Something Unexpected

by Wendy Warren

  Laughter and ribbing erupted from the crowd. “Yeah!” Reginald Jacobson, who owned a small sheep ranch outside of town, hollered, “Two pretty women move to town, and the Kingsleys get ’em both. What’s up with that? The next one’s mine!”

  “Well, soon as you take care of that comb-over, Reg, I believe you’ll have better luck.” More hooting followed Eugene’s comment. He patted the air to calm everyone down. “We’ve got to give our attention to the guest of honor here. The brand-spankin’-new Mrs. Kingsley would like to make a toast.” Detaching the microphone from its stand, he handed it to Rosemary. “Mrs. Kingsley, the floor is yours.”

  Dean tensed as his wife accepted the mike with a nod and a deep breath. Shouldn’t he be up there with her? One of Claire’s more elaborate cakes had been carried out and placed on the end of the buffet table. He’d assumed they would make their toasts while cutting the tiered creation. Perhaps Rosemary wanted to surprise him, and that’s what her avoidance had been about. He began to move toward the stage, this time propelled by shoulder slaps.

  As he reached the steps leading to where his wife stood, their gazes locked. Instead of the melting sugar look he expected…wanted…to see, Rosemary’s brow puckered. Her lids lowered, narrowing her expression to a cloud-covered puzzle. He stopped walking, remained at the foot of the steps and knew instantly she wanted it that way.

  Instead of inviting her husband onto the stage, Rosemary raised the microphone, turned toward the crowd and gave them a smile they may have believed was genuine, but which he realized went no further than the stretch of her lips.

  “Thank you.” She acknowledged the former sheriff then expelled a breath that reverberated in the mike. “Thank you all for coming.” Taking a moment, she centered herself, looking poised and self-possessed as the toast began. “It’s no secret that I arrived in Honeyford a single woman. Yet now here I am, very unexpectedly married.” Happy applause punctuated the comment. She nodded to recognize it. “Some might say I let Dean sweep me off my feet—” increased cheerful hollers “—or that we rushed things. And maybe that’s true.”

  Her eyes skittered toward his again. Dean felt his heart drop heavily toward his gut. What the hell… Her glance was brief. Brittle.

  He considered this one of the most important nights in his life. Earlier today he had contacted his father’s lawyer, instructing him to sell the building on Main Street to the city of Honeyford for the bargain-basement price of one dollar. The only stipulation was that he be allowed to lease the space occupied by the pharmacy for the next ten years and that Clinica Adelina be allowed to lease the two neighboring storefronts at current market value for the same period of time. He’d told Gwen as much this evening when he’d walked her to her car. She was the executor of the will and believed, as he did, that the city would go for the terms. Because he had married in time to meet the will’s demands, he held the cards. What they didn’t have to know was that he would relinquish the building no matter what. He couldn’t conduct this marriage under the shadow of his father’s will.

  All his life Dean had tried to do the right thing. Now the “right thing” was whatever it took to make his relationship with Rosemary work.

  So that glance of hers, sharp as glass, raised an alarm in his head. He met her eyes with a question in his own.

  “The thing is,” she said, again addressing the room, managing to look poised yet vulnerable, “all my life I wanted to marry a man I knew would never let me down. A man I could trust, because his word would be as good as gold, and his love…” for a breath of space, her voice hovered before she completed the thought “…his love would be immovable. I wanted to look into his eyes and know that the man I loved when I was thirty would be standing beside me fifty years later. And nothing would have changed except the lines on our faces.” She looked at the crowd of neighbors, friends and family, her smile inviting their comradeship and offering her own. “When you get down to it, that’s what most of us are looking for, isn’t it? To know that the person we go to sleep beside each night will be in our corner the next day?”

  Dean heard a feminine sniffle. In his mind, a bull’s eye began to take shape on his back.

  His own brother, formerly the devil incarnate, had pointed out that Dean had been lying by omission for the duration of his relationship with Rosemary. Now he stared at his wife, at the hazel eyes that looked like a lake on fire, and though he had no idea what had transpired between their dance and this moment, he knew she delivered no ordinary toast.

