Sister's Choice (12 page)

Kendra was silent.

“I have had two children,” Jamie said, a little calmer now. “I know all the ins and outs, and I’ve always had excellent prenatal care, which included lots of advice. I could probably deliver these babies by myself, I’m such an old hand at it. So you don’t have to worry. I know the rules, and I go out of my way to pay attention. I’m no more careless with your children than I was with my own.”

“I didn’t think you were being careless because they’re
my
children. I just thought that maybe you weren’t thinking.”

“Because you still haven’t caught on that I think quite well and quite often, now that I’m an adult. I’m not that cute little baby you tried to raise all by yourself when the nanny was passed out at the kitchen table and Riva was jetting off to St. Barts.”

“You never told me you were immune.”

“No, and I never told you that all my shots are up to date, my blood pressure’s on the low side of normal, I got chicken pox right after I ran away from home and I’m badly allergic to poison ivy. And there’s a lot of poison ivy around here, but so far I’ve had the good sense to avoid it.”

“I should go.”

Jamie put her hand on her sister’s arm. “Oh, no you don’t! You’re not going anywhere. You’re going to stay and help me finish this party. I have six little girls who spent the afternoon making mud pies. And you can darn well stay here and help me get them into some kind of shape to send home.”

“You’re probably leaving a handprint on my arm.”

“Then you’ll need to stick it under the sprinkler, won’t you?”

Kendra stared at her. “I’m not really into mud.”

“Well, you’d better learn, then. You’re going to have two children who’ll be into it big-time. Kids don’t just go to museums and concerts in the park. They dig up worms and try to eat them. They hang upside down from tree limbs and vomit in the car and wipe their noses on their T-shirts. Time to get used to it.”

“Your grip’s getting tighter.”

Jamie let go of her sister; then, without thinking—which had gotten her into trouble a number of times—she shoved. Just a tiny shove. Not a full-fledged Sumo wrestler shove. More a shove to make a point. But Kendra was off balance, and the next thing Jamie knew, her sister was sitting in the mud pit.

Torn between apology and laughter, Jamie just stood there, trying not to give in to either. She backed away, but not quickly enough.

“Oh, no you don’t!” Kendra grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her into the mud, too.

Jamie fell to her knees and started to laugh. “At least I’m not wearing Ralph Lauren. Look at you!”

“You were always a nasty, grubby little kid.”

“And you were always so perfect!”

“Was not!” Kendra scooped up a handful of mud and tossed it at her sister.”

“Were, too!” Jamie scooped up mud with both hands and went on the attack. “The nannies loved you more than they loved me!”

They were both laughing now. Kendra tried to get away, but Jamie pulled her down again.

“Consider this your parenthood training program,” Jamie said, rolling to one side and scrambling to get up.

“You’re not going anywhere.”

They heard screeching, and looked up to see a swarm of little girls heading their way.

“Their mothers are going to kill me,” Jamie said.

“Head them off!” Kendra got up, but it was too late. In moments the girls were flailing around in the mud with them.

“Enough! Enough!” Jamie shrieked.

But it wasn’t enough. From somewhere behind them, a door slammed. Jamie was pinned beneath her daughters, who were decorating her T-shirt and hair with grass and gunk.

“I’ll be drummed out of Toms Brook,” Jamie told Kendra, as she tried to pick off her daughters and scramble out of the pit. “Exactly what are we going to do now?”

“It looks to me like that’s pretty simple,” a familiar male voice answered.

Jamie had managed to get to her feet. She glared at Cash, who just turned up his hands and waited.

“Help,” she said.

He grinned; then he stepped into the mud, as well. “Don’t worry, sweetcakes. I’m on it.”

“W
ell, you don’t have to grin like you’re the only guy in the world who ever peeled six filthy little girls out of a mud puddle.” Jamie glanced at Cash, who was lounging comfortably on her front porch, and saw that he was still grinning. He hadn’t stopped since his first sight of her in the mud with Kendra and the girls.

