Wedding Ring (27 page)

She knew her parents had met and married during the spring her mother turned twenty-two. Theirs had been a whirlwind courtship, an unlikely but passionate alliance, and the unexpected appearance of one Tessa Whitlock had crushed Nancy’s plans to continue her education. But what had her mother dreamed? What had she hoped for before she fell in love and married a man as different from herself as an eagle from a butterfly?

Tessa set aside the yearbook and dug deeper. As she’d hoped, she found the one for the following year. She opened it and turned to the senior class photographs, smiling at this larger photo of her mother draped in black with the requisite 1960s strand of pearls. Nancy wasn’t smiling here, but somehow she still looked uncomfortable, as if this touch of fake elegance was more than she was used to. Her blond hair was short and carefully curled around her face. Her eyes were huge, open wide enough to glimpse all the frightening possibilities of her future. Her repertoire of activities had increased. This time she was listed as belonging to the pep club, although nothing else. Her favorite book was
Gone With The Wind—
no surprise there—and her fondest ambition was to become somebody.

Tessa closed the book and held it against her chest. Even then, Nancy had known exactly what she wanted. And look where it had gotten her. Just a few years later she had married into the Richmond version of the aristocratic Wilkes family and gone to live at her very own Twelve Oaks, or close enough. And in Richmond, she
was
somebody, a steel magnolia with enough power and prestige to suit her at last.

Or maybe not. For the past month Tessa had picked up hints that Nancy was not satisfied with her life. She made the trip back to Richmond once a week but never stayed the night. She never had news of Billy, and Tessa thought it was unlikely they saw each other. Also, Tessa had noted the way her mother avoided her father on his infrequent visits.

She had never given much thought to her parents’ marriage, other than how odd it was that they had found each other, but now she wondered if there was trouble brewing in the Whitlock mansion. Or had she simply not recognized the obvious, that there had
always
been trouble, and Nancy and Billy had only stayed together for their daughter or for the sake of appearances?

That thought gave her pause and a sinking feeling in her stomach. Nancy could be exasperating, but Tessa loved her. She couldn’t imagine Nancy without Billy. Everything Nancy had become was wrapped up in him and in their life together. Without him, what would she do and where would she go? And even though Tessa was well beyond the age when she needed her parents to stay together to keep her own world intact, the thought of a divorce, of the shattering of family as she had known it, made her uneasy and sad.

Sadder
. Her own marriage was hanging by mere threads. And now, perhaps, her parents’ marriage was, too.

She hoped she was imagining this. Maybe last night’s scene with Mack was coloring everything else. She stood to slide the album back in the trunk, and something that had been stuck between pages fluttered to the floor.

She picked up the piece of paper to return it to the yearbook, but stopped instead. It was her parents’ marriage certificate. She wondered if Nancy knew it was here, or if the certificate had been missing for years.

She started to tuck it under her arm to take to Nancy when something clicked in her mind. She lifted it into view again and stared at it for a moment. Then, with the certificate in hand, she left the attic and descended the stairs.

Nancy was pleased with her day. She and Helen had gone through a dozen quilts, and by the end they’d been laughing and talking like friends. There were few subjects where the two women could have a meeting of the minds, but quilting was definitely one of them. As Nancy had drawn out stories about each one, Helen had asked Nancy for her opinion, listening carefully as she told her what she liked, or even what she didn’t. They had discussed patterns, colors, scale. By the time Helen tired, Nancy felt closer to her mother than she had for years.

Now she stood in the old bank barn and watched as a slim young man, whose hips were just wide enough to hold up a pair of baggy jeans, fiddled with one of the cobwebbed, rusted pieces of machinery lining the barn’s rear wall.

He faced her after another moment or two. “I hate to say it, Ms. Whitlock, but I believe I’ve seen newer tractors at the Smithso-nian over in Washington, D.C. And I haven’t seen this much rust outside of Detroit.”

