Jennifer Lohmann - Weekends in Carolina

“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 did, a fact evident in the way the wood of the banisters sparkled. He peeked into his dad’s bedroom. Photos of his father and mother with different relatives were nicely displayed on the dressers. His mother’s sick room across the hall looked like any other guest bedroom in an old Piedmont farmhouse. As soon as his mother had gotten too sick to sleep through the night, she’d moved across the hall rather than disturb her husband’s sleep, a gesture Trey would have found touching if there was a possibility his father had ever said, “Don’t worry about me.”

Aunt Lois was attacking the stove when he walked into the kitchen. “Bathroom.” She didn’t even look up.

“Aunt Lois, nobody liked my father and there’s no wife to console. I seriously doubt anyone besides you will be dropping by with casseroles.”

“Trey—” she still didn’t look up from her scrubbing “—I don’t care if you’re five or thirty-five, if you don’t get in that bathroom and start cleaning in thirty seconds, I will take a switch to your behind.”

His aunt had always made good on her threats.

Bathroom.

* * *

THE FIRST RELATIVE knocked on the door thirty minutes before Aunt Lois had predicted. “That Gwen Harris,” his aunt muttered, “has had no respect for keeping decent time since she moved to the city.”

Durham, a city of two hundred and fifty thousand souls, was the city Aunt Lois referred to, and downtown Durham was a bare thirteen miles from “downtown” Bahama, despite Aunt Lois’s sniff implying the other side of the world. But Aunt Lois and Uncle Garner had taken their share of Harris farmland and withstood mechanization, buyouts and the bald fact that tobacco causes cancer to keep and expand on a successful tobacco farm. She had no patience with the farmers who gave up their land for pennies to the dollar—even though she and Uncle Garner had profited from their sales—to move into the city. And she also had no respect for a man like Trey’s father, who had clung to his farmland like a virgin to her panties, but had been unwilling or unable to make the land useful.

But, as Cousin Gwen dropping off her rolls being the first of many in a parade of relatives evidenced, blood is thicker than respect. And Aunt Lois had made the house presentable because Hank Harris had been a Harris, even if he’d been a distasteful one.