Wedding Ring (24 page)

“I’m glad she lived to see you married,” Tessa said.

“And didn’t live to see everything that happened afterwards.” Helen stared off into the distance. “Obed and Dorothy moved in after we buried Mama, and Dorothy helped me take care of things. I knew I was having a baby by then, and having Dorothy with me made things easier. Daddy was lost without Mama, but he tried to go on.” Her voice grew softer. “I finished piecing the wedding ring top, then I put it away, to quilt when I was done grieving Mama.”

“Then Pearl Harbor,” Nancy said. The rest of the story was all too familiar.

Helen turned to Nancy. “Your daddy was so happy when he found out I was going to have a baby. He was happy in the Navy, too, happy seeing new places. He was a signalman by then, moving up fast. He didn’t have much education, but he was smart as a whip, and they saw that right away. He wrote me all about Ho-nolulu. He wished I could join him there, even for a week or two. We didn’t have the money, of course, and you were very nearly here, Nanny, so of course I couldn’t travel to Hawaii, but your daddy was fixing to come home the next time he got leave. He was going to come and see you….”

Helen fell silent.

Lafayette “Fate” Henry had died when the first bombs fell on December 7th, 1941. As a child, Nancy had been told that he was one of the luckiest victims, that he had been killed immediately, not left to struggle in the burning water or trapped aboard his sinking ship. Now she wondered if it was true and didn’t want to know if it wasn’t.

“I put the quilt top away for good after that,” Helen said at last. “How could I quilt it? It was my wedding quilt, and my husband was dead.”

“I was born just two weeks after he died.” Nancy couldn’t imagine what her mother had felt, giving birth to the daughter her husband would never see.

“Obed and Tom didn’t wait to be drafted, even though they would have gotten deferments, at least for a while. Farmers got them back then. The country needed food, didn’t it? But no, they had to go and fight. And I wanted them to, you know. I wanted them to kill the people who had killed my Fate. Only they died, too. Both of them. Tom in Guam in 1944, Obed in Italy the year before. Dorothy got a job working on F4U fighters over at Quantico, and we never saw much of her after that. At the end of the war she married a Marine she’d worked with and moved somewhere up north.”

“And your dad?” Tessa asked.

“Worked himself to death. Grieved himself to death. There weren’t no help to be had. The young men were all gone, and the women were off doing clerical jobs in Washington or working in defense plants. Daddy thought it was his duty to raise all the food he could. I helped as much as I knew how, but there weren’t much I could do with a little baby and all the house chores, too. And the family was all scattered by then, off working in the cities or serving in the military, and there was no one else to lend a hand. Even Aunt Mavis and her family moved on down to Norfolk, then on to Jacksonville, and we never saw much of her after that. It cost too much to travel, and it was too hard. Daddy wore himself out, died of pneumonia. There weren’t no antibiotics in those days, you know, not for people like us, and he just couldn’t fight it.”

Nancy had never realized the pace at which her mother’s life had changed. Helen had grown up poor, yes, but there had been love and laughter in this house. Then, in the matter of a few short years, all the joy and comfort had disappeared. Suddenly everything that held meaning for her was gone. All except for one small child, the product of one night of love.

“How did you manage to hold on to the farm?” Tessa asked. “With nobody left to help you?”

“I had my widow’s pension, though it weren’t much, and the little bit Daddy had saved over the years for a rainy day. I paid the taxes before I paid anything else, so they couldn’t take the farm away from me, the way they done during the Depression when people couldn’t pay. Then I just made do. Once the war was over and men started coming back, I rented out what fields I could, hired help when it was cheap enough. A local boy took care of the orchards for me and picked all the fruit, and we split what profits there were. I took the smallest cornfield and turned it into a market garden, and trucked everything I grew into town to a little stand I set up by the roadside from May through October.”

“And you raised me,” Nancy said.

“I did my best. I just had to put the rest of it behind me and keep moving.”

But for Nancy, that last part seemed to be the central question. Because the woman Helen had described, the young, optimistic woman Nancy had never known, seemed to have no connection to the careworn, bitter woman who had raised her.

