Please Remember This (19 page)

“Not physically, no. It was a little strange to be using something another woman had loved and lost, but I’m sure I was just projecting my own love of needlework.”

“I wouldn’t be too hasty. Objects can carry a great deal of emotional resonance.”

“You’d think one hundred and fifty years of mud would take care of that.”

But had it? She thought about hearing herself explain why she cut her thread short. She turned away from the brothers, carefully replacing the napkins in
the display case. She spoke to Ned. “You said you that you’d be keeping the needles that Eveline had threaded. Did you measure the thread length?”

“Actually, I did. And now you are going to ask me how long the thread was, aren’t you?” Ned squinted, trying to remember. “I think they were all around two feet, between twenty-two and twenty-eight inches, but don’t quote me on that. I would need to look it up. Why do you ask?”

Tess cut her thread at eighteen inches. “I don’t know.”

He didn’t believe her. She could tell that.

She locked the display case and avoided making eye contact with him. She couldn’t help feeling as if he
knew
… although she couldn’t say what it was that he supposedly knew. But whatever it was made her uncomfortable.

Glamorous, ambitious Phil was safer than Ned. He didn’t have Ned’s insight. He didn’t have Ned’s interest in peering into dark places. Phil would never stand here, looking as if he didn’t believe her. Phil would believe her.

But she didn’t love Phil.

She had to talk to him. If people were thinking of them as a couple, then he must know it. So why was he letting the impression stand?

What should she say?
I
really like you as a friend
… That wasn’t right. You told a man you liked him as a friend only when you hated him. And she did like Phil. She liked him a lot.

But how hard it was to bring things up with him. She had never realized that before. There were never any silent spaces in a conversation, times during
which you could clear your throat and say, “You know, I’ve been thinking.” He wasn’t a monologist, he didn’t go on and on; it was nothing like that. He was simply very good at small talk.

But sometimes talk needed to stop being small.

She tried to talk to Phil for four days, and she was wondering how she was going to make herself do it when Ned came into the Lanier Building.

That was a surprise. As far as she could remember, the only time he had come by himself was when he had brought over Eveline’s needles. But late one afternoon, when Sasha and her cousin were again working the counter and business was at its quietest, she noticed him in the corner of the big main room, hanging up his parka on one of the brass wall hooks. His back was toward her. His hair, streaked by the sun during the summer, was darkening. When he turned, the contrast between his hair and his eyebrows was less striking.

He lifted a hand in greeting. “I’ve been promising Dr. Matt that I’d slow down,” he said, “so I thought I’d come in and say hi.”

He didn’t need to explain why he had come in. This was an espresso bar, a place of business. She needed people to come in. “It’s good to see you.”

Carolyn and Dr. Matt had childhood pictures on display in their home. Phil had been an angelic-looking boy with fair hair and flawless peach-hued skin, the kind of youth you expected to see in the Vienna Boys’ Choir. He looked at the camera with a steady, clear gaze, his expression the same in every picture.

Ned, almost five years younger, had looked scruffy
and uncombed next to Phil. Sometimes he would look up at Phil adoringly. Sometimes he would look sullen:
I didn’t want to be in this picture.
Other times he would be grinning with mischief. He invariably had at least one bruise or Band-Aid; he had obviously been a “snips, snails, and puppy-dog tails” kind of boy.

There was something so forthright about him; she could talk to him. She waited while Sasha filled his order and then, picking up her embroidery, followed him over to the love seat under one of the windows.

She asked what was happening at the site, and after he had reported on the latest finds, she changed the subject. “I have a question. It’s personal. Is it clear to everyone in town that Phil and I are a done deal?”

He stared at her over the rim of his mug. He then set the mug down without having taken a drink. “Until four seconds ago I would have said, ‘Sure.’ Are you saying it isn’t clear to you?”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“That’s certainly your right,” he acknowledged, “but if what you’re not saying is what it sounds like, then it looks like you are out to make a monkey of my brother … although if you were able to follow that sentence, then you are one bright cookie.”

“I followed every word of it, and I have no intention in the world of making a monkey out of anyone.” That was what she was trying to avoid. Surely he knew that.

“Then what’s going on?” He sat back, propping one foot up against the low table in front of him, turning toward her, ready to listen.

“Nothing. We never do anything by ourselves. We’ve never been on anything that could be called a date.”

“You’re always here on Friday and Saturday night,” Ned answered. “And he doesn’t have a lot of time either.”

“We never talk about anything personal.”

“He never does.”

