Pamela Morsi (8 page)

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“Okay.”

“And thank you for pulling all the Books-By-Mail requests this morning.”

“Okay.”

“Being new to the library, I’m going to need the help of everybody on the team,” D.J. told him. If anything, his head hung lower, as if he wanted to make it disappear into his chest.

“You’re part of my team, right?”

“Yes. Yes. Okay.”

James was nodding rapidly, but his body language screamed
leave me alone!

D.J. took pity on the guy and headed back to her office, but she was smiling. She
had
gotten three words out of him. That was surely progress.

210.4 Natural Theology

T
he long approach to Scott’s place would have been called a road by most standards. Certainly the county that graded it considered it that. But since his was the only building on it, and it ended abruptly at the edge of the river beside his house, many folks in town thought of it as his driveway.

He kind of liked that. The imagery of it appealed to him in some way. As if a journey, his journey arrived at this home and saw no need to go any further.

The truth was, of course, that the county had simply not wanted or needed to spend money on another bridge across Verdant Creek. So the county road stopped abruptly and then picked up again a couple of miles farther west.

Friday was his afternoon off. He kept his cell phone close so that Paula could contact him in the case of an emergency prescription, but since he had to be open on Saturday, the busiest day of his week, he didn’t begrudge himself the break.

Scott pulled into his usual parking place near the back door. Although he’d grown up in a house where locks were never used, he understood that leaving his house open could be abetting the worst impulses of the desperate or larcenous. Still, he was a trusting, rural guy at heart. He reached up above the door’s metal light fixture to retrieve his key, clicked open the lock and then returned it to the magnet that kept it at least sight unseen to would-be thieves.

Inside he began peeling off his clothes immediately. He’d installed his washer and dryer in the mudroom. And living alone he found little need for the frills of domestic life like hampers and baskets. He put his laundry directly in the washer and when it filled up, he did the wash.

Naked, he made his way to the front bedroom. The eighty-year-old one-story farmhouse retained much of the dated, retro appearance enjoyed by the former occupants. Scott had updated the kitchen and painted the exterior, but the bedroom still sported wallpaper with the faded pastel pressed-petals design. It was girly. Undoubtedly decorated for the daughter of the house. But he preferred the morning sun shining through the windows. And a few pink-and-yellow flowers didn’t threaten his masculinity.

In fact, a little less masculinity might be helpful. As he pulled on his jeans, he glanced toward his rumpled bed as if it were an enemy. The last few nights he had been plagued by dreams. He couldn’t quite recall the erotic events involved, but he awakened achy and aching, hard as a rock.

“You need a girlfriend,” he told his image in the mirror.

Immediately he thought of Jeannie Brown. She was lonely and she liked him. That had him halfway into her bed already. He doubted she was any great shakes in the sack, but someone was better than no one, right?

“Wrong,” he answered his own premise. “Someone is
not
better than no one. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.”

The rhetorical tee was exactly the soft and nearly ragged one he pulled out of his chest-of-drawers, a reminder of some long-ago rock concert that he could barely recall. He dragged it over his head and tucked it in, more to get it out of his way than any need for neatness.

At least all those early-morning, sexually frustrated runs freed up his afternoon for less strenuous exercise.

On his way back through the house, he stopped at the fridge and drank a big slug of orange juice directly from the bottle. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Both behaviors would have horrified his mother and disgusted his ex-wife. But if there was to be any consolation for the unplanned single life, it was that a man could be as uncivilized as he pleased.

At the back door he pulled on his muck boots and a broad-brimmed straw hat. He stepped outside and made his way across the bare patches and buffalo grass that he euphemistically described as his lawn. On the north side was the drain field for the septic system. The grass was far greener there, but somehow the source of that lushness did not encourage him to linger.

The south end of his acreage had been transformed into a garden.

He’d bought the property, still known around town as “the old Paske place” along with the surrounding three acres between the house and the creek bank. At the time, he’d had no real plans for the land. If he’d considered it at all, it was as a buffer between the privacy he needed and those friends, family and neighbors who lived nearby.

