A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [96]
“Sous chef,” Cici reminded her.
Bridget said, “Right.”
At that moment the front door opened, and the screen door creaked. Three heads swiveled to see Ida Mae standing there, scowling at them. “Supper’s in half an hour,” she said. “I ain’t calling you again.”
She started to close the door, but Bridget spoke quickly. “Will you join us for a glass of wine, Ida Mae?”
Ida Mae looked from one to the other of them, her fierce expression unaltered. “My mama always said,” she replied archly, “that a sip of sherry at Christmas, or on the birth of a child, is all a lady requires.”
She turned to go inside, while Lindsay mouthed, eyebrows raised, Sherry? And then they heard her mutter, just before the screen door slammed, “Bunch of damn alkies.”
Cici looked at Bridget. “Are you sure you don’t want us to talk to her?”
Bridget sighed. “No. She’s my problem. I’ll handle it. Really.”
Lindsay raised her glass to Bridget. “You’ve got your work cut out for you,” she said, and Bridget sighed as three glasses clinked together.
“Cheers.”
17
In Which Bridget Has a Very Bad Day
Bridget talked to Ida Mae.
“Breakfast was delicious,” she said, “but we really can’t have you getting up before dawn to cook for us. We can make our own breakfast, really.”
And: “Really, Ida Mae, you work much too hard. We can change our own beds.”
And, firmly, “We’re really not accustomed to sitting down to three formal meals a day. We’re all watching our figures, you know. From now on I think it would be better if you let me take care of the cooking.”
None of it made one bit of difference.
“You’re too nice,” Cici told her. “You can’t be sweet to somebody like that. You have to speak up. Let me talk to her.”
To which Bridget replied irritably, “For heaven’s sake, Cici, you can’t fix everything. I’ll take care of it.”
But clearly she could not. If Bridget got up at six a.m. to make muffins, she would find cinnamon rolls already baking. If she chopped chicken breast for a salad, she would find Ida Mae had already used it for a casserole by the time she returned. If she wanted to spend the afternoon making banana bread, Ida Mae would choose that very time to bake a cake.
“Well, there are two ovens,” Lindsay pointed out, which only annoyed Bridget further.
“That’s not the point,” Bridget snapped in return, and Lindsay lifted her eyebrows.
“Just trying to be helpful,” she said.
Bridget apologized, Lindsay shrugged it off, and Bridget felt even worse. For as much as Cici and Lindsay tried to understand, their paths hardly ever crossed that of Ida Mae. It was Bridget who was constantly tripping over her, and now she was even causing Bridget to be short with her friends. And of course, the more irritable Bridget became over the whole situation, the guiltier she felt, and the harder she tried not to take it out on Ida Mae.
So when Ida Mae tossed out the pecans Bridget was toasting for salad, calling them “burnt,” Bridget smiled and held her tongue. After all, it had been Ida Mae who had shelled the entire bushel of pecans, bagged, and frozen them. When Ida Mae went behind her, salting the stew, Bridget pretended not to notice, and when Lindsay and Cici raved over Ida Mae’s chicken and dressing with cracked cranberries, thinking Bridget had prepared it, Bridget just smiled and gave Ida Mae all the credit. But it was the matter of the draperies that broke the camel’s back.
“They’re gonna fade,” stated Ida Mae flatly as Bridget, after two hours spent hand-pleating and hanging twenty-five yards of lined brocade damask, stepped down from the ladder and regarded her handiwork proudly.
Bridget turned slowly to stare at Ida Mae. Ida Mae flipped back a corner of the drapery to examine the lining, and sniffed. “Too flimsy,” she pronounced. “Sun sets through this window all summer long. Won’t last a season.”
Bridget said, “I had this fabric special-ordered from New York to match a swatch I found stored in the dairy loft.”
Ida Mae turned down one corner of her mouth derisively. “I don’t know what you