A Year on Ladybug Farm #1 Read online

  Maggie displayed a brave, rather forced smile, and tried to summon enthusiasm by rubbing her hands together. “Well then. Shall we have a look at the kitchen?”

  They passed through an elegant dining room with a medallioned ceiling, twin built-in, custom-made china cabinets, and an enormous, elaborately carved walnut table. “The table stays,” Maggie pointed out. “Isn’t it gorgeous? It was built for this house, and to tell the truth, it’s so heavy no one could figure out how to move it.” She paused and smiled apologetically. “I don’t know what happened to the chairs.”

  She pointed out the French doors that opened onto the broad wraparound porch. Lindsay admired the pale green paint and the matching silk wallpaper below the wainscoting—a historic color, Maggie told them. She pushed open a set of old-fashioned swinging doors to the kitchen.

  Bridget walked to the center of the enormous room, drew in a breath, and pressed both hands to her cheeks, turning full circle. “Oh, my goodness,” she said.

  The floor was paved in brick worn smooth by time, and the antique brick on the walls was oiled to a sheen. There was a raised cooking fireplace at one end of the enormous room where they could imagine placing a downy sofa and a couple of chairs for cozy winter evenings. The center island was soapstone, and the countertops were tiled in cottage white and delft blue. The backsplash behind the deep farmer’s sink was a mural in the blue willow pattern. There were two big stoves, two dishwashers, a giant refrigerator, and an upright freezer. “Obviously, the kitchen has been upgraded over the years, and the appliances are industrial grade,” Maggie said. “The Blackwells did a lot of entertaining in their prime.”

  Bridget touched one of the stoves reverently. “Oh my God,” she said. “This is a Viking.”

  “Bet you could whip up a casserole or two on that, huh Bridge?” said Lindsay with a grin.

  “Of course all appliances are included,” Maggie said. “And there’s a butler’s pantry.”

  Bridget dashed off to explore it, and in a moment they heard a muffled squeal of delight.

  “I hate the tile,” Cici said, but she was grinning, too. It had been a long time since either of them had seen their friend this happy.

  In a moment Bridget returned, breathless with excitement. “Unbelievable,” she said. “The silverware drawers are lined with blue velvet. There’s a pie safe with a lock! And just outside there’s a walled herb garden. Some of the herbs are still growing. There’s a rosemary bush as big as a tree!”

  Maggie was looking very pleased with herself, and Cici knew what she was thinking, what any real estate agent worth her commission would think: The kitchen sells the house.

  Unfortunately, not in this case.

  “Let me show you around the grounds,” Maggie said cheerfully, and led the way.

  She did a lot of chatting about an overgrown rose garden, which would take nothing, simply nothing, to bring back to glory, and Lindsay, who was Queen of the Roses back on Huntington Lane, identified several antique species. She seemed duly impressed.

  “Do you ride?” asked Maggie, gesturing toward a big barn with a sagging shed and a rusted-out metal roof. “This is a great place to keep horses.”

  “Don’t know one end of a horse from the other,” Cici said, stepping high over tangled knots of fescue grass. She shaded her eyes toward a stone building set in a sunny tangle of wisteria vines behind the house. “What’s that?”

  Maggie led the way. “It’s an old dairy,” she said. “This place is just full of history. They used to make their own butter and cheese, and up until the 1950s, actually sold it. People used to come from as far away as DC to buy Blackwell cheese.”

  She pushed open the recalcitrant wooden door of the building and gestured them inside. “Isn’t it adorable?”

  The interior was cool and smelled faintly of milk products and sweet grass. Sunlight poured in from two overhead skylights and from the rows of windows that lined either side of the building, catching dust motes and soaring ladybugs in its beams and bleaching squares and rectangles on the flagstone floor. The building apparently had once been divided into partitioned sections, like stalls or small enclosed rooms, but some of the walls had fallen over and had been dragged to a pile in a far corner; others were sagging on their supports.

  “It would take some work,” admitted Maggie, “but wouldn’t this make a darling guesthouse? And it’s solid as a rock. Well, it is rock, through and through!”

