Dust

by Eva Marie Everson

  Westley leaned toward me. “Come here,” he said, his voice low and throaty.

  My lips met his, our kiss so tender I believed the purity of it would kill me before we broke apart. And, when we did, I ran my tongue across my lips, tasting him … his cigarette … the leftover tanginess of wine and food. “Come here,” he said again, this time opening his arms to me. I slid out of my chair and went to him, sitting in his lap, draping my legs over the hard, wide arm of his chair. Westley took a final draw from his cigarette, then strained to toss it toward the fire.

  “Here,” I said, taking it from him and bringing it to my own lips. I’d never smoked before, but tonight I felt grown up enough to try. Besides, I reasoned, there was a first time for everything and tonight seemed so perfect for acting more adult than I truly was. Then again, there were so many things I’d never done before and so many things I wanted to try. Especially tonight—

  “No,” Westley said, removing the cigarette from between my fingers and flicking it toward the fire where it landed dead center. “I don’t want you to smoke.”

  I stroked his jawline with my fingertips, cognizant of a bravado I’d never known before, most likely brought about by the day, the night, and the wine. “Why not?” I asked, truly wondering. “You do.”

  “Nasty habit. I need to quit, and you don’t need to start.”

  I kissed his chin lightly, then laid my head on his shoulder, again closing my eyes. “When did you start? How old were you?”

  His chest lifted then fell as if it were collapsing, causing me to place my hand against the warmth of it for assuredness. The rhythmic beat of Westley’s heart warmed me, and I spread my fingertips as my lips pressed against his Adam’s apple. “Hmm?” I asked, truly wanting to know.

  “Twelve.”

  My head came up. “Twelve?”

  He smiled and my eyes found his—sleepy but content. “Put your head back,” he told me, and I did as I was told, trying to imagine him on the cusp of adolescence, trying his first cigarette.

  An odd thought crossed my mind: I would have been all of four years old. What a difference growing up makes when it comes to okaying relationships.

  “I was twelve when I smoked my first cigarette,” he continued. “I didn’t really start until I was probably sixteen. Seventeen.”

  “You really were a daredevil, weren’t you? Always pushing the envelope. Taking risks.” I waited to see if he would answer, and when he didn’t, I said, “What was the last truly crazy thing you did?”

  He chuckled. “I asked you to marry me.”

  I slapped my hand against his chest, even as laughter rumbled within my own. “I love you so much.” The words came as a whisper. A moan to my own ears. A begging and a longing.

  “Ali,” he said, his voice as strained as my whole body felt. “I need you to listen to me because I have something to tell you.”

  I nodded, wondering. Was this it? Was he finally going to confide in me? Tell me that thing he shared with Paul and DiAnn?

  “Have you thought about where we’ll live after we marry?”

  I brought my head up again. “Not really. But I figured we’d talk about it sooner or later . . .”

  Westley gently pushed my head to where it had been before. “I want you to do something for me. Okay?”

  “Anything.”

  “I want you to think about living here.”

  My brow furrowed. “Here?” That certainly hadn’t been in my plans. Renting a house in Bynum until we could build one of our own, perhaps. I was even willing to live with his mother and father—for certain not mine—for a season. His was the large bedroom off the kitchen—probably at one time serving as the maid’s quarters. With its own access to the kitchen and its own bath, it could suffice. But move across the state? Would we live— “With Paul and DiAnn?”

  He kissed my forehead. “No, sweetheart. Here. In Baxter. Actually, not exactly here. There’s a town—about a stone’s throw from here—Odenville. We passed through it, remember? It’s larger than Baxter, but not by too much, so don’t be concerned about going from such a small town to a larger one. DiAnn’s grandmother lives there. She—she owns a string of pharmacies on this side of the state and she’s offered me a job at the one there.”

