Then, there was the striptease. Jennie could feel herself blushing as she recalled what had happened and she hid her face in her hands, even though she was alone in the dark.
I haven’t thought of that in…forever. Why now?
Thomas had always projected an image of being prim and proper and, compared to her, he was. Five of her friends had dared her to perform for Thomas, and they had laid bets on how far she would go, or, at least, on how far Thomas would allow her to go. Other girls had learned of the bet and by Saturday night there were fifteen wagers of fifty dollars, and only two of them would pay off if she lost less than one piece of underwear. Dress rehearsal for her friends had been a blast, and she had gone through the routine several times.
On Saturday night she and Thomas had ridden the elevator to her room on the top floor of the dormitory and walked, hand in hand, down the hall. As she had closed the door, she’d heard giggles in the hall, and she had known that more than a half dozen ears were pressed against the door, waiting to hear what would happen.
She’d motioned for Thomas to sit down, pushed the button to start her CD, and as “I Will Always Love You” filled the room, Jennie had slipped off her coat, forgotten about those who stood listening at the door, and sang softly to Thomas as she had swayed in time to the music. Thomas had sat in her recliner, his eyes following her every move. As her hair had slowly swished from side to side, she had begun to undress. A pile of clothes lay at her feet and one hand was behind her back fooling with a hook, when Thomas had held up his hand, struggling not to burst out laughing.
“What are you doing?”
Jennie had smiled. “There’s a bet,” she had whispered, “but where’s the fun if I stop now?”
Jennie laughed now, remembering. Nothing really bad, as they would have described sex, had happened, but her friends’ imaginations had run wild, and her reputation as a daredevil was sealed when she presented the photographic evidence—a blurred image that could have been her with a pile of clothes at her feet—along with the fact that she and Thomas had stayed in her room for almost an hour after the music had stopped. Jennie had pocketed her share of the money and later in the week she used her winnings to treat her friends to dinner.
Now, she was approaching forty, she owned a home, taught school, and had a retirement account. She devoured books, worked in her garden, canoed on the river, and watched her favorite TV shows. A “good time” was dinner at the Olive Garden in Carrollton, the nearest city. She was reserved, rather conservative, and a bit cynical.
Boring, she thought. Not someone a guy would fall in love with. Certainly not a second time.
She plumped her pillow and turned on her side.
Clearly, Thomas had changed too. Her feelings were out of date, attached to a man who no longer existed.
He had been a student when she left him. Now he was a professor, a good one too, judging by the evaluations she had found online.
He was an author. At the time she had left, he had published a book. Now he had published several, ten at least, and they had appeared on numerous best-seller lists.
His appearance, though, was much the same as she remembered, except for a few gray hairs scattered near his temples. Not like me, she thought, as she brushed her hand across a dry cheek. I look every bit my age.
Thomas had the same smile, the same sense of humor she remembered. He was still unfailingly polite. He still loved photography. Jennie had been in his study twice, and both times she had been impressed by the photographs that covered one wall. Some were family pictures, but most of them were of the marshlands near Charleston, taken from Thomas’s boat.
Thomas had already loved a second time. He had married again. He’d had a child again. His wife had left him again. Although, the situation was different. But still, Thomas was alone, again, a single parent once more.
In the end it didn’t matter who had changed or how. Thomas wouldn’t want her to be around his daughter. She was sure of it.
After four years, she still smarted over what had been said during the hearing. Thomas and his attorney had told the truth. She would have expected nothing less from him. But they had told it in the worst way possible. She was still ashamed she had allowed her family to hear what was said. Now, Alexis knew. Thomas might have been fighting for his children, as Alexis had said, but she had felt like a whore.
She sighed. I suppose I was one, except no one paid me.
She still felt the humiliation.
He thinks I haven’t changed since then. He wants nothing to do with me, and he doesn’t want me near Louisa, either.
She stared at the ceiling for what seemed like an hour. Even if they hadn’t changed, even if Thomas did not think her unfit, Jennie lived seven hours away. She’d have to be at work every morning.
She settled back into bed and pulled up the covers. She did love Thomas, and she wanted good things for him, but she could not be the one to provide them.
Thomas
Thomas sat in his study watching the clouds rolling across the sky. He could hear rain pelting the window and tree branches scraping the side of the house as they whipped about in the wind. He stepped across the room to toss a few sticks of kindling on the fire, checked on Louisa, who slept in a cradle beside his desk, and then eased himself back into his chair. Strange weather, he thought. We shouldn’t need a fire in early April.
The kindling crackled as it caught, and Thomas smiled. He loved the aroma of burning wood, and he had refused to copy his neighbors by installing propane for that very reason. The children accused him of being old fashioned, but he had noted that when he built a fire, they would congregate near the hearth, but when they visited their friends, they seemed to pay no attention to the flames flickering over the gas logs.