“You put it behind you,” Nancy said carefully. “Exactly what did you put behind you?” She glanced at her daughter and saw the slight shake of Tessa’s head, the warning in her eyes, but stubbornly, she looked away. “The memories, Mama? Or the feelings, too? The love, the hope, the laughter?”

Helen appeared to ponder the question. She did not react with anger, as Nancy had expected. She seemed to struggle with her answer. “After your daddy died, I didn’t want to look back. That’s about all I can say.”

“I feel like you’ve described a stranger. I never knew the woman you described. You never let me know her, or the people who loved her and would have loved me.”

“They were gone.”

Nancy leaned forward. “And so were you.”

Helen didn’t try to misunderstand. She didn’t nod, but something in her eyes confirmed Nancy’s words. She got to her feet and started toward the screen door, but she turned once her hand rested on the handle.

“I’d lost them all, you know, Nanny. Every single person I loved. You were a delicate child, always sick with something. Fate’s little girl. There you were, just waiting to be lost, too.”

Tessa waited to speak until the screen door’s closing no longer echoed. The night wasn’t silent. Not far away, a screech owl trilled its territorial call in one of the dogwoods. Coming from behind the house, she could hear the squawking of her grandmother’s strange, exotic chickens, and in the far distance the rumbling of thunder from a storm system that would probably offer no rain.

“She’ll check on the chickens, fuss over them a little, then she’ll go out to the pond,” Nancy said. “Whenever something upsets her, that’s what she does. When I was a teenager, the chickens were in their element. They got extraordinary care.”

Tessa had been prepared to bristle, to accuse her mother of insensitivity, but she heard the love in Nancy’s voice. Had love and concern always been there, she wondered, and some how she hadn’t been able to hear them until now?

“It was a hard story to tell.” Tessa still felt an unmistak able lump in her throat. She, like everyone else, had written off her grandmother as an odd old woman incapable of reaching out. She had never seen the young woman who had lost nearly everyone who mattered to her, the grieving widow who had been forced to go on anyway so she could support the baby who was her husband’s parting gift.

“She was afraid to love me,” Nancy said. “I never realized it. By keeping her distance, she thought she could protect me. If she didn’t love me, maybe I would escape notice. I would survive.”

Tessa was afraid her mother was right. “She does love you.”

“I guess she does. But it was a terrible legacy. When you grow up without seeing love firsthand, you never learn how to give it. I’ve struggled with that all my life and never quite got it right.”

Nancy was not above asking for reassurance. In fact, begging for it was as much a part of her character as her vanity and social climbing. But Tessa didn’t think she was asking for reassurance now. She was simply stating what she believed.

Nancy had never seen into her own mother’s heart. Tessa wondered if she had fallen into the same trap. Had she taken Nancy at face value and been blind to her strengths?

“There were men who were interested in your grandmother,” Nancy said. “I remember two, in particular. Good, decent men. One was a widower with three boys. Another was an old bachelor who lived over in Woodstock and drove out of his way every Saturday to come to our vegetable stand. He’d get all slicked up, even wear a polka-dotted bow tie. You might not see it now, but she was a handsome woman. They noticed.”

“But she didn’t notice them?”

“She was cold as ice. She always said she didn’t need a man to take care of, that she had enough to do.”

Nancy stood and walked to the railing, looking toward the tree where the owl continued to trill. “Will you listen to that old owl? When I was growing up a screech owl this close to the house meant someone was about to die.”

“There’s been enough death here.” Tessa wasn’t thinking only of her grandmother’s husband and family, but of Kayley, as well.

“I guess it’s easy enough to lock yourself away from everything and everyone that matters to you, if you’re afraid. When it comes right down to it, there’s a screech owl in everybody’s front yard, but only the people who’ve already lost too much ever hear it calling.”

Tessa wondered if this desire for protection from pain was the very thing that made Mack want more children. Was he afraid that if he didn’t reach out again, and soon, he would end up lonely and bitter? In its own way, was Mack’s desire for another child an affirmation of life, a promise of sorts that he believed in a good universe, and he trusted enough to try again?

And if that were true, what did it say about her desire not to risk her heart?

