The All You Can Dream Buffet (11 page)

Ruby smelled the alcohol before the cup reached her lips, but she also smelled something else—golden afternoons, sunlight and flowers, the faintest, maybe even imaginary, scent of lavender. She let a few drops fall onto her tongue. It was strong, fiery, but, again, she could taste something more, that gilded depth of honey.

“Mmm, that’s wonderful!” Ruby sighed. “I’m enchanted!”

Lavender took the cup and tossed the rest back, rolling her tongue against the roof of her mouth, making a smacking noise, moving her mouth back and forth. “This might be the best batch yet. I’ve been working on mead for fifteen years.”

“Isn’t this wine country?”

“Yep.”

“Why not wine, too?” Ruby’s father loved wine, all the little notes and stories of it. When Valerie had been writing her blog, he’d followed it religiously. Ruby always thought he might have something of a crush on Val.

“Above all things, know yourself,” Lavender said. “I like fussing with mead because it’s made of honey, but I wouldn’t have the patience to make good wine.” She put the cup down. “Do you want to see the hives?”

“Am I going to get stung?”

“Shouldn’t. We’ll keep our distance this time. You’re not allergic to bees?”

“No. I’m kind of afraid of them, though.”

“Most people are. But I think you’ll like it.”

“Okay.”

Ruby ambled out behind Lavender, taking pleasure in the sunlight on her head. A big black chicken walked along with them, feathers glossy in the sun. “Can you pet chickens?”

“Some are friendly. This one just likes to talk.”

“Do they have names?”

“Not official names. Some have nicknames. I call this girl Martha, for no particular reason.”

“Hi, Martha.” The chicken clucked in a busybody sort of way, and Ruby laughed. “How are you this morning?”

Cluck-cluck, cluck,
the chicken said,
cluck-cluck.

“Really?” Ruby asked. “And then what happened?”

Cluck-cluck-cluck.
Peck. Peck.
Cluck.

They emerged through the doorway in the shrubs, and again Ruby was taken aback by the stunning view of the lavender fields, spread out like giant purple pincushions over the hillside. Lavender led the way down one row, and Ruby followed, brushing her hands over the tops of the flowers. Bees bounced along the rows, feeding.

Lots of bees. The sound of them, bustling and full of purpose, was a fizzy note in the air. Ruby paused, enveloped in the landscape, surrounded by flowers, the smell of the lavender wafting over them, the bees buzzing, the sunlight tumbling down over the hilly landscape. She stretched out her hands and closed her eyes, trying to focus on just the sound. Then she let that fade and breathed through her nose, inhaling deeply the sweet fragrance of lavender, so intensely pleasurable that it could almost make a person levitate.

Then she opened her eyes and let in the visual: the mounded
shape of the plants, stretching out in dark purple and light, white and pink, every single one covered in a head of blossoms, as round and regular as Chia Pets.

Lavender had turned to watch her. Ruby gave her a beaming smile. “Wow,” she said. “Wow, wow, wow. This is fantastic.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

If Ruby was a photographer, like Ginny, she’d take a photo of Lavender standing there against the sky, up to her knees in lavender. As if you could go swimming in it!

She started to walk again, fizzing right along with the bees. As if the baby felt her exuberance, it did a slow, mellow flip, and Ruby laughed. “Do you actually make money from the lavender?”

“You bet.” Lavender gestured toward the two-story farmhouse, near the road. “That’s why I moved out of the farmhouse and into the cottage, so we’d have plenty of room for the shop and the distillery. We can explore that, too, if you like.”

“We can wait for Ginny. Then you don’t have to show it twice.”

“I think she’ll like it.” Lavender pinched a single blossom, crushed it in her fingers, and passed it over to Ruby. “This is Royal Velvet. It doesn’t produce as much oil per plant as Grosso, which is the most common form of lavender. Velvet is much purer. Smell that?”

Ruby inhaled gently, letting the scent fill her sinuses a little at a time. It did seem quite strong, a most lavender-like lavender, but she wanted a comparison. “Do you also grow the other one?”

“I do. This way.” They waded to the end of the row and down into another patch, this one with alternating colors of blossoms. The plants were sturdier-looking, taller, more vigorous, and when Lavender pinched off a flower, she said, “Grosso has a
fairly strong note of camphor, which lessens the quality, in my opinion.”

