Orchard Flower

Orchard Flower

by Robert Lubrican

zbookstore Edition

Copyright 2010 Robert Lubrican

Second edition 2025 Robert Lubrican

License Notes

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Foreword

Various cultures and time periods in history have accepted, or even approved of plural marriage. American culture, for the most part, has not, even though her citizens have sometimes come from cultures that accepted the practice.

In America, just about the only situation in which most people will even consider plural marriage as a viable lifestyle concerns the Mormon religion. Even that isn't tolerated, by most Mormons. But why is this? If plural marriage has been so pervasive throughout history, why is it such an anathema in this particular culture? That question can be debated, but it is not the purpose of this story to do so. Rather, the purpose of this story is to put forth a fictional situation in which the reader may actually examine the concept, perhaps through neutral eyes.

Then the debate can commence.

This book was edited to conform to the publisher's standards and practices. All characters in this book are at least 18 years of age or older. Some parts of the book may seem odd in context.

Bob

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Table of Contents

Chapters: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven

Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | Thirteen

Fourteen | Fifteen | Sixteen | Afterword

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Chapter One

Coincidence is an astonishing thing if you take the time to stop and think about it. Most of us don't. Oh, we think about it fleetingly, as it touches our lives now and then, but we don't actually give it the honor it is due. Some people think there isn't any such thing as coincidence, and that everything is preordained. They would call coincidence fate.

I'm not one of those people.

Coincidence is neither good nor bad, in and of itself. The results can be either, of course, but you can't blame that on coincidence.

Take, for example the coincidence of my fiancé being involved in a fender bender with an up an rising NFL football star. Having been to a party and had a few drinks, he poured on the charm to talk her out of calling the police. She, it turns out, is susceptible to charm laid on by a jock.

Everybody said it was good I found out before the wedding ... like that would make me feel better or something.

Or, there is the coincidence that, when I left Chicago to get away from my ex and her new bang-buddy, and was playing that game where you open an atlas and just put your finger down someplace, my finger landed on Hot Springs, South Dakota.

Hot springs seemed like as good a place as any to just start over. It was close to things like Mount Rushmore and Sturgis. I'd never seen Mount Rushmore and, while I didn't own a bike, I might some day, and Sturgis would be right there, up the road. I'd never even ridden a bike, but I was feeling a little crazy-brash, so who knew what might happen. That gives you some idea of the mood I was in.

A little research told me there were about as many people in the national cemetery located in Hot Springs as there were walking the streets. That was fine with me because it meant having to get to know fewer people than had attended my high school. Its economic basis was tourism, and that was fine too, because all those people would show up once and never come back. That also tells you a bit about the mood I was in.

I was just looking for someplace to hide for a while, where nobody would know me and I could be something other than a certified public accountant. Tourist traps are always looking for workers, and being dirt poor fit with the way I was feeling just about then. There was also a big wild mustang ranch located there, and I had fantasies of magically becoming a cowboy, riding the range and living clean.

Hmmm ... shouldn’t they be called horseboys on a horse ranch? Who knows? Like most men who go off half-cocked in pursuit of healing a broken heart I was a dreadfully uneducated and unprepared man.

It is necessary to mention another man, named Paul, who was living my fantasy, working with horses every day, and who was sitting on top of one which made him the highest point around during a thunder storm. It was coincidence that put him right there, where the lightning bolt would strike, killing both him and his horse. His importance will be explained later.

The string of coincidences wasn't over yet, though. It was coincidence that my radiator lasted precisely long enough to get me just twenty miles short of Hot Springs, and that the first people to drive by were Paul's widow and daughter.

Up in that part of the world, people stop for folks in trouble. It's as unlike Chicago as it's possible to be. And it wasn't just because they had their dog with them, which might have made them feel safer.

Lynne Simmons and her daughter Jill were something of a shock to my system. Lynne was one of those women who looks a little older than she really is because she spends so much time outdoors. She had a windblown kind of look to her. But at the same time, her body just didn't match the impression of being older. Her face made her look like she might be in her forties, like me, but her body said she was Jill's big sister. It was the kind of body that draws a man's eyes like a magnet. She was wearing tight jeans that were faded almost white in places, and a checkered shirt that was packed full of femininity. Wisps of sun-bleached hair fell from under a cowboy hat that sat over pale blue eyes that didn't look at me suspiciously at all. She later told me that was because their dog, Buster, had given me his seal of approval. She trusted that dog's judgment.

Jill, on the other hand, was eighteen, but she looked younger. She was kind of lanky and gawky, with a ponytail. She was slim, but had fresh young curves that were well on the way to becoming lush, like her mother's, some day. Jill was one of those girls who promised to be a looker in a few years. What made her a shock to me was how willing she was to talk to me as Lynne drove me to Bud's Auto Repair, in Hot Springs.

A lot of girls in their teens are uninterested in strangers, and in strange men in particular. Not Jill. She practically interrogated me, asking dozens of questions about where I was from, and what Chicago was like, and why I left. Her mother finally barked at her to stop being a "nosey ninny." I swear that's that she said.

Jill was undeterred.

"I'm just trying to learn something, mom. Aren't you always harping on that ... telling me to read books and all that?"

