The Good Life (11 page)

They had discovered the property after their second boy, Kit, had called them—they still lived in Pittsburgh then—to announce he was changing his name to Rain. As an afterthought, he mentioned he had decided to follow in his older brother's footsteps and drop out of school. Showing a little more imagination than his brother, Rain asked Ron for the money that would have covered his remaining two years of tuition. “Life is my college now,” he actually said.

“What is he majoring in, melodrama?” Lili snapped after they hung up.

“Fantasy. Let's get out of here.”

The first hour south of Pittsburgh they hardly said a word, aside from Ron mimicking Rain: “Life is my college now.” But once they'd dropped into the far western finger of Maryland, an area they'd never explored, the clouds broke apart and the air around them grew moist. The wooded hills held them like a sweet hand. Even the occasional dogs trotting beside the highway wagged and woofed instead of skulking back like Pittsburgh dogs. When Ron saw the sign advertising acreage for sale, he said, “Should we take a look?”

“Next right,” Lili said.

The land was not well marked; Ron drove past the half-obscured thread of a gravel road twice before he saw the realtor's sign in the bushes. Sumac dragged at the windshield as he nosed in, and thornbushes snagged on the tires. But then the path swerved and broke free of shrubbery, and Ron and Lili gazed into a plush valley thick with grass and tumbling drifts of purple coneflowers. A deer strolled from the single line of trees into the sunlight.

Ron started to laugh. “When does the harp music start?”

Coming back weekend after weekend, they learned the masses of summer wildflowers, the deer and fox and single, noisy bear. In the evenings they sat in their Pittsburgh kitchen, re-adding numbers. He could cash in his 401K, she could draw her minuscule pension. Rain's college fund gave them an extra $5,100. The numbers had no elastic, but she and Ron kept stretching them anyway, recalculating mortgage and building estimates, projecting their cost/earnings ratio with more and more optimism until paradise edged almost within reach.

Six months after Rain's call they lunged, buying fifty acres with every dime they could borrow or put a hand to. That night Ron dreamed he was fishing with his bare hands—grabbing hold of their dream, he explained to Lili, before it darted away. But lately she had begun to suspect that they hadn't been quick enough. Every month she worried about the heating bill, the phone. She rarely had time anymore to hike around the property. She rarely had time to look at it. Instead, she looked at Ron's face growing daily more gaunt; when a flyer from the American Heart Association came in the mail, she quietly memorized the warning signs for heart attack and stroke.

Lemons
, she wrote. Sometimes, while she arranged flowers or kneaded bread, she entertained herself with a fairy tale about an enchanted valley that wooed mortals with its beauty and then condemned them to endless labor.
Oatmeal
.

Behind her Ron eased in the back door with an armload of firewood. “Better get cracking,” he said. “Storm headed our way. Snow and freezing rain. Pennsylvania's closing roads.”

“Are our guests going to be able to get here?” If not, she'd skip the hour-long roundtrip to the Fresh Foods. She and Ron could let in the dog, toast's'mores, and drink the champagne one of their New Year's guests had left, whether as a thank-you or by accident Lili had never decided.

“The first ones will; they just called me from the road, in case I was worried about them.” He paused, leaving Lili a comment-sized space in the conversation, which she ignored. He said, “You go on to the store while it's safe—I'll keep an ear on the phone.”

She stood up, pulled her coat from the hook near the door, and tucked the shopping list into her pocket. “We live to serve.”

“Cheer up. If the roads get as bad as people are predicting, our guests will find themselves spending the next three nights here. Which will take care of this month's cash flow.”

“I could stand a night off.”

“No rest for the wicked,” he said, giving her a squeeze at the waist.

She watched him watching her from the kitchen window as she drove away, a moment he wouldn't normally let her catch. He must never have glanced behind him when he was the one driving away—never have seen how perfectly the glass could hold and frame a face, intensifying the weariness it held.

 

Unaccountably, Lili's spirits improved during the long drive back from the store. Ahead of her the advancing storm opened like a dark door, but the road was still dry, the air still brilliant, and when she inched down her window, the raw air made her face tingle. She yipped like a cowboy.

