All I wanted was to be with Russell. He made me feel good in a way I’d never felt before.
All my life I’d been accused of being angry. So many women I’d met had decided to play therapist and tell me that my sarcastic remarks stemmed from a deep anger inside me.
I could agree with that, but what I didn’t agree with was when they said I should “let it all out.” They weren’t happy when I refused to tell them my deepest secrets. I think they thought I wasn’t playing the girl-game by the girl-rules, which clearly state that everybody has to tell everybody else everything.
The truth was that I had no reason for my anger. The bad that had happened to me wasn’t all that bad and in fact, I felt guilty for having any anger at all. In one town my dad and I’d lived in for a couple of years while I was in high school, my best friend confessed to me that her father got into bed with her at night and “did it” to her. She swore me to secrecy before she told me, but I didn’t keep my word. I told my dad.
When the dust settled from the turmoil my father raised, he and I left that town.
No, I had nothing deep-seated to be angry over. It was just that for most of my childhood I’d felt torn in half. I loved my dad a lot, but I was also angry at him for not telling me about myself. As I’d grown up and seen and read about what went on in the world, I realized that something awful must have happened to make my father take me away in the middle of the night. All I wanted was for him to tell me what it was.
But whenever I hinted at wanting to know about my mother, or the aunt he’d mentioned, my dad would either mumble something that contradicted what he’d said before or he’d clam up. It used to make me furious! It was especially infuriating because I could talk to him about anything else in the world. As I grew up, we girls would loftily inform each other about the birds and the bees. Then I’d go home and tell my dad every word, and he’d tell me what was true or not. Later, the girls would say, “You asked your dad that?!”
But my dad wasn’t embarrassed by anything. One time he said, “I used to be normal. Long ago I was like your girlfriends’ fathers and was embarrassed by sex and other private matters. But when you go through what I did, it puts life in perspective.”
Of course I asked him what he was talking about. What had he been through? But he wouldn’t tell me.
So I had to control my anger over my father’s refusal to tell me about our past. And I had to conceal my resentment over the fact that my father and I seemed to belong nowhere and to no one. How much I envied my friends’ families. I used to fantasize about huge Christmas dinners with fifty relatives at the table. I would listen avidly to my friends describing the “horror” of their holidays. They told how this cousin had done that dreadful thing, and that uncle had made their mother cry, and that aunt had worn a dress that shocked everyone.
It all sounded wonderful to me.
My father was a real loner. He and Ford would have been great friends. They could have hidden inside books together. My father had his love for Harriet Lane who was long dead, and Ford had his late wife to love. That a sculpture of her could reduce him to tears showed how much he still loved her.
Oh, well. Ford’s problems had bothered me until the Sunday I met Russell Dunne. With Russell, I felt a kinship that I’d never felt with another man. Physically, he was just my type: dark, elegant, and refined in a way that reminded me of my father. And Russell and I had so much in common, like photography and our love of nature. And we both liked the same kind of food. I hated the term “soul mate,” but that’s what flashed through my mind when I thought of Russell.
After I got home on Sunday night, I spent about an hour in the tub. When the water grew cold, I got out, put on my best nightgown and robe, and sat on the little porch off my bedroom for a while. The night seemed especially warm and fragrant, and the fireflies looked like little jewels sparkling in the velvet air.
Just having such sappy thoughts almost made me sick. When other females had said dopey things like that about some guy, I’d nearly barfed. I even refused to read novels that were about falling in love with a man. “Check his references,” I’d say, then close the book.
Of course I’d done all the logical things with Kirk and had planned everything carefully, yet I’d still been hornswoggled. But at least I’d never rhapsodized about the color of his eyes or the “cute little way his nose crinkles.” Gag me with a spoon.
I could have gone on and on about Russell Dunne, though. His eyes had little flecks of gold in them that caught the sunlight when he moved his head. His skin was the color of honey warmed in the sun. His beautiful hands looked as though they could play the music of angels.
Et cetera. I could go on—and did in my thoughts—but I tried to force myself to stop. I really tried to get my mind off of Russell and put it on my work—whatever my work was. I was still waiting for Ford to tell me how he wanted me to help him with his writing, but he never said anything. Instead, I was a sort of housekeeper cum hostess. Basically, if Ford didn’t want to do it, it was my job.
