Caroline watched the clock all through her afternoon lessons. “You had an exceptionally fine lesson today, Nicole. It’s so much more fun when you’re prepared. Could you get all my students to work as hard as you do?” Caroline rose and closed the piano lid.
“Oh, playing the piano’s not work, Miss Caroline. I really like these pieces you gave me. They’re fun, and my little sister likes them too.”
“Perhaps you’re right, little Miss Nicole. Piano playing should be fun. After all, we do say ‘playing the piano,’ not ‘working the piano.’ ” Caroline saw her to the door, turned on the porch light, and watched to see that she made it safely to her father’s car. She stood at the door and looked out at the fading sky as they left. It was dusk—that dreary part of the day when the sky lost its color before the darkness set in. The gray was too much the color of her loneliness.
She was tidying up around the computer when Sam appeared at the kitchen door. He was usually done with dinner and sitting in his lounge chair watching the news by seven o’clock. She wondered what had brought him down to the studio at this hour.
“Caroline? Caroline.” His baritone voice was almost musical when he called her name.
“Coming, Sam.” Usually the door was unlocked and she would just tell him to come in, but she had been careful to keep things locked since this morning. She opened the door and invited him in.
“Are you done with the piano prodigies for the day?”
“Well, seems neither the prodigies nor the protégés showed up today, and I’m not expecting them tomorrow either. What are you doing walking around this time of the evening in your slippers?”
“Angel sent me down to see if you wanted a bowl of soup. She knew you’d be busy getting ready for your trip tomorrow. Want to come eat? Fresh vegetable soup—your favorite.”
“That’s tempting. And you did walk all the way down here to invite me. How could I refuse?”
Sam scanned the room. “Didn’t figure you would.”
“Okay, let me get the ice cream, and I think I have a few of my homemade cookies left.” She always kept cookies baked for special treats for her students.
“Sounds good. I think I’ll just go over and lock the French doors while you do that.”
Caroline knew Sam had made a promise to her father to look after her, but this seemed odd. “No need to do that, Sam.”
“Well, you can’t be too careful these days.” He was already on his way through the room to the doors.
“I am careful. They’re already locked.”
He checked the doors anyway while Caroline got the cookie tin and a half gallon of peach ice cream from the freezer. She saw him staring out the window.
“Ready, Sam? You know how Angel is about cold soup.”
“I’m right behind you. Come to think of it, I don’t like cold soup either.” He walked across the great room toward the kitchen door.
“Here, you’re in charge of this. I don’t trust you with the cookies.” She handed Sam the carton of ice cream and locked the door. Her habit was to leave windows open and doors unlocked. She hoped Sam wouldn’t notice the change.
Daylight had almost slipped away as they walked up the stone path to the big house. Years ago, Angel had planted creeping thyme between the stones. In the daylight, Sam was always careful to stay on the path. But in the darkness, his steps faltered and bruised the tiny leaves, releasing their fragrance. The thyme was forgiving. In the morning, it would spring to life as fresh as always.
If only life was that way.
On evenings like this he would normally have felt that all was right with his world. He could see his Angel moving about through the kitchen window. The soup pot was on. Caroline was beside him with a tin of snickerdoodles, and dinner conversation would not be lacking. How could a man be so privileged? Not one but two strong-willed, captivating women in his life. Caroline brought such joy to him in his old age, and he loved her as he would have loved a daughter of his own.
Angel turned on the porch light as they stepped up. “I see you brought the cookies.” She looked knowingly at Caroline.
“Why, of course, you know Mama taught me never to show up empty-handed. Besides, Sam’s much better at carrying ice cream than I am.”
Inside, Sam sat quietly at the table watching Angel and Caroline do what they always did in the kitchen when they prepared a meal. How could he have missed the perfect choreography of their movements before? He watched their eyes darting and their mouths moving and their faces breaking out in smiles, but he was so distracted he heard nothing they said—like a scene out of a silent movie. He wondered if this was what the interloper had experienced while watching Caroline.
How would he tell her what the Pendergrass twins had found today?
Table conversation was a lot like the soup bowl, a pinch of this and a little of that. They laughed about Caroline’s morning meeting with Tandy Yarbrough and talked about her trip to Fernwood tomorrow and what she hoped to find out from the Whitmans. An appropriate time for Sam to interrupt their conversation with his secret never presented itself. Perhaps new information would come to light before he was forced tell them. After all, postponement had saved him more than once in a court case. He would wait for her return from Fernwood before giving her this news.
Caroline finished her last bite of ice cream. “Hey, Judge, you’ve been mighty quiet tonight.”
“Just thinking about that book review next week. And besides, getting a word in at this table is like jumping between two moving boxcars.”
“Well, I’d say that stopped the train. Time to clear the table.” Angel rose from her chair.
When the kitchen was clean, they said their usual good nights and Sam walked Caroline out. He latched the screen door and stood on the porch, watching her walk the stone path back to the studio, and wondered if the fragrance of thyme still permeated the night air. He waited until she went in and closed her kitchen door. She didn’t turn out her porch light.