Ruby smelled the blossom, and she could definitely pick out the camphor, an astringent note that undercut the sweetness of lavender. “That’s amazing,” she said. “I’ve used lavender now and then in cooking, and it’s a very strong purple color.”

“Right. Provence is the queen of culinary lavenders. The shape and color of the flower is what you want there.”

“Provence,” Ruby repeated. “Grosso. Royal Velvet.” She held the other blossom to her nose, and the difference was so dramatically clear that she exclaimed, “Oh! I see!”

Lavender smiled. “Good girl.”

“Did your mother name you for the fields?”

“Oh, heavens, no. These were hazelnut orchards.” She swallowed, peering into the distance, then sighed and swept a hand down to brush the plants. “I didn’t want to run the place back then—I ran away to be a stewardess the minute I graduated high school. Wanted to see the world, and I did. That’s how I met Ginger, the one whose daughter sold Ginny the trailer.”

“The artist in Carmel who was your friend from the airline days?”

“Yep.” Lavender half-grinned. “She was an Aussie. We had some good times, she and I.”

Ruby blinked. The smile, so ripe with wicked memory, made everything she knew about Lavender rearrange itself to include a young woman in a tidy uniform having adventures around the world. “Those are stories I’d love to hear.”

“I’m better telling them after a glass or two of mead.”

“I get that. How old were you when you came back here?”

“Fifty-seven. I was in admin at the airline by then and getting pretty bored with it. Then my nephew who ran the farm died unexpectedly, and it was time to come home. I poured my
savings into turning it into an organic and lavender farm. I knew that was what Glen would want. He’d worked so hard on the place, I couldn’t let him down.” She paused, again looking out toward the horizon. She rubbed the center of her chest, as if rubbing the ache of a broken heart, and Ruby knew just how that felt.

“You miss him.”

“He was the closest thing to a child I had.” Abruptly, she started to walk. “That’s before you were born, isn’t it?”

Ruby laughed and nodded. “It is. Kinda weird to think about that.”

Lavender gestured for Ruby to follow, and she made her way toward the other end of the fields. Looking back over her shoulder, Ruby admired the tidy rows of smeary plants. Maybe this could be her work, this magical plant. Maybe Lavender would apprentice her, and she could raise her baby in a place like this one—

“Did you hear me?”

Ruby swung back. “What?”

“How did you get your name? I never have heard that story.”

“My dad used to like to listen to this radio show about Ruby, the Galactic Gumshoe.”

“No kidding! I remember that.”

“Really? Nobody else has ever known what I was talking about! That’s so cool.”

They swished through the lavender in silence for a moment, then Lavender asked, “And your mother? You never speak of her at all.”

Ruby thought of the Google Maps view of her mother’s house in Seattle. “I don’t really remember her. She left when I got sick.”

“When she found out you had leukemia?”

“It sounds terrible, I know it does, but she was young and …” Ruby shrugged. It always made her feel vaguely ashamed, as if she should find some true reason, but she never did. It
was
terrible, leaving a seven-year-old who was that sick.

She felt Lavender’s strong, broad hand sweep around her own, the palm papery. Lavender gave her hand a squeeze. “She didn’t deserve you.”

“I agree.” She squeezed back and put a hand on her tummy, a silent promise that she’d never be that kind of mother. Ever. “Luckily, I got a great dad.”

“He sounds terrific.” A slight pause, then, “I assume the baby is Liam’s?”

“Yeah.” Ruby sighed. “It was foolish. The very end, right before I came home.”

“Does he know?”

“Um … actually, no. I haven’t told him yet.”

“Are you going to?”

Ruby shrugged again. “I guess I have to, right? That’s the only answer. But that means I have to talk to him or have contact, and, honestly, it’s really hard.”

Lavender nodded. She led the way through a diagonal shortcut and stopped. There, sitting in rows at the end of the fields, were four white bee boxes, so perfectly recognizable for what they were. “There are the lavender bees. I have some others on the other side of the farm, but these are close so they can just gather lavender nectar for now.”

“What about when the lavender stops blooming?”

“I’ll harvest the honey and put the boxes closer to the forest and the other fields.”

