Home Fires by Margaret Maron Page A

screened porch overlooking the pond and the others inside took a break and came out to join us for a cold drink and something from the snack bag I’d also brought.
    They were a pickup crew from here in the neighborhood—two white men, a Mexican, and a black man who was the only one who’d actually worked with steel framing before. According to Will, they’d each grumbled about it though. He hadn’t been all that thrilled at working with the stuff himself. Yeah, yeah, he knew it was the wave of the future, termite proof, cheaper, more energy efficient, et cetera, et cetera.
    “All the same, wood’s more forgiving,” he said every time the metal frames popped their bolts or threatened to wobble out from under the men.
    Now that everything was braced six ways to Sunday, the house felt as sturdy to him as Adam’s literature had promised.
    “It might actually stand up in an earthquake,” he teased me.
    Earthquakes aren’t a real big problem in North Carolina. I was more interested in hearing that the house could withstand the wind force of a hurricane and the jaws of industrial-strength termites.
    As the men finished their break, Herman’s Annie Sue came out on the porch. She wore a sleeveless yellow tee, cutoffs, and heavy leather work shoes with bright yellow socks. Her chestnut hair was tied back in a ponytail.
    “I’m all caught up with you, Uncle Will,” she said, unbuckling the tool belt from her sturdy waist. “Nothing more I can do till the Sheetrock’s up. Hey, Deborah. One of those drinks got my name on it?”
    “And a Nab,” I said, holding out the bag.
    She broke open the cellophane wrapper and bit into the cheddar crackers smeared with peanut butter. Orange crumbs showered down the front of her shirt.
    Herman started teaching Reese about electricity before Annie Sue was born, but she’s a better electrician than he’ll ever be.
    Will went back inside and the two of us sat there on the porch steps sipping our Diet Pepsis as we looked out over the long pond where her cousins and older brother still frolicked in the water at the end of the pier.
    “Come on in,” they cried, but we both shook our heads even though I was still damp from the water and Annie Sue was equally damp from her hot sweaty work.
    Reese’s truck radio was set on a golden oldies country station and scraps of tinny banjo and guitar music floated up to us. The sun baked us dry as it started its long slow slide down the western sky. A male bluebird swooped down on a grasshopper and flew off toward the woods. A field of shoulder-high corn rippled greenly at the edge of my new boundaries. Music, laughter and splashing on one side, the sound of hammers on the other, yet I could feel peacefulness sinking into my bones.
    “You picked you one of the prettiest places on the whole farm,” Annie Sue said, unconsciously echoing my own thoughts. “Least it
would
be one of the prettiest if you could get Uncle Haywood to take away that old greenhouse.”
    “He says he’s going to refurbish it,” I said.
    “And you believe him?” she asked cynically.
    Haywood gets enthusiasms but he and Will are a lot alike about sticking to things. The difference is that Will works smart while Haywood can only work hard.
    About five years ago, Haywood decided he was going to get into truck farming in a big way. Cut back on tobacco, go heavy on produce.
    “The man who gets the first tomatoes to market gets to the bank first, too,” he said. “First truckload of watermelons you’n get five dollars apiece. Last load, you can’t give ’em away for fifty cents.”
    So he bought some big metal hoops, covered them in heavy plastic sheets and built himself a greenhouse sixty feet long and twelve feet wide down at the far end of the pond where his and Andrew’s land comes together. And he diligently sowed flats of tomatoes and watermelons. And when they were the right size, he transplanted them out into the fields where they promptly drowned in one of