I’m not offering any. You wanted a plan for my nephew, and yours, so far, doesn’t seem to be working that well. Now it’s my turn. There has to be a price to be paid for what he did to your car, and it has to be substantial. No more rewards for feeding his frog.”
“How long are you going to make him work for me?”
“Hopefully until he’s eighteen,” Ben said dryly. “So, tell me how you’d like to spend time in your yard.”
“To be truthful the whole entertainment thing, like an outdoor kitchen and fireplace isn’t really me. I mean, it sounds lovely, I’m sure you make wonderful yards for people, but I really do love the idea of simple things out here. A hammock. Lemonade. Book. I’d want a place that felt peaceful. Where you could curl up with a good book on a hot afternoon and listen to water running and birds singing, and glance up every now and then to see butterflies.”
It wasn’t fair, really. People did not know how easy it was to see their souls. Did he need to know this about her?
That in a world gone wild with bigger and better and more, in a world where materialism was everything, she somehow wanted the things money could not buy.
The miracle of butterfly wings, the song of birds, the sound of water.
She wanted a quiet place.
He imagined her bare feet in lush grass and was nearly blinded with a sense of desire. He was getting sicker by the minute. Now she didn’t even need to be eating ice cream for him to be entertaining evil male thoughts.
He saw her gaze move to Kyle in the tree again, wistful, and suddenly he was struck by what he wanted to do for her.
“What would you think about a tree house?” he said softly. And saw it. A flash of that look he had glimpsed twice, and now longed for. Wonder. Hope. Curiosity.
“A tree house?” she breathed. “Really?”
“Not a kid’s tree house,” he said, finding it taking shape in his mind as he looked at the tree, “an adult retreat. I could build a staircase that wound around the trunk of that tree, onto a platform in the branches. We could put a hammock up there and a table to hold the lemonade.”
He thought he would build her a place where the birds could sing sweetly, so close she could touch them. He would put a container garden up there, full of the flowers that attracted butterflies. Below the tree, a simple water feature. She could stand at the rail and look down on it; she would be able to hear the water from her hammock.
“That sounds like way too much,” she said, but her protest was weak, overridden by the wonder in her eyes as she gazed at that tree, beginning to see the possibility.
To see her at school, prim and tidy, a person would never guess how her eyes would light up at the thought of her own tree house. But Ben had always known, from the first moment, that she had a secret side to her. The tree in her classroom had held the seeds of this moment.
He was not sure it was wise to uncover it. And he was also not sure if he could stop himself, which was an amazing thought in itself since he considered self-discipline one of his stronger traits.
“We’ll take it one step at a time.” That way he could back off if he needed to. But then he heard himself committing to a little more, knowing he could not leave this project until he saw the light in her eyes reach full fruition. He did a rough calculation in his head. “We’ll come every day for two weeks after school. We’ll see if he’s learned what he needs to learn by then.”
She turned her attention from the tree and he found himself under the gaze of those amazing eyes. He knew, suddenly, he was not the only one who saw things that others did not see.
“There are a lot of ways to be a teacher, aren’t there, Ben?”
She said it softly, as if she admired something about him. In anyone else, that would be the flirt, the invitation to start playing the game with a little more intensity, to pick up the tempo.
But from her it was a compliment, straight from her heart. And it went like an arrow to his, and penetrated something he had thought was totally protected in armor.
“Thanks,” he said, softly. “We’ll be here tomorrow, right after school.” He turned and called his nephew.
They watched as he scrambled out of the tree.
“We’re going to come, starting tomorrow after school,” Ben told him. “We’re going to build Miss Maple a tree house.”
Kyle’s eyes went round. “A tree house?” For the first time since they had laughed together about Casper’s underwear, his defensive shield came down. “Awesome,” he breathed.
“Awesome,” she agreed.
Kyle actually smiled. A real smile. So genuine, and so revealing about who Kyle really was that it nearly hurt Ben’s eyes. But then Kyle caught himself and frowned, as if he realized he had revealed way too much about himself.
Ben turned to go, thinking maybe way too much had been revealed about everybody today.
There are lots of ways to be a teacher. As if she saw in him the man he could be, as if she saw the heart that he had kept invisible, unreachable, untouchable, behind its armor. He could teach her a thing or two, too. But he wasn’t going to.
BETH Maple stood at her kitchen counter and listened to the steady thump of hammers in her yard. She contemplated how it was that her neatly structured life had been wrested so totally from her control.
“Uncle Ben, haven’t you ever heard of skin cancer, for cripe’s sake? The three Ss? Slam on a hat, slather on sunscreen and slip on a shirt.”
For a moment it only registered how sweet it was that Kyle was so concerned about his uncle.
But then she froze. Ben Anderson had taken off his shirt? In her backyard?
“I’ll live dangerously,” Ben called to his nephew.
Now there was a surprise, she thought dryly. Don’t peek, she told herself, but that was part of having things wrested out of her control. Despite the sternness of the order she had given herself, she peeked anyway.
It was a gorgeous day. September sunshine filtering through yellow-edged leaves with surprising heat and bathing her yard in gold. Her yard actually looked worse than it had a few days ago, with spray-painted lines on her patches of grass, heaps of dirt, sawed-off branches and construction materials stacked up.
But the pure potential shone through the mess and made her feel not just happy but elated. Maybe when a person gave up a bit of control, it left room for life to bring in some surprises, like the one that was unfolding in her yard.
Of course, there was one place she had to keep her control absolute, and where she was failing, the order not to peek being a prime example. She had peeked anyway, and she felt a forbidden little thrill at what she was seeing.
Was it possible that sense of elation that filled her over the past few days had little to do with the yard?
Certainly
