Blue Willow (14 page)

When she got her mother settled in front of the bathroom mirror, Mama waved her away. “Go on downstairs and make sure your daddy isn’t scramblin’ eggs with his hook. I’ve got to do things for myself, so I won’t get weaker.”

Lily read the stubbornness in her face and left her reluctantly. Down in the kitchen, her father, already dressed for work, held a glass bowl filled with eggs in one hand. He was stirring the eggs with his hook. Lily kissed his cheek and took the bowl away from him. “You’ll rust,” she teased gruffly. She wiped his hook with a dish towel.

He tried to smile, but his face was haggard. He went to the big table in the room’s center and sat down, staring into space over a mug of coffee. Lily busied herself at the stove, while worry crawled into her stomach and chased her appetite away. “I’m gettin’ a job,” she told him. “Aunt Maude says the Friedmans will hire me at their greenhouse after school’s out for the summer.”

“You’re only fourteen,” Daddy said.

“That’s why I have to have your permission.” She went to him, her hands trembling, and sat down across the table. “Please. You can drop me off on your way to work each morning and pick me up on your way home. Aunt Maude and I’ve got it all figured out. And it’s five dollars an hour, Daddy. Tax-free. They’ll pay me in cash, because Mr. Friedman doesn’t want me on his books.”

“That’s not right, keeping money you ought to pay the government.”

“Daddy, the government wastes more money than we’ll
ever see in our whole lives. It’s not fair. This family needs every penny We don’t waste it.”

“You’ve been listening to Maude and the sisters talk politics too much.” He sighed. “I don’t want you working the way your mother and I had to when we were your age. Besides, you’re set to study art and music at the community center this summer.”

“Aunt Maude’ll get my registration fee back for me. I’ll take the classes next summer.” She leaned forward, her hands clenched on the table. “I want to help out around here. This is my home too.” She hesitated, cast a furtive glance toward the door to the hall, listening for Mama’s steps on the stairs, then whispered, “It’s gonna take a lot longer for Mama’s back to heal than she thinks. I heard you tellin’ Aunt Maude. And I heard you say you’ve got to take out a loan to pay the doctor’s bills. There’s no way we can pay all those bills and the loan, too, unless I get a job.”

Her father’s lined, leathery face stiffened with pride, but there was resignation in his eyes. Lily continued quickly, her tone passionate. “Nothing’s more important than keeping this place. Someday it’ll belong to me, and if I ever have kids, I want ’em to grow up here. And I’m no good at waitin’ for miracles, Daddy.”

He tried to smile, but the little lines around his eyes made it look painful. “I remember when you daydreamed that Artemas Colebrook would come back and make you a princess.”

She blushed but raised her head proudly. “Oh, that was kid stuff. Women aren’t meant to wait around for some man to rescue them. That’s a myth of the male-dominated social structure.”

“You’ve been reading Little Sis’s books on women’s lib again.”

“It’s all true, what those books say.” She was silent, thinking wistfully of the letters Artemas still sent, and the ones she wrote back. They were a cherished part of her life, but only a dummy would sit around fantasizing about a boy she’d last seen when she was six. “He’s off in college,” she said slowly. “I expect he’s got about a dozen
girlfriends.” She dropped her gaze to the old wooden table and scrubbed her fingertips over imaginary stains, as if too busy with important work to care about Artemas. “I’m going to college too. I want a good job and lots of money. Something I can do outdoors, working with plants. I think I’ll start my own business.” She raised her eyes and met her father’s somber, affectionate gaze. “If there’s any rescuing to be done around here, III do it.”

He exhaled, then nodded. “I’ve raised me a tough little bird.”

She went to him and hugged his neck. “A big bird, Daddy, a big one.”

Uncle Charles interred Grandmother in a marble mausoleum in the private Colebrook Cemetery, surrounded by high, thick walls to keep out the less fortunate dead people. Artemas came back to the mausoleum afterward, alone, and said his good-bye. His father’s and mother’s names loomed in the dim light near Grandmother’s crypt.

Mother, drunk, had driven her car into a tree the year before. The young man with her had died also. His wife told everyone who would listen that Mother had killed him in a jealous rage.

