She glanced at her laptop, which hadn’t seen a lot of action today, and said, “I’m free.”
“Great! You can follow me home! I’ll take you around in the garden mobile.”
Kaylee did just that, driving down Highway 36 behind Jillian and then down a long road, through the trees and up to a beautiful Victorian mansion. After she parked she admired the house.
“Completely restored, mostly by Paul Haggerty,” Jillian said. “I found it and rented it and started a small garden, then I bought it and the ten acres it’s on and planned a farm. The house is wonderful; I’ll take you through it after we tour the gardens. Colin and I live here, but my sister, Kelly, uses the kitchen to cook. She has a commercial kitchen in Eureka where she produces her sauces. But she’s always trying new things, usually on a large scale, and this kitchen is perfect. Come in and meet her.”
Kaylee followed Jillian inside and met Kelly, who appeared to be up to her elbows in dough.
“Bread,” Jillian said. “I love it when she bakes bread. You can smell the aroma all the way to the coast. If you’re interested, we can see the gardens first, then the house.”
“Oh, I’m interested. I want to see anything you have time to show me.”
“Good, I love showing it off.”
Sitting in the garden mobile next to Jillian, Kaylee bounced around the huge gardens behind the house. They were like a quilt of many colors and textures, lush and looking tasty. Most of the outdoor gardens were picked clean except for the melons, pumpkins and some late squash. But there were several greenhouses in the back, filled with raised beds that held fruits, vegetables and flowers. “Mostly edible flowers that chefs like to garnish their plates with. I just started doing that a couple of years ago.”
“How do you get your stuff to the restaurants? Because unless I missed something, there aren’t a lot of restaurants around here.”
“You didn’t miss anything. These flowers and heirloom vegetables go as far as Seattle and San Francisco via FedEx. They’re tender little things that won’t last long; they go overnight.”
The back acreage was lined with fruit trees and berry bushes. “The berries come in in spring, finished by the first of August, but the apples come in later. I don’t rely on that apple crop for much, except to satisfy the deer. I sell them out on the roadside stands—we have two large ones now. Kelly uses the fruit and berries in her creations; she ships a lot of pie filling, jams, jellies and that sort of thing. I’ve added to the berry bushes and paid the price—the bears love berries. I have to scare them away. I have an air horn they don’t like. Having wildlife in the yard can be fun until you get a sample of their mischief. A mama bear with a couple of cubs will break into the greenhouses or turn a garden mobile upside down. I really can’t afford to be welcoming.”
“They don’t scare you?” Kaylee asked.
“Not really,” Jill said. “But I don’t get up close and personal. I’ve seen the size of their claws. And I’ve seen the evidence of their shenanigans.”
“Could you put up a big fence?” Kaylee asked.
Jillian laughed. “Have you ever seen a bear up a thirty-foot tree? There’s no fence to keep them out. We do have fences around some of our outdoor gardens to keep the deer out, plus I use a lot of bunny repellant to save my lettuces and root vegetables. The bears, I’m afraid, go where they please. Thus the air horn. It’s very loud.”
Kaylee was in awe of the terraced plots that adorned the hillsides surrounding the house, separated by narrow roads to make movement easy. Every now and then Jillian would stop the golf-cart-size garden mobile and pick some fruits or veggies and throw them in the back of her little truck. There was everything from apples to tiny potatoes; there were several rows of grapes with only a few still on the vine. She pulled up a few honeydew and cantaloupe from their vines and added them to her catch.
“The pumpkins will be ready for Halloween,” she said.
When they got back to the house, Jillian showed her around, and by far the biggest treat was the second-floor sunroom where Colin had his studio. His wildlife paintings circled the large room, and he was at work on a huge painting of a buffalo. “God, that’s breathtaking,” she said. “Do you sell them in a gallery?”
“Most of them go to a small gallery in Sedona, Arizona, owned by an artist who has become a good friend. I do some special orders and sell some from my website. It’s keeping me out of trouble,” he said.
There was a third floor that had a couple of guest rooms and to Kaylee’s surprise, a staircase to the roof and a widow’s walk. “We don’t know where the idea for a widow’s walk came from, but you can see all of Jilly Farms and beyond from up here. The first year I was here, I came up here all the time. I would call Kelly; we didn’t have a satellite connection yet and it was the only place I could get really good reception. And I would watch over my little farm.”