"There's a difference between learning things and snooping into other people's business," said Lynne.

"I don't mind," I said. "Back in Chicago a girl like Jill wouldn't even talk to me."

Lynne darted me a look as she steered the pickup down the road. Jill was sandwiched between us. Buster was happily letting the wind rush by in the bed of the truck. It was fairly close quarters in the cab. But it was Jill who spoke.

"Why's that?" she asked. "Are you some kind of sex offender?"

I was impressed with Lynne's ability to recover her equilibrium and get the truck back on the highway so quickly.

"No," I said. "What I meant was that women her age ignore men my age. I'm not a sex offender."

"What?" asked Jill, sounding injured. "I've heard about registered sex offenders. There's even a place you can go on the Internet to see where they live and stuff. We don't have any in Hot Springs, though."

That was Jill. She was - and I say it fondly - a motor-mouth who saw no problem with saying exactly what was on her mind, whatever that might be. She wasn't trying to push anybody's buttons. She was just honest and curious.

Her curiosity (and probably my desire for somebody to feel sorry for me) was how my situation came out. I told them I had set off into the big wide world to find my fortune, just like some boy in a fairy tale. Jill thought it sounded cool. Lynne thought I was crazy.

"You were a CPA making good money and you threw all that away because a woman broke your heart?" she asked, shaking her head. "There are more women in the world, you know."

"I can't believe you said that!" said Jill.

And that is how I found out that Lynne's husband, who was Jill's father, had died when he was struck by lightning when Jill was six. Jill had been trying to get her mother to go on dates in the last couple of years, probably because Jill was at the age to think about boys, and dates, and all that sort of thing. Lynne was resisting.

"Let's not go into this again," she sighed, as her daughter ratted her out to a complete stranger. "I told you, I still have feelings for your father."

Jill turned her curious face towards me. "Do you still have feelings for your girlfriend?"

I felt my heart wrench in my chest. I was really feeling sorry for myself.

"I guess I do," I said. "I don't want to, but I do." Lynne had helped me out, picking me up like that, so I tried to help her out by passing along some of my wisdom to her daughter. "So I guess I know how your mother feels."

It backfired on me. Maybe on Lynne too, because Jill slumped.

"I hope I never fall in love, then."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

At Bud's Auto Repair there was actually nobody named Bud. I found this out when I tried to be friendly and asked jovially if Bud was around. I later found out there had been no Bud since 1953, when Bud retired and sold his business. There had been four owners since then, none of whom felt the need to rename the business and therefore incur the expense of having a new sign made. The current owner was named Randy, and he said he'd have my car towed to his shop.

"It'll take me about a week to get a radiator and get it installed. Cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred dollars," he said, wiping his hands on a rag.

I had about fifteen hundred in my bank account. More Americans live paycheck to paycheck than you would believe. Most Americans really are three paychecks away from being homeless. But that wasn't my primary problem. My problem was that staying someplace at tourist rates for that week would eat up the rest.

"Know anybody who's hiring?" I asked Randy hopefully.

"Nope." He was a man of few words. "So you want me to fix your car or not?" He also got right to the point.

"Yeah," I sighed. "I guess so. Where's the cheapest place to stay. And where do you recommend I start looking for a job?"

"Beats me," said Randy. "I got a place to stay, and I ain't looked for a job since I bought this place."

I could tell I was going to like the people around here a lot.

I turned to find Lynne still standing there. Her hands were on her hips and her head was tilted slightly, like she was looking at a picture in an art gallery, trying to figure out what it meant. Jill was peering into the open hood of a car that had been left for Bud - who didn't exist - to repair. Buster was sitting on the ground between Lynne and me.

When she spoke, Lynne's voice sounded distinctly wary. "I could use some temporary help at my place," she said.

Randy's head whipped around and he stared at her. You'd have thought I was a known serial killer or something. I later found out that he was among the dozen or so men who had tried to get her to go out on a date with him in the time that had passed since Paul died. She had turned them all down, and had never had a hired man.

Jill thought that was a capital idea, and bounced around like a basketball being played with by the Harlem Globetrotters.

All that to explain the string of coincidences by which I landed on Lynne Simmons' horse ranch and apple orchard, forty miles east of Hot Springs, South Dakota.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Lynne was in the unhappy situation where she had a ranch that could produce a good living, except that she didn't have enough help to make that happen. And hiring full time people would eat up the added income, so there had never been a strong drive to do that. Agriculture is one of those occupations that requires you to borrow a hell of a lot of money on the faith that the crop will come in, or the herd will sell later, and you can repay the loan. If you can't repay that loan, you can lose the farm, literally.

Instead of taking that chance, Lynne took what she knew about horses, quarter horses in this instance, and what she knew about running an orchard, and eked out a living for herself and her daughter. The land had belonged to her father and grandfather before him. When she married Paul, the plan was to have a son to carry on the tradition. Jill had come along and they were working on having that son when Paul got killed.

It was just a fluke - or coincidence - that Lynne's parents had planted the apple orchard at all. If you talked to commercial growers, they'd say South Dakota was all wrong for apples. Lynne would have told them to tell it to the apples that rotted on the ground each year because she couldn't harvest the entire thirty acres and get them to market.

