High Country Fall (2 page)
“Okay.”
“No more crying?”
“No more crying.”
“That’s my girl. Now let’s have that drink.”
OCTOBER
The trouble with making a public announcement is that the public—in this case, my family—feels entitled to respond. Not only to respond, but to exclaim, to criticize, and, above all, to offer comments and advice. The tom-toms, the grapevine, and yes, the Internet, too, were all working overtime.
From my four brothers who live out of state, to the other seven and their spouses still here in eastern North Carolina—not to mention a slew of aunts, uncles, and cousins all up and down the Atlantic seaboard—half the country seemed to be showering advice on my head.
Real showers, as well.
Bridal showers.
It was early October, three days after I’d begun wearing the ring that once belonged to Dwight Bryant’s grandmother; two days after we’d told a couple of friends and both our families that we were planning a Christmas wedding.
I’m a district court judge here in Colleton County. Dwight is Sheriff Bo Poole’s right hand and head of Bo’s detective division, someone who’s known me since the day Daddy piled all the boys who happened to be in the yard at the time into the back of his pickup and hauled them over to the hospital to meet their new sister. Dwight’s always thought that gave him the right to act like one of my brothers, too. One of my bossy brothers.
We’ve both been married and divorced and—
Well,
his
marriage ended in divorce. Mine was merely annulled. (It was years before I learned that Daddy could have saved on lawyer’s fees since I’d inadvertently married a hound dog who was already legally married at the time.) Dwight has a little boy up in Virginia; I sublimate with a bunch of nieces and nephews.
I had sworn off men at the beginning of summer, and after yet another relationship went sour on him, too, Dwight proposed that we quit looking for nonexistent soul mates and turn our solid friendship into marriage. That was less than two weeks ago and it seemed like a good idea at first, especially since it turned out that we were surprisingly solid in bed.
With all the hoopla after we announced it, though, I was starting to have second thoughts.
My family’s so crazy about Dwight that you’d have thought someone had handed me a cool ten million and it was their duty to help me invest it before I threw it all on the nearest bonfire.
Take Aunt Sister, who about hugged the breath out of me the first time she saw me after hearing the news. “Thank God in glory! I thought you won’t never going to settle down before I died.” She looked at me dubiously. “You
do
aim to settle down, don’t you?”, which I think is a little sanctimonious for a woman who spends four months a year on the road in a Winnebago now that Uncle Rufus is retired.
Then there’s Nadine, my brother Herman’s wife, who belongs to a strict fundamentalist church and has never quite approved of me. “Of course, you can’t wear white, but there’re lots of pretty dresses in off-white.”
“Oh, nobody worries about stuff like that anymore,” said April, my brother Andrew’s third-time-lucky try at marriage.
Aunt Zell, my mother’s sister, couldn’t stop beaming. “Now I know you have Sue’s silver, crystal, and china,” she said, “so why don’t I give you a linen shower?”
“And I’ll do lingerie,” said Portland Brewer, my best friend and prospective matron of honor despite her advancing pregnancy. (Some of my brothers were making book on whether or not she’d deliver before the wedding.) “Black satin teddies. Red silk panties!”
“Kitchen goods!” said Mae and Doris.
“Well, what about ol’ Dwight?” said their husbands. “Maybe we oughta give him a tool shower.”
“So romantic,” sighed my nieces. “All these years of catting around with other guys, then bang!” They had taken to singing parodies of “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” every time they saw me.
Maidie, Daddy’s longtime housekeeper, was writing out family recipes for my edification and Dwight’s well-being; while John Claude Lee and Reid Stephenson, my cousins and former law partners, were talking about a formal announcement dance at the Colleton County Country Club in Dobbs.
Dwight’s mother, his two sisters, and his sister-in-law had already booked a luncheon date at the University Club in Raleigh for all the women in both families.
Even Daddy. He didn’t say much, but his blue eyes twinkled whenever someone mentioned the wedding.
Dwight just laughed and took it all in stride.
I was starting to freak.
“They act like this is the love match of the century instead of a sensible arrangement,” I told Minnie.
