Sister's Choice (39 page)

She was heading around a tall hedge-lined bend in the path back to the kitchen, the boys in tow, when Charlie’s shoe came untied. Although she was teaching him how to tie his shoelaces himself, there wasn’t time now for another demonstration. She squatted on the ground to do it herself, setting Adam beside her to stretch his baby legs.

“Pretty soon you’ll be doing this faster than me,” she said, soothing the little boy’s masculine pride. “You’ll be the shoe-tying champion with those strong fingers of yours.”

“Daddy—”

“Even better than your daddy. In fact, by the time Daddy comes home from the Army, you’ll be tying all sorts of things.”

“Daddy!”

She realized Charlie wasn’t talking about knots. Before she could finish, he shook himself loose and took off.

Without turning, she knew who must be standing somewhere behind her. The hedge and the curve had hidden his approach.

The hour of reckoning had arrived.

Adam toddled past her, his chubby face wreathed in smiles. She got slowly to her feet, took quick stock of what she was wearing, and silently slapped herself for not putting on something more attractive today or pinning up her hair, instead of simply gathering it in a net and covering it with a scarf. She looked like a farmhand, probably smelled like one, too, and unless she was mistaken, the wet spot on her buttoned sweater was baby drool mixed with apple butter and bread crumbs.

She brushed at the stain, but improvement was hopeless. She squared her shoulders and turned to find her husband standing just ten feet away. Ben looked thin, and his hair was so short, she could hardly tell the color. He wore olive drab with a khaki-colored necktie, and he carried his hat in his hand. He looked tired. He looked worn.

He looked wonderful.

She didn’t know what to say. Apparently Ben didn’t, either, because even though Charlie was tugging at his father’s tie, trying to make his daddy pay attention to him, Ben was silent.

“I can explain,” she said at last, shrugging the way Ben so often did. “If you’ll let me.”

His gaze bored right through her. “There are women in the apple orchard. Some of them look surprisingly familiar. There are children in the house. They’re not mine, and they sure aren’t Otis Gaff’s.”

“That snake in the grass probably isn’t capable of producing children. He and that cockamamie wife of his would produce rats. Baboons. Donkeys.”

“I’m assuming he’s not around to hear that?”

“Not unless he sneaked on to your property and is slinking around somewhere. But I doubt it. He thinks I have a loaded shotgun with his name on the pellets.”

“And do you?”

“No, I’m a peaceful woman. The threat was good enough. Besides, now that he has a letter from you saying you refuse to sell…” She drew a circle in the dirt with her toe, paying close attention to symmetry. “Well, he doesn’t have much reason to come over here, anyway.”

“A letter, you say? That’s odd. I don’t remember writing one.”

She couldn’t tell anything from his tone, but that was Ben. She suspected that when she looked up from her perfect circle, she wouldn’t be able to tell anything from his expression, either. So what point was there in looking up?

“Well, I may have told a teensy-weensy lie with that letter,” she said.

“Teensy?”

“Maybe a little bigger than teensy. And I may, just
may,
have signed your name to it.”

“Grace, what exactly did you do?”

She finally looked up. She’d been right. Nothing showed, but he had lifted Adam into his other arm, and he was clutching the boys against his uniform as if somebody was trying to steal them.

“Here it is as fast as I can say it.” She took a deep breath. “I decided I could run the place myself. Otis wanted to steal it, Ben. He was going to steal our apples! Could I let him do that? Of course I couldn’t. So I sort of made up a story or two. One for you, one for him. See, I thought if you didn’t know what I was doing, then you couldn’t refuse to let me do it. And it’s working, Ben. We’ve already sent all the Galas and Empires to market, and we got a great price for them. I’ll show you all the figures. And I hired Dolly and Sylvie and some of the neighbor women to pick this season. They’re doing great. Dolly and Sylvie have moved in, the children are being well taken care of, we’re putting by lots of food so we won’t be hungry while you men are off fighting, and there’ll probably be enough to share with the less fortunate, not to mention sell. Maybe the orchard won’t look as good as it did the day you left, you know, when you come back the next time, but it’ll be here, Ben. It will still belong to you and the boys.”

He didn’t speak. She pressed her lips together, then bit them for good measure. She was just about to start drawing another circle with her toe when he put Charlie down on the ground and followed with Adam.

He took two steps toward her; then he stopped.

The boys seemed to sense the gravity of the moment, and they moved away, Charlie to one side, Adam to the other.

“And what about you?” Ben asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You said it will still belong to me and the boys. The orchard. Cashel Orchard. What about you, Grace? Will it belong to you as well?”

