Wedding Ring (40 page)

E
arly Monday morning, a light rain fell, just enough to mist the air and raise the humidity, but Tessa thought it was progress. The clouds hadn’t forgotten what to do. They were just a little rusty, a little out of practice. But the rain, as paltry as it was, seemed a good sign.

There were footsteps behind her, but she didn’t turn. She recognized the squeak of her mother’s new flip-flops.

Nancy joined her at the edge of the steps, where the rain could spatter her cheeks. “You’re up even earlier than usual, sweetie. Too wet to jog?”

Tessa gave her mother a smile. “Do you know where I’m supposed to be this morning?”

“I wondered what was up with school. Aren’t you usually back at work by now?”

“I’m taking the semester off.” Tessa hugged herself, although it certainly wasn’t cold. “I called my principal two weeks ago, and he went to bat for me and found a replacement. She’s somebody I know, and she’s good. The kids won’t be cheated. But I would have started back full-time today.”

“You know, I could have finished up here. No one expected—”

“It’s not that.”

“What, then?”

Tessa stared into the rain. Mist rose from the parched ground to meet the raindrops halfway. The maples were shrouded in a soft gray haze. Without a certain amount of faith, the presence of a sunrise would have been a question mark.

“I’m not good at what I do anymore,” she said at last. “I haven’t been good at it since Kayley died.”

“You needed to take off more time after the accident.”

Tessa couldn’t refute that. She had gone back to work after only three weeks, accepting condolences with a frozen nod, sweeping unopened sympathy notes into an empty drawer in her desk, shutting her students out of her heart, because worrying and caring about them hurt too much.

She tried to explain her decision. “I told him I’ll either figure out how to be the kind of teacher the kids need again, or I’ll quit permanently. But I have to have more time.”

“What are you going to do? We won’t be needed here after another week or so.”

“Gram still needs us.”

“That goes without saying. But she doesn’t need us right here living with her anymore. We’ll both be visiting a lot more often, and so will the neighbors and people from church.”

“Then she’ll be staying in the house?” As well as her grandmother was doing now, Tessa still wasn’t sure she should be living alone. But the alternatives seemed few and unsuitable.

“That’s what she wants. I have to believe she knows best.”

“We can work out a schedule to visit her so she’s never here for too long without one of us. We can hire somebody to come in to cook and clean.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Nancy said. “What will
you
do?”

“I don’t know.” Tessa locked her hands in front of her and lifted them to the sky. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what Mack is going to do, either. I haven’t even told him I’m taking the semester off. I just know I don’t want to go back to teaching until I’m good at it again.”

“I know one young lady who thinks you’re the best teacher in the world.”

Tessa did, too, even though the sentiment was undeserved. “Yes. Cissy’s coming over this morning. I asked her to write her life story. She’s going to let me read it.”

“Get the Kleenex ready.”

Tessa glanced at her mother. “She needs to tell somebody.”

Nancy rested her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. “Maybe you need a semester off and maybe you don’t. But I predict you’ll be back behind your desk before your grandmother’s had time to collect even one stack of old magazines from her doctor’s office.”

Cissy’s petite body was now distinctly Buddhalike, although there was no placid smile to go with it. From the moment she arrived under the dubious shelter of an ancient green umbrella until she was settled on the living-room sofa with a glass of iced tea and a plate of Helen’s old-fashioned sugar cookies, she looked worried.

“Fitch is as slick as all get-out,” she told Tessa. “Water’s not soaking in, just skimming along the surface. I should have brought the truck. I thought it would be fun to walk in the rain, but it wasn’t.”

“I’ll take you home once we’re finished. We don’t want you slipping and falling.”

“I’m nearly done with my quilt top. Soon as I finish, your grandmother’s going to show me how to quilt it up all proper.”

Tessa hoped there was still time. Cissy looked as if she could go into labor at nearly any moment, even though she wasn’t due until late October.

“I’m glad you made it, despite the rain.” Tessa sent a smile, but the words weren’t simply for reassurance. Maybe she’d been reluctant to get involved in Cissy’s life at first, but now she looked forward to her time with the girl.

“I did what you asked me to. I wrote it all down. My whole life.” For just a moment, humor sparkled in Cissy’s eyes. “Didn’t need a lot of paper, you understand.”

“It’s always better not to overwrite.”

Cissy sobered. “It’s not entertaining. I couldn’t figure out how to make it, you know, something you’d like to read.”

“I didn’t expect it to be easy.” Tessa leaned forward. “I don’t think you’ve had an easy time of it.”

Cissy shrugged, as if words were, at that moment, impossible.

“Shall I read it?” Tessa hesitated. “Or is it too personal? Would you rather just keep this for yourself?”

Cissy seemed to be weighing her alternatives. Then she reached inside the plastic grocery bag she’d brought along and handed the damp-around-the-edges pages to Tessa. She cleared her throat. “It won’t take that long.”

Tessa settled back in her chair, but Cissy got up and wandered the room, as if sitting still was too hard. From time to time she rubbed her swollen belly, as if to comfort her unborn child.

The story wasn’t easy to read. Cissy had laid out the basics with little fanfare. A young mother who hadn’t wanted Cissy or her younger brother. A father who only showed up now and then, and never with money in his pockets. A beloved grandmother who had taken Cissy in but couldn’t manage the brother, too, and had wept bitterly as he was placed in foster care. The day Cissy learned her brother would be adopted by strangers and disappear from her life forever. The death of her grandmother. Moving into a crowded apartment with her emotionally unstable mother and a new stepfather who drank uncontrollably.

