Sweet Hush

  She looked from me to Jakobek, and her eyebrows arched. “I believe you’ve been scheming with Hush to get me to visit my mother.”

  “I don’t scheme,” he said with a straight face.

  She turned to Davis. “What do you think? Should I visit her? Will it look as if I’m caving in and I need her approval?”

  Davis gestured toward two tons of apples. “No, I think it’ll look like you want her recipe for apple cobbler.” She smiled anxiously. He took her hand. “Let’s visit your mother. She’s already demonstrated her approval with all those gifts.”

  “Oh, Davis, you’re right.”

  “Then we’ll go.”

  He and she burrowed their heads together and nuzzled each other.

  I crawled down from the truck, scowling dramatically when Jakobek handed me a bandana to wipe my eyes. “They live in a blissful fog of romantic ideals,” I whispered.

  He folded my tear-stained bandana and placed it carefully in the chest pocket of his work shirt. “Good for them,” he said.

  THE CARAVAN OF Sweet Hush Farms trucks made national news for an entire day as it wound from the mountains of northern Georgia to the soft coastal highlands of the Carolinas, Virginia, and finally, Washington, D.C. Smooch saved a few apples to auction on e-bay. Souvenir hunters had already stolen the Hollow’s mailbox and the handsome road signs leading drivers to us from the interstate. Our apples were collectible, too.

  Once the Secret Service cleared us to enter, we parked the caravan on the long front drive leading up to the White House. Jakobek got out and leaned against the lead cab, his hands encased in heavy work gloves, his face sanguine. I sat atop the mound of apples on that lead truck, ruddy from the autumn wind, trying not to shiver despite a heavy jacket and blue ski pants. Edwina—and an entourage of her open-mouthed staff—came out to do the niceties.

  A White House photographer snapped pictures. Edwina smiled up at me. “Well, if it isn’t ‘Johnny Anna Appleseed.’”

  At that moment, Eddie and Davis stepped from the cab of the truck behind mine. “Mother,” Eddie said softly, and began crying. Edwina ditched me and went to her child with her arms out. I sat back atop my apple mountain and looked at Jakobek, who stood on the driveway below me, looking up at me with an expression that heated my skin. He gave me a thumbs up. I nodded.

  I had bested Edwina. I had shown her up with grace and style and cunning. Because I’d brought her a better gift than anything she’d sent me.

  Her daughter.

  “OUR WORK HERE IS DONE,” Jakobek said. “More wine?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He poured a rich merlot into my half-empty goblet, then his. We clinked our glasses over plates of prime rib and grilled salmon, toasting the delivery of Eddie to her mother. A beautiful panorama of nighttime Washington and the Potomac River spread out below the windows of our hotel room. Well, my hotel room.

  Oh, Edwina had insisted we stay at the White House, but no, there was no way in hell I’d sleep beneath her roof. Al was in China, so I didn’t have to worry about offending him with a no-thank-you. So I told Edwina I’d stay out of the way. She deserved some quality time with Eddie and my son. I emphasized ‘my son,’ in a tone that warned her she’d better treat Davis well. To her credit, the evidence I saw left little doubt of that. Even after she restored a certain cold dignity about Eddie’s surprise arrival, she looked happy to meet him.

  “Your son’s safe with me,” she shot back.

  “Stop frowning like that. You’ll need more Botox injections in your forehead.”

  A little nugget from Jakobek. She didn’t have the gall to ask where I’d learned it, though she turned and looked hard toward Jakobek, who pretended to study the Washington Monument.

  A good day, all in all.

  But then people discovered Jakobek and me in the lobby of the hotel and came over for my autograph. No one had ever asked me for my autograph before, and I wasn’t giving it, now. More than that, people recognized Jakobek, and not in a positive way. During the ten minutes we stood at the front desk waiting to check in, a half-dozen brave and obnoxious souls stared at him fearfully. I could see the quiet resolve on his face, the faint, cynical humor of being looked at like a guard dog who isn’t supposed to roam free in public.

  So I made a big show of being unnerved by the autograph thing, and asked Jakobek if he’d mind eating dinner with me in private. He immediately discerned I was doing it for his sake.

