The All You Can Dream Buffet (3 page)

Ruby Zarlingo was the first to arrive at Lavender’s. She drove up from San Francisco to be on hand a week early to help set things up. Lavender was strong, Ruby knew that. But nobody should have to set up a giant party all by herself.

And, honestly, Ruby needed to get away from her father. He’d objected to her driving “all this way,” as if she were seventeen, not twenty-six, and experienced in driving much bigger rigs than her tidy little camper and the trailer she’d talked him into helping her refurbish as a kitchen.

She had to admit now that the trip had been harder than she’d expected, with the morning sickness rolling through her constantly, not just in the mornings. For the first time in her life, she was a grouch, a giant, insane grouch, because mainly she spent her time throwing up, then trying to settle her stomach, then throwing up some more.

She’d always imagined that an Oregon farm would be shrouded in forest, with trees marching up to the field lines, all of it huddled beneath a glowering of clouds. She had also imagined that it would be totally Hicksville.

Instead, as she sat waiting to make a left turn into the farm (thus backing up the impatient Portlandians and out-of-state tourists ambling around Yamhill County wineries), she saw that she was wrong on all counts. Lavender Honey Farms sat in greeny-golden glory beneath a sunny sky, surrounded on all
sides by mountains in the distance and rolling hills closer in. Lambs frolicked in a neighboring field. A pair of young-looking black-and-white cows with big ears munched grass and watched her idly. (How did she know they were young-looking? she asked herself. It wasn’t as if cows got wrinkles.) Vineyards were sketched on the hills in the distance, like a painting of Italy.

She felt the pressure of the cars stacking up behind her, but there was no rushing a left turn when hauling a trailer, and she whistled an old ballad to calm herself. The anxiety made her think of her father, the number one anxiety in her life at the moment, since he had strongly—strongly!—disapproved of her making this trip for all kinds of reasons, some of which might actually have had some basis in reality, and some of which were only leftovers from her childhood, when she had worried him to pieces by nearly dying of leukemia.

A longish break appeared in approaching traffic. Ruby gunned it, making the turn in her camper with exactitude, and hauled the trailer into an open graveled area, where she parked in front of an old, rambling two-story farmhouse that had been converted to a shop. A big wooden sign, carved and beautifully painted, announced
LAVENDER HONEY FARMS
in purple and green. Beneath the name were the products:
HONEY, LAVENDER GOODS, FRESH PRODUCE.

An iridescent bubble of happiness engulfed her, and Ruby laughed aloud. She was here! Putting a hand over her tummy, she said, “What do you think, baby? Let’s go see.”

Leaping out of the truck, she inhaled the earthy, farmy smell of manure and hints of grass, but no lavender. Clumps of it grew in front of the store, and she reached for a blossom and pinched it, bringing her hand to her face.

“If everybody did that, pretty soon there wouldn’t be any
blossoms for anyone to look at,” said a rumbling, cranky voice behind her.

“Sorry!” Ruby said, turning. “It’s a habit. I’m a chef. I smell things.”

The man was in his early thirties, maybe, and she knew exactly who he was from Lavender’s emails about the dilemma he’d posed upon arrival for work. She’d hired him, sight unseen, by his résumé—a farm lad, veteran of Iraq, hungry to get back to the land. Lavender was desperate for a manager to help her with the expanding business and liked the sound of his voice on the phone.

But when he arrived, he was taciturn, broody, and much too good-looking. The kind of good-looking, Lavender had complained to the Foodie Four, that caused trouble.

Ruby cocked her head. He was older than she was, but Ruby could see what Lavender meant. Clearly more ethnic than white, but, as with so many people these days, what that background might be was hard to decipher—it all melted together in caramel and golden brown and an aggressive nose. He might be Tillamook—the local Indians—or Mexican, or Iranian, or … impossible to know. His hair was very thick and black and curly, and his body was shaped by his work of hauling hay and ice and raking manure and loading produce trucks, but it was a certain untouchable, unhappy aloofness that caught you.

“You must be Noah,” she said. “I’m Ruby, one of Lavender’s friends.”

“I figured.” He gave her hand a cursory shake and glanced at her trailer, which Ruby had painted in a Frida Kahlo style in keeping with her fresh-food principles. “The vegan, right?”

