“You should,” Mory agreed, and gave me a hug. “You have that nice wave in it and you’re lucky to have that color. Bree was always so jealous.” She cackled a little then remembered again where we were and why we were here. “How’s Cain doing today?”
“He’s…” I hesitated, because whatever I said would be a little bit of a guess. He hadn’t spoken much this morning, mostly just frowning or looking very, very sad. It would have been hard for someone else to tell that, I thought, but I’d gotten to know his expressions, the little crinkle in the corner of his eye and the funny way his lip twisted when he was upset.
“He’s ok,” I finally said. I saw Cain across the room, speaking with the pastor but also watching me. He hadn’t been talking so much but every time I’d looked up today, he’d met my eyes. And when we’d been close enough to touch, he had. Touched me, I meant, like putting his arm around me or when we’d been waiting for the valet to drive up his car at the hotel, he’d put both of them around me to hold me to his chest.
“It’s cold out here. Are you cold?” he’d asked, and I’d nodded, which hadn’t been exactly true. I was perfect when I was tucked up against his body like that, his hard, muscular body, which I now knew had just a light spray of blonde hair, the same color as his beard coming in on the mornings when he hadn’t shaved. I remembered it rubbing against my breasts, that one time when we’d been together, naked—
“Ari? You’re bright red and panting,” my sister said. “Are you sick or something?”
I removed my hand from my heart, which was beating out from behind my breastbone, and also remembered where I was. In the banquet room, yes, but still in a church!
“Oh, my word. Here comes Mama,” my sister hissed. “Have you seen her yet?”
I hadn’t, even though she’d wanted me to come over the moment we’d stepped off the plane. “No, not yet. Is she mad at me?”
“With everything happening with Aubree and her husband, she’s laying into someone twenty-four seven. Darn it, it’s too late for me to run.”
At least Mama had Aunt Jill with her. “Hi, honey!” my aunt said and gave me a huge hug. “Kayleigh’s doing fine,” she said quietly, before I even had to ask.
“Oh, I’m so glad!” I told her, and hugged her again.
“What are you talking about, Jill?” my mom questioned, immediately suspicious. She hadn’t become the gossip queen for nothing: she knew how to sniff out the action. “Why wouldn’t Kayleigh be all right?”
“Hi, Mama,” I told her to distract her from my aunt. She turned to me and her hands went to smooth down my hair in the familiar gesture.
“Oh, Aria,” she greeted me back, but she hugged me too, and smiled like she was happy to see me. “We’re glad you could make it back home.”
“Actually—” I started to tell her that actually, I might be moving here permanently, but she cut me off.
“It’s nice that you were able to come for the memorial for Cain’s aunt, when you wouldn’t for your own uncle’s funeral.”
Uncle Terrance, she meant. I swallowed and tried to take a breath.
“He had many friends who cared about him,” Mama told me. “It was a beautiful service and very well attended.”
“It wasn’t either,” Aunt Jill said. She didn’t often go against her sister-in-law and she looked surprised that she had right now, but she went on ahead. “There weren’t that many people there besides our family. There weren’t that many people who liked him. I hate him.” She turned just as red as I did sometimes.
“Jill!” my mama exclaimed.
“I hate him too, and I wouldn’t have gone to his funeral for one million dollars.” There. I’d said it. “Miss Liddy was a wonderful woman and she deserves a memorial like this. Terrance didn’t. I’m glad I wasn’t there.”
All three of them turned to look at me and my mama’s mouth dropped open in total amazement. “Aria Louise! You don’t hate anyone. That’s not my good girl talking.” She shook her head. “I’ve never heard you like this. It must be that Cain’s influence on you.”
“Cain doesn’t have anything to do with it,” I said, my temper flaming. “I do hate Terrance, Mama. I know I shouldn’t but I do. He was a terrible person.”
“You just didn’t like how he teased you,” she acknowledged. “He called you ‘biscuit,’ but it was only—”
“No, I didn’t like how he teased me! I didn’t like how anyone teased me and made me feel so bad!”
