Summer of Joy (23 page)

“Oh,” Agnes said. “Well, that’s what I told Josephine. I told her there was bound to be some reasonable explanation and that there was no way on God’s green earth he could be your son.”

“My son?” Zella squawked. “Who told you that?”

“Eh, what did you say? I can’t hear you. I must need a new battery in my hearing aid,” Agnes said and hung up without so much as a goodbye.

“A new battery indeed,” Zella muttered as she stared at the phone. What Agnes needed was a new brain. That had to be the most outlandish thing the woman had ever said, and she’d said some pretty outlandish things over the years. Zella had hung up the receiver and glared at it as if daring it to ring again. It hadn’t.

But her glare didn’t work on the phone at the
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offices. It was ringing off the hook when she let herself in the door. Nobody was there. Not even Wesley. That was good. She hoped he wouldn’t show up until after David did, and heaven knew when that would be the way the roads were sure to be drifted over out in the country.

Zella let the phone ring. It wasn’t eight o’clock. She didn’t have to answer it. And she just might not answer it even after eight o’clock. Not until she’d had time to think. Of all days for David to be snowed in. What if that boy hadn’t made it through the snow out there? She had no way of knowing. David’s phone must still be out because all she could get was a busy signal.

The phone on her desk started shrilling again. She looked at it as if she expected it to fly apart with each ring. It could be David, and she’d like to talk to David. But it could be one of her so-called friends who were passing around a story about that boy, Wesley’s grandson, being her son. Her son!

That had to be the wildest, most preposterous story anybody had ever come up with in Hollyhill, and Zella had heard a few over the years. Some of them that turned out to be true. But not this one.

The only person who could come up with this crazy a story might be Wesley, and he didn’t even know about Robert Wesley Jr. yet or at least Robert had said he didn’t.

And then, of course, there was Jocelyn. She knew about Robert if he’d made it to her house the night before. That girl could make up fiction quicker than anything. But she’d been snowed in with no telephone.

By ten o’clock when Leigh came in the
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office, Zella still hadn’t answered the phone. Wesley had navigated his steps in the snow and was back in the pressroom. When he had first come downstairs, he’d stuck his head through the pressroom door after the phone rang twenty or so times to see if there was a problem.

There was a problem, all right, but she hadn’t told Wesley about it. She’d just looked at him and told him she’d decided to wait until David came in before she started answering the phone. That she didn’t have time to write down a message from every person in Hollyhill reporting how deep the snow was in his or her front yard. Both things absolutely true.

“Suits me. Snow news is no news,” Wesley had said and disappeared back into the pressroom. Sometimes Wesley could be too clever.

She’d started to yell at him there was news all right. That his past had caught up with him. At least some of his past. The law hadn’t found him yet, but who knew? That might be next. If that happened, though, it was going to be because somebody else did some digging. Zella was through digging into other people’s pasts. Even if it was for that person’s own good.

The phone was ringing when Leigh came in red-cheeked and fairly exploding with her exciting engagement news. Leigh slipped her feet out of her snow boots and snatched off her left glove to hold her hand out for Zella to admire her ring. Zella jumped up and came around the desk to hug Leigh.

For a minute she almost forgot the ridiculous stories circulating Hollyhill. And maybe all the phone ringing didn’t have the first thing to do with what Agnes had said. Maybe everybody had been calling to talk about David and Leigh. It could be she should have been answering the phone to make sure they all knew who should get the lion-sized share of the credit for that wonderful diamond on Leigh’s finger. Without Zella prodding David to wake up and notice Leigh, this engagement would have never happened.

Leigh said they’d even already set a date. “The first weekend in June. Saturday probably. Don’t you think a Saturday would be best?”

“Definitely. Afternoon. Four o’clock. The very best time for a wedding,” Zella said. The diamond wasn’t big, but it was a diamond. Behind them the phone kept ringing.

“Sounds good. Or maybe a little earlier if we decide to go somewhere for a honeymoon.”

“Well, of course you’ll go on a honeymoon. Somewhere exotic and romantic.”

“I guess David and I will have to decide on that.” Leigh looked from Zella to the phone that kept ringing. “Aren’t you going to get that?”

