At Home on Ladybug Farm (21 page)

Everyone lingered over hugs by the car when it was time for Paul and Derrick to go. Even Noah, hanging back a little from the women, came to see them off.

“It’s going to be like the day after Christmas when you leave,” Lindsay said, hugging Paul hard. “Oh, I wish you could stay!”

“I wish you could live here!” Lori exclaimed, embracing Derrick.

Derrick laughed. “Shall I tell you the truth? After only a couple of days, I almost wish I could, too.”

“We always talked about buying a B&B,” Paul reminded him.

Lori tossed a triumphant look to her mother and said, yet again, “I
told
you it was a good idea.”

Amidst the laughter, Paul cupped Lori’s chin with his fingers and told her, “You hang in there, precious girl. If you need any more inspirational speeches, you know my number.”

“It’s on speed dial,” Lori assured him, and returned a fierce hug.

Derrick walked over to Noah. “Young man,” he said, “we’ll talk again.”

Noah said, “You coming back?”

“I am. And when I do, I’ll expect a completed masterpiece from you. Until then . . .” He offered his hand, and this time Noah shook it.

They promised recipes and photographs and telephone calls and letters, and then the blue Prius was gliding down their drive, leaving the women nothing to do but wave until it was out of sight.

“I got stuff to do,” Noah said, and slumped off toward the studio.

Lori sighed as she turned to go inside. “Well, I guess it’s back to the real world.”

Bridget, Lindsay, and Cici stood in the drive for a moment longer, rubbing their arms to keep warm, looking wistful. “It really
is
like the day after Christmas,” Bridget said.

“Funny how one little change in the routine can make everything seem different,” Cici agreed.

“It’s not that I miss our old life,” Lindsay said. “It’s just kind of . . . fun to be reminded of it now and then.”

“Like drinking a half-caf vanilla mocha latte on the way to work in the morning,” Cici said, with a touch of longing.

“Or remembering how the shoe department smells at Macy’s,” Bridget said wistfully.

“Or getting a pedicure at Francine’s.”

Then Cici admitted, “There are a few things I miss, but nothing I can’t live without.”

“Me, either,” Lindsay agreed. “But I don’t think I realized how much I missed those two characters until now.”

Bridget said, “It was sweet of them to invite us to go with them on that cruise to Alaska this fall.”

Cici smothered a chuckle. “Like that’s ever going to happen.”

Bridget sighed elaborately. “I’d hate to think our cruising days are over.”

“Not over.” Cici slipped her arm through Bridget’s. “Just temporarily postponed.”

A film of anxiety clouded Lindsay’s eyes. “Do you think it’s too soon to call Carrie?”

Cici slipped her other arm through Lindsay’s. “She’ll let us know something as soon as she knows.”

Bridget said, “I guess I’d better get Lori to help me to undress the sheep. The forecast calls for fifties this afternoon.”

“And burn those coats,” Cici advised.

Lindsay smiled wryly. “Like the girl said: back to real life.”

“There are worse things,” Cici pointed out.

The other two couldn’t help agree as they turned, arm in arm, to go inside.

11

In Another Time

“Always observe the amenities,” her Grandma Addie had told her. “No matter how low life knocks you, you can hold your head up high if you observe the amenities.”

As a child, Marilee had thought the amenities might be a flower, or a bird, that had something special to teach, which was why she was supposed to observe it. After all, Jesus had said, “Consider the lilies of the field . . .” and “His eye is on the sparrow . . .” Later, she reckoned it might be something you studied in Earth Science class, like those beautifully colored plants that lived beneath the sea. Now, as a mature young bride and mother-to-be, she understood exactly what the amenities were, and how important it was to observe them. The amenities were gestures of civility performed in this big, often very uncivilized world, small acts of kindness to let others know that their lives were noticed, and their presence valued.

That was why, as her last act before leaving Mrs. Blackwell’s Home for the Wives of Our Heroes Serving Abroad, Marilee sat down at the small, elegantly crafted writing table in her room to pen a note of thanks to her landlord of the past two years, and to attach it to a gift-wrapped box of rose-scented talcum that she had purchased on her last trip into town a week ago Saturday.

