Blessing in Disguise (24 page)

“A week ago.”

“That’s a good while.”

Gabe went back to sorting through the basket of daffodil bulbs balanced on his knees, examining each one, discarding those that had already begun to sprout, his long fingers moving with the swift precision that made her think of a surgeon. His head was bare for a change, a cool morning breeze ruffling his hair. She noticed a spark of silver here and there among the fine brown strands, and felt a tiny nick of surprise.
Why, he’s going gray!
She couldn’t help feeling pleased, as if that might lessen the ten-year gap in their ages.

She yearned, at that moment, in the rosy morning light, with the dark, wet smell of the earth rising up around her, to take hold of Gabe’s dirt-clotted hand and press it to her cheek.

She forced her mind back to the dilemma that had been pulling her in opposite directions all week.

“Part of me would love to see her ... but another part, I’m afraid, would like nothing more than to take her over my knee and paddle the bejesus out of her. Trouble is, I know which part of me has the upper hand.”

He winked. “Speaking of which, would you mind handing me that trowel?”

She passed it to him, and watched Gabe begin digging in the peaty soil, uprooting one of last year’s jonquils. He separated the cluster of smaller offshoots clinging to the mother bulb, and dug a separate hole for each, using the rule of thumb he’d taught her: make the hole twice as deep as the bulb is wide.

“Still, it’s been a whole year since I’ve seen Chris,” Cordelia continued. “And he’s not coming down with his father this Christmas. He could be six feet tall before I see him again.”

She thought of past summers, when she would have Chris for a week or two at a time. They’d always go to Sinclair Lake, to the cozy, hidden-away cabin that Mother had painstakingly kept up, and that now belonged to her. Oh, how that boy loved to fish! Hours and hours out on that fallen log by the stream, with his rod and extra hooks and a jar of salmon eggs.

But after he turned ten, and Grace had begun sending him to summer camp, she’d hardly seen her grandson. She tried to imagine what he would look like now, at thirteen—a taller, reedier version of the gangly youth he’d been this time last year—but her mind clung to the picture of him she loved best, as a round-faced little boy. So like his mother as a young girl, thoughtful and intense, asking questions like “Grandma, where do stars come from?” and “How come those roses don’t smell?” She did write to him, and they spoke on the phone, but the lifeless letters he wrote back always began the same way and tore at her heart:
Dear Grandma, How are you? I am fine.
...

“Grace’s boy.” Gabe chuckled as he tossed out a handful of bulbs to mark the spots where he would dig. “Hard to believe she could have a teenaged son. I remember when Grace was that age herself—bright as a new penny. She was one of the only students who understood what it means to write what you know, and why Faulkner deserves the effort it takes to read him.”

“Gabriel, you are purposely diverting this discussion.”

He settled back on his haunches, fixing her with his gaze while holding his hand up against the sunlight weaving its way through the tops of the cherry trees. “Maybe I’m not the best judge of how you ought to deal with your daughter.” An unaccountable sadness seemed to settle over him. “There are things about me that you don’t know, Cordelia.”

She felt her pulse quicken, but she tried to sound sensible when she spoke. “Gabriel, I can’t imagine you telling me anything about yourself that would shock me too terribly.”

Something dark glinted in Gabe’s soft brown eyes, a look she’d never seen before. “You think this is all I’m about, planting tulips, mulching flower beds? A harmless crackpot who couldn’t stand up to the pressures of teaching?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I have a daughter of my own, you see,” he said softly ... so softly that Cordelia at first wasn’t certain she’d heard correctly.

But now his revelation was washing over her like a cold ocean wave. A daughter? But his ex-wife—why, it was common knowledge that Josephine Ross hadn’t been able to bear children! Gabe himself had once told her it was one of the reasons their marriage had failed.

Misreading her shocked expression, Gabe shook his head. “It’s not what you imagine—I was faithful to Josie. It happened years before I met my wife. I was seventeen, and there was a girl I was crazy about. We ... Well, to make a long story short, she got pregnant. I would have married her, but her parents had it in mind to give the baby up for adoption ... and in the end they got their way.”

“Oh, Gabe.” Cordelia brought a peaty-smelling hand to her mouth. “Do you know who adopted her? Where is she now?”

