The Three Miss Margarets (17 page)

“He’ll never believe you.”

“I’ll take my chances.” If the coffee cup had been one of the thin ones from the good china she would have broken it by now, she was holding it so hard, but she went on. “Dalt’s always wondered why Miss Myrtis turned you out. When I tell him, a lot of pieces are going to fall into place.”

“I’ll tell him you wanted it. That you were begging for it.”

“Did you ever wonder what happened to me that day? Who saw me?” He hadn’t, of course, so she paused to let the thought sink in. “I went to Miss Li’l Bit’s house. Dr. Maggie stitched me up where you cut my forehead.” She said “Doctor” and “Miss” deliberately, to remind him that they’d be impressive witnesses. “I still have the scar; it’s right up by my hairline.” She thought about lifting her hair and showing it to him, but she wasn’t sure what her hands would do if she took them off the coffee cup. “Dr. Maggie and Miss Li’l Bit will be glad to tell Dalt what I looked like.”

“You were swishing your tail around. . . .”

“They’ve been wanting to tell him for years.”

“You were asking for it. . . .”

“That’s all three of them: Dr. Maggie, Miss Li’l Bit, and Miss Myrtis. Do you really want to go up against them?”

He wanted to hurt her so badly she could feel it. But there was something else in his eyes too. The beginning of fear.

“I don’t care who you get to lie to him!” he burst out, but then he quickly lowered his voice. “He won’t believe it because he won’t want to. That’s how it works. Dalton Garrison doesn’t believe what he doesn’t want to believe. I’m his son, and he won’t want to believe that about me.”

Suddenly she didn’t need the coffee cup anymore. She let it go and stood up. “But he
will
want to believe anything I say, because I make him feel young. And he doesn’t want that to stop. If I’m lying, he’ll have to go back to feeling old and alone. I’m ready to see which one of us he’ll believe. What about you?”

He looked at her, and she had to work to keep standing. But in the end he wasn’t quite stupid enough to do anything to her. He turned and walked out. She sat back down and held the coffee cup for dear life.

Dalt was devastated when he got home and found out Grady was gone.

“I wanted to make it up to him,” he repeated over and over during the next few days. “I didn’t want him to feel like he was run out of his home again.” Since Grady had moved in to one of the most expensive villas the resort had to offer, he hadn’t gone very far, but Peggy didn’t point that out. Dalt was disappointed, and she was learning fast that when Dalt was disappointed it had to be someone’s fault.

“Did you have words with Grady?” he asked.

She shook her head and looked as tragic as she could. “It was as much of a surprise to me as it was to you,” she said.

“I shouldn’t have gotten married so fast. I’m not blaming you, sweetheart, I know it’s not your fault.” While he might have thought he meant that, she knew she’d lost some of her luster for him.

Chapter Sixteen

M
AGGIE LET HERSELF INTO THE KITCHEN
and then locked the door. This was totally unnecessary, but it gave her enormous satisfaction. It felt like she was locking out the world, especially Li’l Bit and Peggy. She loved them both, but right now they were making her weary.

Laverne was snoozing on her bed, not having heard her come in. Maggie walked past her quietly. The dog took her duties very seriously, she’d be upset if she knew she’d slipped up on one of the basics of her job, the ecstatic greeting of the mistress.

“All that bouncing around and barking has to make you feel like an idiot at your age,” she said to the top of the dog’s head. “I wouldn’t do it for love or money. Stay right where you are and sleep.”

She was worried about Li’l Bit and Peggy. Li’l Bit was carrying such a load of anger, Maggie couldn’t imagine what it felt like to lug around that kind of burden. Peggy carried a burden too, a wad of guilt she lightened with her Gentleman Jack. How much longer could she keep that up? For that matter, how much longer before Li’l Bit’s blood pressure went straight off the charts? Medication could only do so much.

The hard part was, they went back so far. It was hard to trace who was where when. Friendships that had been around for a while had an ebb and flow, times when you were in one another’s pockets, and times when you were all involved in your own lives. You kept in touch, but you weren’t as close as you had been. That was what had happened to them after Peggy married Dalton. Not necessarily because she married him, although that played a part. Both Peggy and Li’l Bit had been going through a lot at that time, but neither seemed to want to talk. And the one immutable rule of their friendship was
Thou shalt not push.

