Wedding Ring (33 page)

Their stand was closed on Sunday. Nancy found an excuse not to accompany her mother to church, and as soon as Helen left, she drove the old farm pickup down the road to the house of a girl she’d known in high school. Patricia wasn’t eager to loan Nancy her car, particularly when she heard how far she intended to drive it, but she softened and agreed when Nancy pressed her graduation watch into Patricia’s palm with a promise she could keep it if Nancy didn’t come up with twenty dollars to buy it back.

The trip took hours, and Charlottesville was unfamiliar territory. She paid little attention to the historic buildings or the UVA campus once she found it. She asked for directions to the Zeta Psi house, which Billy had mentioned several times, and parked just down the street. Then she made her way on foot to the front door.

The girl who had given her directions had told her the house looked like a smaller Monticello, but that meant little to Nancy, since she’d never been to Charlottesville and knew little about Jefferson’s home. She straightened her skirt and made sure her blouse was tucked in before she knocked.

She was an immediate hit. Young men flirted with her, offered to duel Billy for her hand, even pretended they’d never heard of him, but in the end, someone went to get him and Billy appeared at the top of the stairs in shorts and a basketball jersey.

He was polite, taking her by the arm and moving her away from his admiring frat brothers and back outdoors before she could even say goodbye. He didn’t say anything until they were well away from the house, in a parklike cove that was probably somebody’s private property.

“How did you know where to find me?” he asked.

“Someone at your house said you’d gone back to school.”

“Did you talk to my parents?”

“You mean did I tell them I’m carrying their grandchild?” She shook her head.

When he didn’t say anything, she filled the silence. “You said you would call. I trusted you.”

“You trusted me not to get you pregnant, too.”

And look where that had gotten her. She wondered if he was trying to tell her she couldn’t trust him, that he had no plans to help her and wouldn’t be swayed. His parents were rich. They could hire lawyers. For the first time she wondered if she was wrong to push him, if he might decide to take the baby, or insist she give it up for adoption because she was unfit to raise it. Her mind flicked through terrible possibilities.

“I’m sorry,” he said, before the possibilities bloomed three-fold. “I’ve been trying to figure this out. I should have called just to say that. But with coming back here, trying to settle in, explaining myself to—” He stopped abruptly.

“To who? Who did you have to explain yourself to?”

He looked away. “A girl from back home. We were pinned.”

“Pinned?”

“I gave her my fraternity pin.”

“Like being engaged?”

“Not quite. Don’t look like that.”

“You mean you had a steady girlfriend while you were sleeping with me?”

“We broke up, or just about did, before the summer. I just made it final, that’s all.”

“Why? Why did you?”

He looked back at her. “Because I’m going to be a father. Do you think she would want me right now?”

The
right
answer would have been “Because I’m going to marry you.” A wave of nausea swept over her. She was exhausted, terrified, at her wits’ end.

She sagged against a tree, resting her head and closing her eyes. Her head was swimming. She’d had nothing to eat all day except a slice of dry toast, and she’d been in Patricia’s clunker of a car for hours. She was one step from total exhaustion.

“Do you know what this will do to my life? I’m an unwed mother. No one will ever look at me the same way again. I’ll be ‘that Henry girl.’” She gave a bitter laugh. “And the baby? The baby will be ‘that Henry bastard’!”

“Who do you think I am? I’m not going to let any kid of mine grow up like that.”

“No?” She opened her eyes and stared at him. “What do you plan to do about it?” All the terrible possibilities she’d fantasized loomed in front of her. “Because don’t you dare—don’t you
dare
—think you can take this baby away from me, Billy Whitlock. You may be rich, and your family may be powerful, but I’ll go so far away you’ll never see me. And if you try, if you try to stop me, I’ll…I’ll kill myself before I let you!”

She was as close to hysteria as she had ever come. When he stepped closer, she shoved him away. “This is
my
baby, you son of a bitch!”

“Get hold of yourself!” He grabbed her hands.

“What’s wrong, frat boy? Too much real life going on here to suit you?”

He stared at her, his eyes angry. Then he dropped her hands. “We’ll get married right away. I was trying to clear things up, Nancy, make this work somehow. And that’s the only way it’s going to work. But get one idea out of your head.
I’m
not rich. My folks are rich, and they’re going to be furious. They aren’t going to put us up in a cute little apartment while I finish school. They’re going to cut me off—like that.” He snapped his fingers. “And they’re going to make our lives a living hell.”

“Marry me?”

“It’s the best way, the only way. Believe it or not, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to make everything come together.”

