The All You Can Dream Buffet (19 page)

“Thank you, baby.” She pressed against the thick fur, and Willow turned and licked her face.

She would have to get moving again. She had to get the hell out of here. In a few minutes.

She’d get up and take some ibuprofen. In a minute.

In a minute.

In the quiet before dawn, Ruby opened her laptop, careful not to disturb the kitten curled up beside her. She’d slept the hectic, overheated, restless sleep of the brokenhearted, waking too often to think of Liam in a tuxedo, saying vows, thinking of him with his arms around someone else. Lavender’s words haunted her:
Maybe he fell in love with the other woman on sight, too.

But how did you fall out of love so fast? How did you do it at all? That was the thing she couldn’t figure out.

She needed to tell him about the baby. Instead of going to email, she went to Google Maps and clicked on her saved searches. The map zoomed to Seattle and then to the neighborhood. She zoomed and zoomed and, when she got close enough, she clicked on the little yellow man to go to street view.

And there was her mother’s house. Electrifyingly, the photo had changed. The lilacs around the yard were blooming, clearly, and there, in the backyard, was the family: Mom, Dad, three children, and a dog in the grass. It made her think of a dollhouse family, so tidy and balanced.

Stupid ritual, this one. She was hardly ready to be anyone’s mother if she was still such a child herself. Who did this, anyway? Her mother had walked away from her when she was seven. And sick. Why wasn’t Ruby furious with her?

A burn settled under her diaphragm, and she immediately cut off that line of thought. She had forgiven her mother over a
lot of years. She forgave herself now for having a quirky little habit.

She opened her email program. There, saved with an orange arrow beside it, was Liam’s last email, about getting married. Before she could chicken out, Ruby hit
reply
and wrote:

She hit
send,
then, heart pounding, gently moved Ninja Girl and got dressed. The kitten stood, stretched, and settled back into a tight little ball on the bed.

Ruby left the camper door open, in case the kitten needed to get out, and headed for the lavender fields. It was not quite dawn, but muted light spread along the top side of weighty clouds that had settled over the farm. A pair of chickens joined her as she walked up the path alongside the laying shack. Many of the other chickens were pecking around in the dirt, their voices a soft, burbling sound. She didn’t recognize the two who’d fallen in step with her. One had red feathers layered with cream and a cream-colored chest. The other was black and gold, very pretty. Both were placid and sturdy and very sure of themselves, clucking in low tones as if discussing the local gossip,
swaying along as if they were two old biddies with their hands behind their backs. Their company eased her.

So did the fresh, cool air. The low clouds were full of rain, though it hadn’t yet begun to fall. She breathed deeply, in and out.
Finding her center,
her dad had called it when she was so ill from chemo, finding a place that was calm and right and beautiful, no matter what was going on outside or in her poisoned body. The technique had seen her through a lot of bad hours, and it helped now.

All night she had tossed and turned over Liam’s news, over what to say to him about the baby. She slept in tiny snippets, reviewing their passionate love affair, flashing on things she’d struggled to stop thinking of—his long, beautiful hands, scarred by his years in the kitchen; the sound he made when he nuzzled her first thing in the morning, a long, satisfied groan that made her feel enveloped every single time.

It was the worst kind of sleep, haunted and restless.

She crossed the threshold into the lavender fields, but the chickens paused behind her, as if they did not have the password to enter the magic garden.

Ruby halted, aching. The sight caught her right in the throat every time, the tidy rows of giant pincushions with tiny purple flowers floating over the green, the small pink fairy roses edging the rows—purely for beauty, Lavender had told her. Ruby knelt now and plucked a few roses carefully, pinching them free with her sharp nails. She twisted them into a bouquet and raised it to her nose. The scent was sweet, rose and lemon and morning, and it unrolled against her sinuses, rubbing fragrance over the bridge of her nose and the taut space between her brows.

She waded into the lavender, breathing that, too, into the mix. The pain she’d been carrying since yesterday let go, as if
she’d dropped a backpack. In her belly, the baby moved, tumbling in a circle, and she covered it with her hand, filled with wonder that such an impossible thing should have transpired.

A baby!
Her
baby. “What’s your name, little one?” she asked. “I can’t wait to see you.”

Finally, she could stop and just be. Breathe. Head into the everythingness that always existed. At seven and eight and nine—struggling through her illness, finding hope, only to be devastated over and over again—she and her father had often walked down to the beach to sit on the sand and touch everythingness in the sound of the waves, whispering, crashing, rippling, fluttering.

Behind her, the chickens conversed in hushed tones, as polite as if they were in church, and it made her laugh. She turned around to thank them and saw Noah standing between the banks of shrubs, watching. She waved the hand with the roses.

“I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said. He was dressed for a workday—jeans shoved into battered leather boots, which had seen plenty of mud and muck and time, and a simple checkered shirt beneath a green hoodie that made his tanned skin look warm. “You’re up early.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

He hesitated, then came down the row next to hers, a hen waddling behind him. The hen paused in a grassy spot, pecking, and he shooed her back through the natural gate. She fluttered and squawked but obeyed.

Again Ruby let go of a soft laugh. “I never knew they were so interesting. They were chatting away, walking with me like they were a couple of dogs.”

“They have a lot of character, all right.”

He joined her, reaching down amid the lavender to pinch off
three blossoms. “Has Lavender talked to you about the varieties?”

“A little. Some are for perfume, some for culinary, some for decorative purposes, right?”

“Yep.” He bruised the blossoms and held them out to her.

Ruby tried to remember her discussion with Lavender. “This is Grosso, right? And it yields more but has a less pure lavender scent because of …” She frowned, inhaling, then caught the scent of it. “Camphor?”

