Four Steps to the Altar

by Jean Stone

  If she had wanted to look to the left, toward the defendant’s table, she couldn’t have seen much because Sutter’s large frame obstructed most of the view. So she stared at the front of the room as she’d been instructed, at the raised platform, at the seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts plastered to the wall, at the flags—one American, the other Massachusetts’s single white star and Native American, with his bow and his arrow facing downward in a symbol of peace. It was hard to tell by the folds in the fabric, but the slogan seemed to be in Latin and might make reference to peace and liberty. She thought that, given the situation, a more appropriate flag might have been the one from colonial days that read Don’t Tread on Me.

  More people entered the courtroom. She recognized the police officer who had once helped her—Lieutenant Williams of the Missing Persons Bureau. She would have liked to say hello.

  She also spotted the private detective, the one Frank had hired, the one who had found Brian, but she couldn’t remember the man’s name.

  She moved her eyes back to the Seal of the Commonwealth, then sensed, rather than saw, that Brian had come into the room. She sucked in her breath; Sarah took her hand once again, leaned close to Jo, and merely said, “Zits.”

  This time, it wasn’t easy for Jo to smile.

  Then the judge came in and the bailiff said, “All rise.” There were shufflings and mutterings, and Jo stood up with her eyes fixed straight ahead and her heart steeling itself to shatter and the golf balls teeing up inside her.

  A moment later Sutter nudged her to sit down again, so she did.

  Then a faceless attorney said, “Your honor, my client would like to amend his plea.”

  And the next thing she knew, Jo heard the words, “Guilty, your honor,” in a voice that sounded more like it had come from Frank Forbes than from Brian.

  Jo blinked. Guilty?

  “Yes, your honor,” Frank/Brian’s voice said.

  The judge moved some papers from one file to another, studied them a moment, then moved them back. He asked Brian some questions: Did he know what this meant, was he prepared for the consequences, had he been coerced?

  Brian yes-and-no-your-honor’ed in the appropriate places, then the judge turned toward the jury box, which Jo hadn’t noticed until then. He thanked them for their time and told them they could leave.

  Jo’s body temperature went from frigid to numb. Her eyes flashed to Sutter in search of explanation.

  Then the back door to the courtroom opened again and Jo heard Brian say, “Excuse me, your honor, but I’d like to say something,” and it took her a second to realize that this time it wasn’t Brian’s voice but Frank’s, that Frank had come to Boston.

  The judge asked him who he was and why he was interrupting his court.

  Frank apologized again, then explained that he was the defendant’s brother and he was there to offer restitution to Brian’s victims.

  Jo blinked again.

  The prosecutor was on his feet voicing an objection; the woman (of course, it would be a woman) who apparently was Brian’s attorney stood and countered with something; the judge whacked his gavel and told everyone to shut up.

  Jo did not move a muscle, not even to breathe.

  The next thing she knew, the judge spoke her name.

  Sutter nudged her, gestured for her to stand up again. Her Jell-O legs somehow managed to bring her upright; Sutter stood beside her.

  “Ms. Lyons, according to the notes, you have accused the defendant of stealing over three hundred thousand dollars from you. Because you are the sole petitioner in this case and the defendant has just pled guilty, are you willing to drop the charges against him if full restitution is made?”

  She did not know how to respond. It was a scenario she hadn’t expected. Her eyes darted from Frank to the judge. How could Frank Forbes come up with over a quarter of a million dollars?

  “If she drops the charges,” Sutter said, “would Brian Forbes be free to go?”

  “Yes.”

  She turned to Sutter in search of an answer.

  “May we have a brief recess,” Sutter asked, “so my client can have a moment to consider?”

  But as he addressed the judge, Sutter had stepped forward, exposing Jo’s line of sight straight to Brian.

  She waited for her heart to stop and her breathing to grow shallow and her entire body to break out in a sweat. His hair had not turned white; he didn’t have acne and he hadn’t gained thirty pounds. Brian was Brian—still good-looking, without a doubt, but no longer charismatic in the way he stood, the way he smiled. Or perhaps she now saw him through much different eyes.

