Wedding Ring (26 page)

For a moment the words would not register. He tried to make sense of them and had no success. “You did what?”

She pulled away, and this time he let her go. “Some of the other volunteers are going to help me. We aren’t breaking any laws. We aren’t stalking him with intent to do harm. We’re just watching to be sure he doesn’t break the law.”

“Tessa, have you lost your mind?”

“I’ve found a way to keep him from killing somebody else.”

“That is not your job.” His hand went to his hair, like a man waking from a bad dream. “You have to let go of this, of him. He’s not your responsibility. You have a life. You have to move on.”

“Making sure Robert Owens doesn’t kill again
is
my life.”

He started to speak; then he closed his lips and shook his head. “You need help.”

The green eyes blazed with anger. “No, I just need to protect somebody else’s daughter.”

“You’re looking for revenge. No matter what you tell yourself, that’s what you want. Sure, you don’t want him to kill someone else, but that’s only part of it. You want him to suffer the way you did. And three years of his life wasn’t good enough for you. You want him to suffer eternally.”

“You’re damned right I do! He killed my daughter!”

“And now you’re letting him kill you one inch at a time. You’ve turned into a vigilante. You’ve shut out everyone who loves you. You’ve stopped letting yourself care about anything except avenging Kayley. And Kayley is dead! She’s not asking anything from you. She wouldn’t even recognize you if she were alive today. You’ve become somebody she wouldn’t want to know.”

“No, this is
me
. This is who I am. I’m her mother, and I love her enough to fight for her!”

“She…is…dead!” He looked away. He was breathing hard, because his chest felt like someone had slid a blade directly into his heart. “She is dead, and you are burying everything that’s left of her under hatred and revenge.”

She was quiet for so long he thought she might not answer. When she spoke at last, her voice was like a winter wind. “Not all of us can be as forgiving, as tolerant, as you are, Mack. I want him back in jail, I’ll admit it. And I want him to suffer. I’ll admit that, too. But I’m not going after him with a gun or an out-of-control Chevy. I’m going after him with the only weapon I would
ever
use. The law.”

“It’s not your job to enforce it.”

“I’m a citizen of this great country of ours. Think of it as a neighborhood watch program on wheels.” She threw her head back and turned away. “Go home. No one asked you for help. No one asked you to agree. Go home and live your life. I’m going to live mine the way it has to be lived.”

He watched her walk away, watched until her footsteps faded and the house was silent.

He tried to remember that there had been a moment when she first arrived when he had felt they were coming together again. He tried to remember that she had been softer, warmer, opening to him and to her feelings the way he had so longed for, that even though he was appalled at what she was doing, she had talked to him. For once she had told him what was inside her.

But all he could really remember was the way her neck arched and her eyes blazed right before she turned away from him.

Again.

B
illy had come to visit exactly three times in the month Nancy had been in Toms Brook. After the first abortive encounter, she had arranged to be gone for the greater part of the last two visits. She wasn’t sure Billy had noticed, since as far as she could tell, he was only there from duty or a desire to visit his daughter. She supposed her reasons for avoiding him ranged from payback for hurting her feelings to testing him to see if her absence mattered. At least part of it, though, was a very new, very tender need to define herself as Nancy, and not as Billy Whitlow’s wife.

She might seem like an empty-headed, foolish woman to those she loved most, but Nancy was beginning to believe there was more to her than even she had known. Out from under the shadow of Richmond’s dogwoods and magnolias, its Confederate monuments and grand old homes, she was finding herself again.

“I never have understood the way your mind works,” Helen said. She was cozied up in her bedroom after a light lunch, with a glass of iced tea beside her and her misshapen, shoeless feet propped up on her sewing chair.

“You said it, I didn’t.” Nancy finished her last swallow of tea and wished she’d made a larger pitcher, but she knew better than to leave her mother alone. In the moments it would take to go downstairs and put the kettle on, Helen would vanish and her quilts would never be documented.

“You lived with me for all those years, visited me at least a million times, and you pick August, the hottest month of the summer, to look at my quilts. Makes me sweat just unfolding them to show you.”

“I told you, Mama, I’m not asking you to do it so I can admire them. We’re going to catalog them. See, I have my laptop computer up and running.” She pointed to a space at the foot of the old four-poster bed. “And we don’t have to do them all today. I know there are way too many.”

“I don’t see the point of this. They’re just quilts. Who cares where they come from and why?”

“I do, for starters.” Nancy wiped her hands on her dress. The dress was damp from a morning of perspiration and as wrinkled as an old dish towel. Today it didn’t much matter to her how she looked. Who was going to see her anyway?

“Then let’s get it over with so I can get busy and make some more.” Shaking her head, Helen delved into the pile of quilts that were folded beside her chair.

