One More Time

by Deborah Cooke

  His third surprise was that the door of the church opened at the end of the aisle. It was supposed to open when they got closer, but they hadn’t even left the altar yet. And it was supposed to open evenly, both doors swinging open in unison.

  But a single door was thrown open and left to fall closed by itself. It did so with a resounding thump as the man who had opened it strode quickly down the aisle of the church.

  It was Zach.

  He ducked behind Matt, taking the place that had clearly been left for him, and Matt felt him take a share of the weight.

  “Just in the nick of time,” Zach muttered.

  “Don’t do us any favors,” Nick muttered and Matt found their animosity reassuring in a way.

  He saw James’ gesture, the one he had been watching for, and straightened beneath his burden. They began the processional march out of the church to Amazing Grace. The doors at the end of the aisle swung open in unison as Matt had expected, the men in black from the funeral home doing their job of facilitating ceremony.

  The rain had stopped, though it was still overcast.

  But the steps of the church weren’t empty as they had been when Matt had arrived. They were lined with Marines in dress uniform and beyond them were other veterans in their dress uniforms, lining the course the hearse would take around the church’s drive. Matt recognized many of these men, knew that they had served in the military and that some of them were still in service. Some were his contemporaries, but many were older.

  His father’s contemporaries. Matt had a glimpse of his father’s history that he knew very little about and saw in the faces of these men an admiration that he had never expected.

  As soon as the coffin cleared the church doors, the first man snapped to attention and saluted. The remaining men and women echoed his gesture with crisp precision.

  The veterans of Rosemount had formed a spontaneous honor guard for Robert Coxwell, and at the sight of it, Matt realized that James had been right. Their father had touched many people, had insisted upon honor and morality, and was admired.

  There was good mingled in the bad, black and white mingled together instead of sorted out neatly as Robert would have preferred. So, maybe the legacy from Robert was an ability to recognize right and wrong, which put the gray zones into perspective.

  The coffin slid into the hearse and the pall bearers stepped back in unison. Matt looked up the steps as Leslie came out of the church and he felt that sense of rightness, that surety of purpose that Robert had encouraged in him.

  He knew what he had to do to make things right.

  He went straight to Leslie and claimed her hand again, not caring what anyone thought. “I think we need to talk, after the service,” he said to her. “Will you come for a drive with me?”

  “But what about Annette?”

  “She can come with me,” Beverly said with resolve. “Go, now.”

  Leslie looked between the two of them and Matt feared for a moment that she would decline. Then she smiled at him, a sad smile that didn’t make him believe his chances of success were very good. “Yes, it’s past time that we had a long talk.”

  * * *

  The demon child had an innate fashion sense. Who would have guessed? Beverly had been surprised by the Hermès halter, but also impressed.

  The girl had potential, after all.

  In fact, Beverly felt that life had more potential than it had before. Robert’s funeral had been difficult, but she left the reception feeling lighter on her feet. The past had been laid to rest and the future beckoned.

  After the service and reception, Beverly drove back to Belmont with Annette to change and to fetch the girls. “The best thing about pantyhose is taking them off,” she informed her granddaughter, who smiled.

  They went to a park together, one that Annette suggested, and the girls approved mightily of this endeavor. It was still overcast, the sky sulking like a teenager, though it wasn’t raining. The snow had become messy slush in the field, but it was fenced so Beverly let the girls run. They always listened, so she wasn’t too afraid. There was no one else around, just one man on the far side of the field, walking alone.

  Annette stayed right with the girls and it was obvious that all of them needed to let off some steam. She began to make snowballs, much to the girls’ delight, and Beverly walked along the perimeter of the park where it was drier.

  She tried to make sense of the buoyancy within her and failed. She was sober and though she knew she would want a drink again, she didn’t want one now. She felt free of that desire, for the moment at least, and watched her granddaughter with an optimism that had become alien to her.

  She caught up to the solitary man and was surprised to recognize him. It was Ross Matheson, the vet, and he looked just as startled to see her as she was to see him.

  “I thought you lived downtown,” he said by way of greeting.

  “I moved in with my son and daughter-in-law for the moment,” Beverly said, hoping it was true.

  “Ah, well, I won’t disturb you,” Ross said with a polite smile. He seemed subdued today and less intent upon charming her. He was still charming, his manners impeccable, and Beverly wondered what had happened to sadden him.

  “Is something wrong?”

  He shrugged and she knew he lied. “No, it’s just a good day for a walk, that’s all.”

  “You need a dog.”

  He smiled. “Maybe I do.” He glanced toward the girls playing with Annette and his smile broadened ever so slightly. “Your granddaughter?”

  “Yes. She and the girls have really taken to each other.”

  “Probably good for all of them. I’ll leave you to your snowball games.”

  Beverly looked at him hard. “I thought you might ask me out for dinner again.”

  “I thought you had declined. Quite emphatically.”

  “I thought you weren’t the kind of man to take no for an answer so easily as that.”

