Resolutely she’d shoved the memory away and gone about her business. A local restaurant wanted a mural on their walls. “Like what?” she asked them. “Venice? Tuscany?” They were, after all, a pizza place primarily.
“No, no.” The owner had shaken his head. “We’re Mediterranean now. The Acropolis, I think. Blue domed churches. You know. Like Greek.”
Martha sighed. She had been trying not to think about Greeks.
She wasn’t used to living alone. That was the problem. She made friends easily, but at the end of the day she was too much on her own. She needed someone in her life.
Not a man!
She didn’t trust her judgment with men anymore. Not romantically anyway. Not after Theo. She was perfectly happy to have Spence as a friend because, even though the rest of the female population—with the exception of Sadie, his office manager—thought he was God’s gift to women, Martha couldn’t have cared less.
She didn’t want a man in her life. She wanted a dog.
A big furry huggable dog.
But there had been no big furry huggable dogs at the shelter that day. There had been several shepherds and heelers, a shih tzu mix that barked way too much.
And Ted.
“Ted?” Martha said to the girl who showed her the dogs.
The girl shrugged. “The old lady named him after her uncle. He farted a lot, she said. So does Ted. You can change his name.”
Martha laughed. Ted wasn’t at all what she was looking for. He was a five-year-old French bulldog, the girl said, whose owner had died. He was also too small. His hair was short and sleek and black, not long and lush and furry.
But what did she know? And how good had her judgment been about anything else?
At least if she had a dog named Ted who farted it would prove she was getting back her sense of humor.
“Come on, Ted,” she said, holding out her arms to him. “Let’s go home.”
She and Ted turned out to be a match made in heaven—or in the grocery store. Once Martha discovered that the way to his devoted little canine heart was through steak bones, chicken skin and baked potatoes—besides, of course, letting him sleep on her bed—Ted was her love for life.
He was also the inspiration that sent her back to the shelter to offer to paint a mural on its outside wall.
“So people can see how great the animals are,” she told the slightly sceptical supervisor. “So they can get great dogs likeTed.”
It turned out Martha was right. The mural was a huge success. It was fanciful, humorous and instantly increased not only traffic to the shelter, but also community support and adoptions of strays. The newspaper photo of her hard at work and Ted asleep on the scaffolding hadn’t hurt.
Her reputation—and Ted’s—grew from there. She was hired to teach art part-time at the high school. She got a job painting a Tuscan vineyard for the real Italian restaurant that opened to take the place of the one that had gone “Mediterranean.” She had done an Irish theme with lots of shamrocks and shillelaghs for a local pub. And she’d recently finished doing a mural in a local museum and a rather lavish one for the remodeled departure lounge at the airport.
The one she was working on now, at this very minute—a montage of Butte history on the walls of the second-story theater-auditorium in Spence’s Park Street building—fascinated her. It was the one Spence had had in mind when he’d suggested she come do a mural in Montana.
She loved it. Professionally it was the biggest challenge she’d ever attempted.
But it didn’t come close to the challenge of figuring out how she was going to deal with Theo. For the next couple of decades, like it or not, until their child had grown up and could deal with his father on his own, Theo was going to be a part of her life.
It didn’t bear thinking about.
At first, after leaving Santorini, she had done her best not to think about it. About him. It had been a one-week affair, after all. One week! And as blazingly hot and intense as it had been, it shouldn’t change her life!
But then she’d discovered she was pregnant—and that theory bit the dust.
She could still remember feeling blindsided when the doctor had announced she was expecting a baby!
She’d gone into the clinic because she was never sick, but within a couple of weeks of arriving in Butte, she’d begun to feel sick all the time. She’d thought it was the altitude bothering her, or maybe the fumes from the paint.
And then the doc had beamed at her and said, “Nothing to worry about. And you’ll be over it soon. It’s just morning sickness.”
“Morning sickness?” Martha had protested. “But you have to be pregnant to be morning sick.”
“And this was what? An immaculate conception?” His tone had been jovial, but at the sight of the blood draining out of her face, he’d added quickly, “Of course it wasn’t. I’m sorry. But…didn’t you even suspect?”
Of course she hadn’t suspected! She’d been taking the pill! She’d never missed. Never! She told that to the doctor.
And he told her exactly what she’d told Theo—that her timing might well have been disrupted by her trip to Santorini. “It happens,” he’d said with a shrug of his shoulders.
Indeed it did.
It had. And so, like it or not, there would always be a connection to Theo in her life.
Not that Theo would care, she’d told herself then. Mr. Here-Today-Gone-Tomorrow, Mr. No-Strings, Mr. Love-’Em-and-Leave-’Em had probably already forgotten her name.
Which was why it was so flaming ridiculous that he would have proposed to her at Elias’s wedding—or act affronted when she’d said no.
She still trembled now every time she thought about it.
Don’t think about it, she advised herself and determinedly concentrated instead on the wall in front of her.