“Why do you keep those quilts right there?” Nancy watched her mother unfold the first one.

“These are my giveaway quilts. Somebody gets burned out, or flooded, or a loved one dies, one of these goes to them. And don’t get all soft-eyed about it, like I’m some kind of saint. I don’t care much for these quilts. I’d rather give ’em away than keep ’em.” She grimaced as she finished spreading one out. “See what I mean?”

The quilt in question was a symphony of soft peach and turquoise in diagonal drifts of color. “Jacob’s Ladder, right?” Nancy asked.

“How’d you know?”

“I used to live here, remember?”

“Well, it’s not Jacob’s Ladder, Miss Smarty. At least, not exactly. It’s a variation. Some call this one Road to the White House. Me, I wouldn’t name a quilt in honor of any of those no-account Republicans you and that husband of yours are so fond of.”

Nancy tried not to smile. “It’s a Democrat’s quilt, Mama. Look, if I turn it this way, the colors are leaning left.”

Helen chortled. “So they are.”

Nancy sat down on the trunk at the foot of the bed and positioned the laptop. She typed the name of the quilt and a brief description, including Helen’s comments about the name. “How big is it?” She continued to type as Helen got out the tape measure and grudgingly answered her questions.

Once she had the basics, Nancy put the laptop down and went to examine the quilt closer. The quilting was as fine, as even, as it was in any of her mother’s quilts.

“You’re not really going to give this away to just anybody, are you?”

“Well, why not?”

“It’s beautiful. I can’t believe this is one of your rejects.”

“Shows what you know.” Helen pointed to several lines of quilting that veered perhaps a sixteenth of an inch from their companions. “The light must have been bad that day, or I wasn’t paying close enough attention.”

“No, you’re just a perfectionist. Didn’t you tell me once only God is allowed to be perfect, and in the old days, your grandmother and her friends would always make a mistake on purpose? Turned a flower upside down or used the wrong color in a block?”

“You remember that?”

Nancy plopped down to a chair beside her mother, where the window fan could ruffle her hair. “I’m sorry if it seemed like I didn’t listen and I didn’t care when you talked about your quilts. I was a teenager.”

“I’m just surprised, that’s all. But if you think this quilt is something else, I have others I like better.”

“I want to see them all.”

Helen carefully smoothed and folded the Road to the White House quilt and set it back on the pile. Nancy suspected that her mother liked it better than she had let on. And didn’t that make the gift of it to a stranger in need that much sweeter?

Helen stood after a maximum amount of fuss and crossed the room, opening a wooden cupboard against the far wall. She returned with three quilts and set the bottom two on the bed, unfolding the top one and draping it over the footboard.

Nancy got up and moved closer. “My God, Mama, the work in that quilt. Is that a Baltimore Album?”

“What do
you
know about Baltimore Albums?”

“I saw one at a quilt exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts a couple of years ago. Remember, I tried to bring you down to see it, and you told me you’d come to Richmond in a casket and not a moment before.”

Helen was silent for a moment. Then she shook her head. “I didn’t say that.” She paused. “Did I?”

“You thought I was going to kidnap you.”

“I didn’t!” Helen paused again. “I guess I thought you’d be ashamed of me.”

Nancy had brought that on herself. She knew it. She owned up to it silently before she exploded. “You’re my mother. If I’m that shallow, then you should have just drowned me at birth.”

“Wished a time or two I had.”

The two women looked at each other, then burst out laughing. Nancy slipped her arm around Helen’s waist. “I wouldn’t have been ashamed. But I’d have bought you a new dress for the occasion.”

“Could stand one, I guess. But there’s nobody much to dress up for here.”

Nancy hugged her harder. “Does it get lonely sometimes, Mama?”

“I’m used to it.”

“I miss you when I’m down in Richmond. I think about you and wish you were closer.”

“I’m not moving to that retirement village. Just count that out right now.”

“I know.”

They stood locked together, staring at the quilt, until Nancy finally concentrated on it again. “It
is
a Baltimore Album, isn’t it?”

“This ain’t Baltimore. It’s a Shenandoah Album, and I made up all the designs on my own along with the name. I patterned it after the old
fraktur
from these parts, you know, like some of those pasted in that trunk up in the attic.”

Fraktur
was stylized, ornate printing and artwork brought from Germany by way of Pennsylvania by the early Shenandoah settlers. The designs had been used, among other things, to decorate birth announcements or baptisms.

The quilt was exquisite, twenty blocks, each one different. Nancy saw birds and trees, angels and flowers and a running stag. She stared at it and couldn’t believe that such a thing had been created from scraps of fabric.

“Mama, this ought to be in a museum.”