James and the others copied Artemas’s relentless determination to move ahead. He wanted them to see, through everything he did and said, that shame could be erased by hard work and rigid scruples. He drilled it into them—discipline, goals, integrity, honesty. He’d graduated with honors and got an engineering degree; he expected each of them to be just as dedicated.

James was a junior majoring in business, achieving the Dean’s List every semester. His love for sports had come to a grim crossroads when he’d entered college. He loved baseball and played on the collegiate team, and Artemas knew he dreamed of reaching the pros. But Artemas told him to consider his options—he might never be good enough, and a baseball player was of no use to the family business. James brooded and suffered, then quietly devoted himself to academics.

Cass had graduated from Evertide with honors and had entered college this year, majoring in art. Her weight had dropped dramatically, and she’d become compulsive about dieting. Michael, Elizabeth, and Julia were straight-A students. All knew that their futures were with Artemas and Colebrook China, and they had a mission.

He wrote to Lily about his grandmother’s death. There had always been two constants in his life—his family and the simple little notes that slipped back and forth through the miles and the memories between him and a girl he hadn’t seen in nine years. He kept his strange hobby a secret, feeling odd and protective that someone his age, with his dark, serious nature, should enjoy writing to a child. He couldn’t picture her as anything else, and she’d never sent a photograph of herself.

He received a neat little box from her, containing a check for twenty-five dollars.
Please donate this to some charity your grandmother loved. Mama and Daddy say she was noble and kind. I cleared a spot in the old gardens behind the estate house and planted a willow there, in her honor
. Lily’s handwriting was sweeping and confident, not a child’s anymore.

Uncle Charles had always said he would put Blue Willow up for sale the day it passed into his hands. When Grandmother’s carefully hidden will was produced by her new lawyers, the ones she’d hired after Father’s death, Uncle Charles vowed to fight the will in court.

Grandmother had left both the old Georgia estate and her controlling interest in Colebrook China to Artemas.

“You won’t fight it,” Artemas told him calmly. “And when I have the money to buy you out, you’ll very quietly sell me the remaining stock.” Artemas handed him a packet containing photographs of his wife with two naked, drunken female friends from her bridge club. When Grandmother’s detective had shown her and Artemas the photographs, Grandmother had said, with all the aplomb of an elderly Ziegfeld Girl who’d seen a bit of everything during her life, “I suppose they’re practicing a new type of trump trick.”

Standing triumphantly in the lawyers’ offices in a rumpled black suit with threadbare elbows, Artemas said to his apoplectic uncle with a smile of contempt, “
I own this family’s future, and if you try to interfere, I’ll ruin you.
”

He took his brothers and sisters from Uncle Charles’s control and moved everyone into an old brownstone not far from the company’s run-down offices in New York. James and Cass would live at home to help with the younger ones and save money.

When he went over the company’s assets with Tamberlaine and LaMieux, he saw that it could be kept from bankruptcy only by hoarding every dollar and sacrificing everything else in his life—his personal time, except for parenting his younger siblings, would be owned by the company for years to come.

There would be no glamour, no luxuries, no playing at corporate lifestyles. He was the head of a failing business that clung to respectability with famous but outmoded china designs that had little appeal for younger customers. There was a whole world of affluent young buyers eager for innovative designs, but Uncle Charles had never bothered to cultivate them.

Management was disorganized, inefficient, and apathetic. The handful of china factories scattered from New York to the Carolinas were dilapidated, the employees poorly paid and unmotivated. Salvaging and rebuilding the company would take more than his good intentions and slavish hard work. Somewhere along the way, he’d have to sacrifice more. What that might be, he couldn’t tell. But he knew he’d do it.

Artemas wrote to Lily about his takeover of Blue Willow and the family business. She wrote back,
Good for you. This is what you were meant to do. But now that you’re the head pooh-bah, don’t get cocky and forget us. I’ll have to come after you with some rotten apples if you do
.

There would always be Lily. Now that he was in charge of his life—such as it was—he had to find a way to see her again.

