скачать книгу бесплатно
She decided to address her own embarrassment upfront. “This is delicious. But I bet I’m making a mess.”
Callie giggled. “You have gravy on your chin.”
Julia felt a napkin dabbing around her mouth. She let her daughter take care of her, grateful that Callie seemed more interested in than frightened by her predicament.
“I’m going to try eating with my eyes closed,” Callie said.
“One messy eater at a table, please.” Julia smiled in her daughter’s direction. “Poor Maisy will have enough to clean up as it is.”
“Another biscuit?” Maisy spoke from across the table. “Julia?”
Julia shook her head. “This is more than I’ve eaten in a week. It’s wonderful.” And it really was. Maisy had always been an eclectic cook, quickly tiring of one cuisine and moving on to another. Thai lemon grass soup or Salvadoran pupusas had been as commonly served as country ham. Tonight she and Jake had prepared Southern classic. Fried chicken, biscuits and cream gravy, green beans cooked with salt pork and Jake’s famous sweet potato pie for dessert. A heart attack on a plate.
“Pie after I clean up?” Maisy asked.
“I’ll help,” Julia said. “I can dry dishes.”
Maisy didn’t argue or fuss. “I’ll help you find your way.”
“I want to see Feather Foot.” Callie’s chair scraped the floor beside Julia. “He might be lonely.”
“I’ll take you.” Jake’s chair scraped, too. “Then we can close up for the night. I could use your help.”
“Can I, Mommy?”
“You bet.” Julia got to her feet and slid her hands along the table until it ended. Maisy took her arm, and, shuffling her feet so as not to trip, Julia followed her mother’s lead.
The kitchen was large enough for a table of its own, enameled metal and cool to the touch. Julia rested her fingers on its edge. Whenever she had needed help she had done her homework here as a young girl, letting Maisy drill her on spelling words or Jake untangle math problems, step by step. She had abandoned this warm family center as she grew older, preferring her own company to theirs. Her room had become a haven, the telephone her lifeline.
Again she thought of Fidelity, and, inevitably, of Christian.
“You have the expression on your face you used to get as a little girl.” Maisy released Julia’s arm. “You’re a million miles away. I used to wonder how to travel that far.”
Julia was surprised. Maisy, for all her love, her sneak attacks into intimacy, rarely expressed what she was feeling. She decided to be honest. “I was just thinking about Fidelity.”
“What brought her to mind?”
“Being here, I guess. I feel like a girl again.”
“She was a big part of your childhood. Christian, too.”
Julia couldn’t touch that. “And Robby. So much sadness.”
“You saw too much sadness.”
“I’ve wondered if that’s what this is about. If I’m blind because of that. If everything finally caught up with me. Fidelity’s murder, Christian’s conviction, Robby’s accident.”
“Did you ask the doctor?”
“Would you share the time of day with that man?”
“Julia, do you want me to see if I can find you a good therapist, somebody you’d feel comfortable talking to?”
Julia could imagine the sort of therapist her mother might choose. An escapee from Esalen, a guru who started each session with ancient Hindu chants or a fully orchestrated psychodrama.
Maisy laughed a little, low and somehow sad. “This is interesting, but I really can almost see your thoughts now. You’ve always been so good at hiding them, but that’s changed.”
“Maisy, I—”
“There’s a woman in Warrenton who is supposed to be excellent. No fireworks or instant revelations. Just good listening skills and sound advice.”
Julia wondered what choice she had. Did she want to call her own friends for recommendations and open her life to more gossip? Could she trust Bard to find someone more suitable?
“Why don’t you give her a try? If you don’t like her, we’ll look for someone else.” Maisy took her arm. “I’ll wash in the dishpan, and I’ll put the clean dishes in the other side of the sink to rinse. You can dry them and stack them on the counter.”
Julia joined her mother at the sink, but the first dish she picked up slipped and fell back into the sink.
“Don’t even say it.” Maisy adjusted the water to a lighter flow. “I won’t put you to drying the good china just yet.”
Julia picked up the plate again and started to rub it with the towel Maisy had provided. “We did this when I was little. Remember? Of course, then I could see what I was doing.”
“From the time we moved in here. When it was just you and me.”
For Julia, those early days seemed like centuries ago. She remembered little before Jake joined their lives and almost nothing of living in the big house with her father. “Why did you move here, Maisy?” She had asked the question before, of course, but she hoped now she would get a more detailed answer.
“Truthfully? Ashbourne’s too large to manage without help, and I thought we needed the time alone to heal after your daddy died.”
“How about later?”
“By then I’d grown to love this place. I couldn’t imagine the two of us rattling around the big house. Then Jake came along…”
Julia couldn’t imagine Jake at the big house, either. Ashbourne had been built by and for people who assumed that they, too, were somehow larger than life. Jake had no such illusions.
Since the conversation was going well, Julia ventured further. “Ashbourne almost seems like a museum. A record of life on the day my father died.”
“Ashbourne belongs to you. I never saw the point of changing things or selling the antiques. I like living here. It will be up to you to decide what to do with Ashbourne once you’re ready.”
“Bard would like to live there.” Ashbourne was grander than Millcreek, although Millcreek had been in his family since the Revolutionary War.
