Words Unspoken (12 page)

Time! My goodness, what that daughter had become with time! A smile settled onto his face.

The doorbell rang, and he called out to Annie, “I’ll get it, honey.”

Well, that was good. The girl was prompt, despite the depression, the fear.

Ev opened the door, still holding a silver knife in one hand, a smile already on his face. He felt happy to see Lissa again, felt pleased, glad she could meet Annie.

“Hello, Mr. MacAllister,” she greeted him.

She had on a casual black and white dress, loose and long. She wore her dark brown hair down—loose and long also—reaching past her shoulders. She had bangles on her tiny wrists, and she was wearing sandals, pretty black sandals. His eyes stopped there, focused on them for way too long. He didn’t even recall later if he had said hello or not.

The blood rushed to his head; he felt the palpitations that his heart doctor warned against, his mouth dry. Sandals! The smallest detail could still send him spiraling back and back and back. Way too far back in time. Tate.

He needed to call to Annie. How long had he been standing there?

“Mr. MacAllister? Are you all right?”

He let out a breath, met her eyes, shook his head. “Yes, yes. Come in, Lissa. So nice to see you. Come in, come in.” Trying to calm his heart, he called out, “Annie, our friend is here! Come meet her!”

Annie hurried to the front door in her apron and blue jeans, wiped a stray wisp of hair from her glistening face, and held out a hand. “Hello, dear. I’m Annie.”

No-nonsense Annie had a forceful handshake that always took guests by surprise. Lissa’s raised eyebrows told Ev that she was no exception.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. MacAllister. Thank you for inviting me over.”

“It’s Annie. Only Annie. You can call him whatever you want,” she said, winking, “but I’m Annie.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Come on in the kitchen, and I’ll get you something to drink. Hot enough for you? They say fall won’t arrive for another three weeks. You like lemonade? Or iced tea?”

Ev watched them disappear into the kitchen and busied himself arranging the linen napkins on the table. He never got it right, but tonight it gave him time to recuperate.

For half a second Lissa
was
Tate, standing there in those silly black sandals, the ones Mother refused to buy. And so Tate had stolen them. He had pushed Tate’s voice so far away in the past years he didn’t hear her anymore, and honestly life was so much easier like that. He simply could not live with the voice of his dead sister whispering all the time.

Healing, grieving, yes, these things he had done almost thirty-five years ago. The anger was gone, and good had come from the tragedy. Years and years of good.

“What are you up to, Lord?” he whispered as he placed the silver knife with the little roses embedded in the handle beside a plate. Thoughts of Tate, though still present, did not interrupt him in the midst of every activity.

Until Lissa Randall had showed up in his life. When that happened, it was as if the Almighty shouted from heaven, “Ev, my boy, there are still a few things on this issue that we need to deal with. It hasn’t been time until now. But now you need to come back to it. For Lissa. For you. For Annie. For the memory of Tate. For your girls.”

The absolute gut-level truth was that he had no desire for God to interrupt him in this way. Ev felt that he had a close, intimate relationship with the Almighty. But going back in the past at this time in his life, with his weak heart and failing eyesight, seemed like sidetracking. Unfortunately, he knew all too well that when he dug his heels in too far, the Almighty had a way of sending him sprawling right down on his face.

“Ev! Mr. MacAllister, are you deaf? We’re waiting for you on the back porch.”

Annie’s voice jostled him back to the present. He observed the table, fit for a queen, and headed through the living room, into the kitchen, and out the back door to where Lissa and Annie were standing, sipping their iced tea.

________

“Annie’s the brains behind our business,” Mr. MacAllister explained while they ate her homemade blueberry pie. “She does all the accounting, chases down the kids who don’t pay, puts ads in the newspaper.”

“Do some kids really not pay?”

