Please Remember This (20 page)

“I said hunky, not chunky. Your shoulders have gotten broader and your butt is sleeker.”

“My butt has always been sleek,” he protested, although he had never given the matter a moment’s thought. But Caitlin was right about his shoulders, upper back, and arms. He was doing hard physical labor day after day; his shirts and sweaters were getting tighter, and his pants looser.

He certainly did deserve another cookie. Maybe even two. He could smell bacon frying in the kitchen. Bacon and homemade Christmas cookies—you couldn’t beat that for breakfast.

He sat back in the wing chair. This was exactly what he wanted Christmas to be. The only thing that
would make it better would be when Caitlin and Doug got their act together and had babies. Worrying about little ones eating the ribbons off the presents and pulling the tree down on top of themselves—that was all they needed to make their family Christmas perfect.

That and a little snow.

Tess had a glorious Christmas. She had planned for the day. Thanks to being able to order on-line, she had new music to listen to and a new book to read. She had ordered a new dress, which she put on even though no one would see it but herself.

She wasn’t being like Sierra, she wasn’t avoiding Christmas. She went to church on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day she listened to Christmas music and read to herself from the Book of Luke. She bought the tiniest container of whipping cream, separated a single egg, and made herself eggnog. She was celebrating the holiday. She was just doing it alone.

Duke Nathan and his family sent her a box of the most wonderful writing paper. The paper was creamy and handmade, flecked with little threads of blue rag. The ink from the walnut-barreled fountain pen they had enclosed soaked into the rich paper, and the lines of Tess’s pretty handwriting thickened into stateliness. She spent Christmas night writing a long letter to everyone at Willow Place.

She couldn’t imagine anything better.

Chapter 13

 

W
eekend crowds remained surprisingly good through January. People weren’t spending as much money as they had in December, but they were coming to town, still buying T-shirts, still eating fudge.

The riverboat was the attraction. Every day Ned was finding something new, and people who lived as far as a hundred miles away brought their kids every Sunday to see what had happened during the week. The high school art teacher was giving students extra credit for photographs of the excavation, so, while there weren’t many artifacts in the museum yet, there were plenty of pictures.

And how could you go to the museum and look at those pictures without then moving on to the Lanier Building for some coffee and cake? Tess was now recognizing a number of these weekend regulars.

She had stayed open late on weekday evenings during December, intending to return to a 6
P.M.
closing in January. But the high school kids persuaded her otherwise. Several groups of students had started meeting at the Lanier Building to study, and they wanted to continue. Of course they bought no gifts, but they ordered
flavorings and extra shots so profligately that Tess knew she would at least cover her costs.

Then two weeks into the new year, it snowed.

The snowfall had been predicted for two days. Tess kept stepping outside to feel the air grow heavy and cold. At first a few white specks floated lazily outside the upper panes of the Lanier Building’s four front windows. Tess refolded a pile of scarves. When she looked up again, the snow was falling more steadily, the flakes melting as they landed on the street and the brick sidewalk, but catching hold on the grass and the tree limbs. When people came in, their hair was glistening with snowflakes and the shoulders of their coats were dusted with white. The snow piled in little ridges along the bare branches of the hickory tree on the lawn of the Old Courthouse, and by evening the whole town looked magical.

Tess borrowed a pair of boots from Brenda Jackson’s daughter-in-law and spent an hour walking through the neighborhoods, looking at the way the snow would cling to one side of the pickets on a fence. She loved the serenity, the beauty. Since her first moments in town, when she had been standing in the cemetery, looking at her reflection in her mother’s headstone, she had never questioned her decision to come to Kansas. But the snow confirmed her certainty. How could something this beautiful not be right?

“Does the snow make things harder for Ned?” Tess asked Phil the next morning.

“No, not really. It’s not all that cold yet, and no amount of precipitation is going to make things any muddier.”

The residents of Willow Place had been, thanks to Mr. Greenweight, following the process of the excavation through Fleur-de-lis’s Web site. In response to Tess’s Christmas letter, Mrs. Johanisberg, a former English teacher, sent her a wonderful quote from
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
about buried treasure. Tess got out gold paint and carefully traced the words onto one of her windows.

