The Bridegrooms (7 page)

Beside her, Hazel winced at his words.

“Now see here,” Garrison said, after a false start in which his voice got tangled at the top of his throat. “I find it insufferably rude of you to comment on the young lady’s age in her presence.”

“I only meant—”

“And furthermore,” he straightened in his chair, “I think it’s a fair enough assessment to say that, even with her misrepresentation—”

“Garrison!” Vada clutched at his sleeve.

He covered her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Darling, we must concede that Hazel’s true age has been, let’s say, altered.”

“Oh, dear Lord.” Hazel planted her elbows on the table with such force that the pansies quivered in their vase, and she buried her head in her hands.

“As I was saying,” Garrison continued, “even given that distortion, the lady is clearly not much more than half your own age—”

“Garrison!” Both sisters pleaded in concert.

“—so if it was the bloom of youth that so enticed you to pursue this introduction, I submit that you have not yet been presented with any reason to disavow the acquaintance of Miss Hazel Allenhouse.” By the end of his speech, Garrison had taken off his glasses and used them to emphatically point to the mortified woman across the table. In the awkward aftermath, he used the edge of the tablecloth to clean the lenses.

Vada studied him—so rare was it to see him without his spectacles, rarer still to see him in the throes of such passion. Suddenly the familiar placid blue of his eyes took on the glint of pure steel, and the impressive Mr. Triplehorn seemed to have been wounded indeed.

“I have no objections to her age,” he said once Garrison’s glasses were safely perched on his nose. “She is simply not the woman I came here to meet.”

“Oh, enough,” Hazel groaned, scooting her chair away from the table. “I cannot take more of this.”

“No, wait.” Vada put a restraining hand on her sister’s. “My sister is a lovely young person. And she may seem like some bold, modern woman ready to strike out and begin a new life in the middle of nowhere, but inside—” Tears welled in Vada’s eyes, and the quivering in her chin wouldn’t allow her to continue.

“After all,” Garrison picked up the argument, “there is a reason they are referred to as the weaker sex. A certain gentleness is required.”

“Please.” Mr. Triplehorn waved away the approaching waiter, whose face was now twisted into sour disdain. “I will say only that I have made a mistake and I apologize. Now, if the three of you would like to stay, I’ll leave instructions that the bill be charged to me.”

“You owe us an explanation,” Vada seethed.

“I owe you nothing besides the lunch to which I invited you.”

“Under false pretenses and with malicious, dare I say, salacious intent,” Garrison added.

“I assure you I meant no harm.”

“Then what did you mean?” Hazel’s voice was reed thin—so far from its usual breezy boldness that Vada felt the last of her reserve begin to crack. “Why bring me here? Why not just write to me? Perhaps if we’d become more familiar, I wouldn’t seem so, so…wrong.”

“All right. If you must know, I came here today hoping to meet a young woman who might be your younger sister.”

“Althea?” Hazel said, her mouth hanging open on the final syllable.

Again, Mr. Triplehorn looked confused. “Marguerite told me she named the child Lisette.”

Marguerite. Mama. She named the child…

Suddenly the innocuous noise of the diners around them—the clinks of the forks, the mild laughter, the rattle of the carted dishes—all
melted to one oppressive roar inside Vada’s head. The burning sensation at the back of her throat spread throughout her body, and it seemed the next breath would incinerate her, so she didn’t take it. She held it in, fearful of bursting, as snippets of long-ago conversations bored their way through the mass of noise. And when the realization hit, horrible in its entirety, all that heat and fire turned to ice.

“Vada, dear, are you all right? You’ve gone white as a ghost.” Garrison’s voice sounded far away, as if coming through a storm. “Now see here, Triplehorn. Just who do you think you are?”

“He knows…” Vada fought the sudden dryness of her mouth. “He knew our mother.”

“It was foolish of me.” Whatever arrogance Mr. Triplehorn had possessed was gone, but Vada wasn’t moved anywhere near to pity. “I loved her very much, and even though she told me the child wasn’t mine—”

“The child? Our Lisette? You think she’s—she’s
yours
?”

