The Memory of Lemon (4 page)

“That's a ghost cat, a panther, some call it,” the herb woman murmured. “They hunt at dark. I had one get up on the roof of my cabin when my Sarah was in her cradle, like to scared me to death.”

There was a rustling in the underbrush: a slither and then a splash into the water.

Sean stood to look out over the dark water. He wished he had a rifle.

The herb woman reached up and touched his hand with something smooth and cold. As he turned toward her in the shadowy light, he saw the small stoneware jug she offered.

“Courage in a bottle,” she said.

He took a swig and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Whiskey with a little spice and something sour. He felt the fiery liquid go down his gullet and then he tasted something familiar.

Suddenly, he felt hollowed out and yet weighed down, as he hadn't let himself feel in a long time. He was back in the kitchen at Ballykinsale, sitting in front of the fire, stunned to learn that both his mam and his pa were dead. Cook had given him hot, sweet tea with something else in it, just like this—fiery and sour.

He felt the presence of the missus, with her kind gray eyes and her hand on his shoulder, and knew he would never see her again, either.

He took another swig and then stumbled as some big creature passed under the flatboat. He felt a steadying hand at his side.

“Sit here with me,” the herb woman said, pulling him back into the present.

He sank down heavily beside her, almost spilling the precious elixir that had brought his old life back so vividly. Would he ever feel at home again?

How much farther did he have to go to find that place?

OCTOBER 1820

QUEEN CITY, OHIO

Under a clear October sky, the woods bordering this river town and the hills on the Kentucky side had burst into color. Maple trees flamed orange, the dogwoods deepened into a reddish purple, and the redbuds glowed a golden yellow. Only the sycamores, with their ghostly peeling bark, did not put on an autumn display. Their leaves simply dried up and fell.

John James would not notice the trees, as his wife, Lucy, knew. He was looking for birds. With any luck, a blue heron, a bald eagle, or a passenger pigeon. He had taken the boys, Gifford and Woodhouse, with him. And when they returned at dusk, they would all be together again. Lucy treasured this time when they all lived under the same roof because she knew it would end soon. It always did.

Lucy, small and dark haired with a ramrod posture, saw them in her mind's eye making their way along the marshy areas of the Mill Creek. Back in Pennsylvania, when she and John James were courting, she would have gone with him, returning later to paint a watercolor in her sketchbook or play an arpeggio on her pianoforte, the descending notes like falling leaves.

But now there was no sketchbook and no time to paint. There was no pianoforte. There was only this bare little house and the arts of a gentlewoman's life that she now taught to private school students. For pay, not pleasure.

The only piece of furniture she did not miss from their old
life was the painted pine cradle that had rocked their two baby girls, buried only a year or so apart in little graves down the river in western Kentucky.

Lucy looked out the window onto the dusty street. It did not help to ruminate on life's misfortunes, she thought, but she had no one to talk to but herself.

She loved her husband. She
loved
him. He was handsome, affectionate, intelligent, and good to her and the boys. But it was difficult, sometimes, to live with him, just as it was once difficult to understand his French-accented English with Quaker “thee” and “thou” added for good measure. That was how he had learned English when he recovered slowly from yellow fever years before, and that was how he spoke it still. Lucy had always found it charming, but most people didn't know what to make of him, even here in this frontier town, where one would meet every kind of vagabond in buckskin clothes and coonskin cap.

John James Audubon was a born dreamer. Lucy had to be the practical one.

His $125 monthly salary at the new Western Museum, promised by Daniel Drake, had not materialized, nor was it likely to. The financial panic that had doomed them in Kentucky now surged like a tidal wave upriver to Ohio. Daniel Drake was about to lose his fine house, his garden, and his carriage. After a few weeks of exacting taxidermy and painting realistic backdrops for wildlife exhibits planned for the new museum, John James had wisely packed up and brought his work home.

With no other means of support, he turned again to portraiture, charging five dollars for each work, as he had in Louisville. He limned General and Mrs. William Lytle in three-quarter
profile and was paid before they, too, became victims of the crash. When portraiture was scant, he gave drawing and painting lessons at Miss Deed's Seminary for Young Ladies. But this could not go on.

