Liz Ireland (10 page)

But every surface was already devoted to apple business, and so the place was loaded with peels and cores waiting to be thrown into slop buckets for the hogs, jars awaiting sauce, and piles of peeled fruit awaiting their destiny. The kitchen probably looked this way from September through December every year, but Ed always managed to seem confounded by the chaos.

Roy sighed. “It’s in your left hand.”

His uncle’s eyes bugged in surprise to see the utensil precisely where Roy said it was. “Aha!” he cried with the shock of Columbus discovering the New World. “It might have hidden there for years. See what a help to me you are, Roy?”

Roy grinned, trying to make his uncle feel better, but the truth was, he suspected Ed was never more absent-minded and fluttery than when he had company. Ed moved and worked in the way of a man accustomed to being alone and doing things his own way, so that the mere sight of a stranger in his kitchen threw him off his stride completely.

He was even more distracted than usual today, but that might have had something to do with the fact that he’d had another visit from Ike just yesterday. Two different people two days in a row would be a novelty. Though Ed usually went into Paradise every two weeks, he rarely spoke to anyone except to conduct his business at the mercantile and the feed and seed warehouse. He never socialized, claiming that all the noise of people caterwauling made him nervous now that he was a solitary old bachelor.

“Ike told me about your mother—” Ed blurted out now, choosing the wrong moment to start a conversation, just as he was transferring a heavy pot of stewed apples to one of the crowded tabletops.

Seeing his gray-haired old uncle careening around the kitchen with hot pans and sharp objects set Roy’s nerves on edge; having him careening
and
talking about Isabel nearly made him apoplectic. He got up and tried to stay a few steps behind Ed, watching him warily as if the man were balanced atop a ladder instead of moving around his own kitchen.

“She arrived a few weeks ago.”

Ed’s brown eyes bulged in surprise. “As much as that? No one told me!”

“You’ve been busy since the harvest.”

Ed laughed. “Yes, of course—busy time of year. How does she look?”

Roy looked around the kitchen. “Fine, except that you’ve got too much filling and not enough crust made.”

Ed’s gray eyebrows shot up in alarm. “I was referring to Isabel.”

“Oh!” Roy naturally assumed his uncle had been talking about his work, which he usually spoke of as lovingly as he would of any woman. More lovingly, even. “I suppose she looks all right. I don’t exactly remember too much of how she looked before.”

“No, naturally!” Ed laughed nervously again, and tugged at his mustache in thought. “Do you really think I shorted on the crust?”

Roy shrugged. “You’ve got a better eye than me for these things.”

Ed frowned. “No, no—it’s good to have you here, Roy. Good to have your opinion on the pies. You say Isabel looks well?”

“I said I guessed so.” He wished his uncle would
pick a topic instead of trying to talk simultaneously about apples and his mother. Of course, Roy knew which topic
he’d
choose.

At first it seemed Roy would get his wish.

“Well, the apples will keep, but I hate to see crust go to waste,” Ed said.

Roy couldn’t see how a crust could go to waste here when there were apples everywhere that looked ready to leap into the nearest pie pan.

“And what’s she doing?”

Roy blinked, distracted by the question. They were back on his mother again. “Oh, she’s…well, she’s setting up a store of some kind. Hats, I think.” Roy laughed in disgust, now that it suddenly struck him how odd a choice of profession that was. “If you can imagine trying to make a living from that!”

Ed clucked his tongue. “Well she’s done pretty well up to now making hats.”

Roy fingered a pippin absently. “Oh, sure, up to now…” He frowned and turned on his uncle. “How would
you
know how she’s been doing?”

Color rose in his uncle’s cheeks. “Oh…we kept in touch through the years.”

“She’s been writing to you? For how long?”

“Ever since I tried to find her.”

Roy was stunned. “When was that?”

“’Bout fifteen years ago. A few years after your Pa died, I wanted to know if she was faring well…you know, didn’t want her to starve.”

“Why should anyone in the McMillan family have cared?” Only once the question had registered in his uncle’s eyes did Roy realize how callous his words sounded.

“Of course we would have cared, Roy,” Ed lectured. “She was your mother and our brother’s wife.”

“She abandoned us!”