Ruby rubbed a gentle hand in a circle over her belly. Lavender’s question had brought Liam’s face to mind so vividly that she felt the wild grief welling up again. Even thinking of talking
to him made her want to cry. “I know it’s just a bad breakup and everybody goes through it,” she said, and once she started, the words tumbled out, one after the other after the other, “but sometimes I really feel like Liam was the love of my life and I won’t love anyone like that again. I mean, I’m still so raw, after all this time! I miss him like crazy, every single day, and so much! And I can’t stop pining. It’s crazy, right? But that’s the honest truth. He was my soul mate and something terrible happened, but I don’t know what it is, and I feel like I’m going to go insane trying to figure it out.”

Lavender didn’t say anything for a minute. She swooped down and tugged a long feather of grass from its mooring and began to dissect the seed head with her thumbnail. “It did seem very abrupt.”

“I know, right?”

“The thing is, it also seemed very certain. He didn’t waver. He left you and he went to live with someone else.”

Ruby made a small noise, putting her hand over the place that had just been gutted. “That’s harsh.”

“No, it’s a fact. If you can look at the facts, maybe it will make it easier to start feeling better.”

“Maybe.” Ruby bowed her head. “It is true, exactly what you said. But it’s also true that we fell in love practically on sight and were together for six years.”

“Maybe he fell in love with the other woman on sight, too.”

“Maybe,” Ruby whispered. It felt as if an anvil were sitting on her chest. “So why did it feel so fated?”

“Because maybe it was fated. Maybe it was to bring you that baby.”

Ruby looked up. “Right! Maybe it is. It’s pretty amazing.” She nodded. “I’ll send him an email in a few days, tell him the truth.”

“You probably need to get that out of the way.”

A little blossom of hope, buzzy as a bee, suggested that it might be the way back to him, back to
them,
if he knew they’d made a child.

“C’mon, let’s get to town and do some shopping,” Lavender said. “We’ve got a lot more to do for this festival. You can help me cook over the next few days. We can use the extra space in the food truck.”

“Cool.” Ruby skipped ahead, thinking with pleasure of breaking in the trailer for real, of serving people. Her father would be happy.

The drive to McMinnville took them on country roads that looped through soft yellow and green fields and past all kinds of houses—trailers and cottages, modern buildings and stately old farmhouses. There was a tiny strip of town dominated by a giant silo and splendiferous gardens of roses. Ruby saw black-and-white cows, wide plantings of crops she couldn’t identify, and wineries and more lavender farms. “Are there a lot of lavender farms around here?”

“Oh, yeah,” Lavender replied. She drove her truck with the confidence of a lumberjack, her big, aged hands strong on the steering wheel. “It’s a big draw in the midsummer; there’s a lavender festival that brings in a lot of tourists.”

Ruby thought about that. If there were a lot of farms, there was a lot of competition, and maybe this wouldn’t be the best work for her. Maybe her food truck was still the best thing. She could get a permit, drive around the Bay Area, find the best parking spot.

It sounded exhausting, which in turn made her feel guilty, because she’d talked her dad into lending her the money. Her
stomach started to bubble, so she tried to focus on something happier, like the pretty view of mountains in the distance, but they went over a hill, swooping down the other side, and Ruby blurted out, “I need to stop!” She put a hand over her mouth, breathing as evenly as she could, holding on until Lavender swerved into a driveway. Ruby flung open the door and puked into a ditch, only afterward looking to see if anyone was around. There was an old man in overalls and a straw hat staring at her from his tiny patch of green lawn across the street. “Sorry!” she called. “I’m pregnant.”

He glared and muttered something, then stomped away in boots that were not tied, the laces trailing behind him in the grass. A cat dashed out from under the bushes and tried to grab them, leaping again with each footstep.

Ruby wiped her mouth. “Sorry. It’s gross, I know it is.”

“It’s not gross. It’s just how it is for some women. Have you had a physical?”

“Of course. My doctor said it should get better soon. Most women get over the worst of it by four or five months.”

“I’ll look up some more teas this evening.”

McMinnville was a normal-looking small town, with houses laid out in tidy blocks and a strip of downtown with a restaurant called the Blue Moon Tavern, which Ruby had to take a picture of for the blog. Down the street a little ways, Lavender pointed out an old hotel. “That’s a place worth visiting when Ginny gets here.”