Wanted: Wife (8 page)

“After you,” he said and, spreading the door wide, kicked the suitcase in.

We stepped into a tiny, windowless anteroom, chairs lined against one wall, a counter directly across. Five feet or so behind it another door opened, and out walked who I presumed was hizzoner.

“Andy!” boomed a ruddy, barrel-chested man. He thrust a beefy paw at Andy. “So,” he said, giving me a languid once-over, “
this
is your intended!”

I tried to ignore the objectification and gifted him with my most gratuitous smile. “Good afternoon, Paul,” Andy said. “This is Julie, my fiancée.”

He squinted at me. “Hey. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “On a utility pole, maybe?”

“Haw!” he laughed, snapping his suspenders. He pointed to Andy. “I like her! Last chance before I snatch her up myself!”

Andy set down the other suitcase and shook the mayor’s hand. “Thanks, but I think I’ll keep her. And if you don’t mind, we have to hurry. Betsy’s about to calve.”

His eyes widened and he erupted again, nudging Andy.” So it’s the
cow
, then? Haw! Guess we won’t need the shotgun after all! Come on!”

It’s for the story, it’s for the story,
I kept telling myself, feeling a little ill.

The mayor led us into an office with long windows that looked out on an expanse of tall trees. Between the cab ride and the front steps I had sweated away the afternoon, but thankfully an old Kelvinator window air conditioner chugged away, chilling the room considerably. The mayor shrugged into a jacket and picked up a small leather-bound book.

“Got a witness?” he asked.

“Jinks was supposed to be here,” Andy said, “but he’s with Betsy.”

The mayor thought a moment. “Hold on, I think I got it covered.” He hustled into the next room for the phone. “Lila?” I heard him say, “You want to make ten bucks?”

Andy turned to me. “Do you have something for me?”

I looked at him, mystified. “Like . . .?”

“The agreement,” he crisply replied. “I need it signed before we start.”

It was like a bucket of cold water to the face. The only bigger squish to my romantic notions would be if he’d inspected my teeth. I plucked the contract from my purse and handed it over. “And so do I,” I pointed out. “Right by the ‘X.’”

He gave it a quick perusal. “No changes?”

“Not at the moment, but I’m starting to think of some.”

He arched a brow, suppressing a smile. “Too late.” He signed then handed over my copy, slipping his own into his inner pocket. “Thank you.”

I dropped mine into my purse. Any further commentary was aborted by an elderly woman being shuttled into the room. “Lila is our town archivist,” said the mayor. “She just happened to be in today scanning documents.”

“Pleased to meet you,” she said, shaking each of our hands, her eyes eagle-sharp. She looked to Andy. “Welcome back, young man. Been a few years, eh?”

“Yes, it has, Mrs. DeForest. I hope you’ve been well.”

Her silver brow lifted. “So you remember me, then?”

Andy smiled. “The school librarian? I used to think you knew everything.”

She looked to me and winked, saying
sotto voce
, “And I do, too.”

My spirits lifted immediately.
Now here was a woman who might come in handy
.

The mayor opened the Bible. “Ready?”

My heart raced:
it isn’t too late, you know
. Yet it was, as I had never bailed on a story in my life. Didn’t matter if my hands were shaking or my mouth was dry, or if all the doubts in the world had suddenly been rolled into a boulder and dropped atop my head: I couldn’t quit just as the camera started rolling. So I took a deep breath, plucked a flower from my bouquet, and nipping the stem three-quarters up, I tucked it into Andy’s buttonhole.

He glanced from it to me, and smiled. “We are now.”

“Dearly beloved,” the mayor began.

I’m sure the ceremony was no more original or eventful than the thousands of others performed that day. But having just canceled a Wedding of Epic Proportions, I knew immediately it wasn’t the Vera Wang gown or Armani tux, an art museum ceremony or a fancy car to an even fancier reception, or even the transcendent honeymoon in Bhutan that made that ceremony any more significant than this one. In fact, the wedding itself hardly had anything to do with it at all. It was the bald fact that
I’d be married
. I looked into Andy’s clear, blue eyes.
Married!
To a man I hardly knew!

My heart stuck in my throat.
Holy shamoly
.

“. . . as long as you both shall live?” the mayor asked me.

I was long past rational thought. So I simply answered, “I will.”

Just as Andy answered, “I will,” not a half-minute later.

“The rings?” the mayor asked.