Sam would manufacture a reason later to call and check on her. He closed and locked the door and pecked Angel on the cheek on his way through the kitchen. She put away the cookies and turned out the kitchen light.
“Sam Meadows, you forgot to turn off the porch light.”
“It’s okay, Angel, I’ll get it later.”
He lied. He had no intention of turning off the light until daylight.
Secrets and Siblings
After supper, Caroline cautiously returned to the studio and locked the door. Although still edgy about the day’s events, she felt keeping her secret had been the right thing to do.
She put down the cookie tin and headed for her CD cabinet to replace Mozart with Mendelssohn. Not a Mozart evening. She was so tired and sleepy, and she hoped the lyrical melodies and intricate phrases of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words would calm her and cloak the silence. Curled up on the sofa, calendar in hand, she began her list-making while she listened.
Somewhere between the packing list and notes from today’s piano lessons, the familiar melody of “The Fleecy Clouds” gently resonated through the room. She put her pencil down, rested her head on the back of the sofa, and closed her eyes. She had introduced David to Mendelssohn, and this piece had been one of his favorites.
The music transported her to an afternoon seven years ago when the music of Mendelssohn had filled her car as she drove to the university to meet David. On her walk to the library, an eight-foot banner suspended from the crosswalk had stunned her. Three-foot-high letters painted sloppily in bright red and yellow had announced I LOVE YOU, CAROLINE. This was David: bold, daring, passionate, and colorful.
She remembered staring at the banner and searching the grounds for him. She knew he’d be near observing her reaction. So she’d sat down in the middle of the walkway underneath the crosswalk and waited for him to appear. How like him to be sitting in a big oak tree. She never saw him until she heard the rustling leaves behind her and turned to see him climbing down limb t
o limb. Her eyes never left his until he approached, pulled her up from where she sat, and kissed her. “I do love you, Caroline.”
Nothing else had existed for that moment in time—just David and their love.
Why hadn’t she done something pertinently clever like pulling paper out of her briefcase and creating a sign that said I’M CAROLINE and positioning herself like a statue until he appeared? She always seemed to think of these things later, never at the appropriate time.
Why didn’t she say, “I love you, too, David”? Instead, her first words had been “David, you could have broken your neck hanging up that sign.” That was her—so cautious. But somehow, in love’s unexplainable way, they had completed each other. Perhaps he had known what no one else would guess: that underneath her thick layer of precaution was a mysterious woman of depth who longed for adventure. And perhaps Caroline knew that behind his bold passion was a man who needed an anchor. Life with David would have been an adventure, and she would have kept them safe.
The last cadence of “The Fleecy Clouds” ended her recollection of that fall afternoon. Caroline lifted her head from the back of the sofa. The remembering was so real she had felt the crunch of the fall leaves as she walked across the campus. Music could transport her to different realities. She wished it would transport her to wherever David was and leave her there. She knew it couldn’t, though, so instead she longed for something to fill the cracks left in her heart.
Her heart convulsed when she thought of how David had died so violently and alone in the jungle.
She moved to the edge of the sofa and put her calendar on the coffee table. Before getting up, she put her head in her hands. “Why, God?” she whispered. “Why would You bring David into my life, give us such a rare love, and snatch him away?” A tear rolled off her cheek and hit the painted wooden floor. She left it there.
She moved down the hall to her bedroom and pulled the covers back on her bed. Moments later, she crawled in and pulled the sheet tight around her shoulders. “Please, please, Mr. Sandman, sultan of sweet sleep, please visit me tonight.”
Friday was a full day. After the last student had left, Caroline grabbed her purse, keys, the new Horowitz CD, and a bottle of water. She called to say goodbye to Sam and Angel from her cell phone as she locked the doors and headed to the car.
The road home could seem so long. Somewhere along this two-hour ribbon of highway through middle Georgia, the moss-laden oak trees were replaced by tall, stately pines. Nineteenth-century plantations had been carved into smaller farms, and Caroline could almost smell the freshly plowed earth. The late afternoon sun piercing the driver’s window for the last hour now slipped beneath the horizon, leaving its trail of corals and lavenders. Debussy filled the car like an orchestral accompaniment to the changing afternoon skies, and Caroline had a front-row seat.
Her cell phone rang. Not now, not in the middle of the Adagio section. She hit the speakerphone button. No surprise, it was her mother.
“Hi, Caroline, where are you?”
“Oh, hello, Mama. I’m about twenty miles out and should be there at the time I told you if not before.”
“That’s good. James and the girls are here. Callie’s here with Sarah, but Thomas and TJ are running late. TJ’s ball practice. It’s that time of year, you know. Sounds like you’ll be here before them.”
“I’m sure they’ll be there as soon as they can. Those two don’t miss many meals, especially when you’re cooking.”
“Oh, there’ll be plenty. All right, then. Let me get back to the biscuits. We’ll see you when you get here.”
“Bye, Mama.”
