Wedding Ring (15 page)

Cissy smiled, as if sharing a joke. “Lots of farm magazines at the Claibornes’ house, though. Then there’s the
World Book Encyclopedia
. I read all the way through C last month, till I figured out that Czechoslovakia isn’t a country anymore, and the Iron Curtain came down a while ago. Figured I’d better find something newer to read or I’d have everything all wrong.”

It was the longest speech the girl had made in Tessa’s presence, and despite not wanting to be, she was touched. Perhaps if she’d suspected Cissy was hinting, she would feel differently. But the girl didn’t seem a bit manipulative. And after years of teaching, Tessa could spot the difference.

“I could loan you the book,” Tessa said reluctantly, “but I’ll warn you, it’s not for the faint of heart. Hardy’s not easy to understand. As many times as I’ve read it, I always find something new to think about.”

“Then it must be good.” Cissy held it out to her. “But I didn’t mean to sound like I wanted to take it home. I—”

Tessa pushed it back toward her. “Go ahead. Just bring it back when you’re finished.” Tessa suspected Cissy would be bringing it back unread soon enough.

“Well, that’s so nice of you.” Cissy clasped the book to her chest. “And, Miss Henry, I’ll bring that cloth over, just like you said.”

Helen harrumphed.

Cissy said goodbye, and both women watched her descend the stairs, slam the hood on the truck and drive away.

“I don’t hold with that girl living in sin with the Claiborne boy,” Helen said, as if to set Tessa straight. “But I’m a Christian woman, and she’ll need something to cover that baby of hers. That’s the only reason I offered to help her.”

Tessa would have smiled, only she was too busy kicking herself for giving the book to Cissy. She didn’t need a teenager so hungry for love and attention that she had chosen a house filled with feuding women to give it to her. She didn’t know what had possessed her to help the girl that way, but whatever it was, it worried her.

Helen never would have guessed that chunks of fish belonged in a salad. Tomatoes, yes. Cucumbers, yes. But Nancy’s supper salad had potatoes and chunks of tuna fish, even some salty kind of olive Helen had never tasted before. She was about to say something when she caught the expression on her daughter’s face. Nancy looked worried. Helen hadn’t seen her that way in too many years to count. These days, Nancy had all the answers. Only, maybe she didn’t really.

“This dish got a name?” Helen asked.

“Salad Niçoise.” Nancy passed a basket of rolls and tried to look nonchalant.

“Never had fish in a salad before, but I guess it’s no different than having it sitting right beside one. Goes to the same place.”

“It looks great, Mom,” Tessa said. “I don’t think I could have eaten anything hot. If this weather doesn’t break tonight, I’m going to sleep outside in the nude.”

“You’d be eaten alive,” Helen said, taking two rolls and passing them to her granddaughter. “Just like Gus and Obed the day I stole their clothes. By the time they got up their courage to come back to the house, they was covered with welts, the likes of which I never did see again. And that was all that was covering them, too, except some vines they’d wrapped round and round their private parts.”

Nancy laughed. “You were a rotten little girl.”

“More power to you,” Tessa said.

They ate in silence for a few minutes. Helen nearly cracked a tooth on an olive pit—just what was the point of leaving them inside?—but she was surprised at how good it all was. Even the rolls tasted fresh, although she knew for a fact Nancy had bought them frozen and warmed them up.

“So, just what did you all do today?” she asked, when the salad had made a substantial enough dent in her appetite to make conversation possible again. She watched her daughter and granddaughter exchange glances. She knew they didn’t want to make a report, in case she got mad about whatever they’d thrown away.

“I got the new curtains up in the living room,” Nancy said.

Helen had seen them. She couldn’t believe it was the same room. Nancy had even rearranged the furniture so that when two people sat down together, they could see each other head on.

“What about you?” she asked Tessa.

“I worked in the attic this morning before it got hot, then I got a start on some paperwork.”

Helen carefully sucked on an olive. “What kind of paperwork?”

“Little of this, little of that.”

That was code, Helen knew, for “I threw away everything I touched.”

“You just stay away from my desk in the dining room,” Helen warned. “I don’t want you touching a thing on it.”

No one spoke.

Helen looked up, a frown deepening the wrinkles on her forehead. “I mean it,” she said more forcefully. “There’s stuff there nobody need concern herself with.”

Tessa sighed and put down her fork. “Gram, that’s where I was working. But I promise I didn’t throw away a single thing except your old junk mail.”

Despite the heat, Helen felt cold. “What junk mail?”

“You know. Advertisements, coupons that expired months ago, offers that are too good to be true. Junk.”

Helen was on her feet before the final consonant sounded. She hurried out of the room, sorry she couldn’t run anymore. As far as she could tell, growing old didn’t have one thing in its favor.

In the dining room—where nobody’d had a meal in decades—the old secretary where she kept all her papers was now as neat as a pin. She didn’t know when Tessa had cleared it out, but Helen suspected it had happened when she went upstairs to quilt after Cissy’s visit.

She sorted frantically through the cubbyholes. Bills in one, up to date coupons in another, a form letter from her church pastor inviting everybody to an annual meeting and potluck supper in the third. She opened the top drawer, where neat piles of booklets and receipts and canceled checks sat side by side in organized glory. She opened the second drawer and found fresh paper, pens and other office supplies.

“Gram?”

Helen slammed the empty bottom drawer and faced her granddaughter. “What did you do with them?”

Tessa looked wary. “With what?”

Helen didn’t answer. She pushed past and started for the front door. She knew what Tessa had done with the “junk” mail. She had tossed it in the horse trailer. All Helen had to do now was find it, bring it back inside, and store it under lock and key.

Tessa caught up with her and grabbed her arm. “What’s the problem? What’s missing?”

