Double Wedding Ring (3 page)

“Mommy! Mommy!”

The little boy stood in front of her, his blue eyes bright with delight. The stripes on his T-shirt matched his eyes. He flung himself into the chair, into her arms, filling her lap.

“Now, Cody, you be careful,” admonished Grandmother. “Susan does not need you crawling all over her like that.”

So Susan put her good arm around the hard little body and pulled him close. Cody put his arms around her neck. “I love you, Mommy. Me ride? Me push?”

“Yes,” she said, hoping that was enough response to his exuberance for the moment.

The man who called her “sis” pushed the chair around the front of the van. That was when Susan saw the house directly across the street, over the sunny fuzz of Cody's hair. The house was brick, one story, set back in a wilderness of overgrown azaleas and rhododendron. A broad porch stretched clear across the front, but it had no rockers, no swing, no invitations to sit a spell. Chimneys rose on either end of the house.

“Tag,” she whispered, her brain grasping frantically at the memories stirred by the forlorn-looking house.

“What, Mother?” Malorie bent over her, but Susan shook her head. Her daughter straightened and spoke to the others. “You wouldn't believe how fast she's learning to read again. Don't worry, Mother, I've got your books and everything else in the back of the van. You'll be settled in no time.”

Susan had no side-view mirror on her chair to keep the house in sight, so she closed her eyes and tried to carry it with her all the way into Grandmother's house. Like the big green-and-white sign on Main Street, the house touched some part of her that nothing else had touched since the accident. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what the sign, what the house, might mean. What Tag might mean.

Light shimmered in that part of her memory, but it was too weak yet to fight back the darkness.

* * *

A
S DUSK CREPT
into Sweetbranch, Tag Hutchins stared out the living room window. It had become his daily penance. His own Southern Baptist, guilt-and-hellfire version of a dozen Hail Marys.

Waking up with a hangover and a stitched-up head two months ago had scared the bejesus out of him. Scared him so bad he'd gone on the run but good. Eight states in six weeks. Racing so hard and fast and dirty he'd won twelve second places, two thirds, a disputed first place and a dislocated shoulder. Of course, the dislocation actually came after the race, during the fight over the dispute, but that
did
make it race-related.

Then the past caught up with him again, only this time he couldn't run. Here he was, smack-dab in the one place he considered his own personal hell on earth. Sweetbranch. So about this time of day, he would stand at the window and stare at her house, forcing himself to live out the old memories, looking each old bitterness square in the face. Daring each memory, each resentment, to drive him back to a long-neck beer bottle.

“Have you decided about the store?”

His nephew's voice drew Tag away from the window. He let the heavy green curtain drop and limped across the room. His bad knee was worse since the fall down his trailer steps. “Yeah. I'll keep it open.”

Sam raised an eyebrow as he jabbed the dying coals in the fireplace. “You?”

“Yes, me. Why the hell not me?”

Sam Roberts was one of the few people who didn't flinch when Tag Hutchins growled. Somewhere during his twenty-seven years, Sam had lost both his awe and his fear of the gravelly voiced uncle with the messy reputation.

“Because you always hated the place,” Sam snapped back.

Tag picked a medium-sized log from the haphazard pile he'd brought in earlier in the week and tossed it onto the ash-covered grate. Sparks crackled and flew.

“It makes money,” Tag countered.

“Barely.”

“Mama had no business managing the damn thing all by herself. I'll get it back in the black.”

The accusations in Tag's head seemed to spill out into the silence. His mother had had no choice but to manage the place herself after his father died. Even if they'd known at which dirt track in which two-bit town in Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia to find him, Tag would have had ten good reasons why he needed to run this race or that one before pointing his rolling tin can toward Sweetbranch. Eula Hutchins had been on her own after the liquor finally did in Eugene Senior.

“I know,” he finally said, facing the fireplace so he didn't have to face Sam. “Her son didn't do her a damn bit of good while she was alive. What makes me think my help is wanted now?”

Sam didn't rise to the bait; his voice stayed level, calm, rational. That ability to stay cool might be the only thing Tag didn't like about his only living relative. “It's yours now. You can do what you want with it. Sell it if you want to.”

