Wedding Ring (7 page)

“That’s the thing about quilts,” Nancy said. “They’re art you can feel all around you. Not that many paintings you can hug this way.”

“I had a quilt I loved,” Tessa said. “Mom,
you
made it. Remember? Whatever happened to it?”

“Your mama? Your mama never made a quilt in her life,” Helen said.

“I certainly did.” Nancy folded the dahlia quilt with obvious reluctance and piled it on the others. “Am I right, or didn’t you buy blueberry pie at the grocery store, Tessa?”

“I did. Would you like some?” At Nancy’s nod, Tessa turned to her grandmother. “Gram?”

“I want to hear about this so-called quilt your mother made.”

“I’ll be right back,” Tessa said. “No fair telling the story until I’m back.”

Helen could hear her granddaughter rattling around the old kitchen. That room, too, had been nearly cleared out, although there were endless boxes and more boxes to sort through that had been carried to the back porch.

Tessa returned with the pie, and Helen took hers grudgingly. They were acting like a family when they weren’t. They were related by blood, but surely that was different. Not knowing what all this meant made her uneasy.

Nancy took her first bite before she spoke. “It’s good, but nothing like the blueberry pie your grandmother makes,” she told Tessa. “Maybe, if we get a little cooler weather, she’ll try one while we’re here.”

“I don’t cook anymore,” Helen said. “Nobody around here cares if I do or I don’t.”

“You are the orneriest old woman in the Valley,” Nancy said. But she smiled as she did.

“You convince me you
ever
made a quilt, and I’ll make a pie.” Helen settled back to eat her slice.

“Well, I half made it. Does that count?”

“Half?” Tessa said. “It was a whole quilt. I remember it.”

“Tessa’s talking about the old wedding ring quilt,” Nancy told her mother. “You pieced the top, remember? And after I was married, you took me upstairs where you had a pile of tops you hadn’t quilted. You told me to pick out any one I wanted and finish it as a wedding quilt. Then you gave me some fabric you’d sewed together for the backing.”

Helen was sorry this had come up. “Then I guess I only have to make half a pie, don’t I? You only half made a quilt.”

“Wedding ring,” Tessa said to Nancy. “I remember now. You told me that’s what it was called. It was made from dozens of fabrics—”

“Hundreds,” Helen said. “It was mostly a feed-sack quilt. Do you know what that means?”

Tessa shook her head.

“When I was a girl, they sold chicken feed, flour, lots of things in sacks, only the people what made them figured out that if they made the feed sacks pretty, the women would push their men to buy certain ones so they could use them for clothes and quilts and stuff around the house. Bits of that one were made from little scraps my mama and others had saved.”

“Only half a feed-sack quilt then,” Nancy said.

“I think this story is only half told,” Tessa said. “Mom, you don’t sew. I don’t remember a single thing you ever sewed for me as a little girl.”

“Just one of the many ways I failed you?” Nancy said.

Tessa grimaced. “Don’t make more of it than what I said. I’m just wondering whatever possessed you to make a quilt.”

Nancy didn’t reply.

Helen set down her plate. The others were still working on their pie, but she had downed hers like a starving waif. “I’ll tell you why she did it. She was living with your daddy’s folks in Richmond and didn’t know a soul. She was going stir-crazy with nothing to do. In that way, she’s more like me than she thinks. So the next time she and your daddy came back here to visit, I suggested she pick a top and do something besides sit and brood.”

“That’s not exactly what you said.” Nancy set down her plate, too, but her pie had only been nibbled, because she worried about calories. “You said you’d give me a quilt top to finish, but there wasn’t much point in it, since I didn’t know how to do anything that useful.”

“So you took it on a dare?” Tessa asked.

“I suppose.” Nancy looked away, as if she was remembering. “It was a little late for a bridal quilt. Your daddy and I’d been married for months before I took the top. But I chose that one because it was a wedding ring pattern, and that seemed fitting. I didn’t have a frame, but your grandmother gave me a lap hoop.”