Time disappeared down in the cargo hold of the
Western Settler.
Every box, every barrel, was its own little challenge—where to tug, what to wash away, how to get it out. The wriggling and rocking, the gratifying sigh the mud gave when it released its suction, would have been satisfying even if the boxes and barrels had been empty. But they weren’t empty. Each was filled with things people were carrying to the West. One family had packed their children’s toys: a doll, a tiny wheelbarrow, five lead soldiers. A store in Omaha had ordered astonishing luxuries: bottled cherries, French brandy, and ladies’ perfume.

Could anything ever be better than this? Ned woke up every morning at four or four-thirty, wide awake, urgent to be at the site. At night he had to force himself to quit.

He did sometimes feel as if the whole world were conspiring to keep him out of the excavation pit. Dr. Matt had started it at Thanksgiving with this business of sleeping at least six hours a night, and now lots of other people were joining in. On weekends it was the out-of-towners who drove out to the site, full of questions. Phil did his best to help out. He was at the site or the schoolhouse all day Saturday and Sunday,
talking to people, but Ned would overhear the questions, and some of them really were so interesting that he couldn’t help himself and he’d start talking, and suddenly the day would be gone. During the week it was the journalists and photographers who were never satisfied with talking to Phil, even though Phil was much better at this interview stuff than Ned would ever be. And now there were school field trips. It was too muddy and cold for the kids to get very close to the site, so Ned had to bring things up to the schoolhouse and talk to the kids there, which took a big chunk out of a morning, but how could he say no? His grandfather had given him such a gift, making him care about the past; how he could say that he didn’t have time to talk to kids who might not have grandfathers like that?

A couple days after the first snowfall, Phil was helping him load up the artifacts that needed to be taken to the limestone mine for underwater storage. As they were finishing, Phil did what he always did: pulled out the little leather case that held his list, checking to be sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. “Good thing I wrote this down. You didn’t get over to Tess’s today, did you?”

Ned shoved one of the washtubs farther back into the truck and raised the tailgate. It clicked into place. “I haven’t seen her since before Christmas.”

“You need to get over there. There’s something in her window you need to see.”

“In her window? What is it?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” Phil said. “Go see for yourself.”

Phil didn’t usually play little teasing games. “Tell me what it is. I don’t have time for stuff like this.”

“You don’t know what it is, so how can you know that you don’t have time for it?”

That was a little hard to answer. “Okay, then”—Ned tossed Phil the keys to the truck—”you go take this to the cave.”

The old limestone mine was only five miles away, but once you were there, you had to get out of the truck to unlock the gate across the drive and drag it open, then get out again at the mouth of the cave and unlock yet another gate and drag that one open. Then you have to drive into the underground quarry and, working in bad light, take the artifacts, one at a time, out of the water-filled washtubs in the back of the truck and put them in the water-filled stock tanks. It was a wet and tedious chore, and Ned did it almost every day.

Phil caught the truck keys and gave Ned the keys to the Jeep. Ned went home, showered, and drove downtown. It was nearly eight o’clock, but the lights in the Lanier Building were still on. The tall, arched windows cast bright rectangles on the brick sidewalk and glittered against the circles of snow around the black iron lampposts. As Ned grew closer, he could see new gold lettering twinkling on one of the windows.

There comes a time in every rightly-constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

—Mark Twain,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

 

Ned put his hands in the pockets of his coat. This was about him. Tess had put a quote referring to him on the window of her business. He hoped that she was inside. She shouldn’t be. She should be at home, doing whatever she did at home, but he hoped she would be here.

He went in. Toward the back of the room a couple of tables had been pushed together, and a group of high school kids was studying together. The backpacks were on the floor next to their chairs, books were piled at their elbows, and Tess’s jade green mugs were balanced on their open binders. Tess herself was seated at a front table, doing something with a piece of lace. She looked up and smiled.

“Is that how you think of me?” he asked. “As a boy?”

“A ‘rightly-constructed’ one.”

He wondered if there was any way she might mean that sexually. Not likely. “It’s a good quote. I don’t remember it, but I haven’t read the book in ages.”

“I didn’t find it. One of the ladies at the retirement home I used to work at sent it to me. Now, what can I get you?” She started to fold up her work.

“Nothing. Don’t move. Show me what you’re doing.”

He sat down and she started to explain.

Ned was a bright guy. He knew that about himself. So he supposed that if he tried, he would have been able to follow what Tess was saying, but in truth, it was nice to just sit here, listen to the music she was playing, and watch the shadows made by the curls in her hair. She was wearing it loose, and its honey color looked as if it had stored up enough
summer sunlight to carry everyone through the winter ahead.