Nancy turned to face her daughter. For once her hands were hanging loosely at her sides, as still as Tessa’s own. “It took a lot for Mama to tell us everything tonight. Maybe we both need to ask ourselves why she did.”

“I don’t think it’s so hard. She wanted you to know who you are, and what kind of people you came from.”

“Everything she said was filled with regret. Didn’t you hear it?”

“Of course she regrets it. Her world fell apart.”

“No, you don’t regret what you have no control over. You grieve, but you don’t regret. Your grandmother regrets the way she shut herself off. And it says something good about her that she can reach out, at the end of her life, even if she couldn’t reach out before.”

Tessa didn’t want more insights, and those she had, she didn’t want to share. She stood. “I’m going to bed. This has been draining.”

Surprisingly, Nancy didn’t argue, and she didn’t look hurt. “Sleep well, honey. The ghosts in this house are good ones, better than I ever knew. They’ll keep you safe.”

T
essa and three other regular volunteers at the MADD office had a regular monthly dinner date at the Tyson’s Corner Galleria. Tessa had planned to forgo it for the summer, but on the last day of July, in the early evening, she found herself at Maggiano’s waiting for her three friends to join her. Jody, a tall, hollow vessel of nervous energy, arrived first, and Tessa suffered her hug. Then Diana, a petite, middle-aged redhead who played Jeff to Jody’s Mutt, and Gayle, a silver-haired, sexy grandmother, joined them in line.

No one said much until they were sitting at their table in the noisy dining room; then everyone talked at once, catching up on summer activities.

They ordered family style, the way they always did, and only wrangled over the choice of pasta, settling on the chicken and spinach manicotti and the gnocchi with vodka sauce. They polished off the stuffed mushrooms and giant artichoke before there was a lull in the conversation.

“You haven’t said much, Tessa,” Gayle said. “Except that your grandmother’s house is coming along.”

Tessa considered what to tell them. These days, the three women and Sandy, the MADD program manager, were probably her closest friends. They had respected her right to work out her sorrow alone, but they had lingered nearby, encouraging and strengthening her as she did. They hadn’t known her until after Kayley’s death, so they never commented on changes in her personality or tearfully reminisced about her daughter. The level of intimacy was bearable.

“I had some bad news,” she said at last.

The table fell silent, although the noise around them seemed to increase. A large group at the next table was clearly celebrating a birthday, and there were periodic catcalls and stomping of feet.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Gayle asked when Tessa didn’t go on.

“Robert Owens is out on probation. A full year before he was supposed to be. He’s living in Manassas with his mother.”

No one asked who Robert Owens was. There was no need.

Diana was the first to respond. “How did that happen?”

Tessa told the story. “Mack says we have to give him a chance to prove he’s rehabilitated himself,” she finished.

Jody gave a humorless snort. “Unfortunately, Mack can find something good to say about anybody.”

It was said without venom, and Tessa couldn’t be angry. Mack was no pushover, but he believed in redemption and second chances, which Jody, who had nearly lost her own life to a drunk driver, did not. Mack’s law practice was built on his faith in humanity, and sometimes it was too much for even their most liberal friends to swallow.

Diana put her hand on Tessa’s and squeezed before she removed it. “At least he’s out of the area. You won’t see him at the grocery store or the dry cleaner.”

“Out of sight, out of mind?” Tessa asked.

“No. But a couple of years after Jerry was killed, I saw the bastard who was behind the wheel, picking up his little girl from school. He’d been out of jail for months, and no one had warned me.”

Diana’s husband had died when his catering truck was struck head-on. Tessa tried to imagine happening on Robert Owens by mistake in her neighborhood. “What did you do?”

“He was with his wife. I was carrying a photograph of Jerry and me with our kids. I took it out of my purse, and I handed it to him. I told him to keep it as a souvenir.”

Diana reached for her water glass. “He was arrested three months later for driving with a suspended license while intoxicated and went back to jail. That time he destroyed somebody’s fence, not their life.” She sighed. “It was years ago. Almost twenty years ago. He moved to Florida after he got out the second time. I hope he was eaten by a shark.”

No one blinked. “Too quick,” Jody said. “Much too easy.”