“I’ve always wondered—”

“Well, stop.” Vada clutched her napkin in both hands, twisting it like rope. “Stop wondering and go home.”

“I have to see her.”

“You’ve no right to see her.” Garrison’s calm voice offered Vada some measure of warmth.

“I need to know.”

“
I
know,” Hazel said, a shadow of her old self. “You couldn’t possibly be her father. She’s beautiful and funny and—”

“Nearly eighteen.” Although he didn’t state it outright, he was obviously implying a calculation.

“Now see here.” Vada stood, clutching the table lest her legs give way. “You have already caused enough heartache for our family. You took away our mother. If not for you, she would be here—would have been here for all of us, all our lives. She might even still be alive.”

“Ah, Vada.” The sound of her name on Triplehorn’s lips steeled her. “You are as strong as she said you were. She knew you would be fine—”

“Don’t you dare!” Suddenly all the school-yard fights, all the scuffles endured defending her mother’s soiled reputation rose up within her, and it was all Vada could do not to leap across the table and knock him to the ground, no matter what his size. “Don’t you dare talk about our mother; you’re horrible, awful—”

From somewhere behind she felt a restraining hand, but she shook it off, ready to relaunch into her tirade until she heard someone say, “Miss.
Miss
. I must insist—”

It was the troll-like maître d’, looking positively justified at having been called in to moderate this fray.

“You’ll insist nothing,” Hazel said. “Take your hands off of her this minute.” She always had been the one to come to Vada’s aid in a fight, and soon Vada’s arm was free, and the maître d’ took two steps back.

“Come on, girls.” Garrison stood and walked to stand between the two sisters. “We’ve nothing more to say here.”

“Yes, we do.” Vada separated herself and walked around the table, leaning closer and closer to Mr. Triplehorn. “You stay away from our home. You stay away from our sister. Do you understand?”

The man refused to so much as flinch, and when Vada stood straight again, he said, “I will be here for the remainder of the week.” He looked around Vada to the maître d’. “I believe I’ll be luncheoning alone after all.”

Vada landed on the sidewalk outside the hotel with all the force of having been thrown there. Nothing about the ground seemed capable of
supporting her weight, and it wasn’t until Garrison’s arm steadied her that she felt confident to stand.

“I’ll get us a cab.” He spoke low into her ear.

She tore herself from his embrace and spun around to find Hazel and grasped her hand. “We’ll walk.” She bent low, ready to shoulder her way through the crowd. Hazel was dead weight behind her—a sullen piece of furniture to be carted across the pavement.

“Hazel, come on!”

“It’s twenty blocks. I’ll never make it in these shoes.”

Vada looked at the narrow kidskin slippers peeking out beneath Hazel’s skirt. A far cry from her usual, practical flat-heeled boot, these had a dainty one-inch heel that quivered in protest beneath the foot spilling over it.

“Those are Lisette’s shoes.”

“I know, but they’re so much prettier than any I have, and I just wanted—”

For the first time since that horrible afternoon began, Hazel’s eyes filled with tears, and she crumpled, sobbing into Vada’s shoulder. “How could I be so stupid?” She punctuated each word with a deep, wet gasp. “I’ve never been so…so…embarrassed. He looked at me like I was a monster.”

The passersby on the street slowed to gawk at the emotional scene unfolding on the sidewalk, and whatever tendrils of pity Vada felt for Hazel withered with each footstep, to be replaced with a branching stem of anger.

“Now you just get yourself together, Hazel Allenhouse.” She shook loose and left her sister to stand alone, fumbling for her handkerchief. “You don’t have any right to cry about this now. It has nothing to do with you. Try to think about Doc for a minute, what this’ll do to him if he finds out. And Lisette…”

“You don’t—certainly he couldn’t be—”

“I don’t know.” Vada burned with shame at the thought of it. “I just hope he stays away.”

