When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fae (10 page)

“I don’t see as I have much choice.”

The little woman stood up. “Things you see with your eyes can sometimes take different shapes. They are representations.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Doesn’t it?”

She didn’t exactly disappear—she didn’t dissolve, or blink off like, say, Elizabeth Montgomery’s mother in Bewitched. But Libby didn’t see her walk away, either. It was more like the night became a little bit thicker and she could no longer make out the little person’s form enfolded within the darkness.

She waited a little while longer, but nothing else happened, so she gathered her things and went back down to the house.

14

It was spring. Time to plow. Only turns out, it took longer to pick a spot to plow than to actually plow it.

That’s because Al Butterman had different ideas about where to plow than Libby did.

Al ran a thirty-head dairy farm a mile up the road. He was in his 60s and Libby could tell he thought she was bonkers to try to do vegetables on the Stowe place. But apparently not “there’s no helping her bonkers” because he still offered opinions on how she should go about it, apparently thinking maybe he could at least save her from complete and total ruin.

His first piece of advice was that she should plant close to the road on the northernmost boundary of her property. To make it easier to load your produce, he said.

But she wanted to start things closer to her house. She had no good reason for this, she admitted to herself. She just liked the idea of it being closer to her, to where she slept. Under her wings.

So Al gave up and drove his tractor to the field closest to her house.

Then they discussed what part of that field he should plow. He thought all of it, then she could plant anywhere she wanted. But she didn’t want to expose topsoil needlessly and then let it sit—that’s a no-no for organic growing, you risk erosion, and nutrients will leach from your soil. “Better get it mown, then, if you’re not going to plow it,” he warned. “You’ll have trees growing here next year if you don’t.”

She noticed that her hands were clenched slightly and reminded herself to relax. She’d worry about baby trees some other time. “It gets the most sun up there,” she said, pointing to the highest part of the field.

“Soil will be better down there,” Al answered, tipping his head in the other direction.

Stand up for yourself, Libby. “All the same, if you don’t mind, I want to try that spot this year.”

So he plowed where she wanted him to plow. Charged her twenty dollars, which probably didn’t cover his fuel, considering how long his tractor had idled while they argued.

Then afterward he threaded the tractor back through the break in the hedgerows and she listened to it mutter away down the road toward his place, and she stood looking at the spot he’d plowed, smelling the newly-turned earth.

And for the first time, it seemed real. That she was really doing it, starting a farm, starting her new life.

♦ ♦ ♦

“So did you decide what you’re going to plant?” Maisey asked.

Libby was sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by seed catalogues. “Yeah,” she said. “Lots of things. But to start, mostly tatsoi.”

“Huh?”

“It’s an oriental green—it’s like bok choy, only the leaves are smaller.”

“Picture.” That was a request. Libby tossed over a Johnny’s Selected Seeds catalogue.

“In there, somewhere.”

“Mom and her squeeze are growing pineapples.”

“Oh, really?” Libby hadn’t realized her sister’s “business venture” was an agribusiness.

“Yup. He’s got some new kind of pineapple he invented. It’s called ‘honeyham.’”

Honeyham? What, a
salty
pineapple? Or pink, perhaps? Nitrates sold separately? “What do you mean, ‘invented’?”

“He, like, crossed one kind of pineapple with another kind, or something. Well, more than once.”

So he’d bred it. “Is he from Hawaii, then?”

“Yeah. He’s not a native, though. Mom thinks he went there to dodge the draft or something.”

“What draft?”

“He’s old.”

Viet Nam, then. “Ah.” Hawaii. Just like Canada. Only tropical.

Libby leafed through another catalogue, thinking about Gina and her boyfriend and that she really needed to forget about Gina and her boyfriend and get her seed order in.

Oh, all right. She was annoyed.

For no good reason, of course. There’s plenty of room in the world for both Gina and Libby to grow a bit of produce.

Libby rubbed her temples and reminded herself to relax her jaw. Libby got headaches sometimes if she clenched her jaw too much.

If it turned out Gina’s boyfriend was rich and she was now living in an island paradise, Libby was going to be seriously pissed off. And not because she wanted a rich boyfriend and an island paradise, either. But running a farm was her dream, not Gina’s.

Trust Gina to step through an easy door into something Libby wanted but had to struggle to get. Gina was the sort of person who could leave her car parked
on top
of a fire hydrant for six months and never get a ticket. While meanwhile, if Libby so much as glanced at a handicapped-only parking sign, a SWAT team would rappel down a nearby skyscraper, yank her out of her car, and throw her to the ground in handcuffs.

Tyler walked into the living room and handed Maisey her breakfast. It looked like it was supposed to be an omelet. But had turned out more like something he’d scraped off a tire. But Maisey smiled sweetly and said, “Mmmm” and he smiled back, and then returned to the kitchen. To scrape another tire for himself, presumably.

“Hey, Aunt Libby, you ever hear from that Carhartt guy?”

Libby flipped to the next page of her catalogue and looked at a description of a pie pumpkin. She’d picked Tatsoi because it was a fast maturer, something she could harvest relatively early in the season. But she’d also have to pick some things to plant that would be ready for harvesting later on. “No . . . why should I?”

“Well you were living with him! For, like, over a week!”

Libby shrugged casually. “So?”

Maisey giggled. Prurient fascination with her aunt’s personal life, Libby guessed. “Why does he live like that—all alone in the woods, like that?”

“I have no idea.” Maybe she’d wait on ordering pumpkin seeds . . .

Maisey took a bite of toast. “So what’s Paul think of you moving in with a stra-ange man like that?” Drawing out the word strange to make Dean sound stranger. “He knows that’s where you were staying, right?”