“I slept under it as a child. I loved it. I always slept better when you let me have it on my bed.” Tessa paused. “Whatever happened to it? Did it fall apart in the wash the way your dahlia quilt did?”

“No, I learned my lesson about that. I always washed it carefully, but when it started to tear, I brought it back here to your grandmother.” Nancy looked at her mother in question.

“It’s up in the attic,” Helen said. “Somewhere up there.” She remembered exactly where the quilt was. She had packed it away herself, taking care to make sure it was out of sight. She had never really forgotten it, but over the years the memory had dimmed.

She lied now, because it was easier than telling the truth. “I planned to see if I could fix it someday, but I never got around to it.”

“I never made another one,” Nancy said. “I just got too busy, I guess.”

“You just got too important,” Helen picked up her plate and stood.

“That’s really not fair,” Nancy said. “The truth is, I could see right away I was never going to be any good at quilting, not the way you were. I love quilts, only I love looking at them, feeling them, examining the workmanship. I’ll leave the making of them to the artists, like you.”

For once, Helen really didn’t know what to say.

H
elen went upstairs to bed, and Nancy retired to her room to make more phone calls in the long series she had begun that day. Tessa was tired, too, and her neck ached, a problem that had become chronic in the past few years. If Mack hadn’t been coming, she would have gone upstairs with the others. As it was, she went back to the front porch, turning off the light, and settled back in the swing to watch the lightning bugs and wait for her husband.

She sat, hands folded quietly, breathing deeply in hopes it would help her relax. She tilted her head from side to side, then back and forth as her physical therapist had recommended, and after a few minutes the pain in her neck began to ease a little.

Mack would not forget to come or change his mind. In some ways her husband of ten years might be a stranger now, but she did know that he would honor his promise.

In the years since Kayley’s death Mack had struggled, sometimes against incredible odds, not to let anybody down over the smallest things. His clients, who had been well served in the past, were better served now. He worked endless hours looking for any available loophole, any obscure statute, that might fulfill his promises to them. He had taken their cases, he would find them justice.

She understood why Mack acted that way, but she didn’t know how to help him overcome it. Their daughter’s death had changed them both so radically that now the pathways to each other’s heart ended well before the destination. Mack’s guilt was his to bear. She could not find her way there to help.

They hadn’t always been so far apart. Love at first sight was too hackneyed and narrow to describe the instant attraction that had been as much about their souls as their hearts and bodies. Tessa Whitlock and Andrew MacRae had struck immediate sparks that had warmed their lives even as they torched their careers in conservative Richmond. Now, as she waited for him a decade later, she thought about that day.

Twenty-seven-year-old Tessa Whitlock had always believed she had boundless energy, but after almost five years of teaching English at one of Richmond’s inner-city high schools, she was afraid she had nearly drained that well dry.

The first leak had sprung when her mother, distraught at her choice of employment, had approached the school principal before Tessa’s contract had even been signed and begged him to reconsider hiring her daughter. The second had sprung on her first real day as a teacher. The students had taken one look at the privileged Windsor Farms neophyte and figured correctly that she had little to teach them and no way of enforcing the carefully-thought-out rules she had printed on the chalkboard.

She had never given up easily. Tessa strengthened her resolve, sought advice from everyone who would talk to her, and little by little gained control of her classroom while simultaneously gaining a reputation for being fair and nonjudgmental. By the end of the year she could measure success, but the required effort had drained away more of her energy.

Now, a month into her sixth year at the school, her personal resources were dangerously low again.

“Look, Tessa, you know you can’t reach every student, don’t you?” Samantha Johnson perched on the edge of Tessa’s battered desk as she tried to make her point. Like Tessa, Samantha refused to sit at her desk during classes, and by the end of a day of walking in and out of rows as she lectured or quizzed students, her feet were swollen and sore.

Tessa rested her head in her hands. “But James? Not James. He’s got so much promise. He’s such a good kid, and he doesn’t deserve this.”

