Last-Minute Marriage

by Marisa Carroll

  “It would be nice to slow down a bit. But your dad up and hiring a woman practically off the street isn’t my idea of the way to go about it. I don’t see any good coming of this.” Caleb saw him watching his lips and abruptly stopped talking. He motioned to the refrigerator. Sam took his cue and went to get the sliced ham and homemade baked beans that Granddad Caleb’s friends Ruth and Rachel Steele had brought over for them two days ago. They’d also brought an apple pie. But that hadn’t lasted long.

  “Do you suppose she knows how to bake apple pies?”

  Caleb shrugged, looking at the clock. “Danged if I know. Probably not. Women these days don’t like to cook no better’n men.”

  “Dad’s a good cook.”

  “By necessity, not temperament.”

  Sam wasn’t sure what his great-grandfather was talking about. “What’s temperament mean?” He tried hard, but he knew he didn’t get it right. Sam sighed. Another word to add to his practice list with his therapist.

  “I’ll explain later. Let’s eat. It’s been a long time since I had my lunch.”

  “Do you suppose the lady in the boathouse has anything to eat for supper?” He’d seen her red car drive in a little while ago. He could see lights in the boathouse from the kitchen window.

  “I reckon she got herself all this way from California, she can find her way to the grocery and buy some food.”

  “And milk for her baby. I know that women who are going to have babies are supposed to drink a lot of milk so their babies are big and strong.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Tara Webber’s stepmom had a baby last spring, remember? She told me.”

  A lot of his friends’ moms were having babies. He wouldn’t mind a baby brother or sister himself. Except his mom didn’t live with them anymore. He could hardly remember when she had. She’d moved to Chicago so long ago. Chicago wasn’t all that far away. He’d looked it up on the map once. But she hadn’t been back to Riverbend since a year ago last Fourth of July. She hadn’t even called him on the phone for weeks and weeks. Not even since he’d got his own phone. The one with the special earphones so that he could really hear her voice.

  She didn’t have a computer, so he couldn’t e-mail her. She said she’d get one if his dad sent her the money. She said she couldn’t afford to buy one on her own, and she wasn’t allowed to e-mail him from work. Sam wanted to believe her. But the truth was, his dad did send her money, and she always had something else to spend it on.

  He was almost getting used to it—his mom not doing what she said she was going to do didn’t hurt so much anymore. Most of the time. But it would be nice to have a mom again. If he couldn’t have his own mom come back to live with them, maybe his dad could find another woman to be his mom.

  Sam bent his head and pretended to study the piece of ham on his plate. Only he really wasn’t checking out the fat on the edge of his ham slice. He was thinking. Thinking real hard.

  His dad must like the lady in the boathouse. If he liked her some, maybe he could learn to like her a lot. And if he liked her a lot…well, wasn’t that how grown-ups sometimes fell in love?

  When Sam’s mom had first left, he hadn’t wanted his dad to have any girlfriends. He figured if his dad had a girlfriend, then his mom would never come back. But as a guy got older he saw things differently. In January he would be eleven. Practically a teenager. Almost a grown-up. He could share his dad now. With the right woman. Maybe Tessa was the right woman.

  She didn’t have a husband, as far as Sam could tell.

  And she was already going to have a baby.

  That was good, too.

  Once, just before his mom left, he’d come into the room while she was arguing with his dad. Her face was all red and scrunched up like it got when she was going to cry. His dad had seen him and tried to make her be quiet, but she wouldn’t. Sam was getting pretty good at reading lips by then, and he’d seen what she was saying before she figured out he was there. Sam had never forgotten that one sentence. She’d said, No more babies, Mitch. No more babies like Sam.

  But Tessa’s baby wouldn’t be like him. Her baby would be able to hear.

  Tessa didn’t have a husband. His dad didn’t have a wife. And Sam didn’t have a mom, or a baby brother or sister. If he could get his dad and Tessa together, he’d have everything he needed to make a family again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “I DON’T KNOW, Ruth. I can’t decide whether I want stripes or a floral pattern in the bathroom. I wish you’d tell me which you like best.”

