Wedding Ring (9 page)

Tessa realized she would be late getting to the high school if she did, yet what choice did she have? Mack’s absence would cost his client far more than the minutes of planning time Tessa would miss. She agreed, grudgingly, and after a kiss and a hug for their daughter, Mack backed out of the house, apologizing as he went.

Kayley, who was sure this was the biggest day of her life, wanted to leave that very minute, but Tessa wasn’t ready. She still had a few books and papers to gather and a follow-up phone call to Kayley’s sitter, to be sure the afternoon plans were confirmed.

Kayley was beside herself with excitement. When she asked if she could walk to school alone, Tessa uttered a firm no, but Kayley wheedled. She would only walk to the corner and wait for Tessa there. She would not cross, but at least she would be closer, and she could watch the other children streaming toward the building.

Tessa knew there was a crossing guard who would watch out for her daughter until Tessa arrived. Kayley was a good child, and if she said she would wait, she would. This small concession, this evidence of her new maturity, would mean the world to her.

And so Tessa had agreed, going over the rules with her daughter as she flew around the kitchen trying to finish organizing herself to go to work. Kayley, blond hair soaring behind her as she ran out the door, was beside herself with joy.

Tessa followed no more than four minutes later. Four minutes that had changed all their lives forever. Four minutes when fate had looked down on them, decided, perhaps, that their lives were too perfect, and intervened.

Four minutes.

“I had no idea the drought was this bad,” Mack said.

Tessa realized they had stopped. They were standing on the first planks of the old dock where Kayley had liked to fish. Now the dock extended across mud flats and ended before the shallowest reaches of the pond.

“Do you think any of the fish survived?” Mack said.

“I couldn’t say.”

“Do you remember the first time Kayley caught a fish here?”

“Why are you doing this?” She faced him. In the starlight, she could still make out his face. “I remember everything. A lot more than I want to. I remember that I let her walk to the corner by herself when I shouldn’t have. I remember hearing the squeal of brakes when I hurried after her a few minutes later. I remember someone—an adult, I think—screaming. And when I got there, when I finally got there, I remember that animal Robert Owens staggering out of his car, looking down at our lifeless daughter and blaming her, blaming my beautiful little girl, for daring to wait there on the sidewalk when he was driving home so drunk he couldn’t see an arm’s length in front of him!”

Mack was silent while she regained her composure, as if he knew how much she would hate it if he touched her or tried to take her into his arms for comfort.

“You still blame yourself, don’t you?” he said.

She took a deep breath before she trusted herself to speak again. “I have a long list of people I blame. I’m on it, yes.”

“And so am I.” It wasn’t a question. “I should have been with her. The timing would have been different. When Owens swerved off the road, we wouldn’t have been standing there, and if we were, I could have pushed her to safety.”

“No.” She turned away and looked over what was left of the pond. “I don’t blame you anymore, Mack. I know I did at the beginning. But you didn’t kill Kayley. You had every reason to think she would be safe with me. You would never have broken your promise to walk her to school if you could have avoided it.”

“She
was
safe with you. And I would have let her walk to the corner alone, too, just the way you did. She’d done it before. She could be trusted. I don’t blame you for what happened. Maybe I did at first, when I was trying to find someone or something to pin it on, but neither of us was responsible. You were a wonderful mother. Robert Owens and all the people who let him get behind the wheel of a car that morning killed her.”

She wished his absolution helped, but it didn’t. Like everything else, it couldn’t bring Kayley back.

This time he did touch her. He reached over and cupped her nape with his hand, applying gentle pressure. His hand was large and warm, and he seemed to know exactly what he needed to do to make her feel better.

Making love had always been that way, too. From the beginning, they had been so attuned to each other’s bodies that they only rarely had to ask each other for guidance. His touch reminded her how long it had been since that time.

“You’ve never really understood why it’s so important to me to make sure that people like Owens get what they deserve,” she said.

“Of course I understand.”

“That was something we shared, right from the beginning of our relationship. We both wanted to fix the world.”

“I’m still trying to fix it. You know what kind of cases I take on.”

She did. Mack worked for justice wherever he was needed. In addition to representing clients who had no other place to turn, he served on the boards of several cutting edge social action agencies. His income was smaller than it could have been, because so many of his clients were poor, but she had always supported him. The money hadn’t mattered.

“If you really understand,” she said, “then why do you complain about the time I spend with MADD? Don’t you see what Kayley’s loss has done to us? We’ve gone from being a family with everything to two people who can barely carry on a conversation. I don’t want anybody else to suffer this way.”