  Suddenly, the room was no longer cold.

  Jo turned her eyes back to the judge. “No, your honor, I do not need a recess,” she said. “I will not accept restitution if it means Brian Forbes will go free. He will only look for another victim. He needs to make amends to society, as much as he needs to make them to me.”

  The judge smiled at her and said, “Brian Forbes, having accepted your plea of guilty to one count of larceny against a person, I sentence you to five years in prison.” The judge made a note on the file, then looked back at Brian. “And, based on the generous offer of Mr. Forbes’s brother, I highly recommend that at least one hundred fifty thousand dollars be paid to the victim, Ms. Josephine Lyons.”

  38

  It wasn’t my idea,” Frank said to Jo as she and Sutter and Sarah walked out of the courtroom. Frank fell in step next to Jo and added, “It was my mother’s. It was what she stipulated in her will. The money is coming from her life insurance.”

  Just then a blond woman passed them on her way out of the courtroom. She glared at Jo quickly, but long enough for Jo to understand that she was Brian’s wife. Jo felt no envy, only pity.

  Turning back to Frank, Jo shook her head. “I don’t want the money, Frank. I can’t take your mother’s money as payment for what Brian did. I’m not sure if jail will change him, but I do know that letting him off the hook by paying his debt would not teach him a thing.”

  “I agree,” Frank said. “Please understand it was only a mother trying to protect her son. And please understand that I fully intend to follow the judge’s recommendation and give you half.”

  Jo did not know what to say.

  “Where’s Lily?” Sarah asked Frank as they stepped through the doorway into the corridor.

  “In West Hope, I guess. I’ve been at the lake with my dad. In my ex-wife’s cabin.”

  Sarah’s eyebrows lifted.

  “Not to worry,” he said. “It took her a few days, but Sondra finally got the message that I wouldn’t sleep with her.” He laughed a short, satisfied laugh. “She is one boring woman compared to Lily Beckwith.”

  Jo smiled and thought how wonderful it was that Frank and Lily might find a way to carve out a life together. Frank and Lily, Sarah and Sutter—this time she did feel envy. Adjusting her pocketbook on her shoulder and turning up her collar, Jo decided to stop feeling sorry for herself. But as the group rounded the corner to head toward the elevators, she noticed a figure sitting on a bench over by the window. She stopped walking. “Andrew,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  Lily was tired but invigorated. She never realized that shedding old-boyfriend baggage could feel like losing twenty pounds.

  Standing in the back room of the shop after the hectic fittings and first rehearsal of the bridesgirls and the groomsboys (as Lily now called them) was complete, she surveyed the rack of dresses and tuxedoes. They looked as if they belonged backstage on the set of The Wizard of Oz and comprised the wardrobe for the Munchkins.

  She counted the accessories like a symphony conductor directing the different sections of his orchestra: first violin, then second, violas, then the cellos. She flitted her fingers and waved her palms this way and that, only briefly wondering if she’d hear from Frank again, or from Antonia, for that matter.

  Frank, of course, was a man, so his odd behavior was not unexpected,
because who knew why men thought what they thought or did what they did. If he went back to Sondra, Lily supposed that she would miss him but she would get over it, the way Billy had gotten over her.

  As for Lily’s former sister-in-law, it appeared that she and her entourage had returned to New York with nary a good-bye or a good-luck or a please-go-to-hell.

  At least men got to the point, would tell you they were leaving, would say they didn’t know if they loved you anymore.

  She turned to the plastic containers from Wal-Mart and counted the little shoes and little socks as if they were tiny piccolos, just as Elaine trudged through the back door.

  “I need a vacation,” Elaine said, and parked herself on the tall stool by Sarah’s drawing table. “When I was a homemaker, life was so simple.”

  Lily double-checked her list of little-kid footwear then sighed. “When I was a diva, it was even simpler than that.”

