The front doorknob clicked open a few minutes later. The two loungers both bolted up to a sitting position, Zach shifting the fit of his jeans, Bett rapidly restoring some kind of order to her hair with her fingers. They were both grinning rather inanely as Elizabeth walked in with a bright smile.
“Well, my goodness, are you two still up?”
“You left at seven. It’s twenty minutes after ten,” Zach informed her flatly, ignoring the elbow Bett poked in his side.
“Really? I didn’t even notice.”
Bett gazed at her mother, searching for signs of mental wear and tear, as Elizabeth hung up her raincoat, describing what she had eaten for dinner right down to the rolls. “How I love homemade yeast rolls. But I’ll tell you, my breaded veal cutlet is better than theirs. I was telling the waiter, you have to be careful what coating you use…”
Elizabeth disappeared into the kitchen. Bett and Zach exchanged glances, and then Bett struggled to her feet, following her mother. “The thing is, did you have a good time?”
“Of course I had a good time. You know how I love to go out to dinner.” Elizabeth frowned as she wandered to the stove and lifted the cover on the stainless-steel pot. “Good Lord. What is this?”
Zach slipped behind Bett. “Spaghetti.”
“You cooked it for dinner and then didn’t eat it?” Elizabeth asked bewilderedly. “What did you two have for supper, then?”
“We…” Bett floundered.
“There just seemed to be a dozen things we were more hungry for than spaghetti,” Zach interjected blandly.
“I should think so.” Elizabeth wrinkled her nose at the congealing mess. “I wouldn’t like to think the two of you couldn’t get by without me as far as making yourselves a decent dinner goes.” She glanced at both of them, her eyes suddenly widening with rare perception. “You weren’t
“Of course not,” they both assured her.
“For heaven’s sake, let’s get some sleep, then.”
All three of them agreed on that.
Chapter 12
“…and the continuous use of a specific residual herbicide has traditionally resulted in poor weed control in the orchard…”
The speaker droned on. Zach crossed one ankle over his other knee, and used his thigh as a table for his pad of paper. His pen rushed across the unlined page in flat, bold strokes.
“So in selecting herbicides for orchard weed control, let us first examine diuron, simazine, and terbacil…”
Half an hour later, the farmers were shifting in their chairs. Most of them wanted the information as much as Zach did, but hadn’t anticipated paying such a high price to get it-suffering through a monotone delivery so hypnotizing that the audience was blinking continuously in an effort to stay awake.
The meeting finally ended at nine; Zach bolted impatiently from his chair and stalked out of the stale air of the classroom. Pickup doors slammed all around him as he buttoned his alpaca jacket against the stiff November wind. A few other growers stopped to wave or exchange a word or two before he slammed the door of the pickup and started the engine.
At least half of the other farmers were accompanied by their wives, most of whom usually stayed in the back of the room near the coffee machine and shared gossip at these agricultural meetings. Bett usually came, but not to drink coffee. If she’d been there this time he could well imagine her hand waving in the air, the men’s affectionate and sometimes amused glances, her very polite demand to know the exact difference in chemical composition between diuron and simazine, what studies had been done on the effects of those chemicals on the environment, and in what conceivable way they might react with other chemicals used in an orchard throughout the year. Last year the agronomist from the local university had not been prepared for such a cross-examination. This year the speaker had occasionally leveled Zach a wary glance, as if waiting to be challenged.
Zach had not been in a challenging mood. Cold air nipped at his cheeks and nose; he turned the dial on for the heater and pulled out of the brightly lit parking lot onto the lonely black strip of road. Snow was in the air. Thanksgiving was a week away, and the last autumn leaves were whirling down in the bitingly cold night. He could have owned the road; no one else was on it.
Fall had always been his favorite time of year. Work wasn’t over-work was never really over on a farm-but the pressure was off; there was the satisfaction of a harvest completed and all the luxury of sudden leisure time. When you walked outside, the crisp autumn air burned in your lungs and made you feel alive…
Often in the fall, he and Bett bundled up and walked the farm on a cold night. Just as often, he associated November nights with a hot fire and cider and Bett curled up next to him in silence, her eyes half closed. In the late afternoon, they would gather chestnuts sometimes. And there was the nuisance job of raking leaves-he had half a dozen pictures stored in his head, of Bett making huge efficient piles of crackling leaves; of Bett, laughing, flat on her back, waving her hands back and forth while he patiently explained that one made angels in the snow, not leaves; then of himself on top of her, burying both of them, most methodically…
There had been none of that kind of thing this year. Zach turned down another lonely side road.
This fall had been an exercise in continuous chaos. The household had ridden the merry-go-round of Elizabeth’s new social schedule. Popularity had mysteriously sneaked up on his mother-in-law. Zach had dragged home Jim Barker from the bank; Bett had discovered the man who owned the local dress shop, a widower named Fred Case. Then there’d been Horace, Graham, Bob-who made the unfortunate mistake of putting the moves on Liz-Joe Greeley, and the Michaels man. There was someone else; she was often gone at lunch, but he’d forgotten the name. Even the neighbors had become involved in the conspiracy. Everyone knew a widower, a bachelor, a divorced man; Susan Lee had a brother…
Bett and Zach had made lists, checked references, vetted the contenders. Elizabeth did not call the outings dates, because she was too old to date, she said. These were engagements, duly noted on an engagement calendar. Each was a complicated project, involving hairdos, clothes, anxiety, anticipation, lengthy debates over shoes and purses, a pre-hash of worry, a post-hash of exactly what had transpired over the evening.
Elizabeth was under the impression that they always invited people to dinner three or four times a week during the fall. Zach had been coerced into donning a suit and going out at least every other weekend; Liz said four at a table made conversation easier. Company came continuously to the house. No crumb dared fall on a coffee table; one never knew who was going to come by.
Liz didn’t seem to be falling for any of the men, but she was certainly happy. Bett was happy because her mother was happy. The chain reaction stopped with Zach. He’d initiated the matchmaking game, so he said nothing.
Actually, he’d been saying less day by day. And tonight the silence all around him as he drove seemed an outer manifestation of something he felt inside.
A few minutes later, Zach twisted the knob of the front door and let himself into the house. The glare of far too many lights assaulted him first. The rest of the room kind of hit him like a sniper’s bullets, one thing after another, as he hung up his coat and, for some strange reason, just stood there.
It was a stranger’s room, his living room. A canary cage blocked the entrance. He was fond of animals, but had never taken to caged birds. The bookshelves had been cluttered up with knickknacks. Bett’s greenery had plastic flowers sticking out of the pots. A purple, green and yellow afghan had been thrown over the couch. The furniture had been rearranged-actually, it had happened some time ago, but he just now seemed to notice it. A velvet- cushioned rocker occupied the prime sun spot. Bett’s type of clutter-a sweater over a chair, four opened books, the pewter collection of tiny creatures, the spray of dried wild flowers on the coffee table-no longer seemed to exist. His magazines had been banished to the study.
He stared for a moment longer before silently making his way toward the chatter coming from the brightly lit kitchen. He found himself pausing for a moment in that doorway, too, before moving forward. Bett hadn’t come with