“Tsh…” Helen laughed. “It’s just an old woman’s fancy.”

“It’s unbelievable. How long did it take?”

“Too long. I could have made fifty quilts in the same time—and should have. My mama would say I’d purely lost my mind. Quilts are made to be used.”

Nancy had seen the dozen or so quilts of Delilah’s that Helen still owned, and she treasured them because they were made by the grandmother she’d never known. But Delilah’s quilts had been simple and utilitarian. Helen’s were something else entirely.

“Mama, you’re an artist.”

“I’m nothing of the sort, just a bored old woman with too much time on my hands now that I can’t work outside much.”

“Why haven’t you entered this in the county fair? Or a quilt show?”

“I just quilt. That’s all. Nothing much else to do here.”

Nancy was surprised to hear shyness and uncertainty in her mother’s voice, along with something more endearing. Just a hint of pride and pleasure that her daughter had found this quilt—so obviously a source of joy to its maker—to be worthy of praise.

“I couldn’t change your mind, could I?” Nancy said. “There’s got to be a quilt show in the area that will want to display this.”

“I don’t go to quilt shows, don’t go to quilt meetings. I just quilt. Don’t matter to me one bit if any of my quilts see the light of day.”

Nancy heard the words but knew the truth beneath them. Helen was unsure of her own work, and she would never try on her own to have any of it displayed publicly.

But that was what daughters were for.

“Are there others as spectacular as this one?” Nancy asked, as nonchalantly as she could.

“Spectacular’s a ten-dollar word, and it don’t mean a thing.”

“Mama…”

“I got a few more I’m not ashamed of. Nothing special in the scheme of things, but they please me enough.”

“Then let’s see them,” Nancy said. “And tell me all about them.”

She wondered, as Helen folded the Shenandoah Album so she could display the next quilt, what Billy would think if he saw her mother’s best work. Would he, the educated collector of valuable abstract impressionists, think her mother’s quilts were nothing more than primitive folk art from an old country woman? Or would he see them as part of a chain of artists that was centuries long, female artists who had used what was at hand to bring comfort and beauty to their modest homes?

And did she really care what Billy thought? In the long run, wasn’t it what
she
loved that mattered? And wasn’t it about time she understood the difference?

Tessa liked working in the attic best. The sorting downstairs was for the most part boring, going through and throwing out meaningless junk that Helen had rescued, and paperwork her grandmother had stacked and never adequately investigated.

Tessa had developed a schedule of sorts. House chores or repairs with Nancy in the coolest hours of the morning, sorting and hauling when the day was hottest, and trips to the attic in the late afternoon and evening when the temperatures dropped enough to make it comfortable.

She thought of the attic as dessert. In her hours here she had uncovered a wealth of Stoneburner memorabilia, in addition to the wedding ring quilt. Ladies’ hats and men’s suspenders and waistcoats. Shape-note hymnals and faded wildflowers preserved between panes of wavery glass. The tattered remnant of a Confederate flag that looked as if it had seen more than one battle. Nineteenth-century postcards from places like Natural Bridge and Virginia Beach. A painfully neat ledger listing farm expenses in bleached brown ink, along with notes about crops and cattle.

This afternoon she was glad to have an interesting way to pass the time. Last night’s encounter with Mack had replayed through her mind all morning as she sorted through the black plastic bags in the spare bedroom. A lifetime supply of tattered tablecloths and dish towels hadn’t offered much of a mental challenge, at least not enough to make her forget that, downstairs in her grandmother’s kitchen, she’d shoved Mack away with both hands, probably far enough away that he would have trouble finding his way back.

And she would lose her way if she tried to look for him again.

The attic was a better challenge than the bedroom. She forgot their angry words for moments at a time as she tackled the trunk that contained Nancy’s school papers. After a layer or two of test papers and surprisingly well-organized essays, she found the high-school yearbook for her mother’s junior year and sat back on her heels to page through it.

Even though Nancy had warned her, Tessa was surprised by how few activities her mother had been involved in. She wasn’t in the photographs of the chorus or drama club. She hadn’t been a cheerleader or a member of any athletic team. She was absent on the pages devoted to service organizations, honor society and special interest clubs. Tessa wouldn’t have known this was her mother’s album except for the thumb-sized face in a line of five others, a cherub-cheeked Nancy smiling tentatively amidst a sea of more confident faces.

Nancy had said she worked too hard at home to participate in much at school, but Tessa had filed that away as just another complaint about Helen. Tessa wondered if the yearbook from her mother’s senior year was here, too, with the usual notes about what had been accomplished during her sojourn at the school. What would it show? The simpering well wishes of favorite girlfriends, sentimental poetry from acne-cheeked admirers, a school life rich in academics if not activities?