Faith flung back the covers—she was fully dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt—and went to the dresser to pick up her hairbrush. “By ‘decided,’ do you mean our engagement? Do you mean, have I picked out my dress yet?” Before he could speak, she turned on him. “Look, Eddie, I don’t know what’s going on with me right now. I thought my life was settled, but I’m not sure it is.”
“What are you saying?” There was a note of panic in his voice. “You aren’t calling off the wedding, are you?”
Faith put her hands to her temples. “Sometimes I feel like I’m in a one-act surrealistic play.” She looked at him. “Eddie, I know you gave me a ring and I’ve worn it around my neck for nearly two years, and I know that you and I talk about marriage as if we did the deed years ago. But the truth is that you never officially asked me to marry you and I never accepted.”
When she started to speak, she put up her hand. “No, just listen to me. I need some time before I decide what to do with my life.”
“Damn him!” Eddie said under his breath. His fists were clenched at his sides.
“Wait a minute! I thought Ty was your friend as well as mine.”
“Not when it comes to love,” Eddie said, his blue eyes cold and hard.
When Faith looked at him, she took a step back. Eddie’s eyes were as angry and as hate-filled as his mother’s.
Faith opened the little enameled box on top of her dresser and took out Eddie’s ring on the chain. “I think you should keep this until things between us are more certain,” she said quietly.
“Faith, you can’t let one afternoon with Ty change your entire future.”
“How do you know how much time I spent with him?”
“Do you think you can do anything in this town without everyone knowing?” He stepped toward her. “You and I are engaged, but you went out with another man.”
“We will only be engaged when you tell your mother and we toast with champagne at your house.”
Eddie stayed where he was and said nothing.
Faith gave him a smile, then dropped the ring into his shirt pocket. “Let’s give this some time, shall we? When you’re ready to go public with us, then I’ll be ready to listen. But for now, I think we should…” She wasn’t sure what to say.
“We should what? Just be friends? Is that what you want to tell me but can’t make yourself say? We’ve spent the last four years together, but you blow me off after you spend just a few hours with your ex-lover? Is that what I’m supposed to understand?”
“Eddie, I really don’t like your tone.”
“And I don’t like what you’re doing with my life. We had it all planned. But now you’re throwing it away.” He took a deep breath and calmed his anger. “Faith,” he said in the voice of a man giving advice to a child, “you’re one of the smartest women I’ve ever met and right now you need to think about what you’re doing. You can’t throw me away for someone like Tyler Parks.”
“What does that mean? That you think you’re a higher class than he is?”
“Don’t be absurd. But I am thinking of practical matters. If you marry Tyler, where will you live? In that shack of his out in the woods? Will you get pregnant on your wedding night and spend your pregnancy working at the local Burger King?”
“For your information, Mr. Edward Wellman, while you and I have been at college having a good time, Ty has been here earning money. Not only that, but he’s bought me a house.”
“A house?” Eddie said, his voice low, his eyes wide. “What kind of house?”
“That big old farmhouse just past the Carsons’ place.”
Eddie frowned for a moment as he thought. When he remembered the house, his frown deepened.
His expression made Faith smile. She didn’t want to betray Ty’s confidence and tell about the new highway, but it was nice to see that Eddie knew the house and knew that it wasn’t just a “shack in the woods.”
Eddie recovered himself. “What has Ty been doing to earn money?”
There was a hint of something in his voice that Faith didn’t like. She also didn’t like the way this argument was going. She’d had very few disagreements with Eddie in her life. As kids she and Tyler had been the ones with the ideas. They’d come up with plans for the exciting things they did, such as putting pennies on the railroad tracks.
Eddie had always been a follower, the one who was up to doing anything they wanted to, but when it got too strenuous, Eddie had stayed far enough away from them to watch, but not participate.
She would have said that she knew everything there was to know about Eddie, but now she was seeing a different side of him. She was seeing what she recognized as his mother in him. She’d never thought about it, but it was inevitable that he would have picked up some of his mother’s snobbery. What was making her sick was that Eddie was directing that snobbery at their friend Ty. Considering that Ty had twice saved Eddie’s life when they were kids, he shouldn’t snub him. But then, the first time Eddie’d been saved, he said that if it hadn’t been for Ty he wouldn’t have been there in the first place, so in a way, it was Ty’s duty to save him. Ty had punched Eddie in the nose. The second time Ty saved him, Eddie said, “Thank you.”
Now, as Faith listened to Eddie, she thought that she wanted him to leave her house and never come back. Instead, she said, “I think it would be better for both of us to take the summer to think about what we want to do with our lives.”