by Lynn Shurr
Rex grabbed the kettle as soon as it let out its first screech of steam. “Sleepy Time okay?”
Tricia nodded, and he poked one of the teabags down into a mug of hot water with a spoon and set it in front of her. For good measure, he got out the bowl of banana pudding and dished some into cereal bowls for the both of them. If milk helped a person sleep, maybe milk products worked as well.
Tricia licked yellow pudding from her spoon, broke off a piece of soggy vanilla wafer, put it in her mouth, and sucked on it. She made eating this homey dessert almost erotic—on purpose, he considered. “My mom made this a lot when we were little. I wonder who sent it.”
Rex lifted the bowl and read the name taped to the bottom. “Ida Lutz. I’ve been to enough church socials to know the ladies always want their bowls back. Look, you don’t have to worry about Cody. An outstanding player on a mediocre team will be noticed. If he doesn’t get taken in the draft when the time comes, I can get him a tryout with the Sinners. They think out of the box when it comes to finding new talent, scooped Jakarta Jones up from some no-account college.”
Tricia still licked pudding from her spoon rather than digging into it—just to drive him crazy? “You’d do that for my brother even if I don’t marry you?”
She’d hurt him again, and he let her know it by the tightness in his voice when he answered. “I’m not Layla Devlin. You don’t have to promise me anything to give a good player a chance. The rest would be up to him. No matter how he feels right now, he has to play hard. What’s his position?”
“Some kind of back, full, half, not sure. I was the drama major, and the boys were just starting to play when I left for college. They don’t show the Cyclones’ games in L.A. even if I had the time to watch them.” She glanced down at her bowl surprised she’d finished the whole portion.
Rex, so earnest and good, asked, “More?”
Yes, please, she’d like more Rex Worthy, but not here and now. How could she think that only a day after her mother’s death? “No. I’m finished. Cute pajamas by the way.”
“Thanks.” Rex declined to tell her his mother bought them. He took the bowls to the sink below a kitchen window and dropped them clattering against the old, yellowed porcelain. “Fire! In the henhouse.”
“Carson!” Tricia moved to the door like a sprinter, but Rex got there first.
“No, go upstairs and wake your family. Where can I find a hose?”
“By the kitchen steps if Dad hasn’t taken it in for the winter. Mom used it for her garden.”
“Go, go, go!” Rex turned her back into the house.
Now he did pray to God that Carson hadn’t set himself and the coop afire smoking weed in there. If so, Tricia shouldn’t see it. He found the hose, turned it up to full blast and dragged its length along the yard hoping it would reach. No need to worry about Carson, he saw immediately. The idiot stood there with a gas can still in his hand watching the coop go up as if fascinated by every twist of the flames. The sweet smell of burning pot rode the wind carrying embers toward a field still covered with stubble from the corn crop beyond the windbreak.
Rex knocked the gas can from Carson’s grip. “You have any burlap bags to smother the cinders?”
“Yeah, in the barn, but I made sure the wind blew away from the house before I lit the match. I’m not totally stoned, you know.” Judging by how slowly he moved, Carson had indulged in one last doobie before getting out of the drug business.
Rex opened the nozzle and trained it on the small building. Reinforcements in half-buttoned jeans, flannel shirts, and unlaced boots clattered from the house. Cy grabbed some of the sacks from the heap in Carson’s arms. “Cody, Colt and Tricia, go into the field and stamp out any cinders you see. I’ll run another hose from the barn.”
“Anyone call the fire department?” Rex asked.
“No need, we can handle this ourselves.”
“What should I do, Dad?” Carson dropped the rest of the sacks to the earth.
“Stand aside.” The older man hadn’t missed the evidence of the empty gas can lying in the dirt.
The middle son bowed his head and did as he was told. The stream from two hoses gradually quelled the fire. As he and Cy continued to spray the rubble, Rex noticed Carson had thriftily removed the space heaters and the grow lights from the building before he torched it. He did not intend to ask what happened to the dried weed. Tricia, Cody, and Colt returned dragging their burlap bags.
