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  “I never thought you were strange.”

  “Me either. I thought you were smart.”

  “Motherhood isn’t something that just happens to you,” Cici said. “It’s a choice you make every day, to put someone else’s happiness and well-being ahead of your own, to teach the hard lessons, to do the right thing even when you’re not sure what the right thing is . . . and to forgive yourself, over and over again, for doing everything wrong.”

  “Half the time your kids end up hating you for at least five of their teenage years,” added Bridget, “but you count yourself a success if they don’t end up pregnant or in jail. And don’t ever expect anything so mundane as a thank-you.”

  “If any of us really knew what we were getting into when we decided to have kids, I don’t think we would’ve signed up.”

  Bridget smiled to herself in the dark. “I would’ve.”

  Lindsay said, “I know this is the best thing. It just . . . doesn’t seem fair.”

  “No,” agreed Cici softly. “It doesn’t.”

  They sat and rocked, wrapped in their thoughts. The sky gave up the last of its light and swallowed the mountains. The balmy evening melted into a cooler breeze tinged with the dampness of dew and the scent of woodsmoke. Somewhere behind the house, Rebel started to bark.

  After a time Bridget sighed and said, “I should go in. But I’m too tired to get up.”

  “I told Noah he was having a history test tomorrow,” Lindsay said. “I’d better go write it.” Her voice had a catch in it. “Not that it will matter, I guess, by Wednesday. I really should give him the rest of the week off.”

  “What in the world is the matter with that dog?”

  “Oh, Cici, he’s probably chasing deer,” Lindsay said. “You’d think after living with one for all this time, he’d catch on.”

  “He knows the difference between his own deer and strangers,” Bridget pointed out with only the slightest note of pride in her voice. “And it’s his job to keep them out of the garden.”

  “Well, can’t someone tell him we’ve got a fence around the garden for that?”

  Upstairs, there was the sound of a window opening, and then Noah’s voice. “Hey, dog!” he shouted. “Shut up!”

  “Hey, Noah! History test!” But there was a small smile in Lindsay’s voice as she called out to him.

  The window closed.

  Cici glanced across at her, smiling. “You would have made a great mother, Linds.”

  “Maybe I’ll sit just a little longer. It’s so nice out, isn’t it?”

  “Kind of late in the year for anyone to build a fire,” Bridget commented.

  “Warm, too.”

  “Maybe Farley’s burning trash.”

  “Probably.”

  “Is it supposed to rain tonight?” Lindsay wondered. “Look at that mist.”

  All of them turned toward the foggy bank of mist that was drifting in patches and threads across the yard. Cici stood slowly, moving toward it to get a better look. “That’s not mist,” she said in an odd, constricted tone.

  She moved suddenly, rushing to the rail, peering around the corner of the house. “It’s smoke!” she cried. “Call 911! Get everyone out of the house! The barn is on fire!”

  17

  It Never Rains But . . .

  Morning dawned gray and flat over Ladybug Farm. No spectacular watercolor sunrise painted the sky, no shafts of golden light etched unfurling leaves, no diamond dewdrops sparkled on the grass. The air was heavy and still and tasted like wet soot. The lawn was churned up by the tracks of heavy fire trucks and spattered with dark, oily puddles. The lilac bushes had been crushed by the weight of the fire hose and emitted a cloyingly sweet perfume, which, mixed with the rank, sharp taste of smoke in the air, was close to nauseating. A bird shrilled suddenly in a nearby tree and then, as though embarrassed by the inappropriateness of his song, ceased abruptly.

  Cici had been sitting on the back steps in her pajamas for the last hour, her arms wrapped around her knees for warmth, waiting for enough light to survey the damage. No one had gotten much sleep after the volunteer fire department left. Cici herself had gotten out of bed every hour or so to look out the window, making certain the fire had not flared up again. She could hear the other women moving around during the night, no doubt doing the same thing. And at three a.m. Lori had crept into bed beside her. Cici wrapped her arms around her and held her tight. Her daughter’s hair smelled like smoke.