But it was more than that to him now. Scott gazed lovingly down the long rows of plants stalwartly growing out of the soil. The carrot tops looked pretty enough to put in a flower vase. The potato plants were already hardy and the peas appeared vividly green against the grayish-brown color of the Kansas soil.

From childhood, his parents had pressed him into service in the family garden. And like every rural teenager, he’d done his share of backbreaking farm labor. But he’d never really considered plants or cultivation as a hobby he’d ever care to pursue. Yet from the moment Scott had moved in, the need to plant something, to grow something, had been so strong in him he was unable to resist it.

He could only imagine that the genes of generations of dirt farmers were finally showing themselves. Scott had surprised himself. His parents had merely shrugged.

“What else would you do with all this good ground,” his father had said.

What else, indeed?

That first year he’d thought to put in half a dozen tomato plants. Everyone knew that homegrown tomatoes were far superior to any bought in the store. But why go to the trouble of tomatoes without some cucumbers and radishes? Squash and gourds practically raised themselves. Broccoli, onions, sweet corn and salsify—every season his garden expanded its borders and its variety. This year he had even planned space for turnips and okra, two vegetables that he would never eat voluntarily.

There would always be people grateful to do that for him.

It was the growing that was important. The satisfaction of planning what needed to be done, doing what you were supposed to do and, with a lot of sunshine and the right amount of rain, seeing your efforts return a harvest of pride.

Scott walked carefully between the rows. Everything looked very good. Here and there he saw evidence of wildlife. He didn’t mind sharing with the occasional rabbit, raccoon or possum. But he knew how easily a great garden could be overrun with pests. He walked over to the shed where he kept a spray bottle filled with diluted pepper sauce. He sprayed down all the cabbage. The water was always welcome. As for the hot pepper, it didn’t deter the critters completely. But it did make them think twice about a casual salad at his expense.

Looking around his garden, Scott was reminded that no man is an island. Humans need fellow humans, but they also need plants. Whether it was God’s great plan or nature’s joke, the most evolved species on the earth was at the mercy of the food chain and its foundation of fruits and grains to sustain life.

Scott actually liked being a part of that. Gardening was a hobby. And he was pretty sure that a guy with no wife, no kids, no girlfriend and no social life needed hobbies.

The ruminations of his job always followed him home. And if he made no move to stop them, he’d spend his entire evening second-guessing his actions of the day and anticipating what might need to be done tomorrow or next week. His father had warned him to “leave the store at the store.” His dad’s philosophy was that the job and the home should be two different places and that it could be dangerous to allow them to mesh together.

You can run a business or a business can run you,
Scott remembered him saying.
Work hard and smart every minute you’re here. When you step outside, leave it all behind.

That hadn’t always been easy, and not just in the aftermath of his father’s death.

Certainly it had been difficult to shoulder the extra stress of running the family business without his father’s help or advice. But even before that. When he was still feeling the sting of his divorce. When he’d felt so unsure about what he’d wanted and so disappointed about facts he couldn’t change. The temptation to hide in his job, to allow all his thoughts and emotions to become absorbed in the details of his career was hard to resist. It felt like virtue and it was quite possible to be completely self-righteous about it. But it was, he knew, only cowardice in disguise. If you weren’t willing to face your life—all your life, including the rough parts—then you weren’t truly living. You were just making a living.

He was startled from his thoughts by the excited yapping of a little dog. The sound came only seconds before the creature was barging into his onions.

“Hey! Get out of here,” he said.

Knowing obedience was unlikely, Scott grabbed the small ball of black fur that was intent on trampling his stalks. He recognized the librarian’s dog immediately.

“You’re a long way from home for a guy with short legs,” he told the pup.

Scott looked toward the house. He couldn’t see all of his drive, but he certainly hadn’t heard a car. He glanced in the other direction, toward the creek, to see his mother walking up the path. She was dressed in a kind of knitted pantsuit with heels more suited to one of her bridge parties than a nature trek.

