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“I’m not worried about competition.” There was always the chance this was the one time Miss Lois could have the wool pulled over her eyes.
“Oh, Maxine, you’ve been staring at my nephew the entire time we’ve been in the funeral home.”
Max hauled her gaze from Trey to Miss Lois. “He’s my new landlord. Of course I’m curious about him. And he seems troubled.”
“You’re welcome to try that on a fool, honey, but don’t try it on me.” Miss Lois’s words carried a reprimand, but her voice was kind. “He hasn’t wanted anything to do with the farm since he was five years old. Hank and Noreen are lucky he didn’t run away and join a circus. Unless you give up farming and move to D.C., there is no future in that man. You can hear it in his voice.”
Lois’s words highlighted something about Trey that had bothered Max from the moment he’d spoken to her. Trey had no Southern accent. Kelly didn’t have much of one, but Trey’s was nonexistent. His voice was completely flat—as if the drawl had been purged from his soul. And he must have grown up with one, as Max had yet to meet a Harris other than Trey without a y’all lingering somewhere on the lips.
And if he’d eradicated the accent, why hadn’t he started going by some name other than Trey, which was a constant reminder that he was the third Henry William Harris? Max tried to look at Trey in his charcoal-gray suit out of the corner of her eye, but the side view gave her a headache. Miss Lois was watching her with raised brows when Max pulled her eyes away. “I’m not watching him for any future, Miss Lois—or any future beyond him being my new landlord, but...he doesn’t seem all that upset.” That wasn’t right; something was clearly wrong with Trey. “Or at least not upset about the death of his father.”
“Trey and his daddy never did rub along, and Hank didn’t care until it was too late.”
Was Trey thinking about his lost relationship with his father as he stared at the cold body lying on satin? Or was he irritated that he was saddled with a farm he didn’t want left to him from a father he had no affection for?
Reading any emotion beyond stress into the tightness of Trey’s eyes was nearly impossible.
“So long as he doesn’t try to sell the farm out from under me, his relationship with Hank doesn’t affect me.” But even as she said those words, she couldn’t take her eyes off the tension evident in Trey’s neck as he ducked out the door. Max told herself that Miss Lois wouldn’t notice and slipped out the door behind him.
* * *
TREY TURNED AROUND at the sound of someone stumbling and swearing under their breath behind him. The voice was soft, so he’d figured it was a woman, but he had expected his cousin Nicole to offer up another slippery round of tears, not solid, stable Max. She hesitated a little, then put her hand on his shoulder, her palm warm even through his suit jacket. He shivered. He should have grabbed his coat.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You already said that.” He struggled to keep the anger in his voice in check. He wasn’t angry with her. In truth, he wasn’t even angry at his father right now, but the pressures of pretending to be sad were wearing on him. And then there were the pokes from stories people had about his father. When he’d made a face at one such tale, Aunt Lois had given him a look and told him not to speak ill of the dead.
Max’s fingers curled around his shoulder, their strength pressing into his collarbone. Somehow, the simple gesture was more reassuring than any enveloping hug he’d received from his relatives. “And I’m still sorry—for Hank’s death and for whatever drove you outside.”
“My cousins were beginning to tell stories of going to the Orange County Speedway and what a grand time they all had, especially after my dad got really drunk and his insults got both creative and unintelligible.” Trey could picture the scene, including his father throwing beer cans until he was tossed out.
“I imagine what seems like a funny story among cousins is less funny to his children.” She hadn’t moved her hand from his shoulder, so he could feel her step closer to him in the movement of the joints in her fingers. Even in the dark, through his shirt, her fingers felt sturdy. Solid. Stable. He wanted her to press up against him so he could feel her strong, purposeful body up against his. To be able to go home with her and draw patterns in her freckles as he forgot himself in her body.
But she was his tenant and he was at his father’s funeral, so his thoughts would remain thoughts only.
“You say that like there could be something funny about the belligerent drunk.” Unexpected sexual frustration made the words come out with more anger than he’d meant.
“When I knew him, he was only belligerent.”
The bald honesty of her statement forced a laugh out of him. “And yet you still have some affection in your voice.”