“Kuk..kuk…kuk…kuk…”

She stopped braiding her wet hair and glared at him. “What’s that about?”

“The call of a mud hen. Not sure why it just popped into my head like that…”

“Falling into the mud was just the tiniest lapse on my part.”

“And your sister’s?”

“It seemed like a nice way to cool off. If you’ve never had a conversation in a mud pit, don’t knock it.”

“Today I had plenty. With the girls, with you and Kendra. With Mrs. Garcia.”

Jamie relented. “I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

Cash had hauled all the little girls out of the mud and sent them over to the repositioned sprinkler to hose down. By then Jamie and Kendra had righted themselves and joined the party until they were all soaking wet but no longer mud pies on legs. Inside, the girls dried off and changed into the extra clothes they’d brought along, while Cash unhooked the sprinkler and firmly steered them away from the mud when they went back outside. When Adoncia Garcia arrived to pick them up, they were still passably clean.

They left clutching their garbage bags of goodies and chattering excitedly about everything they’d done.

“It was a little unruly,” a still grimy Jamie had told Adoncia, a widow who had a young son in addition to Maria.

“You are one brave woman. Me, I told my boyfriend, Diego, what you were doing, and he said someone should give you a medal.”

“Someone should examine my head. But they had fun.”

“By the looks of it, so did you.”

“I always say we shouldn’t ask our children to do anything we aren’t willing to do ourselves.”

“And me? I always say ‘
a la occasion la pintan calva.
’”

“My Spanish is pretty rusty.”

“Make the most of your chances,” Adoncia had translated with a wink.

Kendra was now showered and gone, and Hannah and Alison were inside trying to unwind. Jamie could feel herself drooping with fatigue.

“I was more than glad to help,” Cash said. “But that was a sight I won’t soon forget.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t get much of a chance to talk to Kendra. I guess neither of you were quite expecting the day to go the way it did.”

“While you were in the shower, we had time to talk over the basics. Then she hightailed it out of here. Oh, you look better in that hot-pink scooped-neck thing of yours than she does. It’s not her style.”

“She’ll probably never come back.”

“I think she was having a pretty good time, but she had to get to Front Royal before the tile place closes. She told me to tell you she owes you.”

“I hate to think what she owes me. I might need to change the locks.” Jamie finished the braid and began to twist an elastic band over the end. “You’re still here.”

“I thought you and the girls might like to go up to the orchard, have a peek in at Lucky and maybe see my place. A good way to calm them down.”

From inside the house, Hannah was singing at the top of her lungs, and Alison might have been attempting harmony, considering that she wasn’t within a mile of the same notes.

“They might not calm down for a century,” Jamie warned. “A millennium.”

“I’m not planning to be there quite that long.”

Part of her knew she ought to refuse. Cash kept showing up, backing away, showing up again. Maybe that only bothered her because she was still lonely for adult company. She was slowly meeting people, but none of those relationships had graduated to any real conversation.

Unfortunately, she had been trained by the best to be honest with herself. Truthfully, Cash’s on-again, off-again behavior bothered her because she found him intriguing.

She tested the waters. “You seem to be a very busy guy. Are you sure we won’t be taking up too much of your time?”

“Not any more than you already take up in my head.”

Jamie’s hand paused midtwist. He had surprised her. “We’re a handful. You might want to just leave us right here.”

“I’ve been trying. Apparently that’s one of those things I’m not real good at.” He got up. “Granny Grace showed you the orchard through her eyes. You ought to see it through mine.”

He’d switched the topic so suddenly that she had to scurry to follow along behind. “Why is that?”

“Because it’s a good excuse to spend some time with me.”

“And I need an excuse?”

He examined her a moment. “Looks like you might. And this is a good one. The girls’ll enjoy a look at my new mare. You can lecture me about the way I live. Granny Grace can fuss over everybody, which makes her as happy as a crow in a cornfield and gives you a little rest. It’s what they call a win-win.”