“Not too much got beyond the trees,” Cody reported. “We took care of what did.”
“Good kids.” Cy turned to Carson. “Whatever got into you, boy, setting a fire on a windy night like this?”
“Trish was right. Mom’s gone. I don’t need to raise herbs anymore. She wouldn’t be proud of me.”
“If you’d waited till morning, I would have helped you burn it down.” Cy hugged his son, and the big boy buried his face in a flannel-covered shoulder and cried with sobs so deep his large frame quaked.
“It’s still cold out here. We should go inside before everyone gets sick. Carson, I’m sorry I came down on you so hard.” Tricia hugged her brother from the back.
“S’okay.”
They walked toward the house with Rex coiling his hose as they went. Cody trudged beside him. No time like the present to make good on a promise. “Tricia tells me you’re a back for the Cyclones.”
“Linebacker. She doesn’t know the difference between offense and defense. I don’t know how you two ever got together.”
“I heard that,” Trish said from behind them.
“We aren’t too good this year. Maybe you could come to the home game this Saturday and give us some pointers.”
“Sorry, I told Coach I’d be back to ride the pine for Sunday’s game. Never can tell when Daddy Joe will throw his back out. Just play your hardest no matter what the rest of the team is doing. I’ll see you get a tryout with the Sinners after you graduate if no one takes you in the draft.”
Colt gamboled beside the men eager to talk insider football. “Is Joe really that decrepit?”
“No. If he was, I’d be playing a lot more.”
“Is that what you pray for every game when you get down on your knees, more playing time? Or do you pray for a big win?”
“No. It’s only a game, Colt. I pray for the safety of all who play it and to do my best to support the team even from the bench.”
“Oh,” Colt replied, disappointed.
Tricia followed their conversation. She wasn’t disappointed in Rex Worthy at all.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Tricia woke so much later than intended. Unburdened of some of her guilt regarding her family, she left pleasant dreams better quickly forgotten only to recall her embarrassment over Carson’s activity, the fire, and Rex Worthy. Though she hated to make the pun, his general worthiness shone for anyone to see. How could she explain their entanglement with Layla and being in his bed when her mother died to anyone, certainly not her father or brothers who were rapidly taking to him?
No solving that problem lying here in bed. She should be downstairs getting breakfast for her father and the boys as her mother had done every day at the crack of dawn. Well, dawn no longer cracked. The giant yolk of the sun shone well above the horizon. Smells of cooking from the kitchen below rose, infiltrated the gaps in the flooring, and perfumed her room with the aroma of a country feast.
Tricia got out of bed wearing a flowered flannel nightgown found stored in the old chest at the foot of her bed. She tiptoed across the cold floor and got another pair of the slippers her granny knitted incessantly in her last years from the closet. The pink ones were goners, but she figured she had a lifetime supply. Tricia chose a set made of multicolored yarn and another robe, this one blue. The other, once belonging to her mother, was a comfort to wear, but it, too, suffered from dragging in the field last evening as they sought out sparks that might allow the fire to spread.
In the kitchen, her father stood at the stove cracking
eggs still warm from the hens directly into a giant iron skillet, scrambling them as he went. Ham slices already browned lay on a platter. The eggs bubbled in the grease they left behind. Cy added salt and pepper, a handful of grated cheese from a plastic container before speaking to his daughter. “Do the toast, would you, honey?”
Trisha fed whole wheat slices into a four-slot toaster. “I should have been up to cook for you.”
“I got pretty good at making breakfast these last four years, so good we often have it for dinner.”
“Where is everyone?”
“I sent Colt and Cody off to classes and football practice. Funeral isn’t until tomorrow and nothing much they can do here. No sense in wasting education like your mother did by marrying me.”
“She never complained. She loved you and this farm.”
“Sure. Doesn’t mean she couldn’t have done better. She quit college halfway through because of me. I won’t have any of my boys do the same. Carson will get his chance even if he has to wait a bit. Once all the final bills are paid, we’ll see where we stand.”