It seemed as if Ned was trying to talk her into something. “He has never touched me differently than he would one of your sisters.”

“Oh.” That made Ned pause. He didn’t have an answer for that one. “I can’t say that’s how I would have gone about a courtship, but Phil has more restraint than your average guy.”

“But this isn’t a courtship. That’s my point. And if everyone else is thinking it is, that could be embarrassing for him. He’s done so much for me. I’d hate to humiliate him.”

“Haven’t you talked to him about it?”

She sighed. “I know I should have.”

Ned was sitting forward now, his feet on the ground. “Then why not give him a chance? Why not see if it can turn into a real courtship? He’s a great guy, he really is. He does so much for everyone else. He really does deserve to be happy.”

“I’m not disputing that,” Tess answered. “But I’m not the one who can make him happy.”

“I don’t know how you can say that. The two of you seem perfect for each other. You’re both organized and efficient. You’re both honorable and trustworthy. You both have these phenomenally even
tempers. And you, Tess, the singular you, aren’t needy or demanding. You’re self-contained. You aren’t going to expect things of him that he can’t do.”

All of that was true. Tess was a little surprised that Ned had given the matter so much thought. “What you’re saying is that we are alike. That’s not the same as being right for each other.”

Ned had been reaching for his coffee cup. He stopped. He was not a stupid man. He knew when someone else was right.

He sat back and sighed. “There are a million differences between my brother and me. I mean, he’s Phil Ravenal and I’m not. Everyone always thinks I got the short end of the stick. But it isn’t so. I’m much luckier than he is. I think I was as unaffected by the loss of our parents as it’s possible to be. My first memories are of Carolyn, and before she came along, I had my grandparents, who had been seeing me every day anyway. But it was so different for Phil. One day he was at home, having a mother walk him to kindergarten, and then next day she’s gone, and he’s living in another house. Then two years later Dr. Matt married, and he’s living in yet another place. It’s not that he’s an emotional zero, but there is some kind of big black box inside him that he doesn’t know how to open.”

Tess nodded. She could believe this. That was one key difference between Phil and her; she was much more reflective and self-aware.

“I think that’s why he works so hard,” Ned continued. “I mean, I know I work like a madman, but that’s because I’m so interested in all this stuff. I love it, I always have. But for him, it’s as if he doesn’t exist
unless he has those crazy lists of his, unless he has accomplishments he can point to. Otherwise he doesn’t know who he is.”

“It sounds like he needs a therapist, not a girlfriend.”

“He’s not going to go to a therapist,” Ned said flatly.

Tess also believed that. “What about this from my point of view? Forget about whether or not I am right for him. Maybe he is not right for me. Maybe I don’t want to be so self-contained and even-tempered. Maybe I want to change.”

Ned had clearly never considered that. “Why would you want to change? You seem perfect.”

“That’s not necessarily good, is it?
Seeming
perfect.”

Once again he was open-minded enough to know she had a good point. “It sure as hell makes you pleasant to be around.”

“I think it makes me smug and self-satisfied.”

He shook his head. He wasn’t that open-minded. “No, Tess. Not you.”

If not Phil Ravenal, then what did Tess want in a man?

She acknowledged that her life was nunlike, but a nun’s chastity was supposed to be a sacrifice. Tess’s wasn’t. It seemed like the natural order of things.

Her only lover had been Gordon Winsler, a man who couldn’t watch her when making love to her because she didn’t look enough like Nina Lane. That had been devastating, but she wasn’t going to blame everything on him.

By the time they were raising her, her grandparents’
devotion to each other had been nearly passionless. Perhaps it had always been. They had been raised virtually as brother and sister, their two families clinging to one another, sharing their exile. If there had ever been passion, it had been leached away by the capricious fury of their disturbed daughter.

They had loved Tess, she knew that. But they had been exhausted, worn down by raising a difficult daughter. Their love for Tess had been gentle and weary.

Tess had loved them in return, but they were aging. They were fading. Her love for them had been about letting go, about giving them rest. Love soothed, giving warmth and shelter, comfort and peace.

But love should be a life force, vibrant and green, rousing and rushing. Love should awaken, stimulate, enrich. Yet in Tess’s own history such energy and vibrancy had been gathered in Nina, and Nina had not been a life force. She had killed herself.

There was nothing to do except try to speak to Phil as clearly and simply as she had spoken to Ned. When he came in the next morning, she made coffee for herself and joined him at his table. If people in town stuck to their routine, she and Phil would have ten minutes alone.