Tag had thought of that. He'd sat on the bench at the park and stared across the green at the old brick building where he'd spent way too much of his growing up years to suit him. He'd tried to picture the sign coming down. Being replaced with something cutesy and creative made up by some former debutante yuppie Junior Leaguer from Birmingham with romantic notions of small-town living. Bootsie's Garden Boutique. There would be no more fifty-pound bags of manure against the back wall. No more posthole diggers. No more contracts for bush-hogging family garden plots come spring.

And no more Hutchinses in Sweetbranch, Alabama.

Everything his old man and his mama had worked for all those years would be erased, dead and gone. Even Sam, his brother's only son, had another man's last name now.

If Tag let the old store go, he would have his wish. He really wouldn't belong anywhere at all.

“What is it, Sam? Afraid an old vagrant like me can't keep the place going?”

“You're not a vagrant. Old, maybe. But not a vagrant.”

Tag shot Sam a cynical look. His nephew had been sitting there when Tag awoke two months ago, his head pounding so hard he was certain his skull would explode. Sam had taken him home from the hospital, back to a trailer reeking of stale beer. Sam had propped him up on the side of the couch where the springs weren't broken and stared at him long and hard.

“Tag, what do you plan to do with your life now?”

“Have a beer,” Tag had rasped, although for the life of him he couldn't quite imagine being able to move his head enough to swallow.

“That's not funny.”

“Maybe I wasn't trying to be funny.”

“Have you been drinking long, Tag?”

“Hell, no. Last night. That's all.”

“What started you off?”

“I don't know.” But he did know, now. Now, in the cold light of day, he could remember. Too clearly. A birthday not his own. A birthday he wanted to curse and couldn't quite. And it was easy, once again, to appreciate the lure of oblivion that alcohol promised.

He wondered, fleetingly, what his old man had sought oblivion from. Chastised himself for never caring enough to find out while his father was alive.

“You know the risk,” Sam had continued. “You're that much like Grandpa. One is too many and a hundred isn't enough.”

“You're a smart-ass.”

“I know. It's the family plague,” Sam had countered, unperturbed. “Tag, if you're going to start drinking, you might as well go out there and get on that bike of yours and sail over a cliff somewhere. Do it fast. It'll be a lot less painful for all of us.”

All of us being Sam and Tag's mother, for nobody else who gave a rat's ass had been left. Still, Tag saw the wisdom in Sam's words. And without the murkiness that came with a six-pack, crashing and burning on his motorcycle had little appeal. Neither did going the way his old man had.

Tag hadn't had another drop since. He'd even called his mama regularly, which was how he'd known when she had the stroke. Sometimes, especially since he'd had to drag himself back to Sweetbranch to watch his mama die, he could taste a cold one going down, could feel the damp tickle of a head of foam on his mustache. Sometimes he felt like a forty-six-year-old grizzly with a thorn in his paw. Acted like it, too.

“I know I can sell the store,” he said now. “And I know I've never run a business in my life. But I can do the bush-hogging and the deliveries. I've still got a strong back, you know. But even I'm responsible enough to figure out I'm not ready to get the store back on its feet. I'm gonna hire somebody.”

“Who?”

“Hell, I don't know,” he snapped. “I put some posters out today, around town. I'll advertise in the paper. Somebody'll turn up.”

“What about the house?”

Tag's head was beginning to pound. “Hell, I don't know about the friggin' house, either. She's been dead a week, for chrissake. Cut me some slack.”

Sam propped the black iron poker against the stone fireplace and stood. It always surprised Tag that Sam looked him eye-to-eye. He remembered Sam as a skinny, gap-toothed five-year old. When had he gotten to be a good-looking man on a six-foot-two frame?

“Sorry, Tag.”

“Nah.” Tag clapped Sam on the shoulder briefly. “I'm the one who's sorry. I'm sore as an old wet hen these days.”

“Let me know how I can help, okay?”

“I will.”

Sam stopped at the door. “Mother said to tell you...she hoped you'd understand if she didn't come by.”

Tag had seen Emily at the funeral, with her husband and their two teenaged kids. “Sure. Yeah. You tell her I said she looks great, okay?”

Tag hadn't expected his sister-in-law to pay a friendly visit. For all he knew, she was still pissed at the way he ran out after he was back on his feet. With Tag's brother dead in Vietnam and a little boy to raise, Emily had seemed to think it wasn't too much to expect Tag to hang around, be a role model for her fatherless son.

