Help Wanted: Husband?

“Myrtle Griffin wouldn’t know a coup if it jumped up and bit her in her girdled rear end,” Eve declared.

“She called it a ‘coup.”’ Birdy stood her ground. “And Pauline Van Horn said it was an abomination, an affront to the very principles on which the club was founded.”

“Oh no. Sounds like she’s throwing her hat in the ring for town clerk again next year. If the woman spent less time posturing and more time tending her dahlias, she wouldn’t have to blame the failure of her garden on everything from the European earwig to the ozone layer.”

“Dianthus,” Birdy corrected. “She has trouble each season with her dianthus.”

“Dahlias,” Eve insisted.

Lorna smiled, the sound of the Aunties’ incessant quarrels as familiar and comforting as a mother’s kiss.

It was heading toward the day’s darkening hour when the aunts said their goodbyes, Eve adding admonishments and Birdy shiny eyed, looking at Lorna with silent entreaty. Lorna kissed them both, promising to see them soon, and hurried back to the house. She’d find her new employee after she figured out what she would do about supper. Foreman. What had possessed her? He’d want a raise now before he did a day’s work. Well, he’d just have to be satisfied with the title.

She opened the yellowed refrigerator. Maybe if she cooked him a great meal, he’d forget about wages. But what could she cook him? She’d taken nothing out, not expecting to have to feed anyone except herself and her appetite tending toward the odd lately. She looked in the small freezer. There was a steak—not T-bone but not chuck either. She could add some fried onions, perhaps a potato or two if they hadn’t gone and sprouted in the pantry closet bin. And there was that bread-making machine she’d bought on sale right after her elopement. Six weeks later she’d been a widow. Never even had time to get the machine out of the box.

She bent down to the bottom cupboard and found the bread maker behind the stacked bowls and glass casserole dishes. She slid it out, took it from the box and set it on the speckled counter. It was so white in this old kitchen. She stepped back. She should rough up those cupboards, paint them cantaloupe. She could already picture the faux wood doors gone, their dark surfaces replaced with an orange good enough to eat. She lay her palms soft to her stomach. Her late husband had been a cad, and she’d most definitely been an even bigger fool, so starved to hear the words “I love you,” she believed the first man who’d uttered them. Yet, as she’d told her aunts, her mistakes had brought her here. Now she just had to remember the lessons she’d learned, the vows she’d made. She moved back to the counter to start supper. One glance at Julius Holt with his cocksure grin and easy laughter in his eyes and she’d remember just fine.

THE BACK OF THE HOUSE SAGGED and wood showed bare where a piece of siding had ripped off and never been replaced. Julius stomped up the stairs, noting with disgust the second and third ones were loose. Enough work around this sorry place for ten men. But as he reached the back door, he smelled a bakery. Through the door’s window, he saw Lorna standing at the stove, her stern gaze turned to the sound of his heavy steps. Still surprise flashed in her eyes, as if she hadn’t expected him. He understood. He was just as surprised to find himself still here. With a queenly wave, she motioned him to come in.

He opened the door into a kitchen that smelled of sweet heaven, the aroma of baking bread as thick as hay ready for cutting. He stood at the entrance on a brightly woven square of rug that he knew had to be Lorna’s touch.

“Your company’s gone?” He noted the linoleum was lifting in one corner.

She nodded and glanced at the clock over the refrigerator. “Supper’s at five-fifteen. You’re early.” There was no surprise in her eyes this time. Only a scolding in her voice that made him smile. She turned her narrow back to his grin. She was a prickly one, all right. Man could hurt himself on all those sharp bones and hard lengths.

“So you meant it when you said I was the new foreman?”

“I always say what I mean, Mr. Holt,” she told him without turning around.

“So that’s the secret of your charm?”

She moved briskly from the stove to the sink, her profile unsmiling. “Might be a good time to bring your things into where you’ll be staying. Did you see the trailer not far from the barns? It’s open, been aired out. The water’s turned on—”

“Hold up there. I don’t remember exactly taking the job.” His investigation had revealed the farm was in a sorrier state than he’d thought—broken equipment, a rusting tractor, roofs that looked like they leaked, apple boxes so old the pine was splintering away from the nails. It’d be backbreaking hard work getting this place up and running again with no help except for a woman with a hard spine and soft gray-green eyes who thought she could become a farmer by sitting in her front parlor reading.

