by Annie Jones
“Of course I can. George R. Cunningham. Why?”
“No reason, except...” She gathered up the plates she’d abandoned before, pivoted on her heel, and headed toward the kitchen. “Except before you go feeling all superior over having gotten into such a shrewd business arrangement with the founding family of Fulton’s Dominion, you’d better take a peek at my grandfather’s business card.”
Riley did not want to do it. Did not have to do it, if he were honest with himself. The minute she’d suggested it, he knew what he would find.
Discouragement lay like lead in the pit of his stomach, and a dull, foreboding throbbed behind his eyes as he picked up the card and read aloud, “George Robert ‘Smilin’ Bob’ Cunningham. Principal Judge, Miss Fulton’s Finest Future Furniture Fanatic (baby and toddler division), Chief Justice Dominion Days Bail and Jail Fundraising court, Little League umpire, Mediating matters of all magnitude since 1978!”
Chapter Ten
“As my grandfather might say, Mr. Walker, if you fall asleep in Delilah’s barber chair?” Dixie pressed her back to the kitchen door, dinner plates in one hand, Peachie Too’s crystal supper dish in the other, “You got no call to go bellyaching when you wake up with a new haircut.”
“Isn’t that a piece of shrewd advice!” Riley flicked his wrist and sent the business card sailing across the table. The small rectangle landed atop the bowl of fresh fruit, teetered on a tangerine, then tipped and slid between an apple and a bunch of bananas. “Pardon me if I don’t rush out to have that embroidered on a pillow as a keepsake, Miss Fulton-Leigh.”
“Well, maybe you should check into doing just that.” She had not set out to sound so haughty, but the way he’d discarded the fitting counsel struck a chord in her. “Or maybe you’d really do better with something more permanent. A nice engraved plaque, perhaps, or a tattoos right on your—”
His face clouded. “I cannot believe you can stand there and make light of this.”
“Me?” She started to gesture to herself but realized her hands were full. She ducked inside the kitchen and in two quick steps she had set the dishes on the counter, pivoted and caught the door before it had stopped swinging. Poking her head back into the dining room, she said, “You’ve got some nerve scolding me for not taking this seriously. As long as you thought you had come charging into my life like some knight on a white steed, you seemed all too happy to treat everything like some big jokefest.”
He puffed his chest up. “Yeah, well, that was before—”
“That was before you realized that Greenhow had made just as big a monkey out of you as he had me. Now suddenly it doesn’t seem like a laughing matter, does it?” She let the door fall shut between them, the heavy swish and thump of the thing as appropriate a close to the conversation as anything she could have come up with on her own.
The deluge of hot water rushing in to fill the deep, white sink drowned out her tongue-tied sounds of utter frustration. On one hand she had wanted nothing more than to see this very thing happen, for Riley Walker to be thwarted in his attempt to move in on her family business. On the other hand, some small part of her did not want it to come like this. The only reason Riley would back down now was because he thought her grandfather was a nut.
She grabbed the liquid detergent and squirted it into the water, the aroma of the green liquid filling the damp air around her.
If this was a victory, it was a shallow one at best. She was still in as big a mess as she had been before, trying to run three businesses on her own. Everyone in town would still be dependent on her decisions, and she still did not have a lawyer that she could trust to help her comb through the plans left in chaos by Daddy’s dying. And then there was Riley
She slid the plates into the sink and turned the faucet off with one hard crank of the handle. Standing with her hands immersed in the steaming water, she stared into the fragile, quivering bubbles. Riley. He said he’d changed his entire life for Wendy’s sake, and now to have this happen. What was the man going to do?
The faintest tapping from the door behind her jarred Dixie’s thoughts back to the reality of the moment. She raised her hands from the water, started to wipe them on her apron, only to remember she’d been so worked up she had not put one on. She turned toward the drawer with the kitchen towels in it, but the continued tapping drew her attention away.
