Blessing in Disguise (8 page)

“Why, Dan Killian, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you
believed
that vicious gossip!” cried Cordelia, no longer able to contain the hot fury rising in her.

“ ’Course not, ’course I don’t.” Groping in his back pocket for a handkerchief and mopping his shiny forehead, Dan moved around his desk and paced over to a row of shelves where the half-dozen trophies from that silly golf club of his were displayed. Hackers and Slicers, they called themselves. And how fitting. Because that’s how she felt now, as if he were hacking at her, slicing her dream to bits. “It’s these times we’re living in, Dellie. These damn prickly times. Why, at the mill alone I employ more than eight hundred men and women—more than three-quarters of them black or brown or something in between. We’ve had affirmative action groups, the NAACP, you name it, stirring up trouble wherever they can. You know I’m a fair-minded man ... always have been. But just how do you think they-all’d react if Killian Textiles were to donate close to a million dollars toward a memorial for a senator who’d supposedly had a hand, however accidental it might have been, in killing a black man?”

Cordelia felt like shouting out the truth, asking Dan what
he
would have done in Gene’s place. But she already knew the answer. Dan was a coward. She wondered now, as she often did, what would have happened if Gene
hadn’t
gone to Margaret’s rescue that day. Might Margaret, or even her little girl, have gotten hurt or, worse, killed? Ned Emory, she’d learned after his death, had been unstable, even violent. Forever accusing his wife of things she hadn’t done, affairs with other men. Dear, plain, sensible Margaret, of all people!

Cordelia forced herself to speak in the voice, soft-edged and honeyed, that she used to cloak her emotions whenever they threatened to run away with her. “I was just remembering that nasty union business some years back, all your people on strike, and the scabs you trucked in. One of them got killed, didn’t he? Shot right through the head, God rest his soul. I most particularly remember you calling Gene in a panic, saying that, if somebody didn’t bail you out real quick, you’d have a dozen killed and your precious mill going up in flames.”

“Dellie, you don’t have to remind me,” Dan groaned. “I know there probably wouldn’t
be
a Killian Textiles today if Gene hadn’t gone out on a limb for me, if he hadn’t leaned on the union bosses, gotten them to sit down and hammer out something we could all live with. Hell, you think I’m not
grateful!
There’s not a thing I wouldn’t do for Gene if he were standing right here in front of me now asking me.”

And because he’s not here to ask, you stick a knife in his back.

A wave of regret swept over her—strangely, not for what Dan was robbing her of now, but for the youth they’d left behind, along with everything they’d once foolishly, blindly believed possible. ...

“Well, Dan, I don’t honestly know what to say. I never in a million years would have believed that you would back out on your promise.” Cordelia adjusted her cream hat with its navy-on-white polka-dot ribbon, pulling its brim down in the hope of partially masking the scorched tightness of her face. “It grieves me, too, that people would be ready to tar and feather a man who is practically a saint to them, merely on account of some misinformed article about some silly book.”

“Dellie, it’s your own daughter who’s writing it!”

“Have you considered that she might be acting out of some childhood grudge against her father and me? You know children these days, a chip on their shoulder the size of the national debt. All those talk shows on TV, people going on about how their mothers were too strict or too bossy, and how their fathers were too wrapped up in their work to toss them a ball or play checkers with them. And those audiences just egging them on. I hate to say this, but Grace was always like that, making a mountain out of every molehill.”

“You have a point there.” He sighed, replacing the trophy on its shelf. “Maybe that’s why I hate this job so much sometimes, because it reminds me of being a parent, of the decisions you have to make that always seem to end up hurting one child or another.” Dan walked over and stood looking mournfully down at Cordelia. He made her think of that toy her girls had played with when they were little, a set of plastic eyes and mouth that you stuck into a raw potato. In spite of herself, pity welled up in her. For, buried beneath the pouches of flesh, she had just then caught a glimpse, like the face of a drowned person floating just below the surface, of the sweetly rounded features of the boy she’d once loved.

She pictured Gene then, not particularly handsome, but he had the kind of face—afire with the intelligence behind it—that you saw once and never forgot. Clever caricaturists could capture it in three or four swiftly sketched lines—the hawkish nose, the deepset eyes, the thatch of hair that didn’t quite hide the jagged scar over his brow.

