Till Dirt Do Us Part Read online

  I was stunned as this woman started outlining the details of how she needed to handle the passing of a man who already had a wife doing these things.

  “Mrs. Atwood?”

  “Call me Emmie.”

  “Emmie. Why don’t you come inside, and I can get you some refreshments? Where have you driven from?”

  “Fredericksburg.”

  “Oh, well, then, by all means, come inside.” I picked up the mobile nursery monitor. “My daughter’s napping.” Emmie Atwood smiled. “Do you have children?”

  “No. My husband and I were never able to have any. It’s a shame really—he loved kids. I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Guess not.” Everything was confusing to me, and then again it was becoming very clear. Did Wade Atwood have not one but two wives? I didn’t even know where to start with this woman. How do you break it to a grieving widow that she’d better make room in that front pew during the funeral? As we ascended the stairs, Daisy came skidding into the driveway.

  “Anna forgot Miss Millicent, her doll! You know she won’t go to sleep without her,” she said, running up the drive and coming to a full stop when she noticed I had company. She ran her hands along her thighs in an attempt to straighten her wrinkled uniform. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had company. Mother’s home with Anna, and I thought I’d run over here before she noticed her doll was missing.”

  She extended her hand to Emmie. “Hi, I’m Daisy Atwood. Are you a friend of Betsy’s?”

  Emmie Atwood started to put her hand out to shake and then stopped and cocked her head to the side. “Atwood? Are you related to Wade Atwood?”

  Daisy smiled softly and nodded. “Yes. I’m his wife. Or I was his wife.” She still had her hand out, but Emmie recoiled.

  “His wife?” Emmie turned to me as if I had just orchestrated the worst joke she’d ever been involved in. “What is going on here?”

  I took in a breath about to speak and then pursed my lips. “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth.”

  Daisy was still clearly confused, and a little affronted Emmie wouldn’t shake her hand. “Betsy?” Now she was staring at me, making me feel guilty for something I didn’t do. Thankfully, a wail from Coco came up from the baby monitor.

  “Everybody, let’s go inside. I’ll get Coco, and you can sort this out.”

  I ran inside, pulled two bottled waters out of the fridge, slapped them down on the counter, directed them where to sit and escaped to the wake-up wails of my child. I didn’t realize it, but Daisy had followed me and now stood in the doorway looking confused. As I rocked Coco on my shoulder, I heard a tinny honking in the driveway that broke through Coco’s cries. I looked out the second-story window where the garden committee was evacuating their vehicles ready for a “first look” at the garden. I started looking for the cameras just in case I was being punked.

  As I entered the downstairs, Coco started settling down. I handed her to Daisy, who was still following me. We had been helping each other out so much lately, it just seemed natural she was there to do whatever she could. I started detaching Coco’s grip from my neck and turned to my friend. “Get her a cup of juice. I’ll be right back.”

  Daisy, still dazed, took Coco, who immediately started trying to wriggle free. I ran to the front porch, “Hi, everybody. Go ahead and look around. Take pictures. I’ll be out in a moment.” Coco’s cries echoed through the house. “Coco’s just waking up. I’ll be right there.” Some of the faces of the members of the garden club showed about as much understanding as a skinny girl at a fat farm. “Be right there.”

  Returning to the kitchen, I took Coco back. She had started settling down in long hiccupy breaths. She didn’t want juice. She just wanted me, right now, in the middle of a crisis. Kids. They’re all about timing.

  “I don’t understand just who you are,” Daisy said.

  Emmie nodded. “I’m Wade Atwood’s wife. We’ve been married for about fifteen years now. We have a house in Fredericksburg.”

  Daisy drew her eyebrows together as she tried to digest this information. Emmie pulled out her wallet.

  “Look. Here’s a picture of Wade and me on our last anniversary. We went to Las Rosas. He loves Mexican food.”

  Daisy’s confusion started evolving into horror as her worst fear was being realized. “Did he spend a lot of time away from home?”

