Any Rainy Thursday Read online

  She stayed open later on Saturday, so by the time she was ready to leave it was dusk, her favorite part of the day. It was when the air cooled and the light grew soft, and she could sit for a few minutes in the rose arbor and restore her spirits. She poured a plastic cup of iced tea from the pitcher she kept in the stand refrigerator and walked across the lawn toward her favorite place.

  The arbor had been designed by her great-grandmother. She had seen a picture somewhere, or read a description in a romantic novel, and had cajoled her doting husband into building it for her. What she had actually wanted was an elaborate Victorian style gazebo, a garden house on the side lawn, according to Althea’s grandmother, but she had settled for the arbor and had made it her own special place of refuge. It was now Althea’s.

  The arbor was built of lattice work over a sturdy oak frame, painted white at some time in the past but now mostly returned to natural wood. It bisected a long hedge of old lilacs and several other ornamental bushes that separated the front lawn from what was once a pasture, but now just another patch of natural grass, kept mowed but otherwise not cared for. There were no longer cows in the big barn attached to her house and Althea did not miss them. That barn had served Uncle Raymond, and now her, as a garage and storage space.

  The arbor was eight feet wide and stretched over ten feet through the hedge with a rounded roof of interwoven slats about twelve feet above the flagstone walkway. Generous benches lined either side. The armrests built into the ends of the arbor served well as drink holders. It was as close as great-grandmother could come to her desired gazebo and she had made the most of it. Althea’s Aunt Emily had added deep cushions covered with outdoor fabric in patterned leafy greens. Several old rambler roses climbed the sides of the arbor and met in the middle of the top of the arched top, dark pink on one side, a softer shade of the other, intermingling as they cascaded through the top. When they bloomed in June, their sprays of small blooms scented the whole yard. For Althea, it was an enchanted place.

  Emily had set terra-cotta planters at both ends of the walkway, great round bowls that overflowed with a variety of flowering annuals. This year, Althea had chosen several shades of hybrid geraniums, dusty miller, trailing variegated ivy, and calendulas for seasonal color. Mixed in was a bright purple flower Connie had added, but she had not had a name for it, calling it “something my mother had.” There were many things around like that, half-forgotten pieces of the past. Althea cherished them. Someday, maybe, she would find their names.

  Along the front of the hedge were spring bulbs. Daffodils, paperwhites, spiderworts in several colors, a selection of bearded irises, both pink and white old-fashioned bleeding hearts, and peonies in a variety of shades of pink. There were also asters and mums, which would bloom later. Althea frequently thanked her ancestors for their love of flowers. She didn’t have a lot of time, and needed the hardy perennials they had chosen.

  She settled herself on the left-hand bench, the one that gave her a view of her gardens on the other side of what she thought of as her side lawn. Ed kept it mowed, but she did little with it except enjoy the fact that it was an open sunny space. Space that could be used someday if she chose. Right now, she had as much as she could manage, and extending the irrigation to this area would be difficult. If she could get it to work at all.

  As seemed to be happening more often lately, the cooling air and the deepening shadows did not bring her the quiet enveloping peace that her mind and body craved. She needed somebody to enjoy it with, someone who shared her love of the land. And she needed rain, both for the gardens and the refreshing of her spirit.

  When she could, she walked in the warm summer rain at dusk, that intimate time before full dark, letting the rain soak into her skin and wash the dust of the day from her hair and revive her soul. She would have walked nude, to fully experience the rain, but she was not quite that much of a free spirit, as much as she sometimes wanted to be, even imagined herself to be. Her house was near the road, and she did have a few neighbors, so she wore an oversized T-shirt, knowing full well that once wet, it obscured nothing. Her most intimate fantasy was to meet a lover in the rain under the rose arbor. So far, she had shared that dream with no one. All the men she knew were much too practical and, as they often told her, knew enough to come in out of the rain. Somewhere there must be somebody.

  Still in the throes of an unexplainable sadness, brought on maybe by the lack of rain, she pushed herself to her feet, glanced around the yard once more, and walked home to take a shower. It was the next best thing and the only help she could think of.

  She would have a sandwich and salad for supper, then watch an old movie or a ball game, or maybe finish the book she had started. None of it was very appealing.

  THE THIRD MEETING WITH MILES

  Sunday morning was the one day she allowed herself an extra hour of sleep and a leisurely breakfast while she planned her day. But it was still early, not much after seven. The sun was above the trees on the hill beyond the eastern side of the fields but had not yet reached the top of the stand below her. The yard sloped just enough toward the road to give the impression of height, of being above everything, but she had never thought of herself, or the stand, as being above what she was a part of.

  This was the place she loved, where her heart was, where she had spent much of her childhood visiting her grandparents, happily working beside Uncle Raymond while her older sister, Francesca, declined to dirty her hands. Her two much older cousins had no interest in farming, and had left for professional life when they had finished college. Both of them had eventually moved south for milder winters.

