Nuts Read online

  “I’m not deflecting. Hey, look what I found last night!” I said, holding up a canning jar I’d found in the basement. My mom’s canning equipment was sitting around getting dusty since she was away, and I’d brought a few jars in to run through the dishwasher. I was craving early summer green tomato pickles like nobody’s business.

  “Deflect all you want—I just need know when you get into his overalls.”

  “I seriously doubt Leo wears overalls. Holy crap, do you think Leo wears overalls?”

  “Holy crap, are you making moonshine? What’s with all the jars?” he asked as I lined them up all along the counter.

  “I’m making pickles, silly.” I laughed.

  “You know how to make pickles?”

  “Chef, remember?” I said, pointing at myself. “I’ve even got the tall funny hat somewhere.”

  “Teach me how to make them. Logan is always going on and on about learning how to do stuff like that.”

  “Stuff like pickles?” I asked.

  “Pickles, jelly, stuff in jars.” He filled another shaker. “He watches a lot of Walking Dead.”

  “Not sure I get the connection between zombies and jelly.”

  “Like, if there was a zombie apocalypse and no one was making food anymore, eventually someone would have to start making that stuff. Except no one knows how to do that kind of thing anymore—except hippies and chefs. And what are the chances they’d make it through without getting eaten?” He said all of this as he went about filling the salt shakers, as if it was perfectly natural.

  “But you’re pretty sure you and Logan would make it through? Without getting eaten?”

  “Exactly. We both ran track. Plus he learned how to fence in school, so he’d be like that badass woman with the swords. And when he comes home from a hard day at work killing zombies, it’d be nice to have some J on the PBJ.”

  “And a pickle on the side?” I asked, my forehead wrinkling as I tried to follow this train wreck of thought.

  “Exactly!”

  “Huh” was my only answer.

  A moment later, he looked up from his pouring. “So will you teach us?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Be glad to. For zombies’ sake.” I made a mental note to pick up some vinegar at the market. I wonder if Leo has dill weed?

  My phone rang. Hmm, speak of the farmer, and he doth appear. I mean, doth call.

  “Do you have any dill weed?” I asked by way of a greeting.

  “If I had a nickel . . .” Leo’s deep voice trailed off. Cue shiver.

  “I’ll give you a nickel, I’m making pickles.” I laughed, stifling the second round of shiver. I quickly focused. “I require dill weed.”

  “Pickles, huh? So would it interest you to know the first baby cucumbers are just about ready to pick?”

  “Nothing would interest me more than your cucumber,” I murmured into the phone, keeping my voice low. The Chad Bowman was now holding up the funnel like a low-tech listening device.

  Leo snorted. “I’m so glad we’ve moved on to my cucumber, instead of talking about my nuts all the time.”

  “Oh, I’m sure your nuts will be fair game again soon enough.”

  “What was that loud noise?” Leo asked, sounding a bit concerned.

  “Sorry about that, a customer just fell off his stool,” I replied, shaking my head as Chad’s head popped back up over the counter, his eyes still wide from the nuts. I held my finger up to my lips, warning him to keep quiet. “Nuts aside, what’s up?”

  “Funny that you mentioned you need dill weed, because I was calling to see if you wanted to join the CSA for the summer. You can come out and either pick up your box, or you can pick your own. I usually don’t let people do that, but, you know . . .” He trailed off.

  “But, you know, I know the farmer.” I grinned, swatting at Chad’s hand as he made two salt shakers kiss.

  “You could know this farmer,” Leo said, his tone darkening a bit, his voice getting a bit lower, more heated. Speaking of heated . . .

  “When should I come?” I asked, mimicking his tone.

  Chad bit down on a dish towel. Then spat it out, as I’d been cleaning with bleach.

  “Hmm, I feel like I’m supposed to say something like . . . often? Repeatedly?”

  “Good man.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I can come right after the lunch shift is over,” I purred, and he laughed.

  “Dangerous,” he said, then hung up.

  Laughing to myself, I turned around to see that Chad had written OH MY GOD in salt along the counter.

  “You’re totally cleaning that up,” I said.