Lorna turned on the water. “It was my impression we came to an agreement, Mr. Holt.”

“It was my impression you hired me, then fired me faster than rabbits reproduce.”

“Then I hired you again.” Her voice was calm as a country morning, but she was scrubbing her hands too hard, too long.

“This place is in pretty sad shape.”

She turned off the water, shook out a towel, swiped at the water splatters on the sink’s edge. “Are you afraid of hard work, Mr. Holt?”

“No, ma’am. Work hard, play hard. That’s my belief. Keeps life interesting.” It also kept a person from thinking far into the night, remembering things better off buried.

She twisted the towel. “All right, seven thirty-five an hour.”

“Ten dollars.”

She wrung the towel. “Seven-fifty.”

“Eight.”

“Seventy seventy-five but not a cent more, and be sure you’ll earn every penny of it.”

“Plus the bonus at the season’s end,” he reminded.

She slapped the towel onto the counter. He smiled.

“Plus the bonus at the season’s end. That’s my final offer, Mr. Holt.” She flung up the lid of a bulky-shaped, bright white appliance. “If you prefer to pursue opportunities elsewhere, that, of course, is your prerogative.” She lifted out a loaf of perfect bread, brown, smooth crowned, the smell alone enough to make a man give thanks. She set it on a wire rack. “I wish you good luck and Godspeed.”

That loaf of bread. His grandmother had made bread like that. And pies. Oh Lord, his grandma’s pies. He could still see her, standing in a kitchen as old and dingy as this, her hard-knuckled hands cutting the lard into the flour, giving the bowl a quarter turn, cutting straight in again until the dough formed into soft crumbs. In late spring, there’d be rhubarb. Blueberry and peach would follow in the summer; apple and squash in the fall. His mother had been warned early in her marriage to stay out of her mother-in-law’s kitchen, which suited her just fine since she had never been one much for cooking anyway. When they moved out West, whenever his father had mentioned pies, his mother had always declared she’d go to her grave without ever making a pie. She had, too. After his father had died, she’d pretty much stopped cooking altogether.

“Do you make pies?”

“This isn’t a diner, Mr. Holt.”

He smiled, the smell of the fresh bread sweet as a woman. He looked at Lorna, drawn up tight beneath her loose clothes. Even her high-and-mighty gaze couldn’t take away the pleasure of that fresh bread. He breathed in deeply.

She paused a moment before turning back to the counter. “I’ll get you clean sheets after supper…if you’re staying.”

Out the window the sun was making its way home. He smelled the bread, could feel those clean, fresh sheets. He would stay tonight. What he would do tomorrow, he’d decide, as always, when tomorrow came. “I’ll stay.” He turned to go.

“Did you mean what you said earlier?”

He looked at her over his shoulder.

“About the soil being rich, and our yields being the envy of other farmers? Or were you just saying that for the Aunties’ benefit?”

Her expression stayed neutral, but beneath the careful tone of her voice, he heard the low leavening of hope. He remembered the hurt in her eyes earlier when she talked of the gossip about her. Yes, he’d said those things then for her aunts’ benefit, but for her benefit also. Now he saw she needed to believe. And maybe, just maybe, he needed to believe a little, too. For both their benefits—hers and his—he said, “Seeds are no more than possibilities, Mrs. O’Reilly. Plant them, and anything is possible.”

He opened the door. She cleared her throat. He glanced back once more.

“Thank you.” The gratitude was so quiet and right in her voice, she turned away to the counter.

“You’re welcome,” he replied, his voice without overtones. He was still shaking his head when he reached his truck. A raise and a thank-you. Beneath that buttoned-up, tight-lipped exterior, the widow wasn’t going soft around the edges on him, was she?

“Naw,” he told the listening land. It’d take a lot more than an extra seventy-five cents an hour and a weak moment to prove the widow wasn’t wound tighter than a fisherman’s favorite reel. He gave a chuckle as he gathered his duffel bag. He left his sleeping bag stored in the narrow space behind the front seat. Tonight he’d have clean sheets, the thought alone bringing him enjoyment.

He started back across the yard. He couldn’t say what tomorrow would bring, never could, but tonight he’d have a roof over his head, smooth sheets, a belly full of warm, fresh bread…and a promise of land. He looked at the fields’ gentle curves, the trees waiting for new growth, the light coloring the sky. All was possibility.

No, he couldn’t say what tomorrow would bring but, for tonight, he was here in Hope.

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