He reached across the desk and picked up the schedule for the writing seminar he was teaching the next month in Atlanta. “How to Write a Novel,” he read. In seven hours on the first Saturday of May he would teach thirty university students how to write a novel. He chuckled. If only it were so easy.
Actually, there was more to the program than the one-day seminar. For ten of the students it was an introduction to a course they would be taking over the summer. Thomas would be a visiting professor and would be on campus two days each month from June to August, teaching classes and consulting with the students. Between classes, the students would write. The intent was that by the end of August, each student would have completed a first draft of a novel.
He flipped through the folder that lay in front of him. He had taught the seminar and the course before, in Charleston, and he had made a number of changes. The outline was good, the exercises were on target. He was ready, he decided.
Alexis and Tasha both would be assisting him, leading discussions when the students broke into small groups. It would be good to see them. Christa and Amy had a horse show that weekend. And Louisa…
He sighed. He had forgotten about Louisa.
As if on cue, the baby stretched, opened her eyes, and smiled. Now three months old—actually two months, the pediatrician would remind him, since she had been delivered early—she was beginning to be awake for longer periods of time. A month ago, he could almost have gotten away with taking her with him to the seminar, not that he would have done that, and she would have slept through it.
He scooped her up and she cooed, causing him to smile. He would call the seminar director on Monday and ask her to recruit a couple of students to sit with her.
Strangers? You would let strangers care for your child? He could almost hear Cecelia Cross’s voice, and he laughed. She had been incensed when she discovered he had hired a nanny to take care of Louisa while he was at school. She had all but offered to do it herself, reminding him she had raised four children and now babysat with her two grandchildren.
“If your mother were here, I wouldn’t need to have a stranger take care of you.”
Thomas’s angry voice seemed to startle the baby and she whimpered. Truth be t
old, it had startled him a little too. Three months after Emma’s passing, and his emotions still got the best of him sometimes.
As guilt replaced anger, Thomas held the baby tightly and rubbed her back. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m sorry. It’s not your mother’s fault.” He wiped his eyes. “She would be with us if she could.”
He carried Louisa to the nursery to change her diaper before giving her a bottle.
“They will be nice strangers, though. I promise.” He kissed her on the nose. “Only nice people can be around Miss Louisa.”
As he popped the snaps on her onesie, a vague long-ago recollection came to him, and Thomas suddenly looked up. “Maybe Jennie would like to take care of you.”
No. I’m not that desperate, he thought, and picked up Louisa to carry her downstairs in search of a bottle.
Thomas took a deep breath. His anger was creeping back to the surface. Still, he didn’t want Jennie to be around his daughter. He didn’t want her with any of his daughters, actually, but the other four were adults and made their own decisions. He could not control them, but Louisa was still his responsibility.
He took a bottle from the refrigerator and ran warm water over it.
It was not Jennie’s past that bothered him, as bad as it was. She had put that life behind her. He knew this because in preparation for the visitation hearing, he and his attorney had searched everywhere—friends, family, work, church, the community, her old haunts—probing for a hint, a whisper of anything to indicate it would be dangerous for Alexis and Christa to be with her.
Finding nothing had made it more difficult to oppose her petition, but a part of Thomas had felt proud of her. They could easily document how low she had fallen, but also how she had pulled herself back up.
However, just because they had found no problem did not mean none existed, his attorney had pointed out, it only proved that they had been unable to locate one. Instead, though, they had hammered on her past as well as on the disruption her request would cause in the lives of the children she professed to love.
Ultimately, Jennie had dropped her petition for visitation, which made Thomas more willing to allow it, but he still did not like his daughters seeing her. He’d never asked Emma not to be Jennie’s friend, but he’d lost his temper once when she’d invited her to stay at their house when she’d visited Charleston.
“She’s not a part of my life,” he had snapped. “I don’t want her in my city, in my home, around my daughters.”
Emma had convinced him that if Jennie came to Charleston to see the girls, then they would not be away from him, but he had not accepted her as a member of his family. He would be polite to her—he had always been polite, even in court—but he did not have to be her friend.
“She didn’t have to ask for a court order,” he had argued. “She didn’t have to arrive with heavy artillery. She could have asked to see the girls.”
“What would you have said?” Emma had smiled like she did when she caught one of the children slanting a story to make their point.
Thomas had hesitated.
“I honestly don’t know. I’d like to think I would have been reasonable.”
“Reasonable? About Alexis and Christa? Pooh.”
He had started to laugh. He knew she was teasing him, trying to break through his anger.
“Of course. Always…But we’ll never know. She made no attempt to be nice. I mean, really, how difficult would it have been? How much time would it have taken to ask me? If I’d said no, then she could have still gone to court.”
As much as her petition had angered him, though, his problem with Jennie was more deep-seated, more long-lasting.
