A Lowcountry Wedding (35 page)

Carson leaned back so Blake’s hands fell from her shoulders. She still couldn’t meet his eyes. “You know how I feel. I . . . I wanted things—to change. I hoped—I’d find something here.” She looked up at him. “But it’s not happening. You say you have another job possibility. We both know it will end up being the same story: I won’t have the right credentials, or I’ll not be right for what they’re looking for, or it’s really just a courtesy because they already have someone on the inside they want to hire. This can go on for months and months.” She stopped and said loudly, angrily, “I can’t just keep applying, and hoping. And waiting. I’m not good at standing still, Blake. You know that. I
have to keep moving.” She shook her head in confirmation. “I can’t just sit around and do nothing. I can’t.”

Blake looked off again, his jaw working furiously. When he turned back to her, his face was rigid. “Are you breaking our engagement?”

She looked at him in shock. “No.” She shook her head. “I’m asking you to still go through with the wedding if I take this job.”

Blake leaned back against the cushions, his shoulders drooped in defeat. “I’m sorry, Carson. I can’t do that. I know I don’t have the right to make this decision for you. I only know I can’t go through another six months like the last.”

So, Carson thought to herself. It sounded as if they were giving each other their bottom lines. She wondered what Atticus would advise now. “What do we do?” She looked down at the diamond on her hand.

“Are you asking out of politeness, or do you really want my answer?”

“I want your honest answer,” she said bluntly. “Of course.”

He looked at her, and though his face was calm, his eyes were dark with intent. “Okay then. I know what I think you should do. Contact Charleston Waterkeepers, the Coastal Conservation League, NOAA, and every other nonprofit and profit organization that deals with environmental subjects you can sink your teeth into and send a blitz of résumés out there. Frankly, you sat on your ass for the past month and assumed you’d get the aquarium job. Well, you didn’t. Now you say you’ve only got a few days to decide. So you’d better get cracking, girl. That’s what I think you should do. Fight for us, baby.” Blake took a breath. “Or break it off now. Don’t make me hope if there’s nothing to hope for.”

Carson sucked in her breath. She heard what he was asking, knew it was fair. Blake was always fair. Now she had to be fair, as well. She looked down at the ring on her finger, the small diamond bordered on each side with a sapphire. The ring that had been his mother’s. The ring that had helped keep her sober when she was out of town because when she looked at it, she saw Blake’s face.

“All right, I will. I do want to marry you. I don’t want to break off our engagement.”

Blake released a sigh. “Do you still want that drink?”

“Yes,” she replied honestly. “But then I always want a drink. I don’t want it as badly as I did when I walked in.”

“Do you need to call Bill?”

Bill was her sponsor. She shook her head. “I’m okay. I thought I needed to, but not now. Though, I might give Atticus a call.”

“Sounds good. I’m glad you feel you can talk to him.” Blake reached down and took her fingers and held them in his. Gently he stroked the inside of her palms with his thumb. “You can always talk to me, too, you know.”

“I know.” Then she laughed shortly. “Except I need to talk about you.”

“Okay.” He laughed, too, though there was no humor in it. He brought her fingers to his lips. “Are we still on for dinner?”

“I don’t want to go out. I want to get cracking, as you put it. Want to come over and we can work on them together?”

“Yeah,” he said, brightening. “I’ll bring sushi.”

“Sounds great.”

They’d reached an impasse. There wasn’t anything left to say.

Carson rose to leave. In the corner, Hobbs saw the movement
and immediately climbed to his feet and trotted toward her. Carson, hoping to make up for her rude behavior earlier, gave him a generous pat and back scratch, sending tiny golden hairs flying in the air.

“See you in a little bit,” Blake said, and kissed her gently on the lips. She felt his warm breath, waited, hoping he would kiss her again.

But he didn’t.

Carson felt the chill when his arms slid from her shoulders. She smiled quickly as she said good-bye, then turned and walked head bent to her car, aware that he was watching her. She’d found a parking spot not far from the house, yet by the time she’d reached the car and turned to wave once more, Blake was already gone.

Atticus was sitting at the dining-room table of his condominium writing a sermon for Sunday. He’d been asked to fill in for the pastor of Morris Baptist Church while he went to a conference. Atticus gladly agreed. He needed to get back in the pulpit. Preaching gave his life purpose and meaning. The Reverend Manigault at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta had been wise to urge him to take a sabbatical in the lowcountry for as long as he needed. Atticus was doing more than forging new relationships. He was forming a new identity.

His sermon was on honesty. Something he’d spent a lot of time praying about in the past weeks. During that time he’d slowly gotten to know the Muir family, though he knew he’d only scratched the surface. A lot was bubbling underneath that he wanted to tap into. He’d spent several hours chatting with
both couples—Carson and Blake, Harper and Taylor—but for the most part everyone was being on their best behavior in the small groups, keeping things vague. No one was digging into serious issues. Usually Atticus would have taken the gloves off by this point and started probing deeper, getting the couples to open up more. He felt that he hadn’t seen anything real, raw, and truly honest since that morning out on the water with Carson and Delphine.

Yet in all fairness, he’d never before been in a situation like this. First, they weren’t parishioners. Second, they weren’t even Southern Baptists. And third, how could he ask for honesty from them when he was living a lie, or omission—whatever he chose to call it.

He didn’t know if he could continue the charade much longer. The dishonesty of the arrangement with Mamaw tainted everything he did or said with his sisters. And even if he wanted to tell them the truth, the question was, how could he? How could he drop the news that he was their brother after having spent the past weeks denying them that knowledge?

His cell phone rang. He reached for it.

“Hi, Atticus?”

“Harper?”

A light, nervous laugh. “Yes, it’s me.”

