“Maggie! Our work load is heavier than it’s ever been. Have you flipped out?”
“No, but let’s face it—having this baby means making major changes. I’d want my present job to be waiting for me when I came back from a leave of absence, of course. I’ll need to support the baby.”
“Do you know how hard it is to be your boss as well as your best friend? You are really putting me in a difficult position, Maggie.”
At that moment, a bouquet of wildflowers flew in the open kitchen window. Not knowing at first what this flying projectile was, Maggie dodged it, dropping the phone in the process. She was glad for the interruption, since she didn’t like the way the conversation was going anyway.
“Maggie? Maggie? What’s wrong? Maggie?” Bronwyn was saying when Maggie managed to convey the phone back up to her ear.
“Some flowers have just been delivered,” Maggie said, eyeing the spray of cerise azaleas surrounded by lavender trillium and pale pink lady’s slipper. When she picked up the bunch of flowers, a note fell out.
“Meet me at the river. I can—canoe?” It was signed Tate.
“Who sent them?” Bronwyn wanted to know.
“Remember the man I met the other day?” Maggie said cautiously. She didn’t want to sound enthusiastic and thereby give away her ridiculous happiness at this sign that Tate wasn’t angry with her.
“The naked Cherokee man?”
“Half-naked.”
“I remember,” Bronwyn said, sounding resigned.
“He’s ready to smoke a peace pipe.”
“You shouldn’t smoke, Maggie. It wouldn’t be good for the baby.” This caution was delivered with the fervor of a reformed chain smoker, which Bronwyn was.
Maggie stuck her head out the kitchen window in an effort to find out if Tate had left the clearing. “Must you take everything literally? I’m not going to smoke anything. I hate tobacco smoke, you know that.”
“You’ve said you were going to change.”
“I’m not going to go off the deep end. I think I’d better hang up.” She didn’t see Tate anywhere.
“Call me back,” said Bronwyn, but Maggie hung up without promising and, having learned her lesson on the day that she’d had to swim for her life, grabbed a life jacket off a hook in the utility room before hurrying outside and toward the path to the river.
WHEN MAGGIE REACHED the river, she found Tate standing on the bank with his hands on his hips looking at the shiny new aluminum canoe.
“Hi,” she said. It wasn’t the most original greeting she could have thought of, but it certainly sufficed. She took in the bare muscular torso, the clean but tattered jeans cut off at the knees. He had plaited his hair in a single queue at the nape of his neck and fastened it with a leather thong. She’d almost forgotten the long clean line of his throat; she was newly conscious of the high cheekbones sloping into the straight planes of his cheeks.
“Hi,” he said, his eyes lighting up when he saw her.
“Thanks for the flowers.”
“I figured I needed to make something up to you,” he said.
“You didn’t,” she said. “Except for the canoe, of course.”
He grinned at her in benign munificence and thunked the side of the canoe with a moccasined foot. “What do you think of her?”
“She’s bigger and better than the one I bought. You wouldn’t have had to go, well, overboard,” she said, and he laughed.
“I did that once,” he said, and she laughed, too. But she felt suddenly shy with him looking at her with such intensity.
“Let’s take her out,” she said, and he moved closer and took the life jacket from her. He held it up so that she could slip her arms through the armholes, and she stood very still as he straightened it across her shoulders. His hands lingered for a moment beneath her hair before he pulled it free of the jacket; she held her breath. She thought, in that heartstopping moment, that he was going to kiss her. Instead he turned suddenly and said, “Let’s go.”
In a few minutes she was in the bow and he was in the stem and they were paddling upstream. She wished that she had the ability to read Tate’s thoughts as he seemed able to read hers; she would have loved to know what was running through his mind at the moment.
The canoe handled beautifully, and for the first time, Maggie considered that Tate Jennings should not have gone to the extra expense. The canoe that she’d bought had been of the plain-vanilla variety. She certainly would never have bought this spiffed-up, top-of-the-line, and obviously expensive canoe for herself.