I looked to my about-to-be husband. “I don’t think we—”

“Here,” Andy said, his hand suddenly lifting mine.

It was the strangest thing, and I thought I knew strange pretty well. But when Andy touched me for the very first time, laying my palm flat upon his and sliding on a carved platinum band, tiny diamonds here and there among the filigree, I felt a connection to something so complex I knew it would take everything in me to even scratch the surface.

The sensation was only compounded when he said, “It was my grandmother’s.”

I was beyond surprised, by the ring, and by the man before me. “And . . . yours?”

His mouth crooked. “Unfortunately, my grandfather never wore one.”

The mayor closed his Bible, beaming. “With the powers invested in me by the state of New Jersey, I now pronounce you husband and wife. Andy—kiss your bride!”

“With pleasure,” he said, leaning in.

With his lips slightly parted, he brushed my own in a silky pass, ending with the tiniest of nips to the corner of my mouth. It was quick and chaste yet undeniably possessive. “Mrs. Devine,” he said softly, lifting my hand to kiss it.

I felt a little swoony, not even realizing I had closed my eyes.
Mrs. Devine
. . . I thought . . .
Mrs. Devine
. Then all at once my breath caught. Holy crap—
Mrs. Devine!

A second later I saw myself signing the license, shaking Mrs. DeForest’s and the mayor’s hands, and then being shuttled out the door. “Thanks, Paul, Mrs. DeForest,” Andy said, leaving a hundred dollar bill on the counter. He hefted my suitcases. “Have dinner on me.”

“Wait!” Mrs. DeForest cried. She reached into her purse, pulling out a camera. “You have to remember the day!”

Andy leaned into me and she snapped a picture, then he grabbed the suitcases and me, and we ran toward the door.

“Goodbye!” Andy said.

“Thanks!” the mayor called after us. “And congratulations you two!”

“To the bride it’s always ‘good luck,’” Mrs. DeForest corrected him. “’Congratulations are for the groom. After all, it’s he who’s won her.”

That simple statement was so pregnant with implications that my head fairly spun, but now wasn’t the time for analysis—especially with Andy tossing my suitcases in the back of his truck and stuffing me into the passenger seat. “Maybe you should call Jinks and see how he’s doing,” I said.

“Can’t,” said Andy, climbing in. He started the truck; it exploded to life with a rattle and a chug. “No phone.”

“Oh.” I reached into my purse, producing my BlackBerry. “You can use mine.”

“Wouldn’t matter.” He looked over his shoulder then pulled out in a cloud of dust. “There’s no service out there.”

“No service?” I looked at my BlackBerry, checking my texts. Two from Denny, one saying, YOU CHAINED YET? “My phone’s working.”

Andy looked to me, smiling a bit insularly. “If you’re going to use it, use it quickly. It’s about to be useless.” Then he turned off Main to Forge Road.

Almost instantly, clearings and houses gave way to piney woods and, within five hundred feet, macadam bumped into gravel. Not far after that, the road seemed to lose all sense of civilization as it turned into firmly-tamped sugar sand. Overhead the foliage grew denser from a clumping of tall trees, and I took in their clean scent, their soaring trunks rising out of a shallow stream of water.

“Smells like my grandmother’s cedar chest,” I said, as we thumped over a short wooden bridge.

“That’s because they’re cedar trees. And if her chest was made in Philadelphia, the wood probably came out of a bog like this.”

As the cedar stand thickened, the afternoon dimmed. The bog was alive with gnats and dragonflies and a thousand whirling, zipping, clicking things. The air was cooler yet fragrantly lush. Soon the road narrowed and the woods opened up, pitch pines and scrub oaks replacing the tall cedars. The sparse undergrowth became a mix of bushes and ferns, laurel clumping near the edges. Even though the Pine Barrens had always loomed on Philadelphia’s periphery, I had never taken them for much more than a green filter on the way to the Jersey Shore. Although, once I had done a story on naturalist Howard P. Boyd, author of the definitive
A Field Guide to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey
(tucked into my suitcase, of course), and de facto dean of Pine Barrens ecology. The night before I had crammed like I hadn’t done since my college finals. But it was one thing seeing the forest from the pages of a book or as one zips down Route 72 at 65 mph. It was quite another bouncing inside it at no more than twenty per.

I stuck my hand out the window and let it ride the current, near enough to the trees to flutter a pine swag, when we passed four crumbling chimney stacks rising out of a clearing.

