Weekends in Carolina (5 page)

“I’m a lobbyist, though I used to work on Capitol Hill. I studied public policy in college.”

“Sounds important.”

Trey couldn’t judge the tone in her voice, so he risked another look at her between bites before replying, “I think so. I got into it because I can make a real difference in my government, and I make a good living at it. I’m not sure many others can say the same about their jobs.” Why he felt the need to defend himself in front of his dad’s
farmer,
of all people, he didn’t know and didn’t want to examine too closely.

“I wasn’t being sarcastic,” she said, her hands up in a show of honesty. “It really does sound important. I should pay more attention to legislation and my elected officials and such, but I only really know about what comes into my email from the farming associations I belong to.”

Unused to being complimented in this room, much less in this house, Trey turned the conversation back to Max. “What kind of legislative issues come into a farmer’s email?” At the suspicious face she made, it was his turn to hold up his hands and say, “No, really, I’m curious.”

There was just enough light in the room for him to see Max raise her eyebrows at him. “But not curious enough to take a tour of what I’ve done to your ancestral landholdings.”

The ridiculousness of that statement forced a laugh out of him. “Ancestral landholdings?”

“Sure. Your family has lived on these lands since time began, haven’t they?”

“Well, yes, but I’ve never considered this forty acres to be anything but a mud pit that money and time fall into.”

“Yeah,” Max said with a mixture of sympathy and amusement on her face. “Hank doesn’t seem to have been a very good farmer.”

“And you?”

“Am I a good farmer?” She shrugged. “What’s your metric? I sell out of my vegetables most weekends at the farmers’ market. My CSA subscriptions fill up every year, providing me with the money to buy seeds and plants without having to borrow. I’m not going to get rich, but I have a small savings account and some money for retirement. Plus, I grow nutritious vegetables people want to eat and my job allows me to spend most days outside, hands in the soil and the sun on my back.”

“And the rain.”

Max’s laugh was full and hearty. “You really are determined to spotlight the negatives of the farm. Yes, and the rain, which gets me wet, but also makes the plants grow.”

Her accusation stung a bit. He hadn’t meant for his hatred of the farm to bleed into his relationship with Max because, no matter how he felt about the farm, he
was
interested in the farmer. “You tell me about the legislation emails that interest you so much and I’ll let you give me a tour of the farm tomorrow.”

“More of that rain you’re so afraid of is supposed to hit tomorrow. Buckets of it.”

Her voice was warm, like the rays of sun she described hitting her back, even as she talked about the rain, and he wanted to see the land as she saw it. To understand what had attracted her to this life and had kept her willing to put up with his father when he called her a
lady farmer
. “Tell me what worries you, and I’ll agree to a tour, even if it’s in the rain.”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath before the words poured out of her. “Despite looking at the maps and hearing the reassurances, I worry what fracking will do to my water quality and thus to my plants. I worry about regulations designed for a large corn grower like my father’s farm but which don’t take into account the scale of farms like mine or the different safety issues we face. I worry about changing labeling requirements and how that could weaken the value of my product and the work I put into it. And those are just the legislative and policy worries.” This time Max’s laugh had a self-deprecating edge. “Do you want to hear about the nonlegislative worries, too? I mean, while I’m spilling my fears into the dark.”

“How about we save the nonpolicy worries for Friday,” he responded, surprised to find he meant it. “We can watch another basketball game together and I’ll have had my tour, so what you tell me will mean more.”

The television erupted in cheers, jolting both their heads up to see a replay of a Carolina fast break and dunk. “Tar,” Trey called and Max’s lack of response reverberated around the room. “You’re supposed to respond with ‘heel.’”

“Even if I live in North Carolina, I’m still a Fighting Illini.”

“Tar,” Trey called again.

“Oh, fine.” She laughed. “Heel.”

“Now with more feeling. Tar!”

“Heel!” She had a powerfully booming voice that shook the farmhouse and made Ashes raise his head.

“Good. Now I wouldn’t be embarrassed to take you to the Dean Dome.”

