“Mr. Thackery—”
“Stop patronizing me with that tone of voice. I won’t back off.”
Jakobek held up his left hand, the forefinger pointed at Davis’s livid face in an almost elegant gesture of warning. I got one glimpse of that hand, noting the shocking imbalance of the missing little finger, before Davis exploded. I grabbed for him as he lunged at Jakobek with a fist drawn back. Nick Jakobek caught him by the wrist, spun him, and let go. In the next second Davis went stumbling into a stack of bushel baskets, scattering them everywhere and plowing face first into the barn’s clay floor.
My lungs echoed the guttural whump of his expelled breath, and I put a hand over my stomach. Jakobek looked up at me. The expression in his eyes wasn’t cruel. “I don’t want to hurt your son.”
“Do you think I’ll let you?” Fumbling at a front pocket of my jeans, I pulled out a shower of ma wong tablets from my jeans pocket and a small enameled pocket knife I always carried. I jerked the blade open, leaned in close to Jakobek’s face, wound one hand in his khaki shirt, and thrust the three-inch sliver of sharp steel in front of his eyes. “Touch him again and I’ll core you like a baking apple.”
A kind of appreciation came into Jakobek’s eyes. Not that I frightened him with my tiny prick of a paring knife—hell, no, I didn’t see a shred of fear. But respect, yes. “Then you have to calm him down.”
“I can calm myself down,” Davis said. “A mouthful of clay makes a good tranquilizer.” He sat up among the baskets, his face speckled with red dirt. Blood trickled from his nose. Suddenly his gave swiveled to the barn’s “I’m all right,” he called hoarsely.
Jakobek and I swung around to see Eddie standing there, white as a sheet, clutching her stomach. “How could you do this to him, Nicky?” She sank to her knees.
“Eddie,” Davis yelled. He leapt to her side, sat down close to her, and held her forehead in one hand. She vomited a thin stream of water onto the barn floor.
“Dammit,” Jakobek said under his breath. “I don’t know how to handle this kind of thing.”
“You’re not the only one,” I told him. “I don’t understand what’s happening or why, any more than you do.”
Davis took Eddie in his arms as she coughed and retched. “We’ve been married since last spring,” he finally said. “And Eddie’s three months pregnant.”
Chapter 10
A BLUE-AND-GOLD AUTUMN sunset lowered a lonely mist over Chocinaw, Big Jaw, and Ataluck Mountains that night, filling the Hollow and making Lucille’s crowd of Secret Service agents squint unhappily into the foggy shadows. Davis and Eddie secluded themselves in his upstairs bedroom, where both phoned friends and relatives with the news of their marriage and baby. Smooch sat, dumbfounded, in my log-cabin office behind the house, fielding phone calls from stunned McGillens and Thackerys. Logan trailed Lucille through our commercial buildings, trying manfully to impress her while she scrutinized the alarm systems and made notes and tried to avoid being impressed. Hush Puppy sat with Smooch in the office, too fascinated to do more than listen and watch in speechless awe.
And I had barely recovered enough to do more than walk the floor.
Nicholas Jakobek took over my living room, where he paced before the fireplace with some kind of high-tech security phone to his ear, listening more than he spoke, the set of his big shoulders tired when I spied on him from the door to the front hall. I could not imagine what Al and Edwina Jacobs were saying to him. I heard him reply once, the timbre of his voice deep and a little warning. “They recited vows they wrote themselves and signed a one-paragraph marriage contract Eddie cooked up. No, they don’t have a ten-dollar government license or the Pope’s blessing, but whether we take the marriage seriously or not, they do.”
I admired him at that moment. How many men are willing to tell the President and the Pope to back off at the same time? When Jakobek put the phone down and caught me in the doorway, I didn’t bother apologizing for eavesdropping. We were beyond simple courtesies, at that point. “Homemade vows or not, Jakobek, you’re right. They’re not backing down. At least not yet until the excitement wears off.”
“Eddie was raised to honor her word.”
“That’s how I raised my son, too. And I’m sure he’s sincere.”
“What about you?”
“About marriage vows? I believe in them for the long haul.”