F
OR
M
AGGIE
, those years could best be summed up by the word
contented
. She discovered there was an unexpected bonus to the role she’d taken for herself, the one she privately thought of as Nun Without the Habit. She was at peace. Not wildly, mindlessly blissful—she’d given up on that; she worked hard, didn’t expect anything, and was surprised at how pleased she was with her life. Even when both her parents died within months of each other, she managed to say—and meant it—that she was glad neither one of them had had to live too long without the other.

Lottie continued to live in the cabin behind Maggie’s house with Nella, and that was a big factor in Maggie’s new sense of satisfaction. Lottie was back in her life, although the walls were up. Maggie accepted that they always would be, and kept her own up too.

Lottie’s children brought about the new connection. Charlie Mae had died and there was no one to commiserate with Lottie as her babies were growing up and growing away from her.

James Junior had finished high school in Detroit, but any hopes Lottie might have had for college died quickly. His uncle got him a job on the railroad, and he married a girl he described as “peppy.” Lottie said she had hard eyes and smoked cigarettes. Her name was Dora, and on her first visit to Georgia she announced that being south of the Mason-Dixon Line gave her the heebie-jeebies. She made it clear that she considered her mother-in-law hopelessly countryish. Lottie had to face it that James Junior had become a stranger who talked through his nose and dutifully showed up once a year on his momma’s birthday, without his reluctant wife and children. “He’s James’s child,” Lottie said to Maggie. And Maggie could see it; the boy had all the ambition and lack of sensitivity of his father.

But Nella was hers, Lottie said. Privately, Maggie thought Lottie was wrong; if there was anyone Nella took after it was Charlie Mae. From the beginning the child was practical as dirt, competent in ways Lottie would never be, without a drop of Lottie’s imagination or intellectual curiosity. She stayed in school only because Lottie insisted on it.

“She’s smart, I know she is. But she isn’t. . . .” Lottie searched for the words.

She isn’t hungry the way you were, Maggie wanted to say, but didn’t. Your baby girl is not you, dear one. Nella would never cry because she couldn’t learn to read fast enough. Or because her best friend went to a better school and was getting ahead of her.

However, Nella was lovely, although she didn’t have the fierce beauty Lottie had had when she was young. Nella was soft and pillowy, with big eyes and no sharp angles to her personality. At least, that was the way most men saw her, and they found her very attractive. It scared Lottie to death. The clashes between them started early.

“Mama doesn’t understand why I like him,” said Nella at age fourteen, of her first boyfriend. “I think he’ll be a good daddy.”

“That’s no way for a child your age to be thinking,” Lottie decreed.

“I don’t like school,” said Nella, age fifteen.

“I’ve got money saved up for your tuition and the list of colleges Miss Monross gave me,” said Lottie.

“I want to have eight babies,” said Nella, age sixteen.

“After you have a diploma, you can go anywhere in the world,” said Lottie.

“I don’t want to leave home,” said Nella, age seventeen.

“At least apply to Spelman!” Lottie yelled.

“They’d never take me,” Nella cried.

“There’s a place in North Carolina—”

“I’d be homesick.”

“Do it for me. Please,” Lottie begged.

But for once in her placid, docile life, Nella dug in her heels. By the end of her senior year, she announced she was going to get married. He had left school two years ahead of her. His name was Richard.

“He’s talking about moving to Atlanta—that’s something. She’ll have a better chance to make something of herself there,” Lottie said to Maggie, clutching at straws.

The day after Nella graduated, they announced they’d be staying in Charles Valley.

“Nella begged me,” Richard said with a laugh. “She said, ‘Do it for me, baby. Please.’ And I just couldn’t say no.”

Maggie couldn’t look Lottie in the eye.

So while Peggy figured out the ups and downs of being the wife of Dalton Garrison and Li’l Bit went on her own emotional roller coaster, Nella and Richard moved in with Lottie. And that was where they lived when Vashti was born.

