The mouse shot out one sleeve, headed straight across the open lawn, and disappeared into the zinnia beds. The zinnia blooms had long since fallen off, leaving only tall, drying stalks. Allegra raced after her prey. She was still covered in Gib’s shirt.
We watched his shirt go humping across the lawn and into the rattling zinnia stalks like an armadillo wearing a plaid dress.
I faced him reluctantly, my face compressed in an apologetic wince. He glared at the flower bed and then at me. “I never thought I’d see the day,” he said darkly, “when one of my shirts would run away from home.”
“I’m sorry. I am, really. I—” My gaze went to his bare chest, which was broad, well formed, and elegantly haired, leading down to a handsome belly.
A small, gold ring gleamed in the rim of his navel.
I jerked my gaze up to his face. His brows flattened and he looked grim. “The woman at the piercing parlor in Knoxville didn’t warn me it would itch for six weeks. That’s what I get for trusting a woman who had more metal stuck in her face than a bucktoothed tenth grader.”
“I—you, I can’t believe it—”
“Why? You can’t believe I’m capable of getting a hole punched in my skin? There’s nothing to that, Nellie. If you mean you can’t believe I want to associate with the social and political ideas of the pierced-parts crowd, well, you’re right. This is only a piece of jewelry, Nellie. Not a personal statement.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because I’ve always wanted to be a pirate. I told her to put a ring in my ear but she missed.”
“I’m serious. Why did you do it?”
“Because it helps me to concentrate on some other section of my hide besides my hand.”
“Why?” I insisted, my voice rising.
“Because I want something to rattle me every time I close my mind to new ideas. Something to remind me that I’m capable of taking new directions. I touch my belly ring and hear you haranguing me. You telling me what to do. This”—he jabbed a finger at the ring—“is your opinion, Nellie. This is your voice. This is you.”
I reached out. I didn’t think. There was nothing calculated about it. I just reached out naturally and touched my fingertips to the tiny gold ring protruding from his skin. The flesh around it was warm and slightly pink. When he breathed his stomach shifted in tight shivers.
“Be careful what you touch,” he warned in a low, uneven tone.
“When I had mine pierced I had to leave the tops of my pants undone for weeks. I couldn’t bear to have them scrape against the ring.”
“There’s a mental image,” he said.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Put antiseptic on it every day. Keep it clean.” I drew my hand back. My hand trembled. “I shouldn’t have touched it so much until it’s completely healed. Germs.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
Both of us were caught up in something helplessly provocative. We stood there in the yard, in the clear cool morning sunshine of late autumn, and I said, “Let’s see if there’re other surprises,” and with no guile at all I walked around him, looking at his back and shoulders, while he stood still. I touched his skin here and there. “Allegra scratched you,” I said. “You’re bleeding a little.” I showed him my fingertips with traces of his blood on them. “Do you want me to get something to put on it?”
“My shirt,” he said distractedly.
We walked over to the zinnia bed. His shirt hung on a few broken stalks. He examined it a moment, then put it on. “Your buttons,” I murmured, dazed. Several were missing. The buttonholes were torn.
“I have trouble with buttons, anyway,” he told me.
He struggled with his shirt buttons, the two knotty, stiff fingers of his injured hand refusing to perform that simple task. Color rose in his face. Protective sympathy swelled inside my chest; I understood lost dignity.
“That’s a damn fine belly-button ring you got there, sir, and thank you for letting me help with your buttons.” With that warning, I pushed his hands aside. Standing close to him, I fastened the buttons that were left. He watched me. His chest moved swiftly. My hands shook.
“I can’t have a simple conversation with you,” he said. “You make me want to pull my hair out or howl at the moon.”
“You’re a brave man, Gib Cameron,” I whispered. “Or maybe we’re a good influence on each other.”
“Stranger things have happened,” he said gruffly.
We stepped away from each other when we heard the back kitchen-porch door swing open. I looked around sheepishly. Gib became very busy rechecking his torn buttonholes.