•     •     •

Lily stuck another tiny begonia in a plastic pot and worried about the algebra test tomorrow, the one for which she’d barely studied. She glanced wearily down the rows of bedding plants on long wooden tables. Her shoulders ached from potting begonias. Summer had stretched into fall. December sunshine slipped through the greenhouse’s long expanse and beckoned to her hopelessly—her weekday afternoons and every weekend belonged to Friedman’s Nursery and Greenhouses.

Mama’s back would never be strong enough for her to go back to work at the plant. They accepted that now. She couldn’t even stand up at home for long stretches without her back aching, so she spent her time making quilts to sell at the tourist shops.

Quilts didn’t pay the bills.

Lily tried not to think about the straight-A average slipping downward or what the school counselor had said about college scholarships going only to the best students. She dug her fingers into the potting soil and sighed.

“Hello, gorgeous,” Andy Holcomb said, as he passed her with a sack of fertilizer on one shoulder. “Are you just about done?”

“Yep.” She gave him a half-smile and succumbed to a rush of awkward pleasure. Big, blond Andy Holcomb was the son of a local minister. He was leaving for college after Christmas. He wore nice khaki trousers and tight pullover sweaters, usually with a thick gold cross hanging over his collar on a gold chain, and the cross gleamed almost as much as his mouthful of braces. The Friedmans went home at dark most nights, leaving Andy and Lily to close up. Mama and Daddy thought the world of him. They let him give her a ride home in his Cámaro sometimes, after work.

When she finished, she washed her hands at a spigot, went into the shop attached to the main greenhouse, and pulled Artemas’s cadet jacket over her sweater and jeans. She’d carefully stored the insignia in the Colebrook teapot, and had worn the jacket so much that it had little bare spots at the elbows. She’d grown into the jacket enough
that her fingertips stuck out of the sleeves instead of being swallowed by miles of extra cuff.

She got her baggy cloth tote stuffed with paperbacks from behind the counter and waited for Andy He turned out the lights, donned a leather aviator jacket, and locked the front door behind them. The night was clear and crisp, and the buildings were outlined by a white half-moon above the rim of the mountains. The lights from town stretched out on the black ridge in the distance, and the road in front of the greenhouses was a soft gray stripe.

“Pretty night,” Andy commented as they walked to his car. “I’ll miss driving you home at night.”

Overcome with this sudden admission of interest, Lily mumbled something about missing his company at work. She settled in the low-slung passenger seat and sat in fluttery silence as he drove. They crossed through town, where the sidewalks were already empty and the shop windows dark except for a few small restaurants, then into the countryside again.

When they turned off on Blue Willow Road, Lily distracted her churning thoughts by studying the forlorn clocktower standing in a field at the intersection. It was the Colebrooks’ estate clocktower, and it looked like a Gothic pillar in the moonlight. The clock face was broken, and the hands stood at 2:15. Daddy could remember when its bells had rung every hour, keeping the Colebrooks’ time. The estate began there.

They crossed the Toqua River over an old steel bridge. Inky forest closed in on both sides of the narrow road, hemmed in on one side by a crumbling wall of gray stone interspersed with iron fence.

They passed the looming main gates at the estate, sagging in the middle, where their matching wrought-iron willows met, locked by a chain as thick as her wrist. Beside the gate was the gatekeeper’s house, a ghostly stone cottage with broken windows. The remnants of rotten shutters hung from them. The kids at school thought the gatehouse and the massive gate beside it looked like the entrance to a haunted world, but Lily loved them.

Farther down the road the estate wall parted. A big mailbox on a stub of black railroad tie marked the MacKenzie driveway. Andy pulled into the graveled road. The forest closed in even more. He stopped the car and cut the engine but left the radio playing on a rock station. Lily squinted at him in the faint green light from the dash.

“I wish you were older,” Andy said, leaning toward her. “Because you’re too pretty to just be fifteen.”

Lily’s heart jerked in an excited little rhythm. “I think you’ve been eating fertilizer.”

He laughed softly. “In a few years maybe I’ll ask you out on a date. Have you ever been out on a date?”

“Noooo. But I’ve been out in groups after the football games.”

“I mean a real date. Would you like that?”

Lily considered the enormous shock of being asked this question by an older boy, a respected and good-looking boy, one who was almost as tall as she was. “Sure.”