“They were joking, Aria. They weren’t trying to hurt your feelings,” she told me, and I knew that. They had hurt them, though. “You had a thin skin. You remember how that worked at the pageants,” she said to Aunt Jill, but my aunt just shook her head. “Terrance didn’t mean anything by what he said to you. Is that really why you didn’t come to his funeral? Because of teasing that happened fifteen years ago? Aria, that’s not charitable.”
“Charitable,” I repeated. Anger, hot and suffocating, swelled inside me. “Charit—” I started to repeat, but the word broke into pieces as the feelings closed my throat.
“He wasn’t a good man, Amber,” Aunt Jill said. Her voice shook. “He was a bad person.”
“What do you mean by that?” my mom asked her.
“He touched me.” When the words left my mouth, I couldn’t call them back in. They floated around Mama, Aunt Jill, Amory, and me, little clouds of poison.
“What?” Amory asked. She sounded confused. “What did you say, Aria?”
“He—when he used to take me places, he’d take me to his house and he—he used to touch me and make me touch him. He did it once in our living room. I remember—” But I stopped before I said that I’d been looking out the window as it happened, wishing so hard that my daddy’s car would pull up after his shift and make it stop. It had to stop.
“Aria,” my mom gasped. “Aria!”
“I’m not making it up. It’s true,” I told her.
“It happened to Kayleigh, too.”
I turned to my aunt and my hand flew to my heart, which had just stopped for a moment. “No. Oh, no.”
But she nodded. “She told us on the day of the funeral, after she woke up at the hospital.”
“The hospital?” Mama gasped and Aunt Jill nodded again, angrily.
“She took enough of something that we thought we would lose her. She thought she was the only one who had suffered like that, but of course not. Of course he had other victims.”
I thought that I should have guessed it. Maybe I could have helped her, or we could have helped each other, but we were both so busy hiding it like we’d been the ones who had done something wrong. “I’m so sorry, Aunt Jill,” I told her, and she nodded again and squeezed my hand hard.
“I think that’s why he took his life,” she said, and really, that didn’t surprise me much. Mama had been so careful to assure me that there was nothing unnatural about Terrance’s death that I’d known something was off about it. “I think somehow, some of the truth was going to come out. He took the easy way, the damn coward. Cy and I would have killed him for what he did to our daughter if he hadn’t already done it himself.”
“Jill.” My mother reached and grabbed her arm and she reached for me, too. “Aria!”
“I’m sorry I told you like this,” I said to her. “I wasn’t going to tell anyone. Not ever.” My sister was wiping at my cheeks with a tissue and I realized that I was crying. A lot. “I’m sorry, Mama.”
She looked at me, her beautiful eyes huge and also brimming with tears. “Why would you be sorry?”
“Can everyone please be seated?” the pastor asked into the microphone at the front of the room. It was so packed with Miss Liddy’s friends and my family that he needed to say it several times to be heard, and it took that long for me to react to the words.
“It’s starting,” I told my shocked relatives.
“Aria…” My mom’s hand clutched my arm. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know,” she told me again, and turned to my sister and said it to her
, too. “I wasn’t myself, after your father…I thought that man was helping us. He was hurting you?”
“It’s ok,” I answered her. “It’s ok now, Mama.” We couldn’t talk about it, not here. “I have to find Cain.” I pulled away from her and Amory stepped in.
“Come on and let’s find seats, Mama,” she said. “It’s all right. Ari’s all right.” She looked at me and wiped her own eyes. “Are you?”
I nodded. “I am. I am, now.” I walked away from them, not really seeing where I was going, up to the front of the room to sit with Cain. He looked at me with a question on his face as I sat down and he put his arm around me. I leaned against him and closed my eyes for a moment. I’d been sorry that I’d told my mother, right up to the moment that Aunt Jill said that it had happened to Kayleigh, too. Maybe it was better for everyone to get it all out, everything into the open.
Cain kissed my forehead. “You ok?” he whispered, and I nodded against his shoulder. He needed me now, not the other way around.