Minnie is married to my brother Seth. She’s also my campaign manager. It was Minnie who advised me that it would be politically expedient to quit looking for the moon and settle down with someone respectably earthbound instead. She was surprised as hell that I’d taken her advice and as pleased as the rest that the someone turned out to be Dwight Bryant.
“Won’t hurt you at the polls to be married to a well-regarded deputy sheriff like Dwight,” she said, but when she started cooing like our nieces, I immediately disillusioned her.
“Romantic love has nothing to do with this,” I told her. “It’s pure pragmatism. Sure, we’re fond of each other, but it’s love based on friendship and mutual history, not romance. He’s as tired of channel surfing as I am, so it just makes sense.”
“Oh, honey,” Minnie said, looking bereft. “No real passion?”
“I didn’t say there was no passion,” I told her, unable to repress a grin.
“Well, thank goodness for that much,” she said, smiling back.
“But it’s turning into a three-ring circus. Even at the courthouse. Clerks go out of their way to stop me in the halls and tell me how nice Dwight is. Like he’s got a halo and they don’t think I’m good enough for him. It’s bad enough that Aunt Sister and Nadine and Doris think like that, I don’t need it at work, too. Paul Archdale even had the nerve to ask me if I was letting personal considerations color my judgment when Dwight testified against his client this afternoon.”
“Were you?”
“Of course not,” I huffed. “Paul knows his client’s guilty as sin. He was just trying to get a lighter sentence. I may be thinking about marrying Dwight, but that doesn’t mean I’ve quit thinking.”
“Dwight’s ring on your finger means you’re more than just thinking about it,” Minnie said gently.
We both glanced down at the ring, an old-fashioned square-cut diamond flanked by two smaller stones. I pulled it off and balanced it on the palm of my hand, where it gleamed and shot out sparks of color in the sunshine.
“I don’t know, Minnie. I’m beginning to think this marriage is going to cause more problems than it’ll solve.”
“No, it won’t,” she soothed. “You and Dwight will be good for each other, and it would embarrass him to death if you back out now, so you put that ring right back on your finger where it belongs. A lot of people care about both of you, so the two of y’all getting together’s bound to be a nine-days’ wonder. They’ll settle down once they get used to the idea.”
“Another week?” I asked glumly. “I don’t know if I can take it.”
Happily, I didn’t have to.
That very evening, there was a message from Roger Longmire, Chief District Court Judge in our district. When I returned his call, he said, “Got anything sensitive or pressing on your calendar?”
“Not that I know of,” I told him.
“Good. I’ve been asked if I could spare someone to hold court up in Cedar Gap.”
“Here am I, Lord, send me,” I said prayerfully. Cedar Gap is ’way the other side of the state, a good five- or six-hour drive from Colleton County.
Longmire snorted. He knows the Bible even better than I do. “When did you turn into Isaiah?”
“The minute you offered me a legitimate reason to head for the hills.”
“Getting a little hot for you down here in the flatlands?”
Was that a chuckle in his voice? I considered for a moment. “Minnie called you, didn’t she?”
“Good woman, your sister-in-law,” he said blandly. “I owe her a lot. Did you know she was head of the Colleton County Democratic Women the first year I ran for the bench?”
After Judge Longmire’s call on Friday evening, Dwight and I spent half of Saturday walking around my small two-bedroom house out here on the family farm, trying to decide where to add on a new and larger master bedroom so that we could keep my old one in permanent readiness for his son. I hadn’t seen Cal since Dwight told him about us, but he’s a nice little boy and we get along just fine every time Dwight brings him out to swim in the pond or to ride the horses or the four-wheelers my nieces and nephews are variously addicted to.
Even though my house sits a half-mile off the nearest road, I’ve never had a chance to feel isolated. The farm is crisscrossed with dirt lanes that the whole family use as shortcuts or racetracks, and April spotted us on her way over to Daddy’s with a sweet potato pie still warm from the oven. April moves walls the way other women move furniture, and my brother Andrew grumbles that he never knows from one month to the next whether he’ll get up some night to go to the bathroom and find their bedroom moved to the other side of the house before he can get back. Nevertheless, she made some sensible suggestions about water lines and septic tanks before she left, and so did Seth and Will when they came by after lunch looking for Haywood, who showed up a few minutes later on one of the farm’s smaller tractors.
