A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [106]
“Not much to this town, is there?” he commented as he held her chair, and Lindsay had to laugh.
“Are you kidding? This is the big city!”
He had told her on the phone that he was driving through the Shenandoah on vacation, which was probably a lie because it was too early for the ski resorts to open and there were certainly more hospitable months than November for vacationing in the mountains. But she had pretended to believe him, because the alternative would have been not to see him at all. And she was glad she had done so. Because seeing him was like a sudden welcome breeze, bringing with it the taste and the smell and the feel of everything she had left behind . . . movie theaters, walks along the harbor, coffee shops, bookstores, symphony concerts, sailboat rides. They talked about the crab cakes at Finos, and tailgate picnics on Saturday afternoons, and they laughed over the escapades of her former students, and he brought her up-to-date on mutual friends and colleagues.
“They miss you,” he told her, warm green eyes smiling tenderly as he reached across the table for her hand. “We all do.”
She said, “I miss them, too.” She was surprised to find that was the truth. The simple, achingly genuine truth. “I miss a lot of things.” She let him hold her fingers atop the rose print tablecloth for a moment, then she returned her hand to her lap.
“So,” she said with determined pleasantness, “how is Estelle? Didn’t she come with you?”
He sat back, his gaze steady. “We’re divorced,” he told her. “As of June.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know why she was suddenly so tongue-tied. “Well, I’m—that is, I hope . . . I’m sure it was for the best.”
He nodded. “I guess you figured out I’m not really up here on vacation.”
She reached for her water glass. “You didn’t really drive all the way out here just to tell me about you and Estelle?”
“That was one reason,” he admitted. “The other one was . . .” A slight pause, and his eyes drew her in. “To offer you a job.”
Lori called just as Bridget and Cici were finishing lunch—egg salad sandwiches and tomato soup from a cup that they ate leaning against the countertop because every other available surface was occupied by chopped candied fruit, nuts, bowls of eggs and brown sugar, and mounds of flour made the color of pale sand by the generous addition of spices. The kitchen smelled like mace and allspice and warm baking sugar as Ida Mae took yet another sheet of perfect brown loaves from the oven.
“How many of those do you make every year, anyway?” Cici asked, watching as Ida Mae placed each loaf on the cooling rack.
“Enough,” replied Ida Mae succinctly. “Wouldn’t be Christmas to some folks without my fruitcake.”
Cici and Bridget exchanged a glance, wondering how many of those fruitcakes ended up being secretly shipped off to other deserving relatives by their recipients. And then Bridget said, with a sudden mischievous look in her eyes, “Ida Mae, would you mind making a couple extra for me? I’d like to send some to my friends in the city.” She grinned at Cici. “Wouldn’t Paul and Derrick get a kick out of that?”
“Lotta work in a fruitcake,” Ida Mae grumbled.
“I’ll help of course,” Bridget volunteered.
“And they ain’t cheap.”
“I’ll buy the ingredients.”
Ida Mae added with a sly glance at the two of them, “But it’s the wine that makes them special.”
Bridget’s eyebrows lifted. “Wine? Ida Mae, you put wine in your fruitcakes?”
Ida Mae gave her a disparaging look. “Don’t you know nothing?