“What?” She shook her hands over the sink to fling away the bubbles but they were too thick. Feeling a fool for having acted so impulsively out of her mixed feelings, she thrust her hands behind her back. “What is it? Did somebody want something?”
Slowly the door cracked open, not much, but just enough to allow a small white object to inch through the opening.
Dixie squinted. She cocked her head to try to make out what the peculiar white, and then a bit of yellow, could be. Her grandfather’s card, she concluded after a few seconds study, stuck like a flag on the end of...”A banana?”
Riley pushed his way on through the doorway, a grin as wide as the ol’ Mississippi itself on his face. “It’s a call for a truce.” He held the fruit toward her. “From one monkey to another.”
“If you think this is funny, Mr. Walker, then...” She glanced at the banana in his hand, Dixie couldn’t help but chuckle. “Okay, it’s funny”
“Truce, then?” He held out his hand, his gaze hopeful but hard.
“Truce.” Dixie returned that gaze with one she hoped he would read as strong but sympathetic. She swung her hand out to grasp his.
Their palms met.
The soap bubbles squished and popped and oozed between their fingers.
Riley glanced down.
Dixie winced.
He shook his head. “Well, at least this is going to be a clean break-”
Dixie straightened her shoulders and let her hand slip from his. With all the suds on their warm skin he could not have held it if he had wanted to, but he did not seem to want to.
That was okay with her. She didn’t want to stand here in this cramped but cozy kitchen looking up into Riley Walker’s eyes, holding his hand, anyway. With a deep breath she started to wipe her hands dry on her skirt, caught herself and went over to grab a towel. “Actually, Mr. Walker, this all could become quite messy, if you think about it. You’ve struck a deal that you’ve gone to great lengths to assure me, it’s airtight.”
Riley set his improvised flag of surrender aside. “No deal is airtight if one of the participants can be proven to have, um, shall we say, sprung a leak?”
She grabbed a towel shook it so fiercely the soft cotton snapped in the air as it unfurled from its sharp folds. “Just what are you implying, Mr. Walker?”
“Oh, c’mon, don’t get all coy with me. You know what I mean. Your grandfather there.” He gave a sharp gesture with his thumb in the general direction in which the old man had last been seen. “‘Smilin’ Bob,’ ‘the Judge.’ He’s a wing and a leg short of a full fried chicken dinner.”
“He’s eccentric.” Dixie would have been the first to have said as much about her grandfather if asked. But she hadn’t been asked and hearing it from Riley just hit her wrong. She wadded the soft fabric in both her hands. “But he is competent, mentally competent, and I don’t think you could prove otherwise. Maybe if you had asked some questions before you started signing things Greenhow put in front of you.”
“I was desperate.” He pushed his hand back through the thick waves of his hair, looked up at the clock, over at the window, then right at Dixie. Though he didn’t say the words, there was a plea for understanding his eyes and the weary expression on his face. “I had to do something to make our lives look normal and as positive as humanly possible, and I had to do it yesterday.”
“Wait, Riley, are you saying--”
“I thought I knew what I was walking into after speaking to your father. I thought I was helping both our families.”
“No. Do not put any of this on me.” Dixie put both hands up between them. He wanted her to understa
nd him? He needed to do as much for her. To do that he had to hear the truth. “Riley Walker, you worried that in six years of being Wendy’s father you had neglected all the ‘right things’.”
The quotation marks she made in the air sent a splash of soapy water sailing. When it landed on Riley’s cheek he didn’t so much as flinch.
Dixie fought the urge to reach up and brush it away by pressing on to make her point. “Me, I take one look at Wendy, see how she treats others and the way she lights up around you, and I’d say you worried for nothing.”
“Thanks,” he muttered. “I think.”
“But you had it in your head you had to present the court with some kind of picture book life.” She stepped toward him, her fingers flexing to fight the temptation to take care of the damp spot on his face. “So when push came to shove, you decided you could waltz into my life and buy those things you had neglected to build for yourself, or to siphon them off of my family and all the trappings of stability and—”
“Stability?” It came out sounding like he’d just scalded himself. He tried to maintain a serious expression but he couldn’t hide the spark of amusement in his eyes when he asked, “This group?”
