She saw one of the motel doors open two rooms down from hers and walked over. As she expected, Myrlene was inside changing the bed.
“Hi again,” Kate said. “Where do you eat lunch around here?”
Myrlene considered. “The best place, I guess, would be the Athena Café on the square downtown. That’s where most folks eat when they don’t drive into Jackson.” She looked at the watch on her wrist. “This early, probably won’t be crowded.”
Kate got directions and drove away. In her rearview mirror she could see Myrlene standing at the still-open door of the room watching her, and as she drove by the office, she caught a glimpse of hennaed hair behind the window. She sighed. Obviously, she was the biggest attraction in town at the moment.
TEN MINUTES LATER, she found a place to park on the square and opened the door of the Athena Café to the sound of chatter and clinking dishes. Suddenly the room went silent. Every eye swiveled in her direction. She felt like Wild Bill Hickok stalking into the only saloon in a new cow town.
“Well, sugar, fancy meeting you here.”
She recognized Dub’s voice behind her and heaved a sigh of relief. She spent a good deal of time eating alone in restaurants and had learned to hate it. But he was probably meeting someone. Oh, Lord, probably David. If he was meeting Jason, she’d kill both of them.
“Dub,” she said.
“Come on, sugar, join an old man for lunch.”
She nodded gratefully. “You’re not meeting anyone?”
“Just you.” He put a hand in the small of her back and steered her toward a booth near the rear of the café and waited while she slid in.
“’Scuse me a minute,” he said, and proceeded to work the room with the ease and practice of a master politician, shaking hands, slapping backs, exchanging jokes.
He gave his enemies no chance to draw away. Anyone who did not respond to his bonhomie would look crass and mean-spirited.
When he came back and slid in opposite her, she nodded and said, “Impressive. I’ve seen senators handle scandal with less aplomb.”
“What scandal?” He grinned. “This is just a little bump on the road. Now, when my great-aunt Harriet ran off to Saint Louis with a trumpet player and left three babies under the age of six—
that
was a scandal.”
She laughed. Then she reached across the table and touched his hand. “This is not a bump, Dub. You have to understand how serious this is.”
“Heck, you’ll fix it.”
“Not without help and a great deal of luck.”
They placed their orders and waited while the waitress brought them iced tea. David had been right yesterday. She felt as though every ear in the place was attuned to their conversation. She decided she’d better stick to subjects that had nothing to do with Jason or Waneath. But what?
“Bet you wish you’d stayed at Long Pond, don’t you?” he said. “Told you the Paradise isn’t much of a place to stay.”
“It’s fine.” She cast around for some other topic. “Tell me about Long Pond. How did it get that name?”
“The Calloo River runs right through it. Not so much runs, you understand, as saunters. More like a pond than a river.”
“Ah, I get it.”
“Yeah. When my folks came over in the thirties—that’s the 1830s—they figured they could use the water to irrigate the land. Worked, too. We been here ever since. Even saved the original house from the Yankees. Then my momma burned it down.” He laughed. “She didn’t really, of course. But she was glad when it went. She was a caution, my momma. What she wanted, she got. My daughter, Melba, took after her that way. Hardest-headed woman about getting her own way I ever did see.”
Oh, boy. Kate sipped her iced tea and wondered how on earth to change the subject.
“Named her Melba ’cause she was like a little peach right out of Long Pond orchard when she was born.”
“You wife died several years ago, I believe,” Kate said quickly.
“Yeah. Same thing that killed Melba. Damn shame.”
“You never remarried?”
“Nope. Long as Melba was alive to be my hostess never saw the need. Neva looks after the house and the cooking.” He arched an eyebrow. “’Course, if the right woman was to come along...”
Kate leaned back in her seat. The man was flirting with her. He was attractive, rich, and probably in his early sixties—not much older than Alec Mulholland. But he was David’s father-in-law, for God’s sake, and Melba’s father. Obviously, he had no idea she’d ever known David in the past.
At that point their lunches arrived—meat loaf with four vegetables and hot-pepper corn bread. Kate realized she was famished.
“Like a woman with a good appetite,” he said, as he too, dug into his meal. “My wife never ate more’n a bird. No meat on her bones. Nothing for a man to hang on to in bed.”
Kate choked on a bite of corn bread, and downed a swig of iced tea. He looked at her with concern.
She wiped her teary eyes with the edge of a paper napkin and coughed to clear her lungs of corn-bread particles.
“What’s going to happen to Long Pond if Jason decides to stay in California?” Kate asked after another sip of tea and a deep breath.
“Shoot. He’ll come home. Long Pond matters more than any Hollywood nonsense. David should never have let him go out there. Should have made the boy go to Mississippi State to study agriculture like I wanted.” He broke off a piece of corn bread. “Jason’s got a lot of fool ideas in his head. but he’s young, he’ll come around. Just like his daddy did. Born farmer, that man.” He snickered. “Did you know when Melba married him and dragged him down to Long Pond he was gonna be an act-or.” He pronounced the word in two distinct syllables.
Kate froze. She had to stop the man, but how?
“Yeah,” he said. “New York, Broadway. Now, I like to visit New York as well as the next man, but an actor? Nobody real does that stuff. Shoot, Melba knew better than that. She brought him on down to me, and I made a farmer out of him.”
“I thought you said he was a born farmer.”
“Hell, yes, but didn’t know it till I taught him.” He shook his head. “Never did understand why Melba was so hot to marry him in college. ’Course, I never met him before she brought him down here, and then she had to get pregnant to catch him.”
“Had to?” It was like picking at a scab. She couldn’t stop herself even though she knew darned well she was going to bleed if she kept at it.
