Night Light (31 page)

He let out a long-suffering sigh and slammed his pen on the table. “Okay, Deni, you’ve made me feel like pond scum. I guess I’ll go.” He stormed upstairs to change clothes.

Guilt was a fine motivator. She was glad it had worked.

Ten of Doug’s church members showed up to help — including Mark Green. They all rode bikes over together, and one of the men brought his horse-drawn wagon with all their tools piled in it. Deni and Craig doubled up on Craig’s bike, trailing behind. Craig brooded at Mark’s presence, but Deni pretended not to notice.

With Craig’s arrival and Eloise’s death — not to mention the Disbursement — it had been several days since they’d been there to work. To their surprise, the residents of the complex had finished cleaning up the garbage. Stacks of recyclables, washed and sorted, were stacked against the back wall of the building. They’d started a compost pile in an area that had been nothing but dirt before, and even though they didn’t yet have a place to plant, one of the men pointed out that the compost might be something they could sell if they could make enough of it.

Some of the men were working on digging a pit in which to bury the rest of the garbage, but they had at least separated it into a mound. As soon as the pit was deep enough, they would shovel it in and bury it. Craig helped the men with the digging of the garbage pit, while Deni and her mother wheeled uprooted bushes and saplings from the site where the well would be. Craig and Mark worked side by side, in seeming competition with one another. But after a while, Craig raised his hands in surrender. “I have to rest,” he said.

“No problem, man,” Mark said, and kept working as if there wasn’t an option.

Each time Deni emerged from the trees, she looked for Craig. He never went back to work. Instead, he was talking to the people who stood around. Talking — that was what he was good at. He would make a great politician. Too bad those talents weren’t useful at the moment.

When the pit was finally deep enough, they shoveled the garbage in. The residents cheered as they began to cover it with the loose mounds of dirt. Craig joined in then, shoveling the dirt in, but she could see in the redness of his face that he was out of his element. Most guys she knew loved the outdoors and the sheer brute strength required in such a task, but Craig seemed resentful each time he sank his shovel blade in the dirt.

At one point, little Luke strayed too close to where they were working, and Craig swung around and yelled, “Hey, kid, stay out of the way, or you’ll get hurt!”

Deni caught her breath at his harsh tone. Luke looked crushed and slunk away. Mark stopped working and rescued the child. “Over here, Luke. I’ve got a job for you.” He busied him stacking the cardboard boxes they were using for the reusable items.

Deni’s gaze followed Mark as he stooped with Luke, showing him how he wanted the boxes stacked and praising him for his efforts. It was a far cry from Craig’s irritable outburst.

She turned and saw Craig leaning on his shovel, watching the others work again.

One of the women who lived on the first floor got her small children involved in helping Luke. The skinny kids worked on their piles with pride and contentment.

The stench was already fading as the garbage was buried. Feeling a mighty sense of accomplishment, Deni steered her wheelbarrow back into the woods.

“Hey, Deni.”

She turned and saw Craig with his hands on his hips. “Are we leaving as soon as the garbage is buried, or does your family intend to work until dark?”

“Until dark,” she said.

He huffed out a breath. “You’ve got to be kidding. Enough is enough.”

Deni looked at the dirt covering his arms and shirt. Somehow, the rugged look wasn’t as attractive on him as it was on Mark.

“If you don’t want to work, you don’t have to. Just quit. You know how to get to our house.”

“Yeah and look like a complete jerk,” he said. “I just don’t
get
your family.”

She wanted to say that they didn’t really get him, either, but she didn’t want to fight. “Just take a break,” she said. “You’ve been working hard. Go sit down, drink something.”

“Oh no,” he said. “If mighty Mark can keep at it, so can I.”

She recognized the jealousy in his tone, but it only made her angry. Ignoring him, she went back to work.

L
ATER THAT NIGHT, WHEN THEY HAD ALL RETURNED HOME AND
cleaned up from the hard work, Deni went into her dad’s study to work on this week’s paper. By the light of an oil lamp, she pecked on the typewriter keys.

