Betsy picked a pair of Ty’s socks out of the basket and folded them together. She passed them back and forth between her hands before tossing them back in the basket. “It was probably hard for her to be there without me. When I was home, I was sort of the mediator between her and my parents. Without me there . . . well, Jenna’s not naturally submissive.”
“Who is?” Anna Beth asked around a bite of food. “Give me that.” She leaned over and pulled the laundry basket to her. “I already ate half a basket of bread at the restaurant waiting on you. You eat, I’ll fold.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Betsy popped a grape in her mouth. “Anyway, Jenna moved around a lot after her stint in college, had some boyfriends here and there. We just have different lives. But she does have those two sweet girls.”
“How’d she let that happen? Seems she wouldn’t want to be tied down by kids.”
“Oh, I don’t think having kids was her intention. She just . . . got lucky. Or unlucky depending on how you look at it.”
“Humph.” Anna Beth folded a pair of blue jeans, then sat back in her chair, her eyes on Betsy.
“What?”
Anna Beth pursed her lips, then shook her head. She reached forward and grabbed a T-shirt.
Betsy looked down and pushed the chicken salad around the plate with her fork. It had always been easy for others to dismiss Jenna because of her wildness, her disregard for rules, but Betsy never could. Jenna was her sister, after all. No one else had been through their particular childhood. Not that it was especially bad—in fact, it should have been pretty close to perfect.
Their parents, Drs. David and Marilyn Sawyer, were models of professionalism in their respective fields—David as conductor of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Marilyn as the head of the UAB Cancer Research Center. Having had children much later in life, they were dedicated to their work with a single-minded passion and focus. They threw themselves into civic causes and charity work, were devoted to organizations that helped better the world, and generally tried to be good stewards of their money and influence. All good, noble things, but models of how to be an attentive, involved parent? How to cherish and encourage? Not exactly.
With their parents always focused on their careers, it had been Betsy and Jenna against the world. Huddled together under Betsy’s bed. Hunched over rocks in the backyard looking for cicada shells and long, wiggly worms. Lying in bed together at night listening to their father’s concertos on the stereo downstairs, Betsy whispering fairy tales to Jenna into the wee hours. Betsy never asked to be pushed into the mother role, but it was a role she learned early to play.
It had been a long time since Betsy had had a need—or a desire—to mother Jenna, but even so, she always felt the deep-down urge to defend her sister.
“Jenna loves her daughters. I think she’s just still trying to figure out her place in the world.”
“If you ask me, at twenty-eight and two kids, you’re long past the time of figuring things out,” Anna Beth said. “Best get your butt in gear.”
Betsy shifted her chair to move out of a sharp ray of sun and caught sight of Ty standing just outside the barn doors, laughing at something she couldn’t see. It was always a treat to see him laughing and carefree. He was often so reserved, so focused on the task at hand, but when he laughed—cheeks stretched wide, blue eyes squinted, shoulders shaking—it was a gift.
Anna Beth followed her gaze out the back window. “You two are such lovebirds. Big house, great farm, tons of room for kids. Life already figured out.”
“We don’t have everything figured out.” She finished her last bite of chicken salad and reached for a shirt to fold. “Who does?”
“Tom does. And Ty does too. Tell me your husband isn’t doing exactly what he wanted to do with his life. No farmer gets caught up in a life of farming, whether it’s cows or crops. You’re only in it if you chose it. Maybe you and I got caught up in it, but we did it willfully when we married these boys. They have it figured out.”
Betsy glanced back at Ty again. He pulled off his cap, revealing his blond hair damp with midday heat, and threw it at Carlos. Carlos picked it up and dropped it in a bucket, causing Ty to shout. He pulled his cap from the bucket and wrung water out of it.
“You’re probably right,” Betsy said. “I think he does have things pretty much figured out.”
“Of course I’m right. That’s why you love me.”
seven
Ty
At 8 a.m. EDT, a tropical storm warning has been issued for the south and southeast edges of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea. Interests elsewhere in the central and eastern Caribbean should closely monitor the progress of this system.
Ty sat in his office, his grandfather’s old black radio tuned to the AM station that sent out a constant flow of crop stats, animal prices, and weather reports. That crackly radio usually made him feel like a real farmer, but today the steady stream of numbers and words annoyed him. He fiddled with the dial, turned it all the way to the right hoping for even a hint of real music—country, rock, something—but all he got was static.
He turned it back to the left, slowly. Maybe he’d find that same music his grandfather used to play in the barn—wordless melodies, a river of gospel, bluegrass, folk. But even at the lowest end of the dial, there was nothing but politicians and rural Baptist preachers.
He was about to turn the thing off when a computerized weather report crackled through. “Tropical Storm Bernard has taken a northwesterly turn,” said the robotic voice. “It is expected to continue to the
