A Stillness of Chimes (31 page)

Sean stiffened. That was what had been bothering him. Those pink azaleas. He couldn’t process it, couldn’t find a rational explanation, but he knew what he’d seen.

It might have been nothing, or it might have been the answer to Laura’s prayers, but he couldn’t share it with her yet. Maybe he’d never be able to tell her.

He wanted to drive hell-bent for leather back to her place, but he made himself lock up the truck, leaving the gun on the rack. Then he proceeded to the front door. He fumbled the key in the lock, walked in, and shut the door behind him. He stood there staring at the cedar chest, but in his mind’s eye, he saw only pink azaleas.

All day, Laura’s thoughts had kept straying back to the interesting developments at dawn. Sean had not only kissed her but also told her he loved her. Next thing she knew, he’d be talking about marriage again—and she’d worry about genetics again.

When they’d studied genetics in Preston’s biology class, she’d wondered what the combination of Halloran and Gantt genes would produce. Their future children, should they have any, might be calm and kind and normal, like her mother. Like Sean and Keith. Or they might be walking disasters, cursed with a blend of her dad’s volatility and Dale’s drunken cruelty. But any marriage was a gamble. Having children was a gamble. Life itself was a series of gambles.

She blew out a long sigh and told herself to get to work.

Earlier, sorting through a pile of papers in the kitchen, she’d found a dozen unopened sympathy cards that Ardelle must have set aside for her. Laura gathered a box of thank-you notes, a pen, and stamps and took them to the backyard where a garden bench sat in the sun not far from the spot where the wind chimes had hung.

She was surrounded by reminders of her parents. Trees they’d planted together. The old metal garden markers poking up among their prized
perennials. Their birdhouses and bird feeders. Even the garden bench where she sat. Her dad had built it, and her mom had painted it a soft green that blended in with the bushes.

The first envelope came from one of the elderly, unmarried Flynn cousins in North Carolina. Laura pulled out the card, its artwork a flowery swirl of pale pastels like an old woman’s scarf. Inside, Annabel Flynn’s shaky writing expressed regret that she hadn’t been able to attend the funeral for dear cousin Jessamyn. The printed verse was soberly biblical in nature. Laura wrote a thank-you note and moved on to the next envelope.

A heavy, high-quality envelope in a soft shade of gray, it bore no return address, but the sender had written Laura’s name and her mother’s address in bold, masculine penmanship that matched that of the naughty note she’d found.

She checked the back of the envelope. No return address there either. She ripped the envelope open and pulled out a card. The same color as the envelope, its front was blank.

Slowly, she opened it.

Laura
,

I was so sorry to hear of your mother’s passing. She was a lovely woman. I’ll never forget her. God bless
.

Gibby

It was true, then. Her mother wouldn’t have saved that naughty note unless it had meant something to her. They’d had more than a brief flirtation in a moment of weakness.

Tempted to call Sean, Laura shook her head. He would be back soon. She would have plenty of time to tell him later.

She wrote Gibby a short, kind reply. With every word, she reminded herself that she’d chosen to forgive him and her mother.

With every word, she thought she felt her father’s heartache.

It was all too much, coming on the same day she and Sean had so suddenly resurrected their old relationship. She closed her eyes, listening to the wind in the trees and remembering the chimes that used to sing in every storm. To her father, their soft tinkling might have become as unpleasant as clanging cymbals.

She hated to argue with St. Paul, but love sometimes failed.

Sean had come back earlier than Laura had expected, but as she’d expected, he’d greeted her with another round of lingering kisses. As much as she relished revisiting their teenage romance on a deeper level, sometimes panic threatened. Everything was happening too fast, adding to the tension that accompanied the mystery of her father’s fate.

Something was bothering Sean too, but he refused to talk about it.

Sitting on the couch, he was frowning over the printer’s proof of his brochure. He hadn’t bothered to shave when he made his quick jaunt back to his house, so he looked more like a wild man than ever.

“Are you happy with the brochure?” she asked.

He gave her a blank look. “Excuse me?”

“Your brochure. That piece of paper you’ve been brooding over for ten minutes. What’s wrong with you, Sean?”

“Nothing. It looks great.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You’d better get the order going before it’s too late, then. Just because it’s a quick-print place doesn’t mean you can procrastinate until the last minute.”

“Yes ma’am.” But instead of picking up his phone, he picked up a mandolin he’d brought with him to break in.

Leaving him inside, Laura moved to the porch with a few more notes to write. She hadn’t yet told Sean about the card from Gibby.

She settled into one of the Adirondack chairs her dad had made and opened a sympathy card from one of her fellow teachers in Denver. As she wrote a brief thank-you, she tried to imagine explaining her dad’s situation to her friends there. She wouldn’t even know where to start.

Inside, Sean played a few notes, stopped to work on the tuning, and played a few more. Again and again, he started a song, interrupted it, and went back to it. Or started a different tune. Sometimes he’d nearly reach the end of a song, but he’d stop abruptly before the last line, leaving the song hanging. Unresolved.

“Sean, can’t you at least finish a song once in a while?” she called.

The music stopped.

The door creaked open. He stuck his head out. “Excuse me?”

“I can’t stand it when you never finish a song.”

