The Wedding Tree

by Robin Wells

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because she’s at your house all the time, and . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “And what?”

  “Well, I’ve picked up a certain vibe. And there’s no reason you couldn’t date her.”

  “Yeah, there is.” I waited until she looked up and met my gaze. “I don’t want to.”

  “Oh.”

  Damn, I wished there were more light, because her expression changed and I couldn’t get a good read on it before she looked down at Snowball. She watched him sniff the grass as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. “Have you dated since your wife . . .”

  Why did people shy away from the word? Did they think I’d forgotten what had happened to her? “Died?”

  She nodded.

  I lifted my shoulders. “A few times. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, your wife was beautiful, and everyone talks about how wonderful she was.”

  “Yeah, she was. So?”

  “So I’d imagine it would be hard to find anyone who can measure up.”

  “I don’t expect anyone to measure up.” I shoved my hands in my pockets and dug around for the words. “I mean, I’m not looking for an exact replacement, like a lightbulb.”

  “Still, I would think it would be hard not to compare someone new against her.” Hope angled her face up at me, her eyes earnest and bright. “I’ve done a lot of reading about moving on after a marriage ends since my divorce. Not that my divorce was anything like losing your wife—your tragedy was much, much greater.” Her eyebrows pulled together, and I could see she was worried she’d offended me again. Once more, I felt a stab of remorse for acting like such a jerk around her. “Anyway, from what I read, apparently the first few times you’re with someone new, it’s inevitable that you’ll be thinking of the ways the person is physically like or unlike your ex—or in your case, deceased . . . or late . . . or missing . . . or . . . Oh, you know what I mean.” She looked down. It was too dark to see her face, but I was pretty sure she was blushing. The fast, nonstop way she was talking was a dead giveaway that she was rattled. “The point is, when you kiss them, chances are you’ll be thinking about your spouse.”

  I looked at her, amused. “Is that right.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know, personally. I mean, that’s what I read. I still have to go through it.”

  I gave her a teasing smile. “Want me to help you out?”

  I thought I’d embarrass her into silence, but when Hope was on a roll, apparently there was no stopping her mouth. “What a chivalrous offer! I mean, you’re really living up to your picture on the mural. Not that a real knight would actually kiss a lady—not on the mouth, I mean. I don’t think real knights touched a lady except maybe on the hand. We studied the Middle Ages pretty extensively in my art history classes, and . . .”

  I’d made the offer in jest, but then I looked at her mouth, which had abruptly quit moving, and I realized she was looking at mine. And then . . . well, it just happened. I’m not sure of the specifics—if I stepped toward her, or she leaned toward me, or if we both moved simultaneously. I just know that the minute my mouth made contact with hers, an arrow of heat shot through my chest, down my belly, and kept on traveling south. My arms found their way around her, and hers wrapped around me, and then everything got all hot and smoky and urgent. I pulled her closer, and she stood on her tiptoes and pressed into my erection, and . . .

  A car rounded the corner, the headlights glaring. Snowball barked. We simultaneously jumped away from each other.

  We stood there, breathing hard, awkward and self-conscious as the car passed. Hope shifted Snowball’s leash to her other hand.

  “Well,” I had the genius to say.

  “Yeah. Well,” she echoed.

  I hooked my thumb in the direction of my house. “I, uh, better be getting back.”

  “Me, too.” But she didn’t move. We stood there, staring at each other, the awkwardness swelling to a crescendo.

  “So, thanks for helping me past that hurdle,” she said.

  My brain was still swaddled in lust. It took me a moment to recall what we’d been talking about. “No problem. Glad to be of service.”

  I could think of another service I’d like to provide, but offering it would only make the situation worse.

  She smiled at me—a quick, amused, embarrassed little half smile that made my temperature start rising all over again. “I’d better get Snowball home.”

  I nodded and trudged along beside her. At the sidewalk to her grandmother’s porch, she turned to me.

  “I didn’t think of him.” She spoke so softly I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly.

  “What?”

  “My ex. When you . . . when we . . .” She ducked her head. “I didn’t think of him.” She flew up the porch steps, opened the door, and slipped inside before I could muster a response.

  I stood there for a long moment, staring at the closed door. Because the truth of the matter was, I hadn’t thought of Christine, either.

  22

  adelaide

  A heavy blanket of fatigue, along with a clutter of daily activities—doctors’ appointments, physical therapy sessions, and home nurses, aides, and friends running in and out of the house—made me lose a few days. It might even have been a week. Or more.

  But one afternoon, I found myself awake and alone with Hope. “Where did we leave off talking about Joe?”

  “You never told me if you saw him again after he left New Orleans.”

  The memories came crowding in like animals on Noah’s ark, and then I was sailing into the past.

  1943

  I received a letter from Joe the Monday after I returned from Wedding Tree.

  Lucille had placed it on my bed, where she regularly put my mail, and I found it after work. I stared at it for a while, thinking it must be some kind of a joke. It was too soon for me to have gotten a letter from anywhere out of state, much less from the Pacific.

  “What are you waiting for? Open it,” Marge insisted.

