At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [6]
“Wait a minute.” Lori straightened up. “What do you mean, ‘dig up the ground’?”
Bridget looked up at her, squinting a little in the sun. “Well, first you’ll have to dig up all these weeds and grass. Then you’ll take a hoe and chop up the ground and work in the fertilizer—”
“Fertilizer?”
“Dried manure from the pasture,” explained Bridget—Lori made a face—“along with the compost we’ve been saving all year. You work it all together and let it sit so that the sun can warm it before we plant the seedlings. Otherwise, they’ll go into shock.”
“What I mean is—I thought that’s what the yard boy was for. That’s his job.”
Bridget smiled sweetly. “It’s everyone’s job to bring food to the table. Besides, don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy the soups and stews and pies and pasta sauces and salsa and casseroles we had all winter. Where do you think they came from?”
“Last year’s garden?”
Bridget hesitated. “Well, technically, they were from other people’s last year’s gardens, but this year we’re self-sufficient. And everyone contributes.”
“I understand that,” Lori said. “I just don’t understand why we have to dig up the garden by hand. What about Farley and his tractor?”
Their nearest neighbor, Farley, was also their plumber, electrician, and all-around handyman. During their time at Ladybug Farm, he had been called upon to help with everything from replacing shingles to pulling their lawn mower out of the ditch.
Bridget feigned shock. “What? And pollute the atmosphere with all those diesel fumes?”
Lori made a wry face. “Okay, I get it. Practice what you preach, right?”
“Right. Besides, Farley wouldn’t be able to get the tractor back here without wrecking the flower beds.”
“I think I’d rather help cook.”
“That,” Bridget told her firmly, “is precisely why you have to dig up the garden.”
When Lori had first arrived at Ladybug Farm after Christmas, she had begged Ida Mae and Bridget to teach her how to cook. Despite Cici’s warnings, they had agreed—with results so disastrous that Ida Mae had threatened to leave if Lori ever so much as came near the stove again.
Lori’s expression fell. “Aunt Bridget,” she said seriously, “we need to have a family meeting. I really think my talents are being underutilized here.”
Bridget sighed and sank back on her heels. “My darling,” she agreed, “I often think the same thing about myself.”
The tires crunched on the gravel as Lindsay swung her SUV around the circular drive and stopped, with an especially forceful application of the brakes, in front of the deep, columned front porch. She sat there for a moment, saying nothing, staring straight ahead.
She was dressed in a light gray wool suit with a pink blouse. Her rich auburn hair, usually pulled back into a playful pony-tail, was carefully wound into a French twist and secured with a pearl-studded clasp. Her makeup—with the exception of the lipstick that had been chewed away on the drive home—could have passed muster with a department store model, and she even wore a strand of her mother’s pearls around her neck. All of this on a Tuesday morning, and there wasn’t even a meal involved.
“I don’t see what you’re so pissed about,” Noah said. He had pulled off his clip-on tie and stuffed it into his pocket the moment they left the courthouse, and now he jerked open the top button of his blue Oxford cloth Sunday shirt. “We beat the rap, didn’t we?”
With the greatest of effort, and a campaign that had taken three women two weeks to mount, Noah had been persuaded to cut his hair above his shoulders. The result was a perfect square that ended at the ears that he had styled himself with sewing scissors, with long dark chunks that still fell lankly over his face. He had been persuaded to wear a new pair of crisp dark jeans for the occasion, but nothing could get him out of the dirty sneakers. Lindsay turned upon him a glare that had frozen the hearts of much older—and wiser—men. “We did not,” she told him, enunciating each word with great deliberation, “ ‘beat the rap.’ There was no rap to beat. This was a juvenile court