The Mulberry Tree

“Walter Quincey?” Janice said with a sneer. “He’ll take your money, and you’ll never see any work. He’s the laziest man in two counties. No, you need a real builder, someone who knows what he’s doing.”

Patsy wasn’t saying a word, just looking around the barn. Bailey hoped she hadn’t hurt the woman’s feelings by turning down her brother-in-law so harshly, but Bailey wanted to make herself clear from the beginning.

Patsy looked at Bailey. “Did I tell you that my brother-in-law is a building contractor?”

Instantly, Bailey was at war with herself. She didn’t want to encourage this woman or her bimbo-marrying brother-in-law, but the image of those kitchen cabinets that were barely hanging onto the walls danced before her eyes. “Your brother-in-law is a building contractor?” she heard herself ask.

“More or less. He’s an architect, but he can build things too.”

“Is he any good?” She had a vision of green tiles being thrown out the bathroom window, dark paneling torn from the walls.

“He used to build skyscrapers in Dallas.”

“Is he expensive? I don’t have much money.”

“Well, honey, that’s obvious,” Patsy said in a way that made Bailey blink. “Everyone in town is talking about how some man named Phillip is paying for all of this for you.”

When Patsy didn’t say anything else, Bailey realized that both women were expecting her to tell them who “Phillip” was. She didn’t want to; it wasn’t any of their business. “My husband’s attorney,” she said at last, then gave a sigh.

“But if you’re broke, you came to a good place,” Patsy continued. “Nothing in Calburn can be expensive, because no one could afford it. Except some people, that is,” she said, then she glanced in the general direction of Janice.

“Some people—” Janice began, not looking at Patsy but finally acknowledging her presence.

Now what? Bailey thought. A catfight? She rolled her eyes skyward. What have you dropped me into, James Manville? she asked silently.

“All right,” Bailey said loudly. “I’ll marry him if he’ll repair this house. Or does he want only sex? Or both?”

The two women turned to look at her, their mouths hanging open so identically that Bailey was sure they were related.

Patsy was the first to recover herself. “Sex might cheer him up,” she said without a trace of a smile, “but if you start having sex with a man here in Calburn, it might ruin it for the rest of us. My advice is that you offer to pay him half what he asks and hold off on the sex.” She punched in some numbers on her cell phone. “And it’s my experience that hints are better than the real thing. When you ask him to clean out the septic system, wear short shorts.”

Bailey smiled at the two women. We might get along after all, she thought. When Patsy said into the phone, “Matt, I’ve got a job for you,” Bailey’s smile grew even more wide.

Five

When Bailey awoke the next morning, her first feeling was of fear, old-fashioned terror, because this time she did remember where she was. Her bed had been moved from the barn to the bedroom, and she was surrounded by dark paneling that seemed to make the room close in on her. Light was coming in through the bare windows, but it only showed the ugliness of the room to better advantage.

Last night she’d been so tired that she’d fallen into bed, barely remembering to pull her nightgown over her head. But she hadn’t slept well; her dreams had been haunted by memories of Jimmie. In all their sixteen years together, they had never been apart for this long. If Jimmie went somewhere interesting, he took her with him. “Hey, Frecks,” he’d said once. “How’d you like to see those turtles on that island?” It took her a moment to understand where he meant. “Galapagos,” she said, and Jimmie had smiled at her. She had just finished high school when she’d met him, but she’d read a lot since then, and her knowledge pleased him. “Sure,” she said. “When do we leave?” “Half an hour.” “That long?” she said, then they’d laughed together.

Now Bailey wiped at her eyes, which had begun to mist over. Jimmie wasn’t here, and he was never going to return.

Slowly, she got out of bed and went into the bathroom, with its various-colored toilet fixtures. When she looked into the mirror at her “new” face, it startled her. She’d lived thirty-two years with her large, bent nose, and she’d been plump all her life. To

see something different was disconcerting.

“Now what do I do?” she asked herself aloud as she stepped into the shower. Yesterday she’d asked those two women if they’d known of any job openings, but Bailey knew she was lying to herself as well as them. What skills did she have that would get her a job? She’d never learned to type, and she was probably the only person in the United States under the age of eighty who didn’t know how to use a computer. “Why waste your time?” Jimmie had said. “I can hire people to work computers.”

She had no experience at anything in the world, really, except at being a wife.

She turned off the shower, then slowly dried off on the stiff, new towels that hadn’t yet been washed and pulled on a pair of chinos from the clothes that she and Carol had ordered. Maybe I could call Phillip, she thought, then pushed that thought from her mind. She had a fear that if she called Phillip, the next step would be going to Atlanta and Ray and begging for money.

Taking a deep breath, Bailey opened the bedroom door and walked down the few feet of hallway and into the living room. Late yesterday, Phillip had sent a truck-load of heavyset men to open all the boxes and crates in the barn and set the contents inside the house wherever Bailey wanted them. Now, she tried to look not at the dark, windowless walls but at the furniture. She’d chosen it under circumstances of great duress, and a week later she couldn’t remember any of it, but now she was pleased with it.

There were two couches printed with big red peonies, golden vines, and green leaves, and two comfortable-looking chairs in the dark gold color of the print. A big coffee table stood in the middle. At the far end of the room was a large dining table set on a red Oriental carpet, surrounded by eight Windsor chairs painted a dark blue. Against the wall was a box full of curtains of red-and-black plaid. The movers hadn’t known how to hang the curtains, and, besides, there weren’t enough windows for all of them.

But in spite of the nice furniture, the room was not inviting. How could any room as dark as this one make people want to stay in it?

Bailey walked through the doorway to the kitchen. Yesterday the men had been wonderful. They’d done as much as they could to make the kitchen livable, but it hadn’t been enough. One of the electricians and a plumber had pulled the overhead cabinets off the wall, saying that to leave them up there was dangerous. When the movers had wheeled the giant cooking range, a forty-eight-inch-wide Thermador, into the room, there had been nowhere to put it. One of the gardeners had solved the problem by taking a chain saw to the lower cabinets and cutting out a section. The electrician had hooked up the gas line. It had taken more sawing to put in the big Sub-Zero double-door refrigerator three feet from the range. The men had put the porcelain sink with its tall, integrated backsplash on the other side of the room. “We threw out one of those when we redid my grandmother’s kitchen,” one of the men said as they dropped the sink into place. Beside it, the plumber set the Miele dishwasher she’d purchased.