“Yeah. He got caught by some girl he met after Melba graduated, and damned if he didn’t marry her.” Dub laughed. “Melba took care of that all right. Went right on up there and snatched him out from under her nose.” He laughed. “Fool woman probably never knew what hit her.”
“I’m sure she was deeply hurt.”
“Oh, shoot, if she’d a’ been half a woman she wouldn’t a’ let Melba have him so easy. Not Melba’s fault she didn’t know how to hang on to her man. She kicked him out the minute Melba let her find out she’d slept with him.” He chortled. “Didn’t know then Melba was pregnant, of course, but once she found out and told David, he came straight down and married her like he should. Good man. Even if I don’t always agree with him.”
“Were they happy?”
“Well, heck, yeah, they were happy.” Dub suddenly looked embarrassed. “Happy as most married people, I guess.”
“Why did they live with you?”
“Why not?” He looked baffled. “Plenty of room. Melba didn’t want to move. Her home. Never lived anywhere else. Neither did I, come to that. Neither will Jason, if I have my way.”
“But David moved out after Melba died, didn’t he?”
“Damn-fool idea, building that shack out there in the trees.”
Ah, here was one source of trouble between the two men.
“Don’t know what’s got into David,” Dub said. “First he builds that house, then he lets Jason go off to Malibu, California, to learn how to make movies, and now he’s talking about maybe leaving Long Pond and going to China or someplace crazy like that.”
Kate froze. “China?”
“Shoot. Teaching the Chinese to take our cotton markets away. Don’t know what’s got into him.”
She realized with a start that she didn’t want David half a world away—not now that she’d found him again. She pushed the thought from her. What did it matter to her if he colonized Venus? But it did. Heaven help her.
DAVID CHECKED the cotton gin and found the truck pulling out in good order and five minutes under his deadline. He laid out the schedule of maintenance and cleanup for the remaining men, made certain there was plenty of hot coffee in the office and notified the port in New Orleans of arrival time for his truck. He double-checked the paperwork, faxed copies to the appropriate factors and sat down with a cup of coffee to think about the morning. He’d wanted to tell Kate about Melba for so long. He’d written her all those never-mailed letters, and picked up the telephone hundreds of times in the years since they’d been apart. But he’d had no right.
Besides, it wasn’t safe. He was afraid that if he ever heard her voice, he’d drop everything and drag her away from her husband to some desert island and to hell with his responsibilities.
He finished the coffee and left the cup on the desk. One of his responsibilities needed a good talking-to. He decided to call on his son.
Since Waneath’s death, Jason had refused to say more than a couple of sentences to him at any one time.
In the last year of his mother’s life, as Melba drifted further and further away from everyone and everything that bound her to this world, Jason had grown angrier and more resentful, as if his mother were choosing to leave him.
After her death, Jason transferred that anger to his father, as though he should have had the power to draw her back simply by the strength of his personality. David had understood his anger, but that didn’t make it any easier to endure.
Neva Hardin opened the front door at Long Pond to him with a smile. “Hey. Dub’s not here. You want some lunch?”
David smiled at her and shook his head. “Jason up?”
“Barely. That boy! I swear he’d sleep the clock around. He took a couple of sandwiches back to his room a while ago.” She pointed over her head where the bass beat of music vibrated through the floor. “He’s up, all right. How he thinks he’s going to direct movies when he’s going to be deaf before he’s thirty I’ll never know.”
David nodded and took the marble staircase two steps at a time. He had to knock twice and call out once before Jason lowered the music and gave him a sulky “yeah” from the other side of the door.
David didn’t wait for an invitation, but opened the door and entered. Jason sprawled flat on his back in the middle of his disastrous bed. He wore the same clothes he’d had on earlier, and had not shaved. His eyes looked red as though he’d been crying. For a moment, David wondered whether his son could have begun taking drugs in California.
He dismissed the thought. His son’s drug of choice was beer, which he obtained illegally and seldom. Until his date with Waneath he’d never shown much interest in that, either. He always said he had to keep a clear head to see the world around him through a camera lens.
“What do
you
want?” Jason asked.
David shoved books and papers off the nearest chair, sank into it and stretched his long legs in front of him as though he were totally relaxed and had all the time in the world. “I want to see how you’re doing.”
“Fine. Can’t you tell? I’m stuck in this house, I’m missing school, I’ll probably be expelled if I’m not sent to prison, my career is down the tubes, my life will follow shortly.”
“Cynicism does not become you.”
“I have a right to be cynical. I come home for Thanksgiving, and I wind up going to prison for life.”
“No, you don’t. I’ve contacted Pepperdine. You’ll receive incompletes for this semester. You can make up the work in the spring.”
“From my cell?”
“Come on, Jason, you’re not going to jail. That’s why Kate is here. To get you off.”
“Even if I’m guilty?”
David caught his breath. For a moment he couldn’t speak, and when he did, he didn’t trust his voice. “Are you?”
Jason sat up. “Hell, no! But I had you going, didn’t I? Even my own daddy believes I’m capable of killing somebody.”
“We’re all capable of killing somebody under the right circumstances. If we’re angry enough, or scared enough. That doesn’t always make it murder.” He knew he had to tread carefully.
Jason jerked himself upright, shoved open his French windows and stalked out on the balcony.
Momentarily David was afraid that he intended to throw himself off to land on the bricks below. He was on his feet in an instant.
But Jason stood with his hands on the wrought-iron railing and stared past the guest house and out over the fields. “God, I hate this place,” he whispered.
“You used to love it.”