Weekends in Carolina
Jennifer Lohmann
Wishing the weekend would never end! Trey Harris wants nothing to do with his late father's farm. In fact, he can't get rid of it fast enough so he can enjoy his city life. Then he meets Maxine "Max" Backstrom–the gorgeous woman leasing the land. Between her passion for his family's farm and her determination to show him its beauty…well, Trey can't stop thinking about what it would be like to kiss her!Still, their lives are worlds apart. If he sells, her livelihood vanishes. But his interests aren't here. And no matter how magical their weekends together are, this can't lead to anything…can it?
Wishing the weekend would never end!
Trey Harris wants nothing to do with his late father’s farm. In fact, he can’t get rid of it fast enough so he can enjoy his city life. Then he meets Maxine “Max” Backstrom—the gorgeous woman leasing the land. Between her passion for his family’s farm and her determination to show him its beauty…well, Trey can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to kiss her!
Still, their lives are worlds apart. If he sells, her livelihood vanishes. But his interests aren’t here. And no matter how magical their weekends together are, this can’t lead to anything…can it?
He watched her watch the game...and couldn’t look away
“I don’t think I’ve seen a college basketball game since, well, since college,” Max said, before a forkful of corn pudding disappeared into her mouth.
“Where did you go to college?” Trey asked, suddenly interested in everything about her.
She held up her fork and he waited until she swallowed. “Illinois, so I know a thing or two about college basketball.”
Trey scoffed. “Big Ten basketball is fine, so long as you’re in the Midwest.” He turned on the accent he’d turned off for most of his adult life. “Y’all down South now, ya hear.” When he turned to smile at her, she had an unabashed grin on her face. Her white teeth against her pale lips, her speckled skin, and the wild mass of orange hair were a shining counterpart to the flashes from the oversize television.
He wrenched his face back to watch the game. Right now he controlled her livelihood. Even if he wanted to know just how much of her body was covered in freckles, he was leaving in a week.
Dear Reader,
I grew up in southern Idaho with parents who gardened. And they didn’t just have a small, “square foot” garden; our garden was about an eighth of an acre and included raspberries, strawberries, apples, apricots, pears and plums, along with vegetables. Between tilling in the manure, laying the drip lines, organic pest control, et cetera, this garden was a huge operation for one family. It provided all of our summer produce, along with produce to give away, and to preserve. No one ever had to tell me to “eat my vegetables” because fruits and vegetables made up the bulk of what I ate—although I did have to be told to eat my zucchini.
Now I live on a shaded plot of land and I am a terrible gardener.
Farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture saved me. While agriculture has always been an important part of North Carolina’s economy, I have been blessed to live in Durham at a time when “eating local” really started to gain hold. One of the benefits of writing Weekends in Carolina is that I had an excuse—obligation—to get to know my farmers better. The amount of care, both for the land and for the vegetable, put into a single cucumber humbles me.
If this book inspires you to go to your local farmer’s market and buy a pound of spring carrots, then I also suggest that you visit the bookstore for a copy of World Vegetarian by Madhur Jaffrey and make her stir-fried carrots with ginger and mustard seeds. You won’t regret either purchase and you’ll have the bonus of a delicious side dish.
Enjoy!
Jennifer Lohmann
Weekends in Carolina
Jennifer Lohmann
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennifer Lohmann is a Rocky Mountain girl at heart, having grown up in southern Idaho and Salt Lake City. When she’s not writing or working as a public librarian, she wrangles two cats and five backyard chickens; the dog is better behaved. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, and has received a weekly box of vegetables from the same farm for eight years.
To Elise from Elysian Fields Farm and all the small farmers selling week after week at farmers’ markets across the country; thank you for growing delicious food for me to cook with and eat.
To all the people who helped me weather a rough year. This space is too small to thank each of you individually, but you know who you are. May life bless you as much as you have blessed me.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE (#ueec231e5-954e-5cce-af45-867b543f14bb)
CHAPTER TWO (#uf1eba808-a4d7-5a2d-a4e4-2dac2bc401ca)
CHAPTER THREE (#u29ecaed2-d1df-550a-aaa9-c3ca9743007a)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u5b0ae1ba-12ee-5d0b-8bc7-693a71882a36)
CHAPTER FIVE (#uf1b2b3ca-a9b3-59f0-88c7-890fa565be98)
CHAPTER SIX (#u9396042e-d0c6-59d8-8253-d44d2c392bcb)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
TREY WOULD HAVE bet substantial amounts of money that he would never have found a woman shooting tin cans with a .22 attractive. Or, for that matter, any woman standing behind his father’s house. This woman was evidence that he would have lost both wagers.
He couldn’t see her face, but she had a ferocity to her stance, legs set apart and knees slightly bent, elbows sharp and dangerous, and he could describe the pinch in her facial features without her having to turn around. Her mass of curly, carrot-colored hair was barely contained by the knot she’d tied it in, and the baseball cap it was shoved under was doing nothing to help lash the masses together. She must be keeping it out of her eyes by sheer force of will, as the wind blew wisps of curls everywhere but in front of her face.
Trey was surprised there was enough country left in him to find a woman in work boots attractive. Another bet he would have lost.
Whoever she was, her jeans skimmed over her tight butt before disappearing into her boots, and he was enjoying the way her shoulder blades poked through the white cotton of her T-shirt. And the way the surprisingly bright and unseasonably warm sun of a January day in North Carolina bounced off the freckles on her arms. Only a small amount of bare skin was visible, but what he could see was more freckle than not.
She pulled the trigger and the P in one of the Pepsi cans disappeared before the can toppled over. The woman herself barely flinched. Trey had just taken another breath and she shot the next can. Given the pile of fallen cans and the near-empty box of fresh targets, the woman had been out shooting for a while. He was loath to interrupt her to ask where Max was. Not only was he enjoying the view, but she was an angry woman holding a rifle. Trey knew nothing about Max and his competencies, but Trey’s father had certainly been capable of making a woman angry enough to shoot any human with a Y-chromosome, even from beyond the grave. God knows Trey had spent much of his childhood escaping his house to punch trees while his mother had practiced her bland smile.
Clip spent, the woman put the rifle on the seat of a lawn chair and stalked to the line of dead cans.
“Hey,” Trey called out as he walked to the chair. She didn’t turn around or give any other indication that she’d heard him. His mother’s lessons, always at odds with his father’s example, had been to be polite and respectful to women, but he couldn’t yell “pardon me, ma’am” with enough force to get the woman’s attention, so he reconciled himself to a rude “Hey, you!”
The woman started, knocking over the pile of dead cans she had constructed. When she looked up at him, his spine tingled in response. Even through sunglasses, the force of her stare caught him off guard. As far as he knew, she wasn’t supposed to be on his father’s farm, much less here shooting cans. Or was it his farm now? Or maybe it was Max’s farm. It didn’t matter who owned the property at the moment. This woman wasn’t supposed to be here.
She straightened, then reached up to her ears with both hands and pulled. Two small bits of orange foam bounced off her shirt, just above the rise of her breasts.
Of course she couldn’t hear him. She’d been wearing earplugs. It had been so long since Trey had stood in his backyard and shot at cans that he’d forgotten some of the basic safety precautions.
She marched up to him, her stride as direct as her stare. After they were no longer in shouting distance, she lifted her sunglasses off her face, folded them into the neck of her T-shirt and said, “You must be Trey Harris.”
The woman walked quickly. By the time she had finished speaking, she was directly in front of him. The part of Trey that had been admiring her backside also noticed the peaks of her nipples pressed against her shirt—even if it was a warm, sunny January day in North Carolina, it was still a January day. But Trey wasn’t a complete caveman; he also noticed that she had clear, mint-green eyes.
“You have the advantage over me,” he said, focusing his attention on her arresting eyes. For all that the rest of her was easy to look at, her eyes—and the straightforward way she looked at him—were mesmerizing. She was daring him to look away and he couldn’t. “You know who I am, but I don’t know who you are.”
Or what you’re doing here.
Her straight, pale eyebrows crossed in confusion. “I’m Max Backstrom,” she said without offering her hand.
“You’re Max?” A couple years ago, Trey had asked Kelly if his boyfriend had known he was spending so much time with Max. His brother had choked with laughter—and now Trey knew why.
Her confusion didn’t last. She lifted one eyebrow, this time daring him to argue with her, and he didn’t accept this challenge, either. This woman was his father’s farmer.
* * *
THE ANGER THAT had been warming Max from the inside retreated enough for her to feel the cool breeze on her bare arms. After the one glance at her breasts, Trey had managed to keep his eyes on her face for the rest of the conversation, but she’d noticed that one glance. And his surprise at learning her name. She knew that father and son had barely spoken for years, but she had a hard time believing not one of those conversations had included the basic fact that Hank was leasing his land to a woman. Or at the very least, that Kelly hadn’t told him. She had thought the brothers kept in touch through the occasional email.
The next puff of wind brought a strand of hair across her face and goose bumps to her arms. She debated continuing to stand there in her T-shirt just to see how long he could keep his eyes off her erect nipples, but good sense won out. The ownership of the farm was in flux and she needed Trey’s support. Plus she was cold. She pulled her sweatshirt off the back of the chair and shoved her arms into the sleeves before zipping it up all the way.
Finally buffeted against the chill and Trey’s shock, she said, “Max is short for Maxine.” Which was short for Maxine Patch, but she only used the full ridiculousness of her name when signing contracts, and they weren’t at that stage in their relationship yet. “Let me clean this up and then we can have a cup of tea and talk.”
Having known Trey’s father and seeing the shine on the son’s loafers, Max hadn’t expected him to follow her up the small hill to collect cans. Today was sunny, but the past few days had been nothing but rain. Some of the ground was soil. Some of it was red clay. All of it was mud. Cans clinked against one another as they tossed them into the box. Her supply of targets was going to be much smaller now that Hank Harris was dead.
“Where to?” Trey’s arms were wrapped around the box of cans and he was looking around. Through his eyes, the farm in winter probably didn’t seem like much to look at. The only greens were the loblolly pines at the edges of the fields and the hardiest bits of grasses. Everything else was brown either because it was dirt or because it was dead. Even the winter cover crops were fading.
She bit her lip before the urge to defend the bareness of the land in winter escaped her mouth. This man didn’t care about the land. Hank had said neither of his sons had cared about the land. Of course, Hank had only cared that the land was still in his possession—“got a responsibility,” he used to say, though Max had never been certain who the responsibility had been to. Surely the ancestors who’d first settled this plot of land would have wanted to see it farmed more than they would have wanted to see Hank stand on the dirt with his thumbs tucked into his belt loops.
Max didn’t know where Trey stood on the responsibility line, and she hoped he saw that the land was only useful if it was being used. And she could use it. “Put them in the back of my truck,” she instructed. “They need to go to recycling.”
He nodded then walked off in the direction of her ancient blue pickup truck. If he was concerned about the mud on his fancy shoes, he didn’t show it. Max sighed. Trey wasn’t the only one who’d apparently made judgments based on little information. Neither was he the only one who’d made those judgments poorly. All she had known of Trey was that he rarely talked to his father or brother and wore suits to work. Hank had emphasized the last fact every time he talked about his older son, saying, “I can’t believe I let Noreen raise that boy up to wear suits to work,” with his tone somewhere between disgust and pride. Since Max had occasionally heard Hank brag to his mechanic about Trey, she gave Hank the benefit of the doubt and credited his disgust as a cover for his true feelings.