Trey was pleased when she laughed again. “Is that what this is about?”

He didn’t entirely know what this was about, only that he had forgotten how much this house weighed on him while Max, with her intense eyes and serious manner, laughed.

* * *

M
AX
WAS
TOUCHED
when Trey walked her back to the barn, insisting despite her contention that she walked the farm alone most of the time and had done so for years. Plus, she had Ashes to protect her from raccoons and coyotes. “I’m not doing this for you,” Trey had said, “but for my mom, who would be appalled if I didn’t walk a girl to her front door. I recognize that it’s a mostly empty gesture, but—”

“So long as we both know it’s a bit silly, I’ll let you do it for Noreen’s memory.”

The walk across the grass had been silent and awkward. An evening spent watching a college basketball game and eating the leftovers from a funeral wasn’t a date, but at some point it hadn’t felt like two friends hanging out, either. Flashes of light from the big-screen TV had emphasized the attraction in Trey’s eyes and she had been grateful for the oversize woolen sweater hiding the way her nipples had answered. She could have pretended it was the cold, but she would’ve been lying. Trey was attractive and she liked the way his silliness escaped despite heavy, black eyebrows and a serious career.

He was here for the rest of the week—right next door and very convenient. And then he would leave and she wouldn’t have to worry
what next?
Responsibility-free sex would be nice. Could she do it, though? And shouldn’t she pick a better candidate for such an indulgence than the man who owned her land? Only she couldn’t socialize while at work and the men at the farmers’ market saw a farmer rather than a woman. She went out with friends only occasionally, and even on those rare nights out she wondered if money spent at a bar would have been better put aside for buying land.

That last sad statement was reason enough to give this a try.

Her hand had wanted to reach for his on the walk over—like they were in middle school or something—and she’d had to yank it back. Her pajama bottoms didn’t have pockets to give her hands somewhere to go, so the one closest to Trey still twitched. At least her nipples hardening had been a sexual response. She was an adult and he was good-looking, so that was easy enough to explain away. But hand-holding implied a desire for a relationship and, while she now knew what job required Trey to wear a suit, he was still a stranger and he still lived in D.C. Sex, rather than hand-holding, was what should be on the agenda.

They stopped on her front porch, the wind blowing the storm in, mussing up her hair as surely as his short hair stood on end with no escape. Ashes sat at the door and stared at the wood. “Thank you for dinner and the game. This is the latest I’ve stayed up in ages.” That statement was true, even if she didn’t have her watch on her. “Farmers up with the chickens and all,” she finished awkwardly.

God, this was weird. His eyes were warm and steady on her lips, despite the wind buffeting about everything else in the vicinity. Like some out-of-body experience, she could feel her lips part and her chin lift a little. Her heart fluttered. Warmth flooded her body and she wanted to take off her sweater to cool down. She shifted slightly forward. Trey’s hand was coming out. She wanted him to slip it under her big sweater, to feel his grip tight on her waist.

Ashes barked. Trey’s hand brushed her breasts, more accidental than not, on its way up to the back of his neck. “So, my tour. What time tomorrow?”

She blinked. The spell was over. “I have to start seeding broccoli tomorrow in the greenhouse. Come find me whenever you’re ready.”

“Okay.”

They stood at her front door. Trey was probably waiting for her to go in. She didn’t know what she was waiting for, so she reached behind her and turned the knob. Ashes rushed inside to his bed by the fireplace. “Thanks again.”

“My pleasure.” He leaned back onto his heels, but didn’t leave her porch. “Do you need help getting the fire started?”

Bone-warming, dry air from the woodstove drifted across her back through the open doorway. “No. I left a pretty good fire going. I’ll just need to add some logs and it should keep me through the night.”

“Tomorrow, then.” He wasn’t going to leave. Max didn’t really want him to. She either had to go inside and shut the door on him or invite him in.

She nodded, stepped back until she was inside and closed the door. Only when she heard his feet bounce off her steps did she take off her shoes and head up the stairs to her bed. When she asked Ashes what the hell that had been about, her otherwise reliable dog had no answer.

