“I’ll thank them as I see them,” she responded with a laugh.
“This is my wife, Alea, and my children, Danielle, Julian and Carissa.” Alea shifted her weight and the baby so that Max could shake her hand. The two older children also gave her polite handshakes and said, “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” though the girl said hers loud and proud and the boy mumbled his a bit.
“I saw you at Hank’s viewing,” Jerome said.
“Oh, yes, I remember now.” At the funeral, Jerome had looked so serious and professorial she hadn’t put the man in the suit together with the man in his casual clothes, smiling at his wife and kids.
They talked about this and that for several more minutes until the kids grew impatient and started pulling on their father’s hands. “Don’t be a stranger, ya’ hear?” Jerome told Trey as his children were leading him away. “And let me know the next time you’re down. We can get a drink or catch a baseball game.”
Trey nodded. He was waving at the kids with an unreserved grin on his face. And once again Max started to wonder where his anger at North Carolina had gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
N
ORMALLY
T
REY
FELT
fine when he got back to the farm with Max after a morning at the market, but this was not a normal weekend. In the past week he had determined that work was going to kill him—or he was going to kill one of the fools at the Department of Education who couldn’t keep his mouth shut if world peace was on the line. One of the two.
Creating distractions hadn’t helped. Yet instead of digging up more research to provide for the congressman from Indiana to use as counterbalance to the Department of Education’s idiot, he was educating himself about the effects of the stalled farm bill on small farms and emailing his findings to a colleague who was working with one of the senators from North Carolina. Not his job. Not his area of expertise. And certainly not his area of interest.
But he’d also kept checking the Durham weather report. More rain and more ruined crops might make it impossible for Max to buy the farm, and then where would their relationship be? Where would his life be? After the summer and the comfort he’d found in Max’s company, he couldn’t keep his threat of selling the farm to some developer if she didn’t buy it first. But owning the farm still caused him to cringe. Max made the land bearable. Hell, Max made the land
magical
.
Trey dragged his feet up the back steps into the farmhouse, each shoe feeling like an unwieldy concrete block attached to his foot. After spending all of yesterday scrambling to get done what he needed to finish before he could responsibly leave town, he’d climbed into his car without stopping back home for a bag and driven to Durham. When he’d crawled into Max’s bed at three-thirty in the morning, he’d assured her that he’d be up and ready for the market, but that had been a hard promise to keep—even when Max had made him coffee with his own beans in his own pot. Now he was afraid that if he didn’t get into a supine position on the bed soon, he’d find himself in a prone position on the floor.
Max had understood his offer to help her unload the truck as the hollow suggestion it had been and had shooed him to the door with a kiss.
Ashes took the opportunity to slip out the back door as Trey stumbled his way into the house and toward the bedroom. He’d just taken off his shoes and pants when his phone started ringing in his pants pocket. Tiredness might be responsible for his hallucinations, but he was pretty sure his pants were bouncing off the floor with each ring, like in a cartoon.
When he picked up the phone to turn the ringer off, he saw why the phone had seemed so insistent. Aunt Lois was calling. He debated making her leave a message, but his aunt had a way of persisting—oh, so politely and never without her Southern-ladyness. She would probably haunt his dreams.
“Hello, Aunt Lois.” He hoped he sounded tired and she would get the hint.
“Trey, dear, I hear you’ve been coming down to help Max on the farm. Every weekend, I hear. And that the Kickstarter thing was your idea.”
“Every weekend isn’t quite right.” Trey said the words slowly, not sure what his aunt’s agenda was, though he was sure she had one. She never called him, much less to talk about how he spent his time.
“I’ve been expecting you to come over to Sunday supper when you’re down. Tomorrow. Garner is doing ribs.”
“Oh, Aunt Lois, I don’t know. I have a long drive back to D.C. tomorrow.”
And I’d hoped to spend the entire day in bed with Max.
Even if he couldn’t define their relationship, packing the whole thing into two days every other weekend was difficult. He couldn’t get enough of her in their short time together, which made him possessive of every little second.
