Apples Should Be Red (3 page)

Of course. Even his truck was rude.

Tom unrolled his window and leaned out to peer into her back seat. The truck idled in the driveway, muffler rattling.

“You know. We have food in Hardin. You didn’t need to bring your own.” He paused and lit the cigarette dangling from his lips.

“Hello Tom. It’s nice to see you.”

“I guess our groceries aren’t hoity-toity enough for you, huh?” He squinted at her as a plume of smoke curled around his bushy eyebrows.

“Happy Thanksgiving.” She hefted a box of fresh vegetables into her arms.

“For Christ’s sake. I have a vegetable garden. Why did you waste your money on those?”

“Thank you so much for hosting dinner this year.”

Tom spit out the window. “Hope you don’t mind if we eat on paper plates.”

She hesitated for just a split second and Tom smiled. She had a perverse desire to smash his face with the box she held.

“You don’t mind, do you? Bev?”

“I’m sure dinner will be lovely. Please excuse me while I carry these boxes inside.”

“Knock yourself out.”

Bastard
. They were all alike. Roger used to sit on the couch, laughing at some inane television show, while she spent all afternoon preparing his dinner.

And he never, not once, not once in thirty-seven years, ever said thank you.

Paper plates.

Over my dead body.

Beverly Anderson had commandeered his kitchen. She had bottles of wine lined up next to his toaster. Crates of vegetables stacked on the table. Bunches of herbs already cut and placed in glasses of water, sucking up the fluoride from his tap. Her lips were pursed. She had some god-awful flesh-colored lip gloss on. It reminded him of a slimy piece of smoked salmon. Jesus. Those shiny lips were pursed and judgmental and clearly finding fault with his perfectly reasonable kitchen.

What a bitch.

“Bev, you whipping up something for lunch?”

She didn’t even glance his way. “No. I need to reorganize. To prepare for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Thanksgiving is three days from now. Are you going to eat anything between now and then?”

“Of course. But first things first.”

“How about first things second and lunch first?”

She reached overhead to grab something from a cabinet, and Tom watched her silky little cardigan ride up. Her ass still looked pretty good for her age. He wondered what she would do if he gave her a good hard slap.

She turned to him and narrowed her eyes. “Why are you smiling at me?”

He grunted. “No reason. So what’s for lunch?”

Bev folded her arms across her chest and the bangles on her wrists jangled. “What do you normally eat for lunch?”

“I like tuna melts. I like egg salad. I like roast beef sandwiches with horseradish. I like burgers with mayo.”

“Do you cook these items yourself?” she asked innocently.

Too late, Tom saw the trap. “Um.” He cleared his throat. “I do. But they always taste better when someone else makes them.” He shot her a smile, pretty much resigned to her dinging him anyway.

Unexpectedly, Bev laughed.

He quirked a brow. He was used to hearing her strained chuckle. But he had never heard the real thing. A real honest-to-God laugh.

“You have a lot of chutzpah, Mr. Jenkins. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“As a matter fact, I hear that a lot.”

She smiled.

He really wanted to wipe off that god-awful lip gloss.

“I am not in the least bit surprised to hear that.” She turned back to the cabinets and sighed. “Has it ever occurred to you to organize the canned goods, spices, and sauces into different areas? By alphabetical order? So you can find things efficiently? It would certainly make life easier.”

“No.” His stomach growled.

“No? How do you find anything in here?”

He shrugged. “I rummage around until I find it. And if I can’t find, I go buy a new one.”

Beverly slid several cans to the left of the cabinet. “Let’s start here. A for artichokes.”

“A for artichokes. That sounds like a children’s book. That a hippy farmer would write.” His stomach growled again. “So how about lunch?”

“You are nothing if not stubborn.”

“You have no idea.”

“I have a very good idea, actually. Do you have eggs?”

“Yes, I have eggs.” He tried not to gloat. She was going to make lunch!

“I suppose I could take a few minutes to prepare egg salad. I have celery, chives, and onions for my stuffing. I could spare a bit for some egg salad.”

“Oh no. I don’t like that shit in my egg salad. Just eggs and mayo. Maybe some salt and pepper.”

Beverly hooked one perfectly manicured finger through her pearls and wrinkled her brow. “The word ‘salad’ implies additions to the mixture. Vegetables and herbs. Celery, onions, perhaps scallions, even sweet pepper. And I usually add dill, but we could use parsley instead…”

“No. I hate that crap. Why do you have to go and spoil a good thing? Egg salad should be eggs and mayo. The end.”

“Mr. Jenkins, if you would like me to prepare egg salad for you, I will do it my way. The right way. If you don’t approve, then maybe you should prepare your own lunch.”

Goddammit! He contemplated picking out all the shit from the egg salad for a couple of seconds. Then decided the hell with it.

“Forget it. I’m going to the diner.” He glared at her, waiting for her to back down. Waiting for her to accommodate him.

Waiting.

She tilted up her chin, just a bit. Enough for him to know she was digging in her heels.

“Have a nice meal at the diner, Mr. Jenkins.”

He grabbed his truck keys and slammed the door on the way out.

A is for artichokes.