On Monday, the day after I met Russell, I had a hard time keeping my mind on anything. There was a lot to do outside, and I still hadn’t tackled the library and gone through the books in there. And of course I needed to go to the grocery. Also, I wanted to call Allie and set up a time for Tessa to come and pose for me so I could get my photography studio started.
On Saturday my mind had been full of all the things I wanted to do, but after Sunday, I couldn’t seem to remember any of them. Instead, I sat at the kitchen table and spent what seemed to be hours looking at the little printer Russell had lent me. He’d slipped a pack of photo paper in my bag, and after fiddling with the machine, I managed to produce an index print showing tiny, numbered pictures of every photo on the disk. I sat there staring at the pictures until I’d memorized them. Maybe I was hoping that a photo of Russell would appear on the disk, but it didn’t.
Ford came thundering downstairs sometime during the day—I hadn’t even put on my watch—and took over the printer. He had a real knack with machines so he figured out how to operate it in seconds. He punched buttons and out came a big photo of the picnic Russell had laid out on the sweet grass.
I don’t know what got into me, but I shoved that disk back into the camera and pushed the little garbage can icon as fast as I could. There was something so private about that scene that I didn’t want anyone else to see it. And I knew that if I let him, Ford would make derogatory comments about our lovely picnic. Where was the fried chicken? he’d ask, thinking he was being amusing. The cooler full of beer? What kind of picnic was it with just a bunch of cheese and crackers?
No, I didn’t want to hear his comments.
In my haste, what I didn’t realize was that I was spiting myself. After I erased them from the disk, and burned the photos, including the index print, I had nothing for me to look at.
But such was my euphoria that I didn’t get upset over my stupidity. Oh, well, I thought, I had my memories. And that thought nearly made me burst into song.
I carried Russell’s card with his name and telephone number inside my bra, on the left over my heart. There wasn’t a minute of the day that I didn’t want to call him. But I had an ironclad rule: I didn’t call men.
Of course I called Ford. I called him from the grocery on the cell phone he’d given me and asked if he wanted roast beef or pork roast. (He said, “I thought pork was cooked in a skillet.”) I called him from the fruit stand to ask if he liked yellow squash. (“This is a joke, right?”) And I called him from the service station to ask what kind of oil to put in the car. (“Don’t let those monkeys touch my car. I will change the oil.”)
I could call Ford because I wasn’t trying to impress him. Long ago I’d learned that you never called men you really, really wanted. Not for any reason. If you saw smoke coming out of his house, you called his neighbors and got them to save him. But you don’t call a man.
I’d learned this lesson from years of living with a handsome, single man: my father. Sometimes I thought he moved from one place to another just to escape the women who pursued him. I was eleven before I knew what a kitchen was. My dad and I never had to use one because single women gave us food. “I had this left over and I thought you and your adorable little girl would like some,” they’d say. One time I looked at the perfectly cooked casserole and asked how it could be “left over” when none of it was missing. My dad, who sometimes had a wicked sense of humor, had stood there and let the poor woman flounder about in her attempt to answer me.
Truthfully, they didn’t care about feeding my dad as much as they wanted a reason to call and ask after their “favorite dish.” Always, but always, the women delivered food to my dad in their “favorite dish,” as doing so gave them a reason to come back. Or call. Then call again. When we moved into a town, it wasn’t unusual for my dad to change his telephone number four times in three months.
So, anyway, when I was growing up, I made a sacred promise to myself to never call a man I was interested in. I was sure that a man as beautiful as Russell Dunne had calls all night long, so I wanted to be different, unique.
I needn’t have worried because Russell stopped by the house on Tuesday afternoon. I quickly maneuvered him into my studio because I didn’t want Ford to see him. I couldn’t imagine Ford being gracious about another man being around “his” assistant.
“I hope I didn’t interrupt you,” Russell said in that soft, silky voice of his.
Why hadn’t I done something with my hair? I asked myself. “No, not at all,” I managed to say. I wanted to offer him food. Actually, I wanted to offer him my whole life, but I thought I should start with lemonade. But Ford’s meanderings were unpredictable so he could possibly wander into the kitchen while Russell was there.
“So where are your photos?” he asked, smiling at me in a way that made my heart flutter.
“You’ll be my first,” I said as I grabbed my dear F100, aimed and snapped. Isn’t automatic focus great? I thought.
But I knew from the sound of the click that the picture hadn’t taken. I glanced down at the LCD panel. No film.
