The Wedding Tree

by Robin Wells

  “Good morning, Miss Addie,” one said.

  Wait. There was only one woman—my eyes were playing tricks on me—and I didn’t know who she was. My expression must have told her as much, because she smiled. “I’m Nadine, your daytime health aide. You had a fall and you’re recovering in your own home, and your granddaughter is here, too.”

  I was grateful for the information, even though the fact she was providing it told me she thought I was a nitwit. She helped me to my walker and to the bathroom, where something tall with handles had been added to my toilet. When I came out, Becky—no, Hope; I had to keep that straight!—was standing by my bedroom door.

  “Ready for breakfast?” she asked. “I just scrambled some eggs and made a fresh pot of coffee.”

  “Sounds wonderful.”

  I let the aide help me dress, then used that confounded walker contraption to get to the kitchen. Hope brought me coffee, scrambled eggs, and oatmeal topped with blueberries and walnuts. The aide—Nay-nay? Narnia? Naysayer? Her name started with an N, I was sure of it—gave me a handful of pills to take. The coffee and food—or maybe the pills—perked me up and helped my addled thoughts coalesce into something of a memory: Hope was here to help me go through my things. I needed to tell her about Joe.

  I looked at the aide as she cleared the table. “Would you be so kind as to go the store for me?”

  “I just went yesterday afternoon.”

  “Well, I’m sure we need some groceries.”

  Her heavy eyebrows knitted together. “The house is practically bursting with food.”

  “I have a hankering for some fresh peppermint. Do we have any of that?”

  The aide’s forehead creased. “I—I don’t think so.”

  “Then I’d like for you to go find me some. Hope, let’s get started in the dining room.”

  The aide helped me get settled at the head of the dining room table, then left, muttering under her breath.

  Hope laughed. “She knows you were trying to get rid of her.”

  “That’s okay. Eddie’s paying her the same whether she’s meddling in my business here or running off on a fool’s errand.”

  Hope brought me a glass of water and set it down on a felt-backed silver coaster. A wave of nostalgia swept over me. How many times had I sat here with family? Too many to count. It had been my mother’s formal dining table—and my grandmother’s before that. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, dinner parties. My goodness. The table held a lot of memories.

  But then, so did the boxes and trunks from the attic. I pointed to a slender black trunk. “Let’s begin with that one.”

  Hope lifted it and set it on the table in front of me. She—or maybe it was Eddie; bless his heart, he was the tidiest man I’d ever known—had dusted it off, but it still smelled stale.

  Hope fiddled with the latch. “It’s locked.”

  “The key is in the top drawer of the cupboard.”

  Hope located the big skeleton key and put it in my hand. My fingers trembled as I fitted the key in the hole. It was funny—I felt like I was looking at my grandmother’s hands on the ends of my arms. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to having these veiny, spotted hands with such big knuckles—just like I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing that old woman’s face staring back at me in the mirror. It’s not how I see myself at all, although Lord knows I should.

  I heard a little click, and felt the give on the lock. “I bought this trunk when I was in high school. Saved up all my money from babysitting and working at the drugstore and bought this my junior year. I had a yen to travel.” I’d collected photos of places I wanted to go—Paris, London, Rome, Athens. I hoarded travel magazines under my bed like men hid girlie mags. “Now, turn it up tall.”

  Hope picked up the trunk and set it down vertically, then undid the latch. Her eyes widened. “Oh wow! It’s like a little closet.”

  “Yep.” On the left side was a clothes rod, with several hanging garments. The right side held four drawers.

  Hope ran her hand over it. “This is too cool! Did you take this lots of places?”

  I shook my head. “Only to New Orleans.”

  “But you took all those photos of France and Greece and Egypt!”

  “Oh, I traveled the world—but not until the kids were grown and Charlie had died. I never went further than Alabama until I was fifty-six. Then I made up for lost time.”

  The funny thing was, by then I’d realized that the big deals in life weren’t necessarily big at all. A newborn’s finger, a drop of dew on a blade of grass, an ant carrying a grain of sugar . . . enormously powerful wonders were all around, enough wonders to fill a lifetime, right in your own backyard, maybe under your very feet. It’s not where you are; it’s how you see it.

  “By the time I started traveling, this trunk was obsolete. It was too large for air travel.”

  Hope ran her hand over it. “It’s in beautiful condition.”

  “Unlike the green dress in it. Take it out, would you, honey?” The silk rustled as Hope carefully lifted the padded hanger. Originally the dress had been pale jade, but age had yellowed it to a soft moss green. The fabric-covered belt was slightly stained where the buckle had rusted. “I fell in love in this dress.”

  “Oh, I can see why.” Hope held it up against herself, then carefully placed it on the table. “It’s absolutely gorgeous.”

  She was missing my meaning. I fingered the hem. “I don’t mean I fell in love with the dress, honey. I mean I was wearing this dress when I fell in love.”

  Hope’s eyebrows pulled together. “With Granddad? I thought you two were childhood sweethearts.”