  I brought my head up again; this time he didn’t stop me. That was it? The thing he couldn’t keep away from me forever? “Westley,” I breathed out his name as though it were a prayer. “Live all the way over here? Away from Mama and Daddy?” Since the night of our engagement, I’d imagined my life as a young married woman. I’d work each weekday at the shop, stopping by my parents’—my childhood home—for a brief visit on some afternoons, then heading to our home, once we had one, to cook dinner. Which was, of course, something I hardly knew how to do. I could learn to do, yes. But leaving Bynum? Abandoning my preconceived notions of what happily-ever-after looked like?

  His hand slid up my throat, cupping my jaw, his fingers pressing into the back of my scalp. “Ali,” he said simply, his eyes never leaving mine. “I can make so much more money here. We’ll have a house like the one behind us. Like Paul and DiAnn’s. And we can drive over here on weekends.” He cast a glance toward the lake, then back to me. “Go boating. Eat out. Sit around bonfires all the time. Whenever you want. Go back to Bynum for visits. Whenever you want.”

  I couldn’t think. Not with him so close. Not with his fingers massaging me and his eyes and lips nearly pleading. I couldn’t— “This is something you really want …”

  “For you, Ali. For us. For our future and the future of our children. Odenville is a wonderful place. Paul and Heather and I used to hang out there all the time when we were kids. At DiAnn’s grandmother’s. And, I know that you’ll love it. In fact, I promise that you will.”

  I would love it. That went without saying. The one place I swore I never wanted to even visit in my whole life was the peat-filled wetlands of the Okefenokee Swamp, but that would be paradise as long as the boat ride included Westley. Still, there were so many questions. “How long have you known?”

  “DiAnn called me this past week. After I’d asked you to come here, so I don’t want you to think—She’d visited her grandmother and …” His voice trailed away in anticipation of my next question.

  “Is that where you went this afternoon? To see her grandmother?”

  Despite the night’s drape around us, I noticed when his face darkened. “No. I told you where I went. But we are supposed to stop in Odenville tomorrow on our way back to Bynum. To see Miss Justine. And to look around a bit.”

  I tried to conjure it up, to recall the town we’d passed through before arriving in Baxter. Charming, yes. With more buildings than I was accustomed to. A wide main street lined with imposing houses on either side, fat columns holding up balconies secured by elaborate wrought iron railings. Would we live in a house like that? For certain my mother would be over the moon at that thought, but my father … what would he say?

  I knew the answer—without question, he’d just want his little girl to be happy.

  “Ali?” Westley whispered my name as his hand slid down my sleeve, sending a warm chill down the length of my legs. He tucked it then beneath the opening of my coat until his fingers found the tender flesh of my waist, moving only as far as my father would approve. Whether I wanted him to or not, Westley was sticking to the promise he’d given Daddy. And, if he could be trusted with me now, in this moment where every fiber of my being wanted him as surely as every fiber of his being wanted me, then I knew he could be trusted to take care of me once we married. Once we lived away from all I’d ever known my whole life. Once I’d been dropped into the period of a giant question mark.

  “Yes,” I said then, forcing a strength I was nearly uncertain of into my voice. “Westley, I’ll go anywhere you want me to go and I promise you, I’ll be happy there.” My arms slid around his neck until he squeezed my body against him—an awkward imprisonment, but beyond anything I ever wanted to be released from. “As
long as I’m with you,” I moaned. “Oh, God, Westley. I love you so much.”

  We loaded up the car, said good-bye to Paul and DiAnn around eleven thirty the next morning, then pointed the car, top down, toward Odenville, Georgia—a place I reckoned I’d soon enough call home. Westley held my hand during the half-hour drive, smiled at me occasionally, but said little.

  “Mind if I turn on the radio?” I asked when we were halfway there.

  “Not a bit,” he said.

  I leaned over, fiddled with the dial until I heard a song I recognized. I smiled at Westley, my hair whipping around my face. “‘Dust in the Wind,’” I said. “I love this song.”

  “Kansas. I saw them in concert once,” he said.

  “Did you?”

  “Yep.”

  And then we drew quiet, listening to the haunting melody, both of us growing pensive by the lyrics. “Do you think that’s true?” I asked him when the song had faded to a commercial for a local plumbing company.