If Lucy's stepmother walked through the front door of the tiny house, she would know Lucy for a fool, and it could only be a matter of time before the Audubons moved back east to be a millstone around the family's neck at the Bakewells' farm, Fatland Ford.

In the front parlor, the room with the best light, a tableau sat temporarily forgotten on the rough wooden table. The dead Carolina parroquets, with their glittery green plumage, vivid yellow neck and breast, and brilliant orange on either side of the beak, were strung like puppets with wire to the dowel rods attached to a wooden base that her husband used to simulate their natural, living postures. Clumps of straw-colored cocklebur, the soil still damp at the weedy roots, made the scene ever more lifelike. The little burs that the parroquets loved to eat stuck to everything in the room and were the bane of farmers and sheep and horses—and women who tried to keep a clean house. But Lucy knew better than to attempt tidying up. Her husband could change his mind about the day's outing, come back inspired, and work by candlelight long into the night, drawing and painting.

The charcoal sketch of the parroquets, on paper they couldn't afford, lay crumpled in a corner of the room. It was only good for sketching, not nearly fine enough for John James to wet his brush for watercolor or waste confident smudges of oil pastel crayon.
I am slowly desponding,
he kept telling her.

She was glad he had taken his gun with him that day. She
hoped he would find refuge in the woods. And perhaps he would bring back a wild turkey or plump little quail that she could wrap with fatback and roast on the coals.

Restless, she put on her bonnet and gathered her market basket. She had learned to cook on their hearth without the help of a servant, but baking bread was still a mystery. There was no point in wasting good flour and the yeast from the brewery when she could just buy a large loaf for a comparable price.

In the open-air market a few blocks away, Lucy paid the baker and put the loaf in her basket.

“Missus.”

Lucy walked away, but the voice got louder. “Missus.”

Lucy turned toward the next stall and the older woman in a calico dress and linen apron, with a straw bonnet tied under her chin. She was sitting on a three-legged stool behind a table filled with bunches of herbs, bottles of potions, and liniments.

“Yes?”

“I have something for you.”

Lucy frowned. Was this some kind of trick?

“I do not think I've had the pleasure of your acquaintance, ma'am.”

“Abigail Newcomb, at your service.” She did a sort of curtsy, as a workingwoman was still expected to do to a woman of a class above. Abigail also extended her work-worn hand, a gardener's hand, to Lucy.

Lucy sensed a feminine strength that passed from the older woman's hand to her young one, and she held on a second or two longer than she intended.

“I come up from Augusta on the flatboat every fortnight or so,” said Abigail, matter-of-factly. “Visit my daughter, Sarah, and grandbaby, Little Abigail, and do a little business here.” She gestured at the table. “I've seen you and your boys. And your husband so keen on the birds. I've been wanting to give you this.”

The herb woman handed Lucy a thick bundle of short, slender sticks tied together with a strip of homespun, just big enough to fit into a tankard.

“Spicebush,” the woman explained. “You brew a tea with a few sticks. Let them steep in boiled water. Tastes like allspice, if you know it. Helps you remember the ones who are gone, but you don't feel the melancholy.”

Lucy looked at her sharply. How did she know?

“I bring Sean, here, the dried spicebush leaves. Sean misses his old life in Ireland, and he says that the sour tea tastes like what the cook used to make for him.” The herb woman pointed to a young man dressed improbably in a fine linen shirt and buckskin trousers, loading a cart with thick coils of hemp rope.

“He used to have fancier clothes when he arrived in New York, Sean told me,” recounted Abigail. “The clothes of a gentleman. But the bottle green coat didn't hold up well tramping through the woods.”

“The fine muslin dress from my courting days fared much the same,” Lucy said.

“He has a letter of introduction, does Sean O'Neil,” Abigail continued. “He's a gardener by trade, but not much call for that here, where the big woods are still so close. A good worker, should you ever need someone to tote and fetch. Most days, you
can find 'im here, somewhere in the market. I hope he settles,” she said, and they both gazed in his direction.

Lucy thanked the herb woman and put the bundle of sticks in her market basket. She was saying good-bye when a man hurried past carrying two withy cages, woven from willow branches. One cage held redbirds. The other, glittering green parroquets.

“I can't abide a free thing caged,” the herb woman said with a sigh.

