“I’ll think about it,” she said. “And you’d better get in there and get those lights on the tree. I want that tree fully decorated before Sutton comes home tonight.”
The afternoon drifted along, bittersweet. They decorated the tree with all the old handmade ornaments and collector Christmas balls used on the O’Neill trees for as many years as Reese could remember. He felt swamped with memories the whole afternoon, of making up stories about the tree ornaments with Veda, writing out lists for Santa, sitting and poring over the Sears toy catalog that came in the mail, and making surprise gifts for their family to wrap and put under the tree. On the mantel in the parlor, he could see a photo of the two of them sitting on the fence rail by the barn at only ten, both in jeans and straw hats, laughing and happy. When had things gone wrong between them? Had it started with Dee Dee or before?
By the time they completed the tree, Pamela was wearing thin after a long day of excitement. Reese helped her pack up half the decorated cookies into empty tins and took her home. He felt sure Veda was ready for a rest, too. An eight-year-old could stretch your nerves, even when you lived with her every day.
Shortly after dinner, Reese realized with annoyance that he’d left his cell phone at the O’Neills’. Pamela and his dad sat piled up on the couch watching TV, so he leaned into the den to let them know he was running over to the O’Neills’ to pick up his cell. Dusk hadn’t fallen yet, and the air felt crisp and clear with a full moon beginning in the sky, so Reese decided to walk over. He threw on his coat and a scarf at the back door and headed across the familiar path behind the McNally Farm. It wound through the fields, over the fence by the old oak, and along a wooded pathway lined with cedar trees and now-bare hardwoods to the side yard of the O’Neills’ place.
Sutton let him in the front door, pointing with pleasure to the decorated tree lighting up the front window. On a tray by the couch lay a pile of cookies, which Sutton had been nibbling on while reading the newspaper.
“Where’s Veda?” Reese asked.
Sutton walked two fingers across his open hand in answer and took out his notepad. She went walking, he wrote. Seemed to be feeling moody.
“Where’d she go?”
Probably to the rock, he scribbled, making a sign for the cemetery in further explanation. Losing Rita Jean and the store has been hard for her. He paused and added, She’s looking for herself, I think.
“Well, tell her I dropped by to get my phone,” he said.
Sutton walked him to the door and then gestured toward the hill behind the house. He made a climbing sign with his fingers, raising his eyebrows at Reese in a question.
“Maybe I will,” he said, starting down the porch steps. “But she might not be glad to see me.”
After Sutton closed the door, Reese, following his suggestion, walked around to the back of the house, followed the dirt road by the barn, and then began to make his way up a well-worn path to the O’Neill family cemetery on the top of the ridge.
A short time later, he moved out of the woods into the cemetery clearing. He walked through the family plot of old grave sites, past the ruins of a rock chimney and a settler’s cabin, and then uphill on a winding path to the top of the ridge. Veda sat on a huge, flat limestone rock, looking out at the darkening sky and the view across the overlapping mountain ranges. It had always been her favorite place to come to think.
She turned, hearing his footfall. “What are you doing here?”
“Nice night to be out. Clear, not too cold, with a full moon. Thought I’d take a walk.”
“Did you get your phone?” she asked, not easily fooled.
“Yep.” He edged out on the rock to sit down beside her, draping his feet over the edge.
“Sutton told you I’d be here, didn’t he?”
“He mentioned you might have walked up here.”
She sighed. “He’s always read me too easily.”
Reese waited, looking out over the mountains, feeling the peace of the place and the quiet of the natural scene steal into his senses. Far in the distance, he could see some of the lights of the town beginning to wink on in the valley. It seemed like only yesterday that he and Veda had sat here as kids, each quiet, dreaming their own private dreams.
“What happened to us?” he asked at last.
“You married Dee Dee Palmer.” She glared at him.
“Why do you think I did that?” he asked.
She snorted. “I have no idea.”