“I always thought as much.”
“But not until you open the property to the Mosby Hunt. It would be too embarrassing for him to live there if you didn’t.”
“And I won’t.” Maisy plunked more dishes on Julia’s side of the sink. “Not as long as the land’s in my name.”
Maisy’s objection to foxhunting at Ashbourne was legendary. Her determination to keep foxhunters off her land had made her the butt of many a local joke and the occasional prank. Julia, by default, had suffered, too.
“Speaking of Bard…” Maisy turned off the water. “I think that’s his car.”
Julia had been waiting all evening for the low purr of the BMW’s engine. Now she heard it, too. “This should be a laugh a minute.”
“Where would you like to talk to him?”
“Somewhere Callie can’t overhear. How about the garden?”
“It’s a little cool tonight.”
“I have a sweater in the dining room.”
“I’ll get the door and the sweater.”
Julia listened as Maisy’s footsteps disappeared. She had steeled herself for this confrontation. Her marriage to Bard had always seemed simple and forthright. It had also been untested, and it was failing this one, as if the added weight of her blindness had tipped a precariously balanced scale.
Moments passed. She heard murmurs from the front of the house, a door close, then footsteps. She dried her hands and turned, leaning against the counter with her arms folded. When he crossed the threshold, she was ready.
“Hello, Bard.”
“Julia.” His voice was tight, as if his throat was closing around it.
“We expected you earlier. Maisy saved a place for you at the dinner table.”
“I’d like to talk to you alone. If I’m allowed?”
She was annoyed by his tone. “You don’t need to be rude. Maisy?”
“Right here. I brought the sweater.”
Julia held out a hand, and Maisy placed the sweater in it. “Need help getting it on?”
“No, I’ll manage.”
Maisy must have turned, because her voice came from a different place. “Julia would like to have this conversation in the garden. Can you help her get there?”
“I can still escort my wife any place she needs to go.”
Julia spoke without thinking. “And any place I don’t need to go, as well.”
“Now who’s being rude?” Bard stepped forward to help her with her sweater.
She didn’t apologize, although it had been a cheap shot. “Let’s go out through this door. Callie’s in the barn with Jake.”
“I understand you sent for Feather Foot, too. Just how long do you intend to stay?”
“As long as I need to.”
She heard the kitchen door open, then felt Bard’s big hand on her upper arm. “Let’s finish this outside.”
He was a large man with a long stride. He did little to modify it as he propelled her to the garden. She stumbled once, and he slowed down, but she could tell he was annoyed by the way he continued to grip her arm.
“You should try this sometime.” Julia came to a halt when he did. “Being dragged along by someone bigger than you. It’s not a reassuring feeling.”
“I didn’t drag you.” He hesitated. “Damn it, I’m sorry. Okay? I’m just so angry.”
“Is this what happens when you don’t get your way? Or hasn’t that happened often enough for you to recognize the signs?”
“You’re determined to be stupid about this, aren’t you?”
“Stupid?”
“It was stupid for you to escape from the clinic. Do you have any idea how that made me look?”
“Let me guess. Like the husband of a stupid woman?”
“Damn it, Julia!”
She was silent, waiting for him to gain control. Although a large part of her wanted to have a screaming match, a larger part knew better. Not only would Callie hear, nothing would be accomplished.
He took a while to get hold of his temper. She imagined steam rising from a boiling kettle, then an unseen hand turning off the heat. The steam billowed, then puffed, and at last died away altogether. But the water was still hot enough to scald.
“Let’s sit down,” he said at last.
“Where are we?”
“There’s a bench under a tree.” He led her there. She could hear him brushing leaves from the wooden slats; then he repositioned her. She could feel the bench against the backs of her knees. She sat gingerly.
Julia knew enough of her mother’s gardening style to visualize how this garden looked in moonlight. With fall in the air, Maisy would have planted gold and orange chrysanthemums. Purple asters bloomed here when the weather began to turn, perhaps there was flowering kale this year. Maisy’s gardens were chaotically haphazard and more beautiful because of it, as if God Himself had randomly sprinkled all the colors of the world with a generous hand.
“I came here a lot as a teenager.” Julia explored the bench with her fingertips. “You can see the road through those trees.” She inclined her head. “Sometimes I’d see you riding by. Did you ever notice me?”
If he understood her attempt to take the conversation to a more conciliatory level, he gave no sign. “What were you thinking, Julia? Dr. Jeffers says you found your way downstairs by yourself. You could have been killed.”
“I had help. Did he also tell you he threatened to have me committed?”
“He was trying to keep you there for your own good.”
“Bard, I’m an amateur psychologist. I’ll admit it. But doesn’t it make sense that I won’t get better unless I’m part of the cure?”
“Maybe you don’t want to get better.”
“Then there’s no point to being at the clinic, is there? Think of all the money we’re saving. I can wallow in my blindness for free.”
He took her hand, swallowing it in his. “I don’t mean consciously, Julia. I know you think you want to get better.”
“Now who’s playing amateur psychologist?”
“Well, if you wanted it badly enough, wouldn’t you just see again?”
“Back to that.”