“You don’t know what it was like to live with her,” he had once told Emma. They had been sitting in front of the fireplace one evening in the winter, and she had been attempting to convince him to be nicer to Jennie. “She had made a commitment to us, to the children, and then…she just left. She stormed out of the house, and we never saw her again. Can you imagine what that was like?” He’d clenched his fist. “You love someone. You marry her. You have children together…and she walks away without a thought, without even glancing behind her. You treat a…a house that way, not a person.” He had looked at the floor, then, not wanting Emma to see how much Jennie stilled managed to get to him. “Killed any love I ever had for her,” he had murmured.
As he stood in the kitchen, Thomas felt the old resentment rise up in him again. He shook his head as he stared out the window. “She never explained, never apologized. Jennie says ‘I was sick, I was sick,’ and I’m supposed to say ‘I understand. I understand.’ Well I didn’t understand then, and I don’t understand now.”
Thomas realized he’d been thinking aloud and had begun to shout. He was still clutching Louisa against his chest and she began to squirm, reaching for the bottle he held in his other hand. He relaxed his hold and gazed at her little face. “I’m sorry, darling.” He kissed her forehead and looked into her eyes. “I don’t know why that woman still makes me so angry.”
He carried Louisa and her bottle back upstairs to his study, still thinking.
Emma would never have treated me like Jennie did, he thought. She may have left me, left us, he looked down and rested his cheek on Louisa’s head, but it was not the same. It was not her choice. She was a victim…
He sat and cradled Louisa in his arm as she seemed to inhale the formula.
But wasn’t Jennie a victim too? “It’s not the same,” he said aloud, careful not to shout this time. Maybe Jennie was too embarrassed to apologize.
Thomas recalled the expression on Jennie’s face during her testimony. She had seemed to be about to apologize. She had said she was sorry—of course she would say that for the judge—but once, as she described her feelings and her behavior during the waning days of their marriage, she had looked directly at him.
He had seen that expression before. The first time, he recalled, was when she had taken him home to meet her parents. They had driven over to Whitesburg on a Saturday morning. Thomas had suggested that they go on Friday night so she would have more time to visit with her parents, but Jennie had assured him that one night with her father would be more than enough. She would have planned a day trip, she’d said, but it would have hurt her mother’s feelings.
They had arrived in the late morning. Her parents were on the front porch—she had called them as they left the interstate—and as he pulled to a stop in front of the two-story white house, her mother had hurried down the steps to greet them. Her father had slouched against the front door, a bottle of beer in one hand and the television’s remote control in the other. Every minute or so he had glanced though the door as if the program he had been watching before they had arrived was more interesting than his daughter’s boyfriend.
When Jennie had introduced him to her father, he did not respond to Thomas’s greeting, nor did he take Thomas’s outstretched hand. He just looked him up and down, took a swig from the bottle, and cleared his throat. “Not bad for a college boy, I guess.” College boy had sounded like a piece of spoiled fish.
“Want a drink?” He had held the beer up and Thomas had not been sure if he was offering to share that bottle or whether there was another inside.
Jennie had spoken before he could ask. “Daddy, it’s not even noon, yet.”
“So?”
“Well most people…”
Thomas had put his hand on her arm to let her know it was all right.
Her father had glared at his hand as though Thomas was being inappropriate. “At one time in the British army,” he’d said, “courts martial were scheduled between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon. The assumption was that no gentleman was drunk before ten not sober after two, so they certainly began to drink before noon.”
Jennie had smiled, but her father had continued to stare at Thomas as if he had landed from another planet, and the silence seemed interminable. Finally, Thomas had cleared his throat.
&nb
sp; “I…uh…yes. Thank you. I’ll have something to drink.”
He and her father had spent the better part of the afternoon at the kitchen table, Thomas sipping the vile tasting local beer while Jennie’s father chugged bottle after bottle. He peppered Thomas with questions, discovering Thomas preferred wine to beer, boating to hunting, and photography to fishing. Finally, he had reared back in his chair and glared at Thomas.
“Are you taking liberties with my daughter?”
“Daddy,” Jennie protested.
Her father had held up a hand for silence. “Answer my question, boy. Are you?”
Thomas had turned to Jennie, then back to her father.
“Ah, no. No, sir. Not at all.”
Her father had heaved himself to his feet. “The boy is either a liar or a fool,” he’d declared as he stomped from the room.
That was when Thomas had seen the expression on Jennie’s face as she had walked across the kitchen and put her arms around him. She had tears in her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“Would he have been happier if I’d said yes?”
Jennie had popped his shoulder. “You’re terrible…and you’d be dead now.”
Thomas held Louisa against his shoulder now and patted her back “I saw her expression. Do I really need hear it?”
Louisa responded with a loud burp.
“So you think not?” He stared out the window for a moment and sighed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’ve been unreasonable.”
Jennie did not appear at all the same as she had at the end of their marriage. She looked as if she had lost fifty pounds and her hair was no longer platinum. It was shorter too, just above her shoulders. Actually, she appeared much as she had on their wedding day.
Thomas smiled. I guess that could not really be true.
Once and Future Wife Page 5