The mural was huge, taking up three vast walls of the theater. And even with the contributions of some of her art students—small groups from her painting class were each doing a vignette based on an ancestral photo from their own family—it was taking ages to complete.
She didn’t have ages until she was going to be so fat and ungainly with the baby that climbing onto the scaffolding to work was going to be impossible. And right before she’d left for the wedding, Spence had told her it had to be presentable by the time some troupe of traveling actors came to do a historical play to open the theater.
Six weeks, he’d said.
Martha had just stared at him in disbelief. “That’s a joke, right?”
But he’d just shaken his head and grinned wryly. “Tell those boys to get out the spray cans and get to work.”
That had been a joke of sorts.
Several of the boys who were working for her had come by way of juvenile court. Like the graffiti artists of Santorini, they had been expressing themselves in socially unacceptable ways, and at the urging of a local policeman and probation officer, Martha had agreed to give them a chance to find an alternative. After early days of mutterings and grumblings, the boys themselves seemed to be getting interested, coming around. Some of their work was fantastic. Still, she wasn’t convinced they were well down the road to redemption. It was early days yet. And they didn’t work full-time. All her students were just that—students—and only came after their classes were over for the day.
“I think we’ll just keep the spray cans locked up,” she told Spence.
Now, though, with the deadline of the performance just a little over a month away and her own due date looming as well, she was having second thoughts.
Especially since she kept stopping work every few minutes to think about Theo.
She should have been past it. After all, the worst was over. They’d met again. She’d given him the news about the baby. They’d had their confrontation.
Surprisingly he had even done the responsible bit—offering marriage, though, perhaps more out of shock than anything else. And she had refused.
End of story.
&nbs
p; And if someday he did press the issue of wanting to be involved in their son’s life, well, she supposed he had that right. By then she hoped she would be able to treat him with indifference and assure him that it wouldn’t be a problem.
She wouldn’t always have damp palms and a dry mouth the way she had at the wedding, would she? Her heart wouldn’t always be pounding a thousand beats a minute. She wouldn’t always remember their nights on Santorini and—
“So, how’d it go?” Spence’s question jerked her back to the moment.
She glanced down to see him standing beneath the scaffolding, hands on hips as he stared up at her.
She hadn’t seen him since she’d left to go to the wedding. She was surprised he was here now. He was as here today and gone tomorrow as another man she knew. But Spence’s comings and goings didn’t matter to her. He was her friend, nothing else.
“He thinks we should get married,” she said grimly.
“Seriously?” Spence’s eyebrows hiked up. At her curt nod, he asked, “So when’s the big day?”
Martha looked down at him incredulously. “You can’t believe I’d marry him!”
“Why not?” Spence shrugged. “Thought you loved him.”
That wasn’t even worth a response. Martha went back to slapping paint.
“Ah. Right,” he said after a moment. Then, briskly he added, “So, I guess you said no.”
“I said no,” Martha agreed, not turning, not stopping, not looking down. Every time she thought about Theo’s cold-blooded proposal, her heart still slammed furiously in her chest.
“What’d he say then?”
Martha ground her teeth. “Some drivel about it being the right thing to do. Marrying for the right reason.” Slap, slap, slap.
“Doesn’t sound like he convinced you,” Spence ventured.
She spun around sending paint in all directions. “Would you marry someone without love?” She glared down at him.
Spence wiped spatters of gray paint off his cheek, then shrugged. “I might.”
Martha stared at him in astonishment. “You would? Really?”
“Who the hell knows? Who cares? Anyway, this isn’t about me. It’s about you—and what’s-his-name.”
It was, indeed.
“Well, no fear. I’m not marrying what’s-his-name,” Martha said firmly.
Spence grinned. “Good. More time for the mural if you’re not planning a wedding. Sadie is setting up a reception after the performance,” he went on. “The city council is coming. All the local bigwigs. Some government guys from Helena we’re trying to impress. A few potential investors. You know the sort. They’ll all want to visit with the actors and the artistes.” Spence drawled the word in a terrible French accent. “Everybody in the art co-op needs to be here. And you and your band of thugs as well.”
Having been one when he was their age, Spence could talk about them that way. He also fit in easily with Martha’s semire-formed delinquents.
“My art students and I will be here,” she corrected him tartly. “Now go away and let me get back to work.”
Spence laughed. “On my way,” he assured her. “It’s starting to snow and I’ve got a plane to catch.”
“Where’re you off to this time?”
“L.A., then Hawaii. Tahiti. Fiji. Pago Pago.” Spence ticked them off on his fingers. “No rest for the weary.”
“I thought it was no rest for the wicked.”
Spence laughed. “That, too.” He winked at her. “Don’t marry what’s-his-name while I’m gone.”
“Not a chance,” Martha promised. “Not a chance in the world.”
With luck she wouldn’t even see what’s-his-name again for a long, long time.
The first week in March came in like a lion. It was going out like one, too, if the national weather service was to be believed. Since yesterday afternoon they had been promising the snow to end all snows.