“That’s an interesting way of putting it. But my question is, ‘what do you intend to do about this situation in the short haul?’”
I felt my face grow hot. He inspired awkward, or maybe honest, misinformation. All right. “I intend to honor a simple but ironclad rule for keeping a family together. I’m duty-bound to welcome a pregnant daughter-in-law no matter what the circumstances, and keep my mouth shut for the good of my grandchild. Even if I think this marriage is impulsive and naïve and probably doomed.”
Jakobek walked over, studying my face the way a lost man reads a map. To find the quickest way home. I almost backed away. I almost leaned towards him. He stopped no more than hugging distance from me. “I like your brutal and dutiful honesty,” he said.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It was.”
I left the living room with the tip of my tongue clamped between my teeth.
Blind. Ye be blind, who would see-eth the most. So quoteth I of the self-named Reverend Betty Passover, pastor of the Gospel Church of the Harvest, Chocinaw County’s tiniest church, but, in my opinion, it’s most profound. Blind. I had never looked at Eddie Jacobs and considered the obvious maternal reason for her hair-trigger stomach. I hadn’t wanted to think in that direction. I had pulled a shade of hope over my mind’s eye. Now I stood in the light.
Not Eddie Jacobs. Eddie Jacobs Thackery. My daughter-in-law. Pregnant with my son’s child. My grandbaby.
Up at the public barns my workers were cleaning up and shutting down for the night. Normally, I held a meeting at the end of opening day to toast everybody with fifty-proof apple jack and review the sales record. For the first time in twenty years, I cancelled the meeting. As soon as I figured out what to do next, I’d have to talk to everyone about the wife Davis had brought home. I’d have to feign support and happiness.
The truth?
I saw Davis’s choices through the narrow view of my own impulsive marriage to his father, and so I feared the worst. I wanted to keen in Biblical fashion and slash my breasts.
But I had to keep a close eye on Jakobek.
EDDIE WAS PREGNANT. Pregnant. My kid cousin. The little girl I’d held at birth. Going to be a mother.
Al was headed back to the States on Air Force One. Edwina was on her way from England. “Edwina can’t talk about this anymore, right now,” he said hoarsely. “She’s too upset. We both are. We want to be there this instant. But we can’t be. Thank you for going. Do you know how guilty we feel, not being there?”
He had just the usual job responsibilities—the Middle East, a small crisis, threats to world peace. “I’m not a good stand-in,” I admitted, “ but I swear to you Eddie’s safe, and I’ll keep her that way.”
“What do you think of this Thackery? Your gut level first impression.”
“Smart. Naïve. Cocky. Loves her. Wants to do the right thing.”
“And his family? His . . . irascible mother?”
I spent about ten minutes talking enthusiastically about Hush Thackery, until I realized how much I’d said and how quiet Al had become. “I’m asking you to stay neutral,” Al said slowly. “Are you . . . all right?”
After a silence of my own, I said, “Al, I’m always neutral. And I’m always all right.”
A helluva lie.
That night I stood in Hush Thackery’s upstairs hallway looking at the closed door to the bedroom where Davis Thackery and Eddie had shut us all out. I tossed my duf
fle bag on a twin four poster in a room about the size of a closet. A good copy of an eighteenth century Warford landscape was framed on the wall. Apple pickers in English orchards. The bedroom was the last outpost at the end of the upstairs hall with a tall window. I picked it because I could check the backyard from the room’s window and a side yard from the hall’s window. Vantage points. Davis’s bedroom was only two doors down, across a width of Turkish rug with apples in the design.
His mother’s big bedroom was just beneath mine, downstairs. Hush Thackery, posted at the gate to her home. Guardian of her nest. Keeper of family pride and die-hard morals. She slept alone, down there, standing guard. I’d do my best to keep her world safe, too.
And I’d think about her sleeping, alone.
Lucille Olson called me on the secure phone she’d set up. “Mrs. Thackery has left the house and disappeared into the back orchard. I think she’s upset. Someone should follow her. She told me to make myself at home. I don’t think she meant it. Lt. Colonel, will you go check on her?”
