Wedding Ring (25 page)

“And I decided that I couldn’t allow her to suffer. My God, I loved her enough to throw myself in front of a train for her. I wanted to. I wanted to do something to prove myself. So I made it my mission to change everything, to become all the things I wasn’t, and make sure Tessa came by all the social graces naturally.” She paused. “Well, with a little instruction.”

“With a lot of instruction, the way I heard it.”

She didn’t look hurt. “That’s what happens when you put a hillbilly in Richmond society. Overcompensation.”

“You were never a hillbilly. That word has no meaning, anyway.”

She put her fist to her chest. “It means something if you feel it inside.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it will change the way you feel about me. Maybe I’m just trying it on for size. There’s not much else to do around here in the evenings.”

Then she smiled. Not the tremulous, “love-me” smile he was used to, nor the manipulative “If-you-do-it-my-way-I’ll-smile-bigger” smile that was a close second in her repertoire. This was simply a warm, embracing smile that sat well on her face and eased the lines of strain around her eyes.

He wondered what he should say or do next. She saved him the trouble. She stood and yawned. “I don’t know why Tessa’s this late, but I suspect she’ll be here soon enough. Stay the night and I’ll make waffles in the morning.”

She nodded her good-night and disappeared into the hallway. He heard her climbing the stairs a moment later.

He had come to see Tessa, not her mother. He hadn’t called, which was stupid, but he’d been in Front Royal speaking at the Virginia Bar Association’s Capital Defense Workshop and found himself driving here afterwards with little thought and no consultation. He had expected to find his wife waiting, and it rankled that she could so easily drive back to Northern Virginia to have dinner with her friends, but found so few excuses to come back to be with him.

Nancy had persuaded him that Tessa would be back momentarily, but he wondered if she had decided to go to their home and stay the night. The only reason he didn’t leave was because she hadn’t called to announce her intentions, and he was sure she would have.

The living room looked much better since Nancy had worked her magic. His perception of Tessa’s mother was going through a radical change, but one thing he knew for certain was her ability to create beauty. Tessa had inherited that ability, although his wife’s taste was starker, more minimalist and dramatic. Nancy loved color and lavish displays. On the outside, the Whitlock family home in Richmond’s Windsor Farms was a staid azalea-banked Georgian masterpiece, but inside it was a tasteful riot of contemporary art, antique furniture, lush Oriental carpets, aged bronze and polished brass.

She’d had nothing like that to work with here, but she had kept the farmhouse character while brightening and warming the rooms with paint and inexpensive fabrics. He doubted that even Helen could be unhappy with the outcome.

He got up and wandered fitfully, fingering a Depression glass vase filled with wildflowers, a green-and-white quilt draped over the sofa back, a hand-crocheted doily on an end table. He was at the side window gazing out over lilac bushes and overgrown forsythia when the front door opened.

“Mack?”

He turned and gazed at his wife. “I should have called.”

“You came all the way out here and didn’t let me know you were coming?”

He explained where he’d been and why. “I finished sooner than I expected. I wanted to talk to you, and I didn’t want to waste this opportunity. But I should have called from Front Royal. I guess I just assumed you’d be here.”

“I almost always am. And I bet you forgot your cell phone again.”

He nodded a confirmation. She didn’t look unhappy to see him. He supposed that was a good sign. She looked tired, but the drive back from the city was a long one.

“Did you have a good dinner?” he asked.

“Uh-huh. Did Mom or Gram feed you?”

“I ate at my meeting.”

“Would you like some coffee or tea?”

He had already turned down pots, but he found himself nodding again. “I’ve got to get back on the road in a little while. Coffee’s a good idea.”

One heartbeat passed, then several. “You could stay here,” she said.

He wasn’t sure how to rate the hesitation between his sentence and hers. “I can’t. I have to be in the office early for a staff meeting.”

She didn’t protest. She turned toward the kitchen, and he followed her.

Nancy, or someone, had worked magic in here, as well. The old cupboards had been given a coat of cream-colored paint. The walls, once spotted and stained, were now a becoming sky blue with framed collages of seed packets and prints of sassy crows in sunlit corn fields gracing them. Bright tomato-colored canisters lined the counters and a hand-painted sign over the sink claimed, “I taught Martha everything she knows.”

He stood in the doorway. “Your mom’s handiwork?”

“She’s amazing.” Tessa was at the sink filling the coffeepot. “She really works hard, and she does the fun stuff in the evening. Gram’s loving the changes, even if she’d never admit it.”

“Why is Nancy working this hard when she’s planning to move your grandmother to Richmond?”

“You’d have to ask her.”

“You haven’t?”

“Time takes care of some things. It’s better not to lock Mom into a position she has to defend. When the time comes to decide what Gram should do, she’ll let Gram have the final say.”

He was glad. He wouldn’t have stood by if his mother-in-law tried to railroad the old woman. He doubted Tessa would have, either.

He waited to continue the conversation until she turned on the coffeemaker and joined him at the table. He drummed his fingertips on a flowered placemat while she settled across from him.

Tessa sat back in her chair. “You didn’t come to socialize, did you?”

“I got a call from Harriet Jenkins at the library.”

Tessa was silent a moment. Then her gaze drifted down to his drumming fingers. “How’s the addition coming?”

The addition was a new room at their local library branch, a comfortable, carpeted space that very soon would be lined with low bookshelves crowded with picture books and toys for young children. Story hour would be held there every afternoon. Mothers could gather with their toddlers and preschoolers, and watch them explore and socialize with neighbors’ children. There would be child-friendly computers in one corner and volunteers willing to help children learn to use them.

