The All You Can Dream Buffet (41 page)

And Ginny said, “I am leaving you, Matthew. I’m sorry you’re hurt, and I’m sorry you lost your job, but you’ll be fine. I just can’t be your wife anymore. I can’t
be in Kansas anymore. I can’t be the person you all want me to be. I tried, and you got so mad at me for not being able to do that that I lost everybody. I lost my family and my husband and all my best friends, not because I did anything wrong, but because you couldn’t see
ME.
”

Marnie rolled her eyes.

Rolled her eyes.

For one long minute, Ginny saw herself smacking that super-cilious expression right off Marnie’s face. Rage as clear and clean as grain alcohol poured through her, burning everything unnecessary away. She swallowed the murderous impulse and stepped over to her husband. She kissed his forehead. “I don’t hate you. I hope we can be nice to each other. And I am sorry.”

There were tears in his eyes, but he only nodded, grabbing her hand. “I didn’t really break my legs. That was a lie. Your mama thought you wouldn’t come back unless the accident was worse.”

Ginny looked at her mother. “Really?”

“Honey, I’m just—”

“I’m done.” Ginny squeezed Matthew’s hand. “I’m glad your legs aren’t broken.” Laughing, she wheeled around and headed out the door, not looking back. She strode through the Wichita hospital halls, seeing open blue skies ahead, all hers for the asking. As she stepped out into the humid, hot Kansas day, she called a cab over.

“Airport, please.”

On her shoulder blades, wings sprouted, muscular and powerful, ready to carry her into the next stage of her life. She thought of the ocean, and the promise of redwood trees, and flying.

And freedom. And friends. And people who loved her.

Faintly, she thought she heard a voice, raspy and no-nonsense:

Atta-girl.

October

The morning was damp and drizzly as Ginny puttered around her tiny kitchen. The rental, a place only about double the size of her trailer, sat right on the Oregon beach, overlooking waves that were, this morning, crashing in drama and noise on the rocky coast. She hummed under her breath, stirring blueberries into pancake batter, cracking eggs from a carton marked L
AVENDER
H
ONEY
F
ARMS
. She picked them up every couple of weeks when she drove in to check on Ruby, who was due any day.

“Mmm.” Jack ambled into the room, bare-chested, his hair tousled with sleep. He bent in and kissed her neck. “That smells great.”

“You can make the coffee if you like.”

Ginny’s phone rang and she snatched it up. Ruby’s number showed on the screen. “Is it time?”

“Come now, Ginny. She’s coming fast! We’ll meet you at the hospital.”

“I’m on my way. Love you! Can’t wait to meet her!”

Ruby made a noise. “Oh. Oh. Gotta go.”

Jack was already putting on his shirt. “We’ll get coffee on the way, huh?”

“I’m so excited!”

They drove in her Jeep, since Jack’s rig was way too big. He usually parked his truck at a Walmart in town when he came through, about every three or four weeks. He reached for her hand as they waited for coffee at a drive-up booth. “I’m so glad you’ve settled in one spot for a bit,” he said, kissing her hand.

After Lavender’s memorial service, Ginny had traveled down Highway 1, along the coast of California, then back up, stopping in different spots. She chronicled the special pastries in each place she went, a fresh offering for her blog. She’d met more of the backbloggers, too, and had even conducted an in-person photo workshop in San Clemente. She met with Jack when she could, but it was not as much as either of them would have liked. The relationship had grown enough that she was willing to let him step a little closer. She’d rented the cottage outside Astoria, and Jack would be moving his center of operations to Portland next month. He’d live in Astoria, too, in his own apartment, but they could spend a lot more time together.

“Me, too.” She kissed his hand in return. “I knew she’d go into labor the minute you were able to stay for a day or two. It just works out that way, right?”

“I’m glad. I want to see the baby.” He handed over a cup of coffee. “And we’ll have our Thanksgiving adventure.”

They were going to Tofino, in British Columbia, to see the crashing waves. Both of them had had to apply for passports and were as excited as twelve-year-olds when they arrived. “It’s only Canada,” Ginny said. “But it’s cool.”

“It is cool,” Jack said, and had tumbled her backward, kissing her mouth and her face and her throat. “You’re cool.”

“You’re cool.”