Craig came in and leaned in the doorway. He had shaved when they got home, and he looked more like the man she’d fallen in love with. The sun had done him good. He was getting a tan, though his cheekbones were burned, and without the beard, she realized she really did like his longer hair. “How can you do that now?” he asked. “Aren’t you tired?”

“Exhausted,” she said. “But I have to use all my free time, since I’m so busy during the day.”

He came in and read the headline over her shoulder. “ ‘Gatlin’s Next-Door Neighbor Arrested.’ ”

She kept typing, copying from the original she’d written last night. “I need to get this out tomorrow so that if anyone has information about Edith Stuart, they’ll come forward.”

“Assuming anyone reads it.”

She stopped typing and looked up at him. “
Lots
of people are starting to read my newspaper. Everywhere I go people mention it to me.”

“ ‘Newspaper’ seems a little delusional, doesn’t it? How many copies do you put out? Ten? Twelve?”

She bristled. “Fifteen, on bulletin boards in key places around town. But there may be thousands reading them.”

He breathed a condescending laugh. “I just wouldn’t try using it on a résumé if I were you.”

His amused tone made her feel small. Her mind strayed to Mark’s support of her paper — the typewriter he’d found her, the carbon paper he’d salvaged.

Craig didn’t even realize he’d put her down. He put his arm around her, stroked her arm, and lifted her left hand to look at her ring. “I was thinking, Deni.”

“Thinking what?”

“I can’t stay much longer. Senator Crawford really needs me.”

She sprang up, stricken. “You’re going to leave? When?”

“I need to get back soon,” he said. “I only came to get you. I don’t want to set up housekeeping here with your folks. And as important as the work over at Sandwood Place is, and all the stuff you’ve got going on here, it’s not my kind of thing. I’m better with helping the senator write bills that will help this country move forward. That’s what my job is right now.”

“So what are you saying? That the wedding isn’t going to happen?”

His eyes twinkled. “Think again,” he said. “I didn’t plan to go back without you. I don’t want to leave you again.”

“Oh.” It was what she had hoped to hear in the letters, just the kind of affirmation she needed. Now she wondered why it didn’t thrill her. She tried to smile. “So when do you want to go?”

“I was thinking sometime in the next few days. How would you feel about a quick wedding here with your family, and then we take the train back to Washington?”

She thought of the beautiful wedding she had planned. It would have taken place next month. She would have worn her Vera Wang gown and all of her sorority sisters would have flown in for the occasion. It would have been so beautiful. But she didn’t have the dress anymore, and her bridesmaids were scattered halfway across the country. She’d never get them all here now.

“It’ll be great,” he said. “Your dad can marry us.”

“But he’s not ordained,” she said. “He just set up a house church. He’s not allowed to officiate at a wedding.”

“Then we’ll get someone who is. Your old pastor or the judge or a justice of the peace.”

She didn’t like that idea. “And where will we do it?” she asked. “We can’t very well do it in our backyard with it all tilled up. We could do it in a church, but it’s dark in there, and even in daylight — ”

“Come on, Deni. You’re a problem-solver. This is doable, if you want to do it.”

She looked into the flame flickering at the desk. What would it be like to leave her family now? She thought of little Sarah and her brothers, the project at Sandwood Place, the murder investigation. So much was unresolved. Could she really be happy with him in Washington? She swallowed and tried to think. “I’m not sure I’m ready to leave my folks, Craig.”

He grunted. “Come on, Deni. You left them years ago. You’ve only lived back here a few weeks. They don’t need you. They have your brothers and sister.”

Her gaze drifted down to her ring. It represented so many dreams. But those dreams had changed. And so had she.

Craig lifted her chin and kissed her. “Come on, Deni. I’m ready to go home,” he whispered. “I’m ready to start a life with you.”

“But how?” She pulled out of his arms. “Without any power, we wouldn’t be able to survive in your town house. We couldn’t grow food. Where do you even get water?”

He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get a place closer to the Senate Building so I can get back and forth. I’ll get the food that’s brought in for the senate staff. We’ll be well provided for.”

She tried to imagine that. “But what will I do?” she asked. “I’d be alone most of the time, without a job or anything.”