Max had seen the crisp white collar of Trey’s shirt poking up from the navy blue of his striped sweater and forgotten that he’d spent his childhood on this farm. His full, nearly black hair, cut in a conservative style, thick, black eyebrows and clean-shaven face fit her image of preppy Capitol Hill policy wonk better than son of a Southern good ole boy. But add some stubble to his square jaw and change the intelligent curiosity in Trey’s dark brown eyes to Hank’s amused condescension and the resemblance was clear. Replace his flat stomach with a beer belly, add a ratty #3 Earnhardt cap and twenty-five years, plus a stint in Vietnam, and Trey would be the spitting image of his father.
Her uncharitable thoughts were unfair to Hank. The man had been a jerk, but he’d also leased her land to farm for cheap and helped fix up one of the tobacco barns for housing. Hank may not have understood the changing face of farming in central North Carolina, but he wasn’t going to stand in its way. Besides, the mess she was in now was her fault, as much as Hank’s. She should have pressed him harder on the specifics of the ownership of the farm once he passed away, but she hadn’t wanted to risk pissing him off and losing the farm while he was alive.
No, that wasn’t fair to Hank, either. She’d been afraid to learn he had changed his mind about writing the lease into the will and that she would have to make another plan. Now she was stuck with her three-year plan, and no idea if she would need another by December. She wished she had her mother’s ability to leap into the unknown and reinvent herself every couple years, but—like her father—Max was a farmer, plodding along through life.
She grabbed the rifle and the chair and followed Trey to her truck. She didn’t know how he’d managed it, but there was not a single speck of red clay on his sweater from carrying the box.
“Where are you staying?” she asked.
He looked uncertain. “I’d planned to stay at the house, but...”
“But that was when you thought I was a man.”
“You’re a farmer named Max. Can you blame me?”
“No.” Trey hadn’t been the first person to be surprised at her lack of penis and he wouldn’t be the last. Despite many small organic farms being run by women, people still expected a burly man with a piece of straw sticking out of his mouth and a John Deere hat when they met a farmer. “I’m just surprised the subject never came up.”
A noise somewhere between a laugh and a scoff escaped Trey’s lips. “I’m sure my father meant to be alive and present when I finally met you. Like a big practical joke.”
She laughed at the irritated resignation on his face, especially because she could sympathize. “Hank always did find it funny that he had a ‘lady farmer’ leasing his land. You can still stay at the house. I live in one of the barns. Though Kelly didn’t think you’d be coming today, so the heat’s been turned off and I doubt there’s much edible in the kitchen.”
“Is the offer of tea still on the table?”
“Sure.” She looked at the watch face strapped on to her belt loop. “I’ll even throw in lunch.”
“Great. Let me put my stuff in the house and turn the heat on. Then I’ll be over. By the time we’ve finished eating, perhaps the heat will have pushed the damp out of the walls.”
“Deal,” she said, with more cheer than she felt. Then she watched him for a moment as he walked to his fancy car for his luggage. Whether it was the long line of his legs or his power over her future that interested her so much, she wasn’t sure. Both made her nervous.
CHAPTER TWO
TREY WAS STANDING on Max’s front porch, about to knock, when his phone buzzed. While in the house he’d texted Kelly, asking why his brother hadn’t told him their dad’s farmer was a woman. Kelly’s response was simple.
Hah! I thought Dad had finally told you. Be over after work.
He shoved his phone in his pocket, along with the feeling that his entire family was playing a joke on him. Only his father, the originator of the joke, was dead and Kelly hadn’t ever been interested in traditional gender roles, so this wasn’t a joke he would have played on purpose. Which made this nothing more than a painful reminder of how little connection he’d had to this place after his mother died. In the hereafter, his father was likely cackling that Trey’s discomfort at being surprised was just punishment for only calling his dad on occasional birthdays and Christmas.
A dog barked when he knocked on the door, and from somewhere inside Max called out, “Sit.” When she opened the door a mottled black, white and tan dog was at her feet, looking at Trey with a mix of curiosity and annoyance. It was much the same way Trey had felt looking at Max, when he had wrongfully thought she didn’t belong on his father’s property shooting cans, before he knew she was Max.
“This is Ashes. Don’t mind him. Cattle dogs are a protective breed.” As if to prove her point, the dog growled. Trey thought about growling back—this is my land—but pissing contests only rewarded the fool who drank too much. Better to be smart than a bloated idiot. Plus, for all he cared, the dog could claim the land by peeing on every blade of grass; Trey sure didn’t want ownership of the useless hunk of clay.
With this inauspicious start, Trey stepped through the doorway into Max’s barn. “I figured the barn would have fallen down by now.”
The last time he’d been here, for his mother’s funeral, the barn door had been missing and some of the beams had been rotted through. Now it was downright cozy with stairs leading up to a loft, a large woven rug on the floor and a woodstove along one wall. Trey blinked and took a second look.
The walls and floor were bare wood and the kitchen at the back had a small fridge and an even smaller stove, giving the place the look of someone’s hunting cabin instead of a renovated barn where people lived. So maybe not cozy, but livable, which was still a damn sight better than it had been five years ago.
“The first winter I lived in the farmhouse with your father while we renovated the barn to make it livable.” She blinked and opened her pink, cracking lips like she was going to say something else. Her lips opened and shut one more time before she’d made up her mind about continuing. “I’d planned to move into the farmhouse and use the barn for housing when I finally bought the place but...”
He realized that whatever leasing agreements she had with his father carried over with the property, but that didn’t mean Trey couldn’t toss them all out the window and eat the breach of contract cost just to wash his hands clean of the place once and for all. That was if he even owned the farm. They could both hope that his father had left the property to Max in his will. Because truthfully, Trey didn’t care if his father had left it to the Earnhardt Foundation, so long as he didn’t have to come down here again.
“Anyway, no matter what you decide to do, it seemed crass to move into the house right now.”
“Better to wait until after the funeral?”
“That wasn’t...” she said, but he waved off her apology.
“I know that wasn’t what you meant. I don’t want the farm, though I probably now own it. I’m sure whatever agreement you had with my father will be fine with me. We’ll sort this out. You can move into the farmhouse and I can go back to D.C. Hell, you could move in now, for all I care.”
Trey supposed sadness was the proper emotion to feel after his father’s death, but the only emotions coursing through him were relief that the man had only killed himself and nobody else in the car accident, and irritation that he hadn’t sold the land before dying. The man had been a drunk and a bastard—why did he also have to be irresponsible?
The kettle on the stove whistled and the dog cocked his head to the sound, but didn’t bark. Max pointed at a dog bed in front of the woodstove before heading to the kitchen, and the dog obediently went to lie down.
“Sorry about the mess on the table,” she called over her shoulder. “If you could dump the papers and laptop in the box by the table, we’ll have space for our food.”
As Trey shoveled everything into the box, the receipts and invoices for seeds, straw and ladybugs didn’t surprise him, but the resumes did. What did he know about farming anyway? He’d worked on his uncle’s tobacco farm only because he had to, but when college brochure time had come around, he’d tossed into the trash any pamphlet with Ag or Tech or State on the front. He’d wanted to toss all the applications for North Carolina colleges in the trash, too, but money had been short. In the end, a degree from Carolina and the connections of a fraternity brother had gotten him to D.C. and a congressman’s office and that was enough. He realized he was staring at an invoice for strawberry plants—probably had been doing so for a while. He shook his head, tossed the invoice into the box and then placed the laptop in last, weighing down the pile of papers.
The table cleared, he went to the kitchen to help Max with the plates.
“I hope egg salad is okay,” she said, as she handed him a plate and a mug of tea.
“Egg salad is great.” The plate was brimming with food. The egg salad and some lettuce was on wheat bread, cut diagonally, he noticed with a smile. Also on the plate were apple slices, a pickle and a pile of potato chips. Despite the oddness of drinking hot tea with his lunch, Trey was grateful for it. Max’s cabin wasn’t cold, but it was cool. And it was one of those odd North Carolina days when the inside was colder than the outside.
Their plates each made different clinks when they touched her small table and Trey noticed they were mismatched. So were the mugs. Max got back up to get them some water and returned with mason jars, rather than regular water glasses. He took another look around the barn. There was not a doodad or tchotchke in sight. Judging by her residence, Max had no patience for pretense and no interest in owning things that didn’t have a use. Everything was well cared for, but nothing was fussy. Even the dog, who had been fixin’ to get up from his bed before a look from Max settled him back down, probably had a job.
“Thank you for the reassurance about the house,” Max said before taking a bite of her sandwich. “Clearly, I had expected to live in the barn this summer, but having it to offer for housing will make finding seasonal help easier.”
“I have no interest in ever living back on the farm and I’m sure Kelly doesn’t, either. And the house does us no good standing empty. Kelly and I will take a week to pack up and store anything personal, then you can move in.”
He took a bite of his sandwich. The egg salad was rich with mayonnaise and the yolks were the bright orange of the eggs he remembered eating as a child, when his mother had raised hens. “Do you have chickens?” he asked, a little embarrassed that he didn’t know what Max grew, other than vegetables.
“They were Hank’s. After we finished renovating the barn, he had some leftover wood. There’s a little chicken coop on the other side of the house, built to look like a tobacco barn.” Her smile must be at the thought of the chickens; it couldn’t be at the memory of his father. “It’s cute.”
Trey tried to imagine his father designing a cute chicken coop and got a headache. He also couldn’t imagine his father wanting chickens. Trey, Kelly and his mother had built the original chicken coop after his father’s response to his mother wanting hens had been, “You want ’em, you gotta work for ’em.” Kelly and Trey had gone with their mother to pick up the chicks from a nearby farm, and though Trey had pretended to be too old and too manly at thirteen for anything cute, he still remembered having to repress a giggle at the sight of the cheeping biddies. His father, however, had never once referred to the chickens without the adjectives “smelly” or “dirty.” He’d also never once turned down fried eggs or a slice from one of his mother’s delicious sour-cream pound cakes.
“I’m sorry about your father,” Max said. Her tone held the same sharp honesty of her stare and Trey wondered if she meant it or was the best liar on the planet. He decided to give her credit for honesty.
“I’m only sorry he didn’t sell you the land before he killed himself. Seems like that’s the only thing you should be sorry about, too.”
It was eerie, watching those short, pale lashes lower over her light eyes. Trey almost felt like he’d said something he shouldn’t have. Almost.
They finished the rest of their meal in silence.
* * *
MAX APPRECIATED BOTH Trey’s help carrying the dishes to the sink and his quick exit. She didn’t know how to respond to the anger simmering under the surface of his skin. Hank hadn’t been a paragon of anything, but he at least deserved for his children to be sad at his death.
She scrubbed the plates and stacked them in the small dish drainer. The winter season was slow on the farm, but she had to finish plotting out her fields before the spring vegetables went into the ground. And she must make sure she had enough wax boxes in stock for when the Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, began. And arrange for the intern candidates to visit. She’d been about to send those email invitations when Hank had died, then she’d wanted to wait until she’d met Trey.
Of course, she thought as she folded the kitchen towel and hung it off the oven, she could still lose the farm for the summer. She didn’t think Trey’s promises could to be trusted. She would have to go on with her work as though everything was normal and be prepared to stand tall when everything came crashing down about her feet.
But starting the broccoli in the greenhouse would have to wait until tomorrow, since she’d wasted the morning in useless, irritated shooting and would need to spend some of the precious daylight picking up shell casings. Her irritation with herself for wasted hours would last until she turned the week in her calendar and didn’t have to look at “shot Pepsi cans” as her record for daily farm duties. Maybe if she added “made lunch for new landlord” to it, the day wouldn’t look so wasted on paper.
When she’d asked Hank what happened to the will and he’d said, “I’ve taken care of it, sugar,” she should’ve pressed him for more details. Her morning spent in target practice had been as much a reaction to her own stupidity as to not knowing what Hank had meant by taken care of it.
