Double Wedding Ring (21 page)

Sam put his arm around her shoulder and held her against him. Just for a moment, she let herself sag against his solid chest. But in letting her defenses down, Malorie felt her control slip. She squared her shoulders and glared at them both.

Detective Watkins said, “Maybe it's time to call the boy's mother.”

“No!” Malorie had already explained that Susan was away. She didn't intend to involve Betsy, either. She'd let Betsy keep her away from Cody for more than two years, and she wouldn't let it happen again. This time, she was here for him. When he came back, she would be here. “I'm telling you, I can handle this myself.”

If
he came back.

She made up her mind. She turned, yanked her coat off the back of her chair and headed for the door. “I don't care what you say. I'm going after him myself.”

“Malorie—”

“You can't stop me! I'm his mother and you can't stop me!”

The words spilled out before she realized it. But once they were said, Malorie wouldn't have called them back. Not even after she saw the look of shock in Sam's eyes and knew that her reckless words had no doubt cost her all her hopes for the future.

Suddenly calm, she said, “Cody is my son and I'm going to look for him myself.”

As she walked out the door of the police station into the cold, damp night, Malorie felt free for the first time in almost three years.

* * *

C
OZY
,
COMFORTABLE SLEEP
, with Tag's chest for a pillow, beckoned Susan. She was about to give in to it when a memory tweaked her and she started upright. She looked down at Tag, who had already fallen asleep, his long, brown legs twisted in the quilt, his bare chest dark against the sheets. His hair spread over the pillowcase, and she smiled at the realization it was longer than her own.

Not wanting to wake him, she looked around the room, spotted her overnight bag and struggled with herself.

In the end, eagerness overcame anxiety.

Swinging her legs off the side of the bed, Susan put her weight on her right leg and began to maneuver herself across the room, hanging on to the side of the high mattress. By the time she reached her overnight bag, she was perspiring and trembling. With shaking hands she found the tiny pair of manicure scissors she sought, took a deep, weary breath and struggled back to the bed.

When she reached the bed, she realized Tag was gazing at her questioningly.

“You've been watching me,” she said, embarrassed at being caught, more so as she contemplated the awkward picture she must have made.

He nodded, yawned. “I kept hoping you'd need my help, but looks like you made it fine without me.”

“Yes, I did.”

She climbed back onto the bed, then began running her fingers around the edge of the quilt until she found what she was looking for. With the manicure scissors, she snipped a few stitches at the back of the quilt, parted the cotton batting and spilled a simple gold ring with a tiny chip of a diamond onto her palm.

Tag was sitting up now, too, and she looked at him as the ring shone in the darkness. She wasn't sure what she had expected, but she realized that he now looked as uncertain as she felt.

“Well...” Tag said.

For more than twenty years, the knowledge that this ring remained close by had given Susan a serene confidence that the young love she and Tag had shared had been real and strong and permanent. But with the ring between them once again, she felt a new tension that hadn't been there before. Where did they go now? Could they really put behind them twenty-plus years of pain and loneliness and betrayals, real and imagined?

She was no longer certain. And from the look of him, neither was Tag.

M
ALORIE WANDERED
the dark streets in the vicinity of the department store, calling her son's name. Oblivious to the cold drizzle beginning to fall, even to the danger of being a woman alone in the dark, she knew one thing and one thing only.

Finding her son was all that mattered.

She didn't notice the van that pulled up to the curb behind her on the nearly empty street. Paid no attention when the door slammed and footsteps came up behind her. When Sam spoke her name, she was beyond being frightened. Some things, she'd learned, were worse than risking your neck.

Pushing back the damp hair plastered to her forehead, she turned at the sound of Sam's voice. He stood outside the halo of the closest streetlight and the blinking lights marking the nearby construction. She couldn't read his expression, but at this moment, even that mattered little.

“You shouldn't be out here alone,” he said.

“I'm not leaving.”

He walked to her side. “I'll stay, too.”

“You don't have to, you know.”

He nodded, and his face appeared in momentary flashes, there and gone before she could register the set of his jaw, the emotion in his eyes. She started walking, and he followed.

“Cody!”

An answering sound came back to her, weaker than the mewling of a lost kitten. She froze and called Cody's name again. A high, thin sound seemed to fill the deserted street. She dashed in the direction from which it had come and cried out again.

“Mal, pwease,” said a tiny voice from somewhere beneath the street.

Malorie dropped to the ground beside the construction work. The grate covering the storm drain had been torn out. And there, far beneath street level, looking up at her from a muddy tunnel leading beneath the street, sat Cody, nursing a scraped and bleeding knee. His face, too, was scraped, and he looked soaked through with rain and mud.

“Oh, Cody, baby!” Malorie fought the sob in her throat as Sam scrambled down into the ditch after the baby. Hot tears mingled with the cold drizzle on her cheeks.

When Sam reached up and placed Cody in her arms, the toddler snuggled close and whimpered, “Me cold.”

Malorie felt as if she was holding him for the first time in her life. Never again would she let go.