  “Sure. Wade was a delivery driver. He dumped dirt over three counties. Of course, it barely covered our mortgage, so I work as an accountant.”

  Daisy gulped. “Kids?”

  Emmie smiled and looked almost confused. She’d been asked about whether she had a child twice in the last ten minutes. “No. I’m unable to bear children. Wade really wanted them, though. It wasn’t for lack of trying.”

  Daisy then sat down and unscrewed the top of her bottled water and took a long drink. Placing it back on the table, she quietly said, “Wade has a child. He has one with me. Wade was married to both of us at the same time.”

  A few days later, after my plants had started poking up through the dirt, Aunt Maggie sat at my kitchen table drinking coffee. My cousin Danny was in the living room watching cartoons with Coco. We discussed Wade Atwood’s two wives. To be honest, I’d kept the situation to myself for a couple of days, unsure of how Daisy would have wanted me to handle it. Finally, I was bursting to tell someone, so I called my aunt. She had been on her way to drive Danny to his center for the developmentally disabled, but my call made her do a quick U-turn on Main Street. To her, my news was a top priority. It wasn’t every day that you found out about a man having two wives at the same time.

  “So, she just drove right up and announced herself?”

  “She had no idea another wife was waiting here. She was afraid she’d been forgotten in the notification process.”

  “How is Daisy doing?”

  “She’s pretty shaken up about it. Emmie, that’s the first wife, says she’s going to produce a marriage license to prove that she is his real wife and the wife that should get the insurance settlement.”

  “Now wait a minute. Wade would have designated on the insurance policy who the funds go to.”

  “Yes, but it just says to his spouse.”

  “Man, they are in a pickle.”

  “I’ve been thinking about this a lot overnight. I mean, if he’s going to have two wives, why not have two insurance policies. I figured he was afraid if he got a second policy it might link to the other wife somehow. By making it a general distribution, he doesn’t have to address the issue. It was be the easiest way to do it.”

  “I suppose. It worked well until Mr. Atwood ended up dead.”

  I thought it was bad for Daisy before, but now it was even worse. His actions had devastated two women.

  “I don’t know what possessed a man to have two wives. I just had one husband, and that was more than enough to put up with on some days. Having two? That’s just crazy.”

  “He was a delivery driver. It was easy for him to live two lives.”

  Aunt Maggie laughed and took a sip of her coffee and then leaned closer to whisper to me so Danny and Coco would not hear. “He was delivering more than dirt, if you know what I mean.”

  I shushed her. “I just don’t know what they’re going to do now.”

  Aunt Maggie set down her mug. “Time for the lawyers to step in. Wait until the rest of the town hears about this.”

  She was right. This was the richest gossip to come around the bend in years. I was just waiting for the betting pool to open at Miss Ruby’s Best Little Hair House as to which wife would get the insurance money. Legally it had to be Emmie Atwood, the first wife. Any marriages after that one wouldn’t count.

  “One thing this town loves to do is talk,” I said. “Which reminds me, the gardeners of Pecan Bayou are going to find a whole new subject to talk about once they see my garden.”

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  I confided in Aunt Maggie about Coco’s day of pla
y and the upturned seeds episode. “Oh, my, surely you separated the seeds. Anybody can tell the difference between a pumpkin seed and a tomato seed.”

  “You can, but I can’t. I tried to put similar seeds together and planted them as best as I could. Some of those little bitty seeds looked the same to me, though. The cucumber seeds and the green bean seeds look alike, too.”

  “They definitely do not.” She said, clucking her tongue at my lack of observation.

  “I’ve never planted a garden before. I don’t know how to grow things, and I don’t know how to keep them alive. Of all the things Rocky has gotten me into, this has to be the worst.”

  Aunt Maggie patted my hand. “Come on now, it can’t be that bad. It’s just a couple of plants in the ground. You’re being overly dramatic.”

  I stood up from the table and walked over and stuck my head in the living room as the sounds of cartoon music bounced off the walls. “Will you two be okay in here for about five minutes?” I looked at Danny.

