Down Home Dixie Read online

  Kyle had done a bit of tinkering in his time, creating fancy birdhouses alongside his father in his youth. Those birdhouses had been unique, no two alike. Rummaging in the scrap bin, he found everything he needed to build a birdhouse to hang from the branches of the old oak down by the picnic table.

  He started to work, eager to surprise Dixie. This house wasn’t the fanciest he’d ever made, but birds didn’t care. As he was threading a cord through the screw eye he’d attached for hanging, Dixie drove up. She noticed the light over the workbench as soon as she got out of the car. “What have you been up to?” she asked, craning over his shoulder while he kissed her cheek.

  “Just frittering time,” he said, inhaling her scent. She was the most sensationally feminine woman he’d ever met in his life.

  She studied his handiwork with all its embellishments—a strip of elaborate carved molding on the edge of the roof, a tiny porch to shelter the perch. “Why, Kyle,” she said slowly and with amazement, “what a lovely thing you’ve made.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  She eyed him and frowned. “Misplaced humility doesn’t become you,” she said with mock sternness.

  “I haven’t finished it yet. It needs painting.”

  “We have lots of paint. The previous owners meant to fix the place up before they put it on the market but never got around to it.” She reached for a can of enamel. “Here’s a nice yellow. We have royal blue, fern green, bubble-gum pink and white, of course. Take your pick.”

  “How about basic white?” Kyle suggested, beyond his depth when any decorating was involved.

  “Too unimaginative. How about pink with white trim and a green roof?”

  “That’s okay with me.”

  Dixie beamed. “Where will we be hanging this, Kyle?”

  “Over the picnic table, so the birds will have a nice lake view,” he said.

  She laughed. “By the way, Leland Porter, the Maine coon man, is buying the house I showed him, and he wants to give me a cat.”

  “A cat would make it lively around here. The birds would have to mind their p’s and q’s.”

  “I’ve always been more into dogs than cats. Taking them for walks in freezing-cold temperatures, throwing a slobbery ball for them to catch, coming home to find a shredded couch pillow strewn all over the living room—it all sounds like such fun.”

  “You’re weird, Dixie. Listen, cats are great. They purr.”

  She smiled. “Good point. Now, about dinner—veal parmesan?”

  “Fantastic,” Kyle said.

  He helped her carry grocery bags into the house and watched while she stowed the contents in the pantry. “Anything I can do to help?”

  She stood on tiptoe and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Paint the birdhouse. I can’t wait to see how pretty it will be.”

  Whistling, Kyle headed back to the garage. Outside, dusk was settling in, and in the watery sunlight filtering through the cloud cover, a fine mist sparkled on the newly transplanted bushes. As he pried open paint cans, a mantle of contentment settled over him, a new and unexpected state of being. He stopped what he was doing and savored it for a long moment, wondering if this was what other people experienced in their lives. He’d like to preserve it, make it last.

  In order to do that, he probably needed to figure out what had caused this feeling of well-being in the first place. It seemed way too simplistic to credit Dixie. Surely this new relationship couldn’t be responsible for such a quick change in his level of satisfaction.

  He started to paint the birdhouse, embellishing it with little curlicues around the perch. Dixie wouldn’t expect him to be that original, he figured. And it was fun to surprise her. It made him feel good just to see her smile.

  THOUGH NEITHER OF THEM commented about a future together, Kyle and Dixie settled into a routine of sorts. He worked in her yard and repaired the dock. She went to the office. He helped her make sense out of a tangle of fax machine and computer cords so she could set up her home office in the small den.

  “Why don’t you bring your laptop in here,” she suggested. “It must be hard to run a business out of your truck.”

  He appreciated having an orderly place to work and began to have his business calls forwarded to Dixie’s landline, which he used to communicate with Harry back in Ohio. He placed orders for supplies from his computer and corresponded with customers through e-mail.

  Sometimes he and Dixie unpacked boxes together so she could put things away. She’d inherited a lot of family heirlooms. Old lace, photos, an oak high chair that converted into a rocking chair. Dixie used the high chair as a plant stand and framed lace fragments to hang in the dining room. She dragged out a bunch of photo albums and lined the staircase wall with pictures of her family.