When she looked back at Tate, she flashed him a smile. “I like the canoe,” she said. “You, ah…really outdid yourself.” She aimed for a tone between friendly and casual, wanting him to know that she approved of his choice without seeming to lead him on in a romantic or sexual way.
“Good,” he chuckled. “We’re fair and square now, aren’t we?” He was paddling with bold, rhythmic strokes, the muscles in his arms rippling with the effort. She felt a catch in her throat and thought about the day before when those arms had held her so securely; she had almost lost control, and he knew it.
She turned back around. “Yes. Fair and square,” she replied. She felt awkward about saying anything more.
Paddling against the current provided enough exercise so that Tate apparently felt no need to break the silence either, but eventually he spoke.
“I went to the office to see my boss today,” he said.
“Oh? And are you eager to go back to work?”
“It will be a major change, that’s for sure.”
“You don’t sound happy about it.”
“I didn’t feel comfortable at the office. Either the corporation has changed or I have. And somehow, I don’t think it’s Conso.”
“No,” Maggie said. “Conso seems to expect everyone else to do the changing.”
“They’re the ones with the money. That gives them the power to dictate, or so they think. It’s not only the locals who are under Conso’s thumb—it’s everyone who has anything to do with them, including the employees.”
A butterfly landed on Maggie’s arm and rested there for a moment before flitting away. “Even you?” she said.
“Even me. For instance, Karl told me today that I may get a hefty promotion If I don’t screw up on the job, that is. Oh, and if I get a haircut.”
The words hung heavy with irony, a fact that was not lost on Maggie.
She stopped paddling and looked around. “How do you feel about that?”
“I’m still trying to deal with it,” he said, but he didn’t look pleased.
“It must be nice to know that they’re considering you for a promotion. Usually when you’re not around, it’s out of sight, out of mind.” She thought of telling him how his venture had given her the nerve to request her own leave of absence, but she didn’t want to talk about it until she heard a yes or a no from Bronwyn.
“I’m glad to know that the company thinks highly enough of me to push a promotion, but…”
“But?”
“But I’m not comfortable with the company politics involved. Also, I find myself wondering if I’ll be able to toe the company line now that I’ve experienced freedom of thought. I’m more independent out here in the woods, and I’m comfortable with who I am for the first time in my life. Going back to my full-time position will mean giving up a part of myself.” He saw her start to dip her paddle in the water again and said, “No, Maggie, let me paddle. I don’t want you to get too tired.”
She rested, glad that he was taking over.
“Something you said a few minutes ago sticks in my mind,” she said over her shoulder. “What do you mean about being comfortable with who you are now that you’ve lived in the woods?”
She listened to the dip and swing of Tate’s paddle. It was a while before he answered. “I’m only half Cherokee,” he said. “I wasn’t ready to accept that part of my heritage until recently. I hardly knew anything about it, in fact. For mo
st of my life, it seemed like something of which I was supposed to be ashamed, like a lot of other things about my past.”
“Like what?” Maggie blurted the words. Once she’d asked, she almost wished she hadn’t. Tate didn’t speak, and she turned to look at him. “If you don’t want to talk about it…” she began, but Tate interrupted her.
“I could tell you,” he said, “if you’re in the mood to listen to a long story. Want to take a break? We could pull over here under the willow trees. I know of a quiet place on the bank where we can rest.”
Maggie assured Tate that she was eager to hear what he had to say, and after a searching look, he glided the canoe up onto the grassy bank. He helped her out, and they climbed to a level spot above the river where the sun peeped through a dark canopy of leaves. It was calm there, and the only sound was the music of the water purling over the stones below.
Tate threw himself down upon a bed of moss, and, uncertain where she should sit at first, Maggie finally lowered herself to a soft mat of fallen leaves opposite him so she could watch the dappled sunlight play across his features.