  He sat up straight and nodded his head. “We will be okay. I’ll watch Coco.” Generally, I wouldn’t trust Danny to look after Coco, but once they plugged their heads into cartoons, I knew they wouldn’t wander. If they did, Danny, losing his chance to watch TV, would be hollering out the door in two seconds flat.

  “Good job, Danny. Thank you.”

  As we went out the back door, I heard Danny’s voice echoing throughout the house. “You’re welcome.”

  We stepped out to the yellow boxes that still looked remarkably good, but the plants inside were a terrible mishmash of tall and short. There were broad leaves and thin leaves, and the variety of little seedlings made it look disorganized.

  “You weren’t being dramatic.” She said as she took in the garden’s appearance. “It certainly is interesting.” For Maggie, that’s a code word for “I don’t know what to say at this point.”

  “You see what I mean? Once Enid and Delta come in here, they’re going to laugh like crazy. What’s worse is Rocky’s going to take a picture of it and put it in the paper so that the whole town can be in on the joke.”

  Aunt Maggie took one more tour around my planter boxes. She folded her arms as she thought, and I could tell she was coming up with something to save my bacon.

  “Do you think they would let Coco back into that day care today?”

  It had been several days since I left Chickadee’s, but I hadn’t exactly been nice when I ran off with my child. Still, though, if Aunt Maggie had some sort of solution, I was going to listen. There was no denying, I needed some help at this point.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “You could pick up these little plant labels that you have and stick them in a bag. We’ll get in the car and drive over to the garden nursery in Andersonville. We’ll pick up plants to match the labels.”

  “Pick up plants? You can do that? I thought all the plants were supposed to be grown from seed?”

  “The plants in Andersonville were grown from seed. Just not by you. All these plant nurseries have plants they have nurtured, and they are a heck of a lot better looking than what you can grow yourself. What do you say?”

  I thought it was a great idea and wanted to make the plant switch before the next judging. “You take Danny to his center, and I’ll get Coco ready for day care. I’ll be at your house in half an hour.”

  Aunt Maggie rubbed her hands together and smiled. Nothing like teamwork.

  CHAPTER 9

  When we entered the gardening center in Andersonville, the building was 60,000 feet of backyard paradise. You could find things like pots, plants, grass, stones, fencing, and lumber, and if I only cared about gardening, it would have been even nicer. Aunt Maggie pushed our shiny silver cart with the red handle to a section with an old-fashioned wooden sign that had “Plants” written on it in cursive. I had to figure that this was the way a national coast-to-coast conglomerate of a company intended to prove to me that it was just a small-town garden shop. I might be from a small town, but I wasn’t falling for it.

  “Let me see your plant markers.” I laid them out poker-card fashion, and Aunt Maggie immediately started loading the cart up with plants.

  “Okay, so I need five tomatoes and five cucumbers and five green peppers ...” She began filling up one basket and then another. At the end of it, she put in a carton of marigolds.

  “I never had marigolds in the garden to begin with, Aunt Maggie.”

  “Well, I have a helpful hint for you, Betsy. I put the marigolds in to keep the pests away.” Pests? As in bugs?

  “What kind of pests?” I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

  “Oh, all kinds. You’ve got your initial aphids, which don’t seem harmful, but they really are. Then you could get those big fat tomato caterpillars. Those fellas will eat you out of house and home in twenty-four hours. I had some giant caterpillars one year that were two inches long. They ruined my tomatoes. You want to make sure you have some marigolds.”

  So, by planting things in my backyard, I was going to attract some sort of alien spawn caterpillar? How long before it ate up everything in the garden and then marched its little feet to the house to eat the humans? Gardening was for crazy people. Why would anybody bring it upon themselves? That’s it. Rocky was off my Christmas list from here on out.

  “Well, I think that about does it. We better go check out now.” As we both pushed our baskets to the checkout aisles, I started counting the plants we had just laid claim to. There had to be at least forty plants there. At the prices they were charging, this was going to be a very expensive addition to our garden. How was I going to break it to Leo that after the cost of the planter boxes, the soil, and the seeds, I now had even more money invested in the garden in plants?