  She got up and crossed to the remnants of the barn, the untied laces of her battered gym shoes dragging in the mud. Rebel, unusually subdued, sniffed along behind her, his normally pristine white legs and underbelly black with sooty mud. She paused to untie Bambi from the tree to which he had been secured during the night, repressing a shudder of horror as she remembered the moment when Noah had dashed into the deer’s pen to lead him away from the flaming barn. He had actually taken the animal into the house while the fire was being extinguished. And she hadn’t cared.

  The massive skeleton of the barn, black and charred against the pewter sky, looked like something out of a horror movie, a gothic remnant of some dark and tragic past. Tendrils of smoke still curled from beams that had collapsed on the ground. The arched ribs stood naked against the sky and the tin roof was scorched and buckled. The rock foundation, six feet high, protected nothing but a pile of smoldering debris, and from the center of it all came a high-pitched squealing, hissing sound as water sank into the hot timbers and evaporated into steam.

  After a time Cici realized that Lindsay, dressed in her terry robe and sneakers, was standing beside her. She gratefully accepted a cup of coffee, and held it in both hands to warm them.

  “Well,” Lindsay said quietly. “This certainly puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?”

  Cici nodded slowly. “If it had spread to the house . . .”

  “But it didn’t.” Bridget had come up quietly behind them, already dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, her hair tied back, ready for work. But a look at her face revealed that she had not yet been to bed. “And thank God none of the animals were inside. If this had happened in the winter, or even last month, when we were keeping the sheep in at night . . .” She buried her expression with a sip of coffee, unable to finish the thought.

  “There’s blessings in everything.” Ida Mae, too, was dressed for the day in sturdy work boots and a cotton dress over her twill pants, the whole topped with a fleece sweatshirt. She carried the coffeepot wrapped in a towel, and topped off the ladies’ cups as she spoke. “If you all had finished that chicken coop like you was supposed to, them baby chicks woulda smothered to death from the smoke. I reckon I’ll be putting up with sawdust and chicken crap all over the conservatory for a while longer. Miss Emily must be turning in her grave.”

  Cici’s voice was heavy with despair and disbelief. “How in the world are we supposed to build a barn when we can’t even build a chicken coop?”

  The screen door closed and Lori crossed the lawn in a pink sleep shirt printed with a big-eyed kitten and matching capri leggings, stepping carefully around the puddles in her bare feet. Her hair was a mass of tangled coppery curls, and her face was pale and puffy from lack of sleep. She walked up to her mother and put her head on her shoulder, and Cici held her close. Noah followed in a moment, also in bare feet, but wearing jeans and the same wrinkled, soot-smudged T-shirt he had worn the night before. He paused to offer Bambi a carrot he had brought from the kitchen, and then he stood a little outside the circle, surveying the wreck of the barn in the same glum fashion as the others.

  Lori asked, “Did they ever figure out what started it?”

  Cici shook her head. “The fire marshal said he couldn’t officially say until he wrote up his report. The best theory was that a spark from the power tools we were using yesterday started smoldering in the hay. But there were paint cans stored here, and gasoline for the lawn mower, and those hundred-year-old timbers . . .”

  “They weren’t a hundred y
ears old.”

  Everyone looked at Ida Mae. “The barn wasn’t even built until the sixties sometime.”

  “Which explains why it wasn’t in the mural.”

  “Well, it sure is a mess now,” Noah said.

  Bridget made an obvious effort to sound positive. “At least we have insurance.”

  Cici glanced at her. “About that . . .”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you kidding me? We do have insurance—don’t we?”

  Cici held up a hand to stop the onslaught. “Yes, of course we have insurance. But if you recall, we decided not to insure the outbuildings separately—they were all so old, and there were so many of them, and half of them were falling down, so we just went with the standard ‘separate outbuildings’ clause, which for most people means a garage. In other words, we’re insured for a fraction of what it will take to rebuild. And we have a five-thousand-dollar deductible.”

  Lindsay released a long, exhausted breath. “Well, there you go. It never rains but it pours.”

