Wedding Ring (17 page)

“What are you doing here?” He tried to sound welcoming. He wasn’t sure he succeeded.

“That’s the question I should be asking,” she said pleasantly. He heard volumes behind it.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming back to town. Is everything okay out in Toms Brook?”

“Fine. I had errands. I’ve been trying to call you all day, but your cell phone was turned off.”

“I left it home this morning by mistake.” He thought of all the mornings Tessa had trooped out to the car to hand him something he’d forgotten, just as he was pulling out of their driveway. His briefcase. His phone. Library books he had promised to return. She was the more organized of the two of them, the detail person. And he was the one who saw the bigger picture.

“I know,” she said. “I went home to see if I could find you there. And I saw the phone on your desk.”

Mack realized he had left Erin sitting at the table looking enormously uncomfortable. He introduced her, and Tessa looked down.

“Mack has mentioned you often,” Tessa said. “In connection with Compassionate Friends. I know he thinks highly of you.” She paused just a moment too long. “Very highly.”

The words were measured, polite, and if he hadn’t known better, he would have thought they were kind. But Erin understood the last two for what they were, and her cheeks colored again.

“Tessa, join us,” Mack made an attempt to pull out a chair, but she waved him away.

“I already called in an order, and Frankie’s got it ready for me up front. I was just here to pick it up.”

“Don’t be silly. Where are you going to eat it?” He wondered if Frankie had known it was Tessa’s order. The Siam Palace owner had asked if Tessa was joining Mack. He must have wondered what was going on.

“I had something earlier at home. This is tomorrow’s dinner. I’m going to introduce Gram to Thai.”

He wasn’t sure what to say next, but she saved him the trouble. “If you don’t mind, I need a moment of your time.” She glanced down at Erin. “May I borrow him for the time it takes to reach my car? He’ll be right back.”

Erin looked like she wanted to sink through the tile floor. “Please, I should go.”

“Of course you shouldn’t,” Tessa said. “He’ll be right back, and you can finish your conversation and your dinners.” She nodded a goodbye and started toward the front without looking to see if Mack had followed.

“Don’t leave,” he told Erin. “Please.”

“I’m going to ask the waiter to pack mine, too,” she said firmly.

He didn’t have time to argue. He followed in Tessa’s footsteps. She was just paying for a large plastic bag loaded with takeout cartons when he reached her. She put her change back in her purse, smiled a taut goodbye at Frankie and started out the door.

Outside, cars whizzed by on the street as he followed her into the parking lot. The lamps jutting from cast-iron posts in the four corners were unlit. The sky was still light, and would probably remain so for part of her drive back to Shenandoah County. She stopped beside her Toyota, and he took the bag from her arms so she could unlock the door.

“We were having dinner to talk about the end-of-summer picnic that Compassionate Friends is hosting. I promised to be in charge of some of the arrangements. Erin’s in charge of the rest.”

Tessa opened the passenger door and set the bag on the seat. Then she shut the door and leaned against it. “You don’t owe me an explanation. But I have to say, it didn’t look like a discussion about who should bring the watermelon and who should bring the napkins.”

He didn’t deny it.

“Are you having an affair with her?” Tessa asked at last.

“No.” He paused and decided to be honest. “Not yet.”

Her expression didn’t change. “Then that’s what I interrupted? The whys and wherefores and whens?”

“No.”

“She’s very pretty. And young. She lost a child?”

“A brother. They were close.”

“What’s stopping you, exactly?”

Sometimes he wondered himself. How much rejection could any man suffer? How much pain was he required to bear alone? How hopeless was a marriage supposed to be before a husband walked out on a wife?

“I love you,” he said at last. “That’s what’s stopping me. At least, I think I love you, or the woman you used to be.”

“Then you’re not sure?”

“I need love. I need warmth. They’re absent in my life now. They left when Kayley did. I miss them as much as I miss her.”

