The words reverberated in her head. Echoes of the past. Words so easily spoken, so untrue, so unreliable. She paled visibly and dodged his extended arms. “No,” she rasped. “No, Chad. If you go, I won’t be waiting for you. I won’t spend my life sending you off with vapid little smiles and platitudes like, ‘Please don’t get killed before I see you again.’ I won’t!”
The lines around his mouth hardened even as she watched. The warm light in his eyes went out as quickly as a candle being extinguished. He pulled himself to his full height and brushed past her. At the door he paused to toss one last knife into her heart. “Thanks for the loving send-off.”
The door slammed behind him.
Chapter Eleven
It was her father who came into the office an hour later. Blessedly, everyone had respected her need for privacy and had let her cry out the first bout of tears alone.
Harve Jackson opened the door gingerly and, finding his daughter slumped over the arm of the leather couch with her head buried in her arms, came quietly into the room. “Come on, honey. Let your mother and me take you home.” He touched her tentatively on the shoulder.
Leigh raised her tear-bloated eyes to him. “Is everyone gone?”
“Yes.”
She sniffed, wiped at her mascara-streaked cheeks, and stood with the help of her father’s hand under her elbow. Like one bereaved, she let him lead her out of the office. Her mother and Chad’s parents were waiting for them in the hallway. Amelia came toward her and embraced her lovingly.
“Why don’t you and Sarah stay here until Chad gets back? We’d love to have you. I can’t bear the thought of you being all alone in that big house.”
“I think she should come to Big Spring with us,” Lois intervened. “We haven’t had her and Sarah to ourselves for a long time.”
Amelia looked as though she wanted to argue, but her husband’s restraining hand on her arm kept her silent. Instead, Stewart said, “We’re here when you need us, Leigh. Anytime.”
Tears, tears that she thought would have been dried up by now, flooded her eyes as she said in a choked voice, “Thank you for everything. The wedding was just beautiful.”
Lois had been holding a sleeping Sarah during this exchange. Leigh let her mother carry the baby to the Buick, as her father draped the lynx coat over her suit and led her outside in Lois’s wake. Leigh needed no urging to leave quickly. The remnants of the wedding and its following reception were repulsive to her. She avoided looking at the once-beautiful wedding cake that now resembled a ravaged carcass. The candles had been extinguished. The wicks that had glowed with a celebration of love were now blackened and lifeless. The flowers reminded her of Greg’s funeral. She breathed in the cold air as she stepped out onto the front porch. Everything beautiful in the world had suddenly seemed to decay and she couldn’t get the stench of it out of her nostrils.
Lois had been biding her time, biting her tongue, awaiting the opportunity to let Leigh know in no uncertain terms her view of the turn of events. As soon as she had handed Sarah over to Leigh where she sat in the back seat and they were wheeling away from the house, she said, “I could have warned you, but your father told me to mind my own business.”
“I’m still warning you to mind your own business. Be quiet, Lois,” Harve said.
“I won’t. Not now. Didn’t I tell you she was making a ghastly error? Didn’t I tell you she was getting into the same horrible situation she had with Greg? We begged her to come live with us after he died, but no. She had to live alone. She has no better sense than to have a baby in the back of a pickup truck and now look at what she’s gotten herself into. She never learns. She won’t listen to me.”
“It’s her business.”
Leigh let them thrash it out between them. She didn’t take offense at their talking about her as though she weren’t there. She didn’t feel she was. Her mind was far away, on a deserted highway she’d had no business driving on alone when in the last few weeks of pregnancy.
Hadn’t he said that, softly chiding her on her foolishness even as he helped her? You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever met. He’d said that, too, flashing her a brilliant smile, white against the tanned, weather-roughened face. Beard-stubbled. Blue-eyed. Eyes that laughed. Eyes that sympathized. A bandanna tied around his forehead like a renegade Apache. Thick dark hair falling over it. He’d never worn a bandanna like that since then. She’d have to tell him how much she’d liked it. Maybe someday when they played tennis or—
There might not be a someday. God, what had she done?
On that lonely stretch of highway on that summer day, racked with pain and fear, she had trusted him. Stranger that he was then, she had put her life in his hands. Why, now that she was his wife, did she mistrust him? Now that she knew the man he was, now that she loved him, why had she let fear creep in? Wasn’t love stronger than fear?
You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever met. Your husband is going to be so proud of you.
No, he couldn’t be. He couldn’t be proud of a wife who had sent him off with no word of comfort, no touch, no kiss. He certainly wouldn’t think that she loved him, not with the unselfish, self-sacrificing kind of love that each knew was essential to the survival of a marriage true to its vows of taking each other for better or worse. What if he didn’t know how much she loved him? What if something happened to him and he never knew
“Turn around,” she said suddenly.
Lois’s strident lecture on how foolish Leigh had been abruptly ceased, and she stared over the back of the seat at her daughter. “What?”
Ignoring her mother’s incredulous look, Leigh repeated, “Father, please turn the car around. I’m going back.”
“Don’t you dare, Harve, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Dar” Lois started sympathetically.
“Either turn the car around or let me out here. I’ll walk back with Sarah if necessary. I’m going to stay with Chad’s parents while he’s away.”
“Harve, you can’t,” Lois said. When the turning car told her that he could, she gave up on him and turned again to Leigh. “Leigh, it’s better this way. If you stay with him, you’ll be miserable the rest of your life.”