“And what do you get?”

“Another dinner with you and the girls. Granny Grace is baking a ham, just in case you say yes.”

“How can I say no?”

“With a lot more effort than you’d want to put into it.”

“I always vote for easy, if nobody’s going to get hurt.”

He lifted the end of her braid, then dropped it against her breast. “Let’s just keep tabs on that to make sure.”

The girls bounced on the rear seat of Cash’s pickup, but by the time they reached the orchard, Alison was wearing down and Hannah only made an occasional comment about the scenery.

“All the mailboxes are smashed,” Hannah said.

“Country baseball.” Cash slowed as they neared the orchard drive. “Nothing to do on a summer night except get together with a couple of friends, go out armed with a baseball bat and smash mailboxes out the old truck window.”

“You sound like you know what you’re talking about,” Jamie said.

“Only tried it once. Went for one of those boxes a nuclear bomb would bounce right off of. You know, the kind they sell in fancy mail-order catalogs? Cost the moon, but some farmer knew what he was doing. Hit it once, that box jerked the bat right out of my hand and nearly jerked my arm right out of its socket. I figured that was enough of a warning, so I switched to the other side. Now I’m a mailbox vigilante. Been known to sit by Granny Grace’s mailbox on a summer night with a six-pack and a shotgun filled with rock salt, just waiting for the next Ranger or Silverado that slows down on our road when it ought to be speeding up.”

“
I
know you’re making that up. Now tell my girls.”

“Hannah and Alison, I’m just kidding about the shotgun.” Cash glanced at Jamie and winked. “And the six-pack.”

“And the baseball bat?”

“Not kidding about that. One of the problems with country life. High-spirited teenagers with nothing much to do. Basically, there are two kinds of kids around here. One kind excels in school or sports and has a family that insists on church and scouting and family events. Then there’s the other kind—average students at best, parents too busy or too clueless to understand that they have to take their kids in hand and give them something better to do than just cleaning the chicken house or spraying the apple trees.”

“This is beginning to sound personal.”

“I was somewhere in between. Good enough in school to get accepted to Tech, family that knew they had to program a portion of my free time and enough high spirits to send me off looking for trouble when I got bored.”

“Do you still go off looking for trouble?”

Cash turned into the drive. “You tell me.”

She wondered if
she
was trouble for him. That would depend entirely on what he was trying to avoid, and why. She really knew next to nothing about him. He had been married and no longer was. He was restless, had spent some time in Kentucky around racetracks and still liked horses. He lived somewhere on orchard property, although her tour with Grace had not included his house. He was a talented contractor, with a keen eye and an engaging way of managing others. She knew from the little she had seen that his men liked and respected him. And Rosslyn and Rosslyn was a going concern, most likely with a bright future if he wanted to be part of it.

Despite the easygoing, country-boy persona, Cash was educated, insightful and witty—which was true of a lot of easygoing country boys, now that she thought about it.

They passed the driveway up to the house and continued down the road.

“Used to be, when Grandpa Ben was alive, these fields were all planted. Some in hay, some in vegetables for market. He trucked a lot of those into D.C. for the restaurant trade, grew things nobody else around here had ever heard of back then for restaurants in Dupont Circle or Georgetown. But the apples were his love. To this day, I think he had names for the trees, and I don’t mean York or Delicious. They were like his kids. When one of them lost a limb or developed some disease, I think he felt it, too. Like it happened to him.”

“Grace talks about him fondly.”

“There’s a story there, if you can get her to tell you. My mother was the youngest of the three kids by a lot, and I think most of what’s interesting happened before she was born.”

Jamie filed that away to ask Grace about when they were alone.

Now they were threading through the orchard, acres and acres of apple trees flanking the road.

“We used to have peaches, too,” Cash said. “But most of them are gone now. A couple of unusual freezes, the drought, a season of workers who took advantage of Grandpa Ben’s final illness. The peaches bore the brunt of all that, and now we just have half a dozen or so trees for family and friends. Granny Grace will probably be making peach butter before too long. I’ll get her to open a jar to go with the rolls she’s making.”

