“Maggie,” Tate said. “Oh, Maggie.” He rained gentle grateful kisses on her ear, her nose, her lips. Slowly they drifted down together. She breathed slowly and deeply, her rhythm adjusting to his.
After a time, he slid his sweat-slick body to one side and exhaled, his breath stirring tendrils of her hair. One hand rested possessively on her stomach. She still could not speak; all she could do was relive those glorious moments. But still she could not bring herself to say the words that were engraved upon her heart. She could not say, “I love you.” And he didn’t, either.
Tate’s hand circled the place where the baby grew. “Do you think the little kiddo knows what we’re doing out here?” he said, his eyes alight with humor.
“Maybe,” she said. She smiled at him and placed her hand over his. In that moment, she felt a deep pang of loss for what could never be. She wished desperately that Tate Jennings was the father of her child. A child conceived in a moment of joyful lovemaking such as they had just shared would be a lucky child indeed.
After a while, a time when Maggie allowed herself to feel the sheer and utter pain of regrets that she had never anticipated, Tate turned on his stomach and rested on his elbows. “You’re still planning to keep the baby?”
Slowly she nodded, watching him. He showed no expression of surprise or displeasure; instead he seemed to accept it.
“I thought you would,” he said. “I couldn’t see you changing your mind.”
“Does it make a difference between us?” she asked, holding her breath.
He didn’t hesitate. “No. No, Maggie, it doesn’t. At least not now.”
“How about later?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I never have approved of the idea of single mothers keeping their babies, you know that.”
“It won’t be like it was with your mother, Tate. I have a good job, and I want this baby. It’s real to me, an honest-togoodness little human being.”
“You really love this baby, don’t you?”
“Yes. Oh, yes,” she said.
“I bet your baby is going to look exactly like you. It’s going to have blond hair and gray eyes and a freckle right at the corner of its mouth,” Tate said. He smoothed her hair back from her face and took her in his arms, cradling her gently.
“You see, Maggie, I’m looking forward to the baby, too. Because it’s part of you,” he murmured, his mouth close to her ear.
“You don’t have to accept—”
“I know, but I want to. Something that means so much to you is bound to be important to me.”
She was touched beyond words. “You’re very good to me,” she whispered, her heart in her throat.
“Good? I’d like to be better. Even best.” He was smiling down at her, his eyes bright with happiness. “How can I go about being very, very good to you, Maggie my love?”
What a wonderful man he was, and how proud she was to be the woman with whom he shared his life, if only for a little while. In that moment, she realized that whatever they decided about their future, they shared an incomparable now.
“Try this,” she said, guiding his hands. “And this. And this.”
And for the rest of the night, he was very good to her indeed.
THE NEXT DAY, Maggie woke and stretched and yawned and nudged the sleeping Tate in the back.
“Lazybones,” she said when he opened his eyes.
He reached for her and tickled her, and she started to giggle and tried to roll away, and they both almost fell out of bed. Maggie righted herself, plumped the pillows and fell back with a sigh of sheer happiness. Tate rested his head on her bare stomach, which grumbled noises of protest.
“There’s nothing like an organ recital before breakfast,” he said, and she picked up a feather pillow and whacked him.
“That may be the person that you so touchingly refer to as ‘the kiddo’ registering his protest over last night,” she told him.
“I don’t hear anyone else protesting.”
“Not even Peg and Tsani,” Maggie said blissfully.
“I think,” Tate said carefully, “that they would have approved wholeheartedly.”
Maggie sat up and kissed him lightly. “I think,” she said, “that you’re right. Who showers first—me or you?”
He slanted her a look. “How big is the shower?”
“Oh, it’s—” she began unthinkingly, then realized what he was suggesting. “Big enough for two,” she finished.
“Three counting the little guy,” he amended, and in a matter of seconds they were embracing each other under the warm spray.
“This is nice,” he said.
“Until you drop the soap.”
“There are shower Tsagasi, you know. They cause people to slip on the wet tile, they make the hot water heater run out of hot water, they cause faucet handles to fall off and disintegrate—”
“You’re joking,” she said, but she did drop the soap.
He looked down at it. It had landed near his big toe. “Doesn’t that prove that there are really shower Tsagasi?” he said, and she giggled and kissed the tip of his nose.
Later, sitting around in big terry cloth robes, they had bananas and orange juice, which Maggie told him were her usual breakfast along with a prenatal vitamin, and he said she should eat more for breakfast now that she was eating for two and that she should eat a better variety of food as well. He offered to cook bacon and eggs, but Maggie shook her head and told him that the odor of bacon frying often made her sick these days and that she’d just have another banana, please and thank you. Tate insisted on peeling the banana for her, which she said made him look like a monkey, and he mugged and scratched and made what he thought passed for monkey noises, which cracked Maggie up. Maggie said that bananas were considered a grain, did he know that? Tate said that he was sure that bananas were a fruit, and they argued about it until they both got tired of arguing, and then Tate cut two bananas up in a bowl, mashed them, added a spoonful of sugar, and poured orange juice over them, saying that this conglomeration was one of his favorite snacks, and Maggie wrinkled her nose but was persuaded to taste a bite, after which she declared that the concoction was pretty good and in fact tasted like Juicy Fruit gum. Tate said that the flavor of Juicy Fruit gum had always turned him on when he was a kid, and Maggie said, “You mean sexually?” and he picked her up right off the breakfast stool and carried her to bed, where he proved that the flavor of Juicy Fruit, or at least bananas and orange juice, still turned him on.
