Marriage In Jeopardy

by Anna Adams

  “It’d make a lovely office for a lawyer.” Evelyn slid her fingertips across a desk the school had left behind. “Especially if he wanted to share space with an architect.”

  “Don’t say that.” Lydia stared at Geraldine Dawson. She and Evelyn would both be in trouble if that rumor got back to Josh. He really would hate her if he thought she was maneuvering him home to Kline.

  Evelyn’s knowing nod didn’t comfort Lydia. Taking Geraldine’s arm, Evelyn led her in low-voiced conversation toward the door.

  Lydia followed, but the old school desk drew her fingers to its slick, well-worn surface. She had to stroke the mahogany door frame. The old wood’s soft warmth proved irresistible. She could let herself love this building.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AS SOON AS they got home, Lydia layered on sweatshirts and socks and took a book outside to the hammock. Luxuriating in sunlight through the bare oak trees above her head and feet, she had just enough time to wonder when she’d stop keeping a toddler’s nap schedule before the book slipped from her hands and disappeared. She fell asleep, trying to convince herself to look for it.

  Josh woke her, tucking a quilt around her.

  “I’m awake.” She tried to sound as if she’d never fallen asleep. Foolish, since he’d obviously been home awhile. The last rays of sun gleamed through water droplets in his hair.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “No problem.” She felt around for her book, luxuriating in the sensuous contrast of cool breeze and the quilt’s warm weight. “Did you bring this out?”

  “Mom did when she worried you might get cold.”

  “I may stay here all night. I can’t remember when I’ve been so comfortable.”

  Affection crinkled his eyes. She savored that, even as she had to ruin it, putting him straight on his mother’s plans. “Evelyn’s set on Barker’s.”

  “She made that clear last night.”

  “She’s agreed to look at it with you, along with the little school building.” Should she tell him what his mother had suggested about their sharing office space? No. She was too toasty and happy. Let him find out for himself that his mother was planning big things for him back in Kline. “What time is it?”

  “Just after five. I tried to call you from the boat.”

  “I wonder if my phone’s dead. I don’t think I’ve charged it since we’ve been here, and I forgot to check messages.”

  “It doesn’t matter as long as you’re all right. How do you feel?” He leaned against the tree at the end of the hammock. One hip jutted as he braced his foot against the trunk.

  “Fine.” Too fine, looking at him. She knew the lanky body he took for granted as if it were her own. She’d taken comfort in him as she took comfort from the warm embrace of her mother-in-law’s hammock and quilt. Sometimes marriage could be that basic.

  “Why did you try to call me?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t sure what my mother said to Mrs. Dawson.”

  “About me? I wondered that, too.” She smiled, warmer than ever. “I’m glad you worried, but your mom was discreet.”

  Putting both hands in his pockets, he rocked against the tree trunk. “I’ve always worried. Ever since the first threat, I don’t mention you at the office,” he said. “Your name isn’t in my paperwork. I don’t even list you beside my emergency number.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have felt better.”

  “I didn’t know I had to.” He straightened. “You think you’re out of my head the second I leave home in the mornings? You’re my wife.”

  “I am your wife, but I need a little more information about where we stand.”

  “You mean where we’re going?”

  She nodded. “I’m trying to be patient.”

  He pushed away from the tree and knelt beside her. She held out her hand, and he kissed her palm and then rested his cheek against it. “Will we be all right?”

  “I want more than all right.” She wriggled closer. “Before, I settled for ‘all right,’ but we’re both frozen inside our doubts. We need true love we can trust to make a marriage. We deserve that kind of love.”

  Behind them, the mudroom door opened. He looked up. “Give us a minute, Mom.”

  After a second, the door closed again.

  He kissed her, hard and fast, a man claiming his wife. “I want the same things you do.” His strong tone broke the hard shell Lydia had tried to form as he’d faded to the edges of her life. Every part of this man meant too much to her. “I’m even trying with my mother and father because of you. Maybe the baby and my parents and—Clara—they’re all mixed up in my mind. I don’t know what comes next, but I won’t let you walk away.”

  Walking was the last thing she wanted. “I’m not going unless you force me.” She could have trusted him. She could have admitted she still loved him. Hardly believing happiness could be so close, she held back with the part of her that disengaged for safety.

  She clambered out of the quilt, but faltered, her muscles protesting as she stood. “After a few days of lying around, I’m out of shape.”

  “What do you mean?” He ran his hands over her, as if searching for an injury.

  “I’m achy.” Shivering in the crisp air, she locked her arms around Josh’s neck and pressed her lips to his in a chaste promise to start over. Passion, they understood. They needed deeper feelings that couldn’t burn themselves out or freeze in a nuclear winter of grief for their lost child.

  He caught her close, his breathing swift. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Me, too.”

  He fingered her hair away from her ear and kissed the base of her throat. “We’d better go inside. My mother will think we’re in a heated battle.”

  He reached for the quilt. She took the other end. Together, they folded it. Each time their fingers met, his warmth made her want to follow the quilt into Josh’s arms.

  If he’d hated losing her, too, why had they stopped talking? Distance had grown between them as naturally as choking weeds in an unkempt garden.