By the time I said yes and turned the phone off, I was already heading downstairs.
I HID MYSELF UNDER the Great Lady as a huge orange harvest moon rose among milky purple clouds, and there I broke down. I squatted on my heels in the moon-dappled darkness, hugged my knees to my forehead, and sobbed. The scent of the earth and the night wind and the apples above me wafted into my brain, lifting wisps of the scent from Jakobek’s cigar from my clothes and skin and memory. The Great Lady showered me with a few of her red autumn leaves.
There is a season for letting go and a season for starting over.
“I can’t let go of my dreams for Davis,” I countered. “God, I made the best of what you handed me and I made sure my son grew up respecting his father and I hid the truth about our fights and Davy’s women and how much he disappointed me and how much I disappointed him, all so our son would grow up seeing how a man and a woman ought to treat each other—all so Davis would have more choices and make smarter decisions than his father and I did. Are you telling me it’s smart for him to marry a girl who has nothing in common with his own people? Are you telling me it’s smart for him to leave college and come back here with a baby on the way and the whole world watching? God, do you want everything I’ve built here to fall apart under that kind of scrutiny?”
No answer. You can’t grill God for explanations as if He were the defendant in the trial for your life. I dried my eyes with the sleeve of my sweater and got to my feet, shoving the Great Lady’s lower branches aside. She was trying to tap me on the shoulder and tell me to keep my own counsel. “Why should I listen?” I said hoarsely. “No one seems to be listening to me.”
“I am,” Jakobek said. He stood out in the open alley between the trees, whitewashed in the moonlight.
I froze. “How long have you—”
“Long enough. Sorry.”
The night breeze ruffled his dark hair and pulled at his loose, earth-hued clothes. The fruit-heavy trees seemed to sway toward him, catching at him with their finest little branches. Goosebumps rose on my skin. Davy had never looked right, with his smirk and his leather and his smell of motor oil, among the trees. But Jakobek did.
I moved forward holding a small apple I’d snared off the Great Lady. I stopped in front of Jakobek and thrust the apple into his left hand, then clamped his callused fingers over it, taking little care to be discreet or gentle. If he was uncomfortable about his disfigured hand, my touch didn’t register any regret. Gripping his hand inside both of mine, I tilted my head back and looked up at him with feverish anger and sorrow and hope. “I know the difference between rotten and ripe, and I’m an expert on the difference between an honest man and a liar. In my version of the Garden of Eden, Eve made it her business to grow the apple of wisdom and never be fooled by a snake again. Which are you, Jakobek? The snake or the apple?”
“Both.” He looked down at me with troubled eyes. Most men didn’t have enough words for what they felt, and most women had too many. “If you’ve got anything else I need to know, tell me.”
“You’ve already heard more about my marriage than any other person on the face of this earth.” I paused. “More than my son has ever so much as suspected.”
“I’m not interested in exposing your personal secrets.” He turned the small, helpless apple in his maimed hand, examined it, then put it in his shirt pocket. “We’re in this mess together. If you work with me, I’ll work with you.”
Without another word he pivoted and walked back through the alley in the moonlight toward the house, taking the apple of temptation with him. I stepped out in the light and stood, awed and afraid as I watched him cast half in light, half in shadow, again.
JAKOBEK LEFT FOR Washington the next morning before dawn. Neither of us said another word about the things he’d overheard regarding Davy. I prayed he’d forget. I knew he wouldn’t. Maybe he thought it was all just the soap opera mumblings of an unhappy widow. I hoped so.
Eddie Jacobs Thackery, my pregnant daughter-in-law, slept in Davis’s upstairs bedroom under a silk coverlet in the company of two cats and Davis’s favorite dog, an old mixed Beagle he and his father had found as a puppy at the Foggy Top Dirt Track in northern Alabama. Davis had named the dog Racer. Racer snored on the First Daughter’s feet. Davis, grim-faced and silent, watched over her from a corner rocking chair surrounded by his books, computers, stuffed deer heads, and framed pictures of him and Davy, standing beside stockcars. The room was a young country-boy college student’s bedroom. Not a husband’s, I told myself.
