The Year of Luminous Love (8 page)

“Not very friendly,” Eden said, climbing beside Ciana and leaning over the top fence rail. She wasn’t a horse fan like her friends.

“We’re working on that,” Arie said, joining them on the fence. She whistled and called out to Caramel, but the horse ignored her.

“She’s got a mind of her own,” Jon said from the ground below them. “Just goes her own way whenever she wants.”

Ciana winced at his double meaning and the barb aimed at her. She and Eden fussed over the animal, then jumped down.
Ciana steadied herself and faced Jon with Arie standing close to his side. They made a nice couple, Arie with her white-blond hair and blue eyes, Jon with brown hair, streaked gold by the sun and his bright green eyes. She looked at her watch. “Oops! I have to run. Promised Olivia I’d stop off for a visit.”

Eden said, “Ugh! I have to go into the boutique. Our busiest day and Patty, my coworker, called in sick.”

“But you two just got here,” Arie said, sounding hurt. “I was hoping you could stay longer, watch me work some with Caramel.”

“Sorry,” Ciana said. “Come over later, all right?”

Jon glanced down at Arie. “Lunch?”

She looked surprised but delighted by the invitation. “Love to.”

Ciana turned on her heel, her emotions reeling, and headed to her truck. “See you later,” she called, more sociably than she felt.

Behind her, she heard Jon say, “Count on it.”

Ciana never knew what to expect that afternoon at the Evergreen Assisted Living Center. Would she see lucid Olivia or childlike Olivia? She wasn’t sure she could face Olivia’s rejection today. Not after what she’d already faced at Pickins’s. Seeing Jon had been like seeing a ghost. Except that he was real. And she was real. And Arie was real. And now Ciana faced choices—of desire and loss.

On the drive to Evergreen, she’d kept the truck radio blaring to force away the enduring image of Jon’s green eyes appraising her. She had parked, rubbed her temples. After signing in, she gathered her courage and breezed into Olivia’s room with a cheerful, “Hello, Grandmother.”

Olivia was sitting in a wheelchair in front of a small desk, her laptop in front of her. She looked up, offering a beatific smile. “Ciana, darling. How wonderful to see you. Come kiss me. Why have you stayed away for so ever long?”

Of course, Ciana had been there the day before, and every day since Olivia had been out of the hospital. Relieved by Olivia’s greeting, Ciana swept over, bent down, and kissed her papery cheek. “Forgive me,” Ciana said, which was easier than reminding Olivia about what she couldn’t remember.

“I always forgive you, precious girl,” Olivia purred in her honeyed voice. “Barry Boatwright was just here. Perhaps you saw him in the parking lot?”

“Your attorney? But why?”

“The family attorney,” Olivia corrected. “I had some family business I wanted him to attend to.”

Ciana wasn’t sure if Boatwright had actually been visiting or if Olivia had conjured him out of her imagination. “I must have missed him.” She settled into a comfy chair beside the desk. She had known the elderly white-haired man since she was a small child. He never seemed to change.

“We discussed paperwork.” Boatwright had handled Bellmeade business for many years—bookkeeping, taxes, necessary government subsidy paperwork. Much of the farm’s acreage had once successfully been leased to other growers, but now because of the economic hard times, vegetable planting had fallen off, and so had the leases.

“What business?”

“Oh, child, a farm the size of ours doesn’t run by itself.”

Ciana needed no reminder. She seeded, fertilized, fought weevil infestations, and harvested alfalfa four times a year to feed their horses. The grass had to dry free of mold and dust and then be bundled into manageable bales and stored under
tarps in an outbuilding as winter feed. In summer the horses grazed in the pastures, their diets supplemented by alfalfa hay for necessary protein, but the winter months meant a lot more hay and grain—which had to be bought. The back acre garden fed herself and Alice Faye, and Ciana sold any excess to tourists at the summer farmer’s market. She kept the property surrounding the house and stables mowed and trimmed and the chicken coop well maintained, and she made any necessary minor repairs to equipment, fencing, and damaged outbuildings. All hard work and long days.

“Mama and I are watching over the land,” she assured Olivia.

Olivia dismissed the remark with a hand gesture. “Alice Faye never gave a hoot for the business end of Bellmeade. But when school’s over for you …” She seemed to lose her train of thought. Alice Faye had brought Olivia to Ciana’s high school graduation, but apparently she didn’t remember it.

“High school’s over,” Ciana said quickly to fill the awkward silence. “Got my diploma too.”

Olivia nodded, her expression clouding, as if trying to see something that wasn’t quite clear enough.
Don’t go away
. Ciana hoped Olivia hadn’t slipped into another time and place, but Olivia smiled suddenly, returning to the moment. “You’ll go to college. Vanderbilt, is it?”

“I’ve been accepted.”

“Of course you have. You’re a Beauchamp.” Olivia made it sound as if the name were a free pass to all of life.

“Has Mother been by today?” Again Ciana changed the topic quickly, hoping to keep Olivia in the present.

“My daughter only comes out of duty.”

“Mother loves you,” Ciana said.

“Like a dog loves a master who doesn’t kick it.”

Friction was a constant between the two women, a subtle undercurrent that ran like a fault line through a piece of property. “Mom works with me in our garden every day. Tomatoes are popping off the vines, squash is ripe, and green beans are climbing up their poles.”

“I miss our garden,” Olivia said.

Schoolwork never gave Ciana the sense of achievement a vegetable harvest gave her. “Why, Mama’s canning tomatoes and squash once a week,” Ciana told her grandmother. In the kitchen, making breads and pastry, whipping up meals was as close to happy as Ciana ever saw her mother.

Olivia reached over and took Ciana’s hand. “I’m tired, child. Could you help me to my bed?”