Ed turned and started rattling pans at the stove, pulling off lids and sending plumes of fragrant steam into the air. “Things are never so cut-and-dried, you know. People are hardly ever just one thing or the other. Fellows learned that in a war, I guess. Least-ways, I did.”

Like his older brother, Roy’s father, Ed had served in the Union army. Roy’s father, however, had married and come home after two years with a young bride he’d met during leave in Philadelphia, just before the entire clan up and moved to Nebraska in response to the new Homestead Act. Ed hadn’t come to Nebraska till he was mustered out in May of 1865, the year Roy was born. Roy had always wondered how his father’s siblings must have reacted to his hauling a woman home from the war.

Ed, apparently, hadn’t minded as much as Roy had assumed.

“Your pa and your mother didn’t get along so well.”

“Because she couldn’t stand it here.”

Ed nodded. “That’s what Abner always said. But the fact of the matter was, he mostly couldn’t stand being married. Didn’t like it. He and Isabel didn’t get along.”

Roy frowned. Ed was taking Isabel’s side? “She couldn’t stand it here, and she left,” he insisted, placing the blame squarely back where it belonged.

Didn’t it?

Ed shook his head. “She didn’t jump, Roy, she was pushed.”

“You mean Pa told her to leave?” Ridiculous!

“Not in so many words, but he made it unbearable enough for her here that she couldn’t stay. Maybe you were too little to remember how things were back then, or at least to understand. Things got ugly, Roy.
Then, when she told him she was going back to Philadelphia, back to her folks, he wouldn’t allow her to take you boys. I’ve never seen a woman so broken up.”

His mother? He couldn’t imagine her “broken up” about anything. Roy bristled. “Sounds like she’s had your ear, all right. Why haven’t I ever heard this before? Why haven’t I heard from
her?
”

“Out of respect for Abner, my brothers and I didn’t take sides or interfere. That just wasn’t our way. Then, after Abner died and I tracked her down, I discovered she’d married again.”

“So you see,” Roy pointed out, “she could have gotten in touch with us then.”

Ed looked doubtful. “Except that her husband had had an accident and was an invalid, and Isabel was working hard at her shop to support them both. She didn’t feel she could waltz back into your lives after all that time, especially since she had such a hard financial burden to bear. She didn’t want you to feel responsible for her in any way.”

Ed shook his head. “Women’s lives aren’t always easy, Roy—and they especially weren’t back when Isabel was a young woman. What do you think her folks made of her coming home after marrying and going out west? You think they were glad to see her when they already had five other children to support?”

Roy tried to digest all this information as best as he could, but he was still skeptical. “All I can see is that Pa never should have gotten married.”

“I guess that’s right,” Ed said, obviously glad to be back in agreement on something with his nephew. He looked around in complete befuddlement. “Have you seen a wooden spoon around here, by chance? I know I had it….”

Roy picked it off the spoon rest and handed it to him.

“Abner maybe should have never gotten married,” Ed agreed, stirring a pot of applesauce. “He should have stayed a bachelor like the rest of us. Life’s sure simpler this way.”

Roy couldn’t help looking around the disaster area of a kitchen overrun with apples and apple products. Back when his other uncles were alive to temper Ed’s passion for fruit, things around here had seemed a little saner. Now Ed’s life appeared to be not only turbulent, but one-dimensional.

Yet productive,
he added loyally. An orchard might make life difficult for a few months of the year, but it was nothing compared to the problems his father had endured during five years of marriage.

Roy frowned. What had Ed meant by “ugly”?

“Of course,” Ed reminded him, “if Abner hadn’t married, then you and Parker wouldn’t be here. There’s that.”

Roy nodded. His father had been a curt, taciturn man, but less so with his children than other people. Maybe that’s why Roy had a difficult time believing Isabel could have had such a rough time…except that he’d seen his father rail against other people, and sometimes against his own brothers.

“And then there’s something else, too,” Ed added, sprinkling crushed cinnamon from a shaker into his pot. “Maybe if Abner hadn’t married, he would have always been thinking about that pretty gal in Philadelphia he should’ve married. Maybe he would have had regrets. There’s nothing in the world worse than that.”

