Pressing his lips together as if he were afraid he might say something to add to the volatility of the conversation, Gabe turned and started walking. Rachel followed, searching for a topic that might restore some harmony for the next hour or so. After a moment or two, he stopped beneath the spreading branches of a huge oak tree. The nearby creek gurgled and bubbled and rushed headlong over the rocky bottom.
“How’s this?” he asked, frowning at her.
“Perfect.” She unfurled the red, white and blue quilt she’d brought along. “You were right. Your mother isn’t at all judgmental. I like her.”
Gabe put down the basket and lowered himself Indian style. Rachel sank down on her knees, her skirt billowing out around her. Their gazes locked as she waited for him to respond.
“I like her, too,” he admitted. “And I didn’t expect to.”
There was no need for him to explain, and she was thankful to see that his grumpiness had disappeared. “You said earlier that Libby didn’t have an affair—Lucas did.”
“Right.” While she set out the lunch, he told her everything that had transpired the evening before.
“You’ll never in a million years guess who he was seeing.”
“I can’t imagine...”
“Sarah VanSickle.”
They’d reached the dessert portion of the meal, and dropping that bit of news into the conversation almost caused the piece of pound cake Rachel had just sliced to slip from her fingers.
“Sarah VanSickle?” she echoed, putting the cake onto a delicate saucer trimmed with clusters of forget-me-nots. She thrust the plate at him.
“It surprised me, too, although knowing her as I do, I’m not sure why,” Gabe admitted. He held out the cake while Rachel added a dollop of the lemon curd.
She fumed as she fixed her own dessert. How could anyone deliberately come between a husband and wife? How could anyone destroy a family through sheer malice? No one should have to suffer what Libby and her boys had gone through, all because of one man’s ego and one woman’s vindictiveness.
That any of them had come out of it with as few scars as they had was nothing short of a miracle. She saw God’s hand in sending Frank, the only person to offer two young boys what comfort and love they’d received during their youth. Frank had done what he could to counteract Lucas’s callousness, somehow managing to instill good old-fashioned decency in them.
She saw God’s plan in the way He’d brought Caleb and Abby together, and how through Abby, He’d worked to reunite a mother to her sons and grandchildren. It was so easy to see and trust Him working in the lives of others, but did she dare trust that He was working in hers and Gabe’s? Had it been God’s plan for Gabe to be attacked on his journey home last December? Had Simon been sent just so he could bring Gabe to her doorstep? Was it His intent for them to work through their troubled past and become a family?
“What are you thinking?” Gabe asked, bringing her convoluted thoughts back to the present.
She lifted her gaze to his. “I’m thinking that life is very complicated. It’s unfair and often downright ugly, and only by the grace of God do we manage to come through it relatively unscathed.”
He frowned. “Those are pretty weighty observations.”
“Well,” she said with a self-deprecating smile, “as you well know, I am not a featherbrain by reputation.”
She took her first bite of cake. Gabe had finished his while she was woolgathering. “Do you think Libby will confront Sarah now that there’s no one around to stop her?” she asked.
“Oh, you can count on it.”
She finished her cake and busied herself with gathering and wrapping the soiled plates and flatware in a plain dish towel to transport them back home.
“Do you know what really infuriates me?” he asked, pitching the dregs of his lemonade into the grass and handing her the glass.
From her perspective it was all infuriating. “What?”
“That Sarah can go around and deliberately pick people’s lives to pieces when she’s guilty of far worse than most of them.”
“Maybe she’s asked for forgiveness for what she did to your family,” Rachel said, striving for fairness.
He made a scoffing sound. “If so, I’m sure she got it, but what about the things she’s done since?”
“We all sin, and most of us commit the same sins over and over,” Rachel said. “At least I do. Seventy times seven, remember?”
“I understand that, but there’s a difference. When we ask for forgiveness and mean it, we may inadvertently fall back into that old sin. The difference is when you ask for forgiveness all the while intending to go out and do the same thing at the next opportunity.”
Rachel thought of how Sarah’s wicked tongue had forced Caleb and Abby into marriage, and how her spitefulness had caused her to spread the news about Danny’s paternity to the four corners of the county. How many other lives had she ruined through the years? Would she ever stop her campaign of malice?
That question triggered another, troubling idea about her life. She had almost let her anger and animosity devour her. If Gabe had not returned, would she have become like Sarah? The thought was sobering, frightening. Like Sarah, she attended services regularly, but by harboring hostility toward Gabe, wasn’t she just as wrong?
“You’re right,” she told him, searching for the right words for Gabe. “What she does is wrong, but instead of lowering ourselves to her level and maligning her, we should—”
“—pray for her,” he said in disgust. “I know.”
“Yes,” Rachel said, unable to hide a smile. “But you really should have a better attitude when you do.”
Seeing the mirth in her eyes and knowing she was right, he offered her a halfhearted smile in return. “I know you’re right, but I have a way to go with this Christianity thing.”