  The other two merely nodded, glumly, and sipped their coffee.

  “You’re not getting anything done standing here crying over it,” declared Ida Mae gruffly. “Come on in the house and get some breakfast.”

  “My mouth tastes like it’s full of ashes,” Lori said. “I don’t think I can eat anything.”

  “That’ll be a first,” replied Ida Mae, turning back toward the house.

  “You kids be careful out here in your bare feet.” Cici turned to follow. “There are pieces of hot wood scattered around.”

  “Breakfast will be ready in a few minutes,” Bridget added.

  Noah was poking around the edges of the barn’s skeleton, absently shoving away pieces of debris, when Lori, dispirited, turned to follow the others inside. She saw Noah squat down to pick something up, and she asked in passing, without much real interest, “What’s that?”

  Panic crossed his eyes, and he moved quickly, straightening up, turning away from her, and tucking the object into his jeans pocket. He didn’t reply, and he didn’t look at her. But it didn’t matter, because Lori had already seen what he had found.

  It was a cigarette butt.

  They were unenthusiastically picking at breakfast when the sound of Farley’s tractor chugging up the drive drew them all outside again.

  “Figured you’d need some help cleaning up,” he said, shouting to be heard over the sound of the engine. Being their nearest neighbor, Farley had arrived the previous night almost at the same time as the fire engines, and had stood to the side watching the effort with approving nods until the last hose was wound and stored and the taillights disappeared down the drive. Then, in his usual taciturn fashion, he had tipped his hat to them, climbed back into his pickup truck, and returned home.

  Cici tilted her head up at him with an apologetic expression. “Thanks, Farley, that’s good of you. But we can’t afford to pay much.”

  “That’s okay.” He spat politely into the ever-ready soda can. “I ain’t planning to do much.”

  But what he did in a matter of an hour was more than they could have accomplished by themselves with a week’s work. Using the plow blade on the tractor, he pushed the fallen timbers and charred debris out of the skeleton of the barn and into a pile at the edge of the yard, where Noah was assigned to duty with the garden hose, making certain that the last sparks were fully extinguished. The fact that the pathetic beginnings of the chicken coop were demolished in the process was a small price to pay.

  “You all take a shovel and pile some dirt up around the edges of that trash,” he advised, “and she ought to be okay. Gonna have to get a bulldozer in to take down the shell, though.” He held out his hand. “Ten dollar.”

  And, because they knew that was all he would accept for his labor no matter how hard they argued, that was what they paid.

  The phone rang all morning as neighbors, acquaintances, and the merely curious checked in. A fire, even a barn fire, was an alarming event in the small community, and the news spread like the fog of smoke that still drifted over the valley. “I’m afraid they’re going to start a charity drive for us,” Bridget said after the fifth or sixth call. “I keep trying to explain that we didn’t lose anything valuable, but everyone wants to help.”

  “You shouldn’t discourage them,” Cici said. “Maybe someone will donate a bulldozer.” She stood on the back porch, with her work gloves on and her hair tied up in a scarf, and shook her head helplessly as she gazed at the ruin. “I don’t know where to begin.”

  Noah, working as though driven by demons, was digging a trench around the pile of smoldering trash that Farley had piled up. Flakes of black ash still drifted from it, and greasy mud surrounded it. There was not a patch of skin on his body that was still white. Lori was using the garden hose to spray down the parts of the structure that were still standing—an unnecessary precaution whose only function was to make her feel useful.

  “God, I’m so tired of being poor,” Lindsay said. She came around the corner with a hoe, her voice and her posture heavy with defeat.

  “We’re not poor,” Bridget returned sharply. “We’ve got food in the freezer and wine in the pantry and—and chickens in the sunroom. We’ve got broccoli and carrots and sweet peas and lettuce coming up out of the ground, for Pete’s sake, and we are not poor!”

  Cici managed a faint, crooked grin. “Now if we just had a cow for milk.”

  “And a barn to keep it in,” Lindsay pointed out glumly. “Let’s face it, girls, we’re a bit over our heads, here.”

