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“Do what?”
“Mrs. Carpenter. Why do you like upsetting her?” Luke asked again, grabbing a halter and lead rope someone left on a nearby bench.
“She’s an old bitty with too much information about our personal lives.”
“And she gets her ears full how?” Luke accused, thinking Rex didn’t necessarily say too much but rather chose the wrong things to share when he spoke in the first place.
“She eavesdrops and she makes nice with the women we’ve had in our beds. Marilyn told her anything she ever asked, or have you forgotten that?”
“Marilyn is impossible to forget.”
“Says who?” Rex argued.
“Come on now. Marilyn wasn’t that bad.”
“She wasn’t that good, either,” Rex said, chuckling.
“Marilyn was all right on a rainy day.”
“Thank God she only stayed around during the drought. Can you imagine waking up to her mouth every morning?” A beat later, Rex added, “We had to keep our pants down so we could keep her busy. I hate to think about the trouble that woman would stir if the men in this town didn’t keep her jaws working for the right reasons.”
Luke headed for the far end of the barn and started sorting grain buckets and grumbling about the prices of horse feed. “Why did you turn on her?” Luke asked.
Rex frowned. “Marilyn was a diversion. She kept our minds off Lucy, at least for a second. In the beginning she never expected anything more than what we were willing to give. In the end, she left bitter. She knew what she was to us, and we were good to her while it lasted, but it wasn’t enough. I don’t feel anything for Marilyn. Tell me why I should.”
“We spent the better part of four years with her,” Luke reminded him.
“The relationship was on and off again. She was here one day and gone the next. She was no good, and you know it. She’s the reason Lucy doesn’t belong to us now.”
“You can’t blame Marilyn for what we did. Our timing sucked. We’d just been with Lucy the week before.”
“And after I was with Lucy, I never felt the same again. I had no business taking Marilyn to bed,” Rex admitted.
“Technically? We didn’t lay her down and love her. Anyone watching us would’ve known from the get-go. We were drunk, and she was a mistake, a party that got out of hand. We had her on the dining room table because we couldn’t find the bedrooms in our own damn house. Plus, we weren’t married. We never discussed commitment. We didn’t do anything wrong. Most women would’ve forgiven us.”
Rex looked outside. “Lucy wasn’t most women. Fucking Marilyn was the biggest mistake of my life.”
“I wouldn’t go as far as saying that, but we did make a mistake. We forgot to shut the curtains.”
* * * *
Lucy approached the McDavid house with a photo album in one hand and a bottle of white wine in the other. Walking up the crooked path, she listened to the crushing pebbles under her feet and focused on the beauty surrounding her.
An avid gardener, Mrs. Carpenter had always cared for the McDavid grounds like she might take pride in her own home. In fact, the farm was her home. The McDavids’ housekeeper spent more time there than at her Main Street cottage. Rex and Luke, she’d once confided in Lucy, were the sons she never had.
By the looks of the elaborate concrete statues and an abundance of blooming geraniums, butterfly weed, and multicolored roses, the McDavids and Mrs. Carpenter continued to care for what they’d long since referred to as an angel’s garden, in memory of Mr. and Mrs. McDavid.
Rex and Luke’s parents were killed in a car accident when the boys were still in high school. After they died, their ashes were scattered there, and small marble memorials located under a pair of weeping willows marked their passing.
A trail, about a quarter of a mile long, led straight to a massive gazebo and then split like a fork in the road, the left path leading to the barn and the right circling through another courtyard before looping around the front of the house. Lucy followed the broken trail to the right, strolling along a recently constructed cobblestone walkway.
Halfway there, she stopped and stared at the house. Beyond the trimmed hedges and large, white rockers scattered across an elaborate country porch, a picture window drew her eye.
Swallowing once, she forced herself to put aside the days she’d lost because of bad memories lingering behind that glass. Mrs. Carpenter had invited her to dinner, and she wasn’t going to disappoint her.
“This, too, shall pass,” she said softly.
“I hope not,” Rex said, stepping away from a large oak tree.
