The Mulberry Tree

But what would Bailey tell her children when they asked for her opinion or guidance? “Go ask your father. He makes all the decisions. I just follow.” Is that what she’d say?

And Bailey had firsthand knowledge of how suddenly things could change. What if she and Matt had three kids, then he fell off a scaffolding and was killed? How was she supposed to support her children? Work double shifts waitressing and never see them? She’d read articles about adults who were angry at their stressed-out, overworked single mothers for never having spent much time with them when they were children.

What would she do

if Matt had an affair? Would she do what she’d done with Jimmie—bury herself in thirty-five quarts of grapefruit marmalade and pretend that she didn’t see what was going on? If Matt wanted to have a party with guests she didn’t like, what would she do? Plead fatigue and go to bed? It was one thing to escape from a party in a twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion, but quite another to try to get away in two thousand square feet. No, this time, Bailey wasn’t hiding; this time, she was frying cheese and onions for them.

And she was doing it in her own house!

When Bailey pulled into her driveway, she remembered when she had first seen the farmhouse with Phillip. It had been so ugly then! But in just six weeks, that had changed. Weekend after weekend Matt’s friends and relatives—as if they were holding a barn raising in a western novel—had helped them restore the house to what it had once been.

At first, Bailey had enjoyed the remodeling. Cooking for people who lavished praise on everything that she put before them had been a dream come true. It was what she’d envisioned that life could be. Matt was always there, laughing, smiling at her, his arm often around her. He bragged on her cooking and on the designs that she did for the kitchens in his house plans. With each week he was receiving more commissions for design work, and if he could get a permanent job with a New York company that sold house plans over the Internet, he would be able to remain in Calburn and earn a good living.

During the week, she and Matt had settled into a quiet, easy life. They knew each other’s favorite TV shows; he learned not to bother her when she was reading one of her beloved murder mysteries. They both disliked going out during the week, so they stayed at home and rented videos, or they worked on the thousand-piece puzzle set up in the corner by the fireplace and listened to Enya. Sometimes one or both of Matt’s nephews would spend the night; then Bailey would make popcorn, and she’d have to sit through some dreadful horror movie that would give her nightmares.

But there was no sex. When Matt and Bailey were alone, it was as though they were brother and sister. He was polite, but a bit distant. And since Bailey’s experience with the only man in her life was that he didn’t like aggressive women, she had no idea about how to approach Matt. And did she want to? She was afraid of messing up something great.

On the other hand, when people were around, Matt joked about sex often. He teased Bailey in a way that made the others look at them with approval; she knew that they all wanted her and Matt to stay together.

Matt’s lack of aggression when they were alone made Bailey feel, well, somewhat undesirable, so she teased him back when they were in public. To outsiders, she was sure they sounded as though they were having a great sex life. But sometimes, when she and Matt were alone, Bailey wanted to scream, “I know I said I wasn’t ready yet, but try me now!”

But Bailey didn’t yell anything. Instead, she cooked huge, wonderful meals. She made a big pot of chili and homemade bread when Matt and four of his friends from high school spent the day clearing the beehive out of the chimney. She made pizzas for the same men when they tore out the green bathroom.

And when Matt told her that he’d heard the boss of the company he was trying to get to hire him was considered a gourmet, he’d looked at Bailey with pleading eyes. Would she please make a killer dinner and help him get the job? he was silently asking her. Of course she’d volunteered, then spent twelve hours in the kitchen preparing a Moroccan feast. She made phyllo-pastry-wrapped olives and tomatoes, whole fish baked in spices, a seafood tagine fragrant with cardamon and cumin, and saffron chicken sprinkled with apricots, raisins, and almonds. And, of course, she made a b’stilla, that divine Moroccan dish of spiced, chopped chicken, eggs, and almonds wrapped in thin layers of pastry, baked until golden brown, then topped with sugar. For dessert, when the six men were groaning that they couldn’t eat another bite, Bailey served them plum-raspberry sorbet with tiny sugar cookies in the shape of houses. The six men had laughed at the joke, and the boss told Matt that he would be a welcome addition to their firm. “If you can design half as well as she can cook, you’ll double our sales,” the man had said.

During those weeks, Bailey often saw Janice and Patsy, but when Janice said that she’d “found nothing wrong” in her husband’s account books, even though she’d gone back through nine years, Bailey said nothing. And when Patsy said that her husband and sons had asked her to please not embroider another animal, plant, or fantasy creature on any of their clothing, Bailey had also said nothing. No, Bailey hadn’t wanted to upset the lovely, peaceful life that she’d always craved. Her life with Matt was what she’d tried to make with Jimmie. But Jimmie’s money and his . . . his need for “attention” got in the way of perfect happiness.

Now Bailey got out of the car and walked onto the front porch of the place. The house was beautiful now, the kind of place she’d always wanted. The deep porch wrapped around a third of the house, furnished with two wooden rockers with cane-bottom seats and three wicker chairs with flowered cushions. Matt had even hung a swing up at one end of it.

But Bailey didn’t sit on the porch very often. For one thing, she’d rarely seemed able to get out of the kitchen since the porch had been finished. Patsy said that Matt was trying to make up for lost time. “Rick said that when they were kids, Matt was too proud to participate in anything social because their family was too poor to reciprocate. Rick doesn’t have the ridiculous pride that Matt does, so my Rick went to any party anywhere; he and I had a great time in high school. But not Matt. Matt stayed alone. Then, of course, he married Cassandra.” Patsy said the last as though no further explanation was necessary.

