Jennifer Greene - Wild in the Field

As she trudged toward the lavender fields, carrying a long-armed set of clippers, she could feel every creaky, cranky muscle in her body complaining. For three days, she’d been working nonstop in the lavender. Specifically, that was the same three days since Pete had brought her that dadblamed mangy dog and kissed her.

Working herself into a state of exhaustion hadn’t made her forget Pete-but it was doing a fabulous job of completely wearing her out. It was also giving her something to do to earn her keep. The lavender appeared to be a thankless, ridiculous, hopeless job-but that just suited her mood, anyway. She wasn’t looking for meaningful. She was looking for something so mind-numbing and exhausting she’d be too tired to have nightmares.

When she reached the crest of the hill, the late-afternoon sun was temporarily so blinding bright that it took several seconds before she realized she wasn’t alone. There were bodies in the lavender field. Two of them. Squinting, she realized they were boys. Both were hunkered down in the first row of the overgrown lavender, working with clippers-in fact, working with far better clippers than her own.

In a single blink, she knew who they had to be. Pete’s sons. They were identifiably young teenagers-at an age when boys tripped over their own feet and their arms seemed longer than their whole bodies. But she could see Pete in their height, the strong bones and ruddy skin. Both had his brown hair, too, with that hint of mahogany in the sunlight.

She clomped closer, building up a good head of steam. Obviously Pete had sent them over with the clippers. Her father would have labeled Pete a clishmaclaver -which was one of his Scottish terms for busybody. Doggone it, she hadn’t asked for his help. And she may have turned into a rude, ornery bitch-and was proud of it!-but even a curmudgeon had to have a line. She sure as heck wasn’t going to let two young boys kill themselves working in those hopelessly overgrown twenty acres.

“Boys! Hey!” She yelled, the instant she was within hearing distance. It wouldn’t take her two seconds to send them both packing; she was sure of it.

They both immediately jerked upright. “Hey, Ms. Campbell!” Damn, but they were startlingly alike. Except one had a cowlick-the same one who pushed a step forward, with an agonizing-red blooming on his cheeks as if he normally died from having to speak to strangers. “Hi, Ms. Campbell, I saw the dog in your yard.”

She still intended to throw them both off the property, but obviously that comment forced her to recognize a greater priority-their safety. “Good grief-you guys didn’t try to go close to Killer, did you?”

“No,” the shy one spoke up again. “I meant-I saw what you did with the snow fence. Making a yard for him and all. That was cool. Giving him a way to get some exercise so he didn’t always have to be tied up.”

Camille perched a fist on her hip. She didn’t need praise from some baby-aged kid for hauling five tons of snow fence, all to create a stupid yard for a mangy, worthless, violently aggressive mutt who hated her and everyone else. She needed someone to give her a whack upside the head for being so crazy. But before she could correct the boy’s misconception of her, his brother pushed ahead of him. This one was just as good-looking and gawky, but he didn’t have a cowlick-and no shy blush on his cheeks. “We shoulda said who we were. I’m Simon. That’s Sean. Sean’s the one who found Darby. Dad says he’s always finding trouble.”

“Am not.”

“Are, too.” Simon poked him, then kept talking as if the two of them regularly conducted conversations while socking each other. “See, we heard about Mr. Chapman being taken to a rest home. But it’s like nobody remembered that he had a dog, until Sean did. Mr. Gaff let us in the house. Sean found Darby in the back room, locked in, all dirty, no food, no water. He’d turned wild like. In fact, I thought he was gonna kill Sean. Not that that wouldn’t be a good riddance and all-”

Sean slugged him. Simon slugged back. Camille rubbed two fingers on her temples, wondering when and how she was going to throw them off the property, when so far she couldn’t even get a word in.

And Simon kept right on talking, even as he was being slugged. “Anyway, the pound loaned us this leash they use on wild or sick animals. It’s like any other leash, except that it has this stick thing attached so the dog can lunge, but not so close he can bite you. Anyway, then Sean brought it home-”

Sean finally ventured another comment. “-And Simon’s gonna tell you that Dad was mad at me. Which he was. But it’s like no biggie. Dad always has a cow when I bring home another animal. The point is that Dad figured out right away that you’d be the perfect person to adopt Darby.”

Camille’s jaw dropped. “Your dad said what?”

“He said you’d be the one person who could save Darby. I mean, I could save him, too. But we’ve already got dogs and cats and raccoons and homing pigeons and all, and like, obviously, Darby is too ornery right now to be around other animals. So we couldn’t take him. There was just no way. And that’s when Dad said you were the perfect one. Because you were the only one in White Hills who was even meaner than Darby.”

Again her jaw dropped. “He said what? ”

“Yeah, cool, huh? I wasn’t convinced, because you’re a woman and all. But then Dad explained that you’re not really like a woman.”

This time her voice seemed to raise a complete octave. “He said what?”

The brothers exchanged glances, as if suddenly aware she didn’t sound thrilled with the conversation. The one without the cowlick-Simon-seemed to be inherently elected to handle difficult verbal situations with adults. “Dad said you’re okay. Like, look at you. You dress like a guy. You’ve got dirty boots. Your hair’s all messed up. You’re ornery. I mean, you’re practically like us.”

Sean nodded, as if anxious to clear up this problem of potentially offending her. “See, once Mom took off, we all just said screw it. We don’t need or want women in our lives, you know? Because Dad was, like, way depressed. And now he’s fine. The whole trick was getting rid of women.”

Simon finished up the explanation. “Now do you get us? If you were like a woman, we’d never have trusted you to take Darby.”

“I see.” Actually, what Camille saw was that a chill wind was scooching over the hill; it was nearing the dinner hour; she hadn’t gotten a lick of work done; and now she had to translate fourteen-year-old-teenage-boy lingo into something an adult might understand. That godforsaken dog was clearly a prize. To them. And that she was apparently too unkempt and ornery to be “like a woman” was a giant compliment. To them.

“Okay. Anyways…” Both boys suddenly turned around and picked up their clippers again.

“Whoa. Wait a minute there-”

“It’s okay, Ms. Campbell. We know what to do. Dad called the county extension office, and this guy talked to all of us about lavender, how it’s grown, what to do and everything.”

“We know it’s a flower. Neither of us wanted to work around anything sissy like flowers, but it’s not your fault, after all, that your sister’s so bonkers-”

“Simon, shut up. You’re insulting her family, you nimwit.”

“Oh.” Simon glanced back, stricken. “Hey, I didn’t mean anything. I meant to say how sorry I was for you. Your sister scares all of us, and you have to deal with her all the time. It can’t be easy.”

“Anyways…” Sean started clip, clip, clipping as he talked. “We learned a bunch of junk. It was pretty interesting, about how there’s English lavender and French lavender and Spanish lavender. What you got here is apparently all kinds of crossbreeds.”