  “That’s Granddaddy and Memaw Frances,” she said, pointing to an old black-and-white photograph of a young couple posed in wedding finery. She moved on to another picture of a sweet-faced young woman wearing a white-collared blue dress. “This is Miss Alma, Daddy’s first wife who died young. I never met her, of course, because he didn’t marry my mom until later, and then they had two kids, Carrie and me. Here’s Rabun, Daddy’s son with Miss Alma. Rabun went away when I was a child, so I never really knew him all that well. And this is Mama when she won a first-place ribbon at the county fair for her corn relish. Oh, and here’s Carrie and Luke at their wedding.”

  All these people—who they were and what they’d accomplished with their lives—gave him insight into Dixie, helped him understand what made her tick. As far as he could figure out, it was family, friends and religion. Compared to hers, his own life was beginning to seem sterile and unfocused. Dixie was a window into a different world, one that fascinated him with its many elements.

  When she arrived home in the evening, Dixie prepared dinner. She cooked things a man could savor—meat with gravy, most vegetables fresh. They ate collards seasoned with fatback. They rolled dumplings on her wide kitchen counter. Some mornings she made light, flaky biscuits, and he devoured them with country ham, eggs, grits and red-eye gravy. She always kept a pitcher of sweet iced tea in the refrigerator, and he grew accustomed to pouring himself a glass a few times a day. He learned to like Cheerwine, the Carolinas’ soft drink of choice.

  At night, the two of them cuddled in her bed while they watched old movies on DVD. They stocked potato chips in a dresser drawer so they wouldn’t have to interrupt their movie watching to go downstairs and get a snack. Still, they made good use of the pause button when their own love scenes became more intense than those onscreen.

  Life was romantic. Kyle felt a flutter in his stomach whenever he saw Dixie walking across a room, and when he first set eyes on her after a day of being apart, his heart did a little hippety-hop. They held hands when they walked together, and his arm found its way around her shoulders when they rode in his truck. Theirs was a sensual relationship. They got along well, too. It was a happy house.

  Sometimes Kyle had to remind himself that Dixie had just moved in to a new place and that the atmosphere of good cheer prevailed in spite of various hardships that had to be endured. The plumbing, for instance. When he discovered that the hot-water faucet in the downstairs half bath didn’t work, he repaired it and surprised Dixie when she came home from work by blindfolding her, leading her to the sink, turning on the tap and guiding her hand under the stream.

  “What is this supposed to be, a Helen Keller moment?” she joked, referring to the famous scene in the movie where Helen’s teacher, Anna Sullivan, held Helen’s hand under a water pump to drive home the point that words had connections to real things. Kyle turned up the hot water, and as the warm water increased, Dixie got it. She responded by pulling off the blindfold, throwing her arms around him and giving him a big kiss.

  “Hey,” he protested. “It was no big deal.”

  She became all serious and he could have sworn she had tears in her eyes. “It is to me,” she told him quietly.

  Little things
he did made her happy. He liked that. He began to understand that even though Dixie was independent and could do almost anything she set her mind to, she appreciated his help.

  “I’ve never had a man in my life who took care of me. Not since Daddy and Granddaddy,” she said.

  You do now, he wanted to say, though he was too new to this whole business to say it flat out.

  Together they repainted the living room, which the previous owners, for some unfathomable reason, had painted bathtub-ring gray. Dixie chose a soft shade of yellow, as pale as cream, and once it was done, they exchanged an exuberant high five.

  “Another house sale, and I’ll be able to buy a couple of chairs,” Dixie said. Except for the couch, she’d ditched her living-room set when she moved. “It was time to make room for new things,” she told him.

  “As long as I’m one of them,” Kyle said, and she laughed and hugged him. He liked spontaneous displays of affection. His life had been devoid of them for so long that they always took him by surprise.

