Now
Becca washed up the remaining supper dishes, relishing a rare moment of solitude. Through the window above the kitchen sink, she looked out across the back yard at the barn and the hundred-year-old oak tree just up the hill from it. It had come back to life once again this year, the same tire she’d swung on as a child still hanging from a sturdy limb. It always amazed her that the tree could have survived so long in the same place, season after season, its leaves no less vibrant now than they had been the year before.
Like that old tree, Becca’s roots here ran deep. She loved the farm and the flat lay of the land where it stretched out to the foot of Tinker’s Knob, the mountain that ran along the outer edge of their property. As a child, she’d explored every inch of it, except, of course, Tinker’s Knob, which as a little girl, had always seemed like Mount Everest to her. She used to try to imagine what might be on the other side. When she was nine years old, she’d actually put together a plan to climb it, complete with a map from the County Extension office that marked her family’s piece of the Blue Ridge in yellow highlighter. She’d packed a bag with a flashlight, a pocket-knife, cheese sandwiches and a jar of lemonade, all set to head out when her mother got wind of her expedition and warned her about all the wild animals that lived on the mountain. Bears. Goats. Boars. Live sentries to prevent a girl like her from ever attempting to scale it.
So she’d never actually climbed Tinker’s Knob. And she knew now that her mother had been right about that and so many other things as well.
Aaron walked out of the big main door at the barn, and spotting her at the window, raised his hand. Becca waved in return, suds dripping from her forearm.
He wore one of the light blue cotton shirts she’d made for him on her mother’s old sewing machine. The shirt was tucked neatly into the denim pants she’d also made, suspenders keeping them in place. His face was clean-shaven. On his head sat the straw hat he refused to replace despite the fact that it had been run over by the tractor twice and never quite regained its original shape. Aaron was a hard worker. His view of life was simple in that he kept his head down, never questioning the existence laid out before him.
But Becca had questioned. Considered the what-ifs. Grieved over them, actually.
She could feel them surfacing again, fluttering against the wall of her chest like butterfly wings. He came back. He came back.
She reached into the suds for the heavy wrought iron skillet her mother had used to fry the ham for supper. She refused to use the Teflon-coated pan Becca gave her a few Christmases ago, preferring the one she’d cooked in all her life, even though it was nearly impossible to clean. Becca both admired and resented this stubbornness in her mother. Martha had never seen the value in trying something new when the old still worked.
Becca opened the cabinet door beneath the sink and pulled out a wire scrub brush, working for a minute or more, using the effort as an escape hatch for the direction of her thoughts.
But it didn’t help. She closed her eyes and saw his face for the thousandth time since that afternoon.
Throughout all the years during which she had never once run into him, she’d held onto his image as he was before. Seventeen and confident the world was his for the asking. That boy had disappeared forever today, replaced by a man she did not know, a man whose eyes held shadows of disillusion and something else she wasn’t willing to identify.
The back door off the kitchen opened, a smiling Abby flying into the room, all breathless flurry, bursting with a can’t-wait-to-tell-you secret. “Mama,” she said, her blue eyes sparkling. “Bea just had her calf! Daddy let me help her at the end. It was incredible. The baby just slid out into my arms like she knew I was waiting right there for her!”
Becca set the skillet on the counter, smiling. It was contagious, Abby’s joy. People wanted to be near her, some of that joy rubbing off on them, like some special elixir. “Your twenty-four hour vigil paid off then, didn’t it?”
“It was so worth it,” Abby said, heading for the refrigerator, the long, blonde braid hanging to the center of her back flying out behind her. “I was starting to think she’d never have it, but Daddy kept saying just be patient.”
Becca nodded once, picturing Aaron patting Abby’s shoulder in quiet instruction, as she had seen him do many times. “I wasn’t sure you would be back for supper, but I saved a plate for you.”
“Thanks. I’m starving.”
She opened the oven door, lifting the plate from the rack and setting it on the table. “Is your daddy coming up?”
“He said he’d be on in a while,” Abby said, dropping into a ladder back chair, and then asking, “Where did you go today?”
“To a funeral for a woman I knew,” Becca said after a few moments.
“Was she old?” Abby managed around a forkful of mashed potatoes.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
Hearing the genuine empathy in Abby’s voice, Becca nodded, turning away to wipe down the sink, a lump of sadness lodging in her throat.
“I could have gone with you,” Abby said.
“And leave Bea alone?” Becca said, making her voice light, even as she appreciated her daughter’s generous heart. It was Abby’s nature to feel things for others, animals, people, on a level that seemed out of character for a seventeen-year old. But Becca had known this about Abby even before she learned to talk. Abby only had to look at a dog or cat that wandered onto the farm without a collar or any apparent owner, and her eyes would turn liquid with sympathy. Just as they were now.
Footsteps echoed on the stairs.
Martha walked into the kitchen, slowed by the arthritis that plagued her knees now on a daily basis, her blue calico dress as crisp as if it had just seen the tip of an iron, her gray hair pulled back into a bun and covered with a white bonnet that fit close to her head. She set a wooden tray stacked with dishes on the counter, then reached for the drying towel.
