Sweet Hush

by Deborah Smith

  “I was trying to let you rest,” I said once, deep in those shadows. I had been touching her hair, slowly curling just one red-brown swath between my fingers.

  “You know you really weren’t,” she accused. “I’ve just been waiting for you to admit it.” She straddled me, kissed me, and took me in so fast I couldn’t ask for forgiveness.

  But for the first time in my life, I didn’t need to.

  IF JAKOBEK HAD been following me all his life, then I’d been waiting all my life for him to find me. He rode high and hard and gentle in the rough spots; he knew what a woman’s parts were for, what they liked, what to do. And he knew that sometimes, just the feather touch of a fingertip on the right spot makes a kind of magic. He knew me, on instinct. And I knew him.

  After all my years of angry sex, no sex, and using sex to keep my marriage intact, for once all I had to do was make love. To love a man. Nicholas Jakobek. Jakob. I didn’t know if he would call it love on his side of the bed. I was too afraid to ask him, and maybe he was too afraid to ask me, either. We had enough hope to keep us going, that night, without saying so. I loved him.

  I had known from the day of the bee charming, not needing rhyme or reason, that I did. He bent his head to my breast and took it in his mouth. I called out Jakob as I came, and he followed in a rush of motion, the next second.

  “You got me,” he whispered, as if I’d shot him through the heart.

  Chapter 18

  BY EARLY MORNING WE showered and dressed and touched one more time, then sat on the couch in front of the cold fireplace, separate from each other in the day’s light, knowing we had hard times ahead. Regrets and survival are practical matters to be weighed against common sense. I had to risk everything I loved to save everything I loved. “I’ll talk to Abbie, first,” I told Jakobek wearily. “Then I’ll go home to the Hollow, sit Davis down—just the two of us—and tell him the truth about his father, and our marriage, and Puppy. Beyond that, I have no idea what will happen next.”

  “No one ever does. But you’re doing the right thing.”

  I looked at him dully. “Oh? I’m not being brave, and I’m sure as hell not feeling noble. If I could go on hiding everything, I would. But dear God, it’s better that Davis hear the facts from me than from some reporter.”

  Jakobek nodded. “Let’s go, then.”

  “You’ll talk to Eddie? Help her to help my son understand I never meant any harm by hiding things? I don’t want Eddie upset, either. I don’t want her to think she married into a family of nasty secrets and false honor.”

  “All families have their nasty secrets and false honor. Look at mine. Look at me.”

  “Jakob, there’s nothing nasty or false about you. You’re the most die-hard true man I’ve ever met.”

  He cleared his throat and changed the subject. “I’ll talk to Eddie. She’s a strong girl. Stronger than I realized—stronger than Al and Edwina realized, too. She has a lot of compassion in her. She’ll be all right.” He paused. “They’ll be all right. Her and Davis. They’re good together.”

  “They’re young. They think love conquers all. They’re wrong, but I’m glad they think so.”

  “You’re saying we know better,” Jakobek said, watching me.

  Never read too much into a man’s words—or too little. Analyzing my night with Jakobek would be a job for other nights, maybe the lonely ones, if and when he went on his own lonely way. “Yes,” I said finally, hurting, searching, unsure. “We ought to know better.” He and I traded a long look, then he just nodded. He didn’t know what else to say, and I didn’t know how to listen.

  Neither of us were brave enough to admit loving someone is as simple as saying so.

  Downstairs in the inn’s small lobby—an emotional wonderland of soft Christmas lights and decorations that made me ache with fears I couldn’t describe—I laid our door key on the owner’s desk while Jakobek walked out onto the cold, sunlit veranda, carrying my small overnight bag for me, reaching for the stub of a cigar he always seemed to have on him. I moved slowly, reluctant to get on with the day, staring at the handsome bronze room key, old-fashioned and sturdy. Traditions. Values. I wished I could put a solid lock on my family’s future.