“Oh, they never forget for long,” Annie said, wiping the napkin across her face. “What Ev means is that if it weren’t for me, he’d be giving free lessons all year long, and I’d be working at Big Mart as a cashier. Nothing wrong with Big Mart, mind you, but there’s no sense in letting a perfectly legitimate business implode because the instructor can’t do math and is as generous as your shadow is long at sunset. And that’s
not
a compliment, Lissa. He’d give you his suspenders if he weren’t afraid his britches would fall right off.”

Lissa liked this odd couple: Mr. MacAllister and Annie. She knew she’d never be able to call her driving instructor by his first name, but “Annie” she could handle. The MacAllisters must have been quite a pair, she thought, when they were young. Even in jeans and a sleeveless cotton shirt, Annie was elegant. She bustled about like the nurses at Uncle Irvin’s retirement facility, concise, abrupt, efficient. But there was something refined about both of them. Momma had called it “blue blood.” Unpretentious, casual, but blue blood. Lissa could spot it as easily as Mr. MacAllister knew the make of every car in town. She’d been raised around prosperity at the Chattanooga Girls School.

It was almost as if Annie MacAllister tried hard to look ordinary, but she couldn’t. A little round across the middle, thick silver hair, a silver that matched her husband’s, which fell straight and neat on either side of a lovely sculpted face, brown eyes filled with mischief, and a speech that was as blunt as the silver knife by her plate. Lissa studied them carefully during the meal, relaxing into their hospitality like warm buttered rolls in a basket. She wished she could stay here until the heaviness of life lifted, until she could climb into Ole Bessie and drive up and down the steep, curving road to Lookout Mountain at night.

________

Driving Lissa home to East Brow Road took Ev twenty-five minutes. She sat silently beside him in Ole Bessie as he reviewed the evening in his mind. Thank heavens for Annie, animating the dinner conversation with her stories of other students who had failed the test, stories that couldn’t help but make Lissa laugh. Ev had only managed about fifty words the whole evening while Lissa and Annie chatted about everything from Betty Crocker to Limoges china and then switched to a lively discussion on Latin declensions and the Latin Festival Lissa had attended three years ago. No doubt about it, the girl was bright. When she mentioned Herodotus, Ev was tempted to join the conversation. He loved history; he absorbed it. But not tonight. Tate’s history was crowding in.

“I hear voices.”

Lissa’s voice surprised him. She divulged this information in the muggy blackness as a mosquito buzzed in the corner of Ole Bessie’s windshield, as if she were telling Ev that she liked raspberry jam or fried zucchini.

“That’s why it’s hard to drive. I hear voices, and I see images of the wreck. And they won’t go away.”

Ev kept looking out into the moonless evening, concentrating on the white line down the middle of Nickajack Road. Not another car in sight. He felt the slight pull of his lips into a frown, but before he could erase it, Lissa added, “You think I’m crazy?”

He glanced at her and shook his head. “No.” Ole Bessie’s engine purred, filling up the silence between them. He digested the confession. “No. We all hear voices.”

“Really? You think so?”

“Yes, Lissa, I’m sure of it. Different voices, but we all hear them. I used to hear one all the time that said, ‘When are you gonna change jobs and get a respectable career?’ I also heard ‘Be the best, no matter what’ quite a bit—came straight from my dad.”

Her eyes grew wide. “
You
hear voices? You mean you don’t think I’m nuts—schizophrenic or something?”

“If you are, so is the rest of the world. Problem is, you’ve got to learn which voice to listen to and how to shut up the other ones. That’s all.”

“Yeah. I guess that’s basically what my therapist says too. Anyway, I thought I should tell you. I figure you found out about the wreck, and if you’re going to help me, you might as well know the rest. I hear voices. Also …” She hesitated. “Also, my dad and I don’t get along very well right now.”

