The Mulberry Tree Read online

  “I don’t know. Should I?”

  Matt laughed. “No,” he said, holding out his hand. When Bailey got up and took his hand in hers, he held it and looked into her eyes for a moment.

  Bailey was the first to pull away, then she walked to the front door.

  Matt followed her lead, then stepped past her to go outside. “I’ll move in tomorrow, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Yes,” she said, then hesitated. “You aren’t going to . . . you know. I don’t think I’m quite ready for—”

  “Sex?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said, smiling. “I could stand that. It’s just involvement that I don’t want. I need to find out how I can support myself before I get involved with another man—if I ever do, that is. And I need privacy. Lots of privacy. Understand?”

  “I think so,” he said hesitantly. “Sex is okay, but stay out of your life. Do I have it right?”

  “Perhaps,” she said, smiling at him as she started to close the door. “But let me make it clear: if there’s sex between us, your rent triples,” she said, then softly closed the door.

  Laughing, Matt walked down the driveway and got back in his truck, then leaned his head against the seat for a moment. He really and truly couldn’t believe his good fortune. He was going to get out of Patsy’s house!

  As he started the engine, he kept smiling. And more than just getting out, he was moving in with a woman who could cook, a woman who seemed to know all the domestic arts. He couldn’t believe his luck.

  As he turned off Owl Creek Road onto the asphalt, he hoped that Bailey didn’t find out that Patsy was charging him seven-fifty a month, plus he had to buy one week’s worth of groceries for the entire family of five adults.

  Seven

  Bailey didn’t awaken the next morning until nearly eight, late for her, but then, she hadn’t gone to bed until three. After Matt left, the ugly little house had seemed too empty, too full of all the things in life that she no longer had. She’d gone to bed, but she’d tossed about for over an hour, so she got up, pulled on her chinos and a T-shirt, then padded into the kitchen to get herself something warm to drink.

  For a while, she’d sat at the dining table in the living room and looked at the wall that concealed a fireplace. It was when she heard a noise outside and looked at the front door, fully expecting Jimmie to walk into the room, that she knew she had to do something, or she’d spend the night crying.

  In the kitchen, she had a refrigerator full of pots of jam that needed to be reheated, then put into jars, and on the floor were crates of strawberries that she’d bought at a roadside stand. Also in the refrigerator were bags of plums, a large box of blackberries, a big bag full of cherries, and the crispers were full of vegetables.

  “Cry or work,” she said aloud; then she put on her tennis shoes and an apron. After she’d put the crate of strawberries on the table and found her capper in the box where she’d put her canning equipment, she set to work. Phillip had sent a man to hook her up to a cable service, so she turned on the TV and watched HGTV while she cooked.

  So now, this morning, yawning, she got out of bed, dressed, and went through the kitchen into the pantry to look at the rows of jars: blackberry liqueur, cherry cordial, strawberry jam, green tomato chutney, pickled carrots, strawberry conserve, plum jam, and pickled plums. On the windowsill was the recipe box that she’d been so excited to find. Unfortunately, it had turned out to contain only a few basic recipes for meat loaf and chicken-fried steak. It had not been the great find that she’d hoped it would be.

  Last night she’d run Ball jars through the hottest cycle of the dishwasher to sterilize them, while keeping the lids hot in boiling water. Since there was little work space in the kitchen, she’d set up the table in the living room, covering the surface with layers of clean white tea towels.

  She first mixed the blackberries with sugar and set them in a bowl inside the small proofing oven of the big range. The fat berries needed to stay in low heat for hours, until the sugar drew the juice from them.

  She capped strawberries, then divided them into two pots, one for jam and one for conserve, where the berries were kept whole. While the strawberries were simmering, she pricked the plums all over with a big darning needle, then left them in a bowl while she put cider vinegar, apple juice concentrate, cloves, allspice, ginger, and bay leaves into a pot and let it simmer.

  She tested the jam to see if it had jelled by putting a spoonful on a cold plate in the freezer for a few minutes, and when it was ready, she began putting it into jars. She lugged a big canner full of boiling water to the table. For the jars to properly seal, everything had to be kept as hot as possible, and as clean as possible. There couldn’t be the tiniest bit of jam on the rim of the jar, or the lid wouldn’t seal—or worse, bacteria would get inside the jar.

  The plums went first. She packed the pricked plums as tight as she could inside a dozen hot, sterile jars; then, using a wide-mouthed stainless steel funnel, she poured the strained vinegar solution on top of them. She wiped each rim with a clean cloth, put on the lids, twisted the rims into place, then put the jars on a tray and carried them back to the kitchen. Using the big lifting tongs to set the hot jars inside the canning kettle, she set the timer for the hot water bath, an extra precaution needed to insure safe preservation.

  She followed with the strawberry jam and the conserve, plus the jams that she had cooked the night before.

  While she’d been putting the strawberries into jars, she’d run a two-quart decorative glass jar through the hot cycle of the dishwasher, and when it was ready, she filled it with cherries that she’d pricked with her needle, their stems still attached. She put these into the jar, covered them with white sugar, then poured enough grappa—that dry Italian brandy—in to fill the jar. The lid had a plastic seal on it, and she put it on tight.

  She spent over an hour chopping green tomatoes, which she’d also purchased at the roadside stand, onions, and apples to make green tomato chutney. Once the vegetables were cut, she put them into a pot with wine vinegar, raisins, cayenne pepper, ginger, and garlic.

  She mixed peeled baby carrots with wine vinegar, sugar, celery seeds, white peppercorns, dill seeds, mustard seeds, and bay leaves.

  When the blackberries she’d put in the oven were a mass of juice, she poured the liquid into a cheesecloth bag, tied it closed with heavy string, then hung it from the legs of a chair she’d turned upside down on top of the coffee table, a big ceramic bowl set underneath to catch the drippings.

  When the chutney and pickled carrots were in jars and sealed, she measured the blackberry juice, poured out an equal amount of gin, put the mixture into jars, and sealed them.

  Only after she’d labeled all the jars and carried everything into the pantry did she allow herself to go to bed, and by then she was so tired that she fell asleep instantly.

  So now it was morning, and she was facing the question, What now? Yesterday at the grocery it had seemed a brilliant idea to sell her jams, chutneys, and liqueurs. But during the night while she was working, she’d begun to think about marketing. How did she get her jars to the consumer? She was used to making six jars of one item. If she was going to sell them, she’d have to make hundreds, maybe thousands, of jars of one kind. And what about liquor laws? What did she have to do to be able to sell cherries preserved in grappa?

  In the past, all she would have had to do was tell Jimmie that she wanted something and he would have seen to everything else—or had someone else see to it. Early this morning, when she’d at last climbed into bed, she’d seen her address book on the bedside table. She knew that inside it were all Phillip’s telephone numbers, and she knew, without a doubt, that if she called him and asked, he’d take care of everything. But she wasn’t ready to admit defeat yet.

  So now, looking at all the jars, she didn’t know what her next step was. “Damn you, James Manville!” she said out loud. “Why did you do this to me? How am I supposed to support myself w