A Year on Ladybug Farm #1 (16 page)

Cici shrugged and continued up the stairs. “I don’t see that we have much choice. We can’t afford to make anyone mad at us now. Besides, what are we going to do if we ever need a new roof?”

By Wednesday, there was a hole in their backyard big enough to drive a truck through, and thirteen linear feet of their ceiling had been removed. Cici had just put the final coat of glossy white paint on the porch ceiling and was standing back to admire her work when she heard the inevitable words:

“Ms. Burke? Could I show you just one thing?”

She wiped her hands on a damp rag and went through the screen door into the front room, joining Sam Renfro, the heating-and-air contractor from the Baptist church, as he stood beneath the gaping hole in the ceiling, craning his neck upward to examine it.

“Looks like you boys are making good progress,” she commented, trying to keep her tone upbeat. A box fan roared in the window, pushing warm air back and forth, and the backhoe that was scraping away at the lawn was a steady throb in the background. She had to raise her voice to be heard.

Sam said, “See there?”

Cici tilted her head back as far as it would go, but had to admit, “No. What?”

He extended his tape measure, locked it, and thrust it into the hole, tapping the floor joists with the metal end. “Six inches, max. There’s no way we can run your ductwork through here.”

She stared at him. “But you already tore out the ceiling.”

He looked grave. “Yes ma’am, and I’m real sorry about that. It was fine until we got right here. I’m guessing when they put in the bathroom they ran the plumbing in through here and closed it up.”

Cici drew a breath. “What can you do?”

He thought about that for a minute. “We could tear out the ceiling, lower the whole thing by about a foot. You’ve got the room. Of course, who knows what we’re going to find in the rest of the house.”

Cici blew out her breath. “Right. Who knows.”

He said, “I really hate to tell you what I have to say now.”

He looked so genuinely regretful that Cici felt her spirits sink another notch.

“That furnace them other fellows sold you,” he said, “it’s about half the size you need for this place. It wouldn’t even heat the downstairs come winter.”

The two of them stood for a time, looking at the ceiling and listening to the backhoe. Then Cici said, “Well.”

He agreed, “Yeah.”

“How much more money are we talking about?”

“A lot.”

“I appreciate your honesty.”

He said, “You know, a house like this, it’s stood here all these years, my guess is they must’ve had a few hot summers.”

Cici’s worried frown turned puzzled. “I guess.”

“What I mean is, take that wood-burning furnace you got down there. It’ll heat the whole house on three cords of wood a winter. I know that for a fact because it’s my cousin that delivers the wood out here every year. Less than three hundred dollars a year, you can’t beat that.”

“No,” said Cici, taken aback, “you can’t.”

“And the best heat pump, it’s not going to cool your house more than fifteen, twenty degrees below the outside temperature,” he went on. “It stays cooler than that in your cellar.”

“You’re not suggesting that we move to the cellar for the summer?”

“No ma’am. What I’m thinking is it would be a lot cheaper to move the cool air you’ve got to where you need it, than to try to make cool air out of hot and then move it, if you follow what I’m saying.”

“I’m not exactly sure I do.”

“What if we tried to kind of suck the cool air up from the basement through the same vents your furnace uses?”

The furrows on her brow deepened. “How?”

“I’m thinking some kind of whole-house exhaust fan.”

“Like an attic fan?”

“Something like that.”

“How big a job would that be?”

“Well, I’m going to have to do some figuring on that,” he admitted. “Meanwhile, I can get you in business with some ceiling fans. That ought to help some.”

“Okay, that sounds good. The sooner the better on those fans.”

The backhoe stopped grinding. It was an ominous sign. Sure enough, in less than thirty seconds there was a rattling knock on the screen door and Deke, the backhoe operator and septic tank expert from the Methodist side, stood on the porch in his muddy boots.

Cici turned to greet him, and Sam eyed him with the polite reserve due a neighbor from the opposite camp. “Deke,” he said.

“Sam,” returned Deke in a similar tone.

Sam said to Cici, “I’d best get back to my measuring.”