  Rosemary held the microphone with both hands. “Some people—people in my own family, even—” she grinned to minimize any implied judgment “—say true love is a fairy tale. That to keep from falling down, a strong woman has to stand up alone. Well, to tell you the truth, after surviving a broken heart once, I was all set to agree with them. I even told my friends I wasn’t going to date again. Ever.” More laughter from their guests. Rosemary nodded. “I know, I know. You speak, the universe laughs. And, of course, then I met Dean.” As the chuckles died down, she lowered her voice, sounding almost wistful. “I never expected to meet someone so caring. So willing to put other people first. So deeply, deeply moral. I don’t mind telling you that at first I thought he was too good to be true. And I decided to keep my distance. But that Dean, he’s a persistent—” she paused, slightly but significantly “—devil. When I married him, I knew that with a man like him, I could put my fears to rest.” Her eyes cut to her husband, who felt her gaze like the point of a saber aimed at his heart. “Because Dean Kingsley—the honest, up-front man you all know, the Prince Charming I had started to believe didn’t exist—that man would never, ever, willingly let me fall.”

  There was more sniffling. Rosemary raised her glass of punch, and while their guests drank, she and Dean looked at each other with one thing crystal clear between them: the honeymoon was over. In spades.

  Rosemary pressed her shoulder against the Prius’s passenger-side door, gazing out the window at the clear, sharp night. They’d left the party five minutes ago; it was almost 11:00 p.m.

  In the driver’s seat—literally, but most definitely not figuratively—Dean had been mostly silent. He hadn’t said much at all, in fact, since her toast, and she wasn’t sure whether she was glad or angrier than ever.

  Now as they neared her cottage, he asked, “Do you want to talk now or wait until we get home?”

  If she were a porcupine, he’d be covered in quills right now. When she’d discovered the extent of Neil’s cheating, Rosemary had left her house and hadn’t returned. She’d let Neil live there until they’d sold the lovely Lake Oswego three-bedroom in the divorce settlement. Not this time. The cottage belonged to her, and she was no pushover. Not anymore.

  “My home is on 4th Street,” she said quietly but firmly. “Yours is above the pharmacy.” They would have to talk, yes, but she wanted the ground rules established: the marriage, as they had so briefly known it, was over.

  Still a couple of blocks from the house, Dean pulled over and cut the engine. He turned toward her. “Who told you?”

  “Who told me what, Dean? What is there to tell? Honeyford’s favorite son is an open book, right?”

  “Rosie—”

  She held her hand up between them. “Refrain from using nicknames or endearments, please. These days they tend to make me gag.”

  Dean kept a hand on the steering wheel. His knuckles tightened around it, whitening. He shook his head. “I’m an ass. Whether you believe it or not, Rosie—” She glared at him. “Rosemary—I was going to tell you about my father’s will tonight.”

  “You were going to tell me tonight. After our wedding reception.” She blinked, affecting a broad smile. “Gosh, that makes all the difference. Thanks. Oh, wait.” She began counting off points on her fingers. “Four months after we slept together, two months after you found out I was pregnant and almost three weeks after we got married, you were just going to tell me that according to your father’s will you had to get ma
rried. Ooh, you know what? I’m not that grateful, after all.” She shrugged broadly. “Sorry.” Dropping the sarcasm, she went for the jugular. “What is the matter with you? What kind of person does something like this? Who gets married because of a will? And deceives people about it?” The interior of the small car filled with her wrath. She had plenty more to say, but then remembered something. “Oh, my god. Amanda found out about the will, didn’t she? That’s why she broke up with you.”

  “Amanda did not break up with me.” Twisting as fully as he could toward Rosemary, Dean said, carefully and clearly, “I broke up with her, because when I saw you again I knew I couldn’t marry anyone else. Amanda was aware of the will from the start. She wasn’t in love with me.”

  Rage, hot and furious, exploded within her, and Rosemary kept her arms rigidly by her side so she wouldn’t attack him. Never in her life, not even with Neil, had she felt so outraged, so dangerously furious.

  “I don’t know Amanda, I didn’t know your father, and I obviously don’t know you, but it’s clear that not one of you understands or cares that marriage is something sacred, not a game. You don’t play with it, and you don’t mess with other people’s lives.”

  Dean’s face knotted with regret and contrition. He looked so aggrieved, in fact, that she might have comforted him if she hadn’t wanted, at that moment, to turn his male parts into pudding.