He thought he saw a flicker in Tessa’s eyes. A light that hadn’t quite burned out, a response that hadn’t yet been smothered.

“We can’t go back in time.” She looked away for a moment; then she met his eyes again. “You want to, but we can’t.”

“Then let me build something new with you. Don’t shut me out. I’ve been shut out too long, Tessa, and I need something besides a black hole inside me.”

As he watched, she seemed to give herself a mental shake. “Do you want to know why I was looking for you?”

“Yes.”

“I got a message a couple of days ago, only I just found out about it today. From Robert Owens’s attorney. From his assistant, actually.”

He hadn’t expected that. For a moment he struggled to adjust. “Owens’s attorney?”

“It was a courtesy call. Apparently he tried to reach you at work and Grace wouldn’t put him through fast enough, so the assistant called our home, but the answering machine wasn’t on.”

He heard himself explain. “I’ve been coming home to long taped calls from telephone solicitors. I figured anyone who needed to reach us knew how.”

“Well, he did know how, as it turns out. He left a message for me at MADD. He knows about my involvement.”

“What was the message?”

“They’re releasing him next week. They’re releasing Robert Owens.”

The emotion that hadn’t showed in her face before was there now. Her eyes blazed. Her lips trembled. “Next week,” she repeated in a strangled tone. “Three years for murdering our daughter. Three lousy years.”

Mack drew a jagged breath. Robert Owens had been tried for involuntary manslaughter. He had been nineteen at the time of Kayley’s death, and the sentence could have ranged from jail time served and community service to a more punitive one stretching for years and served at one of the state’s adult facilities.

Since this wasn’t Owens’s first DUI, the lesser option hadn’t been available to him. But Owens’s mother had mortgaged her Manassas home and hired the best attorney she could find. The attorney’s rendering of the young man’s life story, replete with all the angst and dysfunctional underpinnings of a David Mamet play, had moved the judge, and the sentence had surprised them all. Owens had been sent to a special program for youthful offenders at the St. Bride’s correctional center, where he was to undergo up to four years of intensive rehabilitation. When he finished, and if his time there had been productive, he was to be released into a year and a half of intensive probation.

But Mack and Tessa had been promised that Owens would serve the full four years, that the latitude in that particular sentence would not be utilized. He would serve the four years, then the additional intensively monitored probation. And if he slipped up even once, he would go back to prison and serve out the remainder of his suspended sentence, eight additional years.

“His attorney thought we should know,” Tessa said. “The bastard thought we might need to prepare ourselves.”

“What else did he say?” Mack realized he was flexing his hands into fists.

“That Robert was a model inmate, that he did everything he was required to do and more besides, that he’s now a born-again Christian and the sponsor for several other boys in his AA group. That he’s repentant, stable and deserves a better life.”

“I’ll talk to Judge Lutz.”

For a moment Tessa looked vulnerable, even unsure of herself. The mask of indifference slipped. “Mack, will you…
can
you make a difference?”

He couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t. Owens’s release was clearly a
fait accompli
, but he couldn’t tell Tessa that. Not when that possibility was the only thing to give her hope. “I can try.” He took her hands. They were ice cold despite a temperature hovering close to ninety. “I
will
try. But I don’t want to mislead you.”

“Just do what you can. Talk to him. Tell him…Tell him what that drunk bastard did to our lives!”

They stared at each other, as close physically as they had been in weeks. He could feel the soft knit of her jacket brushing his wrist, her thigh against his knee, her breath against the hollow of his throat. Then she wrenched her hands from his. He stepped back, and she rounded the car and opened the driver’s door. He watched as she drove away.

Pain and confusion warred inside him. Things had been bad enough before, but this was a new and terrible blow. And just before discovering that Owens was going to be released, Mack had stood right here and admitted he was being pulled toward an affair with Erin.

Had he been that cruel out of a need for honesty, or simply because he was trying to shock Tessa into trying harder? Was he still, in some perverse way, trying to hold on to what they’d had?