Rachel sobered, knowing that she, too, had a long way to go. “Coming from someone with years of firsthand experience, I can promise you that we’ll never get it right, and it isn’t always easy. The thing that matters is that we keep giving it our best, which I haven’t always done, even though I should know better.”
“What are you talking about? You’re one of the best people I know.”
“I wasn’t very Christ-like when you came to town, was I?”
Gabe’s expression held no condemnation. “You had reason to...hate me.”
“I didn’t hate you, but every time I looked at you, it all came back to me. The shame and guilt and how alone I was when you left me with nothing but an offhand goodbye.” She drew in a shaky breath. “And as much as I tried, as much as I wanted to, I didn’t really hate you. I don’t.”
Gabe’s eyes held an indefinable tenderness that she had opened up to him. He was sorry to have been the one to cause her so much pain. “What do you feel, Rachel?” he whispered, leaning toward her.
Their gazes met and held. “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “That isn’t true. I think I do know, but I’m afraid.”
The trembling words came straight from the heart.
He moved closer, and as he had the day outside her house, he rested his forehead against hers. Her eyes drifted shut.
“Don’t be afraid, Rachel,” he said. “I do know what I feel, and it’s as real and true as the sunrise, because that’s what you are. Real. True. Back in St. Louis I wasn’t thinking about anyone but Gabe Gentry, but this time everything’s different. What I feel isn’t going away, and neither am I. We have all the time in the world.”
“How can you be sure it won’t go away?”
He dropped a quick kiss to the tip of her nose.
“Because my heart is involved this time. Because Danny’s heart is involved. I pray yours is. And because this feels so right that it scares me to death sometimes. I ran from what you made m
e feel once. Not again.”
He was scared? She drew back to get a better look at him. “Why would you be scared?”
“I’m scared that despite everything I do and no matter how hard I try, that when I finally do ask you to spend the rest of your life with me—and I will ask you—that you’ll say no.”
Rachel couldn’t speak for the knot of emotion in her throat. It was what she’d dreamed of nine years ago. But time and circumstances had changed. They had both changed. When he asked, what would she say?
“Stop trying to figure out what you’ll do,” he said, almost as if he could read her mind. “I’m not asking you for anything today. And I promise you that whatever your answer is, I will do everything in my power to never cause you that kind of pain again.”
* * *
“The woman is impossible!” Libby said, stalking across Caleb’s parlor. Another week had passed and they were all congregated at the farm to share another meal. This time Rachel, Edward and Danny were in attendance, even though Rachel felt like an outsider.
With the meal over, the dishes washed and put away, and the little ones down for an afternoon nap, the grownups were gathered to hear the details of Libby’s confrontation with Sarah the evening before.
“Be specific, Mother.” Win sprawled in a wingback chair, his long legs crossed at the ankles, regarding the contrasting tips of his shining shoes. He glanced up. “Surely she listened to what you had to say.”
“Oh, she listened,” Libby said, whirling around to face her family. “I told her that I’d always known about her and Lucas. She had the gall to tell me that if I’d been the right kind of wife, he would never have strayed.”
“That’s interesting.” Edward said. “Especially since it’s common knowledge that he broke off with Sarah and took up with a woman from Murfreesboro not a month after you left.”
Rachel and Gabe exchanged surprised looks. This was new information and said even more about what a rogue Lucas Gentry had been.
“Serves her right,” Libby snapped, clearly in a huff. “Then when I confronted her with starting the gossip about Caleb and Abby even though her accusations were groundless, she informed me that we were supposed to ‘abstain from all appearance of evil,’ and she felt it was her Christian duty to bring awareness to the situation, so that it could be set straight.”
Caleb’s jaw clenched, and he opened his mouth to say something, but Abby stopped him with a hand on his arm. “And here we are,” she said, meeting his heated gaze with a smiling one. “As happy as two fat cats in the sunshine.”
“It could have turned out far differently,” Caleb groused.
“Could have, but didn’t.”
Rachel saw that Libby looked at her new daughter-in-law with unabashed affection.
“All’s well that ends well, then,” Blythe said. Though she seemed painfully shy, as her time in Wolf Creek had passed and she got to know her brothers and their families better, she seemed more comfortable contributing to the conversations.
“I don’t mind telling you that I was furious,” Libby continued. “She was totally unrepentant about anything she’d done. When I brought up Rachel and Gabe and told her she had no right to blather her suspicions about Danny to everyone in town, she just laughed. ‘Your sins will find you out,’ she said, to which I replied that she was twisting scripture and what she had done was motivated by pure meanness—not goodness. Then I reminded her that we are to ‘keep our tongue from evil.’”
“And?” Gabe asked, fighting the urge to smile as he listened to his mother go on about her confrontation with her archenemy.
“She told me not to preach to her and stalked away. I realized then that I was casting pearls before swine and—”
Edward’s sudden hoot of laughter silenced her in midsentence. Planting her hands on her slender hips, Libby glared at him, but then when she realized how ridiculous the idea of her and Sarah tossing scripture back and forth in the heat of an argument must sound, she joined him.
