The Bridal Veil (18 page)

Rose took it and tucked it into her
own pocket. “Yes’m. Thanks, Miss Emily.”

Emily patted her on the shoulder.
“Have a good day at school.”

Watching them, Luke got a funny
feeling in his chest, one that he couldn’t readily identify.
Gratitude, certainly, that Emily was good to his girl. And she
genuinely liked Rose—he could see it in her face. But the feeling
went deeper than that. For a moment, he almost had a sense of
family, with the three of them together like this.

“
I’ll be back in a couple of
hours,” he said to Emily. Rose took her father’s outstretched hand
and climbed up to the wagon seat beside him.

Emily smiled again and waved as he
slapped the lines on the horses’ backs. “Get up now,” he clucked to
the team.

Emily called, “Don’t forget to use
your hankie instead of your sleeve, and mind your
teacher.”

Luke turned the wagon out to the main
road, and couldn’t help but grin. He wasn’t sure if Emily’s
instructions were just for Rose, or for him too.

~~*~*~*~~

“
Rose, we haven’t visited
your mama’s grave for a while. Would you like to go this Sunday
after church?” Luke purposely asked the question to see how his
daughter would respond.

She rolled her eyes. “We
have to go to church
again
? We just went a couple of weeks
ago.”

“
Miss Emily thinks it’s
important for you, and it’s a chance for her to meet new people and
make friends. We could go by the cemetery on the way
back.”

Rose cast him a sidelong glance.
“Sometimes I stop and see Mama on the way home from school.” She
admitted this as if it were news that he wouldn’t like, but it only
confirmed what Emily had already told him. He didn’t care if she
went to her mother’s grave, but a kid her age ought to have more
going on in her life than visiting a cemetery.

“
Well, that’s all right.”
They rode along for a bit, the silence broken only by the clop of
horses’ hooves and an occasional songbird. Then he said, “You know,
if you ever want to, well, talk, I—we, it would be
okay.”

“
Talk about
what?”

“
You know—things, I guess.
If something is bothering you.” Luke stumbled along, laboring under
the sudden and unpleasant sensation of drowning. He didn’t know the
first thing about what went on in a girl’s head. He wasn’t even
sure he was supposed to. Hell, he hadn’t been raised that way. The
old man hadn’t wanted to hear anyone’s opinion but his own, and
Luke’s mother, a worn-out, quiet wraith, had known better than to
speak up. But if Emily was right, if Rose felt like she had no one
to talk to, he had to try.

“
Do
you
ever go see Mama?”

Not for a long time, he hadn’t, but he
didn’t know if he should tell Rose that. For the first year after
Belinda died, the three of them—Cora, Rose, and he—went to the
cemetery every Sunday. Jesus, in good weather, Cora would even pack
a picnic and they’d eat on Belinda’s grave. He’d thought it was
sort of ghoulish. At any rate, he discovered that instead of making
him feel better, the frequent visits had affected him like acid on
a wound. There had been days when the world looked so bleak he
didn’t even want to get out of bed. But men didn’t give in to that
kind of weakness. They just kept going, gave the world a stoic face
to look at, and went about their work. There were fields and
animals to tend, chores to do, mouths to feed. At night, they drank
at their kitchen tables or in their barns, with the stock for
company.

“
I haven’t been there for a
while,” he finally answered. “I imagine your grandmother doesn’t
like that.”

Rose shrugged and then
looked up at him. “You
miss
Mama, don’t you? You still love her, even though
you married Emily? Grammy says you don’t.”

Damn that Cora, he simmered. “Sure, I
miss her, honey.” How could he explain to a kid conflicting
feelings that he had trouble understanding himself?
“But . . . but I think that maybe life is for
the living. Do you know what that means?”

Rose shook her head.

“
I mean that your mama left
us a lot sooner than any of us expected. Now she’s gone, but we’re
still here. We still have years of our own lives to go on
with.”

Rose seemed satisfied with his
answer.

