The Ladies Farm (10 page)

“Weren’t you afraid someone would see you?”

“Nah. All the crew was at the grave. And there wasn’t anything behind that shed except the fence and then the railroad tracks. And, you know something?” Rita cocked her head and looked up at Della.

“I don’t think I know anything.”

“It really did make me feel better. I mean, about Pauline and all. Like she was there, maybe, and was glad to see that life goes on.”

“You felt she was there?”

“Well, not there exactly, but like, if she was, she’d be glad.”

“Glad you were fucking at her funeral?”

“Oh, come off it. Are you telling me you never had sex anywhere but in your bed?”

“I’m telling you I never had sex in a cemetery during my friend’s funeral.” She gave a laugh. “And I certainly never tried to justify it by saying my friend would like it.”

Rita didn’t take offense, but she did press her point. “I didn’t say like it, exactly. I mean, I think she’d be glad to know that someone cares about me.” Her girlish smile was too much for Della.

“Cares about you? Cares about getting his, I would say. That choirboy!”

“Now, you leave off Dave, he was just trying to make me feel better. He is an ex-husband, and he does know me pretty well.”

Della laughed. “I’m sorry,” she said, but she kept laughing. “Oh, Rita!” She reached down toward her friend and put a hand on her shoulder. Just touching Rita started tears flowing, but she still didn’t stop laughing. “You’re right,” she said beneath her streaming tears. “Pauline would be glad for you. And for just the reason you said: that someone cares for you.”
Hugh Jr. and Melissa had hated Sydon House because it had forced them out of the Fort Worth suburbs and turned them into hicks. Even though Pauline had driven them to school in Fort Worth every day, they resented the distance that stretched between their friends and themselves.

“
They treat us like servants,
” Della recalled Pauline mimicking Melissa in her complaints about running a bed and breakfast.
“They expect us to clean up after them!
”

Pauline’s decision to stay on at the Ladies Farm after Hugh’s death had stunned them, Pauline once told her, but Della thought the kids had come to some understanding of it. Della was sure that Melissa and Hugh Jr. couldn’t imagine their mother any other place, any more than she or Kat could.

Hugh Jr. brought his wife, Carrie, with him, and Melissa had her two boys, whose names Della forgot but who were captivated by Nancy’s offer to take them down to the river. “I’ll use the rowboat,” she promised, then disappeared with them.

They started in the office, with Kat handing over Pauline’s ledgers, as well as the printout of the financials for the Ladies Farm.

“We’ll have to do an audit,” Hugh Jr. said as he accepted the binder Kat had assembled.

“You should,” Kat agreed. She glanced at Della. “Particularly because we’d like you to set a price on the place.”

Hugh Jr. smiled. “Our thoughts exactly.” He motioned to Melissa and Carrie, who sat on either side of him on the sagging sofa. Barbara occupied the typist’s chair and Kat the straight-back one next to Pauline’s desk. Rather than take Pauline’s chair, Rita and Della had chosen to stand, leaning against the door jamb for support.

“What about you, Aunt Barbara?” Melissa asked.

Della held her breath.

The color rose in Barbara’s face. “Me?” She seemed startled that they had noticed her. “Well, I want to stay on, of course. That is,” she glanced quickly at Della, “if I’m still welcome.”

Della saw Kat start to reply, but Melissa spoke—gushed—first. “Well, I know that’s what mother wanted, Aunt Barbara. You belong here.”

Hugh Jr. cleared his throat. “I guess what we were interested in, actually, is more the business aspect of this.” He smiled gently at Barbara. “You understand. As executor, in an official capacity, I have a responsibility to the estate. So the real question is, were you interested in purchasing the remaining interest in this property? The real estate?”

“Purchase the remaining—” Her forehead furrowed and her lips pursed with the thought.

That little bastard! Della thought. He wants her to bid up the price! She caught Kat’s warning glance and bit back her anger. We should have talked to Barbara first, she admonished herself.

