“You know how to make corn bread, Janie Bonner?”
“I’ve made it a few times.”
“It’s no good lest you fold in a little buttermilk.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“Before I took so sick, I used to make my own apple butter. Nothin’ as good as cold apple butter on warm corn bread. You got to find you real soft apples when you make it, and watch yourself peelin’ ’em ’cause ain’t nobody on earth likes to bite into a big tough ol’ piece of peel when they’re expectin’ good smooth apple butter.”
“If I ever make any, I’ll be careful.”
Annie had been doing this ever since Jane had arrived, tossing out recipes and bits of folk wisdom: ginger tea for colds, nine sips of water for hiccups, beets to be planted on the twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, or twenty-eighth of March, but no later or they’d be puny.
Despite the improbability of her ever using any of this information, she’d found herself taking it all in. Annie’s advice represented the continuity between one generation and the next. Roots went deep in these mountains, and as someone who had always felt so very rootless, each tidbit seemed like a solid link with a family that had a history and traditions, everything she craved.
“… and if you’re gonna make you some dumplin’s, put a egg in that dough and a pinch of sage.” She started to cough, and Jane regarded her with concern. When she recovered, she waved her hand displaying fingernails painted a bright cherry red. “Listen to me goin’ on. It’s a wonder you haven’t just said, ‘Annie, shut your yap; you done wore out my ears.’ ”
“I love listening to you.”
“You’re a good girl, Janie Bonner. I’m surprised Calvin married you.”
Jane laughed. Annie Glide was the most unexpected person. The only one of her grandparents Jane had ever known had been her father’s self-centered and narrow-minded mother.
“I miss my garden. Had that worthless Joey Neeson plow for me a couple weeks ago, even though it goes against my grain to have strangers ’round here. Calvin, he’s always sending strangers up here to fix things, but I won’t have it. Don’t even like family nibbin’ in my business, let alone strangers.” She shook her head. “I was hopin’ I’d be strong enough to get my garden put in this spring, but I was foolin’ myself. Ethan said he’d come by to help me, but that poor boy has so much work with his church, I didn’t have the heart to do nothin’ but tell him weren’t no sissy boy plantin’ my garden.” She gave Jane a sideways glance from her crafty blue eyes. “Sure am gonna miss my garden, but I won’t have strangers plantin’ for me.”
Jane saw right through the old woman’s wiles, but it didn’t occur to her to be annoyed. Instead, she felt curiously flattered. “I’ll be happy to help you if you show me what to do.”
Annie pressed her hand to her chest. “You’d do that for me?”
Jane laughed at her feigned amazement. “I’ll enjoy it. I’ve never had a garden.”
“Well, now, that’s just fine. You make Calvin bring you over here first thing tomorrow, and we’ll get those ’taters in right away. It’s real late—I like to do it at the end of February, during the dark of the moon—but they still might turn out if we get ’em in right away. Then we plant onions, and after that some beets.”
“It sounds great.” She suspected the old woman wasn’t eating as well as she should, and she stood. “Why don’t I fix us a little lunch? I’m getting hungry.”
“Now that’s a real good idea. Amber Lynn’s back from her trip, and she done brung over some of her bean soup yesterday. You can heat that up. ’Course she don’t make it like I taught her, but, then, that’s Amber Lynn for you.”
So Cal’s parents had returned. As she headed to the kitchen, she wondered how he was explaining not bringing her to meet them.
Jane served their soup in one china bowl and one plastic. She accompanied it with squares of corn bread from a pan on the counter. As they ate at the kitchen table, she couldn’t remember enjoying a meal more. After two weeks of isolation, it was wonderful just being around another person, especially one who did more than bark out orders and glare at her.
She cleaned up the dishes and was bringing a mug of tea to Annie in the living room when she noticed three diplomas among the clutter of paintings, ceramic ballerinas, and wall clocks hanging next to the doorway.
