maze, two bucks for the haunted house, and maybe sell the pumpkins for a couple of bucks each.”
“How much land you got over there?” Seth asked, interested.
“Eighty-three acres.”
“Woods? Creek?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Well, if you had you a tractor and a flatbed, you could give hayrides, too. Littie kids love them.”
“Yeah, you’re definitely gonna need to buy a tractor, but we could lend you plows and disks to get you started,” Zach said.
When they started talking the merits of one tractor over another and just how much horsepower Arnold would need and where he might find a good used one, I gathered up the plates of those who’d finished eating.
Dwight stood up, too, and said, “Here, let me get that door for you.”
He held the screen door wide, then followed me on down the hallway. As we passed the parlor, I glanced inside. Tally was leaning back against the faded couch cushions and looking a little more herself while April and Ruth made light conversation. A.K. still looked uneasy and Andrew looked dazed, but I had a feeling it was going to work out. It was probably way too late for any true father/daughter relationship, but just connecting ought to help the healing on both sides.
Dwight and I went straight through the house to the back porch to dump the empty plates in the trash barrel and fix a couple for ourselves now that the line had thinned out. We passed Minnie, Isabel, and Zach’s wife Barbara in the hallway, on their way out to the porch with their own plates. Nadine, Doris, and Maidie were at the kitchen table in deep conversation with a couple of carnival women I recognized by sight though not by name.
Outside, the rest of the crowd were in groups spread out around the yard. Some were seated in lawn chairs under the shade trees, others were braving the sun on a knee-high wall next to a border of gardenias, hydrangeas, spireas, and forsythias, bushes whose flowering time was finished for the year. We paused to watch Windy Raines and Skee Matusik, who were giving some of the younger kids a demonstration of two-man juggling. They were surprisingly good. Windy was talking trash a mile a minute and Skee kept adding in more lemons from a basket little Bert held out to him till one of them suddenly lost the rhythm and lemons went flying all over the grass.
As the children scrambled to pick them up and asked to be shown the first moves, Zach’s Emma came out with a box of Band-Aids for Skee, who had raw blisters on both his heels. Bert was still of an age that Band-Aids are wonderful. He immediately found a half-healed hurt on his hand and demanded one, too. With his sun-wrinkled skin and old, discolored tattoos, Skee Matusik was an unlikely grandfather figure, but I guess his years of working the Lucky Ducky had made him wise to the ways of children. Before tending his own hurt, he very seriously and very carefully unwrapped a Band-Aid, smoothed it across Bert’s small hand, and said, “There you go, Bo.”
At that moment, Tasha came around the corner with Sam, who had cleaned up better than I expected. A good night’s sleep, a shower, and a shave made a world of difference. He wore clean khakis, a long-sleeved dark purple knit shirt, and brown loafers with no socks. By now, he must have been told that Polly Viscardi was dead, but from the proprietary way Tasha was filling a plate for him, he wasn’t in heavy mourning.
I saw Skee and Windy exchange lifted eyebrows and heard Windy mutter, “Guess he gets to keep on sleeping in the cathouse.”
Almost against my will, my eyes went to Tasha’s feet. Blue leather with thin soles.
Adding a slice of tomato to my plate of field peas and butter beans, I followed Dwight out to a bench under a pecan tree. He looked very nice today in his tan slacks and shirt and a tweedy brown jacket that matched his brown eyes. I resisted the impulse to smooth down the unruly cowlick that always stood up.
“At least Andrew and Tally are talking,” I said. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
“How’d you get him over here?” Dwight asked. “Seth said he wasn’t coming.”
“Seth just didn’t use the right argument.”
He bit into a chicken thigh. “I see you told Mr. Kezzie.”
“Daddy spoke to you?”
“No, but when I got up to open the door for you just now, he gave me a wink.”
“He’s really pleased about it,” I said. “Probably feels I’m getting the best end of the bargain. What about Miss Emily? Did you tell her last night?”
“Yep.”
“How did she take it?”
He laughed. “You mean you didn’t see the skyrockets going off?”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Oh, and she gave me this.”
He hooked a ring from his pocket, a lovely, old-fashioned square-cut diamond in an antique setting. A stray spot of sunlight through the thinning leaves caught the stone and it flashed blue fire. “She gave her own ring to Rob when he and Kate got engaged. This was her mother’s.”
He held it out to me, but I couldn’t take it. Agitated butterflies were tumbling around in my stomach so wildly that for an instant I thought I was either going to pass out or throw up.
“What’s wrong?” Dwight said as I took long deliberate breaths in and out to steady myself.
“You okay?” he asked, starting to look worried.
I nodded. “Stupid of me. Bad reaction. It’s just that telling your mother, my father, and now your grandmother’s ring—it’s really going to happen, isn’t it?”
He closed his hand around it. “Not if you hate the whole idea so much that you’re gonna keep turning green