She whistled and Ashes eased his old bones out of his bed, stretched, then finally wagged his tail. The old dog wasn’t ready to retire from farmwork yet, but this might be his last season. The geese were starting to get the best of the old dog. She wished he could live out the rest of his days in a farmhouse with central heat rather than the often too-cold barn. She opened the door and together they set out for their respective jobs in the fields.
* * *
“SO YOU MET MAX, huh?” Kelly had let himself into the house without bothering to knock. Which was fair, Trey supposed, since their father should have left the house and all the land to both of them, though Trey would bet the farm that the old man hadn’t. The old man’s prejudices coming in strong, even in the end.
Kelly set bags of Bullock’s barbecue on the counter and the smell of vinegar, smoke and pork filled the kitchen. Trey was happy to see the food, even though he had no idea what they were going to do with all the leftover barbecue, especially with whatever food would be brought by the house tomorrow. “She’s pretty neat.”
When Trey opened the containers, it was the first moment since arriving that he was happy to be in North Carolina. Kelly had brought over barbecue, slaw, Brunswick stew, collards, butterbeans and a greasy bag of hush puppies. As Trey loaded his plate until his wrist nearly collapsed from the weight, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten so well.
“She—” Trey put the emphasis on the pronoun “—is not what I expected. I mean, Dad couldn’t find a man to lease the land to?”
“What, you leave the big city and all of a sudden women have their proper place and it ain’t anywhere outside the kitchen?”
“No, but Dad...”
“Calm down, Trey. I’m mostly just funnin’ you. Everyone but Dad was surprised when Max the farmer turned out to be Maxine the farmer. Max was Mom’s choice.”
That Mom would pick a woman to lease the farm to made sense. However... “I didn’t know they had been planning this since before Mom died.”
“What you don’t know about the farm could fill the Dean Dome. Mom has always been on Dad’s case to do something useful with the land. He finally said he’d agree to whatever her plan was if she did the legwork.” He’d probably capitulated so his wife would shut up and just bring him another beer—much the same way he’d agreed to the first chicken coop. “When she was diagnosed, she sped up her plans a little. The lease with Max was signed two weeks before Mom died.
“That’s gross, you know.”
“What?” Trey asked as Kelly pointed to his plate, where he’d mixed his slaw and barbecue into one sloppy, hot-sauce–topped mess. “I’ve been eating my barbecue this way since we were kids.”
“It was gross then and it’s gross now.” There might as well be force fields separating the food on Kelly’s plate. Even the pot likker from the collards didn’t dare seep across the expanse of white into the slaw.
“I guess I’m surprised Max is still here.” Even though Kelly was in the room, Trey said the words more to himself than to anyone else.
“You mean that Dad kept his promise to Mom or that he didn’t drive Max away by calling her his ‘lady farmer’?”
Trey winced. How had their father been able to withstand Max’s frank, cutting gaze and still say the words lady farmer aloud? “Both, I guess.”
Kelly’s look was somewhere between pity and disgust. “I’m sorry it took Dad’s passing to get you to come back to the farm.”
CHAPTER THREE
TREY WAS ASLEEP when the first knock came on the front door. He pulled on some pants and a sweater then stumbled down the stairs to see who was there. Whoever it was hadn’t stopped knocking for even a second. His aunt Lois stood on the front porch, a dish balanced on her left arm as she knocked with her right fist. He didn’t even have a chance to wish her a good morning before she sailed past him into the house and wove her way to the kitchen.
He thought about stopping her, but no man had stopped Lois Harris since the day she was born a Mangum over fifty years ago, and he was unlikely to be the first. When he caught up to her, she was standing in front of the open fridge, shuffling take-out containers of barbecue around.
“I expected it of you,” she said into the fridge, “though your brother should’ve known better. Noreen raised y’all both to know better.”
Trey wasn’t entirely certain what he and Kelly had done—or failed to do.
The brine-only pickle jars Aunt Lois pulled out of the fridge clinked on the metal edge of the old, laminate counter. “Honestly, did Hank think he would break a nail throwin’ out empty bottles?” She pulled other empty jars and bottles out of the fridge, shuffled more stuff around before declaring the fridge as good as it was gonna get and slamming the door. She must have left the beer cans in the fridge because all that was on the counter were empty mustard bottles with a heavy layer of crust around the lip.
“Aunt Lois, what are you doing?”
The counter was now covered in trash from the fridge and his aunt was opening random drawers and pawing around.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” She didn’t even look up when she said it.
Digging through Dad’s stuff, he thought, though he had the smarts not to say that. When she found a trash bag and the jars crashed into the bag with one big sweep of her arm, Trey had a partial answer. His aunt Lois was going to clean the farmhouse. But why?
“Go out to my car and get the tea I’ve ready-made. People will be coming by for visitation in four hours. If you and Kelly had the sense God gave a mule, you would’ve cleaned this house yesterday.”
No wonder his brother had smirked when he’d said it was Trey’s responsibility to get ready for the visitation, that he had a project to work on and couldn’t take the entire day off.
“Lord in Heaven! Henry William Harris the Third, don’t just stand there. Get!” She made a shooing motion with her entire body. “And get my cleaning supplies while you’re at it.”
Taking a detour up the stairs to put on shoes felt devious after Aunt Lois’s clear instructions, but he needed to take a piss and get something on his feet before going outside. When he returned to the kitchen with a box full of jugs of tea and buckets of cleaning supplies, the hands on his aunt’s hips made it clear he’d dawdled.
“I found your daddy’s supplies, though Lord only knows how old some of this stuff is. Take a bucket and broom and start with the upstairs bedrooms. I’ll work down here.”
“Aunt Lois, I doubt we will have many people show up.” If Trey had been looking for excuses not to come to his father’s funeral, surely everyone else in the county was, too. “And even if we do, no one is going to see the upstairs.”
“We may not have time to give this house the scrubbing it needs, but we can dust shelves, sweep floors and make beds before everyone gets here.” As far as his aunt was concerned, if she didn’t want to hear the words, they hadn’t been said. When he didn’t move, she shoved a broom into his one hand and a bucket into the other. “I’m not your mama or your wife and I won’t do this alone. You either respect Noreen’s memory by making her house tidy for company, or I go home.”
Still feeling as if he were putting lipstick on a pig for a fair no one would come to, Trey plodded upstairs and began cleaning. Out the window of Kelly’s room—which was dusty and full of crap his brother should have thrown away or taken to his own home years ago—he saw Max load something into her truck and drive off into the fields. Dark clouds bullied away the nice weather of yesterday, but that didn’t seem to be stopping the farmer. He wondered what she was doing and why? More important, he wished he could watch her work and admire the swift, purposeful movements he had seen yesterday translated from shooting Pepsi cans to growing food.
“Trey, hon, are you dawdlin’?” his aunt shouted up a few minutes later. “I’m not cleaning Hank’s bathroom on my own. Get down here.”
He couldn’t blame her. His father’s bathroom had offended his bachelor sensibilities—skirting mighty close to the memories of the bathrooms in his frat house. Knowing what was in store for him didn’t speed up his steps down the stairs.
Aunt Lois obviously had more practice cleaning a house before a funeral than Trey did, a fact evident in the way the wood of the banisters sparkled. He peeked into his dad’s bedroom. Photos of his father and mother with different relatives were nicely displayed on the dressers. His mother’s sick room across the hall looked like any other guest bedroom in an old Piedmont farmhouse. As soon as his mother had gotten too sick to sleep through the night, she’d moved across the hall rather than disturb her husband’s sleep, a gesture Trey would have found touching if there was a possibility his father had ever said, “Don’t worry about me.”
Aunt Lois was attacking the stove when he walked into the kitchen. “Bathroom.” She didn’t even look up.
“Aunt Lois, nobody liked my father and there’s no wife to console. I seriously doubt anyone besides you will be dropping by with casseroles.”
“Trey—” she still didn’t look up from her scrubbing “—I don’t care if you’re five or thirty-five, if you don’t get in that bathroom and start cleaning in thirty seconds, I will take a switch to your behind.”
His aunt had always made good on her threats.
Bathroom.
* * *
THE FIRST RELATIVE knocked on the door thirty minutes before Aunt Lois had predicted. “That Gwen Harris,” his aunt muttered, “has had no respect for keeping decent time since she moved to the city.”
Durham, a city of two hundred and fifty thousand souls, was the city Aunt Lois referred to, and downtown Durham was a bare thirteen miles from “downtown” Bahama, despite Aunt Lois’s sniff implying the other side of the world. But Aunt Lois and Uncle Garner had taken their share of Harris farmland and withstood mechanization, buyouts and the bald fact that tobacco causes cancer to keep and expand on a successful tobacco farm. She had no patience with the farmers who gave up their land for pennies to the dollar—even though she and Uncle Garner had profited from their sales—to move into the city. And she also had no respect for a man like Trey’s father, who had clung to his farmland like a virgin to her panties, but had been unwilling or unable to make the land useful.
But, as Cousin Gwen dropping off her rolls being the first of many in a parade of relatives evidenced, blood is thicker than respect. And Aunt Lois had made the house presentable because Hank Harris had been a Harris, even if he’d been a distasteful one.
Kelly slipped in through the kitchen door just after Gwen had said her condolences and left. “I saw her on Roxboro Road driving up here and took my time, just so I’d miss her,” his brother whispered to him. “I’ll see her at the viewing and that will be plenty enough of Cousin Gwen for me.”
Unlike his aunt, Trey didn’t care that Cousin Gwen and her husband had left their farmhouse for a split-level in the city. Hell, having escaped to D.C. as soon as the ink on his college diploma had dried, he wasn’t one to judge. However, Gwen had been a crushing cheek pincher all of his childhood, and hadn’t even stopped when he’d hit puberty. Her kids had been just as awful, though in different ways. The eldest always made sure to include the mention of major life purchases in his Christmas letters. Every year between his accomplishments at work and the achievements of his kids was a description of the new boat/car/RV/lawn mower that the family had just purchased. It had bothered Trey a lot more when he’d been a poor country cousin. Now Trey just thought it was in poor taste and felt for all the pinched country cousins getting that letter every Christmas.
During her short visit, Cousin Gwen had apologized for her children, who had to work and couldn’t make it over. Lucky for him and Kelly, they would be at the viewing. And the funeral. And back here after the funeral to eat all this food.
His whining buzzed about in his head, but he couldn’t seem to swat it away. With each relative, family friend, acquaintance and Southern busybody who walked through the front door of his father’s home bearing casseroles and condolences, the house got smaller and smaller until it pressed in on his temples and made his eyes bulge. Out of respect for his mother, Trey smiled and said thank-you to each salad that had been “Hank’s favorite,” but by the time all the people left, the farmhouse felt small enough he could call it skinny jeans and hang out with the hipsters at the new downtown bars.
“I owe you,” he said to Kelly before walking out the door and leaving him with all the food to put away. “I’ll be back in time to leave for the viewing.” The scolding Aunt Lois would subject him to for leaving was nothing compared to his need to escape the confines of the farmhouse.
Storm clouds that had been threatening all day broke the moment Trey left the cover of the porch. Their punishment for the beautiful weather of yesterday was an icy January rain, but he popped up his collar to protect his neck and trudged on, desperate to be anywhere else. As soon as he reached one of the fields, he knew this was his destination.
It looked like Max had spent the day repairing fences. At the edge of the fields was an eight-foot metal and chicken-wire fence with metal wires running along the top, tied with pink flags. Like Trey, the pink flags were hanging their heads to avoid the pounding rain. He could see where she had been making repairs. Some of the flags were brighter and less downtrodden than their brethren. Some of the wires were more taut, still eager to impress with their ability to stand sentry, and some of the wood less worn. It was a deer fence. He wondered if she ever electrified the top wire. Probably, he decided. Max and her electric-green gaze had a definite look-but-don’t-touch luminescence.