“I wish I could have done something after my nephew was injured,” Gayle said. “Everybody was so relieved Alex wasn’t killed. They weren’t with him during those months of rehabilitation, when he struggled to learn how to walk again, how to hold a fork, how to chew solid food.”

“And the driver got off with a slap on the wrist,” Diana said bitterly.

“Well, after all, Alex didn’t die, and the driver was terribly sorry, so her sentence was light. Just a little jail time, lots of probation. The day her probation ended she celebrated with an old-fashioned bender and swiped a police car during the ensuing chase. Since it was a cop, the second sentence was stiffer. Alex had nearly recovered by the time she was released.”

Tessa already knew their stories, and Jody’s, too, but some things had to be said again and again. She supposed the other women were trying to make her feel better. They wanted her to understand that other people had suffered. They were still here to tell about it. They understood her anger and disillusionment and, most of all, her sense of futility. They weren’t trying to one-up her. They were simply sharing their pain and their anger at a system that couldn’t protect its law-abiding citizens from drunks on wheels. That was why they had made MADD such a large part of their lives.

“He’ll kill somebody else,” Tessa said. “I know he will. He knows what to say and when to say it, and I’m sure that’s why they let him out of St. Bride’s. I saw it at the trial. He played the jury like an angel plucking his harp. He’ll be drinking and driving in a week or two, if he hasn’t done both already. He’ll figure out how busy his probation officer is, how limited her funds, how few and far between the phone calls and visits. He’ll be working the system for all it’s worth and having a ball on the side.”

“And you want to do something about it.” Jody waited until the appetizer platters had been removed and the salad course served before she continued. “Your frustration is obvious.”

“I’m tired of waiting for the law to do the right thing. This kid is a time bomb. Can’t they see it?” Tessa realized her voice had risen, but she didn’t care. “If I knew what to do, I would. I don’t want anybody else to go through what I did, and they will. He’ll drink enough to lose any sense of reality, then he’ll get behind the wheel of a car again, and somebody will be standing in his way. It’s inevitable.”

“Maybe not.” Diana reached for more salad and spooned it on her plate. “What happens if somebody catches him driving? His license has been suspended, yes?”

“Of course it is, but who’s going to turn him in? His mother? His friends? Unless he runs a red light or speeds, the cops won’t catch him. And most of the time, they’re not around to see those things anyway. They’ll catch him when he kills somebody else.”

“Would he go back to jail if he was caught behind the wheel? Never mind whether he’d been drinking or not. Just plain driving?”

Tessa grimaced. “The judge says that if he’s caught stepping out of line even a little bit, he’ll go back and serve the whole sentence. And it was a stiff one.”

Jody and Diana were looking at each other and nodding. “I’m in, too,” Gayle said. “You two can stop looking so pleased with yourselves.”

“What are you talking about?” Tessa said.

Jody did the honors. “Look, if you weren’t so upset right now, you’d see what has to be done. You’re pretty sure that Owens is going to drive again. The cops can’t sit around on his street to watch and see. His probation office can’t either. His mom isn’t going to turn him in if he does, and most of her neighbors probably have no idea what’s going on. So somebody who
does
know what’s up needs to watch him. And if he steps out of line, they have to call the police and report the behavior. Hopefully your judge friend will take care of the rest.”

“Who’s going to do it?”

“You are. We are.”

Tessa sat very still, taking stock. “You’re serious?”

“The most likely time for this Owens boy to get antsy and go off for a drive is in the evening after supper. We can take turns watching his mother’s house and see what he’s up to. There are four of us here. We can rotate. Once it’s clear he’s in for the night, we can head home. For obvious reasons we won’t tell anybody else what we’re doing. This isn’t a MADD-sanctioned activity.”

Tessa thought fast. Robert’s license was suspended. If he was caught driving, he would surely go back to prison. But if one of the women caught him in a bar, and she called the probation officer and reported it, the officer could demand a blood test. If Owens’s test was anything except normal, he might go back to prison for that, as well. The judge had promised to be vigilant.

But were the four women one step from becoming vigilantes?