Oh, how she missed him still! She remembered as if it were yesterday that terrible night—young Tommy Pettit, one of Gene’s top aides, standing at her door, his eyes bloodshot, his doorknob of an Adam’s apple working as he told her of the helicopter crash half a world away. First had come the shock, but then how furious she’d been! At the self-serving Pentagon officials who’d allowed Gene to go off to that war zone and then had not protected him. And, yes, at Gene himself, who had placed himself in jeopardy over something as nebulous, as meaningless as a “fact-finding mission.” It was her fury that had given her the strength to cope that first day, and the one after. She had run on empty, without food, drink, sleep, sustained only by the great buzzing wall of red behind her eyes.

But by the morning of Gene’s funeral, she’d had to drag herself out of bed to wake the girls ... and then had crumpled to the floor, crushed by grief. Even now, she could feel its weight pressing down on her. The years had only served to wear it down, smoothing it like a stone at the bottom of a riverbed, which anchored her even while it dragged at her.

“So where does that leave us, Dan?” she asked him, keeping her voice soft, but taking little care to round its sharp corners.

“I’m going to have to hold off writing that check,” she heard Dan say through the rushing of blood in her ears. “Until this whole thing blows over ... or until ... well, we’ll see. I know you had your heart set on this, Dellie, but Gene, I think, would have been the first to agree with me that you don’t pick up a hot potato unless you want to get your fingers burned.”

How dare you? she wanted to cry out. How dare you use Gene against me? This is for him, not for me. For him!

And the deadline for the architects’ competition was less than eight weeks away. Six carefully selected firms at which talented people were slaving away, building models, preparing drawings on great sheets of paper ...

Cordelia felt an urge to slap Dan Killian’s mealy potato face. But she immediately shook it off. After all, he wasn’t at fault, not really.

It was Grace who deserved to be slapped.

Cordelia had to draw on every last bit of willpower to rise from her chair and hold out her small hand to be swallowed up by Dan’s huge, cushiony one.

“I was just thinking, Dan, that if all those years ago you had asserted yourself a bit more, the night of our junior prom, we might not be having this discussion today. I might even have married you. I’m glad for both our sakes that I didn’t.” Hearing the words escape her, she felt shocked. And saw that Dan was, too, judging from the scarlet flush spreading upward from the folds of his neck. She drew herself up to her full five feet two inches and added, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in fifty-nine years, it’s that we all do what’s best for ourselves in the end. That’s what made Gene so extraordinary, don’t you think? He always put his own needs last. But I don’t want that to be his monument—a memorial to him that didn’t get built because the concerns of others came before his.”

“Dellie, I—”

“Don’t apologize.” She stopped him. “Nothing has changed as far as I’m concerned. I’m sure that once this bit of gossip has died down you’ll see your way clear to doing the right thing. Oh, and Dan”—she put out a small, coral-nailed hand that didn’t quite meet his sagging shoulder, and allowed a sad smile to surface—“the creek’s high from all that rain we had this summer. Lots of tadpoles. Come on by one of these days, bring the grandkids.”

Dan nodded sheepishly.

As he ushered her to the door, obsequious as a maître d’ at one of those overpriced restaurants that were springing up like toadstools around Blessing, Cordelia remembered her lunch date with Sissy. Oh, how she wished she could go straight home instead, to her garden ... and to Gabe.

Sissy was also insisting they stop afterwards at that dreadful new shopping mall near Mulberry Acres, out on what, in her day, had been the old Fullerton estate. Her daughter was still looking for the perfect dress to wear to her tenth-anniversary party. The trouble was, she’d been looking for that dress since September, and here it was almost November, and she still hadn’t found it.

With a sigh, Cordelia made her way out of the plush-carpeted hallway above the First Citizens Bank of Blessing—which her grandfather had founded, and her father had managed until the day he died—then down a flight of stairs that led to a brass-fitted plate-glass door onto Main Street. Her heart was still beating too quickly, and the thudding in her breast had spread up into her temples, but she was almost certain no one passing by would notice. All anyone would see was a slim, middle-aged woman in a cream-colored linen suit and matching hat, walking briskly toward the meter in front of Thompson’s Drugs where her silver Town Car was parked.

