The Mulberry Tree

“I went by myself,” Patsy said, her chin up, her mouth set in that line of defiance that her family knew too well.

“Oh, ho,” said one of her big, strapping, six-foot-tall, eighteen-year-old twin sons. “A fight is about to happen.”

“I got fifty on Mom,” John said.

“Twenty-five on Dad,” Joe said.

“You two want any dessert, you’ll can it,” Patsy said in warning, then looked back at her brother-in-law, pretending to ignore her sons as they made silent betting gestures.

“Patsy,” Rick said, “what’s that woman going to think of the people in Calburn if you and Janice go over there together, then don’t speak to each other?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Patsy said, her eyes still on Matt as he mushed the meat loaf with his fork. “We aren’t talking about me. Mrs. James needs a contractor, and you, Matt, are it. I told her that you’d take on the job.”

Matt didn’t look up. He knew that his life was in his sister-in-law’s hands. He was living in her house, so he was at her mercy. And he knew that she hadn’t set him up with “the widow” for any reason except to match-make—with the intention of getting him out of her house.

“Matthew, I am talking to you,” Patsy said in the same tone she used on the other three men in her life. “Are you going to do this one tiny thing for me or not?”

“What did you tell her about me?” he mumbled, pretending to have his mouth full.

“Not to give you any sex,” she snapped, and that made all four males stop eating and look up at her. When she had their attention, she said, “Are you going or not?”

“With that condition already in the works—” Joe began, but the look his mother gave him cut him off.

“I’ll go, but not tonight. Tonight I have to . . . ” He couldn’t think of anything.

“Watch Buffy?” John suggested, both boys obviously loving their uncle’s discomfort. This summer they were working construction with him and, based on the way he was at home, they’d thought they were going to have an easy time of it. But Uncle Matt at home and Matt the boss were two different people. They’d learned that the first day, when they’d sauntered back from a two-hour lunch.

“What’s she going to do with the old Hanley place anyway?” Rick asked, attracting his wife’s attention and thereby letting his big brother off the hook.

“As she said, what else can she do but live there?” Patsy said as she went back to the stove. “I don’t think her husband left her very much money, certainly not enough to live on. But her husband’s lawyer seems to have bought her a lot. Anybody want any more meat loaf?”

All but Matt asked for seconds.

“Why did her lawyer buy her any thing?” Joe asked. “Was she having an adulterous affair with him?”

“Richard Longacre!” Patsy said to her husband. “You have got to do something with these boys. The way they talk is a disgrace.”

“Now, Pats,” Rick said, reaching out and putting his arm around his wife’s trim waist. “They aren’t children anymore.” He gave a sideward glance to his brother, silently telling him that he could leave the table and get away from Patsy’s questions.

That had been last night, and all day today, Matt had dreaded tonight’s meeting. He and his nephews had been working thirty miles away, converting a garage into a guest room, so he’d been spared from hearing about the woman who had set all of Calburn talking. After work today, he’d hurriedly kissed Patsy’s cheek, mumbled something about having to meet a client, and then had gone to the diner in Calburn for a grease burger.

“I hear she’s loaded,” Ruth Ann, the waitress, had said as she poured him a cup of coffee. She was talking not to Matt but to a couple of the locals who had gathered to discuss the goings-on out at the old Hanley place.

“She’d have to be rich to pay for all those men. But why waste it in Calburn? Why not go somewhere else, some place closer to civilization?” asked Mark Underwood. Mark was leaving in the fall for college, and he couldn’t wait to get out of Calburn and never come back.

The others in the diner ignored him.

“You know what I think?” said Opal of Opal’s Beauty Salon down the street. “I think she’s up to something. I think she’s planning to open one of them, what do you call them? Where you stay overnight and eat breakfast?”

Matt was looking into his cup to see what the coffee was like tonight: colored water or motor oil. Once, in an attempt to make a joke, he’d suggested that if Ruth Ann mixed the two together, it might make decent coffee. She’d told him that if he

didn’t like the coffee in Calburn, he could go back to his hoity-toity ex-wife and ask her to make him some coffee. Matt had sighed. There were no secrets in a small town.

As he pondered the contents of his cup, he suddenly became aware of the silence around him. When he looked up, he saw that everyone in the diner was looking at him, obviously waiting for him to give an opinion. Thanks to Patsy, he was considered to be the “big-city expert.” “Bed-and-breakfast,” he said. “It’s called a bed-and-breakfast.”

“Sort of a diner with a motel attached, isn’t it?” Ruth Ann said. “Does that mean she thinks there’s room enough in this town for two diners?”

Matt got up, put a five-dollar bill on the table, and walked toward the door. “Ruth Ann,” he said, “I don’t think you should worry. Your business is unique. No one could replace you and this diner.”