“My first date with Dee Dee was for the prom—just to spite you—after we fought and you told me you wouldn’t go with me, like we planned. I was angry, Veda. You were going with someone else; I didn’t want to sit home alone. Dee Dee invited me to go after she and Josh Wheeley broke up, and I said yes.”
“So? That doesn’t explain why you married her.” She pulled her knees up to wrap her arms around them.
Reese waited, needing to know her thoughts.
A small silence fell before she spoke again. “I still remember the night Aunt Rita Jean called and told me you’d gotten married. I was staying with Daddy that summer after senior year, trying to figure out what I wanted to do after high school, where I wanted to go to college, what I wanted to study. I’d pretty much decided to come back to Townsend, go to Maryville College nearby, where I’d already registered, study business so I could learn how to open my own store someday. I liked working at the Co-op and thought I might like to own a little store of my own one day. The one nice thing Daddy did for me was say he’d pay for me to go to college.”
She paused and sighed. “I knew we’d been angry at each other, but I thought we could probably work it out after I got back. Then Rita Jean called. She said she didn’t want me to learn about you getting married from someone else, or to come back to Townsend not knowing.” Veda turned anguished eyes to Reese. “I cried all night afterward.”
He crossed his arms, dropping his eyes from hers. “Didn’t you figure it out, Veda? I heard Pamela telling you her birthday today—February twenty-first. She’s eight years old. I got married in early August. Think about it, Veda, and do the math.”
Reese could almost hear her mind ticking. “August to February is only six months.”
“So it is.”
A little silence ensued. “Oh my gosh. She did exactly what she said she would.”
“Who did what she said?” He tried to follow her words.
“Dee Dee.” Veda turned wide, shocked eyes toward him. “She bragged to me at school that she was taking you to the prom. I said, ‘It’s only one date, Dee Dee,’ but she laughed and said ‘One date is all I need, Veda Trent. I told you I’d get Reese if I wanted him, and there are all kinds of ways to ensure you get exactly what you want with a nice guy like Reese.’ ”
Reese felt stunned at her words but then shook his head. “Well, Dee Dee was accurate about that, I guess.”
Veda punched him. “Nobody forced you to sleep with her, Reese McNally.”
“I was a geeky kid, Veda. You know that. Didn’t drink, didn’t run around. An all-around nice guy who didn’t know much about what alcohol does to morals and inhibitions.” He kicked a rock over the edge of the ridge. “I don’t even remember that night. Isn’t that pitiful?”
She rolled her eyes but waited for him to finish.
“I married Dee Dee because it was the right thing to do. I changed my dormitory arrangements from living with Lewis Connor in the guys’ dorm to living with my new wife in married student housing. Dee Dee took a few classes that fall, and we managed all right for a time, discovering college life for the first time together, but then her pregnancy kicked in, the baby came, and she grew unhappy. She said she wasn’t having any fun anymore.”
“Did she cheat on you?” Veda asked.
“Yeah, until it became a joke and everybody felt sorry for me.”
“But you stayed with her and kept trying for Pamela,” Veda put in, knowing Reese well enough to realize that’s what he’d do.
“She b
ecame the old Dee Dee we knew pretty quickly, taunting and ridiculing, making me feel like nothing. You know how she was.”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“One day I came back to the apartment to find her packing her bags. She’d met someone at one of the bars she frequented in the evenings, while I studied at the apartment and watched Pamela.” He picked up a stick to turn it in his hands. “She said she was tired of being married to me and was leaving with some man she met to go out West to Las Vegas. ‘That’s a happening place,’ she told me.”
He snapped the stick in two, remembering. “ ‘What about Pamela?’ I asked her. ‘You can have her,’ she said and shrugged, like she was simply giving me an old dress she no longer wanted.”
Veda slipped a hand into his. “I’m sorry, Reese.”
“Yeah.” He pulled his hand away, embarrassed.
“So you got full custody.”
“No legal challenge to that,” he replied, knowing his voice sounded sarcastic.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He turned his eyes to hers. “You never asked, Veda, just went off to school and on with your own life somewhere else. And what point would there have been?” Reese threw the stick over the mountainside.
