A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [109]
She sank back against the chair, regarding him with a puzzled half smile. “So. Did you just pop out of a magic lamp or something? Are you going to disappear after my third wish?”
His expression softened, and he reached again for her hand. “It depends on what your third wish is.”
This time she withdrew her fingers before he could clasp them. “This can’t be about us, Shep. You know that.”
He said, “That’s not why I came here. I miss you. I want you to come home. But I’m offering you this job because I want the best for the Renaissance School.”
She drew in a breath, released it. “I’d actually be teaching art.”
“You’d have a full office staff and two teaching assistants.”
“And a condo on the water.”
He smiled.
She thought about her light-filled studio in the dairy barn, and how hard she had worked scrubbing the stone floors and whitewashing the walls, and how, even with the electric heaters at their highest setting, she could never get the temperature above sixty-five degrees these days. She thought about jogging along the waterfront and going to hear a real symphony, and taking in a movie whenever she wanted. She thought about cable television and high-speed Internet. And all she could say softly was, “Wow.”
He said, “Your contract would start in January. Would you like to see a copy?”
The waitress came by to clear their plates, and asked if they would like to order dessert. Shep turned the question to her.
Lindsay looked at the woman helplessly. “I don’t even know the answer to that,” she said.
The first thing Cici had noticed about life in the country was how different the men were from those in the suburbs. When she went into the hardware store they didn’t hover around, asking what she was looking for, following her from aisle to aisle as though afraid she might break something. When she went into the lumber store they didn’t stop their conversations or look at her as though she had just stepped off a spaceship, as she had half expected. When she purchased PVC pipe they didn’t ask if she was meaning to run hot or cold water through it, as though she didn’t know there was a difference, and when she ordered a stack of two-by-fours no one asked if she meant to use them indoors or outdoors, and when she bought a box of nails no one questioned whether she had meant to get galvanized.
What they did instead was simply ignore her. She was an intruder into a world that smelled like male sweat and hunting boots, tobacco juice and machine oil, and they could not, in good conscience, acknowledge her existence with anything more than the barest courtesy. Cici began to like it that way.
Jake Senior and Jake Junior—the two Js of J&J Lumber—along with the clerk, the loading assistant, and the guys who hung around the woodstove in the office of the lumber store, grew used to seeing her once, sometimes twice, a week. They would tip their hats to her, silently help her load supplies, and occasionally take a reluctant, almost unavoidable interest in her work, as in:
“You ain’t gonna try to dovetail them joints by yourself, are you?”
And, “If you’re going to be cutting all that ash, you’re going to need a couple of new saw blades, too.”
And, “Now, if you want to try matching the hinges that are already on that door, there’s a fellow with a salvage yard over in Hendersonville . . .”
What they never did, and what she appreciated to the point of amazement, was ask if she needed any help, surreptitiously slip her their business cards, or offer their opinions about what was or was not too big a job for her to take on. It seemed to her the questions they sometimes asked about the progress of her projects were laced with an underlying hope that she would eventually break down and admit she was in over her head. But Cici thought that was a small price to pay for their lack of interference in her affairs.
So