Like some Irish sprite who knew she was on his mind, Max suddenly appeared in the distance with Ashes fast on her heels. While he was soaked through, she had on a complete set of rain gear and was probably dry and cozy underneath it all. It was impossible to tell the drips pouring off Ashes from the raindrops, but Trey was fairly certain he saw a big, sloppy grin on the dog’s face, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth.
“How was the visitation?” she asked.
“Is the fence electrified?”
She slowly lowered her pale lashes over her eyes, but didn’t comment on his change of subject. “I had hoped to avoid it, but deer have already tested the fence and I don’t want them to think they can do it again.” When she moved, rain slid off her head in sheets, though she seemed not to notice. His father’s lady farmer was tough. “Would you like a tour while you’re out here?”
He looked out over the field that in just a few months would be awash in green. “No, but maybe you could email me a picture.”
“Sure.” Her slicker rustled with her shrug and more water poured off. “But there are also pictures on my website.” The farmer had a website. Of course. Every business had a website, and Max’s Vegetable Patch was as much a business as any other. She probably even had a Twitter account.
“You could come down and see it in the summer, if you’d like. You could stay with Kelly, or at the farmhouse—it has plenty of bedrooms.” She paused and he let his silence continue through the tattoo of the rain. He didn’t really want a conversation, hadn’t even wanted company until she’d come upon him. He didn’t want her to leave, but he didn’t want to talk, either.
“I’ll send you pictures throughout the growing season,” she finally said, filling the vast, dead emptiness of the fields. “Your father loved how the land changed during the growing season.”
“I probably won’t come down and visit.”
“Well, I won’t take it personally.” Her voice carried a smile he couldn’t see in her face. “The land might, though. After all these years, she’s finally producing and you won’t even come and admire her beauty.”
“She—” he rolled the female pronoun Max used around in his mouth, enjoying the feel “—shouldn’t take it personally, either.”
Even though his father was dead, Trey still didn’t want to be near anything the old man had touched. Henry William Harris Jr.’s touch was poisonous and the toxins lingered on the farm like gases too heavy for the wind to blow away. The miasma would outlast the stinky grime of cigarette smoke on the walls and the farmhouse would never really be clean. Not to him.
Max was talking again and Trey only caught the tail end of what she was saying, but he got the gist; Max would tell the land not to take it personally, either. “I have to clean up before the viewing,” she continued. “And you probably have to change clothes now.”
She didn’t wait for a response, just left him in the fields and the rain, without even granting him the protection of Ashes to bark at his bad memories and keep them at bay.
* * *
THIS WASN’T MAX’S first Southern funeral—she’d been to the funeral of her maternal grandfather over in High Point—so she knew the viewing meant Hank would be cleaned up from his heart attack and subsequent car accident and on display. As much as funerals played a role in the North Carolina gossip chain and anyone with a claim of kin or friendship on the deceased or the survivors’ side was expected to go, this couldn’t be Trey’s first funeral, either. But every time he looked over at the open casket, his eyes closed in a barely concealed grimace. No one should look so attractive while looking for an escape hatch.
Each person who expressed their condolences to Trey and Kelly probably didn’t notice Trey’s discomfort. But they probably weren’t pretending to talk farming with neighbors while really watching the grieving family like Max was.
“Maxine!” The voice of Lois Harris jolted Max out of her thoughts. “Did that mechanic Garner recommended work out for you?”
Max had given up asking Miss Lois to stop calling her Maxine. It wasn’t worth the wasted breath, plus Lois and Garner had been invaluable in providing local farming contacts. So Miss Lois could call Max whatever she wanted and Max would call her by the not-quite-formal-but-still-respectful name of Miss Lois, and they would both be happy.
“Yes, he’s been quite helpful.” The used tractor had seemed like such a deal when she’d bought it, but it turned out to be a piece of junk. Luckily, the Harris’s mechanic got it working at the end of last season and it appeared to be making it through the winter. Still, saving for a new tractor seemed smarter than trusting in the magic of the Harris’s mechanic, even if she now had three pots of savings money and keeping track of them strained her Excel spreadsheet. Asking to borrow a tractor last summer had been professionally embarrassing—and she had no desire to repeat the exercise.
“Now, don’t let him...”
Max stopped listening to Miss Lois warn her about the mechanic’s propensity to predict doom. Not only had she heard it before, but she was curious about the attractive brunette grabbing on to Trey’s hand with both hands and pressing it to her heart.
“That’s my second cousin.” Miss Lois leaned in to whisper to Max. “Never been to a funeral or wedding she didn’t cry at, bless her heart.” Sure enough, the young woman had both moved on to Kelly and been moved to tears. “The Roxboro Mangums always have a pool going on when she’ll burst into tears. She’s no blood relation to Trey, but she’s not your real competition.”
Miss Lois was a wily woman and it was a fool who turned a back to her. She “y’all’ed” and “blessed hearts” and “sugared” like a Southern cliché, but she wasn’t a fragile flower of womanhood. Max hadn’t been in North Carolina long when she realized that Lois’s politeness was a bit like a rattlesnake’s rattle—the more polite Lois was, the greater the warning about the coming bite. The ruse didn’t only work on Yankees like Max; Southern men were equally gullible. Garner might be the farmer on that side of the Harris family, but Miss Lois was the businessman.
“I’m not worried about competition.” There was always the chance this was the one time Miss Lois could have the wool pulled over her eyes.
“Oh, Maxine, you’ve been staring at my nephew the entire time we’ve been in the funeral home.”
Max hauled her gaze from Trey to Miss Lois. “He’s my new landlord. Of course I’m curious about him. And he seems troubled.”
“You’re welcome to try that on a fool, honey, but don’t try it on me.” Miss Lois’s words carried a reprimand, but her voice was kind. “He hasn’t wanted anything to do with the farm since he was five years old. Hank and Noreen are lucky he didn’t run away and join a circus. Unless you give up farming and move to D.C., there is no future in that man. You can hear it in his voice.”
Lois’s words highlighted something about Trey that had bothered Max from the moment he’d spoken to her. Trey had no Southern accent. Kelly didn’t have much of one, but Trey’s was nonexistent. His voice was completely flat—as if the drawl had been purged from his soul. And he must have grown up with one, as Max had yet to meet a Harris other than Trey without a y’all lingering somewhere on the lips.
And if he’d eradicated the accent, why hadn’t he started going by some name other than Trey, which was a constant reminder that he was the third Henry William Harris? Max tried to look at Trey in his charcoal-gray suit out of the corner of her eye, but the side view gave her a headache. Miss Lois was watching her with raised brows when Max pulled her eyes away. “I’m not watching him for any future, Miss Lois—or any future beyond him being my new landlord, but...he doesn’t seem all that upset.” That wasn’t right; something was clearly wrong with Trey. “Or at least not upset about the death of his father.”
“Trey and his daddy never did rub along, and Hank didn’t care until it was too late.”
Was Trey thinking about his lost relationship with his father as he stared at the cold body lying on satin? Or was he irritated that he was saddled with a farm he didn’t want left to him from a father he had no affection for?
Reading any emotion beyond stress into the tightness of Trey’s eyes was nearly impossible.
“So long as he doesn’t try to sell the farm out from under me, his relationship with Hank doesn’t affect me.” But even as she said those words, she couldn’t take her eyes off the tension evident in Trey’s neck as he ducked out the door. Max told herself that Miss Lois wouldn’t notice and slipped out the door behind him.
* * *
TREY TURNED AROUND at the sound of someone stumbling and swearing under their breath behind him. The voice was soft, so he’d figured it was a woman, but he had expected his cousin Nicole to offer up another slippery round of tears, not solid, stable Max. She hesitated a little, then put her hand on his shoulder, her palm warm even through his suit jacket. He shivered. He should have grabbed his coat.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You already said that.” He struggled to keep the anger in his voice in check. He wasn’t angry with her. In truth, he wasn’t even angry at his father right now, but the pressures of pretending to be sad were wearing on him. And then there were the pokes from stories people had about his father. When he’d made a face at one such tale, Aunt Lois had given him a look and told him not to speak ill of the dead.
Max’s fingers curled around his shoulder, their strength pressing into his collarbone. Somehow, the simple gesture was more reassuring than any enveloping hug he’d received from his relatives. “And I’m still sorry—for Hank’s death and for whatever drove you outside.”
“My cousins were beginning to tell stories of going to the Orange County Speedway and what a grand time they all had, especially after my dad got really drunk and his insults got both creative and unintelligible.” Trey could picture the scene, including his father throwing beer cans until he was tossed out.
“I imagine what seems like a funny story among cousins is less funny to his children.” She hadn’t moved her hand from his shoulder, so he could feel her step closer to him in the movement of the joints in her fingers. Even in the dark, through his shirt, her fingers felt sturdy. Solid. Stable. He wanted her to press up against him so he could feel her strong, purposeful body up against his. To be able to go home with her and draw patterns in her freckles as he forgot himself in her body.
But she was his tenant and he was at his father’s funeral, so his thoughts would remain thoughts only.
“You say that like there could be something funny about the belligerent drunk.” Unexpected sexual frustration made the words come out with more anger than he’d meant.
“When I knew him, he was only belligerent.”
The bald honesty of her statement forced a laugh out of him. “And yet you still have some affection in your voice.”
Her fingers tensed on his shoulder. “I won’t force it on you.”
“Why?”
“Why won’t I force it on you?”
He turned to face her and her fingers slipped off his jacket. He wished she had kept them there. “Why the affection?”
She shrugged. “For five years we shared the farm, and worked together some. He wasn’t a very good farmer, but Hank liked to have a cup of coffee with me in the mornings and hear what I was doing to the land. He even came to the farmers’ market occasionally. It’s hard not feel some measure of affection.”
“I lived with him for eighteen years and I managed.” Even in the dark, he could tell he’d startled her again. And again, he had the inkling that he’d said something he shouldn’t have, yet knowing the words that would come out of his mouth next would make him sound like a petulant child didn’t stop him. “Despite what you and every person in that room want to think, my father should have been tossed into an unmarked grave with a bucket full of lime and forgotten about.” Max’s mouth fell open, but Trey wasn’t going to back down. “And if I was in control of this funeral instead of Aunt Lois and Kelly, that’s exactly what would happen.”
Trey turned on the hard heels of his dress shoes and stomped back to the viewing, away from one person who had pleasant memories of his father and toward a crowd of them. He would shake hands, accept hugs and look sad as was required, but there would at least be one person who would know the truth of how he felt. And somehow, it was important that the one person was Max.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE FUNERAL WAS just as awful as Trey had imagined it would be, although in ways he didn’t have the creativity to have foreseen. First, there was the knowledge that he’d had a near temper tantrum at the viewing and the bland look Max gave him wasn’t enough to pretend it hadn’t happened. Second, the church was packed, and not just with family members. The mayors of Oxford and Roxboro were both there, along with one Durham County commissioner, proving that you could be a drunk and an asshole and still have dignitaries at your funeral so long as you were from an established family. The mayor of Roxboro was perfectly polite, but the mayor of Oxford was determined to talk with Trey about upcoming legislation and its effects on small towns. Trey had been prepared to talk with family members he had no interest in and express sorrow he didn’t feel to people whose names he couldn’t remember, but feigning interest in a rider on a farm bill had not been on his agenda.