When they went back downstairs, Kelly had some snacks prepared for them. They talked for a while about their various artistic pursuits from Kaylee’s writing to Kelly’s culinary skills. And when Kaylee was finally leaving, Jillian handed her a large plastic laundry basket full of the things she’d picked on their tour of the gardens.
All of them made sure she knew she’d be welcome back anytime. “I can’t wait to come back,” she said.
She drove directly home from there, and as she pulled in she saw Landry was sitting on his porch steps, holding a bottled water. When she parked in front of her house, he wandered over. She lifted the hatch. “I’ve been to Jilly Farms. And look what I got!”
“Awesome,” he said, looking through the fruits and veggies.
“I’m going to have a veggie dinner.”
“Do you have a ham hock to go in the beans?” he asked.
“No, of course not—I wasn’t expecting this.”
“I do. I’ll get it for you. You can’t have a pot of green beans without pork of some kind.”
“Then you have to join me for dinner!”
And there was that grin. “That would be great. I’ll make sure Otis stays home.”
5
KAYLEE’S FIRST DINNER with her landlord was so easy, she felt as though she’d known him for years. He helped her clean up the kitchen, accepted an after-dinner cup of coffee, didn’t stay too late and thanked her profusely. She and Kitty—erm, Tux—wrote eight pages, staying up till almost midnight.
The very next day when she was returning from her afternoon walk he waved to her from his porch and shouted, “What are your plans for dinner?” She gestured that she didn’t know, just shrugging her shoulders. He told Otis to stay on the porch and walked down the path to the road. “I thawed some ground sirloin for hamburgers. Care to join me?”
She glanced at Otis. “If you cook them on your grill and bring them over, I’ll slice tomatoes and make deviled eggs. And there are leftover beans.”
“That sounds perfect,” he said. “I’ll get a shower and do some grilling. How about six?”
“I look forward to it.”
She had her own shower and did a little primping, wondering if he’d notice. Then she wondered why she bothered.
She bothered because he was handsome, pleasant and quite good company. They talked about anything and everything. He gave her the background on a lot of her new friends.
“The story on Jillian and Colin is she was fired from a big executive job and came up here from San Jose to try to get her head together. Colin came to Virgin River because his brother Luke lives here, though why he did that is a mystery. They can’t get along at least half the time. I take that back—they’re either best friends or enemies. Jilly found the house and its neglected garden and started digging and planting. Colin is an ex-military Blackhawk pilot. He was recovering from a crash and painting was his therapy. He didn’t quite know he was any good.”
“Any good? He’s gifted!”
“I know. He met Jilly, fell in love with her and they’ve been together ever since.”
“And now they’re married?”
“No. But they are a permanent couple nonetheless. And, this being Virgin River—meaning it’s very small and very nosy—people ask them constantly when they’re going to get married. They’ve been together in that big house for years. I don’t know why they haven’t married and as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter. Kelly, Jilly’s sister, is married.”
“To a film writer, I was told,” Kaylee said. “She’s very proud of him.”
“Then there’s the preacher,” he went on, giving her the scoop on how Noah came to town to fulfill the needs of a church he bought on eBay and how he fell in love with the church secretary, a former exotic dancer.
“This town doesn’t look nearly as interesting as it really is at first glance,” she said, laughing.
* * *
Three days later, after only seeing Landry on the porch or in the yard, she asked him if he was interested in joining her for dinner and he readily accepted. They had drinks on her porch at sunset before dinner and then coffee on the porch afterward. She always sat on the swing and he lounged in the porch chair, a rocker, next to the swing.
The next day Kaylee could see that he was busy and she watched as the owners of his three dog trainees came to pick up their pets. Landry spent at least an hour with each of them in the yard, going through the training commands, directing the dogs to heel, turn, sit, down, stay in place. She watched it all from her porch—from a safe distance, while trying to write. She noted that the owners didn’t leave without handshakes and hugs. There was such a sense of joy around their well-behaved dogs.
She was surprised when there was a knock at her door at about eight that evening. She opened the door to Landry, who held up a bottle of wine. “Care to see the stars come out?”