Carolina Mist (24 page)

For the first time, she tried to picture what the new owners might be like. She prayed the new mistress would not be a pe
rt little blond thing with a turn
ed-up nose.

28

“
A
bby, for crying out loud, what did you do?” Having responded to Abby’s frantic phone call just as the supper hour concluded, Naomi now stood, hands on her hips, before the chair in which a miserable Abby sat and scratched at her burning arms and legs and everywhere the burning itch had spread like wildfire. “You were weeding in the herb bed, weren’t you?” The question bore the distinct ring of an accusation.

“And you had your face in the tansy.” Naomi leaned over and peered at Abby’s lips, which had swollen to twice their normal size. “Didn’t I tell you to leave that bed alone until I could work with you?”

Abby nodded in the affirmative. “I thought it was because you were afraid I’d weed out the wrong things,” Abby wailed, “but I found Aunt Leila’s book and used the pictures as a guide. I only pulled out the grass and the dandelions.”

“And stirred up the chiggers, by the looks of your neck and arms.”

“Chiggers?”

“The scourge of the Southern gardener,” Naomi told her. “Little red bugs—mites, actually—that hatch in the ground and wait for some unsuspecting host to come along and offer them dinner. That’s what raised those itchy welts all over you. Bu
rn
like nobody’s business, don’t they?”

“How do I get rid of them?”

“They’ll drop off when they’ve had their fill.”

“Oh, that’s encouraging. So, meanwhile, I just sit here and play lunch counter to a flock of bugs I can’t even see.”

“Go take a shower, then rub this on the welts.” Naomi handed Abby a dark blue glass jar half-filled with a pleasant
smelling ointment. “My, you do have a lot of them, don’t you?”

“Do I put this on my lips, too?”

“No, sugar. You owe your fat lips to sticking your face into the tansy. If you are one of the unfortunate ones who are sensitive to it—and, obviously, you are—it can cause a nasty contact dermatitis. I’ll have to bring you something special for that. In the meantime, run up and get out of those clothes, and take a warm shower. Dab the bites with the aloe”—she pointed to the jar—“after you have dried off. I’ll be back in half an hour, and we’ll try to work on those lips.”

The warm water felt good, but Abby emerged from the shower every bit as itchy as she was when she went in. The light gel Naomi had given her did, however,, soothe the sting. She put on a nightshirt and went downstairs to wait for Naomi’s return.

“I will never forget the one and only time I got that close to tansy,” Naomi told her as she put a tea kettle of water on the stove to boil. “My bottom lip blew up so big, I scared the bejesus out of Meredy. She thought I looked like a circus clown.”

“Why would anyone grow that stuff if it does this to you?”

“Everyone doesn’t react to it. Now, my sister can go all day with her face right in it and never have a problem. Of
course, she doesn’t get poison ivy, either, now that I think about it.”

“Well, my lips are
throbbing,
so whatever cream you brought with you, give it to me now, please,” Abby begged, “and we’ll worry about making tea later.”

“Abby, I am not making tea. I am boiling water to make an infusion.” Naomi pulled an envelope out of the pocket of her jeans and dumped some gold and green dust into a bowl.

“Oh, wait, let me guess. An herbal cure?” Abby looked horrified. “Thanks, but no thanks. I think I’ve had enough close encounters with the plant world for one day.”

“Abby, there is only one treatment I know of for the reaction you have had, and it’s in this bowl.” Naomi tapped the blue and white pottery bowl with her index finger.

“I think I need a dermatologist.”

“Abby, you need what’s in this bowl.”

“What is it?” Abby sniffed suspiciously.

“Myrrh and golden seal.”

“Of course. The miracle drugs for the next millennium.”

“Scoff now if you must.” Naomi poured boiling water into the bowl, then added cold tap water to cool it down. “But you’ll thank me in the morning.”

“If I live till morning,” Abby muttered. “If I haven’t scratched myself to shreds clawing at the chigger bites. Or ripped my bottom lip right off my face.”

“Are you finished whining, Abigail?” Naomi asked with all the patience of a mother of two small children.

“I guess.” Abby grunted. “What are you going to do with that stuff?”