Such a simple, ordinary, normal thing as actually having enough time with your lover that you would
want
a small break seemed impossible to him. Other than Max’s surprising thoughts the other morning, they’d only mentioned the future so far as to talk about a tour of D.C. when the busy growing season was over. And the farm’s future seemed uncertain at the moment. A sexual relationship with his tenant was only bearable when the lease had a defined end point. If she couldn’t buy the land and he didn’t sell it to someone else, the small, petty fights could become real big and real hurtful real fast. And when Max bought the land...
The convenience of their relationship had gotten complicated. If he was being honest with himself, he had to admit that he could have foreseen the entanglements of the farm and their feelings. But also, if he was being honest with himself, he was glad he hadn’t.
If only he could lie down, fall asleep and dream of Max without any complications or clothes.
Unfortunately, thinking about his future with Max meant he hadn’t been paying attention to what his aunt was saying. Apparently, she’d agreed to have supper a little earlier and he’d agreed to come over with Max. Since his aunt wasn’t a liar—she was far too forthright to lie and never seemed to need the aide of manipulation to get what she wanted, anyhow—he had to believe he’d actually said yes.
Which was fine. If he’d been listening, then he would have argued. If he’d argued, she’d have kept at him. Eventually, he would have given in, but he would’ve lost fifteen minutes of much-needed sleep. This was shorter, at least. They settled to have supper at three; he agreed to bring a side dish, and as soon as the phone clicked off, Trey stripped off his shirt and fell backward onto the bed.
* * *
T
REY
FOLLOWED
M
AX
’
S
little sedan as she turned into his aunt and uncle’s driveway. They’d driven separately because Trey had to leave for D.C. as soon as supper was over. Max stood by her sedan, waiting for him.
“Have you been to my aunt’s for supper before?” he asked her, after greeting her with a kiss. The entire drive over, he’d looked to the passenger seat of his car, wishing she was sitting there instead of in her own car.
“I’ve been over a couple times before. She collects quite the variety of guests. I never know who will be here and what Miss Lois will have arranged the conversation to be about. It’s like a bar and political forum all in one. And since today is Sunday, there’ll also likely be a bit of the church feeling.”
“Do you know who’s here?” he asked as they walked to the front door.
“That car belongs to a county commissioner.” Max nodded to a blue sedan. “I don’t know who the other two cars belong to.”
Trey spun that little piece of knowledge around in his head. If his aunt had her Sunday suppers for the reasons Max implied, and if she curated her guests as carefully as he imagined she did, everyone here had a purpose and Aunt Lois’s purpose was more complicated than just sticking her nose in her nephew’s business.
Trey stalled Max’s hand before she could knock on the door. “Do you know anything about the commissioner?”
“Not much. She’s young. She’s not originally from Durham, but has been active in politics since she moved here when her husband got a job at Duke. I voted for her.” Max pulled her hand away and knocked. “What are you afraid of anyway?”
“Like any reasonable person, I’m afraid of my aunt.” Max grabbing his hand and smiling at him wasn’t as reassuring as he’d hoped. She was probably afraid of his aunt, too. But her attempt at encouragement meant he was smiling when his aunt opened the door.
“Oh, deviled eggs,” his aunt exclaimed as she took the tray from Max’s hand. “You do make some of the best deviled eggs I’ve ever tasted.”
“I can’t take all the credit. The chickens lay some good eggs.”
Max stepped inside the house and Trey followed her, bending down to drop a kiss on his aunt’s cheek and receive one from her in return. His aunt’s living room was spotless and comfortable, as always. Since his aunt and uncle had been the Harrises to keep up the family tradition of farming, it seemed like they should have the old farmhouse with rickety heating and wood floors. Instead, his aunt and uncle lived in a brick ranch house with carpet and a large back deck. As a child, Trey had envied his cousins their more modern home. Now, though he still saw the old farmhouse as the home of his father’s failures, he’d come to look forward to hearing the squeak of floors at Max’s steps when she got out of bed in the morning.
As soon as he walked out onto the back deck and saw the five people his age seated in deck chairs and drinking iced tea, Trey knew what Aunt Lois’s purpose this afternoon was.
He was introduced to the young county commissioner and her husband; a second couple who had devised a way for small meat farmers to combine their resources, lower the cost of slaughtering and get their goods to the consumer; and last, a sheep farmer.
