When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fae (24 page)

She pulled the dock free and stood up.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“What’s up?”

Maisey didn’t answer.

Libby tossed the dock into the bushel basket she was dragging along beside her for the sacrificed weeds. “Is something wrong?”

A faint rumble of thunder rolled across the valley, and as if on cue a breeze licked across the field and the air suddenly smelled different, the faint smell of rain mixing itself into the tang of hot ripe greenery.

Maisey still hadn’t answered.

“Hey, want to go for a walk?”

Maisey nodded again and Libby pulled off her gloves.

The dock plant had already begun to wilt in the heat.

She tossed her gloves into the basket on top of the weeds and glanced at the campers. They were still talking amongst themselves.

“C’mon,” she said.

They started across the field through the heavy air, away from the campers and Libby’s house. But a moment later, a three-person camper delegation started in their direction.

“Damn it,” Libby muttered. “Hang on a sec, Maisey. They’re after me.”

“Hey,” one of them said when they got close enough to talk. “Are you going to work somewheres else now?”

“No. Actually, I am trying to have a private conversation with my niece.”

They looked at her doubtfully. Just then a stab of lightening split the western sky, followed by another drumroll of thunder. Libby gestured toward the valley. “We’re about to get some weather. So I’ll be knocking off soon. In the meantime, you should tell the others to get down off the hill. I wouldn’t want someone to get hit by lightning.”

“What about you?” This from a girl who didn’t look much more than fifteen. Libby wondered if her parents were among the campers. “Are you going to come down, too?”

“I’m protected,” Libby said, deepening her voice for dramatic effect.

It worked. When Maisey and Libby started walking again, the delegation turned and started back toward the others. Walking kind of quickly.

“I didn’t realize this would happen, Aunt Libby,” Maisey said. It took a second for it to sink in, what she meant—she meant the campers, the unwanted attention Libby was getting. But then it did sink in and Libby felt a flicker of gratitude. Who would have thought it? Of all the people in her life, it was Maisey who actually felt a bit of sympathy for her. Well, Dean perhaps did, too. But Dean wasn’t really in her life.

“Yeah. I didn’t know it would be like this, either,” Libby said gently. “And it wasn’t your doing. I don’t blame you. Or Tyler, for that matter.”

“What are you going to do?”

Libby shrugged. “I don’t know. But Paul’s calmed down, at least. Since I’ve agreed to see a doctor. So maybe he can help me figure something out.”

“Mom said he’d break up with you over it.”

More thunder.

They had reached the end of the first field now.

“This way,” Libby said, and led her niece through the hedgerow to the next field over.

“Mom said Paul is too uptight to deal with stuff like this.”

“Paul . . . Paul’s got a lot on his mind. He’s got twice the workload, ever since Cal4 got bought by Dormet Vous. And he doesn’t really get the whole organic farming thing. He thinks it’s too . . . fringey. So he’s been . . . kind of cranky for awhile now. But he’ll be okay. And he’s smart. He’ll help me figure out what to do.”

“Mom’s going ahead with launching that website.”

Libby sighed. “Yeah. I’m not surprised . . . I learned a long time ago, if your mom sets her mind on something, there’s not much I can do about it.”

“Are you really going to get a lawyer?”

“I . . . I might. Paul knows someone who he thinks might be able to do something for me. And keep it quiet . . .”

But Libby wasn’t seriously considering retaining a lawyer, anymore than she was considering calling cops to chase the campers from her land. The fact was, there probably wasn’t much she could do. Except sell the place. Which was what Paul really wanted, anyway. Not that he’d said so, directly. But she could tell. He’d wanted that ever since . . . ever since it was too late to want Libby not to buy it in the first place.

They walked on a bit and then Libby noticed something and knelt down.

“Look. Look at this clover plant.”

Maisey knelt down next to her and gasped. “A four leaf clover!”

“But look at this. It’s not just the one leaf. They’re all over the plant.” Libby touched the plant’s stalks one by one, counting. “It’s got four . . . five . . . here’s another one—six—seven. It’s not a four-leaf clover, it’s a four-leaf clover plant. I’ve never seen that before.”

A fat drop of rain struck her head.

“It’s . . . do you think it’s, like, super lucky?”

Libby laughed. “Could be.”

“Are you going to pick it?” Maisey said.

“No.” Libby stood up. “I’m going to leave it. But don’t tell anyone it’s here, okay? It will be our secret.”

Maisey nodded.

“So enough about me. And four-leaf clovers. What’s going on with you?”

Libby looked at her niece.

Maisey’s lips were trembling.

“Tyler,” she said.

And Libby knew what was coming next. She’d felt uneasy ever since the day they’d sat around, trying to get Libby to answer those camper questions. The way Alex seemed to focus on Tyler . . . the way he seemed to like it.

And something else. It was Libby’s fault. If she hadn’t kicked him out, he and Maisey would still be wrapped around each other, all lovey dovey, 24/7, just like they had been before . . .
 

Her and her stupid temper. Her stupid, selfish—

She caught herself. She needed to focus. She’d have time to beat herself up later. Plus, maybe it was—maybe there was nothing serious going on.

“Okay. First things first. Is there definitely something going on between them? Or are you just . . .”

Maisey shook her head. “I don’t know. Tyler’s said there’s nothing going on. It’s just the way they act around each other.”

“Have you talked to your Mom? What’s she say?”

A tear rolled down Maisey’s cheek. “I haven’t really talked about it with her. She and Alex . . . they’ve gotten kinda close.”

Libby felt another flash of anger toward Gina. Didn’t that just figure.