No, I didn’t burst into tears.
Russell was shaking his head at me and smiling. “You are truly naughty,” he said in a way that made me blush. If Ford had said those same words I would have said something about dirty old men, but when they came out of Russell’s mouth they were sexy.
“I want to see everything,” Russell said and I started talking.
I showed him the equipment Ford and I had chosen, and I told him Ford’s idea of putting retractable awnings over the windows. I told him about the afternoon Ford and I had painted the interior of the storage room, and how Ford and Nate had put the shelves up for me.
“You seem pretty attached to this man,” Russell said.
I nearly fell for that trick, but since I’d seen my father use it a thousand times with a thousand women, I caught myself. I used to look away in embarrassment when a woman would turn verbal somersaults as she tried to make my father believe that there was no other man in her life.
“Yeah, I am,” I said, looking at the floor as though Russell had pried some great secret out of me. I tilted my head up to see how he was taking this news. I was pleased to see that he was looking a little surprised. Good, I thought, since I didn’t want him to know how I felt about him.
“I guess I’ll just have to try harder, won’t I?” he said, smiling.
I took a tiny step toward him, but Russell looked at his watch.
“I have to go,” he said, and was at the door before I could reach him. Pausing, he stood there for a moment, a ray of sunlight on his cheek. “Jackie,” he said softly. “I think I said too much the other day about…You know.”
I did know. About the woman who was crushed. “That’s all right,” I said. “I don’t mind.”
“It was all long ago and—” Breaking off, he gave me a grin that made me weak-kneed. “Besides, who knows? The woman may actually have been in cahoots with the devil. I heard she used to have visions.”
“Visions?” I said, blinking fast and not trusting my voice. He was trying to be lighthearted, but I wasn’t feeling very light. In fact, I wanted to sit down.
“Yeah. She had visions of evil deeds. No one in town could do anything bad because she saw what they were going to do before they did it.”
I swallowed. “But wouldn’t visions like that be a gift from God? To be able to stop evil would be from God, wouldn’t it?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “I think it started out that way, but her visions got stronger until she began to see the evil in people’s minds. It was said that she—” Breaking off, he waved his hand, as though he meant to say no more.
“What?” I whispered. “What did she do?”
“My father said she started preventing people from doing what she saw in their minds.”
I didn’t like to think about what that meant. I put my hands to my temples.
“I’ve upset you,” Russell said. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you about what happened. It’s just that I’ve carried these secrets so long and you seem so caring. It’s as though…” He didn’t finish his sentence.
“I am,” I said. “It’s just—” I didn’t want to say what was in my head. I couldn’t very well tell him that I’d had two visions, a car wreck and a fire. What if I next saw that someone was plotting to kill someone else? How would I stop it?
Russell looked at his watch again. “I really must go. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said, trying to smile.
“How about lunch this weekend?” he asked. “Another picnic? And no ghost stories.”
“Promise?” I said.
“Sacred honor. I’ll call you to set up time and place.” Then, with one more brilliant flash of a smile, he was gone.
Leaning back against the wall, I tried to still my pounding heart. The first vision had upset me a lot, and when I’d seen it in reality, I’d been shocked into immobility. The second time, Ford had been there and the whole thing had been almost fun.
But what would happen if—?
“Who were you talking to?”
I turned to see Tessa standing in the doorway. She was a funny little kid who talked little. Except to Ford. The two of them seemed to be on the same circuit board so they agreed on everything. Allie said she’d never seen anything like it. She’d always bemoaned the fact that her daughter was antisocial and wouldn’t talk to adults or her peers. But Ford and Tessa were often together, doing things like looking inside some hole in the ground and speculating as to what was inside it.
“A man,” I said to Tessa.
She didn’t ask any more questions, but during the day I saw her looking at me oddly a couple of times. I ignored her. I knew from experience that to ask Tessa anything would only get me silence and a blank stare.
One time Allie was watching Ford’s feet disappear as he slithered on his belly into some dungeon of greenery he and Tessa had made, and she gave a huge sigh. “My daughter is hungry for male companionship.”
I leaped on the chance to find out about her former marriage. After all, I’d told Allie about Kirk. Truthfully, Allie was the only woman I’d revealed more to than I’d learned from. “Does Tessa see her father often?” I asked.
“Rarely,” Allie said quickly, then turned and walked away. And that was all the info I could get out of her.