“No.”

“Are you all right, Zella?” Leigh’s smile was gone and she looked concerned.

Zella frowned at her. “You look like you may have been listening to gossip.”

“Judy called to see why I wasn’t at work. I overslept. She told me some man was at your house last night, but I told her there had to be a reasonable explanation.”

“Well, certainly not the explanation Agnes Calhoun gave me this morning.” Zella stomped back around her desk and sat down. “My son, indeed. A poor boy comes to my door to get directions and this is what happens. I just let him in because he was standing there in the snow without the proper coat or hat.”

“Where did he need directions to?” Leigh perched in the customer’s chair next to Zella’s desk. She still looked concerned.

“David’s, of course,” Zella said. “I don’t know if he made it out there. David’s phone must be out.”

“Why did he need directions to David’s?”

“You don’t have to look so worried. It doesn’t have the first thing to do with you and David. He’s not David’s long-lost son any more than he’s mine. Can you believe the kind of stories people will tell?”

“I was thinking more of maybe Stephen Lee’s father.”

“He wasn’t black,” Zella said matter-of-factly. The leaps some people made without the first bit of facts. She looked over her shoulder toward the pressroom and lowered her voice to a whisper. “He’s Wesley’s grandson.”

28

W
es would have known the boy anywhere. Looking at him standing there in front of him was like looking in a mirror that could go back in time forty years. Back before his hair turned white and he started letting it sprangle out wherever it wanted. Back before his eyebrows grew in bushy and stiff. Back before the years of riding his motorcycle into the wind had wrinkled his face. The boy looked the way Wes still sometimes imagined he looked when there weren’t any mirrors around to prove different.

But he didn’t look angry. Wes had thought he might when David had come in the pressroom and told Wes about the boy after the snowplow had cleared the roads into town. David made the boy stay out in the front office with Zell and Jo while he talked to Wes. It was plain that David wasn’t sure whether Wes would think he was bringing him good news or bad.

Wes wasn’t sure himself. He hadn’t ever expected his past to come hunting him. He’d sometimes thought about going back to see what kind of man Robert had become, but then he’d think he should leave things as they were. Robert had been in his twenties with a new wife and the promise of the rest of his life in front of him when Wes left. He hadn’t needed Wes to hold his hand. More to the point, Wes hadn’t wanted his son to think he had to stop his life to hold Wes’s hand.

Besides, Wes had had to run. He couldn’t stand being in the house he and Rosa had lived and loved in. It was Rosa’s house. Without Rosa it was a prison cell.

Then after he’d been on the road a few years, he felt like he’d been gone too long to go back. He wasn’t the same man who’d left. They wouldn’t know one another. They’d never really known one another as adults. Only as father and son.

He had loved his family. He had loved his son. Too much to stay around and be a reason for sorrow. It was himself he had hated. Himself he couldn’t live with. That’s why he’d gone on the road and invented a new Wesley Green. A man who could be from Jupiter.

And then there was Jo. Wes hadn’t invented her. The Lord had dropped her into his path to walk beside him and hold his hand. To tug him back to a place on earth where he could let himself love again. Funny how the Lord worked.

Maybe the Lord was working in this. Maybe the Lord knew the time was right now for him to look straight into the face of his past. Wes would have liked to ask David that, but David went back out in the front offices and sent the boy back alone. Wes saw Jo peering through the pressroom door as the boy came through it. She looked worried, and Wes wanted to step past the boy and assure her that Jupiterian love lasted through anything earth could throw at it. Sort of like old Paul wrote in Romans about how nothing—
not death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor
depth, nor any other creature
—could separate a person from the love of God.

But the boy stepped through the door, and the door closed, leaving the two of them alone. He looked unsure of himself as he stood there staring at Wes without saying anything. Wes could imagine him groping through the words he’d practiced inside his head and coming up empty. What do you say when you come face-to-face with a man who has been the same as dead to you all your life?

Wes didn’t help him out. He just waited for the boy to find words and wondered what he’d say back to him when he did. The boy wasn’t going to be interested in any Jupiter stories. The silence built between them until it almost twanged like a guitar string stretched too tight.

“Are you really my grandfather?” the boy finally pushed out.