He dropped his hand. She realized she had forced him to drop it by stepping away from him. She hadn’t even realized it, and she didn’t know if she regretted it.

“Are you so concerned about everybody else in the world that you’ve forgotten you still deserve a life and happiness, and so do I?” he asked.

She faced him, and this time, she gave in to the temptation to cross her arms and ward him off. “I have a life. Right now it revolves around making the world a safer place for children.”

“Your life used to be
about
children. Now you even keep your students at arm’s length.”

She heard the unspoken corollary.
Now you keep me at arm’s length, too.

“I do what I have to so I can keep going,” she said.

He nodded, as if she had confirmed what he already knew. “You don’t see another way, do you?”

“What way would that be?”

“You were right when you said we can barely carry on a conversation, but I don’t think you were right about why. It’s not Kayley’s death. It’s because our lives are so separate now that we’re not sure what to say to each other anymore.” He held his hands out to her, but she didn’t take them.

“Is that going to make what you have to say easier?” she asked. “Holding my hands?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why did you want me to take this walk? You said you had something to say. Have you said it? Or have you been saving it?”

He dropped his hands. “I’ve said part of it.”

“You have a long drive back.”

He was silent for a moment; then he shrugged. “All right. Here’s the rest. I don’t think we can continue this way.”

The words hung between them long enough for her to think that as much as she had expected this, the reality still made her feel faint.

“I’m not asking for a divorce,” he said. “I don’t want a divorce—at least, I don’t think I do. But I need to know we’re doing something to repair this rift. We have to get into counseling.”

“I’ve told you I don’t—”

He held up his hand. “Yes, you have. You don’t need or want counseling. But I need you to be sure about that, Tessa. Because if our marriage isn’t worth that much effort, then I think it’s over.”

“Your way or no way?”

“No, it’s been your way for three years, and your way hasn’t worked. We’re dangerously close to a separation. This summer is a separation in more ways than one.”

She considered carefully before she asked, “Is there someone else, Mack? Or do you just want the freedom to go looking?”

He didn’t answer directly. “I want a real marriage, and if I can’t have it with you, yes, I want it with someone else. I need a home and a wife and a family. I had that. I remember what it felt like. I’m young enough to have it again.” He paused. “And so are you.”

“You don’t want a
real
marriage, whatever that means. We have a marriage. You want a wife who will do everything your way and be everything you want.”

He shook his head, and his expression was sad. “No, Tessa, I only want a wife who wants to be one.”

N
ancy wearily lifted her hair dryer, and the hot air blasting the side of her face wasn’t that different from the air that had wafted through her window all night. She had been living in her childhood home for two weeks now, and she still wasn’t used to the heat—or a lot of other things. But at least in that brief time she and Tessa had made noticeable progress on clearing the place out.

She juggled the hair dryer to her other hand, and the plug slipped out of the socket. Cursing under her breath, she plugged it in again.

“Mom, I’m back. But don’t worry, take your time.” Tessa’s voice sounded just outside the door, then trailed off, as if she was passing by on her way to the kitchen. When Nancy had looked out her bedroom window a little earlier, Tessa had been a mere speck in the distance, running along Fitch Crossing.

Nancy turned on the dryer again, but she really couldn’t do much with her hair in her mother’s tiny bathroom. She’d had the same problem as a girl. In those days the major hurdle had been Helen pounding on the door, shouting about the curse of vanity. Now the problem was lack of water, a paucity of electrical outlets and weary arms that really didn’t want to hold a round brush or curling iron for the minutes required to lock every strand into place.

This morning the ritual was probably worth the effort. She was trying to prepare for Billy’s arrival, and she was surprisingly flustered. She had not seen her husband since her arrival here. For the first week he had been in Atlanta at a conference. For the second he had simply been…busy. Or so he had said. She wondered and worried.

Satisfied her hair was dry enough, she unplugged the hair dryer and plugged in the curling iron. While she waited for it to heat, she leaned forward and gazed at herself in the mirror, not at all happy with what she saw.

She looked tired. That should have been a given. She had not done so much physical labor since adolescence.

She hadn’t had a manicure since her arrival in Toms Brook, and this morning, before her two-minute shower, she had given up and clipped the ragged, discolored remnants nearly to the quick. Her nose was peeling from an unfortunate sojourn in the sun when she had helped Tessa repair the vegetable garden fence. The backs of her hands looked like the surface of the moon. Her knees and elbows felt like a cat’s tongue.

Billy was coming to visit, and he was going to discover that his wife had aged a decade. Panic swept over her. She was fairly certain that Billy had stayed with her all these years for three reasons. First, their admirable sex life. Second, Tessa, whom he adored. And finally, Nancy’s attention to presentation. In all the years of their marriage, she had never shamed her husband. She knew how to dress, what to say and to whom she should say it.