  Kyle kept busy. So far he’d assembled five more birdhouses and promised another to Mayzelle, whom he’d met when he stopped by the real estate office one day. Dixie chose the colors for the birdhouses, and he considered them gaudy. Dixie was so certain of her choices that he went ahead and painted them as she suggested. He had to admit they were cute.

  “Why, I declare, this is the most adorable birdhouse I’ve ever seen in my life,” Mayzelle said to him when he delivered it. “You could sell these at the flea market.”

  “I build them for fun, not for profit,” Kyle said.

  Dixie was almost as enthusiastic about the flea-market venture as Mayzelle. “Let’s take a few on Saturday and try to sell them,” she suggested. “At the same time, I’ll unload the bric-a-brac that the previous owners left in my house.”

  She seemed to be anticipating this enterprise with so much pleasure that Kyle didn’t have the heart to deny her. When Saturday arrived, Kyle would just as soon have stayed in bed, but Dixie coaxed him out from under the covers before it was fully light. Together they loaded his truck with baskets of junk, old clothes and the birdhouses, which now numbered seven.

  “Where’s this flea market?” Kyle asked. Even the sight of Dixie all dewy from her shower didn’t quite make up for leaving so early.

  “We’ll hang a left at the nuclear plant onto the Allentown Road. It’s a five-mile drive to the old tobacco-market shed where they hold the flea market. Carrie and I used to go once and a while and get rid of old household items.”

  “Are you sure anyone will be interested in birdhouses?” he asked skeptically.

  “Of course. They’re wonderfully imaginative. I love the one with the front porch and rocking chair.”

  “Speaking of porches, did I mention that I’m going to show the Meehan house next week? My client’s name is Lana Pillsbry, she’s a teacher at Yewville Elementary. She’s been in the house before and likes it. I hope I can get her to sign on the dotted line before we ever leave the property.”

  Kyle grinned. “You’re a real go-getter, Dixie.”

  “Daddy brought Carrie and me up that way. If he’d lived long enough, he would have been proud of how well we’ve done in our chosen professions.” She paused, a habit of hers before changing the subject. “How did you become a farrier, Kyle?”

  He kept his eyes focused on the road ahead. “I graduated from college with a degree in history. My only job offer involved flipping burgers. Shoeing horses seemed more lucrative, and the area needed farriers.”

  “How’d you learn it?”

  “In my senior year I had a job exercising horses at a local stable, and the guy who shoed the horses liked me. He trained a student or two every year and asked me if I wanted to learn to be a farrier. It was the best thing I ever did.”

  He braked at a sign that said Flea Market and turned into the parking lot. As he parked the truck, he slid his arm around the back of the seat. Could he help it that Dixie was so delectably and unconsciously seductive? He kept going, closing the distance between them. It was only a few inches to the clean line of her jaw, the soft skin of her throat.

  “Don’t ruin my lipstick again,” she warned. “I didn’t bring any with me.”

  “You’re fine without it,” he said, ruining her lipstick anyway. He came up for air. “Did you wear a bra?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” he retorted as he lifted her shirt.

  “I lied.” Invitingly, she slid down in the seat.

  This was what he liked about this woman. “Dixie, have you ever made love in the front seat of a farrier’s truck?”

  “No,” she whispered, “but I’m ready to prove it can be done.”

  It was a while before they unloaded the truck, and before they did, they came close to scandalizing a few old biddies parking nearby.

  FLEA-MARKET BUSINESS was brisk right from the start. As they set up their booth, Dixie self-consciously avoided Kyle’s eyes. Every time their gaze met, they both began to sputter with laughter.

  “And what is the price for this one?” a mother asked him after her young daughter dragged her over to the booth where he and Dixie were displaying their wares.

  Off the top of his head, Kyle named a dollar figure for the birdhouse, and the mother shelled out her money along with the comment that she wasn’t going to hang this wonderful creation outside where the elements might work their way with it. No, this was too special, and little Chelsea demanded that it occupy the dresser in her room.