All Tag knew was, Emily would've probably ended up a lot more pissed off if he
had
stayed around to be a role model. Tag Hutchins was nobody's hero. Especially not some impressionable little kid's.

He looked at Sam. The boy had done just fine without him. Real fine, in fact. “You think I can do it? The store, I mean.”

Once the question was out, Tag realized Sam's opinion was important to him.

“I know you can.”

Tag wondered, as Sam closed the door behind him, how long he could manage to feed off his nephew's belief in him.

Dusk was thick now. The house was growing dark. But Tag didn't turn on any lights yet. He stood in the halo from the fire, which was once again dying, and stared at the front window. Finally he gave in.

The new van was still parked out front. But one thing had changed, one thing was different from all the other times he'd stared out this window since coming home to Sweetbranch a few weeks ago.

There was a light in the corner front bedroom upstairs. Susan's window.

April 1967

“S
O WHAT ARE YOU
gonna do in June?”

With high school graduation six weeks away, Tag still didn't have the answer to the question everybody was asking. His mama. His old man, especially when he was tanked. Now even Crash Foster.

“I don't know, man. Do you?”

Tag and Crash lay in a circle of grass enclosed by Tag's mama's pink-and-white azaleas and stared up at the stars.

“We could join up.”

Tag didn't have to think twice about that. He'd been Elliott's shadow all his life. He didn't want to follow his brother into the army, too.

“And end up in Vietnam?”

Crash tossed a stick into the air and caught it on the way down. “Where is Vietnam, anyway?”

“If you hadn't been such a slack-ass in school, you'd know where the heck Vietnam is.”

“Okay. I'm a slack-ass. So where is it?”

“Indochina.”

“Oh.” They sat in the dark for five minutes, listening to the season's first crickets. “Where's that?”

“Look it up.” Tag figured he was under no obligation to reveal—even to his best friend—that he knew too much about this tiny spot that was beginning to create such a big stink.

“It wouldn't be bad if we could go together,” Crash said.

Tag wasn't so sure. Six months after he'd shipped out, Elliott didn't write much, and when he did, his letters sounded funny. Spooky funny, that is. Tag had been reading about Vietnam in the Birmingham paper whenever he could sneak away from the store and get to the library without anybody noticing. From what he was reading, Tag wasn't so sure he wanted to end up rotting in the jungle in a place called Vietnam.

“I think I'll save my money,” he said. “Buy me a car.”

He didn't mention the things he thought about doing with the car. Driving to Hollywood and learning to be a stuntman for the movies. Or driving over to Hueytown, Alabama, to see about working on the pit crew for a stock car driver. The way Tag figured it, he had lots of options.

“Save what money?” Crash said.

“I'll get a job.”

“You've
got
a job. And your old man doesn't pay you diddly.”

“A
real
job.” Tag hated working for his old man. Hated Hutchins' Lawn & Garden. He figured lawns and gardens were fine for women, but men had other business. “Construction, maybe.”

“If you don't want to join up, maybe you ought to go to college. Before the draft gets you.”

Tag rolled over on his belly. He wasn't about to tell Steve Foster—known as Crash because he'd managed to do exactly that to three cars within one month of getting his driver's license—that college was the one thing he
really
wanted to do. He gazed across the street at Crash's house, a big white two-story with a weeping willow in the front yard. Crash's old man had the Cadillac dealership for the whole county, which made him practically a millionaire compared to storekeepers like Tag's old man. Tag wondered if he had the brains to get as rich as old man Foster, then figured it didn't matter, anyway. Tag Hutchins wasn't going to college and get all brainy. No prayer of that.

“Who needs college?” he replied to Crash's question. “Say, what's that?”

“What?”

Propped on his elbows in the cool, dew-damp grass, Tag pointed to a front window upstairs at Crash's house. A light was on, and the ends of filmy yellow curtains drifted out the open window. Inside, someone moved back and forth across the room, all graceful arms and legs. The backdrop for the movement was some kind of classical sounding music, which also floated out the open window.

“Oh, that. That's Susie.”

“What's she doing?”

“Dancing.”