And while she knew a lot about horses and apples, there are things to do on a ranch that take a man's hand. I'm not being sexist. There are differences between women and men, and some of those differences are physical.

I know what you're thinking, but that's not what I'm talking about. Sure, a woman might be able to lift as much as a man - a few times. But it's going to wear harder on her body than on the man's. That's just a fact. And another fact is that a woman who is five-eight and weighs a hundred and twenty just isn't likely to be able to perform the same physical feats as a man who is almost six feet tall and weighs two hundred pounds. It's not gender bias. It's simply physics. Give me a two hundred pound six-foot female body builder and she'll probably be able to work me into the ground.

But neither Lynne nor Jill were that woman.

As a result, there was about seven years of semi-neglect all around the ranch. It wasn't all because they were women. A lot of it was because there were only two of them, and they were both busy putting out this fire or that one, trying to make a living. And when the tractor stopped running, and it cost too much to have somebody come out and fix it, and neither woman had time to learn how to trouble shoot and repair a tractor ... well it just sat there and they improvised.

Of course I didn't know how to repair a tractor. Not when I first got there. But I could do many of the hundred other things that needed doing, as long as I was supervised by somebody who could tell me what the heck to do.

That turned out to be Jill, mostly.

Which is how coincidence led me to have, as one of my best friends, an eighteen-year-old girl.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

There was a bunkhouse on the ranch. It hadn't been used as a bunkhouse for sixty years, but it was there. It was full of junk, having been turned into storage when America no longer needed horses in quantity to pull freight, or act as primary transportation for people.

So my first job was to clear me a place to stay. It was June which, in Southwestern South Dakota, is like the fall weather I loved so much back in Illinois. That night Lynne gave me some blankets and a pillow, and I was as happy as a pig in shit.

Or whatever pigs love to be in. You know what I mean.

For two days I worked around the house and barns cleaning stuff up and hauling trash off. The stables were clean, but the manure pile was about ten feet tall. The tractor had a bucket on the front, but the tractor didn't run. I wasn't a mechanic but I had two arms, which is all that's required to use a shovel. I can't complain, because Jill was right there with me, shoveling it in the back of the truck and then back out of the truck a mile away into a draw that was the equivalent of their land fill. I thought I might actually die.

It wasn't because it was back-breaking work.

Okay, maybe it was.

But it wasn't because the manure pile was wet in the middle, and greasy and smelly and soaked through my shoes within an hour while Jill's boots repelled it like Rain-X on a windshield.

Okay, maybe it was that too.

But it was honest work and I got to talk to Jill all day while I did it, and she didn't mock me when I had to sit down and rest my back. She rested too, but not every ten minutes, like me.

And I felt pretty proud when that fricking pile of fricking horse shit was gone. I mean I'd helped make it be gone, and from now on whenever I uttered the term "Horse shit!" it would have a hell of a lot more emotion behind it than it ever had before.

Then I fixed fences for three days and I was sure I was going to die. Again, it wasn't because it was back breaking work.

Okay, maybe it was.

But it wasn't because it was dangerous, pulling wire with the pickup, and then getting it even tighter with a come-along until the wire was taut as a guitar string. And if it snapped, it could wrap you up in barbed wire like a birthday present for a cannibal.

Okay, maybe it was that too.

All I know is that each night, when I got back to the bunkhouse and fell into bed, I felt like it would be easier to just expire and get it over with than get up and take a (cold) shower in the bunkhouse bathroom (and I use that noun with tongue planted firmly in cheek), so I could get up at five the next morning and start all over again.

Chapter Two

One of the things I learned being on the farm was how valuable the friendship of a dog can be. Buster was always there to greet me when I stepped out of the bunkhouse. He was always glad to see me any time of the day, no matter what I smelled like. And he was happy in an obvious way about the attention I gave him. He was glad I was in his life, and I was glad he had come into mine. Of course if given a choice to get attention from me or Jill he'd go to Jill in a heartbeat, but I didn't mind. I had to admit I'd like if she paid that kind of attention to me too.

That would be worth staying alive for, even if it made me feel faintly perverted.

To be honest there was another thing worth staying alive for. That was Lynne's cooking.

Actually, eating was the high point of each day all week long. Lynne could cook, and she cooked what the pundits call "comfort food." I could have gotten three dollars apiece for her hot rolls back in Chicago. And her pies? I wanted to eat an entire pie at one sitting, even if I had to use a broomstick to cram it down my throat. I would have been entirely happy looking like Jabba the Hutt if I had been able to eat her pies all day long.

Except that I worked so hard I could have eaten a pie a day and never gained a fricking ounce.

Jill always rode out with me, telling me where to drive the four-wheel-drive truck to do the next job. Then, when it was time for lunch, she'd drive the truck back to the house, get food, and bring it back out to where I was still working. If we needed anything, she'd go back and get it. I worked. That's all I did.

Except for when we got to break for lunch. Even Lynne's cold comfort food was delicious. And in the evening, after I'd stopped shivering from the ice cold water in the bunkhouse shower, I'd go up to the farmhouse where there would be beef and mashed potatoes with green beans, or black-eyed peas, or corn, and fresh baked hot rolls and butter. And pie for dessert.