  Lindsay walked carefully around the rubble, turning this way and that to observe the fall of light, and her face was filled with wonder. Both Cici and Bridget knew what she was thinking, but Bridget said it aloud.

  “Well, here’s your art studio, Linds.”

  Cici said, “You’d have to get electricity down here, but it probably already has plumbing. The dairy operators would have had to have some way to hose the place out.” She moved to test the sturdiness of one of the upright posts that had once framed an interior doorway, giving it a little shake. It crashed to the floor in a cloud of dust, causing everyone to jump back. “Not a problem,” said Cici, brushing off her jeans.

  “You can fix that,” finished Bridget and Lindsay in chorus, and all three women shared a grin.

  They walked back toward the house, intending to thank Maggie for her time and veer off toward the car. Instead, they started wandering, separately and together, around the overgrown lawn, through the house, over the porch. They peeked into the decrepit barn and pried open the door on an old potting shed. Standing on a slight rise behind the house, Maggie pointed out an orchard of peach, pear, and apple trees, now in such bad need of pruning they were practically unrecognizable, as well as a tangled hill of grapevines that had overgrown their support posts.

  They found a wrought iron fence that enclosed absolutely nothing, and a moss-covered statue of a girl with a flower basket standing beside a black reflecting pool. They imagined white wicker furniture on the wide covered porch and a gazebo in the garden, and painted iron chairs with colorful cushions underneath the spreading oak tree. They meandered through the warren of downstairs rooms and the big sunny bedrooms upstairs, and speculated in wondering tones about the time in history when people could afford to lead such lives. Cici even went down to the cellar and came back, peeling cobwebs off her eyelashes, to report that not only were there copper pipes throughout, but the wiring wasn’t nearly as antiquated as one might expect. Morever, there was a stone wine cellar, and several other rooms that had no doubt been used for storage. The heating system, however, remained a mystery.

  When they finally were ready to move back to the car, the sun was low on the late-summer horizon, and they spent a good ten minutes apologizing to Maggie for taking up her Sunday afternoon. “It’s a wonderful house,” Cici assured her. “But none of us is ready to buy yet, and even if we were, it’s way out of our price range.”

  “Not a problem,” Maggie insisted. “You just remember what I said about referrals. I’m sure there are lots of people in Baltimore who are looking for the perfect family getaway.”

  “Well, exactly,” said Bridget. “This is really a family house, isn’t it? No place for a single woman.”

  “It’s so far away from everything,” agreed Lindsay.

  “It certainly is quiet,” agreed Maggie. “But I love living out here. The community is so friendly and close-knit.”

  “Well, we appreciate your time.” Cici offered her hand as they reached the car.

  “We were really just looking,” Bridget apologized.

  “Oh wait!” Lindsay untangled the camera strap from around her neck and handed it to Maggie. “Do you mind taking a picture of us in front of the house? We like to keep a photo journal of our vacations. Come on, girls, it’ll only take a minute.” She grabbed Cici and Bridget by the hand and tugged them back to the house, posing them one above the other on the steps, leaning forward, faces close together, grinning into the camera.

  The photograph captured in the background a brick-faced, Corinthia
n-columned house, its paint a little cracked, its brick a little faded, but all in all aging beautifully. In the foreground were three women with the corners of their eyes crinkled by the sun, their lipstick a little faded, their faces full of the joy of adventure, and also aging beautifully.

  When that photo eventually made it onto the first page of a brand-new scrapbook, mounted in 3-D with puffy torn-cotton clouds on a cerulean background, the scrolled caption would read, “In the Beginning . . .”

  2

  In Which a Dream Is Born

  Eight Months Previously

  “Sweetie?” Cici came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel. “How about a cup of tea?”

  From her place in a corner of the deep window seat, Bridget looked like a small black-and-white kitten, curled in upon itself and all but lost in its surroundings. She shook her head silently, staring out the window. An early winter dusk had settled over the suburban street, and there wasn’t much to see. Almost as though she suddenly realized that, she cleared her throat, pulled her gaze away, and directed a small, vague smile toward Cici. “No, thank you.”