  “If you think I’m going to be stoic and turn down an invitation to go to your room,” he said, “you’re wrong.”

  At least we understood what we were getting into.

  “Feel good?” he asked, when we were finished eating. The mood between us suddenly went very quiet, very intense.

  I laid my napkin atop my plate. “Very good.”

  “This is the first time we’ve gotten to sit down at a meal together, alone.”

  “It was wonderful. So pleasant it . . . makes me nervous.”

  “You make things too complicated. Me, I like simplicity.” Smiling a little beneath serious eyes, he gestured at his empty plate. “When I’m hungry, I say so.” He let those words settle into the deep pulse of sexual energy we shared. His smile faded. “When I look at you, I’m starving.”

  He had me, in that moment. He had me right down where I lived and breathed and didn’t need to think. He had me in ways that whispered, He’s a blessing, and you’ve earned him.

  “Jakob,” I groaned.

  He rose halfway out of his chair, and I rose to meet him.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  Eddie and Davis stood there. She’d been crying. Davis looked angry. Behind them, Lucille and her agents gave us tired nods.

  “I’ve had more than enough visiting time with my mother, thank you,” Eddie said. “We can go home, now.”

  IT HAD TAKEN LESS than three hours of face-to-face conversation for the small bombshell to fall from Edwina’s tongue. She’d been careful, at first, bless her paranoid little heart, to make the kind of small talk any doting mother would make. What was Eddie eating, how she was sleeping, did she feel good in general, and how did she like the obstetrician she was seeing, down in Atlanta? It was a doctor I’d suggested, a friend.

  Fine, fine, fine, and fine, Eddie had answered firmly. Everything was fine.

  But then Edwina slipped up and said, “I understand your physician is quite an amateur gardener in her spare time, and that’s how she and Hush met. When Hush conducted a state gardening society workshop on growing the old Southern apple varieties.”

  At which point, Eddie froze. “How would you know that, Mother, since you and Hush barely speak and I’ve never told you the story of how they met?”

  “Oh, well, I . . . now, listen, I’m sure you must have mentioned that bit of information, I mean, such an innocent little anecdote—”

  “Oh, Mother. You checked out my doctor, didn’t you? You investigated her. You’re still spying on me.”

  And all Edwina could do, caught like a motherly rat in a maternal trap, was admit it.

  I almost felt sorry for her, except when I thought of the night Jakobek and I had lost, driving apple trucks back to Georgia instead of making good on the promise of a hungry heart.

  Chapter 15

  WITH THE RECONCILIATION of Eddie and her mother on hold again, life in the Hollow settled back into its extraordinary ordinary routines, and neither Jakobek nor I ventured near the subject of what had nearly happened in Washington. We had a dull brand of self-control that said we wouldn’t touch each other with his unhappy niece and my wary son under the same roof with us. When cooler thoughts prevailed, I told myself Edwina had saved us from starting something that neither of us knew how to finish happily. He wasn’t an apple farmer. I was, and always would be. He’d spent twenty years trav
eling the world, and lived out of a duffel bag. I’d been rooted in one place all my life.

  Not that I liked Edwina any better for taking that night from us.

  Jakobek said nothing, but didn’t have to. He loaded apple crates with a grim vengeance; he commandeered the final autumn mowing of the orchards alleys atop a tractor dragging a wrathful Bush Hog blade; he was up in the coldest dawn and outside in the darkest night, working harder than any person on the farm, except me, impressing my relatives beyond any possibility. But he wasn’t doing the work to win their favor. He was doing it to forget that night we’d lost.

  And so was I.

  DURING AN AVERAGE fall season Sweet Hush Farm welcomed about five hundred visitors a day during the week, two thousand on Saturdays, and a thousand on Sundays. Thanks to the national blitz of news and gossip about Eddie’s marriage to my son, our average jumped to two thousand customers per weekday and five thousand on the weekends, both Saturday and Sunday.

