Love Letters from Ladybug Farm (20 page)

“Daddy!” Lori squealed, and flung open her arms. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,
Daddy!”

Richard thrust the roses unceremoniously into Cici’s arms and rushed to his daughter’s side, wrapping her in his embrace. “Now then!” he declared. “What’s all this I hear about you dropping out of the Olympics? The press has been all over me, but I assured them a little thing like a broken leg wouldn’t keep
my
girl down.”

Lori giggled, and he caught her face between both his hands and kissed her forehead, then both cheeks. “How’re you feeling, sweet thing? Tell me all about it.”

Lori proceeded to do so, with eyes shining and voice animated, and Lindsay watched with a slow cynical shake of her head. “What is it about a daddy that can turn a woman into a ten-year-old girl in a heartbeat?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Cici said. “Maybe the fact that he only shows up when there’s a crisis?”

Bridget, who was the only one who bothered to lower her voice, offered, “It’s not like we haven’t been by her side for twenty-four hours straight or anything.”

“Of course,” Cici observed, “we didn’t bring her six dozen roses. What am I going to do with all these? There aren’t enough bedpans in this hospital to hold them.”

She dumped the roses onto Lori’s bed table, and interrupted her discourse to repeat, as pleasantly as possible, “What are you doing here, Richard?”

“And where else should I be when my little girl needs me?” He pinched Lori’s cheek and rose to address Cici, barely missing the gagging gesture Lindsay made to Bridget behind her hand.

“Thanks, by the way,” he added in a lower tone, “for leaving a message telling me my only child was in surgery, but not leaving a callback number.”

“Oh.” Cici looked blank for a moment. “Sorry.”

Richard was the kind of man who not only aged well, but, thanks to the best cosmetic assistance money could buy, hardly aged at all. His teeth were impossibly white, his tan flawlessly golden, and his luxuriously thick, expensively styled hair was a gorgeous shade of silver. He jogged to stay fit, played racquetball to be seen being fit, and had one of those faces on which a few craggy lines only added character. Having presumably come straight from the airport, he was nonetheless impeccably groomed in razor-creased khakis, navy blazer, crisp white shirt. He turned to Bridget and Lindsay and smiled politely.

“Ladies,” he said. “You’re looking good.”

Lindsay smiled thinly. “Nice to see you again, Richard. You’ve put on a little weight, haven’t you?”

The comment caused Richard to immediately suck in his stomach, and Cici struggled to keep a straight face.

“Lori,” she said, “Lindsay and Bridget have to get back to the house. They’re leaving now.”

Hugs and kisses followed, promises that everything was going to be fine, inquiries as to whether Lori needed anything from home. As she passed, Lindsay said to Cici, seriously, “Are you
sure
you’re going to be okay?”

“Really,” Cici said, “I’m good.”

“Because we can stay,” Bridget insisted, glancing at Richard.

Cici hugged her. “Thank you.” She hugged Lindsay. “Thank you both.”

“Call if you need anything.” Lindsay held the embrace a moment longer than Cici did.

“Anything at all,” Bridget added, looking anxious.

Cici smiled. “I’m good. Promise.”

When they were gone, Richard observed, “Your friends certainly have aged, haven’t they?”

Cici glared at him. “My friends,” she responded deliberately, “were up all night with your daughter.”

He returned her cold stare measure for measure. “Well, they could have saved themselves the trouble if someone had bothered to let
me
know what was going on.”

“This is ridiculous,” Cici said. “What are you doing here, anyway? Whoever would have thought you’d fly three thousand miles just because you couldn’t get an answer on the telephone?”

“I’ve flown three thousand miles for dinner,” he replied coolly. “And this is my little girl you’re talking about. Who, might I point out, never broke anything when she lived with me.”

Cici’s smile was as convincing as a circus clown’s and her voice dripping with saccharine as she said, “I really want to slap you right now.”

“I can hear you,” Lori said, but when they both turned, guiltily, to look at her, she was smiling at something that had just appeared on the screen of her telephone.