Her fingers tensed on his shoulder. “I won’t force it on you.”
“Why?”
“Why won’t I force it on you?”
He turned to face her and her fingers slipped off his jacket. He wished she had kept them there. “Why the affection?”
She shrugged. “For five years we shared the farm, and worked together some. He wasn’t a very good farmer, but Hank liked to have a cup of coffee with me in the mornings and hear what I was doing to the land. He even came to the farmers’ market occasionally. It’s hard not feel some measure of affection.”
“I lived with him for eighteen years and I managed.” Even in the dark, he could tell he’d startled her again. And again, he had the inkling that he’d said something he shouldn’t have, yet knowing the words that would come out of his mouth next would make him sound like a petulant child didn’t stop him. “Despite what you and every person in that room want to think, my father should have been tossed into an unmarked grave with a bucket full of lime and forgotten about.” Max’s mouth fell open, but Trey wasn’t going to back down. “And if I was in control of this funeral instead of Aunt Lois and Kelly, that’s exactly what would happen.”
Trey turned on the hard heels of his dress shoes and stomped back to the viewing, away from one person who had pleasant memories of his father and toward a crowd of them. He would shake hands, accept hugs and look sad as was required, but there would at least be one person who would know the truth of how he felt. And somehow, it was important that the one person was Max.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE FUNERAL WAS just as awful as Trey had imagined it would be, although in ways he didn’t have the creativity to have foreseen. First, there was the knowledge that he’d had a near temper tantrum at the viewing and the bland look Max gave him wasn’t enough to pretend it hadn’t happened. Second, the church was packed, and not just with family members. The mayors of Oxford and Roxboro were both there, along with one Durham County commissioner, proving that you could be a drunk and an asshole and still have dignitaries at your funeral so long as you were from an established family. The mayor of Roxboro was perfectly polite, but the mayor of Oxford was determined to talk with Trey about upcoming legislation and its effects on small towns. Trey had been prepared to talk with family members he had no interest in and express sorrow he didn’t feel to people whose names he couldn’t remember, but feigning interest in a rider on a farm bill had not been on his agenda.
The preacher droned on and on about our reward in heaven—though Trey wondered how many people were picturing his father someplace more tropical—until finally a cell phone ringing in one of his great-aunt’s enormous purses and the subsequent digging through said purse derailed the preacher’s lack of train of thought. “God bless both the phone and the purse that ate Atlanta,” Aunt Lois muttered to Uncle Garner, then gave Kelly a dirty look when he snickered.
A slight black man with glasses and a trim beard was waiting by his car with what appeared to be a pie in his hands when Trey made it past the crowds of mourners. “Jerome, buddy, I didn’t expect to see you here. Thank you for coming.” He meant the words and the welcoming handshake more sincerely than he had for any other guest at the funeral. “I haven’t seen you in ages, and you didn’t have the beard then. How does Alea feel about it?”
“She likes it fine. And the last time I saw you was at your mother’s funeral.” Jerome Harris gave a shrug and a slight smile. “I try to attend all my kin’s funerals. It’s the only time I get to see certain people.”
Trey smiled at the small joke—and the truth behind it. “You’re one of the many people here not here for my father, but for some other reason. Gossip seems to be the main reason. Respect for my mother is another.”
“Oh, I’m hoping my presence has your father rolling around and knocking in his grave, but my parents said he’d gotten less overtly racist in his old age.”
Jerome wasn’t the first person at the funeral to mention that the prejudices that had strangled Trey’s father most of his life had loosened their grip in his old age, though he was the first person to put it so baldly.
“Alea’s home watching the kids and I can’t stay, but she baked a pie for you. I felt certain your father would like a bean pie in his honor.”
Trey laughed. Most Southern food was Southern food with little racial distinction, but not only was bean pie black food, it was Nation of Islam food. It was also delicious, so Trey had no trouble taking it out of Jerome’s hands. “I’m sure everyone will appreciate the pie. And Kelly will appreciate the gesture.”
“You’re in the big house now.” Jerome had always had a wry sense of humor. “I hope you won’t be a stranger to Durham.”
“I used education to get out. I’m not sure why I would voluntarily come back.”