Lucy's own heart sank at the sight. And then she knew.

She would have to let him go. She would help him pack his gun and tackle, his violin and flute, his much-loved copy of La Fontaine's
Fables
. Sheets of art paper, two feet wide and three feet long, rolled into a long tin case. His watercolors, brushes, chalks, and pencils. His wire for mounting specimens. His portfolios. The ledger with the marbled blue endpapers he had just bought at W. Pounsford, the bookbinder, three doors north of the Presbyterian church. Paper for letter writing.

John James Audubon would travel down the Ohio, then the Mississippi on a cargo flatboat, drawing birds from here to New Orleans. In seven months, he promised, he would have his collection of American birds.

And they would be together again.

But not here.

“Mrs. Newcomb.” Lucy turned and touched her arm. “You have been very kind to me. In return, my husband could render your likeness before he goes downriver. He's very good with sketching and then coloring with chalk pastels. What they call a portrait, but on paper.”

Lucy knew it was an odd offer, and Abigail Newcomb looked
appropriately puzzled. Only the rich had pictures of themselves hanging on a wall.

“If not of you, maybe your daughter and her baby?”

Abigail's eyes lit up. “Then I can see them whenever I want. Like they were with
me.”

Neely

I peered out of Rainbow Cake's front window on Saturday morning. The empty sidewalks reflected the bleak day. Where were the brides, their mothers, their friends? Anyone?

Maybe the cold drizzle and overcast skies had kept everyone snug in their beds.

In the empty bakery, I penned the last lines to a short letter to my dad. Although I was of two minds about renewing our relationship, I'd decided to risk it. Who knew how long he'd stay in Missouri before he moved on again? I had to take the chance while I could.

I wrote in longhand on printer paper:

My problem might seem a little silly—the bride who wants a hillbilly wedding and her snobby mother who is hiding
something. But what really bothers me is that I'm not getting any kind of a flavor feedback from them. Maybe I just need to be patient.

Did that ever happen to you when it was something important?

Write back when you get the chance, and hope everything is going better for you, Dad.

Claire

I had wanted to sign off
Love, Claire,
but I just couldn't. I folded the letter and put it in the envelope. Maybe Dad would have some advice. Maybe not. Maybe he'd move on and never even get this letter. Dear old Dad.

I wondered if I should include anything else. A photo? A business card? A brochure from the bakery? Yes, the brochure. Just information, not anything too personal. If I enclosed a photo, he might send one back of him. And I wasn't ready for that.

I placed the letter on top of the bills I was paying. A lot of bakery supply vendors still believed in paper invoices, doing their best to keep the post office in business.

This morning, when I checked my business checking account online, before the bakery opened, I noticed the balance was teetering on the brink of going to red. Our retail orders were down this week, although our wedding orders were up.

Now I just had to make sure the weddings were successful. No easy feat, especially ones like the pie wedding. I refused to think about that until our trip to Augusta the following day. The joys of the self-employed. Always something.

Justin, our barista, was wiping down the counter around the La Marzocco coffee machine for the umpteenth time, so I put him to work. It was a measure of how busy we weren't that he had the time to make an intricate spiderweb pattern in the milky foam of my latte. I took a sip, then looked at the pattern again. I grimaced. What I now saw was a shaky dollar sign.

That—and the caffeine—filled me with nervous energy. If I had to pay Luke back for the monies I'd used to get this business started, could I really make it? Could I even get a bank loan? Could I survive with all that debt to carry? When I compared sales figures for February and March, it had looked like March formed a canyon compared to February's peak. April was a plateau so far. What I needed was a mountain range. And a bunch of hungry shoppers.

I looked around the almost-empty bakery for something to do. The glass cases displayed spring-themed sugar cookies. Surely the wise souls of the Queen City area could brave a few raindrops for a really great sugar cookie. We also had breakfast cupcakes—though Maggie insisted on calling them muffins—of every flavor, as well as to-die-for cinnamon rolls.
C'mon, people.