Now he wondered if Tessa would ever be able to move on with her life unless he left her. He was a part of a happy past, and maybe she needed an absence of constant reminders of her pain before she could escape it. Maybe that past and their mutual agony were all that bound them together after all.

Ironically now, their mutual agony, in the form of one drunken murderer, had come forward to haunt them directly. Could he free her of Owens’s presence for another year?

Could and should he free her of his own?

T
he skies were dark, but a full moon hung over the valley as if a divine hand had set it there to light Tessa’s way to her grandmother’s house.

Tessa thought the whole world seemed to be operating that way tonight, as if everything in it was a sign or a signal, as if she were not a mere speck on this speck of existence, but somehow central to it all. The boy who had killed her daughter, then stood over the little girl’s body and blamed her for standing on the sidewalk, was about to go free. Her husband was contemplating an affair. And her own heart was so constricted, so damaged, that she could no longer feel it beating.

She was a shell of the woman who had been Tessa MacRae. Had she not been so filled with fury, she would question whether she was still alive. But surely she had to be living and breathing to feel this much hatred for Robert Owens. She had felt little but hatred and anger since Kayley’s death, and now it calmed her to know that at least she could still feel something.

It would calm her more if she could
do
something, as well. She knew that, and knew that tonight was not the night to decide exactly what. But she would not accept the young man’s early release without a fight. She might not be able to change the inevitable, but she would find a way to make sure that Robert Owens never destroyed another life.

After Kayley’s death, she had questioned why she still lived when her daughter did not. For months it had been the central question of her existence, fading a little as time went on and her faith that there was any plan to the universe faded with it. Now, though, she wondered if she understood at last why she had been left behind, why she had not been standing beside her daughter when Owens jumped the curb, why she had not been killed, as well.

Because it was her mission on earth to make sure he never killed again.

She was parked in her grandmother’s driveway before she even realized she had made the turn onto Fitch Crossing. She tried to school her thoughts, but they tumbled unnaturally through her head. She held herself still, breathed deeply, tried to picture calm blue waters. But all she could see was Robert Owens’s face as he stared drunkenly at her little girl, so drunk that he couldn’t tell where a road ended and a sidewalk began.

She was sobbing before she could find a way to stop the tears. She rested her arms against the steering wheel and ducked her head. The tears were intruders, unwanted and uninvited, but the harder she tried not to cry, the harder she did.

She wasn’t sure how much time passed until she finally had herself under control. She was glad it was late and that the other women had certainly gone to bed. She blew her nose, then gathered the takeout from Siam Palace and the bag from the quilt shop, and stepped out of the car.

The moon was surrounded by a canopy of stars, and the lightest of breezes rustled the twin maples’ branches, and spread the scent of wild roses and parched earth. She stood quietly for a moment, forcing herself to notice, forcing herself to feel something besides pain and fury.

She wondered if Mack was right after all, and there was no reason to live with her now, no reason to continue their marriage. Why should another human being endure what she did every day? Shouldn’t she just give up their life together? If she still felt anything for him, shouldn’t she just set him free so he could try to move on?

Move on with Erin Foster. Move on to more children, a mortgage, sex whenever the mood struck—which it surely would often. Erin was pretty enough to be appealing to Mack and young enough to bear half a dozen children if he wanted them. They would always have a spare or two, if any of
their
children died.

The pettiness of that last thought shocked her, and she was horrified at herself. Mack had tried and tried hard to move through the bad times with her. Even now, poised on the brink of an affair, he was still trying to make their marriage work. And what encouragement had she given him? When had she gone to him, told him she still loved him, begged him to help her work things out? She knew, even now, even at this extraordinarily late date, that if she did those things, he would wait for her.

But what sign would he ask for? What change would signal that their marriage still had a chance? A genuine interest in exploring her pain with a marriage counselor? The promise of another pregnancy? Cutting her volunteer time with MADD in half so that they could rebuild their relationship?

