Bittersweet Creek (11 page)

Romy

G
oat Cheese wasn't at his house when I got there, and his wife, Adelaide, had no recollection of having ever met me. Finally, I talked her into loaning me some of the colostrum stash her husband kept in the freezer by giving her my charm bracelet as collateral.

Despite how long it felt, it was only twenty minutes before I was back in the middle of the pen trying to get the calf to take the bottle. I heard the Porsche speed up the drive, but willed myself not to look away from the task at hand. The calf skittered away, and I cursed to the point where Daddy muttered something under his breath about the student surpassing the master.

“Mr. Satterfield, I need to find Rosemary!”

“There she is,” my father deadpanned.

“Rosemary, we have to talk about this Julian character.”

The calf backed away from me again, her wobbly legs collapsing under her. She needed to eat.

“Richard, I'm busy here!” I hissed under my breath.

“What the hell?”

“Shut up or leave.” When I looked over my shoulder, Richard stared at me slack-jawed. No one spoke to a Paris that way—especially not a farm girl who'd been wallowing in manure and mud.

“But, Romy, you're bleeding.”

In the second I looked down at my bandaged arm, the stubborn little calf latched on to the bottle. Tentative at first, she ended up taking me for a ride. I could commiserate with those mama cows whose babies would butt the udder so hard the cow's back feet would come off the ground.

“Romy, did you hear me? I said—”

Daddy and I both shushed him as the calf finished the first bottle.

“Make yourself useful and hand her that second bottle,” my father murmured.

Holding the rapidly emptying bottle with my left hand, I stretched with my right for the second bottle that Richard held over the gate. I fell backward, breaking the calf's latch, but she stepped forward and eagerly took the second bottle. Now that the adrenaline had faded, my left arm ached like the devil. Still, I held the bottle steadily as the calf slurped and bucked, her tail swishing and her back feet stamping.

Finally, she let go.

I sagged into the gate as she danced around in a circle before bedding herself down with a sated moo. “We did it, Daddy.”

“No, Romy, you did it. Proud of you, girl.”

For those few moments, I forgot Richard was even there. I hadn't felt so proud since I was in sixth grade and Daddy had spent an afternoon teaching me how to catch fly balls.

“Rosemary, seriously. The blood is seeping through the bandage. I have half a mind to find your ex and beat him to a pulp for what he's done to you.”

“Julian didn't do anything to me,” I started, but then I saw Richard's swollen nose and a few traces of blood. “Good heavens, what happened to you?”

“Your
husband
punched me in the nose.”

“What?” No one could punch out a flat “what” like Hank Satterfield.

“Daddy, it's a long story—”

“When did you haul off and marry that McElroy sonuvabitch?”

“A few days before graduation. You know, maybe I ought to take care of this arm, after all.” My arm had progressed from ache to burn but I preferred it to anything else the two of them were discussing. I unchained the gate and squeezed through, forcing Hank to back his chair up to let me pass.

“Oh, you aren't changing the subject so easily. When exactly did you plan on telling me about this? And what are you doing agreeing to marry Richard here if you're already married to Julian?”

“It was a mistake, Daddy.” I shot daggers at Richard. What in the hell was he thinking? “And I would already be divorced from Julian if Richard hadn't torn up the papers.”

“You also could've not married him in the first place.” Hank snorted.

“That ship's sailed.”

Both men looked at me expectantly, so I did the only reasonable thing I could do: walk back to the house and hope they wouldn't follow me. Unfortunately, follow me they did, arguing all the way.

“Rosemary will need an annulment to marry me anyway,” Richard said.

“And why is that?”

“I can't marry a divorced woman!”

“Are you saying my daughter isn't good enough for you?”

“Mr. Satterfield, I love Rosemary with all of my heart. Since she never consummated the first marriage, getting an annulment shouldn't present that big of a problem.”

“Huh. Did she do any consummating before the marriage? That's what I'd like to know. Maybe you and I—”

I wheeled on the two of them, holding the palm of my good hand out but almost getting trampled by Daddy's wheelchair nevertheless. “What I did with Julian is none of either of your business. And it's in the past. So you can both get over yourselves. Now I'm going to take a shower. That way I don't have to listen to the two of you.”

Taking satisfaction in letting the screen door slap behind me, I grabbed some clean clothes from the stack on the dryer and locked myself in the bathroom. The faucet squealed, but the sound of running water soon drowned out everything else.

I peeled off my clothes in record time, but unwrapping the bandage took longer. Too long, since I knew only too well the limitations of the ancient hot-water heater. Beneath the gauze, my skin looked angry. The bleeding had stopped, but it seemed I was destined to have ugly scars after all.

Julian

A
fter The Fountain fiasco, I drove straight to the Co-op. I needed a new chain for my punching bag and a couple of salt blocks, but when I walked through the door I saw a whole display of steel-toed rubber work boots. Hoping Romy still wore the same size as that pair of cowboy boots I'd got her for her birthday back in high school, I grabbed a pair and put them on the counter along with everything else.

I dared the clerk to say a word about my weird purchases or my rapidly swelling face.

She didn't.

She did, however, look from the smaller boots to my hands and back up to my eyes before quirking an eyebrow.