Becca picked up a plate, scraping the mostly untouched food into the bowl at the edge of the sink, then dipping it in the soapy water. “Emmy didn’t eat much tonight,” she said.
Martha sighed and shook her head. “Sometimes, I think it all tastes the same to her.”
“Maybe Aunt Em just wasn’t hungry,” Abby offered from the table.
“Maybe not,” Becca agreed, even though she’d noticed for some time the way her sister turned her head at the sight of food. The mechanical way in which she chewed, then swallowed, her blue eyes registering no pleasure in the process.
“Were there a lot of people at the funeral today?” Martha asked, as if she wanted to change the subject.
“Yes,” Becca said. “Mrs. Griffith had a lot of friends.”
“She was a good woman.”
A little spurt of anger prodded Becca to ask her mother why she hadn’t gone to the funeral then, but she didn’t. She knew the answer, after all.
They finished cleaning up the kitchen, Abby intent on completing her homework at the table, the silence in the room blatant. When the last of the glasses had been put away, Martha looked at Becca and said, “Emmy loves your banana pudding. Maybe you could make her one tomorrow. See if that helps her appetite.”
For a single moment, a spear of rebellion hurtled up from somewhere deep inside Becca. She felt bruised by everything that had happened today, her mother’s words like boulders pressing against her too sensitive skin. An almost impossible to resist desire to simply walk away swept through her, a need to leave this house and the weight of obligation she thought would sometimes completely smother her.
But she glanced at Abby then, seeing the hint of question in her eyes. The rebellion died an instant death, as it always did. “Of course,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’ll be happy to.”
6
Impending Storms
“The willow which bends to the tempest often escapes better than the oak which resists it.”
- Sir Walter Scott
Now
Martha didn’t miss the look in her daughter’s eyes, the instant flare of resistance, and then its deliberate squelching. She watched as Becca let herself out the back door off the kitchen, nearly called her back, then pressed her lips together and turned to put away the remaining dishes.
She could feel her granddaughter’s gaze on her back, all but heard the questions running through the young girl’s mind. It wasn’t as if Martha hadn’t noticed them before. Of course, she had. Abby was an intelligent child, and she often observed the interactions between Martha and Becca with a kind of intensity that made Martha feel as if she were being looked at through some kind of special lense. And falling short on her granddaughter’s measuring stick.
Abby had always been so closely bonded with Becca. As an infant, she would stare up into Becca’s face with a look of utter adoration, as if Becca had saved her very life. Which, in so many ways, Martha could not deny that she had.
“I’m going upstairs to do some homework, Grandma,” Abby said, sliding back her chair and bringing her remaining dishes to the sink. “I’ll do these first though.”
Abby’s shoulders were stiff with disapproval. Strangely, Martha felt no resentment of this. Abby’s conclusions, after all, were based on what she witnessed with her own eyes. And Martha could not deny the strain between Becca and herself, the recently renewed tug of wills that for so long had succumbed to acceptance on Becca’s part. It was only in these past few days that Martha had felt the bloom of it in her daughter’s bearing. She felt it in the air between them, an undeniable threat to the normal pattern of a day like the humidity that precedes a summer storm.
“That’s all right,” Martha said. “I’ll do them.”
“Thank you, Grandma.” Subdued, Abby left the kitchen then, her footsteps sounding on the wood staircase. For the next few minutes, Martha busied herself with the mindless task of cleaning up. When the last glass was stored in the cupboard, she braced herself at the sink, both hands grasping its edge while a hollowness echoed up from deep inside her.
She regretted now her earlier abruptness with Becca. Wished, as she had so many other times, that she could take it back, soften the requests she frequently made of her oldest daughter. She realized the unfairness of it, even as she felt the sharpness of her own tongue.
If there were any excuse for her behavior, it was that she depended on Becca, had no idea, in fact, what she would do without her. Not so much, she realized, for the physical help that Becca provided for Emmy, but for the way in which she trudged through each day, pulling Emmy along with firm insistence, when Martha would have long ago given up.
This wasn’t something she was proud to admit. But it was true, nonetheless. She loved Emmy with all her heart, but at her very human core, she sometimes wanted to shake her into waking up from the trancelike state she’d succumbed to a little more with every passing year.
Not once had Martha ever seen this frustration in Becca. If she felt it, she never let it show. And as much as anything, it was this Martha feared losing now. She doubted her own ability to give Emmy what she needed. Without Becca, she could not begin to imagine what would happen to any of them.
She turned away from the sink and dried her hands on a cotton towel. She felt the ugliness of her own admission and the single wave of shame flowing up from behind it.
This family needed Becca. And with the return of Matt Griffith to the county, Martha was deeply, desperately afraid that they would lose her.
7
A Secret Room
“A mill cannot grind with water that is past.”
– American Proverb
Now
The potting shed at the far left corner of the yard beckoned like a shady maple on an August afternoon. Becca headed across the grass, arms folded across her chest, a knot of something that felt too much like bitterness sitting tight and hard inside her. She quickened her steps, nearly running by the time she reached the front door. Inside, she flipped a switch, and soft light bathed the small room.