Why had he ever thought anything was wrong with this place? It was pretty, it was restful. Tess was here.

“Did you understand a word of what I’ve been saying?” she asked suddenly. “I didn’t try.”

She laughed. “I love you, Ned. You are sweet.”

Sweet? That was just what every fellow wanted to hear. “You’re lucky that only the high school kids were around to hear you say that. Otherwise the whole town would have written
Romeo and Juliet
by tomorrow.”

She reached for her little scissors to snip a thread. “But they already have.”

“What?” He was confused. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s not actually
Romeo and Juliet.
I think they’re hoping for something more positive. Apparently the only thing that convinced people I wasn’t passionately in love with Phil was the idea that I was passionately in love with you.”

“With me?” Ned couldn’t have heard her right. “With
me?”

She nodded. “At first I thought people were making a mistake, simply using the wrong name, when they said they wanted to invite the two of us over, but now it’s clear. I’m like Katharine of Aragon or Queen Mary when she was Princess of Teck.” Her voice was even; she was almost smiling. “When Son Number One proves to be a nonstarter, you’re bumped down to Son Number Two.”

“Wait a minute …” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Where did people get this idea?”

“Where does anyone get any idea? I don’t know.” She looked at him curiously. “This bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“Of course it does.”

“What do you mean ‘of course’? Last month you told me not to worry about what people were saying about Phil and me, and now you’re standing on your ear because they’re talking about you and me.”

“But this is different,” he protested.

“I don’t see how.”

“For one, you’re taking it differently. The idea of being with me seems like a big joke to you.”

Why had he said that? It made him sound like a whining little boy.

“Oh, Ned, that’s not fair. It’s got nothing to do with you. Or Phil. That’s why it seems like a joke. There’re so few single men in town. Clearly, I’m destined to be paired off with every, one of them. I am not going to get upset about it. It’s part of being an unmarried woman in a town like this.” She stood up. “But it’s not worth talking about. What did you find at the site today?”

“Hinges, nails, wood screws. Same thing I found yesterday.” He was sounding less than gracious. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m frustrated by how behind schedule we are.”

“I know. But Phil has said that you’re really cooperating with the media and trying hard to do what is right for the town.”

Phil, Phil, Phil.
Was Phil the only person she ever
talked to? He stood up so abruptly that his chair almost fell. “I think I’d better leave.”

What was wrong with him? Why was he acting like this?

He stood on the sidewalk for a good thirty seconds looking for his truck. Phil’s Jeep was here, but—oh, right, he had been driving Phil’s car. Phil had taken a load of artifacts out to the cave.

He supposed that Phil would expect to meet him at Matt and Carolyn’s to trade vehicles, but Ned didn’t dare go near his mother, even though there was a whole lot better chance of getting actual food there. Carolyn would take one look at him and want to know what was wrong. And he didn’t know what was wrong. Or if he did, he didn’t want to talk about it.

So he went back to Great-uncle Bob’s little house, leaving Phil’s Jeep parked out in front.

Whatever Tess had said about Katharine of Aragon and Queen Mary, it was nice to see that she knew her history; he’d hate to think that a place as attractive as the Lanier Building was owned by someone who couldn’t keep her Tudors and Stuarts straight. But a romance with him was not an idea that would have occurred to the town on its own. Someone had started it. And he knew who.

He paced through the house, opening and closing the refrigerator, not really looking for something to eat, waiting for the sound of his truck. When he heard it, he jerked open the front door.

Phil was crossing the dark yard. “I thought you’d be at—”

“What have you been saying about Tess and me?” Phil paused. “Not much.”

That was the wrong answer. That was completely the wrong answer. “Nothing” was the right answer. “Not much” was way too much.

“When people talked about having her and me over,” Phil continued, “I simply said that perhaps they should include you too.”

Simply said.
Why not put up a billboard, paint graffiti on the side of the municipal building, post it on the town’s Web site? “Why the hell did you do that?”

“What’s the problem with it?”

“I don’t want you interfering in my life.”

“But, Ned—”

Ned was mad. He was mad at Phil. This was new. He had resented Phil, he had envied Phil, but he had never been flat-out mad at him before. “Didn’t she just ditch you?”

The porch light was on. Ned could see Phil’s lips tighten. “According to her, there was nothing to ditch from.”

“You didn’t like it, did you?”

“A person needs to move on. You accept defeat, figure out what lessons there are to be learned, and then you move on. That’s the name of the game.”