  My hand shook a little as I pried up the flap, thinking, His lips touched this to seal it. “Dear Addie, I read in a big, masculine scrawl. “Just wanted you to know I take my correspondence promises seriously. Love, Joe.”

  “What an odd thing to write!” Marge said, peering over my shoulder.

  “He means he’s written to my father,” I said. I turned it over and saw the base’s postmark. He’d mailed the letter before he left.

  “You think? Oh, that’s so exciting!” Marge’s smile faded into a pout. “But that means you’ll be engaged before me!”

  As far as I was concerned, I was engaged already—but no one, Marge included, considered it official. The next day, I had another note. Dear Addie, To make sure you don’t forget about me, I left some letters with Carl and asked him to mail one a day to you. Hopefully this will tide you over until you start getting my letters from overseas. Love, Joe.

  After that, I raced home every day at noon to see if the mail had come. Thanks to the efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service, some days there were no letters; other days there were two. They were all just a line. “Your kiss haunts my lips.” “You are my everything.” “Your face is like a flower—bright and open and beautiful.”

  Oh, be still, my heart! I slept with the letters under my pillow, as if they somehow kept him close to me.

  I waited for my parents to mention a letter from Joe. Given the way they’d reacted to my news about him when I’d last gone home, I figured it was best to let the letter arrive and let them broach the topic with me. My mother’s letters were full of news about Charlie, telling me how well he was doing, how he was gaining weight, how his color was better. I heard all about how he was learning to walk with just a cane now instead of crutches, and how he was religiously doing the exercises the
army hospital had prescribed.

  Charlie wrote me, as well. Long, gushy letters, telling me how much he adored me, how he couldn’t wait for me to get the photography thing out of my system and come home, how he was working half days at his father’s lumberyard. The store had fallen on lean times, but that was sure to end once the war was over. In every letter, he begged me to come home for at least a visit. I dutifully wrote him back, short letters about my job, how much I enjoyed it and how busy I was. We made plans to go to dinner together when he came to New Orleans in May to attend a lumberyard trade show.

  After two weeks, Joe’s stash of pre-written letters ran out. I continued mailing letters to him, but I didn’t get a single letter in response.

  And then I missed my period. At first I thought it was just late, but within a week, I started to feel sick. I stayed home from work because I threw up one morning, but later in the day, I was better. The next morning, I threw up again.

  I opened the bathroom door to find Marge standing outside it in her robe, her face slathered in cold cream, her eyes round. “Oh my God. You’re pregnant!”

  The word squeezed me in a vise of panic. “No. I can’t be.”

  “You can’t?” Marge asked. “Or you can’t bear to think about it?”

  “But—but we used rubbers!”

  “They’re better than nothing, but they’re not foolproof,” Marge said.

  I dropped my head and cried.

  Marge insisted I see a doctor she knew.

  I used an alias—Mrs. Patterson. After a humiliating exam, the doctor confirmed what I already, deep in my heart, knew. “Congratulations, Mrs. Patterson. You’re just a few weeks along, but you’re going to have a baby.”

  “What are you going to do?” Marge asked when she came home from work and found me sobbing on the bed.

  “I’ll write Joe,” I said. “He’ll know how to make it right.”

  Although how, I didn’t know. I only knew that Joe was extraordinary, and he could accomplish extraordinary things. Maybe he could use his wiles and connections to get transferred back to New Orleans for another training mission so we could quickly marry. Maybe he’d arrange for me to sneak aboard a transport plane and fly to California so we could marry before he left. Maybe he’d wire me to take a train to the West Coast and he’d jury-rig a reason to fly back to a base there. I didn’t know how, but I was sure that Joe would come up with a way to solve this problem. Why, oh why had I refused to elope? In hindsight, I could see so clearly that getting married wasn’t nearly as important as being married.

  Marge wanted me to see a special doctor she’d heard about, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I refused to consider anything but somehow marrying Joe. I continued to write him every day, and every day, I rushed home from work and checked the mail. Nothing—except more letters from Charlie. One of them said he was coming to New Orleans on the twenty-sixth on business and he wanted to take me to dinner.

  I’d known I was pregnant for exactly two weeks when I rushed home to find Joe’s friend Carl in the parlor, his Army hat in hand, his expression grim. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. My heart pounded so hard I thought I would pass out. I knew something was wrong, and I knew it was bad.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I, uh, got some news about Joe.”

  The breath left my lungs in a sudden whoosh, and I couldn’t draw another one for the life of me.

  His fingers tightened on the brim of his hat. “His plane was shot down over the Pacific.”

  The room seemed to spin. “Did he . . . did he bail out?”

  Carl swallowed. His voice came out low and tight. “He was part of a formation, and no one saw any parachutes.”

  “But still . . . maybe . . . ?”

  Carl pressed his lips together and blinked several times. “Addie—officially he’s MIA, but his family’s been told he’s presumed dead.”

  “But if he’s MIA, that means there’s a chance . . .”