“Let me take over making breakfast. You can see to the animals.”
“Colt’s 4-H pigs and the steer are already butchered and in the deep freeze. The old biddies still lay two dozen eggs a day because they like that new henhouse so well.” Cy nodded at the basket of hen fruit and cracked two more into the pan. “Corn and beans are harvested, hay is in. I only have one thing to do today.” He stopped talking.
Tricia took the popped slices from the toaster and fed it four more. She began buttering. “What must you do?”
“Got an order of fertilizer to pick up at the Feed and Seed—and I need to bring clothes for your mother to wear and take them over to Emig’s Funeral Home. Maybe you can help me with that. Nothing fit her well at the end.”
“They can—make adjustments.”
“I guess. So when do you have to get back to Layla?”
“Never. I quit. I’ll be here helping you as long as you need me.”
Cy shoveled the eggs onto the platter with a large spatula and put it on the table. “Your mom said you’d try to do that. She told me not to let you give up your life because she can’t be here to take care of things. I should—marry again soon, she said, but I can’t even think of it just now.”
“I don’t want to return to Layla. Things weren’t as good between us as I led Mom to believe. Maybe, I’ll enroll in college part-time and get a teaching degree in English. I can direct high school plays like Miss Morgan. She had high hopes for me and Layla. One of us made it to the big screen.”
Her father cleared Colt and Cody’s dishes from the table and put down clean ones. “What about that fine young man who wants to marry you?”
“Like you, I can’t think about that now. Dad, I-I was in bed with him when you called me. Right now, I feel like I danced on my mother’s grave.”
There, she’d made that uncomfortable confession to her father. She and Rex must be sinking in his esteem like a hogs into a mud wallow. Tricia gave all her attention to carefully placing the toast slices individually into a rack her mother bought on a whim after watching Upstairs, Downstairs years ago, a touch of English elegance in the midst of Iowa. She braced for her father’s reaction.
His words came out mildly with no anger, no shocked outrage. “She liked to dance, your mother, not that we did it often enough. Marty said life was love and love was life. Life goes on. She knew she was dying, honey, and kept it from you. Like two peas in a pod, you two. And believe it or not, we know what young people do—the same as us when we were your age. You didn’t figure it out, why she quit college.”
“Because she loved you, but you’d already inherited the farm and couldn’t leave it. You needed her help to run the place.” Tricia parroted back words often repeated in her childhood and never questioned. She placed the delicate, filigreed toast rack on the table by the platter and the jug of orange juice, the half-gallon of milk nearly empty.
“She was expecting you, Trish. We gave our marriage time to set, to make sure it would work before we had the boys, so you got four years on them.” Cy poured a cup of coffee and hid behind its rim after he got the words out.
Tricia sat down abruptly. “I thought I was a honeymoon baby.”
“We had no honeymoon to speak of except what we could enjoy upstairs. Nothing wrong with that either. We fiddled with our anniversary date a little to keep all of you in the dark, not because we were ashamed, but we didn’t want our kids to feel embarrassed. Folks forget the details after a while. It becomes old news, and no one cares as long as you live a decent life, which your mother surely did.”
“I don’t know what to say except thanks for not getting rid of me.”
“Never entered our minds. Now, eggs are getting cold. Call Rex and that brother of yours to come eat before I throw it away.”
****
Tricia helped her father pick out the casket clothes, a favorite dress Marty liked to wear to church with the shoes to match. Not knowing if they needed to, they packed underwear and nylons along with her favorite necklace and a little gold cross on a chain to place in her hands. The difficult task completed, Cy set off for town, taking Rex and Carson with him to load bags of fertilizer from the Feed and Seed on the way home.
Tricia stayed behind intending to clean the lower floor of the house and the half-bath off the laundry room plus the one upstairs until they shone. Beyond hope she could make her brothers’ rooms presentable in a day, she simply shut their doors. Coats of the guests arriving after the service could be piled in her parents’ always-tidy bedroom.