Helen was too upset to talk. She wrenched her arm free and started down the porch steps. She was halfway to the spot where the horse trailer had been sitting when she realized it wasn’t there anymore.

“Where’s the trailer? What have you done with it?”

“Zeke came and got it. He said he’d take it to the landfill and bring it back tomorrow morning.”

Helen knew that must have happened while she was upstairs, too. “Then you just get in your car and take me over to the Claiborne house, you hear? Maybe he hasn’t dumped it yet.”

Tessa looked calm. Only a faint tightness around her mouth showed that she was not. “I’m sorry, but he was going to dump it on the way home. He had an old chest freezer in his pickup that had to go, as well.”

Helen couldn’t believe it. “Then we’re going to the landfill.”

“It closes at four. Zeke mentioned that.”

Helen had known that, but she was too rattled now to think straight.

Nancy came to stand in the doorway. “Mama, get hold of yourself. Tell us what’s wrong.”

“My maps. My danged maps!”

Tessa looked perplexed. “I didn’t throw away maps, Gram. I’m sure I didn’t. But we can always buy you more, if you need them. I—”

“Hush!” Helen was trying hard to think. What would happen if she went to the landfill after hours?

“Whatever is bothering you, you don’t have to handle it alone,” Nancy said calmly. “That’s why we’re here.”

“You’re here to make a mess out of things! You think I need this kind of help? Everything. Gone!”

“We’re just clearing out the clutter, Gram,” Tessa said.

“That wasn’t no clutter. That was my maps.”

“What kind of maps?” Nancy crossed the room and rested a hand on her mother’s shoulder. “Whatever it is, we’ll fix it.”

“Danged right you’ll fix it!” Helen realized now there was only one choice left. “Change your clothes and get ready to dig. And I won’t be taking no for an answer, so don’t even give it a try.”

“Nobody, Mama, absolutely nobody buries money anymore. What were you thinking?” Nancy slammed her heel against the old shovel and felt it sink another few inches in the ground.

Helen was digging, too, and not far away, Tessa was doing the same.

“I was thinking it was my money and I could do whatever I wanted with it.” Helen slammed her foot against the shovel in rhythm to her words.

“It could have been making money for you in the bank or the market. Billy could have made sure you made the right investment decisions.” Nancy hit a tree root and realized this couldn’t be the right place. She abandoned the hole, shoveling the dirt she’d displaced back into it, and made a halfhearted attempt to tamp it down.

“You think I don’t know what can happen? You think I wasn’t born yet when the market crashed and the banks closed down and some people in these parts lost everything they had? Least my family didn’t have nothing much to begin with. But Mama never kept what little butter and egg money she had anywhere but right here in the ground.”

Nancy moved her shovel a yard away and began to dig again. “You always used a bank when I was growing up. You helped me start a savings account.”

“Times were all right then. Times aren’t so good now. I know the difference.”

Nancy knew this was just another example of why her mother shouldn’t be living alone or living in this house. She had lost the ability to make rational decisions. Now, it seemed, she’d lost all her savings, too.

Twilight had come and gone, and darkness was settling. Even the moon seemed to have left for parts unknown, and the stars were obscured by thick cloud cover. Helen had insisted they wait until darkness to begin to dig, and nothing Tessa or Nancy had said could dissuade her. She hadn’t wanted anyone to see where the money was hidden.

Another example of irrational thinking.

“Try to visualize your map,” Tessa said.

Helen slammed her shovel deeper. “If I could see it in my head, I wouldn’t need it on paper, would I?”

“Do you know how much money we’re looking for?”

“Enough, Missy. That’s all you need to know.”

“And you’re sure you hid three different tins? Not more or less?” Nancy said.

“You think I don’t know how many I buried?”

Nancy’s temper was growing shorter. “Yes, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I think. You don’t know where they are, you admitted that. And you didn’t think to put the location of the tins somewhere safe. No, you had to scrawl it on the back of some ad from Publishers Clearing House promising you’d won big money.”

“You think I wanted it to be easy, so somebody could just waltz in and find it?”

“I think
this
would be easier if you two would stop fighting,” Tessa said.

“Who said it ought to be easy?” Helen demanded. “You’re the one that threw my papers away.”

“I’m the one who didn’t know my grandmother was drawing treasure maps to her life savings on a four-year-old circular. You are right about that.”

Nancy thought her daughter was beginning to sound irritated, too. They had worked all day, and Tessa had done a wonderful job of organizing her grandmother’s papers. Now, instead of going to bed early, as she usually did, she was out in the sultry night, digging holes.

“You never asked,” Helen said.

“Gram, that’s not exactly the kind of question any reasonable person thinks of.”

“You’re saying I’m unreasonable?”

Tessa stopped and leaned on her shovel. “
This
is unreasonable. You knew we were cleaning and clearing. Why didn’t you say something then? Why didn’t you get the maps and store them up in your room?”

“How was I to know you would go through my private papers?”

“They were not private papers! It was junk mail. J…U…N…K!”

For a long moment, the only sound was the usual nighttime symphony of crickets and frogs.

“Well, you don’t have to get so uppity,” Helen said at last.

Nancy thought her mother sounded hurt. She could feel a tightness in her own throat, a need to say something, but nothing was there.

“I’m sorry.” Tessa sighed. “It’s this heat.”

“Damn heat,” Nancy said. “That’s what it is.”

“You’d think I did this on purpose, the way you two have carried on,” Helen said. But she didn’t sound angry. She sounded fragile and worried.

“We’ll find the money.” Tessa started to dig again. “We’ve got the rest of the summer.”

“And then what?” Helen said. “You’ll use this against me. You think I don’t know? I can hear the lawyers gathering up their papers now. I can see the judge shaking her head, and the little men in white suits coming for me.”