So I ignored Tessa’s funny looks at me on Tuesday and got her to pose. At least I got her to pose after Ford told her she should do it.
I wish I could describe how good my photos of Tessa came out. It was one of those cosmic things that happens now and then. I think that if I’d been myself that day the pictures wouldn’t have been half as good. Usually, I tend to be a bit anal about depth-of-field and light meter readings, but that day I was so distracted that I didn’t think about adjusting every knob on my camera. My camera had a depth-of-field preview button, so I just pushed that, and when Tessa and the background looked okay, I pushed the remote cord and took the shot.
Maybe Tessa caught my mood that day. Usually, she was impatient to be off and doing her own thing, so I’d thought of what I could use to bribe her to get her to sit in front of a camera. A gift certificate to that garden store where she and Ford had bought the truckload of ugly little statues?
But I didn’t have to bribe her that afternoon because Tessa seemed to be as much in a dreamlike state as I was. My attention wandered as I thought about Russell Dunne. I imagined wearing a ball gown—not that I owned one or had ever worn one—and waltzing in the moonlight with him.
I sat Tessa in an old chair by the window, gave her a book to read, then snapped pictures. Not too many pictures and not too quickly because my mind wasn’t moving that fast. Instead of scurrying around and adjusting hair and reflectors as I usually did, I just let things be.
Tessa and I hardly said a word in the three hours that I took pictures of her. Usually, I’d take an hour and six times the photos I took that day, but I was so dreamy that I moved in slow motion, and the result was more time but fewer photos.
After a while, Tessa and I moved outside. She stretched out on the grass in the dappled shade of a tree and looked up at the overhead leaves. Had I been myself that day I would have straddled her and given her a thousand directions about how to look, where to look, and even what to think. But since I wasn’t my usual bossy self, I just let Tessa do whatever she wanted and trusted my camera to perform.
That night Ford stayed in his office late, so I went to my studio and started developing my black-and-whites of Tessa. When that first photo came into focus I knew I had something. With a capital S: Something.
I was still moving at half speed, but I was awake enough to see that I’d finally done what I’d always dreamed of doing: I’d captured a mood. I’d put a personality on paper. Not just a face, but a whole person.
As I stood there looking at those wet pictures, I learned a lot in an instant. Whenever I’d photographed kids previously, I’d done it fast because they move a lot and get bored quickly. “Look at me! Look at me!” I was always saying, then snapping rolls of film as fast as I could push the button.
Maybe a photographer had to do that with some kids, but there were also children like Tessa. She was an introverted, moody child, and today, purely by accident, I’d been in the same state, so I’d caught it on film.
The photos were good. Very, very good. Maybe even, win-a-prize good. I had some close-ups of Tessa that were so beautiful they brought tears to my eyes. And as I looked at those pictures, I saw why Allie and I got silence from Tessa, while Ford got invited into the secret house.
Allie and I were alike. We were doers and movers. Ford could sit in the same chair for twelve hours, but I couldn’t sit in one place for more than thirty minutes. For me, reading was easiest when I was on a treadmill. There was a world going on inside Tessa’s head and Ford saw it. Today, I had captured Tessa’s inner world on film.
I left the photos hanging in the studio, wandered into the house, and up to bed, smiling all the way. Obviously, Russell was good for me. Being around him had put me in this state where I could be quiet long enough to listen to Tessa with my camera.
It wasn’t until I was getting ready for bed that I remembered what Russell had said about Amarisa having visions. I remembered my fright when he’d told me about her seeing evil in a person’s mind. Again, I wondered what I’d do if that happened to me.
As I slipped on my nightgown, I thought that if I had another vision maybe I’d tell Russell about it. Maybe I’d break my ironclad rule and call him and tell him what I’d seen. Maybe he’d understand. Maybe that would be a way Russell and I could form a bond. A forever bond.
Smiling, I climbed into bed and went to sleep.
On Wednesday, I was still wandering about in a daze. I’m not sure what I did all day, but everything seemed to take twice as long as usual. Ford said, “What the hell is wrong with you?” and I had enough presence of mind to say, “PMS.” I guessed correctly that that statement would make him back off. He didn’t comment on my mood again.
I didn’t show Ford the pictures I’d taken of Tessa. When they were dry, I slipped them inside a big portfolio because I wanted to show them to Russell first. After all, he and I shared a love of photography, didn’t we?