“Good morning,” Min called. She gazed out at us like a tall, benignly curious praying mantis in a shapeless jumper the rust color of old leaves. “I thought I heard a commotion out here.”
“No problem, Minnie,” Gib said. “We were just headed indoors.” She nodded, eyed us both with her head tilted, then discreetly withdrew inside the house. Gib and I walked across the lawn. “No one but you knows about this,” he said, gesturing toward his stomach. “I’d like to keep it that way.”
“No problem.”
That night I fed Allegra an entire can of tuna and stroked her fur with a soft wool sock she loved. She deserved special favors for her part in uncovering Gib’s secret.
My contentment didn’t last long.
“I have some extra bleach for you,” I said to Ella. “Your hair’s starting to take on a kind of reverse skunk stripe when you part it in the middle.”
A full two inches of silky black roots showed at her scalp. She smiled. “In a couple of months it’ll be long enough to cut the blond section off. I’ll have a full head of short, black hair. Carter’s thrilled that I’m changing it.”
“I bet. He’ll get to pretend he’s with another woman.”
“Don’t start.”
“Well, I for one don’t intend to throw away years of carefully cultivated bleached roots and synthetic braids. This is me, and it’s going to stay me.”
“Stop trying to sound smug. You’re a softie at heart. I know you’re helping Jasper practice his social skills around girls. And I also heard that Kelly brings you poetry and you set it to music for her. And you’re going to teach her to play the guitar.”
“No, I said I’d teach her the basics and then you could take over, because you’ve developed such an interest in the guitar,” I said sarcastically.
Carter had bought my sister a red-and-silver Gibson, the Cadillac of guitars. Ella had taken to it like an old friend. She was now playing country-western music. “We’re goin’ to have us a bunch of musical babies,” Carter told everyone who’d listen. “They’re going to grow up to be country-music stars. They’ll all be TV spokesmen for big pickup-truck companies. And at the awards shows, Ellie and me will insist we gotta be seated between Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire.”
“You’re not playing guitar because you want to head a dynasty of country yodelers,” I insisted to Ella. “You’re doing it to please Carter.”
“I wish you and I didn’t argue every time we try to have a serious conversation,” Ella said sadly. “We could both have nice lives! We could trust people! Love people! But the only way we can do that is if you stop rejecting every single living human being who might, just might, have a painfully unpleasant opinion about us!”
“What has that got to do with—”
“You always do it! You always assume the worst! But people shouldn’t have to pass some kind of loyalty test!”
“I will never,” I said through gritted teeth, “betray our family. And neither will you.”
“Betray? Oh, Vee. You’re hopeless. I give up on you,” she said in a tired voice. She had never said anything like that, in that tone of voice, to me before. She clasped her chest. Tears streamed down her face. She brushed past me and left the house, slamming the screen door.
After that argument, she and I didn’t speak one word to each o
ther for a week.
Their names were Bobby Jim and Wally Roy. They were two of Ebb’s boys, both of them under the age of ten. They wore camouflage pants and T-shirts for casual dress. For toys they had four-wheeler dirt buggies decorated with squirrel tails. They hadn’t been hit with many smart sticks.
Bobby Jim and Wally Roy were yelling and racing around on their dirt buggies, but everyone except me and Kelly was out at the back orchards harvesting the remnants of the fall apples. One of the inn’s trademarks had always been FeeMolly’s apple butter. Ella had suggested that all the guests for the opening weekend find gift baskets of apple butter and fresh muffins waiting for them in their rooms. She came up with these small, Martha Stewartish ideas with an ease that impressed everyone; her most recent projects included designing new table arrangements for the dining rooms.
Through the music room’s open windows I could hear the faint sounds of Ella playing guitar. Laughter drifted to me on the breezes. I swore I could smell the sweet aroma of a wood fire. Min and Gib had set up an iron stew pot filled with mulled cider.
I wanted to be outdoors drinking cider and pretending to be aloof while everyone else laughed. Instead I was in the music room with Kelly, who presented me with the sheet music for the piece she’d chosen to perform. She still insisted she was going to perform in a teenage beauty pageant. I looked at the music incredulously. “If you don’t mind my asking, why in the world do you want to sing ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’?”
