by Nora Roberts
Caroline gave a snort, and was politely ignored.
“I recall how you took the Bonny boys for twenty dollars in the drag race down on Highway One—back in July of seventy-six it was. They put their Camaro up against your Mustang.” Junior accepted a match from Tucker and lit it with a flick of his thumbnail. “Wasn’t no contest.”
Tucker remembered the race with pleasure. “Might’ve been closer if Billy T. had let John Thomas drive.”
Junior nodded agreeably. “Closer, maybe. But neither of those boys got the talent for driving you have.”
“Idiots,” Caroline said under her breath. If Junior heard her, he pretended not to. He’d been a married man more than a year now, and knew when a man should let his ears work and when he shouldn’t.
“I gotta ask you,” Junior continued in the same slow, quiet voice. “How’d you happen to hit this pole here?”
“Well …” Tucker took a considering drag. “You could say the car got away from me. Steering seized up.”
Junior nodded and continued to smoke. Caroline nearly asked them if they’d like her to go back and fetch a couple of folding chairs so they could have their conversation in comfort.
“Don’t look to me like you even hit the brakes.”
“I hit them,” Tucker said. “They were out.”
Junior eyes came as close to sharp as they ever did. If it had been anyone else, he would have shrugged off the story. But he knew and admired Tucker’s skill at the wheel. “Now, that’s a puzzle. Bad steering, bad brakes, all at once in a car like this? No more than six months old, is she?”
“Just.”
Junior nodded again. “We’ll have to take a look.”
“I’d be obliged if you would, Junior.”
Caroline held her tongue until Junior walked back to his tow truck. “What the hell does a drag race more than fifteen years ago have to do with you crashing into my mail post?”
Tucker smiled. “It was a hell of a night. Get on back from the car now, darlin’. It might shift some when he hooks it on.” Careful to keep her sympathy close to the surface, Tucker slid an arm around her shoulders, leaned a little of his weight on her, and allowed her to help him move back a few feet.
“Are you dizzy?”
He wasn’t, but there was such sweet concern in her voice. “Maybe a little,” he said—bravely, he thought. “It’ll pass.” He bit back a smile when her arm curved around his waist in support.
“Let’s get you back in the car.” She’d insisted on driving him to the end of the lane rather than allowing him to walk. “I’ll take you home.”
Home, hell. He was just starting to make progress. “Maybe I could just stretch out on your couch till I get my strength back.”
She was wavering, he could tell. When he heard the blare of a horn, he had to swallow an oath. Dwayne screeched his white Caddy to a stop, dead in the middle of the road. He hadn’t shaved yet, and his hair was sticking out at all angles. He had pulled a pair of pants over his Jockeys and had added a muscle shirt.
“Jesus H. Christ, boy.”
He glanced at Tucker, saw he was standing on both feet, and gave his attention to the car Junior was hooking up.
“Out for a Sunday drive, Dwayne?”
“Crystal called.” Dwayne whistled through his teeth as he took a look at the front end of the Porsche. “Seems Singleton Fuller was in the Mobile when Junior got the call. He ran into Jed Larsson, then Crystal stopped in for a six-pack of Cokes. Good thing I answered the phone before Josie, or she’d’ve had a hissy fit for sure.” His hangover, thanks to Josie’s stock of pills and remedies, had backed off enough to make him sympathetic. “Shit on toast, Tuck, you sure did kill that pretty little toy.”
Out of patience, Caroline sucked in a breath. “He’s doing as well as can be expected,” she shot out. “It could have been worse, but as it happens he only rapped his concrete head. It’s understandable that you’re so concerned about your brother’s condition, but let me reassure you. He’ll be fine.”
Junior had stopped what he was doing to stare, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Dwayne blinked. Tucker struggled not to lose his dignity by hooting with laughter.
She was crazy about him, he decided.
“Yes, ma’am,” Dwayne said, meticulously polite. “I can see he is. I just rode down so I could take him home.”