She didn’t give him a chance to speak. “People around town are making assumptions about you and me that are far ahead of the reality.”

“I’m aware of that.” His voice was even, but for a moment Tess thought that he was going to look away, and she was sure that he wanted to, that some instinct in him longed to break eye contact. But he
didn’t. “Ned came over last night and told me that I may have been ‘a courtin’ too slow.’ “

Tess shifted uneasily. Ned had reported their conversation to him? She didn’t like that.

But she had no business minding. She had not asked him for secrecy. He hadn’t betrayed her. His loyalty was to his brother, not to her.

“Fast or slow isn’t the issue, Phil.”

“I know a political life is difficult, Tess, but—”

She shook her head, stopping him. He hadn’t heard her. His profession wasn’t the problem. “Our scars match, Phil. We’re too much alike. We—”

She realized there was no point in explaining. He would accept the conclusion quickly enough. That’s what politicians do. They are realists. And as for the reasons behind the conclusion, he wouldn’t understand, he couldn’t.

If she had come to Kansas looking for a brother, then she had found him. But she was not going to marry a brother.

Her grandmother already had.

Chapter 12

 

E
very weekend in December, and many Thursday evenings as well, there were activities to draw people to town—house tours, visits from a Father Christmas-style Santa, horse-drawn hayrides, caroling around bonfires. Each event took hours and hours to plan, hours and hours to set up. Ticket tables had to be borrowed and returned; hot chocolate had to be made and sold. Signs had to be made; extension cords had to be found. Doors and windows had to be decorated, bonfires had to be built, and manure had to be scooped up. Everyone, not just the merchants, was working—the Scout troops, the Jaycees, the high school band, the church youth groups, and the PTAs were all using the events as fund-raisers. Everyone, not just the merchants, was exhausted.

People were complaining that they had no time to enjoy their own Christmas. No one was entertaining this year because no one had the time.

The complainers usually managed to do their whining in front of Phil, and Tess marveled at his patience. He listened and listened.

“Did people entertain all that much last year?” Tess had to ask.

He glanced over his shoulder to be sure that no one could hear. “No. They couldn’t afford to. Now they’ve got some extra money, but no time.”

“Doesn’t that drive you crazy, the inconsistency?”

“No. You have to be realistic. People are people.”

Tess’s relationship with him was exactly the same as before they had “broken up.” He came to the Lanier Building as often; his manner was as relentlessly even as ever; their conversations were as friendly as before, as lacking in intimacy as before. In fact, Tess wondered if anyone except her, Phil, and presumably Ned even knew that this candle’s little flame had gone out. Ned himself might not even know.

If people had been entertaining, she might have been able to assess the town’s information about her love life from the invitations she was receiving, but everyone was far too tired for festivities. Suzanne Dragiuse of the antiques store was so weary that when she ran into Tess at the bank, she said that she and her husband would get Tess and Ned out to the house as soon as all this holiday craziness died down.

“Sounds great,” Tess said. If there was a tactful way to say, “I think you mean his brother Phil, but don’t bother, because he and I have gone our separate ways,” Tess was too tired to think of it.

People were, of course, going to celebrate Christmas itself, and Carolyn Ravenal’s invitation for Tess to spend Christmas Day with her family was as warm as her invitation for Thanksgiving had been.

This time Tess refused. “It’s so sweet of you to ask,
but I am exhausted. Some days I’m here for fifteen hours. I just want to spend the day at home.”

Carolyn didn’t looked convinced, and indeed, the next morning Phil showed up with instructions to try again. “You could come only for dinner. You wouldn’t have to spend the whole day with us.”

“Thank you, thank her, but truly, I prefer to be alone. I need to be alone.”

Phil shook his head. “I’ve done some fast talking in my day, Tess, but do you really think I can go home and persuade my mother and sisters of that?”

Tess had to smile. “If anyone can do it, you can.”

Apparently he couldn’t. Two days later Carolyn sent in her next wave of assault troops—Ned.

He looked terrible. He was coughing, the skin around his eyes was shrunken and gray, and his nose was red. Tess had a sudden urge to take care of him, to tuck a blanket around him, rub his shoulders, pour cough syrup into a spoon, make him hot tea with lemon.

He gestured with his hand, dismissing the concern that he must have read on her face. “I have a cold. It’s nothing. I’m here to—” He broke off and looked at her blankly. “Shoot, why am I here?”

“To try to get me to come to your mother’s for Christmas?”

