A Love to Call Her Own

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A Love to Call Her Own Page 18

by Marilyn Pappano


  “I don’t know. Never thought about it.” They hadn’t had a lot of relatives in town to start with—the Smith and Reynolds families were spread wide over Oklahoma—and of the ones who’d lived in Tallgrass, the older folks had died off and the younger ones had moved away.

  After another silence, Noah pushed his chair back and propped one ankle over the opposite knee. “You think…Do you think Dillon’s buried out there somewhere, with nobody to put flowers on his grave?”

  Dalton slowly chewed the biscuit in his mouth, then washed it down with a gulp of coffee. He hated talking, even thinking, about his twin, but that didn’t keep him out of his mind. Noah had been so young when Dillon took off. In the beginning, he’d asked about him every day—Where’d he go, when’s he coming home?—but now he rarely mentioned his name. Part of it was just time passing, and part was a desire not to stir Dalton’s bitterness. Obviously, Dillon wasn’t far from Noah’s thoughts, either.

  “I don’t know,” Dalton said at last. “Odds are just as good he’s alive.”

  “Don’t you feel something? You’re his twin. You’re supposed to have some kind of connection.”

  Dalton’s first response was derision, his second surprise they’d never had this conversation before. No, no surprise. He’d never given Noah the chance to ask. “Maybe it works that way for some twins, but not us. I never knew what was going on with him, even when we were kids and shared a room.”

  “Why’d he leave like that? Why didn’t he ever let anyone know he was okay?”

  “I imagine part of the reason he sneaked off in the middle of the night was because he took my girlfriend with him. Her daddy would have met him with a shotgun if he’d had any clue what was happening. As for not calling…that’s just Dillon. He never thought about anyone but himself.”

  Noah’s eyes went big at the girlfriend part. Had their parents never told him the whole story? Had he been too concerned about bringing up painful memories to ask them? Unlike Dillon, Noah did think about other people’s feelings. He might get pissed and pop off something smart on impulse, but as a general rule, he respected people’s emotions.

  “Sometimes I’m not even sure I remember him,” he confessed. “I remember a lot of stuff, but sometimes I’m not sure whether I’m remembering him or you. I mean, you looked alike, acted alike. Like, I don’t remember if it was him that threw me in the lake in my church clothes or you.”

  “Him. It was him who shaved your head while you were asleep. And him who hung you up by your overalls strap on a hook in the barn. And him who told you Santa Claus liked to steal little boys and take them back to his workshop to make toys.” Abruptly Dalton grinned. “In fact, if the memory is of someone doing something to you, it was him. I was the good twin.”

  Noah snorted, then leaned down to set his plate on the floor for Oz. “Were you in love with her?”

  It took Dalton a moment to realize which her he meant. “I thought I was. Turned out, it was just that I was nineteen.” Exhaling, he brought the image from the long-past-relevant section of his mind: blond hair, blue eyes, a fondness for fire engine red lipstick, dancing, country music, and fun times. “Her name was Alice, she chewed gum all the time, and every sentence she said, ‘you know?’ We wouldn’t have lasted another month before she got bored or I strangled her for saying ‘you know?’ one time too many.”

  “But it’s the principle,” Noah argued. “She was your girlfriend. You don’t mess with your brother’s girlfriend.”

  Dalton remembered warning Jessy away from Noah last month. Now he knew there’d been no need. She might have flirted with him, had a beer with him, even danced with him, but Dalton knew his little brother wasn’t her type.

  He knew, because he was.

  * * *

  Jessy had a blast at the Memorial Day parade with the margarita group staking out a good-sized chunk of sidewalk in front of Jessy’s building for themselves and their families. Dane and Keegan, Therese’s sweetie, talked a lot of Army stuff, and her kids, Abby and Jacob, entertained Keegan’s little girl, Mariah, while visiting with their own friends. Bennie brought her grandmother, a sharp old lady whose cocoa brown eyes seemed to see everything. After that first soul-deep look when they’d been introduced, Jessy had avoided making eye contact with her again. Lucy and Marti were their usual selves. Fia was having a good day, though Jessy had provided her with a chair just in case, right between Bennie’s grandmother and so-very-pregnant Ilena.