  Lindsay took a cashmere throw from the sofa and draped it over her friend’s knees. “You already have a cup, Bridge,” she reminded her, and picked up the untouched cup of tea on the windowsill. “It’s cold.”

  “I’ve got a pot of decaf on,” Cici suggested, “if you’d rather.”

  Bridget pulled up her black-stockinged knees, drawing the throw beneath her chin. “I don’t think so.”

  Cici and Lindsay exchanged a helpless look. “How about a sandwich, then? There’s plenty of chicken and roast beef. Maybe some fruit? Honey, you’ve got to eat.”

  “No,” Bridget replied softly, gazing at the window again. “You go ahead, though.”

  Lindsay put down the cold cup of tea, pressed her hands against the sides of her black pencil skirt, and said, “I don’t know about you two, but I’m having Scotch.”

  Bridget looked at her, and the smile that curved her lips was very close to genuine. “Now you’re talking,” she said.

  Lindsay poured, Cici served, and Bridget made room for them on the window seat. Cici patted Bridget’s knee as she scrunched up her long legs and squeezed into the opposite corner. “Where are the kids?”

  “Oh.” Bridget sipped the Scotch. “Kevin had a seven o’clock flight. Katie and the girls went back to the hotel. It’s been a hard day on them, and they’re leaving first thing in the morning.”

  Cici looked incredulous. “Do you mean they’re not staying the weekend?”

  Lindsay punched her in the leg and gave a warning frown as she kicked off her shoes and slid in beside her. Bridget glanced at the liquid in her glass. “Oh, I know. It sounds a little selfish. But they came so often while Jim was sick, and they both have jobs, and lives of their own . . .”

  “Excuse me!” Cici said. “Their dad just died. I think they could spare one evening to spend with their mother.”

  “Cici, will you shut up one minute?” This time Lindsay kicked her with a stockinged foot.

  “Oh, come on, you know it’s the truth. And I’m sorry Bridge.” She gentled her voice as she squeezed Bridget’s knee. “You know I love Kevin and Kate, and Katie’s little girls are just too precious for words. But are we all really so wrapped up in our own little self-important worlds that we can’t even take a little time off for death?”

  “Cici, for the love of—”

  “No, it’s okay, Linds.” Bridget sighed and sipped her drink. “She’s right. Kids’ll break your heart every time. You were smart not to have any.”

  Lindsay gave a little snort. “What, are you kidding? I’ve got thirty-two.” Lindsay had been a middle school teacher for twenty years. “And when they’re not selling drugs or giving each other blow jobs in the bathroom, they fill my life with joy, make my heart sing, and impart meaning and hope to a bleak and unforgiving world.”

  Bridget smothered a half laugh. “Lindsay, you’re awful.” And then she sighed. “You know what else is awful? I’m glad the kids are gone. They get on my nerves. I don’t know them anymore, I hardly even know how to have a conversation with them, and I’m not . . .” She paused and sipped her whiskey. “Entirely sure I like them.”

  The silence from the other two was understanding and nonjudgmental. They sat and drank without talking for a while, comfortable together in the way that is only possible between those who have known all the best and most of the worst of each other.

  Their friendship had begun twenty-three years ago, when Cici, who lived on the cul-de-sac at 118 Huntington Lane, had sold Lindsay the house at 115 Huntington Lane, which was next door to Bridget, at 117. Bridget’s dog had promptly bitten Lindsay’s husband, and Cici, in an attempt to try to avoid a lawsuit and preserve her commission, had taken them all out to dinner. As it turned out, Bridget’s husband Jim was held up at work and Lindsay showed up at the restaurant without the person for whom the entire outing was arranged, because, as she announced without hesitation to the other two, her husband was a jerk and didn’t deserve to eat.

  Two hours and twelve mai tais later, the three women had shared far too many secrets and laughs to ever be mere neighbors again. Less than a year later, Lindsay had divorced her husband, and even though the offending pooch had gone on to his Great Reward years ago, Lindsay still sent Bridget flowers on the dog’s birthday.