“I spent ten years looking,” he told her. “I searched every hamlet within five hundred miles of Atlanta.” He gave a rueful smile. “That’s how I ended up settling here. And maybe that’s what drew me to teaching—at the time, she’d have been around fourteen, you know. And now ... Well, I’ve often wondered if, all that time I spent searching, I wasn’t also running from something ... from who I really wanted to be.”

It occurred to Cordelia at that precise moment, with the sun reflecting off the sudden jewel like brightness of his eyes, that perhaps Gabe was also in some way urging
her
to find her own self—the woman she’d been before she’d moved back here to Blessing, before she’d become so respectable, so ...
staid.

“I ... I’m glad you told me,” was all she could think of to say.

The sadness that was making him look older and grayer abruptly broke, and he smiled, appearing once more his usual relaxed self. “I guess you see why I think it’s so important, holding on to what counts.”

“Grace and I have relied on greeting cards to say what we should be speaking aloud to one another ... but I suppose it’s better than nothing.” She sighed. “Maybe that’s why I’m having such trouble making up my mind. I’m afraid of risking what little communication my daughter and I
do
have.”

“And if you
don’t
go, what will you have gained?”

The same as I’ll have gained by not asking you to Sissy’s party,
she thought.
Nothing.

Cordelia felt suddenly conscious of the dowdy brown cardigan she’d thrown on over her gardening clothes, and the fact that she hadn’t bothered with lipstick since before breakfast.

She snatched at a thistly weed, forgetting that she wasn’t wearing her gloves, and felt a sharp prick.

“If you know so much, why don’t
you
tell me?” Cordelia blurted, all at once irritable with him for getting under her skin like the tiny nettle she could now see sticking up from her thumb.

“I only know when I see the backside of someone running from the truth,” he said, peeling the dry brown tunic from a daffodil bulb.

“And what
is
the truth?” she demanded.

“You love your daughter, and if there is even the smallest chance that you can patch things up with her, you’ll be on the next plane to New York.”

If there was such a thing as a mental antiseptic, she thought, Gabriel was it. All at once, she felt washed clean, faintly stinging all over. He made perfect sense, but still she felt so unsure.

She
used
to be so certain of everything, so quick to act upon those convictions, but now ...

Cordelia rose to her feet, wincing at the stiffness in her joints. Dizziness spiraled up in her as if she were a glass being filled with some fizzy liquid. She braced herself against a column of the pergola, still hung with the raggedy remains of last summer’s clematis, waiting for the dizziness to subside.

Instantly, Gabe was at her side, looking concerned. “Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m getting to be too old for all this bending and stooping,” she told him with a little laugh. “Why don’t we go inside? I’m sure we could both use a glass of tea. And I promised I’d help Netta put up that last batch of apple butter so she could get to the hospital in time for visiting hours.” Cordelia knew Netta was worried still about her little grandson, even though he appeared past danger from meningitis.

She paused on the porch, reluctant to leave behind the sight of the hydrangeas swelling up over the railing like a great pink snow drift, and the hollyhocks along this side of the garage drooping with the spent Indian summer. She sank down onto the old glider that had stood out here for as far back as she could remember. She’d had it reupholstered twice since Mother died, most recently in cabbage-rose chintz, around the same time as she’d had this porch glassed in. Did they even make this kind of heavy-duty glider anymore? Probably not. The best things, like those old clunky cars that gave you the security of a Sherman tank, and kitchen stoves you didn’t need a degree in engineering to know how to operate—where had they all gone to? Did other people miss them the way she did? Or was it just a sign of encroaching years when what you
remember
begins to outweigh what you
know?

“This wouldn’t be a good time for me to go, what with the holidays and all,” she said. “There’s so much here that needs doing. Organizing the benefit supper for Hilldale ... and I’m meeting with the League of Women Voters in Macon for help in raising funds for the library. Not to mention Sissy’s party this coming Saturday”—she winced inwardly at her cowardice in not inviting Gabe—“which I confess has gotten
completely
out of hand. Mercy, you’d think it was Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh celebrating their golden anniversary, the way she’s carrying on.”