  It seemed all the girls were celebrating this day of remembering with only good memories, or at least they were putting on a damn good show. Jessy’s own were bittersweet, as always. A lot of love and good times, sorrow and regret. One surprising thing: She wasn’t feeling so much the fraud. Maybe she’d finally hit bottom in her well of guilt. Maybe her psyche was starting to realize that she might be worthy of forgiveness. Of doing enough rights to offset those major wrongs.

  After the parade ended, the ones who lived close enough to walk home did so, while the others waited to let traffic thin out. That was how Jessy found herself seated next to Bennie’s grandmother. Call me Mama Maudene, the old lady had said, clasping Jessy’s hands in hers, but Jessy had too much of the old-fashioned Southern girl in her and found the name Mama darn near impossible to use.

  “What is your name again, dear?” the old lady asked.

  “Jessy. Short for Jessamine.”

  “The state wildflower of South Carolina. Is that where you’re from?”

  “No, Miss Maudene, I grew up in Georgia.” She was a work in progress.

  “My people are from South Carolina, down by Beaufort. They’re good people.”

  “Mine are from Atlanta, and they’re everything you’d expect of the Old South: old money, old beliefs, old attitudes.” There were more than a few plantations in the Wilkes-Hamilton family histories, more than a few slaves and ugly secrets.

  “When did you leave?”

  “When I was eighteen. When did you?”

  “When I was thirty-one, divorced, and looking for a new life in a new place. Haven’t decided if I like it yet,” Miss Maudene said, then let out a great laugh. “I liked it good enough to pick out my own resting spot in the cemetery. You come to my funeral, Jessamine, and make sure my girl laughs and sings and doesn’t shed a tear.”

  A knot formed in Jessy’s throat. Laughing, singing, maybe. Not shedding a tear? When you loved someone, tears were a nonnegotiable part of the whole funeral/burial thing. “I’ll laugh and sing with her.”

  Mama Maudene shook a crooked finger at her. “You didn’t say anything about not crying.”

  “I can’t promise that, and you know it.”

  The old lady laughed again, one that rippled through her entire body. “Oh, well, I got a lot of years left before we have to worry about it. I’m only seventy-eight years young.”

  When Bennie came to help Mama Maudene out of her chair, Jessy took Maudene’s arm, marveling at the fragility of the skin beneath her hands and the strength it covered. The woman had had some tough times in life, but Jessy would bet she’d handled them all with grace, because Miss Maudene was just surrounded by it.

  And Jessy, who’d always thought people cluttered up her pictures, wanted to capture some of it in a photograph.

  Lucy and Marti were last to leave, and they invited Jessy to join them for lunch. They weren’t due at Carly’s until two, and the feasting wouldn’t start until sometime around five. Lucy, on day four of her diet, couldn’t possibly wait that long.

  Jessy turned them down. She had one more thing to do before the cookout, and it was the sort of thing, for her, best done alone. She picked up a few bits of trash, folded her camping chairs, and left them inside the door, then ran upstairs. The wreath was in the backseat of her car, and her camera was with her purse. Her clothes were respectable for a graveside visit—a blue sleeveless dress and sandals—and neither her hair nor her makeup required a touch-up.

  Fort Murphy National Cemetery was busy, of course.
A ceremony was taking place near the war memorials, and the various sections were dotted with people. An American flag fluttered on every grave, the image bringing a lump to her throat. Aaron had been so proud of that flag. He’d worn it on his uniform, hung it outside every day, had decals on his car. To him it stood for everything in the world worth standing for. Worth fighting and dying for. He’d loved that flag.

  While she had remembered it for too long as merely the cover draping his casket.

  She was patriotic, too, though not as wear-it-on-her-sleeve as Aaron had been. She believed there were principles worth fighting for. She believed there were definitely people worth dying for. She didn’t think she’d ever had what it would take to sign up, to carry a gun, to run toward danger instead of away from it. Not everyone was cut out to be a hero.

