Double Wedding Ring (13 page)

She grew warm inside as the slow smile spread across his face.

“Ah, a redemptive bent. I like that in a woman. Especially in a woman with freckles on her nose.”

“When you have freckles on your nose, you can't afford to be too frivolous.”

“I noticed that about you right away.”

“You did?”

He nodded. “I think it was the day I came to the house and found you lying in the front yard letting Cody's puppy lick your nose while Cody tickled your feet. Bare feet, at that. In November.”

Malorie ducked her head. “Shoes are for the timid, the stodgy, the unimaginative.”

“A redeemer
and
an adventuress.” Sam lifted her chin and looked into her eyes. “Are you adventurous, Malorie?”

His eyes challenged her, promised imminent adventure. Suddenly unable to breathe, Malorie backed away.

“Not really,” she said. “I'm probably not at all who you think I am.”

“Then, who are you?”

Again the urge to tell him swept over her, set her heart racing even faster than his touch. She called herself a fool and gestured toward the rows of evergreens. “I'll turn on the light. I think I know the perfect tree.”

Twenty minutes later, Malorie had locked up the store, helped Sam load a ten-foot Scotch pine into his van and was helping him haul it into the church vestibule. Working quietly in the hushed emptiness of the church, they set the burlap-bound root ball of the tree in the galvanized washtub Maxine had left out for them, then draped the tub in the red-and-green flounces Addy Mayfield had made.

“It looks better already,” Sam said, stepping back to regard the tree.

Malorie was careful to keep an arm's length away from him. “Wait until we lavish a little attention on it,” she said.

“That's all it takes for most of us. A little TLC.”

He took another step in her direction and Malorie sought a diversion. “Like Mother,” she said. “Is that part of your prescription for your patients?”

Disappointment briefly flickered across his face. “I'm glad you brought her up. I'd almost forgotten, but that's one of the reasons I came by this afternoon.”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing, really.” He frowned, and paced a few steps into the sanctuary. “She's asking for a quilt. More than asking, really. She's starting to obsess over it. Sometimes people with this kind of injury can't let go of an idea as easily as you or I can.”

“The Double Wedding Ring?”

Sam's face brightened. “You know the one she's talking about?”

Malorie leaned against the back of the last row of pews. “I know the one. It was always her favorite. But it's gone. Lost in the accident, I guess. We'd just had a picnic. It was in the car.”

Now another kind of disappointment settled onto Sam's face. “That's too bad.”

“Should I tell her?”

“If she asks about it again, I think we'll have to tell her.”

Anxiety clutched at Malorie's stomach. “It's going to upset her, isn't it?”

“Probably.”

“I don't want to set her back again. She's just getting her fight back.”

“I know. What happened? Do you know?”

Malorie shook her head. “No, unless it was her outing with Addy.” She told him about the afternoon the two women spent going up and down Main Street. She hesitated, remembering how the afternoon had ended. “Do you know—how well Mr. Hutchins knew Mother?”

“Tag? They grew up across the street from each other. He was friends with your Uncle Steve. He and Susan dated when they were kids. Why?”

Malorie told him then, both about the Sunday morning Tag had argued with Betsy and the afternoon Susan came into the store. Sam frowned.

“I'll find out,” he said. “Tag doesn't need to be running around making Susan's life more difficult right now.”

“Thanks, Sam. I know I probably worry too much.”

“It's understandable. She's your mother. You want her to be better.”

“She was... I miss talking to her, you know? We were close. It's like losing my mother
and
my best friend.”

Sam stepped close again, but this time Malorie was trapped against the pew. “You shouldn't isolate yourself, Malorie.”

“I know. But—” She shrugged.

“You need some substitutes for what Susan can't give you right now. I can't be a mother-figure. But I could be a friend.”

“Sam, I—”

“Give me one good reason why I couldn't be a friend.”

“You don't know me, Sam.”

“You won't give me a chance.”

She looked up at him, wishing she knew how to explain. But sometimes it didn't make sense, even to her. People make mistakes. They do what they can to fix them. Why was it the thing she'd done to fix her mistake seemed to have left her more trapped than the mistake itself?