Emily Blackwell had sent two sons to fight in Europe. One would not be coming home. On the day that Mitch Crane—whom the girls in the house had nicknamed “the Grim Reaper” both because of his long, dour face, and because of the dreadful news he so often brought—stepped out of his black Hudson with the telegram in hand, Emily Blackwell had locked herself in her room and refused to come down to read it. She stayed there for two days. When she emerged, Mitch was still there, and he sat with her in comforting silence, until the pastor arrived. Observing the amenities.

It was then that Emily had decided to open her home to the military wives, many of whom had come from other parts of the state, who worked at the nearby textile mill while they waited for their husbands. The textile mill made the cloth that was used for uniforms. They worked to keep their husbands warm, and they liked to think they worked to bring them home sooner.

When Marilee first arrived at Blackwell House, there had been fifteen young women swarming through the upstairs rooms in their housecoats and slippers, their hair done up in papers, tossing laughter and shouts back and forth. Someone had broken a heel. Someone else had lost a button. Someone needed a bobby pin. And everyone stopped and turned with big welcoming smiles when Mrs. Blackwell brought Marilee up the stairs and introduced her as the “wife of Sergeant Jefferson T. Hodge,” and the newest member of their household.

There were three beds in most rooms, four in some, but there were six bathrooms and they never felt cramped. They took all their meals at the big noisy table downstairs and climbed onto the rattletrap old bus that the mill sent for them every morning. After work they all helped in the creamery, making butter and cheeses and buttermilk and thick cream, because what they didn’t need for their own table could be sold to help buy household necessities. In the evenings they would leave their doors open upstairs so that they could talk back and forth, sometimes passing around a bottle of nail polish or reading aloud from a magazine article, writing letters to the ones they loved or sharing the letters they had received, until Mrs. Blackwell called lights-out. Sunday afternoons they gathered around the radio in the big front parlor and rolled bandages for the Red Cross.

Suzie Todd had been the first to leave them, when her husband was wounded in a firefight in the French countryside. He was flown to the naval hospital in Norfolk, where Suzie would join him. The other women rushed to her aid, making travel arrangements, helping her pack, loaning or giving her little items they thought would be of use on her journey. Though their words and their faces were full of sympathy, inside they were secretly torn with jealousy, and ashamed of it. Her husband was coming home. For her, the war was over.

Twice Mitch Crane had come to their house in the big black Hudson and stood in their front parlor with a telegram in his hand and a grim look upon his face. All activity stopped upstairs. Silence fell like a caught breath. The girls clung to each other, feeling the sweat that prickled on each other’s skin, heartbeats pounding in their ears, straining to make out the words that were murmured in the parlor below. And then listening to Mrs. Blackwell’s slow, heavy steps coming up the stairs to the steady frantic inner prayer of
Not me, please don’t let it be for me, not me, please . . .
And then she was there, a tall, dignified figure in her spectral black dress, and she gently spoke a name and extended a hand, and there was a sob, a cry, a scream of denial, and everyone else breathed again. Their numbers were diminished by one.

Then Amy McClellan had flown to Guam to join her husband on leave, and had returned home pregnant. That was much the way it had happened for Marilee, only for her and Jeff it had been four glorious weeks in Hawaii, the best time of her life. Neither woman had pretended her pregnancy was an accident. Even though they knew it would mean leaving Blackwell House before their babies were born, they were among the rare and lucky ones who had had the opportunity to seize new life from the hovering shadow of death. They did not waste it.

Amy had gone home to her parents in Indiana to await the birth of her child, and had later written to gush about her baby girl. Her husband was still serving in Europe. But Marilee, who was due in a mere ten weeks, was going to San Diego, where Jeff would be permanently stationed at the end of the month. She was the luckiest woman in the world.

“You’re the luckiest woman in the world. You know that, don’t you?”