And Deke said, “I don’t want to track in dirt, Miss Cici, but I was wondering if you could come out here for a minute. I just wanted to—”

“Show me one little thing.” Cici sighed, heading for the door. “I know.”

 

 

“So,” Cici wound up the story long-distance, “it seems the roots of a hundred-year-old hickory tree have infiltrated the septic system and we have to have a whole new drain field dug.”

“Jeez, Mom, it sounds awful.” But Lori, three thousand miles away, sounded as rushed and as distracted as she always did when she talked to her mother. Cici knew that the only reason she didn’t hear music blaring in the background was because it was blaring in Lori’s other ear from her iPod, and she could picture her daughter balancing the phone on one shoulder as she tried on earrings or held up dresses or did whatever it was that twenty-year-old girls did instead of worrying about septic tanks and drain fields.

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” she said. “We can flush the toilets once a day, we just can’t do laundry or empty the bathtubs.”

“Eeew, gross! It’s like a third-world country or something! How can you stand it?”

“Listen to this.” Cici held the phone toward the open window.

She returned the receiver to her ear in time to hear Lori say, “I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly.”

“Whatever.”

“When are you coming to visit?”

“When are you getting the toilets fixed?”

Cici laughed.

“Mom, I love you, and you know I’m dying to chat but—”

“You’ve got to run, I know. Where’re you off to on your big day?”

Lori’s voice became infused with genuine excitement, “Dad got us into the absolute coolest pool party in L.A.—and he bought me a brand-new swimsuit to wear to it! It’s gold lamé with a beaded top and three strands of Swarovski crystal on each side of the bottoms from front to back, you know, it’s just to absolutely die for. All kinds of models and actors and producers are going to be there, including—you won’t believe it!—Hugh Grant!”

Cici bit her tongue until she thought she actually tasted blood. “Sounds fabulous, sweetie,” she managed at last. “Although I really can’t understand why you’d rather spend your birthday at a pool party with Hugh Grant than digging up septic tanks in Virginia with your mom.”

She laughed. “I love the ring, Mom,” she told her, “and thank Aunt Bridget and Aunt Lindsay for me, too, will you? I’ll write them a note.”

“I know you will, sweetheart.”

“I wish I had time to talk to them but—”

“I know, you’ve got to run. Have a wonderful time.”

“I’ll call you!” Lori sang.

“I love you,” returned Cici, but the line was already dead.

Cici let the screen door squeak shut behind her as she went out onto the porch and took her place in the rocker next to Lindsay. The last light of day had faded to a deep purple twilight, silhouetting the poplar leaves in stark black against the sky. Crickets trilled in and out. Their rockers thumped softly on the freshly painted boards of the porch. On cue, as it had been for the past ten evenings just as the last daylight left the sky, there was the distant whine of a bottle rocket, a muffled pop, and an umbrella of red, green, and gold light cascaded against the eastern sky.

“Ooh, nice,” observed Bridget, rocking.

“Umm,” agreed Lindsay, passing Cici a cool glass of chardonnay. “How’s Lori?”

“Terrific.” Cici took a significant swallow of wine. “She’s going to a party with Hugh Grant.”

“No kidding!”

“There’s going to be nothing but wild sex and free drugs.”

“At a Hollywood party?” exclaimed Bridget, feigning shock. “Surely not!”

And Lindsay added, “Thank God we never had anything like that when we were in college.”

“She’s wearing a swimsuit”—Cici pointed out with great deliberation—“that’s held together at the bottom with three strands of Swarovski crystals.”

Lindsay and Bridget sipped their wine in silence for a moment. Then Bridget said, “Guess she won’t be doing any actual swimming, then.”

“It won’t matter,” Lindsay said, “since the swimming pool is probably filled with champagne.”

Cici sighed. “My daughter is going to a pool party with Hugh Grant. I’m sitting in a sweat pit with a thirty foot hole in the backyard and a ceiling that’s falling down. What’s wrong with this picture?”

“It’s a little cooler tonight,” Bridget offered.

“And the fireworks are nice,” Lindsay said. They watched as a red flare spiraled upward and exploded into a canopy that covered half the night sky. Everyone made an appreciative sound for that one. “Actually, I think I like this better than having them all on the Fourth of July.”

