The All You Can Dream Buffet (18 page)

We have a pregnant woman and a teenager in the house at Lavender Honey Farms. Either of them is likely to fall to hysterics over anything at any moment. Once they finish sobbing, there will be a nice tea and a hot bath for them. This is a great decoction for the bath, calming and sleep-inducing.

Mix dried herbs together and loosely pack into a muslin square tied with string (or one of our reusable bath sacks, which you can order
here
). Run a hot bath and let the herbs soak, along with the tired/cranky loved one for as long as necessary.

Have you checked out our selection of
loose lavenders
? There’s something for every purpose!

Lavender saw Ruby fall to her knees. Drawing on almost four decades of airline emergency management, she cast a quick glance at the others and settled her cup carefully on the saucer. “I’ll be right back.”

She found Ruby bent over, hands wrapped around her belly, but she wasn’t throwing up. A keening noise came out of her. Lavender touched Ruby’s shoulder with an open palm. “Are you all right, child?” She didn’t want to say what worried her, that it was the baby, that Ruby was miscarrying, in case that
spoke it into existence,
as her mother used to say.

“No.” Ruby raised her head. Her nose was running, and her eyes were red and awash with tears. “Liam is getting married in two weeks.”

Only a man.
Lavender let go of a breath and pulled a clean hankie out of her pocket. “I’m sorry, honey. Is that what he said in response to your news of being pregnant?”

“No, I haven’t told him yet.” She held up the phone, cradled in her palm, her wrist bent backward in a languid position. With her free hand, she wiped her nose, but the tears kept falling, as if from a river. “He just emailed me so that I wouldn’t hear it from somewhere else.”

Lavender bent with some difficulty and drew Ruby to her feet. She wanted to say,
It’s only a man.… There are others.… You’ll
get over him.…
“I’m sorry about your broken heart,” she said instead, “but you’re here with us. The only thing you have to think about now is the baby.”

Ruby let herself be led through the thin row between plants. Her legs brushed blossoms on either side, sending a faint waft of lavender through the air. Calming. Ruby hiccupped a little, wiped at her nose. “Do I still tell him now? I don’t know what to do about that.”

“You probably still have to tell him. It’s only fair to let him know.” Lavender wondered if he would turn his back on the baby. That would be best overall, of course.

“Are you okay?” Valerie asked, standing as they came up to the table.

“I’m fine,” Ruby snapped. “I wish everyone would just leave me alone.” She plopped into her seat and made a face. “Wow, that was so not me.”

Valerie chuckled. “Welcome to motherhood.”

A pinch worked its way through Lavender’s chest, persistent, then gone. She coughed, then rubbed the spot for a minute. Into memory floated the face of a swarthy man with beautiful lips, almost too full. Lavender had not been able to get enough of kissing those fat, luscious lips, and he was not like a lot of men, who found kissing to be only a prelude. He kissed for ages at a time, the two of them pressed against a wall in a dusty hallway, his body against hers, mouths firm and wet and succulent, moving and pressing, sucking and supping, tongues tangling. Absently, she touched her mouth.

“That was a faraway expression,” Valerie said, smiling faintly. “Will you share?”

Lavender glanced at Hannah and gave an inward shrug. If the girl had not already ripened, the time wouldn’t be far off. “I
was remembering a man who broke my heart once upon a time. I was twenty-two and I met him in Cairo. He was a pilot, and so beautiful.” She shook her head. “For over a year, every time we could manage to be in the same city, we”—she realized that not only Hannah but Noah was listening, and she picked through the words—“got together.” Lavender thought of the hot joinings, the frantic heat, the long lazy days in air-condition-less hotel rooms, windows open, cigarette smoke curling up from their hands. She leaned back luxuriously. “He was really something.”

“Those pilots,” Noah said. He winked at Lavender. “The pilots always got the women when we were on deployments. Every time.”

“My dad was a pilot,” Hannah said haughtily. “He wasn’t like that.”