They stayed in bed most of the morning, watching the leaf-filtered light play over each others’ faces, finding new ways to please each other, laughing over private jokes. The fax machine, now operative in the dining room where Maggie was using the table for a desk, beeped from time to time, but they ignored it. The telephone rang, but Maggie, in a fit of impatience, finally flounced out of bed and yanked its cord out of the wall.
It was almost nightfall before they got up and dressed, and then they wondered why they had bothered since it was so late. Tate said he might as well not even go back to his camp unless she was ready for him to leave, and she gave him an are-you-kidding? look and asked him what he’d like for dinner. She happened to have steaks in the refrigerator, and he cooked them on the charcoal grill he found in the shed behind the cabin.
“What a perfect day,” Maggie told him later, and he grinned. “How are you feeling?” he asked her. He was always asking her, worrying about her, concerned that she might feel sick to her stomach or woozy or something, but she assured him that she felt fine.
“I could fix the television set,” Tate said after they cleaned up the kitchen.
“I don’t even remember what programs are on or when.”
Tate studied the back of the TV. “The little doohickey that fits around the screws in the back of the set and connects with the antenna on the roof is broken,” he said after his inspection. “I’ll have to get a new one, but I can buy it in town.”
Maggie sat down in the r
ocking chair and picked up the quilt. “It’ll be nice to be able to watch TV while I’m working on the quilt. Come to think of it, I haven’t been working on this as diligently as I could have been,” she said.
“You’ve had other things to do.”
“Other much more interesting things,” she agreed.
“Go ahead and work on the quilt now,” he said. “I know it means a lot to you to finish it.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t mind?”
“I like the way your hair falls over your cheeks when you bend your head to sew,” he said. “I won’t mind at all as long as I can sit here with you and watch.”
She smiled at him fondly. Soon the only sound was of the old-fashioned clock ticking on the bookcase. Tate read tattered copies of out-of-date magazines, every now and then stealing looks at Maggie whose head was bowed diligently over an appliquéd square as her fingers plied the needle in and out of the fabric.
“I feel close to Peg when I’m working on the quilt,” Maggie said after a while. “Sometimes when I’m here alone, I hear dulcimer music as I’m sewing. I wish I knew why that seems to go along with her. The mountain dulcimer must have been special to her. I’d like to know more about Peg’s life. We know from the pamphlet that she married the old man, and I’ve always thought of her as pining away here in this cabin. That doesn’t square with the feeling I get when she’s around—a light, happy feeling, and then there’s the laughter, which makes me think that Peg must have been a particularly happy person.”
“I think she was, too,” Tate said.
Maggie went on talking. “You know, Tate, I’ve always wondered how, if Peg married the old man whose name was Harry Garvey, and if I’m descended from her, why has my family name always been Macintyre? Women in those days didn’t keep their birth names.”
“Good question,” Tate said. He watched the fireflies winking on in the shrubbery outside the window. Beyond the line of trees bordering the clearing, Breadloaf Mountain was silhouetted against the sunset, and he thought distractedly how this view would be so different in a year’s time. But then everything would be different in a year’s time—Maggie, her baby and even him.
“It would be fun to do some research about my family. It seems like I ought to learn more about my ancestors now that I’m going to have a baby who will presumably want to know someday.” She set the sewing aside. “You know, I happened to think of something. There’s an old family Bible stored on the top shelf of the wardrobe in the bedroom. Let’s take a look.”
Maggie led the way into the bedroom and pulled open the wardrobe door. “The cabin was originally built without closets, so this wardrobe has been here since time out of mind. The stuff I’m looking for is on the top shelf. Can you see what’s in that bundle on the left side?”
“Sure,” Tate said. He reached up, shoved a small box out of the way, and retrieved a bundle of objects wrapped in a faded flour sack. “Is this it?”
“Here, put it on the bed so that we can open it and spread things out.” Maggie sat down on one side of the bed, and Tate sat beside her. She tugged at the knot that bound the bundle, her nose twitching as dust fluttered upward.
“No telling what we’ll find in here,” she said.
It was a motley collection of keepsakes. A child’s top, circa the early 1930s. A wedding ring, apparently real gold. A baby’s woolen hand-knit bonnet, so old that it was falling apart. And on the bottom, a family Bible.
Maggie touched it with reverence. It was so old that the cover was crumbling into dust; the pages were so brittle that she feared that they would disintegrate beneath her fingertips. But she found what she wanted.
“Births,” she said when she had turned to the right page. The ink was faded to a faint brown.
“Is Peg listed?”
“Margaret Mary Macintyre,” Maggie read in triumph. “Born May 31, 1825.” When she said the name, she felt a definite breeze swish by.
“Did you feel that?” she asked Tate.