“My mouth is watering.”

“Good practice for the real thing.”

He kept driving. As before, Jamie could see fabulous vistas through the orchard rows. Not only was there a lot of land here, it was magnificent land.

“I know Grace is afraid the orchard will be sold the moment she drops the reins,” she said, feeling her way. “I’m sure it’s worth a small fortune.”

“Large fortune. Picture the next crop of McMansions out here. City people looking across driveways into each other’s kitchen windows, hiring the local boys to cut the grass and trim the evergreens, buying their apples over at the Food Lion, because these trees will be wood chips by then, mulching somebody’s flower beds.”

“I’m shuddering.”

“Nobody wants to see it end like that. My uncles are good men. Granny Grace raised them, after all. But they’re professionals, and their children are heading down that track, as well. Not a money-grubber in the bunch, but practical to the core. They feel like they can do some negotiating at this point, while the taxes are still being paid and the sheriff’s not at the door with an eviction notice. But down the road, that might not be the case.”

“Hard decisions.”

The road wound around a pond and over a dirt dam. She saw what looked like a riding ring, with a three-rail fence circling it, and freshly whitewashed stables beyond that. Cash slowed and pulled in to park beside a mobile home that more closely resembled a Dumpster than somebody’s living quarters.

“Home sweet home,” he said.

“This is a high price to pay for independence.”

“You mean for not sleeping where generations before have laid their heads?”

“I can’t believe Grace wants the family home all to herself. I bet she’d give you a bedroom if you asked nicely.”

“I like my privacy. And I’m closer to my horses out here.”

“I’d say you’re closer to everything, like the sky and the grass and whatever else you can see through the holes in that thing. Bet it saves on air-conditioning.”

“You’re making fun of home sweet home.”

“Cash, I wouldn’t say a word, but quite clearly you don’t have to live this way. So it’s interesting, that’s all.”

“Women. There’s a training manual somewhere. I’d like to get my hands on it.”

“I’ll save you the trouble. You’re on page three-oh-two. Cash Rosslyn, a wild mustang who will not be broken, a—” she looked at him and bit her lip in contemplation “—a bluetick hound who will not be housetrained.”

“What do you know about bluetick hounds, city girl?”

“What your men have told me. Gig was trying to convince me to take one from his next litter.”

He snagged her braid in his finger and wiggled it. “They like you, you know. They’re a little afraid of your sister, but you’ve wrapped them around that little finger of yours. And they all want to do their best work and make you happy.”

She was delighted to hear it. “That will serve me well in years to come when I’m out on job sites. Do you think they’ll be half so accommodating when I start looking like the mother of twins?”

“Granny Grace hasn’t said a word to me about that, by the way. Does she know?”

“It just hasn’t come up. And I guess you haven’t told her.”

“Your business.”

“I’ll tell her soon. It’s going to be obvious before long.”

Cash got down and let the girls out the rear door. Then he stopped them before they could go running toward the stables.

“Okay, we have to have rules here. One, these horses aren’t pets. They’re easily frightened, and a frightened horse is something you don’t ever want to see. So we’ll speak softly, and we won’t make any sudden movements around them, okay?”

“You train racehorses?” Jamie thought it was a rhetorical question. She’d certainly been left with that impression. “Is this a large enough facility for something like that? Do you have enough help?”

“Sweetcakes, this isn’t a facility at all. And I do more or less train racehorses, but I train them not to be. Or at least that’s what it looks like I’m going to be doing for a while. Somehow that’s the way things have turned out.”

“You lost me.”

“Come on, I’ll show you.” He scooped a giggling Alison off the ground and swung her around so she was riding piggyback before she knew what was happening. “Hannah, you’ll take your mother’s hand, okay?”

“Who’s going to protect whom?” Jamie asked her daughter.