  The profits were astounding. The work was backbreaking. Smooch, who avoided Jakobek and was still prickly with me, nonetheless reveled in her role as marketing director of the Eddie Jacobs Thackery show. Eddie graciously ignored the fact that she was valuable. Davis grimly pretended nothing was wrong and spent hours at the computer in his and Eddie’s bedroom every night, where she and he conferred on a business plan that they said would launch Sweet Hush Farms into the new century. During the day Davis loaded baked goods into our delivery trucks while Eddie made fritters and pies and caramel apples and threw up nobly and won over all my relatives with her good-natured smarts.

  She was the talk of Chocinaw County, and despite my efforts to sanctify our relationship by not making money off her, the money rolled in. “I don’t mind being your celebrity cash cow,” she told me gently. “It comes with the territory.”

  “I mind,” I said. “You’re my daughter-in-law.”

  She hugged me. And I hugged her back.

  Eddie’s community impact came home to me in a big way at the November meeting of the Chocinaw County Chamber Of Commerce. Our restaurants, our little country inns, and all our shops had all prospered mightily since September with the overflow of curiosity seekers lured by Eddie.

  So Eddie received a key to the county along with a plaque thanking her for representing us to the world. “I’m very honored, but all I’ve done is make fritters,” Eddie said with a smile to two hundred leading citizens packed into the sanctuary of a local church.

  They laughed and applauded. Davis grinned at the reaction. Lucille and her team watched discreetly from the vestibule and the choir loft, like armed angels. Jakobek, dressed in corduroys and a brown leather bomber jacket, sat beside me in a pew, drawing stares from everyone, and not approving ones. When Bernard Dalyrimple, a brief, discreet, pleasant-enough manfriend and business partner, leaned over to me and whispered, “You’re looking good. Call me,” Jakobek turned slowly and stared at him. Bernard sat back and swallowed hard.

  And God help me, I enjoyed that.

  THE MORE I FELL in love with Hush—without much hope that we’d ever get past the canyon of family duties and role-model dignity we were trying to pull off with every shred of self-control we had—the more I wanted to take her picture. The one hidden in my wallet wasn’t enough. She seemed planted and ripe and full and . . . I searched for some old-fashioned word . . . bountiful. I liked the language of old books, gallant language, elegant, courtly. I kept wrapping myself in new layers against the cold. Forewith or anon, sooner or later, I had to expose my skin to something or someone extraordinarily warm.

  Hush.

  “What are you doing?” she asked in the apple barns, the orchards, sometimes on her own front porch.

  “Taking your picture. I take pictures of everything and everyone around here. You’re my favorite, though.” I paused. “You and the baby goat.”

  We could joke about ourselves, if there were goats involved.

  That weekend I caught a pair of teenagers trying to steal the goat, who’d become my closest friend. I’d named him Rambo. They were locking him in the trunk of their mother’s Lexus when I reached them. “Hey, dude, we just wanted something from the Presidential collection,” the lead ass-wipe said. I shook the kid hard enough to rattle his teeth, took the keys, set Rambo free, then turned the pair over to Hush’s brother.

  “Nobody gets our goat,” Logan said, red as hell, and dragged the little bastards off to find their mother.

  I carried Rambo up to the house in my arms. I locked him on the back screened porch with a pan of water and a loaf of apple bread, and said, “Stay put, you stinking S.O.B.” I walked back to the public barns smelling like the third day of a goat-shit marathon.

  Rambo chewed a two-foot hole in the porch’s screen door and followed me to the open pavilion, where I was walking among the produce stands. “Jakobek, your friend’s back,” called a McGillen cousin with her hand over her smile, and everyone laughed. I found a length of twine, tied one end around Rambo’s neck like a collar, and tied the other end to my belt. “He’s a trained security goat,” I said. The little bastard stayed on the leash as proudly as a poodle at a poodle show.

  At the end of every Sunday, Hush gathered her whole crew and they voted on best employee of the week. The prize was a free dinner for two at the Apple Valley Inn on a small lake outside Dalyrimple and a small, enameled lapel pin of an apple with a gold star in the center. Some workers at the farm wore dozens of best-employee pins on red vests or the fronts of their baseball caps.