The preacher droned on and on about our reward in heaven—though Trey wondered how many people were picturing his father someplace more tropical—until finally a cell phone ringing in one of his great-aunt’s enormous purses and the subsequent digging through said purse derailed the preacher’s lack of train of thought. “God bless both the phone and the purse that ate Atlanta,” Aunt Lois muttered to Uncle Garner, then gave Kelly a dirty look when he snickered.
A slight black man with glasses and a trim beard was waiting by his car with what appeared to be a pie in his hands when Trey made it past the crowds of mourners. “Jerome, buddy, I didn’t expect to see you here. Thank you for coming.” He meant the words and the welcoming handshake more sincerely than he had for any other guest at the funeral. “I haven’t seen you in ages, and you didn’t have the beard then. How does Alea feel about it?”
“She likes it fine. And the last time I saw you was at your mother’s funeral.” Jerome Harris gave a shrug and a slight smile. “I try to attend all my kin’s funerals. It’s the only time I get to see certain people.”
Trey smiled at the small joke—and the truth behind it. “You’re one of the many people here not here for my father, but for some other reason. Gossip seems to be the main reason. Respect for my mother is another.”
“Oh, I’m hoping my presence has your father rolling around and knocking in his grave, but my parents said he’d gotten less overtly racist in his old age.”
Jerome wasn’t the first person at the funeral to mention that the prejudices that had strangled Trey’s father most of his life had loosened their grip in his old age, though he was the first person to put it so baldly.
“Alea’s home watching the kids and I can’t stay, but she baked a pie for you. I felt certain your father would like a bean pie in his honor.”
Trey laughed. Most Southern food was Southern food with little racial distinction, but not only was bean pie black food, it was Nation of Islam food. It was also delicious, so Trey had no trouble taking it out of Jerome’s hands. “I’m sure everyone will appreciate the pie. And Kelly will appreciate the gesture.”
“You’re in the big house now.” Jerome had always had a wry sense of humor. “I hope you won’t be a stranger to Durham.”
“I used education to get out. I’m not sure why I would voluntarily come back.”
Jerome harrumphed. “I have basketball tickets. Maybe I’ll invite you to the Duke game.”
“Of course I’d come down for the game.” Agreeing was easy since it wasn’t likely he’d actually receive an invitation. Jerome had better friends to share those tickets with, plus a wife who might want to go. “I’ve got my priorities straight.”
“I mean it, now.”
“Get home to your wife. Thank her for the pie.”
After they said their goodbyes and Jerome was walking to his car, Trey wondered if his friend knew the pivotal role he’d played in Trey’s escape from the farm. They’d met in seventh grade, when they’d been assigned to work together on a science project. Trey had been certain he would end up a lazy, good-for-nothing drunk like his father. He’d been angry at his future and pissed at his father for the inheritance. Another option was to turn into his uncle Garner, but Trey hadn’t wanted to be a tobacco farmer. Option three was join the military, but he was pretty sure Vietnam had turned his father in the direction of alcohol. But those were his only choices as he saw it back then.
When Jerome had insisted Trey actually do some work for the project, Trey had scornfully asked Jerome why he studied so hard. The look Jerome had given Trey through his thick glasses hadn’t been the look of a cross teenager; it had been the look of a thoughtful, mature man. A look Trey only recognized because of his uncle Garner. “My grandparents used education to climb out of poverty,” Jerome had said. “I’m not going to be the first person in my family to leap back in.”
By asking around, Trey had learned that Jerome’s grandfather was a preacher and his father was a vice president at Mechanics and Farmers Bank. Jerome’s great-grandfather had been a sharecropper and his family before that had been slaves on some Harris’s farm. Jerome Harris, a professor of history specializing in the history of the South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, probably knew which, but Trey didn’t.
Jerome had opened Trey’s eyes to new possibilities. He’d started looking around at the family he met at weddings, funerals and reunions. Most were working class—farmers, mechanics, retired mill workers and the like. But there were also a number of teachers, and every once in a while a doctor or a lawyer popped up. There was even an army colonel. And the one thing all these escapees from the farm had in common was that they had studied hard enough in high school to get into a good college.
Since that moment, Trey and Jerome had leveled into a relationship somewhere between acquaintances and friends. They had nodded to each other in the hall all through middle and high school and kept in touch through college. No matter where their lives had drifted, occasional emails were exchanged and major life changes kept track of through Facebook, if nothing else. Like distant but friendly cousins, Trey supposed.
Jerome had always regarded Trey’s desire to escape Durham with a bit of amusement, saying, “If I can get along as a black man in the South, you can survive as a white one.” But Trey had watched his father drink and grow nothing but anger, dirt and kudzu while his mother worked long hours at a job she hated. If he didn’t pull up his roots and flee, he wouldn’t do any better. His destiny had been sown in the clay.
Even now, as he climbed into his car to parade to the graveyard for the burial, the familiar rolling hills of the Piedmont were more oppressive than picturesque. Trey wasn’t even able to feel relief that his father’s overbearing spirit was gone from the earth. The only positives about the day had been talking with Jerome and seeing Max’s muscular legs sticking out beneath her black skirt.
* * *
THE FIRST DAY of packing had been surprisingly easy, Trey thought as he watched his brother leave. His father had an absurd amount of clothes for an old man who never went anywhere, but it hadn’t been hard to sort them into donation and trash piles. Some of the clothes weren’t worth wearing to muck out a pigsty—apparently the man never threw anything away. And their father’s pack-rat tendencies would make the rest of the week harder, especially since the man hadn’t cleaned out their mother’s stuff in the five years since her death, either.
It was a two-for-the-price-of-one deal at the Harris family farm. Or Max’s Vegetable Patch, which was what the sign on the refrigerator van said. The name was cutesier than Trey associated with the woman who’d shot Pepsi can after Pepsi can without flinching.
Though he’d tried, he hadn’t been able to convince Kelly to stay for supper. His brother had taken some of the leftover food with him but had muttered on about his own life, leaving Trey alone in the house surrounded by his parents’ stuff. At least there was a Carolina game on and conference play had started.
His plate filled with a variety of casseroles, he looked out the kitchen window to see the light on in Max’s barn. Maybe he didn’t have to be alone in the house watching a basketball game. Trey stuck his plate in the microwave, set the timer and headed out the back. Ashes barked when he knocked on Max’s door.
She opened the door wearing an oversize turquoise sweater that looked surprisingly nice with her red hair, though a bit ridiculous with the pink-bunny pajama bottoms and fuzzy, purple slippers. As Trey had come to expect, Ashes was sitting at Max’s feet, though the dog looked less annoyed with his presence this time. Max was the suspicious-looking one now.
“I’m sorry for the way I acted at the viewing.” Which was true; he wished he’d had the sense to keep his anger to himself much like he’d managed to control his attraction to her.
“Losing a parent would be hard. Losing a parent and not being able to feel sad about it must be harder, I think.”
Is that what she thought? That it wasn’t that he shouldn’t feel sad, but that he couldn’t feel sad? He took a deep breath before he got distracted from his purpose. “Anyway, I was heating up some leftovers and wondered if you wanted any, though it looks like you’ve already eaten.” He gestured to her pajamas.
“No.” She smiled, and the rigid air that usually surrounded her relaxed. “I’m just too lazy to put on another set of clothes after I clean up for the day.”
“Lazy is not a word I would associate with you.” Every time he’d looked out a window today, Max had been busy doing. Trey wasn’t always sure what—when she wasn’t disappearing into the fields of the greenhouse, she was lifting things out of the back of her truck or walking around making notes—but she and the dog were always doing. At least he could tell what the dog had been up to. Ashes’s job seemed to be to keep the Canada geese out of the fields.
“You’ve not seen how tall I let the pile of dirty clothes get before going to the Laundromat.” She stepped back from the door and let him in.
“Dad didn’t let you use the washer in the house?”
“Sure, if I did his laundry, too.” That sounded more like his father than any nonsense about a cute chicken coop. “Hank and I got along better if he never saw me do anything that he might construe as ‘woman’s work.’ Though I think sometimes he said that phrase just to get a rise out of me.”
“I’m sure he meant the words.”
“Maybe at one time, but after your mother’s death, there was plenty of woman’s work to be done and no woman to do it. Hank got to be quite good at making biscuits in the morning. He would even share them. Though I’m not even sure he attempted to clean.” She seemed to be smiling at the memory of his father, which Trey still had a hard time believing. “What’s left for dinner?”
“A little bit of everything. And I was going to watch the Carolina game, if you’re interested.”
She appeared to give his invitation more consideration than he’d given it when the idea had hit him. Finally, she said, “Sure. Let me put some shoes on. Can Ashes come?”
“Of course. Did Dad not let Ashes in the house?”
“He did. Hank liked the dog quite a bit, but Ashes is always a little dirty. Just a warning.”
“Whatever mess he makes, I’ll leave for you to clean up when the farmhouse is yours.”
“Deal.”
He waited for her while she exchanged her slippers for shoes, wrapped a purple scarf around her neck and shoved a bright green toboggan—the local word for a knit ski cap—over her hair. From the hat on her head to the red shoes on her feet, she was a mass of bright colors. Since Trey had only seen her in either her work or funeral clothes he hadn’t expected the rest of her wardrobe to be so vibrant. He found himself wondering if she wore utilitarian, white underwear—as he would have guessed if asked—or if her panties were as vivid as the rest of her. Betting either way seemed dangerous. She had messed with his odds from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her.
And he’d never get to find out the answer anyhow.
His father hadn’t bothered to upgrade the electric baseboard heat in the house or add air-conditioning, but he had gotten a satellite dish so that even out in the country he could have ESPN. The man had had priorities, and Trey only disagreed with most of them. By the time Dick Vitalle’s annoying voice had started in with, “It’s Syracuse’s first time playing Carolina as an ACC team, baby,” Max’s food was hot and they were settled into Trey’s father’s recliners.
“I don’t think I’ve seen a college basketball game since, well, since college,” Max said, before a forkful of corn pudding disappeared into her mouth.
“Where did you go to college?”
She held up her fork and he waited until she swallowed. “Illinois, so I know a thing or two about college basketball.”
Trey scoffed. “Big Ten basketball is fine, so long as you’re in the Midwest.” He mimicked the accent he’d abandoned for most of his adult life. “Y’all down South now, ya’ hear.” When he turned to smile at her, she had an unabashed grin on her face. Her white teeth against her pale lips, her speckled skin and the wild mass of orange hair were a shining counterpart to the flashes from the oversize television.
He wrenched his face back to watch the game. The fact was, right now he controlled her livelihood. Even if he wanted to know just how much of her body was covered in freckles, he was leaving in a week. And he controlled her livelihood, he reminded himself again. The surge in his blood pressure would have to be attributed to the 10-0 run Carolina had just gone on. “So what does an organic vegetable farmer study in college?”
“Farm management, though I didn’t go to college planning on farming a small plot of land,” she said with a hitch in her voice. Had she felt the attraction between them, as well? “What does a— Oh, I don’t even know what it is you do besides wear a suit to work and do something with the government.”
Max was saying the words, but Trey could hear his father’s voice. Only crooks and politicians wear suits. Makes it easier for the crooks to blend in. Nothing in his father’s life had worked out the way he wanted it to and everyone but his father—the government, the immigrants, the blacks, the feminists—had been responsible for his troubles. North Carolina was full of the new South and the new Southerners to go along with it, but his father hadn’t been one of them. The only way Trey could figure Max had ended up leasing the land for an organic vegetable farm was that his father had been really drunk when the contract was signed and too lazy to find a way out of it afterward.
“I’m a lobbyist, though I used to work on Capitol Hill. I studied public policy in college.”
“Sounds important.”