In the afternoon, I used the little digital to snap some photos of Nate in the garden. He was sweaty, had flecks of grass on his face, and he was squinting at the sun, so I was sure the pictures would be awful. While I cooked dinner, Ford ran the photos off on Russell’s little printer.
I was removing a dish of sweet potatoes from the oven (coated in brown sugar, swimming in marshmallows, the only way Ford would eat them) when he held a photo in front of my face. It was impossible to believe, but Nate was better looking on film than he was in person. He was only seventeen, but on film he looked about thirty, and he was handsome in a way that made your breath catch.
I put the potatoes on top of the stove and looked at the photo while Ford ran off more. When he had a stack of them—and each one was gorgeous—he said he’d send them to the art director at his publishing house.
But the next morning when Ford showed the photos to Nate and said he might have a modeling career ahead of him, Nate said he couldn’t leave Cole Creek. He said it as though it were an unchangeable fact, then he turned on the lawn mower and began to cut.
Standing to one side, I watched Ford turn the mower off and start talking to Nate in a fatherly way. I was too far away to hear all of it, but I caught phrases like “deciding your future” and “this is your chance” and “don’t throw this away.” Nate looked at Ford with an unreadable face, listened politely, and said, “Sorry, I can’t,” then turned on the mower again.
Ford looked at me as though to ask if I knew what was going on, but I just shrugged. I figured Nate was really saying that he couldn’t leave his grandmother. She’d raised him and she’d be alone if Nate left town. But my impression of his grandmother was that the last thing she’d want was a grandson who’d sacrificed his future for her.
I decided to let Ford handle it. He was pretty good at talking to people, so I figured he’d eventually get Nate to come around. Besides, I didn’t have time to get involved. I needed to go to the grocery to buy food for Ford—and for the picnic with Russell. He hadn’t called yet, but when he did, I wanted to be ready. I planned to take enough food that Russell and I could stay out all day long. Just the two of us. Alone in the woods.
So I left Ford to talk to Nate while I went to the grocery. When I returned hours later, the house was empty. There was an open FedEx envelope on the hall table and I figured it was “maintenance,” as Ford called it. His publishing house often sent him paperwork that he had to approve or disapprove about his books, which were all still selling after all these years.
As usual, I lugged all the groceries in by myself. After a glare at my cell phone because it still hadn’t given me a call from Russell, I put away all the groceries, then went to the sink to get myself a glass of delicious well water.
When I turned the handle, it came off in my hand, and water came shooting up, hitting me in the face. I threw open the doors below the sink and tried to turn the water off, but I couldn’t budge the rusty old knobs.
I ran out of the house shouting for Ford, but when I reached the garden, I was drawn up short by the most extraordinary sight. Ford and Tessa were standing side by side, looking at two men I’d never seen before.
One man was standing behind the old bench Nate had repaired. He was tall and ruggedly handsome in that country-and-western way that made some women swoon.
Sitting on the bench in front of him was a little man who looked like Ford—if you saw him in a fun house mirror, that is. Every one of Ford’s features was exaggerated. On this little man, Ford’s thick eyelashes were like one of those sleepy-eyed dolls. And Ford’s rather nice lips were like a nursing baby’s. And his nose! Yes, Ford’s nose was a bit unusual, but it was small enough that no one noticed it. But this man’s nose looked as though a miniature hot dog had been placed crosswise on the end of it, then smoothed out.
When I first saw the man sitting there, my face and hair wet, water dripping into my eyes, I thought he wasn’t real. I wanted to say crossly to Ford and Tessa that they had to take that huge statue back to the store and get a full refund.
But as I wiped water out of my eyes, the stout little creature turned his head and blinked at me.
It was then that I knew who the men were. The handsome one, the one with the face that looked as if he could write songs about his “honky-tonk life,” was called “King” in Ford’s books. As in “King Cobra.” Ford had described him well enough that I recognized him—and I remembered that he hadn’t been portrayed as a good guy.
As for the little man, he was Ford’s father. In his books, Ford called him “81462”—which was the number on his shirt in the prison where he’d been since before the hero’s birth.
The man in back, the country-and-western singer, said to me, “Is something wrong?” He had a voice that was filled with every cigarette he’d ever smoked and every smoky bar he’d ever been in. And he had an accent so thick I could hardly understand him.