She had always found the way he looked fascinating, but today he seemed even more exotic. His eyes were slightly slanted with an almost oriental cast to them; they were so black that it was almost impossible to distinguish iris from pupil, especially in this shady glen where his pupils expanded to let in more light. She had never before noticed how precisely arched his eyebrows were, and her gaze lingered on them, avoiding his mouth. She waited for him to speak.
He threw his head back and stared at the specks of sky beyond the leaves above. “I don’t talk about this much,” he said finally, lowering his head to look at her. He sounded faintly apologetic.
“Why do you want to now?” she asked.
“It’s easy to talk to you,” he said, sounding halfway surprised. “You probably don’t realize it, but for me you opened the door for confidences when you shared the news of your breakup with Kip.”
“Did I?” she said, surprised.
“Yes, and I’m glad. I think we both need a friend right now, Maggie.”
Suddenly she couldn’t look at him anymore. Yes, she needed a friend; Tate couldn’t know how much. Tell him, said the soft and insistent voice in her head, disconcerting her. It was the first time she’d heard it away from the cabin. But she couldn’t tell Tate that she was pregnant, not now when he was primed to talk about himself. Any misguided revelation would immediately and inappropriately train the spotlight on her. Mentally, she told the voice to mind its own business.
Tate, for once, seemed oblivious to her thoughts. He picked up a leaf and began to shred it methodically. “All right. The early history of Tate Jennings. Well, here goes.” He shot her a quick look but apparently saw nothing amiss in her expression. With a look of determination, he went on.
“My mother was a singer at the Golden Fleece Tavern in Nashville and my father was in town peddling songs to record companies. He and his pals persuaded my mother to party with them, and she and Phil Jennings ended up at a no-tell motel on the outskirts of town. She had the presence of mind to check his driver’s license before she crept away at dawn, and that’s how she learned his address. If she hadn’t done that, I might never have known who my father was.” He spoke quickly at first, then more calmly, but Maggie sensed that his words hid a carefully concealed pain.
“My mother had been trying to make it big in Nashville’s country music scene for four long years by the time I made my appearance in the world. There was no doubt that I looked like an Indian when I was born. The nurses in the hospital nursery, I was told, exclaimed over my black hair and my dark eyes.
“‘He’s a cute kid,’” people would tell my mother, ‘but he doesn’t look like you had anything to do with him.’
“‘Looks like his daddy,’” Ma would say. My mother was a blue-eyed blonde. Nothing about me resembled her, and I think that bothered her. Maybe that’s one reason that the motherhood bit got to be too much for her and why she finally contacted Phil Jennings to ask for help. My father’s letter of reply was swift and to the point. ‘I’m not ready for a family. Please don’t contact me again,’ it said. In the morning Ma strapped me in my stroller, wheeled it to the landlady’s door, popped my pacifier in my mouth, and left me there. She didn’t come back for three years.” He stopped speaking suddenly and stared into the distance as if at an invisible wall.
“I can’t imagine it,” Maggie said, shaken by Tate’s story. “I can’t imagine walking off and leaving a baby with anyone.” She placed a comforting hand on Tate’s arm, and he rested his on it. “What happened after that?”
“I was shuffled from one foster home to another. The first real memory I have of my mother is of her sudden appearance on a frosty December morning when I was four. She showed up at the foster home where I lived, handed me a present wrapped in gilt paper, fussed over me, and told me that she loved me more than anything. I asked my mother if she would take me home with her.
“‘Oh, I don’t think that would be such a good idea,’ she said. ‘Mother thinks it’s best for you to live with these nice people. Mother has to leave you here because she loves you so much.’”
“You must have been so unhappy,” Maggie said softly, her eyes searching Tate’s face. He still held her hand, and she didn’t try to pull it away.
“I was bewildered. If she loved me, wouldn’t she want me with her? If she loved me, why did she pry my fingers loose from her coat and thrust me away when I begged to leave with her? Why didn’t she wave to me after she got in the car?”