She was trembling. Now, annoyingly, her eyes filled. She sniffed. “I guess that depends on you.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s always depended on you. Or nearly always. Maybe on that night when Adam turned six months old and started cutting teeth, and I found you rocking him, even though you’d been carrying him around all day long and any other woman would just have let him cry. Maybe it was that night. Or maybe it was the night I saw you standing on the front porch looking up at the stars and counting them, like you ever really could. Count them all, I mean. But that didn’t stop you. Whenever it was? It’s depended on you from that moment. It depends on you now.”

She saw the future she had wished for. And she knew it would have been a fine one, filled with sights that now she might never see, people she would surely never meet. Then she saw the future she had never wanted. A future with Ben Cashel—somber, obstinate Ben, who would never leave the place where he’d been born. Ben, who would spend his future and hers, if she let him, growing apples and raising his little family.

“Well, then, if it depends on me,” she said, “then I guess I’m in this until the end of the play. But you have to promise you’ll teach me how to prune an apple tree, because I’m hoping to work right beside you some of the time. Once you come back, Ben, I’m not sure I’ll want you out of my sight again.”

He didn’t move, but he seemed to dissolve, as if all the hard edges holding him together were now soft and fluid. He smiled, not a huge grin, but the sweetest smile she’d ever seen.

And the sexiest.

He held out his arms. She went into them without a thought. And kissing him felt as natural and right as she had hoped it might.

They weren’t alone until that night. Between the boys, the sisters-in-law, the hired man and the neighbors who had heard—as Valley neighbors always seemed to—that Ben was home on leave, they were surrounded by family and friends. But when nighttime came, Grace made sure Ben came to the right bedroom to sleep.

He walked in to find her putting something in a dresser.

“What’s that?” he asked, coming up to stand behind her.

“I hope you won’t be angry.”

“I’ve managed to keep my temper under check so far,” he said, putting his arms around her waist.

She felt the excitement of his touch, and just the faintest apprehension that they were about to really become husband and wife. She fished in the drawer and pulled out the quilt top she was making from Anna’s scraps. She turned in his arms.

“I found this pattern and fabric in a box of Anna’s. It’s called Sister’s Choice. I just felt like I needed to make it.”

He looked down and fingered the top. Then he nodded. “It’s right you should.”

“It’s not like the quilts Anna usually made. I felt drawn to it. Especially, well, because of the name.”

“It’s not like the ones she usually made, Grace, because she was going to make that one for
you.
She told me it was going to be your wedding quilt. She knew you would like all the fabrics and colors. She said, after a lifetime of keeping you in line, for once she wanted to give you something you would really love.”

For a moment she couldn’t speak or breathe. She looked up at him. “She gave me you.”

His lips found hers. The quilt top fell between them. There would be time in the long, lonely years of the war to finish it. But for now, Grace had something else that had to be finished first.

W
henever possible, Rosslyn and Rosslyn believed in historical preservation. Cash and his father were responsible for saving more than a few cabins, stores and mills that would have been demolished if not for their intervention and skills. Despite himself, Cash had always been proud of that.

This morning, though, a month after Jamie’s evening visit, he was ready to swing a sledgehammer himself. Or light the first match.

The mobile home he had called his for too many years wasn’t old enough to be historic, and he doubted many good memories had been made here. For the most part, it had been temporary housing, available for a few months in the autumn if an overflow of workers came to pick and process fruit. Even then, his grandparents had made certain to keep the place in good repair until the day Granny Grace had judged that impossible and put a padlock on the door. But the old trailer had never been a real home for anybody until Cash had taken it over.

For that matter, it had never been
his
real home, either.

Cash had spent a lot of the last month wondering why a man who was devoted to preserving the past, a man who was rightfully proud of restoring and building homes that would grace Shenandoah County for decades or centuries, had, at the very same time, worked so hard both to forget his own history and to live in one of the valley’s least historic eyesores.

He was not a fan of complexity. He was determined to think of himself as a simple country boy. He wanted his path through life to be straightforward and uncomplicated. But a man didn’t always get what he wanted.

This morning he still wasn’t sure about much, but he was sure he no longer wanted this. He did not want to live in a rusted-out tin can. Never again did he want to wake up at six on a February morning, as he had today, to find icicles forming in the gap between window and wall in his living room, and an inadequate furnace struggling unsuccessfully to heat both the interior of the trailer and too much of the great outdoors.

Normally, at a moment like this one, he would have gone up to the farmhouse and bummed coffee from his grandmother while he waited for the sun to rise. But that option was no longer available. By now Jamie would be up, getting Hannah and Alison ready for school, helping Granny Grace in the kitchen or packing lunches for her daughters. He didn’t want to witness her carefully blank expression or hear her polite, condensed responses to all conversational gambits.

He had seen Jamie in the weeks since that last conversation, of course. He continued to take the girls to school in the mornings, and she allowed that, since driving them herself was now virtually impossible, particularly when the roads were as icy as they appeared to be this morning. But he didn’t drop by the house just to visit his grandmother unless he knew ahead of time that Jamie wouldn’t be there.