Chapter Seventeen

L
I’L
B
IT LOOKED DOWN AT HER HANDS
. They were big, almost big enough to be a man’s, with rough skin and sinews so pronounced they looked like bones. The arthritis that was nibbling away at her knees had not touched them. Because of her gardens. Sometimes she thought most of what was good in her life had come from her gardens. She walked to the back porch and looked out.

They’d had the first frost of the winter two days ago, and it was time to mulch. Her tulip bulbs were already in the ground, and she’d harvested her sunflower seeds, making sure she left some seed heads on the plants for the birds. She still had to finish cutting back her perennials, and she hadn’t yet prepared the bed for her early spring peas. She looked up at the sky. The winter sun was at its warmest of the day, and she could still get in a few hours of work. It would feel so good to get her hands dirty just for a little while. She went to her bedroom to change into her ancient overalls.

W
HEN SHE STARTED OUT
she barely knew a shovel from a hoe. There were no gardens on the property. At least, they weren’t visible to her untutored eye. Later she would learn to spot the bones of old beds buried in forests and meadows.

For all that he loved his home, landscaping wasn’t one of her father’s passions. He had inherited a house with shallow lawns, surrounded by forest. He kept his grass mowed, he pruned the holly in front of his porch, and he made sure there was a path cut through the forest so he could go for his nightly strolls to the pond. Beyond that he wasn’t interested.

But he did have an oil painting of the back of the house, done in the days when the gardens around the old mansion had been the pride and joy of the Justine Plantation. The painting, in all its glory, hung over his desk in his study. When she was a child, it fascinated Li’l Bit.

“Oh, yes, the old pleasure grounds, as they were called,” Harrison said, when she asked about it. “Impossible to keep them up today, much too time-consuming. And extravagant. I wouldn’t waste my money on such nonsense.”

His wife rolled her eyes heavenward, but Li’l Bit understood. Her father lived uneasily in the skin of a rich man. He had achieved a fragile truce with his conscience by working for the public good and living simply—at least as simply as a man could in a house with five bedrooms and two parlors. Harrison’s sense of right and wrong could produce some fairly tortured loops of logic. So Li’l Bit dropped the subject of the gardens—until years later, when her father had died, the house was hers, and she had time on her hands. Lots of time.

It was a period when her two friends were both busy. Peggy had just married Dalt and was busy trying to make a go of what had to be one of the most difficult unions ever. Maggie was working long hours at the clinic and seemed absorbed with Lottie and Nella. She and Maggie and Peggy still tried to get together on her porch at the end of the day, but it was difficult. And often Peggy or Maggie would have to cut the time short. It seemed to Li’l Bit that everyone’s life was full but hers.

She knew she had a lot to give, but no one seemed to want it. For the first time in many years she found herself thinking about men. It hit her at odd times during days that had suddenly gotten too long and nights that were even longer, a vague stirring that stopped being vague and became embarrassing. She had stupid dreams of kisses and arms holding her that she knew came from bad movies and worse music. She saw beauty in men she had known all her life; her lawyer, the trust officer who handled her money, the postmaster, and even Mr. Lawless, who worked in the grocery store—all would have been stunned if they knew what she was thinking. Of course, she had money and a wealthy woman didn’t have to be alone, if she was willing to make certain bargains. But that kind of barter wasn’t her style. So she paid the price for having been born both proud and homely as a mud fence.

She had trouble sleeping and took to wandering the house at night, often winding up in her father’s den. One night the old oil painting caught her eye again. As she looked at the colors, the pinks, greens, yellows, purples, blues, and reds rioting over the canvas, she knew what she wanted to do. She might be plain herself, but she would make something beautiful.

She started in without knowing what the hell she was doing. She had no plan and had not asked anyone for advice. There was a long curved hump in the backyard that seemed to correspond to the terrace garden in the oil painting. Closer inspection of the hump revealed that it was actually a low stone wall buried under earth and grass. On a fine Monday morning, right after her breakfast, she began digging it out, armed with an ancient shovel she’d found in the barn.

Noon found her in Jenson’s General Store, buying a new shovel, gardening gloves, a spade, a variety of gardening forks, overalls, a straw hat, and boots.