“They're not for me.”

She shrugged as if to say “Sure they aren't” and took my money. Since my jaw was aching, I was glad to head for home.

By the time I unhitched the trailer and checked on all the cows and horses, poor Beatrice had passed indignant and gone straight to pathetic, holding her head low. She perked up with a little extra sweet feed and an apple. As I walked past the tree where the dogs had been chained, the eerie silence caused something to crawl up and down my neck. Even worse? There was Curtis leaning against the rotting back porch of the trailer, the orange tip of his cigarette glowing eerie against the long shadow of dusk.

“Well, well, Mr. High and Mighty. Seems that my dogs had to go because they had the audacity to bite your
girlfriend
.”

I kept walking. The little beagle hound nosed up beside me. I refused to pet her. If Curtis saw I loved her, he'd be sure to take her away.

“Goat Cheese said you gave
my
dogs to Pete Gates.”

And if Curtis knew Romy was my wife? My heart hammered ninety to nothing. “What else did he tell you?”

“That he was sorry to hear about my eyesight,” Curtis sneered.

Relief washed over me. He didn't know. For some reason, Goat Cheese had actually held back a piece of information.

“That why you jumped at the chance to take the farm out from under me?” Curtis continued. “Thought maybe she'd take your sorry ass back in if you had some land like those do-gooder Satterfields?”

“As I recall, it was your idea. I already do all of the work around here. Might as well get paid for it and get rid of you, too.”

Just before I slammed the door behind me, I heard chairs being thrown and, possibly, the screen door being swung off its hinges. It wasn't wise provoking Curtis like that, but the way he said “girlfriend” made me want to throttle him. Instead, I hoisted up my punching bag with a new chain and strapped on my gloves.

I threw my punches, slowly at first but quickly picking up speed.

But I was supposed to be done with her. Wanting to kiss her outside The Fountain? That was just something you felt for an old flame.

I pounded away at the bag, dust motes flying through the air and catching the last rays of evening sun. Sweat trickled down the side of my face and still I punched. The worst part was that I'd probably just thrown away any hope I had of becoming Curtis's power of attorney.

No. He couldn't. He wouldn't. He couldn't see for shit and no amount of meanness could change that.

I punched and punched until I could hardly catch my breath. If Curtis was bad, Uncle Charlie was worse.

They can all go to hell,
I thought as I leaned against the punching bag.

It was stupid for me to feel so bad about something that was so clearly Curtis's fault, but I did. I took off my gloves and unwound the tape. I couldn't fix things, but I could make them better. Grabbing the boots, I started walking up the road, my little beagle bounding after me. She sniffed her way up the road ahead of me, her tail straight up at attention.

“We are on a stealth mission here,” I scolded her when she bayed at some invisible creature down in the dip between our two farms. She whined at me like she understood and didn't say another word as we walked up the driveway.

I tiptoed onto the Satterfields' porch. Looking through the window, I saw Romy take dishes off the table then disappear out of my line of sight. I laid down my gift and rang the doorbell before hightailing it off the porch.

Romy

W
hen I stepped out of the bathroom, the smell of fried country ham bowled me over. My stomach growled a reminder I'd somehow managed to skip lunch. For an irrational second I thought I'd walk into the kitchen and find my own mother, wearing the same pink checked apron she'd helped me sew for 4-H. She'd draw me into a hug and promise me she wouldn't cook so many fried foods . . . next time.

Instead I saw Richard leaning awkwardly against the upright freezer that sat beside the door that led to the kitchen. He held a white freezer-paper-covered bag of purple hull peas to his left eye. I doubted the tightly packed, home-frozen peas were as good at bruise prevention as the floppy store-bought bags.

“It says peas on here,” he said with a shrug.

I put my stuff on the cane-bottom chair by the door. “Oh, Richard.”

He looked so out of place, so out of his element holding that package of peas up to his face while standing on the porch my granddaddy had added.

“I'm sorry about this afternoon,” he said. “This has all been such a mess. Things were so much simpler back home.”

Home for him was Nashville. Home was a Starbucks and a Target on every corner, one traffic light after another, and a round of golf at the Brentwood Country Club. Things
had
been simpler there. My alarm told me when to get up and get ready for school. I constructed my lesson plans to tell me what to do each minute of each class period. We shared an online calendar, and he sent me reminders about date nights, fund-raisers, and galas.

Oh, the places we went without a care in the world! Wine tastings, concerts, horseback riding, antique shopping—you name it. We had brunch each Sunday after early Mass, then he would let me work the crossword puzzle in the Sunday paper. But then he would leave, and I would stay up all night grading papers and constructing new lesson plans that would fill up each second of class and plan for any contingency like the knife fights that sometimes forced us into lockdown.

And suddenly I was tired, so tired of that ceaseless, scripted activity.

“This isn't working, is it?” He switched the bag of peas from one side to the other.

I sighed. “I don't think so. I don't know.”

“For what it's worth, I'm sorry about the cow thing.”

“I'm sorry I yelled at you,” I said. “You didn't know.”

He reached out to caress my cheek. “But I should've trusted you. This is your world, not mine.”