The fluid movements of the slender body that was framed only fleetingly by the open window looked nothing like the Jerk or the Swim or the Monkey. This looked like his mama's gladiolas swaying in a summer breeze.

“Susie? No kidding?”

“Yeah. What a dope, huh? She does that every night. Mom yells at her, but Susie doesn't pay any attention. Every night, she practices those dumb dances. Then she comes out on the porch and works on this blanket she's making.”

Tag had known Crash's little sister practically all his life. He couldn't remember when the skinny, freckle-faced girl with the long blond ponytail hadn't been a pest, spoiling things, tattling on them. But this person floating back and forth in front of the upstairs window bore no resemblance to that gawky, goofy kid. This person moved like a cloud. This person wasn't skinny; she was slender and perfect.

This couldn't be Susan Foster. This person in the window was a...a...a girl. And he meant that only in the best possible way.

Tag sat up. His mouth felt dry and his chest felt big and empty, the way he felt when he got the wind knocked out of him on the football field.

“Let's go over to your house,” he said.

“Nah. That's a drag. Besides, I told you, Susie'll be down soon and she'll mess up everything. Let's go into town, see who's at the Dairie Dreme.”

Almost a week passed before Tag found a way to get over to Crash's house without Crash figuring out what was going on. He and Crash'd had plans to double-date with Debbie Compton and Alta Fay Wills that Friday night, but Tag backed out at the last minute. Alta Fay was knock-kneed, anyway, and he'd only agreed because Crash said Debbie wouldn't go out with him alone the first time. Buddies came through for buddies.

This time, though, Tag figured Crash was on his own.

Almost every night after seeing her that first time, Tag had figured out a way to be sitting in his mama's garden about the time Susan Foster went upstairs to practice. He watched her and thought about goddesses in the mythology junk he'd managed to tick off Old Lady Strawbridge by not reading. Some nights, Susie wore her hair loose, and it hung way past her shoulders, down her back, like a cloak of butter-colored dandelion fuzz. He wondered what it would be like to hold a fistful of that hair in his hand and blow it, watch it float away, feel the weightlessness of it.

He knew he was getting mush-headed over a girl, because his grandpa had warned him this day would come. He'd never believed it before. Not that he hadn't felt an itch that needed scratching real bad sometimes, but feeling that kind of itch was a whole lot different from this. Grandpa was right. This was mush-headed.

The hardest part was acting like nothing was different during the day at school. Because the worst thing that could happen would be for Crash to find out that his best friend since the first grade had a crush on his kid sister. Crash clearly had not matured enough to recognize that his kid sister had been transformed into a goddess.

So Tag kept away from her at school and resorted to spying on her at night from the protective darkness of his mama's circle of azaleas, which would soon curl up and turn brown. Seemed like a waste to Tag, tending them and fretting over them and babying them all year long, like his mama did, for a few short weeks of color every spring. But for this short week, the delicate blossoms seemed somehow tied to Tag's discovery of this delicate creature who now lived in the body of a one-time pesky kid. All of it—flowers, music, stars, girl with the cloud of butter-colored hair—were some form of magic, and he walked into the spell willingly, eagerly.

He discovered Crash was right. After she danced, she came outside, onto the screened-in side porch, and curled up on the porch swing. She set the swing in motion with one bare toe, then set to work.

Tag made up his mind he would talk to her, that he would make her realize that if she could overcome her years as pesky Susie that he, too, could be transformed. He hoped that didn't mean he would have to start letting people call him Eugene Junior. But if it did, so be it.

This night, with Crash safely at the movies with Debbie Compton, Tag made his move.

She sat there, just the way she always did, only this time she was closer. He came around from the back of the house, knowing he didn't have the guts to march right up the front walk with her looking at him, all curious. So he was at the back edge of the porch before she realized he was there.

“You scared me, Tag Hutchins. What are you up to, sneaking around like that?”

He realized her voice was different, too. Not a whiny little girl's voice anymore. Soft, almost shy-sounding.

“I'm not sneaking around. I just saw you sitting here and thought I'd say hi.”

She stopped her work and looked down on him. She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail, even though almost nobody wore ponytails anymore. But it looked right on her. And it made her big, dark eyes easier to see.

“Steve's not here.”

“I know.”

She looked at him another moment, then lowered her eyes to the big sea of material in her lap. “I thought you were doubling?”

