Emerald Windows (3 page)

Brooke had sprung out of her seat at the announcement and cried as she’d made her way to Nick. He’d wanted to grab her up and hug her, but he knew the rumors would only mushroom if he did. Instead, he shook her hand, congratulated her, and gave her the small statue.

After the ceremony, Nick had gone to stand in the lobby to congratulate each of his graduating students. Brook was one of the last to come out. She held her diploma in one hand and her award in the other, looking as excited and vibrant as he had hoped she would. He had taken a step toward her, but she’d been encircled by her family, swallowed into their hugs and congratulations, and ordered to put her robe back on and pose for an eternity of pictures.

He had thought of waiting to congratulate her, but a surprising melancholy had fallen over him. The school year was over. His star student was going to college. He would have no reason to see her again.

That melancholy had disturbed him, and finally, he had withdrawn from the crowd and headed for the art room. He had turned on one of the easel lights, casting the room in a dim yellow glow, and had stared at the air as he reminded himself that he couldn’t get so attached to his students if he was going to make it as a teacher.

When she’d stepped through the doorway, it had startled him. She had her graduation gown draped over her arm, and her award and diploma in her hands.

“I was looking for you,” she said with a smile. “I thought I might find you in here. Do you ever go home?”

“Sometimes.” Smiling, he nodded down at the statue in her hands. “How does it feel?”

She tried to answer, but the words wouldn’t come. Grinning, she just shook her head. “You knew and didn’t tell me.”

“I wanted you to be surprised,” he said. “And I wanted everyone to know about it. Your moment of triumph. You deserved it.”

Her eyes misted over. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Sure, you could have.”

She shook her head, insisting that she couldn’t. “Where is it?” she asked. “My sculpture, I mean. Did they return it?”

“I have it in the closet. I thought of displaying it in the foyer at graduation, but I was afraid it would get knocked over and chipped in the crowd.” He went to the closet and got it out. “Here. You can make it the centerpiece of your first showing. It’s really amazing, Brooke.”

She took it reverently. “Did you know I named it
Infinity?”
she asked quietly.

“I saw that on the entry form,” he said. “Interesting name. Where did it come from?”

“I just thought those hands represented something that lasted. Something that just goes on and on, no matter what.” She
studied the sculpture, her green eyes sobering. “Mr. Marcello, I want you to have it.”

Nick caught his breath. “But, Brooke,” he said. “It’s the best thing you’ve ever done. You should keep it…or sell it…”

“I could never sell this,” she whispered, setting the sculpture in his hands. “It means too much.”

He took it then, frowning down at it, and tried to think of something eloquent to say. When words failed him, he just reached down to hug her.

Suddenly the lights flashed on, flooding the room in cruel fluorescents. Nick and Brooke jumped apart and turned to the door. There stood the school superintendent, Gerald Hemphill, and his wife, Abby, gaping at them in horror and condemnation, as if they’d caught a teacher molesting a child.

Abby Hemphill looked as if she’d been personally offended. “Apparently we’ve interrupted something,” she said. Then picking up Brooke’s graduation gown, she thrust it at her. “I suggest you take this and go home.”

“Yes,” her husband said. “We have some important matters to discuss with Mr. Marcello.”

“I just came to thank him—”

“It’s all right, Brooke,” Nick said. “I can handle this.”

For the rest of his life, Nick was sure he would never forget the look of mortified humiliation on Brooke’s face as she left the room.

Mr. Hemphill had fired him on the spot, and the school board had threatened to take legal action. But the thought that kept running through his mind was that Brooke was hurting. As soon as he’d gotten near a telephone that horrible night, he’d called her.

“It’s going to be all right,” he’d assured her. “We’ll get this straightened out.”

But the next morning the headlines in the paper read, “Teacher Fired for Rumored Affair with Student,” and the article told how rumors had abounded for weeks about twenty-four-year-old Nick Marcello and eighteen-year-old Brooke Martin. It
also stated how Mr. and Mrs. Hemphill had discovered them in a compromising position after the commencement ceremony and fired Nick.

Brooke had left town that same day, and as far as Nick knew, she had not returned until today.

Now he had the chance to work with her again, one artist with another. He hoped she didn’t turn him down. His interest in her was strictly business, he assured himself. Some lessons were never forgotten. Especially when one learned them the hard way.

CHAPTER
   

B
ROOKE PULLED HER CAR OUT
of the church parking lot and onto the main street that ran through Hayden, past J. C. Penney’s, the Phillips
66
gas station owned by Jarrett Plummer and his son, and the old rec hall where she’d had her first art lesson at age five. Everything was the same as when she’d left it. Yet everything was different.

She’d had her down moments since she’d left Hayden, and Brooke was certain she’d have more of them in her life. But there hadn’t been a day since that graduation night that she hadn’t felt the abysmal humiliation that had begun when she’d looked up, startled, into the shocked faces of Mr. and Mrs. Hemphill. A day hadn’t gone by since then that she hadn’t closed her eyes at least once in remembrance of that hug and wondered how something so innocent could have had such ugly consequences.

Now, as she drove through the blue-collar section of town to her family’s home, she recalled the anger in her father’s face the night Mrs. Hemphill called and told him what they’d allegedly caught his daughter doing. For the
first time in her life, Brooke had seen in her father’s eyes that he was capable of doing harm to another human being. As long as she lived, she would never forget his huge frame bolting across the floor as he’d carried his broken pride like a weapon that would exact the only revenge he understood.

“Daddy, where are you going?” she had shouted.

“I’m going to find Nick Marcello and kill him!” George Martin’s voice had shaken the frame house.

