Wedding Ring (2 page)

Right now, she looked resigned.

“I meant to get here earlier.” Nancy started talking before she reached the porch. The words started as a trickle and ended as a cascade. “The traffic in Richmond was horrible. Then I had to stop and get gas. By that time I was starving. I’d have bought you a sandwich, just in case, if I thought you’d eat it. You don’t eat enough, and it shows. Why are you still on the porch? Did you just get here, too?”

“Gram’s not answering the door. And no, I got here on time.”

The last was not a reprimand. The words were matter-of-fact. Tessa had been on time. Of course she had been on time. Nancy was the one who got distracted, who tried and failed to be punctual, confident, cool. Nancy, who knew that she failed everyone she loved with every word and gesture.

Nancy responded only to the first statement. “Not answering the door? Why are her clothes out here?” She gestured to the rose bush. “And all this paper?”

“She hasn’t answered for the hour or more I’ve been here, but she’s home. I’ve heard her at the bedroom window.”

Nancy stopped before climbing the porch steps, shaded her eyes with a cupped hand and squinted at the window in question. “Heard her? The window’s shut and the curtains are drawn.”

“They’re drawn
now
.”

“She closed the windows and drew the curtains, knowing you were waiting down here? In this heat? She left you to bake out here?”

“It’s probably cooler outside than in.”

“Maybe she’s sick.” Nancy took the steps as fast as her legs would carry her. She threw open the screen door and tried the doorknob. When it didn’t turn, she began to pound. “Mother! Mother!”

“I don’t think that will help.”

Nancy continued to pound. “Something could be wrong.”

“Unless something’s wrong with her hearing, that’s not going to get us anywhere.”

Nancy halted abruptly. “You have a better idea, Tessa? Seems to me you’ve just been sitting here not doing a blessed thing. Who knows? She could be dead in there.”

“She was alive when I drove up, alive when she tossed things out the window, still alive when she closed the window and the drapes.”

“You really think she’s stonewalling us?”

“It’s pretty clear.”

Nancy stepped back, glaring at the door. Like everything else, it needed several coats of paint. The roof needed repairing; the porch needed shoring; the windows needed cleaning; the screen door needed patching.

The main door had survived generations of Stoneburners and looked it. Years ago Nancy had left the house through this doorway and never looked back. Now she banged on the door once more for good measure.

“I think she’ll come down eventually,” Tessa said. “When she’s punished us long enough.”

“Punished us?”

“For insisting she change the way she lives to suit us.”

“I suppose you think I don’t have that right.” Nancy could feel her shoulders slump. She was sixty but looked younger, much younger, when she was rested and reasonably contented. She was neither now. Sweat steamed a path between breasts which were jammed together in a bra that was close kin to the Iron Maiden. She wanted to rip off her control-top panty hose, tie them to the unpainted porch rafters and hang herself. She had been up every night for a week worrying about the days to come. The bags under her eyes had bags of their own, and she could feel a new chin growing and wobbling as she shook her head.

Tessa didn’t sigh. She was a still, dark lake, and whatever churned beneath was hidden, as always. “We’re here,” Tessa said. “It’s too late to reconsider. I’ve cleared my calendar for the rest of the summer, you’ve cleared yours. All we can do is move ahead.”

“And how do we do that? She’s locked herself in like a prisoner.”

“I gather you don’t have a key?”

“Why would I need a key? She never locks the door. I’ve told her and told her to lock it—”

“Well, it looks like this time she did what she was told.”

Nancy glanced at her daughter and saw the shadow of a smile. The two women were nothing alike. Tessa was tall, with narrow hips, small breasts. Her eyes were tilted and green, her hair bone straight and a rich, silky brown. She wore it long, pulled back like a dancer’s. She had, in fact, devoted herself to ballet until mid-adolescence, when the pleasures of a more normal life had called her away. She still had a dancer’s posture, a dancer’s grace, a dancer’s simplicity. Today she wore cream-colored shorts that highlighted her long tanned legs and a matching raw silk blouse with a mandarin collar.

Nancy knew herself to be an aged cheerleader. Stocky, blond, as perky as any woman with arthritis and high blood pressure could be. Her hair curled at any provocation; her skin blistered in the sun. She exercised religiously and exorcized the ever-creeping pounds, subdued the hair with the help of Richmond’s best hairdresser, wore expensive sunscreen under more expensive foundation that she shaded and contoured to soften her square face.

Today she wore a designer dress of baby pink and more undergarments than a flock of Victoria’s Secret angels. And right now she was sorry about all of it.

“I think she just wants to show us who’s boss,” Tessa said. “When Gram is sure we’ve gotten her point, she’ll let us in. We should make ourselves comfortable.”

Nancy didn’t have to think about that approach. “No.”

“No?”

“Did you check the back door?”

“It will be locked.”

“Then you didn’t check.”

“I didn’t feel comfortable barging in, not when she so obviously wanted to keep me out.”

“Well,
I
don’t have that problem. Two can play this game. She’s not the only stubborn Henry woman in the world. I’ve come a long way, and I’m not spending the night on this porch. The mosquitoes will eat—”

“We’re a long way from the mosquito hour,” Tessa interrupted. “Can’t you just wait a bit, see if she lets us in now that we’re both here?”

Nancy was cranking up. She had put her entire life on hold for this. She had given up a chance to chair a garden club luncheon next week. It was an honor she’d long coveted and might not be offered again. She had left her husband in Richmond, and without her constant presence at his side, she was afraid he would have too much time to reflect on all the things that were missing in their marriage. “And what for?” she spoke out loud, as if Tessa had been privy to her thoughts. “Not to stand out here and plead to be admitted to my mother’s inner sanctum.”

