“Who was far from being a child,” Kathy said.
“Right. I was the adult but he...he was outdoing me. His work was applauded while mine was ridiculed. The children adored him but they tolerated me. My shield was bad. His was perfect. In my mind, war had been declared. I had to prove that I was better than he was.”
Kathy opened a bottle of wine. “What did you fight with? Cooking and what else?”
“Everything. Anything.” Olivia closed her eyes for a moment. “For three weeks I nearly killed myself. Remember the movie about the woman who cooked everything in Julia Child’s book? I almost did it before she did. Duck a l’orange and coquilles Saint Jacques and Bavarian crème. I canned grape jam and marmalade and gallons of apple butter. I made huge pots of soupe au pistou and vichyssoise and froze them.”
“I bet the old men loved that,” Kathy said.
“They certainly did! Mr. Gates went to the grocery nearly every day. They began talking about food like they were writing critiques for the New York Times.”
“And the children?” Elise asked.
Olivia smiled. “Something I could do that Kit couldn’t was sew. I rummaged in the attic and found an old treadle machine and my mother cleaned out her fabric storage. I made the kids medieval-looking outfits to go with the shields Kit had made—which, by the way, I coated in silver paint. Thanks to lessons in set design, I put a blue dragon on Ace’s and a white unicorn on Letty’s. I got hugs and kisses for that one.”
“What did Kit do?” Kathy asked.
“Worked as hard as I did. Every day, Bill, Letty’s father, came by and told us what Kit was doing. He single-handedly cleared up the old cemetery. Bill told us how Kit lifted big marble headstones and reset them in concrete, and how he cleaned off the moss. And he repaired the old fence, then planted rosebushes around the whole place. Bill said that Kit had slithered on his belly through the wild blackberry vines to reach the old well house and repair the roof.”
Olivia took a breath. “Bill said that between Kit and me doing so much work, he and his wife were having time for a second honeymoon. ‘Nina really wants another baby,’ he said. The old men laughed at that, but I was embarrassed.”
“Who won?” Kathy asked.
“Neither of us,” Olivia said. “It ended when we slept together.”
“Ah...good ole sex,” Elise said with a sigh.
“No, not sex. Sleep. And we didn’t know we were together. We’d had weeks of no rest and masses of work. We were exhausted. We didn’t know it, but we both collapsed under the big magnolia tree, one of us on each side, and fell asleep. Everything would have been all right if the kids hadn’t seen us.”
Olivia laughed. “By that time I’d fed all of them so much butter-laden food that they were having digestive problems. They were getting homesick for the bland food they usually ate. And the kids were refusing to eat anything with anchovies or garlic and absolutely no chicken livers. They wanted canned tomato soup and grilled cheese—and nothing green added to either one. ‘Like the old days,’ they said.”
Olivia smiled. “Years later, Dr. Kyle—that’s who Ace grew up to be—told me that Uncle Freddy said that if Livie and Kit didn’t stop fighting his heart was going to burn up. Poor softhearted Ace started to cry. He’d never heard of heartburn and didn’t know it wasn’t fatal. He just thought Uncle Freddy was going to be taken to the hospital where his mother was.”
“What did they do to get you two together?” Kathy asked.
“Weaving.” Olivia’s eyes were sparkling in memory. “While we were asleep, those loud, boisterous children tiptoed around Kit and me on fairy feet and tied us inside spider’s webs. I think they thought that if they tied us to one spot we’d talk and become friends. At least that’s my guess. Shall we go sit in the living room?”
“Only if you tell more of the story.” Elise stood up.
“I agree,” Kathy said as they left the kitchen.
Chapter Sixteen
Summer Hill, Virginia 1970
Olivia woke when a bunch of pebbles rained down on her body. They were followed by the muffled giggles of two kids, then the sound of their running away.
She didn’t open her eyes. She knew she was lying under the big magnolia tree and that she’d been sound asleep. A stick was poking her in the back, but she didn’t mind. The air was heavy with warmth and fragrance. For weeks now she’d rarely left the kitchen and she was sick of it! Onions, tomatoes, cucumbers. She wasn’t sure she ever again wanted to see any of them.
And it was all the fault of that boy! The way he’d raised gravestones without any help. Tore away briars with his bare hands. Built things. Restored. Repaired.
It was all totally disgusting—and she’d had enough of him.
With a sigh, she opened her eyes and looked up at the underside of the big, beautiful tree. Uncle Freddy said his mother had planted it and that’s why there was a statue of her under it. The kids said she was the queen of a planet called Athena—they’d heard the name from Uncle Freddy—and they made flower garlands to drape on her.
Olivia knew she had to get up. She had jam to make. Soup to cook. Chickens to roast. “Wonder what phenomenal things he’s done while I was sleeping,” she muttered.
When she started to lift her hand, she couldn’t. “What in the world?” She tried to sit up, but she seemed to be tied to the ground.
She gave a sharp tug to her arm and it broke away. Lying still, on her back, she held up her arm and looked at it. There were about a dozen strands of various colors of sewing thread over her arm.
Slowly, she sat up. Each movement pulled threads away from where they were tied to clothespins that had been pushed into the soft ground.
Her annoyance changed to amazement. How in the world had the children done this Lilliputian task? She’d seen a big, illustrated version of Gulliver’s Travels in Letty’s room. Had the children tried to copy it?
“What the hell?”
It was “his” voice coming from the other side of the tree.
“I can hear you breathing,” he said, “so get over here and cut these off of me.”
She knew he thought she was the children. “It’s me.” They were the first words she’d addressed to him that weren’t hostile. “Are you tied down?”
He gave a grunt of pain. “Yeah. You?”
Olivia gave a few kicks, then rolled her body to the side, and the threads broke. She stood up and walked around to the far side of the tree.
Kit was sitting on the ground, untying his ankles from purple knitting yarn. As always, he was as naked as he could get without being arrested, and there was yarn hanging off all of him.
A bit of a laugh escaped Olivia.
He looked up at her in disgust. “I know. More ridicule of the worthless boy.”
Olivia held out her arms and multicolored threads hung down from them. “It’s a bat wing fringe. Think the style will catch on?” Threads were also on her dress and around her ankles.
At her joke, Kit leaned back on his hands and his face softened. “Looks like they got you too.”
Bending, she used her nails to loosen the knots in the yarn around his ankles. “How do you think those children did this without waking us?” She sat back on the ground a few feet away from him and began pulling threads off her clothes.
Kit was tugging at the pink yarn around his wrist and when he couldn’t loosen the knot, he held his arm out to Olivia. “Hovering spacecraft. I’d believe anything of those two. I have to put cracked corn around the blackberry vines to keep them out of there. Warning them that the thorns will make them bleed doesn’t do it.”
Olivia was trying to get the knot undone but it was too tight. She started to break the yarn, but Kit pulled his arm away. “You’ll hurt yourself.” When he broke it, there was a red mark on his wrist.
She was trying to pay no attention to being so close to his nearly naked body. “Why cracked corn?”