Caroline closed her phone. She smiled, knowing the biscuits would be going into the oven in exactly ten minutes. All of her growing-up years, she’d watched her mother scoop out flour into the sifter and turn the crank until the flour mounded up in the yellow crock reserved for biscuit making. Then her mother would use the back of her spoon to carefully flatten the mound’s peak into a well that would hold the buttermilk and cooking oil. Mama never measured anything. She gently stirred so the flour would fall into the pool of buttermilk and oil, her spoon never penetrating the flour basin to scrape the bottom of the bowl. She always cautioned Caroline, “Too much stirring and kneading make for tough biscuits and a hard life.”
Caroline knew the pride in her mother’s face when the hot biscuits were delivered to the table. The scene had been well rehearsed over decades of meals at the Carlyle table.
Caroline expected to smell the hot biscuits as she made the right turn onto Fifth Street. Pulling into the driveway, she heard FoPaw yelping. FoPaw was her dad’s dog, aptly named because he was black with four white paws. His barking alerted the family, and they all rushed out to help her bring in her one overnight bag.
Thomas and TJ arrived just as the tea was poured, and the family moved toward the dining table. Caroline hugged her freckle-faced nephew and followed him out of the kitchen. “Why the frown, TJ? Did you lose the game?”
“No, ma’am. Just practice.” He looked at his dad, already standing at the table.
Thomas chuckled. “I’m the coach, sis. No way they could lose. They even win when they practice.” He pulled out the chair for his mother and took his seat next to Julia.
Caroline’s father always asked the blessing at family meals, and that never changed. After everyone’s plate was served, Mama rose quietly and left the dining room. Everyone knew this meant the arrival of the biscuits. James, Caroline’s older brother, spoke. “What I’ve been waiting on all day: Mama’s biscuits.”
Caroline knew the grilling would start momentarily—always the same questions, and she’d give the same answers. She tried to head it off. “Okay, my brilliant niece and nephew, how are your grades? And, Callie, how are your parents?” She smiled at her sister-in-law.
Thomas interrupted. “Grades are fine. Callie’s parents are doing great, and not one thing around here has changed since your last visit.” He elbowed Caroline. “Tell me, sis, dating anybody lately?”
Caroline hated that question. It was always Thomas’s first and only. “No, little brother, no dates. No time.”
“Don’t tell me that. You have time. There’s just no one in that one-horse town to date. You need to get out more before you get frumpy.”
Callie swiped her husband with her napkin. “Frumpy? Thomas, what does that mean? Be kind to your sister.”
Thomas wiped the biscuit crumb from his mouth. “I am kind to her. Nobody else around here will push her, and she needs pushing out of that boring life of hers.”
“Don’t mind Thomas, Callie. I don’t. He’ll grow up one day.” She rolled her eyes at her little brother and wanted to tell them that her boredom had been severely encroached upon, but she kept her secret of yesterday’s intruder. She hoped for a chance to speak with James. She trusted him to keep her secret and to give her good advice.
Caroline tried to keep up with the three different conversations going on around the table, but she felt like a spectator. She quietly stared at the one empty chair—the tenth chair at the table. David sat there. If David was here, he’d challenge Thomas and get into some philosophical discussion with James. He would be hugging Mama and asking for another biscuit. He’d squeeze my arm and kiss my cheek, and later he’d tell me he loved my loud family.
The food disappeared, and the family members began their departures. She heard James tell her dad he’d be at the office writing briefs Saturday morning—her chance to talk with him alone.
Caroline and Mama caught up with all the news while they washed the dishes. With good nights said, Caroline found her overnight bag on the bed in the lavender room of her childhood. Lying in her white French provincial bed was truly coming home for Caroline. She had moved to college and then to Moss Point. Her life had taken unexpected turns, but her bed was still here, unchanged and unmoved.
She picked up the picture frame off the nightstand. There they were—those Carlyle kids, twenty years ago, wet
from swimming, arm in arm and smiling. They lived different lives now, but at gatherings like this Friday night, they were still the same kids who’d made their parents proud.
Caroline had always found security in James, the oldest. He was forty and had the brains in the family. She accused him of being born fifty. He was serious, self-disciplined, and could be depended upon for anything except fun. During his second year in law school he’d married Julia, the tightly wound social climber from a tobacco-growing family in North Carolina. The family accepted Julia simply because James loved her, and now their daughter, Laura, was becoming more like Julia.
Caroline was more like James but wished she could be more like Thomas. He was thirty-seven and the fun one in the family. He equaled James in mental abilities but was more relaxed than driven. Thomas had become his own person at age five and had never been referred to as James Carlyle’s little brother. He had a superb baritone voice, a gift which he had not developed because no one in Fernwood could imagine a singing shortstop. Instead, Thomas played ball, hunted and fished his way through college, and barely got his degree. But he didn’t need a degree to open the local sporting goods store. He’d married Callie, his high school sweetheart.
When Caroline needed a laugh, she called Thomas, but when she needed sound advice, she called James.
Caroline treasured Saturday mornings with her parents. It was customarily just the three of them, with FoPaw circling the breakfast table for any bit of bacon he might beg. Today her father lingered briefly to hear her latest stories about her students and to catch up on how Sam and Angel were doing.
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