The Ladies Farm Read Free

friends’ confessions. But she had been a faithful confidante, with never even a disapproving silence.
    Rita frowned a little, and her forehead furrowed. “I do believe that Dave and I were divorced by the time Larry came back around.” Dave was Rita’s husband between her two marriages to Larry. He often told Della that he persisted in his pursuit of Rita now because she had married Larry twice, a sure indication she would do the same with Dave.
    “I think I was dating that boy from Dallas,” Rita continued, “the one with the car lot.” She looked to Della again. “You remember him?”
    “The art lover who used to come get you in an Eldorado with longhorns mounted on the hood?”
    Rita nodded solemnly. This past spring she had abandoned her Texas Big Hair for punk. She had dyed her yellow hair jet black, sheared it down to a spiky cap, and highlighted it with a changing rainbow of iridescents (this weekend’s was teal) that blended oddly with her loopy earrings and mostly denim and rhinestone wardrobe. Della thought Rita’s bizarre fashion sense succeeded only because, even surrounded by morning puffiness, the depth of Rita’s blue eyes overwhelmed whatever ludicrous hair color or plastic bauble she sported.
    Rita shook her head again, as if to clear it, then fixed those eyes on Della. “So who is she? The guest?”
    Della shrugged. “Just a friend of ours from Fort Worth.”
    “A widow,” Pauline said. “Her husband died last year.”
    “Last February,” Della amplified before she could think. “A year and three months.”
    “She have a name?”
    “Barbara Morrison,” said Kat. “Mrs. Richard Morrison.”
    “Is that someone I should know?” Rita, in her years in Fort Worth, had developed a clientele that included well-known names, some of whom still drove out to Sydonia on a regular basis for her ministrations.
    “Richard had a medical supply business,” Della said.
    “Until he saw the impact of computers on practice management,” Kat hurried to add. “He started repping software along with his cotton swabs and syringes and parlayed his nice little business into the biggest practice management program in the Midwest.”
    “And his wife—Barbara—worked with him in the office for a while,” Pauline said. “They have one kid, in medical school in Dallas; Barbara lives in Fort Worth.”
    “I don’t recall Barbara working in the business,” Kat said.
    “Early on,” Della replied. “Probably before you knew them.” She grinned. “Boy were we young then! I still remember her driving car pool with that van full of medical supplies. The kids just piled in the back. No seatbelt laws, I guess.”
    “Who got the business?” Rita asked. She had begun to glance around in a distracted way that signaled her interest in grazing.
    “We’re about to fix lunch,” Della said quickly. They had baked yesterday for the purpose of filling the freezer with breakfast muffins, and Della dreaded another Kat-versus-Rita shoot-out over Rita’s raiding.
    Kat, however, was occupied with other matters. “They cashed out, sold it to a software house in Boston. So all they had to split was piles of cash.”
    “Nice life,” Rita said. “What’s her hair like?” She brushed a hand over the top of her own hair.
    Della watched the black spikes spring back into place while Kat described Barbara’s appearance. I never told Rita about Richard, she thought, watching Rita’s eyes go wide at Kat’s narrative. Week afterweek, year after year, she was cutting and combing and styling for Richard’s pleasure, and she didn’t even know he existed.
    Della hadn’t told anyone except Pauline, and that wasn’t until Richard’s death, when she couldn’t control her grief. Pauline had listened and clucked and sighed and patted, pronouncing no judgment, shooing guests away as they sat at the table by the river and watched the turtles in the unexpected warmth of a February sun. Della supposed Pauline feared that the