Veda hesitated before she spoke again. “Dee Dee always told me if you ever thought about it much, you’d pick her over me—that I wasn’t as pretty as her or as popular, that you were already more focused and growing away from me.”
He turned to her in shock. “And you believed that crap?”
“She had a way,” Veda said in reply, looking off into the distance over the ridge.
“Yeah, she did,” he admitted. “She made our young lives a misery and then found a way to ruin my adult life as an extra perk.” He could hear the bitterness in his own voice.
They sat quietly for a time. A hoot owl’s sound echoed nearby, and the smell of cedars drifted to them on the winter breeze from the forest nearby.
“You did get Pamela from it all,” she said at last, turning to look at him. “She’s wonderful, nothing like Dee Dee, Reese.”
“Thank God,” he replied. “Dad says she’s all McNally through and through.”
Her eyes slid away from his. “I never came back because I couldn’t stand to see you and Dee Dee and your child as a family. I felt awful when Rita Jean died this year, knowing how often I’d stayed away. Knowing I wouldn’t ever have time with her again.”
“Did you visit her grave tonight?”
“Yeah.” Her voice grew soft. “I told her all the things I’d done today to try to take her place and told her I’d even tell a Christmas story in her memory at the church, like everyone wants me to.”
“Have you ever tried storytelling?”
“No, not ever. It was Rita Jean’s gift. Rita Jean’s legacy. Never mine.”
“You’ve never heard the wind sing?” He teased her a little with the words, glad to move the focus off himself.
“No. I got Rita Jean’s practical side, but not her fanciful one.”
“You’ll do fine with whatever you do.”
She got to her feet. “I’d better start back. It’s getting dark and Sutton will worry.”
Reese pulled himself up.
Veda bit her lip, obviously considering whether to tell him something else that was on her mind. “Pamela said her mother told her she wasn’t pretty when she visited her the last time.”
Reese sucked in a breath. “Dang woman.”
Veda giggled. “Pamela also said she kicked her for it, and told her it was mean. She must have inherited some of her mother’s gumption to do that.”
“Ouch.” Reese hunched his shoulders.
Veda smiled a Cheshire cat grin. “Pamela said she didn’t get in trouble with her grandfather when she told him about it. He said it was exactly the sort of thing Veda Trent would have done.”
Reese laughed at that and then let his eyes lock onto Veda’s. “God, I’ve missed you so much, Veda.” And before he could think, he pulled her into his arms and pressed his mouth to hers, trying to draw out all the sweetness he remembered from their early years together.
Veda stiffened at first, tried to pull away, then yielded, wrapping her arms around his neck and opening her mouth to his. It was heaven, and Reese took full advantage of the moment, letting his hands rove under her wool jacket and over her body, the memories of shared times rolling back through his mind and emotions.
“Quit that.” She swatted at his hands as they tried to slide under her shirt. “I haven’t been married like you, remember? You know things I don’t know yet.”
He checked himself, happy with her words. “Are we okay, Veda?” he asked.
She met his eyes with an honest gaze. “We’re better, Reese. But we’re both different now. And we can’t go back.”
“But we can go forward,” he suggested.
“Yes, but I’m still not sure yet if that forward for me is meant to be here or somewhere else, Reese. So don’t read too much into this moment.” She stepped away, straightening her jacket and wrapping her wool scarf around her neck.
Then she started back down the path. “I’m taking one day at a time, Reese. I’ve made mistakes, too, and I want to be sure about the next step and direction for my life. I still don’t know if Townsend is the place for me. In some ways, I’ve never belonged here, like everyone else. It’s always seemed like I was just passing through.”
Chapter 5
Veda settled back into life in Townsend over the next week. She and Sutton seemed to fall into an easy routine of sharing the cooking and cleaning at the farmhouse. Occasionally, Veda helped out at the Christmas Tree Store, although Sutton and Walker or Bovee usually handled the hours that the small store was open. With December here, Sutton opened the store all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and took trees to the vendors he sold to annually the other days of the week.
