The Sweetgum Ladies Knit for Love (38 page)

Esther stood in her backyard and eyed the small stone angel in the flower bed. Frank had placed it there under her direction when they’d first moved into the house. Shed had no idea how heavy it was—she couldn’t lift it herself. The movers had already left, so there was no help from that quarter. She glanced around the yard and considered her options. The buyer would be pulling up any minute. She had to take the statue with her now.

Beside her, Ranger barked for her attention.

“Not now,” she said to the dog. “It’s a shame I don’t have a harness for you. You could help me get this to the car.”

“Maybe I could give you a hand.” Brody’s voice came from over her shoulder. She swiveled toward him and almost lost her balance. “Steady, there,” he said, catching her arm to keep her upright.

“I didn’t hear you,” she said, pushing a strand of hair out of her eyes. She was dusty and dirty from the last-minute packing and cleaning—not to mention the effort of digging up two of her prize rosebushes to take with her to the condo on Sweetgum Lake.

“Didn’t mean to sneak up on you.” He grinned. “You have dirt on your nose.”

Esther swiped at her nose. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see if you needed help.” He shrugged. “It’s my day off.”

“This statue’s too heavy for me. I should have asked the moving men to help.”

Brody moved closer and leaned over the stone angel. In one quick motion, he bent at the knees, grabbed the angel, and hoisted it in his arms. “Where do you want it?”

“The car.” She nodded toward the garage.

“Last time was easier,” he grunted and took a few stumbling steps toward the garage. “At least with Ranger we had a blanket to carry him in.”

Esther suppressed a laugh. “True. But this thing won’t bite us.”

“C’mon, woman,” Brody growled as he walked. “Open that door for me.”

Esther did as instructed, opening first the garage door and then the passenger door of her Jaguar. Brody managed to wrestle the angel to the floorboard.

He groaned and straightened, one hand to his back. “What are you going to do with it when you get to your new place?”

“I’ll bribe one of the maintenance men or something.”

“Seems like a strange thing to take with you. Where are you going to put it? You won’t have a yard.”

“I have a little patio. It will go there.”

“What’s so special about this statue?”

Esther paused, unsure if she should or even could answer him. For decades, being Esther Jackson had meant keeping her own counsel, never letting her guard down. This angel represented perhaps her darkest secret, one she’d never shared with anyone but Frank. She looked Brody up and down, as if sizing him up.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.

“Nobody but Frank knew about this angel.”

“Didn’t everybody who set foot in your backyard notice it?”

Esther shook her head. “I don’t mean its existence. I mean its purpose.”

Brody nodded. “It marks something important.”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to tell me what?”

Esther didn’t know what to do. “I’m not sure where to start.”

“The beginning’s usually the best place.”

“That might take awhile.”

He nodded. “Why don’t I help you finish here? Then I can follow you to the lake and help you unload that thing.”

Esther refused to cry, but she couldn’t avoid the mixture of gratitude and relief that rose in her throat. “I would appreciate that very much.”

Brody shrugged. “What are friends for?”

Esther bit her lip. “I don’t know. It’s been a long time since I had one.” The confession sprang out of her before she could stop it. “I’m a little out of practice.”

“Yeah,” Brody said agreeably. He put a friendly arm around her shoulders as they turned back toward the house. “But you’re getting better at it. Pretty soon you’ll be a pro.”

Esther laughed and felt a weight slip from her shoulders even as they were encircled by Brody’s arm. Change was inevitable as the tides, and she’d been forced to make the choice between allowing it to drag her under or fighting her way to the surface and swimming for the shore. For now, at least, her head was above water, and she could see dry land in the distance.

“I’ve got coffee on,” she said to Brody.

“I’d love some.”

Later she would tell him the story about the stone angel. How it had marked the place in the yard where she’d sprinkled the ashes of her first child, the little girl who died only hours after her birth. The little girl no one knew about, because she and Frank had lived in Nashville at the time.

But that was later, not now. For now, she would simply enjoy the company, and the comfort, of a friend.

At five o’clock on Saturday, Camille closed the door to the dress shop behind her and then reached up to put the key in the dead-bolt and turned it with a click. She stared for a long moment at the sign that still swayed gently on the other side of the glass.

Closed.

Her past, her time in Sweetgum, her memories. All that would change soon. She would take only essentials—dorm rooms were small. She’d need to work, too, when she got to Murfreesboro, but she could easily find something as an assistant manager at a retail chain store. Beyond that, she didn’t have to worry about anyone or anything else, except getting as far away from Sweetgum as she possibly could.

“Camille.”

Dante’s voice startled her, and she turned to face him. He stood on the sidewalk not ten feet away, still dressed in his
coaching clothes even in the off season—anorak emblazoned with the Sweetgum High School mascot, those knit pants coaches always wore, and running shoes. The brim of a Tennessee Titans baseball cap shaded his eyes.

“Hey”

“I saw Natalie Grant at Tallulah’s.” He stared hard at her. “She said Esther Jackson bought your shop. When did this happen?”

Of course Natalie had found out. Camille nodded, her throat tight. She thought she’d have more time to prepare for this conversation. “I’m on my way to drop the keys off at her condo at the lake.”