  I heard a soft sound outside, as if a large dog was scuffling in the dried oak leaves that matted along the inn’s front walkway. I glanced dully through the glass panes of the front doors and halted, stunned. Davis stood in the inn’s yard, swaying, his face furious but tear-streaked, one hand still drawn back in a fist. Jakobek stood with his legs braced apart and his back to me. He drew one hand across his mouth. I saw blood on Jakobek’s fingers.

  The breath clotted in my throat. I rushed outside, dropping the coat I held over one arm, flinging myself between Davis and Jakob. Blood smeared Jakobek’s lower lip. He rubbed off another red smear with the pad of his thumb. “You’ve needed to punch me since the first day,” he told Davis.

  Davis stared at him bitterly. “Don’t patronize me. That’s for sleeping with my mother.” He shifted his father’s blue eyes to me, full of fury and pain. “And for helping my mother hide the fact that everything she taught me about love and marriage and my father’s honor is a lie.”

  Dear God, he knew.

  WHILE JAKOBEK AND I had been working out our miseries and strategies and needs the night before, thinking we still controlled the world, that world had gone up in the smoke of sly gossip. The public’s right to know is a respectable ideal some of the time but a sham to cover its greed for trash, most of the time. We’re so used to treating other people’s lives like entertainment that personal privacy doesn’t mean a damn thing and the facts mean even less.

  As Eddie dozed in their bedroom upstairs at the Hollow with a baby magazine on her stomach and yet another firm, pleading letter from her estranged mother in one tear-stained hand, my son had gone downstairs, past one of Lucille’s men posted in the kitchen, to get himself a glass of milk. Jakobek’s unexplained night out didn’t worry him; he had no idea Jakobek had headed for Chattanooga, too.

  His cell phone rang. Eddie had programmed it to play a few bars from God Didn’t Make The Little Green Apples. Davis searched out the song. He’d dumped his phone on a table by the back porch door lined in garland and apple ornaments. It lay among work gloves, a box of custom-made koi food courtesy of the Japanese royalty, and a file folder stuffed with Davis’s meticulous shipping report on the orders of Sweet Hush apples, apple products, and baked apple goods throughout the fall season. One week until Christmas, and we’d broken all our previous sales records.

  Frowning, looking at an apple wall clock where the stem pointed to midnight, he dug the phone out. After several months spent dodging crank calls from strangers and questions from the media, plus guarding new, unlisted numbers the Secret Service set up for every phone in the house except the Sweet Hush Farm business lines, Davis didn’t suffer phone-in fools lightly. “Davis Thackery speaking. My wife’s asleep and it’s midnight. Whoever you are, you’re calling my private number and this better be important.”

  “Mr. Thackery,” a smug male voice said, “This is Haywood Kenney, calling from Chicago, and I’d say that you may want to wake your wife up. Because, Mr. Thackery, I’m about to tell you a story about her in-laws that she might want to comment on before I put it on the air, nationwide, in the morning. I certainly hope so.”

  And my son could only stand there, listening in speechless horror, as the lurid details of his father’s life spilled out. When Kenney told him Puppy was his half-sister, Davis said, “I have to go,” and laid the phone down, and turned to find Eddie behind him, floating like a soft, pregnant vision in a long flannel nightgown with tiny apples on it, something I’d given her. She stared at him anxiously. “Who’s calling? Is everything all right?”

  My strong, grown son couldn’t bring himself to answer. He sat down in a chair his father had bu
ilt from apple wood and I’d proudly carved so apples spilled across the lattice of the back—the fruit of his parents’ roughly partnered hands—and he put his head in his own hands, and he cried.

  JAKOBEK STOOD THERE IN Chattanooga with blood on his mouth, one hand on my shoulder, the other on my son’s—who let him offer silent comfort that way, now that blood had been shed and his father had been turned into a tainted ghost. “Where’s Eddie?” Jakobek asked quietly.

  “On her way to Washington.” Misery was written in every inch of Davis’s body. “She believes none of this would have happened if she hadn’t married me. She blames herself for the public exposure of my family’s secrets.”

  “Go after your wife,” I said.

