The House on Persimmon Road (21 page)

“What?”

“The weight of the world.”

Justine sighed. “Easier said than done.”

Tucker expertly dealt with the food. He sliced off a small rib and handed a sample to Justine.

“It’s delicious. Better than delicious. You ought to enter that sauce in a contest, Tucker. You’d win.”

“You think so?” He turned away so that she couldn’t see the pleased flush that seeped into his face. He fortified himself with a swig of beer.

“I know so. What can I help you with?”

“I’ve left the salad until last. The makings are on the kitchen counter. Come on, I’ll get you started.”

The ingredients were all laid out—cherry tomatoes, radishes, spring onions, all from Tucker’s garden, lettuce leaves washed, black olives, feta cheese. “You’ve gone all out,” Justine said.

Tucker leaned against the counter, one foot crossed over the other. “We have to talk.”

“We are talking.”

“About us.”

Justine gripped the back of a chair. “What about?”

“Merging our families? Solving our problems together?”

All the air seeped from Justine’s lungs. “I’m not ready.
Our
families aren’t either.”

“That’s because you’re trying to make the decisions for all of us. Why don’t we put it to a vote and see what everybody says?”

“No! I’m responsible. That won’t work.”

“You’re holding back.”

“One of us needs to.”

With a dawning clarity, Tucker surmised what he was up against, why she protested so. He had recognized vulnerability in her, but it went further than that. Justine had never been deeply loved in marriage, as she should have been. Distanced now from those years and Philip, she must be wondering what was real, what was fantasy. The move to Alabama, the directing of Agnes’s and Pauline’s lives and those of the children, working at home, were all efforts to shore up her own lagging confidence.

It was beyond her to understand that what she had to offer was everything in the world he had ever dreamed of having for himself: stability, wife, children—an extended family. She thought herself a failure as a wife and a woman. Though he was well aware of his flaws, or thought he was, failure was a luxury he’d never allowed himself within the narrow confines of his life, for he’d had no one to fall back on. What needed doing he stuck with until it was done.

“The difference between us, Justine, is that I see all the ways a thing will work and you see all the ways it won’t.” He searched her face. “Are we supposed to be falling in love by some rule that I don’t know about? First we do this, then we do that. I have never been so affected by any woman in my life. That tells me something.”

Her eyes were huge and troubled and full of uncertainty. “It’s not any of them that would have to sleep with you, it’s me!”

“That doesn’t appeal to you?”

Their eyes met. “You know it appeals to me! Oh, I must be crazy. I need a cigarette.”

“You quit smoking.”

“Yes.” Now she couldn’t look at him.

He lifted her hands off the chair back and put them around his neck. “Hold on to me, Justine. I won’t let you down.” He stroked her hair. It was silky beneath his fingers. After a long, tense silence, he said, “I want to see you tonight. Leave the porch doors open in your bedroom.”

Stunned, she shook her head. “With my children there? My mother? Agnes?”

“Dear heart, I won’t arrive beating drums or tooting bagpipes.”

“You’re mad, completely out of your mind.”

“The salad dressing is in a cruet in the fridge,” he said, and sauntered out of the kitchen.

Shaken, Justine sagged against the sink.

She closed her eyes for a moment, concentrating. Had she agreed to bed the man? No, only if the doors were left open. She’d keep them closed and that would be the end of it.

Endings.

But she was weary of endings. She just wanted everything to be in the middle, no cautious, awkward beginnings, no harsh, unhappy endings. She dredged up a self-deprecating smile. Nicotine withdrawal. That’s what she was suffering.

That,
said an interior voice,
and Tucker Highsmith.

In the last rays of sundown Wheeler and Agnes sat at the table, elbow to elbow, trading acerbic remarks like a pair of bullies, each trying to best the other.

Pip and Judy Ann hung on their every word, laughing, cheering them on.

Pauline nudged Justine. “You should speak to Agnes. She’s making a fool of herself. Imagine! Flirting like an adolescent! At her age.”

“Flirting? Be serious, Mother. They despise one another.”

“They’re flirting. You and Tucker don’t have a monopoly on it, you know.”

“We haven’t been flirting, either.”

“Pfffft.”