“It’s going faster than they hoped,” he said. “Not the usual story. Most of the time you hear the opposite, but there haven’t been any delays or cost overruns. The new room is going to be ready to dedicate at the end of September.” He paused. “They want one of us to speak at the ceremony. Harriet said that without Kayley’s memorial fund, they never would have broken ground. They’ve decided to call it Kayley’s Room.”

He watched Tessa’s breath catch. He waited for the barriers, for the impenetrable shield Tessa erected between them at the mention of their daughter’s name. But her eyes misted instead. “How she would have loved it.”

He could not have been more surprised. “You’re all right with speaking, then? You’ll be there for the dedication?”

A breath shuddered through her. “I don’t want to speak, Mack. Will you? I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“Sure.” He leaned forward a little. “It’s the right memorial, isn’t it? Kayley loved the library, and she always wanted to spend more time there, but it was always so crowded.”

“It’s the perfect thing.” She looked down at her hands, folded neatly in front of her. “It’s terrible, I guess, but I don’t remember agreeing to it. I know I must have at some point. I did, didn’t I? But I don’t remember anything from those days except wanting to die.”

“You gave your permission, but if I’d suggested we donate the money to a survivalist compound or a Doomsday cult, you would have agreed to that, too. Neither of us was capable of making decisions. Billy was the one who urged me on and finalized it.”

“Dad?”

“I think your mom was involved, too.” He thought about the Nancy who had spoken her mind to him that evening, the stranger he’d never gotten to know. He suspected that Nancy was the one who had helped bring about the perfect memorial.

“I wanted Kayley to love reading as much as I did,” Tessa said. “I used to take her to the library and walk through the aisles with her when she was still teething on cloth picture books. I’d point out stories I’d read as a child and tell her about them.” She looked up. “It was working.”

Kayley had learned to read by the time she was four. No one had taught her. She had simply memorized her favorite books, then used the words she already knew to learn the words on the page. She had dictated her own stories to Tessa, who had carefully printed them so Kayley could read them back whenever she wanted. They had worried that school might bore her. They had never worried that she might die before she stepped inside the front door.

“What happened to the books she wrote?” Mack said. “The ones you worked on together?”

“They’re packed away with all her things.”

He felt such a surge of relief that for a moment he couldn’t breathe. “You didn’t…”

“Didn’t what? Throw them away?”

He nodded.

“How could you think I’d do that?”

“I came home after a conference to find no sign we’d ever had a daughter. Even Biscuit was gone. You said you couldn’t bear looking at her anymore, that you’d thrown things away—”

“I said I’d thrown
some
things away,” she corrected him. “I told you then to go through the boxes in the basement if it made you feel better.”

He hadn’t, of course. He hadn’t wanted to see what Tessa had left and what she had discarded. He hadn’t wanted to think of his daughter’s life reduced to the contents of a few cardboard boxes.

“I only threw away things that never mattered to her or us,” Tessa said. “Everything that mattered is still there.”

“The books? The photos?”

“Of course, Mack. And the photos aren’t in the basement. I bought special photograph storage boxes. They’re in the top of the coat closet.”

She was hurt. He heard it in her voice. He didn’t know what to say.

The coffee had finished dripping, and she got up and went for it, pouring it into spatterware mugs and adding milk before she came back to the table.

She put his in front of him. “And Biscuit was at such a loss without Kayley. She was languishing. She needed children. The Hitchcocks were happy to have her. They volunteered.”

“You didn’t ask me.”

“That was more than two and a half years ago! You didn’t say a word.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“We’ve done nothing but hurt each other.”

He rose. She was still standing beside the table, just a breath away. She looked defeated, sad, and more vulnerable than he could remember in years. He reached for her, and she went into his arms as if she had never left them.

She curved into his body as if it were a familiar destination. Her hip settled between his legs, the side of her breast against his chest, the silky length of her hair fell against his collarbone. Her arms crept around him; her hands locked at his waist. He laid his cheek against her forehead and felt her breath against his neck. His arms tightened around her.

His voice was hoarse. “I only want to make things better.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Let’s work on it together, then.” He tilted her head, two fingers under her chin. Her eyes were the green of troubled waters, and there was nothing to be seen in them except sadness.

“Mack…” Her arms tightened a little. She didn’t move closer so much as lean more heavily against him, as if she no longer wanted to carry her own weight.

“I could stay the night,” he said softly. “I miss you so much, Tessa. You were so late tonight, and I was beginning to think I’d lost you, too, that you had disappeared from my life….” He lowered his lips to hers and felt resistance, then a slow soft blooming of desire.

He told himself to move slowly, not to push her into intimacy she wasn’t ready for. He rubbed her back as he kissed her lips, her cheek, her chin, and felt her bending into him like a willow branch.

And then she moved away. Before he could show her his patience and concern. Before the fire inside him could ignite a matching blaze in her.

“You need to know where I was,” she said. “Before this continues.”

For a moment he wondered if
she
was having an affair, if all his struggles against his growing attraction to Erin had been ridiculous, that Tessa herself had found someone new. Then he saw that she felt no guilt, that whatever it was, it had not been that kind of betrayal.

“Does it matter?” he asked, refusing to relinquish his hold on her, even if she had taken a step backwards. “Can it wait?”

“I was sitting in a parked car across the street from the Owens house in Manassas, watching to see if he tried to drive, or went into town to a bar with his friends. I was spying on Robert Owens, and I’m going to continue until I catch him violating his probation agreement.”