Marilee grinned to hear her own thoughts echoed out loud, and she turned to see Penny standing at the door of the room, her arms and white cotton sock-clad ankles crossed, leaning against the jamb. Penny, so called because of her bright copper hair, was one of the three women with whom Marilee had shared this room for the past year, and it hadn’t taken long for them to become fast friends. Penny’s husband Bill was fighting in the South Pacific, too, just like Jeff. But Penny hadn’t seen her husband in eighteen months.

“First you get to go gallivanting off to Hawaii on an all-expenses-paid honeymoon courtesy of the United States government,” Penny went on, feigning annoyance, “and you stay there just long enough to make sure there’s a bun in the oven, mind you, then you come traipsing back here and expect us to welcome you home like nothing ever happened. And if that wasn’t bad enough, we barely get used to your snoring again before you’re off to San Diego.” She sighed elaborately. “Baby. Husband. White picket fence. What did you ever do to deserve all that?”

Marilee pinched off a wilting blossom from the bouquet of black-eyed Susans on the desk and playfully tossed it at Penny. “Comes from clean living and hard praying,” she returned. “Besides”—she sealed the envelope on her thank-you note, and tucked it carefully beneath the grosgrain ribbon with which she had wrapped the gift to Mrs. Blackwell—“I don’t think there are many picket fences in military housing.”

“That makes me feel ever so much better.” Penny picked up the tossed blossom and crossed the room to drop it into the wastebasket. “All packed? You didn’t forget the stationery, did you?”

The night before, the girls had given her a going-away party, using up almost all the sugar rations for the cake they’d baked, and even opening a purloined bottle of scuppernong wine. Mrs. Blackwell had pretended not to notice. Their going-away gift to her had been a box of scented writing paper delicately decorated with pansies in each corner, and they had made her promise to use it to write to them. Marilee had cried and hugged their necks, one by one, and told them she would never forget them, not ever. And it was true.

“I just wrote my first letter on it.” Marilee smiled as she carefully closed the box of stationery and rearranged the lavender ribbon with which it had been wrapped. “A thank-you note to Mrs. Blackwell.”

Penny gave her an indulgent look. “You are just the sweetest thing. I don’t know what we’re going to do around here without you.”

Marilee braced herself against the seat of the chair and pushed herself up. She really wasn’t all that big yet—in fact, she had worked up until three weeks ago and her employer hadn’t even known she was expecting—but she still found her increased girth awkward and hard to get used to. She brushed down the hem of her flower-print maternity jacket as she crossed the room to tuck the stationery atop her open suitcase.

“Well,” she said, snapping the locks on the suitcase, “I guess that’s it.”

“Oh, honey! You’re not forgetting this, are you?”

Penny picked up the quilt that was folded neatly at the foot of Marilee’s bed, and Marilee laughed as she hugged it to her. “Grandma’s quilt? Not a chance. I just didn’t have room for it in my suitcase. I’ll have to carry it on the bus. Did I ever tell you the story behind this quilt?”

“Only about a dozen times,” Penny assured her affectionately, and slipped her arm through Marilee’s. “Earl Crowder is going to be here any minute to drive you to the station. Let’s get your things downstairs. Maybe we’ll have time for a glass of lemonade.”

Marilee looked around the room with something close to regret. “I’m glad everyone else went on to church today. I don’t think I could stand saying good-bye again. I sure am going to miss this place.”

Penny squeezed her arm. “And we’re going to miss you, too. Now, let’s get you out of here before we both start bawling again.”

They both turned toward the window at the sound of tires crunching on the hard-packed dirt below. “That’s probably Earl now.” Holding the quilt over one arm, Marilee turned to get her suitcase.

“Honey, don’t try to carry that heavy thing. I’ll holler down for Earl to come up and get it.”

Penny went to the open window and leaned out, but she did not call down. She didn’t do anything. In fact, for a long moment, she didn’t even move.

Then she straightened up slowly and turned around. The flesh at the corners of her eyes seemed tight, and her bright red-painted lips a garish contrast to a face that had suddenly gone very white. “It’s not Earl,” she said. “It’s Mitch. He’s got a telegram.”

Marilee felt the baby inside her belly turn over once, slowly, and then was very still. Instinctively she drew her arm over her abdomen, shielding the little one inside with the quilt she still held. She could feel her heart beating.