“I like you, Malorie,” he said softly. “I don't put the rush on the daughters of all my patients, you know. Just give it a chance.”

She wanted to tell him she liked him, too. But then what defense did she have? How, then, to explain that she could be neither friend nor lover?

“Susan trusts me,” he said, moving closer and putting one hand on her shoulder. With the other, he touched her hair. “Why can't you?”

“It isn't that.”

“Then, what?”

His fingers brushed against her temple, lightly feathering her curls away from her face. A tickle of sensation curled low in her belly. She closed her eyes, afraid for him to see her weakness. Afraid to feel it, even.

The touch of his lips on hers didn't surprise her. For a moment, she allowed herself the pleasure of that warmth, that softness. She didn't lean into the kiss but she didn't, for the moment, retreat, either. She let her lips soften against Sam's, felt the heat sinking deeper into her, sending sensations rippling through her.

How sweet it would be...

And how impossible.

The instant she felt his lips part, she drew away. “I'd better go.”

He stepped back, shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his white slacks. “If that's the way you want it.”

She couldn't even answer. She only nodded and walked past him as quickly as she could, afraid that if he tried to stop her she wouldn't have the courage to keep going.

* * *

H
OW MANY TIMES
, Tag asked himself, had he sat beneath this very tree staring at the Foster house, waiting?

Too many times to be doing it again,
he told himself.

So many that one more wouldn't make much difference,
a more hopeful part of him countered.

But maybe it
would
make a difference. Maybe if he could stop being so damned stubborn and prideful for a few minutes, he might find that things were a lot different than he'd thought.

Sam's visit a few hours earlier had been a slam to the gut. He hadn't been expecting his nephew. In fact, he'd been expecting to leave the house in another fifteen minutes, on his way to God knows where. Hours on his bike, feeling the bite of the autumn wind on his cheeks, in his hair, that was how he killed most of his free time these days. And at night, things didn't look quite so stark. Everything was in shadows, and that was the way Tag liked it. Sometimes his wandering turned up a diversion—a sign advertising a Saturday afternoon dirt track race or a drag race in some rural county.

Sometimes his wandering just accentuated his loneliness.

But Sam had caught him this time. And his first words had stalled Tag in his tracks.

“What are you trying to do to Susan Hovis?”

Tag had whirled around, letting his helmet drop into an armchair. “What do you mean?”

“I've heard about your little scenes with Betsy and with Susan. I want to know what you're up to, Tag.”

“Has Betsy got you on a string now, too?”

“What's eating you, Tag? This is my patient you're messing with, and I want to know why.”

“None of your damn business.” He snatched his helmet up and stalked toward the door, but Sam grabbed him roughly by the arm.

“Susan is my business. And when you get her so upset she doesn't want to continue her therapy, that's my business.”

“So sorry she's upset. Maybe it's time I upset her life for a while.”

“I'm not leaving until you tell me what's going on between you two.”

So they had sat for nearly twenty minutes, glaring at each other across the silent room. Tag had finally recognized a stubbornness that matched his own.

Besides, there was a small part of him that desperately wanted to hear what Sam could tell him about Susan.

He shifted his eyes from Sam's face, stared at the dark rug on the floor, the same rug he'd stared at when he was growing up and his old man chewed his butt out for something. “We were friends. A long time ago. I told you that before.”

“Friends, Tag? I thought it was some kind of puppy love.”

“Yeah. That's it.”

“Is it really?”

“Okay, okay. We were...engaged.”

Only silence greeted that admission and Tag knew he'd taken his nephew by surprise. “Before I went to ‘Nam. She promised to wait. She didn't. That's it.”

“Aah. So she jilted you and you've been ticked off about it half your life?”

Having his pain belittled angered Tag. He fought the urge to sweep his mother's red-and-gold Tiffany lamp right off the table and onto the floor with one swift swipe of his arm. “Come back when you've been in love, Sammy, and we'll talk about it then.”

“Okay. Fair enough. But, Tag, you were gone, how long, four, five years? Nobody knew if you were dead or alive. She was young. Are you going to hold that against her forever?”

