At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [3]
She simply knew better than to continue to fight it with words.
So she said instead, “I don’t know what you’re whining about high-speed Internet for, anyway. Your father is paying a fortune every month for that fancy Internet phone of yours.”
Cici’s ex-husband was a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer. He had greeted Lori’s decision to drop out of UCLA and return to live with her mother in Virginia with a mixture of outrage and—as the responsibilities of fatherhood had never particularly suited him—thinly disguised relief. His way of dealing with emotions had always been through expensive gifts, and the phone was his way of saying “keep in touch.”
Lori made a face. “Which only works when the moon is in Scorpio and the wind is out of the southwest.”
Cici shrugged. One of the things she loved most about being surrounded by mountains was the limited access to technology. It slowed life down, and took out the background noise. “You can get perfectly good cell phone reception if you go to the top of the hill and face the antenna toward the east.”
“A lot of fun when it’s seventeen degrees outside, Mom.”
“Do you know where they have really good cell phone reception?”
“The University of Virginia dorms, yeah, I know. Listen, I’ve been thinking—”
“Lord preserve us.” Cici coughed and brushed ash out of her air as Lori’s enthusiastic sweeping stirred up another cloud of dust. “Will you give me that broom? You’re just making a mess.”
Lori turned over the broom and dustpan without protest. “We should take a vote,” she declared. “You’re always saying we’re a family, aren’t you? And families decide important things together. I’ll bet Aunt Bridget would love to have high-speed Internet. And where’s that boy?”
Cici looked up from her sweeping with an exasperated look. “Will you stop calling him that? You’ve lived under the same roof for four months and his name is Noah, as you know perfectly well. And, as you also know perfectly well, today is his court date.”
Lori rolled her eyes expressively. “Oh, right. You mean juvenile court. Trouble, that’s what his name is.”
“It’s just a traffic ticket, Lori. There’s no need to make it sound like he robbed a liquor store.”
“If I had been cited for driving without a license when I was fifteen you would have made me wish I’d robbed a liquor store!” returned Lori smartly. “You all are way too easy on him, if you ask me—and I know, no one did. But maybe you should, now and then. I’m just trying to help.”
Cici finished sweeping the ash into the dustpan with small deliberate movements, and straightened up, regarding her daughter with an exaggerated display of patience. “My beautiful girl,” she said, “light of my life. It’s been a long winter. We’re all a little cranky. But you are standing in a six-thousand-square-foot, one-hundred-year-old house with walls that need to be painted, floors that need to be stripped, windows that need to be washed, and rugs that need to be cleaned, in the middle of a working farm with animals that have to be fed, stalls that must be be raked out, ground that needs to be turned, porches and walks that have to be swept, and gutters that need to be cleaned. And if you don’t find something useful to do within the next thirty seconds I am going to strangle you.”
Lori said meekly, “I think I’ll help Aunt Bridget in the garden.”
Replied Cici with a hard look, “Good plan.”
Lori grabbed the sales brochure as she scurried out of the room.
She cut through the big stone and brick kitchen on her way to the backyard. The kitchen was filled with windows, and every windowsill was filled with flat plastic trays of seedlings that Bridget had been nurturing all winter. The room smelled like woodsmoke and vanilla, and, oddly, like vinegar. Lori wrinkled her nose and glanced around, and that was when she noticed Ida Mae half in and half out of one of the oversize industrial ovens. Her hands were clad in yellow rubber gloves up to the elbow, and she was scrubbing out the oven with a mixture of