Barbara finally figured it out and shook her head slowly, enabling Della to release a long, slow breath. Tears filled Barbara’s eyes. “Your mother was such a wonderful woman. I’m sure she wanted these ladies to have the rest of the farm.” She turned back to Della. “Just being allowed to live here brings me more happiness than I could ever have hoped for now.”

Della smiled wanly. She means happiness from irritating Kat and me to death.

Hugh Jr. was talking about appraisals and letters of appointment, and Kat was making notes and nodding as if her future were not at stake.

“Well,” Kat concluded briskly. “We’ll get together after you’ve had time to look at the books. Let’s take a look at your mother’s things.”

They all tromped upstairs, Kat hanging back to grab Della by the arm. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” she whispered fiercely under the sound of feet clumping on the uncarpeted stairs.

Della shook her head. “I’m imagining you running her off.”

“Get a grip,” came the instruction. “Lose that loopy grin and stay with her and make sure she doesn’t change her mind.” Kat gave Della a little push up the stairs.

They crowded into Pauline’s room, the only suite in the old part of the house, with a small sitting room and windows to the east, next to the bedroom that overlooked the street. These rooms in the older part of the house were small, and there was no bath in the bedroom. The ladies of the Ladies Farm shared two baths down the hall in the new part, where the walls were thin, the rooms were commodious, and every window looked out over the Nolan.

Della stood in the center of the room with the others, looking at the executive-stripe wall covering that Pauline had designed in the eighties and never replaced. Finally, Carrie approached the mahogany wardrobe as if to open it, then veered at the last minute to the small bookcase. “Look,” she said, leaning over, “these are all books your mother covered in fabric.”

“Journals,” said Hugh Jr., following her. He turned to Kat. “We brought some cartons.…”

Kat nodded. “Let us go get them for you. We’ve been saving them, too.” With that they dispersed: Kat, Rita, Barbara, and Della hurrying downstairs to get boxes from Hugh’s van, while Hugh Jr., Carrie, and Melissa began sorting through Pauline’s things.

“Leave them,” Kat said on the stairs, after the third trip. She checked her watch. “We’ll fix lunch for them in the kitchen after the guests have eaten.”

From the river, they could hear an occasional raised voice, and Della supposed Nancy was helping Melissa’s boys spot fish. “We need to make up rooms,” Della said. “Since Nancy managed to snag river duty.”

“I’ll get the rooms,” Barbara said, and the others jumped. Kat looked hard at Della, and Della gulped. “There’s no need for you to do all that by yourself,” Della said. “We can do them together.”

Della’s offer did not surprise Barbara. No one at the Ladies Farm trusted her competence, and Barbara reminded herself once again to give them all more time. She followed Della to the second-floor utility room and helped her move the cart into the hallway. “I’ll start the bath,” Della said. Barbara nodded agreement and, letting the cart pass, pulled the vacuum cleaner from its corner, and followed.

The ladies had a system: One person hit the bathroom while the other did the beds and straightened the room. Nancy had explained it the day after Pauline died, when everything was still in an uproar and no one seemed to remember that there was a business to run. The straightener, Nancy had shown Barbara, always finished first and went on to the next room, where she started the bathroom and the other eventually came in and did the beds.

In the first room, occupied by a married couple on a trek out to California, Barbara and Della worked steadily and with little conversation, but Barbara’s mind was shrieking questions. Everything had changed now. Now it was Della and Kat who controlled her future. Maybe she should just tell them, Barbara thought, stripping the sheets from the king-size mattress and bundling them into the sack that hung from the cart handle. But what would she say?

How could she explain that she had no interest in buying the Ladies Farm, that she just needed a place to live? Maybe she should just buy the place and let Kat and Della keep their money. They’d get it back eventually. But they’d hate me, Barbara fretted, dropping a pillow into a pillowcase and smoothing it down at the head of the bed. And I want to live with them.