Nancy had to smile. Zeke Claiborne was not what she had expected. He was no stranger to droll country humor, and he was clearly intelligent, to boot. He wasn’t much to look at yet, but put a few more pounds on him and shave off the scraggly, adolescent goatee, and he would be better than passable. Considering he’d gotten Cissy pregnant and hadn’t bothered to marry her, she’d assumed he was poor white trash. But since then, she had figured out that Zeke was anything but.

“I had an antique dealer look at all the old farm machinery,” she told him, “but he said there’s not much chance anybody would want it.”

“We could haul this one outside, take off what rust we can get to and let your grandkids play on it.”

Nancy’s heart squeezed painfully. “No grandkids, I’m afraid.”

“Too bad.” He put a long, unfarmerlike finger to his cheek. Then he grinned. “You could use it as a planter. Put a pot here, and here…” He demonstrated.

She smiled, too. “I guess you’ll have to haul it away, Zeke. You know we’ll pay you, don’t you? We really don’t expect you to do all this work for free.”

“No, ma’am, it’s my pleasure to help out. You folks have been good to Cissy. She talks about you all the time. I’m glad to give back.”

Nancy heard the rustle of straw on the barn floor behind her and turned to see Tessa approaching. She wore green shorts and a knit shirt with thin straps that bared her tanned arms and shoulders. She had braided her hair, and the braid swung behind her as she walked.

“Tessa, have you had a chance to meet Zeke? He comes and goes so fast most of the time, he’s hard to nail down.”

“No.” Tessa came up beside her and stopped, eyeing the boy as if he were a face on the post office wall. “Hello, Zeke. I’m Tessa MacRae.”

“Afternoon, Ms. MacRae. Cissy’s told me a lot about you.”

“There’s not so much to tell.”

“She’s been talking about the book you gave her. I didn’t know she liked to read that much. We went to the library a couple nights ago, and she came home with an armload.” He sounded proud. “I’m going to make sure she gets there every week.”

“She’s a smart girl.” Tessa paused. When she spoke again, her voice was even cooler. “I hate to see her drop out of school the way she did.”

“Me too.” He shook his head. “But she wouldn’t go while she’s carrying the baby. Said she just couldn’t. I figure after the baby’s born, maybe I can convince her to work on a GED, and when she sees how well she does and gets some confidence, maybe take some courses at Triplett Tech or do some long-distance courses over the computer. I looked into it already, and it sounds promising. I know she won’t want to leave the baby at first.”

Nancy was impressed, and beside her, Tessa had nothing to say.

“You decide what you want to do,” Zeke said, “about this equipment. I got a friend over in Edinburg who likes to tinker with stuff. He might get a piece or two up and running to sell.”

“Tell him it’s his if he wants it. I’d rather recycle it than junk it,” Nancy said. “And you’ll haul the rest of it away?”

“I’ll check it all first. Anything too far gone, I’ll just take over to the landfill.”

Nancy started to protest his refusal to be paid, but he held up his hand. “Now you don’t want to go making trouble for me with Cissy and my dad, do you? They just wouldn’t stand for it, and neither would I.”

Nancy closed her mouth and nodded.

“Nice talking to you both. You have a nice evening.” He walked away, and only when his back was to them and he was nearly out the barn door did he pull his cap out of his back pocket and set it on his head.

“He’s not what I expected.” Nancy turned to her daughter. “Am I right?”

“I don’t know what you expected.”

“About the same thing you did, I’d guess.”

“He seems nice. And concerned about Cissy.”

That morning Nancy had noticed a new, grimmer set to her daughter’s lips. It was still there. She hated seeing Tessa this way. She was beginning to forget what a more relaxed Tessa looked like. A happy Tessa was an imaginary figure from another lifetime.

“Why don’t we take a day off tomorrow?” she offered impulsively. “There’s a wonderful little restaurant in Woodstock right in the middle of this indoor mall of sorts, and the chef is as good as anybody in the city. Maybe we can even convince your grandmother to come with us. We could browse some of the antique stores, check out—”

“Mom, I’m okay.”