  But she’d signed on for her soldier. She’d married him, lived alone a good part of the time, supported, and encouraged him. She’d appreciated the benefits and hadn’t minded the low pay, the moves, or the strength the Army forced her to develop.

  And she’d always been waiting for him when he came home.

  Just as she would have been waiting the last time. She hadn’t talked to a lawyer yet. She hadn’t filed any papers. If he’d survived the last two weeks on his rotation, he would have come home, like always, to her best welcome. Even though she wanted a divorce, she’d still loved him, just not with the intensity she should have. She would have been thankful for his safe return. She never would have diminished his homecoming in any way.

  And who knew? Maybe she would have changed her mind about the divorce.

  The part of her so well versed in blaming herself was skeptical. Part of her was intrigued by the idea.

  She eased her car past others on the narrow road, pulling to the shoulder when she reached Aaron’s section. Circling to the other side of the car, she hung her camera by its strap over her shoulder, lifted out the arrangement, and carried it the few yards to his grave. Pansy, her favorite florist, had made it for her, a woven basket filled with fine silk falls of wisteria, greenery, and a few flowers in matching shades. Jessy set it next to the stone, pulled a few tendrils up and around the dowel that held the miniature flag, and let a few dangle over the top of the stone.

  Wisteria had bloomed in the live oaks outside their Savannah apartment when they were first married. How many mornings had she lain there, gazing out the window at the delicate petals, thinking she was the luckiest woman in the world?

  She knelt to pull an errant piece of grass that had escaped the trimmer, then laid her hand on the marble, warm, solid. “You deserved to come home, Aaron,” she whispered. “You’d fought your battles. You’d done yourself proud. It shouldn’t have been your time.”

  But it had been. God, luck, fate, fortune, misfortune had taken him. They’d cheated the world out of a man it needed.

  And they’d left her. For what?

  She kneeled there until her feet began to tingle. She kissed her fingertips, then pressed them to the carving of his name, and for an instant, she felt…peaceful. It was a foreign sensation. Her life had always been chaotic—anger, rebellion, loneliness, emptiness, fear, hurt, happiness and uncertainty and no self-esteem and unbearable sadness. The moments of peace—of calm, serenity, the absence of fear and self-loathing and ugly thoughts—had been few and far between. She wished she could grab the feeling and hold on to it forever, but she couldn’t.

  She just had to learn to find it again.

  Getting to her feet, she brushed bits of grass from her legs, then glanced to the south, to Sandra Smith’s grave. Its flag wavered over a beautiful sunshine yellow bouquet. Dalton had brought her yellow flowers the day he and Jessy had met. Probably her favorite color. Jessy loved every color, just as long as it screamed, Look at me! I’m gorgeous!

  She walked between stones to Sandra’s marker. “You were a braver woman than me,” she murmured. “I would have been way too afraid to do the things you did.”

  “What’s the saying? Bravery is being afraid and doing it anyway?”

  The sound of Dalton’s voice startled her. She looked over one shoulder, then the other, before spotting him leaning in the shade of a nearby tree. Her emotions were all good: surprise, pleasure, and simple happiness. Had she forgotten that simple could be wonderful?

  He pushed away from the tree and came a few steps closer. “You would have done fine. And you would have come home.”

  “She did her best to come home.”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it again. After a moment, he gestured to her camera. “You take a lot of pictures in graveyards?”

  “I used to, back home. Two-hundred-year-old gravestones always interested me.” She removed the lens cap, turned on the camera, and swept her free hand across the area. “I want to get shots of the flags.”

  The symmetry of the marble markers and flapping colors drew her photographer’s eye, and she began snapping, shifting, snapping again. “Did you know that at a lot of the old country cemeteries in the South, when people celebrated Decoration Day, they would put flowers on the graves, then spread a sheet or a tablecloth on the ground, have a picnic, and visit with their families and neighbors while the kids played?”

  “I didn’t know that. I prefer my picnics someplace a little less somber.”