“If it gives her pleasure, why not?” Gabe leaned up against a fluted porch column from which hung, on several elongated brass hooks, ceramic pots trailing the last of the pink Rose-impatiens and the cyclamen, their leaves turning yellow, and their blooms mostly gone.

“I don’t know ... All this excess, it seems tacky. She wants ‘Caroline and Beech’ printed in silver on every napkin, even the hand towels in the powder room.”

He cast her a wry look that made her blush. “Is that what’s bothering you, napkins and towels?”

Cordelia looked out at the naked, turned flower beds, and the grass alongside the old brick kitchen-garden path growing brittle with the onset of winter. Christmas was only two weeks away. Yet, from where she sat on the sunny porch, shielded from the chill, she felt almost too warm.

“Well ... no. Sissy called this morning. She was nearly beside herself, she was so upset. She suspects Beech is having an affair.”

“And you know it to be a fact.” This was a statement, not a question.

“Yes.” But how did
Gabe
know that she knew?

“Have you told Sissy?”

Cordelia sighed. “I kept wanting to, but what good would it do her? She’s been putting up with him for years, one way or another. This party, maybe it’s all she has to show for ten years of marriage.”

“Do you know the O’Neill play
The Iceman Cometh?
Some people need illusions, or they fall apart.” He spoke in that slow, considering way of his that made her picture him standing before a classroom. “Everybody needs to believe in something.”

“I don’t want to see Sissy hurt.”

“And Grace?”

“Are you telling me I should go to New York?” she asked, cocking her head a bit as she peered up at him.

“There!” he exclaimed, lifting his gaze and pointing. “Did you see that? An oriole, I think it was. I haven’t seen one of those in ages.”

She strained to pick out what Gabe had seen, but there was only the gold of the sun on leaves the color of ash. It wasn’t until he laid his hand on her shoulder, squeezing it gently as he steered her to a different angle, that she saw it—a flash of vivid orange and black among the branches.

She felt unexpected tears in her eyes, even while she sat there thinking how silly it was of her to be worked up over a simple thing like a touch, or the unexpected treat of an oriole, when important decisions—such as whether or not to visit Grace, or if she ought to confirm Sissy’s fears about her husband—remained open and unresolved, like wounds in need of dressing.

“Come to the party,” she said softly, the words flying out of her, surprising herself as much as they probably did him. “I’ve been
wanting
to send you a proper invitation, but I suppose it’s no secret that Sissy doesn’t approve of our ...” She faltered, then straightened her shoulders and finished in a strong voice, “... our friendship. But this is my home, and I can ask whomever I want.” Only now did she dare look up at him. “Please, Gabe ... It would mean a lot to me.” There, she’d said it. She’d all but admitted her feelings for him. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d made a fool of herself.

Even so, as she sat still and straight in the old glider, the morning sunlight hot against her face, Cordelia’s heart fluttered like the wings of the oriole she now saw flying out over the weeping willows along the creek below the orchard. Would he accept? Or would he politely refuse, not wanting to try and fit in with Blessing society?

But it was Sissy and her shallow friends who didn’t deserve the company of a man like Gabe.
Please,
she repeated silently, not entirely sure what it was she was pleading for.

Cordelia waited, feeling oddly suspended, as if she were holding her breath, even though she was dimly aware of air slipping in and out of her lungs.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Gabe dropped his gaze onto her and smiled. “I’d like that, Cordelia,” he said softly, simply, releasing her heart from its frenzied flight so she could breathe again.

The cake Sissy had ordered had the look of a parade float, iced in candy-heart colors and smothered with pink sugar roses. In mint-green frosting, below a pair of silver foil nesting doves, was piped: “Happy Anniversary, Caroline and Beech.”

Cordelia thought it was the ugliest thing she’d ever laid eyes on. She felt a pang of despair. Sissy and her friends, pretentious Junior Leaguers like Melodie Hobson and Julia Hunnicutt, were always trying to one-up each other, no matter how vulgar the end result. Vying over who had the fanciest car, landscaping, designer dress, catered extravaganza. With people, too, position was everything. And when Gabe arrived, how they’d cluck about “crazy Mr. Ross”!