Actually, the work wasn't so bad either, all things considered. It got my mind off of cheating very-nearly-spouses and jocks with cocks that probably hang halfway to their knees and who drive BMWs instead of a six-year-old Chevy. And there was something that stirred my heart when I looked down a stretch of fence and saw nothing but shiny barbs on tight wire, stapled to posts that, if not perfectly perpendicular to the ground, at least all tilted the same direction at the same angle.

And then it was Saturday, and Randy called to tell Lynne my car was ready. I found out about it when she rode out on one of her horses, to bring us lunch. It was roast beef sandwiches and potato salad and celery sticks with peanut butter spread on them. She had a thermos of tea too. She spread it out on the tailgate of the truck and ate with us.

"You should probably wrap things up after lunch and come on in," she said. "We need to get you to town before he closes for the day."

"Yeah," I said, suddenly wondering what I was going to do that night. I had been working for my room and board, so I hadn't spent anything. Suddenly my dark and dusty room, and that cold water in the bunkhouse shower didn't seem all that much to put up with, considering it was free and I got to eat like I was eating right then.

"I don't want you to go!" wailed Jill.

"Stop that!" barked her mother. "Bob has his own life to get on with."

"Not really," I said, without even thinking about it first. It just came gushing out of my mouth.

"Why can't he stay?" whined Jill. "He's actually pretty good at doing stuff."

"Jill, we can't afford to pay him, and this isn't the kind of job he's looking for anyway," said Lynne.

"Well, maybe," I blurted.

Which is how coincidence led me to extend my stay at the Simmons horse ranch and apple orchard for a month ... and then another month ... during which I found out what harvesting apples was like ... and then two more months, at which point I had to ask for some more blankets. I was used to the cold showers by then, but I liked to sleep warm.

Lynne looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup. It was late, and Jill had been sent to bed.

"How long are you going to stay?" she asked, suddenly.

"Is that your way of saying I need to move on?"

We'd gotten to know each other pretty well in the almost six months I'd been there. There was little formality between us any longer. I had settled into what now felt like a reasonable existence. I liked Lynne a lot. I adored Jill. I had a place to stay and the best food I'd ever eaten. I watched a little TV with them some nights, but mostly I read books in the bunkhouse. I had gotten special dispensation from Janet Biggs, the town librarian, to exceed the five-book limit because we only went to the library once a month, and I could usually go through ten books a month easily if they were any good.

"Of course not," she said. "I'm just wondering how much longer you're going to enjoy this cave man routine you're in."

"Cave man?" I could feel my eyebrows rise.

"Bob, no man I ever met enjoyed sleeping in an old bunkhouse by himself, taking cold showers, and working his ass off every day for nothing." She looked almost irritated.

I thought about it. She was right. Before I had gotten there, if somebody would have described it all and said "Want to do that for six months?" I'd have laughed and suggested they were crazy to even ask.

"I guess I feel like I'm actually doing something worthwhile," I said, realizing that was exactly how I felt.

She thought about that for a half minute. "Well ... you are doing something worthwhile," she said slowly. "You're making Jill's and my lives a lot easier. I just don't see what you're getting out of it." She frowned. "At first I thought you were angling for sex ..." She obviously hadn't meant to say that out loud, and her hand came to slap over her mouth.

I blinked. "Sex?"

Her cheeks got pink. "At first, when you wanted to stay ... I thought you were trying to wiggle your way close to me ... that you had some kind of nefarious plan."

I laughed. I laughed out loud. The first thing that popped into my head was that any man who attempted to pull something over on Lynne Simmons was looking for trouble. She was a smart, tough woman. I'd been there long enough by now to know she could work me into the ground. I'd thought more than once that it wasn't fair that she was having to scrape along, because she deserved to be a lot better off than she was, both financially and in the comfort department.

She looked like I'd slapped her and I realized she had interpreted my laughter as an indication of what I thought of her as a woman ... a sexual being ... that I was rejecting her outright.

"It's not what you think!" I said, holding up a hand. "You're a babe. But you're also a man-eater, and I knew better than to ..."

Her face got dark red. You know how sometimes they say that thunderclouds come onto someone's face? It was like that. I knew I had made things worse.

"Wait!" I gasped. "Let me explain!"

"You've explained enough, thank you," she said darkly. It's bedtime. Hank Thompson is coming over tomorrow to bale our hay and it's going to take all day to get it put up." She stood up.

"Lynne," I moaned. "Don't be mad. I just said it wrong."

"Yes, you did," she agreed.

Then she turned and stomped out of the room.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The next morning I was sitting at the table when Jill came in. She was dressed and ready to go to work too. Lynne had said she had to move things from the washer to the dryer. The griddle was heating for waffles.

"What did you do?" asked Jill, as she poured herself a glass of orange juice.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Yesterday Mom said she was going to tell you you could sleep in the spare bedroom from now on. But when I got up to go to the bathroom the bedroom was empty and the light was still on in the bunkhouse. You obviously stayed out there last night. Nobody in his right mind would do that if he could stay in here. Ergo you did something to make her mad. So what did you do?"