Farley, having finally obtained his fireworks, had decided to prolong the pleasure as long as possible by setting off a few each night from his backyard. The residents of Ladybug Farm had front row seats for every show.

“She wanted me to thank you for the book, Bridge,” Cici said, “and she loved the CD, Lindsay. She’s going to send notes.”

“She always writes such sweet notes,” Bridget said.

“She’s a good girl,” Lindsay added.

And Cici admitted, “I know.” She sipped her wine and appreciated the spectacle of another light show, this one red, white, and blue, blossoming against the sky. “Would you go back to being twenty if you could?”

Lindsay said, “For Hugh Grant? You bet your sweet booty. Of course,” she added thoughtfully, “he might be disappointed. After all, I wouldn’t be nearly as good-looking as I am today.”

Bridget chuckled. “You couldn’t pay me to go back. Lord preserve me from ever being that stupid again.”

“It all seemed so simple then,” Cici agreed. “Remember? You made a plan, you mapped out your life, and you figured all you had to do was sit back and watch it unfold. Your job was done.”

“Hmm.” Lindsay sipped her wine. “I was going to study at the Sorbonne.”

Bridget said, “I was going to go to Africa and build irrigation systems. But first I was going to marry a priest.” When the other two looked at her she explained with a wistful sigh, “I was wild about
The Thornbirds
back then. I must have read it twenty times.”

Lindsay lifted her eyebrows. “It was a book?” She rocked back thoughtfully. “What do you know about that?”

Cici said, “When I first started working, right out of college, I was actually refused an apartment because I was a single woman. They wouldn’t even let me fill out an application.”

Bridget sipped her wine, and seemed a little embarrassed as she reported, “When Jim and I were first married and things were tight, you know, I applied for a job as a secretary at a glass factory. The manager wouldn’t hire me until he got my husband’s permission.”

“Jesus,” Lindsay said.

“You should have slapped his face and walked out,” Cici said.

“You should have taken the apartment manager to court,” Bridget said.

Both of them just smiled, sadly, reminiscing.

“Hell no,” Lindsay said after a moment. “You couldn’t pay me to go back.”

In the distance there was a fanfare series of pops, accompanied by a lively explosion of red and white sparks near the horizon line. They appreciated the show while it lasted.

The startled crickets, silent during the fireworks, started chirping again. Cici said, “Well, I guess that’s it for the night.”

“I wonder how many more fireworks he has left?”

“Maybe he should save some for New Year’s.”

Bridget changed the subject. “I have a theory about the garden thief,” she said.

Cici and Lindsay looked at her with interest. The nanny cam, cleverly set up in a tree to record everything that happened during the night, was unfortunately not equipped with night vision. So when two more stalks of corn had gone missing, a review of twelve hours’ worth of tape had shown nothing but foggy darkness.

“If you’ll notice,” elucidated Bridget, leaning forward a little to capture their attention, “all the thefts occur on the hedge side of the garden.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call that tangle of blackberry vines and honeysuckle a hedge,” Lindsay objected.

“But it’s always the same row,” Bridget insisted. “Right there, next to cover. I think whatever—or whoever—it is, is sneaking through the hedge at night and pulling stuff out of the ground, then hiding back in the hedge before anyone can catch him.”

There was nothing but the sound of rocking chairs and crickets for a while. Lindsay and Cici sipped their wine. Cici said, “I don’t know, Bridge. Sounds pretty weird to me.”

“You still don’t have a motive,” pointed out Lindsay.

“I’m working on it,” Bridget pronounced darkly.

A ladybug dive-bombed into Cici’s wineglass. She plucked it out absently and flicked it away. She said, “It’s going to take the rest of the summer to get the air-conditioning installed.”

“Wouldn’t be so bad if we could take a shower.”

“We can take a shower,” Bridget pointed out, with an obvious effort to remain positive. “We just can’t use more than five gallons of water doing it.”

“We haven’t even gotten the estimate on what digging the new drain field is going to cost.”