Trey couldn’t judge the tone in her voice, so he risked another look at her between bites before replying, “I think so. I got into it because I can make a real difference in my government, and I make a good living at it. I’m not sure many others can say the same about their jobs.” Why he felt the need to defend himself in front of his dad’s farmer, of all people, he didn’t know and didn’t want to examine too closely.
“I wasn’t being sarcastic,” she said, her hands up in a show of honesty. “It really does sound important. I should pay more attention to legislation and my elected officials and such, but I only really know about what comes into my email from the farming associations I belong to.”
Unused to being complimented in this room, much less in this house, Trey turned the conversation back to Max. “What kind of legislative issues come into a farmer’s email?” At the suspicious face she made, it was his turn to hold up his hands and say, “No, really, I’m curious.”
There was just enough light in the room for him to see Max raise her eyebrows at him. “But not curious enough to take a tour of what I’ve done to your ancestral landholdings.”
The ridiculousness of that statement forced a laugh out of him. “Ancestral landholdings?”
“Sure. Your family has lived on these lands since time began, haven’t they?”
“Well, yes, but I’ve never considered this forty acres to be anything but a mud pit that money and time fall into.”
“Yeah,” Max said with a mixture of sympathy and amusement on her face. “Hank doesn’t seem to have been a very good farmer.”
“And you?”
“Am I a good farmer?” She shrugged. “What’s your metric? I sell out of my vegetables most weekends at the farmers’ market. My CSA subscriptions fill up every year, providing me with the money to buy seeds and plants without having to borrow. I’m not going to get rich, but I have a small savings account and some money for retirement. Plus, I grow nutritious vegetables people want to eat and my job allows me to spend most days outside, hands in the soil and the sun on my back.”
“And the rain.”
Max’s laugh was full and hearty. “You really are determined to spotlight the negatives of the farm. Yes, and the rain, which gets me wet, but also makes the plants grow.”
Her accusation stung a bit. He hadn’t meant for his hatred of the farm to bleed into his relationship with Max because, no matter how he felt about the farm, he was interested in the farmer. “You tell me about the legislation emails that interest you so much and I’ll let you give me a tour of the farm tomorrow.”
“More of that rain you’re so afraid of is supposed to hit tomorrow. Buckets of it.”
Her voice was warm, like the rays of sun she described hitting her back, even as she talked about the rain, and he wanted to see the land as she saw it. To understand what had attracted her to this life and had kept her willing to put up with his father when he called her a lady farmer. “Tell me what worries you, and I’ll agree to a tour, even if it’s in the rain.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath before the words poured out of her. “Despite looking at the maps and hearing the reassurances, I worry what fracking will do to my water quality and thus to my plants. I worry about regulations designed for a large corn grower like my father’s farm but which don’t take into account the scale of farms like mine or the different safety issues we face. I worry about changing labeling requirements and how that could weaken the value of my product and the work I put into it. And those are just the legislative and policy worries.” This time Max’s laugh had a self-deprecating edge. “Do you want to hear about the nonlegislative worries, too? I mean, while I’m spilling my fears into the dark.”
“How about we save the nonpolicy worries for Friday,” he responded, surprised to find he meant it. “We can watch another basketball game together and I’ll have had my tour, so what you tell me will mean more.”
The television erupted in cheers, jolting both their heads up to see a replay of a Carolina fast break and dunk. “Tar,” Trey called and Max’s lack of response reverberated around the room. “You’re supposed to respond with ‘heel.’”
“Even if I live in North Carolina, I’m still a Fighting Illini.”
“Tar,” Trey called again.
“Oh, fine.” She laughed. “Heel.”
“Now with more feeling. Tar!”
“Heel!” She had a powerfully booming voice that shook the farmhouse and made Ashes raise his head.
“Good. Now I wouldn’t be embarrassed to take you to the Dean Dome.”
Trey was pleased when she laughed again. “Is that what this is about?”
He didn’t entirely know what this was about, only that he had forgotten how much this house weighed on him while Max, with her intense eyes and serious manner, laughed.
* * *
MAX WAS TOUCHED when Trey walked her back to the barn, insisting despite her contention that she walked the farm alone most of the time and had done so for years. Plus, she had Ashes to protect her from raccoons and coyotes. “I’m not doing this for you,” Trey had said, “but for my mom, who would be appalled if I didn’t walk a girl to her front door. I recognize that it’s a mostly empty gesture, but—”
“So long as we both know it’s a bit silly, I’ll let you do it for Noreen’s memory.”
The walk across the grass had been silent and awkward. An evening spent watching a college basketball game and eating the leftovers from a funeral wasn’t a date, but at some point it hadn’t felt like two friends hanging out, either. Flashes of light from the big-screen TV had emphasized the attraction in Trey’s eyes and she had been grateful for the oversize woolen sweater hiding the way her nipples had answered. She could have pretended it was the cold, but she would’ve been lying. Trey was attractive and she liked the way his silliness escaped despite heavy, black eyebrows and a serious career.
He was here for the rest of the week—right next door and very convenient. And then he would leave and she wouldn’t have to worry what next? Responsibility-free sex would be nice. Could she do it, though? And shouldn’t she pick a better candidate for such an indulgence than the man who owned her land? Only she couldn’t socialize while at work and the men at the farmers’ market saw a farmer rather than a woman. She went out with friends only occasionally, and even on those rare nights out she wondered if money spent at a bar would have been better put aside for buying land.
That last sad statement was reason enough to give this a try.
Her hand had wanted to reach for his on the walk over—like they were in middle school or something—and she’d had to yank it back. Her pajama bottoms didn’t have pockets to give her hands somewhere to go, so the one closest to Trey still twitched. At least her nipples hardening had been a sexual response. She was an adult and he was good-looking, so that was easy enough to explain away. But hand-holding implied a desire for a relationship and, while she now knew what job required Trey to wear a suit, he was still a stranger and he still lived in D.C. Sex, rather than hand-holding, was what should be on the agenda.
They stopped on her front porch, the wind blowing the storm in, mussing up her hair as surely as his short hair stood on end with no escape. Ashes sat at the door and stared at the wood. “Thank you for dinner and the game. This is the latest I’ve stayed up in ages.” That statement was true, even if she didn’t have her watch on her. “Farmers up with the chickens and all,” she finished awkwardly.
God, this was weird. His eyes were warm and steady on her lips, despite the wind buffeting about everything else in the vicinity. Like some out-of-body experience, she could feel her lips part and her chin lift a little. Her heart fluttered. Warmth flooded her body and she wanted to take off her sweater to cool down. She shifted slightly forward. Trey’s hand was coming out. She wanted him to slip it under her big sweater, to feel his grip tight on her waist.
Ashes barked. Trey’s hand brushed her breasts, more accidental than not, on its way up to the back of his neck. “So, my tour. What time tomorrow?”
She blinked. The spell was over. “I have to start seeding broccoli tomorrow in the greenhouse. Come find me whenever you’re ready.”
“Okay.”
They stood at her front door. Trey was probably waiting for her to go in. She didn’t know what she was waiting for, so she reached behind her and turned the knob. Ashes rushed inside to his bed by the fireplace. “Thanks again.”
“My pleasure.” He leaned back onto his heels, but didn’t leave her porch. “Do you need help getting the fire started?”
Bone-warming, dry air from the woodstove drifted across her back through the open doorway. “No. I left a pretty good fire going. I’ll just need to add some logs and it should keep me through the night.”
“Tomorrow, then.” He wasn’t going to leave. Max didn’t really want him to. She either had to go inside and shut the door on him or invite him in.
She nodded, stepped back until she was inside and closed the door. Only when she heard his feet bounce off her steps did she take off her shoes and head up the stairs to her bed. When she asked Ashes what the hell that had been about, her otherwise reliable dog had no answer.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHEN TREY FOUND Max in the greenhouse about ten o’clock the next morning, she had already planted the first table of broccoli and was ready for a break and a chance to stretch her legs. The monotony of the task plus the patter of the rain against the thick, plastic roof had lulled her into a trance. The only way she knew she hadn’t planted two seeds into one cell was because she was out of cells and seeds at the same time.
Since all she’d seen Trey wear so far had been jeans that were nice enough for any place in Durham; dress pants, complete with dress shirt and sport coat; and a funeral suit, she hadn’t known what to expect him to don for his tour in the rain. His boots looked a little too big, the rain slicker a little too small, and his jeans would get soaked, but they would do. Especially when she gave him something to cover his pants. He called out to her, but she couldn’t hear what he said over the drumming of the rain.
She walked across the greenhouse to where he stood petting Ashes. “There are rain bibs on the peg behind you.”
“Won’t you need...” he said before looking up and noticing the rain bibs she was wearing. “Will they fit?”
“Better than any of the clothes you have on.”
“Dad’s clothes are packed. These are my grandfather’s. Apparently, he had big feet and tiny shoulders. I found them in the closet off the back porch.”
Max thought it would have been simpler to have unpacked Hank’s clothes, especially as he and Trey were of a size—minus the beer gut. Perhaps it was easier to step into his grandfather’s shoes than his father’s.
Trey sat on the bench and tugged off his boots before stepping into the bibs. He was wearing dress socks. Max was about to comment that for a man who grew up on a farm, he didn’t know how to pack to visit one, when she realized that was probably the point. He hadn’t planned to step out of the farmhouse long enough to need woolen socks. After he and Kelly had packed up all their parents’ things, would Trey ever come back to the farm?
“Ready,” he said. The bibs covered the flannel shirt he’d also apparently found in a closet somewhere and he fastened the slicker over them. Max put on her own raincoat and, in unison, they flipped their hoods up over their heads and stepped out into the cold rain. Ashes had to be cajoled out of the greenhouse into the damp.
“I thought a farm dog wouldn’t be so averse to rain,” Trey said.
“Ashes is now an old farm dog. He likes to pick and choose his farm duties, but he wouldn’t want to be shut in the greenhouse, either.”
Trey kept up with Max easily as she strode past the packing shed and the second tobacco barn to the fields, Ashes bounding alongside. Now that being out of the rain wasn’t an option, the dog was determined to enjoy himself. Plus, rain wouldn’t scare away the geese and Ashes still had his farm chores to attend to.
Max walked more quickly than normal, but couldn’t seem to slow herself down. She didn’t want there to be any strangeness between them. Here she was, a grown woman in a man’s job, upset because Trey didn’t seem to have any leftover feelings from their near kiss last night!
Or had that near kiss been a figment of her imagination and he hadn’t been reaching for her when Ashes barked? Just because she couldn’t escape her thoughts by walking faster didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try.
When they stopped at the first field, Ashes dashed off after some geese cheeky enough to encroach on his territory. “I have four fields, each divided into two sections, and we rotate the crops. This field will have peanuts for a season, which will add nitrogen back into the soil. In the past, I’ve planted cowpeas or clover for the same purpose, but I had a request from one of the downtown restaurants for peanuts, so I’m giving it a try.” The peanuts were part of the joy and the fear of farming. She’d never grown them before and she didn’t come from a part of the country where they were grown, so she lacked a gauge to measure her progress. But there was also exhilaration in trying something new: reading the literature, testing the soil, shoving something in the ground and then looking to Mother Nature for the rest. Knowing that only some of your success or failure was under your control and that the forces of nature held tight to their power. She scanned the field, trying to read her future in the soil, then shrugged at her own silliness. If the peanuts didn’t work out, there was always next year. And regardless of whether she got a cash crop out of them, they would add nitrogen to her soil.
“Crop rotation, like during the Middle Ages?”
“Well, yes.” When she nodded, the rain dripped off her hood, obscuring her view of the field. “I have a tractor instead of oxen, a pickup instead of a wagon and I can buy ladybugs over the internet, but the basic principles are the same. Rotating your plants keeps insects from gaining a foothold and your soil from being depleted. Cover crops and tilling in add nutrients. That plus elbow grease, sun and rain and you will grow good food.”