Struggling to keep the conversation
going, he remarked, “Your hair looks nice today.” Her wild
coffee-colored hair was braided into two long, neat plaits and tied
on the ends with ribbon.

She smiled and plucked at one braid,
obviously pleased that he’d noticed. “Miss Emily helped me with
it.”

Chalk up another one for Emily, he
thought.

“
Why doesn’t Grammy like
her?”

“
I wouldn’t say she doesn’t
like her.”

“
Oh, I would.”

Luke couldn’t lie to her, but he was
hard pressed to explain their complicated domestic arrangements to
anyone. “We’ll work it out somehow. Try not to worry about
it.”

They drove down the last hill that led
into town and Luke pulled the wagon up in front of Fairdale’s small
white schoolhouse. Children played in the yard, running and
laughing, enjoying their freedom before the teacher came out to
ring the bell.

“
Thanks for the ride,
Daddy.”

“
See you tonight,” Luke
said, watching Rose scamper down from the high seat. He looked at
the other girls in the yard and saw that they were dressed very
differently from his daughter. No judge of fashion, even Luke could
see that she would be a target for teasing in Cora’s garish
flounces. Thank God that Emily wanted to help with Rose’s clothes
as well as her manners.

As he drove off toward Main Street, he
sensed that he’d forged a little path into his daughter’s heart.
And it hadn’t been as hard as he’d expected.

~~*~*~*~~

Luke walked into the general store and
was immediately struck by the familiar scents of bacon, coffee,
leather, and soap. He wasn’t much interested in shopping, but he’d
always liked coming in here. Out front in the summer, a couple of
men always occupied the bench Franny kept there, and in winter,
they bellied up to the stove to spit, whittle, and spin yarns. It
was the way her father had run the place, and Fran had kept it that
way after he died. She carried a lot of different merchandise to
appeal to all of her customers, and had a knack for artful
displays. Behind the counter, rows of glass jars full of peas,
beans, rice, and candy lined the shelves. He supposed she’d make
some man a reasonable wife, if that man didn’t mind being ordered
around like a flunky. Franny Eakins was bossy and insisted on being
in charge—in all matters—which was one reason Luke had never been
very interested in her, even when she was young.

This morning she stood behind her
counter, unpacking a crate of baking soda. This was the first time
he’d seen her since the day in the sandwich shop, when Rose had
stolen the candy. He hoped she’d had enough time to cool off by
now. “Hi, Fran. How’s business today?”

The look she shot at him from beneath
her caterpillar brows—well, a lesser man might have frozen dead in
his tracks. He didn’t wince, but he had no doubt that she was still
mad.

“
Luke,” she
acknowledged.

“
I need to order a new hip
strap for my team.”

She set aside a box of soda and
reached for a green-backed ledger on the desk behind the counter.
Flipping through its pages, she ran her finger down a column, then
spun the book around, pointing to his name entered there. “I see
here that you owe one dollar and thirteen cents on your account. I
can’t add anything to it until you pay off your balance.” She
paused and lifted her chin. “That includes the candy and the pencil
that your daughter stole from me.”

Other names on her list had sums next
to them that were ten or twenty times higher. He’d run up much
higher balances in the past, himself.

He stared at her, unblinking, until
she finally dropped her haughty gaze. “One dollar and thirteen
cents,” he repeated, reaching into his pocket, “as much as that, is
it?” He put a silver dollar, a dime, and three pennies on the
counter and pushed them closer to her. She snapped them up like a
miser counting her last coin. “Is this about Rose? Or is there a
problem between you and me?”

Her chin came up again. “You
and
me
—I don’t
know what you mean.”