  She totally adored her house, in spite of its many shortcomings and constant need of upkeep, as it usually tended to be with old houses. It was a typical New England farmhouse, a story-and-a-half with an attached ell containing a woodshed, former carriage shed, and a tack room that led to the barn. Half of the houses in Somerset were of the same general style, built before the Civil War during a period of general prosperity. The porch, which her grandfather had half screened in, extended across the front of the main house. Someday, she told herself frequently, she would enclose the rest of it into a three-season sunroom. There were just too many mosquitoes to allow sitting outside on nice summer evenings.

  The house was much as it was when it was built. Aunt Emily had liked the old-fashioned wainscoting, the crown molding in the front parlor, and the wide pine plank floors, and had never modernized anything but the kitchen and the two bathrooms. Althea was thankful for that, too. There is really nothing quite like a good shower, and ceramic tile is much easier to keep clean than old plaster walls. The well that served the house and barn had never failed, but the annoying irrigation system was attached to another well. It was not quite as reliable in a drought, but should serve. The local contractor who had installed it earlier this spring said it should work fine, and he could find no reason why it didn’t. It must be some fault of hers, he said. She had stopped arguing with him, but she had considered some legal action. The system had not been cheap, even if she had found it secondhand.

  So she sat in the screened part of her porch, with a second cup of coffee and an apple turnover from the local bakery that supplied cookies for the stand, and contemplated what would be another lovely day even without the needed rain. The commentator on the radio on the table beside her had said as much before she had turned off his depressing litany of world news and found a station offering her kind of music: instrumental classics.

  But a glorious summer morning, even one without a promise of rain, was not a time for depression. She had a full day ahead of her, customers to visit with, and no Connie to help. This afternoon, Becca Ross would come in over the noon hour. Althea liked Sundays.

  The day was as she had expected it to be. Her usual customers stopped for corn on their way home from church. Barbecues were planned and people wanted green salads. The first
of the local blueberries had been delivered, and the last of the raspberries. She rarely stocked anything from outside the county, but she had a wide variety of small farmers and niche growers as local suppliers. Life was good. Mostly, anyway.

  She closed at four on Sunday afternoon, a concession she granted herself and those who worked with her.

  “You can’t work all the time,” her grandmother often said, admonishing her grandfather who seemed to never stop, except for church on Sunday morning. “Everybody needs a little time to think and rest the body.” Althea thought of it as regrouping, marshaling her inner resources for another week.

  Her grandfather had died comparatively young, in his seventies, but it had not been from overwork. Cancer can happen to anyone, and it had not spared her own father.

  She chose a bottle of root beer from her limited selection, picked up a plastic cup because she disliked drinking from a bottle, barred the big doors, hung up the closed sign, and walked to the rose arbor. She glanced at the flower bed in front of the hedge as she passed. It really needed weeding. Maybe she should invest in some mulch, as much as she disliked the rather sterile effect, preferring the natural look, even if it took a lot more work. But today was not the day for that. She settled on the left side bench as usual, picked up a magazine she had discarded during a previous visit as not being very interesting, and heard a vehicle stop in front of the stand. She decided to ignore it. The stand was closed. Anyone she knew well would come around the corner to go the house.

  It was Miles Davidov who came into view. He came toward her, grinning. Infuriatingly. He didn’t just walk, he strode confidently, as if he was not only welcome, but belonged here.

  “Hi,” he said. “I guess I’m too late to pick up some cucumbers. I wondered where you were.”

  She didn’t move. He should have taken the closed doors as a hint and kept going. “I close early on Sunday.”

  He sat down uninvited on the opposite bench. “Probably a good idea. I try to take weekends off, but it usually doesn’t work out that way.”

  “It depends on what you do for work.” She didn’t ask for details. She didn’t want to encourage him.

  “Yeah.” He leaned back, stretched his legs out, and gazed up at the top of the arbor. “This is a nice spot. Very pretty. It must have been here quite a while to have those roses like that.”

  She wondered what he knew about old roses, how slow growing the heritage climbers were. “My great-grandmother designed it.” She tried to keep her voice noncommittal, as cold as she could manage. He was much too good looking and beginning to attract her. Superficially.

  He lowered his eyes to meet hers in a long, appraising, and discomforting, gaze. “You don’t have any music out here?”

  His oddly colored eyes were bright and inquisitive, and unsettling. She answered, “No.”

  He studied the arbor again, gazing into the sprawling roses and around the upper edges. “Maybe you should have it wired so you could. Bury the wires. Put a speaker up there in the top. The roses would about hide it.”

  The idea was appalling. “No. This is my retreat from technology.” She added firmly, “Just as my Aunt Emily left it.”

  “Oh.” He sat up straight again. “That could be a good idea, too, but,” he looked directly at her. “I like your kind of music.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I don’t like the hip-hop, the hard rock, the acid stuff. That isn’t real music.”

  There was a note in his voice that she unwillingly responded to, warming a little toward him. She didn’t care for that kind, either. It tended to be jarring and could give her a headache. “A lot of people do like it.”

  “Yeah. Kids.”