“You can take care of our house. You’ve gotten good at that kind of thing.”

“Not by choice,” she said. “It’s different when it’s a team effort, for a real purpose. We do what we can to survive. I’d be all alone there.”

“You wouldn’t be alone. You have lots of friends there.”

The friends she had made during college had probably gone back home to their families as soon as the trains started running. She doubted there were many still there, but even if there were, that seemed like so long ago. So much had happened. Before the outage she had been ready to sever her ties with her parents and start a new life of her own. But things were so different now.

Still … she had longed for weeks for Craig to come and get her, to take her back with him. Did she really want to hesitate? Maybe she was just tired.

“It’s just that I always hoped for a pretty wedding with a beautiful dress. A little more time to plan. At least I could have
some
of my dreams.”

“We’ll do that later,” he said, “after the outage is over. We’ll have a big shindig and get all dressed up and you can wear the veil and the whole bit. How’s that sound?”

Not good, she thought. “It wouldn’t be the same, Craig.”

“No, it wouldn’t, but
nothing’s
the same.
Everything’s
changed. We might as well get over it.” He leaned down, pressing his forehead against hers. “Think of it, Deni. We can get married and get on that train and go back to where our lives are supposed to be. And trust me, when the lights start coming back on, they’re going to come on in Washington first. You’ll be the first one in line to get Katie Couric’s job.”

The thought of her pre-outage plans began to fill her up again. “It is the right thing, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is,” he said. “It’s always been the right thing.”

fifty-five

D
ENI
’
S PARENTS WERE GETTING READY FOR BED WHEN SHE
knocked on their door.

The burning candles had the scent of mulberries. Her parents were sitting on the bed, her father leaned back against his pillows, and her mother sitting Indian-style in the center of the bed facing him. Deni felt guilty stealing this time from them, when they had so little time to talk alone.

“Mom, Dad, can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure,” her mother said, turning around on the bed. She patted the mattress, inviting her to join them.

Deni sat, kicked off her shoes, and pulled her feet under her.

“What’s wrong?” The shadows on her father’s face accentuated the concern she saw there. She hated to give him one more thing to worry about.

“I just wanted to tell you that I’ve made a decision.”

She saw the dread passing over her mother’s face. “What is it?”

“Craig needs to get back to work. He wants us to get married in the next few days so I can go back with him to Washington.”

Doug sat up straight, those shadows moving down his face. “What’s the rush?”

“Craig came here just to get me, Dad. Now he’s got to get back. He has important work to do.”

The candlelight caught the glisten of tears in her mother’s eyes. “But we haven’t had time to plan for it,” she said. “That doesn’t even give us much time for you to pack. Why can’t you wait a week … two weeks? A month? Why don’t you just plan to get married on your original wedding date?”

“Because he doesn’t want to sit here for another month.”

“Then he could go back without you,” Doug said, “and you could go to him on the train. Or he could come back before the wedding, and we could do it right.”

She picked at a thread on their bedspread. “I’d miss him too much. I don’t want to wait. I want to get married now, with my family here to celebrate it with us. Besides, it’s too expensive going back and forth.”

Doug looked flabbergasted. “So you want to get married
now
?”

Kay got off the bed and looked down at her. “Deni, you need to think through this. You’re settling for something. This isn’t like you.”

“Mom, everything we’ve done since the outage has been settling for something. Nothing’s the way it should be. I’ve watched you and Dad make the best of things, and I’m trying to do the same thing. Even though I can’t have the beautiful wedding I’d planned, I can still get married.”

“But maybe you
can
have the beautiful wedding.” Kay got on her knees on the mattress and knelt in front of her. “Deni, we could find you a dress. Every woman in Oak Hollow has her dress boxed in her closet. Someone would let you borrow everything you need. We could have a gorgeous outdoor wedding by the lake. It could be everything you’d hoped, if you’ll just wait.”

“I have waited. I’ve waited months to be with Craig, and now I can be. I don’t want to be separated from him again.”

Her father got off the bed, raked his hand through his hair. “Deni,
he’s
the one determined to go back. If he loves you, if he doesn’t want to be separated, let him stay.”