She closed the door behind her, the tightness in her chest instantly dissolving. The potting shed always had this effect on her, the only place she ever went that truly felt like hers. A place where she could steep her hands in soil, seeds and plants until she found her own roots again, and the world ceased to tilt around her.
Her daddy had helped her build the shed so she would have a place to put the gardening tools and supplies Granny Miller had left her when she died. Aaron and her mother both had been opposed to the idea of making such a building for something as humble as gardening. But her father had built it anyway, knowing how much Becca had needed this space for herself.
Against the back wall was her work area, a harvest style wood table some nine feet in length and four in width. The table had belonged to her granny. In the right hand corner of the shed sat a refrigerator with a glass front, by far the most expensive thing Becca had ever bought for herself and certainly the most worldly. She’d driven to Raleigh, North Carolina and shopped for it at one of those specialty stores that sold equipment with names like Viking and Northland to high-end restaurants. In it, she kept the seeds passed down from her grandmother along with the ones she’d cultivated since, rows and rows of blue jars with muted silver lids neatly lining the shelves.
She’d bought the fancy refrigerator with its glass door for the simple reason that seeing all those jars somehow grounded her, reminded her that sometimes a thread of the past could weave its way into the present.
Growing up, Becca had loved visiting her Granny Miller’s house, especially in the spring when she was busy planting her enormous garden. With each year, the garden had grown to meet the demand of the customers who came back season after season to purchase the produce she raised and displayed in green cardboard containers. Becca loved watching the empty black rectangle of earth transform with row after row of new vegetables, the colors and textures rich and alive.
First the lettuce, tender leaves of Buttercrunch and Mascara. Then the spring onions, fragile green tops peeking through the dark soil. Next, Hubbard squash and Cocozelle zucchini, vine after vine, picked while they were still small and tender. Then the tomatoes, German Johnsons, Marglobes, and Old Brooks, each perfectly staked on its own wooden trellis. And multiple teepees of climbing beans, Scarlet Runners and Yellow Squaws.
Gardening was the same for Becca as it had been for her Granny. There was something wonderfully addictive in the seasonal process, a chance each spring to start fresh, create something from nothing, carrying on the tradition of saving from the best plants the seeds Granny had cherished.
Becca walked over to the long worktable where row after row of starter plants sat waiting for the weather to become consistent enough that they could be transplanted outside. She rubbed a finger across a tomato plant, calmed by the assurance of the work ahead of her. These months, April through August, were the best of the year, the days where she lost herself in the cycle of labor necessary to grow the garden and harvest its bounty.
Now, at the end of April, the lettuces were already planted and would be ready to begin picking any day. The workload would increase steadily from there, and the timing was good. After today, she would need the steady immersion and its distraction.
Becca reached for a plastic jug of water and began dosing each of the plants on the table. The quiet of the shed was peaceful, soothing, and she willed it to settle over the images in her head, suffocate them with reason. But she couldn’t blink away the image of Matt’s face or the sorrow in his eyes.
She knew the danger of letting herself think about him. But then where Matt was concerned, logic had never applied. Her response to him had always come from her heart, unexpected, unsummoned, and at first, unwelcome.
How, then, did a woman fend off something that came from inside her, as organic as the soil she used to grow her vegetables? She could feel the funnel of it now, rising up from a single pinpoint of energy, the same feeling, really, she’d known the first m
oment she’d set eyes on him nearly three decades before.
∞
Then
THE FIRST TIME Becca saw the Griffith house, it looked like a castle to her. It had been built in the 1800’s, Georgian, Federal or some such style. It was a classic old house, one of the nicest in Ballard. The boxwoods out front formed a defining border all the way around the yard, and they’d already outlived generations of the Griffith family.
Becca had been nine years old the Saturday she rode with her mother into town to deliver the eggs they collected each week for a dozen or so regular customers. Mrs. Griffith was new on their list, and Becca’s mother said for her to wait in the car while she took the two cartons to the door.
The day was warm so Becca sat in the front seat with the window rolled down and her door open. A dozen yards away, a boy she’d never seen before tossed a baseball high in the air and caught it with a leather glove. He looked to be about her age. He had dark blonde hair and the kind of face that assured him a future of being chased by girls.
He walked over to the car, not saying anything, just staring. This was hardly a new response for Becca. She’d long ago gotten used to the questions from other children who wondered why her family wore funny clothes and didn’t have televisions in their homes.
“Do you always have to wear a dress?” he asked, tossing the ball up again and catching it in his glove.
“Do you always have to cut your hair so short?” she threw back, staring at his head.
He grinned and threw the ball up higher, catching it again with a solid whump. “Only in the summer when it’s hot. Why? You don’t like it?”
She lifted a shoulder, tipped her head, figuring he already had a big enough ego. “It’s okay.”
“So, you gonna answer my question?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I always wear a dress.”
“Why?”
She thought about this for a few moments, startled to discover that she didn’t have an immediate answer other than that it was what she was supposed to do. “You have something against dresses?”
Crossing Tinker's Knob Page 3