  “Oh, we knew each other all our lives. We lived just down the street, two houses away, and our parents were best friends. My mother and his mother were tight as sisters. Charlie’s older brother had died when he was two, so Charlie was an only child, and I might as well have been—my brother was twelve years older than me and away at college by the time I started school. But the sweetheart part . . .”

  “That came later?”

  I hesitated. Here was where I had to turn off the road paved with illusions and steer onto the bumpy dirt path of truth. “The fact of the matter is, the sweetheart part was always pretty much one-sided.”

  Hope’s eyebrows rose in surprise.

  “Charlie always liked me a lot more than I liked him. In a romantic way, I mean.”

  Funny, the way you remember things. Memories don’t lie down flat like stripes on a road or photos in an album. They pop up and flap around, like those Mexican jumping beans Uncle Ronnie brought me that time he went to Tijuana.

  I wanted to tell Hope about meeting Joe, but instead, all of a sudden—poof! I’m viewing a mental film of the night of my first high school dance.

  My mother is at the front door, wearing a ruby shirtwaist dress with her grandmother’s pearls, and she’s opening it for Charlie. Charlie is dressed in his father’s best suit, his hair slicked back, and he’s holding a white orchid corsage. I’m excited about the dance for lots of reasons. For one, I’m wearing a new dress—it’s baby blue chiffon, with a full skirt, cap sleeves, and a lace sweetheart neckline that I’d had the dickens of a time sewing just right—and I can’t wait to show it off. Secondly, I’m eager to see everyone’s reaction to the “heavenly night” decorations I’d helped hang in the gym; and thirdly, I’ve never danced to a live band before, and Billy Bob and the Crooners are supposed to play.

  But then I see Charlie in the living room, and he’s looking at me in a way I’d never noticed before, and it hits me: he’s thinking about the dance in entirely different terms than I am. He doesn’t think I’m going with him just because he has his daddy’s car and my mother doesn’t like me out at night by myself and he always gives me a lift to group events and we’re lifelong buddies; in his mind, this is a date—a real, honest-to-good
ness, boy-and-girl date. My stomach does a cold, funny flip, like a fish trying to get free from a hook. The thought of being romantic with Charlie just, well . . . it makes me kind of squirm inside my skin. I don’t think of him that way. Maybe I’m not ready for it. Maybe I just don’t want to change the easygoing way we get along.

  And then—poof! again.

  I’m seven or eight years old, and Charlie and I are playing tag with a group of other kids on the school playground. When Charlie is “it,” he always, always chases me. It annoys the dickens out of me, because I don’t like being caught.

  “You never chase me back,” he complains.

  “I used to, but you just turn around and make me ‘it’ again. And the other kids get mad because we’re leaving them out and it’s like only the two of us are playing.”

  “I like it that way,” Charlie says.

  And then—another poof!

  • • •

  We’re four or five, and playing doctor. Charlie wants to listen to my heart. I unbutton my shirt, and he puts his ear on my chest. Even back then, when our chests look just the same, he’s fascinated with mine. He wants to see under my skirt, and I might have let him, but my mother walks in, and . . . oh mercy, does she get into a dither!

  I have to confess, I never felt any curiosity at all about Charlie’s private parts. Junk, they call it now. Junk—what a hilariously terrible name for something they’re all so proud of.

  • • •

  “Are you okay, Gran?”

  I realized I’d closed my eyes. I opened them and saw a lovely, worried, young face. It took me a moment to remember: I was in the dining room with my granddaughter. “Yes, dear. I just got caught up in some memories.” I smiled at her. “Where were we?”

  “You were telling me about you and Granddad. I thought you two dated all through high school.”

  “Oh, we did. Although at first, I didn’t even realize we were dating. By the time it dawned on me that everyone thought we were a couple, well, we’d been together so long that no other boy even thought I was available.”

  “Did you like someone else?”

  “No. This was a very small town, honey, and as the saying went, the pickin’s were slim and none, and Slim had left town. The senior class at our school had only thirty-five students, and Charlie was the best of the bunch.” I toyed with a silk-covered button on my old dress. “I tried to break up with him after graduation, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the war was on. Like most boys in my class, Charlie enlisted right after graduation. Before he went off to basic training, I told him we should see other people.”

  “And?”

  And nothing. “He didn’t want to hear it.” He’d cried, in fact. I’d never felt so bad about anything in my life.

  The whole thing flickered in my mind’s eye like a Technicolor movie, but I kept talking as the mental movie played.

  We’d been sitting in his father’s car—a 1939 Ford, red as a firecracker, with a gray interior—parked out at the lake. We ended every date that way, talking and necking at a place called Lover’s Point.

  Charlie’s breath had been hot on my neck. His fingers moved from my back to my breast, but I shooed his hand away.

  “It’s okay, Addie,” he’d murmured against my skin. “When I come back from the war, we’ll get married.” He reached for my breast again.

  I pushed him away and pulled myself against the door. “I’ve told you over and over, Charlie. I don’t want to get married.” What I really meant was, I don’t want to marry you. I don’t know why he couldn’t take the hint.

  “You want to be an old maid?” he’d demanded.

  How many times had we covered this same ground? “I want to be a photographer. I want to travel the world and make my mark on it.”

  “So work as a photographer while I’m gone. Then when I get back, we’ll get married.”