So this morning, he was spending the interval before dawn plugging every gap he hadn’t bothered with before. He cut and stuffed strips of insulation into cracks, covering some of it with duct tape, some with strips of paneling, to keep it in place. And as he worked, he asked himself how his life had come to this.

He still wasn’t halfway to an answer when somebody knocked. Startled, he let the hammer slip from his hand, and it landed on his foot. Muttering under his breath, he limped across the room and threw open the door, expecting to find one of his crew. Instead he found Isaac.

Cash and his “new” half-brother had gotten together four or five times since their father’s revelation. They usually went out for a beer when Isaac and Kendra were in town, and let the conversation wander wherever it wanted. At this point, neither of them was trying for anything except friendship, but that seemed well on the way.

Cash was embarrassed. He had never invited Isaac to the trailer. He supposed he had been ashamed of his choices even before Jamie pointed out how revealing they were. He hadn’t really wanted Isaac to see where and how he lived or question him about either.

“You’re not exactly dropping in, are you?” Cash asked.

“You can tell that because the sun’s not up yet and you live in the middle of nowhere, right?”

“That’s about it in a nutshell. Come in, but don’t take off your jacket. It’s freezing in here.”

Isaac stepped inside and looked around; then he shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans as if he were afraid of frostbite. “Well, you don’t live this way because you have to. I happen to know for a fact you have a good job.”

If he had danced around the obvious, Cash would have thought less of him. But Isaac had gone straight to the heart of the matter, and he sounded just interested enough.

Cash listed his reasons. “It’s free, it was already here and it’s close to my horses. That seemed like motivation enough at the time.”

“You don’t spend many hours here, I bet.”

“I wish I hadn’t spent last night. What’d it get down to? Ten degrees?”

“Not quite. But it was cold up at the house, too. Though not nearly this cold.” He nodded in the general direction of the farmhouse. “Did you know we spent last night at Grace’s?”

“Nobody mentioned it.”

Isaac didn’t seem surprised. Cash was sure Isaac knew that he and Jamie were nearly strangers these days.

“Your grandmother heard we were going to be in town, so she asked us to stay at the house instead of the cabin. Kendra’s taking Jamie to the doctor this morning, so that made it easier.”

“I bet you’ll be glad when your house is all done and you can just move down here. You’re in the county nearly as often as you’re not.”

“Did you know Jamie’s considering moving into our place in Arlington at the end of the school year? She might look for a job with an architect in the area if she doesn’t go back to Michigan to finish her degree right away. The schools are great, and she’d be close by.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Do you need any help?” Isaac nodded toward the insulation. “Looks like a real do-it-yourself project.”

“It’s what we call a stop-gap measure.” Cash tried for an easy grin, but it died. “I’ve got to get out of here. One day pretty soon I’ll go to patch something and the whole place will turn to dust.”

“Thoughts about where you’ll go?”

“Lots of thoughts. Not a plan in the bunch.”

“I bet you have a coffeepot. Mind if I find it and make some?”

“You don’t have to stay. I can take care of this, then I’ve got to get ready to go.”

“Actually, I just came down here to tell you that on the way to that doctor’s appointment, Kendra’s taking the girls to school, Jamie out to breakfast and Grace to the bee, so you don’t have to get moving so fast. We have four-wheel drive, so they’ll be fine. But now I’m intrigued. I’ll go if you want me to, but I’d rather stay and help.”

“Okay. Coffee would help most of all. Black and hot.”

Cash heard Isaac rummaging around in the little galley kitchen. At least he had washed dishes and put food away last night. He cut another strip and tucked it in the gap between the floor and a baseboard. He was cutting one more when Isaac came back in with two steaming mugs.

Cash motioned to the sofa. Isaac sat, and in a minute Cash joined him, propping his feet on the newspaper-strewn coffee table.

Cash cupped his hands around the mug for warmth. “Things okay up at the house?”

“Jamie’s about as tired of being pregnant as you’d expect. I think the girls are anxious to have her back the way she used to be, but she won’t be quite that way ever again. She’s got a lot ahead of her.”

Cash didn’t want to talk about Jamie, but unfortunately, he had opened the door himself. “She has, what, three, four weeks to go?”

“That’s what they say. But it could be any day.”

“Sooner would be better.”

“I know you’re upset about the decisions she’s made.”

“She’s a grown-up.” Cash hesitated; then he shrugged. “I put my nose where it didn’t belong. I should have stayed out of things. It was her decision when to tell you and Kendra what was going on.”

“Why did you?”

“Because she was making a mistake. I still think so.”

“I don’t know you that well yet, but I’d guess you don’t go around mopping up after other people. I’ve seen you on the job site. You just expect the best and get it. If somebody screws up, they make good on it by themselves or they get the ax.”

“This is her life.”