  “Believe me, I am. As soon as I get some answers from you.” He swayed. “Did you love Dad? Or was that all just a lie, too?”

  To have your son say something like that to you is a small death inside you. I hugged myself, pulling my heart into a tight, numb block. “It was no lie. I did love him.”

  “You wouldn’t let anyone so much as steal an apple from you, but you let Dad screw other women?”

  “There were years when he reformed, and years when I needed him. And years when we slept on opposite sides of a king-sized bed and never so much as touched by accident. Do you think marriage is simple? Do you think there’s an easy explanation for any of this? Marriage isn’t something you do just because you love someone. Or even if you don’t. Your father and I were never meant to be together, but we became partners. We became parents. We didn’t have to be happy together. We just had to raise a son who could count on us to be there for him. And we did.”

  “You could have told me! There were so many times when I wondered why you didn’t go with him on the race circuit, and why I never saw the two of you hold hands or kiss. I thought you were . . . dignified. God.”

  “Your father wanted you to grow up with two parents in the house just as much as I did. He and Smooch got hurt so badly as children; your father knew how it felt to be a kid with no real home and no parents to depend on. And I knew how that felt, too, in my own way, losing my father young, and then my mother when I was barely grown. Would you have been happier if you’d grown up with divorced parents like half the other kids your age? Would you have been happier growing up with parents who fought in front of you and a father you only visited according to some schedule set by a judge?”

  “There’s a lot more to the issue than that. How could you justify not telling me about Puppy! You would have let me go on not knowing I have a sister. I had a right to know that. She had a right to know I’m her brother.”

  “I made the best decision I could at the time.”

  “Because Dad wanted to raise her but keep her identity secret out of respect for you and me? Because he wanted to take responsibility?” Davis looked desperately hopeful. I hesitated, searching for the right words. That silence gave me away. Davis groaned. “Dammit.”

  “I’m sorry. But I wanted her. And your Uncle Logan wanted her. She’s loved and wanted and she has a good life, Davis, but now she has to be told that Logan isn’t her father and that her real mother gave her up for adoption. Would I do anything different if I could keep her and you from learning about all that? No. I wouldn’t change one damned thing. You turned out fine and god help me, if what I did made you the man you are today, then I can’t swear to you I’d go back and make different choices. Look at you—you’re smart and thoughtful and you know how to love well and you married a great, smart young woman—”

  Davis exploded. “Don’t you understand? Yes, I married Eddie because I love her. Because I wanted the romance my parents had. What am I supposed to tell her now? That everything I based my ideals on was an act you and Dad made up to lie to the rest of the world—including me?”

  “You tell her you were raised right. Tell her the whole point was to teach you to expect better than your own parents had. You tell her you married her for love and respect and partnership because we taught you to. Those things are real, Davis. Whether your father and I practiced what we preached or not, what we preached was the truth.” I reached for him. He held up a hand and stepped back. Tears still streaked his face, and mine. I moaned. “Do you really hate me?”

  The wind seemed to rise on those words. Jakobek tightened his grip on my shoulder, warning me. Davis swung a hand at the cold breeze, staggered, then made an ugly, broken sound. “Right now, Mother, I don’t know how I feel about you.”

  He turned and walked away. My legs folded and I sat down on the pathway of the inn, with only Jakobek’s quick hold on my blouse collar to slow me down. I watched my son throw himself into the farm truck he’d driven. I watched him disappear up a Chattanooga street lined with handsome winter trees that seemed to toss their branches in the opposite direction of home.

  Jakobek dropped to his heels beside me. “Comeon. I’ll help you get inside.” He pulled me to my feet and guided me to a small couch near a glittering tree of tiny Victorian angels. I sat down and shut my eyes. “What have I done?”

  Jakobek bent over me, cupped my chin in his hand, and raised my face to his. “You gave your kid a father to love. You gave Puppy a father to love. I never even learned my own old man’s name, but all my life I’ve known he was out there, somewhere, not knowing about me, probably not caring. Trust me. Mothers owe their kids a father. You did the right thing.”