  “Do I think what’s true?”

  “That all we are is dust in the wind?”

  “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

  I feigned a cough. “What?”

  “It’s from the Book of Genesis.”

  I turned toward him, shifting completely. “I know that. I just—I never heard you quote a single verse of Scripture.”

  Westley threw back his head and laughed. “You think I don’t listen when I’m in church?”

  I shrugged. “I mean … nothing personal or anything, Westley, but you don’t strike me as the type.”

  He grew sober. “The type to what?”

  “You know … think about things like dust to dust. Mr. Daredevil and all that.”

  Westley raised his chin. “We’re almost in town.”

  The car slowed and I turned to face the front. “I need to do something with my hair,” I said. “Before I meet DiAnn’s grandmother.”

  “You look fine.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  We’d come to the outskirts of town, the place where crop fields gave way to low-rise buildings. A service station. A small grocery store. A couple of houses in need of repair with lawns in need of fertilizing. “I’ll pull in here,” Westley said, indicating the service station. “Do you need to go in?”

  I took one look at the building—white brick that hadn’t seen a hose or even a shower of rain in who knew how long. Single-pane windows looking into the office, cloudy with prints; the painted-white concrete black with oil. The bay doors had been shoved up and appeared to be hanging on for dear life.

  “No,” I said, then grabbed my purse from the floorboard. “Not even if my bladder was about to bust.” I dug around until I found a brush, a tube of flavored lip gloss, and then flipped the visor to reveal the mirror.

  “See?” Westley said. “You look fine.”

  I shook my head. “I’m hideous,” I said, pulling the brush through my hair as if it had done something wrong.

  “Come on now,” he said to me, then craned his neck to call to one of the grease monkeys who’d stepped away from the bay where a car had been raised. “We’re good,” he said with a wave of his hand. “My fiancée just needed a moment.”

  “All right,” the man said. “No problem.”

  I pause, watching him return to the elevated car. “I can’t go meet DiAnn’s grandmother looking like a Raggedy Ann doll, Wes.” His low chuckle earned my attention. “What?”

  “You called me Wes. That’s a first.”

  “Well, you call me Ali …”

  He reached over and pinched my chin. “You’re a mess, you know that?”

  I sighed. “I just want to impress her.” I flipped the visor and looked at him. “I don’t even know her name.”

  “Mrs. Knight. I told you that last night.”

  Heat rose from my belly. “I can hardly be expected to remember the details of last night,” I said. For one, after my final declaration of love, Westley had kissed me so long and so hard I may have possibly lost brain cells, leaving them scattered with the ashes along the firepit. And for another, I’d never had more than a glass of wine in my life … until last night, when I’d consumed close to three. Between the alcohol and the kisses and the headiness that comes from days like that, my whole body had gone languid. My brain to mush. I looked up. “Looks like rain.”

  “I’ll raise the top.”

  I waited until it clicked into place to ask, “And she’s nice?”

  Westley leaned over and kissed my cheek. “You’ll adore her.”

  Chapter Ten

  I’d never seen anything like it, this palace Justine Knight called home.

  Justine. Miss Justine, as I came to call her. Which was also what the maid who answered the door called her.

  A house with a maid. The full-time, dressed-in-a-uniform kind that I knew about from the movies and television, and from a handful of books but had never experienced firsthand. The kind that came once a week, yes. Those I knew. But not this.

  The woman who answered the door at Justine Knight’s house was something else entirely. Black cheeks overly blushed but flawless, hair styled in soft curls around her face, apron strings pulled a little too tight around an ample but not large middle, and an aura that let you know she may not be in charge, but she was surely second-in-command.

  “I reckon y’all are the ones here to have lunch with Miss Justine,” she said not two seconds after one of the stained glass double doors at the top of the wide steps jerked open. She peered up at the sky. “Come on in before it goes to raining. I ’spect it might any minute now.”

  Westley placed his hand on the small of my back. “I’m Westley Houser and this is Miss Allison Middleton,” he said, his voice taking on a formality I’d never heard, much less expected, from him. “And, yes, Mrs. Knight is expecting us.”