She didn’t know why she was so intent on having him understand, having him be impressed with her land management. Probably because of his dismissive attitude toward the land that was his by birth, but she didn’t want to accept that. She’d never let one person’s opinion, especially one man’s opinion, of her business affect how she felt about her life choices before.
Mud squished and squawked under their feet as they walked up the small rise to the next field. Ashes let out a woof when he finally noticed they were gone, and vaulted some rocks up to them. The gray, wet weather obscured the breath of her fields, but land was alive. Max could walk it, plant it and make it grow.
She wished Trey could see the land’s value, as useful as wishing she could plant infertile seeds plucked from hybrid plants. Max continued her tour, which had turned into a treatise on crop rotation. She talked about how she would schedule carrots in fields that had previously had potatoes because the potatoes cut down on weeds and how she planted clover between all her crop rows. If Trey was bored, he hid it well.
By the third field, Trey was talking about his life on the farm as a boy. He pointed out places where he’d hidden from his father and where he had surprised Kelly with an angry and aggressive water snake, telling him it was a water moccasin. He also pointed out where he’d been bitten by a cottonmouth, which he’d deserved for poking it with a stick, and where his brother had broken his arm jumping out of a tree into the pond during a drought.
As they rounded the dirt road from the fields back to the greenhouse, Max asked the question that had been burning inside her since Trey had actually expressed feelings other than disgust for the land. “You talk about your memories fondly, even though they involved physical pain. Why don’t you enjoy coming back here?”
“Do you want me to decide to become a gentleman farmer and kick you out?”
The hard tone in his voice pushed her into a defensive position. “Well, no, but...”
“Why don’t you return to Illinois and farm there?”
“I didn’t come to North Carolina to escape my father. I came to North Carolina because the growing season is good, the local produce market is strong without being saturated and my mom lives in Asheville. I was attracted to North Carolina, not repulsed by Illinois or my family.”
Though everything she’d told Trey was true, it wasn’t the whole truth. She’d grown up thinking she would farm her father’s land with her brother, but one summer spent interning at an organic vegetable farm outside of Chicago had changed her mind. Her brother and father grew the food that fed the world, no mistaking that, but she wanted to feel the sun directly on her back, not through the glass of a harvester window. Despite her father’s claim to her childhood, she was her mother’s daughter after all.
He harrumphed, the same noise Ashes made when scolded. “Maybe that’s the difference, then. I decided at an early age that whatever my parents were, I didn’t want to be that. Farm included.”
His use of the plural parents was interesting. “I know you didn’t like your father, but no one ever has a bad word to say about your mother. Surely she holds some tie for you.”
“My mother was an uneducated woman who worked a job she hated with people who made fun of her. She was afraid if she quit that she’d never get another job. And we needed the money because my dad was a failure at life.” Max turned her head to look at him. He raised an eyebrow at her, though the disgusted look on his face softened before he spoke again. “She was a lovely, kind person who spent her entire life being trampled on by people who never noticed she was there.”
Trey said the words with the hesitation of someone who didn’t know whether to be disgusted or sad. Max saw what he described but she credited Noreen with being a woman of untapped strength. She had to be, to put up with what Trey had described so that her children would have one stable parent and food on their table. Noreen may not have been a role model for her children, but she’d provided them with enough stubbornness to grow up and get out of a trap. Max supposed Noreen would think Trey’s success was worth the antipathy he felt toward the farm.
The wind started again, and Trey’s slicker wasn’t as weather-hardy as Max’s; the wind and rain were starting to break through. “Let’s go inside the greenhouse. It’s not much warmer in there, but we’ll be out of the weather and we can share my thermos of hot tea.”
* * *
TREY DIDN’T SAY anything as Max took a sip from the thermos cup before handing it to him. She’d stripped off her slicker as soon as they had stepped under cover, so now she was wearing her rain bibs, a neon green thermal undershirt and a navy blue flannel shirt. With her masses of hair, she looked ridiculous and underdressed. And also like the loveliest thing he’d ever seen. A fire burned inside her that warmed her from the inside out. It made her glow. Trey gripped the tiny plastic cup with a fear that he would never be warm again. He tried to step closer to Max, but she moved away, busy in her greenhouse on her farm.
Despite the official ownership, this was more her farm than his—or than it had ever been his father’s. She’d taken a ratty, falling-down piece of property and was turning it into something productive and wonderful. He wanted to pack up his clothes and drive back to D.C. Sell the dirt under his feet to the highest bidder and forget he’d ever lived here. Instead, he poured another cup of tea.
Max was laying out flats on one of the long tables. When her hands stopped moving, he handed her the cup and she took a big gulp. “Thank you.”
“What are you planting?” Besides the flat, she had seeds and soil.
“The last of the broccoli for today.” She was already looking down at her task. Tour was over and tea was shared; he’d been dismissed for work. “Broccoli gets started early then transplanted into the fields. In another two weeks, I’ll seed more broccoli. I should have three weeks of broccoli for the CSA and six weeks of broccoli for the market.”
“Can I help?” He couldn’t say where the impulse behind the question had come from. A lack of desire to go outside into the rain made more sense than wanting to spend more time with Max.
Her head jerked up and her pale eyes were questioning. “Sure, I guess. Planting’s not that hard.” She demonstrated, filling the flat with soil, adding a seed to each cell and topping it with a little more soil. “It’s basically your same seed-starting process as in a garden, only on a larger scale.” She gestured to the table of flats. “I’ll need 2600 feet of broccoli in the field. Makes for a lot of little transplants.”
“You don’t have help?” Trey didn’t know what he’d pictured winter on a vegetable farm to be like, but he’d expected more people.
“No.” She stopped, putting her hands down on top of the flat. “I have three interns March through September, otherwise I’m the only one. It’s a lot of work, but not more than I can handle.”
“I didn’t mean to imply...”
“The winter’s slow, spent mostly planning the coming summer. I’ve thought of starting a winter CSA. Or maybe selling at the market in the winter. I already grow a winter garden for myself. But selling means I’d need another person and I’ve never been willing to risk the cost, especially since I wouldn’t be able to provide housing. If I’m living in the farmhouse, the second person can live in the barn and a winter CSA might be feasible.”
As she was talking, he realized he’d opened his hand out in offering to her. All of her dreams depended on him and his willingness to keep leasing her the land. But she didn’t appear to notice that the land wasn’t resting like a gift on his proffered palm. Once she had stopped talking, she had started planting again. Trey followed her movements until he’d gotten the hang of them enough to find his own rhythm. Ignorance of the farm and Max had been preferable to this...whatever their relationship was now. He’d rather think of the farm as his personal trap than as soil for dreams. But he still couldn’t help asking, “What other plans do you have for the farm?”
She glanced up from her planting and her uncertainty looked tinged with fear. But that was ridiculous. A woman with her forthright gaze couldn’t be afraid of anything. Yet it was written on her face.
When she didn’t answer, he clarified his question. “If money was no object, what would Max’s Vegetable Patch look like?”
“I’ve toyed with the idea of raising animals, but—” she stalled and he could see the objections to her grand plans piling up in her brain “—they’re expensive and unless you’ve got the staff you can’t ever go on vacation.”
He raised a brow at her. “Money is no object.”
“What about time?” she retorted.
“If you have money, you can hire extra people to cover the time.”
“Right.” She went back to planting and Trey gave her some space to organize her thoughts. What he’d meant to be a simple question asked out of curiosity clearly was not.
“Right now I’d like to own the land I farm. Renovate the second tobacco barn so I can offer housing to two interns. Past that, I have no plans.”
When she stepped away from her finished tray of broccoli to begin another, he thought their conversation was over. Max didn’t hum to herself. She didn’t whistle or mutter. The only noise she made was the brushing of her clothing against itself as her hands busily planted seeds and the occasional shuffling of a seeding tray against the wooden tables. Outside the greenhouse the rain pounded—on the ground, on the sides of the greenhouse, on the trees. But even with all the noise Mother Nature could muster in the storm, Max was so centered in her thoughts and her work that the greenhouse felt silent. Trey knew it wasn’t. When he stopped working to listen, the rain buffeted about outside and Ashes panted at Max’s feet. So long as he didn’t resist, Max and the work pulled him into a meditative state.
It wasn’t until Max checked her watch that Trey noticed how the light had faded. He’d spent several hours in contemplative, comfortable peace with a woman on his dad’s farm. No anger, no frustration, no resentment, just the repetitive movements of planting seeds.
“Finish up your tray and then we’re done. I got far more finished today than I’d hoped. Thank you for your help.”
Trey stretched his hands out in front of him and rolled the stiffness out of his neck. “You’re welcome. Thank you for the tour and conversation.” Now that he was moving, anger poured back into the empty space left from his meditation. The tightness that had been in his shoulders from stillness morphed into the restrictive straitjacket he was familiar with. He tilted his head from the left to the right, hoping to add ease back into his muscles.
Max directed him through cleaning up and they walked out of the greenhouse into the drizzle together. Only the noise of the rain, the shuffling of their steps and the rustle of their clothing accompanied them, leaving Trey to concentrate on Max walking next to him. Even Ashes seemed contemplative. As they were passing the chicken coop, Max spoke again. “I thought a lot about your question.”
“My question?” After the absorbing quiet of the greenhouse, his question now felt intrusive. His idea of bigger, better and flashier was out of sync with the peace of the farm.
“There are so many things I could do with this farm that would make a splash in the organic farming world. There’s this guy in upstate New York with a complete CSA. People pay him a yearly fee and once a week they pick up all their food, meat, cheese, bread, preserves, vegetables, everything. His wife wrote a book about it. Closer to home, there’s a farm in Orange County with a complete rotation of their animals and vegetables. They do things with organic farming I could only dream about.”
“But?” Just because he felt like he was intruding, didn’t mean he was going to stop.
“I’m pretty simple. My dreams for the farm are modest: a winter CSA, a renovated tobacco barn and land I can count as mine.”
“What’s wrong with saying that?”
“What are your dreams, Trey?”
Trey stopped and stared at the farmhouse. His mouth opened to speak but drizzle dripped off his nose into the emptiness of what he couldn’t say and he had to shut his mouth before he drowned. He either said what he didn’t even want to admit to himself or never speak again. “All I ever wanted was to get away from my father and this farm.”
“And after you moved away, how did you decide what to do next if you didn’t have dreams?”
Max’s eyes were clear and bright, even through the fading light and the spit coming down from the heavens. Trey started walking again, to the farmhouse. He’d never imagined wanting to enter those doors, but the house was dry. And warm.
When Max and Ashes caught up with him on the enclosed porch, he could feel the cowardly way he hadn’t answered her question in the prickle in his spine. The drips off the metal roof were louder now than the sound of the rain, but neither noise was loud enough to drown out the truth he didn’t want to admit to himself.
“Since I packed up my car and left North Carolina, I haven’t had a single dream for my life. I’ve taken logical and practical steps to further my career and the agendas of my employers, but nothing I’ve done has been my dream.”
Ashes’s wet tail made a squishing noise as it swept back and forth on the concrete floor. Max was silent.
“Kelly’s coming over soon so we can do more packing. I should go inside.” Trey hadn’t looked at her during his confession. He didn’t want to see pity in her eyes.
The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on him as he watched Max and Ashes shuffle down the steps and around the back of the house. Max had one very simple dream, and he owned it. He had had one simple dream, too, and owning Max’s dream meant he hadn’t fully realized his.