What was Billy going to think when he saw her here, in this house, looking the way she did now? All these years, all these difficult, panicky years, she had never forgotten that even though she might appear to be the epitome of the smart, sophisticated Southern matron, deep down inside she was still a barefoot farm girl with country manners, callused hands and dirt under her fingernails.

“Mom?”

Tessa sounded like she was right outside the door again. Nancy wrapped the ends of her hair around the curling iron and held on for dear life. “What?” she called.

“Daddy’s here.”

Early? Billy was early? For a moment Nancy allowed herself to hope that he hadn’t been able to stay away, that he had missed her so much he had gotten up before dawn to make the trip.

“We’re going bird-watching in a few minutes,” Tessa said. “Do you want to say hello before we leave?”

Nancy’s eyelids fluttered shut. “I’ll be out in a moment.”

“I’ll get him some coffee.”

Nancy unclamped her hair and did a halfhearted repeat on the other side. Then she yanked the cord from the wall and set the curling iron on the back of the toilet to cool. She’d hoped for another go-round with the mascara wand, but there was no time now. She fluffed her hair, tucked her crisply ironed white blouse into linen pants and went to find her husband.

Billy was sitting in the kitchen with Tessa, sipping steaming coffee from a pottery mug. Tessa was dressed in black running shorts and a tank top. A white hand towel hung over one shoulder, and as Nancy watched, she mopped her forehead.

Billy looked up and smiled, getting to his feet as a brief respectful salute. “Tessa tells me she’s taken up jogging.”

“She’s going to have a heart attack in this heat,” Nancy said, waving him back to his seat. “But she doesn’t listen when I tell her. Why don’t you try?”

“I think it’s great,” Billy said. A sip of coffee washed away most of his smile. “You look fresh and ready to greet the morning, Nancy.”

“I stay as comfortable as I can.” She tried to sound like a lady of leisure. She didn’t tell him that just yesterday she and Tessa had hooked up her mother’s tractor to the chicken coop, pulled up all the fence stakes, chased the chickens into the coop, and hauled the whole foolish enterprise to another part of the pasture, where they had reassembled it under Helen’s watchful eye. Then, for a respite, they had climbed out on the roof and cleaned a decade’s worth of leaves from rusting gutters.

“You’re feeling well?” he asked.

She chided herself for feeling disappointed that he hadn’t kissed her when he got to his feet. He wasn’t shy, but Billy had never been demonstrative. He was charming, gallant and respectful of women. His Southern belle mother had done herself proud with her only child.

“I’m feeling hot, and I bet you are, too,” she said. “I’m sorry my mother refuses to get central air or even a window unit. I’m sure you’re wishing she weren’t half as stubborn about now.”

“There’s a breeze coming through the window. I’m fine.”

“We spent all day Wednesday making sure the air flows now,” Tessa said. “I took some of the window frames into town for new screens. Gram and Mom patched the better ones. They look like little crazy quilts. Very artistic.”

Nancy surreptitiously examined her husband, almost hoping that he had aged visibly, as well. But Billy looked just the same. He was a tall man, with wide shoulders that were always thrown back and a waist that had widened only marginally in the past decade. His once-dark hair was steel gray, but thick enough to be notable in a man nearing retirement age. His eyes were still the unusual silver-brown of mica-flecked stone.

Billy took care of himself, but not with the obsession of so many men at their country club. He spent most of his leisure time canoeing the James River or tramping through fields and swamps to add birds to his life list. He was a good man, still a handsome man, and Nancy loved him without reservation.

“Want another cup of coffee, Mom?” Tessa asked.

Startled, Nancy realized she had been staring. “I’ve had plenty, thanks. Did you make your dad a fresh pot?” Before Tessa could answer, Nancy addressed her husband. “If I’d realized you were coming this early, I would have put together some muffins.”

“You don’t have to fuss,” Billy said. “It’s fine.”

Tessa excused herself and left the room to change, but Nancy hardly noticed. “It’s just that I know you like your coffee stronger than we do.”

“It’s fine.” He set down his cup. “The house looks a lot better than I expected.”

Nancy had to admit that the farmhouse decor almost passed for bad housekeeping now, instead of making-do gone awry. Three trailers filled with junk had traveled their last miles to the landfill. “It does look better,” she conceded, “but you should have seen it. Not that it was ever much to look at, but when we got here, it was unbelievable.”

“A lot of life has been lived here.”

