Love Letters From Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [42]
“Still waters run deep,” Miriam murmured to her at the door, watching Frank get into his pickup truck and crank the engine. “Whoever knew old Frank had anything to say?”
“We all have something to say” Lindsay replied. She smiled at the other woman. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
She was straightening up the tables and putting away the supplies when she heard a light rapping against the frame of the open door. She turned and smiled to see Dominic standing there. “Hi, Dominic. What’s up?”
“I hope I’m not bothering you. I couldn’t tell if you had any students or not.”
“They just left. Come on in.”
He looked down at his boots. “I don’t want to get the place dirty.”
Lindsay laughed. “Take a look around. You can’t do much more damage than I have already.”
Dominic was a nice-looking man with golden tan skin and sun-weathered gray eyes. His salt-and-pepper hair was worn long, grazing his collar, his hairline just high enough to make his face interesting. He was only an inch or so taller than Lindsay, and slightly built, but when he rolled up his sleeves, as today, the ropy muscles of his arms told a story about a life of physical labor.
“I stopped by the house,” he said, “but it looked like they were pretty busy up there.”
Lindsay shrugged. “We’re pretty busy everywhere.” And she explained, “We’re having a wedding here.”
“Oh?” He looked surprised and, oddly a little anxious. “One of you ladies getting married?”
Again Lindsay chuckled, dumping her paintbrushes into a cup of mineral spirits in the utility sink. “Hardly. We’re thinking about going into the wedding business, and this is our first one.”
He shook his head in slow admiration. “You ladies sure do keep yourselves busy.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
He gazed around the room, smiling at the four identical paintings of red water pumps—some more identical than others—but mostly interested in the larger canvases that were drying on the long walls. Noah’s paintings hung intermixed with Lindsay’s—studies of hands, which were difficult for any artist and which he clearly had not yet quite mastered, some wild impressionistic renderings of animal eyes in the dark, some architectural studies, and a whole series of monarch butterfly wings. Dominic studied them for a time.
“Are these Noah’s?” Lindsay nodded. “He’s a talented kid.” He turned. “Did I hear someone say that his grandmother was Emmy Hodge? I knew her, you know.” And he gave a slightly self-deprecating grin. “Had a huge crush on her when I was Noah’s age, the whole glamorous older woman thing and all. She was only here for a summer, but that was long enough to set me to dreaming about going to Paris and becoming a famous artist so that she would fall madly in love with me.”
Lindsay gave a wide, delighted smile. “Is that right?”
“Of course, by the next summer I was in love with Kathy Willis and wouldn’t have recognized Emmy Hodge on the street. Good thing, too, because I still can’t paint the side of a barn.”
Lindsay chuckled again. “Me either, to tell the truth. Which is why I don’t teach barn-painting.”
“I’m not clear how Noah ended up here. Did one of you know his folks?”
“Actually no.” Lindsay swished each brush back and forth in the mineral spirits, cleaned off the excess liquid with a paper towel, and set the brush, bristle side up, in a stand to dry. “We thought his parents were dead—so did he. His mother left him to be raised by his grandmother, and when she died his father took him and moved out of state, which is how she lost track of him. I had actually looked into adopting him last year, and that’s how his mother finally found out where he was. Apparently she’d had a pretty rough time of it during the early years, but she’s back on track now, working as a counselor for troubled teens in Richmond. The tragedy is that not long before she found Noah, she discovered she has terminal cancer. When she realized how well Noah was doing with us, she decided it wouldn’t be fair to burden him with her last few months