  Chapter 12

  The next afternoon I headed out to Maxwell Farm again, with even more anticipation this time. I was looking forward to the picking of the vegetables, the signing up for the farmshare, the kissing of the lips. Mostly the kissing of the lips.

  I hadn’t seen him since the night I’d made him dinner, since the fire department interrupted something that was already smoldering. I’d been busy with the diner—working double shifts, replacing the back door lock, and getting back into the swing of cooking in a professional kitchen. I had new burns on my forearm from wrestling with a meat loaf, a Band-Aid on my thumb when I mistook it for a carrot . . . and a girlish urge to giggle every single time I went into the walk-in. I fought the giggle right now, just thinking about it.

  When I arrived at Maxwell Farm, the fields and parking lot were a flurry of activity. I grabbed the square of ginger spice cake I’d brought Leo from the diner and set off across the gravel. It was the day everyone came to pick up their farmshare box, and I nodded to several people I knew. It was late afternoon, the sun shining down through a cloudless sky, and groups lingered around cars, almost like a farm-to-table tailgate. Kids played with barn cats, parents chatted leisurely with other moms and dads, and the easy community feel was palpable. It was a feeling I was familiar with, but I’d never really felt it . . . on the inside before. Since my family owned the most popular diner around, if anyone should feel like they belonged, you’d think it’d be me, right? But now, as a few familiar faces smiled in my direction, and a few casually friendly waves were sent my way, I felt something suspiciously like hometown pride. Interesting.

  People were leaving the main barn with large baskets filled with all kinds of produce, cartons of eggs, paper-wrapped cheese, and walnuts. Smiling, I headed inside.

  There, in the middle of everything, was Leo. I was struck once more at how truly handsome he was. Women around me were similarly struck, and I felt an odd urge to strike them myself, as a matter of fact . . . He chatted easily with everyone as they came up in line for their box, asking questions about their kids, making recommendations on how to pair this with that, telling them what would be in season in the next few weeks.

  The women understandably hung on every word. He was kind, his grin was warm, and his forearms were spectacular. A vintage long-sleeved Beastie Boys T-shirt was shoved up to his elbows, his skin tanned from working outside, faded, ripped jeans hanging low on his hips. When he lifted a box of rhubarb down from the truck behind him, a sliver of skin peeked out, and I saw a woman fan herself with a leaf of romaine.

  His eyes rose toward the crowd, and then found mine. His easy smile changed, one corner of his mouth lifting in a sexy grin that made my pulse skippy. He waved me up through the chatting throngs, past the romaine lady, and I felt my cheeks warm at being singled out. He pointed over toward the side, where wooden crates were stacked.

  “Hey, Sugar Snap,” he said in a low voice, and my pulse skipped again.

  “Hey, Almanzo” was all I could answer. And he called me dangerous.

  He leaned in. “Little House?”

  “Busted. Are you a fan?”

  “Kid sister. She used to make us play Little House in the summer in the big barn,” he replied, his eyes twinkling. “You hiding something behind your back?” he asked, and I proudly produced the sweet treat I’d brought fo
r him. “For me?”

  “You seemed to like the walnut cake, thought you might like something a little spicier,” I said. Loudly enough for romaine fanner to hear me? It’s a fair bet.

  He grinned, lifting the corner of the parchment and peeking inside. “Smells good.”

  “Tastes even better,” I answered, giving him an honest-to-goodness eyelash bat. He nodded, set the cake inside the cooler behind the table, and then turned back to me with an expectant look.

  “You ready for this?”

  “I think so? Not sure exactly what we’re doing here.” Liar. You knew exactly what you were hoping was on tap for the day.

  “Simple,” he replied, stepping out from behind the stand with a crate. “We’re going shopping. Take over here for me, will you?” he asked, slapping the guy next to him on the back and handing him a clipboard.

  As he led me out of the barn, he pointed out the giant deep freezers and coolers behind the workers. “Depending on the share you purchase, you can get everything and anything you want, when it’s in season. Some people opt in for a small share—just produce and sometimes specialty items like mushrooms or canned tomatoes. Some people go in for the full share, and they get protein each week. Sometimes pork, sometimes beef, always chicken, either whole roasters or already cut up. Usually eggs, and sometimes cheese.”