Jerome harrumphed. “I have basketball tickets. Maybe I’ll invite you to the Duke game.”
“Of course I’d come down for the game.” Agreeing was easy since it wasn’t likely he’d actually receive an invitation. Jerome had better friends to share those tickets with, plus a wife who might want to go. “I’ve got my priorities straight.”
“I mean it, now.”
“Get home to your wife. Thank her for the pie.”
After they said their goodbyes and Jerome was walking to his car, Trey wondered if his friend knew the pivotal role he’d played in Trey’s escape from the farm. They’d met in seventh grade, when they’d been assigned to work together on a science project. Trey had been certain he would end up a lazy, good-for-nothing drunk like his father. He’d been angry at his future and pissed at his father for the inheritance. Another option was to turn into his uncle Garner, but Trey hadn’t wanted to be a tobacco farmer. Option three was join the military, but he was pretty sure Vietnam had turned his father in the direction of alcohol. But those were his only choices as he saw it back then.
When Jerome had insisted Trey actually do some work for the project, Trey had scornfully asked Jerome why he studied so hard. The look Jerome had given Trey through his thick glasses hadn’t been the look of a cross teenager; it had been the look of a thoughtful, mature man. A look Trey only recognized because of his uncle Garner. “My grandparents used education to climb out of poverty,” Jerome had said. “I’m not going to be the first person in my family to leap back in.”
By asking around, Trey had learned that Jerome’s grandfather was a preacher and his father was a vice president at Mechanics and Farmers Bank. Jerome’s great-grandfather had been a sharecropper and his family before that had been slaves on some Harris’s farm. Jerome Harris, a professor of history specializing in the history of the South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, probably knew which, but Trey didn’t.
Jerome had opened Trey’s eyes to new possibilities. He’d started looking around at the family he met at weddings, funerals and reunions. Most were working class—farmers, mechanics, retired mill workers and the like. But there were also a number of teachers, and every once in a while a doctor or a lawyer popped up. There was even an army colonel. And the one thing all these escapees from the farm had in common was that they had studied hard enough in high school to get into a good college.
Since that moment, Trey and Jerome had leveled into a relationship somewhere between acquaintances and friends. They had nodded to each other in the hall all through middle and high school and kept in touch through college. No matter where their lives had drifted, occasional emails were exchanged and major life changes kept track of through Facebook, if nothing else. Like distant but friendly cousins, Trey supposed.
Jerome had always regarded Trey’s desire to escape Durham with a bit of amusement, saying, “If I can get along as a black man in the South, you can survive as a white one.” But Trey had watched his father drink and grow nothing but anger, dirt and kudzu while his mother worked long hours at a job she hated. If he didn’t pull up his roots and flee, he wouldn’t do any better. His destiny had been sown in the clay.
Even now, as he climbed into his car to parade to the graveyard for the burial, the familiar rolling hills of the Piedmont were more oppressive than picturesque. Trey wasn’t even able to feel relief that his father’s overbearing spirit was gone from the earth. The only positives about the day had been talking with Jerome and seeing Max’s muscular legs sticking out beneath her black skirt.
* * *
THE FIRST DAY of packing had been surprisingly easy, Trey thought as he watched his brother leave. His father had an absurd amount of clothes for an old man who never went anywhere, but it hadn’t been hard to sort them into donation and trash piles. Some of the clothes weren’t worth wearing to muck out a pigsty—apparently the man never threw anything away. And their father’s pack-rat tendencies would make the rest of the week harder, especially since the man hadn’t cleaned out their mother’s stuff in the five years since her death, either.
It was a two-for-the-price-of-one deal at the Harris family farm. Or Max’s Vegetable Patch, which was what the sign on the refrigerator van said. The name was cutesier than Trey associated with the woman who’d shot Pepsi can after Pepsi can without flinching.
Though he’d tried, he hadn’t been able to convince Kelly to stay for supper. His brother had taken some of the leftover food with him but had muttered on about his own life, leaving Trey alone in the house surrounded by his parents’ stuff. At least there was a Carolina game on and conference play had started.