She couldn’t promise any of those things, not in good faith. Not now. Perhaps not ever.

She let herself inside by the front door, which Helen always left unlocked. Nancy lectured Helen about it repeatedly. Nancy would install a security system with motion detectors and flashing lights if Helen gave the nod. But Helen wasn’t ready to abandon a world where doors remained unlocked at night and car keys perpetually hung from ignition switches. She’d made it clear that when she had to lock her doors against her neighbors, they might as well lay her in her casket whether she was dead or not.

Tessa closed the door behind her and stepped into the living room. Helen was sitting there in the dark, silently waiting.

Tessa drew in a sharp breath at the sight of her. “What are you doing there?”

“I think I live here, don’t I?” Helen flicked on the lamp beside her chair. It glowed a warm gold—Nancy had replaced the old shade with a brand-new one. Helen was wearing the nightgown set that had floated off the roof the day of Tessa’s arrival. “What are you doing sneaking inside like that? You like to give me a heart attack.”

Tessa suspected that her grandmother had fallen asleep and only just now awakened. “Were you waiting for me?”

“Why would I bother? You’re grown, aren’t you? You can come in all hours of the day or night if it suits you. You don’t have to call and let us know you’re all right.”

Tessa was ashamed. She’d been so filled with her own problems, she hadn’t thought about her mother and grandmother, who had expected her back before this. Tonight the universe might be centered directly over Tessa’s head, but Helen and Nancy hadn’t gotten the word.

“I’m sorry.” Tessa set her bags on the newly repaired and slipcovered sofa. “I didn’t once think about calling you. That was an oversight.”

“Your mama tried to get you, but your phone was turned off.”

She had turned it off after her conversation with Mack at Siam Palace. She hadn’t wanted him to call her for another installment.

More passive-aggressive behavior in a life now rich with it. “Next time I’ll be more thoughtful,” Tessa promised. “But you never have to wait up. I’m a good driver. I’m careful.”

“We both know that being careful doesn’t keep you from dying, don’t we?”

Tessa sank to the sofa beside her bags. “Do you ever think that dying isn’t the worst thing that happens to us? That being left behind is the real blow?”

“It’s not dying, and it’s not being left behind. Maybe some day I’ll tell you what it is.”

“Tell me now.”

“You’re not ready to hear it.”

Tessa knew she should go up to bed so that her grandmother could do the same. But even the thought of being alone in the tiny bedroom, thinking about Robert Owens, and Mack and Erin Foster, made her throat close and her stomach roll.

“I don’t want to keep you up,” Tessa said. “I’m sorry I kept you up this long.”

“I’m up ’cause I want to be.”

“Anything on television?”

“The answer to that’s always no. Your mama keeps nagging me to let some foolish satellite cluttering the skies beam down television shows to me, like something in some sort of science fiction novel.”

“And you, of course, being a purist at heart, say not a chance. So now you can’t get most of what
is
available to watch.”

“I’d snap it up in a minute if there was just something I wanted to see. I was a girl, we’d sit of an evening, all of us together, and listen to Grand Ole Opry music on WSM, all the way from Nashville. Mama’d make popcorn, and sometimes the neighbors would visit. Now that was entertainment.”

Tessa smiled, and was surprised she still could. “I take after you. I don’t like television that much, either. I’d rather read.”

“And I’d rather quilt.”

That reminded Tessa of the contents of the bag beside her. “Look what I found today.” She opened the bag and pulled out a large book with a soft, shiny cover. “This is a handbook on repairing old quilts. And I got some good advice at the store, too and a few supplies they said I’d need. They’ve got an expert on staff, and she said I could bring the quilt in any time I have a question, and she’d look at it.”

“You’re going to let her do the work?”

