As You Wish Read online

  Freddy hired him, added the Mr. to his name, and two weeks later they were inseparable companions.

  Over the many years, Uncle Freddy—as he became known to everyone—had helped a lot of people. He gave them jobs on the old plantation that seemed to devour money. And he listened to them. In fact, he lived by the belief that most problems could be fixed by people genuinely listening to each other.

  He developed contacts in law enforcement, social services, with clergy. He learned who to ask for help with any problem.

  The only aspect of his life where he wasn’t successful was in keeping a housekeeper-cook. No one lasted very long. The house was too big, there were too many mouths to feed, et cetera. The longest anyone had lasted was three years. That was Margaret and she had stayed because Uncle Freddy gave her the summers off.

  Three years ago Uncle Freddy’s distant cousin William, his wife, Nina, and their two-year-old daughter, Ruth, came for the summer. Bill taught physics at an eastern college and Nina was a housewife. The idea was that for the whole summer, Bill would work with some local boys in cleaning up the acres around the old house and tending the orchard and vegetable garden. Nina would cook, can, and freeze anything that grew. In the fall, they’d go back east and Margaret would return from her sister’s place in Alabama to a pantry full of food that she didn’t have to prepare.

  It had all worked perfectly for about a month, then Summer Hill’s Dr. Everett Chapman came to check on Uncle Freddy. His wife had some church meeting, so the doctor took his two-year-old son Kyle with him. Nina said she’d watch the kids so the men could visit.

  The children disappeared. They just plain vanished. Half the town joined in the search for them. After eight hours of looking and no sign of the children, the families, the entire town, were sick with worry.

  But then the kids came down from the attic, dirty and covered in cobwebs. They were hungry.

  That night there were some serious lectures and threats given to the children—but they made no difference.

  The next day when young Kyle saw Mr. Gates’s red truck go by, he sneaked out of the house. The child climbed in the back and hid behind the bags of cracked corn.

  His parents found him at Tattwell with Ruth. “Let him stay,” Uncle Freddy said.

  Mrs. Chapman, who was pregnant and feeling awful, agreed that Kyle could stay for two nights. When she lost the baby, she was so depressed and weak that she went to Tennessee to stay with her mother for what came to be the rest of the summer. Kyle moved into one of the many bedrooms at Tattwell so his father would be free to take care of the medical needs of the town.

  The next summer Kyle’s parents were trying for another baby and after the boy sneaked off three times in two days, they agreed to let him stay at Tattwell. That was the summer Ruth said that from now on she was to be called Princess Colette, and Kyle was Ace. Her title was shortened to Letty, and the names stuck.

  This was the third year the children were spending the summer together at Tattwell. Letty stayed with her parents in what had once been the old kitchen, while Ace had his own room upstairs in the Big House.

  On the surface, this summer looked like the others, but three weeks ago, Nina had slipped on the bathtub and broken her right forearm. She couldn’t do the huge amount of cooking that she usually did in the summer. She couldn’t tend the big vegetable garden and put up all those quarts of beans and tomatoes, or make gallons of applesauce for the winter. And if all that prepared food wasn’t waiting for Margaret when she got back, she just might stay in Alabama. Then what would the men do?

  But what had really changed was that little Ace’s mother was dying of ovarian cancer.

  When Olivia was told this, she knew she couldn’t deal with such grief. It wasn’t something she knew about. Mr. Gates said she should just be kind to the children, but yesterday the kids had run through the clean sheets hanging on the line and knocked half of them into the dirt. She’d seen the girl wearing her favorite silk scarf—which meant that the children had been in her bedroom going through her things. Olivia asked Uncle Freddy for a key to the lock on her bedroom door but he’d laughed. None of the doors had been locked in a century or more. “Maybe not since the Yankees came through here,” Mr. Gates said, and the two old men had laughed together.

  All in all, the three days she’d been at Tattwell were more than she could handle. Bratty kids, old men who found everything amusing, trying to cook—something she had no aptitude for—and having no contact with the world of theater overwhelmed her. Drained her.

  “Better save a can of soup for Kit,” Mr. Gates said without looking up.

  It took Olivia a moment to realize that he was talking to her. “Who is that?” Her frown deepened. If it was another person for her to take care of, she might start screaming.

  The kids came out of their food trance. “He’s tall,” Letty said.

  “He’s strong,” Ace said.

  Olivia narrowed her eyes at Uncle Freddy. “Who is this?”

  “He...” Uncle Freddy swallowed. “He’s from Maine, the son of a relative on my mother’s side. His father called me and said young Kit needed a place to spend the summer, so I...” He didn’t have the courage to admit what he’d done.

  Olivia put her hands on her hips and went toward him. With him in a wheelchair, she was a great deal taller than he was. “Summer? You have added a man to my workload? Without asking me?”

  “Well,” Mr. Gates said, “at nineteen, he’s hardly—”

  “Nineteen!” Olivia nearly shouted. “You want me to take care of a nineteen-year-old boy? Do you have any idea how much they eat? I’ll be cooking in vats. Roasting whole turkeys for lunch. I’ll have to—” She took a breath. “I’m not going to do it,” she said to the two old men. “I’m going to go to work for Abigail Harding at her dress shop.”

  The children had stopped chewing and were looking from one adult to another, their eyes wide. This was the kind of grown-up drama they usually weren’t allowed to hear.

  Uncle Freddy twisted around to look out the screen door. “There he is now.”

  “That boy can work!” Mr. Gates said. “He didn’t get here until one a.m.” He glanced up at Olivia. “I guess you slept through his arrival, but then, Ace and I were trying to be quiet. Out of respect for you, Livie.” He looked back at Uncle Freddy. “And the boy was up before daylight. He took a hand sickle to those old briars at the back. I’ve been meaning to do that for about ten years.”

  “Bill said he’d never seen a harder worker than that kid,” Uncle Freddy said.

  Olivia knew the old codgers were trying to coax her into staying, but it wasn’t going to work. She glared at them. “I was told I was to cook for two people. That’s all. But half of Summer Hill plops down in this kitchen and I’m supposed to serve them. And now you’re dumping a teenage boy on me? Have you two thought about his being around the children? He’ll have girls here and...and marijuana. It’s what all the kids do now.”

  With each word, the children’s eyes got wider. They expected that at any moment someone would tell them to leave, but no one did. “You have to tell him,” Uncle Freddy said to her.

  “Yes, you have to tell Kit to...” Mr. Gates waved his hand. “Tell him to eat somewhere else or you’re leaving. I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  Olivia knew they were up to something but she didn’t know what. Maybe they thought that she wouldn’t have the courage to stand up for herself. Or, heaven help her, maybe they thought that at twenty-two, she was the same age as the boy.

  With determination in her eyes, she went to the screen door and flung it open. She was ready to confront the kid, tell him he’d have to find somewhere else to eat.

  He was, as Letty said, tall, over six feet, and he was wearing next to nothing. The upper half of him was nude, while an old pair of khakis hung low on his hips. She could see the V-shape that moved d