Now, in the cradle of the Jeep, with the windshield wipers slashing the water away, Ginny admired his profile, craggy and
not perfectly handsome but astonishing to her nonetheless every time she looked at it. “I’m so glad I met you,” she said.

He smiled, reaching his hand over to grab hers again. “It was going to happen, one way or the other. Even if you hadn’t left Dead Gulch, I would have stopped on my way through, and you would have been standing there, and our worlds would have turned upside down.”

“That way would have been much harder for me.”

“Yep. But you would still have loved me.”

They all gathered in the waiting room. Ginny and Jack perched on hard plastic chairs. Valerie sat next to Ginny. Ruby’s father, a tall, lean man with a balding pate and a very serious face that seemed exactly the opposite of Ruby’s cheery one, paced. “Do you think she’s all right?” Paul asked anxiously. “It’s been a long time.”

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Val said. “Do you want to get a cup of coffee or something? Sometimes first babies can take a pretty long time.”

“It’s already been three hours,” he said.

Valerie smiled. “Yes.”

Paul went back to his pacing. Jack leaned over. “I think I’ll take the poor guy to get some coffee.”

“Good idea.”

As the two men made their way down the hallway, Ginny said, “How’s it going in San Diego?” Valerie had flown back to Portland a week ago, to be on hand to help with the baby.

“Better than I anticipated, honestly. My parents have needed the help for a while, I think, and I was too immersed in my own troubles to see it. They have a big house in La Jolla and plenty of
room, and we all enjoy the company but can escape one another when we need to.”

“That’s great. And Hannah?”

“She’s like a new person. I don’t know if it was just time or she’s blooming with her grandparents or the trip, but she’s doing well. I made her see a counselor for the first few months, but even the counselor said she’s fine for now.”

“It seemed like meeting Ruby really helped her.”

“Funny how things turn.”

The men came back in from the hallway, carrying paper cups of vending-machine coffee. Paul peered into the coffee with a sad face.

“That bad?” Val asked.

He looked up and gave her a crooked smile. “Worse. But it’ll do.”

“Any coffee in a storm.”

His expression lightened, and he took a sip, wincing with exaggeration. “First World problems, right?”

Val laughed, the sound as rich as a cello. Paul frowned, then seemed to actually focus on her. “Are you the wine blogger?”

“Yes. Or I was.”

“I loved the blog you wrote about the old vines. The Norton, right?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Ruby turned me on to the blog,” he said, moving a step closer, “but I kept reading because you were so entertaining and didn’t take it all so seriously.”

Val smiled, and Ginny noticed the little sheen about her mouth, an ever so slight straightening of her spine. “Are you a wine enthusiast?”

“I don’t know that I’m all that knowledgeable.” He tucked his hands into the pockets of his well-cut but loose-fitting wool
trousers. “The science is interesting. The product is creative. That intrigues me.”

Val patted the seat beside her. “I agree with you. It’s like perfume—so many possibilities.”

Paul sat and tilted his body toward Val, leaning closer to listen.

Ginny smiled. Jack nudged her and raised an eyebrow in their direction.

Perfect.

Labor was, Ruby thought, about five thousand times more work than she had expected. Her body felt as if it were being turned inside out, one agonizing inch at a time. “This HURTS!” she cried at the top of her lungs.

“You can do it, sweetie,” a nurse said. “Don’t yell. Save that energy for pushing.”

“I can’t push anymore,” Ruby said, sweating. “My eyes will pop out.”

Noah laughed. He had begged and cajoled and pleaded to be allowed to be her coach. Ruby had resisted for three months, all through the new sweetness of their blooming love affair, all through the time she grew more and more huge and marveled that he could find her attractive at all, all through the struggle to secure the farm—which they had finally done with a combination of loans from the VA, the sale of the food truck (on which she had made a fine profit), and a low-interest loan from Ruby’s father, who had proved to be agreeable once he saw the farm.

In the final month of Ruby’s pregnancy, when she had begun to waddle and her face was like a moon of fat, Noah knelt down and asked her to marry him, for real, so that he could be the baby’s father, and Ruby had burst into tears.

“Your eyes are fine,” he said now, and the laughter in his voice enraged her.

“I am
exhausted,
” she cried. “How long can a person push?” But the waves of energy built up again in her body, wilder and wilder and wilder. She gripped Noah’s hand and held her breath.

