When Laura saw the oxen, and Ma and Carrie on the wagon seat, she jumped up and down, swinging her sunbonnet and shouting, “They’re coming! They’re coming!”
“They’re coming awful fast,” Mary said.
Laura was still. She heard the wagon rattling loudly. Pete and Bright were coming very fast. They were running. They were running away.
-On the Banks of Plum Creek
Nine
Roelke walked over to Libby’s small ranch house and let himself in the back door. Libby was in the kitchen pulling plastic wrap from a Styrofoam tray of ground beef. A radio on the counter was tuned to NPR. Otherwise the house was suspiciously quiet. “No kids?” he asked.
“Justin’s at T-ball practice and Dierdre’s got a play date.” Libby dumped the beef into a blue mixing bowl. She was a slim woman of medium height, with dark hair cut extra short for the summer. As a single mom she handled her two young children, an asshole of an ex-husband, the household, and the demands of a career as a freelance writer pretty well. She’d honed efficiency to a fine art since her divorce, but her blunt demeanor had developed in childhood.
Now she pulled spice jars from a cabinet and began shaking this and that over the meat. “What’s up?”
Roelke pulled the crumpled farm listing sheet from his pocket and smoothed it out on the counter. Her hands didn’t stop moving as she looked at the paper. “Grandma and Grandpa’s place is for sale?”
“Yeah.”
She sprinkled pepper into the bowl, considered, sprinkled some more. Then she glanced up with a So-o-o-o? expression.
He waited.
Suddenly her eyes widened. “You’re not thinking about buying it,” she said flatly.
He looked at her.
“Oh my God.”
“I’m thinking about it. That’s all.”
She fetched ketchup and an egg from the fridge, added them to the mixture, washed her hands, and began kneading everything together. She leaned over the listing again, and he could tell she was reading the price. Her hands went still and her mouth opened. It was still open when she slowly met his gaze. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Probably,” he admitted.
Libby pressed her lips together for a moment. “Go fire up the grill, will you? Let me get the burgers on. Then we can talk.”
Chloe and Kari trotted shaky-kneed around the bend. Alta’s bus had come to a stop on the shoulder just beyond a bridge. She’d managed to slow down by scraping the right side against the bridge’s low cement wall. The bus backfired over and over and over. But things could have been a whole lot worse, Chloe thought.
The door accordioned open. Alta stumbled out first, her face like chalk beneath red hair and a purple calico bonnet, one hand automatically clutching up her long skirt so she wouldn’t trip.
Chloe reached her. “Is everybody all right?”
“Everybody’s all right,” Alta quavered. Her fellow travelers were climbing out now, some dazed, some chattering.
“What happened?” Kari asked.
“All of a sudden I couldn’t slow down!” Alta wiped sweat from her forehead. “The gas pedal seemed stuck or something. I didn’t know what to do! Finally I just—just turned off the ignition switch.”
“I thought we were all going to die,” Hazel Voss said, but she managed a shaky smile.
“Let’s hear it for Alta!” another woman called. “Using that bridge to slow us down was brilliant!”
“That took skill,” someone else agreed.
Or luck, Chloe thought. A shudder rippled down her spine as she glanced back at the bridge. If the high-profile bus had slammed into the bridge laterally, instead of maintaining a mostly forward motion, it might easily have flipped over and landed upside down in the gully below.
“Is the damage repairable?” asked Henrietta Beauchamps.
Alta looked at her minibus and cringed. The right side was horribly scraped, the assault particularly offensive against the cheerful paint job. “Oh, please,” she whispered.
And suddenly Chloe flashed on her first glimpse of Alta Allerbee, pleading with someone unseen back at the Pepin Wayside: Please don’t do this! You’ll ruin everything!
Frost formed on Chloe’s ribs. Dear God, she thought. Surely no one would … “Alta?” she began.
“Where’s Leonard?” an elderly woman asked. “He might know something about mechanics.”
“No, he stayed in town to talk to that nice curator about Charles Ingalls,” another woman said. She turned to the sole male in evidence. “Bill? Can you figure out what’s wrong with the bus?”
Bill took a wary step backward. “Definitely not.”
“In my day,” the first woman observed tartly, “men knew how to take care of things.”
Before anyone could further lament the loss of manly knowledge, a station wagon stopped and two men jumped out. “Hey, everybody okay?” Then a blue pickup stopped in the other lane. “I’ll go call for help!” a woman hollered through the window before speeding off again.
Alta sat on the ground abruptly, as if her knees had given out. Hazel eased down beside her. “Oh, honey. All you need is a hug.”