“We have to tell Doc.”

“No, we don’t. We don’t have to tell him anything. It’s best we keep it to ourselves.”

“But what if Mr. Triplehorn—”

“We’ve enough demons of our own to worry about, Hazel, without bothering our heads about what Mr. Triplehorn might do.”

“Here we are, ladies.” Garrison stood holding the door open to a black horse-drawn cab. He bowed like a footman in a fairy tale.

It was a scene that spelled escape, and suddenly Vada was more than ready to take it. She allowed Garrison to take her hand, but still she lingered on the little extended step. “Are you sure? I hate to cost you the cab fare.”

“Trust me, darling.” He brought her fingers to his lips for a quick kiss. “It’s nothing compared to the price of our abandoned lunch.”

Vada offered a weak smile and settled inside, scooting across the seat to make room for Hazel. Garrison folded up the steps, climbed in, and shut the door, signaling the driver to commence.

For a while the only sound inside the cab came from the sounds outside the cab—the rhythmic clomp of the horse’s hooves, multiplied a hundred times over, accompanied by the shouts of all those drivers trying to maneuver through the streets. Sometimes the song of a street vendor rang out, and Vada’s stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten yet that day.

She looked out the window and saw the man with a dozen hot pretzels stacked on a stick and a green grocer’s display of fresh fruit. No doubt Molly had prepared a lovely dinner, but they had already told her not to
expect them, and to show up unexpectedly was sure to set Molly in a fiery temper.

But in just that minute, the pang of hunger twisted, and she couldn’t imagine taking even a bite to fill it.

“I’m starving,” Hazel said, pouting.

“Just shut up.” They weren’t children after all.

“Now, Vada…” It was the voice Garrison used every time it seemed her mouth was about to run her into trouble. Sometimes she resented the stifling, but now—poised at the edge of falling to a real fight—she surrendered to the gentle rein and came to a shuddering verbal halt.

For the first time since they got in the cab, she looked at him. He offered her a warm smile through the dim light until the cab hit a jarring bump sending him sideways in his seat. When he righted himself again, his long legs stretched farther across the width between them, and she could feel the boniness of his knees through her skirt. As usual, when some unforeseen event brought them into such close physical contact, he begged her pardon and resumed his unnaturally erect posture in his seat.

That was Garrison, gallant and proper to the extreme. Usually she basked in his chivalry. But right now she inwardly cringed at his decorum. Given the circumstances of the afternoon, had she somehow been tainted by Mr. Triplehorn’s revelation?

“Oh, Garrison.” She covered her face with her hands. “What you must think of us.”

“It certainly was…enlightening.”

“I guess I never told you about our mother.”

“You told me she died.”

“She did,” Hazel said.

“But she actually left us before that.”

“So, she left with this Triplehorn fellow?”

“I don’t know,” Vada said, more to herself than to him. “We woke up one morning when Lissy was just a baby, and she was gone. Maybe she left both of them.”

Garrison brought his hand to his chin and gazed at a point just above the sisters’ heads. “Now why would they run off and leave their baby?”

“Lissy isn’t
their
baby,” Vada said.

“She doesn’t exactly look like the rest of us,” Hazel muttered.

“That’s because we look like our mother.” Vada didn’t often allow herself to dredge up painful memories, but from the moment Mr. Triplehorn said her mother’s name, she’d been haunted by that final image of the woman, sitting in the rocking chair next to her marriage bed, knowing her lover waited in the carriage on the street.

“We might look like her,” Hazel shifted in her seat, “but Lisette certainly
behaves
like her. All those boys. Hanging off the arm of one with another following behind like a puppy. Next day, same scene, different boys. Both of them, no more morals than a couple of cats.”

“Don’t talk about our sister that way,” Vada said. “Besides, how much better are you, running down strangers who answer a newspaper advertisement?”

“There’s no comparison—”

“You have five pictures pinned to that armoire door—”