  Josh opened the kitchen door. “Here we are, Mom.”

  Lydia slipped past, brushing his waist with her hand. Her nerve endings were sensitized, her awareness of him almost painful.

  His mother looked up from a half-made salad. Spaghetti sauce bubbled on the gas range. A loaf of Italian bread waited on the counter between crushed garlic on a cutting board and a mound of freshly grated parmesan cheese.

  Warm light filled the kitchen. Good smells and the signs of people living life reminded Lydia she was also alive. “I’m starving, Evelyn.”

  “Supper’s almost ready. Your father’s back from the hardware store, Josh. I wonder if you’d help him unload paint from the truck.”

  “Paint?”

  Lydia looked up. “I thought you worked together on the boat today. What’s your dad doing at the hardware store?”

  “He went out again while I was in the shower.” He went to the counter and snagged a grape tomato, which he popped into his mouth. “What’s he up to, Mom?”

  “He thought you might like to help paint the barn.”

  “Like to?” He stared at his mother. “Have you noticed how big that barn is? Some chat over a few cans of paint isn’t going to make us move back here.”

  Lydia laughed. “You’re in danger of overplaying your hand, Evelyn.”

  “What’s funny? You don’t realize it, but Bart’s getting older each day. He can’t do everything by himself.”

  Lydia worried a little about her father-in-law, who was only in his midfifties. Josh laughed out loud. “Mom, he could whip my ass in a fight.”

  “Josh.” His mother pretended to be shocked.

  “Okay—I give up.” Josh shot Lydia a look of surrender. “I’m dying to paint the barn.” Passing Lydia the quilt, he headed out to help his dad.

  Evelyn scooped the quilt out of Lydia’s arms. “Am I clever, or what?”

  “Or what, I’m thinking. He knows exactly what you’re
up to.”

  “He’s never been so wild to help around here before.” Evidently feeling she’d maligned Josh, she continued. “Not that he’s lazy, but he never hangs around long enough.”

  “I know.” Lydia had been along for every visit in the past five years. She knew this family’s construction as well as any of the buildings she’d worked on in Hartford.

  “You agree he’s weakening?”

  He was making different choices to save himself from his own bitterness. “There are four sides to the barn, Evelyn. How do you know they won’t split them up?”

  “Spoilsport. Bart will make sure it all goes according to plan.”

  “Stop trying to manipulate Josh. He deserves better.”

  “We all deserve better.”

  “He won’t come home to stay.” And yet, Kline felt more like home to her every time she came here.

  “We’ll see.” Evelyn pointed her toward a stack of plates and silver and carefully folded, snowy linen napkins. “Feel like setting the table?”

  “MAYBE LYDIA’S right, Bart.” Evelyn turned from the dressing table, rubbing lotion on her face. “I should stop manipulating our son.”

  “Try to keep your voice down, honey. One thing we’ve learned from this visit is that they can hear every word we say.”

  Evelyn shared a warm smile with Bart and wished Josh and Lydia could find the trust she and Bart had struggled so hard to achieve. Unequivocal. No matter what he said or thought, she knew he’d be on her side. And he could assume the same about her. “Josh guessed what I was up to that first day they were here.” She looked up, rubbing the last of her moisturizer into her elbows. “They seemed better together tonight.”

  He laid his book flat on his chest and took off his reading glasses. “They were more comfortable together. Isn’t that more important than what we want, honey? Josh and Lydia are getting along again. Let’s leave them alone to work out their problems.”

  “He’s going to help you paint.”

  “I don’t need to paint already. You’re getting desperate.”

  “Yeah, I panicked. Lydia was so energetic today, I suddenly thought they might go home and we’d sink back into an armed truce with Josh.”

  “We can’t make him change. I’ve gone along with you so far, but let’s try being honest. We just want our son to be part of our family. We don’t have to trick him. Tricking him won’t work.”

  “Neither has being honest all these years. I don’t understand why he’s chosen to help, knowing I was working him.” She came to the bed and pounded her pillow. “He’s seen the barn, and he’s a country boy at heart. He has to know the paint’s only a couple of years old.”

  “Our tricks have nothing to do with it,” Bart said, gentling his tone. “He’s lost a son. He and Lydia are apparently a lot closer to separating than we ever dreamed. Family gets more precious when you know what you’re giving up.”

  “I know—believe me—I know, but I think it’s more. Whatever they’re fighting about includes us. Every time I try to get information from Lydia, she clams up about Josh, but you can bet he wouldn’t be here if Lydia hadn’t pushed him to come.”

  “Give up for tonight, Ev. Just come to bed.” He set his book on the nightstand.

  Evelyn lifted the bedding and burrowed into his side. “You’re so warm.”

  “And I’m right about Josh. Don’t push him anymore. Let him decide what he wants from us.”

  “I think it’s working, though.”

  “Evelyn.”

  “All right, but I like making things happen, rather than waiting.”

  “Feels as if you have more control?” he asked.

  “Are you saying we don’t?” Bart was usually the more sensitive, though he’d never brag about it. She tended to barge into a situation and hope for the best. Impulse control, her therapist had called it all those years ago.