Tessa had actually considered it, but in the end the thought of someone else making the repairs hadn’t appealed to her. Helen had pieced the top. Nancy had quilted it. It only seemed right that Tessa should restore it.

“I’m going to do it.” She thought she saw approval in Helen’s eyes. “The first thing I have to do is figure out what can be left the way it is and what has to be replaced. Marilyn—she’s the expert—said I should be on the lookout for fabrics that match the ones that are too rotten to save.”

“New fabric?”

“Not unless that’s all I can find. Old fabrics from the twenties and thirties, I guess. Like the ones you bought then. And if they look too new, I’m supposed to fade them.”

“Bleach’ll make them weak. Next generation will have to repair it all over again.”

Tessa didn’t point out that there was no next generation, that what was left of the Stoneburner genes had ended with her. “Marilyn suggested I put the scraps on a windowsill for a week or so and let the sun do the job.”

Helen screwed up her face, as if she was thinking that over. “She sounds like she knows what she’s talking about.”

That was the ultimate expression of approval. Tessa was glad Helen was on board with the project. “Do you remember my telling you a couple of weeks ago that I found a box of feed sacks in the attic? Well, I’m hoping some of those will work as replacement pieces. What do you think?”

“They might do. But I’ve got boxes and boxes of old fabric. You won’t have to go far to find what you need. I guess I don’t need to tell you I don’t throw much away.”

Tessa smiled. “No, I guess you don’t. I don’t suppose…”

“What?”

“Well, I told Marilyn there’s one particular fabric that shows up often, and that’s the soft blue with the threads of white criss-crossing through it that’s along the border. It almost looks like chambray or denim, but it’s much finer. Some of it’s intact, and some of it has to be replaced. She said since it’s so prevalent throughout the quilt, we’re going to have to find something that’s a nearly perfect match, and that could be difficult.”

Helen was silent for a moment; then she sighed. “I’ve got more. I didn’t throw away a scrap of it. Not one. And I didn’t use it in any other quilt. There might be enough.”

Tessa was amazed that her grandmother could remember what she had done with scraps of fabric from nearly seventy years before. “You can’t possibly remember that, can you? Do you remember every scrap of fabric in every quilt?”

“I sure remember that one.” Helen got to her feet. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

“Where?”

“Up to the attic.”

“We’ll wake Mom.”

“She wakes up, she was meant to.”

Tessa supposed that now was as good a time as any. The attic would be cooler this time of night, and she needed the distraction. She lifted the bag from the restaurant. “There’s food in here. I’ll put it away and meet you upstairs.”

On the second floor, Helen had just reached the attic door when Nancy came out of her bedroom, belting a white silk wrapper sprigged with tiny pink roses. “There’s a parade, and I wasn’t invited,” she said flatly.

“I’m sorry, Mom, but Gram wants to show me something in the attic. It’s a long story.”

“Where have you been?”

“That sounds remarkably like something you used to ask back in the eighties.”

“I was worried.”

Tessa gave an almost verbatim repeat of her apology to her grandmother.

Nancy appeared to be appeased. “I’m just glad you’re all right. Did you see Mack? How is he?”

Tessa could think of a dozen things not to say about her husband. “I did see him for a few minutes. He’s okay. Busy.”

“What’s upstairs that you two just have to see?” Nancy asked her mother.

“Come take a look yourself, or, better yet, go make us some coffee and I’ll bring it downstairs.”

Nancy wrinkled her nose, as if considering. “Coffee,” she said. She moved toward the stairwell.

Helen switched on the light and started up to the attic, and Tessa followed behind. She had done a lot of organizing here, but at night the remaining boxes hovered like monsters in the shadows. The floor creaked, and the smell of must and mothballs was worse after coming in from the fresh night air.

“Never did like this attic,” Helen said. “I’ll tell you true, I don’t much come up here at night ’less I have to.”

“Did you play here when it rained as a little girl?”

“We didn’t play much, not the way you mean. We made fun out of the chores we did.”