  As soon as the woman and her daughter walked off, a woman with a behind the size of a cement mixer swooped down upon Dixie. “Why, Dixie Lee! I haven’t seen you since your sister’s wedding!”

  “Hello, Mrs. Hatcher. How have you been?” Dixie smiled politely, clueing Kyle in to the fact that she didn’t really like the woman very much.

  “Why, I’ve been fine, though I sure do miss Carrie at the gas station. That Hub is a nice fellow, but he doesn’t have the gift of gab.”

  “I’m sure Hub gives the customers good service,” Dixie replied.

  “I’ve been hearing about you and your new boyfriend,” Mrs. Hatcher said, wagging her forefinger. Her tight yellow curls bobbed up and down with each wag.

  “Um, Mrs. Hatcher, this is Kyle Sherman,” Dixie said, drawing Kyle forward.

  “You won’t find a nicer girl than our Dixie here,” Mrs. Hatcher said, looking him over before she turned back to Dixie. “Dear, Milo told Priss he’d seen you since he moved back home.” She aimed a sly sideways glance at Kyle. He stared back with what he hoped was a blank expression.

  “Yes, Milo stopped by to visit with Kyle and me one evening,” Dixie replied coolly.

  “Hmm, I didn’t realize you and he stayed in touch,” Mrs. Hatcher said, her forehead puckering.

  “We didn’t, but Priss and I were friends long before Milo and I knew each other,” Dixie pointed out.

  “Naturally she’d keep you posted,” Mrs. Hatcher said, obviously fishing for more information.

  “Have you noticed these birdhouses that Kyle makes?” Dixie asked, refusing to swallow the bait. She guided Mrs. Hatcher toward them.

  Kyle, amused at Dixie’s adroit handling of the situation, stood back as Dixie pointed out the unusual features of the ones remaining. No wonder she was doing so well selling real estate, he reflected. She was adept at focusing a buyer’s attention, and she kept working at it until she’d clinched the sale. This meant that Mrs. Hatcher eventually churned down the aisle with two birdhouses under her arm, safely distracted from Dixie’s love life.

  Dixie collapsed against him. “That woman freaks me out. She’s so nosy.”

  “About Milo, you mean?”

  “About everything. She’s not all that unusual. Around here there’s not all that much to do.” Dixie spoke ruefully, as if she wished she could change that facet of small-town life but realized it was pointless to try.

  He studied her expression for a long moment. “Dixie, does it
worry you that people talk about us?”

  “Not exactly. They’d gossip in the same way if I didn’t date. In fact, that’s what happened last year. People kept asking when I was going to find a new boyfriend. In a way, they were just being friendly. I keep getting phone calls from people who’d like to set me up with a brother over in Timmonsville or a forty-year-old cousin who’s never married.”

  “Now you have me.” Kyle pulled her behind the concrete pillar, drawing her into a full-body hug. Dixie giggled, a sound like a purling brook, and they remained in an embrace until someone walked up to the booth.

  In the next few hours, he and Dixie sold all the birdhouses and took orders for more. Kyle was astonished at their success.

  In the afternoon, as crowds began to disperse, they closed the booth and loaded their unsold items into the truck. Out of habit, Kyle opened his cell phone before he started the engine. They were in range of a tower, and he quickly checked his messages. One from Elliott. One from his landlady, Mrs. Steidel, reporting she’d watered the dracaena. And two from Andrea. He frowned and snapped the phone shut.

  On the drive back toward Yewville, Dixie counted out his share of the money and folded it into an old breath-mint tin in his glove compartment.

  “I kind of have the urge to splurge with this windfall,” he told her. “Would it be enough for a down payment on one of your listings?”

  “Doubtful,” she said with a little laugh.

  “I’m not sure you took me seriously when I mentioned it. Really, I mean to check out some properties.”

  A long pause, almost too long. “If you’re sure you want to…” Dixie let her sentence taper off as if waiting for reassurance.

  “It’s an option,” he said, considering that it had only recently become one and that perhaps he shouldn’t trust his gut feelings on this.

  Before he could waver, Dixie rose to the challenge. “How about now?” she asked.