  “Well, I’ll be,” Aunt Maggie said as she gazed across the store to another checkout. “Do you see who I see?” I turned my head to look in the same direction.

  “Is that Miss Enid Haney?”

  Aunt Maggie slapped her thigh. “It sure is. I can’t believe she’s over here doing the same thing we are. Enid’s always bragging about how she only raises plants from seed. She saves scads of money by recycling her seeds every year. She says she only buys plant food, never plants. I would have to say today she has as many plants as you do.”

  “Really?”

  Now I had a moral dilemma. Should I keep this to myself or return to Pecan Bayou and tell the other garden club members about Enid Haney’s secret shopping trip? It didn’t take me long to make my decision. “I think we should talk to her.”

  “I do too,” Maggie agreed a little too happily.

  I raised my hand and started waving. “Yoo-hoo, Miss Enid? Is that you over there?”

  Mrs. Enid Haney had been looking down at her phone and cringed as she looked up to see Aunt Maggie and me over in aisle one. Her guilty expression looked so busted I could swear I’d seen her on Cops one night. “And look at all of the beautiful plants you’re buying. Are those for the garden contest?”

  She glanced into her basket as if realizing for the first time that it was full of plants. “I shop here from time to time just for the essentials. My garden, of course, is already established. These are for ... a friend.” She eyed my basket. “You also have many beautiful plants.”

  “Well, I’m just a beginner, not like you. I thought you grew all your plants from seed?”

  Aunt Maggie only nodded her head and smiled. I had done well, asking just the right question.

  Enid flushed. “Like I said, these are for a friend.”

  As we moved forward in line, I ended Enid’s pain. “Well, we have to go now. It was so nice seeing you here, Enid. Don’t you think so, Aunt Maggie?”

  “So nice.”

  As the cashier started ringing up our purchases, Aunt Maggie whispered, “Hot diggity. I can’t believe we caught her.”

  I smiled with a secret joy in my heart while I searched for a credit card in my purse. As I swiped it on the card reader, I gl
anced back at Enid. She was hurrying to get her things out of the store before anyone else noticed her. “Why do I suddenly feel like a big fat caterpillar who just ate up her latest crop?”

  Maggie and I spent the rest of the day planting all our store-bought seedlings and replacing the plant markers. When we were finished, I couldn’t believe how good it looked. She had really turned my garden from a mess to a masterpiece. Just wait until the garden committee came through this time. They wouldn’t believe it. Technically, I wrote down that my plants were started from seeds, but I never stated that they were started from the seeds I acquired from Sprouts. It was all semantics. I was confident that Enid Haney was going to use that defense. Aunt Maggie made sure that I understood the watering schedule and how to keep the plants healthy and whole. After we had finished planting, we sat down at the kitchen table, and she gave me many helpful hints to put into my column. I asked her if she wanted the credit for this, but she insisted that she was happy to be a part of the Happy Hinter research team.

  Later that night, after the boys had finished their homework and Coco was fast asleep, I let Butch out for a final run in the backyard before getting ready for bed. It was still a little chilly at night, so I grabbed my sweater and stood out in the backyard waiting for Butch to do his business. I walked closer to the garden and hugged myself as I looked up at the full moon in the sky. The moon glow filtered down onto my boxes filled with plants.

  “What are you doing out here?” Leo came up behind me and slipped his hands around my waist. I leaned my head on his shoulder and put my hands over his. This was the most comfortable place in my world. “Letting Butch out and looking at my garden.”

  “At night?”

  “It just looks so great now. I can’t believe we did all of this in a day.”

  “I can’t wait until the vegetables start coming in.” He leaned down and nestled my neck.

  “So, you don’t mind about the added expense?”

  “It couldn’t be that much. You couldn’t have planned on Coco doing her own version of scattering the seeds.” Now he was starting to work his way up to my ear. I felt a little surge of electricity go down my spine.