“By what?” Diana asked, taken aback.
“By you,” he said solemnly.
She rolled her eyes in laughing disbelief. “For a man who’s impressed, you’ve been looking awfully grim.”
“Probably because it doesn’t happen very often, and I’m not used to the feeling.”
He was serious, Diana realized, and she was momentarily speechless with pleasure and surprise.
“By the way,” he added, “that isn’t my ‘grim’ look.”
“It isn’t?” she said, still glowing from the compliment. “What’s your ‘grim look’ like?”
“I don’t think you want to know.”
“Oh, go ahead. Let me see it—”
Cole was so unaccustomed to being treated with teasing impertinence that it startled a shout of laughter from him, and Diana thought there was a rusty quality to it.
“You haven’t asked me what about you impressed me. . . .”
She pretended to ponder that. “Well, I know it wasn’t Grandpa’s workshop. You called a beautiful piece of mahogany ‘a board.’ And I don’t think you know a hybrid rose from a hibiscus either.”
“You’re right on both counts. But I do know a little bit about business. I realized your magazine was a success, but I had no idea you’d managed to create national personalities out of your stepmother and her parents. At the very least, that’s an amazing feat!”
“I didn’t create personalities for them,” Diana said with a shake of her head and a wry, affectionate smile. “They were unique when I met them, and they haven’t changed a bit. They were forerunners of a coming trend.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“About a month after my father and stepmother were married, they took Corey and me to Long Valley, and I met my grandparents for the first time. Although I wasn’t familiar with the term at the time, they were the consummate ‘do-it-yourselfers.’ During the day, my grandfather was a surveyor for a town with a population of about seven thousand. But he spent his evenings and weekends in his garden, where he experimented with ways to grow the biggest and best flowers and vegetables in west Texas without resorting to chemical fertilizers or insecticides.
“When he wasn’t poring over seed catalogs or searching through books for new or ancient methods of controlling garden insects and diseases, he spent his time in the little workshop behind their house, where he built everything from dollhouses and scaled-down furniture for Corey, to wooden jewelry boxes and rocking chairs for my grandmother. I loved everything about my grandfather’s workshop, from the wood shavings on the floor to the smell of the wood stains he used. I remember on that first visit, I stepped on a little piece of wood about an inch square lying beside his workbench. I picked it up and started to toss it into a trash can beside his workbench. He laughed and stopped me and asked me why I wanted to throw away a kiss. I was fourteen at the time and although he was only in his late fifties, he seemed very old to me. So when he described a little chunk of soft wood as a kiss, I was horribly afraid that he was old and—” With her forefinger Diana made a circular motion near her ear, a child’s pantomime for crazy.
“But he wasn’t,” Cole ventured with a smile, enjoying her tale and the way the sun glistened in her hair and the way her eyes glowed when she spoke of the people she loved. She was part of America’s aristocracy, but there was a wholesomeness and gentleness about her that had always appealed to him—now more than ever, because he realized how rare that combination really was.
“No, he wasn’t crazy. He picked up a little carving knife and whittled it into a rounded triangle; then he reached on the shelf and tore off a piece of old silver foil. He wrapped it in the foil and dropped it into my palm. And there it was—a Hershey’s ‘kiss.’ One with no calories, he told me, laughing. There was a bowl of them, I later realized, on a coffee table in the living room.”
“How did your grandmother and mother fit into the picture?” Cole asked when Diana turned aside to study a large gardenia bush beside them.
She glanced at him, then returned her attention to the fragrant bush. “My mother worked as a secretary for a manufacturing company when my father met her, but she spent her free time as my grandmother did—cooking and canning and baking to her heart’s content.”
She snapped off a stem from the bush and turned back to him, her hands cupped around a mound of glossy, dark green leaves with one perfect blossom in the center that looked as soft and white as whipped cream.
“Go on,” Cole urged, watching her lift the blossom to her nose.
“My grandmother used the fruits and vegetables that my grandfather grew, and she experimented with recipes that had been handed down in her family from mother to daughter for generations. Every recipe had a name that conjured up friendly ancestors and bygone events along with wonderful tastes and delicious smells. There was Grandma Sarah’s three-bean salad and Great-grandmother Cornelia’s cherry cinnamon pie. There was harvest-moon cake and wheat-threshers ham biscuits.”
Ruefully, she admitted, “Until my first trip to Long Valley, I actually thought strawberries grew on trees and that ‘canned goods’ meant tin cans with labels on them that said Libby and Green Giant, and that the cans belonged out of sight in a pantry. You can imagine, then, how I reacted to the sight of bright yellow peaches in a glass jar with a label on it depicting a peach tree with a baby sitting beneath it on a blanket, framed in a border of peach blossoms and leaves. To me, it was more than wonderful, it was positively exotic.”
He eyed her with amused fascination. “Did you really believe strawberries grew on trees?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” she replied, batting her lashes in a comic imitation of a dopey femme fatale. “I thought chicken was created in a carton with plastic wrap. Actually,” she admitted sheepishly, “I still prefer to think of it that way”; then she finished her tale: “I thought my grandparents’ house was magical. When they came to live with us in Houston, our house began to change in the same wonderful ways, from the back lawn, which had only had a swimming pool and some palm trees when they got there, to the rooms in the house.”
Finished, she lifted her hands and offered the flower to him, cradling it in her palms as if it were a priceless treasure. “It’s exquisite, isn’t it?” s
he said softly.
You’re exquisite, Cole thought, and he shoved his hands into his pockets to avoid the temptation to cradle her hands in his and lift the flower to his face, and then see how her fingers would taste against his lips. Lack of control over his sexual urges had never been a problem for him. Neither had sentimentality, lack of concentration, or the urge to protect a member of the opposite sex beneath the age of sixty. Annoyed with himself for his unprecedented failings in all three of those areas in the last twenty-four hours, he said curtly, “And so you managed to create a market for their talent and philosophy. You were very clever.”
She looked a little taken aback by his brusque tone, but she shook her head and her voice remained soft yet firm. Like her body, Cole decided, and glowered at the tree trunk in self-disgust for the direction of his thoughts. “I didn’t need to create a market; it was already there and growing bigger each year, though no one seemed to recognize it at the time.”
“What do you mean the market was there and growing?”
“We live in a time when Americans are feeling more and more rootless and more separated from each other and their natural surroundings. We live in an impersonal world; we come home to huge subdivisions filled with near-identical houses that are filled with mass-produced everything, from furniture to accessories. Nothing seems to give us a sense of timelessness, of stability, of roots, of real self-expression. People feel a desire to personalize their immediate surroundings, even though they can’t personalize the world beyond. The Foster Ideal is about rediscovering the pleasure of, and depth of, one’s own creativity.”