  Cici glanced at her. “And you’re just now figuring that out?”

  “God, I just don’t see why this had to happen now, on top of everything else. We’ve got that meeting with Carrie tomorrow and I can barely even remember why. It just doesn’t seem real, any of it.”

  “I know what you mean,” agreed Cici. “But let’s just focus on one disaster at a time.”

  “I can’t even decide which one to focus on.”

  “I’m going to suggest the burnt barn. At least that’s something we can do something about.”

  And Lindsay replied, “Like what?”

  “Okay, okay.” Bridget had a determined look on her face. “We’ve dealt with crises before. We might not have the resources the Blackwells did when they built this place, but we’re doing okay. We can handle this.”

  In a moment, Lindsay took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “You’re right. We’ve been through all this before. We’re in it for the long haul, and we knew it wouldn’t be easy. What else is new? Come on, let’s see what we can do with this mess.”

  Cici watched as Lori crossed to turn off the spigot, then, leaving the garden hose stretched across the ground, wandered over and sat on the stump of the hickory tree they had cut down last year. Her expression, even from the distance, was noticeably bleak.

  Cici said, “You guys go ahead. I’ll be there in a minute, okay?” She crossed the yard toward her daughter, and then sat down beside her on the stump and waited.

  “Nothing bad has ever happened to me before,” Lori said. Her gaze, sad and a little unfocused, remained on the smoldering skeleton of the barn. “I mean, I thought it had. But not really.”

  She looked at her mother. “Last night was really scary. Someone could have been hurt. The animals could have burned to death. The fire could have spread to the house, and we all could have been trapped inside. I don’t think you realize how important it is to feel safe until suddenly you don’t anymore.”

  Cici had to swallow hard before she could speak. “No mother ever wants her child to learn that the world is not a safe place. I’ve worked so hard trying to make sure nothing bad ever did happen to you.”

  “I know,” Lori said softly. “But I’m not a child anymore.” She took a breath. “Even though I’ve been acting like one. All of that nonsense with sheep and chickens and jam and expensive B&Bs . . . they had nothing to do with real life. This is real life.” She ga
ve a small shake of her head. “I should have stayed in California with Dad, where the only thing I’d have to think about was whether I’d put on enough sunscreen before I went to the pool. I don’t belong here. I’m no good at this. I’ve just been wasting my time and making your life harder.”

  She started to stand, but Cici put a hand on her knee.

  “The only way I got through college,” Cici said, “was by taking remedial algebra courses. Even then I barely passed. I had to take the real estate exam twice. It was the math. It’s always been hard for me. Of course, there was a lot of math in my line of work, and over the years it got easier, but it’s still a struggle. Even yesterday, building the chicken coop—we had to tear down everything we’d done, not because Bridget measured wrong but because I multiplied the fractions wrong. And I’ve been doing this for over twenty years.”

  Lori was silent for a while. “Uncle Paul talked to you, didn’t he?”

  Cici squeezed her knee. “He loves you, sweetheart. So do I. And I don’t ever want you to think you’re not good enough because you’re comparing yourself to someone else—even if that someone is me. Mothers have to pretend to be perfect, don’t you see that? If we didn’t, anarchy would rule the world. But most of the time we’re just doing the best we can, and trying to get better at it every day.”

  Lori tried to smile. “It’s hard, when you don’t know where you fit in. Everyone else is good at something—Aunt Lindsay with her teaching and Aunt Bridget with her cooking and you building things and even the kid”—she jerked her head toward Noah—“at drawing. But me?” She shrugged. “All I’ve got is a bunch of dopey ideas.”

  A note of motherly indignation tinged Cici’s voice. “You’re twenty years old! You have plenty of time to discover what it is you were meant to do in this world. And it doesn’t have to be just one thing, either. Leonardo da Vinci started out with nothing but a bunch of ‘dopey ideas,’ so did Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison and Winston Churchill and—and, well, Al Gore, for heaven’s sake! And look what they ended up contributing to the world!”