* * *

B
ETSY IMPARTED THE NEWS
to Tag and Susan as if it pleased her that disaster had occurred while they were away together.

Susan talked to Malorie at the hospital in Atlanta. The doctors wanted to keep Cody twenty-four hours, to make sure dehydration was the only fallout from his experience. Malorie said there was no need for them to come, but Susan heard the ragged exhaustion in her daughter's voice. No mother could have stayed away.

The drive seemed interminable. Tag insisted on driving and Betsy refused to acknowledge his presence the entire way.

While the windshield wipers smeared her vision of the dreary day, Susan focused sharply on the tension of her unresolved relationship with Tag. Tag had studied the engagement ring, then handed it to her. But it was clear neither of them quite knew where to go from there. Susan had slipped the ring into her makeup bag and wondered if it hadn't been better off lost in the back seat of a junked station wagon somewhere in South Carolina.

Somehow, she had believed everything—twenty years' worth of wrongs—would be okay now. Maybe things wouldn't be that easy, after all.

* * *

T
HEY FOUND
S
AM
in the waiting room across from the elevator on the ninth floor of the hospital. He looked haggard, and as strained as the three of them had been during the trip from Sweetbranch. He pointed in the direction of Cody's room and said in a scratchy, bone-tired voice, “Malorie wanted to be alone.”

Susan wondered at the look he gave her, and said, “I'm going in.”

Betsy stepped up behind her chair. “I'll go with you. You'll need some help.”

“No, Mother. I can manage by myself.”

“Well, I hardly see—”

Tag stepped up and put a hand on Betsy's elbow. “We'll wait here,” he said, giving Susan an encouraging smile. “You see about Mal and Cody.”

With part of her questioning the wisdom of leaving those two together, Susan rolled herself down the hall and into Cody's room.

Malorie had pulled the only chair in the room close to the bed. Her eyes were closed, and her head drooped to one side. One hand rested on Cody's arm, which was hooked up to an IV. Susan winced, noting that they'd taped the restless toddler's arm to a side rail to keep him from dislodging the needle.

As Susan rolled closer, Malorie started awake.

“Mother.” She rubbed her eyes, which looked swollen and red. “Oh, Mother, I was so afraid.”

Malorie's voice quavered. In one swift movement, she was at Susan's side, kneeling with her head in her mother's lap. Susan touched her daughter's soft blond hair, felt her shoulders shake with tears.

“I thought it would be my punishment,” Malorie murmured. “I thought he would die because I gave him up, because I lied about him.”

She looked up at her mother, eyes glistening with tears. Susan thought her heart would break from the anguish in her daughter's face. The pain of childbirth, she thought, was nothing but preparation for a worse pain—seeing your child brokenhearted.

“I kept remembering, over and over, how Grandmother told me I'd have to live with the disgrace forever. How the shame would ruin everybody's life. Even Cody's.” She wiped away the last of the tears on her cheeks. “But she was wrong. Wasn't she wrong?”

“Yes, she was wrong. And so was I, for not being able to see that. For not being able to stand up to her.” Susan shook her head, touched Malorie's cheek. “I keep thinking I had to be forced into a wheelchair before I could learn how to stand up to my own mother.”

Malorie nodded, then bit her lower lip. “Sam knows.”

Susan remembered the defeated look on the young man's face and felt dread.

“He had to know,” Malorie continued. “I can see that now. But...I don't know how he feels.”

“Ask him.”

“But he wanted to marry me. And now—”

“Don't think you can make his decision for him.”

Malorie gave a shaky laugh. “I'm not sure I can make my own decisions.”

“I think you can.”

Cody stirred, whimpered, and Malorie looked over her shoulder at him. “I guess I have to, don't I.”

* * *

T
AG'S FIRST IMPULSE
when Betsy returned to the waiting room with her cup of coffee was to leave. But he told himself he could be civil even if she couldn't. Besides, he wanted to be here when Susan returned.

“Sam didn't go in, did he?” Betsy asked sharply, clearly prepared to be miffed if she had been barred from the hospital room while an outsider was admitted.

“He's taking a walk.”

He'd acted strange, Tag thought, troubled in a way he'd never seen before. Tag supposed Sam was simply tired and stressed. But it also confirmed to him that Sam's interest in Malorie was far more than casual.

Betsy sat in an empty chair across from Tag. “The two of you might just as well go back to Sweetbranch. The girls and I can manage fine from here.”

Tag decided that any answer he gave would end up sounding antagonistic. He wasn't in the mood for Betsy. He wasn't in a mood to tolerate much of anything, truth be told. What in blue blazes had happened last night? he kept asking himself. How had things gone so quickly from feeling right to feeling uncertain?

“What exactly do you hope to accomplish with my daughter, Eugene?”

For spite, Tag wanted to snarl that he was going to marry her daughter. But the words stuck in his throat, jammed up by his memory of the awkwardness that had surfaced once that engagement ring lay in the palm of Susan's hand.

“That's between Susan and me, Betsy.” He told himself to keep calm, but he doubted he'd been able to keep the resentment out of his voice.

