by Cara Colter
An hour later, the doorbell rang, and Tally scuffed over to the door. She had not been out of her housecoat in three days and her hair was a tangle. Her eyes were puffy from crying. No one, not even her sister, was going to see her like this. She peered out her peephole. The hallway was empty.
She slid open her apartment door and a pizza, still steaming, was on the hallway floor. It wasn’t until she had leaned over to pick it up, that she saw the envelope taped carefully to the lid.
And noticed the handwriting, Tally Smith, masculine and spiky.
No, it couldn’t be! But she was pretty sure she was never going to forget that handwriting, and pizzas didn’t generally come personally addressed. She brought the pizza in and set it on her coffee table, turned the envelope over and over in her hands. Finally, she took a deep breath, and opened it up.
Inside was a single sheet of lined paper, folded.
Written across the top of it was What a Man Should Know. Whatever text there was was hidden in the fold.
“Humph,” she said, and told herself to throw it away without reading it, but she was intrigued. Besides, she could read it and pretend she hadn’t.
She unfolded the paper and read.
One, a man should know better than to settle for engines on the counters instead of wild, hungry nights of endless passion.
Then she noticed the photo. It had been taken in J.D.’s kitchen. Little Jed peeped out of a huge box.
She snorted again, crumpled up the paper and threw it on the floor with all her used tissues. She ate the whole pizza and most of the ice cream, then picked through the tissues to find the note and read it again.
She studied the photo. Jed looked adorable. The box was huge, like something a refrigerator came in. Sure enough, if she squinted at the picture, she could see the box was from Airbeam appliances.
So, J. D. Turner thought he could buy her forgiveness with appliances!
But he’d had them delivered to his house, not hers. Or maybe he had just found a box for Jed to play in.
Still, if he had appliances from Airbeam at his house, and he was talking about nights of hungry passion instead of clutter on his countertops, it would seem he was linking his life with hers.
Of course, she wasn’t allowing it, but it was still nice to know that the great J. D. Turner wanted her.
In fact, her depression lifted, and she went and showered and did her hair. She put away the rest of the ice cream before it melted, went to bed and tried to read a book, not very successfully.
She finally phoned her sister, who had the good sense not to answer since she was so obviously party to J.D.’s scheme.
“Benedict Arnold,” she said to the answering machine, and hung up. But she was smiling when she hung up.
The next morning the doorbell woke her early. She told herself to stay in bed, but after a few minutes she couldn’t resist.
She went and peeked out her security hole. No one was there. But when she opened the door, a dozen red roses had been laid carefully at her doorstep. There was an envelope with them, the same handwriting announcing What a Man Should Know.
She gathered up the roses, and didn’t even put them in water before she ripped open the envelope. If anybody ever asked her she could say she dealt with the roses first.
The lined sheet of paper said: Two, a man should know that women like things that don’t necessarily make sense to men. Like flowers.
An hour later the doorbell rang again, and there were more roses laid at her doorstep. She looked up and down the hall, but it was empty.
This time the note said: Lots of flowers.
And the flowers kept arriving all day, on the hour, until she had used up every vase in her house and her small apartment was filled with the aroma of roses and carnations and other flowers; the aroma of romance. She didn’t even turn on one soap opera that day.
She, Tally Smith, was being romanced. Her life was not over after all. No, it seemed there was a possibility that her life was just beginning.
She showered, did her hair, put on makeup and went out for a walk early in the evening after the hourly flower deliveries had stopped. She had a salad for supper, no Double Doozy Chocolate ice cream.
The next day she was waiting when the doorbell rang, her nerves strung tense as violin strings. She actually had her eye to the peephole most of the day, not that anybody would ever know.
Even so, she missed the crucial moment when the delivery was made. The doorbell rang, while she was in the bathroom reapplying her makeup. She raced out and opened her door to find a wrapped box, the size her microwave had come in.
There was the envelope taped to the top that said What a Man Should Know.
She tore into the envelope and, Tally Smith who thought she would never smile again, smiled as she read: Three, dog kisses are a poor substitute for the real thing. And so are these, but they’ll do in a pinch.
She opened the box right there in the hallway. Thousands of foil-wrapped chocolate kisses filled the big box to the top. She took one out and unwrapped it, savored it slowly. He was right. Delicious but no substitute for the real thing.
She dragged the box into her apartment, and left it on the floor since every available surface now had flowers on it.
Tally went for a walk. It seemed to her as if the grass was the most lush shade of green she had ever seen, and the birds were singing as crazily in love with life as she had ever heard them. The sky looked bluer and everyone smiled at her.
She thought she would see him today, she was certain he would show himself, but night fell and there was no J.D. She went to bed, restless with disappointment, and dreamed dreams of his lips and eyes.
The doorbell startled her awake. She looked at her clock. Midnight. How did he get in the front security door at that hour?
She went and peeped out her peephole. Nothing. She opened the door cautiously. And there was a long, narrow beautifully wrapped box, with the now familiar envelope taped to the top of it.
She took in the box, set it on the side table and opened the envelope. The paper inside read: Four, women like getting dirty as much as men do.
She shook the box. It was light as a feather. Much too light to be old jeans and a T-shirt, perfect for a day at the mud bog. Her fingers trembling, she finally managed to open the box. In a nest of pink tissue lay a pale yellow confection as sheer and fragile as a butterfly’s wing.
She took it, and shook it out. A dainty and terribly sexy negligee unfolded before her.
