A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [51]
“What if we tried to kind of suck the cool air up from the basement through the same vents your furnace uses?”
The furrows on her brow deepened. “How?”
“I’m thinking some kind of whole-house exhaust fan.”
“Like an attic fan?”
“Something like that.”
“How big a job would that be?”
“Well, I’m going to have to do some figuring on that,” he admitted. “Meanwhile, I can get you in business with some ceiling fans. That ought to help some.”
“Okay, that sounds good. The sooner the better on those fans.”
The backhoe stopped grinding. It was an ominous sign. Sure enough, in less than thirty seconds there was a rattling knock on the screen door and Deke, the backhoe operator and septic tank expert from the Methodist side, stood on the porch in his muddy boots.
Cici turned to greet him, and Sam eyed him with the polite reserve due a neighbor from the opposite camp. “Deke,” he said.
“Sam,” returned Deke in a similar tone.
Sam said to Cici, “I’d best get back to my measuring.”
And Deke said, “I don’t want to track in dirt, Miss Cici, but I was wondering if you could come out here for a minute. I just wanted to—”
“Show me one little thing.” Cici sighed, heading for the door. “I know.”
“So,” Cici wound up the story long-distance, “it seems the roots of a hundred-year-old hickory tree have infiltrated the septic system and we have to have a whole new drain field dug.”
“Jeez, Mom, it sounds awful.” But Lori, three thousand miles away, sounded as rushed and as distracted as she always did when she talked to her mother. Cici knew that the only reason she didn’t hear music blaring in the background was because it was blaring in Lori’s other ear from her iPod, and she could picture her daughter balancing the phone on one shoulder as she tried on earrings or held up dresses or did whatever it was that twenty-year-old girls did instead of worrying about septic tanks and drain fields.
“Oh, it’s not so bad,” she said. “We can flush the toilets once a day, we just can’t do laundry or empty the bathtubs.”
“Eeew, gross! It’s like a third-world country or something! How can you stand it?”
“Listen to this.” Cici held the phone toward the open window.
She returned the receiver to her ear in time to hear Lori say, “I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly.”
“Whatever.”
“When are you coming to visit?”
“When are you getting the toilets fixed?”
Cici laughed.
“Mom, I love you, and you know I’m dying to chat but—”
“You’ve got to run, I know. Where’re you off to on your big day?”
Lori’s voice became infused with genuine excitement, “Dad got us into the absolute coolest pool party in L.A.—and he bought me a brand-new swimsuit to wear to it! It’s gold lamé with a beaded top and three strands of Swarovski crystal on each side of the bottoms from front to back, you know, it’s just to absolutely die for. All kinds of models and actors and producers are going to be there, including—you won’t believe it!—Hugh Grant!”
Cici bit her tongue until she thought she actually tasted blood. “Sounds fabulous, sweetie,” she managed at last. “Although I really can’t understand why you’d rather spend your birthday at a pool party with Hugh Grant than digging up septic tanks in Virginia with your mom.”
She laughed. “I love the ring, Mom,” she told her, “and thank Aunt Bridget and Aunt Lindsay for me, too, will you? I’ll write them a note.”
“I know you will, sweetheart.”
“I wish I had time to talk to them but—”
“I know, you’ve got to run. Have a wonderful time.”
“I’ll call you!” Lori sang.
“I love you,” returned Cici, but the line was already dead.
Cici let the screen door squeak shut behind her as she went out onto the porch and took her place in the rocker next to Lindsay. The last light of day had faded to a deep purple twilight, silhouetting the poplar leaves in stark black against the sky. Crickets trilled in and out. Their rockers thumped softly on the freshly painted boards of the porch. On cue, as it had been for the past ten evenings just as the last daylight left the sky, there was the distant whine of a bottle rocket, a muffled pop, and