“You do realize, of course, that Susan is not quite...right. And she may never be.”

“She has a lot to relearn,” he said. “And she's doing fine. No thanks to you.”

Betsy set her coffee cup down on a plastic table littered with six-month-old magazines. “You're living in a dream world, Eugene. And I'll thank you not to hurt my daughter through your own selfishness.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“As bad-tempered as your father, I see,” she said, smug satisfaction written all over her face.

Tag wanted to deny that he was anything like his old man, but those words stayed balled up in his chest, too.

“Eugene, let me ask you one thing. What kind of life do you plan for yourself?”

“Your interest is touching, Betsy.”

“Does that mean you have no plans? Or do you plan for more of the same?”

“I have the store now.”

“Mmm-hmm. And I suppose you plan to settle down in Sweetbranch?”

Tag wasn't sure which made him feel more like squirming, Betsy's interrogation or the idea of settling down in Sweetbranch. As often as he'd longed for a family, for normalcy, he'd never quite imagined finding it in Sweetbranch.

“I wonder how long that would make you happy, Eugene. How long it would be before you wanted to get back into that tacky little trailer of yours and go off on some more little adventures.”

“Listen, Betsy—”

“No, you listen, young man. I know the way you've lived. I know what it did to your mother, too. Her only living son tramping around the country like some no-account, never doing a useful day's work in his life. Why, if it weren't for my granddaughter, you would have run that store into the ground by now.”

True, true, all of it true. Tag had no defense.

“Can you honestly tell me you want to spend the rest of your life living in a backwater town like Sweetbranch, renting out backhoes, selling fertilizer and taking care of a crippled woman?”

The images bore down on Tag relentlessly. He told himself the picture she painted wasn't accurate, but Betsy's vision of the future—and her assessment of him—filled his mind, nonetheless.

“How soon before you start hankering after a little excitement, Eugene? Before you get tired of the burdens on your shoulders? How long before you run out on my daughter?”

“It won't be like that,” he said, but he knew his protest was weak.

When he looked up and saw Susan sitting in the doorway of the waiting room, he knew she could see the uncertainty on his face, had no doubt heard his hesitation in the face of Betsy's questions.

He wanted to hate Betsy for the hurt he saw in Susan's face. But he knew that this time Betsy didn't bear the blame. This time,
he
had caused the pain.

* * *

A
S
C
ODY SLEPT STRAPPED
into his carrier on the van's back seat and Malorie sat huddled against the passenger door, Sam wondered how he could convince Malorie the three of them belonged together. He only knew he had to try. That's why he had insisted on driving them home from the hospital, although Malorie had seemed reluctant to be alone with him.

He decided to plunge right in. “I love you, Malorie.”

His heart began to pound faster as he realized she had no intention of replying.

“No matter what,” he added.

“I was nineteen,” she said. “I thought I was pretty grown-up, but I guess I wasn't.”

“Mal, you don't have to—”

“Yes, I do,” she said with a determination he knew better than to question. “It was just dumb, that's all. I'd gone away for college. My first time away from home. And I wanted to be so sophisticated and so mature. So when one of the graduate assistant instructors started paying attention to me, I knew exactly why—because I was so sophisticated and so mature.”

Sam wanted to pull over to the side of the road, wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her. He wanted not to hear this story, but he knew she needed to tell it. And that need far outweighed his need to pretend it hadn't happened.

“He was furious when he found out I wasn't doing anything about birth control.” She laughed softly. “But not nearly as furious as I was when I found out he was engaged to some law student in Boston.

“Anyway, I found out I wasn't sophisticated and I certainly wasn't mature. I was just plain scared. And when Grandmother suggested that Mother and Daddy take my baby... Well, it made sense at the time. Better for the baby, everybody said. Better for me.”

“But it wasn't better for you?”

Again, she was silent. Then, “I've made a mess of everything.”

“Every life is difficult,” he said softly. “We all screw stuff up. I like to think we aren't measured by how many things we manage to get right, but by how we handle our problems.”

“If that's the measure,” she said, “I come up pretty short.”

“You were young.”

“That's a cop-out.”

“So maybe it's time to be measured again.” From the corner of his eye, he could see that she had turned to look at him. “I love you, Malorie. No matter what,” he repeated.

“But you're so...admirable,” she whispered so softly he could barely hear her. “You wanted to wait. And here I'm...”

“Not perfect?”

“Far from it.”

“Good. Look what being perfect has done to your grandmother.”

She groaned in response, but paused to think it over. “But how could you ever forgive me?”

“It isn't my place to forgive you. You did the best you could. The only person you need forgiveness from is yourself.”

He glanced at her in time to see her skeptical look. She looked into the back seat and said, “And from Cody.”

* * *

S
AM CARRIED
C
ODY
up the stairs when they reached the house. By the time they got him ready for bed, the little boy was awake. Mustering her courage, Malorie asked Sam to leave them alone for a few minutes. He nodded and closed the door behind him. But she didn't hear his footsteps on the stairs and knew he was waiting for her.