Half-frozen rain began to patter on the truck's windshield when she started down the long valley road, and by the time she angled toward the house she was down to ten miles an hour, feeling the back tires skitter. A somber blue BMW—she hadn't known they came so big—sat parked at the porch steps, and Lili fixed a smile in place.

Still smiling, she hauled the grocery bags into the kitchen, where she heard a voice laugh from the living room. “Get down, now. Down. Don't you know ‘down'?” Then the scrabble of toenails on the pine floor. She swore and dumped the groceries into the sink.

“I'm sorry,” she said, hurrying through the swinging door and snapping her fingers at Sailor, their brown and white mutt, named for his swagger. “He knows he's not supposed to be inside.”

“My bad. I let him in.” The young man rubbing Sailor's ecstatic belly looked up and grinned guiltily. “Whoops.”

“You—” Lili said to Sailor,“—just got your bacon saved. Lucky dog.” As if she needed to tell him. The animal was a cartoon of pleasure, his tongue and paws dangling and his tail sweeping like a windshield wiper while his belly was scratched by a man Rain's age, so handsome Lili lost, for a moment, her breath. His hair thick and dark as sable, his eyes like blue enamel—Ron should put him on their brochure. “You must be Dr. Connor.”

“I'm Brian. Mom and Dad are upstairs, resting. I snuck down to break the rules.”

“You're not really breaking anything. We let him in when we're by ourselves, but not all guests like dogs.” As Brian worked his long fingers up and down Sailor's belly, the dog wiggled, pawed the air, and loosed a long, sighing fart. “He's not exactly an amenity,” she said.

“I love dogs. I don't have one.” Brian straightened up. Broad and supple shoulders, a waist considerably tighter than hers. “Think you can show me around, before it gets too icy?”

“I've got a dinner that needs making. But Ron can point out a trail.” She looked at Sailor, who wagged his jug-handle tail. “You can take your new friend if you want.”

“Tell you what. You come out and show me the sights, and then I'll come back and help you with dinner.”

“Sorry. I'd get drummed out of my B & B association if they found out I had a guest in the kitchen.”

“I like to cook.”

“There are rules. The kitchen's for me, not you.”

He smiled, an expression so luminous that Lili's legs swayed a little. “Cinderella,” he said.

“Happy ever after.”

“I knew this place was happy as we drove up. I could tell just by looking at it.”

“I hope we don't disappoint you.”

“I'm happy already.” He reached down to scratch behind ecstatic Sailor's ears. “I want to stay for a long time.”

She glanced out the window at the dogwoods, already slick with ice and starting to bend. “I think we can take care of you there.”

Back in the kitchen, she forced her eyes onto the potatoes that needed peeling. After that there was the lemon sauce, and then the pie filling. An hour passed before she looked up to see that every window had become black and still; only the steady
tick tick tick
, like a boy tapping the glass with a stick, reminded Lili that an ice storm was in progress. “Any word from the other couple?” she asked Ron when he came in with more wood. Then, looking at his gray face: “Are you all right?”

“Just cold. I haven't heard anything. We may have to call highway patrol.”

“Can't you sit down for ten minutes? You look like you're about to keel over.”

He frowned at her, an expression that at least brought some shape to his colorless features. “Stop fluttering at me. I'm cold, that's all.” He pinched his own cheek, which remained gray. “It smells good in here, babe.”

“Thanks. These things took an hour.” Reaching into the oven, she pulled out a tray of ginger-lace cookies, her most delicate and difficult. She worked one free with a spatula and held it out to Ron, although it was still too hot. “You can have one if you'll sit down.”

He sank into a chair and held the cookie up, admiring its light shape. “Putting on the dog.”

“Might as well. The dog's already in the house, in case you hadn't noticed.”

“I meant to ask you about that. It can get us a letter from the association.”

“Young Mr. Connor let him in. Have you met him yet?”

“Quite a set of wheels.”

“You noticed the
car?
Open your eyes. The guy looks like Prince Charming.”

“Hope he's not looking for a princess to take to the ball. Guess we could give him Sailor.”