  “If you really believe that, then follow Davis,” I whispered. “Follow him all the way to Washington. Take care of him and Eddie. Try to talk to them. I have to go back to the Hollow and take care of Puppy. But you take care of my son for me, Jakob. Please.”

  “Of course.” He spoke with the quiet sadness of a soldier who knows that what he does best is not pretty. “We’re a team, remember?”

  I continued to sit without moving, dazed. My hard work, ferocious pride and good intentions had failed to keep my family safe. My good stories had been exposed as wishful thinking. My reputation had been peeled away. My legend had been pared down to a rotten core. My son hated me. The flesh of my flesh, hating me.

  “Mrs. Johnson, is everything all right?” the innkeeper asked.

  “My name’s Hush McGillen Thackery,” I answered. “And as soon as I can remember why that still matters, I’m going home.”

  IT TOOK EVERYTHING IN me to leave Hush there, looking the way she did. Yes, I knew she was the kind of woman who could take care of herself and everyone around her. If I’d tried to take care of her any more than I already had, she’d have told me to get out. She only needed one thing from me, and I respected her choice on that: Her son.

  I’d go after him and act as his mother’s voice until he was ready to listen to Hush himself. In the meantime, I’d tell Eddie she’d married for better or worse, that she was no more to blame for what had happened than anybody else was, and that all the gray areas between trust and loneliness were worth the trouble. I was suddenly an expert on love and marriage.

  Not that the realization didn’t come too little, too late, for me.

  AL AND EDWINA were packing to leave Washington for Christmas at one of the Habersham homes belonging to Edwina’s sisters when the news broke about Kenney’s radio program. They got a full briefing from their staff as Kenney went about the business of broadcasting the so-called sordid connection between the President’s new in-laws and the wife of a big-money Jacobs supporter in Tennessee. “Did you have any inkling of this?” Al asked Edwina.

  “I knew Hush was hiding something. I’d done some . . . research. I warned her to tell me the details, so I could help her. She wouldn’t.”

  “Of course she wouldn’t,” Al yelled. “I wouldn’t either, if someone was spying on me! God, I’m ashamed of you!”

  Having Al—her devoted Al, ashamed of her—accomplished a rare thing. Edwina, the killer shark of motherhood and politics, the toughest wom
an I knew except for Hush, burst into tears. Al was so startled he hugged her, but at the same time he said with a no-bullshit-Chicago-butcher’s-son voice—“Some things are going to change around here.”

  And she nodded against his chest.

  I walked into the White House’s family quarters as Al and Edwina met Eddie and Davis at the doors. Edwina’s face was puffy but composed, and she opened her arms wide. “Oh, honey, welcome home. And come here, Davis. It’s so wonderful to see you again. I’m so sorry for everything.”

  She enfolded the very pregnant, very upset Eddie in her arms, then the grim-faced but gallant Davis, while Al frowned and I watched from the sidelines. Davis turned and stared at me like stone. “Mother sent you after me?”

  I nodded. “And I’m not going anywhere until you listen. So get used to me.”

  Eddie protested in a soft voice, “Nicky, this is one problem you can’t solve by guarding us.”

  AT THE HOLLOW, in Dalyrimple, and all through Chocinaw County, news of Haywood Kenney’s radio show spread like a fast infection. Smooch was the first on my doorstep, running into the house, her dark hair a wild jumble, a fat blue ski jacket wrapped around her sweater and jeans like a bulky shawl. “We’ll sue that bastard for lying about my brother that way! I’m calling a lawyer! Who does he think he is—and where did he get such a pack of lies! My brother may have been wild when he was young, but to claim he had other women after he married you . . . and this Abbie . . . claiming Puppy is my brother’s baby—”

  Her voice trailed off. She stared at me. I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, barefoot, my hair tangled worse than hers. I was dressed in old jeans and a sweatshirt, a wad of Christmas garland in my clammy hands. Don’t ask me why I was putting up more decorations in a house already covered from roof to basement in holiday finery. I only knew I had to keep moving and stay focused on any small chore I could find.