“I feel Evita Perón made an important statement about political corruption.”
“For or against?”
“Okay, so maybe she was all show and no substance, but she was interesting. She looked glamorous in the movie.”
“Would you consider, hmmm, something more conventional for a beauty pageant? Say, a nice tune from a musical that doesn’t require a companion primer on Latin American politics? Something from a Disney musical would be bland and harmless.”
“Oh, puh-leeeze. Do I look like a white-bread kind of girl?”
“Well, frankly, yes.”
“I want to be seen as daring and brave.”
“It’s not a matter of how you see yourself, it’s how the judges will see you. Do you really think you can sell them on the image of you as the wife of a South American dictator? You have to be able to act the song’s emotions, not just sing the words. You have to be Evita Perón.”
“Look, I can be cute or I can be different. Trying to be cute isn’t going to win me any points. I have to be something else.”
“You’re already something else,” I said gently. “I like you.”
“You’re being polite.”
“I’m never polite if I can help it.”
She studied me with the trademark Cameron squint, but her lips quirked and finally, she grinned. “Different can be good,” she said.
“You win.” I set her music on the piano’s backboard. “So it’s the song from Evita, eh? All right, we’ll determine the best key for you to sing in, and I’ll write the accompaniment for it, and we’ll work on your delivery.”
“Excellent!” She thrust out a hand. We shook.
Bobby Jim and Wally Roy crept up through the shrubbery to the music-room window, pressed their noses and tongues to the glass obscenely, then snorted with laughter and ran away.
Kelly and I traded looks of disgust. “Buffoons,” I said.
I should have known they were up to something.
Late that afternoon, I gratefully hurried outside. Everyone had moved to the back rows of the apple orchard to harvest the last round of ripe fruit. The orchard was dotted with stepladders. Isabel, Min, Jasper, Ebb, Flo, Ruth, Paul, Ella and Carter, Gib—each was perched in a tree or waiting below to catch the small, tart, dusky-red winesaps and place them in large latticework produce baskets.
Olivia and Bea supervised from queenly armchairs with a table between them, where a jug of the mulled cider sat alongside stoneware mugs and a bottle of dark rum. “Here’s for you, Rapunzel,” Bea called, and handed me a mug.
I took a deep sip, expecting warm spiced cider with a hint of rum. “Holy moly,” I said between strangled coughs. “No one should climb up on a stepladder and handle fruit after drinking one of these.”
“Oh, yours is a wee bit stronger than the others,” Bea admitted. “You have to catch up on the sippin’ we’ve been at all afternoon.”
Gib watched me as I stopped beneath his tree. I was at eye level with his thighs and hips. I looked up at him with a warm, giddy sensation already creeping through my brain. “Nice big apples,” I said.
“You should see the stem,” he replied.
Chortling under my breath, woozy with sexual insinuation and rum cider, I hurried away, as if helping Isabel carry a full bushel basket were suddenly my mission in life. Ella waved at me from across the orchard. I waved back. Carter was up in a tree. Ella stood beneath, looking pink-cheeked and pastoral in a print dress with a handsome sweater in some geometric Cherokee pattern woven in it. She caught apples in a large gingham apron she wore, then gently set them in a basket by her feet.
I didn’t go over to see her, not with Carter there. There was so much tension under the facade of our daily routines. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, and I couldn’t bring myself to pretend otherwise. Our argument still hung in the air. I knew my kind of pride could be disciplining or self-destructive, and I was always tormented by the debate over which it had become.
I got drunk. Not sloshy, overtly drunk, just drunk enough to hum Debussy off-key while I lugged baskets of apples to the kitchen’s back porch, where FeeMolly and Golwat sat peeling apples and smoking long pipes. An old radio hung from an iron hook on an inside post. Some twangy Loretta Lynn song was playing.
“Loretta Lynn,” I said cheerfully. “I saw the movie. You know. Her biography. With Sissy Spacek.”