“That’s right. How did you know?” He shook his head, marveling at her wisdom. “The trouble is I’m supposed to be tactful, and I think I’m too tired to be tactful.”

Tess could sympathize with that. “Then just say it, and I’ll edit out everything that your mother wouldn’t have wanted me to hear.”

“That sounds good. I can do that.” He coughed and pounded on his chest with a fist, trying to clear his lungs. “Okay, here it is. Mom and Dad know you’ve given Phil the old heave-ho, but they want you to come anyway. They like you for you. And so do the girls. Phil still likes you, and I do too, for that matter. And I’m sure if we asked him, Doug would say that he liked you, but in truth he probably hasn’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about you because he is even more tired than I am.”

Doug was Caitlin’s boyfriend; he was in the first year of his medical internship. “And I like all of you too.” At least she assumed that she would like Doug. She had met him at Thanksgiving, but he had barely managed to stay awake through dinner. That had made him a little hard to get to know. “But I want to be alone. I’m here fifteen hours a day talking to people, making coffee, and answering questions. I want some quiet. I don’t want to hear a single sound unless I make it myself.”

Ned coughed and blew his nose. “Mom would say that holidays are family time.”

“I’ll agree with that. But I am my own family. It may only be a family of one, but that’s where I am right now, and I’m not feeling sorry for myself. I don’t feel like Cinderella.”

Ned’s nose was still red, the skin under his eyes was still gray, his lungs sounded like the Missouri River was detouring through them, but the eyes themselves were suddenly alert, even a little soft. He got it. He understood. “Then I wish you the best.”

It was certainly true that with her grandparents dead and her biological father unknown, she was her own family. But the Ravenals were not the only people unable to imagine a family of one. Duke Nathan called, asking her to join his family in New York. Wyatt and Gabe, who apparently felt a familial connection because of their days in the Settlement, also called, offering to hold a table for her on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, or both.

“Let me get back to you on that,” she said. It did occur to her that the one person from whom she had not received an invitation was the one with whom she had actually lived. For three months, Sierra must have thought that the two of them were a family, and Tess, in her self-absorbed, ignorant little baby mind, had probably agreed.

The Lanier Building was often quiet around two in the afternoon. Tess told Sasha that she was going out for a few minutes. She put on her coat—which wasn’t adequate for the December winds—but she simply couldn’t bear to buy one of those puffy down-filled things that everyone else wore; as soon as she had a minute she would make herself a black wool,
French Lieutenant’s Woman
cape, which probably wouldn’t be adequate either, but at least she would be willing to put it on her body.

A lady was leaving the Celandine Gardens shop when Tess arrived there. She was carrying two well-filled shopping bags, but she was hurrying, avoiding eye contact, her shoulders hunched forward underneath her fur-trimmed coat.
Get me out of here.

Another person with no interest in Sierra’s view of life, in Sierra’s desire for “connection.” Tess stepped
back, allowing the shopper to escape more quickly.

There was no one else in the shop. Sierra was behind the counter. She had a little bin recessed into the counter that had been cut to the size of her Celandine Gardens tissue paper. She kept the bin full of flat sheets of the paper, and that made it easy for her to wrap people’s purchases. Tess had admired it. At the moment, Sierra seemed to be straightening the tissue in the bin. Except that she couldn’t be. The tissue fit the bin perfectly. There was nothing to straighten.

She knows. She knows that this isn’t working, that people can’t stand her.

Tess hated the thought. It was one thing to think of Sierra as weird and difficult, disliked by everyone. It was another to think of her knowing that. Tess spoke quickly. “I was wondering, after we close up on Christmas Eve, if you would like to join me for dinner at The Cypress Princess.” Tess could then still be alone on Christmas Day. “Wyatt and Gabe will hold a table for us near the fireplace.”

Sierra looked at her. “No.”

Tess blinked. She had been prepared for a refusal—hadn’t she herself been refusing invitations right and left?—but this refusal was so flat. “Well, maybe some other time,” she murmured.

Why was she being a hypocrite? There wasn’t going to be another time.

“Not Christmas,” Sierra said. “Christmas is not a holiday I celebrate.”

“Okay.” What else was there to say?

“I’m Jewish … or at least my family is.”

“Oh.” Tess wondered if she should have known that. She didn’t think that Celandine was a Jewish
name, but it probably wasn’t the one Sierra had been born with. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that.”

“I haven’t set foot in a synagogue or lit a Shabbat candle in more than twenty-five years, but I do abstain from Christmas.”