“Wait, wait, wait,” cried the midwife. “I need you to hold on for as long as you can, Ruby, then give it all you’ve got.”

She closed her eyes.
Come on, daughter,
she thought, reaching for the tiny soul she could feel anxiously trying to get free.
Let’s work together.

Ruby gathered all that she was and took strength from the beings she could sense around her, whispering and urging and touching her with encouragement. She became something else, some being of light and power and fierceness, and spied her daughter wearing a funny little medieval gown. She gathered her up and they dove into the world.

A cry rang out, and then they were putting her baby in her arms. Her daughter, who settled immediately, looked up at her mother with big blue eyes, and stopped crying.

“Welcome,” Ruby said. “You are so loved and wanted. I am so glad you came to be my daughter. Thank you.”

Everyone said newborns couldn’t smile, couldn’t even see, but Ruby saw the rosebud lips do exactly that as the baby’s eyes rested on her mother’s face. “Welcome, Lavender. I’ve been waiting for you.”

And, in the distance, Ruby heard the kind laughter of the other Lavender, off having adventures in the other land. “Thanks to you, too,” Ruby said, and fell back on the pillows. Noah bent and kissed her forehead, then kissed the baby, too.

*   *   *

Late that night, Ginny cleaned up the kitchen after their dinner. Jack had already headed over to her Airstream, parked beneath the tall tree she loved. Paul and Val had stopped to have dinner at a celebrated restaurant in McMinnville and would come back later.

Ginny hoped they hit it off. Neither one of them had had a lover or a partner in a long, long time. As she put sheets on the foldout bed in the living room, she thought of what Valerie said at the hospital:
Funny how things turn.

She plumped pillows in the quiet, and puffs of lavender came out of the feathers. She closed her eyes and inhaled, missing Lavender very much, all at once. If only she’d been able to be here for the baby’s birth!

But that was the turn of the wheel, wasn’t it? Ginny placed the pillows carefully against the top of the bed, smoothed the blanket, and looked around one last time to make sure it all seemed welcoming for Paul or Val, whichever one chose the couch.

A photograph caught her eye, one of a cluster that covered most of one wall. During the day the photos were in shadow, but now, at night, the lamp illuminated the march of Lavender’s life.

The one that caught Ginny’s eye showed Lavender in her Pan Am uniform, at thirty-four or thirty-five. She was stunningly beautiful and elegantly coiffed, her hair rolled back smoothly from her face, her body as lean and lanky then as it had been in her eighties. The woman with her was a redhead, laughing, a braid falling over her shoulder.

Ginger.

Riveted, breath coming in shallow bits, Ginny looked carefully at the other photos for confirmation of what seemed utterly obvious, and there she found it. Lavender and Ginger,
camping, both dressed in pedal pushers and sneakers and plaid shirts, their long hair hanging in braids. This photo was black-and-white, but Ginny still recognized her, the woman who had shown up along the road, in bathrooms and restaurants. Ginger. It was Ginger who had been her companion.

She smiled and touched the faces. “Thank you,” she said, then grabbed an umbrella and ran up the hill to the trailer spilling out yellow lamplight into the darkness, to a man who took her in his arms and rumbled, “There you are,” before he put his hands on her, and made her laugh, and then made love to her the way she deserved.

Every now and then the universe bestows a sudden, unexpected, and quite fortuitous gift in your life. For me, one of those events was the arrival back in my life of my cousin Sharon Jensen Schlicht. With brains, creativity, and a thoroughly astonishing organizational ability, she has brought more blessings into my work life than I can possibly enumerate here.

Farmwork, whether it is food or lavender or any other agricultural product, is not a minor undertaking, and I needed to understand that life. On a research trip to Yamhill County (along with Sharon), I met two extraordinary women who gave me the bones of this book.

The first was Chrissie Zaerpoor at Kookoolan Farms (visit them at
www.kookoolanfarms.com
), who responded to my tentative request for insight with a generous, rich depth of material that is still reverberating with me. Without that serendipitous afternoon and a multitude of emails, much of this book would never have developed. I was charmed by the chickens and the kittens, by the meadery and the lambs, and by the very no-nonsense, hardworking, brilliant Chrissie herself. Thank you, Chrissie, for your thoughtfulness, your grim truths, your emotional honesty, and your wit.