Dante continued to regard her steadily, and that very calm made her nervous. She felt moisture breaking out across her forehead.

“I’ll drive you,” he said.

She started to protest, but before she could get the words out, he took her arm and hustled her toward his car.

“There’s no need—”

“We have to talk. Might as well tie up all your loose ends at the same time.”

She had known he’d be angry, which was why she hadn’t told him about the dress shop. Or about college. His hand on her arm was insistent but not controlling, like Dante himself

“I’m not sure this is a great idea,” she said.

He stopped, turning her to face him. “Right now, I’m not sure you would know a great idea if it ran over you.”

Camille bit her lip and slid into his car when he opened the door for her. She would just have to ride out the storm. She was an expert at that by now. Heaven knew she’d had enough practice over the years. What couldn’t be cured had to be endured. She’d heard someone say that once, and it had become her personal mantra. But she wasn’t sure that advice had ever been intended to cover a situation like this.

“When were you going to tell me?”

Dante kept his eyes on the road as he drove away from the town square, and so did she. She couldn’t afford to look at him now, not if she wanted to keep her composure.

She also couldn’t answer him. The silence stretched out between them.

“You weren’t going to tell me.”

She shrugged. “You would have found out.”

“From who? Tallulah, the next time I had lunch at the café? Esther Jackson, when I went in the shop looking for you?”

“Yes.”

He took his foot off the accelerator, and Camille’s heartbeat sped up even as the car slowed. When he hit the brake, she clutched her purse in her lap and felt her pulse pounding in her neck. Dante swung the car onto the shoulder of the road and stopped.

Camille felt the tears pressing against the backs of her eyelids, but she refused to let them fall. He had a right to be angry. She was a coward.

Dante turned the key, shutting off the engine. Then he turned toward her.

“Do you know what I thought freshman year, the first time I saw you?” he asked.

That was the last thing she expected to hear. She’d thought he would yell at her with the same deafening roar he used on his football players, but Dante was as cool and calm as if they were discussing the weather.

“Freshman year?”

“My family had just moved here from Nashville. As far as I knew, my life was over, stuck out here in the middle of nowhere. But there was football. And there was you. When I saw you, I knew why God had brought me to Sweetgum.”

Camille stared at him, dumbfounded. “But—”

“That’s not something you say to a fourteen-year-old girl. I kept it to myself. But I knew.”

“Dante—”

“I still know.”

“Don’t bring God into this. That’s not fair.”

“Then tell me you don’t love me, and I’ll shut up.”

“That’s even less fair.”

“You think life is supposed to be fair? After all you’ve been through, you still haven’t let go of that?”

“I have to leave, Dante. I’ll suffocate if I stay here. As it is, I’ve been on life support for the last six years.”

His hands clenched around the steering wheel. “We’d be worth it, Cammie. We’d be worth your staying here.”

“It’s too high a price.” She wished she could wrap her own hands around something, anything to hang on to. “If I don’t go now, Dante, I never will. And I’ll always regret it. Always.”

She knew that with bone-deep certainty. And as the silence lengthened between them, anger, fierce and low, kindled in her midsection. Why couldn’t she get just one break? One time when things went her way?

Dante took his hands from the steering wheel and retrieved something from the front pocket of his pants. A box. Small, black, and velvet.

“Don’t.”

Her command didn’t stop him. He opened the box.

The ring was breathtaking, a square-cut diamond in an old-fashioned platinum setting. “It was my grandmother’s,” he said. “She left it to me.”

Camille couldn’t stop the tears. “Put it away.” Instead, he took it out of the box and reached for her hand. She jerked away. “Dante, put it away.”

“Just let me see it on your finger. Just once, Cammie. You can at least do that much.”

With her right hand, she wiped away tears while he took her left and slid the ring onto her finger. It fit perfectly. The weight of it terrified her.

“That’s where it belongs,” he said. He reached over and cupped her chin, turning her face toward his. She didn’t want to look in his eyes, but she made herself. The love she saw there frightened her even more than the feel of the ring on her finger.

“No. It doesn’t belong there.” She started to take the ring off, but he stopped her. She looked at him in confusion. “What?”

“It’s yours,” he said.

“Dante, I can’t marry you. This belongs to the woman you’ll spend the rest of your life with. Not me.”

“No, Cammie. That ring’s meant for you.”

“I can’t keep it.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“Of course I have a choice.”

“Camille, you can leave Sweetgum. You can go anywhere in the world, see everything there is to see. But no matter where you go, I’ll still be here, loving you. And that will still be your ring.”

She didn’t know what to say. He reached for the key and turned the ignition. Before she could gather her thoughts, he had the car in motion, gliding down the road.

“I’ll drop you off at your house. I don’t think driving you to the lake right now is a good idea.”

“I’m not keeping the ring, Dante.”

“Yes,” he said without looking at her. “You are.” He turned, and their eyes met for a brief second. “You owe me that much, Cammie.”

She cried in earnest then, her heart breaking, torn in two by her love for Dante and her fear of being trapped in Sweetgum.

When they reached her house and pulled into her driveway, she didn’t wait for him to get out of the car and come around to
open her door. She clambered out as fast as she could, and then stood there, twisting the ring on her finger.