At breakfast, Sutton reminded Veda that they were expected for Christmas brunch with the McNallys. It had been a tradition for years for the two families to get together Christmas morning at one farm or the other.
Sutton pulled out his notepad. Can you buy some gifts for us to take? he wrote. I’m not very good at gift buying.
Veda nodded, not excited at the prospect of an intimate family day with the McNallys but not wanting to let Sutton know how she felt and spoil his pleasure. He signed a few ideas of what she might consider looking for in gifts. We’ll need to take food, too, he scribbled. But we can decide about that closer to the time.
Realizing she had the day free, Veda decided to head over to Maryville to the mall to look for gifts. She’d stop in Townsend for others on her way back.
Later that afternoon, as she drove back down Highway 321 into Townsend, she made a stop at the Apple Valley Country Store for a cute stuffed animal for Pamela, and then at the woodcraft store to look for a carved bird for Reese. He’d collected them ever since he was a kid and had also tried whittling a few of his own. Veda grinned, remembering some of the comical results.
Noticing the MIMOSA INN sign as she drove down the highway, Veda decided to stop in and thank Grace Teague for hosting the Co-op party at the bed-and-breakfast. Jack Teague sat on the Co-op board, of course, but it was still a generous gesture. She turned into the long drive and parked.
Grace answered the door herself.
“I’m Veda Trent,” Veda introduced herself, putting out a hand. “I wanted to stop by to thank you for hosting the Co-op party. It’s really nice of you to do that. I know this must be a busy season for you.”
“It’s a joy to do it. Jack and I are so proud to be a part of the Co-op in even a small way.” She held open the door. “Come in. I have hot spice tea back in the kitchen and some pumpkin bread.”
“I’d love some.” Veda smiled and followed the gracious blond woman toward the kitchen. She wore tailored slacks and a pullover sweater of teal blue to match—still a beautiful woman at midlife, and beautifully put together. Yet even with
her beauty, Veda sensed a kindness about her, too. Veda had learned with her mother and with Dee Dee Palmer that beauty and kindness didn’t always go hand in hand.
The Mimosa Inn, a charming Victorian bed-and-breakfast, sat on a lush green lot along the banks of the Little River in Townsend, next door to the church Veda attended, and down the River Road from the gleaming black shay engine beside the Little River Railroad and Lumber Company Museum, the rustic Heartland Wedding Chapel, and Miss Lily’s Cafe.
Veda’s eyes wandered around as she walked back toward the kitchen. “You’ve done a beautiful job fixing up Carl and Mavis Oakley’s old inn.”
Christmas decorations nestled in nearly every corner: garlands looped up the stairwell and lavishly decorated trees graced several of the downstairs rooms. Veda spotted a ceramic nativity scene on a sideboard, arrangements of holiday candles and fresh greenery on the dining room tables, and a collection of Christmas nutcrackers marching across a fireplace mantel. “Your Christmas decorations are wonderful, too.”
“Thank you.” Grace smiled, gesturing to a chair at the kitchen table. “It was fun decorating for the holidays, and the girls enjoyed helping.”
Veda remembered then that Jack had two daughters by a previous marriage. She searched her memory for the girls’ names. “I’m trying to remember their names,” she admitted at last.
“Meredith and Morgan.” Grace set two mugs of steaming, fragrant spiced tea on the table and then brought over a loaf of pumpkin bread from the counter before sitting down herself.
Veda put her hands around a warm mug. “The girls were only toddlers the last time I saw them, about eight years ago. It wasn’t easy for Jack, raising them by himself.”
“No.” She cut a slice of pumpkin bread and passed it to Veda. “And I think the experience of being left with children to raise is one of the ties that bonded Jack and Reese McNally. He has the law office next to the Co-op. I think Jack mentioned your families are close.”
When the Snow Falls Page 31
