Somewhere In-Between by Donna Milner Read Free Book Online

the middle of August. One morning not long after they leave, Julie finds herself kneeling in the potato patch outside of Ian’s office. Keeping a garden is a first for her. If only her mother could see her now. She would either be horrified or impressed.
    While Julie works, the morning mist rises like steam from the lake’s rippling surface. The only sound is the water lapping against the stones near shore and the drone of mosquitoes and black flies. The sky is clear and the smell of smoke no longer fills the air, so that the insistent insects are back in full force. Julie alternates between waving them away and attacking the weeds with her hand trowel. As the morning wears on, the sun’s rays warm her back and the mosquitoes dissipate in the heat. Rooting around in the freshly turned earth beneath a drooping plant, Julie retrieves a handful of nugget-sized potatoes. She rubs them between her gloved hands then drops them into the basket at her side. Her bounty smells of warm soil and the promise of a hot summer afternoon.
    This is the love part of the love-hate relationship she has developed with this inherited garden. The hate part is the commitment to someone else’s project. So in retaliation, all summer she has weeded and hoed Elke Woell’s forsaken garden on her own terms, which is giving it as little time as necessary. And it shows. Today, guilt has forced Julie to pay attention to the neglected plants. Still, a part of her resents it. Now that she’s free to, now that the sky is clear of smoke and the crews are gone, she would rather be hiking, following the serpentine creek that winds through the empty meadows or exploring the forests. She has to admit though, that the garden serves the same purpose. It forces her outdoors in spite of herself. It would be too easy to hide inside the house, too easy to get lost in it. It certainly is large enough. Large enough that she and Ian can keep their distance.
    She glances over her shoulder at the French doors. Inside Ian’s office, the top of his silver head is bent over the computer screen; files are piled high on either side of his desk. For a man who was so anxious to ‘go back to the land’ he spends very little time enjoying it.
    When they first moved out here, he often joined her on her daily hikes. Before long he started begging off, claiming he was snowed under with paperwork. After a while he stopped altogether. Now, the furthest he ventures from the house is over to the tenant’s cabin to collect the rent and have a cup of coffee. Coffee, which she notices, takes him a while to drink. After the first month, Ian had decided not to charge Virgil Blue rent, given all the work he did around the ranch. His offer was refused. The tenant insisted that, as with the previous owners, he would continue to pay the two hundred dollars a month rent as well as helping around the ranch. In return he expects unrestricted use of the ranch draft horses to log his woodlot. It’s a fair exchange, according to him. More than fair, according to Ian. All this negotiation, Julie has learned second-hand from the scrawled notes she sometimes finds tacked to their back door. Here it is almost mid-August and she has yet to meet their elusive tenant. The only proof of his existence has been his shadowed outline behind the wheel of his pickup, and the distant figure she saw guiding the massive team of Clydesdales through the chest-high meadow grass during the haying season.
    The hired crew had worked with the machinery, the mowers and rakes, which had come with the ranch. But just as Elke Woell said, it appears Virgil trusts no one with the horses, not even their rightful owner. Ian’s only too happy to keep things this way. Haying for him has been a novelty, a diversion from accounting. Now that it’s done, Julie worries that he’ll go back to sitting in his office getting lost in his numbers. She fears that the only physical exercise