Maggie sat very still, letting Tate talk. She sensed that this was a catharsis for him, and she wondered how many other people he had ever told about his childhood. Not many, said the voice. Maggie wished for a dial with which she could turn off this pesky and insistent nuisance, and as she wished it, she heard a peal of laughter. With a tremendous effort of will, she pushed the voice out of her mind and concentrated on Tate.
He paused for a moment before continuing. “After I left that foster home, I spent a brief time in a group home. The house parents were cruel to all of us kids.” He gazed at the river for a moment before continuing.
“I finally ran away. Police caught up with me two days later in the bus station, a bedraggled seven-year-old begging strangers for the fare to go to New Orleans, where I thought my mother was.”
“Did you find her?” Maggie asked.
He shook his head. “I was sent to another foster home.”
A chipmunk poked its head out of its burrow, spotted them, and quickly disappeared. The leaves above rustled and shifted, the scudding clouds overhead dimming the light in the clearing.
“You’ve had a hard life,” she said.
“Harder than most,” he agreed. “In a way, it’s why I’ve never wanted to marry and have a family. The idea is foreign to me, since I don’t know the meaning of a happy home life. I put all my effort into building a career, trying to overcome my background.”
“Would you say your values have changed while you’ve lived on the mountain?”
“I’ve been forced to examine my life honestly, and I’ve discovered that all those supposedly worthwhile reasons for working at a job in which I exchange my personal values for a certain amount of economic power have more or less faded away. Gone. Kaput. Finito.” He gave a little half laugh.
“Would you ever quit your job at Conso, Tate? Just not go back?”
He seemed to consider this carefully. “I’ve thought about it,” he confessed. “I haven’t figured out a way to do it, that’s all.”
Maggie thought about Bronwyn’s reaction to the very mention of a leave of absence. She could only imagine what Bronwyn would say if Maggie decided not to return to MMB&O. Not that this was in the cards; Maggie liked the creative aspects of her job, although she was increasingly aware that she disliked the hustle and bustle of the busy office. Also, with a baby on the way, she couldn’t afford to quit.
“You
know, Tate,” she said, “it seems as if there are all kinds of supports built into working at jobs we don’t enjoy. Our bosses set examples that we’re supposed to live up to, even if we don’t believe in the corporate ethic. We’re ostracized if we don’t fall into place and spout the company line. And there are hardly any precedents for doing what you did, for taking time out to consider what we’re really doing with our lives. It’s sad, I think.”
“I’m through with sadness,” Tate said with conviction. “I’ve made up my mind to be happy. If that requires that I return to Conso, then that’s what I’ll do. If not, well, I’ll have to figure out something else, won’t I?”
“Mmm,” said Maggie. She leaned back against a boulder and gazed up at the sky. “I thought I had a hard life when I was growing up, but it wasn’t nearly as awful as yours.”
“You said you had a hard time with your parents’ divorce.”
“Don’t most children?”
“Probably. That’s why if I marry, I hope to get it right the first time.”
“That’s important to me, too,” she said. “Like a lot of people in my generation, my parents’ divorce made it that much more important for me to find the right person. I can’t imagine putting kids through that kind of turmoil. Growing up is hard enough as it is.” It seemed so natural to be having this conversation with Tate; they were relating as friends, all pretense gone.
“Growing up is a difficult time, isn’t it?. Yet so many babies come into the world without the benefit of a real family,” Tate said.
Maggie froze. It was almost as if Tate knew her secret. Was he reading her mind?
Or—giving him the benefit of a doubt—maybe he was really talking about his own situation. She didn’t know him well enough to know what he was getting at, but she certainly had no intention of giving herself away, especially now that she knew his feelings about single mothers keeping their babies. She adopted what she hoped was a nonchalant expression.
“After my father left, you couldn’t say that my mother and I were what the rest of the world considers a real family, yet Mom did a great job bringing me up, and I admire her for it,” she said.
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