“I don't like Alta Fay.”

She didn't answer. He didn't know what he'd expected. Had he thought she would ask him who he did like? Tell him she was glad he wasn't squandering his attention on somebody like Alta Fay? It sank in that if he wanted this encounter to turn into something like a conversation, it was up to him to get it rolling.

He walked up the five steps and opened the screen door without being invited, the way he would have if it had been Crash in the swing, even though he suspected the rules he knew didn't apply to this strange new situation. He sat on the concrete floor, his back against one of the porch rails, facing her. He was close enough to touch her bare foot. Her ankle was narrow, all bone and pale skin. Her toes were long. He'd never before in his whole life realized that toes could be pretty, but it struck him that hers were. Her toenails were painted a pale, shimmery pink.

“What are you working on?”

“Nothing you'd be interested in.”

“Tell me.”

“Just a quilt.”

Tag wasn't sure how a quilt was different from a blanket, but he sure wasn't about to ask. “Is it hard?”

She looked at him without raising her head from her task. He saw that she worked with a needle and thread, and that her fingers were as long and graceful and pretty as her toes.

“It's tedious,” she said.

“Why do you do it?”

“Because when I finish it will be a work of art. And...”

“And what?”

“That's all.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Put it in my hope chest.” She raised her chin, daring him to poke fun at her, the way he'd poked fun at her as long as he could remember.

He couldn't see any way to poke fun at her anymore. All he could see when she mentioned a hope chest was this picture of her in his mind's eye, dressed up in white the way Emily had been when she and Elliott got married. There was old Susie, dressed in white lace and dancing in front of a cedar chest.

“Oh.” He had to draw a deep breath, because somehow he couldn't quite get his lungs full. “I didn't know you were talented until I saw you dancing in your window.”

“You watched me?”

Tag knew right away from the tone of her voice that he'd said the wrong thing. “I can see you. From the house.”

Her mouth looked tight and displeased. It called to mind the contrast from moments before, when her mouth had looked soft. He knew then that he wanted to kiss her.

Gee willikers, what was he going to do about that? Wanting to kiss Crash Foster's kid sister. Crash would never let him live it down. Or else Crash would kill him, because nobody wanted one of his horny pals messing around with their kid sister, even if their kid sister had always been a pest.

“You look...” Tag swallowed hard, but his mouth remained dust-dry. “You look real beautiful when you dance.”

She let go of her needle and stared at him. “If you're trying to josh me, Tag Hutchins, I'll—”

“No! I'm not. I swear it.”

“Did Steve put you up to this?”

“No!”

She started back on her needlework, but her pursed lips told him he'd made a real mess out of this.

“You won't tell him, will you?”

She frowned. “Tell him what?”

“That I...came over tonight. That I said you look...beautiful.”

“Now, why would I tell him that?”

She smiled a little then, and her lips grew soft once more. And Tag thought if he didn't touch some small part of her soon, he might just die from lack of...whatever it was she had that he needed.

“How long are you going to work on that thing tonight?” he asked.

“Oh, I don't know. Usually I work on it till bedtime.”

“Suppose you might want to quit early tonight?”

“What for?”

“We could take a walk.”

“To the Dairie Dreme?”

Tag almost said yes, then he remembered that Crash and Debbie and everybody else getting out of the seven o'clock movie would be crowding into the parking lot at the Dairie Dreme before long. Including everybody who knew he'd bailed out on his date with Alta Fay tonight.

“How about down by the creek? It wouldn't be so crowded. We could talk.”

“Down by the creek?” Once again, her voice rose an octave in that tone that signaled he'd said the wrong thing. “Alone? At night?”

“It's not scary. Crash and—” Then it hit him. What she really meant. “Oh. I didn't mean anything by it.”

“You didn't?”

He looked up then, and saw the strangest look on her face. Sort of expectant, sort of teasing. He felt himself stirring and felt the least bit ashamed. “Well, maybe I did mean a little something by it.”

She laughed at that, and her laugh was as light as her hair when it floated on the spring breeze while she danced. Tag thought his heart might thump its way right out of his chest.

“My mother would never let me walk down to the creek alone with you at this hour, Tag,” she said softly. “I'd have to sneak out to do that.”