“Of course,” Libby said smoothly. She was going to add, “I would never hide anything from Paul,” but she started re-stacking her catalogues instead.

“He’s probably some sort of Ted Kaczynski type,” Maisey said. Tyler walked in and Maisey moved down one couch cushion to make room for him. “He’s probably holed up writing a manifesto about the evils of society, about how corporations are stealing our souls—”

“I thought you figured he was hiding out because of a broken heart?” Tyler mumbled through a mouthful of food.

“Corporations do not steal peoples’ souls.” Libby pushed the catalogs into their storage spot, on the floor under an end table, and carefully re-straightened the stack. “They buy souls, not steal them. And not all corporations even do that. Which you’d know, if you actually had a job.”

That last observation had no visible impact. Maisey received a monthly allowance from her father. Small by adult standards, riches beyond measure to a nineteen-year-old. Or anyway, enough that she saw no real reason to work.

“Ty and I are going to go visit him, aren’t we, Ty?”

Libby reversed herself and returned quickly to the living room. “Visit who?”

“Ted. The Carhartt guy.”

“Ted? You mean Dean? His name is Dean. You can’t visit him.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn’t want visitors.” But she wondered, when she said that, if it were really true. Or if he was, behind that wall of solitude he’d built up, secretly wishing someone would drop by. Did he ever wish maybe Libby would drop by . . .

“I want to see Bo.”

“You can’t just—you can’t just drop in on people. You need to be invited.”

“He’s a neighbor. We have to be neighborly. And I want to see his cabin. I love log cabins.”

Argh.

But what could Libby do? If she kicked up a serious fuss, it would seem . . . odd. Whereas if she dropped it quietly, chances were Maisey would forget about it. It’s not like the kid had a record-breaking attention span.

“Suit yourself,” Libby muttered and retreated to her office.

And mulled, sitting at her computer. She didn’t like this—this mixing of two worlds. Which was how she’d come to think of it. Her life had been so disrupted lately. Ever since the separation, really. And then the move, and the ice storm . . . sleeping on Dean’s couch—which in a way had lasted almost long enough to start feeling normal. And then NYPRG restored her electricity, and just like that she was back in her house, watching a plumber solder a new section of pipe into place in the basement, checking her email, talking to Paul on the phone—the old new normal, back again.

She’d never had two normals before. So that took getting used to.

It wouldn’t be good, Maisey mixing them up together. Or turning Dean into . . . just a neighbor.

Libby stared at her computer screen, telling herself to get a grip.

♦ ♦ ♦

“Hi, this is Libby Samson, editor of Dormet Vous Lustre’s newsletter,
Skin Tones
. I understand you’ve tried our ‘Tight By Tomorrow’ nightly facial crème, and I was wondering if I could profile you for our upcoming issue.”

“I guess so.”

Cold calls. Never Libby’s favorite part of the job.

“Is now a good time to talk?”

“I guess so. Who did you say you are, again? Did I win something?”

Libby repeated her intro spiel. With the addition of: no, sorry, you didn’t win anything. Then asked her victim’s permission to record the conversation. One of the new requirements Dormet Vous had imposed—record all interviews, and send the tapes to Paul for archiving. Dormet said they wanted them in case they decided to “repurpose” any of the material. Libby suspected that the real reason was that their lawyers wanted to make sure the Dormet’s collective rear-end was covered in case she took too many liberties with her marketing narrative.

“Let’s start with the basics. I’ve got a little bit of information about you from a survey card you filled out. But tell me in your own words, why did you decide to try ‘Tight By Tomorrow’?”

“Well, a woman always wants to look her best.”

Libby made a suitably sympathetic murmur.

But it was a fake murmur. The only one who deserved sympathy was Libby.

The woman went on a bit more, about how she’d noticed a difference right away, diminished wrinkles, tighter skin. She sounded like she was reading Dormet Vous copy off the Dormet Vous box. So much so that a picture of her rose unbidden in Libby’s mind: there she was, sitting on a dilapidated sofa, cordless phone in one hand, and in the other a “Tight by Tomorrow” box that she peered at through her drugstore reading glasses as she spoke.

Libby fished around desperately for a line of questioning that would give her a real story. She needed to get to the pain. The humanity. “Tell me, Angela, when did you first start to worry about how old you look?”

“Oh! I don’t look old!”

Whoops. “No, of course you don’t. What I meant was—” Quick. Switch bait. “When did it become important to you to ‘look your best’?” Lame, lame, lame. She’d never go anywhere with that.

“Oh, I’ve always wanted to look my best. Doesn’t everyone?”

So. Back to the beginning again. Libby sighed. And wondered if Dormet would continue to fund the newsletter once they realized her articles were lifted, word-for-word, from their product packaging.

15

Oak trees are the slowest trees to leaf out in the spring, and the trees on Dean’s property were mostly oak. So when Libby looked up from her planting, it didn’t look like May, it looked earlier. April-ish. But the sun was already pretty hot, at 10:30 in the morning, and the soil was definitely dry enough to work.

Not that there was much soil to work with. To her horror, when she finally got down on her hands and knees for a close look, she realized just how depleted her topsoil was. There was so little organic matter that it had hardened into rock-like clumps. And shallow. In some spots, Al’s plow had hit subsoil.

Not good.

After mucking around in it a bit, Libby stood up and walked to the downhill end of the field. She pushed her spade into the ground, past the sod, and flipped it over. Then again, deeper, another shovelful.

Topsoil there was a good foot deep.

She guessed why. Over years of use, the uphill topsoil had been washing down to the lowest end of the field.

Oh. And also, Al Butterman had been right.