She didn’t think he meant it as derisively as it sounded, though people took her diet very personally at times. “That’s right. I had leukemia as a child, and my father put us both on a
vegan diet the day I was diagnosed.” She gave him her best, sunniest smile, the one that dared foodies and blood-centered chefs to be grumpy about it all, and gestured to her robust figure. “As you see, it seemed to work.”

He grunted. “Lavender’s in the meadery. I’ll show you.”

“The meadery,” Ruby repeated, and forced herself not to skip. “That is
so
cool.”

He gave her a single glance, not quite rolling his eyes, but Ruby was used to people reacting that way to her. Her old boyfriend Liam—the thought of his name sent a sharp pain through her ribs, right under her left breast—used to actually be embarrassed by her relentless good spirits. He was a native New Yorker and said her cheerfulness made her stick out like a sore thumb.

But there were things you couldn’t help. Ruby had been born cheerful. Now, as she trailed behind Noah, joy swelled through her, golden and buoyant, lifting her elbows and knees. Every turn revealed a new delight. Chickens just wandering around! That view of blue mountains hanging like curtains around the valley! A slice of sky visible between barn and roof!

They walked along a well-beaten path, down a slight hill. A pair of chickens, one shiny black with a red thingy on its head (what was it called? she wondered) and the other a mottled brown, waddled along with them. On a hill to her left, near a stand of outbuildings, barns, and open sheds, were a handful of others, pecking along in the dirt. “Hello, Mr. Chicken,” Ruby said. “You’re looking well.”

“It’s Ms. Chicken, actually,” Noah said. “These are some of the layers, and of course that would make them hens.”

“Ah.” He probably knew what the thing was called. “What’s that thing on her head called?”

“Comb.”

“Oh, sure. I’ve heard that.” Under her breath she repeated,
“Comb,”
making sure to capture the word.

In front of them stretched a wide field planted with rows of vegetables, rising and falling like tidy hills across the acreage. The tops of the mounds were covered in straw. A man in a plaid shirt and a brimmed hat bent over one of them, gently plucking carrots and shaking off the soil. Nearby, a woman collected beets and placed them in baskets. Ruby shaded her eyes. “That’s a lot of vegetables!”

“Couple acres,” he said.

Ruby had often risen with the dawn to find the freshest, most beautiful produce. “Do you sell them at the farmers’ market?”

“Some.” His posture eased a little. “Some go to our CSA subscribers. A lot more are going to restaurants these days.”

She nodded. CSA stood for “community-supported agriculture.” “Multiple revenue streams are always good.” The restaurant world taught you that.

“Yep.” He turned onto a path running between the fields and barns. A band of trees marked the boundary of the vegetable gardens, blocking her view of the rest of the farm.

“Where is the lavender?” Ruby finally asked.

“You’ll see.”

They passed the barn and a corral, then Noah led the way through a line of shrubs with dark-green heart-shaped leaves—maybe lilac bushes, but she wasn’t always that clear on what was what in the plant world. Ruby stepped through behind him, as if she were entering a magic kingdom.

He stepped sideways, out of the way, and gestured. “Here it is.”

“Oh!” she breathed. “Oh, my.”

The lavender stretched out in long, long lines that followed
the contours of the fields, soft purple and dark purple and white and pale pink, in perfect rounded tufts that grew as high as her waist. A breeze swept over them, and the flowers swayed languidly, revealing the pale undersides of their leaves and making the field look like waves, like water. Ruby actually put her hands to her face. “Oh, my gosh.”

“Take your time,” he said. “The meadery is right there on your left. I’ve got some work to do.”

Ruby did not move. She barely breathed. Maybe, she thought, maybe
at last
she could discover her purpose. Maybe it would be here in these amazing fields, amid the lavender.

Had she ever seen anything so beautiful?
Ever?

A tall, rangy woman with cropped, no-nonsense white hair emerged from the utilitarian outbuilding. “Told you it was a sight to see,” she said, hands on her hips. The voice was not at all old but sturdy and sure.

“Lavender!” Ruby flung open her arms exuberantly, and Lavender met her with a fierce hug.

“Oh, girl, I’m so glad to see you.”

Against Ruby’s lush frame—not fat, never that—Lavender was as lean as a teenage boy, all shoulders and wiry strength. “Me, too,” Ruby said, and, to her surprise, tears welled up in her eyes.