“I’ve done a lot of research, talked to some friends who happen to be doctors. Nobody’s as sure as
you
are that she did the wrong thing. Some of them thought her choice was commendable, maybe even correct.”

“You ever watched somebody die up close? Ever been there holding their hand?”

Isaac thought about that a moment; then he held Cash’s gaze. “I guess I’ve never been that lucky.”

For a moment Cash couldn’t believe what he’d said. A polite response eluded him.

Isaac took advantage of the silence. “I’ve never been close enough to anybody who was dying to be there at the end. My mother—my adopted mother—was living overseas, and nobody even told me she was sick until after she was gone. I’ve only been really close to one person in my whole life, and that’s Kendra. Of course, I almost lost her because I wasn’t very good at it.”

“There’s nothing
lucky
about watching somebody die.”

“Maybe not, but there’s something pretty amazing about loving somebody so much you have a right to be there. About that level of intimacy. About knowing they would be there for you if the situation were reversed.”

“It’s like having your flesh peeled off an inch at a time.”

Isaac set his coffee on the table. “Jamie’s not trying to die, you know.”

“Did she send you here?”

“You’re kidding, right? You think she needs an intermediary?”

Cash realized how foolish his question had been. Asking somebody else to speak for her was one of the last things Jamie would ever do.

Isaac sat quietly, as if the two of them had sat that way a million times throughout their childhoods. Cash wasn’t sure he’d ever met anyone easier to be with.

Cash spoke at last. “I’m not sure anymore that this whole thing between us is really even about her.”

“I’m sure it is, at least a little.” Isaac hesitated. “But maybe it’s a lot about your wife.”

Cash wasn’t surprised that Isaac knew. Jamie had probably told Kendra about Kary. That was what sisters did. And brothers, he supposed.

“Did your wife choose an option that hastened her death?” Isaac asked.

“Kary? Kary had no options. That’s what makes me so angry. Jamie had options, and she didn’t take them.”

“I can understand that.”

“Jamie says my whole life is about not feeling anything again.”

“That’s pretty harsh.”

“Why the hell am I telling you all this?”

“You want an answer?”

Cash considered.

Isaac picked up his cup and held it out, as if in toast. “Because whether you want to or not, you
are
feeling things,” he said. “And who better than your older brother to make sure you’re thinking everything through very carefully?”

Grace hadn’t expected to find friendship again in Shenandoah County. She most certainly hadn’t expected to find it in the person of Helen Henry, or in Helen’s comrades at the Shenandoah Community Church Bee. But find it she had. Perhaps if the women ever sat down together and made a list of things they believed or didn’t, very few of Grace’s own choices might match with theirs. But quilting cut through superficial differences, straight to the heart of what they did agree on. They were committed to beauty, to home and family—whatever form that took—to bedrock traditional values such as helping neighbors, creating something for others to enjoy, providing color and warmth in a world that always needed more.

So here she was, surrounded by women who had spent their lives in exotic places and women who had never been farther than a day’s drive. To her left was Kate Brogan, a busy young mother for whom quilting was simply a much-needed diversion. To her right was Helen, who had confided she was going to enter another quilt in the Houston International Quilt Festival, just in case her entry was accepted again and she lived long enough to travel there at the end of the year. Young and old, accomplished and all-thumbs, sophisticated and plain-speaking, somehow it didn’t matter. They had become her friends, her community, and she was finally at peace with her decision to live out the rest of her life in the county she had once despised.

Helen looked over her glasses at the women assembled around the bee’s quilt frame and cleared her throat loudly. “Now, maybe I’m an old woman and don’t know more than a thimbleful or two, but seems to me if we sewed more and talked less, we might finish this quilt this afternoon, before those babies arrive.”

Most of the women nodded, then went right back to talking. But Grace noted that they seemed to be quilting a little faster as they did.

For her part, she had finally confided to Helen that hand quilting was too difficult with her limited sight. Helen had solved that dilemma by basting several rows of straight lines using heavy perle cotton, and now Grace could feel exactly where her own stitches were supposed to go when things got blurry. She supposed if she lost her sight entirely one day, Helen would still find a way to make sure she remained useful.

“Jamie will love this,” Grace said, to no one in particular. “It will mean the world to her.”

“Girl’s done so much for everybody else, she deserved a quilt all her own.”

“Leave it to you, dear, to come up with the perfect block.” Grace looked down at the quilt at her fingertips. She could still see well enough to get the total picture. Shining Hour was a traditional pattern. A nine-patch block, on point like a diamond, adorned the center of an eight-point star, with longer ribbon-like strips extending outward to connect the star to its neighbors, so that the effect was like an elaborately woven tapestry.

This was indeed Jamie’s shining hour, something everyone in the bee had come to understand. She was giving the most unselfish of gifts and had become something of a heroine to the other women.