“I felt—something,” he said.
“It was like a butterfly’s wings brushing my cheek,” Maggie said. She looked around the room, which was golden with the afternoon sunlight. The rag rug on the floor glowed with brilliant colors; the handmade sampler on the wall looked as it had ever since Maggie was a child and, probably, as it had looked before that. Yet there was an indefinable change in the room.
“She’s here,” Maggie said unsteadily. “Peg Macintyre is in this room now, Tate.”
“I sense her, too,” he said.
Maggie collected herself. “If anyone had told me that I would ever think I was in a room with a—a ghost, I would have laughed myself silly.”
“This ghost probably would have laughed right back.”
Maggie herself laughed at this.
“See how many children Peg had,” Tate urged.
Maggie ran her forefinger down the column of names. “John Garvey, born in 1842. John Garvey?”
“John is the English form of the Cherokee name Tsani. Peg named her son after his natural father,” Tate said. He reached across her to turn the tattered page. “Marriages,” he read. “Margaret Mary Macintyre to Harry Garvey, June 2, 1842. And then…” He checked the page for Deaths and found Harry Garvey listed. “He died in November of the same year shortly after Peg gave birth to John.”
Maggie shifted her position so that she could more easily read the pages. She found what she was looking for on the Marriage page. “Margaret Macintyre Garvey married Laurence Macintyre, her third cousin, two years after Harry Garvey’s death!” she read excitedly. “I didn’t know this, Tate. Family gossip was that Peg mourned Tsani’s death for the rest of her life, that she died miserable and lonely.”
“You know how stories get mixed up over the years, and the Lover’s Leap legend was certainly more interesting if people could think that Peg pined away here on the mountain,” said Tate.
“If she had been sad, I would know it,” Maggie said with certainty. “Maybe that’s what she’s been trying to tell me. That she was happy here in her later years. She knows I’ve been unhappy over Kip’s leaving and not knowing what to do about the baby, and it was as if she were telling me not to worry, that everything would be all right. And it is all right, Tate. I’m happy about the baby now, and I know I don’t need Kip.”
He smiled at her. “I’m glad,” he said.
Maggie returned her attention to the Bible. “Peg and Laurence had three children. First, Polly Macintyre, born to Peg and Laurence four years after their marriage. And Carter Macintyre, born two years after that, and David Macintyre nine years later. My father’s name is David Laurence Macintyre. Those names have always been traditional in our family. So, I think we can safely assume that I’m descended from the union between Peg and her cousin. I wish I knew more about them.”
Tate slid an arm around her shoulders. “Let’s go visit the Scot’s Cove Historical Society tomorrow. It’s located in a little museum in the old railroad station.”
“A great idea!”
“And while we’re in town, I can pick up the part I need to get the television working again.”
“Another great idea.”
“In fact, for the rest of the week, let’s do exactly what we want to do. No schedule, no work—”
“I might have to check the fax machine once in a while so that Bronwyn doesn’t go ballistic,” Maggie interjected.
“I can deal with the fax machine. And if you want to sew, that’s okay. But we should go fishing for that big catfish in the pond and grill it over charcoal, and we should lie in the sun, and we should—”
“Unplug the phone and make love as often as possible?” Maggie asked innocently.
“I’m not the only one who has great ideas,” he said, grinning.
“You’re going back to work when?”
“Monday.”
“You don’t sound too happy about it.”
“I’m not. I don’t think I fit in at Conso anymore.
/> “Perhaps you’ll readjust quickly,” she said comfortingly.
Tate didn’t say anything, only stared out the window at Breadloaf Mountain. Maggie’s eyes followed the line of his gaze to the site of the future Balsam Heights mobile home park.
“So that’s it,” she said softly. “A case of the guilts.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” He knew he sounded discouraged.
“I know you don’t want Conso to build that mobile home park on Breadloaf,” she said.
“It’s worse than you know.” He told her how Conso was planning to renege on their agreement to preserve a wilderness park in order to double the size of the Balsam Heights mobile home park and how he was the one who was supposed to win over the townspeople to the company’s new plan.
Maggie’s eyes reflected her horror. “That’s awful,” she said flatly.
“I know,” he said. “A lot of things that Conso does are awful, but in a job like mine, you learn to live with them.”
“It’s a good job by anyone’s standards,” she agreed, her voice thoughtful.
“I worked hard to get where I am,” he said. “It wasn’t easy. That’s why I can’t just…” He shrugged.
“Why you can’t what?” Maggie said.
“Why I can’t chuck it all,” he said.
“Maybe you won’t have to. Maybe you’ll find a way to mediate a different solution.”
“That’s not my job Karl Shaeffer made it clear to me that if I want to be a vice president, I’d better do exactly what they say.”
Neither of them spoke for a long time, and then Maggie said, “How much do you really want to be a VP of Conso, Tate?”
“The job is worth a lot of money,” he said.
“Is it also worth your integrity?”
He stared at her. “No,” he said unhappily.
She leaned closer for a kiss. He kissed her hungrily, deeply, as if he would never stop. When at last they parted, she rested her head on his shoulder.
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