  “No, Charlie. I’ve got other plans.”

  “Plans that don’t include me?”

  I didn’t want to hurt him, but sometimes he was thick as a brick. I pulled at a loose thread on my sweater. “I just don’t feel about you the way you deserve to have a girl feel.”

  “That’s only because you’re such a good Christian. Once we’re married and you know that everything is blessed by God, your conscience won’t bother you, and you’ll enjoy the kissing and touching and all.”

  I was pretty sure that a church ceremony and a ring on my finger wouldn’t suddenly make me feel all quivery and excited to kiss him, the way other girls talked about kissing their boyfriends—or make me want to grope him the way he wanted to grope me. “Neither of us has ever dated anyone else. I think it’s a good idea for us both to see other people.”

  His face had gotten all mottled. He’d been a pale boy, pale and slight. His lips looked kind of mushy when he pressed them hard together. His eyes had teared up, but behind the wateriness I glimpsed a flintlike hardness I’d never seen. “Who is it?” he asked.

  I was too surprised to take him seriously. I laughed.

  “This isn’t funny.” His voice was tight and low. “Is it Ted Riley? I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

  Ted was a tall, thin, painfully shy boy with glasses and an Adam’s apple like a goiter. I couldn’t remember him ever saying a word to me—or to any girl, for that matter. “Don’t be ridiculous. You know there’s no one else. But if I were to meet someone—and if you were to meet someone—well, I just think we should be free to date other people if the occasion arises.” I tried to smile, but Charlie was blinking fast, trying so hard not to cry that it cut me to the quick. I tried to lighten the mood. “I hear those French girls are really something.”

  “Jesus!” Charlie never cursed or took the Lord’s name in vain, so the word jolted me. So did the way his hand banged down on the steering wheel. “I don’t want to see anyone else, Addie, and I don’t want you to, either.” He looked away, wiped his face with his knuckle, then turned back to me. “Say you’ll wait for me. Promise me you’ll wait.”

  I couldn’t. But I had to promise him something. This was Charlie—my lifelong friend, my companion since we were both in diapers. I couldn’t send him off to war crying with a broken heart. “I’ll write. I promise I’ll write.”

  “Every day?”

  “You know I’m not that good about writing. I’ll send a letter every week or two, though.”

  “Every week.”

  “Okay. Every week. Or at least every ten days.”

  “Every week. Promise?”

  I blew out a sigh. “I promise.”

  “That’s better.” He put his arm around me. “And when I get back—well, by then, you’ll be ready to settle down.”

  It did no good to argue with him. I looked down at my hands.

  “You will,” he insisted. His hand tightened on my upper arm. “You will. You’ll see.”

  Jiminy! I just wanted him to give it a rest. “Maybe,” I’d muttered.

  “That’s more like it.” He tried to pull me in for a kiss, but I drew away.

  “Come on, Addie. It’s my last night. Let’s seal it with a kiss,” he said.

  “I need to get home,” I said. “You can kiss me good night in the driveway.”

  “So you wrote to him?”

  Hope’s voice made me open my eyes. I’d forgotten she was there. “Oh, yes. Just as I said I would.” I also wrote to four other servicemen. It was part of the war effort, keeping up the morale of the boys. I used to write the same letter five times, copying it onto scented stationery. “They weren’t really personal letters—just chitchat about the weather, the latest movie, the war effort at home, what was happening at my job . . . just general stuff.”

  “He was hurt in the war, wasn’t he?” Hope said.

  �
��Yes.” My mood darkened. We were jumping ahead, getting to a part of the story I dreaded talking about. “Right after the holidays, he took shrapnel in the foot and lower leg.”

  “In England, right?”

  “Well, it happened in France, but he was sent to a hospital in England, and they weren’t sure he was going to make it.”

  “How awful!”

  “Yes, it was. He had a fever. And back in those days, fever often meant gangrene. Penicillin wasn’t available until later in the war. While he was in England, they thought they’d have to amputate his leg.”

  “Oh, Gran!”

  “I felt so sorry for him, and for his family. His parents were terribly upset. But . . .” I sucked in a breath. It felt callous saying it, but I was on a mission to tell the truth. “It didn’t jar me into a sudden realization that I couldn’t live without him.”

  I fell silent for a moment. I was surprised to hear rain pattering on the roof. “I kept him in my prayers, of course. And I wrote him more frequently, trying to cheer him up, telling him I was praying for him, just generally trying to make him feel like he had someone rooting for him. I even knitted him a scarf. This happened just before I met Joe.”

  “Joe was the man you fell in love with?”

  “Yes.” Joe’s face floated into my memory, his smile calling up one of my own.

  “What was he like?”

  “Oh my. He was . . .” The years were falling back now, peeling back like bedcovers, inviting me to climb right in. “He was really something.”

  Poof!

  • • •

  All of a sudden, it’s 1943, and I’m in New Orleans. And this time I’m not just watching a film in my mind; this time I’m reliving it. I’m pretty sure I’m telling Hope about it, but I can’t hear the words, because the memories are so crisp and clear, it feels like it’s happening all over again.

  8

  adelaide