At the far end of the bakery, our canvas curtain heralded April's lime and coconut theme. Little bags of coconut meringue polka dots with lime buttercream filling were there for the taking. I was proud of our little cakes shaped like a cracked-open coconut—white coconut cake interior with a dark chocolate “shell,” complete with a lime cookie straw inserted in the center for imaginary sipping. Lime bars with a coconut crust and lime curd filling sat on a snowy white cake stand. If they all didn't go that day, I'd be packing them up to deliver to the nuns and caregivers at Mount Saint Mary's.

All that work
 . . .

Jett Patterson, a local high school student, would soon arrive to begin sculpting delicate sugar cake decorations for the Martin/Obermayer wedding the next weekend. Jett's artistic talent was as weighty and emphatic as the heavy black makeup she applied to her lips and eyelids.

Maggie kept the books and waited on customers. Norb did most of the baking. Suddenly, I felt useless. While a smattering of people sipped their beverages and ate their pastries, I started to pace, latte in hand.

Maggie gestured me to come back behind the counter.

“Why don't you catch the first part of the regatta? It would give you something to do.”

“Am I that obvious?”

She gave me a look.

“Why don't
you
take some time off? I'm sure you've got things to do on a Saturday.”

“The other grandparents are keeping Emily this weekend. I don't have any money to shop. The weather is crappy. And the thought of a whole day spent with my mother watching reruns of old sitcoms, well . . .”

“All right, all right. I'll have my phone with me if we suddenly get busy.”

I ran next door to change into my running shoes, added a sweater, arranged my hair into a topknot, and pulled on the hood of my bright yellow rain slicker. I looked like a unicorn on traffic duty. I pulled off the hood and redid my hair into a low ponytail.

It wasn't that far to where the regatta was gathering at Vorhees
Landing, but I decided to drive in case I had to get back to the bakery fast.

The canoes and kayaks were angled on the sloping east bank of the creek, ready for push-off. Under a makeshift tent, volunteers passed out water bottles and name tags. Dave Pearce, his angelic blond curls tamed by an old baseball hat, was the organizer. Even in grade school, he was always bringing fossils and crayfish he had found in the creek for show-and-tell. He now headed the tri-state environmental board overseeing the water quality of the rivers and creeks that flowed from southern Indiana and Ohio, into the Ohio River, and across into northern Kentucky.

The next person I recognized was Lydia. She was holding hands with a tall, earnest-looking guy wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a puffy jacket. The groom? I made it a point never to assume, so I ventured carefully as I approached them. “Good to see you again, Lydia. Have you done this regatta before? It's my first time to see it.”

“Mrs. Davis—”

“Oh, please call me Neely.”

“Neely, this is my fiancé, Christopher.” I shook his hand.

“I'm working on the desserts for your wedding,” I explained.

“I'm not much into sweets,” Christopher admitted, “but whatever Lydia wants is fine with me.”

“You mean whatever my mother wants,” Lydia said, darkly.

“We'll find a way to make everyone happy,” I said. “So how did you get involved in the regatta?” I asked, desperate to change the subject.

“Lydia and I take our canoe and do river cleanup days almost
every weekend in the spring and fall. When Lydia is committed to something, she gives it her all,” he said, squeezing her hand.

Lydia's demeanor, which I had first taken to be steely and stubborn, now took on a different slant. She was an activist. She must feel a deep connection to our little part of the world, and she was trying to make it better. I admired that about her.

“Five minutes, ladies and gentlemen,” commanded a familiar voice from a bullhorn.

I said my good-byes to Lydia and Christopher and walked over to Ben and Gavin, who were sipping coffee. “So you two really are doing this.”

“Neels.” Gavin gave me a one-handed hug.

“Come here, you,” Ben said as I reached up to put my arms around his neck. He held me a little longer than was strictly friendly, but Gavin didn't mind, and I certainly didn't.

“I'm so glad to see you,” I whispered in Ben's ear and gave his arm a squeeze.

“And I'll see you again tonight,” he whispered back. “Dinner. Pick you up at seven.” His warm gaze made me feel lighter, more buoyant, as if slow bakery traffic on a rainy Saturday was no big deal. There were more important things in life. I wanted to bottle this feeling. But, happy or not, I hadn't yet filed for divorce from my high-profile husband, which meant that my budding romance with Ben needed to remain under wraps for now—especially at events like this one where we were surrounded by several dozen nosy Facebook and Instagram friends.