Then Zeke, who had turned her lonely world upside down, who had reached out a hand to her, told her she was beautiful, bought her flowers and stuffed animals, and finally taken her into his heart and his bed.

Tessa stopped at the next to last page and took a breath. Cissy was sure she had found her knight in shining armor. For the girl’s sake, Tessa hoped she was right. Tessa liked Zeke, but they were both so young. So very, very young. And there was a baby on the way and no wedding ring.

She turned the page and read the last few paragraphs, and for a moment she couldn’t make sense of them. The rest of the story had been in carefully wrought prose. The handwriting had been neat and easy to read. This page was scribbled, as if Cissy had written it as an afterthought. Several words were misspelled. There was virtually no punctuation. But it was the content that was a knife in Tessa’s heart.

“Oh, Cissy.” She put down the paper and looked up at the girl. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Neither do I.” Cissy stood with her back to Tessa, her shoulders hunched. “And that’s why I never did tell anybody.”

“Who is this Lucas?”

“He’s a friend of Zeke’s, or Zeke thought he was, anyway. They went to high school together.”

“How…did it happen? Or do you want to tell me?”

“Zeke and I’d been together a while. Six months, I think. We were happy. It was the first time since my grandma died I’d been happy. I wanted to be with him. He made me feel so good, so special, and we were careful most of the time when we…you know. We knew better than to make a baby while we were so young.”

Cissy faced her. “There was a party this one night, and Lucas was there. Zeke got called away. His mama had to go to the emergency room. She got bit by a spider and swelled up something fierce, and his dad called to tell him where they’d gone. Zeke wanted me to come with him to the hospital, but I wasn’t sure how they’d feel about me being there. They didn’t know me very well, and I felt I’d be in the way.”

Tessa imagined that Cissy had felt “in the way” most of her life. “So you stayed at the party?”

“Lucas said he’d take me home when the party was over, and Zeke was so worried he said that would be okay. Only when it came time to go, Lucas, he’d had a lot to drink, so I said I’d drive. I was going to drop him at his house, then take his car back to the place where I was staying. Only, when we got to Lucas’s house, he said he’d need help getting inside.”

For a moment Tessa wished she had never started this by asking Cissy to write her life story. Then she looked in the girl’s eyes and saw how much she needed to talk about it. “And he raped you,” Tessa said, trying to make it easier by using the word first.

“I tried to get away from him. But he’s big. Over six foot. And strong. And he’d had so much to drink, I’m not sure he knew what he was doing.”

“Oh, I suspect he did.”

Cissy averted her gaze. “I scratched him good. That was about all I could do. After, he said he was sorry, and he asked me not to tell Zeke.”

“Did you?”

Cissy shook her head. She looked miserable. “I didn’t think he’d want me. You know.”

“Did you think about going to the police?”

This time she shook her head in horror. “How could I prove I didn’t want him to do it? He told me if I tried, he’d swear I did. And why would they believe me? I’m nothing to anybody here. I’m nobody.”

Tessa was sorry the girl hadn’t reported the rape, but she understood why Cissy had kept the truth locked in her heart all these months. She also understood how much damage the secret had done. “The baby?”

“I figured it all out. If the baby comes when the doctor says it’s supposed to, then it’s Zeke’s baby. But if it comes later…”

“Did you tell the doctor?”

“No, I just asked him, you know, when it was conceived.”

The word seemed incongruous, an adult word from a little girl who was still trying to put her world into perspective after an ordeal no one should ever undergo.

“And he said?”

“Before I was ra—before Lucas. Two weeks before. Maybe even three.”

Tessa reached out and took her hand. “Is this why you won’t marry Zeke?”

“He’s been asking me since the beginning. He
wants
to marry me.”

“And you?”

Her next words were so soft, Tessa had to strain to hear them. “What if it’s not his baby? What if the doctor’s wrong?”

“You’ve had an ultrasound recently?”

Cissy nodded.

“They can pinpoint age, Cissy. Particularly later in the pregnancy. If the doctor says—”

“What if he’s
wrong
?”

Tessa pulled the girl over to sit beside her. “What will happen if you tell Zeke the truth, honey?”

Cissy didn’t protest. She gave one miserable shake of her head. “I don’t know.”

“But you’ve thought about it?”

“Not at first. I thought I could never tell him. What if he thinks I wanted Lucas to…you know.”

“Have you ever given him a reason to think that?”

“No!”

“What are you thinking now?”

Cissy threaded her fingers into a knot on her belly. “I got three choices. I can tell him and see what he says. I can marry him and lie to him the rest of my life. Or I can just up and leave him right now, before the baby comes.”

Clearly she had a handle on the possibilities. Tessa probed a little more. “I can’t see you living very well with choice number two.”

“I been trying to live without telling him the truth, and it’s not working.”

“I know. And choice number three means you don’t trust him to hear the truth and make his own choices about it.”

“I got to tell him.” Cissy examined her fingers. “I just don’t think I can do it alone.”

Tessa had known from the first that this girl would suck her in, that knowing Cissy would complicate her life and demand responses she wasn’t ready to give. All her barriers had slammed into place at their first meeting, yet here she sat with Cissy, her own choice as clear as any she’d ever made.

“Of course I’ll go with you,” Tessa said. “Will that help?”

Cissy gave a quick nod. “What if he throws me out?”

Tessa took and squeezed her hand. “Then you’ll come back here with us and we’ll figure out what to do together. We aren’t going to let anything happen to you, Cissy. There’s not a woman in this house who would. We’ll make sure you and the baby are taken care of.”

“I never did anything, you know, to deserve that kind of help.”

“You don’t have to do a thing. It’s not about deserving anything. It never is. We care about you. It’s that simple.”