“First, we make a compress.” Naomi dipped a cotton pad into the liquid.

“And then what?” Abby asked, her head tilted back as Naomi spread the warm, soothing compress on her hugely swollen bottom lip.

“Then you drink what’s left over.”

“Ugh!” Abby groaned at the thought of swallowing the watery, pea-green substance.

“Trust me.” Naomi laughed at the face Abby made. “It
works. I swear it does. You’ll feel one hundred percent better in the morning.”

A
nd actually, she did. Although Abby’s bottom lip was still swollen, the compresses she made with Naomi’s herbal powder soothed the discomfort. And the chigger bites, while still a distinct presence, had lost a lot of their sting with the application of the aloe gel.

“I told you you’d thank me in the morning.” Naomi chuckled as she placed a peace offering of still warm banana bread on Abby’s kitchen table.

“I can’t believe how much better I feel,” Abby admitted. “But I also can’t understand how—or, for that matter, why—anyone gardens around here, with those damned little bugs lurking in the leaves.”

“Chiggers lurk in the dirt, actually. Before you venture out into the garden again, cover yourself with this.” Naomi handed Abby a plastic bottle of bath oil spray. “And I mean
cover
yourself. That should take care of the chiggers. And as far as the tansy is concerned, now that you know how you react to it, keep your face out it. Once you know what to avoid, you can garden to your heart’s content and not have to worry.”

“I think my heart would be more content if I stuck to the inside jobs.”

“Nonsense. You’ll learn how to protect yourself, and you’ll go about your business.”

“I don’t know, Naomi. I’m starting to think if God had wanted me to garden, he wouldn’t have had me living in cities all these years.”

Naomi laughed. “As soon as the swelling goes down and your bottom lip returns to its normal size, you’ll forget all about it.”

“I doubt it. And how long before you think this will go away?”

“The swelling? A few days.”

“A few days?” Abby bellowed. “It’s Thursday. Alex will be here tomorrow night.”

“Sorry, sugar. Just keep using the compresses
…”

“I’ll bet if I called a dermoto
logist…”

“It would take you a week to get an appointment, and he’d charge you next week’s grocery money to tell you that you’ve had an allergic reaction, topical in nature, to avoid c
ontact with the subject plant…”

“Okay, okay,” Abby grumbled. “But I should report you for practicing medicine without a license.”

“
W
hat’s wrong with your face?” was the first thing Alex said when Abby opened the front door on Friday night.

“I had a little run-in with some unfriendly specimens in Aunt Leila’s herb garden,” she muttered, tucking her chin into her chest to obscure, as much as was possible, her reddened neck and cheeks and her still swollen lips.

Certain she resembled Quasimodo, Abby resolved to stay out of Alex’s line of vision as much as possible for the weekend—or at least until the swelling of her mouth subsided somewhat. She ate dinner with her head down and made herself an extra-early breakfast so she wouldn’t have to face him across the table. She would skip lunch, she told herself. Then, maybe by dinner, the swelling would be that much less apparent.

Abby had dragged the ladder into the alcove in the bedroom where she’d been working for the past week and set up to scrape the section of wall above and around the windows, the last bit of scraping in this particular room. Naomi had been exactly right, she thought. The ivory she had suggested would just perfectly reflect the light, and when the sun began to set
…

The
tap-tap-tap
on the window, somewhere around her midsection as she stood upon the ladder, drew her attention downward. She leaned over and found herself face to face with Alex, who, atop his own ladder, was preparing to scrap the frayed paint from the outside the window frames.

“Hi.” He grinned. “Missed you at lunch.”

“I wasn’t hungry.” She pretended to concentrate on the business of spraying water on the last bit of paper clinging to the wall.

“Hey, Ab.”

“What?” She refused to look at him.

“Nice lips.”

Abby lowered the spray bottle and shot through the screen squarely into his laughing eyes.

It had been an agonizing weekend, start to finish, she later confided to Naomi. Alex had progressed from being merely annoying on Saturday afternoon to being sarcastic on Saturday evening to being a downright pain in the butt by Sunday morning. He had seemed to latch on to the Drew thing, as Abby thought of it, and would no sooner let go than Mrs. Lawrence’s boxer would have dropped the Marshalls’ cat. For the first time since returning to Primrose, Abby had been glad to see his car pull out of the driveway to head back to Hampton.

