Wanted: Wife (15 page)

He thought a moment. “The cameraman.”

Then his gaze darkened. “
Richard
. That’s your former fiancé, right?”

It was almost as if he were standing between us. “Yes.”

“You leave anything with him you wish you’d taken?”

I felt like an insect pinned under a microscope. “Nothing I can’t get later.”
Say, around November
.

“So, nothing of particular importance.”

I had to admit, “There was an antique tea table.”

“Was it a family heirloom?”

“No.” Richard had bought it for me during a trip to the Eastern shore of Maryland, back when we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. I was ridiculously fond of it, and not for any particular reason connected to Richard, yet I felt a blush creep over me. “But I did like—”

“I’ll buy you another one,” he said quietly. “I’ll buy you five more, if you want.”

“That’s not necessary,” I said, taken aback. “I don’t need you to buy me anything.”

“Yet I would.” He stared at me a moment before abruptly reaching for the toolbox. “Let me put this away. I’ll be right back.”

I watched him walk away, at a loss. What was
that
about? Was he actually jealous? Or was it something much more elemental? I didn’t know, and at the moment I wasn’t up to examining it. Not that he gave me much time to anyway. In short order he was striding toward me in heavy boots, the leather sheath on his belt unmistakably housing a large knife. Seeing that, my blood coursed a little hotter. Was it simply the Tarzanian implications, or had something fearful in me actually spiked? Either way, after the Rabid Raccoon Incident earlier that morning, I was happy he toted something that could inflict damage. Not that I relished the idea of his rolling around on the ground with some wild animal, but I set that image aside. His lordship and I were about to survey our dominion, and my stomach flipped with anticipation.

“Where first, Mr. Devine?” I said as he passed me, heading toward the back of the house.

He beckoned me to follow. “The kitchen garden, Mrs. Devine,” he said, his smile an implication that whatever heaviness between us had eased. Funny how that ebbed and flowed; what was with him anyway? When we rounded the house I saw what twilight and a rim of bushes had obscured: at least a quarter acre of various crops, bursting past their obvious yield.

Andy stepped into a waist-high tomato patch, bright red-orange orbs dangling tenuously from their leafy vines. “Most of this garden isn’t native to the area,” he said, plucking an inordinately large beefsteak from within its wire cage. He rubbed it against his shirt. “Years ago, we had topsoil trucked in, as the soil’s real sandy, which some crops like, mainly tomatoes.” He bit into it before handing it to me. “We have your regular salad ones and some plums for sauce. Then there’s cukes, eggplant, zucchini . . .” His finger bounced from crop to crop, pointing. “Lettuce, green beans, Brussels, carrots, potatoes, yams, radishes, onions, shallots, garlic, peppers . . .”

I took a bite of the tomato as he meandered through the rows, pushing aside lush overgrowth, the vegetables plump and ripe for picking. “And back there . . .” He flung his hand to a far corner of the patch, “. . . some sweet corn. And of course, an herb garden. Later on we’ll get some winter vegetables, squash, pumpkin, cabbage, beets, cauliflower.” He turned to look at me, eyeing me chewing tomato. “Good?”

I swiped my mouth and took another quick bite before handing it back. “Amazing,” I said, meaning it. “So I expect we’ll have some picking to do for the market tomorrow?”

He raised his palm to shade his eyes, looking past me. “In just a little bit. Before it gets too hot.”

“Right,” I said, already feeling the sweat collecting on my chest. I swatted at an encircling fly. “What time’s the market tomorrow?”

“Crack of dawn—Bucky
come
!” he yelled, clapping his hands. I turned to follow his sightline: there was the hellhound, bounding toward us.

“Oh, why,” I said, as the dog skittered to a barking halt before us. I bent to him. “I hate you, you canine catastrophe. Why don’t you go terrorize some other farm?”

Andy dropped to his haunches to ruffle Bucky’s fur as the Border Collie licked his face. “You know, he really is a good dog.”

“Every time you say that, he drops a new disaster on me. Perhaps I should have said ‘
He
hates me,’ instead.”

He scratched his fur a bit more then stood. “You know, my dad had him for three years before he died. From what Jinks told me, Bucky was his constant companion. I know he’s acting a bit crazy now, but you think maybe it’s because he’s grieving? Do you think that’s possible in a dog?”