“You can check with your husband,” Diana said. “Ask him if there are any legal problems with watching the house. We won’t be stalking anybody. We’ll just park and watch. And here’s some really good news. I have a friend in the Manassas police department. He married my college roommate. If I explain what we’re doing, he’ll be on our side. We’ll have a direct pipeline to the cops, and he’ll make sure the kid’s in police custody before his engine gets cold.”

Tessa wondered what Mack would say. She was certain he wouldn’t agree that this was the way to solve the problem of Robert Owens. But she didn’t need Mack’s permission. She needed justice.

“I can’t ask you to take that much time out of your week,” she said.

“You didn’t ask,” Jody said.

Tessa held up her hand. For a moment she couldn’t speak. She had asked for nothing but listening ears, and they had given much more. They had given her a solution, a place to put her anger and concern. “I’ll do it every other night. That way the three of you will only have to do it about once a week. Do you really have the time and patience?”

Jody reached for the bread basket and passed it around the table. “Honey, we have more than time and patience. We have a mission. Try to stop us.”

“If Owens isn’t doing anything wrong, we’ll know that, too,” Diana said. “And maybe knowing he really has changed will relieve your mind. And ours, too.”

Tessa wondered if anything would ever be that simple again.

Nancy fluttered around the farmhouse living room, asking Mack yet again if he wanted something to drink. They had already indulged in three five-minute rounds of excruciatingly inane conversation, and he had already made multiple refusals of coffee and tea.

He wanted Nancy to leave, but he couldn’t say so. He had never been fond of Tessa’s mother. He thought of her as a bottomless pit into which the world could throw love and adoration for millennia to come, without ever, ever filling it. Her intentions were good, and he supposed that growing up with Helen Henry would turn even the most resolutely confident child into mush. But understanding and accepting were different. He understood why she was the woman she was, but he still didn’t want her there.

Nancy plopped into the chair across from him at last, her duties as hostess shortcut by his final curt refusal. “You know, it’s been clear to me from the first time we met that you don’t like me.”

Mack had sunk deeply into thought about Tessa’s family dynamics, and it took mental strength to pull himself up and out of the mire. For a moment he was afraid he had put his thoughts about Nancy into words. “Excuse me?”

“Oh, Mack, give it up. You heard what I said.” She sighed. “I guess it’s to be expected. I don’t like myself very well, either.”

He felt as if he’d stepped through some invisible barrier to an alternate universe. Nancy never came right out and said anything. He didn’t know how to respond.

She smiled a little, not unpleasantly, but with no intent to impress him. “Yes, I am a real person with real thoughts and feelings, and I have not quite forgotten how to express them.”

He wondered how far his jaw had dropped, and if maxillofacial surgery was in his immediate future. “I never thought you weren’t real,” he said.

“That I doubt, though maybe you didn’t phrase it that way in your head.” Nancy reached for a magazine on a side table and began to fan herself. “Now tell me you’ve always liked me.”

He didn’t—couldn’t—answer. He’d been set up, and there was no way out except a lie. And oddly, he didn’t think she wanted that.

“This summer it’s come to my attention that my head is screwed on sideways,” Nancy said. “I’ve been so busy trying to do what I thought was right for everybody around me that I couldn’t see what was directly in front of me.”

“You’ve lost me,” he said.

“I know you don’t like the way I treat Tessa.”

“I didn’t come into this world to critique your performance as a mother, Nancy.”

“When Tessa was born, I was so happy I thought I was going to die. I adored every little thing about her. You should have seen her. Those tiny little toes, that rosebud mouth. And hair? She had a full head of hair for weeks, and when that fell out, there were little curls that seemed to spring from nowhere. You’d never know that now, would you? Nobody’s hair is straighter than Tessa’s.”

She pulled herself out of baby reminiscences. “And then the truth hit me. Here was this gorgeous little girl, and I was her mother. Me. I didn’t know how to walk, how to talk. I had no education, no talents to trade on, I was passably pretty, but not in a sophisticated way. No, I was just little ol’ Nancy Henry from Boondock, Virginia, with nothing but natural blond hair to offer. And my daughter, the grandchild of Harry and Caroline Whitlock, was going to suffer.”

He was not sure why he rated the retelling of her life story, but despite his best inclinations, he was hooked. “And…?”