“Those belong to my grandsons,” Annie said, “but they give ’em to me. They knowed it always bothered me the fact I had to quit school after sixth grade, so each of ’em give me their college diplomas the same day they graduated. That there’s Calvin’s hangin’ at the top.”
Jane fetched her glasses from the kitchen table and gazed at the top diploma. It was from the University of Michigan, and it stated that Calvin E. Bonner had received a Bachelor of Science degree… with highest distinction.
Summa Cum Laude.
Jane’s hand flew to her throat. She whirled around. “Cal graduated summa cum laude?”
“That’s what they call it when a body’s real smart. I thought you, bein’ a professor, would of knowed that. My Calvin, he was always smart as a whip.”
“He—” She swallowed and fought to go on as a roaring sounded in her ears. “What did he get his degree in?”
“Now didn’t he tell you that? Lot of athletes, they take real easy classes, but my Calvin, he wasn’t like that. He got hisself a degree in biology. Always liked roamin’ in the woods, pickin’ up this ’n’ that.”
“Biology?” Jane felt as if she’d just taken a punch in the stomach.
Annie narrowed her eyes. “Strikes me strange you don’t know any of this, Janie Bonner.”
“I guess the subject never came up.” The room began to sway, and she felt as if she were going to faint. She turned awkwardly, sloshing hot tea over her hand, and stumbled back into the kitchen.
“Janie? Somethin’ wrong?”
She couldn’t speak. The handle broke off the mug as she dropped it into the sink. She pressed her fingers to her mouth and fought a rising tide of horror. How could she have been so stupid? Despite all her conniving, she’d brought about the very disaster she’d tried so hard to avoid, and now her child wasn’t going to be ordinary at all.
She clutched the edge of the sink as hard reality overcame her rosy daydreams. She’d known Cal had attended the University of Michigan, but she hadn’t believed he’d been serious about it. Didn’t athletes take the minimum number of courses to get by and then leave before they graduated? The fact that he’d majored in biology and graduated with honors from one of the most prestigious universities in the country had such brutal ramifications she could barely take them in.
Intelligence tended toward the mean. That fact screamed at her. The one quality she prized in him—his stupidity—was nothing more than an illusion, an illusion he had deliberately perpetuated. By not seeing through it, she’d condemned her child to the same life of isolation and loneliness she’d lived herself.
Panic clawed at her. Her precious child was going to be a freak, just like her.
She couldn’t let that happen. She’d die before she’d permit her child to suffer as she’d suffered. She’d move away! She’d take the baby to Africa, some remote and primitive part of the continent. She’d educate the child herself so that her precious little one would never know the cruelty of other children.
Her eyes stung with tears. What had she done? How could God have let something so cruel happen?
Annie’s voice penetrated her misery. “That’ll be Calvin now. I told you he’d come after you.”
She heard the slam of a car door, the pounding of footsteps on the front porch.
“Jane! Where is she, dammit?”
Jane charged into the living room. “You bastard!”
He stalked forward, his face twisted. “Lady, you’ve got some explaining to do!”
“God, I hate you!”
“Not any more than what I think of you!” Cal’s eyes blazed with anger and something else that w
as now so clear Jane couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it all along—a keen, biting intelligence.
She wanted to throw herself at him and scratch that intelligence from his eyes, chop open his cranium and pluck it from his brain. He was supposed to be stupid! He read comic books! How could he betray her like this?
The last of her self-control shredded, and she knew she had to get away before she fell apart. With an exclamation of fury, she whirled around and dashed back into the kitchen, where she flew out the rickety back door.
As she began to run, she heard a roar of rage coming from behind her. “You get back here! Don’t make me run after you, or you’ll be sorry!”
She wanted to hit something. She wanted to throw herself in a deep hole and let the earth close in on top of her, anything to stop the awful pain raging inside her body. This baby that she already loved more than she’d ever loved anything was going to be a freak.