“Good grief,” he muttered to himself.

With the dog clutched under one arm, he walked down to meet her.

“You walked over here?” he asked her incredulously.

Viv was flushed and breathless. “It wasn’t my intention,” she said. “Mr. Dewey got a bit ahead of me and...and here we are.”

Scott offered his free arm and she took it gratefully.

“You should have had him on a leash,” he told her.

“Oh, I suppose so,” she admitted. “But he’s so happy when I let him wander free.”

The thought,
who are you and what have you done with my real mother,
floated through Scott’s head, but he didn’t voice it. Instead he commented on the obvious.

“This is a really long walk for you, Mom. It’s got to be close to three miles.”

Viv’s smile faked nonchalance. “I used to walk that far to and from school every day.”

“Yeah, sure,” Scott responded with skeptical sarcasm. “With little blood prints of your bare feet in the snow. They had school buses in the 1960s, Mom. It’s an historical fact.”

“Well, whatever,” she replied. “I could use a drink of water.”

As they neared the back door, Scott set the dog down. “If you run off, you’ll be finding your own way home,” he warned.

The happy critter, ears perked up and tongue hanging out, appeared oblivious to the threatening tone. And when Scott opened the back door for his mother, the dog charged in ahead of her.

Viv sat down with a grateful sigh in the first kitchen chair she reached in the windowed alcove that was Scott’s breakfast nook. He poured her a glass of cold water from the refrigerator. As an afterthought, he filled a small bowl from the tap and set it on the floor.

His mother was enjoying the view. From this vantage she could see his small expanse of lawn, the neatness of his garden and the tree line in the distance along the edge of the creek.

“You’ve made this a really pretty place, Scotty,” she told him as he seated himself across from her. “I should come out here more often.”

“You are always welcome, Mom. But you know, if you’re not going to drive, at least put on sensible shoes.”

She chuckled. “Sometimes you remind me so much of your father. He never allowed himself to scold me. He’d just get exasperated.”

“I don’t remember a lot of exasperation on his part,” Scott replied.

“Well, of course you don’t. We always made a point of keeping what was between us, between us. There was no need to drag the kids into the normal ups and downs of married life.”

“Who knew that you two could be secretive? I would have said you were perpetually blissful.”

Viv laughed. “There is no such thing as perpetual bliss. If two people manage chronic bliss, that’s probably the definition of a happy marriage.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Scott had meant the words to be light. He immediately saw the worry line that emerged in his mother’s forehead.

“Kidding,” he assured her.

She reached across the table to pat his hand. “One of these days, you’ll find the right one, Scotty.”

He smiled at her, but he didn’t voice agreement. It might be cruel to get her hopes up.

“What did you think of our new librarian?” she asked. “Isn’t our D.J. a lovely young woman?”

Scott managed not to roll his eyes. “I’m sure she’s very nice,” he said.

“Perhaps you should show her around this weekend,” his mother said. “I’m sure it’s difficult, being all alone in a new town.”

He wasn’t about to get trapped into that.

“Mom, she very likely has plans of her own already,” he pointed out. “They say she’s originally from Wichita. So she’ll probably drive there to see friends and family on the weekend.”

“She doesn’t know anyone in Wichita,” Viv stated. “She’s an only child, her parents died several years ago. They were quite elderly and from what I gather, she grew up in boarding schools and summer camps. Her only ties are the ones she makes right here in Verdant.”

“Well, it sounds like you two are becoming well acquainted,” he said. “Honestly, she wasn’t all that chatty when I talked to her.”

His mother blushed. “Well, naturally, no one tells her life story the minute she meets someone. But a part of vetting a new employee is finding out about her life.”

Scott raised an eyebrow at that. His mom’s information didn’t seem like the type to be acquired in a job interview.

“I need to get home,” his mother said, abruptly changing the subject. “D.J. will be worried.”

“Worried about you?”

“About Mr. Dewey, of course.”