Nancy knew she wasn’t. But how did you tell a beloved daughter you knew she was lying? That you knew as much about her mental state just by looking at her as a therapist might after a dozen sessions?

“Mack didn’t stay last night,” Nancy said. “And I heard raised voices.”

“Let’s talk about
your
marriage for a change.” Tessa pulled a rolled up paper from her pocket and handed it to her mother.

Nancy glanced down at the marriage certificate she hadn’t looked at for decades—more than three decades, in fact. Every joint in her body seemed to seize and lock. “Where’d you find this?”

“In your high-school yearbook.”

Nancy tried to remember putting it there and couldn’t. But her wedding had been such a long time ago. And maybe it made sense, after all, to have put the certificate in her beloved annual. She had been so young, a baby, really, who even at twenty-two still had dreams common to high-school girls and no place to go after graduation. Until Billy came along.

“William Lee Whitlock and Nancy Ann Henry.” She gazed down at the document and shook her head nonchalantly, but her heart was beating rapidly. “I remember thinking that William Lee Whitlock was a wonderful name when the minister pronounced it, and Nancy Ann Henry was so common. The first time somebody called me Nancy Whitlock, I didn’t know who they were talking about.”

“The minister pronounced both your names three months later than the day you’ve always claimed you were married.”

She took a deep breath. “I know when I was married, Tessa.”

“You were pregnant with me, weren’t you? That’s why you claimed you were married in the spring.”

“It’s not exactly something you blurt out, is it? When would have been the right moment to tell you? I just let sleeping dogs lie.”

Tessa was silent.

Nancy was embarrassed but resolute, and denial was futile. “I met your daddy when I was still too young to know anything. I was a diversion, I guess, while he waited to start his final year at UVA. When he left here that summer, I thought I’d never see him again. You might think I’m an unbelievably foolish woman nowadays, but the truth is that even then, I knew facts when I saw them. I never really expected Billy to marry me, not even when I found out I was carrying you. But Billy, being Billy, did the gentlemanly thing.”

Tessa’s face softened. “Mom, he stayed married to you. That’s more than the gentlemanly thing.”

Nancy didn’t know what to say about that. She had turned herself into the kind of woman Billy needed, and she supposed he had seen the value of keeping her. Her social and political savvy had earned him points with clients and business connections. She kept everything in his life well oiled and trim. Even after menopause, when her friends claimed they would rather shoot a man than sleep with him, she was still there for Billy when he wanted sex. Heck, she wanted it, too. She loved the ungrateful bastard.

“How did it all happen?” Tessa said. “I guess everything I’ve ever been told was a lie. You didn’t meet at a party and fall madly in love, did you?”

“It was such a long time ago.”

Tessa put her arm around Nancy’s shoulders, more like a friend than a daughter. Her tone was cajoling. “Let’s go for a walk. It’s cooled down a little. We might be getting another storm if we’re lucky. But it’s nice enough now for a little stroll.”

“There’s nothing very exciting to tell.”

“It doesn’t have to be exciting. The truth would be nice, though. Or whatever part of it you feel like telling me.”

Nancy thought maybe the timing wasn’t so bad. She’d always known Tessa might find out she’d been conceived out of wedlock. Now that particular cat was out of the bag. And clearly this new turn in the soap opera of their lives was taking Tessa’s mind off Mack and her own marriage. And Kayley.

She started to twist her hands, then shoved them in her pockets, instead. “Let’s walk toward the river. I always like that hill that looks down on it. I used to think I’d build a cottage there someday, and your daddy and I would use it as a getaway.”

“Didn’t he want to?”

“I guess not.” Nancy wondered if she had ever asked Billy his opinion or just assumed his answer. After all, what would William Lee Whitlock want with a rustic country cottage, when he owned vacation homes in Hilton Head and Vail?