She didn’t hear him come up behind her, and she gasped when he spun her around. “I told you to stop!” he shouted.
“You’ve ruined everything!” she screamed back.
“Me?” His face was pale with rage. “You damned liar! You’re an old lady! A goddamn old lady!”
“I’ll never forgive you for this!” She balled her hand into a fist and hit him in the chest so hard the pain shot into her arm.
He was spitting fury. He began to grab her by both arms, but she had been transported into a place of vengeance and she wouldn’t be restrained. This man had harmed her unborn child, and she, who had never hit another person, wanted his blood.
She went wild. Her glasses flew off, but she didn’t care. She kicked and clawed and tried to damage him in any way she could.
“You stop this right now! Stop it!” His bellow shook the very treetops. Once again he tried to restrain her, but she sank her teeth into his upper arm.
“Ouch!” His eyes widened with outrage. “That hurt, dammit!”
The violence felt good. She lifted her knee to slam it into his groin and found her feet swept out from under her.
“Oh, no, you don’t…”
He went down with her, breaking her fall with his own body, then twisting to pinion her against the ground.
The fight had taken everything out of her, but he was a man who took hits for a living, and he wasn’t even winded. He was, however, enraged, and he let her have it.
“You settle down right now, you hear me? You’re acting like a crazy woman! You are crazy! You lied to me, cheated me, and now you’re trying to kill me, not to mention the fact that you can’t be doing that baby any good with your carryin’ on. I swear to God I’m going to have you locked up in a mental ward and shot full of Thorazine.”
Her eyes stung with tears that she didn’t want him to see, but couldn’t hold back. “You’ve ruined everything.”
“Me?” He bristled with outrage. “I’m not the one who’s acting like a lunatic. And I’m not the one who told everybody I was twenty-eight fucking years old!”
“I never told you that, and don’t you curse at me!”
“You’re thirty-four! Thirty-four! Were you ever planning on mentioning that to me?”
“When was I supposed to mention it? Should I have told you when you were stalking me in my classroom, or when you were screaming at me over the telephone? How about when you pushed me on the airplane? Or maybe I should have let you know after you locked me up in your house? Is that when I should have told you?”
“Don’t try to weasel out of it. You knew it was important to me, and you deliberately misled me.”
“Deliberately? Now there’s a big word for a dumb jock. Do you think it’s cute putting on that asinine hillbilly act and making everyone think you’re a moron? Is that your idea of a good time?”
“What are you talking about?”
She spit the words at him. “University of Michigan. Summa cum laude.”
“Oh, that.” Some of the tension left his body, and his weight eased on her.
“God, I hate you,” she whispered. “I would have had a better chance at a sperm bank.”
“Exactly where you should have gone in the first place.”
Despite his words, he no longer sounded quite so angry, but acid churned in her stomach. She knew she had to ask him, even though she dreaded hearing the answer, and she forced out the words. “What’s your IQ?”
“I have no idea. Unlike you, I don’t keep it tattooed on my forehead.” He rolled to the side, which allowed her to struggle to her feet.
“Then your SATs. What were they?”
“I don’t remember.”
She regarded him bitterly. “You’re a liar. Everybody remembers their SATs.”
He swiped at some wet leaves on his jeans as he rose.
“Tell me, dammit!”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.” He sounded annoyed, but not particularly dangerous.
That didn’t calm her. Instead, she once again felt a swell of hysteria. “You tell me right now, or, I swear to God, I’ll find some way to murder you! I’ll put ground glass in your food! I’ll stab you with a butcher knife while you’re sleeping! I’ll wait until you’re in the shower and throw in an electrical appliance! I’ll—I’ll club you in the head with a baseball bat some night when you walk in the door!”
He stopped brushing his jeans and gazed at her with what looked more like curiosity than apprehension. The fact that she knew she was only making herself appear more irrational further inflamed her. “Tell me!”