“That used to be a tavern,” he said, pointing toward it. “My family ran it when this trail was a post road to Camden.”

“Back when people actually wanted to get to Camden,” I said.

“Some still do, but not from there.” He made a right onto an even narrower trail. “A friend of mine said some folks from Trenton were sniffing around last month—more than likely from the State Museum, looking for relics.”

“This friend of yours,” I ventured, “does he live in the woods, too?” “Of course. He works for the fire service—
merde!”
The truck jangled as it hit a rut. “Sorry about that. Anyway, he works the tower over at Snakes Ridge. He told me we had a big one near there two years ago. Burned for a week and nearly four thousand acres. Ray’s the one who spotted it. Lightning.” He shrugged. “What’re you going to do?”

“Put it out, I’d imagine.”

Again, that insular smile. “That’s the general consensus.”

Suddenly the air changed. It felt denser, even amid all the humidity, yet it took on a spicy freshness. A slight breeze kicked up. “How far out of town will we be?”

He looked at me, his hair catching the breeze. “Little over five miles, although I prefer to think of it as five miles
in
.”

I took a deep breath, settling my hands in my lap.

He reached over, taking one. “Hell of a wedding, I know. But I’ll make it up to you, I promise. How are you doing otherwise?”

His hand was warm, his thumb stroking the inside of my palm. “I’m okay.”

“Glad to hear it.” He gave my hand a squeeze then abruptly let go, twisting the wheel into a sharp right. The over-reaching bushes scraped the side of the truck, the dense foliage overhead closing around us like a tunnel. I glanced to my hand, still warm from Andy’s touch and my heart raced, my throat harboring the occasional gulp. Overcome by exploding nature, my senses worked overtime.

A couple hundred more feet and the trail opened up into a large, weedy clearing and a small one story wooden house sorely in need of paint, a long barn with more than a few broken windows, several vehicles of questionable operation, an overgrown garden, and to the left, a dock leading to a wide expanse of lake, tall pines rimming it. A moment later, Jinks barreled out of the shed.

“Jesus, Andy—get in here! I think something’s wrong with Betsy!”

Andy yanked off his jacket. “Just what I wanted to hear.”

“Ever done this before?” I asked.

“No, but I’ve been reading a book.” He grabbed my hand. “Come on.”

We tore from the truck as a lamentable
moooo
emanated from inside. Andy threw back the door and there was Betsy, on her belly on a bed of hay, her soft-brown head thrashing side to side. The stalled barn was rife with the scents of manure and alfalfa, tempered somewhat by the opened windows and the fecund odor of bovine birth. Andy whipped his tie off and tossed it to me, rolling his sleeves as he hurried toward the stall.

“She can’t push it out!” Jinks said, frantic, a book in his hand. “She’s been like this since you left, yelling and mooing.”

“Damn,” he said, squatting to get a better look. The heifer’s distended belly rippled in a mohair wave, her swollen vulva dripping and contracting. I clamped my hands around the rim of the stall, alternately appalled and fascinated.

“I guess the water’s broken,” Andy said to Uncle Jinks. “Did you see a hoof?”

“Yeah,” he answered, but it was pointing up. And according to this book . . .” He tapped a page, “it’s supposed to be facing down.”

“Like in a diving position,” Andy said. He looked to Jinks, his brow furrowed. “Damn.”

“What?” I said. “What’s that mean?”

Jinks closed the book. “Means someone’s gotta reach inside Betsy here and turn her calf around.”

“What!” I cried. “Call a vet or something!”

Again, Andy’s insular smile. “She might be dead by then. Or her calf.” He pushed a sleeve up over his bicep and loosed a couple buttons of his shirt, his chin jutting toward the shelf across. “Julie, get me that bottle of baby oil over there, please?”

I darted to it, a heel squishing into something I hoped wasn’t what I figured.

He held out his arm. “If you don’t mind, squirt some on me.” When I did, he slathered it up and down his forearm, flexing his hand as the heifer let go with a
moooo,
just pitiful enough to make us all shiver.

“Holy cats . . .” Jinks groaned, “you’re really gonna stick your arm up there?”

“You have a better idea?” Andy said briskly. He swiveled around and dropped to his knees, his muscled arm slick and gleaming in the late afternoon sun. “Here goes,” he said, and taking a deep breath, he slowly slid his hand into the cow’s vulva. She screamed.