I looked to Andy, the sun obscuring this big man before me. Instantly I imagined a boy running through the weeds, calling after his dad as his mother pulled him away. Growing up, my own family had always been around me, as constant as a hangnail. Yet as dismissive as we were to each other now, we had remained intact, touchstones of each other’s collective memory. Maybe I couldn’t possibly understand.

I touched his arm. “I’m sorry, Andy. Really, I am.”

He looked down, his stance widening, as if covering more ground would make him appear too large, too overpowering for anything as elemental as grief. “For what?” he said, quietly gruff.

I slipped my arms around his waist, my head against the moist warmth of his chest, realizing perhaps he mourned more for the lost possibilities than for the actual man. He sighed, his chin brushing against my temple, and all at once the scents of the garden swirled around me,

“For nothing,” I said.

He kissed my hair as something definitely furry slipped between our legs, sitting atop my feet. “Which will get you everything,” he said.

P
EOPLE WHO LIVE
in cities are used to walking. Most often, it’s simply easier to take to the sidewalk than to hail a cab or run after a bus or catch the subway. But that morning I had not only done more walking than I had attempted in weeks on a treadmill, I had walked with significantly more purpose: over creeks, up hillocks, down gullies, across savannahs, and through more trees and shrubs and wildlife than this urbanite has ever encountered out of an arboretum. In fact, we had covered so much sandy trail I was certain we’d walked every inch of Andy’s six hundred acres until he casually informed me, two hours later, we had barely covered half of it.

“Next time we’ll take the truck,” he said as I teetered across a fallen tree over a stream.

“Thanks,” I said, falling in.

But not before he’d taken me to his peach grove, forty short-trunked trees laid out in neat rows of five, the sandy road in between well-rutted from years of picking. Andy plucked one of the few that remained among the long leaves, branches he said were once laden with so much fruit they half-bent to the ground under the weight.

“Taste,” Andy had said, taking a chomp out of a particularly monstrous one before holding it out for me.

I bit into it, succulent juice bleeding down his fingers and my chin, my mouth bursting with intense flavor. “Oh God that’s good . . .” I groaned, pulling his dripping hand back for another messy bite.

“This is what I call a leaner,” he said, chomping more, spitting out the stone. “They’re so juicy you have to lean over the sink.”

“Cute,” I said, snatching the last of it. “I’d be interested to know what you’d call a nice, dry Beaujolais.”

He bent into me, licking a bit of juice from my lip. “With that, a piece of cheese, a loaf of bread and you . . . I’d call it dinner.” He growled and I shivered.
“Délicieux.”

As we skimmed the edge of the woods Andy pointed out another smaller grove of apple trees, and I suddenly thought it funny that in all the years I had driven through the Pines, I never imagined myself actually in them. They’d always been just an inert green corridor funneling me toward the Shore. As we crept past a herd of slumbering deer, hunkered down behind a wall of tangled vines and shrubs, I felt like a character in someone’s documentary. Especially when we came across an expanse of squarish acre-wide trenches of red-tinged vines, each bordered by two-foot moats, with a large pond at the end in the distance.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Those . . .” he said, as if lost in memory. “They’re cranberry bogs.”

I fell to my haunches, peering into a trench, millions of red berries crowding each other. “So this is where cosmopolitans start. Are they yours?”

“No,” he said, nearly laughing. “Cranberries were always beyond the scope of my family’s ambitions. Remember the friend I mentioned, Ray?”

“You mean Ranger Rick?”

“I mean Ray who works for the Forest Fire Service.”

“Right.” I rose, looking across the expanse. I couldn’t tell how much land the bogs encompassed. But it certainly looked like a football stadium and maybe even a bit of the parking lot would fit into it. “They’re his?”

“His family’s. Wait until you see this place next month. Nothing but a sea of red when they flood the bogs. It’s a gorgeous sight.”

It was one I knew I’d be around for. “Sounds awesome.”

There was more, I’d soon find out, not that it didn’t take us a bit more walking. We passed through more of the pitch-pined forest, the underbrush so sparse in places that dead needles were the only other thing crunching under our feet—before gnarly vines and laurel bushes took over. A bit more walking and then it opened up again to the ten-foot-high bushes of Andy’s blueberry patch. Which was where I fell into the stream.

“I can’t believe how much time I’ve spent getting soaked,” I said as I sloshed to the streambank, splashed to the knees. “It’s a good thing it’s not freezing out or I’d be a Popsicle by now.”