It probably wasn’t a good sign that she found the conflicting emotions in him charming. But she was trying to make a point and she hated being charmed when she was trying to make a point. “Yes, in many ways my family does seem to have the stability yours lacks. Otherwise, why us?”
He took a deep breath and let it out, resignation now mixing with his need for her to understand. “It was business.”
“Well, it turned out to be bad business, didn’t it? You think you’ve done all this to put all of us on solid ground but what you’ve really done…” At last she reached up stroked the dampness from his cheek with the side of her thumb. She couldn’t help herself, just as she couldn’t held adding, “What you’ve really done is put yourself between a rock and a hard place.”
* * *
She was right. He knew it. She knew it. But no power on earth was going to make him admit it. Not today, not with so many thoughts crashing together in his mind that he could not concentrate on anything but his own anger and embarrassment.
“There’s no sense in us going over and over my motivations, Dixie.” He stepped back, surprised at how much he instantly missed her touch, her nearness. What had happened to him? He was losing his focus. He took another backward step and shook his head, his hands up. “I think maybe it would be best if Wendy and I stayed elsewhere tonight.”
He gave the kitchen door a shove and in two long strides he was back in the dining room.
The door whooshed and clunked, swinging back and forth, back and forth in smaller and smaller increments over the threshold.
A sudden noisy wham broke the thumping rhythm. The door swung open and there stood Dixie, eyes flashing. “Did you just walk out on me? Nobody just walks out on me.”
It took every ounce of irritation Riley could conjure up just to keep him from smiling at her response. And from confessing he hadn’t been walking out so much as running away, and not from her but from his own feelings for her. “You wanted me out of your family’s business. I want out. You should be happy. “
She tipped her head back. “You don’t know how I feel.”
He pinned her with a glare. “You’re just not content unless you’re contradicting me, are you?”
“I’m not content unless I am doing the right thing, Mr. Walker. If that happens to make you look like the north end of a southbound mule in the process, well, that’s just a happy coincidence.” She crossed her arms, smiled slyly and cocked her head.
A neat little row of pearls accentuated her slender neck and complemented the flawless color of her skin. That he could take note of such things when other men might have been contemplating circling that pretty neck with both hands, told Riley something that scared him far more than any business deal gone sour ever could. Dixie Fulton- Leigh had gotten under his time-toughened hide like no other woman had before. Now, more than ever, he knew he had to get out of there.
“And the right thing is to make you and Wendy comfortable in my home. You are the invited guests of this household, and I will not be any part of you running off with that precious child of yours into the night when we have perfectly fine—”
“Into the night? Where do you get that stuff?” His laugh came out harder than he intended but he did nothing to soften it when he threw out, “You won’t allow me to take my child and go? I’d like to see you try and stop me.”
* * *
Dixie stayed on Riley heels as she followed him down the dark and narrow hallway that lead to Lettie’s room. She tried to reason with him but she didn’t manage to get more than a few syllables out before the sound of Wendy’s darling voice reached them, and Riley pulled up.
“I liked that story, Miss Lettie, can you tell me another, please?” Wendy seemed quite careful not to jostle or disturb the old lady lying next to where she sat cross-legged on the wide bed.
Still, Miss Lettie braced herself with one hand on the pillow that Sis had propped behind her back, as if she expected the child to start bouncing and somersaulting like a gymnast on a trampoline. Even so, there was a faraway light shining in those dark old eyes that Dixie had not seen in a very long time, the light of joy in the company of a young child.
Seeing that, Dixie gladly obliged Riley’s wish to linger on the fringe of the serene scene.
“Another story?” Lettie laughed. “No, lambkin, I don’t think ol’ Lettie got it in her tonight. Old ‘uns like me and the Judge, we tends to wear right thin when it gets to the very last nub of day.”