Driving along the Interstate, the dwindling cow pastures and peach orchards of her childhood giving way to the strip malls that clustered like horseflies about the grander Mulberry Acres shopping complex she was now approaching, Cordelia remembered the unpleasant duty that lay ahead—the whole reason she’d invited Sissy to lunch in the first place.

She had to find some way of gently letting Sissy know what half the town of Blessing would soon be privy to, if they weren’t already: that Beech was cheating on her.

The crust of that man! He no doubt believed that Sissy was too devoted to suspect ... and that even if she did catch wind of it she would just shovel it under the rug. But there was one thing Beech, with his jacked-up ego, hadn’t counted on—that Sissy, if she didn’t love herself enough to do something about this, fortunately had a mother who cared enough about her for both of them.

Her daughter would not take the news well, she knew. Sissy might even accuse her of meddling, of trying to break up her marriage, which admittedly Cordelia had been opposed to from the start.

But was a mother who loved her daughter supposed to keep quiet while her double-talking son-in-law made a fool of the girl? It wasn’t, after all, as if she’d had to go sniffing around to ferret out Beech’s slimy peccadillo. Emily Bowles down at Whipple’s Bakery said she’d seen the two of them holding hands in broad daylight. And just last week Cordelia herself had accidentally picked up the phone and heard him cooing over the bedroom extension. It was only a matter of time before Sissy caught on, or one of her busybody friends put a bug in her ear. Wouldn’t it be better for her to hear it from someone who had only her best interests at heart? Didn’t Sissy have a right to know, so she could either put a stop to it or, better yet, divorce the loudmouthed piece of trash?

On the other hand, Cordelia reflected, look at the wedge that had been driven between her and Grace when she’d interfered with Grace’s marital problems. ...

By the time she’d parked her car behind the restaurant, a brand-new brick affair with white collonades that overlooked the manicured green of the Mulberry Acres golf course, Cordelia was having second thoughts about breaking the bad news to Sissy.

How strange! she thought. Usually she couldn’t bear dithering. Any course of action, in her opinion, was better than none. Hadn’t it been her suggestion, all those years ago, that Gene call in his old friend Pat Mulhaney at the FBI to handle the Emory mess as discreetly as possible?

Darling Gene, I helped save you from scandal then ... and I’ll do everything I can to save you now.

As she spotted her daughter at a table by the window, Cordelia’s thoughts abruptly returned to the business at hand. If she didn’t look after Sissy’s best interests, who would? Even before Gene died—with Grace a precocious fourteen, and Sissy still a baby at ten—the burden of raising her daughters had fallen mainly on her shoulders. Those early years, with Gene away in Washington or traipsing over the countryside raising funds and drumming up votes, she had been mostly alone with the girls. It was merely owing to the strange and wonderful spell Gene had cast over her, she decided, that she had somehow never felt alone. No matter where he was, he called her every day, and flew home most weekends, his pockets full of little gifts for them—paper dolls and tin frog noisemakers from the five-and-dime for the girls, a pretty pair of earrings for her or maybe a jar of her favorite piccalilli.

She wanted that for Grace and Sissy both. A marriage like the one she had had—rich, unconventional, exciting. Perhaps hers had been too exciting at times, like the hornet’s nest Gene had stirred up down here when he came out in strong support of the civil-rights movement. But never, ever had it been boring.

Winding her way over to the table where Sissy sat, Cordelia wondered which was worse—Beech’s utter lack of both decency and discretion, or the mere fact that he was so unutterably, irredeemably pedestrian.

The trouble was that in many ways, though Cordelia hated admitting it even to herself, so was Sissy.

After half an hour of listening to Sissy prattle on throughout lunch about her ridiculous anniversary party, how quickly people had accepted her invitation, the wildly talented pianist she was thinking of hiring, the sumptuous flowers and cake she’d ordered, Cordelia began to feel a headache coming on.

Shifting in her white wicker chair under a false arbor drooping with silk lilacs that was supposed to give the feel of a veranda (but only succeeded in making her feel claustrophobic), Cordelia felt the throbbing in her head quicken. This party means everything to her. How can I tell her that her husband of ten years is cheating on her?