He smiled, pulling me to in. “I can’t remember the last time I saw anything iced over . . . must have been five or six years now.”

“Really?” I said, squishing my sneakers against a rock. “So where does Andy Devine winter?”

“Last year, Belize,” he said, turning toward a blueberry bush. He stripped a few withered berries from a branch. “Too bad these are all gone. I picked the last of them right after I got here. Next June, unless the weather is terrible, we ought to get a pretty good crop out of them.”

“Were you there all winter?” I said, flicking what remained of a bell-shaped bloom, now gone papery. “In Belize, I mean.”

He flicked a few dead leaves from the bush. “For a healthy portion of it, I guess.” He looked around. “Well, we’ve come full-circle. This stream feeds the lake by the house. See? There it is, past the bushes.”

It was supremely interesting how Andy tossed out interesting asides about his nomadic lifestyle while actually telling me nothing. Then again, maybe he did. So far I learned he was a sort of a sailor, but the kind who could while away the winter in a tropical paradise? I came up beside him, sniffing a leaf. “You spent the winter in port?” I idly asked. “You don’t sound much like a sailor to me.”

He looked at me, eyebrow cocked. “And you’re a TV reporter who doesn’t even have a TV. I’d say we’re both a little out of context.”

I coughed; a perfect deflection. Good Lord, he was a master. And continually fascinating, I had to admit. I took a few squishy steps into the blueberry patch, aiming toward the house. “Come on, dear, I need to change my shoes and slip into a wetsuit. Would you like to help?”

“Only if I could talk you out of it,” he said, pinching me into a squeal.

I
SLOUGHED MY
sundress to the bathroom floor and stared at my garden-abused body. We had picked I-don’t-know-how-many pecks of tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis, green beans, and whatever else that was exploding in that ungodly fertile patch of earth, leaving me with a rash, a sunburn, and more bug bites than I could count—a veritable itching, scratching, burning trifecta of pain.

“Oww . . .” I groaned, slipping a bra strap over my reddened shoulder, the contrast of my skin achingly apparent.

“Didn’t I tell you to wear a shirt with long sleeves?” Andy asked me, unhooking me from behind. “Didn’t I offer to rub you down with repellant?”

“But we were in the shade—
ooh,”
I said, wincing as his hand brushed the baked skin leading up to my neck. Good thing I had worn a wide-brimmed hat while picking, or I don’t think I would’ve have been able to turn my neck. “And how much sense does it make to slather olive oil on in the sun?”

“Eucalyptus in olive oil is a natural bug repellant.” He held out his arms. “Look—not one bite. If you had covered up you wouldn’t have gotten burned or bitten at all.”

I tossed my bra to the corner. “I didn’t think—”

“No, you didn’t,” he said, turning to the tub to twist the taps. “Get in the tub. I’ll be right back.”

“Yes sir,” I said, kicking my dress away. Strange how he took such an authoritative tone with me. Maybe because the mirror was the only thing Richard had ever reigned supreme over. Maybe because it wasn’t in my DNA to let someone take care of me on such a visceral level. Either way, at the moment, it felt good. I stepped out of my underwear and tested the quickly-filling tub, blissfully cool to my scraped fingers. A second later, Andy entered with a large, steaming pot. His gaze flicked over me.

“Turn it off,” he said, a bit thickly, “and get in.”

As I lowered my heated body it reacted as if I were sinking into the Arctic and I hissed, recoiling a bit as I clipped my disheveled hair atop my head. “Cold!” I said, shivering, even though the ceiling fan spun overhead, chopping the humid air with a languid thrum.

“Move your feet,” Andy said as he tipped the pot over the tub, blackened water and teabags plopping out.

“Tea?” I said, instinctively kicking at the pods, churning the water brown. The couple of dozen or so bags bobbed around me as I slipped into the water up to my neck. “What’s it supposed to do?”

“The tannins in the tea draw the burn out—here.” He scooped up a few tea bags and molded them to my shoulders. Almost instantly, I could feel the pain easing.

“Aaaahh . . .” I said, my eyes fluttering in relief. “You’re a genius, you know that?”

“Just an old sailor’s remedy,” he said, sitting on the edge of the tub. We idled there for a few minutes, saying nothing, Andy paddling the water with his fingers as it darkened obligingly. I closed my eyes, nearly dozing until Andy abruptly stood up. “I left some aloe for your bites on the sink.”