“I tried to see her. She doesn't want to see me. She...she pretended she doesn't even know me.”

“She probably doesn't. Her memory was pretty much wiped clean, Tag. It isn't like she zeroed in on you for special treatment.”

“No?” Tag felt himself begin to soften and melt at the reminder of Susan's illness. Hearing about it like this, he could be sympathetic, understanding. But seeing it face-to-face made him crazy. Anger was easier to deal with than the pain of the truth.

“She didn't remember Malorie, either, at first. Or Cody.”

“Cody? That's the little boy?” Something about the little boy had given Tag an extra pain in his heart. As if seeing the tyke had reminded him of everything he'd missed.

“Whole parts of her life are missing, Tag. She's learning to read all over again—and she'd be doing a lot better if Betsy didn't think it was a waste of time.”

“What?” His fury at the woman grew.

Sam shook his head. “I've never seen anything quite like it. Susan is her daughter, but she seems to be doing everything she can to convince Susan she'll never recover. Susan gets discouraged just listening to her. And it's easy enough for Susan to get discouraged, anyway.”

“But she will get better, won't she?”

He remembered the way Sam had talked about it before, his mention of miraculous recoveries. The word
miraculous
had lain in his mind for days until he allowed it to take root. He wouldn't have said that was what he was hoping for, because that would have been too optimistic.

But a part of him kept saying it
could
happen.

He didn't bring it up again because he didn't want Sam snatching away that thin thread of hope.

Sam voiced the noncommittal phrase of the professional who neither wants to raise hopes nor dash them. “She's getting better all the time. Her physical therapy goes well—when she's feeling encouraged enough to stick with it.”

“No thanks to Betsy.”

“And you.”

Tag heaved a sigh. “What can I do, then? How can I help?”

“Since you can't seem to keep from blowing off steam, I'd say you'd better keep away from her.”

Tag had made up his mind to do just that. But just as Sam was leaving, his nephew said something that changed Tag's mind. He'd been talking about how rapidly Susan was recovering her memories and how arbitrary her brain was in offering them back to her.

“She's got her mind set on finding this old quilt right now,” Sam said. “I don't know how she's going to feel when Malorie tells her it was lost in the accident.”

So here Tag sat, waiting for the last light to go out in the Foster home, determined that the only one who was going to tell Susan about the quilt was him. For it had to be
their
quilt. The Double Wedding Ring. He just knew it.

And if she wanted the quilt, didn't that mean that buried somewhere in her injured mind were good memories about Tag, about the two of them?

At last the lights went out. Still he waited, hoping everyone in the Foster house slept soundly. Then, when he was too impatient to wait any longer, he walked up to the side porch. The screen door to the porch was unlatched. And the window beside the door into the house was also unlocked, as were half the windows and doors in Sweetbranch. He opened it as quietly as possible, reached inside and freed the door lock. He was inside in minutes.

He stood, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. Slowly he began to see shapes. The piano. A wheelchair. A bed beside the fireplace.

Then Susan's voice came to him in the darkness. “I've been waiting for you, Tag.”

Atlanta—1973

T
HE NIGHT STARTED
like a hundred others.

Stretching her back and rubbing her neck, Susan turned out the light on her sewing machine, folded the wool plaid suit she was altering from a size 16 into a size 14 for Mrs. Wickham. Quitting time.

Through the screen door, she could smell the charcoal burning as Buddy fired up the grill. Susan smiled, knowing if she stuck her head out the door and looked down into Buddy's backyard, he would call up, “You hungry? Just so happens I've got an extra burger here.”

So she did just that, and went down to join him.

Burgers on Buddy's back patio—overlooking the clutter of his auto repair business and the neatly painted garage Susan had been renting since her freshman year at Georgia Tech—was a better deal than another night alone in her apartment. Susan had spent enough of those to last a lifetime before she started accepting her landlord's overtures of friendship.

A bed and overstuffed floor pillows had been her only furnishings during her freshman year, when she had spent her time either studying or writing letters to Tag in Vietnam. The Double Wedding Ring quilt was with her, of course, but carefully wrapped and stored in a box in the top of her only closet. Over the years, she had added furniture—a couch from the Salvation Army, a kitchen table and chairs that were a yard sale find. The quilt was now folded across the bottom of her bed. She'd dropped her classes more than a year ago. And the letter-writing long before that.