  “Rosie—” he began. Once more channeling one of the witches in Macbeth, she raised a brow. “Rosemary,” he corrected, “only a handful of people know about my father’s will. I’m not sure who told you—”

  “Nobody told me,” she said, omitting what she now recognized as a slip on Claire’s part, earlier. She didn’t want to involve anyone else in this mess. “I was coming to look for you and overheard Gwen Gibson say how beautifully everything had worked out for you and Fletcher. Imagine my surprise when I heard the mayor congratulate my husband on his forced marriage.”

  Dean closed his eyes briefly, swearing beneath his breath. “I’m sorry. That isn’t what I intended—” He stopped as a new realization dawned. “Wait. If you overheard Gwen and me then you—” He shook his head. “You didn’t stay for the whole conversation, did you?”

  “No. Although, golly, that would have been fun. What’d you two talk about next? Insurance scams? Pyramid schemes?”

  Dean did not answer. He merely started the car again, and Rosemary was glad. Sarcasm was not her usual modus operandi. She felt as if an alien force had taken over her tongue, and she was already sick of it, sick of the hatred she felt. She wanted to be done.

  Exhaustion, as swift and global as her fury, drained her. When Dean passed her cottage without stopping, it took her a moment to react.

  “What are you doing? Go back, please. I want to go home.”

  Dean didn’t look at her. “We’re going to see Gwen.” He set his jaw as if steeling himself to press forward no matter what.

  “I don’t want to see anyone, and it’s eleven p.m. I doubt Gwen will be happy to see us.”

  Dean turned right on Oak Street then made a left on Second, heading for an area of lovely old Victorians. “You heard a fraction of our conversation,” he said. “You’re not going to believe anything I tell you right now, and I don’t blame you. So you’re going to hear the rest of it from Gwen.” He stared forward, through the windshield again, his face illuminated by the occasional streetlamp. “From the second I saw you, I felt differently about you than I’ve felt about any other woman in my life. I didn’t tell you the truth right away, because—” Now he glanced her way. “How the hell do you tell someone your father’s will requires you to marry? I was afraid I’d lose you before we ever got started.”

  Through the darkness, Rosemary saw the turbulence in his usually pacific blue eyes. Emotion roughened his voice like sandpaper. “I didn’t want to lose you, Rosie. So I tried to control everything, and you’re right—I screwed up. But you’re mistaken about one thing. Kingsley men do value marriage. Fletcher and I valued it to the point that we were too scared to make a move toward it. Our father valued it so much, he tried to force us into it. The problem isn’t that we don’t want love—it’s that we haven’t got the faintest idea how to make it work.”

  They pulled up in front of a grand home with only one small light glowing from an upstairs room. Dean cut the engine and opened his door.

  “It really is too late to disturb someone,” Rosemary protested mildly, trying vainly to digest everything that had happened tonight and all Dean had just told her.

  He came around to her side, opened the door and bent down to look at her. “It is too late to disturb someone. And maybe what Gwen is going to tell you won’t matter in the end. But I’m not giving you—or our family—up without a fight, Rosemary Kingsley. The only ammunition I’ve got left is the truth.”

  He stepped back, letting Rosemary decide what it was going to be: end things here or listen to what Gwen Gibson had to say.

  Life seemed so ridiculously complex, so unbearably painful that Rosemary wanted to run from all of it. Even as she tried to steel herself against Dean, her heart thumped against her chest as if it were trying to move closer to him. She wanted to listen, wanted him to reassure and convince her that this issue of the will and a forced marriage was all some big misunderstanding.

  Magical thinking.

  She tried to remember that she had just left three friends, two sisters and a mother, all of whom were single and in a lot less pain than she was in right now.

  Dean waited at the curb, his expression as intent as she had ever seen it. Anxious finger-combing had mussed his usually neat hair.

  Not two hours ago, you were my knight in shining armor, and I was lucky in love, Rosemary thought with a sadness that penetrated her bones.

  When she got out of the car, it was not with hope, precisely, but rather with the weary conviction that if nothing else, perhaps Gwen Gibson would weave the loose threads of this insane tapestry together.