Richard took her arm and gestured, with a curt nod of his head, toward the door. Lori didn’t even notice when they stepped outside.

Cici had already drawn a breath for rebuttal to whatever it was he was about to say, but he cut her off. “Listen,” he said lowly in that way he had of commanding attention without demanding it. “I can see you’re in a mood, and I understand why. I know it’s been a rough night for you. But whatever else you think of me, Lori is my kid and I’m crazy about her. You scared the hell out of me, okay? Leaving a message like that—accident, surgery—what was I supposed to think?”

Cici could see the remnants of raw emotion in his eyes and she felt a stab of remorse. “I’m sorry” she mumbled, dropping her gaze. “I guess I wasn’t thinking straight.”

He sighed and ran a hand through his thick wavy hair. “I guess I can understand that. But how about we call a truce for a while, huh? Just give me a break and let me enjoy the fact that I get to spend a little bonus time with my daughter and not...” There was actually a catch in his voice. “Attend a funeral. Okay?”

“Oh, Richard.” Cici tried to imagine what the cross-country plane trip must have been like for him, but her mind balked. She touched his arm, feeling miserable.

He looked down at her hand, and then at her eyes, and she was surprised by the tenderness she thought she saw there. She quickly withdrew her hand.

“I think,” she said, shifting her gaze away, “I’ll go to the hotel and wash my hair.”

Richard regarded her appraisingly. “Good plan,” he replied, and, just like that, the Richard she knew was back, and whatever sympathy she had begun to feel for him evaporated.

Cici scowled. “Tell Lori I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

But Richard had already turned away, pushing through the door to Lori’s room, and as she left she heard his voice booming cheerily, “So, sweet pea, killer motor scooters aside, how do you like the school?”

And, perhaps even more irritating, Lori actually looked up from texting long enough to reply. Neither one of them noticed when Cici left.

At the corner of the driveway to the house, there was a sign, hand-painted by Lindsay and decorated with ladybugs and a garden scene, that said, Welcome to Ladybug Farm. It never failed to make them smile. As they made the turn and started down the gravel drive, lined with tall oaks, the anticipation of some grand destination always made the heart beat a little faster. And then, coming out of the shadows and rounding the curve where the full, emerald lawn with its purple hydrangeas and brilliant pink peonies and carefully cultivated beds of hollyhocks and impatiens and showy, old-fashioned dahlias spread out like a ruffled quilt designed to show off all the colors of nature, there was always a catch of breath. In the background, the majestic blue mountains spilled their shadows onto a bright green meadow dotted with sheep. And in the foreground the big old house with its faded brick, painted columns, and tall, high windows seemed to reach out to them, and welcome them home. Bridget and Lindsay shared a glance as they pulled up in front of the wide front steps, each of them understanding what the other was thinking:
I can’t believe we live here
.

Rebel charged up from his post underneath the porch in full voice, turf flying under his paws and saliva spraying from his snarling muzzle. He skidded to a stop before the SUV, focused a full ten seconds of furious, lunging barking at the right front tire, and then, tail wagging, casually walked away.

Bridget turned off the engine and sat there for a moment, taking it all in. “It is good to be home,” she said fervently.

“So good,” agreed Lindsay with a sigh. She hoisted her purse over her shoulder and opened the door. “And I am dying for a shower.”

“I never understood how a hospital could make you feel so filthy. I don’t think I’ll ever get the smell of disinfectant out of my hair.”

The two women got out of the car, slammed their doors closed, and then stood there, noses wrinkling, eyebrows drawing together, looking around.

“What is that smell?” Lindsay said at last.

“Did Noah forget to clean the chicken yard?”

“A commercial chicken plant wouldn’t smell this bad.” Lindsay looked at Bridget uneasily. “It couldn’t be the goat?”

Bridget guarded her nose and mouth with her hand. “It would take more than a goat—or a herd of goats—to smell like that. Besides, nanny goats don’t smell.”

“Then what—?”

“It smells like ... like fertilizer.” Bridget’s eyes widened slowly as she turned to Lindsay. “You don’t suppose ... ?”