Because of Patsy’s words, Bailey had felt an obligation to entertain half of Calburn and a great deal of the surrounding county over the last six weeks. She couldn’t very well deny Matt something he’d missed out on as a kid, could she? Besides, true to his word, Matt paid for all the food. And he always asked her if she minded cooking for so many people and so often. “No, I love it,” she’d said every time he asked.

Now she looked at the porch, but what she really saw was the chairs, the swing, and the two little tile-topped tables that had come out of a rented storage unit. It was part of what Matt got in his divorce settlement. “Since Cassandra bought them, I’m sure they must have cost the earth,” he’d said. “And they’re just sitting there, so we might as well use them. If it’s okay with you, that is?” he’d asked, looking at her. “Sure,” Bailey’d said. “Of course we should use them. It would be silly not to.” But she’d never liked the chairs. They were too slick, too “designer,” and the pattern of the chintz was too bright, too modern. Bailey would rather have taken a trip to North Carolina and purchased something made by a craftsman there. But she didn’t tell Matt that.

Inside the house, she looked around. The living room was a far cry from what it had been when she’d moved in. The kitchen was now open to the living room, with stools at the granite countertop. For the last three Saturdays she’d served the men something called “fried cheese” while they watched a baseball game on the big-screen TV that Matt had brought home one Friday evening. “They’re not used to foreign food,” Matt had said the night before the men, all of whom he’d known in high school, were to come over and help him replace the unstable floor in the attic. “Don’t get me wrong, I love what you cook, but these guys grew up in Calburn, and, well . . . ” He didn’t have to finish; she understood what he meant. The second Saturday the men came (and there were more of them that day), one of them brought her a thank-you gift. It was a machine to cut onions into segments, which, when deep-fried, would make an “onion flower.”

The men, under Matt’s supervision, had made the room beautiful. The kitchen was small and efficient, with its huge walk-in pantry for storage. There were no overhead cabinets, just open shelves where she stored her most-used items. Matt had borrowed a friend’s woodworking shop, and he’d made her lower cabinets out of knotty pine that he’d pulled off the walls of the garage he’d remodeled. They’d laughed together over the fact that the woman didn’t like the beautiful old pine, but wanted Matt to put up plasterboard in its place. “And she covered it with wallpaper that was printed to look like knotty pine,” he said, making them both howl with laughter.

Matt filled the nail holes, sanded the pine just enough to take off years of grease and soot, then finished the wood with a matte-finish sealer. The cabinets were so beautiful they made Bailey smile every time she saw them.

But if the kitchen was all hers, other parts of the house seemed to have no relation to her. What Patsy said about Matt making up for lost time rang in her ears. In a way, Matt seemed to be trying to rewrite history. Matt had been a recluse, Patsy said, when he was in high school, and later he’d left Calburn “before the ink was dry on his diploma.” But now he was constantly calling men he’d gone to high school with and trying to renew friendships that, according to Patsy and Rick, had never existed.

“You hated him in high school,” Rick said one day when Matt said that a certain “old buddy” was coming over on Saturday. “That jerk wanted everyone to think that he was the best football player Calburn had ever produced, even though he knew that you could out-throw and outrun him. But you had to work after school and on weekends, so you couldn’t be on the team. Remember the showdown you two had in the parking lot when you worked at the Dairy Queen? The manager fired you that night.” “That was a long time ago,” Matt had mumbled, then turned on the TV and refused to comment on the matter any more.

Now framed photos of Matt’s family hung in Bailey’s house, along with a couple of landscape paintings. They weren’t bad, but Matt had bought them with his ex-wife. “Friend of her father’s painted them,” Matt said. “Not worth much now, but they may be someday.” “So why didn’t Cassandra take them?” Bailey had asked. Matt shrugged. “Carter didn’t like them.” Bailey had wanted to say, “Neither do I,” but she hadn’t.

&nb

sp; The hall closet was packed full of Matt’s sports equipment; she could barely squeeze a broom in the front. The third bedroom was filled with boxes that hadn’t been opened since Matt’s divorce. He said he was going to unpack someday, but he never seemed to find time to do it.

Upstairs, “her” loft was now packed with Matt’s business equipment. He had bought something called a CAD system to make his designs. The floor on the far side of the attic had been repaired, the little railing taken down, and that area too was filled with Matt’s possessions. He’d set up another drawing board with a drafting machine that slid up and down the surface. “I think better with a pencil in my hand than with a mouse,” he’d said, smiling. In the corner was a fat easy chair with a light over it and a big ottoman. Matt had built shelves all along the walls and filled them with hundreds of his reference books.

Bailey walked out the back door, across the newly exposed porch, and into the garden. At least the mulberry tree was the same, she thought. Pausing, she looked up at the big, old branches, at the fruit that was nearly ripe. Until today, she’d thought that she loved the way her life was heading, but the double blows of hearing that the shop had been sold, then being taken back to the past by Arleen, seemed to have changed how she was seeing things.

As she looked up at the mulberry tree, she knew she had reached a turning point in her life. Jimmie’s death had started it, and that event had led up to this moment. She had some important decisions to make. She could allow things to continue as they were—and with that thought, she remembered how she’d always let things “continue as they are.” It was true that Jimmie was already rich and famous when he’d met her, but he’d been as famous for his daredevil stunts as for anything else. After their marriage he’d stopped his more flamboyant pursuits and entered what the media called “the world of the big boys.” Only after he married the young, quiet, plump Lillian Bailey did he become a contender for the coveted title of richest man in the world.

She knew that what she’d given Jimmie was the knowledge that someone on earth knew him, the real him, and loved him anyway. To be truly loved, wasn’t that the most powerful drug in the world? Jimmie used to pick her up, whirl her about, and say, “You give me the strength to do it, Frecks. I don’t need much in this world, but I need you.”