  His smile turned rueful. “Maybe that’s my problem.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  He sighed, looked around, then met her gaze steadily. “My wife didn’t want to get married, but I persuaded her with my persistence. Maybe she just surrendered. Maybe she knew all along that it wasn’t the right thing for her to do.” He shrugged again. “And now she’s gone and I really only have myself to blame for the whole mess.”

  “Hardly!” Beverly snorted. “She could have had the sense to say no, if marriage wasn’t what she wanted.”

  “But I talked her into it…”

  “Dr. Matheson, you are not as persuasive as you imagine yourself to be.”

  He chuckled. “And that’s supposed to reassure me?”

  “No, of course not. Reassurance comes from other things. A game of snowball with a dog, maybe, or a smile from a granddaughter.”

  “Or dinner with an enchanting lady?”

  “Maybe.” Beverly found herself smiling in turn. “Of course, the possibility of that depends upon what kind of sherry you prefer.”

  “Not my charm?”

  “We both already know that it’s considerable.”

  “I thought you’d given up drinking, that you were going to AA.”

  “I have and I am, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve used taste in sherry as a measure of character for most of my life and am not about to change now.”

  “So, what kind did you prefer?”

  “I’ll never tell. That’s like asking a woman her age.”

  “I’ll guess then. Not a cream sherry.”

  Beverly snorted. “That’s for amateurs.”

  “Maybe an oloroso, round and rich and amber.”

  Beverly shook her head. “I’m sweet enough already.”

  Ross laughed slightly. “I don’t imagine you so dry that a pale straw would be a good match.”

  “You know a lot about sherry,” Beverly accused lightly. “And you’re right, of course. What about you?”

  He
shoved his hands into his pockets and gave the matter the consideration that Beverly thought it deserved. “An amontillado is pretty much my favorite,” he said finally. “Not too sweet, not too rich, not too frivolous or presumptuous.” He looked up, met her gaze and his own eyes were twinkling. “It strikes a nice balance.”

  Beverly smiled at him, then pointed her finger at his chest. “Friday. Seven. You choose the restaurant and I’ll meet you there.”

  “But I don’t know your number!” he protested as she turned away.

  “You can tell me where to meet you when I bring the girls in tomorrow to have their ears cleaned.”

  “You’re on.”

  Beverly found her heart taking a little optimistic skip when Ross Matheson smiled at her, really smiled at her.

  Maybe joy wasn’t so hard to find, after all.

  * * *

  To Leslie’s shock, Matt drove to Lowell.

  “I haven’t been here in years,” she said, even as she unwillingly sought familiar landmarks.

  “Not since we decided to get married,” Matt confirmed.

  There was another portent Leslie could have done without. Bring on the plague of locusts and the hail of comets: it had to be better than standing by to watch her marriage dissolve.

  Once she wouldn’t have asked, once she would have just waited to see what he intended to do. But she wasn’t the same person anymore. “Why are we going to Lowell now?”

  “Because there’s something you never did here, something that maybe you need to do.”

  “Like?”

  Matt frowned as he took the exit from the highway. It was starting to rain again and the ramp looked slick. “I didn’t want to go to the funeral today, but that therapist told me I needed to go to find closure, and that if I didn’t go, I’d never again have such a good chance to put the past behind me where it belonged. So, I went, and it wasn’t so bad.”

  He turned at the end of the ramp, going in the opposite direction of the house where Leslie had grown up.

  “Not the cemetery!” she said with alarm.

  “Yes, the cemetery. You never went to his funeral, so this is as good as it gets.”

  “But there might not be a stone. We could spend all day wandering around in the rain…”

  “No, I know exactly where it is.”

  Leslie turned to look at her husband, startled by what an enigma he could be. “How?”

  “You and your father still weren’t speaking at the end. Your mother asked me to help her with having the stone installed.” He shrugged. “So, I did. You know she didn’t drive, so I used to take her there a couple of times a year.”

  “I never knew,” Leslie said with wonder.

  “You weren’t supposed to. She insisted upon it.” He cast her a rueful smile. “I used to pick her up at the T so you wouldn’t guess the truth.”

  “Am I that scary?”

  Matt laughed a little. “No, but I think your mom thought that both you and your dad were pretty strong-willed.”

  Leslie thought about legacies unexpected, then sat up straight in recollection. “There used to be a greenhouse and nursery up here. Could you stop?”

  “Of course, I can.”

  It was right where Leslie remembered it. They had to run through the rain to the door and Matt shook his head over the state of his suit. The lady was very helpful and they left with a Christmas Rose that she insisted would not only continue to bloom in the snow, but survive quite nicely.

  The car filled with the smell of wet wool as they drove onward and Leslie wrinkled her nose. “The dry cleaner is going to love us.”

  “Oh well, it’s only money.”

  Leslie braced her hand on the seat and twisted to watch his expression. “I’m probably going to quit my job,” she said.

  Matt blinked, then he smiled. “That’s probably a good thing. You’ve been pretty frustrated. Any idea what you’re going to do?”

  Leslie stared at him in awe. “You really believe that things just work out, don’t you?”

