A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [86]
“We won’t be able to do this much longer,” Bridget agreed regretfully. And then she brightened. “But we’ve got plenty of fireplaces. And there’s nothing better than sitting by a fireplace with a good book in the winter, is there?”
“How cold is it supposed to get tonight anyway?” There was a worried note in Lindsay’s tone. “Do you think Noah will be warm enough?”
“He has a fireplace, too,” Cici reminded her.
“We should have sent him more blankets,” Bridget said.
“If we do that, aren’t we encouraging him to stay?”
“Well, we can’t let him freeze!”
“Kids,” Cici said and sighed again. “Whoever knows what’s right?”
“I should have brought it up this afternoon,” Lindsay said unhappily. “I really blew my chance. There he was, talking to me, practically opening up to me . . . I should have found a way to talk to him about school, about his home situation, about what he was going to do with winter coming . . . I let him slip through my fingers.”
“I don’t know what you could have told him,” Bridget said, “except to go home. And knowing what we do about his home, I wouldn’t feel right about that.”
“Me either. That’s the problem.” Lindsay sighed. “I’m a teacher. I’m trained in crisis intervention. I should know what to do.”
“I’m a mother,” Cici said glumly. “I’ve lived in a constant state of crisis for twenty years. And I still don’t know what to do.”
Lindsay leaned across and clinked her glass with Cici’s.
“Richard’s right, you know,” Cici said after a moment. “I can’t make Lori come home for Christmas if she doesn’t want to. She’s over eighteen, an adult.”
“I’d love to know who decided that,” Bridget said.
“Some man, probably.”
“Up until about four hundred years ago,” Lindsay pointed out, “boys in Europe were considered adults at age thirteen.”
“Yeah, that was when they only lived to be twenty-five.”
“Before dying of syphilis,” added Cici.
“In some tribal cultures today, girls can get married at age nine.”
“That’s sick.”
“I’m just saying.”
“You shouldn’t be allowed to call yourself an adult until you prove yourself to be one.”
“By building a log cabin?”
“Or making a quilt?”
“Or going to war?”
“Or having a baby?”
And Lindsay said quietly, “Or living in the woods all by yourself because you’ve got no place else to go?”
Bridget said, rocking gently, “Our children are so very lucky.”
Cici sipped her wine silently for a time. Then she said, “I don’t think you should be allowed to be an adult until your mother says you can.”
The other two laughed softly. “I’d vote for that.”
“Me, too,” Bridget said. “I would have emancipated my two at age twelve.”
Cici said, “What if she doesn’t want to come home?” “What if,” Lindsay said abruptly, “we let him sleep in the dairy?”
Cici said, “What?”
And Bridget said, “Who?”
Cici said, “There’s no heat in there!”
“It’s better than what he’s got now.”
Bridget added, “What about your art studio?”
“It would be just for a little while. Until he finds something better. We’d take it out of his wages.”
“Heaven knows, there’s plenty for him to do around here,” Bridget admitted.
“He’s an awfully good worker,” Lindsay agreed, a little anxiously.
“I have to admit, I’d sleep a lot easier myself, knowing he wasn’t freezing to death out there in the woods,” Bridget said.
“Maybe we could even get some space heaters out there,” Lindsay said.
“I say we do it,” said Bridget.
They both looked at Cici.
She said, choosing her words with obvious care, “This isn’t the 1920s, you know. You can’t just pick up a hobo off the road and let him sleep in your barn.”
“I think if he was a serial killer he would have done something about it before now,” Lindsay pointed out.
“And it’s not like we don’t know him,” Bridget added, “or that no one in the community knows him. He’s a good kid. Kind of,” she had to add, honestly.
“We’re aiding and abetting a truant and a runaway. That’s got