  “I don’t think stripes will work, Rachel,” said Rachel’s twin sister in a tone of long suffering. “The house is as old as we are and the walls aren’t all that straight.” The two women sat surrounded by sample books at the old-fashioned oak library table in the middle of the hardware store.

  Rachel pursed her pink lips. “But this one is so pretty.”

  Everything about the two old ladies, Tessa had noticed, was pink and white. From the tops of their curly white heads to the tips of their toes.

  Rachel Steele—they’d introduced themselves the moment Tessa walked up to ask them if she could be of help—was dressed in a pink sweat suit, with colored bands of rose and mauve on the sleeves. Ruth wore a raspberry sweatshirt and matching sweatpants. Both were wearing identical pairs of pristine white tennis shoes. They were small and plump and looked like two pieces of candy that had somehow found their way out of their gilded box and into the wallpaper-and-paint department of Sterling Hardware and Building Supply.

  “Rachel. Ruth.” Caleb looked over the waist-high wall that blocked off the view of the office on the upper floor. “Good morning, ladies.”

  “Good morning, Caleb.” Rachel glanced up from the sample book, the frown that had marred her face disappearing in a smile that deepened myriad tiny wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. “The search goes on. I’m almost in despair of ever finding the right wallpaper pattern for my bathroom.”

  “The paper on the walls now is just fine,” her sibling insisted. “We’ve got better things to do this morning.”

  “You always say that. I’m determined this time to find just the right paper.”

  “Perhaps a floral stripe?” Tessa suggested, pulling sample books from the shelves. She’d told Mitch the day he hired her that she didn’t intend to spend her time in paint-and-wallpaper, but that’s where she’d ended up.

  Working for Mitch, she was finding, wasn’t the same as working at Home-Mart, because Mitch’s hardware store was different, and so were his customers. Some of them had been coming to Sterling’s since long before he was born, she suspected. Many of them were friends and contemporaries of Caleb’s, like the ladies she was helping at the moment, and probably of Mitch’s late parents’. The men smiled politely, tipped their feed-company hats and headed for Mitch or Caleb for their electrical and plumbing needs, or sought out Bill Webber in the lumberyard.

  The women did the same if they were buying hardware. But if they were looking for paint or wallpaper, they brought their questions to her. Riverbend was a traditional place, she was coming to learn. And one of the traditional things about it was the unwritten rule that men didn’t like to look at wallpaper books or paint-chip cards. Even men whose business it was to know about such things.

  So Tessa smiled when she was approached with a request, and debated the merits of vinyl versus grass cloth, and enamel versus latex, flat finish or semigloss, from morning to night.

  And she liked it.

  Mitch’s customers weren’t workaholic boomers with high blood pressure who’d been told to get a hobby. Or people who’d spent three hundred dollars on tools and how-to books and still couldn’t miter a corner. Or thirty-something couples, with two precocious, ill-mannered children in tow, who were looking for just the right lighting for that dark corner of the study.

  They were hardworking farmers, factory workers, housewives and professional people with pride in their homes and deep roots in the comm
unity. They did most of their own work and didn’t want or expect a huge display of home-decorating magazines by the cash registers or weekend classes in sponge painting and plumbing 101.

  “Do you think a floral stripe will work, Ms. Masterson?” Rachel asked, looking over her shoulder as her twin drifted away to continue her conversation with Caleb. “My sister’s correct about one thing. The walls aren’t quite as straight as they could be. Miriam Harris is going to hang the paper for us. She said not to worry, to buy what I want. She’s very good.” Rachel paused. “Have you met her yet?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. I’ve only been working here a week.”

  “She’s a lovely person. Widowed so young, poor thing. I’m sure you’d like her. I don’t want to make the job harder for her than it has to be.”

  “The floral stripe you were looking at in this book,” Tessa said, tapping her finger on one of the open sample books on the table as she brought the conversation back on course, “has a straight-across match and it’s wide enough that your paper hanger can compensate for any problems she encounters with an off-plumb wall whenever she comes to a corner.”

