The Wedding Tree

by Robin Wells

  “That’s the weekend I’m leaving.”

  He lifted his shoulders. “It can be a send-off celebration. We’ll get a room in the French Quarter and spend Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night.”

  Three days of bliss in his arms. “Oh, that sounds wonderful!” I murmured before I had a chance to censor myself.

  “Okay, then. We have something to look forward to.”

  I immediately had second thoughts. Oh, God, what was I doing? A weekend of splendor, and then what? I’d be more in love with him than ever. It would make the inevitable good-bye all the harder. Tears trembled on the edge of my lashes.

  “Hey—are you still crying?”

  “No.” It was a ridiculous thing to lie about, since my cheeks were wet and my vision was fuzzy. “Not sad crying anyway. This is emotional, overwhelmed crying.” I looked up at him in the deepening twilight. “Know what would help?”

  “What?”

  “A visit to the potting shed.”

  “You shameless hussy.”

  “You’ve turned me into one.”

  “Is that so?” His arm tightened around me, and he angled down a sexy grin. “In that case, I’d better check out just how good of a job I did.”

  51

  hope

  I was adding shadows to the mural in the back room of the coffee shop when the black plastic drape covering the doorway moved aside and a female voice squealed, “Oh my gosh—this is amazing!”

  I looked up to see Freret standing in the doorway separating the main coffee shop from the new addition, bouncing on her ballet flats.

  “Shhh,” Kirsten said. She was standing on a ladder, hanging photos on the opposite wall. “What are you doing back here anyway? You’re not supposed to see it until the surprise party.”

  “It’s not my surprise party. It’s Miss Addie’s,” Freret said, walking into the room and staring at the mural. “Which I’m not sure is a good idea anyway, given her age. A surprise like this might kill her.”

  I’d worried about the same thing. “I checked with her doctor, and he said she should be perfectly fine,” I said. “Besides, he’ll be here.”

  “I want the unveiling to be a surprise for the whole town,” Kirsten said.

  “News flash: since the whole town is donating pictures, they already know. Here are mine, by the way.” Freret handed Kirsten a stack of photos and stared at the mural. “Hope, you’ve done an incredible job!”

  “Thanks.” I still had some spots to fix, but I was pretty proud of the way it had turned out.

  “Hope is astounding. Look at the pen-and-ink of her grandmother’s house she did as a going-away present for Miss Addie.” Kirsten held up a five-by-seven I’d sketched from one of Gran’s photos.

  “Oh, that is so gorgeous! I’d love to have one of my parents’ house to give them for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Could you do that?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Just give me a photo of it.”

  “Really?” Her face brightened. “You know, I can think of about a dozen people that would pay top dollar for house sketches. You could make a whole career out of doing this. Are you sure you don’t want to change your mind and stay in Wedding Tree?”

  “Actually, I’d love to.” The answer surprised me as I heard it come out of my mouth. “I love it here. But this job—well, another one like it is unlikely to come around.”

  “Excuse me for saying so, but men like Matt don’t come around every day, either,” Freret said.

  The mention of Matt made my heart flutter. “Things aren’t like that between us.”

  “I’ve heard reports from Mrs. Ivy that say otherwise,” Freret said.

  Kirsten snickered.

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  “No,” Kirsten said. “We don’t.”

  “It’s a short-term thing. It’s not forever after.”

  “If you hung around, it might be,” Freret said.

  “Well, I can’t blow off one of the best jobs in the art world for something that may or may not happen with a man who may or may not be over his late wife.”

  Freret’s eyebrows rose. “So Christine’s the issue?”

  “Not the issue, but I guess she’s an issue,” I said. “The biggest issue is that I have a great new job in Chicago.”

  The bell over the front door rang. Kirsten stepped down from the ladder. “Well, my issue right now is tending to the customer who just walked in.”

  “And I need to get back to the bank,” Freret said.

  “Thanks for dropping off those photos,” Kirsten said.

  I drew a breath of relief when they left. But the mention of a future—or was it the lack of one?—with Matt left me restless and unsettled.

  52

  hope

  The next ten days passed in a frenzy of activity. Eddie and Ralph flew in and set to work making the house look like an HGTV makeover. They put the furniture I wanted into storage, shipped the furnishings they and Gran had selected to California, and filled in the gaps with rented modern pieces and paintings, which gave the place a hip, eclectic look.

  “This place looks absolutely stunning!” Lauren said when we took her on a tour of Gran’s home so she could photograph the place for the real estate listing.

  “You can thank Hope for handling all the decluttering, packing up, and repairs,” Eddie said.

  I swept my hand toward Eddie and Ralph. “And these two are the maestros of design.”

  “There’s only one little thing you might want to fix.” Squinting, she held her thumb and index finger about a half inch apart.

  “What is it?” Eddie asked.

  “Well, there’s a missing section in the fence between your yard and the neighbors’. It’s hidden behind the shrubbery and I don’t think it’ll make or break a deal, but it’s a little . . . odd.”

  Eddie looked at Hope. “It wasn’t there when I was growing up.”

