Kelly set bags of Bullock’s barbecue on the counter and the smell of vinegar, smoke and pork filled the kitchen. Trey was happy to see the food, even though he had no idea what they were going to do with all the leftover barbecue, especially with whatever food would be brought by the house tomorrow. “She’s pretty neat.”
When Trey opened the containers, it was the first moment since arriving that he was happy to be in North Carolina. Kelly had brought over barbecue, slaw, Brunswick stew, collards, butterbeans and a greasy bag of hush puppies. As Trey loaded his plate until his wrist nearly collapsed from the weight, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten so well.
“She—” Trey put the emphasis on the pronoun “—is not what I expected. I mean, Dad couldn’t find a man to lease the land to?”
“What, you leave the big city and all of a sudden women have their proper place and it ain’t anywhere outside the kitchen?”
“No, but Dad...”
“Calm down, Trey. I’m mostly just funnin’ you. Everyone but Dad was surprised when Max the farmer turned out to be Maxine the farmer. Max was Mom’s choice.”
That Mom would pick a woman to lease the farm to made sense. However... “I didn’t know they had been planning this since before Mom died.”
“What you don’t know about the farm could fill the Dean Dome. Mom has always been on Dad’s case to do something useful with the land. He finally said he’d agree to whatever her plan was if she did the legwork.” He’d probably capitulated so his wife would shut up and just bring him another beer—much the same way he’d agreed to the first chicken coop. “When she was diagnosed, she sped up her plans a little. The lease with Max was signed two weeks before Mom died.
“That’s gross, you know.”
“What?” Trey asked as Kelly pointed to his plate, where he’d mixed his slaw and barbecue into one sloppy, hot-sauce–topped mess. “I’ve been eating my barbecue this way since we were kids.”
“It was gross then and it’s gross now.” There might as well be force fields separating the food on Kelly’s plate. Even the pot likker from the collards didn’t dare seep across the expanse of white into the slaw.
“I guess I’m surprised Max is still here.” Even though Kelly was in the room, Trey said the words more to himself than to anyone else.
“You mean that Dad kept his promise to Mom or that he didn’t drive Max away by calling her his ‘lady farmer’?”
Trey winced. How had their father been able to withstand Max’s frank, cutting gaze and still say the words lady farmer aloud? “Both, I guess.”
Kelly’s look was somewhere between pity and disgust. “I’m sorry it took Dad’s passing to get you to come back to the farm.”
CHAPTER THREE
TREY WAS ASLEEP when the first knock came on the front door. He pulled on some pants and a sweater then stumbled down the stairs to see who was there. Whoever it was hadn’t stopped knocking for even a second. His aunt Lois stood on the front porch, a dish balanced on her left arm as she knocked with her right fist. He didn’t even have a chance to wish her a good morning before she sailed past him into the house and wove her way to the kitchen.
He thought about stopping her, but no man had stopped Lois Harris since the day she was born a Mangum over fifty years ago, and he was unlikely to be the first. When he caught up to her, she was standing in front of the open fridge, shuffling take-out containers of barbecue around.
“I expected it of you,” she said into the fridge, “though your brother should’ve known better. Noreen raised y’all both to know better.”
Trey wasn’t entirely certain what he and Kelly had done—or failed to do.
The brine-only pickle jars Aunt Lois pulled out of the fridge clinked on the metal edge of the old, laminate counter. “Honestly, did Hank think he would break a nail throwin’ out empty bottles?” She pulled other empty jars and bottles out of the fridge, shuffled more stuff around before declaring the fridge as good as it was gonna get and slamming the door. She must have left the beer cans in the fridge because all that was on the counter were empty mustard bottles with a heavy layer of crust around the lip.
“Aunt Lois, what are you doing?”
The counter was now covered in trash from the fridge and his aunt was opening random drawers and pawing around.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” She didn’t even look up when she said it.
Digging through Dad’s stuff, he thought, though he had the smarts not to say that. When she found a trash bag and the jars crashed into the bag with one big sweep of her arm, Trey had a partial answer. His aunt Lois was going to clean the farmhouse. But why?
“Go out to my car and get the tea I’ve ready-made. People will be coming by for visitation in four hours. If you and Kelly had the sense God gave a mule, you would’ve cleaned this house yesterday.”
No wonder his brother had smirked when he’d said it was Trey’s responsibility to get ready for the visitation, that he had a project to work on and couldn’t take the entire day off.
“Lord in Heaven! Henry William Harris the Third, don’t just stand there. Get!” She made a shooing motion with her entire body. “And get my cleaning supplies while you’re at it.”
Taking a detour up the stairs to put on shoes felt devious after Aunt Lois’s clear instructions, but he needed to take a piss and get something on his feet before going outside. When he returned to the kitchen with a box full of jugs of tea and buckets of cleaning supplies, the hands on his aunt’s hips made it clear he’d dawdled.
“I found your daddy’s supplies, though Lord only knows how old some of this stuff is. Take a bucket and broom and start with the upstairs bedrooms. I’ll work down here.”
“Aunt Lois, I doubt we will have many people show up.” If Trey had been looking for excuses not to come to his father’s funeral, surely everyone else in the county was, too. “And even if we do, no one is going to see the upstairs.”
“We may not have time to give this house the scrubbing it needs, but we can dust shelves, sweep floors and make beds before everyone gets here.” As far as his aunt was concerned, if she didn’t want to hear the words, they hadn’t been said. When he didn’t move, she shoved a broom into his one hand and a bucket into the other. “I’m not your mama or your wife and I won’t do this alone. You either respect Noreen’s memory by making her house tidy for company, or I go home.”
Still feeling as if he were putting lipstick on a pig for a fair no one would come to, Trey plodded upstairs and began cleaning. Out the window of Kelly’s room—which was dusty and full of crap his brother should have thrown away or taken to his own home years ago—he saw Max load something into her truck and drive off into the fields. Dark clouds bullied away the nice weather of yesterday, but that didn’t seem to be stopping the farmer. He wondered what she was doing and why? More important, he wished he could watch her work and admire the swift, purposeful movements he had seen yesterday translated from shooting Pepsi cans to growing food.
“Trey, hon, are you dawdlin’?” his aunt shouted up a few minutes later. “I’m not cleaning Hank’s bathroom on my own. Get down here.”
He couldn’t blame her. His father’s bathroom had offended his bachelor sensibilities—skirting mighty close to the memories of the bathrooms in his frat house. Knowing what was in store for him didn’t speed up his steps down the stairs.
Aunt Lois obviously had more practice cleaning a house before a funeral than Trey