Barbara switched on the vacuum cleaner, which roared over the sloshing sounds Della was making in the bathroom. The way Barbara remembered it, Della’s lack of cleaning skills had been an ongoing joke, and it was odd to think of her swabbing toilets and
scrubbing bath tile. Barbara herself got a lot of satisfaction from cleaning things. Clearing the carpet of lint and litter as she ran the vacuum cleaner over it gave her a sense of accomplishment. I guess, she thought, Della had a lot of career accomplishments. She didn’t need to clean.

There were five guests: the married couple, two women in a double, and one woman in the single. The new crafts teacher had them out in the barn painting flower pots. The teacher had agreed to hold the pots for the married couple, who would pick them up on their return trip home to Baton Rouge.

After she finished vacuuming the third room, the single (which could actually sleep two since it had a double bed, but only a small dresser and a stall shower), Barbara stepped into the bathroom to see how Della was doing. “I’ll get the commode,” she said.

“Be my guest,” replied Della, who was working at the shower stall. Nancy, who sometimes cleaned all six rooms herself, missed a lot, and the ladies made it a point of pride to correct her deficiencies on the days they did the cleaning.

Barbara squirted cleaner into the bowl and reached for the longhandled brush. “I’m sorry I made a spectacle of myself at the funeral.”

“What?” Della looked up from where she was bent over the floor of the shower stall. Her yellow-gloved hand held the soapy sponge in midair.

“I said, I’m sorry I made a spectacle at the funeral.”

“Forget it,” Della said, dipping her sponge in the running water and rinsing off the newly scrubbed stall.

“I don’t know what came over me,” Barbara said, still facing the commode. She swished the brush around the bowl and squinted into it to make sure it was getting clean. Then she turned to look at Della. “I’ve never talked about it, but suddenly, right then, I had to tell someone.” Della’s back was still to her, but the sponge had stopped
moving. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate … how grateful I am …”

“Look,” said Della, standing abruptly and turning the faucet knobs off with a jerk, “It’s okay. I understand. And, I promise you I won’t tell anyone.” Barbara noticed that Della, as she finished speaking, put her hand to the small of her back and grimaced a little.

Barbara’s eyes filled with tears, but she managed a thank you. “And,” she took a breath, “thanks for letting me stay here.”

Della looked away. “Well,” she said, “there’s no sense in making any big decisions until we see what the kids want to do with Pauline’s share.”

Barbara wavered a second, then forced herself to press on. “You know, Della, Richard left me … comfortable.” She saw the skepticism in Della’s eyes. “More than comfortable, I guess. And I don’t want to start any fights here.” She felt her lips start to tremble, but she kept going. “So if you need to borrow something … to take care of Hugh Junior and Melissa, I mean …”

She didn’t know why Della looked so exasperated. “Kat and I can take care of Hugh Junior and Melissa.” Della’s eyes narrowed, and Barbara felt the same way she had years before when Della would squint at her and ask, “What do you do all day, anyway?”

“I meant that since I won’t be bidding on the other half of the Ladies Farm, there’s no reason why I can’t make funds available to you. After all,” she straightened her own back, “there would be no sense in just running the price up, as long as I can go on living here.” Her resolve lasted only as long as the sentence, leaking out with each word until she felt tears again. Still, she stood facing Della in the bathroom across a cart of cleaning supplies, both of them wet, dirty, and clad in yellow rubber gloves.

Maybe Della felt sorry for her. “Oh, of course you can stay here, Barbara. I just meant that for Kat and me, this is business and we should finance it that way. That’s all.”

Barbara nodded, not trusting herself to speak. They wheeled the cart out of the bathroom and into the hallway. “I’ll vacuum this hall,” Barbara said. “I guess we’ll leave Pauline’s room alone today, let those kids work in peace.”

“Yeah,” said Della, but she held on to Barbara’s gaze, and Barbara looked at her quizzically. “Can I ask you one thing? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.”

“Sure,” said Barbara. She braced herself, knowing Della wanted to know how long she would stay.