Franny had been as obvious as Clara in
her maneuvers to snag him after Belinda died. He’d never led her
on, never once allowed her to believe that he regarded her as
anything more than an old acquaintance. Even in their youth, he’d
had nothing to do with Fran. He just wasn’t attracted to her. So
he’d ignored her clumsy attempts at coquetry that she sent him from
her rows of jars and boxes. That had only made her more determined.
But her attitude toward him changed once he began receiving letters
from Alyssa Cannon. While he’d never discussed his plans with
anyone, she’d sniffed those scented letters like a bloodhound and
begun giving him baleful looks. True, Rose’s antics hadn’t helped,
but he sensed that Fran’s hostility went deeper. He had to do
business with her, though, and decided to let the matter
drop.

“
I need that hip strap,
Fran, and a package of black dye.”

Her manner was crisp and clipped, and
she took his order with a minimum of chitchat. If she wondered what
the dye was for, she didn’t ask. When she offered to put his
purchases on account, Luke refused and paid cash. It wasn’t easy.
At this time of year, he didn’t have a lot of money. But if Fran
was going to pucker up like a prune over a dollar, he didn’t want
to give her the chance to get snippy again.

He was just about to leave
the store—couldn’t
wait
to leave—when his eyes fell upon a bolt of
blue-green fabric on a table near the door. It was the color of a
mallard’s head, rich, dark, and almost iridescent. He glanced down
at the box of black dye in his hand. He could imagine that teal
color on a woman with creamy skin and light hair, the sun falling
upon her and making her gleam like a rare gem. And wasn’t that
church social coming up?

“
I’ll take some of this,
too.” He pointed at the bolt.

Now Fran’s dark brows drew slightly.
“What? That grosgrain silk? I just got that in.”

“
Well, it’s for sale,
right?”

“
Yes, but, what are you—why
would—” She stopped herself and her nose went up, and she was all
businessy again. “How much do you want?”

“
I don’t know. Enough to
make a dress.”

“
For Rose?”

“
No, for a
woman.”

~~*~*~*~~

All the way home, Luke eyed the
twine-and-paper-wrapped package in the wagon bed behind him,
cursing his impulsive purchase. When he was young, he’d been
impetuous, making decisions with no thought of the consequences,
and more than once he’d paid the price. As he grew older and
settled down, trying to prove himself to both Belinda and her
mother had made him circumspect and, well, maybe even stodgy, he
supposed. Something had come over him today, though. He wasn’t sure
if it had been Fran’s curt attitude or something less easily
defined. He’d just seen that teal color and thought of how well it
would go with Emily’s coloring.

Huh, as if he knew about that kind of
stuff.

But now he was worried. She
had asked only for black dye—what if she didn’t want this material?
Franny had tried to sell him just six yards, but he didn’t know if
that would be enough. So he’d bought ten. It had cost over five
dollars, a hell of a lot of money for a dress or anything else that
couldn’t reproduce or provide food for the table. More than five
dollars for
frippery
. And as soon as Fran had made the first cut with her
scissors, he’d known he couldn’t change his mind.

He passed Chester Manning’s farm,
where he saw Chester tending his sheep. The flock looked good, as
good as sheep could, anyway. Luke had never been interested in
raising them himself. Last year had been hard on the Mannings.
Chester had fallen off the barn roof and broken his leg, smack-dab
in the middle of harvest. He was laid up for over four months, and
Luke had rallied the neighbors to help bring in the Mannings’s
onion crop. First they’d pulled the onions, and then everyone,
including Chester’s wife Jennie and their six kids, had spread them
out to dry. Chester had watched the work from the back of a wagon,
where he sat on a divan brought out from their parlor, cursing his
bad luck and his splinted leg. After they’d dried, they came back
with wagons and drove Chester and his crop to market.

It had been a lot of work—two hundred
acres worth—but that’s what neighbors did. It was so different from
the way Luke had grown up—the old man had never done anything for
anyone unless he stood to gain from the deed. People who acted out
of charity or human decency were all saps to Cole Becker. Even
those who’d occasionally helped his own family. But Cole had been
such a miserable failure as a man and at life in general, Luke had
finally figured out that if his father thought something was right,
it must be wrong. Over the years, Luke had discovered that was
usually true. So he tried to do the opposite of what Cole would
have done, hoping everything would turn out.