This isn’t the time to ask questions, Chloe thought. But Alta’s troubles had just evolved from None of my business to Heaven help me. After the way the minibus had barreled down on them, it just might have been her and Kari who ended up crashing.
Roelke began to relax when, fifteen minutes later, he settled into a lawn chair on Libby’s patio. The juicy smell of searing beef wafted from her enormous grill. The menu called for cheeseburgers, veggie kabobs, and skewered pineapple. Roelke had opted for iced tea.
Libby opened a Leinenkugel’s and pushed a wedge of lime into the bottle. “Okay,” she said after a long pull. “Can you even consider buying the old farm? I thought you were saving for a plane. When did you decide you wanted to be a farmer instead of a pilot?”
“I most definitely do not want to be a farmer. This isn’t about Holsteins, or the so-called simple life, or going back to the land or whatever.”
“What is it about?”
He’d been struggling to put that into words for a week now. “The farm is a good place. Remember when we were kids, and we’d all get together for Sunday dinners and holidays—”
“Please tell me you’re not buying a farm so we can have Thanksgiving dinners there.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
Libby got up to check the burgers. “Look, I have great memories of that place. And I know you spent a lot more time there than I did, after things went sour with your dad—”
After Roelke’s dad’s alcoholism escalated and he began beating up Roelke’s mom, she meant.
“—but that doesn’t mean you should tie that anchor around your neck.”
“I don’t want to live in my stupid apartment forever.”
“That was never meant to be more than temporary,” Libby agreed. “But Roelke, you moving out here in the first place was supposed to be temporary. My divorce got ugly, I needed help, you were there. I’ll be grateful forever. You will always be an important part of my life, and of the kids’ lives.”
Roelke tried to imagine life without them. Libby liked to boss him around. Justin was more than a handful. Dierdre believed she was an honest-to-God princess. Roelke loved them so much his heart hurt just to think about it.
“But I never expected you to stay in Palmyra,” Libby was saying. “Buying any place out here would mean giving up on a city career for good—”
You’ve got a golden opportunity here, McKenna, but it won’t last forever.
“—and I didn’t know you’d made that decision. Have you?”
Roelke swirled ice cubes in his glass. “A lot of things have changed since I left Milwaukee. After what happened last winter, I don’t know if I could handle going back there. And now that Chloe’s in the picture … ”
“Are you considering the farm because of Chloe?” Libby checked the burgers again. This time she propped the grill lid open and reached for a spatula. “What does she think?”
“Old places are her thing,” he reminded Libby.
“But what does she think about you buying this particular old place?”
“She’s off on a road trip with her sister, so we haven’t had a whole lot of opportunity to discuss it.”
She handed him a plate. “Is the idea that you’d both live there?”
“Well … ” He reached for a napkin, avoiding her gaze. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
His left knee began to bounce. “Look, I would love to live there, or anywhere, with Chloe. I’ve wanted us to move in together for a long time. And now we wouldn’t be breaking the law.” Wisconsin had only recently legalized the cohabitation of unmarried adults.
“So, why haven’t you? Doesn’t she want to?”
“We’ve never discussed it.”
Libby sat back down with her own plate. “Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to screw things up. We’ve been doing good.” Really good, actually. It had taken them a while to figure out if they wanted to be together. Even how to be together. But they’d made the leap, and worked through some stuff, and grown closer. And sometimes he looked at Chloe and simply could not believe that this amazing, perplexing, beautiful, strong-minded woman had chosen to be with him.
“Oh, sweetie,” Libby said softly. “Having the conversation about living together will not screw things up. I can’t predict Chloe’s answer, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask the question.”
“She’s traveling,” he reminded Libby. “She and her sister are off visiting old houses where some famous author lived. And Chloe’s giving a talk about her at one of the places.”
“Who’s the author?”
“Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
Libby grinned. “I loved the Little House books when I was a kid!”
“You did?” He would not have guessed that. “Well, hunh.” He finally sampled his cheeseburger. “This is great, by the way.”
“Grass-fed beef and smoked Gouda. Anyway, I got the whole set of Little House books for Christmas when I was in fourth grade. I’ve still got them. In fact … ” She hesitated.
“What?”
“Well, when my marriage went down the crapper, and I was trying to figure out whether the kids would be better off if Dan and I split—”
“They are.”
“When you’re in the middle of the mess, it’s not so straightforward,” Libby said. “But I came across my old Little House books when I was packing up, and they made me feel better about leaving.”
“Really?”
“They’re books about family, Roelke. And the dad—Pa—is just amazing. He could do anything, and face anything, and survive anything, and all he wants to do is provide for his family. And I thought, that’s what I want for my kids. I want them to know that whatever bad things might happen, their parents love them and will take care of them. And Dan was not cutting it.”