FeeMolly only grunted. I was looped enough to feel magnanimous. “I’m sorry you and I started out on the wrong foot a few weeks ago,” I told her sincerely. “I really respect your work here and wish we could be friends.”
“What you care ’bout us’n folks, mop head? You ain’t nothin’ but a flutter-by. I seen ya come, I be seein’ ya go. Misser Gib need better’n you. Gully-witch. Haint. Booger. Fly away ’fore ya cream turns to sour clabber in the churn.”
“Well, thank you for listening,” I said, then wandered back to the orchards, embarrassed and depressed, my skull beginning to tighten with a rum-induced headache.
After I toted the last basket of apples I slipped away to the broad, peaceful deck around the pool, which Gib and Carter had already covered for the winter. I found a lawn chair situated where it couldn’t be seen from the tiers of windows across the back of the Hall. I stretched out on my back and watched wisps of white clouds ride a sky turning gold with sunset. I thought about Ella and FeeMolly. I was not popular.
My head hurt. I fanned my braids over the backrest of the lawn chair and let them dangle. The clouds hypnotized me. I dozed off and dreamed, in odd and worrying patterns, that FeeMolly had turned into a giant red-haired snake that hissed at me. It’s true, what she said is true, I dreamed. I became a bird and flew past her. A flutter-by. I circled the Hall, trying to land, but couldn’t remember how. I looked desperately for Gib. FeeMolly hissed again.
I woke up with Gib’s hand on my shoulder. It was almost dark, and the air had grown cold enough that I shivered. “Good God, quit wandering off without a word,” he scolded mildly. “It’s dinnertime.”
“I have a rum-and-apple-cider headache. I was a little stewed.”
“That was Bea’s goal. She likes to get people crocked and see how they act. It’s her hobby. She uses it as a gauge of character.”
“Well, my gauge is stewed, too.”
“You did fine. You held your liquor well, you kept working, and you didn’t turn ill.”
“Wrong. I do feel ill.”
“No, turn ill. Mean. Angry. You’re not a mean drunk. Under that crabby ext
erior you’re a mellow soul.”
“I’m a spicy, rum-soaked soul. I’m a fruitcake.” I sat up, rubbing my forehead. The scalp at the crown of my head felt as tight as a piano wire, and itched. My hair seemed to have coagulated into one heavy planklike weight. “I need aspirin,” I moaned. “My head feels peculiar. Maybe this is what a migraine feels like.”
“Hold on. Let me turn on some lights before you get up. I don’t want you to stagger onto the pool cover.” Gib walked over to a small metal box hidden at a corner of the deck. He flipped the lid up and pressed a switch. Around the deck and pool the landscape lights came on.
“Thanks,” I said. I stood, then clasped my hands to the top of my head, massaging.
“Good God,” Gib said. He stared at my hair. I took one look at his face and quickly ran my hands farther back.
“What? What?” My fingers touched an alarming texture. Sticky, matted. My hair was stiff. I jerked my hands down and looked at them. Dabs of orange paint colored my fingers. “What? What?” I grabbed the ends of my braids. The entire mass moved. I smelled the chemical scent of orange spray paint.
I swayed. “Somebody painted my hair.”
Gib strode to me and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Sit down. Sit.” When I was safely planted on the lawn chair he guided my head between my knees. “Breathe,” he ordered.
I gulped air. After a few minutes I straightened shakily. “My hair,” I moaned.
His face grim, he stood and examined the ruined, spray-painted braids, trying to pry them apart. It was useless. “I promise you I’ll find out who did this, but I’m sorry, Nellie. That’s heavy-duty paint and there’s probably not a damned thing that’ll save your hair.”
Someone had turned my do into bad graffiti.
My symbol of pride, rebellion, ambition, and disguise.
Ruined.
Within an hour Gib pinned the crime on Bobby Jim and Wally Roy. “How can you be sure?” I asked him. Everyone gathered in the den of the family wing. My head was wrapped in a towel he’d brought me. I had refused to walk into the house with the horror exposed.