When Venus Fell (56 page)

Eventually we followed her, all of us in a quiet procession.
Bo Burton brought up the rear. Before I realized it, he had stopped. He stayed back at the edge of the woods.

Min stood at the foot of Simon’s grave, which was marked by a simple gray stone. When she looked at us there were tears on her face, but she smiled. “I think he knows,” she said. “We’re all going to be fine, now. And he’s so proud.”

“I swear to you, Min,” Gib said, “we’ll build the history center. We’ll set up a foundation and work from there. It won’t be funded by moneymen using Simon’s legacy for window dressing; it’ll be built and paid for and managed by people who loved him.”

She nodded. “I know we’ll do it. This family is his legacy, and it won’t let him down.” She looked tenderly at each of us, and finally at Kelly and Jasper, who came forward and put their arms around her. “He’s already been honored,” Min whispered.

“Bo’s hitting the trail,” Ruth announced bluntly. She pointed. He was walking toward his car, which was parked in the chapel drive along the woods.

“He’s just trying to be formal,” Min said uneasily. “He doesn’t butt into family events that are this intimate.”

“Yeah,” Ruth grunted, “but if you keep treating him this way the day will come when he drives off and doesn’t come back. Is that what you want, Minnie? You think Simon wants you to be alone for the rest of your life?”

“Mama, go tell Bo to come back,” Kelly whispered.

“It’s okay,” Jasper added. “Dad always liked him. We like him, too.”

Min whipped around and gazed tearfully at Simon’s grave. “Minnie, look,” Ella said in soft awe. She bent near the tombstone and picked a small white feather from the grass.

Isabel uttered a soft
oh
of delight. “A feather,” she said. “Minnie, it’s a sign.”

Minnie pivoted and hurried after Bo, calling his name. He stopped. His head came up. He gazed at her with amazement
as she walked up to him. She spoke to him for a moment, then took his arm. A stunned smile lit his face.

The two of them walked back together.

I wandered over to my sister and eyed her with flinty suspicion. “Did you plant that feather?”

She gazed at me innocently. “No. It fell out of my hand.”

After a moment, I hugged her. A sign is a sign, and people find their wings in the strangest places.

Gib and I sat by the spring with our bare feet dangling in the warm water. It was almost dark. The day had dissolved into soft tones. From where we sat the sky was a deep cobalt-blue above a rim of gold along the mountaintops. The bare winter trees around the spring opened our view to a wide panorama of the heavens.

“Look,” he said in a hushed voice. He pointed to the spring’s mirror-surface. At almost the center of the pool we saw the white pinpoint reflection of the evening star.

“It can’t be,” I whispered. I scanned the sky, what we could see of it. “I can’t find the new moon, much less Venus.”

“Over there,” Gib said, gesturing through the lacework of treetops. “Just now rising.”

We gazed from the sky to the water’s glimmering reflection. “It’s true,” he said. “I always wanted to believe it could happen. Now I know.”

I held his hand tightly. “When the stars are right, we have to believe in them.”

“That’s not hard to do anymore.”

He kissed me. We slid our hands together, just under the surface of the water, mingling with the reflection. The namesake my mother had given me, and my father had preserved, when Gib was a hopeful child and I was no larger than a star’s shadow, now lay like a diamond in our palms.

A former newspaper editor and multiple award winner for her novels and contemporary romances, D
EBORAH
S
MITH
lives in the mountains of Georgia.