  “You guys make cheese here too?” I asked, surprised at the scope of the operation.

  “We don’t, but we work with other farms in the area to make sure the shares are really well rounded. We partner with Oscar Mendoza, the guy who runs the creamery the next farm over, to bring cheese, milk, butter, and all that for our customers.”

  As I looked around, I noticed several baskets with big glass bottles of milk, smaller bottles of thick, heavy cream, and paper-wrapped butter, all stamped Bailey Falls Creamery.

  “It seems like you don’t even have to go to the grocery store if you’re a member,” I said. This was how shopping used to be, back in the day.

  “That’s what we hope. For the most part, you can feed your family entirely from locally sourced, clean-eating food,” he said, his voice full of pride. “Supermarkets have their place; that’s never going to change. But we like to think this can be just as convenient, and over time, it costs less than conventional stores.”

  “And you know the guy who’s growing your food,” I said, warming to the idea that I would be preparing food that Leo’s hands pulled from the earth. Granted, I seemed to have special access to his hands this summer, but I was still tickled by the general idea. Also, his mouth. I’d like to be tickled by that mouth. Dammit, where was that romaine leaf? I needed fanning.

  And speaking of his mouth, his was now turned up in a mischievous way. “What are you thinking about right now?” he asked.

  “Honestly? Food.”

  “Just food?”

  “And your mouth,” I admitted.

  His eyes widened, then narrowed. “C’mere.” He dragged me and his basket behind the barn, into a tiny cleft of the rock wall. And then his mouth pressed into mine in a flurry of licks and nibbles, and soft little moans and sighs.

  “If I said I was thinking about more than your mouth, what would that get me?” I panted between fiery kisses.

  “Trouble,” he replied, looking to his left and seeing a few people wandering close to where we were. “Come on, let’s go fill your basket.”

  “I feel like that might be farm code for something way more fun than picking vegetables, but I’ll indulge you.” I laughed, straightening my dress, making it look like I hadn’t just been pressed between a rock and a hard farmer. “This would be the time to tell you I want the full share.”

  “You got it.” He winked and, grabbing my basket, led me out into the fields.

  We wandered up and down the rows of the vegetable patch, and I marveled at everything that was just coming up. I tasted lemony sorrel and snappy fennel, and picked handfuls of tiny baby eggplant, a Japanese variety striped purple and white. In this week’s share everyone was getting new lettuce, more of those brown sugar strawberries, some rhubarb, and, new this week, the first blackberries. I was mentally testing recipes, deciding what else I’d need to spice up my home dinners, and what else I could use at the diner.

  And as we walked, Leo pointed out various landmarks. Where they’d tilled an unused field and discovered a hundred-year-old coffee can filled with old pennies. Where an original well was still hidden by rotting wood planks, but was now safely fenced off. The well was repurposed and used now for irrigation in the herb garden. He’d laid raised beds in the same pattern originally planted, using an old landscape blueprint he’d found in the attic of the big house, when gardens were plotted to exacting standards.

  “Back then, marigold would have been planted all the way around. It’s a great insect repellent,” he explained as we made our way through the herbs. “You needed dill, right?”

  “Yeah, I’m turning some of those little cukes and green tomatoes we picked into zombie pickles,” I said.

  “Should I know what that means?” he asked, kneeling down and picking a handful of dill.

  “I’d hope not. Chad asked me to teach him how to make pickles. So he and Logan are coming by the diner after we close this weekend, and I’m going to show them how. The zombie part is harder to explain.”

  “They want to learn how to pickle?” he asked, incredulous. He bundled the dill together, wrapping the ends with a bit of kitchen twine. “Is this enough?”