My world.
This wasn't my world. Not anymore. I'd snagged myself on the electric fence. Conversations with people I'd known all my life were stilted. I'd had the audacity to leave, and they eyed me warily.

But Nashville wasn't my world, either. Richard's private-school friends tittered behind my back. The other teachers at my school—even the students—eyed me suspiciously, as if wondering what the white girl was doing working at a fenced-in school with metal detectors. Sure, I had loans that would be reduced if I taught in an at-risk school, but I wanted more than anything to make a difference, to help kids love literature as much as I did.

I had no world.

No, I was stuck between two worlds. My commitment to education was often frowned upon in Ellery, but my humble roots meant most people in Richard's social circles couldn't quite accept me. I was the ultimate oxymoron: an educated hick.

“Hello? Earth to Romy? I was going to stay until your birthday, but I'm leaving. I've made things worse.”

“No, you didn't. I should've told you everything from the start.”

“Well, on that much we can agree.” He put the bag back in the freezer, then advanced to kiss me. Part of me wanted to run. Another part of me wanted to see if it felt any different from how it had before.

He didn't brush my lips first like he sometimes did. Instead he pulled me tight and crushed his lips against mine, his tongue forcing its way in like a battering ram. I whimpered when he crushed my injured arm against me. He broke off the kiss. “I love you. You know that, right?”

“I love you, too,” I echoed automatically, but I was marveling at how little I felt. Mainly annoyed that he'd kissed me so possessively without asking. Of course, wasn't that how it was supposed to be with husbands and wives? Were husbands supposed to ask before passionately kissing their wives?

“Put your ring back on,” he said as he stepped outside. “We'll work this all out once the craziness subsides.”

“Drive safely,” I said.

He nodded and let the door close softly behind him.

When I turned back to the kitchen, I saw Daddy through the wavy panes of that ancient door. He awkwardly turned in his wheelchair to reach into the oven for a pan of biscuits. He leaned up and to his right but bobbled the pan at a dangerous angle, causing me to gasp. I shoved the door open to give him a hand.

“Daddy, I didn't know you could cook,” I said as I rummaged for a pot holder to take the biscuits from him.

“Didn't think I was starving, did you?”

“But you never cooked before.”

His eyes shifted to the corner of the kitchen as though learning to cook was akin to keeping books for a mafioso. “Took some lessons. Where'd Richard go?”

“He went back to Nashville.”

Daddy nodded and I put everything on the table: country ham, biscuits, fried potatoes, green beans, fried okra, sliced tomatoes, and . . . red-eye gravy? “Where'd you learn to make that? Even Mom couldn't make that.”

“Rosemary, you could write a book with all the things you don't know about me.”

That was my cue to sit down and start eating.

“Proud of you,” he said after a while. “You did your best to get Maggie to take her calf.”

I blushed. Compliments from Hank Satterfield were few and far between—and never exaggerated. “Thanks, Daddy.”

“And to think I thought you were all citified.”

I opened my mouth to make a smart-aleck comment, but I shut it. True, I was sore and tired, but there was a genuine satisfaction from working the garden and especially from taking care of the calf. I might be going back to Nashville in less than six weeks, but my life there seemed far away. This house, my home, suddenly seemed far cozier than my apartment. I thought of Richard's condo with its sleek lines and modern furniture of metal and glass—in my mind I seemed as out of place there as he'd seemed leaning against my granny's antique freezer.

Daddy leaned forward, and I wanted to tell him what he so desperately wanted to hear, but I couldn't. After all, I was engaged to Richard but married to Julian. And Julian was a fine reason for me to
never
make my home here again.

Finally, Hank lowered his eyes and sopped his biscuit in gravy. “Genie must've called four times today.”

I closed my eyes. No doubt she wanted to finish our discussion from earlier in the week. “I'll call her after supper.”

Daddy nodded, his jowl jiggling.

We finished supper in silence, then turned to the one routine that had held us together after Mom died. I washed the dishes. He dried. Even right after she died when people brought us enough desserts and casseroles to feed the entire Hun army, I washed and he dried, sometimes emptying containers prematurely so we could keep washing and drying.

We hadn't been able to find the words back then because she'd been the glue that held us together, the person who bridged the gap between the person he was and the person she wanted me to become. Without her, we were only this routine minus the person who had cooked our meal then sat at the table playfully heckling our efforts to clean up her mess.

That last mess she left us was one we hadn't been able to clean up yet.

I started to put the stack of plates in the cabinet, then remembered Daddy couldn't reach them there and set them on the counter instead. He placed his old, rough hand on top of mine. “I still miss her, too, you know.”

I nodded, but turned before he could see the tears threatening to spill from my eyes. I squeezed out the dishrag to wipe down the table. After supper would be a great time to tell Genie I couldn't help her out after all. I could shift my duties to just taking care of Daddy, maybe picking and canning the garden yield so nothing went to waste. There had to be farm boys—other than Julian—who could be paid to put up hay for the cows.

The doorbell rang as I leaned over to wipe the table. I tossed the rag down.

When I got to the door, no one was there, but on the mat was a brand-new pair of steel-toed rubber boots in just my size.