  “I don’t remember it from my childhood, either, but it was there when I arrived this spring,” I said. “The neighbor’s daughters use it to visit Gran.”

  That night at dinner, Eddie asked Gran about it.

  “Oh, that.” Gran laughed. “It’s so the good-looking man next door could come over and visit without the neighbors seeing.”

  “You built that for Matt?” Ralph asked.

  “Heavens, no, dear! Although I’m sure it’s come in handy for him and Hope.”

  I felt my face turn fifty shades of red. How on earth did Gran know?

  “They’ve been dating?” Ralph looked at me with raised eyebrows.

  “That explains the candle I found in the potting shed,” Eddie whispered to me. “Or should I call it the love shack?”

  “Stop it!” I roughly elbowed him.

  “You have me intrigued, Miss Addie,” Ralph said. “Who took out the fence?”

  “There was a gentleman who lived there in the seventies, whose wife had Alzheimer’s.” She turned to Eddie. “Do you remember him?”

  “Vaguely,” Eddie said. “Glen something, wasn’t it?”

  Gran nodded. “Glen Adams.”

  I put down my fork and stared at Gran. Eddie and Ralph did the same, then we all exchanged a look. Was she saying what we thought she was saying? “So you and Glen . . .”

  “We became very close friends during some hard years. Charlie, of course, was paralyzed, and then he died. And poor Glen’s wife didn’t even know who he was. He cared for her at home as long as he could—longer than he should have, actually; she roamed the house at all hours and kept running away. He finally had to put her in the nursing home. And then he was out there every day for most of the day, even though half the time she thought he was trying to harm her.”

  “Oh, Gran.”

  “After she died, he moved to Dallas to be near his daughter.
We met up several times a year. He went with me on some of my trips abroad.”

  “You loved him?”

  “Oh, yes, honey.”

  “So why didn’t you marry him?” Eddie asked.

  “Oh, we talked about it. But his kids were very sensitive—they hated the idea of their mother being replaced, and he didn’t want them to know that we’d seen each other when she was alive—although I don’t think that you can cheat on someone who has already mentally gone. Besides, we didn’t consummate our relationship until she’d passed. It was a line neither one of us wanted to cross.”

  “Well, there’s a lot two people can do besides actual consummation,” Ralph said.

  His words echoed Matt’s the night we’d caught the kids digging in the yard. My already warm face grew hotter.

  “Hey!” Eddie put his hands over his ears. “This is my mother we’re talking about!”

  “Glen should have stood up to his children and the gossips and married you,” I said.

  “Oh, I never wanted to marry again.” Gran buttered a roll, as if we were discussing something as mundane as the weather. “I liked having my own space and being able to come and go as I pleased without having to answer to anyone. Plus I wanted to travel more than he did. For a long while there, though, we gave each other a lot of comfort.”

  “So you had another romance in your life,” Ralph said.

  “Oh, more than one, dear. You know all those years I traveled?”

  We all nodded our heads. Throughout my childhood, Gran had taken lots of exotic trips.

  “Well, there a French man who’d meet up with me. He was single, too, and the kind of person who didn’t want to be tied down. Oh, we had the best times! I think one reason it was so wonderful was because we only saw each other often enough to not get sick of each other.”

  “I had no idea!” Eddie put his napkin on the table, clearly flummoxed.

  “And later, there was a man in New York who had the most delightful sense of humor. We visited Hong Kong and Australia and Tahiti together.” Gran speared a dainty bite of salad. “There were other little flirtations here and there along the way, but those were the main ones.”

  “Wow!” said Ralph, clearly impressed.

  It took Eddie a moment to close to his gaping jaw. “I’m gobsmacked.”

  Gran laughed. “Most people don’t really know what goes on in another person’s private life.” She primly took a sip of iced tea. “Most of us keep secrets because we’re afraid of being judged. Funny thing is, the person who judges us the most harshly is usually ourselves, so our guilt and regret and shame just fester in the dark.”

  “So the answer is complete disclosure?”

  “Oh, no, not necessarily,” Gran said. “The answer is forgiveness. Of others, of course, but most especially of ourselves.”

  Eddie put down his fork. “How, exactly, do you do that?”

  “Yeah,” Ralph asked, leaning forward.

  “It’s taken me ninety-one years to figure it out, but after Hope and Matt found out the truth about that baby, I had to find a way to forgive myself or else die of remorse. I know this will sound strange to you, but Mother gave me the key.”

  “Is she still on the ceiling?” Ralph asked, clearly intrigued.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Gran said. “I don’t see her, but she talks to me sometimes. And I distinctly heard her say, ‘Pack your burdens in a suitcase and give it to God.’”

  Eddie, Ralph, and I looked at each other. Maybe Gran was further gone mentally than we’d realized.

  “That’s when it hit me: forgiveness is not so much something you do as something you don’t do. You stop carrying your guilt and anger and resentment around. So I pictured it as a big old heavy suitcase I’ve been lugging around everywhere. I imagined carrying it onto a train and hoisting it into the luggage compartment. Then I climbed off and watched the train leave the station, going faster and faster and getting smaller and smaller until it disappeared down the track. And then I walked away, feeling light and free.”

