The Things We Do for Love (6 page)

Baby hair sank a small hand into a pile of pumpkin slime.

“Let’s sort out the seeds, Merrill,” Bridget told the younger, who instead dropped pumpkin guts on the floor.

Clare looked pointedly at her daughter, who rose in a leisurely way to clean up and move the baby’s high chair.

Squalling ensued, and minutes later Bridget was nursing the child and telling her brother, “It’s cross-eyed.”

“So are some of your neighbors,” he answered. “In fact, it looks a little like…”

“That is not nice,” Bridget replied.

Paul touched the knife to the jack-o’-lantern’s face. “One tooth, it is,” he said.

Mary Anne could not for the life of her see why Cameron should find Graham Corbett interesting when Paul Cureux was her best friend. He worked at the zoo at Chief Logan State Park. Kids loved him. He was smart. He was a talented musician and a performer audiences loved. And he was extremely handsome.

To forestall Clare saying something like, “This is Mary Anne Drew. She purchased one of my love potions,” Mary Anne greeted Paul, reintroduced herself to Bridget, whom she’d met once years before, admired the children and used them to lead the conversation into the subject of childbirth.

To Mary Anne’s relief, Clare did not mention the love potion, though her heart faltered when the phone rang and it turned out to be someone calling long-distance—from Woodstock, New York—seeking to buy one.

As Clare spoke to the person on the phone, Paul said, “Jake wants to make a documentary about Mom and her potions.”

Jake was apparently a friend.

He added, “Sometime, I’m going to write a song about them.” Among his other talents, Paul was able to create songs in front of an audience, sometimes at their request. He’d say, “Anyone have a topic for a song?” and hands would shoot into the air. Someone would say, “Buying a house,” and Paul would come out with a hilarious song that covered everything from disclosures to competing offers to a spouse changing her mind.

At the moment, Mary Anne just wanted to get the Cureuxs, the second generation, off this subject of love potions.

But Bridget said, “You’d probably be happier if you drank one and got married and had children.”

“You’re scary sometimes, you are,” he said.

“Mom has shown me how to do it,” Bridget told him.

To Mary Anne’s surprise, he looked less scornful than horrified. “I think I’ll start drinking from a private water bottle.”

Mary Anne swiftly steered the subject back to birth. “Bridget, have you helped your mother at any births?”

And by the time Clare got off the phone, Bridget and Paul had lost interest in the subject of love potions.

O
N
T
UESDAY AFTERNOON
, Graham put a stack of library books on the passenger seat of his four-wheel-drive Lexus and loaded the back with two weeks’ recycling. There was not a lot of it. Bottles, newspapers, magazines, always neatly collected in the basement.

Graham did not like to go into his basement. This was why he put the recycling there. This was why he left the washer and dryer there. It was his basement, and he was
going to make himself use it. So what if three out of four West Virginia snake stories involved vicious black snakes cornered in basements?

In any case, this was October. In October, it was safe to go into the basement without looking under the stairs and over by the hot-water heater.

They like hot-water heaters,
a neighbor had told him. Not David Cureux, but the neighbor who’d told him about the baby copperheads in the jar. This neighbor had confronted a black snake in his basement and dispatched it with a shovel. It had taken Graham some time to pick up the fact that this event had occurred twenty-five years earlier.

Everyone also agreed that there were “snake years.” Two years ago, when he’d seen the black snake and the copperhead on the same day, it had been a “snake year.”

As he carried the recycling out to the car, leaves skittered past on the sidewalk and blew from the trees. It was time to put away the hoses. Five years ago, when he’d moved into the white house, he’d purchased some high-quality black garden hoses at Home Depot. For the past two years, he’d wished the hoses were green.

He started the car, and the radio came on.

“In the next ten minutes, we’ll have local news on the city council’s misuse of public funds and Mary Anne Drew talking about the magic of birth.”

