Wedding Ring (28 page)

“Where did you meet?” Tessa said. “Were you at a party, the way you always told me?” She started to walk, and, reluctantly, Nancy followed.

“No, I was selling tomatoes, and when he said something fresh to me, I threw one at him.”

Tessa stopped. “You’re kidding, right?”

Nancy thought about Billy’s lack of interest in her this summer, and her mouth hardened into a thin line. “You think I’m kidding? Someday soon I’ll demonstrate. Then you’ll see what a pitching arm I have.”

June 1964

H
igh-school graduation had come and gone, and there’d been no money for college, although Nancy hadn’t really wanted to go, anyway. She didn’t want to be a teacher or a nurse, and the high-school guidance counselor had tried to steer all the smart girls toward one or the other. She thought she might like to be an interior decorator, although she wasn’t sure how to go about that. The one thing she had been absolutely certain of was that she wanted to leave Toms Brook and everything it represented behind her.

Unfortunately, four years later, she was still standing smack-dab in the middle of town.

Nancy watched as her mother paused on her way to the red mud parking area just in front of the shabby little farm stand where she marketed her vegetables and preserves. Scratching a shoulder, Helen faced her daughter one last time.

“Nanny, you sure you got everything you need? I filled the Thermos with tea and put your sandwiches in the cooler. Make sure you hide the cash box all the time.”

Nancy rolled her eyes. “I know, Mama. You think a masked man with a six gun is going to raid some old hick vegetable stand?”

Helen looked tired, and older than her forty-four years. She wore a shapeless seersucker wraparound skirt and a white blouse with old-lady lace-up shoes. Her dark hair was already more than half gray. Nancy didn’t know why her mother couldn’t try a little harder. She was younger than the mothers of many of Nancy’s friends, and she might be almost attractive if she would dye and set her hair or use a little makeup. But nobody could tell Helen Henry anything.

The twin lines between Helen’s eyes deepened. “What I do know is that I worked hard to get this produce, and I don’t want somebody else making off with my rewards.”

“You’ll be back after lunch?” Nancy said.

“I said I would be, didn’t I? That’s when it’ll get busy. All you have to do is tidy up ’til then. And put aside all those soft tomatoes.”

Nancy watched her mother make her way to the old Ford pickup. Helen would be back by two o’clock with new bushels of tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers and sweet corn. Last night’s thunderstorm had left such deep puddles in the garden that she’d decided to wait until the worst of the water drained off before she picked more produce for the afternoon rush.

Once the pickup was gone, Nancy relaxed a little. If she was lucky, nobody she knew would stop by or see her here. Most of her high-school classmates had left town for good or found jobs farther afield in Woodstock or Strasburg. The class president had gotten a job in a real estate office down in Mt. Jackson, where his uncle lived. Most likely someday he would own the office and half the countryside, too. He was such a smooth talker that at least two female members of the senior class had become personally acquainted with the back seat of his daddy’s Pontiac.

After high school, Nancy had gotten a job helping at the elementary school library and office. She was taking some classes at night to learn to type and do shorthand, but she didn’t seem to be talented at either. She was afraid she was going to spend the rest of her life helping out at the school for minimum wage, struggling to get her shorthand curlicues just right and selling tomatoes when school was out of session.

She glanced at her wrist. The Elgin watch Helen had given her for graduation claimed it was only 8:00 a.m. That meant she had eleven hours to go before Helen rolled in the outdoor display stands, and secured and locked the folding doors. Eleven excruciating, boring hours until she was free, at least more or less.

She had wanted a better summer job. She could have found one, too, if her mother hadn’t insisted she mind the stand for the summer. But how could she refuse? She hated farm work, but she knew their market garden paid a sizeable portion of her mother’s bills. No matter how much she fought with her mother—and she certainly did fight with her—she also felt bad about how hard Helen worked. She couldn’t leave her to work harder. So this summer she would serve as free labor, but hopefully it would be the last time.