“Sorry. I’m not thinking about the songs. I’m thinking about the tuning. The sound.”

The weariness around his eyes made her wonder when he’d last had a good night’s sleep. She smiled, softening.

“I’m sorry, Sean. I was just being difficult. Go on; get back to it.”

Instead, he joined her on the porch and studied the dogwood tree that stretched a branch over the porch. Hands in his pockets, the wind ruffling his hair, he kept quiet.

Leaving her correspondence on the chair, she stood in front of him. She reached up to push his hair off his forehead, revealing the small scars from the time Dale shoved him through a window on a summer night. Dale
wouldn’t let him see a doctor, so Sean had cleaned the cuts, sprayed them with Bactine, and applied a butterfly bandage to the worst one. By the time school started in the fall, the cuts had healed. But he would always have the scars.

Hands still in his pockets, he gave her a quizzical frown. “Yeah, I know. I need a haircut.”

“But that’s not what I want to tell you.” She stretched upward to give him a quick kiss. “Gibby sent a sympathy card.”

“That was nice of him.”

“The writing matches the note I found in my mom’s drawer.”

Sean sighed. “I’m sorry that your mom and Gibby had a fling, Laura. I really am.”

“Me too. Especially for my dad’s sake.”

Sean took his hands from his pockets and reached out to tug a dogwood leaf from its branch. “You know what your dad told me once about dogwood leaves?” He ripped the leaf, gently, so it was still held together by tiny threads. “See those? He told me they’re like strands of memory and fact that hold past and present together. They’ll hold for a little while, but not forever.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Facts don’t change, but sometimes memories do.” He tugged the two halves of the leaf completely apart, breaking the delicate filaments. “Even if we uncover some unfortunate facts, some ugly truths, hang on to your good memories.”

“You mean you don’t want me to forget all the good I ever knew of my mom, even if she cheated on my dad?”

He dropped the two halves of the leaf over the railing and watched them
fall to the grass. “I was thinking of your dad too. He might have changed, but we need to remember the man he was. Honor the man he was.”

“You sound almost like you’re ready to admit he might be alive.”

“I’m starting to believe it’s possible. But be prepared for the worst. If he comes back, he might be in rough shape.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

Swallowing the urge to cry, Laura turned her back on Sean—and faced the cemetery and another dogwood tree growing green and healthy near the family plot. Every time she saw a dogwood now, she would remember the leaf Sean had ripped in half. The way the past pulled away from the present, one filament at a time. One hour at a time.

“He’s bound to need … some help,” she said, keeping her voice on track, no wavering or wobbling allowed.

“Then we’ll get him some help.”

“Imagine what it might be like to bring him home. To cook him a good meal. To let him sleep in his own bed and wear clean clothes.”

“Lord willing, that’s going to happen,” Sean said. “But we just don’t know.”

Laura went to sit on the steps. “He had the heart of a poet. He’s the sentimental one, not Mom.” She stopped, realizing she’d mixed present tense and past tense. “He was the one who always cut fresh flowers for his parents’ and grandparents’ graves, and for Mom’s side of the family too.”

Sean sat beside her. “He did that?”

“On Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Easter, and Memorial Day. Don’t you remember?”

“Come to think of it, yeah. And it’s almost Memorial Day.”

“Those are all spring and summer holidays, though. When I was little,
I always felt sorry for dead people because they didn’t get fresh flowers all through the winter, and that’s when I thought they would need them the most. To cheer them up.”

Her dad had laughed softly when she’d shared that little-girl worry with him. He assured her it wasn’t the dead people they needed to worry about.

“No, it’s the living who need flowers on their loved ones’ graves.”

“Why, Daddy?”

“To make us stop and remember who they were and why we loved them.”

That was all he’d said, and she hadn’t pressed him for more. By kindergarten, she’d learned not to trigger his moods by asking too many questions.

“He even knew the language of flowers,” she said. “You know, that silly Victorian thing. Grandma Gantt taught him when he was a boy. Irises for good news. Daisies for innocence. Pansies for loving thoughts.”

Sean smirked. “Pansies for loving thoughts. I like that. My inheritance from Dale will help me think loving thoughts of him when he finally kicks the bucket.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The pansy gun. He says he’ll leave it to me when he dies.”

“I’ve never seen it. Does it have pansies engraved on it or something?”

“No, he calls it the pansy gun because it’s a woman’s gun, designed for a small hand.” He measured with his fingers to show a gun no more than four inches long. “I haven’t laid eyes on it in years. It belonged to his grandmother, and it’s the only gun he has left. He’s a convicted felon so he can’t buy another one except on the black market. He shouldn’t even have the pansy gun.”

“Why don’t you report him?”

“I don’t have the heart to. He’d wind up behind bars again. Besides that, I would feel like I was taking away his last shred of dignity.”

“You could at least blackmail him into handing it over now instead of making you wait for him to die.”

Sean smiled faintly. “I could give it a try.”

The wind was gathering strength, but it had no chimes to play on. A train’s whistle blew in the distance, tone-on-tone, like two or three ribbons of sound that crossed each other and separated again.

If her dad was out there, not too far away, he heard the same train at the same moment. With every breath she took, he took one. With every beat of her heart, his heart beat. And the moments went by. Days went by. Life went by.