Home Another Way (21 page)
The newlyweds brought their faces close, noses bumping, laughing as they tilted their heads in the same direction several times before their lips met sweetly, awkwardly. The clapping grew louder, punctuated by whistles and camera flashes. I wondered if this was their first kiss, not as man and wife, but ever.
Beth took her flowers, and she and Dominic made their way to the back of the hall. Patty and I played until the crowd swarmed to greet them and no one listened to us anymore. I stashed my violin in Jack’s office and wandered into the kitchen. Pans of lasagna—stacked four or five high and wrapped in blankets—lined the counter. Several women gathered plates and cups and brought them into the main hall. I grabbed a few boxes of plastic forks and followed.
Already the men had the tables set up and covered with white paper tablecloths. Guests pulled their chairs around the tables and sat. Maggie, Adele, and others carted the hot pasta to the food table, and soon people were serving themselves, eating and gabbing.
“Over here, girl,” Memory called to me. She sat on two chairs, and wore her favorite yellow sweat suit, all blond and pink-faced, a banana pudding pie with a juicy Maraschino cherry on top. “I got a place for you.”
“If the whole town is here, who’s with Robert?” I asked.
“Doc White said he’d sit with him. He ain’t the celebrating type. Seems he got the sadness stuck all over him, and is hankering to keep it there.” She said it like that. The Sadness. As if it were a disease. “You got your speech ready?”
“What speech?”
“You’re the maid of honor. They always give a speech ’bout how special the bride is and all that whatnot.”
“You mean the toast.”
“If that’s what you fancy folk call it. To me, toast ain’t nothing but some crunchy bread. With butter, yes, ma’am. And that raspberry jelly Aggie Standing makes. Mmmmmm.”
I excused myself as our table went to fill their plates. I wouldn’t be eating today, not if I wanted my dress to continue fitting.
Not everyone could sit at the same time, so people hovered, holding cups of soda, some waiting for a place to sit, others snapping photos and shaking hands with the bride and groom. Music trickled through the room. I didn’t recognize the song, but Beth and Dominic danced together. He stood a head taller than her, and she fit under his chin. She swayed against him with her eyes closed, trusting him to lead, a tiny, contented grin glossing her lips.
Near the end of the song, other couples joined Beth and Dominic. Husbands and wives. Fathers and daughters. I saw Jack and Patty; she tugged on his arm, motioning to the dance area. He shook his head. She persisted, red nails bright against his navy jacket. But Jack removed her hand, said something to her. She smiled and nodded, watching him walk away.
Take that.
Patty turned, as if she felt my eyes, my thoughts. Her face pinched together as I smirked and waggled my fingers at her, a snooty wave. She flipped her hair behind her, and trotted off to her mother.
I needed air. My coat still in Jack’s office, I grabbed Beth’s parka from the vestibule and went outside, leaned against the porch railing. The frigid afternoon peeked up my dress, and wet, thick snow tumbled from the sky.
“If you’re out here hiding from the toast, don’t worry. Beth won’t make you do it,” Jack said, closing the heavy wood door behind him. He joined me on the railing.
“I’m not hiding,” I said. “And you’re not dancing. Poor Patty.”
“You saw.”
“She’s nothing if not persistent.”
“It’s complicated,” he said, cupping his hands to catch the falling snow. “Patty and I, we dated, you know. All through high school. It was always assumed we’d end up together. By her, by everyone.”
“By you?”
“I suppose, yes.”
“But?” I prodded.
He shrugged, spread his fingers. The snow plopped to the ground. “We tried for a little while, after I came back from seminary. But I wasn’t the same person. I knew it wouldn’t work.”
“You didn’t love her anymore.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then you did love her.”
“What is this? Twenty questions?” He sighed, rolled the bottom of his tie, then let it go. “I don’t think I ever loved Patty the way a husband should love a wife. I mean, we were kids. What did we know?”
“So, have you ever?”
“Ever what?”
“Don’t play games with me, Jack Watson.”
“I would never dare be anything but up-front and honest with you,” he said, and laughed. “Now, what was the question again?”
I jabbed him with my elbow, knocking him against the side of the building. Snow slid off the roof and, with Jack safely tucked beneath the overhang, fell onto my open-toed shoes. I danced out of the pile. “Oh, sh—sugar. That’s cold.”