Like it or not, I could see the wisdom in my attorney's advice. Rich men—like Luke—were used to getting their way. When they didn't want a divorce, they could make life
really
unpleasant for
the women who wanted to leave them. Like me. Especially
unfaithful
wives who made their public-image-conscious husbands look weak or inadequate in the bedroom.

I wasn't about to make that mistake. Besides, I hadn't been unfaithful. Yet.

“Hey, I saw her first.” Gavin pretended to strong-arm Ben and grabbed for me. He wore designer jeans and his baseball hat backward like the preppy, hip-hop-listening environmentalist he was—today.

Ben laughed and released me. “I think we need a team look.” He turned his baseball cap backward, too.

“If this was an actual regatta, I might agree, Tranter,” said the voice from the bullhorn—Dave had now joined us. I turned to face him, long and lean and nerdy as ever. “But it doesn't matter who comes in first,” he continued. “Our big ‘win' today would be noting an improvement in the biodiversity of this unique ecosystem.”

“You had me at ‘biodiversity,'” Gavin teased, “but then you had to go all ‘ecosystem,' too. Is fun not allowed, Pearce?”

“People have been having fun on the Mill Creek for generations and look where it's gotten us,” said Dave.

Ben gave Dave a couple of big pats on the shoulder. “Dave, we got it. Gavin brought his binoculars. He's our lookout man. Got your clipboard, Nichols?”

“Clipboards are so football. We're using the Mill Creek Regatta app.” Gavin pulled out his phone and pushed a few buttons. “All you do is tap here for blue heron or turkey vulture or red-winged blackbird. Or navigate over here to report illegal dumping or suspicious effluent.”

“In fact,” said Dave with a wide smile, “we're going to be paddling on treated effluent.”

We stared blankly at him.

“Effluent starts off as raw sewage, then goes through a water treatment plant,” explained Dave.

“Sewage, transformed. Just adds to the experience,” said Gavin, who, nevertheless, turned a shade paler.

“Well, it looks like you two are in good shape. Too bad I'm not,” said Dave. “My tracker—my girlfriend, Shelley—missed her flight from Chicago this morning.” He turned to me. “How about it, Neely? Want to be my tracker?”

I looked at Ben and he smirked back at me. Inside joke. In high school, Ben had listened to me complain about getting stuck with Dave Pearce as a lab partner semester after semester because our last names threw us together alphabetically. Dave was nice enough, but prone to annoying lectures and tangents. Well-meaning, but officious. Now here I was, with the chance to be Dave's science buddy all over again, this time on a lab that floated in effluent. The irony was thick—a fact not lost on Ben, who was chuckling indiscreetly behind his coffee cup. I had to smile, too. Ben might love to tease me, but it was always a pure-hearted sort of ribbing. I felt lucky to have finally found a man who could give me a run for my money
and
always have my back.

My phone buzzed with a text message from Maggie. “So sorry, Dave.”
Not.
“I've got a new appointment,” I said, happy that the day's business was picking up. “Dave, if anybody can do two things at once, it's you.”

“See you later, Neely,” Ben said meaningfully.

—

“Remember when this was the Maisonette, very old-school French?” Ben asked, as he opened the brilliant red-orange door of Boca that evening.

I did remember, but I didn't want to spoil this occasion with a sad trip down memory lane. I was at the Maisonette with Luke and several other people the first time I realized he had been cheating. I brushed that thought aside and gave Ben my warmest smile.

“Boca's food is supposed to be great.”

Inside, the pewter bar with a men's club vibe was buzzing. Ben had wanted to go to a famous and expensive steakhouse that major sports figures liked to frequent, but I had steered him here. I had envisioned a sports-free evening for this next milestone in our relationship. Maybe Boca was a mistake, though. It was busier than I expected.

The maître d' guided us up the contemporary glass-walled staircase to a private dining alcove under a pendant lamp with a drum shade. Two sculptural leather wingback chairs in vivid orange cozied up to a round table. The brick walls were done in that old European peeling paint finish. Old World meets New. This was more like it—far from the madding bar crowd below.

When we sat down and I saw how Ben looked at me, I felt suddenly shy. And nervous. This was what I wanted, wasn't it? Still, I felt like I was jumping in at the deep end.