  “The kids could leave tomorrow. I don’t want a relationship with Josh because he’s staying for Lydia, or you’ve talked him into helping me paint.”

  “All right. I’ll leave him alone, but is it okay if I still ask him to look at the properties with me?”

  “Yes, honey. Just don’t talk him into anything else he doesn’t want to do.”

  He turned off the light. Evelyn welcomed his arms around her. Often in the night, she remembered how it had been to sleep without him for almost two full years—grieving for their daughter, longing for their son, who was being worked to death on a dairy farm. All because of the things she and Bart had done.

  “You’d think guilt would have made us hate each other after what happened,” she said.

  “Who else could we talk to about it? Anyone else would have blamed us as much as we did. No one else could have felt how deeply sorry we were—and how afraid for Josh.”

  “I love you, Bart, and I’m going to trust your instincts about him.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “I’m going to hope your trust is well-placed.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, Lydia was watching the morning news when a story came on about the science lab at the high school burning.

  She stood, knocking her plate of eggs to the floor. “Josh?”

  “Huh?” Surrounded by real estate papers, he hadn’t been paying attention until he’d heard the plate fall.

  “The school. Someone did break in last night.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Look, look.” She turned his mother’s small television in his direction and then wiped up the eggs. A man in a suit was talking about storms offshore raising the tide.

  Josh lifted his papers in an unspoken “what?”

  “They’ll talk about it again. What if it was those boys?”

  “They’ve graduated to more dangerous crimes, and Simon has a problem on his hands.”

  “I mean what if they were Geraldine’s grandsons?”

  “Could you have identified them?”

  “I told you I didn’t see their faces clearly. Maybe if someone put them in the same clothes and made them run across the field.”

  “Which Simon would never do.” Josh concentrated on his paperwork again. “You did your duty.”

  “Why do I feel guilty?”

  “Because you don’t want to see young boys in trouble, but you wonder if you should have done more.”

  “Who’s Sigmund-damn-Freud now?”

  “What do you want to do, Lydia?”

  “I’m thinking of calling Simon.”

  “Well, I won’t let him put Mrs. Dawson’s grandsons in a run-across-the-field lineup for you. Why are you smiling at me?”

  “Because you call her Mrs. Dawson as if you were still in high school.”

  “Time in this town stopped for me the day I left for college.”

  “She’s been awfully nice to your mother, Josh. You wouldn’t believe how difficult Evelyn was yesterday.”

  “I know what I want,” Evelyn said from the doorway, “and I don’t see why I should waste Geraldine’s time or mine, looking anywhere else.”

  “Because you can’t make a purchase like this with your heart first, Mom.”

  “I’m putting your father’s and my money into this building and this business. If my heart isn’t there, we’ll both be in trouble.”

  Lydia only half paid attention to their wrangling. “I’m going over there.”

  “Over where?” Josh and Evelyn asked in one voice.

  “To the school. The fire trucks are still there. The school’s closed. Maybe those boys I saw will be there and I’ll recognize them.”

  “What are you talking about?” Evelyn asked.

  “Someone broke into the high school and burned the lab.”

  “The whole lab?”

  “I don’t know, but they talked about extensive damage.”

  “You can’t accuse Geraldine’s grandsons without proof.”

  “I’ve been bending over backward to avoid doing that, Evelyn, but this is serious.”

  “You don�
�t know they were even the kids you saw.” She grabbed a mug from the counter. “Let me have one cup of coffee and I’ll come with you.”

  “I’m taking a shower and getting dressed. If you want to go, you’ll have to be ready when I am.”

  “Wait,” Josh said, “I don’t want them seeing you if they did something and they think you might identify them.”

  “You’re the one who said they were kids.”

  “I was wrong,” he said. “Don’t go over there.”

  “I’m going.”

  “Mom, if you want to come along, be ready when we are,” Josh said.

  Lydia couldn’t believe his sudden loss of common sense. “Let’s take the circus over. Your mom’s fine, Josh, but everyone in this town knows you’re an attorney. If they see you, they could think I’m out to get them.”

  “Why are you going?”

  “I just want to know what’s happening. Evelyn?”

  She pulled the cup away from her mouth and waved her hand in front of her lips. “I’m burning myself to hurry. Give me a second. Josh, I think she’s right.”

  He stared at them, but Lydia could tell he was thinking something more than “why can’t I make them do what I want them to?” He suddenly stacked the papers on the table in front of him. “I need to speak with Mrs. Dawson.”

  “About her boys?” Evelyn set her mug down. “You can’t do that.”

  “About your real estate ambitions. I need to know about deeds and title searches. You know how confused those things can be in a town like this.” New England property turnover could be as twisted as the lines of history and family marriage. “If she happens to mention the boys came in smelling like gas, or covered in soot, that’s none of my doing, but no, I’m not going to interrogate her.”

  “Oh, like she’ll do that.” Laughing in utter relief, Evelyn pushed Lydia toward the hall. “Get dressed before your husband does something crazy.”

  “They’ll think Mom’s there to help you finger them,” Josh called.

  “Josh, no one uses ‘finger,’ anymore. I watch the movies.”