“Why didn’t you call me, then? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I still hadn’t come up with a good answer. I’m still at a loss. But I know this much. We’re not telling anybody what’s going on. We’ll get a license tomorrow and go ahead with the ceremony. We’ll find somebody who’ll do it. I already checked. There’s no waiting period. A couple of weeks into the marriage, we’ll make the announcement. It will be too late for anybody to do anything at that point. Then we’ll see where we go from there.”

He took her hands, not tenderly, but as if he hoped it would stave off another attack. “We can’t think of ourselves anymore. We have to think about what’s good for the baby. And to begin with, we’re going to tell everybody that we got married a couple of months ago, right after we met, and that we knew our parents wouldn’t approve, so we got married secretly.”

She was crying. This calculating man holding her hands was not the Billy she’d fallen in love with, but he was all she had. And he was saving her from raising this baby alone and in poverty.

“Thank you,” she said, as tears slid down her cheeks. “I can get a job here. I’ll work. Maybe we can get you through school on our own.”

“Let’s find a place for you to stay tonight. Tomorrow we’ll take care of business.”

“I have to call my mother and tell her where I am.”

“Don’t tell her much.”

“I have to return the car. I borrowed it.” Nancy had promised to have the car back by evening. She knew her watch was a goner now.

“We’ll figure out something.”

She searched his face. He didn’t look happy. She supposed the tears were proof that
she
didn’t look happy, either. This was not the way she had hoped to marry. And while Billy was more than she had ever hoped for, forcing him this way was the wrong way to start a marriage. She was young. She was immature. But even so, she knew this was the worst sort of way to begin.

“We liked each other,” she said huskily. “We had fun together.”

He dropped her hands. “I think the fun is over.”

The next morning they drove to nearby Nelson County, where nobody knew them. That evening the boyish Pentecostal minister who performed the ceremony stumbled through the words as if they were brand-new to him. But it didn’t matter, because they were legally married once he was finished.

“I’ll get you a ring,” Billy promised as they left the old church, which looked more like a run-down convenience store than a house of God. “As soon as I can.”

She nodded. Mrs. William Lee Whitlock. She was numb.

“I saw a motel on the main road. Nothing fancy, but just about all we can afford.”

She nodded again. She and Billy. Married. In a motel.

At the front desk, the clerk raised a brow at the absence of a ring and the shopping bag with a few things they’d bought for the night. Billy pulled out the marriage certificate and held it up for the man to read.

He smirked and gave them his best room, which simply meant the roaches were smaller and there was only one mousetrap in the corner.

Nancy wanted the wedding night to mean something. It seemed to her that if she could just show Billy one more time how well they fit together, how easy it was to be in each other’s company, he would feel better and their marriage might flourish someday.

But stress and exhaustion took what had been simple morning sickness and blew it into something so fierce, so frightening, that she spent most of the night in the tiny bathroom with the cracked linoleum and the rust-stained sink.

Billy slept alone.

M
onday morning’s jog was longer than usual. Tessa could almost feel the ounces dropping off her already thin torso. She didn’t stop to rehydrate along the way. Instead she splashed herself with her bottle of water until halfway through her route, when she gave in and poured the remainder over her head. She kept running and thought about her mother’s confessions over yesterday’s lunch.

Nancy had been matter-of-fact, but the wound had bled through every word. Tessa was not as surprised to find she’d been conceived out of wedlock as she was to find how much pain Nancy felt about her own shotgun wedding. Clearly Nancy still believed that Billy had married her out of duty, and nothing that had come afterwards had remedied that. She felt closer to her mother because of this revelation, and understood so many things that much better.

Marriage had always seemed simple enough to Tessa. A woman met a man who attracted her. She tried on the relationship, like an off-the-rack dress at a specialty boutique. Then, if it didn’t fit or look promising, she discarded it and went on to another. If it almost fit, she made tucks here and there, raised or lowered the hem, and surveyed the final product. If the dress met her approval, she kept it and wore it everywhere.

In hindsight, Tessa was surprised she had ever been that cavalier. Until Kayley’s death, she hadn’t been a particularly complicated woman. She’d had a host of advantages. Parents who loved her, money, education, status. She had a highly developed social conscience but no paroxysms of guilt over her own good fortune. She had loved deeply, forgiven easily, and always given everyone in her sphere the benefit of the doubt. Truth was that her charmed life had not prepared her for Kayley’s death. Evil, sorrow, hatred, were abstract concepts, and she’d had no deep, personal knowledge of any of them.

Nancy’s life before marriage hadn’t taught her what
she
needed to face a crisis, either. Helen had kept her daughter busy so she wouldn’t have time to dream, but, of course, with few friends and even fewer dates, she’d done nothing but. Nancy had never experienced love, security or desire. She hadn’t even experienced much laughter. In a way, she had been like the princess in the tower, waiting for the handsome prince to rescue her. Only Tessa’s father had been anything but glad to have her once she escaped.

