said, glancing at Edith in the rearview mirror as the road curved around the side of a cliff and the sleepy village of Hideaway came into view.
The lush growth of trees, flowers and healthy victory gardens encircling each house reminded Bertie of an easier time, when she, Red, Ivan, John and John’s sister, Dixie, would ride their bikes through town.
“You remember when we’d snatch flowers?” Ivan asked, looking in the rearview mirror at Bertie. “You were the worst of the bunch, Bert, making the prettiest bouquets from flowers you snitched from different gardens.”
“Nobody missed ’em,” she said.
“She didn’t keep ’em for herself,” Red protested. “She left ’em for the elderly folk to find on their front porches.” He looked at her then, almost reluctantly, before quickly dropping his gaze. “Then she’d knock on the doors and ride away before she could get caught.”
Bertie felt surprise,
then a flush of pleasure at Red’s defense of her actions.
“I heard about that,” Lilly said, chuckling. “But their worst bit of troublemaking came when Bertie and Red went fishing one Friday afternoon and caught ’em a mess of fish, but did they bring that catch to me for a fish fry? Nosiree.”
“I remember that,” Ivan said. “I was with them. We left the fish on Mrs. Murphy’s front porch, because Mrs. Murphy loved a good mess of fried striper.”
Lilly clucked her tongue. “Well, when Bertie rode her bicycle past Mrs. Murphy’s house on Monday, the fish were still out there, stinking to high heaven. Mrs. Murphy had been out of town with her daughter that weekend.”
Edith’s delighted laughter lifted Bertie’s mood only slightly. “Bertie’s always bragging about how pretty her town is, and I’ve always wanted to see it. She never told me the half of it.”
Ivan drove his Chevrolet around the square, showing off their tiny town to Edith. Bertie suspected he also wanted to show off the car his parents had given to him as a reward for returning home in one piece.
Gerald and Arielle Potts would do about anything for their only child. If there’d been a new car manufactured this year, they would have bought it for him.
Everyone had known for many years that Arielle’s plans for her son included an internship in Baltimore, Maryland, at her brother’s bank. What most folks didn’t know—what only a few of Ivan’s closest friends had known for years—was that he had no intention of going to Maryland.
He had worried about the problem since high school, but he had been granted a reprieve by earning a scholarship to the state university in Columbia, Missouri. The war had claimed him immediately after college graduation, but Bertie knew he would soon be expected to take that long-awaited journey to Maryland. If he didn’t, it would break his mother’s heart.
Ivan loved his mother dearly, but as he’d told Bertie once, he “was a homegrown man,” with no interest in venturing into his mother’s native world. He identified far more with his father, who liked a good hunting trip, loved to fish, and whose highest ambition was to be mayor of Hideaway as he earned a living with the MFA Exchange feed and farm supply store—a lucrative living by local standards, though not quite what Arielle had in mind when she’d married Gerald.
Three old friends from church waved at them from the sidewalk, and twice Ivan had to stop the car when someone gestured him over to the edge of the red-brick street.
Everyone wanted to talk to the soldiers who’d come home from the war…and everyone wanted to hug Bertie and sympathize with her about her father’s death. They also wanted to meet her friend from California. Mrs. Jarvis eyed Edith with suspicion, as if she was some foreigner, but then she warmed to Edith’s southern charm in no time.
As Edith explained, no one was actually a native of California. She, herself, had been born and raised in Mobile, Alabama.
The sudden homecoming crowd on the town square was startlingly different from the anonymity Bertie had experienced in California, where everyone she passed on the street was a stranger. She glanced at Edith, and smiled at her friend’s expression of growing disbelief.
“You’re right, Bertie,” Edith said quietly, under cover of another conversation between Lilly and Mrs. Thomas, the owner of Mode O’ Day ladies’ wear shop. “People are wonderfully friendly here.”
Bertie shrugged. “As you’ve pointed out to me often enough, when folks are isolated from the rest of the world by a long drive and hard times, they learn to depend on one another. They have to socialize.”
Bertie risked a look at Red, and for once, he returned that look. Still no twinkle, no light of welcome in those blue eyes, only a brooding watchfulness that tore at her. But there was something else…some barely detectable look of…what? Tenderness?
Her imagination was running rampant.
She wanted to tell Edith that sometimes, no matter how well you knew someone, there was still a stranger inside. No one was ever completely knowable.
They drove past the Methodist church, and Lilly turned to look over her shoulder at Bertie. “We’ll have the funeral at noon tomorrow.” She pointed toward the cemetery, where the grave had already been dug.
“The Methodist church?” Edith asked, leaning forward to glance at Bertie. “But you attend the Lutheran church in California. I thought you were Lutheran.”
