Mine to Tell (3 page)

“Maybe later,” he said, looking around. “Where’s your brother?”

“I don’t know. We’ll go find him pretty soon.” I threaded my fingers through his and tugged his hand in the direction of the wall, hoping it would draw his attention back to my tale. “The Crouses take marriage extremely seriously,” I teased, hoping to gain his attention. He squeezed my fingers. “It will sound kind of silly at first, but it’s been vexing enough to my family that I thought if we…”

“Let’s go find him, okay? I’ve got something I want to talk to him about, and then we can do this other stuff later. Maybe tomorrow,” he said. I looked up at him, his face alight with the desire to find Paul Junior.

“Is there a ballgame on or something?” I squeezed my fingers around his, trying to hold on, remind him we were supposed to be one and this was our special weekend.

“This afternoon,” he said, his fingers loosening as he craned his neck to look behind him into the next room. Trevor and my brother had become fast friends the first time I’d brought him home from college with me, shortly after we’d begun dating seriously. They’d bonded over some baseball team, and at the time I’d been ecstatic over their easy interaction. Even my parents had taken to him, so much so that I’d have gotten a more explosive reaction if I’d announced we weren’t getting married than that we were.

“Go on,” I said, smiling away my disappointment. “This can wait.” Excitement lit up his dark eyes, and I let him go, uncoiling my fingers from his. “He’s probably outside waiting for you.”

Trevor bounded off like a child, careening around the stand with the family Bible as he went to look for my brother. I watched his back until he rounded a corner, and then I turned to the wall of faces and the photo in my hand, their countenances an array of expressions frozen in time—fire, ice, and sorrow forever in their eyes. I thought of Trevor’s boyish expression. Our picture wouldn’t be like these. He and I were happy, and in ours we’d be all smiles.

“What in the world are you doing with that picture?” Mama asked from behind me.

I turned around, pressing my great-grandmother’s photo against my stomach. “Just showing Trevor some of the family,” I said, hoping she’d say no more.

“Well, go put it back under my bed.” She nodded toward the picture I was protecting. “You don’t want to scare your fiancé off with stories about her. He’ll think the worst of us, and you’ll get off on the wrong foot.”

“We’ll be fine.” I warded off a lecture about the bad gene pool I was from and my responsibilities as a wife. I turned and marched to Mama’s bedroom, wishing Trevor had just said yes and we’d gone to Julianne’s house before Mama spotted us.

“Marriage is hard enough.” Mama’s voice came from the doorway of her room. I tucked Julianne’s picture back into the box where it was kept and slipped out from under my parents’ bed. I stood up, raking my eyes down the front of me looking for dust bunnies I knew wouldn’t be there, while Mama raked her eyes all over me looking for immoral spots she could fix. “Trevor’s a good man, and you’ve got to do everything you can to hang onto him and keep him happy. If he thinks you’re proud of your great-grandmother, he’ll assume you won’t make a good wife. Just like the local boys here probably thought. Good boys, like Carl, or Kyle, and Wayne, who are all looking for respectable wives.”

I thought of Carl, who’d tried to kiss me in the sixth grade. He’d yanked me between two parked school buses and leaned over me with lips puckered out like a toadstool. I’d resisted him then and did it again when we were in high school. He would come by our house to see Paul Junior, but he watched to see when I was alone and he’d tell me he’d date me if I’d just let him, his eyes on fire. I never did. And Kyle? I’d forgotten he even existed. He was a quiet, private boy no one ever noticed.

“Mama, I didn’t want any of the boys around here. It’s not that they didn’t want me. But I want Trevor and he wants me. Being married won’t be that hard for us.”

There was a shout outside, a loud grunt, and some laughter. Those boys—my brother and my fiancé—were playing something, some sort of game two can play if they change the rules enough to suit them. I knew those sounds well, and I looked toward the bedroom window as I listened to their happy yells penetrating the wall.