  “I was never a diva. What was it like?”

  “To be waited on every moment? To spend your days at the spa and your nights being seen? To have to worry only about whether Cartier would have your diamonds reset in time for the Valentine’s Ball? Oh, my dear Elaine, life as a diva was so simple it was dull.” There was no need to mention that her life had changed that very morning, that she’d decided Antonia could keep her money and Sondra could keep Frank and that Lily, dear Lily, would carry on.

  Elaine laughed, then said, “You’re awfully chipper today, Lily. Don’t you ever just get tired?”

  “That’s another thing,” Lily said, her voice in delicate singsong. “If I was tired as a diva, I would take a nap. A nap! Can you imagine?” She twirled, then grasped the side of the dress rack because she’d made herself dizzy. She laughed and shook her head. “Oh, hell’s bells, Elaine. Sometimes being a working girl isn’t pretty, but it beats the heck out of being a lump.”

  “But, Lily, you were always my hero. You don’t have to work. You can sit back on Reginald’s moneyed laurels.”

  “I’m afraid it’s too late for that now.”

  Elaine swung her feet. “You don’t regret it, do you, Lily? Starting the business?”

  Lily shrugged, then resumed her counting, this time the little-girl headpieces.

  “I mean, look at you and me,” Elaine continued. “We changed our lives most of all. Sarah and Jo, they always worked. But our lives were different. I was a wife once. Boy, that’s hard to remember. I wonder if I’ll be good at that anymore.”

  “You say that as if you’re going to give it a try.”

  Elaine smiled. She wiped her hands on the white chef’s apron she wore over her jeans and Liz Claiborne shirt. She stood up again. “I followed your advice. I proposed to Martin.”

  “What?” Lily jumped up and down and clapped her little hands.

  “You don’t know if he said yes.”

  “Of course he said yes. He’d be a fool not to!”

  “Well, then he’s no fool. Because he did say yes. And we’ll get married in the fall. A year after we should have gotten married in the first place.”

  “And we’ll be your bridesmaids!” Lily shrieked. “And we’ll help pick out your gown! Oh, Lainey, this is divine. Our lives have come full circle!” She danced over to Elaine and kissed her on her right cheek, then her left.

  Elaine laughed. “I thought you might be happy,” she said. “And though it’s been nice chatting with you, I have to get back to work. My father agreed to cater the Elks Club bowling banquet, so I’m swapping foie gras and bruschetta for kielbasa and peppers.”

  “Whatever!” Lily a-cappella’ed, then resumed her symphony, pointing to the box of small dress gloves that sat in the percussion section and dancing back into her world, back to her happy work.

  Sarah showed up at four-thirty, just as Lily was about to lock up the shop.

  “What the heck are you doing here?” Lily asked. “I thought you’d be in Boston a few days.”

  “The trial is over. Brian has gone to jail for five years and Jo and Andrew are together and all’s right with the world.”

  “Wow. That was fast. So they could have gone through with the wedding after all.”

  Sarah laughed. “God, Lily, is that all you ever think about?”

  “Weddings are what I’m paid to think about these days. In fact, they’re what we’re all paid to think about. Speaking of which, our Lainey is going to marry Martin! We’ll be bridesmaids just the way we planned!”

  “Well, that’s really swell,” Sarah said. “By the way, you might not believe this, but your boyfriend tried to get his brother off the legal hook.”

  Lily jangled her keys in her hand, forgiving Sarah for not getting as excited as she did about Elaine’s news. The four of them were so different. She hoped that never changed. “What do you mean?” she asked, because if it involved Frank, she was more interested.

  Sarah explained how Frank had showed up and tried to make restitution with his mother’s life-insurance money.

  “He should save it for his new life with Sondra.”

  “As it happens, the judge suggested that he give Jo half. She says she doesn’t want it, but Frank has insisted. As for him and Sondra, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  “The hell it isn’t. He was with her for four days.”

  “No. I don’t think he was ‘with her’ in the sense you mean.”