  “Well, y’all right on time, too. And if you know Miss Justine, you know she don’t like folks arriving late or unannounced.” When she stepped back, Westley all but pushed me into a foyer I was willing to bet I could fit my entire house in. One that was, for sure, beyond anything I’d ever expected to see. A floor of black marble swirled and feathered in white. A massive table sitting dead center hosting a Chinese vase filled with fresh, long-stemmed flowers. Overhead, a chandelier dripped crystals of various size, their prisms shooting in all directions. To the right, a curving staircase, carpeted in red, swept to the second floor. And from everywhere, it seemed, light spilled over and through, shining upon an opulence I’d never known.

  A quick catch of my breath and Westley’s hand went to my elbow and squeezed. “Easy,” he whispered.

  The uniformed maid, who I guessed to be in her thirties, clasped the wrist of one hand with the other. “Miss Justine said take y’all on to the back.”

  “Thank you,” Westley said for the both of us, which was good because, had I attempted to speak, I believe only a squeak would have come out.

  We followed the sound of nylons swishing in the cavernous room. I looked up at Westley, who squeezed my elbow again. If he meant this to comfort me, it wasn’t working. “Westley,” I mouthed, more a plea to “let’s turn around and just go home” than anything.

  “There you are,” a low, raspy voice said from the back where a sunroom stretched across the length of the house.

  “Right on time, Miss Justine,” the maid said as she stepped to one side, approval thick on her tongue. “Jus’ like you like it.”

  I felt my mouth go slack at the sight of the woman who owned such grandeur. I had to remind myself that she was DiAnn’s grandmother. And that DiAnn had come from … this. Played inside the papered walls and among the imported furniture and thick wool carpets.

  Justine Knight stood no more than five feet tall—five-foot-five if one counted the teased red hair and high-heeled shoes—and she held on to the petite frame of a woman who’d always been small but who had also borne children. Her creamy complexion only made astute, dark ey
es beneath arched brows all the more pronounced. But her smile—crooked and framed by deep red lipstick—warmed me immediately. “Right on time they are, Rose Beth,” she said from beside a round wicker table topped with crisp linen and three place settings of fine china, silver, and crystal. She clapped as her gaze met Westley full-on. “There you are, dear boy. There you are.”

  Westley stepped away from me long enough to wrap the woman in a bear hug, then kissed both of her cheeks. “Look at you,” he said. “You’re as pretty as a picture, not that you haven’t always been.” After she gave him a good-natured swat, he turned to me. “Miss Justine, allow me to introduce my fiancée, Miss Allison Middleton.”

  Justine Knight reached for me with a stack of bracelets jangling from both wrists and most of her fingers decked in gaudy rings. Her scent, rich and heavy, enveloped me as she clasped my hands in hers, and more so as she drew me to her softness. “Land’s sakes, Rose Beth, is she not darling?” She patted my cheek. “And much more child than woman, I’d venture.”

  “Yes’m,” Rose Beth said. I looked back in time to catch a single nod. “I thought so soon as I saw her standing out there on your front stoop.”

  Miss Justine touched Westley’s arm. “Westley, this is Rose Beth. She’s been with me for a couple of years now, haven’t you, Rose Beth?”

  Westley smiled. Nodded. Then turned back to our hostess. “What happened to Olive?”

  “Passed on,” Miss Justine whispered, as if speaking the words loud enough might possibly raise her back from the dead. “Some time back now.”

  “Mm-mmm-mmm,” Rose Beth chimed in. “Sweet Jesus, that one just dropped dead on the spot and went on to her glorious reward. May we all be so blessed.”

  Miss Justine shooed the maid with a wave of her hand. “Now, Rose Beth, let’s get lunch served so Westley and I can have a talk.” She smiled at me. “And you, too, of course, sweet child,” which led me to wonder if I was supposed to go help Rose Beth or if I had been invited to be a part of the conversation between her and Westley.