In all honesty, it hurt sharing Trevor with my brother on our special weekend. Almost as much as having Mama cast doubt on my ability to be a good wife. The weekend wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Trevor was supposed to be sitting by my side, holding my hand, helping me toss out answers to the multitude of questions my parents were supposed to have asked. Like when will the wedding be? Where will it be? Have you chosen your colors, your flowers, your caterer, and all of the other important details a wedding entails? I looked away from the window and back at my mother, promising myself it wouldn’t always be this way. Trevor and I would be fine, and my family would eventually get over their fears that history was someday going to repeat itself. Trevor cared and would never draw silly conclusions like they did. And as for today, he was just busy, a little bit distracted while he waited for the ballgame.

“I’m not going to be a bad wife, Mama.”

Mama’s eyes were dark under brows gathered in a stormy warning. I shifted uneasily as she silently measured me for this heavy yoke I was supposed to wear, the one my great-grandmother’s disappearance had created in everyone’s psyche but mine.

“Just be happy for us. Okay?”

Mama’s shoulders dropped a little, but the worry of disgrace stayed in her eyes. “You’re the first female truly related to Julianne,” she reminded me. “I don’t want you to be like her. I don’t want your father and grandfather to have to go through any more than they already have.”

“We don’t know what she was really like,” I said too loudly, “so how do we know if I’m like her or not?”

“We know what she did, and that’s enough. You don’t want to be like that.”

Male voices reaching for octaves they normally would be ashamed to hit pealed in excited laughter outdoors. Good-natured challenges and barrel-chested guffaws were announced in unmanly shrieks. I glanced toward the window again, imagining Trevor racing across the yard, escaping my brother’s grasp. Trevor was tall and athletic. Paul Junior was husky, portly if I were to be precise. I’d always laughed at them before, but today it wasn’t funny. I fought tears from my eyes as I wished we’d called to tell them we were engaged instead of coming here.

I batted the tears away and pulled myself up straight. “No woman would do something like that without a good reason, and Julianne should at least have the chance to explain herself before she’s judged. I’m ready for marriage, and everything will turn out fine. You’ll see.”

Chapter 3

“My beloved is dazzling and ruddy,

outstanding among ten thousand.”

“You ready to go Christmas shopping?” I asked gaily as Trevor opened the door of his apartment to me. I was bundled in all of the festive colors I could find to match my mood, my excitement, my celebration of being a couple at Christmas. He wrapped his arms around me and we did a two-body shiver, both of us jiggling up and down until I squealed. He let me go, laughing, and I stood back to admire him, to relish the fact that he was fun and handsome, and he was mine.

“Sure thing,” he said, winding a scarf around his neck so wildly I laughed even harder. He raised his eyebrows at me and reached for the hunting jacket my brother, Paul Junior, had given him.

“Not that,” I blurted, wanting our day to be perfect. “Wear that long coat that I love. The one that makes you look like a spy.”

He frowned as he laid the hunting jacket aside, but then he shrugged and put on the long coat instead.

I snuggled in close to him as we left his apartment, establishing my place with him, near him, as much under his being as I could be. It felt good to be there. It tickled my heart, made me bubble inside and talk like a child while I chattered away as he tried to step around me, not complaining I was actually in his way.

“Mind if we stop for a newspaper?” he asked as we started down the sidewalk toward Cincinnati’s downtown blocks of stores. I looked up from beneath his armpit. “I just need to check last night’s scores.” It was there in his eyes, that unique sort of boyish excitement over sweaty competition that a woman could never create in a man.

“Can’t it wait?” I pleaded. He glanced down at me, his eyes changing to another sort of delight, the kind only I could create in him.

“Wait, yes. But be avoided, no.” He grinned.

“This time next year we’ll be doing our shopping as a real couple.” I batted my eyes at him.

“We’re a couple this year. What do you mean?” He ushered me along the sidewalk into the downtown area, past bundled individuals trying to stay warm.

“You know what I mean.” I planted an ineffective elbow into the thick bulk of his coat. “When we’re a
real
couple.”

“Oh, that kind of real couple.” He looked down at me again. “Like a married couple.”

I nodded. We were both graduating at term and were working at jobs that had agreed to hire us full time as soon as we were done. Everything was falling into place. We’d be a married couple within a year.

“You can do this Christmas shopping stuff alone then,” he said.