His plate filled with a variety of casseroles, he looked out the kitchen window to see the light on in Max’s barn. Maybe he didn’t have to be alone in the house watching a basketball game. Trey stuck his plate in the microwave, set the timer and headed out the back. Ashes barked when he knocked on Max’s door.
She opened the door wearing an oversize turquoise sweater that looked surprisingly nice with her red hair, though a bit ridiculous with the pink-bunny pajama bottoms and fuzzy, purple slippers. As Trey had come to expect, Ashes was sitting at Max’s feet, though the dog looked less annoyed with his presence this time. Max was the suspicious-looking one now.
“I’m sorry for the way I acted at the viewing.” Which was true; he wished he’d had the sense to keep his anger to himself much like he’d managed to control his attraction to her.
“Losing a parent would be hard. Losing a parent and not being able to feel sad about it must be harder, I think.”
Is that what she thought? That it wasn’t that he shouldn’t feel sad, but that he couldn’t feel sad? He took a deep breath before he got distracted from his purpose. “Anyway, I was heating up some leftovers and wondered if you wanted any, though it looks like you’ve already eaten.” He gestured to her pajamas.
“No.” She smiled, and the rigid air that usually surrounded her relaxed. “I’m just too lazy to put on another set of clothes after I clean up for the day.”
“Lazy is not a word I would associate with you.” Every time he’d looked out a window today, Max had been busy doing. Trey wasn’t always sure what—when she wasn’t disappearing into the fields of the greenhouse, she was lifting things out of the back of her truck or walking around making notes—but she and the dog were always doing. At least he could tell what the dog had been up to. Ashes’s job seemed to be to keep the Canada geese out of the fields.
“You’ve not seen how tall I let the pile of dirty clothes get before going to the Laundromat.” She stepped back from the door and let him in.
“Dad didn’t let you use the washer in the house?”
“Sure, if I did his laundry, too.” That sounded more like his father than any nonsense about a cute chicken coop. “Hank and I got along better if he never saw me do anything that he might construe as ‘woman’s work.’ Though I think sometimes he said that phrase just to get a rise out of me.”
“I’m sure he meant the words.”
“Maybe at one time, but after your mother’s death, there was plenty of woman’s work to be done and no woman to do it. Hank got to be quite good at making biscuits in the morning. He would even share them. Though I’m not even sure he attempted to clean.” She seemed to be smiling at the memory of his father, which Trey still had a hard time believing. “What’s left for dinner?”
“A little bit of everything. And I was going to watch the Carolina game, if you’re interested.”
She appeared to give his invitation more consideration than he’d given it when the idea had hit him. Finally, she said, “Sure. Let me put some shoes on. Can Ashes come?”
“Of course. Did Dad not let Ashes in the house?”
“He did. Hank liked the dog quite a bit, but Ashes is always a little dirty. Just a warning.”
“Whatever mess he makes, I’ll leave for you to clean up when the farmhouse is yours.”
“Deal.”
He waited for her while she exchanged her slippers for shoes, wrapped a purple scarf around her neck and shoved a bright green toboggan—the local word for a knit ski cap—over her hair. From the hat on her head to the red shoes on her feet, she was a mass of bright colors. Since Trey had only seen her in either her work or funeral clothes he hadn’t expected the rest of her wardrobe to be so vibrant. He found himself wondering if she wore utilitarian, white underwear—as he would have guessed if asked—or if her panties were as vivid as the rest of her. Betting either way seemed dangerous. She had messed with his odds from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her.
And he’d never get to find out the answer anyhow.
His father hadn’t bothered to upgrade the electric baseboard heat in the house or add air-conditioning, but he had gotten a satellite dish so that even out in the country he could have ESPN. The man had had priorities, and Trey only disagreed with most of them. By the time Dick Vitalle’s annoying voice had started in with, “It’s Syracuse’s first time playing Carolina as an ACC team, baby,” Max’s food was hot and they were settled into Trey’s father’s recliners.
“I don’t think I’ve seen a college basketball game since, well, since college,” Max said, before a forkful of corn pudding disappeared into her mouth.
“Where did you go to college?”
She held up her fork and he waited until she swallowed. “Illinois, so I know a thing or two about college basketball.”