“Oh, my,” she said, scooted into her bedroom and peeled off all her clothes. She tried it on, and stared at herself in the mirror.
“He’s still trying to change you into something you aren’t,” she said, but the words had no bite to them. She looked glorious in the skimpy outfit. She blushed, took it off rapidly, but couldn’t quite bring herself to put it away. She tucked it under her pillow where she could touch the silky gossamer folds. But she didn’t sleep.
At 7:00 a.m. the next morning her doorbell rang again. She raced to it, but it was too late. The hallway was empty.
This time there was no box and no flowers, just the same heading scrawled across the envelope.
She tore open the envelope and read: Five, life needs to hold surprises. Like honeymoons. And two tickets to the Super Bowl fell out on the carpet.
She sat down right there in the hall, and stared at the tickets. Honeymoons? But they came after marriages. He hadn’t even proposed yet. He hadn’t—
The doorbell rang and she flung it open. Another huge box and another note. She raced down her apartment hallway in her nightgown looking for whoever had come, but they had disappeared into thin air.
She opened the note. It said: Six, men who stay single because they think they are free end up like dried-up old prunes. In brackets it said number one and number six could possibly be combined. And the box was full of dried prunes!!
She realized that was getting very close to a marriage proposal. As she was dragging the b
ig box of prunes through to her kitchen, the doorbell rang again.
She raced back and opened it and Beauford sat there, a huge red bow tied to his collar, a letter in his mouth. She accepted the letter from him, and stepped out into the hall.
Where Beau was J.D. could not be far and she felt her heart begin to sing in anticipation of their reunion.
She hugged that dog and kissed him right on his nose. She didn’t even care when his big old tongue rolled out of his mouth and caught the side of her lip. She invited the dog in, and closed the door behind him.
Standing in her entryway, she studied the envelope. It was different than the others, only in that the face of the envelope was blank. She opened it.
There was no note inside either. Just some torn up pieces of paper.
She pieced them together. She could see that once it had been a certificate proclaiming membership in the Dancer, North Dakota, Ain’t Gettin’ Married, No Way, Never Club.
She opened the apartment door, and called “J. D. Turner, I know you’re out there. I love you madly. I’ll never stop loving you. J.D., come home to me.”
It was insanity. Tally Smith would never proclaim herself publicly.
Except that love had made Tally Smith a brand-new person.
The door across the hall opened, and J.D. stepped out.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said. Jed peeped out from behind his leg, and then let out a hoot and ran toward her.
“Pawtners in cwime,” he announced happily, and raced across the hall to her, wrapped his sturdy arms around her legs.
“Thanks for your help, Mrs. D.,” J.D. said to her neighbor who loved the pink jogging suits, and turned and bowed to her.
Tally hugged Jed to her. She hadn’t known it was possible to miss someone as much as she had missed this child. Or the big man with him.
She drank in J.D., from the sweep of his lashes, to the brand of his jeans. She drank in the breadth of his shoulders and the easy confidence of his stance. She drank in the tenderness in his eyes as he looked back at her, the softness around his mouth. She could feel her heart growing inside her chest, until it felt so full it might burst for loving him.
“He’s not really a cop,” Tally called to her neighbor.
“Oh, I know that by now,” her neighbor said. “J.D. and I are the best of friends, aren’t we, dear?”
“That we are,” he said. “You have helped smooth the course of true love.”
Tally’s neighbor blushed and giggled and closed her door.
J.D. came slowly across the hall. Tally could not take her eyes off of him, could not drink deeply enough of the sight of him, and she noticed, delighted, he could not take his eyes off of her. He came and stood before her, touched her cheek with the back of his hand, then closed his eyes and sighed, the heartfelt sigh of a man who had found his way home.
And then he bowed his head and leaned his forehead against hers, reached out and touched Jed’s shoulder with one hand.
He did not have to say a single word. Tally knew exactly what he felt for her. And she knew exactly what she felt for him.
And she felt as if she was the most fortunate woman in the whole world. A woman who had almost thrown her life away, and who had been stopped by some universal force that simply had a better plan for her.
A plan that involved love.
For without love, a life could seem full, and actually be empty. And without love, a life could be full of riches and yet the soul would feel impoverished. And without love everything could look so right, and feel so wrong.
When J.D.’s arms moved and wrapped around Tally and Jed, and he pulled them to him, she could feel his strength, and his warmth and the beat of his heart. But more, Tally could feel the sense of family that she had yearned for her whole life.
That she had tried so hard to create when she had controlled everything and everyone around her.
And that had been created for her when she had surrendered. Tally had been so afraid of losing control, but not only had she survived her loss, her feet of clay had been transformed into wings.
She had found a photograph of a man in a box, and without even knowing it, at that moment, she had surrendered to the salvation she had seen in a stranger’s eyes.
“Marry me,” J.D. said gruffly.
“I will,” she said. And it felt like so much more than just a promise to J.D.
It felt like a promise to say yes to life, and to all its wondrous adventures.
“I will,” she said to the future.
And then his lips took hers, right there in the hallway of her apartment building, and he kissed her until she was breathless and trembling.
They stepped inside the apartment and closed the door on the world, and opened it to a brand-new life.
ISBN: 978-1-4603-5405-6
WHAT A WOMAN SHOULD KNOW
Copyright © 2003 by Cara Colter
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All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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*The Wedding Legacy