She turned to her mother. “Mom, stop him!”

“No!” her mother screamed. “If
he
doesn’t kill him, I’ll do it myself!”

How could her parents so quickly and easily believe the things the Hemphills said? “But it didn’t happen that way! It was just a hug! He was congratulating me! He doesn’t feel that way about me, Mom!” she cried. “We never did anything, Daddy. We just hugged. What’s wrong with that?”

“He’s a grown man, and you’re a child!” her father had roared. “He’s a teacher!”

“He didn’t
do
anything!” Brooke sobbed, but she knew that nothing she said would ever make things right in their eyes. “Nick did
not
take advantage of me.”

“That’s not the way Abby Hemphill tells it!” her mother said, hysteria cracking her voice. “We’ve worked all our lives in this town to be known as good people with good children, and it wasn’t easy with an income that makes people look down on you, anyway. But now, in one night, it’s all ruined. We’re reduced to trash, because whatever happened, Abby Hemphill’s word is the only word that matters!”

And her mother had been right. As long as she lived, Brooke would never forget the headlines the next morning, the words that implied she and Nick had been having a secret affair for some time. When she read that he had been fired for something he hadn’t done, it had been too much to endure.

She had packed her suitcases that morning, withdrawn all the money she’d worked at the local theater box office to save, and driven the little third-hand car she’d bought months earlier
out of town before her parents even knew she was gone. The only person who had seen her leave was her little sister, Roxy, only ten years old at the time. Roxy had sat on the porch and waved goodbye, a look of mournful confusion on her face as she tried to understand the events that would change her family forever.

The summer that followed was the loneliest and most miserable of Brooke’s life. She had rented a tiny hole-in-the-wall apartment in Columbia, Missouri—three hours from Hayden— and taken a job as a waitress to support herself until school started. There, she had nursed her wounded pride. But she imagined that the blow to her pride was nothing compared with the loss of Nick’s livelihood. She doubted that he would ever forgive her.

She had concentrated her time and efforts on school, and had been considered by her professors to be a stellar art student. After graduating, she had gone to work for a stained-glass artist. She had been there ever since, nurtured and trained by one of the finest. Her boss—a jolly old man who treated her like his daughter— always wanted her to stretch and take on new projects, and he’d been thrilled by her opportunity to do the windows at St. Mary’s.

If he’d only known what those windows might cost her.

She pulled into the driveway of her family home and sat for a moment, staring at the little house in which she had spent a happy childhood, before she’d known what cruel games adulthood played on people. What would her parents say, now that the black sheep of the family was back in town? Would they count the days until she left, fearing that the longer she stayed, the more gossip she would provoke? And when they learned she would be working with Nick…

She reeled the thought back in and told herself just to face what came and not to dwell on the unknown. Slaps in the face were easier to endure when they came as a surprise, she told herself. Dread and anticipation were wasted energy. She knew firsthand.

Brooke grabbed her suitcase from the back seat and got out of the car. For a moment, she peered up at the small house that clearly represented the Martins’ modest status, but revealed their
stoic pride in what little they had. The house was freshly painted in blue, though it had been white the last time she’d seen it. And they had changed the color of the front door. A large awning hung over the picture window, a new addition in the last few years. Funny that her parents had never mentioned it when they’d visited her in Columbia—but then, it was such a little thing…not the kind of thing families talked about when they got together only once or twice each year.

Brooke went up the steps to the porch, set her suitcase down and shook her key chain around until her old house key was in her hand. It jammed in the knob, as if it didn’t fit, and she stepped back, frowning.

The door opened from the inside, and her mother smiled at her, as she had when Brooke was a little girl—before she had become the family albatross. Alice Martin’s expression gave Brooke’s heart a nostalgic twist, making her ache for the simple childhood days when her parents’ approval was so easily earned. For a moment, as Brooke smiled at her mother, who still wore her hair in the same frosted bob she’d worn for fifteen years, she wondered whether it could be possible that things hadn’t changed that much, after all. “Brooke, we’ve been waiting for hours. Where have you been?”

“I got tied up.” Brooke hugged her mother and stepped over the threshold, dropping her keys back into her purse. “The key…it didn’t fit…”

“We had the locks changed a few years ago,” her mother explained, taking her suitcase out of her hand and setting it against the wall. “Roxy lost her purse, and we were afraid whoever found it would break in.” Her mother saw the distraught look on her daughter’s face and gently touched Brooke’s hair. “I’m sorry, honey. It never occurred to me to tell you. It’s been so long since you were here. I guess I thought you’d never come through that door again.”

Brooke sighed, and her gaze panned the living room. Her mother had covered the warped hardwood floors with an inexpensive wall-to-wall carpet, and new furniture filled the room.
The old recliner she remembered with its split seams where the stuffing oozed out was gone, as was the old couch with the leg that fell off if you sat on the wrong end. The unfamiliarity and newness made her want to step back outside and focus on her mother’s face a little longer. “Everything looks…different,” she whispered.

Her mother took her hand and drew her toward the kitchen. “Don’t look so surprised, Brooke. When you decide to stay away for seven years, you have to expect a few changes.”

Brooke rallied and forced a smile, determined not to reveal how difficult this homecoming was. Maybe she should have come home a few days earlier, allowing more time to break the proverbial ice and put the past behind her. But somehow, before today, she hadn’t been able to do it.

The swinging door to the kitchen burst open, and her father hurried out, his leather-tanned face sporting the same smile he’d worn when she was his princess.

“There you are!” He swept her up into his arms and swung her around, as if she weighed fifty pounds again. “I took off work early today to see you, but we were beginning to think you’d never show up.”