The pastor spoke for a while, wonderful things about Miss Liddy and her generosity and kindness, and several of her friends talked about meeting her sixty or seventy years before and loving her just the same as they had back then. Then it was Cain’s turn to talk. I felt him take a deep breath before he stood and walked to the lectern.
“Thank you all for coming to honor my aunt,” he told them, and there were murmurs in response. I looked around at the crowd of people and saw some sympathetic faces and some that looked a little angry, some that looked disbelieving. You don’t know him, I told them in my mind. You don’t know.
“I’m Cain Miller and I was the boy who Elodie took in to live with her twenty years ago,” he stated. “I hadn’t seen Aunt Liddy much before then, but she’d always sent me presents at Christmas and my birthday, and written me letters and cards, and sometimes I got to talk to her on the phone. Once, I remember very well, we went to her house for lunch. It was the most wonderful day. She smiled at me and hugged me like she already knew me so well and she let me eat anything I wanted. I was full as a tick.” He smiled, too. “She introduced me to the little girls who lived next door. One of them was just a baby with red curls on her head and big, green eyes.” He looked at me and nodded. “That was a wonderful day,” he said again.
“I came to live with her when I was ten because my parents had done awful things, to each other and to me. She didn’t hesitate to say that I was welcome in her house, even though she’d never had children of her own and never thought she would. I’m certain she never expected an angry, destructive kid like me to drop into her lap. I was furious at the world and I took it out on her. On everyone,” he said, and I watched some heads nod. He’s not that, not anymore, I wanted to tell them.
“Aunt Liddy loved me anyway. I never knew what that was like before. I never had someone love me,” he said. His voice was quiet but the microphone caught the words. “She didn’t get angry at me back, she just loved me more. She told me that she knew I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. She said she knew that things would seem better in the morning. She said that I was going to be just fine.” He stopped for a moment and I wanted to run up to the lectern too, to hold him and tell him that he was.
Cain cleared his throat and went on. “We’ve all been told how to act, what’s good and righteous. Aunt Liddy didn’t need the reminders. She just was good, just purely righteous, every day of her life. I left her and moved away so I wouldn’t ruin things for her here and to try to prove to everyone else that I was worth more than they thought. I missed her every day but I always knew that she was in my corner. No matter where I was or what I did, she loved me and was proud of me. At first, without her, I felt like I was lost.” It seemed like he wasn’t speaking to us now, not us in the audience. His gaze went off into the distance. “I wished I hadn’t left Tennessee because I missed that time together, all those years. I’m sorry about a lot of things but I’m grateful that I got to know her at all. I think she made all of our lives better.”
Many, many heads nodded.
“She used to tell me that one day I’d settle down and be happy with someone and I never believed it, but she knew best, as always.” Cain looked right at me. “I’m also glad that she got to know that she’d been right and that I was marrying Aria. Aunt Liddy was so happy that somehow, I’d found this wonderful, sweet, generous woman, a woman with a heart bigger than the state of Tennessee, and she agreed to marry me. Me,” he said, sounding surprised. He looked at me and I smiled at him through my tears.
“Some things have gone wrong in my life and I’ve done a lot to put myself off the path, too. A lot,” he repeated. “But somehow, I got so lucky. Somehow, I was born to be the son of the man who had Liddy Miller as his sister, and somehow she lived next door to Aria McCourt. Aria Miller, now.”
“Aria Miller,” I whispered back. His wife.
“I’m grateful every day. I’m the luckiest man who ever lived.” He turned and looked at the picture of Miss Liddy, smiling as she sat on her front porch. “I love you,” he told her, and covered his eyes as he walked back to his seat. When he got there, I put my arms around him and felt him shake a little, and I heard a lot of sniffing and some sobs. I was one of the sobbers.
“That was beautiful,” my mama told him after the service was over. The guests were enjoying the spread that the caterer from Chattanooga had prepared and they were writing memories of Miss Liddy in journals that I hoped Cain would be able to read someday.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he answered, and I was sure that he wasn’t aware that his fingers tightened over mine.