“What a concerned, close-knit family you must be.”
“We do tend to stick together.” When he smiled, there was something charming about him despite the bloodshot eyes, the barroom glow.
“I’ve never known another family like yours,” Caroline said sincerely.
“She’s all set, Tuck,” Junior called. “I’ll let you know what’s what.”
“You do that. Thanks.” Tucker had to turn away. He just couldn’t watch his car being towed off. It was almost as bad as watching a loved one being carried away on a stretcher.
“Nice to see you again, Caroline,” Dwayne began, then headed to his car. “Let’s go, Tucker. There was a game starting when Crystal called. I’ve missed the whole first inning by now.”
“In a minute.” Tucker turned back to Caroline. “I appreciate the nursing.” He touched a hand to her hair. “And the listening. I didn’t realize I needed someone to listen.”
It took her a moment to understand he was being sincere. There were no teasing lights in his eyes, no trace of mockery in his voice. “You’re welcome.”
“I’d like to pay you back.” When she started to shake her head, Tucker cupped her chin. “I’d like you to come to dinner tonight, at Sweetwater.”
“Really, Tucker, you don’t have to—”
“It occurs to me that I’d like you to see me under some better circumstances than I’ve managed so far.” His thumb traced along her jawline. “And I’d just like to see you, period.”
Her heartbeat skittered for a moment, but her voice was clear. “I’m not interested in starting anything, not with anyone.”
“Having neighbors in for Sunday dinner’s an old country custom.”
She had to smile. “I don’t mind being neighborly.”
“Shit, Tuck, would you just kiss her and come on?”
Smiling back, Tucker brushed a finger over her lips. “She won’t let me. Yet. Come on down around five, Caro. I’ll show you around Sweetwater.”
“All right.”
She watched him walk to the Caddy, ease in carefully beside his brother. He flashed her a quick grin before Dwayne shot toward Sweetwater, the Caddy hugging dead center of the road.
“Here I come rushing home from the bake sale, thinking you’ve cracked your skull or worse, and you tell me company’s coming.” Della whacked her rolling pin down on the pie crust. “Now I don’t even know how much we took in. Had to leave Susie Truesdale in charge, and she don’t know squat about salesmanship.”
As this particular refrain had been playing for the best part of three hours, Tucker decided to act. He pulled a twenty out of his pocket and slapped it on the counter. “There. That’s my contribution to the Trinity Lutheran bake sale.”
“Hmph.” But Della’s nimble fingers snatched up the bill and tucked it away in the deep pocket of her apron. She was far from through. “Nearly had me a spell when Earleen came running down to tell me you’d gone and wrecked that car. Told you when you bought it, no good comes of buying foreign. Out racing the roads on the Lord’s day, too.” She flipped the crust into a pie plate. “And when I come hurrying home to see if you’re dead or alive, you tell me you’ve invited a guest for dinner.”
Fuming, she trimmed and fluted the edges. “As if that ham in the oven was going to fix itself. Edith’s grandbaby, too. I had a great fondness for Edith, and she told me how her grandbaby’d been to Paris, France, and Italy, walked right into Buckingham Palace and even had dinner with the President of the United States in the White House.” She pounded out the next crust. “Here she’s coming to dinner and I ain’t had time to see if t
he silver needs polishing. Your mama’d turn over in her grave—God rest her—if I weren’t to use the good silver.” She wiped the back of her wrist over her brow. Her heavy charm bracelet danced and jangled. “It’s just like a man to think Sunday dinner makes itself.”
Tucker scowled down at the potato he was peeling. “I’m helping you, aren’t I?”
She gave a superior sniff and glanced at him. “Fine help you are. You’re taking too much meat off them ’taters—and getting peelings all over my clean floor.”
“Jesus Christ—”
Della’s eyes flashed with the cold ire Tucker respected. “Don’t you use the Lord’s name in vain—not in my kitchen on Sunday.”
“I’ll clean up the floor, Della.”