CHAPTER FIVE

W
HEN
T
REY
FOUND
Max in the greenhouse about ten o’clock the next morning, she had already planted the first table of broccoli and was ready for a break and a chance to stretch her legs. The monotony of the task plus the patter of the rain against the thick, plastic roof had lulled her into a trance. The only way she knew she hadn’t planted two seeds into one cell was because she was out of cells and seeds at the same time.

Since all she’d seen Trey wear so far had been jeans that were nice enough for any place in Durham; dress pants, complete with dress shirt and sport coat; and a funeral suit, she hadn’t known what to expect him to don for his tour in the rain. His boots looked a little too big, the rain slicker a little too small, and his jeans would get soaked, but they would do. Especially when she gave him something to cover his pants. He called out to her, but she couldn’t hear what he said over the drumming of the rain.

She walked across the greenhouse to where he stood petting Ashes. “There are rain bibs on the peg behind you.”

“Won’t you need...” he said before looking up and noticing the rain bibs she was wearing. “Will they fit?”

“Better than any of the clothes you have on.”

“Dad’s clothes are packed. These are my grandfather’s. Apparently, he had big feet and tiny shoulders. I found them in the closet off the back porch.”

Max thought it would have been simpler to have unpacked Hank’s clothes, especially as he and Trey were of a size—minus the beer gut. Perhaps it was easier to step into his grandfather’s shoes than his father’s.

Trey sat on the bench and tugged off his boots before stepping into the bibs. He was wearing dress socks. Max was about to comment that for a man who grew up on a farm, he didn’t know how to pack to visit one, when she realized that was probably the point. He hadn’t planned to step out of the farmhouse long enough to need woolen socks. After he and Kelly had packed up all their parents’ things, would Trey ever come back to the farm?

“Ready,” he said. The bibs covered the flannel shirt he’d also apparently found in a closet somewhere and he fastened the slicker over them. Max put on her own raincoat and, in unison, they flipped their hoods up over their heads and stepped out into the cold rain. Ashes had to be cajoled out of the greenhouse into the damp.

“I thought a farm dog wouldn’t be so averse to rain,” Trey said.

“Ashes is now an old farm dog. He likes to pick and choose his farm duties, but he wouldn’t want to be shut in the greenhouse, either.”

Trey kept up with Max easily as she strode past the packing shed and the second tobacco barn to the fields, Ashes bounding alongside. Now that being out of the rain wasn’t an option, the dog was determined to enjoy himself. Plus, rain wouldn’t scare away the geese and Ashes still had his farm chores to attend to.

Max walked more quickly than normal, but couldn’t seem to slow herself down. She didn’t want there to be any strangeness between them. Here she was, a grown woman in a man’s job, upset because Trey didn’t seem to have any leftover feelings from their near kiss last night!

Or had that near kiss been a figment of her imagination and he hadn’t been reaching for her when Ashes barked? Just because she couldn’t escape her thoughts by walking faster didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try.

When they stopped at the first field, Ashes dashed off after some geese cheeky enough to encroach on his territory. “I have four fields, each divided into two sections, and we rotate the crops. This field will have peanuts for a season, which will add nitrogen back into the soil. In the past, I’ve planted cowpeas or clover for the same purpose, but I had a request from one of the downtown restaurants for peanuts, so I’m giving it a try.” The peanuts were part of the joy and the fear of farming. She’d never grown them before and she didn’t come from a part of the country where they were grown, so she lacked a gauge to measure her progress. But there was also exhilaration in trying something new: reading the literature, testing the soil, shoving something in the ground and then looking to Mother Nature for the rest. Knowing that only some of your success or failure was under your control and that the forces of nature held tight to their power. She scanned the field, trying to read her future in the soil, then shrugged at her own silliness. If the peanuts didn’t work out, there was always next year. And regardless of whether she got a cash crop out of them, they would add nitrogen to her soil.

“Crop rotation, like during the Middle Ages?”