She had brought two magazines to read, one with poor Jackie Kennedy staring right at her from the cover, but first she had to prepare for the day. The display stands were framed wooden platforms that tilted at a slight angle. She picked out the trash, corn husks, leaves and overripe produce, then took cloths and a bucket of water from the spigot by the front door to dust and scrub, moving vegetables back and forth as she did.

She liked to make attractive displays. It was the only part of working here that she found tolerable. In the fall she polished apples and piled them in geometric stacks, yellow nestled with red so they showed to their best advantage. Now that the tomato season was underway, she saved the largest, reddest tomatoes for the top of the quart and half-bushel baskets, and stacked the smaller, greener tomatoes in the bottoms. Eggplant, with its gleaming purple-black skin, looked most attractive if paired with peppers. Later in the season she would have red peppers to sell, as well, and she would place the eggplant in between the green and the red to show them off to advantage.

She graduated to the jars of preserves. They gleamed, jewel-like, in neat rows on a shelf near the front. She dusted and turned them so each label was in full view.

Helen complained about the time Nancy took arranging the stands, but what else did she have to do all day? The gravel floor didn’t need sweeping or mopping. There were no records to keep, no windows to wash. There were vegetables and jars, and there was time to fill.

This morning she took her time over the tomatoes. The best specimens had been snatched up yesterday almost as soon as they’d been put out. Only the overripe and the underripe were left, until Helen returned with a fresh crop. She had promised her mother she would take those that were too soft to sell and put them in a bucket to take home. Helen planned to can them that evening after supper. Nancy knew she would feel obliged to help.

There were more soft tomatoes than she had expected, due to a heat wave that made the valley feel like a swamp. She filled two buckets before she quit and set them under the table where she took money and made change. The metal cash box was hidden between the table legs under a board that swung out to reveal it. Her mother was proud of her hiding place, but Nancy figured Helen’s invention wouldn’t fool anybody who really needed the money.

She was lining the corn up end to end outside under the awning when a car swung in and pulled up to the stand. They were close enough to Skyline Drive that tourists sometimes came through and stopped, although they didn’t get as many as the nearby towns with stores and banks and things to see. Toms Brook was a place to receive mail and maybe go to church, but there wasn’t much more to it. Just that and some old houses with wide front porches where you could sit and stare at the people across the road, who were staring at you.

The car was unfamiliar, a shiny red convertible with toothy grillwork on the front and a white V-shaped panel on the side. Nobody she knew had anything half as cool.

The door opened, and a young man about her own age unfolded gradually until he was standing beside the car, looking down at his tire. To her eyes, he was as exotic as the car, broad-shouldered, clean-cut and utterly confident. As he turned to look at her, she saw that his short dark hair set off dark-lashed brown eyes and a straight sloping nose. And when he grinned, his teeth were absolutely straight.

“I was bouncing around so much I thought I might have a flat. I guess it’s that road. It needs some work.”

“Always will,” she said, trying not to stare. As she was busily not staring, though, she noted his crisply ironed shirt and the knife-edged pleat in his tan pants. She thought he looked a lot like Ricky Nelson without the pout, but with every bit of the glamour.

“I’m supposed to buy a bushel of tomatoes, anyway. I’m working over at the Dan-D restaurant for the summer. They want some for salads.”

She knew the Dan-D. She tried to picture him there and couldn’t. It was an ordinary place, not too far from the river, flanked by half a dozen tourist cabins set back toward the woods. It was the kind of place people not much better off than her mother went to spend a few days of vacation.

“I’ve got tomatoes cheap.” She tried to sound nonchalant. “We’ll have better ones by afternoon, though.”

“I’ll take whatever you’ve got right now. They’ll be good enough. Old Wallace—that’s the cook—can’t make a salad to save his life, anyway.”