“Okay. Tell you what. Let’s look at this objectively, okay? Like scientists.”

Maisey nodded.

The sky had darkened considerably and the wind was picking up. A few more drops splattered down around them, although it wasn’t raining really, not yet. These were stray drops, blown in from the thunderclouds that were mounding upward on the far side of the valley.

They’d reached the highest point of her property now and had turned to face the valley.

A shard of lightning stabbed across the dark gray sky.

“Wow,” Maisey said, and Libby felt it, too—the first edge of the thunderstorm’s power, and then a loud BOOM echoed across the valley.

The wind lifted her hair.

If she’d been a kid, she’d have raised her arms then, it felt like she could just raise her arms and let the wind lift her up, up . . .

On the other hand, being out here on a relatively open field during a lightning storm probably wasn’t very smart.

“C’mon,” she said. “Let’s get ourselves over that way, by the woods.”

They picked up their pace and Libby started talking faster, as well. “So let’s start with the facts. You haven’t, like, seen them . . . you know. Kissing or anything.” She didn’t want to come right out and ask the obvious. Are they having sex? This was, after all, the same girl whose braids she’d once done up with ribbons for her fifth birthday party.

“No.”

“And Tyler—he hasn’t said any of the things guys do, sometimes—‘I need some space’—anything like that?”

“No.”

“So what you have now is just—they seem to be friends . . . they have a connection of some kind.”

“Yeah. Like, he smiles at her a lot. And he pays attention to her. Like, when we’re talking about the . . . about your website, and if I have an idea, and Alex has an idea, it’s like, her idea is always better.”

Libby thought to herself, yeah, Maisey, maybe because you’re actually a decent person. So maybe your ideas don’t have that go-for-the-jugular intensity—

They’d reached the trees now. The branches were whipping in the wind, their leaves flipped over to show their silvery undersides, and the fat stray drops were falling more thickly.

“Aunt Libby,” Maisey said. “I don’t want to mess this up. I love him so much. I don’t want to lose my Tyler.”

“I know. And you are caught between, you know, your pride and your love.”

They started walking downhill.

Libby hadn’t brought any water up with her that afternoon and even though the air had changed, she wished now that she had brought some along. She licked her lips. “Maise, if you really want to keep Ty, the best advice I can give you is, try to ignore all this.”

Maisey looked over at her aunt. She looked thoughtful.

“You love him, right? So here’s the thing. You raise a fuss, confront him or whatever, and all of a sudden you . . . you sort of make it a big deal in his eyes, and in Alex’s too, if she gets wind of it. So, you know . . . it may be that they don’t even realize it’s going on. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah. I guess . . . you know what’s funny?”

“What?”

“I was in Mickey D’s the other day, and someone had left a registration packet for Geneseo on the table there.”

Geneseo? “The college?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” Libby wasn’t sure why that had come up.

“I wondered if it was a sign.”

“Oh. Well, I’m a biologist, Maisey. We don’t believe in signs.”

Maisey laughed. “Aunt Libby, you talk to fairies.”

She had her, there. Only not really. “Yeah.” Libby raised voice now to carry over the wind. “And look where it got me.” She rolled her eyes for comic effect. “See? It illustrates my point perfectly. We’re better off relying on good, practical common sense.”

“Aunt Libby?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you know it when . . . when Wallace was cheating on you?”

“Kind of. Yeah. Toward the end.”

But she felt uneasy all of a sudden. Her marriage had nothing to do with . . . with anything, really.

“I don’t think Tyler is cheating on me. I don’t think of it as cheating. At all.”

“Well then, that’s kind of my point. If it’s not cheating, and you make a scene like it
is
cheating . . .” They’d reached her growing beds. “I’m going to grab my stuff. Wait here by the trees.”

Libby trotted over to where she’d left her tools and the basket of weeds.

And there was her little man, sitting and looking at her.

“Hi.”

He nodded.

“Everything okay?”

He nodded again.

She stood, looking at him. “Do you . . .”

“Leave the purslane,” he said. “When you weed.”

“Okay.”

“The hail will do some damage, but most of your plants will be okay. Except your lettuce.”

Libby winced. This was supposed to be her fall lettuce crop. The plants were only baby seedlings now. She’d tried to time them so that they’d be maturing as the weather cooled. “Is there anything I can do? To protect it?”

“No.” He turned and walked away into the weeds.

She rejoined Maisey. “Were you talking to one of them?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he say?”

“That we’re going to get some hail. We’d better hustle, Maise, and get inside.”

And then the first sheet of rain swept over them, so that by the time they got down to the house, both were drenched to the skin.

Libby knew Gina was there, somewhere, so she kept her voice to a whisper when the stepped inside. “Sometimes women have to be . . . patient. Keep our cool, let our men sort out their little problems. Tyler’s a good man, Maisey. You take it easy, it’ll sort out.”

Maisey nodded and went to her room to change.

34

“So what can I do for you, Libby?” the doctor asked.

She sat on a stool on the other side of the little examination room. The nurse had done the usual stuff—taken Libby’s blood pressure, her weight, given her a bunch of forms to fill out about her medical history. Only Libby wouldn’t tell the nurse why she was there. “I’d rather just speak to the doctor, if you don’t mind,” she’d said.

The nurse didn’t like that very much. She made a face and mentioned that every thing Libby said was confidential.

But Libby had made up her mind. Her new resolution. To stand up for herself more.

She waited for Dr. Grande. And then explained her situation.

The doctor listened, nodded, and then looked again at the papers Libby had filled out.