She pivoted and started down the steps, only glancing behind her once to see if her daughter had followed. Tessa was trailing behind, but she didn’t look pleased.

“Good,” Nancy said. “We’ll find a way. There’s a door into the basement from the fruit cellar.”

Tessa didn’t respond.

The back door was locked. The fruit cellar door was locked. Most of the first-floor windows were closed and probably locked. Except one. Nancy stood below the window that led to the room her mother called a parlor and gazed up at it. Since the ground sloped, the first floor was higher here and the window was out of reach. But the window was open. Wide open and large enough for Nancy to squirm through.

“Did you sneak in and out this way as a teenager?” Tessa asked.

“Where would I have sneaked to? Look around. This is the middle of nowhere. There’s probably a sign to that effect somewhere. I’m sure I passed it at the beginning of Fitch.”

“You must have had friends. With cars.”

“I didn’t have time for friends. By the time I finished all the chores your grandmother gave me, there was no time for fun.”

“Even if I thought creeping through windows was a good idea, I wouldn’t suggest starting here and now. The window’s too high.”

Nancy registered her daughter’s reasonable tone. Tessa sounded like a mother trying to be patient with a recalcitrant preschooler, a diplomat asking for concessions from warring nations. Combined with the heat, it was a fatal mixture. Nancy pulled herself up to her full five foot four. “There’s a ladder in the garage. Or there used to be.”

Tessa put her hand on her mother’s arm. “We should wait.”

Nancy shook her off. “Look, we need to establish ground rules right away. Your grandmother cannot be in control of what happens here this summer. If she puts up roadblocks every time we try to help, nothing’s going to get done.” She started for the garage, a freestanding structure that was as dilapidated as the house.

“So you’re going to show her who’s boss?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“It doesn’t matter how you put it.”

Nancy stopped mid-bustle and turned. “I lived with her for twenty-two years. No matter what you
think
you know about your grandmother, I know more.”

Tessa stood quietly, but her expression said it all. She disapproved. She did not understand—and never would—what drove her mother. No matter how hard Nancy tried to get through to her, to enlist her support, Tessa, just like her father, would never regard her mother as anything more than a lightweight, beautifully wrapped burden.

“It’s going to be a long, hot summer,” Nancy said. “And it’s going to seem even longer if you spend the rest of it passing judgment on me, Tessa.”

Without watching to see the effect of her words, she started for the garage again. Only when she heard a loud
thunk
did she stop and turn. Tessa shrugged, then stepped back and gazed up at the window above her head. What had just been an open window was now firmly closed. As Nancy watched, the woman inside drew the curtain across this window, too, and completely shut out the world.

Panic was an old enemy, one that Helen Henry could usually subdue the way she had subdued most of the enemies she had confronted in her eighty-two years. Now it clawed at her gut and wrapped its hands around her throat so that she could hardly breathe.

Of course there was always the chance she was having problems filling her lungs because there were no longer any window open in the house and the temperature inside was inching its way into the triple digits.

She stood with her back to the small portion of empty wall beside the parlor window and tried to catch her breath. While the window was open she had stood in this very place and listened to her only living relatives discuss the relative merits of storming her house. Only then had she succumbed to the panic that had hovered an arm’s length away for a week.

They were here. Sooner or later they were going to come inside. They were going to
see
.

Her head fell forward in despair, and she noticed that her blue housedress was missing two buttons so that it gaped over her pendulous breasts. She had a thousand buttons to choose from, but no energy for the task of repairing it. She was pear-shaped, and she wore the dress and others of its ilk to hide her wide hips. Good hips for childbearing, her own mother had told her. Right now Helen was sorry her mother had been right.

“Mother!”

At Nancy’s summons, Helen gritted her teeth, which were still mostly her own. It was common knowledge that Stoneburner teeth outlived many a Stoneburner. She considered praying that hers would outlast her, that she would die right here and now. But she doubted the Lord would take her quickly on such a flimsy pretext. She had to save that prayer, just in case things got really tough.

Right now, she had to either fish or cut bait. She was not a coward. Her life had not been easy, but she had marched through it, keeping panic at bay with one hand as she hacked a path through her personal wilderness with the other. The hand that had done the hacking was the only hand she’d allowed anyone to see since her husband’s death, and it was the hand she needed to show right now.

If she didn’t show that hand, if she allowed her daughter and granddaughter to see any other part of her, they would descend on her, prey on her weakness. She pictured wolves with Nancy and Tessa’s faces, and was only vaguely ashamed.

“Mother!”

She thought she heard Tessa trying to shush Nancy. She could have told her granddaughter that the effort was useless, although she supposed Tessa knew that and just couldn’t help herself. To the rest of the world Nancy might look flighty, even foolish at times, but Helen knew the granite those more superficial layers had been built upon. Nancy usually got what she wanted. Her pampered, made-to-order life was a testimony to that.

Helen lifted a corner of the parlor curtain and peeked out the window. The two women were still standing with the sun blazing down on them. Nancy was wilting like a carnation in the sunlight. Helen felt a twinge of sympathy. Sweat was pouring down her own back, and her dress was soaked under the arms. Unfortunately, she was the one who was inflicting this misery on everybody.

Helen dropped the curtain and straightened. The time had come. If she waited any longer, she wouldn’t find the strength. Her choices were gone, and the only choice now was to act as if she was in charge, even if it wasn’t true.

She wound her way toward the front door, trying not to look too closely at her surroundings. The dead bolt screeched when she turned it, as if it hadn’t been used very often—which it hadn’t. The air that rushed in was hot, but it was air. She breathed deeply; then she closed the door behind her, stepped gingerly out on the porch and made her way to the railing.