“Sure he does. You think because he says please and thank you, Miss Whitlock, he’s got the right to bring a weapon into this school? If he blows you or me or one of your other students away with it, what difference are please and thank-you going to make?”

Tessa knew Sam had a point, as she usually did. Samantha Johnson had been teaching here for twelve years, a record for this particular high school. She had taken Tessa under her wing after a short probation period while Sam waited to see if the newly graduated white girl was going to flee to some nice private academy. Sam was middle-aged, comfortably padded and happily adjusted to both. She was not adjusted to bad manners, bad grades or bad study habits, and she made certain that the students who streamed through her classroom didn’t become adjusted to them, either.

Tessa lifted her head. “But it wasn’t James’s gun. I don’t think he even knew Malik had a gun in the backpack when he carried it in for him.”

“You believe that?”

“I’m an incorrigible optimist.”

“You lose that real fast in the neighborhoods these kids live in.” Sam lifted her considerable bulk from the desk. “I’m sorry this happened, too, but don’t beat yourself up over this one, Tessa. Just let go, because there’s not a single thing you can do about it without losing your job. We got enough kids here you can make a real difference with. Just take your pick and have at it.”

They said goodbye, and Tessa waited until her friend was gone before she began tidying the classroom so that the janitor could clean later that afternoon. She couldn’t “let go,” though. Not even a little.

A student named Malik Green had brought a loaded gun to school earlier in the week. Tessa had never been entirely certain why Malik was still enrolled at the high school. He was frequently absent, always in trouble, and the subject of frequent locker and backpack searches. His juvenile record looked like something a profiler might point to as an example of what to watch for when scouting out psychopaths.

The boy had a following, though. He was good-looking, bright and never without a stack of bills in his pocket, fastened casually with a chrome money clip adorned, ironically, by a gold DEA seal. He was always surrounded by a crowd, both male and female, some wannabes, some who rivaled him for making trouble, some who just wanted to bask in his radioactive glow.

Although Malik was not a student of Tessa’s, one member of that latter group was, a young man named James Bates. James was a kid who rarely said much, but he always listened intently to her lectures. His papers held special promise, and several times she had asked him to help her after school as an excuse to find out about his plans for the future. She was sure he ought to be heading for college in two years, and she wanted to help him find the resources he needed to make that happen.

Unfortunately, the day Malik showed up with a 9 mm Glock in his backpack, James happened to be waiting outside for a friend. Malik, who saw two male teachers standing just inside the door and realized he might be searched, asked James to take his pack to their first class while he made a detour to the dean of students’ office. James, flattered to be included in Malik’s world, agreed.

Neither boy knew that the principal had instituted a policy of random backpack searches that week. James, who had never been in any trouble, was one of the students singled out for that honor. When the gun was found, James explained that the backpack belonged to Malik, which was easy enough to prove. But explaining why he had it was a different matter.

Tessa had no qualms about punishing students who disobeyed rules, and bringing a weapon to school was a rule that could never be bent. But the administration had refused to consider the circumstances or James’s unblemished record. He had brought a weapon into the school, and so he was expelled until the following school year, and there were no alternative programs open to him.

Never mind that next year James would be a year older than the other students and less likely to finish high school because of it. Never mind that he would be out on the streets for a year with little to do except explore the scarier side of their fair city. Never mind that he was a United States citizen with all the rights that bestowed.

“Are you Tessa Whitlock?”

Tessa looked up to see a man standing in the doorway. For a moment she forgot to answer. Then she smiled, perhaps the first real smile of the day. “
You’re
Andrew MacRae?”

“Call me Mack.” He walked toward her, hand held out. “I was expecting someone older.”

“So was I.” She took his hand, a warm, solid hand that folded around hers with strength and energy. He had dark curly hair, an athletic body and the tan to go with it, and pale blue eyes that seemed almost silver against his skin.

He was, in one single package, everything she appreciated in a man.

She cocked her head. When she’d called the law firm where Mack was an associate, she had expected to be channeled to someone older and more buttoned-down. She had thought—and still did—that her father had given her the number of Mack’s firm because it was the one most likely to dissuade her from trying to help James. Now she suspected that Billy had made an error.