Only the sheep farmer was a native North Carolinian and he had taken over his parents’ tobacco farm when he was twenty-five. He now produced most of the local lamb sold in the Triangle’s very popular and well-regarded restaurants.
When Trey and Max approached the crowd, fortified with their own icy glasses of sweet tea, they were talking about a new chocolate shop opening off University Road and how this shop’s hot chocolate compared with the hot chocolate at some other new place in town, which did single-origin bar chocolate. Durham was not the struggling mill town he’d grown up in, and Aunt Lois wanted to make sure he knew it.
When Uncle Garner pulled the ribs off the grill, Aunt Lois announced she would go inside to get all the fixin’s, so everyone should be prepared to eat soon. Trey followed his aunt into the house.
“Aunt Lois, you’re not being subtle.” He held out his arms and she put a tray into his hands.
“I have never been subtle in all my life,” she responded, her accent thick and slow—the true molasses in January. In the past, the accent had grated on Trey’s ears, reminding him of his mom’s unhappy servitude and his father’s bigotry. Coming from his aunt, the tray in his hands getting heavy with plates, napkins, forks and a big bowl of coleslaw, the accent sounded soothing. “Mah life,” his aunt had said, and some of the tension in his shoulders had relaxed.
His aunt picked up another tray loaded down with potato salad, cornbread, collard greens and pickled shrimp. Before she could walk outside, he called out, “I’m not moving back to Durham because there’s now good chocolate shops here. Or because there’s a well-educated population my age.”
“No.” She turned around to face him with a look on her face that made him feel dumber than a grasshopper who’d stumbled into the hen house. “I expect you would move down here because you’re crazy about that girl and she’s crazy about you.”
“On my sixteenth birthday, I made a promise to myself that I would never move back to the farm. And unlike my father, I keep my promises.”
“Trey, honey, I never thought I would say this about anyone, but you have grown into more of a fool than your daddy ever was.” She balanced her tray on her arm and pulled the sliding glass door open. “Stop being stupid and go outside and make friends. You’ll find these people are interesting, if you can stop staring at yourself in the winda’ for one minute.”
Scolded and not wanting to be caught standing at the open door with his mouth agape, Trey followed his aunt outside. Max had already sat down and was patting the seat next to her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
W
HILE
TAKING
A
break from giving tours of the farm, Max stood by the ice cream bus, enjoying her cone and watching Trey work. With some of the folks who stopped by the farm tour, Trey joked and y’all’ed. With others, he was a serious businessman listening to their questions and answering their concerns. Still others got the righteousness of the organic farmer treatment, complete with information about the importance of the water supply and keeping diversity in the seed population for everything from apples to zucchini. He seemed to be able to get the perfect read on the person as they walked up to the table and knew which persona to take on before the person even opened their mouth. Whatever he was doing, he was having more success than Sidney, who got people to pick up their Kickstarter brochure but failed to get them to take it home. Trey hadn’t only gotten people to take a brochure home, but a couple people took advantage of the iPad Trey had provided to give a donation while on the farm.
Still, she couldn’t complain about Sidney’s work. Both Sidney and Norma Jean had come back to the farm for the weekend to help out with the farm tour. Norma Jean was taking a group through the tobacco barn while Max took a much-needed break. She was wondering if she should switch the interns’ roles when the couple with Trey leaned over the tablet, presumably to enter a donation, and she caught sight of Trey’s face absent of any guise.
He looks tired.
But not only tired, he looked uncertain.
Max sucked vanilla ice cream into her mouth and let the cold freeze her back teeth. There’d been a brief moment a month ago when she’d felt like whatever relationship she had with Trey
wasn’t
dependent on his feelings about the farm or her ability to buy it. Like they were a normal couple exploring their feelings for each other and the comfort they could provide. And then he’d left his aunt Lois’s supper and come back two weeks later a different person. More reserved. Timid, even.
She could still feel his affection for her. He still smiled when he saw her and when they made love she felt his need for her. But after they pulled apart and were lying in bed together, no matter how dark the night was, she sensed him looking around the room. Tension radiated through his body, as if the room was pressing in on him.
And maybe it was. Maybe all the activity of planning the Kickstarter and tugging the farm through the hard summer had distracted him from his underlying hatred of the land, and when the mortgage papers were signed, he would have nothing more pulling him south. And once he crossed the state line—going north—for the last time, the lines that had appeared in his forehead would smooth away.