“See that you do—and not with one of my good dishrags neither.”
“No, ma’am.” It was time to pull out the big guns, Tucker decided. He set the bowl of potatoes in the sink, then moved over to wrap his arms around Della’s considerable waist. “I just wanted to do something nice for Caroline after she’d patched up my head.”
Della grunted. “I’ve see what she looks like. I can guess what that something nice is.”
He grinned into her wild red curls. “Can’t say the thought hasn’t passed through my mind.”
“Passed under your zipper, more like.” But her lips were quirking. “Seems a bit skinny for your taste.”
“Well, see, I figured she’d flesh out some, especially after sampling your cooking. You know there’s nobody in the county who can set a table compared to yours. I kind of thought I’d like to impress her, and the surefire way was to have her taste some of your honey-glazed ham.”
Della snorted and shifted, but the flush of pride was creeping up her cheeks. “I guess I don’t begrudge giving the girl a decent meal.”
“Decent?” He gave Della a squeeze. “Sugar, she won’t have had better in the White House. You can take that to the bank.”
Della chuckled and slapped his hands away. “She won’t get nothing if I don’t finish. You drop them ’taters in that kale I got simmering, then clear out. I can do this quicker without you sniffing ’round.”
“Yes’m.” Tucker pressed a kiss to her cheek that made her grumble and grin. When he walked out of the steamy kitchen a few minutes later, he found Dwayne sprawled in the parlor watching another baseball game. “Wouldn’t hurt you to shave.”
Dwayne shifted and reached for the bottle of Coke sitting on the floor. “It’s Sunday. I never shave on Sunday.”
“We’ve got company coming.”
Dwayne took a long swallow, and swore when the shortstop bobbled the ball. “If I shave, she might see that I’m better looking than you. Then where’d you be?”
“I’ll risk it.”
Dwayne snorted. “They’re going to be pulling this pitcher before the inning’s up—if they got half a brain. I’ll do it then.”
Satisfied. Tucker started upstairs. Before he reached his room, Josie called to him.
“Tucker? Is that you, honey?”
“I’m going to take a shower.”
“Well, just come on back here for a minute and help me out.”
He checked the grandfather clock, saw he had a half hour before Caroline would arrive, and sauntered down the hall to Josie’s room.
It looked like a department store after a clearance sale. Blouses, dresses, lingerie, shoes, were tossed over bed, chair, and window seat. A black lace teddy hung suggestively from the trunk of a stuffed pink elephant some forgotten swain had won for her at the state fair.
She was still wearing the little red robe and her head was stuck in her closet as she pawed through what was left hanging there.
As always, there was a scent clinging to the air, a mixture of perfumes, powders, and lotions. The result was something between the perfume counter at Bloomingdale’s and a high-class bordello.
Tucker gave the room a brief survey, and came to the obvious conclusion. “Got a date?”
“Teddy’s driving me down to the nine o’clock show in Greenville. I told him to come on to dinner, since we’re having company anyway. How’s this?” She turned, holding a short orange leather skirt up to her waist.
“Too hot for leather.”
Josie pouted a minute because she knew the skirt showed off her legs, then tossed it aside. “You’re right. I know what I need, that little cotton dress, the pink one. I wore it at a garden party last month in Jackson and got a marriage proposal and three indecent propositions. Now, where the hell is it?”
Tucker watched as she started tossing through clothes already discarded. “I thought you were trying out the doctor for Crystal.”
“I did.” She glanced up and grinned. “Thing is, I decided he wasn’t Crystal’s type at all. And he’ll be going back north in a day or two, and that would just break her heart. She couldn’t afford to visit him if things got serious between them. And I can. Does your head still hurt?”
“Not much.”
“Look here.” She pointed to a small bruise on her calf. “You went tearing out of here so fast before, you kicked up gravel. Now I’ll have to put Erase on that if I want to wear a skirt.”
“Sorry.”