A nudge from Riley sent Dixie’s gaze over to the overstuffed chair where Grandpa sat, head back, mouth open, snoring to beat the band. She laughed. “Chief Justice of log sawing, huh?”
“Does that mean I have to go now?” Wendy asked, her head bowed slightly over the limp figure of Baby Belle draped in her lap.
“No such of a thing. Not at all. I’m all run out of stories to tell you right now, but that don’t mean you can’t tell me one.”
“I don’t know any”
“Then tell me about this baby doll of yours you’ve come toting in here.”
“It’s not mine, it belongs to Miss Dixie.” She held the doll up. “She said you made it for her when she was a little girl.”
“Yes, yes. That’s right, now I remember. I made so many dolls for that little gal, I almost forgot which one was which. But this one, she’s special. That’s the doll I made for her just before the accident.”
“Why did you make so many dolls for her?” Wendy fussed with the doll’s buttons. “Did her daddy not know how much little girls liked dolls and never buy her any?”
Riley shuffled his feet. He looked down.
“Her daddy could have bought her any doll they sold at the finest stores, lambkin, but she preferred the ones I sewed up for her because they was made with love.”
Wendy studied the women for a moment, tilting her head one way then the next before she asked, “Are you Miss Dixie’s mother?”
Lettie cackled up a laugh. “Only a pure heart could ask such a question child. No, I’m not my Dixie Belle’s mother. I helped to raise her, though, just like I raised her grandmother. Raised her mother, too, right alongside my own little girl, Helen Betty.”
Wendy pointed toward the open doorway, leaning in as she asked in a loud whisper, “Is that the lady with the funny dog?”
Again Lettie laughed. “No, darling, Helen Betty has gone on to live with Jesus in heaven like so, so many people I have loved and cared for in my lifetime.”
Dixie thought of the grandson that Lettie had not seen in so long. Now more than ever she knew she had to do something to bring about a reunion. And soon.
“I’m not blood relation to any of the folks in this house. They’re my family by fate, by the will and grace of God, and by some measure of mutual consent, I reckon.”
“I don’t understand.” Wendy shook her head.
“Well, the way I sees it, the Lord has brung us together here for a whole lot of reasons and we’ve all of us made our home together, now. All of us that’s here, we’ve all had a heap of love but we’ve all known our share of loss. You’re too young to understand about grieving for them what’s gone away or gone on.”
“My mother’s gone away,” she said quiet but distinctly “She left me for my daddy and my grandma to take care of. Sometimes thinking ‘bout her leaving makes me feel real bad, Miss Lettie. I know how that feels—all sad, and lonely, and wishing you knew how to make it all better.”
Dixie reached out to pat Riley on the back, but her hand came to rest on his arm instead. She just left it there.
“Faith and time helped me when I lost my Helen Betty, my only child, first when she moved away with that no-account husband of hers, Walter Summers, and then after...the accident.”
“There it is again,” Riley muttered. “The accident. It seems to be a defining moment in your family’s personal history.”
Dixie said nothing. What could she say? To deny it would be to deny all the pain and anguish this family had endured because of that one eventful night. To acknowledge it meant an explanation that Dixie was not ready to issue to a man she wasn’t sure she could trust—or would ever see again after they dissolved his partnership with Grandpa.
“After the accident, I lost touch with my grandson. I ain’t seen him since his mother’s funeral. Yes, this household sure has known its share of good-byes.” Lettie began to stroke Baby Belle’s hair as she spoke, her head lifted high and her gaze fixed somewhere in the unseen distance. “Miss Dixie, she’s done just lost her daddy and years before that her mother went on to glory along with Young Bobby, that was Miss Sis’s husband, and—”
“Will you tell me about the accident?” Wendy asked softly as her small, nimble fingers worked in unison with Lettie’s gnarled ones to straighten out a row of yellowed lace on the doll dress.