She was a smart girl, just like her mother.

"I'm in my right mind!" I said, sounding wounded.

"Yeah, right," she said.

We had gotten to be even better friends than Lynne and I. I now preferred Jill's company over that of anybody I could remember back in Chicago. Lynne's too, for that matter.

"I just said I wasn't trying to hit on her," I said, "and she took it the wrong way." I frowned. "She said I could stay in here?"

"She asked me if I thought it was a good idea," said Jill, sitting down. She shrugged. "I told her I didn't know why you ever stayed in the bunkhouse at all."

"Well," I said. "Back then I was a strange man, and she was smart enough to keep me at arm's length."

"You're still a strange man, Bob," she said, deadpan.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Long story short, I did get invited to live in the house with the women. Now I know what you're thinking. Single guy, living in house with a woman and her blossoming daughter. Well get your mind out of the gutter, because it wasn't like that at all.

Oh sure, I notice them as females. Lynne had a long flannel nightgown that she wore that first winter. It had been around a while, though, and it wasn't loose, so I got to see plenty in terms of her shape. And Jill wore actual footy pajamas, made out of some kind of stretchy yellow and white striped material. Her gawkiness had vanished, somehow, and she was all girl under that stretchy material. It clung to her right between her legs where ... well ... not to be indelicate about it but it was very clear she was no male. She looked vaguely like some kind of modern art tigress.

But even though I noticed them as women, I didn't have thoughts and fantasies about them. Not really. Since then I've talked to several old geezers who thoroughly enjoy looking at women and who wish their manhood would get hard, but they know their days of rutting like a bull are over, so they just kind of have happy, horny thoughts about what it was like back in the day, and how much fun it would be to make this or that young thing squeal ... if you could ... which you can't ... so oh, well.

I wasn't old. I could still get rock-hard ... and did. And I beat it into submission pretty much every day too. But not because I was thinking about Lynne and Jill. They were more like my sisters or roommates or something. They just weren't on that page of the program, you know?

I still tortured myself over Tiffany, imagining her spreading her long, slim, tanned thighs for Bubba the running back. She was actually chapter two in a book that I wasn't all that excited about being a character in. It was complicated, and nobody around me would have understood why I felt like I did about it, because how I felt wasn't how most people would feel. It's not like I got off on thinking about her with him. But she couldn't handle having feelings for both of us, even though I was convinced her feelings for him were just physical. I guess I kept trying to win her back in my mind or something. I was a sad case back then.

Anyway, that first winter was amazingly happy. I studied up on things mechanical and made friends with the blacksmith in town. He taught me stuff and I started checking over the tractor, which was an old John Deere 40/20. The battery was stone dead, but when I charged that back up it still wouldn't crank. I found a bunch of corrosion where the ground wire attached to the frame and then the engine would turn over, but not start. I went through the lists one by one and by the time March rolled around nobody was more surprised than I was when the stack belched black smoke and the thing started clattering along. It smoothed out and ran pretty good. I felt like I had just built the pyramids of Egypt or something.

Of course I had no idea how to drive the thing. Jill climbed up, leaned back and stretched out her left foot pushing the clutch, popped it in gear, moved the throttle lever and away she went. She'd been able to drive it when she was ten. I know I was grinning like an idiot.

My newfound mechanical skills did not, as it turned out, transfer to the pickup. When the dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree I had no clue. Randy had a thing that could talk to the computer in the vehicle and he blithely informed us that five hundred dollars would fix it up just fine. He kept looking at me like I was some kind of monster. It might have been because Jill, wanting a piece of gum, just got in my pocket for it instead of asking. He thought I had a thing going with Jill, or her mother, and I think it still stung him a little that he'd gotten shut down.

That was when I found out what kind of straits Lynne was in financially. When Paul died, there was some insurance money, but it hadn't lasted all that long and she was running things on a shoestring. She'd put a bunch of money into a college fund for Jill, and had managed not to touch it since then. Now, though, she had to get into that for the money to fix the truck.

I didn't think that was fair. Jill was a smart girl, and would do well in college. She deserved to go. So I hung out my shingle as a CPA again and started doing taxes for people because it was that time of year. I put the money back into Jill's college fund. It's amazing that you can walk into a bank and, if you know somebody's name, you can put money in their account. You can't take any out, but anybody in the world can make a deposit.

Of course Lynne said I didn't have to do that, but she had taken me in when I was in need, and had let me stay, and fed me and all that, so I just thought I should contribute something towards my upkeep. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

And I swear that I wasn't trying to get any points for ... well ... you know ... anything.

Chapter Three

The next spring was when we actually started to catch up on all the maintenance that had been missed and needed doing. That whole summer is kind of hazy in my memory, because I just lost myself in the work and finally got Tiffany out of my head. Again, my usual work partner - when I needed one - was Jill, and we were so comfortable together by that time that I really can't even remember what we talked about most of the time. That summer was a fog as my spirit healed.

Then, in the fall, Buster died. He was curled up in his dog bed, and looked like he was still sleeping, but he was gone. They'd gotten him for Jill when she was four so he was old, but everybody kind of expected he had a couple more years left in him.