Will’s the one who actually built my house, and Seth can find his way around a blueprint, too, but Haywood knows precious little beyond the basics. Didn’t stop him from telling us what he’d do if it was him, though. Or Robert either, who had tired of waiting for Haywood to bring the tractor over and had come to find him.
I excused myself to go do laundry and they were still at it two loads later.
Carrying a fresh jug of iced tea and a half-dozen plastic cups, I rejoined them in time to hear Robert say, “—and build it from right there.”
“Or we could just build a new house in Maine,” I said, setting the jug and cups on the back of the tractor.
Will and Dwight laughed as I perched cross-legged on the open tailgate of Dwight’s pickup to pour them tea. Robert and Haywood didn’t get it.
“Maine?” said Haywood. “Now why would you want to build a house ’way up yonder?”
“Get your cup and let’s go,” Seth told him with a big grin. “I’ll explain it to you over at Robert’s.”
“Sorry about that,” I said as the last of my brothers disappeared down the rutted lane.
“Why?” Dwight asked. “Think I don’t know the way they like to help and give advice? Besides, you didn’t have anything special planned, did you?”
“Well, when you called this morning, you said something about wanting to wet a line and I had my mouth set for pan fish.”
“Really?” He moved closer and brushed my hair back from my face with both hands so he could examine my mouth with exaggerated care. “Nope, that’s not how it looks to me.”
His lips were mere inches from mine and I didn’t need a second invitation to put my arms around his neck and let him swing me down from the tailgate, although I could have taken him right there on the back of the truck. Summer had been long and celibate for both of us; and my house here, his apartment in Dobbs, on a couch, on a bed, on a floor or table, we had spent these past ten days making up for lost time. Hard to remind myself that I’d spent my whole life treating him like another one of the boys—not when the mere touch of his hand on my hair was now enough to unleash every hormone in my body.
It was full dark by the time we were ready to think about food again. Much too late to try to catch our supper out on the pond. Instead, we went over to Jerry’s Steak & Catfish House and had a waitress bring it to us with a side dish of onion rings and a basket of hushpuppies.
Big mistake.
Every third person who passed by our table was someone who’d known Dwight or me from birth or grade school, and they each had to stop and tell us how surprised they were when they heard we were engaged, “but we’re wishing y’all lots of luck and happiness.” Whenever I lifted my eyes from my plate, I saw beaming faces watching us.
“Thank God for Cedar Gap,” I said when we were back in Dwight’s truck, headed for home. “Don’t you wish you could get out of Dodge, too?”
“Why?” he asked, sounding honestly puzzled.
“The way everybody’s burbling over us? It’s not making you crazy?”
He grinned. “Nope.”
“Well, it is me. I feel like I’m drowning in a tub of warm honey.”
“Not me. I sort of like it that people seem happy for us. Besides, you’re the one who thought that getting married would generate some political goodwill, remember? Seems to me it’s working.”
I sighed and glumly admitted he was right.
At the house, he didn’t switch off the truck. “You’ll want to pack tonight and get an early start tomorrow and I’d just be in the way.”
It was a sensible decision, especially since all our appetites were temporarily sated. Nevertheless, I was irrationally disappointed. We’d been together only a few short days, yet I was already getting used to his comforting bulk in my bed, and when he stayed over, I found I liked waking up to the smell of coffee . . . among other things.
I reached for the door handle. “See you next weekend, then.”
“Actually, you won’t,” he reminded me. “I’ll be out that way myself. We’ll probably pass each other on I-40 Saturday morning.”
I’d forgotten that he was due to spend the weekend in the mountains of Virginia with Cal.
Slow as Dwight drives unless he’s expediting to a crime scene, I figured I could be halfway home before he got out of the state. “Want to try and meet up for breakfast in Burlington or Greensboro?”
“Sounds good,” he said, “but I plan to get on the road real early.”
“That’s okay. I’ll call you.”
He leaned over to kiss me goodnight and I deliberately kept it short and casual so he wouldn’t think I was trying to change his mind about staying the night. His smile in the glow of the dash lights was teasing. “Don’t go driving off any mountains while you’re out there, you hear?”