“I hope you and Aria will come to my apartment for dinner tomorrow. She and I have things to discuss.” Her eyes filled with tears and I put my arms around her.
“I love you, Mama,” I told her. “I know you love me, too. It’s ok.”
“You were right about Aria’s heart,” she told Cain. “Don’t go breaking it.”
He took my hand again and held it even tighter, and he nodded at her as she walked away. A lot of people left and the goodbyes took a long time. My relatives had to hug and kiss me and they shook hands with Cain and hugged him, too, which seemed to shock him. Miss Liddy’s friends told him how much he’d also changed her life, for the better—how even though she hadn’t expected him, he’d been the son she’d never known she needed. It took him a while to be able to talk after he heard that.
“I’m so tired,” he said as we walked out to his car. “I don’t know why I’m so tired.”
I took the keys from his hand. “Because you’re sad,” I explained as we got in. “My mama slept for days after we lost my father. Days and days, and us girls were so scared that she wasn’t going to wake up. Bree kept holding a mirror under her nose.” I thought back. “It took at least a year before she seemed to wake up again.”
“I’m not sad, not really,” Cain answered. He rested his head against the seat. “I feel better than I did before.”
“You got to see how loved she was. Not just by you and me,” I said, and he nodded.
“I’m glad I got to see it. I’m glad other people loved her like I did.” He reached across the car to rest his hand on my knee. The next time I looked over at him, he was asleep.
That gave me plenty of time to think as I drove us over Flat Top Mountain and down into the valley of Soddy Daisy. I thought about what he’d said in his speech, mostly, about how surprised he’d sounded when he talked about me and our marriage. It had been a surprise to both of us. As much as I’d already cared about him then, I shouldn’t have jumped into marrying him that way. I should have waited, taken trips out to San Francisco and had him come to visit me here. We should have talked about what had happened and what we both wanted for the future.
And after all that, maybe we wouldn’t have ended up together. I put my hand on top of Cain’s and tried to imagine my life without him in it. I’d still work at the law firm, which I hadn’t enjoyed very much, and I’d still be going out with Kayle
igh and Cass. No, I reconsidered. Cassidy’s life was changing, too, and Kayleigh—I had to talk to Kayleigh. Learning that Terrance had hurt her made me understand her a lot better, and made me very, very sad.
I sniffed and wiped my eyes on my sleeve. Well, maybe Cain and I shouldn’t have jumped into getting married like we did, but here we were. And what was I going to do about it now? I looked over at him, at his relaxed face as he slept. What was I going to do?
I was going to have to put on my big girl pants, that was what, I answered my question. And put on some other things, too.
When we got back to the hotel, Cain was still tired. We went up to the room and both of us fell asleep on the bed, and it was late enough when we got up that we decided to go out to eat in downtown Chattanooga again. Again, he put his arm around me and held me close to his body. It was cold, I agreed silently. I put my arm around him, too, and he gave me another funny smile. A few times on the walk, I thought he was going to say something, but both of us had been quiet since we’d gotten back from the service.
I raised my water glass when we sat down. “To Miss Liddy,” I said, and Cain nodded.
“To my aunt.” He clicked his glass with mine. “I know I said this today, Aria, but she was so glad that we were getting married. I wish she could have come to the wedding.”
“Such as it was,” I added, thinking that tiny Miss Liddy would have been freezing if she’d stood out in the mud that day with us.
“Do you regret it?” he asked me suddenly.
“I was thinking about it today,” I admitted. “I was wondering what would have happened if we’d waited. I think so much of what’s gone on between us is because we didn’t know each other, not really. We just jumped in feet first.”
“It’s my fault.”
“No,” I disagreed, “no, I was the one—”
“Aria, it’s my fault,” he interrupted. “I have to tell you. I can’t keep this from you anymore.”
I held in my heart, which had started to pound inside my chest and I also held onto my jade pendant over it. “Tell me what? Keep what from me?”
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