“I’ll pick out the best ones.” Nancy thought her heart was going to leap out of her chest, it was beating so hard. She felt as if she was talking to a celebrity. The car, the clothes, the way he stood. All were signs of a life she had never lived herself.

“Thanks, that would be great.”

She made good on the offer, retrieving a bushel basket and choosing the best tomatoes from the tops of the baskets she’d readied for display. She wanted to ask him about himself, what he was doing at the Dan-D with a car like that one, how long he would be staying, and if he might be stopping by for more vegetables as summer wore on. But she knew better. She sold tomatoes, and he drove a car that probably cost as much as her mother made in a very good year. Or two.

“I’m glad we got some rain,” he said, wandering between displays, looking them over as if he was really paying attention. “But now I’m going to have to scrape the mud out of the coves.”

“Coves?”

“Those white indentations on the side of my car. All Corvettes have them.”

“That’s a Corvette?”

“Heck, I thought every girl in the world knew what a Corvette looked like. What’s the point of having one?”

“So you can scrape mud out of the coves when you don’t have anything better to do.”

He laughed as if she’d said something really funny. “You must live around here. They don’t import you for jobs like this one, do they?”

“They imported you, didn’t they?”

He leaned against the table as she carefully transferred his tomatoes into brown paper bags. “My dad went to school with Dan.” When she didn’t respond, he said, “Dan, the guy who owns Dan-D? Dad called Dan and asked him if he had a job for me this summer. Unfortunately, he did.”

“You don’t want to be here?” It was just barely a question. Of course he didn’t. Who did?

“God, no. But Dad’s furious at me. I was supposed to graduate from UVA this summer, but I didn’t take all the courses I needed. I wasn’t even this close.” He held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “He says it’s time I learned about real work and what’s waiting for me if I don’t finish up next spring.”

He was so friendly, so candid, that she almost forgot to be shy or flustered. “So, have you learned anything new?”

“Really? Well, no. Not so much except that I like it here. Dan’s got me doing KP, you know, peeling potatoes and shucking corn and scouring pots and pans. I don’t like that part. But I like exploring when I’m not working. I like hiking and things like that.”

“Why’d you goof off?”

“Oh, drinking. Parties. Women. Taking classes I liked better than accounting and economics.” He grinned and shrugged.

She tried to imagine having that kind of time and freedom. Working and night school were just an extension of high school, where there had never been time to fit in or have fun. The few dates she’d accepted had been anything but exciting, and typing classes were not the place to meet eligible young men.

“You’re looking wistful.”

She found he was staring at her. “Nothing of the kind.”

“Sure you were. Are you in college somewhere? This is a summer job?”

For a moment she considered lying, but Helen had drummed into her the importance of honesty, and besides, she wasn’t sure she was thinking straight enough right now to keep up with her own lies. “I work over at the elementary school. In the library. I haven’t decided what I really want to do yet.”

“I haven’t met many people our age.”

That didn’t surprise her. The Dan-D was a family place, not one of the spots anyone their age went for excitement. She wasn’t even sure where those spots were. Young men from Fitch Crossing liked to go off in the woods, drink beer and shoot anything that moved in the dark. It amazed her any of them had made it to graduation.

“You drive that car slow enough and smile that smile of yours, and you’ll meet every girl in Shenandoah County,” she said.

“You like the car and the smile?”

She might be a country girl, but she knew better than to say yes. “Just the car.”

He laughed. “You’re a cool customer, aren’t you?”

She was anything but cool. She was afraid that when she took his money, her hands were going to drip a gallon of perspiration on the counter. “That’ll be two fifty.”

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a wallet. From one quick glance she thought it might be real alligator. All it needed was a head and teeth. “My name’s Billy Whitlock,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“Nancy. Nancy Henry.”

“How do you do, Nancy?” He held out three dollar bills.

When she reached for them, his hand closed around hers, and he shook solemnly.

She was afraid the bills were going to wilt or dissolve, and she snatched back her hand. “I’ll see if I have enough change. We just opened.”