“You are some bloodthirsty woman.” Looking faintly bemused, he shook his head. “That electrical appliance thing… You’d need an extension cord or something to reach all the way into the shower. Or maybe you weren’t planning to plug it in.”
She gritted her teeth, feeling prodigiously foolish. “If it wasn’t plugged in, it wouldn’t electrocute you, now would it?”
“Good point.”
She took a deep breath and tried to regain her sanity. “Tell me your SATs. You owe me that much.”
He shrugged and bent over to pick up her glasses. “Maybe fourteen hundred, or somethin’ like that. Mighta been a little lower.”
“Fourteen hundred!” She punched him as hard as she could, then stomped away from him into the woods. He was a hypocrite and a fraud, and she felt sick down to the very depth of her soul. Even Craig wasn’t as smart as this man.
“That’s dumb compared to you,” he called after her.
“Don’t ever speak to me again.”
He came up next to her, but didn’t touch her. “Come on, Rosebud, you’ve got to settle down enough so I can take you apart for what you’ve done to me, which is a whole lot worse than my damned SATs.”
She whirled on him. “You didn’t do anything to me! You’ve done it to my child, don’t you see that? Because of you, an innocent child is going to grow up to be a freak.”
“I never told you I was stupid. You just assumed.”
“You said ain’t! That first night we were together, you said ain’t twice!”
A muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth. “A little local color. I’m not apologizin’.”
“There are comic books all over the house!”
“I was just livin’ up to your expectations.”
She collapsed then. She turned her back to him, crossed her arms against the nearest tree trunk, and rested her forehead against her wrist. All the humiliations of her childhood returned to her: the taunts and cruelties, the awful isolation. She had never fit in, and now, neither would her child.
“I’m going to take the baby to Africa,” she whispered. “Away from civilization. I’ll teach her myself, so she doesn’t have to grow up with other children taunting her.”
A surprisingly gentle hand settled over the small of her back and began to rub. “I’m not going to let you do that to him, Rosebud.”
“You will once you see what a freak she is.”
“He’s not going to be a freak. Is that how your father fel
t about you?”
Everything within her went still. She pulled away from him and fumbled in the pocket of her Windbreaker for a tissue. She took her time blowing her nose, wiping her eyes, regaining her self-control. How could she have let herself fall apart like this? It was no wonder he thought she was crazy.
She gave her nose a final blow. He held out her glasses, and she put them on, ignoring the strands of moss caught in one hinge. “I’m sorry for causing such a dreadful scene. I don’t know what came over me. I’ve never hit anyone in my life.”
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” He grinned, and to her amazement, a dimple popped into the hard plane of his cheek. Stunned, she gazed at it for several long moments before she was able to pick up her train of thought.
“Violence doesn’t solve anything, and I could have hurt you quite badly.”
“I’m not trying to get you cranked up again, Rosebud, but you don’t have a whole lot going for you when it comes to packin’ a punch.” He took her arm and began steering her back toward the house.
“This is my fault. Everything’s been my fault from the beginning. If I hadn’t let myself buy into every conceivable stereotype about athletes and Southerners, I would have been a more astute judge of your mental abilities.”
“Uh-huh. Tell me about your father.”
She nearly stumbled, but his hand on her elbow steadied her. “There’s nothing to tell. He was an accountant for a company that manufactured paper punches.”
“Smart man?”
“An intelligent man. Not brilliant.”
“I think I’m getting the picture here.”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“He didn’t have a clue what to do with you, did he?”
She picked up her pace. “He did his best. I really don’t want to discuss it.”
“Did it occur to you that your problems as a kid might have had more to do with your old man’s attitude than with the size of your brain?”
“You don’t know anything.”
“That’s not what my diploma says.”
She couldn’t respond because they had reached the back of the house, and Annie waited for them at the screen door. She glared at her grandson. “What’s wrong with you? You get a pregnant woman upset like that, it’ll put a mark on the baby, for sure.”