  “What it means, Addie, is that they don’t have a body.” His voice broke on the last word. He glanced up for just a second, just long enough for me to see his eyes. What I saw there killed all hope. “Joe made me promise that if anything happened to him, I would come and tell you.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “I was on a list he’d left with his aunt.”

  I don’t remember much after that. I don’t remember Carl leaving, or going to my room. I remember being sick to my stomach, and Marge trying to get me to eat soup, and being unable to get out of bed the next morning, or the morning after.

  I remember Marge coming home from work that day, and holding me while I sobbed.

  “Addie, honey—you’ve got to pull yourself together, or Lucille is going to call your parents to come get you.”

  That hit me like a pitcher of cold water. “Oh, Marge! What am I going to do?”

  “You’re going to get your situation taken care of. This girl at the cannery knows a doctor who took care of her friend who was in a similar situation, and . . .”

  “I can’t get rid of Joe’s child!”

  “Well, Addie, you can’t have a baby.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Listen to me, sweetie. The paper will fire you when they learn you’re pregnant. And your parents—well, you know your mother.”

  The thought rolled another wave of nausea over me. My upright, proper, virtuous mother would be devastated. And my father . . . The shame would likely kill him.

  My mind sorted through various scenarios, the way it already had a thousand times. I could move away, claim to be a widow—war widows were becoming horribly common. But I wouldn’t receive a widow’s benefits. How would I explain that? Who would care for my child while I worked? The lack of money would create suspicions, and suspicions would create whispers. And oh, dear Lord—it would be so horrid for my child to have the taint of scandal attached to him!

  I’d seen what it was like, how cruel life was to kids conceived out of wedlock. I’d gone to school with a boy whose mother had never married, and he’d been treated as if he had some kind of contagious venereal disease. Parents had forbidden their children to play with him, so he’d been shunned and taunted. “We don’t associate with people like that” had been the mysterious explanation, and the dark tone of it had implied it would lower one’s own social standing to befriend him.

  The word bastard had clung to him as if it were pasted on his forehead. He’d been bullied and badgered, and even some of the teachers had treated him with barely disguised disdain. He’d dropped out in eighth grade, then left town when he was barely fifteen. Word had it he’d hopped a train and become a hobo.

  I didn’t want that kind of life inflicted on my child for my mistakes. I’d have to put my baby up for adoption—although that, too, was unthinkable. There were no options I could live with.

  Unless . . . maybe Joe’s family would take me under their protection, and treat me as his widow. Maybe they’d help me care for his child, at least until I could get on my feet and support us both. If they backed me for just a little while, I could emerge from this as a respectable woman. “I’ll call his aunt,” I decided.

  I got the number from Carl. It took me two days to work up the courage, and another one to find the right time when Lucille was out of the house.

  My hand shook as I picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect me. “Mrs. Madison, you don’t know me, but I’m Adelaide LeDoux, and I was Joe’s fiancée.”

  “Joe didn’t have a fiancée.”

  “Yes, he did. You can check with his buddy Carl. We got engaged right before he left. And . . . and it turns out that I’m . . . well, I’m pregnant.”

  I heard a deep gasp on the other end of the line, then silence for such a long moment that I thought the connection had dropped.

  “Hello?” I said.


  “Young woman, I don’t know who you are, but you are not going to work a scam on this family, do you hear me?” The voice was an angry, vitriolic, wavering hiss, scarier than anything I’d ever heard. “We are in the deepest grief, and if you think you can use this opportunity to further yourself by sullying Joe’s name . . .”

  “No! You don’t understand. I don’t want money! Not . . . not for myself anyway. I . . .”

  “The hell, you say!” Her voice rose in both pitch and volume. “So what do you want? To drop your bastard on our doorstep?”

  “No! I loved Joe, and . . .”

  “How dare you!” she spit. “You leave us alone. We’re decent people. My brother-in-law is in law enforcement, and I’ll have you arrested if I get another call from you or if you dare show your face here. Have I made myself clear?”

  I hung up, my hand shaking, and turned to Marge. “She—she said . . .”

  “I could hear her, the loud old witch.”

  “Oh, Marge.” Tears brimmed in my eyes.

  She hugged me, then pulled back and looked at me, her brow creased. “Are you okay? You look pale as a ghost.”

  I felt weak and nauseous. “I’m—I’m going upstairs to lie down.”

  I lay on the bed and sobbed, feeling more alone than I’d ever felt in my life. I was still in bed when the doorbell rang some time later. Marge went and answered. I heard a familiar voice—Charlie’s voice. Oh, dear Lord. I pulled the pillow over my head. This was the night we were supposed to have dinner together! In all of the chaos, I’d completely forgotten. Oh, I couldn’t, I absolutely couldn’t deal with him now.

  I thought that Marge was sending him away, because she stayed downstairs a long time, but then I heard footsteps on the stairs. I kept my face turned to the wall as the door creaked open. “I can’t see him,” I said. “Tell him to go away.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  I rolled over to see Charlie standing by the bed, his lips pressed tight, his eyes red.

  “Charlie—I, uh—I’m not feeling well. I’m sorry, but I can’t . . .”