She went back to the wall and dug until it was time for Peggy and Maggie to come sit on the porch. She was so engrossed in her project, she barely had time to cram her hair back into its net and change out of her overalls before they arrived. There was an impressive collection of blood blisters on both of her hands, and her back ached. She was very happy.

It took her a month to clear the wall. Then she started digging a flower bed next to it. And she began reading books about gardening. But the advice in them was technical, and she was after romance and history. She dreamed of heirloom roses and pass-along camellias in old gardens reborn. She went into Atlanta to hunt for out-of-print books on landscaping and came back with a moldy tome written by Andrew Jackson Downing.

“He was a nineteenth-century landscape artist,” she told Peggy and Maggie as she showed off her musty treasure. “He revolutionized gardening in America before the Civil War.” She read sections of his
Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening
to them.

“Fascinating,” said dutiful Maggie.

“Honey, do you ever think about going out on a date?” asked Peggy.

And she kept on digging her long curved flower bed—without, as Peggy pointed out, having put one seed in the ground.

The truth was, she didn’t know what to plant. It was as though she was waiting for direction, either from the earth or from the books, she wasn’t sure which. She just knew she had to wait. And dig.

Peggy said she was getting strange. Li’l Bit argued that she always had been considered eccentric so it was nothing new. Peggy said this was different, and not quite healthy. Maggie said somewhat dubiously that she hoped Li’l Bit was having fun with her new hobby.

She finally finished the bed early one afternoon in April. It spread out in front of her, a perfect semicircle of raw earth, waiting for her to make beauty happen.

“What are you going to do with it?” a voice behind her asked.

She whirled around to see a man standing in her backyard.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. He had thick black hair that fell over one eye so he had to brush it back. “Name’s Walter Bee.” He stuck out his hand to shake hers. His hands had the same kind of calluses she had recently acquired, and they were big, so her own big hand was engulfed. He was tall enough that she had to look up a little to see into his eyes. “I’m the new head gardener at the resort. Mrs. Garrison said to come over because you need help.”

“You sure dug yourself one hell of a hole,” Walter Bee said. “What’re you putting into it?”

“Roses,” she said, to say something.

He looked up at the sky and down at the bed. “Well, your sun is right for them,” he said. He bent down and picked up a handful of the dirt and rubbed it between his fingers. She watched and wished she knew what he was feeling for.

“Gonna have to do some work on your soil,” he said. “Roses aren’t gonna like this.” His hair fell into his eyes again as he talked. His eyes were very deep-set, a shade of brown so dark it was almost black. He could probably shut you out fast with those black eyes. “Got to get enough peat moss and compost mixed in here, might could try Epsom salts too; that should make them happier. And you’ll have to raise the bed so they’ll have the drainage they like.” He was wearing a work shirt and blue jeans. He was waiting for her to say something.

“That sounds very . . . complicated. Maybe I should start with something easier than roses.”

“They’re not that hard. Just fussy, that’s all. They want what they want, and they get it ’cause they’re worth it.” He smiled. “Like the way you spoil a pretty girl.”

She nodded solemnly. One thing she’d always understood was the power of being pretty.

“What else do you want to plant?” he asked.

“I thought, old-fashioned flowers. The kind that might have been there when the place was built.” She had spent the last few months compiling lists of flowers, but now here in the sunshine with this man looking down at her ever so slightly, it felt like every name had flown out of her head. She grabbed a few back. “Lilies, and . . . violets, daisies, camellias, gardenias, daffodils—not all together, of course. I have some books—”

“Don’t need them. Walk me through the bed and show me what you want.”

So she started. And the flower names came back to her as she took him on a tour of her fantasy garden. Sometimes he stopped her because she used a Latin name he didn’t know. And once in a while he’d say she shouldn’t plant this shrub in front of that one because it would grow too tall, or she was putting in too many perennials that would bloom and die at the same time, and he would suggest something else instead.

“Should we write some of this down?” she asked once.

“I’ve got it all in my head,” he said.