I was the one who noticed, because he always lifted his head and wagged his tail when I walked into the mud room, where his bed was. When he didn't, I investigated. I admit I freaked out a little bit. I'd never had a pet, and I'd never lost one.

But my freak-out was as nothing compared to Jill, who sobbed. I ended up holding her and Lynne, who was also crying. We had a group hug for a good half hour. Then I disengaged myself and went about getting a grave dug. We had a little impromptu memorial service, where the women remembered things he'd done and talked about it and cried some more, but those were slightly happier tears. He'd been a good dog.

I lost it when I covered him up with dirt, and then it was the women holding me.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

By the next spring I was a fairly accomplished mechanic, electrician and plumber. My tax business had expanded significantly. Agricultural operations are quite complicated when it comes to the tax code, and there weren't all that many people who wanted to specialize in that kind of service. The way I did things, I had my forty-seven agricultural clients give all their receipts and records to me once a month and I kept them up to snuff so that when tax season came around the next year filing the return would be a piece of cake. I only had to spend maybe an hour a night keeping things up to date in the books I kept for them.

It was because of my contacts through taxes that I happened upon what I thought was the perfect birthday present for Jill. Her birthday fell right in the middle of apple harvest, which made it hard to give her a special day. Harvest took all our resources and we still had tons - literally - of waste. I kept thinking I should do some research into marketing the apples further out than we were, but I'd never gotten around to it.

Anyway, I was picking up receipts from one of my tax customers when I was almost bowled over by a very friendly black Labrador, who jumped up on me and left three bright red stripes of blood on my left arm, like I'd been attacked by that comic book character Wolverine.

"Damn dog!" yelled Don Rigsby, who ran the local co-op feed store. "I can't get him to settle down for shit! Everybody told me he'd be fine in a couple of years, but he's three now and I swear he acts more like a puppy every day. I can't spend the time with him it would take to train him up right." He looked at my arm, concerned. "Let me get you something to clean that up."

"It will stop eventually," I said. I'd been cut, scraped, nicked and bruised countless times by now. I rarely put anything on an injury. I might wash it off, but that was about it. The dog sat, tongue lolling from his mouth, bright eyes on me. Then he started jumping up on me again. It was almost like he had waited for me to pet him, but I took too long, so he reminded me again.

"I'm really sorry," said Don. "If he keeps that up I'm gonna have to put him down. I can't have him hurting customers."

"You can't kill him just because he wants attention," I objected.

"I can't leave him alive if he's going to get me sued," he said. "He needs to be out somewhere where he can run some of that energy off."

And that comment was what got me thinking about Jill, and her birthday, which was about two months away.

Which is how coincidence brought me to end up with a black Lab named Duke in the back seat of my car when I left the feed store. Once Don got the chance to get rid of a problem dog, he wouldn't wait for her birthday to get closer. He even threw in a hundred pounds of dog food in the bargain. Duke the black Lab would end up being an important mover and shaker in our lives, but I'll go into that later.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

As things had worked out, I was making what, for me, was a comfortable living on my tax business.

Which is why, after the apple harvest was over that year and things settled down, I tried to pay Lynne rent one day. It happened to be just before breakfast. Why that was important will be explained later.

"You don't owe me rent," said Lynne.

"But I live here," I said, needlessly.

"For which you pay me by working," she said. "If anything, I should be paying you. Your labor is worth a lot more than just room and board."

"Nonsense," I snorted. "I'm homeless, and you're being kind."

She snorted. "If I didn't know better I’d swear you were trying to get me in bed, Bob MacAllister."

That was out of the blue, until I remembered another time when she'd said something like that. That time I had stuck my foot in my mouth and she hadn't talked to me for a couple of days. Jill had patched things over, though. So I probably should have just smiled mysteriously or something and left it at that. But oh no ... I just had to try to tease her.

"You sure do talk about sex a lot," I said.

"I do not!" she snapped.

"This isn't the first time you've accused me of trying to get in your jeans," I said confidently. I thought we had the kind of friendship by now that could sustain this kind of give and take. Guys do it all the time, and I felt like one of the guys, you know?

"That's not what I meant and you know it!" she said, her voice rising. "Besides, that was ... forever ago!"

"It was just a year or two ago if I recall right," I said, smiling.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

This, gentlemen, is where a lot of men go wrong. They think they're being clever and witty and, if they actually were talking to another man, they might be clever and witty. But I wasn't talking to a man, no matter how much I thought of her as one of the guys. And what a woman hears in that situation is: "I remember you talking about having sex with me, and it sticks out in my mind enough that I think of it often. That should be obvious since I just brought it up."

And yes, I know she brought it up. But there's no traction in pointing that out, boys. Believe me. I know.

In other words, her comment, which was designed (by a woman) to put me in my place, was responded to by my comment (designed to put her in her place) which meant I was interested in having sex with her.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

She blinked at me and her cheeks got darker. Her mouth opened and then closed, and then she licked her lips like they were dry or something. I remember all this now, but it didn't mean anything to me then.

"I see," she said. Her voice was kind of flat, without any emotion.

Just so you know, I didn't pick up on that either.

"Yeah," I said gleefully, digging my hole even deeper. "Sometimes I worry about you, cause you're obviously frustrated. Maybe you should think about getting laid."