“Alexander called from the airport while you were in the shower,” Belle said pointedly as Abby set the table for dinner on Thursday evening. “He was on his way to Atlanta. For what’s-her-name’s sister’s wedding.”

“That’s nice.” Abby shrugged, and Belle merely glared at her in return.

Abby insisted to herself that she was, in fact,
glad
he would not be there to torment her that weekend. But as the day wore on, and Thursday slid into Friday, and Friday night approached Saturday morning, she found herself dwelling more and more on the goings-on in Georgia.

Unable to sleep, Abby grudgingly got out of bed to look for a book she’d been reading earlier in the week. After climbing back into bed, she plumped the pillows up behind her and tried to snuggle into the mattress to make a cozy reading spot. Before too long, she realized, she had made herself all too cozy. Her eyes fluttered helplessly, and she nodded off to sleep. Soo
n some perversity of her subcon
scious had transported her, to her horror, smack into the wedding reception, where she, invisible, could view the lavish festivities without being seen. It was, she realized, just like being the proverbial fly on the wall.

She could see them at the wedding reception, in the grand ballroom of some Southern manse completely decorated in white for the occasion. A thin, white, ghostly mist swirled
around the scene. The tables were all adorned in white lace cloths which draped luxuriously onto the thick white carpet beneath the feet of the party-goers. Tall white centerpieces—lilies and stephanotis and roses—graced every table, and all the guests w
ere wearing white. Among white-
garbed relatives, a beaming Melissa wound her way, snaking through the crowd with a smiling Alex in tow. Her low-cut gown of white satin was buoyed by rings of hooped slips. All the relatives expressed their approval of Melissa’s catch by patting Alex on the back and stuffing large legal-sized envelopes into his white leather briefcase. Though no one spoke, it was clear from the smiling faces that the entire gathering was witnessing the silent announcement that Melissa and Alex’s wedding would be the next cause for such a gathering. The happy couple seemed to float in slow motion, and Abby could see every little crease on his face— the laugh lines around his eyes and mouth, the little valleys that ran across his forehead and deepened when he slipped into thought.

Alex turned his head slightly as if looking into the lens of a camera, gazing past Melissa, past the crowd pressing in on him and his intended, to peer with piercing, deliberate eyes into Abby’s own, mocking her with a grim satisfaction. Soon, Melissa and the others spotted her, and, with open mouths from which no sound was uttered, like watching a television movie with the sound off, they all turned to Abby, who now was, in fact, a fly on the wall, and began to swat at her with flaying arms, driving her up toward the ceiling and through the first open window.

She awoke with a start, her heart pounding and her body in a sweat of anger, the sheets tightly clenched and twisted in her fisted hands.

“Damn you
anyway, Alex,” she growled to the darkness, and she turned over fiercely, punching her pillow and wishing it was his face.

She tossed miserably for the next hour, and when it was clear that there would be no more sleep that night, she got out of bed. She opened the window overlooking the backyard and leaned out, taking the still air into her lungs. In the
moonlight, she could see the outline of the garden she would bring back to life, picturing it in June with roses winding over the fences and the flower beds alive with color. The image soothed her, as did the moment’s whiff of lavender that drifted into her room through the open window.

She rested both arms on the sill and watched as yesterday and tomorrow met in the briefest of passings before merging into the new day. The moon stood large and proud in the predawn sky, the sun still only the merest promise below the horizon. All below was still and silent as Primrose lay tucked in a snug wrap of predawn sleepiness. The thought of being here, in this house, in this town—miserable though she might be at this moment—comforted her. She would rather be miserable in Primrose, she acknowledged as she climbed back into her bed, than anywhere else on earth. There was no other place where anyone cared if she hurt or if she laughed, if she succeeded in a task or failed. There were no hands that reached to help her but those here in Primrose. Belle and Naomi cared deeply for her, and she for them. Even the house seemed to welcome her every time she returned from even the shortest errand. She drew the blankets up as if to hide from the very dearness of it all.