“You know, you don’t look like a lawyer,” she said, assessing him further just because it was fun.

He examined her as she examined him. “And you don’t look big enough to wrestle these kids to the ground when they need it.”

She noticed that the skin around his eyes crinkled when he smiled, which made him look even younger. “You don’t look like somebody who makes waves for a living.”

“You don’t look like somebody who would think seriously about jeopardizing her job.”

She freed her hand, aware at last that she was still letting him hold it. “I know we’re going to lose. Even after we explore all the legal channels, James will still be out on his ear until next fall. You’ll have a loss on your record, your firm isn’t going to be at all happy with you for taking this case in the first place, and I’ll be looking for work.”

He didn’t reply right away. His eyes searched hers, but he didn’t dispute her words. He spoke at last. “But here’s what we
will
have. James will know that somebody cared enough to fight for him. I’ll be on record for standing up for what’s right. And you…”

She waited. “And me…?” she prompted.

He had a deep, gravelly voice with laughter built into it. “You, Tessa Whitlock, will have my undying devotion.”

She smiled her second smile of the day and watched his face light slowly, too.

Then, and in all the months and years that followed, she had learned that the devotion of a man like Andrew MacRae was worth almost any price.

Tessa’s memories were cut short by angry squawking coming from somewhere behind the back of the house. Years ago her grandmother had constructed an ingenious chicken coop on wheels, and now every time the chickens pecked their way through a portion of the field behind the house and rid it of pesky bugs and weeds, the coop was moved to a new location and the chicken wire fencing was re-erected.

Kayley had been enchanted by Helen’s chickens. They were an odd enough flock. Practical to the bone marrow in most areas of her life, Helen’s chickens were anything but. She was not a woman who had ever indulged in pets. Animals served a purpose, and affection was not one of them. She had a wheelbarrow load of unnamed barn cats who sometimes made their way to the front porch for a nap in the sunshine but never found their way inside. They were neutered and fed, and they killed mice and snakes in exchange. But it was purely a business deal.

Helen’s chickens were as close to pets as anything in her life.

Helen collected unusual varieties, trading with other local farmers when she could. Tessa remembered the names of some of them because Helen had taught Kayley, and Kayley had recited them like a nursery rhyme. The sleek Araucanas, who laid green and blue eggs—Kayley’s favorite. The stately, splendid Brahmas, with their black-and-white feathered shanks and hackles, the black Minorcas with their large red combs and wattles.

Kayley had never been afraid, not even when the chickens pecked at her sandal-clad feet on one memorable excursion into the coop. Blond pigtails flying, she had shooed them away like a veteran 4Her. Helen, not given to praise, had snorted and said that maybe at last somebody else in her sorry family had what it took to be a farmer.

The chicken alarm ended as suddenly as it had begun, and all was quiet again. Tessa stood and walked to the railing, leaning over it as she stared into the darkness. The night was still filled with sounds. Insects whirring and chirping, cows lowing in the distance. The first time Kayley had gone camping, Mack had encouraged her to listen to the night noises. She had renamed the nocturnal symphony “fright noises,” demanding to know where each sound came from and what it was before she was reassured. She had always been more curious than afraid, a child who adjusted quickly and went on about the business of living.

Fitch Crossing brightened perceptibly as a car approached. In a moment Tess could see two distinct headlights; then, as she watched, the car slowed, nearly stopping before the turn into her grandmother’s driveway. She heard the faint drift of music, most likely country, before Mack’s blue Toyota—the fraternal twin to her car—pulled to a stop not far from the porch and the engine was silenced.

She didn’t walk down the steps to greet him. She waited quietly, hands unclenched and still at her sides.

He appeared a moment later, rolling her suitcase behind him along the walkway. She waited until she could speak in a normal tone before she greeted him.

“Mack, I’m up here.”

He lifted the suitcase and carried it up the steps, depositing it against the railing. “What are you doing out here in the dark?”