I grinned widely with that guy-to-guy grin that is sometimes augmented with a wink.

Which is when Jill walked into the kitchen, it being breakfast time. She obviously heard the words "getting laid" because she gaily asked, "Who's getting laid?"

We both turned to stare at her. Mine was a guilty stare, of course. Lynne's was astonished. I knew Jill had a generic sexual nature. Everybody does. But I don't think Lynne had really thought about it all that much, probably because Jill hadn't expressed any real interest in dating yet. Whenever she went out, it was always with a crowd of her friends from school. There were boys in the crowd, but there was no boy's name that came up in Jill's conversation other than as an identifier.

But the way she tossed off that question made it crystal clear that Jill not only had a sexual nature ... she was both knowledgeable and comfortable about the vernacular used to refer to it. The word "laid" just sounded so bizarre rolling off her lips like that.

We stood staring so long that she finally realized there was something wrong. She didn't know she had simply shocked us.

"Well it's not me," she said, holding up both hands as if to ward us off. "I'm a virgin!"

That pretty much blew our minds too. Not that she was a virgin, but that she would just come right out with that information so blithely. I was one of the guys, but the guys don't talk about who is and isn't a virgin. Not unless they're trying to mess with somebody. Her mother and I kept staring. Our mouths were probably open.

"Honest!" said Jill, her voice rising. "I swear!"

Lynne recovered first.

"We weren't talking about you, dear," she said.

With typical teenage adaptation, Jill relaxed. The danger was gone and she was bullet proof again.

"Well that's good," she said, moving forward again and pulling out a chair. "So who were you talking about?"

The ease with which she asked the question was what gave me the hard-on. I swear it was. She was so willing to engage in frank conversation about sex, even if it was gossip, that she just suddenly exploded into my head as a sexual being. She was a virgin, who was saying "Hey, I'm interested in sex! Let's talk about sex!" I was glad I was already sitting down. I favored loose trousers, rather than the tough (and tight) jeans the women usually wore, and that meant that my sudden boner would have announced itself rather obviously had I been standing.

Lynne and I were the only other ones there, so Jill just looked from one to the other of us, obviously interested to see which of us was "getting laid."

"Never mind," said Lynne, almost gasping. I think she, like me, was still grappling with how much Jill had grown up while neither of us were watching.

Jill sat down and leaned back, folding her arms under her breasts. I stared at them. When had they gotten that full? My eyes went to Lynne's, which were only a little larger, maybe.

"Mom, are you and Bob having sex?" she asked, her voice completely serious.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Well there you go. That's a question that just isn't welcome in the circle of guys. Which is about the time I realized we weren't all guys. Which sounds stupid, except it really was a paradigm shift in the way I looked at both of them. You can't sit there with a boner - a boner that's the result of one of them - and perceive them as "one of the guys" any longer. Not unless you want to contemplate whether or not you're gay, and that wasn't even a flicker in my mind.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Of course not!" gasped Lynne.

For once I sat, silent.

Lynne looked over at me as if she expected me to back her up or something. My mouth finally came unglued, but I still have no idea why I said what I said, which was: "This is so weird!"

"Oh," said Jill. It could have been my imagination, but she sounded vaguely disappointed. "Well who are you having sex with then?"

Man! This girl was just chock full of surprises that day.

Lynne just spluttered, and I thought she was going to have a stroke or something, so I tried to help.

"Jill, you're too young to be asking about this kind of stuff."

"No I'm not," she said firmly. "I'm nineteen, the perfect age for concerned adults in my life to guide my curiosity and urge to explore sex. All my girlfriends are having sex."

Now I was the one spluttering. I didn't feel any chest pains, but I knew something was seriously wrong with me. There had to be. This girl sounded so mature it was scary.

I'm not sure whether it was just Lynne's inner strength that finally burst up to the surface to take in a deep breath of air, or whether Jill's comments were like a slap in the face that woke her up, but she finally started communicating on a level that was more efficient.

"Honey," she said suddenly. "I'm perfectly happy to talk with you about your feelings, but it's really none of your business who I'm sleeping with."

"So you are sleeping with somebody," said Jill.

"No," said Lynne with a heck of a lot more patience than I would have believed she could have. "But even if I was, it's none of your business. And it's none of your business who Bob is sleeping with either. You can't go around asking people who they're sleeping with."

"You're not people," said Jill calmly. "You're my mother." She looked over at me and apparently thought I felt left out. "And Bob is ... " she looked confused for just a second or two, and then finished "Bob."

I wondered what that meant.

"Where did all this come from?" asked Lynne, who realized she was holding a half crushed box of Cheerios and set it down on the table.

"Where did what come from?" asked Jill.

"This talk about sex," said her mother.

Jill rolled her eyes and threw one hand out away from her body.

"I just came here for breakfast. You two were the ones talking about sex!"

Chapter Four

The little scene at the breakfast table that morning was even more important than either Lynne or I realized. We reflected on how unexpected, and bizarre it was, and it showed us a side of Jill we hadn't paid any attention to yet ... but neither of us realized how important it was.