“Oh, honey,” Valerie drawled. “How do you think I met him?”

“You were on a plane. That’s not the same.”

Valerie laughed, but Lavender saw the sharpness in her eye. “Your father was a silver-tongued devil, Hannah my dear, which is where your sister Kalista got it.” She addressed the others at the table. “Both of them could talk the wings off an angel.”

“But he wasn’t a player.”

“No,” Valerie said, and touched her daughter’s hand. “He was a very good family man.”

Hannah yanked her hand away. “I hate talking about them.” She left the table.

“Liam isn’t a silver-tongued devil,” Ruby said with some misery. “He was so devoted to me, you wouldn’t believe it. I mean, girls were always coming on to him, and he just never even saw them. He only had eyes for me.”

“Not a pilot, I guess?” Noah asked, tongue literally in cheek.

Lavender laughed at the startled, confused expression on Ruby’s face. “What?”

Noah held Ruby’s gaze steadily, easily, until Ruby got it. “Oh.” Reluctantly, she half-smiled. “No, he was a cook, but, believe me, chefs can be players, too.”

Valerie ladled watermelon salad and more crackers onto her plate. “What happened to your pilot, Lavender?”

“Oh, Khalid.” She sighed. “He was married. He would have continued on forever, but I was idealistic then and wanted to find a husband of my own. I let him go.”

“Did you ever marry?”

Lavender sipped her mint tea. “No. After a few years, it was pretty clear to me that it didn’t make the girls happy. I’d run into somebody and they’d gotten fat or they were divorced or stuck in someplace like Dead Gulch, wishing they were back in the sky. Ginger and I decided we were going to stay single.”

“Ginger is the one who owned Ginny’s trailer, right?” Ruby asked.

“Yep. She eventually did marry a good man—a pilot, as it turned out—when she was thirty-seven. Late in those days, and pregnant, so it was a happy ending. She became an artist and still traveled in that Bambi. We stayed in touch.”

The table went quiet. Lavender thought of her recent sighting of Ginger when she toured the farm in the morning. Maybe it was because Ginny was bringing the trailer out here.

“I guess I’d better get back to work,” Noah said. “Want me to walk you back, Ruby?”

The girl had been staring at her fingernails, phone loose in one hand. She raised a pale face, those Dresden eyes blinking in exhaustion. “Sure,” she said, and let him help her up. “Thanks.”

Lavender watched them walk away. “I guess I’m ready for a nap.”

“I’ll pick up,” Val said. “And I’ll see if I can get a reply from Ginny, so Ruby doesn’t worry. She’s a little mother, isn’t she?”

“Born to it.” Lavender touched Val’s lean shoulder. “Rest yourself, gal. Don’t get worn out, now.”

Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.
—
Richard R. Niebuhr

This was not the easiest day of my life. I’ll be late posting this, too, since I have no connection to the Internet. So sorry, my friends.

By the time she made it to her evening stop, Ginny was weepy and absolutely exhausted. Something she’d eaten at lunch disagreed with her, and her stomach was upset and gurgling. The fire had closed the highway toward Boise, which meant she would have to take a long detour through the mountains of Idaho and Montana, then loop back down toward Portland. It added hundreds of miles to her route, and she wouldn’t make it to the farm tomorrow. She hadn’t made the backbloggers’ party, either, nor could she call them to let them know. The telephone numbers were in her phone, of course, and that was still not working.

She’d hoped to stop in Idaho Falls, but because of all the rerouted traffic from the fire, every campground in the area was filled. One of the attendants at the last place she stopped to inquire had pointed her to this lake. She realized as she pulled up that he was probably a fisherman, and the lonely lake was perfect.

For him.

For her tastes, the area was quite isolated, with only a handful of campsites taken. Ginny dithered in the parking lot by the unmanned ranger station, tapping her thumb against the steering wheel. This was not what she’d been expecting, and it added to her sense of isolation and dread. Maybe she should keep driving.