“Nobody takes my dog. Besides, Sailor can't dance for crap.” Back at the pie board where she'd been working, Lili edged a knife under a sticky patch of dough.

“Well, I'm not going, so that leaves you. Don't stay out too late. If I remember the fairy tale right, something bad happens.”

“The princess burns the morning pancakes.” Lili refloured the board and started over. “I haven't seen Dr. and Mrs. Connor yet. I wonder if they want any tea.”

“I'll go ask. Anything else?”

“Get some rest. You scare me.”

“Rest is for old guys.”

She knew without looking that he was smiling, inviting her to smile, too. Instead, until he left the kitchen she paid special attention to the fluting on the pie crust, pushing, not squeezing the dough, as recommended by Julia Child in the cookbook Ron and Lili had bought to celebrate moving into their new house.

 

Six o'clock was cocktail hour at Heaven's Pride; Ron liked to roll into the living room the little trolley he had found at a kitchen supply house, and Lili popped out of the kitchen long enough to join in whatever toasts were proposed. Tonight's ought to be interesting. Collapsed in the huge wing chairs before the fireplace sat Brian's parents, looking 150 years old apiece. Their hands were veiny and trembling, their skin was the color of dust, and every breath they took seemed a tribulation. Ron gestured at the trolley and asked their pleasure, and they requested cups of hot water with a squeeze of lemon. Small cups.

He was slicing the lemons when Sailor barked twice, and Lili heard a slither, as if of tires. Impossible—the road down the valley must be slick as grease by now. But after a moment, headlights still high on the valley wall wavered into view. She stood at the window for five minutes, watching the lights veer and skid and finally slide straight into the lilacs, not usually a parking spot. The couple whooped across the flagstones.

“George and Jenny Pitts!” called Ron from the door.

“Guilty,” said the heavily cheerful man. He and his wife, dressed in brilliant, rustling nylon, burst into the room like a squall. “
Whoo
. That was
driving
. I'm not a religious man, but you should have heard me saying ‘Thank God for four-wheel drive.' Is that scotch?”

“Looks like you could use a double,” Ron said. Lili watched him hug both Pittses and lead them upstairs. He barked with laughter while George leaned from side to side, showing Ron how the car had skidded down the road. “Those slalom skiers don't have anything on me,” he said.

Ron said, “We'll give you a 10 just for making it.” He would, too—he'd make up a sign with a 10 and bring it to dinner. He loved the laughers, the hearty ones, the great big bluff guests who told bawdy jokes and got up early to watch the sun rise.

The Connors remained silent through all the
har-har-har-ing
. Watching their mouths, thin lines, Lili went to the trolley and finished pouring their hot water. “Thank you,” Dr. Connor said. His voice was not quite as dry as she had expected. “What with Roald Amundsen's arrival, I thought we might get overlooked.”

“No one gets overlooked here, Dr. Connor.”

“So says our son.”

“Where is Brian?” Just as she asked, Brian emerged onto the landing with the Pittses. Another burst of laughter obscured whatever his father might have said and made his tiny mouth tighten even further.

“Let the good times roll!” Brian said.

His father said, “Straight downhill,” and Lili held up the teapot.

“More water?”

By dinnertime the battle lines were hard. George and Jenn told jokes and asked questions and praised every new dish that Lili brought out. They heaped bonhomie on the table, all of which slid into the black hole of disapproval where Dr. and Mrs. Connor sat, next to Lili, picking at their food and occasionally shivering.

Lili and Ron didn't generally eat with the guests, but Brian, on his third gin, had leaned on Ron to join them, and the Pittses had added their voices to the companionable persuasion. Now Lili felt part chef, part referee. “Who wants more pork?” She smiled coaxingly at Mrs. Connor. “I made plenty.”

“Too rich,” Mrs. Connor said, pushing back her plate with a papery hand. She had eaten a few beans.

“I'll take some,” Brian said.

George leaned across the table toward Mrs. Connor. “So what brought you here?”

“Our son. He found a brochure.”

“A gift! How nice,” said Jenn.

“Actually, we don't travel very much.”