From Jill's point of view, "sex" had been brought out into the open. Never mind that her mother immediately tried to quell the frank and open discussion that Jill had in mind. Lynne had said she would be willing to talk about it, and Jill remembered that.

And, while she had been interested in sex for several years, that interest had been a somewhat vague and misty thing, a little like wondering what Sasquatch looks like. You've heard a lot of rumors about it, but you'd sort of like to see the real deal for yourself, even if it would be scary. Now, at least in theory, Sasquatch could be called into the room on demand, and under complete control. Jill was suddenly quite interested in seeing the beast.

Another problem is that Lynne and I were laboring under an illusion. It's understandable, as you'll see. The illusion was that we assumed Jill was like most other young people and had no interest in the details of her mother's sex life. All adolescents assume that all adults have sex. They're wrong, of course, but they believe it. And while they can be very interested in the sex lives of most adults, the average adolescent doesn't want to think about her parents having sex. Lynne and I knew that.

But Jill wasn't average. She didn't see me as a parent, and her father was gone before the age at which the taboo of thinking about her mother as a sexual being developed. She perceived her mother as both "Mom" and an adult woman.

In other words, Jill assumed that both her mother and I were having sex. Not with each other, necessarily, but if we were, then that was acceptable. And that was because sex, as far as Jill was concerned, was a good thing. She'd never been taught to think it was nasty, or perverted, or dangerous. She was aware that some people felt that way. She just didn't feel that way herself. To Jill, sex was an unknown, one of those exciting adventures she'd get to go on some day. It was like being at a theme park and not being able to ride because you weren't tall enough. You knew that someday you would be tall enough.

And finally, Lynne and I were oblivious to the fact that I held a special place in Jill's heart. I was a friend and confidant who was an adult male. Those are rare in most young women's lives. We had worked together, played together and even cried together when her dog died. We were best friends, and had the kind of easy comfort in each other's presence that allowed her to run around in a lot less than she would have otherwise. It wasn't like we were nudists or anything. But if she went to the bathroom in her bra and panties and if I saw her, well ... it wasn't the end of the world.

So, at that point in her life, sex became something even more interesting than it had been. She was eighteen and curious. She had questions, and a pledge to answer them, at least from her mother. I'm pretty sure she expected she could ask me anything under the sun and it would be fine. She just hadn't thought to ask me about things sexual before.

That was to change. And all because of the coincidence that she happened to be in the right place, at the right time, to hear just two little words: "getting laid."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

What actually precipitated the beginning of the actual questions was that Duke found himself a girlfriend. She was a stray, and wandered into the yard one day. She was a short-haired mutt of some kind, that looked like a dozen types of dog all put together haphazardly. Most people would have yelled at her and maybe chunked a rock her way to run her off.

Jill, of course, fed her. Jill was just like that.

She turned out to be a well-mannered and sweet dog. She was also in heat, which Duke noticed right away. I came out of the shed, where I'd been sharpening the blades of the riding mower, and saw Jill squatting on her haunches, watching Duke licking his new friend's rear end. Her vaginal opening was black and swollen. About the time I got there he hopped up and his sharp, pink penis slid unerringly into her. He began to hump immediately and vigorously. Jill looked up at me as I walked up to her.

"Doesn't that hurt?" she asked.

"Doesn't what hurt?" I looked at my hands, expecting to see blood. I was always hurting myself, and Jill called me a klutz quite often.

"What he's doing to her," she said, looking back at Duke. The female was just standing there. She looked bored, but her back legs were spread slightly and her tail was out of the way. I could see the flash of pink as Duke frantically mated with the bitch.

"Naw," I said. "It's made to fit."

"I remember the first time I saw horses doing it," she said, watching the dogs intently. "I got scared. I just knew he was hurting her."

Duke went still for a few seconds and hopped down happily. His pointed penis was still out of its sheath and had a drip of clear liquid on the tip. The female looked around at him, as if to say "That's it?" I guess males are pretty much the same across the species.

"Mom said the same thing," Jill went on. "But I don't see how it can not hurt. She wasn't aware of it, but she had lifted one hand and was looking at her index finger. She might as well have said "It's bigger than my finger, and I can barely get that inside me."

The way she was squatting, her jeans-clad legs were apart and I could see the tight fabric that covered her crotch. I thought about her finger, sliding into what was behind that denim, and felt heat suffuse my body. I also felt blood finding its way into what was in my pants.

"All part of nature," I said hastily and moved on, lest she see something she didn't need to see down around my zipper.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The next question didn't come until after the apple harvest, when we were getting things ready for dealing with the horses the following winter.

Because we didn't have the equipment to handle big bales of hay, Lynne had Hank Thompson bale our hay with an old-fashioned small square bailer. It produced bales that weighed between fifty and eighty or so pounds, depending on what kind of hay they were made of. We could handle those during the winter by putting them in the pickup and taking them wherever they were needed. Jill and I were getting twenty-five or thirty bales down from the loft in the big barn, to put in the stables. It was hot, sweaty work but it was the dust that made it itch uncomfortably. Jill was wearing a too-large T shirt with the sleeves cut off and she might as well have taken it off for all that it covered her bra. I could even see the little pink bow on the bra between her breasts when she bent over.