  Rachel Steele peered at the pattern over the top of her glasses. “Why, yes. I see what you mean. And it is lovely. I liked it immediately. My eye keeps going back to it.” Tessa had noticed that. “The roses look real enough to pick. And I can accessorize around those little yellow and blue forget-me-nots. I’ll buy new towels. They have such lovely thick ones at Killian’s department store. Have you seen them, Ms. Masterson? You’d be pleasantly surprised, I think. But perhaps not. Caleb said you lived in California. I expect Killian’s is very small potatoes compared to the stores you shopped in there.”

  “I only lived in California eight months,” Tessa said, closing several of the rejected sample books so as not to distract Rachel further. “But yes, the stores were very chic. And very expensive.”

  “Well, Killian’s has excellent value for your dollar. You really should give them a look see when you decide on a permanent home.” The old lady sounded as if it was a settled thing that Tessa was staying on in Riverbend.

  Tessa didn’t know quite how to respond. She had no idea what explanation Mitch had given for hiring her. His other employees had been polite and helpful, but none of the men had asked her about her private life. And the only other female employee, Linda Christman, the bookkeeper, was expecting her first grandchild to be born in February. The few conversations they’d had over the past week centered on babies, not Tessa’s past or her future plans, which suited Tessa just fine.

  “I’ll be sure to do that.” But of course, she would probably never set foot in the old-fashioned department store on Main Street. She wasn’t going to be living in Riverbend permanently. She’d be gone long before she needed towels or new curtains. The well-worn leather sofa in the boathouse could use a little sprucing up, though. An afghan in camel and gold, maybe, and a couple of throw pillows to hug close on a cold winter night. A nice thank-you gift to Mitch and his grandfather.

  Rachel ran her finger over the wallpaper sample. “Ruthie, come here, dear. What do you think of this one? Ms. Masterson believes it will do nicely.”

  Ruth came back to the table, along with Caleb Sterling. “You’ve chosen from the most expensive book,” she said.

  It was easy to see which of the twins had the more forceful personality. Ruth looked and sounded just like a teacher Tessa had had in third grade—the way Tessa herself might sound forty years in the future if she realized her dream to teach history. The thought tickled her fancy, and she raised her fingers to her lips to brush away a smile.

  “I imagine this will be the last time I repaper the bathroom in this lifetime. I want to be sure I get a good-quality paper.”

  Tessa busied herself returning sample books to the shelf. She didn’t want to appear as if she were eavesdropping on the Steele sisters’ discussion. It was surprising, and a little alarming, how interested she was becoming in the lives of the people she waited on. Was this an occupational hazard of living in a small town?

  Or perhaps it was because you saw these same people every day, and over time learned to care about them in a way you never could in a city.

  “Let’s sleep on it,” Ruth suggested in the same no-nonsense tone she’d used before.

  Rachel pushed back her chair. “I suppose you’re right. After all, I’ll be looking at that paper every morning for the rest of my days.”

  “Take the sample book with you,” Caleb offered, giving Tessa a sharp look. She should have suggested that herself, but she’d been too lost in thought. She sighed. Another point against her. “Prop it up against the side of the tub and see how it looks on the wall. You might find it’s not what you want at all. Or it just might be perfect.”

  “An excellent suggestion, Caleb. Yes. That’s exactly what I’ll do.”

  “I’ll carry it out to the car for you,” Tessa said, leaning forward to pick up the heavy book. Her belly brushed against the table and the baby did a somersault. She sucked in her breath on a little “Oh” of surprise. She wondered if she would ever get used to the feeling of another human being moving around inside her.

  “No, you might hurt yourself,” Rachel warned. “The baby could get the cord wrapped around its neck.” It was the only reference either sister had made to her pregnancy.

  “Rachel, that’s an old wives’ tale,” Ruth scolded. “I’ll carry it,” Caleb said, taking the book from Tessa before she could protest that she was pregnant, not incapacitated.