And she was suddenly, overwhelmingly, nauseous. Pulling away urgently, she rushed for the edge of the field and tossed her cookies right in a little ditch. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she turned, unconsciously putting a hand over her lower belly, which was swelling sweetly with the baby. “Sorry,” she said. “I thought morning sickness was supposed to be mornings, but I have it all the time.”

Lavender cocked her head. Her face was shaped into angles by high cheekbones and a hard jaw. “Pregnant?”

Ruby nodded. “Five and a half months.”

“I thought you couldn’t have children.”

“Me, too,” she said, and the whole impossible business of it struck her again. She opened her eyes wide. “But here I am. Really, it’s kind of a miracle, they said.”

“So you’re happy?”

Ruby put both palms open on her belly and laughed. “Yes. Very.
Very.
”

“Well, then, congratulations, my friend.” Lavender flung an arm around Ruby’s shoulders and bracingly moved her away from the meadery. “I was going to give you a taste of mead, but first let’s get some food in you. Maybe a cup of tea, how about that?”

“Perfect. As long as we can come back to the meadery later.”

“Promise. You aren’t going to get away that easily!”

Lavender helped Ruby set up her campsite. She parked in a wide spot beneath a sheltering of tall pines, which had been shorn of their lower branches to allow open views of the rolling hills around the farm. The spot gave Ruby a sweet vantage point over the lavender and the shop. She hooked her camper and trailer up to the amenities.

It was mid-afternoon, and Ruby was sleepy the way she had been as a child. That was the other thing about pregnancy. Sleep could overtake her like a spell, so insistent she had no choice but to crawl into whatever hole she could find and succumb. Just now she didn’t bother to open up the kitchen trailer but crawled into her camper, propped open the door to the breeze, and fell onto the bed.

Most of the camper was the bed, with a portable toilet tucked in a closet. She’d gutted the camper when she was eighteen and
wanted to explore the country, then put in the biggest, softest bed she could find and added bigger windows to let breezes flow over the mattress. Storage was tucked beneath the bed, and shelves with netting held the little things that made life rich: books and a brush, socks for cold nights, maps of her travels. The walls had been covered with fabric to make it more feminine, in a pattern of pastel stripes that made it feel more homey. Over the fabric, she’d découpaged photos of her life—her father and her; one ancient picture of her mother and father and her together, before Ruby got sick; her mother laughing, long blond hair tumbling over her brown shoulders and bikinied back; various pets, friends. And Liam. Lots of Liam. She needed to cover them with something but hadn’t yet had the heart to do it.

Sprawled on top of the bed, she kicked off her shoes and let the breeze cover her. It was a habit to gaze up at his beautiful, beautiful face with the high-bridged nose and luscious lips. He had the most alluring mouth on the planet, a mouth she wanted to kiss all the time. He wore a goatee, which she thought was gilding the lily. It was so unnecessary to—

A knock on the side of the trailer shook her out of her reverie. “Hey, sweetheart,” Lavender said. “I brought you a bowl of fruit and some saltines. I’ve never been pregnant myself, but my sisters used to say saltines saved their lives.”

Ruby sat up, blinking. “Thank you,” she said, and put her hands over her heart. “That’s so kind.”

“And this is the wireless password.” She handed over a lime-green sticky note. “Noah put in a super-duper router four or five months ago, so it should be fine even with all of us accessing it.”

“Thanks! I can get online through the phone, too, so no worries.”

Lavender gazed around the camper. “This is so you, kiddo. Love it.” She slapped the side of the door. “You rest now. I’ll fix us some supper.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that! I was planning—”

“Don’t be silly. I can cook vegan, you know. Not like your generation invented plants.”

Ruby chuckled. “Thank you, then.”

Propped against a pile of exotically embroidered and mirrored pillows, Ruby slid her laptop out of its special padded shelf and fired it up. She entered the network name and password into the settings, made sure the connection worked, and then checked her blog quickly for any spam. It was still the cherry blog from a few days ago. She’d need to get something up tonight or tomorrow. Some bloggers wrote every day, but Ruby never liked to be pinned into anything too tightly. Of the Foodie Four, only Ginny blogged every day, and she’d been doing so for almost seven years. Amazing.