“From what David tells me, I’m thinking that might be the case,” Wes said.

The boy’s lips twitched as if he wanted to smile but then thought better of it. “My name is Robert Wesley Green Jr. I’m sorry for showing up like this without letting you know or anything but I’ve always wanted to meet you and ever since we got Miss Curtsinger’s letter, I’ve been anxious to come. So I just did.” Then the boy did smile. Not big and wide, but worried and hesitant.

So Zell was behind this. That was a bigger surprise than the boy showing up in front of him. But then again, she’d always been curious about his past. Had been sure for years that the authorities would show up to cart him away one day. It had probably been a letdown to her that nothing more potent than a grandson had shown up.

The boy was still standing there, waiting for Wes to say or do something, maybe throw open his arms and embrace him or else turn away from him. Wes thought he might ought to ask the Lord to give him the right thing to say, but the truth was, he hadn’t gotten that good at praying yet. Not at asking for anything specific. He’d been working on it, but most of the time he just opened up the Scripture and read awhile before he sat quiet in his chair to let the Lord fill his head with whatever he wanted to be in there.

David had told him there wasn’t any one set way to pray to the Lord. That the Lord heard all prayers, so maybe the Lord was hearing Wes now and he’d put the right words in Wes’s mouth to say to this boy. The only thing Wes was sure of was the way his leg was paining him. “You mind if I sit down?” he asked the boy. “My leg’s bothering me some today.” Wes sank down in one of the chairs and propped his foot up on a handy box. “You can sit down too.”

The boy turned one of the other chairs around and sat in front of Wes. “Jocie told me about you getting hurt in the tornado.”

“She did?” For some reason that surprised Wes. He hadn’t expected the boy and Jocie to have talked.

“We went for a walk in the snow this morning. She told me about how she’d claimed you for her granddaddy. I think she might have just pushed me over in a snowbank and left me there if I had said anything against that.” The boy finally smiled big and full.

Wes smiled too. “That sounds like Jo. She’s the reason I’m here. The reason I stopped running.”

“But you didn’t stop running from us. Why didn’t you ever write and tell us where you were?” The boy’s smile disappeared.

Wes looked down at his hands in his lap and then over at the press. “I don’t know that I can give a good reason for that. It just seemed like once I rode off I couldn’t ever go back. Not after what happened.” Wes looked back at the boy. He deserved the truth. “Me being the reason your Grandmamma Rosa and your Aunt Lydia were gone and all.”

“Dad says it was an accident.”

“It was that, but a good many accidents can be prevented if a person is more careful.”

“What happened?”

Wes looked back at the press. “I don’t know. One minute I was driving down the road in a rainstorm. The next I woke up in an ambulance with my life blown to smithereens. The doctors said I hit my head and that I’d probably never remember exactly what happened.”

“Then you don’t know if you could have prevented whatever happened or not.”

Wes didn’t say anything for a minute. Some things couldn’t be explained, and the way the tentacles of guilt had wrapped around Wes and strangled out his life was one of them. Finally Wes said, “How’s your father?”

“Dad’s good. He sold your house a couple of years after you left and used the money to go back to engineering school. Has a good job. Mom, she’s a teacher. Third grade. I have a sister younger than me. Her name is Lydia Rose.”

Wes felt the tears pushing against his eyes. “Is she pretty like her Aunt Lydia?”

“She’s pretty, but she doesn’t look much like Aunt Lydia’s pictures. She looks like Mom. But Dad says she’s like Aunt Lydia in a lot of ways. Smart, sweet tempered, but stubborn too. She just turned seventeen a couple of months ago.” The boy reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. “I’ve got pictures. Do you want to see?”

Wes took the pictures the boy pulled out of his wallet. The girl had blonde hair and light blue eyes. Her smile showed perfect teeth and a glowing happiness. There was also a family picture, a few years old since the boy looked to be maybe sixteen in it. Robert was older. His face broader. His hair going gray at the temples. But Wes would have known him anywhere. His son. The son he’d rocked through the nights when he had the colic. The son he’d taught to fish and play baseball. The son he hadn’t been able to share his grief with. The son he’d never stopped loving.