“Surely not.” Lindsay drew in a cautious breath and coughed, spreading her fingers over her own nose. “I told Dominic we were having company tomorrow.”

“We can’t serve lunch on the porch with this—this smell!” Alarm was rising in Bridget’s eyes, and her voice. “We can’t even have them
sit
on the porch!”

“I don’t think that will be a problem.” Lindsay’s voice was muffled by her fingers. “Nobody’s going to want to get out of the car.”

They hurried up the front porch with their hands over their faces and closed the front door behind them quickly. They were met by the sight of Noah and Ida Mae lugging a mattress around the corner where the grand staircase spilled into the foyer, moving toward the sunroom.

“What are you doing?” Bridget gasped.

Ida Mae gave her an impatient look as she shuffled along with her shoulder to the mattress. “Stands to reason, don’t it, that girl is going to need some place to sleep when she comes home? And she can’t climb stairs with her leg in plaster. So we set her up a temporary little place in the sunroom. It don’t get too terrible hot there this time of year, but just in case, I whipped up some curtains on that sewing machine of yours.”

For a moment, Lindsay was too stunned to react. “Using the calico?”

“There was plenty of it.”

Lindsay shook off her dismay and hurried forward to help. “I know you’re as strong as an ox, Ida Mae, and you can leap tall buildings at a single bound, but let me do this, okay?”

Ida Mae relinquished her place to Lindsay, both hands pressed to the small of her back. “About time you got here,” she said. “Next thing you know I’ll be in traction, myself.”

Bridget pressed a hand to her heart, her eyes misting—although how much of that was due to exhaustion, and how much to genuine emotion, was uncertain. “You made curtains? Ida Mae, thank you. Thank you so much.”

The older woman looked uncomfortable. “Well, I ain’t saying it’s much. Not up to your usual, anyhow. But it’ll get her through.”

“I know Lori will love it,” Bridget said sincerely. “We’re hoping she’ll be home on Wednesday.”

“Well, at least we’ll be shed of them city folks by then,” Ida Mae said with a curt nod of satisfaction. “That woman called about fifty times. I finally just let that machine pick it up.”

“Thanks, Ida Mae.” The fatigue was starting to show in Bridget’s voice as she contemplated wading through all those telephone calls, hoping against hope that none of them was a last-minute change in the menu. She let her purse slide off her shoulder and propped herself up wearily against the foyer table. “Listen, I’m really going to need your help if we’re going to pull this thing off for tomorrow. Did you get a chance to look at the recipes I marked?”

“Already got the chicken thawing,” replied Ida Mae, “and the boy picked up the crab this morning. We got it under control.”

For a moment Bridget was so overwhelmed with gratitude that she couldn’t speak. Finally she managed a “thank you” on a single, exhaled breath. Then, hesitantly, “I don’t suppose you know why the yard smells like—”

“So, I spruced up the flower beds for you a little while I was at it,” Noah was saying as he and Lindsay came out of the sunroom. “And I started building that goat house Bridget wanted. The goat already chewed through the rope on the gate twice, but I got her back. Meantime I had an idea about that brochure you were talking about. I thought, what if instead of pictures we used a sketch of the house, maybe with some flowery things and wedding birds—you know, doves—on the front fold, all in black and white, to give it kind of a classy look. Then inside we could just use a repeat of the sketch, in miniature, to separate the paragraphs. If you don’t take up all that room with photographs you can use a single fold instead of a trifold brochure. Anyhow, I made a mock-up for you to look at.”

Lindsay drew an astonished breath, but before she could even speak he went on, proudly, “And I got the grapes fertilized for you this morning. Farley came over and helped. Don’t worry,” he assured her, “I called up Dominic to ask him what to use and he said chicken sh—I mean, manure, mixed with that fish stuff he left in the barrels in the barn would do the trick. It sure does stink though, doesn’t it? I figure ya’ll’d be tired after your party” he explained generously, “and no need for you to have to get out there and work on Sunday.”