He gave a nod, lips turned down in approval. “Good.”

“How do you get the oil out?”

“We have a lavender distiller. It extracts the oil from the blossoms. Takes about fifty gallons of blossoms to produce a half cup of oil. And that’s with Grosso, not Royal Velvet.”

Rolling the lavender and the roses together, Ruby sniffed. “I’d love to see it sometime.”

“I’m sure that could be arranged.” He plucked another trio of buds, bruised them with his thumbnail, and breathed them in, almost meditatively. “It’s a good crop this year.”

“Why don’t you take over the farm for Lavender?” Ruby asked. “You seem to like it.”

He bent his head. “No, that’s not my goal. I’m here to take care of the animals, to help her out.”

Something about the slant of his jaw, the set of his shoulders, told her there was much more there than that. She used a trick she’d learned long ago, of simply being quiet to let someone talk, but he could out-quiet just about anyone.

“Why farmwork, Noah? Did you grow up on one?”

“Not really. My parents were farmworkers, and I grew up in that world, mostly in the Central Valley in California.”

“So all kinds of farming.” She rearranged her history of
Noah, seeing him as a young man in the lettuce fields. “Are they from Mexico?”

He gave her a half grin. “Is that who works in the fields?”

“Oh, don’t do that.” Ruby met his gaze. “It’s a legitimate question, not racist.”

“I’ll let you off the hook.” He started walking down the row and gestured for Ruby to follow. “They are not from Mexico. My mom was half Mexican, half Anglo. My dad is Cheyenne and Ute with a little bit of Navajo thrown in for good measure.”

“Ah.” She flashed him a sideways grin. “Brother! Did I tell you I am 1/120th Cherokee?”

His sun lines crinkled faintly, almost into a smile. “You did. I can see it in your sense of humor.”

The baby swirled again, and she touched the place, smiling to herself.

“So that’ll make the baby, what—1/240th Cherokee?” Noah asked, straight-faced.

She snorted in laughter. “That’s right. If it were true, which it isn’t.”

“I kinda guessed that.”

“Be sweet to Hannah, will you? She’s already got a big crush on you.”

He nodded. “Poor kid. That’s a rough story. Maybe she’ll want to help me around the farm a little bit today. Her mom seemed like she could use a break.” At the end of the row, he stopped. “Are you feeling better?”

The kindness, the way he stood there looking at her with concern, made her eyes prickle. She ducked her head. “I guess.” She shrugged, tucking a lock of hair around her ear. “We’ve been broken up for nine months. I should be over it by now.”

“Or not,” he rumbled. “It takes as long as it takes. But you’ve
got good friends, and everybody is really happy to help you with your baby.”

“I know. I’m lucky.”

“Cute, too. Hope you know that.” He looked toward the treetops, the gesture of a shy person.

“Oh, yeah? Pregnant, throwing up, and now crying?”

“Still cute,” he insisted. “Come on. I want to show you something.” He held out his hand, and Ruby took it in the friendly way it was meant. His palm was calloused and hard. It felt like a hand you could trust.

“Did you come looking for me?” she asked.

“I went to your camper first.” He didn’t let go of her hand, and Ruby liked how much bigger he was next to her, tall enough that she had to look up to see his face. “You seemed upset yesterday.”

A wash of grief moved over her, head to toes. “Yeah.”

“It never seems like it when it happens,” he said gruffly, “but when something breaks, there’s usually a good reason.”

Liam’s face floated in front of Ruby. “I can’t talk about it.”

He nodded, tugging her through the break in the shrubs and down the hill toward the chickens. Their beds were made of hay, and a roof covered the wide, open space. Chickens wandered through, waddling to and fro, some busily, some lazily, all colors—white and gold and black and mottled variations of all sorts. A slight, dark woman of about twenty collected eggs carefully, yellow eggs and blue, pale green and the usual white and brown.

Noah spoke to her in Spanish, and she flashed a smile over her shoulder, shooting back something saucy and aloof. He laughed but didn’t share it with Ruby. She peered into the basket at all the eggs.

“Over here,” Noah said, and led Ruby to a nest where two tiger-striped kittens, eyes still closed, curled together with a pair of eggs.

“Oh!” Ruby cried. “That is the cutest thing ever. Can I touch them?”

“It’s better not to handle them when they’re so young.” A chicken fluttered over, complaining loudly, and pecked at Noah’s foot. “As you see.”

They stepped back, and the chicken leapt up to the nest and settled protectively over the kittens and her eggs.

The girl raiding the nests said something arch, and Noah shot something back without looking at her. She wandered up the hill.

Ruby watched the girl’s hips swaying exaggeratedly. “She’s teasing you?”

“She says you are a woman with some curves, that’s good.”

“Great.” She rolled her eyes. “Just what a jilted girl wants to hear.”

“Women worry too much about being skinny,” he said abruptly.

Ruby put her hands on her tummy. “I don’t. I love this body, whatever shape it’s in. Being sick teaches you that.”

“I guess it would.”

“I figured you for the silent type,” Ruby said. “You’re very talkative, actually.”

“Not with everybody.”

Ruby smiled.

A cell phone buzzed, and Noah slipped it out of his hoodie pocket. He glanced at the message. “Gotta go.”

“Thanks,” Ruby said. “For everything.”

“De nada.”

Lavender Honey Farms

yamhill co., oregon

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Many of our lavenders are coming into full bloom as we head into the height of the season. We are beginning to harvest blossoms for a variety of uses, and we will be filling up our gift shop for the Lavender Festival, coming up in July. That’s a glorious time to visit Yamhill County, so if you haven’t done it, grab your husband or your daughter or maybe your best girlfriends and come tour the glories of lavender country.