After Lissa got out of Ole Bessie, waving good-bye and saying “Thank you so much” for the fourth time, Ev drove a short way down the road to another of his favorite haunts: Point Park, where the Union Army had defeated the Confederates in November of 1863. He cut the motor beside the castlelike stone entrance, walked into the park, passed a large monument, and leaned against the railing at the park’s northern tip. Staring down to where the black outline of the Tennessee River snaked its way through Chattanooga at Moccasin Bend, Ev stood there thinking of Tate and Annie and the girls. Thinking far back to an arrogant but broken young man at an evangelistic crusade, closed up in his heart, hearing voices, so many voices, until that gentle whisper had shouted louder than all the other ones.

Come home.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

Ed Clouse was in panic mode, not a very fun thing to wake up to on a Monday morning.

“We are going to get the Green novel out in three months. Three! That means you go into high gear, sales staff. Ads in the papers, contact the reviewers, get the cover drawn up. I’m doing all the editing, as usual, so don’t bother me unless it’s an emergency. I want this book on the bookshelves in the stores a week before Christmas. I want crowds lined up waiting to purchase it, convinced it will be the perfect gift. Is that understood?”

Ten heads nodded a nervous yes—the marketing team, the publicity team, the editorial team. No one said a word, but everyone was thinking exactly what Silvano was:
The boss is cracking up. Has he bothered to look at the fall catalog? We already have thirteen titles—more than ever before—and he wanted these to get heavy promotion.

“Look, I know I’m asking a lot. How many of you were here when we published Miss Green’s last novel, back in ’82?”

Two hands went up, Leah’s and Jim’s.

“That’s what I thought. Most of you don’t remember the results of that campaign, because you weren’t here. That’s why I’ve asked Leah to fill you in on some history.”

Leah, in her plain gray skirt and too-tight blouse, stood. “Miss Green’s 1982 novel was received on June 22 of that year. Edits took one month. Galleys went out in early September, sales teams contacted the stores, and the book was released on December 3. Big Christmas advertising publicity scheme. First printing was 120,000, sold out in a week. By January 15 there were 500,000 copies in print. The book evened out at a million copies, and everyone at the publishing house went home with a big bonus that year.”

She smiled. “It’s a lot of work, but it can be done. We’ll need a big push at Frankfurt in October and at all the smaller trade shows this fall.”

“But you had five months to prepare. If we’re aiming at a before-Christmas release, that’s … that’s twelve weeks max. Sir, that’s impossible.
Publishers Weekly
won’t even look at it.” This came from the top marketing guy.

Ed Clouse boomed, “Listen,
PW
will look, and so will every other reviewer in America. With a name this big, it’ll work.”

“But wouldn’t it be better to take our time, do a really slick job, cover all the bases? Give the book the best possible promo?”

“We will give it the best possible promo. Every parent will be buying this book for their kid’s stocking stuffer. We’ll aim at the high school and college kids—a great read over Christmas break. But it’s got something for parents too. If we get it out just before Christmas, with the right publicity and marketing, it’ll take off. Miss Green’s newest novel will be in the back pocket of every kid in America, just like the first one.”

Ed smiled, and his presence took up the whole room. “Remember, the stats show that every year we put out a Green novel, the staff take home fifteen percent more than their average salary. This time will be no different, I can guarantee you. A little extra work, long hours. It can be done.”

Silvano shook his head. The boss was nuts, but at least things would be moving around here now. He needed to finish editing Frank Blanton’s novel
rapidamente
. He had a lot of work ahead if he was going to introduce the world to Miss S. A. Green before Christmas!

________

Annie slipped onto the porch, wearing one of Ev’s old sweat shirts over her pajamas.

He gave her a smile, took a sip of his coffee, and continued staring out into the sunrise.

“Took you a while to get home last night, boyfriend.”

“Yes, I’m afraid Ole Bessie and I kinda puttered around the back roads.”

Annie sat lightly on his lap and laced her arms around his neck. “She reminds you of Tate, doesn’t she?” she whispered.

Ev swallowed, but the catch remained in his throat. He closed his eyes, gave Annie a squeeze, but could not find any words.