Graham gave the radio a look. He didn’t want to hear about the city council mischief. It did not involve the entire city council, just one councilwoman who had taken a private jet to San Francisco and stayed at the Fairmont for a national conference on municipal planning. David Cureux was not involved, and Graham
found it appalling that a man who would remove a venomous snake from a watering can before killing it in order to preserve the three-dollar can should be accused of squandering anyone’s money. However, he wanted to hear what Mary Anne had to say on the magic of birth.

The local news carried him over the Middleburg bridge and onto the highway. He’d thought of raking before he headed out, but he had to admit he liked looking at the newly fallen leaves on the lawn. He could rake tomorrow.

“This week marks the hundredth anniversary of Logan County’s first hospital birth,” she began. “And I felt an irresistible urge to look at some of the births that have occurred here since then, including the births of both of my parents, my cousins, aunts and uncles, niece, my own grandmother…”

Mary Anne wasn’t brilliant. This wasn’t even one of her more brilliant essays. Yet somehow, she always seemed to vividly depict Appalachian life, mesmerizing her audience. Now, she revealed that her mother had been born in the hospital here during a snowstorm and her father at the hospital on a summer’s day. She said that a cousin had almost died during childbirth. Not Cameron surely—must be another cousin. She’d talked to women out in hollows who had given birth at home, including one woman who talked about the convenience of breast-feeding her six children, saying, “I was the best dairy cow those kids could have had!”

Maybe the essay was uninspired, but Mary Anne was fascinating. Suddenly Graham noticed he’d driven past the recycling center. With a sigh, he continued into town. Library first. And enough Mary Anne.

J
ONATHAN
H
ALE SMILED
. “Good essay, Mary Anne. Just the kind of thing our listeners like to hear from you.”

Our listeners.
Was he saying the essay had no broader appeal? Possibly. They were alone together in the studio for the first time since his slightly altered behavior toward her on the weekend.

“Damning me with faint praise?” she asked.

“I think Graham’s show will be good for you,” he said. “You’re capable of so much more than what you’ve done, so far, in radio. You have a great voice, great presence. And face it, you come from show business stock.”

Mary Anne detested being reminded of this. Her father was past it, now. His personal weaknesses were no longer tabloid worthy, as they had been when she was a child.

Mary Anne pulled on her sweater-coat and swung her purse over her shoulder, then pulled out her cell phone to check for messages, lingering casually with one hip on Jonathan’s desk.

Nearby, Jonathan leaned against the door of the recording booth.
All Things Considered
was under way. He asked, “Have you ever been married?”

“Absolutely not,” Mary Anne said, not sure they’d been the right words or said the right way. “Why?”

He gave a casual shrug. “I guess it’s usual for women to be more certain than men.”

“I have no idea if left-at-the-altar statistics support that,” Mary Anne said. “You know, one of my girlfriends was getting married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and she changed her mind.”

“Really,” murmured Jonathan, with mellow interest. “Beforehand?”

“No. Well, I mean, before she married him. Before she
actually got there.
He’d
gotten there, though. I sort of wondered if that was a last dig at him, you know. The total humiliation.” She frowned, trying to imagine herself acting that way. “But probably not. She probably just realized she was doing the wrong thing.” She squinted at Jonathan and was
very
careful not to sound hopeful. “Are you having doubts?”

He made a face. “Something like that. I just find there are more women I want to know better.”

“You may not be a candidate for marriage,” Mary Anne said without thinking.
“Ever,”
she couldn’t help adding. Then immediately she backpedaled. “Of course, you’ll always get to know other women—just not in the same way. I just mean—” Good grief, she was stammering. But she couldn’t help thinking of her own father, her own mother, the pain her mother had endured—and probably
still
endured because of the antics of Jon Clive Drew. “Not everyone’s cut out for marriage,” she finally said.

“It would kill her,” he said.

“No,” Mary Anne told him. “It won’t kill her. But it is insulting. I mean, to—” Stammering again. Her own heart knocking.
Come on, Mary Anne, even if he decided he did like you, he’s already pretty much said he’s not sure he’s ready for commitment. And talk about being on the rebound.

Not to mention that, at this moment, he was engaged to another woman.

“I’m not sure she’s—” He seemed to be hunting words.

“Yes?”