She shrugged and went back to looking for the pink dress. “I guess it’s okay. You were upset. Everybody’s going to know she was lying, Tucker. Even before they bury her on Tuesday, everybody’ll know.”
“I expect so.” He spotted a swatch of shell pink and crouched down to pull the dress out from under the pile. “I’ve calmed down, Josie. Hearing it from Burke just fired me up.”
She touched the bandage on his forehead, and they stood close, in a drift of Josie’s perfume. They shared more than their mother’s face, more than the Longstreet name. Between them was a tie deeper than blood. It went to the heart.
“I’m sorry she hurt you, Tucker.”
“Poked a few holes in my pride, that’s all.” He kissed Josie lightly on the lips. “They’ll heal up fast enough.”
“You’re just too nice to women, Tucker. It makes them fall in love with you, then you’ve got nothing but trouble. If you were a little harder on them, you wouldn’t get their expectations up.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Next time I take a woman out, I’ll tell her she’s ugly.”
Josie laughed and stood up to hold the dress in front of her as she twisted and turned in front of her cheval glass. “Don’t go reciting any poetry, either.”
“Who says I do?”
“Carolanne told me you talked poetry when you took her over to Lake Village to look at stars.”
Tucker shoved his hands in his pockets. “How come women always tell the intimate details of their life over a manicure or a permanent?”
“It’s the same as men bragging about the size of their wangers over a bottle of beer. How’s this look?”
He scowled. “I’m finished handing out compliments to females.”
Josie only chuckled as he strode off to shower.
Caroline was so stunned by Sweetwater that she stopped her car halfway up the drive to stare. The house was pearly white in the afternoon sun, all gracious curves and delicate ironwork, slender columns and glinting windows. It took no imagination at all to picture women in hoop skirts strolling across the grass, or gentlemen in frock coats sitting on the porch discussing the possibility of secession while silent black servants served cool drinks.
Flowers grew everywhere, climbing up trellises, spilling over the borders of brick-edged beds. The heady smells of gardenia, magnolia, and roses perfumed the air.
A Confederate flag, faded and ragged at the edges, hung from a white pole in the center of the front lawn.
Beyond the house, she could see neat stone buildings. What once were slave quarters, smokehouse, summer kitchen—she could guess that much. The lawn stretched back to acre after acre of flat, fertile land thick with cotton. She saw a single tree in the center of one of the fields, a huge old cypress left standing either through lazi
ness or sentiment.
For some reason that—just that single tree—brought tears to her throat. The simple majesty of it, the endurance it symbolized, touched her in some deep corner of her heart. Surely it had stood there for more than a century, watching over the rise and fall of the South, the struggle for a way of life, and the ultimate end of it.
How many spring plantings had it seen, how many summer harvests?
She shifted her gaze back to the house. It, too, symbolized continuity and change, and the stately elegance of the Old South that so many from the north thought of as indolence. Babies had been born there, grown up and died there. And the rhythm of this quiet spot on the delta went on. And on. The slow pulse of their culture and traditions survived.
The proof was here, just as it was in her grandmother’s house, in those houses and farms and fields dotting the road into Innocence. And in Innocence itself.
She wondered why she was just beginning to understand that.
When she saw Tucker come out the front doorway to stand on the porch, she wondered if she was beginning to understand him as well. She got the car moving again, eased it around the island of peonies, and stopped.
“The way you were sitting back there on the drive, I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind.”
“No.” She opened the car door and stepped out. “I was just looking.”
He was doing some looking of his own, and decided not to speak until the fingers squeezing his heart loosened up. She was wearing a thin white dress, with a full skirt he imagined would billow gloriously in a breeze. Two finger-width straps held it over her shoulders and left her arms bare. There was a necklace of polished stones around her throat. Her hair was sleeked back to set off matching stones that dangled from her ears. She’d done something mysterious and female to her face, deepening her eyes, darkening her mouth.
As she mounted the steps toward him, he caught the first whiff of her light, tempting scent.