Her hands ached. She desperately wanted a shower. Her stomach roiled and pitched, and every bone in her body ached. Driving farther seemed like a punishment.

Make a decision.

She made camp by the lake. Ginny let Willow out to explore the area, knowing she wouldn’t wander far. The dog padded into the water up to her ankles, took a drink, smelled a log, stared off into the distance. There were probably bears out there. Coyotes and raccoons, maybe.

She really did not feel well. Her head ached, and shivers were starting along her spine. Maybe the best idea right now would be to just get some sleep.

First, she leashed Willow and took her for a walk along the edge of the lake in the twilight. The water was still and a cool breeze blew off it. A man walked toward her, hunched and frowning, and didn’t speak even when she said, “Good evening.” A bristling unease crossed her body, and she couldn’t help looking over her shoulder at him.

STRANGER!

She shook it off. Again her mother’s voice.

On the way back, she saw a campfire burning not too far away from her own camp. A whirl of men’s voices rang out, laughing, hooting, as if they were having a party. As she approached her trailer, it looked frail against the big twilit sky, silver and delicate, as easy to rip into as the foil wrapping on a Hershey’s Kiss.

Maybe she ought to move on, forget about this.

But her body protested. Everything ached. Her stomach kept roiling, and her shoulder hurt where the barbed wire had torn it earlier. Who even knew how much farther it was to the next stop?

Friendly lamplight spilled from the kitchen window of the
Airstream, the trailer so ardently female with its cabbage roses and winding vines. Why hadn’t she realized that? That she’d be advertising her femaleness by driving a flower-painted trailer?

She stopped, taking in the scene, trying to talk herself into a more reasonable state of mind.

A terrible vision spurted across the peaceful scene—her body bloody and violated, sprawled on the narrow floor of that beloved little kitchen. The roar of a gang of men having their way with her, the terrible pain—

She swayed dizzily and put a cold hand against her forehead, pressing fingers against her eyelids for a minute. Her skin was very hot, and her stomach was beginning to really
hurt.

Whatever it was, she couldn’t drive this way. With a sense of resignation, she climbed into her turtle shell, secured the door carefully behind her, and drew all the curtains. Willow woofed and settled down on the floor.

Right. She had a dog. Willow wouldn’t let anyone in to hurt her.

Feverish, cramping, she curled up on her bed without even taking off her jeans. A ribbon of reason wound through her mind. In a little while, she told herself, she would take some Advil. For right now she desperately wanted to lie down. Just for a minute.

She dreamed of a green chrysalis built around her, seeming fragile but really very strong. The colors were extreme—purple and green and bright yellow—and seemed to pulse and beat. Even in her sleep, even in her dream, she thought there was something wrong with that, and if she wasn’t so hot, she’d open her eyes.

A woman with a martini glass bent over her, whispering,
Wake up, wake up. You’re in trouble.

She jerked into wakefulness, the fever making everything
seem light from within. Willow licked her hand. Ginny crawled to the bathroom and looked for something to take, but her vision was so blurry, she couldn’t figure out which bottle was which. She struggled back to the bed, kicked off her jeans, and crawled under the covers, shivering and shaking.

Willow leapt up on the bed with her, and Ginny gratefully buried her face in her dog’s fur, ashamed to be weeping, unable to stop.

What if she died of E. coli or something? How would Willow get out? Her dog would die, too, a slow and terrible death of dehydration. She should open a window or something. Willow was smart enough to claw her way through the screen.

She felt herself being dragged under by the fever.

A bright burst of orange exploded. Ginny bolted upright, realizing that it was Willow barking savagely at someone at the door of the trailer. She raised a hand to her aching head, felt the clamminess all over her skin. Indistinct voices came from the other side of the door.

The door handle rattled, and Willow renewed her furious, savage barking. Someone said, “Fuck it,” and the voices drifted away. Carefully, Ginny swayed toward her dog, sinking down beside her.