“Sugar? Okay, where’d you hide the real Sarah Graham?”
“Memory’s taken to smacking me with a wooden spoon anytime I, as she puts it, cuss around her.”
Jack laughed again. “I think I’d pay to see that.”
“And I think I’d like an answer.”
His smile flickered, faded. “I was in love. Once.”
“With who? What happened?”
“Someone I met during seminary,” he said. “It didn’t work out.”
My jealousy wanted to probe, to learn more about the memory of the woman who could steal Jack’s crooked grin. He stared out toward the field, where the footprints and sledding tracks filled slowly with new snow, regret darkening his beautiful, long-lashed, amber-streaked eyes.
I put my hand on his arm. He looked at it, startled to be touched, I think, as if it had been a long time. Then he covered my hand with his own, his warm fingers wrapping under and squeezing.
“So, how about you?” he asked. “Have you ever?”
Yeah. Right now.
“Of course,” I said. “More times than I can count.”
“That’s not what I mean, Sarah.”
“Like you would know, Reverend.”
He took his hand away, suddenly realizing who—what—his skin touched. My hand, protected for a few moments from the snow and wind, froze again. I stuck it in my pocket. Jack turned around, his back against the rail now. “You know, Sarah, you really know how to—”
The door opened. Jack and I jumped away from each other. It was Maggie. Her forehead wrinkled, and she said, “Beth’s about to cut her cake.”
“We were just coming in,” Jack said.
He went inside first. Maggie followed closely, protectively. She didn’t hold the door for me; I stuck my foot in to stop it from closing, bashing my knee against the sharp edge. Still wearing Beth’s coat, I backed into a corner and willed myself to disappear into the wall.
If I had a way to get home, I would have left then. I’d been there only for Beth, and she was too busy, too happy—too loved—to notice my absence. But with my truck parked at the inn, I’d need to find someone to take me to it. Not Maggie, though. The woman might like me, but not nearly enough to want me breathing the same air as her son.
Both the wedding and the cake sat poorly in my stomach. The former dredged up memories I’d worked years to bury, the latter wound through my intestines as if I’d swallowed tacks. I woke from nightmares—David and Jack volleying me between them in a game of hot potato, neither of them wanting to keep me; rows of gray-skinned babies, dressed in pink buntings and lying silently in hospital incubators; Maggie, ten feet tall and waggling her index finger at me, grinning maliciously with vampiric fangs—all dazed and clammy. And with cramps that forced me to the bathroom every two hours.
Midmorning, I abandoned my attempt at sleep and decided to make my way over to the inn. I still had Beth’s wedding gift, and I wanted to speak with Maggie. I needed to convince her I had no interest in her precious son. Even if I did.
Plus, I had no clean underwear. I couldn’t wait three days for Beth to return from her honeymoon and do my wash.
I gathered my dirty laundry in a plastic garbage bag and drove to the inn. “Maggie?” I called. When she didn’t answer, I lugged my clothes to the washing machine, in a tiny closet under the staircase. I loved nooks like this, and had spent more than one afternoon in here, lying across the tops of the washer and dryer, one of Maggie’s clean, honey-scented towels folded beneath my head, knees bent, lulled to sleep by the sloshing and thumping, and the warmth.
Starting my whites, I tossed in socks—some balled up, some inside out—panties, bras, and thermal long johns. The bleach splashed on my navy sweatshirt, leaving milky blotches across my chest and sleeve.
“Maggie?” I walked down the hallway to Beth’s room. It still smelled of fresh paint. An antique brass bed stood in the center of the room, headboard under the window, and Maggie had covered it with Beth’s wedding quilt and several throw pillows. I propped a card against them.
I hadn’t known what to get for a gift. Because Beth and Dominic were moving into the inn, they didn’t need shower curtain hooks or potholders, or any of those newlywed things. So I gave money—a check for one thousand dollars.
I’d never be that generous with my own cash, but right now it still belonged to Luke. And I loved spending money that wasn’t mine.
Across the hall, Maggie’s door was cracked. I knocked and pushed my head through, into the empty room. The hope chest open, baby clothes hung over the lid. I went to look at them—two sailor-style rompers and a long gauzy gown embroidered with pink and lilac rosettes.