  As she stepped onto the curb, Rosemary looked into Dean’s troubled eyes.

  The only ammunition I’ve got is the truth, he’d said.

  Truth was good. Maybe truth was all she needed. Because she certainly sensed she was finished with fairy tales, forevermore.

  Lucy Jeffers sat on the floor of her sister’s living room, picking food from a plate on the coffee table, which currently was set like a Thanksgiving buffet.

  “Thanks for coming over and bringing…a snack.” Rosemary pushed a halfhearted smile her sister’s way. Because Lucy never ate junk food, she had arrived at Rosemary’s door with a whole roasted chicken from the market, a quart of wild-rice pilaf, salad, rolls, a Dutch apple pie, a pesto-crusted cheese ball and water crackers.

  Eschewing the real food, Rosemary had curled into a corner of the couch with an open bag of cheese puffs—the natural kind, because she refused to feed the baby anything fluorescent, but still something that resembled food therapy. She was depressed, miserable, wretched; roasted chicken and a green vegetable were not going to cut it.

  “I still can’t believe you stayed in town after Mom and Evelyn left,” Rosemary said, watching her sister carefully remove all visible fat from a bite of poultry. “How was the Honeyford Inn?”

  “Good. They put me in the honeymoon suite, though.” She snorted. “What a crock.” Jamming a fork into the meat with unnecessary aggression, Lucy put the chicken in her mouth and chewed as if the bird still needed to be killed.

  “Um, why did you stay exactly?”

  Lucy looked up. “My sister having a nervous breakdown onstage at her wedding reception isn’t a good enough reason?”

  “I wasn’t having a nervous breakdown,” Rosemary protested, hugging her cheese puffs. Apparently the veiled irony in her little toast hadn’t been so veiled, after all. Daphne had phoned her three times on the trip back to Portland and once since. Vi had videotaped most of the toast with her cell phone and threatened to post it on YouTube unless Rosemary called to tell he
r exactly what was going on. “You, Mom and Evelyn should be proud of me,” Rosemary protested in a wobbly voice that sounded dangerously like whining. “I was refusing to be a patsy.”

  “We are proud. It was just hard to figure out what was going on last night. ‘Oh, wow, my sister must have found out her husband had to marry her to inherit a building’ is not the first thing that crosses your mind before the wedding cake is cut, you know?” Picking walnuts out of the wild-rice pilaf, Lucy raised a skinny brow, dark as soot against her pale skin. “Unbeeffinglievable that he thought he’d get away with it. Putz.”

  Squirming painfully on the sofa she had purchased originally for its uncommon comfort, Rosemary reminded Lucy dejectedly, “Except that he wasn’t trying to ‘get away with it.’ Remember? I told you, Gwen confirmed that he’s selling his building to the city. He just wanted to keep the will quiet as long as possible, because he knew there was no way to explain it to me so that it would make any kind of sense.” Gee, put that way—

  “Don’t romanticize him, Rosemary,” Lucy snapped, and Rosemary jumped guiltily.

  “I’m not romanticizing him. He still lied to me…by omission…for months, and…that’s a deal breaker.”

  “Damn straight. Because if a man lies once, he’ll do it again. Men are such shmucks.” Abandoning the wild rice, Lucy plunged her fork into the Dutch apple pie.

  Rosemary stared. “Luce, is there something you need to talk about? I mean, other than my being duped into a marriage of convenience, did something else happen to make you take this…vacation?”

  Filling her mouth with apples and streusel topping, Lucy affected an amazed expression. “What? No. I am here for you.”

  “Luce—”

  “I said, no! Look, it’s no big deal.” She shoveled in more pie, expanding her normally gaunt cheeks. “One of the partners at my firm got engaged, and his fiancée—” shifting from apple pie, she aimed her fork-weapon at the cheese ball “—joined the firm. Like being around each other 24/7 is going to contribute to marital bliss. Whatever. Anyway, no time like the present to claim some unused vacation time now that Lindsay the Perfect is there to pick up the slack. Not that there was any slack, because, of course, I have busted my butt for that ma—that firm practically my entire adult working life. But that’s okay, because now there’s plenty of lawyers on board to cover any emergency, so I can have a—” she looked as if she was going to cry or spit “—vacation.”