The moment felt fragile, so Roelke just nodded. Libby wasn’t one to spill personal stuff easily, even with him.
“One day I’ll read the books with Dierdre.” Libby used a fork to pull chunks of pineapple from their skewer. “This road trip Chloe and Kari are taking sounds like a lot of fun.”
Roelke tried to picture Chloe poking around old houses from here to South Dakota. He wondered if any of those places might have a job opening. The chance to become a curator at a historic site devoted to her favorite author would be pretty damn appealing. After all, she’d never said she was committed to working at Old World Wisconsin forever. She’d lived in Europe, for crying out loud. How could he expect her to—
“You okay?”
Roelke realized his knee was firing like a piston. “Sure,” he said. “And you’re right. I’m sure Chloe and Kari are having a blast.”
Within half an hour, so many people had stopped by the battered bus to offer assistance that everything was under control. Several who were on their way to the pageant themselves offered rides. There was a moment of hesitation as Alta’s gang considered accepting rides with strangers.
Then Hazel spoke up. “WWLD?” she asked brightly. “I want to see the pageant.”
Alta’s Laura Lookers divvied up with instructions to rendezvous near the ticket booth. A farmer said he could tow the minibus to a service station. “My cousin’s brother-in-law is a mechanic,” the man explained cheerfully. “He’ll take a look.”
Alta opted to stay with her bus. Chloe felt a niggle of unease about driving away, but the farmer seemed friendly, Alta was clearly unwilling to leave, and Kari had promised a ride to three of the strandees. “I’ll come find you,” Alta told her charges, “after I learn what’s what. Meet me in the Grace aisle after the pageant.”
Five minutes later Chloe and Kari headed south with Hazel Voss and Bill and Frances Whelan squeezed onto the back seat. Chloe, who’d decisively handed the car keys to her sister, swiveled sideways and made a stab at polite chitchat. “What brought you two on the tour?” she asked the Whelans.
“We’re both retired teachers,” Frances said. “I used the Little House books to get my second graders excited about reading.”
“And she has a crush on Michael Landon,” Bill Whelan added.
“Bill!” she scolded. Then she added, “Well, I must admit, Michael Landon makes a better Pa than Charles Ingalls did.”
Chloe had no idea what to make of that.
“I taught fourth grade,” Mr. Whelan said. “I integrated Plum Creek into lessons about state history.”
“Have you seen any of the homesites before?” Chloe asked.
“No, and that was why I wanted to come,” Mrs. Whelan said. “I’m not sure I could have talked my husband into a bus tour, though, if it hadn’t been for the Looking For Laura symposium.” She patted his knee.
“You’re interested in the latest scholarship?” Chloe asked.
“Not really,” he admitted affably. “I’m a collector, and half the fun of building a collection is sharing your treasures with people who appreciate them.”
“What do you collect?” Kari asked.
“Anything Laura-related,” Mr. Whelan said. “I have several first editions, and I’m after a full set.” His genial smile suddenly held a sharkish gleam.
“A full set from each incarnation,” Mrs. Whelan added dryly. “First editions from the original 1930s and early ’40s printing, with illustrations by Helen Sewell and Mildred Boyle, and another set with illustrations by Garth Williams. You can see why we’re touring the Midwest in a minibus instead of cruising the Greek isles.”
“Ah,” Chloe said sagely, with a don’tcha know smile of her own. Then she turned forward again. She hadn’t even known that Garth Williams hadn’t been the original artist. No offense to Ms. Sewell and Ms. Boyle, but in Chloe’s humble opinion, Mr. Williams had been born to illustrate the Little House books.
More than that, though, she was struck by Bill Whelan’s motivation for joining the LLT. I really did not think this through, she thought. Not everyone Looking For Laura was simply a longtime fan. Jayne-with-a-Y had pierced that pretty balloon with her incendiary authorship darts. Chloe didn’t like Jayne any better today than she had two days earlier, and she would reject Jayne’s cockamamie theories until the end of time, but the woman had opened Chloe’s mind to the promise of a lively, thought-provoking, educational symposium in De Smet.
However, it hadn’t occurred to her that some symposium attendees would be collectors. Which was pretty dumb, she realized, with a new stab of fear for the quilt bumping along in the trunk. But she had always valued artifacts because of the stories they could tell about the people who had once made them, owned them, cherished or disliked them. Sometimes she forgot that for most people, the antiques business was just that—a business. A business that was, for a lucky few, quite lucrative.
Chloe wished all over again that Miss Lila’s quilt was locked in a vault somewhere. What would collectors make of a quilt once owned, and possibly even stitched, by Laura Ingalls Wilder?