She thought that was the kind of response he’d been trained to give from the moment he first babbled “Da-Da.” Responses that were polite without any substance to speak of.

She was surprised at herself. That thought, that errant, arbitrary thought, felt disloyal. She brushed it aside. “The same could be said for our house in Richmond.”

“That’s an interesting comparison.”

He hadn’t smiled again, but the words could have been accompanied by one, because she detected a sliver of humor under them. Quite clearly, in Billy’s mind, the two houses had nothing in common.

Maybe she was exhausted from the unaccustomed physical labor. Maybe she’d held the blow dryer to her head for seconds too long that morning. Maybe the fact that he hadn’t kissed her when she’d appeared rankled more than she’d thought. But her next words surprised her.

“There’s a very
strong
comparison,” she said. “The people who built both houses were our ancestors. Yours and mine. For good and for bad. Frankly, this one appeals to me more and more because it’s not pretentious.”

He merely looked interested. “And ours is?” Billy and Nancy lived in a Georgian style mansion that had been built in the 1920s by Billy’s extravagantly wealthy grandparents and lovingly cared for by the subsequent generation. Nancy had always been sinfully proud of it.

“What would you call it?” she asked.

“A showplace?”

“Architecturally, it’s no slouch. I won’t dispute that. But it was ostentatious when they built it, and it’s a monster now.”

“You’ve never seemed to mind.”

Suddenly the whole conversation played back in her head. She wondered what exactly had gotten into her. The Whitlock house was a stop on every architectural tour of the Windsor Farms neighborhood. Living there had been a dream come true. Living
here
had been a nightmare.

She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe I’m criticizing the home your family has lived in for three generations.”

“You’ve always seemed happy living there.”

Had she been? Another astounding thought. But had she been happy there? And if not, if indeed she hadn’t been, why hadn’t she realized it before now? Was she really as shallow as everyone seemed to think?

“Of course I’ve been happy,” she said, still wondering if it was true. “I guess I’m feeling a little sensitive about this house and my family. I haven’t lived here for a long time.”

He got up and took his cup to the sink. “You’ve
always
apologized for who you are and where you came from. And you’ve never said a good word about this place. I’m surprised you’re defending it today.”

“Billy, what are you talking about?”

He didn’t answer. He looked as if he wanted to but had thought better of it.

“I’m not apologizing, and I’m not defending anything or anyone,” she said when he didn’t answer. “I just compared our childhood homes, that’s all.”

“But you didn’t quite get to the heart of it, did you? You just skirted the edges.”

“Meaning?”

“The differences in our backgrounds. Two dots on the Virginia map that are worlds apart. Lives so separate it’s surprising we even glimpsed each other in passing.”

She was stunned. It was as if Billy had launched himself straight to the heart of her inadequacies. Or at least what she had always perceived them to be. The fears that had nagged at her earlier bloomed fully now. Coming here, living here again, had highlighted the enormous gap between them.

Yet wasn’t that absurd? Had all the years when she had struggled to deserve him mattered at all? Had all the love and attention she had showered on him and on their daughter meant nothing?

“I was talking about houses,” she said. “You seem to be talking about something more important, like our entire life together.”

“Never mind,” he said at last. “I’m tired. I had to get up early to get here, and I guess it shows.”

“You didn’t have to come this early. I didn’t expect—”

“I want to spend some time in the hills with Tessa before it gets too hot.”

He had come to see their daughter. He had not come to see her. And now he clearly did not want to belabor this distasteful conversation. Pretenses were everything in the code Billy lived by, the code Nancy herself had adopted with such enthusiasm.

For a moment Nancy thought she was going to cry. But she couldn’t. Not in front of Billy. She didn’t want him to see how vulnerable, how graceless, she really was.

“Well, run along,” she said, turning away. “The birds are waking up, too.”

“I’ll see you when I get back.” He stopped on his way out to put his hand on her shoulder. “Maybe we can go out for lunch.”

She felt like an old hound dog who hadn’t picked up a single scent during a long day’s hunting. Maybe there would be a consolation bone waiting in the kennel, but there wouldn’t be any new trips into the woods.

She was rarely angry at her husband, but suddenly, she was filled with it. The fiery weight of it, the enormity, blocked every other feeling. She could hardly catch her breath. She stepped out from under his hand before she could think twice about it.

“You know, I think I’m going to be busy at lunch,” she said, pausing to inhale twice before the sentence was finished. “I told Mama I’d run some of her old magazines to a nursing home in Strasburg, and they’re expecting me. But it was nice of you to ask.”

Then she left the kitchen one step ahead of him and went up to her bedroom to cry alone.