  “Perfect,” I said as he offered it to me like a bouquet. And like a bouquet, I sniffed it. Mmm. Nothing smelled like warm, fresh herbs. “And you’d be surprised how many people want to know that stuff. The most popular class at the Learning Annex at UCLA is canning and pickling. A bunch of my clients used to take classes there. All these gorgeous plastic women with more money than they know what to do with, and they’re learning how to make fifty-cent fridge pickles.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Oh yeah. Your slow foods movement here is all about getting back to the land and local and sustainable, but it’s also a rampant food trend. And nobody knows trendy like LA wives. It makes sense, though. No one in our generation knows how to do much of that stuff.”

  “Stuff like . . . ?”

  “Pickling. Canning. Putting up preserves. Also sewing. If I lose a button on anything, I’m screwed. My mom knows how to sew, but I never bothered to learn. And she’s in the minority—most women these days are at least two generations away from those skills. Does your mom know how to sew?”

  He threw his head back and laughed. “You’re adorable.”

  “Exactly. But I bet her mom did—money had nothing to do with it. People used to know how to do these things, and now they don’t.”

  “The Learning Annex. Interesting,” he said thoughtfully, rubbing his beard. “Can I come to the pickle class?”

  “It’s not really a class,” I said, playing with the dill fronds. “But, sure. If you want.”

  “I want.”

  I ran my fingers over the frothy green herbs, feeling the silk slide across my skin. I want. I enjoyed the way that sounded, more than I cared to admit. But what I didn’t enjoy was the telltale buzz that suddenly zoomed by my ear.

  “No! No no no!” I shrieked, dropping my dill and my basket and running halfway across the field before Leo knew what had happened.

  “Rox! Hey, Rox!” he yelled after me, but I was running full out. “Roxie!”

  I looked over my shoulder to shout back, “I told you, bees are assholes!” And because I looked over my shoulder, I tripped over a left-behind bucket, and down I went into the softly tilled dirt.

  Catching up to me a few seconds later, Leo crouched down next to me. “Are you okay?” he asked, scanning me hurriedly.

  “Of course.” I sighed, holding my hands over my face. “I really have this thing with bees.”

  He pried my fingers loose, but didn’t release them. He inhaled deeply. “Must be that honey.”<
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  I held my breath, aware of every point of contact between us. On the ground, surrounded by walls of green ruffling in the breeze, we seemed cut off from the world, and asshole bees—just me and this farmer and a skirt rucked up around my thighs.

  He leaned down, releasing my hands to brush my hair back from my forehead. “If you get stung, guess what happens?”

  “The world ends,” I answered promptly, and he gave me a pointed look.

  “You get stung. That’s it. It hurts, sometimes worse than others, but then it’s over.”

  I raised up on my elbows, deliberately pushing into his space. “I’d rather not get stung at all.” And then I kissed him. My lips brushed his once, twice, and I was gearing up for a third when I heard a rumble nearby.

  He groaned, but held me to him for one more kiss. “Unless we want the afternoon tour to catch us taking a tumble in the catnip, we should probably get up.”

  “Probably.” Reluctantly, as I could hear voices getting closer, I let him pull me up and we went back to where my fifty-yard dash had scattered vegetables every which way.

  After Leo helped me gather them back up, he sneaked one more kiss just before the tour crested the top of the hill. We waved from where we stood, and headed in the opposite direction. We wandered from this field to that, chatting about anything and everything. He told me all sorts of trivia about the property, asked me endless questions about different ways I might use certain products from the farm, and we laughed more than I can remember doing in a very long time.

  “It’s great that you have access to all this history, knowing the hows and whys of how this estate came into being,” I remarked as we started back toward the barn.

  The day was winding down. From up high on the ridge, the only thing we could hear was the wind and the birds chirping. My hands were dirty from digging in the beds, fingertips stained green from tugging on a stubborn parsnip.

  “We didn’t come here that often; mostly in the summer,” he said, stopping and looking down at the big house, silhouetted against the setting sun. The Hudson was just on the other side, wide and unhurried, and he pointed in the opposite direction. “I’d spend hours out here, running through the woods, playing with the dogs. There’s a creek on the far side of the property, and I can’t tell you how many arrowheads I used to find along the banks. I’d come home covered in chigger bites and absolutely filthy, usually to the horror of my mother and her friends.”