The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,131
calls my name, too.”
“Been a while since you had a good woman, huh?” He pressed his hips against me.
“Yes, it has been, but the last one sent me a wonderful substitute.” I kissed him. “Take Rosie with you tomorrow. She needs it. She misses the horses.”
Dew fell and the odor of the earth rose up, different from the smell of North Carolina red clay—musky and less metallic. I remembered Addie, misshapen and lying on her side like a bear in the mud. “Let’s not sell any more land. Not just yet, okay?” I couldn’t sever that tie.
“No, we shouldn’t have to. If I get work, we’ll be okay. We need to find someone willing to take care of the farm and the horses.”
I immediately thought of Joe’s son, Bud. He was grown now and recently married. His wife, Wanda, had been a farm girl until she married him.
With that we decided to try living in Florida. We went to bed and I did not stay awake listening to crickets, mockingbirds, and my husband’s breathing. I slept deep and hard and woke to Adam bending over me to kiss me good-bye as he left to look for work.
Adam found a job quickly—a job with a house. Randy and Edith Warren needed a groom and trainer. They hired him on the spot. The job came with a small house if we wanted to live on the property.
The wood-frame house needed paint, and had three small bedrooms instead of four, but its windows looked out on those rolling hills and grazing horses that Adam found so appealing. The Warrens’ ranch was pretty, especially in that early part of the year before the summer sun dulled the green of the pastures.
As we dusted, bleached, and cleaned our new home, wolf spiders skittered out of sight. What furniture there was in the house smelled of unfamiliar molds. We quickly discovered how far Florida roaches can fly and which shade of red hair they prefer for a landing. But Pauline helped us, and her presence defused the girls’ whining. She and the Warrens loaned us furniture, so each of us had a place to sit during the day and a place to lie down at night. We enrolled the girls in school as soon as possible.
At the end of their first week in school, I made a trip back to North Carolina, alone. A lightning raid to check on the farm and pick up essentials.
The Florida flatlands receded and the sun rose to my right as I drove north. The solitary drive took all day. Through the monotony of southern Georgia back roads, I waffled between anxiety and anticipation. I reminded myself that the authorities wanted Adam—not me, not our land. I imagined all my familiar things in our Florida kitchen. No more paper plates or cheap, new coffee cups.
By late afternoon, the first of the familiar red clay hills rose around me, a bittersweet, almost sexual pleasure. An hour after sunset, I was on the farm. My motherland. The place my children were born.
In the moonlight, I could see little had changed in the weeks we’d been gone. Wallace had even kept up the parts of the garden already planted. The tea roses needed pruning.
I unlocked the back door, swung it open, and stepped into my kitchen as if into a lover’s arms. But before my hand reached the light switch, I felt the emptiness of the house as a tangible, shocking thing. My hand faltered. Then light burst through the kitchen. Everything looked the same. Exactly as we’d left it. The only difference was a neat pile of mail in the middle of the table, right where I’d asked Joe to leave it. Numbly, I fanned the envelopes, searching them as if the key to our changed lives resided there. Bills. Letters from the girls’ schools. A letter from the Centers for Disease Control. I dumped them all, unopened, in a paper bag, and ran out to the car, away from the oppressive quiet of the house.
Outside, the air seemed brittle and strange, deeply familiar and distant, unattainable as the dead. I wanted to call the names into the air: Jennie. Momma. I wanted to go down on my knees and scream their names into the dirt. But I held my tongue on those fruitless syllables. I walked the perimeter of the hay field. In the garden, I dug my hand into the soil and felt the residue of the day’s warmth. The ground