Something creaked outside the room. “Maggie?” I turned to look and noticed some letters on the bed—five or six, tied with a burgundy ribbon. When I picked them up, a photograph slipped from between the envelopes, fluttering to the floor, landing face up. Maggie gazed at me from the picture, arms around a red-haired man in a baggy cable-knit sweater, brown leather buttons down the front.
I yanked one end of the ribbon. It fell away, and I spread the envelopes in a row across the bed. Closing my eyes, I chose one, opened it. The paper smelled of cedar.
M&M. You have waited long enough. Forgive me. I do love you. L.
The words blurred as I stared beyond them, tracing the wrinkles on the blue-lined notebook paper with my eyes. I wadded the page in my fist, squeezing until my fingernails cut into my palm.
“Sarah? Are you here? I thought I heard—”
Maggie stopped in the doorway. She wore a sweater, the one she had on the first night I came to Jonah, the sleeves cuffed three times, patched on the elbows. And leather buttons. I knelt, slowly, picked up the dropped photo. “It’s his sweater,” I said.
“Sarah, I—”
“What had you waited long enough for?”
“Maybe we should sit down. I’ll put on water for tea and—”
I threw the crumpled note at her. “What had you waited long enough for?”
She caught the paper, flattened it, smoothing it against her chest with her hands. And kept it there, pressed against her heart. “For Luke to ask me to marry him.”
I swallowed. “You wanted him to.”
“Yes. Very much.”
“Why?”
“I loved him,” Maggie said.
All my emotions collapsed in on themselves, compressing to a dense iron marble rolling around and around the pit of my stomach. “He killed my mother,” I said softly.
“I know.”
“But you didn’t care.”
“You think Luke was some sort of monster. But he wasn’t.
He was kind and generous, and decent.”
“And he fixed shutters, and pulled children out of fires, and leapt tall buildings in a single bound.”
She stood there, shoulder against the door’s inner molding, cocooned in that shabby sweater. I wondered how many weeks, months, had it taken for Luke to fade from the worsted yarn, how many mornings Maggie woke and buried her nose in the collar, searching for the last remnant of his cologne. Did she take out his letters every day, or only when loneliness overwhelmed her?
Did she still cry over him?
I wasn’t certain of the reasons, or the precise date and time, but in my distraction I’d allowed my anger, my lifeblood, to dissipate. It happened somewhere between the brumal mountain nights, the pot-roast dinners with the Watsons, the so-called
softening
Memory spoke of, and the afternoons with Zuriel. But now, the thought of Maggie—of anyone—mourning the loss of my father melted my indifference, and a viscid warmth radiated from my gut, seeping into my extremities. My toes and fingers tingled with heat. Ah, this was hate. I closed my eyes, savoring the broken-in fit.
Maggie cleared her throat. “Sarah, I know you’re hurting, but—”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Then tell me.”
“What, Luke didn’t fill you in?” I asked, eyes on her now. Maggie turned her head away; her mouth trembled. “He didn’t, did he? He never told you anything about me.”
“He—” She swallowed, massaged her knuckles. “Luke didn’t talk much about the . . . past.”
“And there wasn’t much to remember, was there? Just his dead wife. And his only daughter. But he didn’t need any of that. He had his new family.”
“It wasn’t like that—”
“Stop defending him,” I shouted. “He doesn’t deserve it.”
“He loved you, Sarah. I know he did.”
Her words pierced me, and I deflated, sinking crookedly onto the bed, one hip on the mattress, leg tucked under me, the other foot flat on the floor. With one finger, I traced a path around the remaining letters. It was my bowing hand—no tough, callused skin on my fingertips—and I felt the bitty, hand-quilted stitches in the calico. “No one has ever loved me.”
Maggie shocked me then by laughing. “Don’t be silly. Even if that was true in the past, it sure isn’t now. If you’d just let us help you—”
“I don’t need help. I don’t need you and your friendly stepmother routine. And I don’t need him,” I said, raking Luke’s letters into a pile. “Any part of him.”
The envelopes were thin, light. They couldn’t have had more than one sheet of paper in each. I held them before Maggie and, with an exaggerated motion, tore them in half. I stacked the halves together and tried to rip them again, but couldn’t. The paper was too thick now.
With a disgusted snort, I flicked the pieces toward the door, toward Maggie. “He’s all yours,” I said, watching her ease down to the floor to retrieve them. I stepped over her.