I stopped. I thought he was kidding until I looked into his face. His oblivious expression said he was stating a fact, one that brought a series of unhappy images to my mind. Me, overloaded with gifts, a wailing child or two hanging from the tails of my stained coat, Trevor at home contentedly watching a ballgame on television. Paul Junior next to him eating up everything we owned. “You don’t mean that, do you?”

He looked down at me, the placid look vanishing from his face when he saw mine. “Um, of course not,” he said quickly, but he didn’t sound sure. “Not if it’s that important to you,” he added. His arm tightened around my shoulders, buoyed my body upwards, picked up my pace, and tried to lift my spirits.

As my feet came off the pavement I wondered if marriage was going to be more complicated than I’d thought. Apparently it wasn’t going to be for him, since he thought I would take care of everything.

“Look, there’s a newsstand,” I said, pointing ahead, brushing away my concern. The vendor beneath the shack of magazines and newspapers was smacking his hands together like a seal and blowing mushrooms of cold air from his mouth. “Come on, we need to get you a newspaper so that poor guy can go home.”

I slid out of Trevor’s grip and ran ahead to get him a paper.

“That one,” he said, appearing at my side.

I looked where he was pointing and saw the one he meant. It wasn’t the newspaper I worked for, but its thick folds of dull white paper promised to contain all the sports stats he would need to keep him happy.

That’s what was important after all, keeping him happy. It’s what my mother did for my father and what she told me I was supposed to do for Trevor.

Well, I was doing it.

I took his free hand and told myself I was doing it because I wanted to, not because of the tiny thought that said I was doing it because I had to.

Chapter 4

“A double-minded man is unstable

in all his ways.”

Trevor sat across the small Formica-topped table from me. We were sharing a light dinner at his apartment, the silence between us as thick and tough as the pork chop I was trying to chew. I looked away from him, my eyes traveling around his apartment as I worked over the meat. He had graduated college, had a fantastic job, but he still decorated his place as if he lived in a fraternity. My gaze roved over the green sofa on four skinny legs, the cardboard paintings he considered art, the pole lamp in the corner that leaned against the wall because its spring had long since broken, and the myriad of posters of sports teams and heroes taped here and there. It was immature. I didn’t know how he could stand it.

His eyes were on me. I could feel them. I looked back at him, forcing the chunk of macerated pork down my throat.

“What do you think about buying a house instead of renting?” he asked me. Our wedding date was looming ahead, and he’d been a responsible fiancé and searched Cincinnati for a suitable apartment for the two of us. We’d looked at dozens and I hadn’t been pleased with any of them, including the one we’d just seen. He waited for me to answer. My thoughts teemed with wrong size, wrong carpeting, wrong neighborhood, wrong price. Something was wrong with every apartment we’d looked at. I wasn’t happy with them. I wasn’t happy with the way things were going or the way I acted. I wasn’t happy, and it made me afraid.

I looked at him, not sure what to say. He put down his fork and I followed suit. It felt like my insides had turned to ice. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t say anything. I was worried I couldn’t thaw.

“I guess not,” he said studying me with a frown. “I just thought it would be a wise investment. We’re young, and it would give us a jump on things in the future to own something so soon.”

“Like what kind of house?” I finally managed to say.

He looked at me like I was stupid. “What kind of house? A house-house, a nice house, something with a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom. Normal stuff. What the heck do you mean, ‘what kind of house’?”

I looked at him. His eyes were wide, frustration contorting his good looks. Trevor wasn’t one to lose his temper easily, but I knew where his aggravation was coming from. He’d suffered through our apartment hunting and now his frayed nerves saw that I was promising to be an even worse house hunter. He looked exasperated, but quite honestly, I felt even worse.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It just surprised me that you mentioned buying, that’s all.” It was a lie and I knew it. I just didn’t know what the truth was. I didn’t know where my enthusiasm for marriage had gone, why fear and hesitancy had taken its place. I’d criticized every apartment we’d looked at and then hated myself afterwards as I watched Trevor walk sullenly away. The same way he had walked today. I tried to imagine us looking at much larger places, houses with commitments, and I saw unlimited potential for finding something wrong, even if what was wrong had nothing to do with the house.