  My throat felt strangely tight. I think Eddie’s did, too, because his eyes were glistening.

  “And that worked?” Ralph asked.

  “Yes, dear. You might have to picture it a couple of times, but then when an old regret comes up, you just remind yourself, ‘I got rid of that baggage.’”

  The doorbell rang. “Oh, that’ll be the Weldon sisters,” Gran said. “They said they’d come over for a visit tonight.”

  I helped Gran up and onto her walker while Eddie got the door. And later that night, I dreamed about helping Gran load her steamer trunk onto a train, then watching the train levitate off the track and into the sky, where it soared away like an old warplane.

  53

  adelaide

  I should have suspected something two days later, when Hope took me and Eddie and Ralph to the coffee shop to see her mural at five in the afternoon. Not because she was taking me to see her work—I’d been asking to see it, and she’d kept telling me it wasn’t finished yet—but because it was the afternoon before I left town for good. I was such a jumble of mixed-up emotions about leaving Wedding Tree for the last time, though, that it slipped right past me—plus it made sense, since Eddie said he wanted to take us all out to dinner.

  My first clue should have been Eddie’s red cheeks. That boy has always gotten flushed when he’s excited about something. My second clue should have been Hope’s attention to her appearance. She wore a fitted pink sundress that made her skin glow, and she seemed as high-strung as a cat on a tightrope. I chalked it up to nervousness at showing us her work.

  My third clue should have been that there was a parking spot right in front of the coffee shop. And if that weren’t enough, I should have known something was up when there wasn’t a soul in sight. “Looks like someone rolled up the sidewalks,” I said.

  “Everyone quits work early on Mondays,” Ralph said.

  “When did that start?” I asked. “No wonder the economy is in trouble.”

  Hope got my walker out of the trunk, unfolded it, and helped me to the door of the Daily Grind.

  It looked dark and vacant. “Are you sure this is open? It looks like the lights are off.”

  “It just looks that way because the windows are tinted,” Eddie said.

  Hope put her arm around me and opened the door—and sure enough, it was dark inside. I was about to say something, but suddenly the lights came on and a huge crowd yelled, “Surprise!” Well, it was good thing Hope had a hold of me, because I darn near passed out.

  The place was packed. Practically everybody in town was there—including most of the residents of the nursing home.

  Kirsten appeared at my elbow. “You didn’t think we could let you go without throwing the biggest party this town has ever seen, did you, Miss Addie?”

  Well, I gotta say—I was flabbergasted. I put my hand on my chest.

  “You all right, Miss Addie?” my doctor asked.

  “Yes. Yes, indeed.”

  Eddie and Ralph ushered me further into the room. After a moment of breathlessness, I felt buoyed and light and floaty as a kite. “My goodness, my goodness,” I muttered, over and over. The high school band started playing “Stand Up and Get Crunk,” the official song of the New Orleans Saints, and the local dance team did some high kicks on the coffee bar.

  Person after person came up to me. It was only when the band stopped playing that I could understand what they were saying.

  “Miss Addie, I want to thank you for how much you’ve meant to my family,” said Rachel Reed, who worked at the pharmacy and knew everything about everybody. “You’ve photographed all of my big life events. My high school graduation. My wedding. My baby’s christening. Her first birthday. Her high school graduation. You’ve been a big part of the best moments in my life.”

  “M
iss Addie, your photo of my mother is the one thing I took with me when we evacuated during Hurricane Katrina,” said the middle Boudreaux boy—who wasn’t a boy at all anymore, considering his graying temples.

  “The pictures you took of my grandmother are the only ones I have,” said a teenaged girl I couldn’t place.

  “I love the photo you took of our house,” said Bitsy Mangus.

  “The picture you took the day my shop opened has been by the front door for forty years now,” said Wendall Preaux, who ran the local shoe repair place.

  On and on it went. At length I turned to Hope. “This is all incredible, but I wanted to see your mural.”

  “And see it you shall,” said Kirsten. She cleared a path, and Hope, Eddie, and Ralph escorted me through a door into the back of the building.

  “Oh my!” I gasped. It was just like being in the middle of the street outdoors, only in miniature. There was the barbershop, the cleaners, the coffee shop, the real estate agency—all painted along the wall—and through each painted window, I saw someone I recognized. There was Charlie in the hardware store, and my mother at the cleaners, and—oh heavens! The man in the barber’s chair was a handsome young airman who made my heart flutter. On the sidewalk—oh my—there was a picture of me! I looked to be in my late twenties, and I was taking a photo of Eddie and Becky as children in front of the bakery. A lump the size of an egg formed in my throat. “Hope, honey, you don’t have one ounce of an inkling of how talented you really are.”

  “Nor do you. Look.” She turned me around to face the opposite wall. It was entirely covered with photos. I looked closer. They were photos I’d taken—photos that went back decades. The back of the room held two partitions, which were also covered with photos.

  “Oh my,” I muttered.

  “Gran, the New Orleans Museum of Art wants to do a special show of your photography,” Hope said.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No. I’m not. And some of your prints . . . Well, Eddie has a gallery that wants to sell them in California.”