“Sink,” I said, suddenly remembering that the kitchen of my beautiful house was being flooded. “The sink!” Days of lethargy left me; I was myself again. I sprinted back toward the kitchen, four people close behind me.
“You got a monkey wrench?” the younger man said to Ford as soon as all of us were in the kitchen. There was contempt in his voice: a blue-collar worker’s contempt for a white-collar worker. The water was shooting up to the ceiling and these two men were about to get into a socialist war.
The little man, 81462, grabbed a cookie sheet off the countertop and directed the spray of water out the open window over the sink. Smart, I thought. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“Course he’s got tools. He’s a Newcombe,” Number 81462 said.
At least I think that’s what he said. I could have understood Gullah more easily than his twang.
Ford disappeared into the pantry for a moment and returned with a heavy, rusty wrench that was probably new when the house was built. I’d never seen it before and wondered where he’d found it.
Two minutes later, the water was stopped and the five of us stood there on the flooded floor, staring at each other and having no idea of what to say.
Tessa spoke first. She seemed to be fascinated with 81462, couldn’t take her eyes off him. “Praying mantis?” she asked, and I wondered what she was talking about.
81462’s eyes started twinkling in a way that made him as cute as a…Well, as cute as a garden gnome. Or a bug’s ear. Or a—
Turning slightly, he said, “Halfway down.”
I was trying to understand his dialect—it was too strong to be called an accent—when I noticed his vest for the first time. It was covered with hundreds of little enameled pins of insects. They were all about the same size and as far as I could see, there were no two alike.
“Centipede,” Tessa said, and 81462 lifted his left arm to show a centipede.
I couldn’t believe it, but out of my mouth came “Japanese beetle”—the bane of my gardening life.
When Number 81462 looked at me, smiling, I couldn’t help smiling back. He was just so cute!
“Right here.” He lifted up the tip of his vest. “Where I can see that he don’t eat nothin’ good.”
I don’t know why, but I kind of melted. Maybe it was because of all the drippy-movie hormones that Russell had released in me. “Are you two hungry?” I asked. “I just went to the grocery and—”
“They’re not staying,” Ford said. Or, actually, grunted.
When I looked at him, his face was as hard as the steel in his truck, and his eyes were flashing angrily. But you know what I’d learned about Ford Newcombe? He had a heart made out of marshmallow cream. He complained and he bellyached about a lot of things, but his actions never fit his words. I’d seen him risk his life to save a bunch of teenagers who were strangers. And I well knew he wasn’t researching his devil story because he feared I was involved.
“Nonsense,” I said. “Of course they’re staying. They’re family.” I wanted a family more than life, and I was damned if I was going to stand aside and watch Ford throw his out because of some silly childhood arguments.
“Lightning bug,” Tessa said, ignoring the adult drama playing around her.
81462 crooked one of his short fingers at her and Tessa waded through the water on the floor to stand before the man. Bending so the upper part of his vest was right before her eyes, he reached inside, pushed something, and the tail of a lightning bug lit up.
Tessa looked at it in awe for a moment, then turned to Ford. I didn’t have a mirror in the kitchen, but my guess was that she and I were wearing identical expressions. Of course they’d stay.
When he saw Tessa’s face, Ford’s marshmallow cream heart turned to liquid. Throwing up his hands in defeat, he left the kitchen.
For a moment the four of us stood there in silence, then Country-and-western said, “Ma’am, do you have a mop?”
“Sure,” I said, blinking at being called “ma’am.”
Tessa took 81462’s hand and pulled him outside, leaving Country-and-western and me alone. He took one of the two mops I got out of the closet, and from the efficient way he used it, I could tell he’d done it before. We worked in silence, with him doing most of the work.
“Noble,” he said as he wrung out the mop into the bucket.
“I beg your pardon?”
“My name is Noble.”
“Ah,” I said, thinking that that’s why Ford had named his character “King.”
“When my mother was carryin’ me she heard somethin’ that was in a book. ‘The nobles of the land were new come to God.’ Since my daddy’s name was Newcombe, she called me Noble.”
I stopped mopping. “I like that. It’s sort of a prayer.”
“I never thought of it that way, but I guess it is.” He stopped mopping for a moment to look at me. “And I take it you’re Ford’s new wife?”
I smiled at that. “No. His assistant.”
“Assistant?” Noble asked, his voice full of disbelief.
Isn’t marriage strange? I thought. In front of this man I’d snapped at Ford and ordered him around. Therefore, it was assumed we were married. So where was “love and honor” in that formula?