Trey scoffed. “Big Ten basketball is fine, so long as you’re in the Midwest.” He mimicked the accent he’d abandoned for most of his adult life. “Y’all down South now, ya’ hear.” When he turned to smile at her, she had an unabashed grin on her face. Her white teeth against her pale lips, her speckled skin and the wild mass of orange hair were a shining counterpart to the flashes from the oversize television.
He wrenched his face back to watch the game. The fact was, right now he controlled her livelihood. Even if he wanted to know just how much of her body was covered in freckles, he was leaving in a week. And he controlled her livelihood, he reminded himself again. The surge in his blood pressure would have to be attributed to the 10-0 run Carolina had just gone on. “So what does an organic vegetable farmer study in college?”
“Farm management, though I didn’t go to college planning on farming a small plot of land,” she said with a hitch in her voice. Had she felt the attraction between them, as well? “What does a— Oh, I don’t even know what it is you do besides wear a suit to work and do something with the government.”
Max was saying the words, but Trey could hear his father’s voice. Only crooks and politicians wear suits. Makes it easier for the crooks to blend in. Nothing in his father’s life had worked out the way he wanted it to and everyone but his father—the government, the immigrants, the blacks, the feminists—had been responsible for his troubles. North Carolina was full of the new South and the new Southerners to go along with it, but his father hadn’t been one of them. The only way Trey could figure Max had ended up leasing the land for an organic vegetable farm was that his father had been really drunk when the contract was signed and too lazy to find a way out of it afterward.
“I’m a lobbyist, though I used to work on Capitol Hill. I studied public policy in college.”
“Sounds important.”
Trey couldn’t judge the tone in her voice, so he risked another look at her between bites before replying, “I think so. I got into it because I can make a real difference in my government, and I make a good living at it. I’m not sure many others can say the same about their jobs.” Why he felt the need to defend himself in front of his dad’s farmer, of all people, he didn’t know and didn’t want to examine too closely.
“I wasn’t being sarcastic,” she said, her hands up in a show of honesty. “It really does sound important. I should pay more attention to legislation and my elected officials and such, but I only really know about what comes into my email from the farming associations I belong to.”
Unused to being complimented in this room, much less in this house, Trey turned the conversation back to Max. “What kind of legislative issues come into a farmer’s email?” At the suspicious face she made, it was his turn to hold up his hands and say, “No, really, I’m curious.”
There was just enough light in the room for him to see Max raise her eyebrows at him. “But not curious enough to take a tour of what I’ve done to your ancestral landholdings.”
The ridiculousness of that statement forced a laugh out of him. “Ancestral landholdings?”
“Sure. Your family has lived on these lands since time began, haven’t they?”
“Well, yes, but I’ve never considered this forty acres to be anything but a mud pit that money and time fall into.”
“Yeah,” Max said with a mixture of sympathy and amusement on her face. “Hank doesn’t seem to have been a very good farmer.”
“And you?”
“Am I a good farmer?” She shrugged. “What’s your metric? I sell out of my vegetables most weekends at the farmers’ market. My CSA subscriptions fill up every year, providing me with the money to buy seeds and plants without having to borrow. I’m not going to get rich, but I have a small savings account and some money for retirement. Plus, I grow nutritious vegetables people want to eat and my job allows me to spend most days outside, hands in the soil and the sun on my back.”
“And the rain.”
Max’s laugh was full and hearty. “You really are determined to spotlight the negatives of the farm. Yes, and the rain, which gets me wet, but also makes the plants grow.”
Her accusation stung a bit. He hadn’t meant for his hatred of the farm to bleed into his relationship with Max because, no matter how he felt about the farm, he was interested in the farmer. “You tell me about the legislation emails that interest you so much and I’ll let you give me a tour of the farm tomorrow.”
“More of that rain you’re so afraid of is supposed to hit tomorrow. Buckets of it.”
Her voice was warm, like the rays of sun she described hitting her back, even as she talked about the rain, and he wanted to see the land as she saw it. To understand what had attracted her to this life and had kept her willing to put up with his father when he called her a lady farmer. “Tell me what worries you, and I’ll agree to a tour, even if it’s in the rain.”