Chapter 7
Chapter seven
“So, Dad.”
My voice is super casual as I pull out onto the main road that runs along the top of Wildflower Valley to Buckholt. It’s Sunday afternoon, and my dad is in the passenger seat, wearing a pink button-down shirt, gray suit trousers, and a gray silk bowtie. It’s quite an outfit.
“Tell me about this tea dance,” I invite.
He gives me a humorous look, which also manages to be a little wary. As if he knows what I’m really thinking, and he’s not going to enlighten me.
“It’s just a dance,” he says mildly. “A string quartet, a few people taking a turn around the floor. I haven’t done the Lindy hop in quite a few years. Your mother was never much of one for dancing.”
I almost prickle at that but force myself to relax. “You’ve always liked a little boogey,” I say with a smile, and he smiles back and nods. If I’m looking for info, though, I’m clearly not going to get it. Now I know where William gets his propensity for tight-lipped silences on social matters.
Well, I tell myself, my dad is seventy-six. He’s entitled to a private life. But it doesn’t stop me from craning my neck to peer into the community center when I drop him off for the dance, just to see who might be in attendance.
“I’ll see you at six,” my dad says, a little sternly, as if he knows what I’m doing. I’m sure he does. He is my father, after all.
I drive toward the feed store feeling a little disconsolate.
I know Josh would tell me to get over it, and I should, but I can’t keep my mind from leaping ahead to potential—and unwelcome—scenarios.
What if my dad gets a girlfriend? What if it becomes serious, and they get married?
Will he move out? Will my kids have to call her Grandma?
All right, I definitely don’t need to go there. Not yet, anyway.
I refocus my thoughts on our garden plans as I park and head into the feed store. The other night, Josh used an online ‘garden size calculator’ to determine how much we need to plant to be self-sufficient. The amounts were fairly staggering.
“One hundred and five pounds of cabbage?” I exclaimed. “Forty-seven plants?” And that’s just for one vegetable.
“I don’t like cabbage,” Rose told us, and Josh gave her a quick smile.
“Don’t worry, I wasn’t counting you.”
I scanned the list he’d made based on the calculator.
“Twenty-five pounds of beets… forty-seven pounds of cauliflower… two hundred pounds of potatoes!” I gaped at him.
“Where are we going to keep it all?” Never mind planting it all in the first place.
Josh has plowed another field, but I’m still not sure we’ll have enough space.
“We’ll need to build a root cellar,” Josh said, as though it was something that could be accomplished with a snap of his fingers. Then he elaborated, “Mike offered to help me.”
“Mike the Prepper?” I winced, recalling I was trying not to call him that.
“Mike,” Josh agreed with a grin. “He’s going to help me build the root cellar, and I’m going to help him build a barn.”
“A barn! Even with your leg the way it is?”
“My leg is fine,” he stated firmly.
“You haven’t been going to PT—”
“I do it at home. I’m fine, Abby.” His tone brooked no argument, and I knew better than to push the point. It was hard enough getting my head around that much veg.
Now, I tell myself to get on board with my husband’s big plans. I’m going to buy our seed potatoes and start them off in our greenhouse, which I probably should have done a couple of weeks ago, but here we are. A baby and a broken leg got in the way.
For two hundred pounds of potatoes, I discover when I use another online calculator, we need twenty to thirty pounds of seed potatoes. That’s a lot of seed potatoes.
I get a dolly rather than my usual cart and start loading up on seed potatoes, throwing in some packets of herb seeds and tomatoes. Might as well start those, too.
I see a sign that chicks arrive next week, and I put in an order for two Plymouth Rocks.
Rose has been researching chicken breeds as she wants to branch out.
It was one of her more recent homeschooling assignments—a report on different breeds, including health, egg-laying capacity, resistance to disease, and docility.
She even made a graph. She’ll be pleased to pick up the Plymouth Rocks next week, I think, my heart lightening at the thought.
So often I let myself be burdened by the petty and not-so-petty cares that I forget how fun this life is, what a joy and privilege it is to be part of it.
“I’ll take one more bag of seed potatoes,” I tell Janice, the lady at the checkout with whom Rose has a long-standing arrangement to sell two dozen eggs a week. My eight-year-old has quite the booming business.
Janice nods and rings it up. “You can never have too many potatoes,” she says sagely, to which I can only agree.
After I finish loading up the car, I head to Kroger to top up our staples—the things we can’t make ourselves, that is.