Afterward, she brought out a pitcher of iced tea and a piece of paper and they sketched out a plan for the garden, and he was right; he did remember everything she’d said.

“That’s a lot of planting for one person,” he said. “You could hire the work out. I could find some men for you.”

“I want to do it myself,” she said, “so it’s mine.” And from the way he nodded she knew he understood. So it was a surprise when he drove up to the house the next morning in an elderly pickup and rolled a wheelbarrow full of mulch off the back end of the truck.

“I have Wednesdays off at the Gardens,” he said. “I’ll start at one end of the bed and you start at the other, and we’ll get the job done twice as fast as you will on your own.”

And before she could say anything he was pushing the wheelbarrow to the far end of the garden.

They worked silently as the sun rose and burned off the morning mist. He was faster than she was, but she watched him and picked up pointers. When the sun was directly overhead they stopped and washed their hands at the outdoor faucet. He used a pocketknife for his nails. She used a scrub brush. She liked it that they were both fanatics about keeping their big strong hands clean.

She served him one of the two egg-salad sandwiches Millie had made for her lunch, and found some pickles and potato chips. He liked his iced tea super-sweet the way she did.

“Mrs. Garrison called you Li’l Bit,” he said. “What’s your real name?” She told him. He nodded as if he approved. “Margaret is real pretty,” he said. They went back outside into the hot sunshine and continued to work.

As the sun started to fade, she worried about Maggie and Peggy showing up; she wasn’t quite sure what she’d do if he was still there. But he stopped working, pretty much the way he’d started, with no explanation, and began packing up. He left without saying anything about coming back.

“Did Walter Bee come over to help you?” Peggy asked, when they were sitting on the porch.

“Yes,” said Li’l Bit, and added casually, “he seems very knowledgeable.”

“Dalt says he’s amazing. He knows as much as any of the horticulturists, and more than a couple of them, about grafting and breeding and all that. But he doesn’t have a degree. Dalt’s pretty sure he never even went to high school.”

“How did Dalt find him?”

“He just wandered in one day looking for work. He’s from somewhere in Alabama, that’s Dalt’s guess. Someplace in the backwoods. Probably dirt poor.”

“How did Dalt manage to deduce all that?” Li’l Bit asked, with more of an edge than she intended.

“The man had to sleep in the back of his truck when he started working. He couldn’t afford to rent a place until he got his first paycheck. But when Dalt offered him an advance he turned it down. Got real stiff-necked about it. You know the way country people can get.”

Li’l Bit thought about Walter’s sunburned neck, and every instinct told her Peggy was right; it could get stiff in a second if he even suspected he was being looked down on. Any friendships he had would be on his terms. Not that it would make any difference to her. She knew better than to expect him again. She wondered if Peggy had made Dalt pay him extra for working on his day off. She decided not to ask.

The next day, working in the garden seemed much harder than it had before. For the first time Li’l Bit noticed how the bugs bit. The red clay was heavier to shovel than she remembered it, and the humid air was heavier than the clay. The sweat poured down, her eyes hurt from squinting in the sunlight, and her back was sore. Since she took pride in being honest with herself, she knew why. But there wasn’t anything to do except keep working and wait for the time when she would stop listening for his truck coming up the drive. She never mentioned any of it to Peggy and Maggie.

At night, she scrubbed her hands clean and looked in the mirror, which was something she hadn’t done in forever, not more than the occasional glance. Because there was no reason; her mother had driven that point home years ago. But now she looked.

The years hadn’t improved her. On the other hand they hadn’t made her any worse, which was probably the bright side to being homely; you were fairly timeless. For a brief moment she thought about going to the drugstore and buying a lipstick, but she discarded the notion. If you looked like a horse the last thing you needed to do was make yourself look like a ridiculous horse. Better to keep your dignity. No amount of lipstick would give her a chin that balanced her nose. She would never have cheekbones that were visible to the human eye. She wasn’t fat, but her six-foot frame had filled out to what would charitably be called solid. The mass of frizz that was her hair would never be sleek, and it was still “the color of mouse,” as her mother had once said. Those who loved her would have to do so for her sterling character and fine mind. In her experience, that group did not include men young enough to be interesting.