Ciana jumped up, rolled the wheelchair to the bed, and locked the brake. She helped Olivia stand and then half lifted her into the bed. She fluffed the pillows and made sure the covers were all smooth and tucked. “Snug as a bug,” she said, quoting what her grandmother had often told her at bedtime when she was a child.

Ciana straightened, but Olivia held tightly to her hand. “Don’t leave just yet.”

Did Olivia sense that these rare moments of lucidity were as precious as gold to both of them? “I won’t leave. I know,” she added with an inspired smile. “Why don’t I snuggle with you and you tell me a story.”

The old woman’s eyes brightened. “What story would you like to hear?”

Anxious to hold on to the moment, Ciana suggested Olivia’s favorite. “Tell me about how you met Grandfather.”

Olivia beamed. “A wonderful story. Haven’t I told it to you before?”

“Not lately.” Ciana got on top of the covers, lying on her
side so she could watch Olivia’s face. “Did you always know you loved him?” She knew the answer but still wanted to hear it.

“From the very moment we laid eyes on each other. When he emerged from his car, when our eyes met, the earth moved. And I knew then and there, he was the one.”

Caught up in the spell of the story, Ciana hungered to feel such certainty. Perhaps she’d come close one summer night weeks before.
Close only counts in horseshoes
, she thought automatically. Farm people were practical, even Beauchamp girls who met a stranger in a dance hall and fell into a fantasy.

Olivia’s creamy voice spilled over words in Ciana’s ear. “But the day he rode up Bellmeade’s driveway on horseback to claim me … well, I can see him still on that sleek chestnut Tennessee walking horse, saddlebags heavy with apples he would lay at my feet, his offering for my hand, his pledge of his undying love.”

“Well, look what the cat dragged in.”

Eden rushed through the living room on her way to her upstairs bedroom, scowling but ignoring her mother’s put-down. “Not now. I have to change for work.” The trip to see Arie’s horse had put her off schedule. She usually left Tony’s apartment early enough to arrive home before Gwen woke up, although after a year, it was no secret where she spent most Friday nights.

She made it to the staircase when Gwen announced, “Store manager called me in. I’m at the registers until four today.”

The grocery store often used Gwen to fill in their schedule when others didn’t show up for their shifts. At least she was back on her meds and could handle the job. “Work strong,” Eden said, with more sarcasm than necessary.

Gwen exhaled a mouthful of cigarette smoke as Eden crossed to the stairs. “You need to stay away from that guy you’re with. He’s nothing but bad news.”

Eden jerked to a halt. “I said not now.” She took the stairs
two at a time, ripping off her T-shirt. In her room, she pulled off her jeans and pawed through her closet. Everything was dirty or at Tony’s.

“I’ll put in a load of wash before I leave,” Gwen said from the doorway.

Eden hadn’t realized that her mother had followed her up. “Forget it. I lost a good white shirt last time when you stuck it in with a red towel.”

“So you want me to do laundry but get mad at me when I do it. Which way do you want it, Eden?”

Over her shoulder, she shot, “Please don’t smoke in my room.” After a sniff test, one shirt passed and Eden flung it on. She grabbed a long multicolored skirt.

“Well, excuse me, missy. Didn’t mean to pollute
your
air.” Gwen grabbed a half-finished and forgotten cola bottle from Eden’s bedside table and poked her cigarette through the opening in the neck. The cigarette sizzled in the brown liquid and fizzled out. “And stop ignoring me. You prance in and out of here like it’s a motel instead of your home. The only time I can talk to you is between your run-throughs!”

Eden, in front of her dresser mirror, smoothed powder blush over her cheeks and gloss on her lips. She bit back a bitter torrent of words about her and Gwen’s relationship. “What have we got to talk about? You only gripe at me.”

“I’m trying to help you. Warn you. What do I have to say to get through to you? Tony Cicero is a user of people who will eat you alive. Get away from him. Far, far away from him.”

“You don’t know him! You’ve talked to him, what, six or seven times over the last two years?”

“I know his type,” Gwen said over Eden’s voice. “He’s a control freak, and he’ll keep his thumb on you until he squashes you.”

“Stop it! Stop running him down.” Eden shook her hairbrush at her mother. “He’s good to me. I have a car because of him. I have pretty jewelry.”

Gwen crossed her arms and looked at Eden with eyes hard as marbles. “So, then, what does that make you?”

Eden froze. “Did you just call me a slut?”

Gwen’s lips pressed into a thin line. “His gifts are just another way of locking you into him. Buy your own car and jewelry. Believe me, it’ll be a whole lot cheaper in the long run.”

Eden slung the hairbrush across the room, not directly at her mother but near enough to make Gwen flinch. The brush dented the wall over the bed and dropped harmlessly onto the pillows. “You’re not exactly mother of the year,” she growled. “And you lecture me? You who can’t stay on your medications long enough to give me a life? To raise me? You judge
me
?”

Gwen didn’t blink, just plowed ahead. “I’m trying to save you. Trying to help you see—”

“Don’t!” Eden yelled. She picked up her purse, brushed past Gwen, and clattered down the uncarpeted stairs in her clogs.

Once in her car, Eden screeched out of the driveway backward and onto the road. Brakes squealed from behind and a driver sat on his horn. She was beyond caring. She held the steering wheel in a death grip. The car was unmercifully hot. She cranked up the AC, pushed her curling hair off her forehead, and struggled to calm herself. She was furious at her mother, but not just because of their fight. Eden would rather chew off her arm than admit to Gwen that she was correct. Tony was all the things she’d said and was getting worse. He wanted an accounting of Eden’s every move, a timeline for everything she did when she wasn’t with him, and he wanted
her with him constantly. He wanted more and more of her, while she wanted him less and less, and she didn’t know what to do about it.