  That Sunday, I won the pin, for rescuing Rambo.

  “Just smile and act pleased,” Hush ordered quietly, as she handed me the prize pin in front of everyone. She didn’t expect me to indulge their tradition and put the silly pin on. I attached the apple pin to the breast pocket of my work shirt. “It’s an honor,” I said. “My goat and I thank you.”

  Everyone applauded. Hush smiled at me with the off-kilter brand of approval she got on her face when she thought no one might catch her looking pleasantly surprised. I invited her to share the prize dinner with me the next night, and sitting at a table overlooking the little lake, we talked about everything and nothing and we wrapped ourselves around each other without even touching. We drove back to the farm with enough heat between us to warm the cold autumn midnight.

  Davis and Eddie were sitting on the front porch, wrapped in blankets, waiting for us. “You kids stayed out past your curfew,” Davis said dryly.

  Hush went to bed in a brusque mood, and the evening was over.

  But God help me, I had never had a better night.

  Or a pet goat, before.

  THEIR NAMES WERE Marcus, Simon, and Bill. Three cocky, good-hearted, but hell-raising Harvard men who had been Davis’s best friends since his freshmen year. They couldn’t have been more different from him in background, race, or religion, but under the skin they shared the same solid bone structure: Family, Faith, Friends. All three had wandered in and out of the Hollow with my son for the past few years, and so when they showed up at dark one Friday in an old blue van waving champagne bottles and hooting that it was time for Davis’s better-late-than-never bachelor party down in Atlanta, I gave each one a hug.

  Eddie, however, was not so understanding. She confronted Davis in my kitchen, while Jakobek and I sat there at the harvest table nursing glasses of pre-dinner wine and pretending not to listen. “Are you planning to go with them to some strip club?” she demanded.

  Davis stared at her, open-mouthed. “No. The last time I went to . . . well, it was a long time before I met you. No. Why in the world would you think—”

  “Oh, I see. Then the four of you are just going to a bar and get drunk?”

  “We’re going to one of the clubs in Buckhead and eat dinner and have a few beers.”

  “Get drunk,” she insisted. “Get drunk and pretend you’re not a marrie
d man and father-to-be who spends his days defending a wife who’s alone and depressed, a wife who hasn’t spoken to her own mother in weeks, a wife who knows you hate being trapped inside all this ridiculous publicity we get, a wife who feels very, very deserted, right now.”

  “Deserted? The whole world watches you. You’re a local hero. My mother makes you homemade applesauce—and she doesn’t just do that for anybody.”

  “You’re changing the subject! You’re going down to the bars in Atlanta to drink and smoke and ogle the girls. Not the pregnant girls. The slender girls who don’t vomit every morning.” And crying, she went upstairs.

  Davis looked stunned. “I just want to have some beers with my friends.”

  “You’re talking to a pregnant wife full of hormones,” I countered. “You don’t stand a chance in that battle. I’ll cook for you and the guys. Break out the beer and the smokes. Have your party here. Include Eddie in it.” My memories of life as a pregnant wife with a wandering husband wouldn’t allow me to take his side.

  “No, I’m going down to Atlanta and enjoy a night out with my friends. Friends who knew me before I was a joke in the national media.” He shut his eyes, took a deep breath, then looked at the ceiling as if talking to Eddie in the rooms above us. “I’m going because my wife should trust me.” Then he scowled in my direction. “And you ought to encourage her to trust me, Mother. You always trusted Dad, even though he was away from home a lot.”

  I kept my eyes on my wine glass and struggled for the right words, the right lie. Jakobek came to the rescue. “I’ll go with you. Be your designated driver. Spy on you for Eddie. Keep you straight.” His mouth curved in what might be a smile or not. With Jakobek, it was always a little hard to tell.

  “Forget it, Lt. Colonel. I don’t need a chaperone. Or a bodyguard.”

  I lifted my gaze to Davis. “You always tell me what your father would do. I’ll tell you what he’d do right now. He’d consider his wife’s feelings. He’d invite his wife’s relative to go out with him, just to make her happy. He’d compromise.”