Wild Orchids Read online

  Toodles and Tessa had been hanging some of the origami insects they’d made on the trees when I saw Toodles stop and stare at Dessie. His arm was extended, a red paper giraffe hanging from his fingertips, when he halted.

  No, no, no, I thought. Toodles had the mind of a child, but he was actually a full-grown man. Was he going to be like his son and fall madly in love with the over-endowed Dessie?

  For a moment, I was frozen in my tracks. What in the world could I do to stop this? As I walked toward Toodles, I tried to compose myself and think about what I could say to end it before it started. That his son was already having an affair with Dessie? That Toodles would have to get in line? That if Dessie Mason had any interest in a man like Toodles it would be so she could make a sculpture of him and sell it?

  By the time I’d taken the three steps to reach Toodles, I’d come up with nothing I could say. He was still staring, his arm still extended, the little giraffe still swaying in the breeze—and his tongue was hanging out. No subtlety in him!

  “She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” he said, and I let out a groan. Why was it that when I wanted to understand him, I couldn’t, but now that he was saying something I didn’t want to hear, his speech was perfectly clear?

  When he started walking toward Dessie, I put out my hand to stop him, but he just brushed past me. I was contemplating finding Ford and seeing if he could do something with his father, when the most extraordinary thing happened:Toodles walked past Dessie as though he didn’t see her. As I watched, my mouth open in disbelief, Toodles kept walking until he came to Miss Essie Lee. Looking up, since she was taller than he was, he gifted her with his paper giraffe.

  I wanted to run to Toodles and protect him. What would that stiff-backed, dried-up old woman do to him? I’d taken one step forward when I saw Miss Essie Lee’s face soften, and she became a wholly different person.

  Toodles crooked his arm, Miss Essie Lee slipped hers into it, and the two of them walked toward the food table. As far as I knew, they hadn’t exchanged a word with each other.

  Feeling as though I’d just witnessed something out of a science fiction movie, I wandered back into the house. It was said that like attracted like. Ford’s stories about his family made it clear that they knew all about various and sundry criminal behavior. Was Toodles subliminally attracted to Miss Essie Lee because the woman had participated in a murder?

  The kitchen table and the countertops were covered with huge bowls full of food. I was standing there, munching and thinking about what I’d just seen, when Ford yelled, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  I jumped half a foot. “Nothing,” I said. “Why are you yelling at me?”

  Walking across the kitchen in two strides, he took a bowl of potato chips off the table. I had a potato chip—one of those thick, crinkly kind—on the way to my mouth. I looked at the thing as the nutritional poison it was and dropped it on the table.

  Ford was frowning at me as though my eating a potato chip was immoral. I spent three seconds thinking about defending myself and starting a fight with him, but, instead, I stretched out my hand. Taking it as though he were a toddler, he followed me outside.

  I hadn’t been wrong in what I thought I saw. Miss Essie Lee was standing on a bench, Tessa was handing her origami creatures, and the thin woman was hanging them in the high branches. When Miss Essie Lee started to get down, Toodles took her by her narrow waist and swung her down. As she put her hands on his shoulders, she giggled like a teenager.

  “Your father’s in love,” I said, but Ford was staring just as I had been a few moments earlier, so he couldn’t make a sound.

  It was sometime later when I finally saw Miss Essie Lee alone. By that time the party was in full swing and very loud. Earlier in the week, Ford and Noble had gone shopping and bought some serious speakers. The good news was that if the speakers ever broke, we could rent them out as condos.

  Finally, there came a moment when I saw Miss Essie Lee standing by the fence by herself, drink in hand. As always, she was wearing one of her antique blouses, but her hair had come down a bit from its usual tight style, so she looked kind of good. I nearly ran over to her before Toodles returned and I lost my chance.

  It took me a moment to get myself under control enough not to stare at her. Of course I wanted to know if she was a murderer, but that happened long ago, and right now there was something more urgent that needed attention. “So what do you think of Ford’s father?” I yelled over the music.

  “He is as pure as a sonnet,” she said, her voice carrying better than mine. “Did you know that he doesn’t know how to read? Isn’t that refreshing?”

  That set me back a bit. “Yeah, well, I guess it is,” I managed to say.

  “You don’t know how tired I get of literacy. Everyone talks to me about nothing but what’s inside books.”

  “But I thought—”

  “That because I’m a librarian that I want my entire life to be about books? Not quite. We all want a life.”

  Suddenly I thought of how Russell had lied to me about himself, or at least omitted some basic facts. Miss Essie Lee might possibly have a dubious past, but I still didn’t want her, or any woman, to get hurt. “Did you know that Mr. Newcombe has…Well, that he’s…”

  “Spent his entire life in prison?” Leaning toward me, she whispered loudly, “I find that fascinating, don’t you?” The next second her face changed. She was a girl seeing her first boyfriend. “There he is,” she said as she ran toward Toodles, leaving me to stare after her in shock.

  It was about a half hour later that I saw Russell. I was closing the garden gate—why, I don’t know because everyone within hearing distance, invited or not, and far more than my original twenty-eight, had shown up—when an arm reached out and grabbed me. As the arm spun me out of the garden and toward the alley, I let out a little scream, but it was stopped by a man’s lips on mine.

  It took me a few seconds to realize that it was Russell, but his body next to mine made me forget that I’d decided I no longer found him attractive. Plus, I’d had three of some fruity drink that Ford had been making in a blender and telling me that he’d fortified with six essential vitamins.

  Still, I could pretend to be furious. I pulled my mouth away from Russell’s and said petulantly, “You didn’t call me.”

  Still holding me, he nuzzled my neck. How did we go from two encounters to this? I wondered, but I didn’t push my body away from his—his hard, lean, muscular body. Damn Ford and his vitamin drink. Was the thing half rum or two-thirds?

  “I’m sorry, Jackie,” Russell said in that divine voice of his. “I couldn’t call. My father’s been ill, but he’s all right now. We thought it was a heart attack, so I went running back to Raleigh, but it was just anxiety. I was angry about the whole thing, but relieved. Can you forgive me?”

  “They have telephones in Raleigh,” I said even more petulantly. Are there degrees of petulance? Could I go from medium to high? “You don’t teach at the University of North Carolina,” I shot at him.

  Smiling, Russell pulled me closer. “Not anymore. Not as of this spring. I quit because I’m working on a personal project and because I’ve had two other job offers.”

  He started to kiss my neck again, but I turned my head away. His arms were around my lower back, my hips against his. “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I asked.

  When Russell dropped his arms from around me, I wanted to take the question back. I wanted to be the injured party so he’d coax me into forgiving him. As he looked up at the stars, some wonderful person turned the music down. “I can’t figure out what you’ve done to me,” he said softly. “I’ve thought of nothing but you since I met you.”

  I tried to make my heart stop racing, but I couldn’t. He was describing the way I felt about him.

  Turning, he looked at me. “Promise you won’t laugh, but for three days after I met you, I was like a cartoon character. I was walking into walls.”