Marriage wasn’t simple at all. Like so many others things Tessa had learned in the past years, that was a lesson she would rather have skipped.

By the time she was only half a mile from her grandmother’s farmhouse she was thinking about Mack. She had slowed her pace, and now she walked the rest of the way to cool down.

She hadn’t spoken to him since Saturday night, when he had found her peering through Robert Owens’s window, but she had been thinking of him ever since. How clear a demarcation existed between the conscious and unconscious mind? How long had she been pushing Mack away, and when had it turned from instinctive to deliberate? At what point had she told herself she would be better off alone?

She realized now that since Kayley’s death, she had been trying not to love Mack, because he reminded her of better times. And wasn’t she also afraid that someday he might leave her, too? That if she pushed
him
away, the moment of departure was under her control?

Would a therapist have helped her see this more clearly? Helped her find ways to cope that were healthier?

Something inside her was broken. With help, could she have mended it? Could it be mended still?

She was so lost in thought that she nearly stumbled over Cissy, who was walking toward her from the direction of Helen’s house.

Tessa stopped and smiled a vague apology. “I was thinking. I didn’t even see you. Have you been to see Gram?”

“Not yet. I’m coming over later for a quilting lesson.” Cissy was dressed in a blue plaid sundress, her freckled arms bare, her hair a soft sunrise-colored cloud floating over her shoulders. “I feel better if I walk a little before the day gets too hot. I just go back and forth on the road a piece. My back aches if I sit too long.”

“Mine did, too.” Tessa surprised herself. She had stored that memory in her mental attic, along with all the others.

“I know you lost a little girl,” Cissy said. “It must have been so hard.”

This was the moment when Tessa always changed the subject. She started to now, then caught herself and wondered momentarily what might happen if she uttered just a few sentences about Kayley’s death. She tried, but nothing would come.

Cissy filled the space. “When my grandma died, I thought I was going to die, too. Losing a child, well, that would be worse.”

“It was.” Words, not sentences, but Tessa felt lighter.

A beat-up Plymouth passed, slowly enough, since the road was too narrow and rough for speed, but the two women waved and waited until it was gone.

“I wrote a few pages.” Cissy looked down at the ground and rearranged dirt clods with the toe of a dusty tennis shoe.

“Good for you.” Tessa considered her next words. “I’d like to see them. Do you feel like showing me?”

“You’d really be interested? Because I don’t want to make you sorry you offered or anything.”

“I’d like to see them.” Tessa was being honest. Working with Cissy reminded her how much teaching had once meant to her, even as it also reminded her that she was no longer performing well in a classroom setting. That last part had been on her mind a lot.

“I’ll bring them when I come for my quilt lesson.”

They parted ways, and Tessa finished her walk back to the house for a quick breakfast before she began her newest project, the root cellar and hundreds of jars of home-canned fruit and tomatoes.

When Cissy arrived after lunch, Tessa was relaxing on the front porch. Cissy was a wilted flower, hot and bedraggled and heat-flushed when she climbed up to take the chair beside Tessa’s.

“It can’t get much hotter, can it?” Cissy complained.

“Don’t tell me the mobile home doesn’t have air-conditioning?”

“Just up and stopped for no reason last night. Zeke’ll fix it. He can fix anything. But he’s been gone all day. I spent part of the morning in the house, but I don’t want them thinking I’m a burden or nothing…anything.”

Tessa wondered if Nancy had felt like a burden when she was pregnant and living with Billy’s parents in Richmond. She decided to ask her mother when she had the chance. Obviously there was more to her mother and father’s story.

Cissy frowned, as if she’d just realized how her comment had sounded. “Nobody
says
I’m a burden. I don’t want you to think bad about Mr. and Mrs. Claiborne. They been good to me. Real good. They treat me like I was a real member of the family.”

Tessa wanted to ask the girl why she wasn’t. What was keeping the two young people from marriage? Good sense? Selfish disregard for their child? An age in which marriage simply wasn’t important, and illegitimate was a word losing its hold on an entire culture?

“How’d you meet Zeke?” she asked instead, hoping that Cissy would feel comfortable with a more casual topic.

“He was playing fiddle in a string band over in Mt. Jackson, and I stopped to listen. Next thing you know, here we are.”

Tessa thought there was probably a bit more to it, since Cissy was hugely pregnant. “I’ve been thinking today about the reasons men and women find each other. What was it about Zeke that made you fall in love?”

Cissy squirmed in her seat. “He was good to me. In a way nobody else ever was.”

“I don’t know Zeke, but I like what I do know.”

Cissy looked up. “Do you?”

“I wasn’t sure I would.”

“Why?”

“I wasn’t sure he was treating you the way a woman deserves to be treated.”