“Bundle up,” the newscaster had said before Martha headed off to paint again this morning. “Winds out of the northwest. Falling temperatures all day. Snow continuing into the evening with accumulations over twenty inches. You’ll want chains on the passes if—” he had grinned here “—you’re fool enough to get behind the wheel of a car.”
Martha wasn’t.
She still didn’t have a car. But it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going anywhere these days except to the theater to paint the mural, to her “preparing for childbirth” classes, to the high school to teach, to the grocery store for essentials, and around the block to give Ted and herself a little exercise. Hers was a small world.
And today it was getting smaller and whiter by the minute.
Except in the theater where it seemed to be getting darker now as the skylights had long ago been covered over and the inexpertly hung stage lights cast more shadows than anything else.
No matter. Martha kept on painting.
She had come early this morning because she didn’t teach on Tuesday and thus could spend the whole day working on the mural. There were just over two weeks left until the traveling theater troupe arrived for its weekend performances, and the mural needed to be, if not finished, at least close enough so that the attendees would be suitably impressed.
She also wanted it to be done before she was too awkward to finish it. The baby seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds—or kicks and thumps, if the way he was moving these days was any indication.
She didn’t want Spence to come home to a bunch of half-finished walls. Sadie said he had called from Hawaii and from Pago Pago and that she expected him back anyday now.
“Maybe this afternoon or evening,” she had reported as she’d locked up the office this morning, “which is why I’m leaving for Deer Lodge to visit my aunt before the snow gets worse.” She’d grinned. “I want to be gone before he comes home and finds more work for me to do.”
“Don’t blame you.” Sadie kept Spence’s empire functioning while he was out dashing around the world.
Once Sadie left, the building seemed to echo. Martha considered leaving herself. But the students would expect her to be there when—if—they arrived. And with the performance looming and her due date fast approaching she really didn’t have time to waste if the mural was going to be finished first.
Of course, the part that needed the most work was Dustin’s great-grandparents’ Chinese wedding vignette. And it was the one she’d been avoiding. She had worked with all the students to some degree or another, mentoring and encouraging, and putting in the extra time they weren’t able to.
At least, she had worked with all of them but Dustin.
Probably her most accomplished graffiti artist—and least enthusiastic muralist—Dustin had taken his own sweet time to come up with a photo that reflected his own family’s Butte history.
“Who wants that old stuff?” He’d dismissed it all with a shrug.
But Martha had insisted. The other students had brought in an amazing variety of intriguing photos from their own family backgrounds. “Surely you must have something,” she’d pressed him. “Or go to the historical society and ask them for a suggestion.”
To Dustin that had been even worse. Last week he’d finally slouched in and shoved a large formal wedding photo at her. “This what you want?”
“Oh, yes!” Martha had been thrilled at the sight of the very young, very solemn Chinese couple—the bride in an intricately embroidered red jacket and long, fringed multicolored paneled skirt, the groom in a dark suit and high-collared starched shirt—standing on the porch of a small clapboard house. “It’s perfect.”
“Yeah, well,” Dustin mumbled and shoved his black hair out of his eyes. “If you say so. You’re gonna help me, aren’tcha?” he had added a little nervously.
“Of course,” Martha said. “You just get it sketched in. We’ll need to haul the projector up and set it up so you can rough in a sketch.”
Dustin had done the hauling. But beyond the first day, when she had climbed up and shown him how t
o project the photo onto the wall and sketch from the image, not much had been done. Dustin had been avoiding it, and she had, too.
Somehow, every time she’d looked at the photo, she’d been brought face-to-face again with the last wedding she’d attended—Elias and Tallie’s—and it was a short step to begin remembering once more what had happened there.
Theo.
It always came back to Theo.
She’d thought that by now the memory of their encounter at the wedding would have been fading away. No such luck.
But maybe avoiding it had been a mistake. Maybe if she got into it, focused on these two people, she wouldn’t think about other weddings—other proposals of marriage.
So she climbed up the ladder and turned on the projector, displaying an enlarged image on the opposite wall. Then she climbed back down, mounted the other ladder, cursing her ungainliness and, finally, set to work.
Once she began to sketch in the areas Dustin hadn’t finished, the memory of Elias and Tallie’s wedding began to fade. Her attention focused on this young couple who had come a hundred years before to a land that had been far more foreign to them than it was to her.
They looked very solemn in their photo. Had they been happy? What had brought them together? What had their courtship been like? Had they even had one? Had it been a marriage of convenience?
Had they been in love?
She studied their faces as she painted, wishing she knew.
With the skylights covered by snow, the room was darker than normal. And so quiet she could hear the panes groan under the snow and the walls creak.
Ordinarily Marcus, the sculptor who had the studio in the front, wandered in shortly after noon. But his day job was working for the street department, so he’d be out plowing all day. Agatha, who did vibrant southwestern-themed watercolors, had gone to Mesa for the winter. And the quilting brigade—a baker’s dozen of ladies in cardigans and lace-up boots—had wisely stayed at home.
The Santorini Bride Page 12