CHAPTER SIX
“ARE YOU SURE you don’t want to drive?” Max asked with a smile in her voice as Trey opened the passenger door to the truck late the next morning.
“No, I’m comfortable enough in my masculinity to let you drive.”
Trey had looked in the cab while they were filling the bed with his dad’s crap. The rust around the gearshift hadn’t given him much hope that the transmission actually worked, though he’d seen Max drive the beast around the farm. This would be the first time he’d seen her drive the truck—instead of her small sedan—off the property. When Max hopped up into the seat and caught him eyeing the stick shift with suspicion, he knew his answer hadn’t fooled her.
“Your car is a standard, so I know you can drive one.”
“My car also doesn’t have rust.” Or a thick layer of dirt and torn seats, but he didn’t say any of that. This was a working farm truck and it wasn’t meant to be beautiful.
“Well, make sure you have your cell phone,” she said as the engine cranked, “in case we need to be rescued.” She seemed to be using all of her arm strength to shift the truck into Reverse, though the mischief in her voice made him wonder if this, including her asking if he wanted to drive, was all an act. Another side to his farmer?
“You’re not helping. One of your dreams for the farm should be a new truck.” He was guessing this hunk of metal was from the eighties.
“Bertha is from one of Ford’s greatest ever truck years.” Her struggle with the gearshift had clearly been an act. She had easily shifted into first gear, too busy defending her truck to fake difficulty this time. “She’s a collector’s item.”
“Does that include the price archeologists would pay to carbon date the dirt they scrape from the floor?” He said the words lightly, so she would know he was teasing. And she laughed.
Everyone’s mood was lighter today, it seemed. The clouds from the day before had evaporated, though the water it had left behind still gave everything a sparkle in the bright winter sun. The birds seemed to chirp a little louder this morning, as if they knew that this load of junk would mean the farmhouse was almost completely cleared out.
Important-looking papers had been sorted and shoved into boxes that went up into the attic, along with the family pictures Kelly hadn’t wanted. Anything that Kelly had felt a sentimental twinge for also went in a box and into the attic. They’d already made several trips to the Goodwill with anything that still had a use, and this should be the only trip they had to make to the dump.
Trey rolled down the window enough to let a little breeze in then settled into the torn seats and the dust for the novelty of being driven into town.
Max was apparently an experienced dump-goer, because she knew where to pull in to unload their hazardous materials, where to unload the boxes of broken electronics and where to dump the trash bags. Trey was just along for the ride because it was his father’s crap—and because spending his time with Max yesterday had been surprisingly relaxing. He wanted to see what she could do with a trip to the dump.
Lightened of its load, the truck seemed to drive better and Trey was settling in for the drive back when Max pulled into the small parking lot of a corner grocery store. “Do you mind?” she asked, though not until turning off the engine and engaging the parking brake.
The trip to the dump meant he was one chore closer to being back in D.C., so Trey said, “Of course not.” Given how old the store looked, complete with handwritten signs in the windows advertising the week’s specials, he must have passed this store a thousand times in his life as he drove up and down Roxboro Road. “What are we getting?”
“King’s has good local bread and milk, plus dried peaches for my oatmeal in the mornings,” Max said as she exited the truck and walked into the store, with Trey right behind her.
“Hey, sug,” the clerk called as Max grabbed a shopping basket. “How’s the farm?”
“Slow right now, but it’ll pick up soon.”
Trey trailed after Max through the aisles of the small store, content to play tourist and look around. The store had some items he expected, like bags of frozen chitterlings and other things that he didn’t know existed, like molasses in what had to be a ten-gallon bucket, and some things he’d never expected to see at a small grocery store in Durham, like bags of organic and fair-trade coffee.
Trey stopped in front of a packaged-meat case and stared at the small tubs of pimento cheese. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a pimento cheese sandwich, though they had been a staple of his childhood. Max came up behind him. “You should buy some. They make it fresh in the store.”
Her breath was soft and intimate in his ear, and suddenly the entire stop had a casually familiar feel. Stopping in for a few groceries was something couples did together. “Are you a regular here?” he asked, reaching forward to grab a tub, more to put some distance between them than because he actually wanted it.
“Anyone who comes here more than once is a regular.” She reached past him to grab her own tub, the movement defeating his desire for space. “Plus, they support local farms and businesses, so it’s hard not to return the favor.
“Do you sell here?”
Max waved at the butcher behind the counter before answering. “No, but I know the baker for some of the bread they sell here and the brewer of some of the Durham beer. If I gave up on the diversity of my farm and specialized in one product, maybe I would. Right now I don’t produce enough of any one thing to sell at a store.” She looked back over her shoulder at him. “I’m not sure I would want to.”
Here in the store, Max wasn’t just the farmer on his dad’s land, but a real person—related to the farm and his past but not of the farm and his past. It was like realizing your parents had a life before you were born. The thought made him laugh and realize how self-centered he’d been this entire week.
Trey followed Max to the front of the store, put his tub of pimento cheese on the conveyor belt and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. He no more knew what to do with his tub of pimento cheese than his newfound realization.
* * *
THOUGH TREY AND Kelly had packed up enough of their dad’s stuff that he could’ve driven back to D.C. Friday morning, Trey kept to his original plan of leaving Saturday. He had made a tentative date with Max for another basketball game and he wanted to keep it. He drove to Chapel Hill for a late lunch with Jerome, took a side trip through Orange County for Maple View Farms ice cream and stopped for more barbecue takeout for dinner with Max. He didn’t plan on returning to North Carolina until Kelly got married—which probably depended more on politics than Kelly—so the memory of this barbecue would have to last him a while.
When he opened the door to Max’s knock, he was surprised to see her in jeans. “Does access to your own washing machine starting tomorrow mean no bunny-print pajama bottoms?”
When she turned from hanging her coat up, a flush rose up her neck, turning the pale parts of her skin bright red and her freckles a deep oak.
“The pajamas were cute, but the jeans look nice, too,” he offered as a lame apology for whatever he had said to make her blush. Nice was a weak description of how Max looked.
The long sleeves of her dark purple T-shirt covered her arms, but his eyes followed the trail of freckles down into the deep V of the fitted shirt’s neck, and his hands wanted to accompany them. Her hair was pulled back into a long, tangled braid that looked like a fraying piece of rope with strands and ringlets sticking out every which way, giving her otherwise tidy look a wild quality. Max hadn’t lost the unsullied glow he’d discovered in her yesterday, even back on this contaminated soil. A pleasant, but uncomfortable realization.
“Mama would say I know how to treat a girl right,” Trey said as they walked into the living room with their plates of barbecue. “TV trays.” He gestured to the room he’d set up for their evening. “No low-class eating with the plate on your lap tonight.” She laughed, as he had known she would. “I think these were my grandmother’s and I didn’t know they were still around until I found them in the attic. Mama always insisted we eat at the table. Dad would use these trays sometimes, but after Mama died, I guess he didn’t feel the need to put his beer anywhere other than his mouth.”
“I don’t remember Hank drinking.”
“Maybe he learned to hide it better. Anyway, let’s leave my parents to their resting places and talk basketball.” Talking about his father left a sour, hungover taste in his mouth that the vinegar in the barbecue couldn’t overpower.
“I can’t talk basketball, so you talk basketball and I’ll eat my dinner.”
“That ‘I’m still a Fighting Illini’ wasn’t a sign you could debate the finer points of fast-break ACC-style basketball versus slooow Big Ten style?”
“No.” He looked over to see her smile dancing over her raised fork piled high with barbecue. “It was just a sign that I didn’t want to yell out ‘heel.’”
“Well, I’ll be crushed and deceived. You owe me something, then.”
“I owe you something?” A chuckle came out on the tail end of her words.
“Sure. I’m feeding you barbecue as payment for having someone to talk basketball with. If you can’t talk basketball, what am I feeding you for?”
“Company? Enlightened conversation? A thank-you for the tour?”
Trey pretended to think over her response. “Nope. None of those are good enough.”
In the dim light of the lamps and the television, he could barely tell the difference between her pale raised eyebrow and her pale skin, so he didn’t back down. He was certain Max was the kind of person who enjoyed being pushed, and who liked pushing back.
“Okay,” she said finally. “I’ll give you something, but if you tell a soul I will wallpaper your apartment in D.C. with pictures of the farmhouse.”
He’d been right about the pushing back part. Max knew how to make a good threat. “Deal.”
“My mother’s family is from the Winston-Salem area. My grandparents used to come to Illinois for visits, but I didn’t visit North Carolina until I was ten or so, when my parents divorced and my brother and I were shipped out of town for the process.” She grimaced at the memory. “My grandfather took us to Stamey’s in Greensboro for my first taste of barbecue. I didn’t know any better so I asked the waitress, ‘What kind of meat is this?’”
Trey smiled, knowing where this was going.
“‘It’s barbecue,’ the waitress replied. I pressed her to tell me what kind of meat it was and she kept telling me it was barbecue, like I was dumb or something.”
“A reasonable assumption on the part of the waitress,” Trey said. “The rest of the South can smoke what it likes, but barbecue in North Carolina is always pork.”
“I should’ve made not teasing me part of the deal.” Max wrinkled her nose at him, but she was smiling. “This back-and-forth went on forever. Now that I’m older I can see that my grandfather’s grimace was him trying not to bust a gut laughing, but at the time I was just frustrated. The waitress wouldn’t answer my question and Grandpa finally told me it was pork about the time I was ready to walk out. Or when the waitress was going to kick me out. One or the other.”
“On behalf of mah state—” Trey put on his fine Southern gentleman accent “—may ah say how delighted we are that you gave us a second chance.”
“Now you’re just being ridiculous.” She made an exaggerated motion of wiping her hands on her paper napkin. “Is there dessert?”
“There’s banana pudding. If you can wait just a minute for me to finish my last cold hush puppy.” Trey popped the fried ball of cornmeal into his mouth, then stood. “Let’s go into the kitchen.”
Trey blinked several times when he passed the muted TV. The game was nearly at halftime and he hadn’t looked away from Max once to see the score.
* * *
THIS TIME, WHEN Trey offered to walk her and Ashes across the yard to the barn, Max didn’t object. She’d planned on him walking her to her door, actually. Worn a low-cut T-shirt, donned her most flattering pair of jeans and put on lip gloss in the hopes that he would notice. His eyes had warmed when she’d taken off her coat, so she was pretty sure he’d taken a peek. He was leaving tomorrow morning and that was all the more reason for her to take a chance on him tonight. When they reached her door she let Ashes in then stood on her porch with Trey.
“I imagine you’ll be working when I leave tomorrow.” He was looking at her lips when he said the words.
Taking a step closer to him seemed like a good first move. Give him a chance to make a second move without the risk of two different sets of expectations bumping into one another. “I work a little on Saturdays, but I’ll be around. You should come find me.”
Their two evenings spent watching basketball and eating dinner together had been fun. When he let go of his anger, Trey managed to walk the line between serious and goofy without falling into the abyss on either side. She didn’t want him to come find her tomorrow morning; she wanted him to be next to her when she woke up. Just this once.
He shrugged, not taking his eyes off her lips—and he didn’t take a step back when she took another step closer. “It will be a pleasure being your landlord.”
She cocked her head. The cold air between them warmed with their shared breath and there didn’t seem to be enough oxygen for them both. Would he be okay with kissing his tenant? Would communication between them be awkward if they spent the night together? God, what if he thought she wanted something else out of this night besides good sex?
What if I do want something else out of Trey? That last thought was stupid. He was leaving in the morning and wouldn’t come back to North Carolina unless forced.
“Well, good night, Max.” When she pulled herself out of her thoughts, she could see he’d stuck his hand out for her to shake. “I hope to see you tomorrow before I leave.”
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