His heart warmed for this particular sister, close to his age, tenderhearted. Of his three sisters, she seemed the most fragile. He readily understood Taylor’s inclination to be her knight in shining armor.

“What’s going on?”

“I really need to talk to you. In person. Do you have time?”

“Is it urgent?”

“Yes,” she said in a soft voice.

He heard the anxiety in her voice as though she’d shouted the word. “I’m working now. Can I swing by in two hours?”

“Thanks.” Her relief was audible. “I’ll make tea. See you then.”

He hung up the phone and started back at his sermon. Then the front doorbell rang. Who could that be? he wondered, pushing back his chair and rising. He crossed the tiled floor and swung open the door.

Carson stood at the door carrying two Starbucks coffees. “Surprise.”

“Come in,” he said, glad to see her, but curious what she’d come for. Other than Dora, no one in the family had come by his condo yet.

“Nice place,” she said, looking around. Like him, she was drawn immediately to the view. “I always love the view of the Cove until I see the view of the ocean. I go back and forth. But this is pretty up here. How long do you have it for?”

“Till June.”

“Then what?”

“I go back to Atlanta. At least until I get my permanent location. In the meantime, I’m working at a few local parishes, helping where I can.”

“While you do your research.”

“What?” he asked, uncomprehending.

“While you do your research. That’s what you said you were in Charleston to do.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said quickly, remembering what he’d told them the day he’d arrived. “Of course.”

“What are you working on now?” She walked toward the table filled with papers, several of them balled up in the trash.

“My sermon for Sunday.”

She studied him a moment. “Do you ever get nervous up there? With all those people listening to you, hoping to be inspired. I’d think it would be daunting.”

Atticus shook his head. “Maybe before I speak I get a little nervous. Not stage fright exactly. More that I hope that my message is received. That I find the right words. Once I begin to preach and feel the spirit of the Lord, I just let her rip.”

She nodded, lips pinched, and looked out the window to the ocean.

“So, what’s up, Carson? Want to talk about anything in particular?”

“You must be so bored of hearing my problems by now.”

He laughed. “What? No way. They’re mesmerizing.”

“Very funny. Seriously, we Muirs are really keeping you on your toes.”

“It’s par for the course with weddings,” Atticus said, hoping to reassure her. “Brides and grooms always end up having more questions than they thought. You wouldn’t be normal if you didn’t. So sit down and let’s drink that coffee. It smells great. Then you can tell me what’s on your mind.”

Carson sat at the table and pried open the lid of her coffee. Atticus sat across from her and took a sip of the hot brew. He felt the caffeine flowing through his veins, waking him up a bit after his struggles with his sermon.

“So, I had some news.”

“Good news?”

“Bad. I didn’t get the job at the aquarium. But I did get the job in California. So now I have to decide if I’m going to stay
here and find a job and marry Blake. Or”—she stretched out the word—“I take the film job and break off my engagement.”

“You’ve been bouncing back and forth on this issue since I met you.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been bouncing around pretty much my whole life.”

“Why do you think that is?”

She looked at him as if he were stupid to ask. “My father.”

“Parker?” Atticus was keenly interested in learning about their father. “How is he responsible?”

Carson snorted derisively. “I’m sorry, I just have a hard time hearing the name
Parker Muir
with the word
responsible
. He was anything but.”

Atticus didn’t respond. He picked up his cup and took a long sip, allowing Carson time to continue.

She looked at her cup for a minute. “Parker—my father—struggled with his alcoholism all his adult life. Unfortunately, it fell to me to care for him rather than the other way around. I was only eight when we moved to California. It was a pretty ghastly childhood. I spent a lot of nights going out to bars looking for him so I could bring him home. I cleaned the house, bought the groceries. Money was always tight. I used to take some out of his wallet while he was sleeping just to have money to buy us food. He made some money on his writing. God knows he tried hard. And there was always that monthly check from Papa Edward. But he couldn’t manage to pay his bills. So”—she brought the cup to her lips—“we moved from place to place a lot.” She drank her coffee.

Atticus was stunned. He hadn’t thought it could’ve been so
bad for her. “Your grandmother let you live like that without interfering?”

“She didn’t know. I only told her the truth about it all after Parker died.”

Atticus didn’t want to criticize, but he thought her grandparents were neglectful not to have kept better tabs on their grandchild. And that Carson was tragically loyal to a father who didn’t deserve it.

Carson sat silently staring out the large porch window. He often found himself staring out at the sea. It was calming, like pressing a delete button in your brain.

“When did he die?”

Carson turned back to Atticus. “When I turned eighteen, I moved out on my birthday. Happy birthday to me,” she said flippantly. Then her face grew serious again. “Parker died a few years after. Alone and drunk.” She looked into Atticus’s eyes, almost as a challenge. “I had to go to the morgue to identify his body.”

“I’m sorry you had to do that.”

She placed her hands around her cup as though seeking warmth. “I don’t think I’ve entirely forgiven myself. Or him.”

“What do you have to forgive yourself for?”

Carson looked up from the coffee. “For leaving him, knowing what he was.”

“Now you’re taking on too much responsibility.
You
were the child.”

Carson shrugged. “Maybe. But from that time on I had a hard time making a commitment of any kind, not to a boyfriend or a pet. I didn’t even take a long-term rental apartment.”
She drank the dregs of her coffee and set her empty cup on the table. “One diagnosis would be attachment disorder.”

She was being curt, something he recognized as a front for her vulnerability. “Did a doctor make that diagnosis?” She shook her head. “Then neither should you.”

“Whatever you call it, the scars are there. I’m still skittish about losing my independence. Sticking to one place, one guy. It’s causing problems between me and Blake. Why else am I so afraid to commit? To settle down? It’s got to be because of my shitty childhood. Because of
him
.”