The couple finished entering their information. Trey looked up, caught her looking at him and gave her a big smile and a wink. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe the tension and withdrawing she felt was from her.
Finishing the summer with the same bank balance she’d had at the beginning of May had been a huge accomplishment, but not the accomplishment she’d wanted. And it didn’t give her the confidence she’d hoped to have when they launched the Kickstarter. With the CSA over and her stints at the market winding down for the season, she had more time to panic over her future.
Maybe it’s not him. Maybe it’s me.
That thought wasn’t reassuring. Trey had come down early to help set up for the tour. He’d helped clean and was leading occasional tours for those people who wanted a more historical understanding of the farm. He was putting his whole self into this launch. If she couldn’t put
her
whole self in as well, she didn’t deserve him.
Later that night, Trey stood silent and focused as she flicked his shirt buttons open. She trailed her index finger up to his neck and then down through each new inch of flesh she revealed until she could place her palms on his chest and fully spread her fingers over his skin. When the rush of the day threatened to speed up her hands, she took a deep breath and concentrated her attention on the man in front of her. She took her time exploring his body with her lips and tongue, muscle by muscle and pore by pore until their desire had them shaking in unison. When he entered her, he filled her completely, leaving no space for the anxieties that had haunted her all day.
Her release soaked her in awareness of his body and hers. But the tenderness and time they had taken with each other meant she felt his retreat more completely than she ever had before.
* * *
“I
S
THERE
SOMETHING
WRONG
?” asked a soft voice through the dark.
Trey had pulled Max tight against him and was enjoying the warmth of her back against his chest when she asked the question. His skin pulled back from hers, but he kept his arms around her, fighting to close the distance.
“No.” His reply was both a lie and the truth. He could imagine no better feeling in this world than to lie in this bed in this farmhouse with his arms wrapped around this woman, and the willingness with which he would toss his life away to be here forever scared the shit out of him.
You’re crazy about that girl and she’s crazy about you
.
You have grown into more of a fool than your daddy ever was.
Aunt Lois’s words had followed him home, though with a different result than she’d intended.
“I know this relationship has an end point, Trey. I knew it when we started.”
“Let’s not talk about this now,” he said, pulling her hair back from her neck and kissing the one freckle-free spot he’d found on her entire body. The full, four square inches of white skin was back behind her ear. Only someone lying in this position and pulling her hair away would know it was there. Thinking about this secret spot was usually a precursor to his research into farm legislation instead of education. For a chance to kiss this one spot he would drive five hours.
He pulled his lips away and smoothed her hair back over the spot. “I was just thinking of something my aunt said.”
She stiffened in his arms, the same response he often had to his aunt, and he smiled, though his smile quickly disappeared at the defensiveness in her voice as she spoke. “I admire the work she does and don’t know if I’d have settled into this community without her support, but she doesn’t speak for me about this relationship. I’ve never spoken with her about it.”
Had he lied when he’d told Max his withdrawal wasn’t about her? No. He hadn’t lied to her and he didn’t plan to start. He also hadn’t wanted to have this conversation here, now,
again,
but the opportunity was here. He should seize it. “At her supper, she was trying to convince me to move down here.”
The bed creaked as Max rolled in his arms over onto her back. The moonlight reflected off her light skin and fell into dark freckles to create a brilliant pattern of bright versus hidden. He could spend the rest of the night exploring the mysteries of her face and know no more at 6:00 a.m. than he did right now. “You know I’m not moving back to North Carolina, right? Whatever this relationship is, I can’t do that.”
“Your hatred of this farm has never been a question.”
She hadn’t answered his actual question. “Even if it wasn’t this farm, I still wouldn’t move back.”
I have a life in D.C., a good job, and...
He didn’t say any of those things. Defending his stance implied there was a weak point she could exploit.
“I know you’re not moving back, and that my buying the farm means the death of our relationship.” Her tone was flat, but before he could press, she said with more pep, “But I’ve never been to D.C. and I’d still like a tour one day.”
He ignored the false brightness of her tone to focus on her words. “I give the best tours.”
Rammed in the future they’d agreed on, Trey closed his eyes and waited to fall asleep.