“Yes. His assistant,” I said firmly. “Jackie Maxwell.”
“Nice to meet you, Miss Maxwell,” he said, wiping off his hand on his jeans before he held it out for me to shake.
I did the same thing and shook his hand. Now that Ford was no longer in the room, the arrogance and hostility were gone from his eyes and he seemed nice.
“So…?” I began. “You and Mr. Newcombe are…?”
“Toodles just got released from—” He looked up at me to see how my pure, easily-shocked, middle-class morals were going to take the coming revelation.
“Prison,” I said. “I know.” Truthfully, the name “Toodles” shocked me more than the idea of prison.
“Yeah, prison,” Noble said. “And the truth is, he ain’t got no home.”
Oh, dear, I thought. Ford wasn’t going to like this. His father to live with him? “And you?” I asked.
Noble shrugged in a self-deprecating way. “I take care of myself. Tumble about the country. Do odd jobs.”
“I see,” I said, wringing out my mop. “You’re dead broke so you volunteered to take, uh…Toodles to his rich son in hopes you’d get a…what? A loan? Or do you want a place to stay?”
When Noble looked up at me, I could see the “King” Ford had written about, a man who “could charm the pants off any female.”
But I was in no danger. Between liking Ford so much and living in a daydream over a handsome stranger, my psyche didn’t have room for another man.
“You sure you ain’t married to my cousin?” Noble asked.
“Double sure. So tell me what you’re after and if I like it I might help you.” I didn’t say so, but it was my opinion that Ford needed family as much as I did. To hear him talk, he despised his family. On the other hand, Ford was so deeply involved with his relatives that he’d written books about them.
I could see that Noble was debating whether or not to tell me the truth. I had a feeling that “truth” and “women” weren’t two words he thought of as belonging together.
After a while he sighed as though his decision had been made. “I need a place to live. I’ve had a little trouble at home, and, well, I ain’t exactly welcome there right now.”
I lifted my eyebrows and made a guess. “Nine months kind of trouble?”
Looking down at the floor, Noble gave a little smile. “Yes, ma’am. One of my uncles has a new wife, and she’s real young and real pretty, and reeaaaal lonely and…” Breaking off, he looked up and gave me a little what-could-I-do? kind of grin.
I thought about what he’d just revealed and wondered why I’d ever craved a family.
“Ford won’t like this,” I said.
“I understand,” Noble said, then, slowly, dramatically, he leaned his mop against the kitchen cabinet. When he turned away, his shoulders were slumped and his head was down so low he looked like a turtle retracting into its shell.
“You ought to go on the stage,” I said to his back. “I haven’t seen such bad acting since I was in the fourth grade. Okay, what can you do to earn your keep?”
When he turned around to look at me, I saw what I was sure was the real Noble. Gone was the slump; he was standing up straight and proud.
“I could put this rat trap of a house back together,” he said. Also gone was his meek attitude—and so was half his accent. “In one stint in the poky I worked in the bakery.”
I wasn’t going to be so uncool as to say, “And what did you do to get put into jail?” I decided to test him. I said, “Tell me how to make a croissant.”
With a little smile he described—accurately—how to make a croissant with the butter between the layers.
I hated to be redundant even in my own mind, but all I could think was, Ford isn’t going to like this.
“Look,” I said after a while, “you rummage around, find what you need, and start baking. The richer and more gooey the things you make, the better. This plan calls for some sweetening-up of the boss.”
And exchange of information, I thought. If there was anything Ford liked better than high-fat food, it was information. I knew he was aware that I’d been withholding info from him lately, so if I wanted to coax him into letting Noble and…uh, Toodles, stay, I was going to have to bargain.
As I went up the stairs to Ford’s office—where I was sure he was hiding—I thought of the absurdity of it all. I was going to have to reveal private information about myself in an attempt to get Ford to allow his own family to live with him. It didn’t make sense.
But as I reached his door, I thought, Who are you kidding? I was dying to tell somebody about Russell. And since Ford was becoming the best friend I ever had, he was the one I wanted to tell. And I didn’t agree with Russell that Ford would tell Dessie. It had been days since his date with her and, as far as I knew, there’d been no contact between them since then. And, yes, I did push the button on the phone that shows all the incoming calls for the last month. Not one from Ms. Mason.
Lifting my hand, I knocked.