“I think she may be…a little…narrow, for me.”

Mary Anne would have seconded that sentiment heartily just a week before. But now, for reasons she couldn’t explain, she was leery of doing so. Perhaps it
was simply that, failing to win Jonathan through skullduggery, she now wished to use only the most honorable means to gain his love. Which was pretty wild thinking, considering that until the past few days he’d never seemed to acknowledge her as a sexual being.

“Is it going to be a problem for you,” Jonathan asked suddenly, “working with Corbett? I mean, you’re going to do it, aren’t you?”

“Why would it be a problem?” Mary Anne studied Jonathan’s expression while she waited for his answer.

“Well, he clearly thinks you’re something special, but I’ve always had the feeling that he doesn’t really ring your chimes.”

“Pushes my buttons, more like,” she muttered.

He grinned. “Noticed that, too.” He bit his lip. “It’s partly her friends. I don’t
get
them. You know?”

“You don’t…understand them?”

“I guess so. I mean, they’re all treating this like a royal wedding, and they’re talking about what kind of house we’ll live in and where our children will be christened, and it’s not relevant to me. I wouldn’t have thought Angie was that way.”

“I don’t think she is,” Mary Anne admitted truthfully. “I think she’s got something to her.”

“Maybe
you
could befriend her,” he suggested. “If you’re seeing someone, we could double up sometime. Go to dinner. Have some beers at my place.”

Mary Anne wanted to get down on her hands and knees and pound the floor.
No! No! No!
All this was because he wanted her to make friends with Angie? God. How pathetic her hopes seemed now. She said, “I wouldn’t mind spending time with the two of you,”
hoping that her tone clearly conveyed it would never happen. “I’ve got to get to the recycling center before it closes. See you later.”

Jonathan seemed to read her feelings. He nodded mutely.

Outside the office, Mary Anne leaned against the brickwork and groaned aloud.

Myrtle Hollow

“W
E NEED THE
phone books back.”

We.

David Cureux’s eyes quickly surveyed the area. Leaves falling on the cabin roof and over the grass, which couldn’t be confused with a “lawn.” No one was there. No Bridget’s car.

Just Paul and his friend Cameron unloading firewood from David’s truck, efficiently stacking it on the porch. Cameron was with them because, after they left the firewood, they were going to the Salvation Army to pick up some furniture and children’s toys she’d found there for the safe house. Her presence was necessary, if they were to deliver everything.

No, “we” was just Clare, who had emerged from the cabin with an ominous sense of purpose, demanding that David bring back her phone books.

“They’re gone,” he told her, glad to join Paul and Cameron on the firewood job; glad he had a ready answer. “Took them to be recycled.”

“The recycling doesn’t leave the transfer station until Wednesday morning. This is Tuesday, and they’re open till six. I called, and they still have them. We need them back.”

“No,” David replied. He wouldn’t ask
why.
If he
opened the door a crack, she’d swing it wide and he’d be driving all over Logan County with a truck bed full of phone books. Again.

“Who is ‘we’?” Paul asked. Paul hadn’t had to move any boxes of phone books.

“For the schools. For the Crane-a-thon.”

David did not ask. He said, “Then the schools can go get them.”

“Muriel Aubrey, the peace artist, started it. Two cities in each of the fifty states are going to fold ten thousand paper cranes. Muriel is going to use them to construct a large paper crane to be a gift to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a pledge against nuclear violence. The schoolkids who fold the cranes will also collect pledges from people for the number of cranes they fold and that way they’ll raise money for cancer research.”

“Sounds worthwhile,” Paul remarked.

“So we need the phone books,” Clare repeated. “For the paper.”

David paused with his hand on a piece of firewood. His son paused, too, and their eyes met. David knew they were thinking the same thing.

David said, “Okay. Have to drop off my own recycling anyhow. Seeing that it didn’t fit in the truck on my last trip.”

Clare seemed startled. Taken aback. She’d been prepared for an argument. Instead, she said, “Thank you.” Brusquely addressing Cameron, she said, “I spoke with your friend. She didn’t mention the potion.”