“Nobody ever treated me this good. I feel right, like everything’s working the way it’s supposed to, when he walks into a room.”

It wasn’t the most romantic definition of love that Tessa had ever heard, but at its core it was as good as any. She’d once felt that way about Mack.

“I wrote about Zeke,” Cissy said. With her coloring and the heat, it was hard to tell if she was blushing, but Tessa thought it was a safe bet.

“I’d like to see it,” Tessa offered.

“It’s not lovey-dovey. Nothing like that.” Cissy fished through her purse, a beat-up canvas and straw bag that was big enough to hold lunch, dinner and a midnight snack. “Here it is.”

Tessa held out her hand, afraid that if she actually reached for the paper, the girl would snatch it back.

Cissy relinquished it slowly and with great ceremony.

Her handwriting was painfully neat. Fifth grade cursive, Tessa thought, as if she’d been practicing with triple-lined paper, measuring the tails of her letters with perfect precision. Tessa read the paper slowly to herself, then she smiled.

“Cissy, what good ideas you have.”

Cissy slumped in her chair. “You’re not just saying that, are you? Nobody ever told me I had good ideas when I was in school.”

“Well, someone should have. I’m not sure what they were thinking. Maybe they were just more concerned with grammar and spelling. Some teachers are that way.” Tessa was afraid that maybe she was becoming one of them.

Cissy had taken the two major male characters in
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
and compared their actions and personalities to Zeke’s. It wasn’t expertly done, and everything needed work. But she clearly saw the flaws and strengths of each of the three men, and compared them while organizing her opinions in a sensible yet creative way.

Cissy would benefit from a class discussion of the book, which would help her broaden her viewpoint, but there was no getting around the fact that the girl had understood the most important points of Hardy’s characters and drawn interesting conclusions about them. She was Tessa’s favorite kind of writing student, an astute and quirky observer, able to express her observations in a meaningful way.

“I’ll tell you what,” Tessa said. “Let’s break up our time into two parts. We’ll go over some of the simple stuff like punctuation and grammar and get it out of the way. Then we can talk about the way you expressed your thoughts. That’s the dessert. Because you did it so well.”

Cissy’s smile turned a dampened, disheartened pregnant teenager into a Madonna. “You’re not just saying so?”

Tessa smiled, too. “I am not just saying so. I never have the energy to lie. It’s just not in me, even when the weather’s cooler.”

Cissy’s laugh was low, husky and more adult than Tessa had expected.

Helen had gone up to her bedroom early that night. After Cissy’s quilting lesson, she had gone down to the root cellar to help Tessa identify the jars of food that were probably still safe to eat, and the experience had worn her out. She was a strong woman, but throwing out what seemed like perfectly good food—even if it was ten years old—took the starch right out of her backbone. She went upstairs right after an early supper and never returned.

About seven, Tessa took the wedding ring quilt out to the porch, where the light was still good, and settled herself in the swing, spreading the old quilt on her lap and over the wooden arms. She had successfully replaced three patches with fabric that was not too different from the original. The patches had been sewn into place and pinned with big safety pins to the batting and lining, waiting until the rest were added and she could re-stitch the carefully snipped lines of quilting.

She was lucky in a way that the quilt had been Nancy’s first and only project. She could mimic her mother’s stitches, but never her grandmother’s, which were tiny and straight. Nancy’s were more like the woman herself. Erratic, exuberant, although certainly falling short of a desire to please.

A car slowed on the road, and Tessa glanced up to note it was her mother’s.

“Like some company?” Nancy asked a few minutes later.

Tessa was struck by how different her mother looked. Nancy had missed supper and called to tell them to go on without her. Now she could see where her mother had been and what she’d been doing. “Wow!”

Nancy’s hand went to her hair. “I got my hair cut in town. I told her to whack it all off, and she certainly did. Then I went to Wal-Mart.”

This was a new Nancy. The haircut was very becoming, not masculine, but wispy and curly. Curly! “You have curly hair?” Tessa said.

“Well, I guess I must. There it is. I’ve blown it and pulled it and wound it around so many brushes in my time that I didn’t remember what it was really like. Now I can just ruffle it with my fingers and I’m all done for the day.”

“Wal-Mart?”

“Shorts, T-shirts, flip-flops.” Nancy wiggled her rubber-sandaled feet. The sandals were adorned by large plastic daisies. “Two-ninety-nine. I liked them so much, I bought three pairs in different colors and put these on in the car.”

She rummaged through a shopping bag and held up some of her purchases. The shorts were bright lemon-yellow. The shirt was horizontal stripes of yellow, red and black. Horizontal stripes, one of Nancy’s biggest no-no’s.

Tessa tried not to smile. “I hesitate to say this in case it precipitates a heart attack, but you look cute.”