“Well, yes.” When she nodded, the rain dripped off her hood, obscuring her view of the field. “I have a tractor instead of oxen, a pickup instead of a wagon and I can buy ladybugs over the internet, but the basic principles are the same. Rotating your plants keeps insects from gaining a foothold and your soil from being depleted. Cover crops and tilling in add nutrients. That plus elbow grease, sun and rain and you will grow good food.”

She didn’t know why she was so intent on having him understand, having him be impressed with her land management. Probably because of his dismissive attitude toward the land that was his by birth, but she didn’t want to accept that. She’d never let one person’s opinion, especially one man’s opinion, of her business affect how she felt about her life choices before.

Mud squished and squawked under their feet as they walked up the small rise to the next field. Ashes let out a woof when he finally noticed they were gone, and vaulted some rocks up to them. The gray, wet weather obscured the breath of her fields, but land was alive. Max could walk it, plant it and make it grow.

She wished Trey could see the land’s value, as useful as wishing she could plant infertile seeds plucked from hybrid plants. Max continued her tour, which had turned into a treatise on crop rotation. She talked about how she would schedule carrots in fields that had previously had potatoes because the potatoes cut down on weeds and how she planted clover between all her crop rows. If Trey was bored, he hid it well.

By the third field, Trey was talking about his life on the farm as a boy. He pointed out places where he’d hidden from his father and where he had surprised Kelly with an angry and aggressive water snake, telling him it was a water moccasin. He also pointed out where he’d been bitten by a cottonmouth, which he’d deserved for poking it with a stick, and where his brother had broken his arm jumping out of a tree into the pond during a drought.

As they rounded the dirt road from the fields back to the greenhouse, Max asked the question that had been burning inside her since Trey had actually expressed feelings other than disgust for the land. “You talk about your memories fondly, even though they involved physical pain. Why don’t you enjoy coming back here?”

“Do you want me to decide to become a gentleman farmer and kick you out?”

The hard tone in his voice pushed her into a defensive position. “Well, no, but...”

“Why don’t you return to Illinois and farm there?”

“I didn’t come to North Carolina to escape my father. I came to North Carolina because the growing season is good, the local produce market is strong without being saturated and my mom lives in Asheville. I was
attracted
to North Carolina, not repulsed by Illinois or my family.”

Though everything she’d told Trey was true, it wasn’t the whole truth. She’d grown up thinking she would farm her father’s land with her brother, but one summer spent interning at an organic vegetable farm outside of Chicago had changed her mind. Her brother and father grew the food that fed the world, no mistaking that, but she wanted to feel the sun directly on her back, not through the glass of a harvester window. Despite her father’s claim to her childhood, she was her mother’s daughter after all.

He harrumphed, the same noise Ashes made when scolded. “Maybe that’s the difference, then. I decided at an early age that whatever my parents were, I didn’t want to be that. Farm included.”

His use of the plural
parents
was interesting. “I know you didn’t like your father, but no one ever has a bad word to say about your mother. Surely she holds some tie for you.”

“My mother was an uneducated woman who worked a job she hated with people who made fun of her. She was afraid if she quit that she’d never get another job. And we needed the money because my dad was a failure at life.” Max turned her head to look at him. He raised an eyebrow at her, though the disgusted look on his face softened before he spoke again. “She was a lovely, kind person who spent her entire life being trampled on by people who never noticed she was there.”

Trey said the words with the hesitation of someone who didn’t know whether to be disgusted or sad. Max saw what he described but she credited Noreen with being a woman of untapped strength. She had to be, to put up with what Trey had described so that her children would have one stable parent and food on their table. Noreen may not have been a role model for her children, but she’d provided them with enough stubbornness to grow up and get out of a trap. Max supposed Noreen would think Trey’s success was worth the antipathy he felt toward the farm.

The wind started again, and Trey’s slicker wasn’t as weather-hardy as Max’s; the wind and rain were starting to break through. “Let’s go inside the greenhouse. It’s not much warmer in there, but we’ll be out of the weather and we can share my thermos of hot tea.”