Tess prepared herself to hear a discourse on the emptiness of institutionalized religious rituals and the need for each individual to create his or her own sanctity. She would listen to every word of it. She would make herself do that.

But Sierra surprised her. She said nothing.

So Tess picked up some hand lotion and soap for the ladies’ room at the Lanier Building. Sierra wrote the items up and wrapped them without speaking. Tess was halfway to the door when Sierra’s voice stopped her.

“You know, when you were born, I gave you a Hebrew name.”

“A Hebrew name?” Tess knew that her grandparents had had her baptized, having assumed that no one in the Settlement had bothered. “I don’t understand the significance of that.”

“It doesn’t make you Jewish. Even if there had been a rabbi there—which there wasn’t—a baby naming isn’t the same as a conversion. I did it to make you seem more like mine.”

“Do you remember what the name was?”

Of course she remembered. “Shira—it means song.”

“How pretty. What a nice name.” It didn’t fit. Tess was not at all musical, but still, the name had a lovely sound.

Tess hated this, she really did. What kind of relationship
were she and Sierra supposed to have? She was a disappointment to Sierra, she knew that. She had been disappointing her since the Nina Lane Birthday Celebration last May, but what was Tess supposed to do? She wasn’t deliberately withholding the intensity that Sierra craved; she simply wasn’t capable of it. She wasn’t that kind of person.

Maybe I should be. Maybe this is something I should want to change about myself.

But she had no idea where to begin.

Ned had a feeling that he was going to spend most of Christmas trying to explain Tess to the rest of the world. “She’s exhausted,” he said to his family Christmas morning. “She wants to be alone.”

Hadn’t he warned her? Back in late July, when they were eating sandwiches in the park, hadn’t he said that there was no place in this town for a person who wanted to be alone? Why hadn’t she just painted her body blue and run naked through the subfreezing night, or engaged in some other behavior that people would have a chance of understanding? Wanting to be alone was close to severe psychosis around here.

“But on Christmas?” his mother called out from the kitchen. It was still early; they hadn’t started opening the presents under the tree. “How can you want to be alone on Christmas?”

“Who wants to be alone on Christmas?” Brittany said. Still in her bathrobe, she was coming down the staircase.

“Tess.” Ned was sitting in the blue velvet wing chair that had been wedged in an odd corner to make room for the tree. “She says that the secular aspects
of Christmas—Santa and the presents and the tree—don’t mean very much to her. Apparently her grandparents were always so stressed about spending money during the holiday that it was hard to enjoy things. She likes the lights and the music and the pageant at church. And we did see her at the church last night. She was there.”

“But you can value the religious aspect of the holiday without needing to be alone.” Caitlin came into the living room carrying a tray of Christmas cookies. The dental student, she was the clearest thinker of the three Ravenal sisters. “Christmas is for families.”

“You aren’t going to say that when you see what lousy gifts I got you guys.” Ned had warned everyone that his holiday shopping had been limited to spending one hour on-line buying books and CDs and then throwing himself on Sierra’s mercy for his share of the stocking stuffers. “And anyway, we aren’t Tess’s family.”

“Well, not technically,” Caitlin conceded. “But she feels like some kind of cousin, having people on the boat and all.”

“Does snow count as secular or religious?” Dr. Matt entered with another tray of Christmas cookies. The fact that it was not yet 8
a.m.
did not impact this family’s cookie-eating habit. “I may be an old guy, but I still want it to snow at Christmas.”

“Snow is definitely religious.” Phil followed Dr. Matt into the room. “As are Nana’s candy-cane cookies.” He reached across Ned to take a cookie. “Candy canes themselves are secular, but Grandma’s cookies are a spiritual experience.”

“It’s how we remember the departed,” Dr. Matt
agreed, also reaching across Ned for a cookie. “Through their recipes. Your grandmother was a wonderful woman, kids.”

All these carbohydrates passing under his nose were making a convert of Ned. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was converting to or from, but he took a cookie anyway. Ropes of white and red dough had been twisted into a candy-cane shape and then rolled in crushed candy before baking. Not anything to run out and brag to your nutritionist about, but Ned’s personal definition of nourishing food was pretty elastic, especially now that that stupid cold was gone and he could taste again.

“You know,” Caitlin said suddenly, “you’ve gotten sort of hunky, Ned.”

“Me?” He had a mouthful of cookie. “Chunky? I’m not chunky. Look at this.” He swallowed the cookie and pulled at his trousers. They were loose. “These are not the pants of a chunky man.”