Jesus H. Christ!

B
everly peered over the edge of the fence in the backyard. Unlike the charming vegetable gardens she saw in glossy magazines, which were always enclosed by a white picket fence and had lush morning glory vines rambling up the stumps, Tom’s garden looked like something out of a prison. There was wavy chicken wire strung between recycled posts. Jagged sticks topped the railing, jutting out in a most unwelcoming manner. There were no sweet garden gnomes, or birdbaths, or crooked signs heralding “The Garden.” There were no colorful flowers. No birdhouses mounted on poles. Just row after row after row of cabbage, onion stalks, broccoli. Nothing was labeled.

The smell practically knocked her off her feet. Her landscape always smelled like freshly cut grass and impatiens. This smelled horrible. Like waste and decay.

“What do you think?”

She jumped. “Please don’t do that, Tom. I hate it when you sneak up on me like that.” She twisted her pearls in her curled fingers.

“Why do you think I do it?” he chuckled. He nodded at the garden. “Pretty goddamned impressive, isn’t it?”

Bev suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. He was puffing up with pride, like a strutting rooster.

“I suppose so.”

“You suppose so?” Tom shouted. “Have you ever grown a vegetable garden?
Bev
?”

She hated the tone he used when saying her name. Roger used to do that. An inflection insinuating she was an idiot. The image of her stabbing Tom with a pitchfork popped into her head.

She took a deep breath. “No, I have not. I concentrate on perennials, annuals, and shrubs.”

“Nonessentials.” He glared at her.

“I’m not sure I’m following your train of thought.”

“You know exactly what I’m saying, you uptight—” He stopped, pulled out a fresh package of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and pounded the pack on his palm. “You’re all about form, not function, Bev. Your garden looks pretty, but it doesn’t
do
anything. Your house looks pretty, but nothing ever gets accomplished there.
You
look pretty, but…”

Her teeth were snapped so tightly together, she could feel the muscles in her jaw ache. “But what, Mr. Jenkins?”

“You know, you’re stepping in chicken shit.”

Tom whistled as he ambled away.

Bev glanced down at her feet. Manure dotted her three hundred dollar designer leather pumps.

She eyed the pitchfork leaning against the fence as she turned back to the house.

“Why are there jagged sticks at the top of the fence?”

Beverly and Tom sat across from each other at the kitchen table, eating a store-bought chicken potpie for dinner. Bev thought it was bland. Tom had smothered his in hot sauce. She stared out the window at his garden as dusk settled.

“Keep out the raccoons.”

She stopped eating. “What are you talking about?”

Tom shook salt on his dinner. “I got critter problems. Gophers tunnel under the fence, raccoons climb over. I have the chicken wire buried three feet deep. Keeps the gophers and moles under control. But the goddamned raccoons are surprisingly agile. I’ve seen one scurry up the wooden posts. My sharp topper will pierce their eyes, their face. I didn’t spend hundreds of hours of hard labor to feed those furry fuck-wads.”

Bev tensed every time Tom cussed. Which was probably why he did it so frequently in her presence. Roger always said Tom was a low-life. But the truth was Tom was more educated than Roger. He just didn’t care about his appearance or car or what anyone else thought. What a thorn in Roger’s side. This cranky, miserable old man, who’d started his career as an engineer, educated at Caltech, now worked as a contractor. Roger, a car salesman, could never understand why a man would trade in a suit job for greasy fingernails and a power saw.

“Is there no other way to prevent the raccoons from eating your garden?” She was surprised to find she was genuinely interested in the answer.

He nodded. “Poison. Cayenne pepper. Traps. One of them impaled himself on a stick one night. I left the carcass there for a while. That did the trick.”

Bev sucked in a breath. “That is sickening. Sick. You are a horrible man. You left his dead body—”

“Don’t get your knickers in a bunch. They’re pests. And they’re a nuisance.”

“I don’t care. That is foul and disgusting.” She shuddered and put down her fork. She’d lost her appetite.

“I’ll bet if you had raccoons and gophers eating up your perfect little flower beds, you’d hire some landscaping company to come out and ‘eliminate’ the problem for you. How do you think they do that? Invite the little fuckers to tea and politely ask them to leave the premises? Fuck, no. They kill them. Do you know how the poison works?”

“I don’t want to know.” She wrapped her fingers around her pearls and peered down at her empty plate. It was paper. He had won that round.

Tom reached over and touched her collarbone. He ran his callused fingers over her skin and tapped the pearls. “I can’t believe you’re still wearing these.”

Bev stilled like a startled wild animal. Tom continued to rub her skin. His fingertips were rough and leathery, nicotine-stained. She felt the brush of that touch all the way down to her polished toes, all the way to the top of her salon-perfect hair, to every fiery nerve in her body.

Her late husband’s touch had made her cringe with nausea.

This.

This.

This was different.

“Why wouldn’t I wear the pearls, Tom?” she asked. Her voice cracked.

He shrugged his shoulders and slouched back in his chair. “I’m just surprised. I thought the second old Rog keeled over, you would lighten up. Lose the tight bun, the attitude. He had you under his thumb for so long, maybe it’s too late.”