That list is a little smaller than it used to be, I acknowledge with a wry smile, now that we make our own milk, eggs, butter, and cheese.
Bethany also makes our laundry detergent and dish soap, shampoo and shower gel, all using her essential oils, and with everything we’ve canned, as well as the meat chickens we processed last summer, well, there’s not actually too much I have to buy.
The kids have porridge for breakfast every morning, so I skip the sugar cereal I once would have put in my cart, although Jack does like his Cheerios on occasion.
Same with soda—Bethany made a raspberry cordial last summer that we’ve been drinking instead.
I do buy a few bags of potato chips for a treat, although I suppose we could make those ourselves this year, especially with the two hundred pounds of potatoes we’re going to have by the end of the summer.
I shake my head and suppress a laugh at the thought.
Maybe we’re closer to self-sufficiency than I realized.
We still need quite a few of the basics, though—toilet paper, coffee, and bacon, although if Josh goes through with getting the pigs, I’ll be able to eliminate one of those from my list.
I spend a happy half-hour browsing the aisles and head to the checkout with my cart less than half full. What a change, I think, from the days when I piled it so high, I had to wheel it very carefully, so the shaky pyramid of groceries didn’t come tumbling down.
“Hey, Abby.” Elliot, one of the other cashiers I’ve worked with, a friendly but shy boy of about twenty, greets me as I start bagging. “You’re a customer, not an employee today, huh?”
“It’s nice to be on the other side of the checkout,” I reply with a smile.
“Cara said you’re leaving soon, though?” He looks at me expectantly, a twelve-pack of toilet paper in his hands.
“What?” I am a little taken aback and try to hide it.
“I mean, when the baby comes,” I allow. “Although I’ll come back after that.
” Actually, Josh and I haven’t discussed it, but the truth is, we need the money.
We’ve been managing all right for the last few months, between his tutoring and my work at Kroger, as well as Bethany’s job in town and William working for the forestry, but…
it’s barely enough to sustain us, and I certainly can’t lose my twenty hours a week long term.
“Oh.” Elliot looks confused as well as uneasy. “I thought Cara said you were finishing for good next month. Sorry, I must have heard wrong.”
Or Cara has decided to lay me off, I think with a pang of anxiety. As a part-time employee, I’m not entitled to paid maternity leave, but I thought I was still entitled to twelve weeks of unpaid leave. Although, do I even want to come back to Kroger when this baby girl is only three months old?
“Thanks, Elliott,” I say as he insists on putting the bags in the cart.
I’ve tried not to let money woes affect me too much lately.
It was a big source of strain between Josh and me back in the fall, and inadvertently—or not—led to his car accident.
Even so, the worry about our finances has been like a cloud hovering over my head, ready to descend.
Now it has—or at least started to.
What if I lose my job? Can we even afford to have this baby?
I do my best to push such thoughts away as I go to pick up my dad. I feel like I’m the teenager’s parent after the party, waiting in the car and checking her watch as my dad strolls out at six-fifteen. I really didn’t expect to be doing this with my own father.
Then I notice he’s not alone.
He’s walking next to a woman who, my first thought is, is nothing like my mother.
My mother was briskly petite, practical but elegant.
This woman is almost as tall as my dad, broad-boned with a full head of curly gray hair, and she’s wearing a dress of vivid purple satin, complete with gloves, hat, and fishnet stockings.
I mean, kudos to her for owning it, but… really?
Then she lets out a loud honk of a laugh, I can hear even though the windows of my van are up. She lays one hand on my dad’s arm as he grins bashfully.
I feel like my head is about to explode.
As they say goodbye, I work hard to keep my expression neutral. I must fail, though, because my dad gives me a knowing look as he opens the passenger door and slides in.
“Hi, sweetheart.”
“Who was that?” The words burst out of me. I can’t keep myself from it.
“That,” my dad says with deliberate mildness, “is Jolene.”
“Jolene? Like the song?”
“Yes, but she was born before the song, so…” He smiles faintly, as if he’s remembering something, and looks out the window.
I glance once more at Jolene, who is chatting loudly to someone else. Goodness, but she’s a…. vibrant… woman. And so unlike my mother, which makes me feel both better and alarmed.
“Are we going?” my dad asks pointedly.
I glance at him, too discombobulated to hide my horrified expression.
“She’s just a friend, Abby,” he tells me patiently. “Now, can we go home? I’ve been jitterbugging for two hours, and I’m tired.”