Friday
Beth walked into a kitchen she barely recognized. Every flat surface was covered with green beans, Mason jars, or some sort of cooking utensil. Her mom’s usually tidy kitchen had been turned upside down.
“What happened in here?” Beth pivoted in place to assess the disaster. “Did you have a fight to the death with vegetables and the green beans won?”
Startled, Rita pressed a palm to her chest. “Gosh, you scared me, Betsy. It’s canning day. I plan to put up twenty quarts or die tryin’. What on earth are you doing here?”
“This is where I live unless you carried my stuff to the curb in the last twenty-four hours.” Beth pulled the pitcher of iced tea from the fridge.
“Why are you home at one o’clock in the afternoon?” Rita resumed snapping the ends off beans, the floor already littered with stems that had missed the trash bag.
“Mike and I had a very early, very long trip back from Denver, thanks to a layover in Dallas. Don’t they have direct flights anymore? Then we were stuck behind every slow-moving vehicle on Route 61 from Baton Rouge.” Beth pressed an icy glass to her forehead. “I told Mike I’d complete my report and update Nate from home. Besides, we had a late night. Dinner at a hibachi restaurant takes forever. They cook your food one piece at a time. If you give me some beans, I’ll make myself useful.”
Rita dumped a pile in front of Beth and added more to her own heaping mound. “Did you catch Reverend Dean’s killer in Denver? I hope you slapped the cuffs on him.”
“I don’t even own cuffs because I’m no longer a cop. But now we know where the church’s money went. And who knows? The director of that charity might turn out to be a murderer as well as a thief. Mike didn’t believe a word the guy said. Elliott Rayburn was far too slick to be a humanitarian.”
Her mother arched one eyebrow. “Why were you out late at a fancy restaurant? I thought this was a business trip for your murder investigation.”
Beth looked up from her pile of beans. “It was a business trip. We went to the charity where Reverend Dean invested the money for the new school. All restaurants in a big city are fancy. Denver isn’t like Natchez. Not my fault the meal took hours. As soon as Save the Children sends Mike the quarterly statements, we’ll have a better idea of their scam.”
“Mike, Mike, Mike. Do you realize you mentioned his name four times since you walked in the door?” Rita dumped her colander of beans into a pot of boiling water.
Beth stopped zealously snapping ends. “What’s the matter with you? He’s my partner. If I’m talking about an event he was part of, of course I would mention his name. I thought you liked Michael.”
“I do like him. That’s why I don’t like where this is headed.” Rita emptied the basket in the center of the table, burying them in a mountain of beans.
“Are you having some sort of menopausal episode? Where what is headed?” Beth’s voice rose with agitation.
“You two play nice in there,” Stan Kirby called from the other room. “Or I’ll send you both to your rooms.” Roused from his nap, her father padded into the kitchen. “Hey, daughter, we don’t usually get to see you in the afternoon.” He planted a kiss on Beth’s head and headed outside.
“Hey, Pops, I hurried home to help Mom on bean day,” Beth called after him. Then she locked gazes with Rita. “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Rita softened her tone. “Where your relationship with your partner is headed. I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen this with you before.”
Beth wiped her hands on a towel. “Mike and I are friends. This is nothing like what happened with Chris.”
Rita snapped a dozen ends before replying. “I know you believe that, and it might even be true. But I’ve lived long enough to know men and women can’t be friends.”
“That is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.”
Surprisingly, her mother laughed. “I would have said that too at your age.”
“There’s nothing wrong with having an amicable relationship with people at work. Partners have to get along to make an effective team. But I couldn’t become romantically involved with Michael in a million years. We’re from opposite ends of the spectrum.”
Rita shrugged. “Perhaps I’m wrong and times have changed. If you can honestly say Michael Preston isn’t seeing something more to this, I will butt my nose out.”
“He’s not, Mom. Mike just came off a bad relationship. He’s all about self-improvement, not falling in love on the rebound.”
“Good to hear. Now be a dear and pick the last two rows of beans. That afternoon sun will give me a migraine.”
“You have more beans in the garden? This is already enough for every family in Natchez.”
Rita patted her arm. “Seeds were on sale last spring. Then we got perfect weather for a bumper crop. I’ll fill jars with what I just blanched.”
“Sure, I don’t mind.” Beth swept her stems into the trash and grabbed a hat by the door. The afternoon sun could give anyone a headache, but she didn’t mind a couple of hours in the garden. It would give her time to think. Although she had protested her mother’s allegations, deep inside she knew Rita was right.
It was something about Michael’s behavior at dinner: He listened to her every word as though she spouted pearls of wisdom instead of offhand comments from someone who had never eaten Japanese food. He insisted on paying for the taxi, tipping the van driver, and buying her snack during the flight, even though she had their expense money. Any one of those niceties could be written off as simple kindness, but if she added them together, along with a few surreptitious glances in her direction, she reached a frightening conclusion—her mother was right. Michael might be developing a crush on her. And she’d found out the hard way that work relationships don’t end well.
Beth knew she needed to reconcile herself to snapping beans in her mother’s kitchen for many years to come. Her father would totter in on his walker, ordering them to behave or suffer the consequences. The mental picture made her laugh, but Beth knew there was nothing funny about the situation. She really liked Michael. He was twice the man Chris was. He just wasn’t the right man for her.