“I see Mr. Snipes's Lincoln is back,” she said, setting the folding metal table with paper plates and napkins while Buddy flipped the burgers.

“Yeah, and it'll keep coming back unless I convince him to replace that carburetor.” Buddy shook his head. “Shoot, maybe I'll just fix it, anyway. He's too old to get stuck out on the highway if the blasted thing gives out on him.”

“You wouldn't let me get away with giving away my time,” Susan protested.

“Do as I say, not as I do.” Buddy looked over at her, his eyes sparkling. “Besides, I'm not out to make a fortune. Just so I have enough to get by. You know that.”

“I know that.”

She also knew that Buddy Hovis was a smarter businessman than he liked to let on. Hadn't he shown her all the ropes in getting her own alteration and seamstress business off the ground? With his help, she had gone from doing a little work on the side to supplement her scholarship to working forty-plus hours a week, with customers willing to wait until she could get around to their curtains or couch covers or bridesmaids' dresses.

But Buddy's heart was bigger than his ambition. Susan also knew that firsthand.

They'd eaten the burgers and recapped their day and were watching the first fireflies of the season flit around the backyard when Buddy shifted uneasily in the webbed lawn chair.

“Susie, I've been thinking.” He spread his big, thick-fingered hands on the table and stared at them. Susan noticed that he'd scrubbed so hard tonight they were clean. No grease, no stains. Not easy for a mechanic to accomplish. “I've been thinking a long time, actually. But I guess I'm pretty much a coward.”

Susan grew uneasy.

“But I've made up my mind and I just want to plow right on through this, get it out here in the open, where you can tell me I'm an old fool or...or not.” He blotted his upper lip with the back of his hand. “You know how I feel about you, Susie. You're the sunshine in my day. And I know you...had your heart set on other things. And maybe you won't ever be able to put those other things out of your heart completely. But that doesn't matter to me. I'd like you to be my wife, Susie. And I'd do everything in my power to make you happy again.”

* * *

B
UDDY HAD BEEN THERE
in 1970, when word came that Tag was missing in action. When Susan almost fainted, Buddy caught her safely in his arms.

The only haven Susan knew for the next few years was her friendship with Buddy. For months after receiving the news, she was paralyzed by fear, able to do little more than sit and wait for news about her fiancé. She barely passed her courses at Georgia Tech. She couldn't even begin to think of dancing, for she no longer possessed the joy that once gave lightness to her feet.

She had no one to talk to about her pain except Buddy. Most of her friends on campus were on the antiwar bandwagon, and Susan couldn't bring herself to ask them for sympathy or understanding. Turning to her family was even more out of the question.

“The worst of it is Mother,” she told Buddy, one of those long, lonely evenings when she sat on the floor in Buddy's living room, knees curled up to her chin. “She keeps saying...” Susan's chin wobbled, and with it her voice. “She keeps saying I should get on with my life. That it'll be a...a blessing if he... That I wouldn't want him to be a prisoner. And that's true, but... Oh, Buddy, I don't know what to think. Some days I just don't think I can get up in the morning.”

“Anybody would feel that way, Susie. What you're going through is hell, and nobody expects you to act like nothing's wrong. Nobody expects you to quit hoping, either.”

“Mother does.” And Susan no longer had the heart for battling her mother. She felt like giving up.

“You just let old Buddy be your mother for a while. How's that?”

And she had done just that. Although only ten years older than Susan, Buddy had a weathered, trampled look about him that said life had dished out a lot, but he'd stood up to it. Stocky and ruddy, with eyes that out-twinkled anybody's idea of Santa Claus, Buddy was a workhorse, not a racehorse. That stability, that reliability, gave Susan something to hang on to while the rest of the world careered out of control.

During the next two years, Susan gave up many of the dreams she and Tag had shared. Dance became as much a fantasy of her childhood as tales of sleeping princesses and the princes who saved them. She quit college, concentrating instead on building her business. She refused to go home, taking only small pleasure in defying her mother.