Not a father’s.
I STAYED IN A HOTEL when I went to Washington, never at the White House. My own choice. The White House was Al and Edwina’s world, not mine. I stepped off an elevator into the family quarters, carrying a huge wicker basket. I set it on a gilded table.
One of Edwina’s staffers came out of an office. “Lt. Colonel, Mrs. Jacobs will be with you momentarily.” She stared at the basket. Twenty pounds of Sweet Hush Farm fried apple pies and apple muffins and apple fritters and apple fruitcake and God alone knew what else bulged inside tight, shrink-wrapped plastic beneath a fat red bow. Hush had asked me to present the food to Edwina. “She may laugh at it or she may spit on it,” Hush said, “but we share a grandbaby, and I have to send a gift. It’s another of my rules.”
“I’ll get it there,” I said. “And she won’t laugh at it. I can’t promise anything else.”
“You’re loyal,” she said. Staring into my eyes, searching down behind the corneas, looking for the real me. Like a threat, or a question.
I looked away. Facing guns in a jungle somewhere was easier. “I’m trustworthy. A regular Boy Scout.”
“We’ll see.”
“What’s that, may I ask?” the staffer asked, sniffing at the basket.
I told her. Her face neutral, she probed the cellophane wrapping with a fingertip and read the labels with an arched brow. “Has this homey little offering been cleared by the Secret Service?”
“Lucille Olsen watched Mrs. Thackery pack it. Yes.”
“I thought this woman had employees to do her menial work for her.”
“It’s a gift. Personal.”
“Is this Thackery woman presentable? Somewhat educated?”
“Why don’t you call her and ask her? She’ll be happy to hear she’s up for evaluation. After being spied on by Edwina and her minions.”
“I’ve never appreciated your morbid jokes.”
“I’m not joking.”
She left me in a breeze of expensive perfume and disapproval. I nodded to Secret Service agents who nodded back as I walked into a sitting room Edwina had decorated in country style—French country. “I had to exile my beloved Louis The Fourteenth collection to Mother’s estate,” Edwina had said. “Our advisors decided it made me look too Marie Antoinettish.” Only a grass-sta
ined set of golf clubs in one and a framed picture of my Grandfather Jacobs on the mantel—hinted Al lived in the White House with Edwina.
Her brilliant masterminding of their campaigns and their image had put them there, and her protective control over Eddie had been wise—to a point. But she’d gone a bridge too far in fighting the fear I’d seen in her eyes that day I killed the man in the park. Her cynicism and distrust had spread. It included Hush and Davis Thackery, now.
I scowled at myself in a gilded mirror. As I straightened the wrinkled jacket I’d pulled out of my duffel bag I discovered something in the pocket: A slice of apple wrapped in cellophane and a torn piece of Sweet Hush Farms business stationary. I unfolded the slip of paper and saw Puppy’s big, scrawled, first-grader lettering.
THE BEES SAY U BEE LONG 2 US OK?
Standing in Edwina’s sitting room, I folded Puppy’s note carefully and saved it in my pocket, then unwrapped the apple slice and ate it in small bites. The sweet juice spread over my tongue. Hush had grown this apple. Hush McGillen Thackery, with an emphasis on McGillen. She had fostered the tree and ripened the fruit and maybe even picked this apple with her own hands. Then she’d carved it and handed it to her niece to hide in my pocket like a communion wafer. Shape and form and spirit and hunger.
A door opened on silent hinges, and Edwina walked in. The tailored blue dress suit she wore cinched her like a store mannequin, and her mound of blonde hair didn’t move. She was fifty-five years old and welded into the armor of campaigns and fundraisers and political maneuvers and the career of a glorified hostess. That was the price she’d paid for standing behind Al instead of in front of him. I missed the cheerful Edwina from those early years before she saw what it would take to survive public life.
“You never sit,” she said. Red-eyed and hard-soft. Never athletic or svelte but strong. “Sit, Nicholas,” she ordered. “For godssake, someone in this family ought to do what I tell them to, for once.”
“Too much toile makes me nervous.” I nodded at chairs covered in the patterned green fabric.