“Dad was Lutheran when he came to this country with his family as a teenager,” Bertie said. “But there was no Lutheran place of worship in Hideaway when they got here. Dad’s parents would never adapt, but my parents started attending the Methodist church after they were married.”
“How did that go over?” Edith asked.
“There was a culture clash,” Bertie said. “The Germans liked to drink their beer at town gatherings, so there were a lot of eyebrows raised at my parents. But my parents never got used to women not properly covering their arms and legs, even at church.”
Bertie remembered some of those conflicts from her childhood. People laughed about it years later, of course, but at the time those differences in customs and attitudes had fueled the German Americans’ sense of exclusion in their new country.
At the Meyer Guesthouse, neighbors and friends started bringing food and lingering to talk, reminiscing about old times with Dad. The house gradually filled, and Bertie realized there would be little time to bake anything this afternoon.
That was okay. She had other things she wanted to do, as soon as she could slip out of the house.
Chapter Seventeen
Red wasn’t surprised that the first visitors through the front door were Gerald and Arielle Potts, followed by Ivan, who carried a large covered plate. Red knew that the plate would be filled with tiny sandwiches and quiches, bite-sized cakes and meringues, Arielle Potts’s specialties.
Red always wondered how the Potts men could be so hale and hearty. Those dainties Arielle made usually wore off in about an hour, and a fella was starving again.
Gerald had met Arielle at college in Baltimore, where she had been born and raised. Both had been smitten at once, and they married as soon as they both graduated. According to Ivan, it’d been quite a shock for his mother when Gerald brought her back to his hometown of Hideaway to settle and have a family.
It had been an even deeper shock, and a huge disappointment to her, when she’d been able to produce only one child.
In spite of these initial disappointments, however, Arielle Potts had been quick to set about maintaining her pride of heritage, and even in Hideaway, she’d tried to instill a sense of community spirit for the past. She’d attempted to convince Ivan to attend the same college in Baltimore she and Gerald had attended, but she’d been thwarted and disappointed when Ivan didn’t abide by her wishes.
Her next great plan for her son was to see him taken under the wing of her brother, a banker, as soon as this war was over, to be established in business.
Ivan was smart, he’d done well in school, in spite of a bit of rebelliousness, and she wanted to see him in politics, maybe even the governorship someday.
She’d always encouraged the friendship between Ivan and Red—she was partial to Red, which baffled him, being a homegrown boy in every way. But Red knew that even after all these years of being a citizen of Hideaway, the wife of the mayor, and running the library, Arielle Potts still didn’t have any really close friends. Leastways, not according to Ivan. For the most part, the townsfolk still treated her like an outsider.
Once, when she didn’t realize Red and Ivan had come into the house after school, they had overheard her complaining to her husband about the town’s “hillbilly mentality.” That had been after Gerald had run for mayor and was being criticized for some of his new policies.
Red felt a little sorry for Ivan’s mother. She was like a princess who had come to a town of commoners and could never become one of them, hard as she tried. Red suspected a bit of jealousy might be part of the reason she wasn’t fully accepted—because of her look
s. Arielle Potts was a pretty woman, still slender, with blond hair and dark brown eyes.
Some folks said Gerald had been elected mayor in spite of his uppity wife. Some folks were plain ornery and envious.
“Arielle!” Bertie called to Mrs. Potts, stepping from the kitchen with a platter of corn muffins to set on the table.
The two women hugged each other, and Red thought he saw tears in Arielle’s eyes. She murmured something into Bertie’s ear.
It seemed, ever since Bertie’s mother died in ’42, that both Red’s and Ivan’s mothers competed over who would take Marty Moennig’s place in Bertie’s affections.
“So,” came Ivan’s voice from behind Red at the fireplace, “first of all, are you going to tell me why you’re covered in dirt? Second, when are you going to change clothes? And third, when are you going to start showing Bertie how much you missed her?”
With a grimace, Red looked down at his dirty old clothes. “Guess I oughta get out of these things.”
Ivan put a hand on his arm. “Not until you answer my questions. What are you up to, Charles Frederick?”
Red scowled over his shoulder at his fair-haired friend. “Still checking things out.”
“Did you fall out there at the house?”
“Not exactly.”
“So what happened? Don’t tell me somebody jumped you.”
Red gave a long-suffering sigh. “If you must know, Mr. Noseypants, I thought I heard artillery fire, and I did what any good soldier would’ve done.”
“Hit the ground.” Ivan’s puzzlement turned to obvious concern. “Somebody shot at you?”
“Nope.” Red felt a flush creep up his neck. “Let it drop, okay?”
Ivan seemed about to press.
“And I’ll deal with Bertie my own way, if you don’t mind.” Red crossed the room to Ivan’s mother. “Mrs. Potts,” he said softly in her ear, “mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”
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