* * *

T
REY
DIDN
’
T
SAY
anything as Max took a sip from the thermos cup before handing it to him. She’d stripped off her slicker as soon as they had stepped under cover, so now she was wearing her rain bibs, a neon green thermal undershirt and a navy blue flannel shirt. With her masses of hair, she looked ridiculous and underdressed. And also like the loveliest thing he’d ever seen. A fire burned inside her that warmed her from the inside out. It made her glow. Trey gripped the tiny plastic cup with a fear that he would never be warm again. He tried to step closer to Max, but she moved away, busy in her greenhouse on her farm.

Despite the official ownership, this was more her farm than his—or than it had ever been his father’s. She’d taken a ratty, falling-down piece of property and was turning it into something productive and wonderful. He wanted to pack up his clothes and drive back to D.C. Sell the dirt under his feet to the highest bidder and forget he’d ever lived here. Instead, he poured another cup of tea.

Max was laying out flats on one of the long tables. When her hands stopped moving, he handed her the cup and she took a big gulp. “Thank you.”

“What are you planting?” Besides the flat, she had seeds and soil.

“The last of the broccoli for today.” She was already looking down at her task. Tour was over and tea was shared; he’d been dismissed for work. “Broccoli gets started early then transplanted into the fields. In another two weeks, I’ll seed more broccoli. I should have three weeks of broccoli for the CSA and six weeks of broccoli for the market.”

“Can I help?” He couldn’t say where the impulse behind the question had come from. A lack of desire to go outside into the rain made more sense than wanting to spend more time with Max.

Her head jerked up and her pale eyes were questioning. “Sure, I guess. Planting’s not that hard.” She demonstrated, filling the flat with soil, adding a seed to each cell and topping it with a little more soil. “It’s basically your same seed-starting process as in a garden, only on a larger scale.” She gestured to the table of flats. “I’ll need 2600 feet of broccoli in the field. Makes for a lot of little transplants.”

“You don’t have help?” Trey didn’t know what he’d pictured winter on a vegetable farm to be like, but he’d expected more people.

“No.” She stopped, putting her hands down on top of the flat. “I have three interns March through September, otherwise I’m the only one. It’s a lot of work, but not more than I can handle.”

“I didn’t mean to imply...”

“The winter’s slow, spent mostly planning the coming summer. I’ve thought of starting a winter CSA. Or maybe selling at the market in the winter. I already grow a winter garden for myself. But selling means I’d need another person and I’ve never been willing to risk the cost, especially since I wouldn’t be able to provide housing. If I’m living in the farmhouse, the second person can live in the barn and a winter CSA might be feasible.”

As she was talking, he realized he’d opened his hand out in offering to her. All of her dreams depended on him and his willingness to keep leasing her the land. But she didn’t appear to notice that the land wasn’t resting like a gift on his proffered palm. Once she had stopped talking, she had started planting again. Trey followed her movements until he’d gotten the hang of them enough to find his own rhythm. Ignorance of the farm and Max had been preferable to this...whatever their relationship was now. He’d rather think of the farm as his personal trap than as soil for dreams. But he still couldn’t help asking, “What other plans do you have for the farm?”

She glanced up from her planting and her uncertainty looked tinged with fear. But that was ridiculous. A woman with her forthright gaze couldn’t be afraid of anything. Yet it was written on her face.

When she didn’t answer, he clarified his question. “If money was no object, what would Max’s Vegetable Patch look like?”

“I’ve toyed with the idea of raising animals, but—” she stalled and he could see the objections to her grand plans piling up in her brain “—they’re expensive and unless you’ve got the staff you can’t ever go on vacation.”

He raised a brow at her. “Money is no object.”

“What about time?” she retorted.

“If you have money, you can hire extra people to cover the time.”

“Right.” She went back to planting and Trey gave her some space to organize her thoughts. What he’d meant to be a simple question asked out of curiosity clearly was not.

“Right now I’d like to own the land I farm. Renovate the second tobacco barn so I can offer housing to two interns. Past that, I have no plans.”