Roy’s brows lifted in surprise. “Why, Uncle Ed, sounds like there’s a pretty gal hidden away in your past somewhere!” He laughed. “Where is she, in
Omaha? Or maybe you left somebody back east during the war? Is that why you’ve turned into such a bleeding heart all of a sudden?”

Ed’s face turned pink, and he fluttered his hand at his nephew to shut him up. “That’s none of your business!”

Roy chortled. “You can’t fool me. You’re the happiest man alive here on your little farm with your orchard. Your life’s turned out just the way you wanted it.”

Ed nodded thoughtfully. “Just the way I wanted it when I was a young man.” Then he looked up. “Only I never expected all my brothers to be gone so soon. Or…” His words broke off as a lid over a bubbling pot started making threatening noises.

Roy wasn’t used to seeing his uncle so introspective. Ed was a busy man, and usually didn’t have time for such foolishness as looking back and worrying about regrets. “That’s the female influence, all right,” he muttered. “That’s what they do to a man. Start making him think about all sorts of things that are best left alone.”

“What woman are you talking about, Roy? Isabel, or that woman that’s over visiting Parker?”

“Both!”

Ed laughed. “Ike told me about her. Said she was real pretty.”

“Did he tell you she was pregnant?”

“Widow, isn’t she?”

Roy nodded.

“Well, now, I have some sympathy for widows,” Ed said. “I reckon they have a harder time than most folks, on account of they’re grieving and trying to figure out how to make their way in the world at the same time.”

Roy rolled his eyes. This visit was supposed to be
helpful.
It was supposed to remind him of the bachelor paradise his world used to be. He put his hands on his hips and informed his uncle, “There’s been no end of trouble since she arrived. Ike’s practically in love with her, Parker’s in such a funk I can’t tell what he’s thinking, and did I tell you I broke my toe?”

Ed looked down at his boot. “Looks fine to me.”

“Oh, sure,
now.
When it happened, Doc told me I was going to have to stay in bed for months.”

Ed frowned. “But you didn’t.”

“Of course not,” Roy said testily, “but it was touch and go for a while. And it never would have happened if it weren’t for that Fitzsimmons woman.”

“What did she do?”

Roy stubbed the toe of his uninjured foot against the wide-plank floor and shrugged. “She was helping me one night.”

Gray eyebrows arched. “Helping you where?”

“In my bedroom.” Roy blushed. “Well, actually, it’s hers now. I was just getting some things down and…” He let out a ragged sigh, remembering how Ellie had looked that night in nothing but her nightgown, with all that cloud of red silky hair framing her face. Was it any wonder he had taken a fall? “Anyway, it wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for her.”

Ed nodded. “Looks like you’ve got a problem.”

“The foot’s better now.”

“But your heart’s sore, isn’t that it?”

Roy felt heat burn his cheeks. “Of course not! I’m just worried that she’s never going to leave—that things won’t be the same back at the farm again. You know how happy we all were.”

“Happy? Just last month when you were over here helping me with the picking you told me that Ike was driving you crazy. Said his constant talking was getting
on your nerves. You said you didn’t know if you could stand another winter locked up with Parker and his moaning. Said you were considering running off to Alaska or someplace.”

“Did I?” he asked in amazement, only having a vague recollection of his complaints from last month; his woes now seemed so much stronger. He muttered in disgust. “I just didn’t know how good I had it then.”

“You just didn’t know how love felt,” his uncle corrected.

Roy opened his mouth to refute the implied accusation, but Ed cut him off.

“Hand me that potholder, won’t you, Roy?”

Feeling numb, Roy did as he was told. He wasn’t in love!

“Uh-oh,” Ed said, looking out the window again.

“Is the snow bad?”

Uncle Ed shook his head. “It sure is—but not as bad as the news I have for you.”

Roy looked up, alarmed, and joined his uncle at the window. He had to lift himself up to peer through the opening. Outside, through the driving white powder falling through the sky, they could just make out the figure of a small woman with red hair peeking out from beneath her scarf, riding up the disappearing path to the house.

“That would be the Widow Fitzsimmons, I suppose,” Ed guessed.

Ellie?
Here?

Muttering a curse, Roy spun on his heel, slammed his hat on his head and ran outside. Squinting against the driving flurry of ice and snow, he ran till he reached Ellie and her horse and grabbed the reins from her.