“You can’t reason with unreasonable people, my dear,” he told her. “I’m afraid that unless something drastic happens to make Sarah see the error of her ways, she’ll never change. It’s a reality you’ll have to deal with if you do decide to move here.”
Caleb, Abby and Gabe looked as shocked by the casual comment as Rachel felt. The animation on Blythe’s pretty face vanished, and her hands tightened in her lap. As usual, Win’s expression gave away little, but Rachel thought he seemed watchful beneath the nonchalance, as if he were inordinately interested in everyone’s response.
Frowning, Caleb addressed Win. “I know we talked about this some, but I thought you were just making conversation, showing interest in town. Are you really considering a move from Boston?”
Win gestured toward Libby, who sat down in a chair next to Edward’s.
“Well, I am. At least for part of the year. With Sam gone, there’s no reason I can’t go where I wish. So why not? Win is perfectly capable of overseeing the family businesses.”
“Which are?” Gabe asked.
“Actually, Win worked with his father’s newspaper and printing endeavor, and Sam handled the furniture-manufacturing facility,” she said. “Since he died, Win has taken it on, too. Along with Philip’s help, of course. He’s an attorney.”
Gabe was impressed in spite of himself.
“Win and Blythe have had me for more than twenty years, and I feel I have so much to make up for with you two boys and the grandchildren here. I would miss Win and Blythe terribly, of course, which is why I’m considering equal time at both places.”
“Unless Blythe and I decide to come, too,” Win added, casting a quick glance at Gabe, who felt a sudden urge to smash his fist into his stepbrother’s aristocratic nose.
“I don’t want to move,” Blythe said, her lips forming a pout that made her look younger than her twenty-two years. “Wolf Creek is a nice little town, but after living in the city all my life, I can’t imagine being happy with no theaters, museums or parks and no eating establishments but the hotel and Ellie’s café.”
“The choices are a bit limited,” Win said, “but I think that’s exactly why this might be a good place to branch out. It seems to me that the area could use a new business or two. What about an attorney? There are bound to be legal issues that crop up, even with so few people.”
“Are you saying your brother might move, too, if the rest of you come?”
“Not Philip!” Win said with an emphatic shake of his head.
“I agree,” Libby added. “I can’t see him ever leaving the city, but some young lawyer out there will settle here one day.”
“So it’s really all still up in the air,” Caleb said. “What would you do with your days, Mother? As Blythe said, we don’t have much to do in the way of activities, and there isn’t much of a social scene. I don’t see that changing any time soon.”
“I’m not sure. I’ll be somewhat limited being gone half the year, but I’ll think of something. Maybe Ellie would let me help her part of the day.”
“You’d work in a café?” Rachel asked, astounded at the thought that the stylish woman sitting across from her would lower herself to work in an eating establishment.
“Well, I’m a pretty fair cook, and I had a lot of practice before I went to Boston. I’m certainly not above it, just because my husband left me with a lot of money,” she said with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter what we do. It matters that we do something and that we’re happy doing it. I happen to like being busy and I love to cook and bake.”
“I don’t know, Mother,” Win kidded her. “I’m not sure your piecrust is up to Ellie’s standards. Her food is pretty wonderful. Not to mention she’s a real stunner. What I can’t figure out is why someone hasn’t snatched her up.”
“Sheriff Garrett is working on it,” Gabe
said, giving Win a pointed look. “They’ve hit a bump or two lately, but it’s nothing they can’t resolve, I’m sure.”
“What kind of bumps?”
Abby looked around the room. “Well, I don’t want to gossip...”
“For pity’s sake, Abby!” Caleb said. “Just tell the truth. Colt is a good man, but his children are wretched little brats.”
“I can vouch for that,” Gabe said. “I actually shudder when I see them come through the doors at the store.”
“They are a handful,” Rachel added. “But that isn’t the biggest problem.”
Everyone looked at her expectantly.
“Ellie’s daughter, Beth, is a Mongoloid. Ellie’s husband took one look at her and disappeared. She hasn’t seen him since, so Ellie isn’t divorced, and she isn’t a widow. Until her husband is located or declared dead, she couldn’t marry again if she wanted to.”
* * *
Over the next few days, every moment Rachel was not treating someone’s ailment, she was thinking about her conversation with Gabe and his mother’s announcement that she might return to Wolf Creek. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that, but she understood the older woman’s need to reconnect with her sons and establish relationships with her grandchildren. She would think less of Libby had she not felt the way she did.
As for everyone else, they were fine with the idea. Neither Danny nor Ben was accustomed to having a grandmother around and were ecstatic about the notion. No doubt the younger children would be just as happy once they figured out exactly what having a grandmother meant.
Two days before the Granvilles were scheduled to return to Boston, Edward asked them to the house for dinner. Win and Blythe declined, stating that Ellie was having chicken and dumplings at the café, a dish they hadn’t tried before coming to the South and one they declared was so good as to be “positively sinful.” Though they might be right about how good it was, Rachel suspected there was something more behind their refusal. She also suspected that that something more was Libby wanting to spend some special time with Danny before she left.
Wolf Creek Homecoming Page 19