  “We’ll have it back tomorrow,” Ruth promised.

  “I’ll need more time than that to decide,” Rachel said.

  “You take as long as you like,” Caleb urged, settling the argument.

  “Yes, yes. I’ll do just that,” Rachel agreed. “Goodbye, Ms. Masterson. It was nice meeting you.”

  Rachel was all smiles again. Her blue eyes sparkled with quiet satisfaction, and Tessa rethought her first impression that Ruth made all the decisions for the two. Rachel might not be as outspoken as her sister, but Tessa had the feeling that sooner or later, the flowery striped paper would find its way onto Rachel’s bathroom wall if that was what she wanted.

  “You handled that very well,” said a voice from behind Tessa as she turned to replace the sample books on the shelves.

  She looked over her shoulder to see who had spoken. Another elderly lady was standing by the display of paint-chip cards. “Rachel and Ruth can take hours just to decide what to have for lunch.”

  Tessa tried not to smile at the blunt assessment of the sisters’ personalities. “I really wouldn’t know. I only met them a few minutes ago.”

  “Trust me. We’ve been friends for over sixty years. My name’s Margaret Leatherman, by the way. And you’re Tessa?” she asked, looking pointedly at the name tag on Tessa’s royal-blue Sterling Hardware vest.

  “Tessa Masterson.”

  “I’ll bet Tessa’s short for Teresa, isn’t it.”

  Tessa laughed. “Yes, it is. But no one calls me that.”

  “Then I won’t, either. But you may call me Maggie.”

  “Thank you, Maggie. Can I help you with something?”

  “I need paint for my kitchen. But unlike Rachel Steele, I know exactly the shade of green I want. The trouble is, so far I haven’t found a paint chip to match.”

  “If you have a picture or even a piece of fabric that color, we can match it on our computer,” Tessa offered.

  Maggie looked interested. She was tall and heavyset with salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a bun on top of her head. She was wearing jeans and running shoes and a rust-colored sweater open over a T-shirt that said Genuine Antique Person in big red letters. “One of the ladies at the Altar Society meeting told me you could do that. Seems hard to believe, but with computers these days, I suppose anything’s possible. Here.” She fished in a big canvas bag slung over her shoulder and pulled out an old knitted baby sweater in a soft shade of apple-green. “This is exactly
the color I want. I knitted this for my oldest son when he was born. He’ll be forty-nine next week, so please take care of it.”

  “I’ll be very careful,” Tessa promised. She had so few things for her baby, only some sleepers and little T-shirts that fastened between the legs, which she’d acquired in the first flush of her pregnancy—when she thought Brian would be as happy as she was. She had nothing at all handmade with loving care like the apple-green sweater. “Is there anything else you want to look for while I run the match for you?”

  “No. I’ll just hang around and watch you, and ask nosy questions about how a California girl like you came to end up in Riverbend.”

  “I got here because I have a deficient sense of direction and almost ran out of gas,” Tessa said, slightly taken aback by the old lady’s directness.

  “We’re a long way from the interstate.”

  “I know.” Tessa smiled. “If I may have the sweater, I’ll get started.”

  “You’re not brushing me off that easily, young lady. I have ways of finding things out.” The broad smile on Maggie’s face, and the twinkle in her eyes took the rudeness from the words.

  “Aunt Maggie, what are you doing here today?” Mitch came down the wide aisle that bisected the sales floor. He’d evidently come from the lumberyard. The scent of fresh-cut wood clung to his clothes, and sawdust flecked his dark hair. Tessa found herself wanting to reach out and brush it away, and tightened her grip on the baby sweater to keep from doing just that. Maggie Leatherman felt no such reluctance. She reached up and brushed the sawdust away with the ease of long familiarity.

  “I’ve finally found the color I want to paint my kitchen, and Tessa says she can match the shade exactly on your computer.”

  “She can. Want to watch, or do you want to come have lunch with me? I’m just heading off to the Sunnyside for a sandwich.”

  “I could eat a bite. But I insist that Tessa come with us.”