  “Well, yes. I mean you have to believe that if you’re going to take a chance on anything. Why would anyone get married, if we couldn’t believe that it was going to work out? Why would anyone have children or buy a house or buy a car or take a vacation, if we couldn’t have that optimism that it could work out, or that it would work out?”

  Leslie watched the rain hit the windshield, her fingers caressing the waxy blossom of the Christmas Rose in her lap. “Your book is good, you know.”

  The car swerved a little. “No, I didn’t know.” Matt stopped at a traffic light and turned to face her. “You’re not putting me on, are you?”

  Leslie shook her head and smiled. She crossed her heart with her fingertips, touched them to her lips and saw the tension leave his shoulders.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m positive.” Leslie shook her head. “Matt, you have such a gift. It’s such a powerful story and so well told, and the characters are so real that they could just step off the page. I halfway thought you’d had a secret life without my knowing about it. It seemed so true. I couldn’t tell where the fiction ended and the truth began.”

  “I have no secret lives,” he said with quiet fervor as he parked in the cemetery. He turned off the ignition and the rain beat on the roof. “You know everything about me, Leslie.”

  “New Orleans?”

  He sighed. “I thought I knew what I wanted, but the truth is that I didn’t have the nerve to ask you for what I wanted.” He met her gaze, a little wonder of his own in his eyes. “But you gave it to me anyway. You told me your truth and you asked me for mine. I’m sorry. I should have known better than to have assumed that you would insist on my sacrificing my dreams for the sake of yours.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” Leslie said, but before she could say more, she found the heat of his fingertips against her lips.

  “I should have believed,” he whispered, close enough that she could see not just the myriad hues in his eyes but the sincerity there. “I should have asked. And I should never have hurt you. I’m sorry.”

  Leslie lifted his fingers from her mouth, closed her hand over them. “I’m sorry, too. We stopped talking. We both stopped asking and stopped listening.” She looked down at his hand within hers, took a breath and asked what she really wanted to know. “Did you sleep with her?”

  Matt’s fingers moved, he touched her chin and tilted her face so that she was looking straight into his eyes. “No. I thought Sharan was what I wanted. I thought she was my future. But by the time I got there, I knew that Sharan was my past. I’d not only left my future behind, but quite possible jeopardized it.”

  “In your book—” Leslie said, hearing that her voice was uneven. “In your book, at the end, you say that there are times when something has to be taken completely apart—”

  “—into its component pieces, in order to rebuild it better than it was before,” Matt finished. “Yes, I did write that and I believe it.”

  Leslie dared to look at him again. “Is this one of those times?”

  “I hope so.” He swallowed, his gaze filled with all the candor and integrity that had stolen Leslie’s heart in the first place. “I want it to be, if you’ll give an unemployed lawyer one more chance.”

  “You’re not an unemployed lawyer,” Leslie chided softly. “You’re a writer in search of a publisher.”

  She saw how the words pleased him and then, just because she had so seldom initiated anything sexual between them before, she kissed him.

  She immediately tasted the change in the balance between them, felt not only that old black magic but a new appreciation for each other. They were embarking on a new journey together, one that maybe they had undertaken once but which had had an obscured path in recent years.

  One more chance was all they needed to get it right. Leslie knew it and so, she saw, did Matt.

  “We’d better go see your father before we start steaming the windows,” Matt sa
id, when their kiss broke. “I don’t even want to know what will happen then.”

  “Maybe he’ll haunt us.”

  “No, he’s done that already.” Matt peered out the window, perhaps unaware of the truth he had uttered. “Come on, it’s letting up. Let’s go.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Two weeks after Robert’s funeral, the Coxwells gathered at James and Maralys’ house for dinner. Leslie had been astonished by the invitation, given that they’d never socialized much before, but Matt had insisted they accept.

  “It’s different since he’s gone,” he said simply. “It’s easier.”

  Once Leslie would have argued, once she would have demanded more of an explanation: now she trusted Matt’s instincts. He was different since his return and yet still the same. The determination with which he revised his book, the demands he made of himself, his sheer intensity reminded her of why she had fallen in love with him in the first place.

  She could feel the new balance in him and it made her smile even more when she came home at night. They had shared some hot kisses and she knew that he was waiting for her to invite him back to bed.

  Tonight was the night.

  Leslie knew it.

  She’d worn that black camisole, just for him.

  Matt was at ease in James’s house, perhaps because he had stayed there those few nights. Maybe the camaraderie was because Zach had declined the invitation. Theirs was a noisy kitchen, especially with so many in attendance.

  “Can we be excused?” Jimmy asked as soon as forks hit the dessert plates.

  “You just want a rematch,” Annette said, smug in her earlier triumph.

  “Well, duh,” her older cousin said. “Can we?”

  “May we?” James corrected in a tone that told Leslie that he knew he wouldn’t win the grammatical battle.

  She could relate to that.

  “Whatever,” Jimmy muttered, then flashed his father a smile. “Can we? Please?”

  “Go. It’ll be quieter without you,” James said with a flick of his hand. There was a clatter as three teenagers leaped from the table in unison.

  “Me first,” Johnny, the number two son, insisted.