From the upstairs window, she thought at first a dust cloud moved down the lane, but when it thinned, she saw a caravan of church ladies charging ahead to do good and possibly bring more food, though where she’d put it, only heaven knew. They parked en masse in the front yard and rang the doorbell. Wearing jeans and an old T-shirt bearing an indelible stain, her dark hair covered by a blue bandana, Tricia welcomed them inside. Letty Welch stated they’d come to clean.
Still pretty in her mid-forties, Letty kept herself up, not a gray streak in her black hair and a trim little figure exuding energy packed into jeans and a fitted top. She assigned duties: kitchen, bathrooms, family room. “Tricia and I will do the parlor.”
An old-fashioned space with a fireplace and impressive carved mantel, Tricia’s grandmother had decorated the parlor with a tufted pale blue brocade settee and matching side chairs aping the style of long gone French kings. A spindly white and gold coffee table displayed a huge chunk of fool’s gold obtained on a rare vacation and a lidded iridescent candy dish, currently empty. The print in a thick gilded frame over the fireplace portrayed an eighteenth-century gentleman on a bobbed-tailed horse bending to kiss the hand of a lady in a white wig and wide panniered skirts. Granny treasured this room off-limits to men, boys, and dogs, used only once a month when the Ladies Guild came for tea, and generally covered in plastic slipcovers the rest of the time.
“Not too bad in here,” Letty Welch proclaimed, but we should take off the slipcovers and give the furniture and mantel a good dusting. You’ll want to use the space for the guests after the funeral, maybe have a fire burning to make it more inviting and not so formal.”
Tricia yearned to rebel, but her mother had said something similar a few months after Granny’s passing. “Now we can redecorate, maybe make this place a little more modern.”
Marty Welles admired and got along with her crusty mother-in-law, certainly a big help with the four children and not a word of censure over the hasty marriage, but move one item or suggest a change and one paid hell for it. She didn’t get the chance to put her own ideas into effect, being diagnosed with advanced breast cancer within months of the old lady’s passing. So, Trish helped fold the plastic covers, cleaned every curlicue with a soft brush, and lifted up the china figurines of the shepherd and shepherdess made in Japan that adorned the mantel to dust beneath them.
Le
tty kept up a constant chatter, mostly anecdotes about her mother’s bravery and her grandmother’s eccentricities. Mind elsewhere, Tricia barely answered. She could tell when the men entered the house after unloading the fertilizer in the barn. The voices of the women waxing the hall floor changed from gossipy banter to an almost cooing tone as they gathered around Cy and Carson to express their sympathy and gain an introduction to Rex. Letty declared the parlor finished and rushed to join them.
She hugged Cy a little too long in Tricia’s opinion. “Anything I can do to help, anything, I’m your girl. And Trish if you need a woman to talk to, call me anytime.”
The ladies drafted Rex and Carson to move the heavy sofa in the family room. Deeply embedded in the pile of the only carpet in the house, it yielded up long lost items: coins, plastic soldiers, marbles, and a five-year-old copy of Playboy once hastily hidden. The women laughed. Carson blushed and thumped down his end of the sofa few feet away.
Elderly Ida Lutz cupped a hand around her wrinkled lips and said to her nearest crony, “Did you see those muscles? Don’t think I’m too old to appreciate that.”
She referred to Rex of course. Carson had gone soft in the last year. Tricia, standing off to one side, had been admiring the play of those same muscles stretching the black T-shirt and bunching as he lifted the heavy piece of furniture a foot higher than her brother. Rex set his end down in one careful, controlled move.
“Such a good, clean Christian boy,” the pastor’s wife murmured piously.
“Not a good boy anymore according to the papers at the grocery store,” Ida whispered with a jerk of her head in Tricia’s direction. “He hangs out with movie stars and their ilk now.” Hard of hearing, Ida’s whispering tended to come out loud and travel far.
Color crept up the back of Rex’s neck. More concerned for him than herself, Tricia announced over the roar of the vacuum attacking the revealed carpet. “Thank you so much for your help. We can manage from here. See you at the service tomorrow.”