just pull through this latest setback. Family, he was belatedly coming to realize, was one part anchor, one part compass. In rough weather, he’d hate to be caught at sea without either one.
So, maybe in a year or so, he thought as he crossed the state line between North Carolina and Virginia, he might consider relocating. He’d incorporated in Delaware because of its favorable laws, but that didn’t mean he had to stay there. After a while, a man got tired of zigzagging across too many time zones.
Pulling up at a stoplight, he yawned, rubbed his bristly jaw and wished he had a street address. He’d called ahead to rent a four-wheel-drive vehicle in case the chase involved more than the five-lane highway that ran from Virginia to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Having experienced back roads of all descriptions from Zaire to Kuala Lumpur, he knew better than to take anything for granted. So far it looked like a pretty straight shot, but he’d learned to be prepared for almost anything.
“We’re out of prunes,” came a wavering lament from the back of the house.
“Look in the pantry,” Liza called. “They’ve changed the name—they’re called dried plums now, but they’re still the same thing.” She smiled as she snapped her cash box shut and tied a calico apron over her T-shirt and tan linen pants. Uncle Fred—her great-uncle, really—was still sharp as a tack at the age of eighty-six, but he didn’t like it when things changed.
And things inevitably changed. In her case it had been a change for the better, she thought, looking around at the shabby-comfortable old room with its mail-order furniture and hand-crocheted antimacassars. A wobbly smoking stand, complete with humidor and pipe rack—although her uncle no longer smoked on orders from his physician—was now weighted down with all the farming and sports magazines he’d collected and never discarded. There was an air-conditioning unit in one of the windows, an ugly thing that blocked the view of the vacant lot on the other side, where someone evidently planned to build something. But until they could afford central air—which would be after the kitchen floor was replaced and the house reroofed—it served well enough. Both bedrooms had electric fans on the dressers, which made the humid August heat almost bearable.
Liza hadn’t changed a thing when she’d moved in, other than to scrub the walls, floors and windows, wash all the linens and replace a few dry-rotted curtains when they’d fallen apart in her hands. Discount stores were marvelous places, she’d quickly discovered.
Shortly after she’d arrived, Liza had broken down and cried for the first time in months. She’d been cleaning the dead bugs from a closet shelf and had found a shoe box full of old letters and Christmas cards, including those she’d sent to Uncle Fred. Liza and her mother had always done the cards together, with Liza choosing them and her mother addressing the envelopes. Liza had continued to send Uncle Fred a card each year after her mother had died, never knowing whether or not they’d been received.
Dear, lonely Uncle Fred. She had taken a monumental chance, not even calling ahead to ask if she could come for a visit. She hadn’t know anything about him, not really—just that he was her only living relative except for a cousin she hadn’t seen in several years. She’d driven all the way across the country for a few days’ visit, hoping—praying—she could stay until she could get her feet on the ground and plan her next step.
What was that old song about people who needed people?
They’d both been needy, not that either of them had ever expressed it in words. We’re out of prunes. That was one of Uncle Fred’s ways of letting her know he needed her. Danged eyeglasses keep moving from where I put ’em. That was another.
Life in this particular slow lane might lack a few of the amenities she’d once taken for granted, but she would willingly trade all the hot tubs and country clubs in the world for the quiet predictability she’d found here.
Not to mention the ability to see where every penny came from and where and how it was spent. She might once have been negligent—criminally negligent, some would say—but after the lessons she’d been forced to learn, she’d become a fanatic about documenting every cent they took in. Her books, such as they were, balanced to the penny.
When she’d arrived in May of last year, Uncle Fred had been barely hanging on, relying on friends and neighbors to supply him with surplus produce. People would stop by occasionally to buy a few vegetables, leaving the money in a bowl on the counter. They made their own change, and she seriously doubted if it ever occurred to him to count and see if he was being cheated. What would he have done about it? Threaten them with his cane?
Gradually, as her visit stretched out over weeks and then months, she had instigated small changes. By the end of the year, it was taken for granted that she would stay. No words were necessary. He’d needed her and she’d needed him—needed even more desperately to be needed, although her self-esteem had been so badly damaged she hadn’t realized it at the time.
Uncle Fred still insisted on being present every day, even though he seldom got out of his rocking chair anymore. She encouraged his presence because she thought it was good for him. The socializing. He’d said once that all his friends had moved to a nursing home or gone to live with relatives.
She’d said something to the effect that in his case, the relative had come to live with him. He’d chuckled. He had a nice laugh, his face going all crinkly, his eyes hidden behind layers of wrinkles under his bushy white brows.
For the most part, the people who stopped for the free ice water and lingered to buy produce were pleasant. Maybe it was the fact that they were on vacation, or maybe it was simply because when Uncle Fred was holding court, he managed to strike up a conversation with almost everyone who stopped by. Seated in his ancient green porch rocker, in bib overalls, his Romeo slippers and Braves baseball cap, with his cane hidden behind the cooler, he greeted them all with a big smile and a drawled, “How-de-do, where y’all from?”
Now and then, after the stand closed down for the day, she would drive him to Bay View to visit his friends while she went on to do the grocery shopping. Usually he was waiting for her when she got back, grumbling about computers. “All they talk about—them computer things. Good baseball game right there on the TV set and all they want to talk about is going on some kind of a web. Second childhood, if you ask me.”
So they hadn’t visited as much lately. He seemed content at home, and that pleased her enormously. Granted, Liza thought as she broke open a roll of pennies, they would never get rich. But then, getting rich had been the last thing on her mind when she’d fled across country from the chaos her life had become. All she asked was that they sell enough to stay in business, more for Uncle Fred’s sake than her own. She could always get a job; the classified ads were full of help-wanted ads in the summertime. But Fred Grant was another matter. She would never forget how he’d welcomed her that day last May when she’d turned up on his doorstep.
“Salina’s daughter, you say? All the way from Texas? Lord bless ye, young’un, you’ve got the family look, all right. Set your suitcase in the front room, it’s got a brand-new mattress.”
The mattress might have been brand-new at one time, but that didn’t mean it was comfortable. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers, and at that point in her life, she’d been a beggar. Now, she was proud to say, she earned her own way. Slowly, one step at a time, but every step was straightforward, documented and scrupulously honest.
“I’ll be outside if you need me,” she called now as she headed out the front door. Fred Grant had his pride. It would take him at least five minutes to negotiate the uneven flagstone path between the house and the tin-roofed stand he’d established nearly forty years ago when he’d hurt his back and was no longer able to farm.
