Weekends in Carolina. Jennifer Lohmann
* *
THE FIRST DAY of packing had been surprisingly easy, Trey thought as he watched his brother leave. His father had an absurd amount of clothes for an old man who never went anywhere, but it hadn’t been hard to sort them into donation and trash piles. Some of the clothes weren’t worth wearing to muck out a pigsty—apparently the man never threw anything away. And their father’s pack-rat tendencies would make the rest of the week harder, especially since the man hadn’t cleaned out their mother’s stuff in the five years since her death, either.
It was a two-for-the-price-of-one deal at the Harris family farm. Or Max’s Vegetable Patch, which was what the sign on the refrigerator van said. The name was cutesier than Trey associated with the woman who’d shot Pepsi can after Pepsi can without flinching.
Though he’d tried, he hadn’t been able to convince Kelly to stay for supper. His brother had taken some of the leftover food with him but had muttered on about his own life, leaving Trey alone in the house surrounded by his parents’ stuff. At least there was a Carolina game on and conference play had started.
His plate filled with a variety of casseroles, he looked out the kitchen window to see the light on in Max’s barn. Maybe he didn’t have to be alone in the house watching a basketball game. Trey stuck his plate in the microwave, set the timer and headed out the back. Ashes barked when he knocked on Max’s door.
She opened the door wearing an oversize turquoise sweater that looked surprisingly nice with her red hair, though a bit ridiculous with the pink-bunny pajama bottoms and fuzzy, purple slippers. As Trey had come to expect, Ashes was sitting at Max’s feet, though the dog looked less annoyed with his presence this time. Max was the suspicious-looking one now.
“I’m sorry for the way I acted at the viewing.” Which was true; he wished he’d had the sense to keep his anger to himself much like he’d managed to control his attraction to her.
“Losing a parent would be hard. Losing a parent and not being able to feel sad about it must be harder, I think.”
Is that what she thought? That it wasn’t that he shouldn’t feel sad, but that he couldn’t feel sad? He took a deep breath before he got distracted from his purpose. “Anyway, I was heating up some leftovers and wondered if you wanted any, though it looks like you’ve already eaten.” He gestured to her pajamas.
“No.” She smiled, and the rigid air that usually surrounded her relaxed. “I’m just too lazy to put on another set of clothes after I clean up for the day.”
“Lazy is not a word I would associate with you.” Every time he’d looked out a window today, Max had been busy doing. Trey wasn’t always sure what—when she wasn’t disappearing into the fields of the greenhouse, she was lifting things out of the back of her truck or walking around making notes—but she and the dog were always doing. At least he could tell what the dog had been up to. Ashes’s job seemed to be to keep the Canada geese out of the fields.
“You’ve not seen how tall I let the pile of dirty clothes get before going to the Laundromat.” She stepped back from the door and let him in.
“Dad didn’t let you use the washer in the house?”
“Sure, if I did his laundry, too.” That sounded more like his father than any nonsense about a cute chicken coop. “Hank and I got along better if he never saw me do anything that he might construe as ‘woman’s work.’ Though I think sometimes he said that phrase just to get a rise out of me.”
“I’m sure he meant the words.”
“Maybe at one time, but after your mother’s death, there was plenty of woman’s work to be done and no woman to do it. Hank got to be quite good at making biscuits in the morning. He would even share them. Though I’m not even sure he attempted to clean.” She seemed to be smiling at the memory of his father, which Trey still had a hard time believing. “What’s left for dinner?”
“A little bit of everything. And I was going to watch the Carolina game, if you’re interested.”
She appeared to give his invitation more consideration than he’d given it when the idea had hit him. Finally, she said, “Sure. Let me put some shoes on. Can Ashes come?”
“Of course. Did Dad not let Ashes in the house?”
“He did. Hank liked the dog quite a bit, but Ashes is always a little dirty. Just a warning.”
“Whatever mess he makes, I’ll leave for you to clean up when the farmhouse is yours.”
“Deal.”
He waited for her while she exchanged her slippers for shoes, wrapped a purple scarf around her neck and shoved a bright green toboggan—the local word for a knit ski cap—over her hair. From the hat on her head to the red shoes on her feet, she was a mass of bright colors. Since Trey had only seen her in either her work or funeral clothes he hadn’t expected the rest of her wardrobe to be so vibrant. He found himself wondering if she wore utilitarian, white underwear—as he would have guessed if asked—or if her panties were as vivid as the rest of her. Betting either way seemed dangerous. She had messed with his odds from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her.
And he’d never get to find out the answer anyhow.
His father hadn’t bothered to upgrade the electric baseboard heat in the house or add air-conditioning, but he had gotten a satellite dish so that even out in the country he could have ESPN. The man had had priorities, and Trey only disagreed with most of them. By the time Dick Vitalle’s annoying voice had started in with, “It’s Syracuse’s first time playing Carolina as an ACC team, baby,” Max’s food was hot and they were settled into Trey’s father’s recliners.
“I don’t think I’ve seen a college basketball game since, well, since college,” Max said, before a forkful of corn pudding disappeared into her mouth.
“Where did you go to college?”
She held up her fork and he waited until she swallowed. “Illinois, so I know a thing or two about college basketball.”
Trey scoffed. “Big Ten basketball is fine, so long as you’re in the Midwest.” He mimicked the accent he’d abandoned for most of his adult life. “Y’all down South now, ya’ hear.” When he turned to smile at her, she had an unabashed grin on her face. Her white teeth against her pale lips, her speckled skin and the wild mass of orange hair were a shining counterpart to the flashes from the oversize television.
He wrenched his face back to watch the game. The fact was, right now he controlled her livelihood. Even if he wanted to know just how much of her body was covered in freckles, he was leaving in a week. And he controlled her livelihood, he reminded himself again. The surge in his blood pressure would have to be attributed to the 10-0 run Carolina had just gone on. “So what does an organic vegetable farmer study in college?”
“Farm management, though I didn’t go to college planning on farming a small plot of land,” she said with a hitch in her voice. Had she felt the attraction between them, as well? “What does a— Oh, I don’t even know what it is you do besides wear a suit to work and do something with the government.”
Max was saying the words, but Trey could hear his father’s voice. Only crooks and politicians wear suits. Makes it easier for the crooks to blend in. Nothing in his father’s life had worked out the way he wanted it to and everyone but his father—the government, the immigrants, the blacks, the feminists—had been responsible for his troubles. North Carolina was full of the new South and the new Southerners to go along with it, but his father hadn’t been one of them. The only way Trey could figure Max had ended up leasing the land for an organic vegetable farm was that his father had been really drunk when the contract was signed and too lazy to find a way out of it afterward.
“I’m a lobbyist, though I used to work on Capitol Hill. I studied public policy in college.”
“Sounds important.”
Trey couldn’t judge the