The hens, which only moments earlier had been pecking at supper scraps thrown them, began to seek out their roosts.

Tucker struck a match, lighted the pair of citronella candles, then began gathering up dishes. Justine leaped to help.

“Sit,” he ordered. “I’m just clearing these out so we have room for dessert and coffee.”

“I don’t think I can manage another bite,” Justine told him.

“That’s the appreciation I get after slaving over a hot stove?”

“I’ll sample your dessert,” Pauline put in. “You can’t know how wonderful it is to eat someone else’s cooking.”

The coffee was Decaf Golden Pecan and the dessert was Mandarin zabaglione in sugared meringue cups.

Justine stared at her plate, then at Tucker. “You made this?”

His awareness of opportunity was outweighed by his desire to be casual. “It’s just a way to use up egg whites.”

“Don’t be so modest. I can’t believe you concocted this.”

He meant to say it was a recipe he had collected for his book, but his lungs fluttered. “It’s just an old favorite of my mother’s,” came cowardly off his tongue. Bloody damn!

“Somehow I just can’t quite picture you in the kitchen creating such elegance—”

In the candlelight his expression was irresolute. “Why not? Lots of men cook.”

“Not zabaglione, they don’t.”

“Oh, we had a chef once who created all sorts of wonderful delicacies,” said Pauline. “But Evan let him go.”

“Why?” Tucker asked, curious.

“Well, he was…limp-wristed, you know. Evan couldn’t tolerate that sort of thing. Gave him the shudders.”

Tucker wished he’d made ice cream instead. Cranking the handle would’ve been a far more masculine endeavor and more acceptable.

The way he saw it, he had narrowed the critical hurdles of his relationship with Justine down to two: cookbooks and condoms. He’d thought of the zabaglione as a way to insert writing cookbooks into conversation, get it over with that he was writing one. He blew it.

Next, if he messed up discussing sex, Justine would no doubt suggest to him in precise terms the anatomically impossible things he could do to himself.

Maybe, he thought, he should’ve reversed the order of his priorities.

The zabaglione was consumed amid lavish compliments. On the one hand Tucker lapped up the praise, on the other, he felt condemned.

Pauline, being polite, offered to do dishes.

“Thanks,” Tucker agreed and escaped to clean the grill.

Pauline gaped.

Justine laughed. “Since you stuck your foot in your mouth, I’ll help,” she said.

“He wasn’t supposed to take me up on it.”

“You did sound sincere.”

Pauline sighed. “Living with you has made me lose my touch.”

Justine eyed the clock. It was already after eleven. Of course he wasn’t coming. That business about needing to see her, merging families. It was just talk. Jaw-flapping, as Agnes would say.

Tucker and Wheeler had walked them to the back door and uttered platonic good evenings before she and her family were well into the kitchen. No secret looks had been exchanged, no whispered reminder of their earlier conversation.

Justine thought he was being circumspect. And so she had bathed, changed into a sundress, dabbed perfume behind her ears and in the hollows of her neck.

Perhaps he was waiting for his dad to be sound asleep. She had long since made certain that Pip and Judy Ann were in dreamland. Pauline and Agnes were another matter. After watching the antics of the
Golden Girls,
they had passed up the news and late-night television, saying they, too, were exhausted.

She must have said something that offended him. Or he had taken her at her word when she’d said she wasn’t ready. Oh, foolish, lying tongue when she was so swollen with caring for him she felt she’d burst. And here she was all dressed up in the middle of the night, for nothing!

She cast off her clothes, trading the dress for pajamas, turned off the light, surrendered to the cool welcome of the bed and gazed ruefully into the shadows. At least she was saved from the humiliation of having an audience observe her make a choice fool of herself.

Lying there, sleepless, she couldn’t slow down her thoughts. She wondered if he was as sexual as he appeared, wondered if he had decided she had no sex appeal whatsoever, wondered if she should have said something, given him a sign, been more aggressive. That was it; perhaps he liked aggressive women.

She was so involved in the turmoil of questions that when the light tapping came she discounted it as night sounds, the old house settling. It was only after the tapping became more insistent that she switched on the bedside lamp and sat up, her chest suddenly an inefficient bellows.