  “Oh, pooh, Sarah, what do you know, anyway?”

  Sarah laughed. “I know that I only stopped by to tell you that Jo’s ordeal is over and that she’ll be working full steam ahead toward the kindergarten teacher’s wedding. As for you, Ms. Lily, if you don’t believe a word that I’ve told you about Frank, I suggest you march your little self across the town common, where he is busy at his shop, trying to reconstruct his life. Not that you care about his life anymore.”

  With that, Sarah turned on her Birkenstocks and went out the back door, leaving Lily standing there, a smile slowly pirouetting across her face.

  39

  He was with a customer.

  Lily stood inside the doorway of Antiques & Such and listened as Frank cited “period piece” and “matching sideboard” and “Duncan Phyfe.” His voice was low and not close—Lily suspected he was in the room at the far end of the store, the “Assessor’s Office,” he laughingly called it, because that was what it had been when the building was the West Hope Town Hall. It was where Frank now showcased his most coveted stock.

  She moved to the front of the room and began to inspect the estate jewelry, which was set in a velvet-lined curio cabinet that subtly implied it was worth more than it was.

  Personally, she found estate jewelry creepy.

  “Whoever owned it is either dead or fallen on hard times,” she’d said to Frank as she supervised the arrangement of the display back when he’d relocated his business across the street. “Knowing those things, why on earth would I want to wear something—no matter how sparkly—that has such a sad, ill-fated past?”

  Frank had laughed, because it was still early in their relationship—before his mother had taken a turn for the worse, before Lily had stopped working hard to charm him, before Sondra had resurfaced. He told Lily she was too funny and he kissed her on the mouth and they made love right there amid the moving cartons in what once had been the town clerk’s office.

  She’d been startled by the spontaneity of the small-town, solid citizen but amused to think that they were making love where so many West Hopers had obtained a marriage license.

  She studied a brooch with a large stone encased in a gaudy swirl of platinum. The color looked too deep to be ruby, so it must be a garnet. She wondered if the original owner had been someone like Aunt Margaret, who’d spent too much time and money surrounding herself with baubles instead of with people she might have loved. Lily wondered what had happened in Margaret’s life to make her that way and why Lily had so readily followed in her high-heeled footsteps for so many years.

  Loneliness, she supposed, was o
ften at the root of such shallow behavior. Loneliness, sorrow, fear of waking up each morning finding yourself alone. Until now Lily hadn’t realized those things were simply part of life and could even be embraced for the strength and courage that they fostered.

  “I have a wonderful drop-leaf table coming in next week,” Frank said, his voice growing louder.

  Just as Lily was about to step forward and make her presence known, his customer said, “Set it aside for me, please.”

  Lily flinched; she nearly gasped. The voice, she was quite certain, was Antonia’s.

  She ducked behind the curio cabinet, wondering what the hell was going on.

  Why was Antonia back in West Hope?

  Why was she talking to Frank about sideboards and drop-leaf tables?

  Squeezing her eyes shut, Lily wrinkled her nose. Her heart began to do a little dance somewhere in her throat, a cha-cha, maybe, or a lively salsa.

  “If you wouldn’t mind holding those pieces for me, I’ll let you know when I have a place.”

  “Of course. And give Don Benjamin a call. I’m sure he can help you find something suitable soon.”

  When she has a place? What the heck did that mean? And wasn’t Don Benjamin a real-estate broker whose office was three or four doors down from Second Chances?

  She should have stayed where she was, out of sight, and apparently out of mind. She should have remained in the shadows in her new state of contentment.

  But that would have been sensible and, no matter how much she’d evolved, Lily was not that. Besides, she no longer cared what either of them did or thought, did she?

  Sucking in a small breath and tipping up her chin, she stepped one, then two feet forward until she was in plain sight, until the conspirators’ heads turned and noticed her standing there.

  “Lily,” Frank said.

  “Lily,” Antonia said.

  “Yes,” Lily answered, “that would be me. I didn’t know the two of you had become acquainted.”