  Together they had founded the Huntington Lane Reading Group, the Huntington Lane Neighborhood Watch, the Children’s Food Drive, and the Animal Rescue League. They had taken twenty-eight vacations together, and had spent every Christmas together since the time they met. When Bridget’s son Kevin had chased a ball into the street and been struck by a car, neither Cici nor Lindsay had left the hospital for the three days he was in a coma. Afterwards, quietly and without being asked, they took over the running of Bridget’s household, shopping, cooking meals, picking up Katie from school, until Kevin was home from the hospital and life was back to normal again. When Cici moved her mother into her home to care for her during her last months of life, Lindsay and Bridget had taken turns providing respite care. When Lindsay totaled her car during an ice storm one January, it was Bridget and Cici that the nurse called from the ER at two in the morning.

  But those were not the things that made a moment like this possible, as they sat in easy, comforting silence in the cold dusk of loss. Such a moment was the result of a thousand cups of coffee, an endless stream of phone calls, shared diets, bad dates, and ruthless assessments of how the two-piece swimsuit really looked. They had gone from homework hotlines to hot flashes together, and everything in between. When Bridget said she wasn’t sure she liked her children anymore, what she really meant was that the only people she wanted with her right now were the two women at her side. Lindsay and Cici understood that, and that was why they did not have to say anything.

  When her glass was almost empty, Bridget sighed, looked around the room, and said, “I can’t stay here. How can I stay here?”

  Cici said hesitantly, “Do you mean—do you want me to sell your house?”

  Bridget shook her head vehemently. “I love this house! I don’t want to sell my house. But how can I stay here? How can I take care of everything by myself?”

  Both Lindsay and Cici, who had been taking care of everything by themselves for years, looked a little confused. “Like what? What things?”

  “Oh, you know.” She made a clumsy, wavering gesture with her hand that encompassed the room, and then briefly blotted a tear from one eye with her knuckles. “The gutters. The storm windows. The lawn. Everything.”

  “Oh, is that all?” Cici waved it away. “You can learn how to do that stuff. I’ll show you.”

  “I don’t want to learn how to do it,” she said, sniffling. “I’m afraid of ladders. I hate mowing the lawn.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Lindsay said, patting her hand. “Mowing the lawn sucks. We’ll get you a boy.”

  Bridget covered her fa
ce with her free hand and sobbed. “I don’t want a boy!”

  Lindsay moved in and slipped her arm around Bridget’s shoulders, hugging her close for a minute. Then she said, with her voice muffled into Bridget’s hair, “Do you mind if I get one?”

  Bridget choked on a cross between a laugh and a sob, and wiped her face with a corner of the cashmere throw.

  Cici said gently, patting her hand, “Honey, I think you’re a little drunk.”

  Bridget sniffed again and held out her empty glass. “Not yet.”

  Cici took the glass and got up to refill it. She returned with the bottle, and a box of tissues.

  Bridget leaned back with her hands wrapped around the glass. “I just wish . . .” She exhaled a soft breath. “I just wish we’d had more adventures, you know? Jim used to talk about sailing to Bimini, tying up at the marina and living off the boat, catching our dinner right out of the ocean every night . . .”

  “Sweetie,” Cici pointed out gently, “you get seasick.”

  “I know. But it didn’t matter, because I knew . . . I knew he was never going to do it. And I was right. God, it’s just so sad.”

  Cici passed her a tissue. “I guess we all have things like that, that we talk about doing, and dream about doing, but we never really get around to doing.”

  “Like me and my art studio,” Lindsay said. “Some sun-filled loft where I can do nothing but paint all day, take in a few students on the side, you know, just to pay the rent . . . I’ve been threatening to do it—”

  “And talking about it,” Cici pointed out.

  “Ever since I got out of college, but somehow I never actually got around to it.” She shrugged a little and took a sip from her glass. “Everyone does that.”

  Bridget nodded. “Like my restaurant. I’ve always wanted to do it, and I’d be good at it, you know? Jim and I even talked about it, and we could have used some of our savings to get started, but there were always so many other things to take care of first.”