  “So,” she asked, leaning back into her seat, “Do you play an instrument?” She envisioned him with a guitar. He looked the type.

  “Sometimes.”

  He sounded evasive. Maybe he only wanted to play but didn’t. Or couldn’t.

  She could sympathize with that. Music was an integral part of her life, and her inability to play an instrument as well as she wanted to was one of the hurts she lived with. Her much enjoyed childhood piano lessons had taught her technique but proved that she did not have the natural ability to continue beyond playing for her own enjoyment. Nor did she have the desire to commit to the many hours of practice it would have required to be more, since that would have ruined her pleasure in playing. She had tried, while in high school, to play a flute and be part of a band, but it didn’t work out. She didn’t have the proper temperament, and she didn’t like the music they played. It wasn’t proper flute music, but the instructor hadn’t agreed.

  Her favorite instrument was her great-grandmother’s 1860s Estey reed organ. It was a parlor instrument, one of the plainer designs, and she had her grandmother’s trove of sheet music. Her grandmother had played for the village church for many years, and there were many old hymns in the collection, but she had also liked the music of the abolition era, of women’s rights, the Hutchinson Family Singers, and the Civil War. That so few other people enjoyed it now was discouraging.

  Miles had said no more, just sat continuing to gaze at the top of the arbor. She asked, to be polite since he did not appear to be ready to leave, “Just what kind of music do you like?”

  He glanced at her and shrugged. “All kinds of stuff, as long as it’s played well. And properly.”

  His self-assured arrogance was back, riling her. “In your opinion, I suppose.”

  He laughed, a rich warm chuckle. “In music, it’s always the listener’s opinion.” He glanced sideways at her again. “I really dislike opinionated critics who don’t perform anywhere. What do they know?”

  She unscrewed the top of her soda bottle and poured some of it into her cup, hoping he would get the message that he was not really welcome. “Sometimes they know a lot.”

  He didn’t answer for a long minute. Then he said seriously, “The old music needs to be played on the old instruments. The ones it was written for.”

  She studied him covertly over the top of her cup. “And I suppose you know all about those?”

  “I’ve heard a few. Like a melodion, or a really old Irish harp, or good pan pipes.” He glanced at her, his eyebrows raised. “Or a glass harmonica. Have you heard, or seen one played?”

  She hadn’t, but she knew what it was, a series of water-filled glasses, each providing a different tone when a wet finger was run around the rim. She sipped at her drink and said nothing. She did not like egotistical show-offs. But his knowledge was intriguing, and she wondered about his background. She would not, however, ask.

  He pushed himself to his feet. “I guess you aren’t in a talkative mood.” He saluted her, half seriously. “I’ll come back another time, Althea. To get my cucumbers.”

  “Do that.”

  He was still watching her. “My name’s Miles, remember?”

  She nodded at him. “So you said. Miles Davidov.”

  He smiled, nodded at her, and turned away.

  She watched him walk away. In her very biased opinion, he strutted. His self-importance, his ego, his arrogance, she could not name it, radiated around him. She revised that assessment to oozing. She heard his Jeep start and drive away and released a long breath.

  His intrusion had spoiled her afternoon peace. She picked up her drink and walked up the hill, intending to do a little housework. She could come back to the arbor in the cool dusk. Then she would be alone. But she wondered, again turning to look at the road where Miles’ Jeep had vanished around the bend. Just how much did she want to be alone, just how much did Miles know about old music? And did she really want to know?

  She shifted her frustrations to a flurry of house cleaning chores, filling the dishwasher, sweeping, and dusting until she was tired. She took her supper, soup and sandwich,
into the living room to watch a ball game. It was a poor substitute for company.

  FRIDAY

  Dusk, that neither light nor dark part of the day when the heady scents of evening were rising from the cooling earth, was Althea’s favorite. That was when she tried to do her harvesting for the next morning, while the plants were cooling but she could still see. She chose a carry basket and went into the field to gather cucumbers. A customer had asked for little ones for pickling and there were several special hills of those, a new variety she had found. She could check on other crops while she was out, especially the pumpkins, since they still weren’t getting enough water. A gentle breeze had risen, just enough to deter the mosquitoes. It was going to be a lovely evening.

  She heard the music before she reached the end of the garden. Intrigued, she left her almost-filled basket at the end of a row and walked toward a grove of old oak trees that marked her western boundary. Before she saw the musician, she recognized the song being played on a harmonica, as she had seldom heard it played.

  Miles was sitting on a large rock beside the stone wall playing “Oh, Susannah.” He glanced at her, acknowledging her presence, and produced an impossibly elaborate flourish on his mouth organ.

  She stopped in front of him, pushed her hands into her pockets and, remembering his earlier comments, said as sarcastically as she could manage, “I’d have thought you’d be sitting under one of those oak trees playing pan pipes.”

  With his eyebrows raised and his eyes laughing, he blew one more long quavering note and lowered the harmonica. “You can’t play that song on a pan pipe. It’s not fitting. It requires a banjo.” He glanced at his mouth organ. “But a harmonica works.”