The only dream she held on to was the dream that Tag would return, whole and unharmed and ready to whisk her right back into the happily-ever-after dream world they had built for themselves on the banks of Willow Creek. She wore her engagement ring and caught herself staring at it, lost in the sparkle of its tiny diamond, a dozen times a day. And at least once a week, she took the Double Wedding Ring quilt down from the closet, out of its box, and spread it on the bed. Sometimes she lay on it, facedown, imagining the smell of Tag's skin still clinging to the rose-and-green squares.

Mostly, however, the quilt only grew mustier and more tear-stained with each week, each month, each year, that passed.

Sometimes, Buddy Hovis was Susan's only link with sanity. He discovered new albums he thought she would enjoy and brought them home for her to listen to. He took her to funny movies and coaxed her into reading him the Sunday comics every week. He taught her to bake bread and how to use a corkscrew. He was gentle and compassionate and he let her talk about Tag whenever she needed to. Buddy was her one true friend.

Tag had been missing more than two years when Susan's hope began to waver.

The U.S. was scaling down its efforts in Vietnam. Reports surfaced almost daily about the inhumane treatment being handed out to prisoners of war. Few had survived.

“And I'm not sure I would have wanted him to,” Susan confessed in a whisper against Buddy's often-bleached workshirt. His arms tightened around her. “I don't want to think he had to endure those things. Is that awful, Buddy?”

He patted her back and whispered against her hair. “To hope he didn't suffer? No, Susie, that's not awful. That's no more than any of us would wish for the ones we love.”

“And I do love him, Buddy. Even after all this time.”

“I know you do.”

“I think I always will.”

“I think so, too, Susie.”

She had straightened up then, backing out of his arms and looking him straight in the eyes. “But maybe it's time I started letting him go.”

* * *

T
HAT HAD BEEN ALMOST
a year ago. And on the surface, Susan knew she'd done a pretty good job of convincing the world she'd let go of her memories of Tag. She might've fooled everyone, but she didn't think she'd fooled Buddy. He knew her too well.

At least that's what she'd thought until this moment.

“Buddy, I...I hope you know how I feel about you, too.” And she saw from the look in his eyes that he did. But she still felt the only fair thing to do was say the words out loud. “You're my best friend. My family. My rock. I love you. But the way I love you...”

“I know it isn't the way you love Tag.”

Susan looked down at her hands, clasped in her lap. The tiny diamond still winked at her from her third finger, left hand.

“Notice I said ‘love.' I know it's not past tense, Susie. I know it probably never will be. But Tag's gone and I'm here. And maybe I'm just patting myself on the back a little too much, but I think he'd want you to be with somebody like me, who'll love you just as much as he did.”

Tears came to Susan's eyes then, because she believed that was so, too. She knew Tag wouldn't want her to be alone forever. And she knew he would want someone as fine and decent as Buddy to take care of her.

She reached for one of the paper napkins she had anchored under the catsup bottle and wiped the tears that were trickling down her cheeks.

“Buddy, I can't imagine ever finding a better husband.”

* * *

E
VERYONE WAS THRILLED
with the news. Especially Susan's mother, who seemed more than gratified with the way her daughter had quit resisting. But as the days passed, bringing her wedding day closer and closer, Susan grew more uncertain.

Tag haunted her. The stubborn line of his jaw, the determined jut of his chin. The gleam in his dark eyes and the hope in his young voice.

Sometimes she could almost imagine that she saw him—not her young Tag, but Tag as he would be today, older and harder from what he'd seen in the war, with an edge to him that almost frightened her. And whenever she saw him, he was reminding her.

You promised,
he seemed to say.
You said you'd wait forever.

But the lace suit had been made and the cake ordered and the invitations sent. Even a new ring bought.

The morning of her wedding, Susan slipped off Tag's ring for the last time. A pale indention marked her finger. She held the ring in the palm of her hand and looked at it one last time. Then she took the Double Wedding Ring quilt from her bed, opened a seam in the back and tucked the engagement ring inside the soft, fluffy batting. Then she sewed the seam shut.