Danger, Sweetheart by MaryJanice Davidson Page A

great outdoors.) “Excellent.”
    â€œShe turned him down because she wanted her kids to grow up the way she had, working the land, and all he wanted to do was leave town and make his fortune and never come back. So he left town and made his fortune … and came back a decade later. He bought up all this land and started building.” She gestured at the house, the barn, the fields. “The house first. And when that was done he asked her to marry him again, and she said no. So he built the garage. She said no. He bought more land. She said no. He built Main One.”
    â€œAnd then she said yes,” Blake said, since the answer was self-evident.
    â€œWell, no, by then she had died of a stroke.”
    â€œUnexpected.”
    â€œShe was eighty-four by then.”
    â€œThis is a terrible story.”
    Natalie shrugged. “He never built anything else. But for a long time he meant to. The barn was nicknamed Main One because lots of people heard him call it that. ‘This barn is the main one, but I’ll add on a silo.’ ‘This is the main one until I build more outbuildings.’ Like that.”
    â€œAgain: terrible story.”
    â€œHe did eventually settle for someone else and married her and fathered his first child at age seventy-nine.”
    â€œHe must have indulged heavily in powdered rhino horn. Which was a legal indulgence back then, so the only stigma was one of humiliation, not societal.”
    â€œDunno about that, but he was your great-grandfather.”
    â€œAh.” Blake took a moment to process the new data. A beautiful woman had on short acquaintance told him more about his family than his mother ever had. “So this farm belongs to my mom now?”
    â€œNo. His kid sold it and it’s been changing hands ever since.”
    â€œAh.” This, then, was the moral: things come full circle. His grandfather, of whom he knew nothing save that he turned his back on his daughter when she needed his counsel and comfort as she never would again, sold the farm, and three generations later Blake tried to sell and was now penalized. As far as life lessons went, it was obscure and unhelpful.
    â€œThank you for explaining.” Then a dreadful thought hit him. “Are you one of the families my mom told me about? Have you done things you never wished to do in order to hold on to your family’s land, which has been in your family a century or more?”
    She was giving him an odd look, but at least it wasn’t a glare. “No. I’m not in one of those families.”
    â€œExcellent.”
    Later that same day, she had introduced him to the other farm employees,
    (field hands? was that PC?),
    all of whom had rhyming names
    (“Harry, Larry, and Gary? Really?”
    â€œReally.”)
    and were sullen and disinclined to be friendly. They made themselves very busy whenever approached, whacking nails into posts, using pitchforks to stir things around, starting up a tractor and driving away … random farm chores he didn’t yet understand. What Blake found interesting was that they didn’t seem to care for Natalie, either. Perhaps she was a strict part-time foreman.
    He heard scattered mutterings from Harry,
    (no, the redhead is Gary),
    one of which was, puzzlingly, “douche” and the other “Degas.” He had no idea why a trio of male farmhands would be concerned about feminine hygiene, but such things were not his business. Nor had he been aware those same employees had a passion for the works of Edgar Degas
    (was it Degas’ uncanny ability to depict movement they found worth commenting on, or his penchant for portraying human isolation? must find out),
    but it was heartening to know that there was at least one topic they could all discourse on.
    Well, more than one, but he was reluctant to chat about how they were nearly made jobless and homeless by his various dealings with the local bank, Sweetheart