He whispered her name.

She opened the double doors and he was caught in the lamplight. He just stood there, his smile tentative, a shoe box held in his large hands, giving her time to absorb him. He was wearing a beige suit, a white shirt, a wide pink tie poorly knotted, and sandals sans socks.

“Monumentally unfair!” she whispered with a righteousness and hint of hurt that camouflaged her relief at his arrival. And because relief brought anger, she was compelled to accommodate it. “I’ve already undressed. You could’ve at least—”

“Do I get to come in?”

She threw up her hands and moved aside. “What’s that on your lapel?”

“A boutonniere.”

“Looks like weeds.”

“It’s a sprig of blooms off a tomato plant. Kinda hard to find flowers this time of night, y’know.”

“I know you want me to ask. Why’re you dressed like that?”

“I’ve come a-courting, said the country bumpkin to the sophisticated lady.”

“I’m hardly sophisticated.”

“Well, you smell better than any woman I’ve ever met. And when we jog, you hardly sweat.” He made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a groan. “I can see by the look on your face this explanation is getting nowhere. Suppose I told you I felt tonight might be special, that I ought to have on more clothes than a pair of shorts and shirt.” It made perfect, if perverse sense to him. A pair of shorts and a shirt could be discarded in half a second. If he read her wrong, he’d be standing there buck-naked while she told him to get out. What with suit, shirt, tie, et cetera, he’d have an inkling of where the evening was going long before he was entirely disrobed.

She walked away from him to the bed and sat in the middle. After a moment he followed and gingerly took a spot at the foot, one leg bent and the box cradled in his lap.

“Naturally I’m supposed to find you funny,” she said.

“I just thought you’d like to know I can be presentable, even debonair, if need be.”

“But not on time.” Something was at stake here, Justine thought, but whatever it was escaped her.

“I didn’t say a time, I said later. Besides, I had to wait until all the lights went out.”

She stared at him, then let her tensed shoulders drop, offering him an uncertain look. “You’re up to something.”

“You have an excellent mind. Have I ever mentioned how much I admire your intelligence? I said to myself when I first saw you flapping your arms, ‘Hey, this woman’s something, good-looking, smart…is this working?”

She looked up at the ceiling, her throat working. Finally she was able to direct her eyes to him and nod. “Are those really yellow suspenders I see under your jacket?”

She had adroitly backed and filled, shifting the direction in which he was trying to take them. He went with it. “They’re Dad’s. The pants have gotten a little too big since I wore them last. I always drop a few pounds in the summer—sweat it off. You don’t approve?”

“I approve wholeheartedly of anything that keeps your pants up,” she said too quickly.

Ah! Back on track. He managed to look pained. “I walked into that one nice and snug.”

Justine nodded. “Yes, you did.”

“Do you feel better now that you have all the vitriol out?”

“Much better, thank you. What’s in the box?”

“Well, we’re going to get to that. First, I have a little speech prepared.”

“Gosh. I’m all ears.”

His look was meant to chastise her. “I wish you’d let me get on with this.”

“Forgive me,” she said, not at all contrite.

“You’re starting to make me mad. I get prickly when I get mad.”

“How prickly? Do you flex your tattoo?”

A glower set his face like stone, crumbling only seconds later when a light dawned. “You really thought I wasn’t coming?”

Her eyes picked a spot on the wall beyond his shoulder. “That may have crossed my mind twenty or thirty times.”

“I’m eminently trustworthy. Which you should know by now. I’m trying to woo you, to confide in you. I’m trying to be sensitive, and I’m also running out of pluck. No man in his right mind would put himself through this for more than five minutes. Maybe I ought to leave?” Now why did he say that? Testing the waters?

“Why? You’re here now,” she said shakily, fearful he might do just that. “I’m listening.”

“No more smart remarks?”

“I promise,” she said, sitting cross-legged and folding her hands demurely in her lap.

He loosened his tie and drew in a good solid breath. “I thought we should discuss the nasty little details of carnal indulgences.”

Justine’s mouth fell open.

He dumped the contents of the box on the bedspread. “There’s red and orange, clear…heart-shaped. How that one works is beyond me, but—”