  She turned the camera to look at him but didn’t take the shot. “I can’t imagine you picnicking.”

  “I haven’t done it in a long time.”

  She wasn’t surprised. Neither had she. “What are your plans for today?” Kneeling once again, she lined up rows of markers in the viewfinder, waited for the breeze to still, then pressed the button. She took a couple more for good measure.

  “I was planning to surprise you.”

  Even the comment surprised her. She lowered the camera, then got to her feet. Had he intended to stop by her apartment with an invitation of some sorts? The surprise would have been on him, since she wouldn’t be home until dark. “How?”

  “You’re going to a cookout this afternoon.”

  “Yeah.” She’d probably mentioned it. She did tend to talk a lot.

  “So am I.”

  “At Carly and Dane’s?” When he nodded, she thoughtfully turned her camera in another direction, focusing on flowers, trees, shadows, rippling flags. She knew Dalton and Dane were friends, but it still would have surprised her to walk into Carly’s backyard and find him there. All the margarita girls would have been wondering who the handsome cowboy was, and she wouldn’t have known how to act around him, and someone would have gotten suspicious and guessed…

  Or she would have acted perfectly normal with him. Everyone would have realized they knew each other. Maybe she even would have said, This is Dalton, my—Friend? Boyfriend? The man she’d slept with first and was getting acquainted with now? The man who occupied an awful lot of her time and made her want more?

  “I can skip it if it would make you uncomfortable.”

  She looked at him again through the lens. His dark gaze was steady, searching, and this time she captured it. When had his face become so familiar that she could trace the lines etching it from memory? When had the yearning to do just that taken control of her fingers?

  Deliberately she gripped the camera tighter. “Of course not. If you don’t mind tagging along for a bit, we can go together and surprise everyone there.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  He did literally tag along, walking with her to the next section, an older one with fewer flowers, lonelier graves. These troops’ families didn’t live locally, she guessed, or they’d passed on themselves, or they celebrated Memorial Day simply as a day off work, a time to go to the lake or hang out by the pool and socialize. It should have made her feel blue, but it didn’t. The troops weren’t in those plots, and distance couldn’t diminish love. Eventually, everyone’s grave went unvisited. It was the way of things.

  “You have any other surprises?” she asked as she turned away to allow an elderly woman
privacy at her loved one’s grave.

  “I’ll be at the wedding Saturday.”

  Dalton, Dane, friends. Of course he was invited to the wedding. Then the thought occurred to her: Would he ask her to go with him? Wouldn’t that be a fabulous date, watching one of the people she loved best make her new love official before God and everybody? That was practically enough to make a woman swoon.

  As if he’d read her mind, he said, “I have to be there early because I’m the best man, but I thought maybe afterward, we could go out to dinner. Since I’ll be dressed up in a suit and tie for the first time in years, maybe someplace nice.”

  She’d had cuter, funnier, smoother invitations but couldn’t think of one she’d been more eager to accept. “Sure. I’ll dress up extra nice, too.”

  “Just your usual glamour will be enough. You don’t want to steal attention from the bride.”

  A smile curving her lips at the suggestion that she could outshine Carly on her wedding day, she began snapping pictures again and thinking of the addition she would make to her calendar when she got home tonight. Saturday was already marked in red as An Important Date.

  Tonight she would write beneath that: A Very Important Date.

  Chapter 10

  If she hadn’t had desserts to carry, Lucy so could have walked to Carly’s house for the celebration. After four morning walks with Joe—and three in the evening that she hadn’t expected—she’d noticed at least a smidge more strength and endurance. It wasn’t a race, he’d told her. The point was to eat better, live healthier, and exercise regularly. She wouldn’t see huge results like a ten-pound loss in the first week—you’re breaking my heart, she’d told him snidely—but she would get there.

  She kept to herself that she had to get there quickly enough to get Ben’s attention. They were definitely friends, but she wanted him to see her as so much more, and his time in Tallgrass was limited. He’d put his life on hold to come here, and once Patricia’s immediate need had passed, he would return home. Would it be another twenty years before they saw each other again?

 

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