Rules Get Broken

by John Herbert

  Shirley said nothing. She had no advice to offer. Her daughter was no longer a child. She was a woman who knew her own mind. And heart.

  Ninety-Four

  “There you are,” I said. I handed Nancy a J & B on the rocks. “Merry Day-After-Christmas.”

  We touched glasses and took a sip of our drinks. Nancy was sitting on the sofa; I was standing next to her. Both of us were looking at the tree we had so painstakingly decorated two nights before.

  I turned away from the tree and looked at Nancy and marveled again at how beautiful she was. She was wearing jeans tonight, the dressy kind, and an oversized maroon turtleneck sweater. She had taken off her shoes while I was in the kitchen making our drinks, and now her feet were tucked underneath her on the sofa. She looked deliciously huggable.

  I sat down and pulled her towards me. I kissed her neck, and as always, the smell of soap, shampoo and perfume washed over me. I waited for some sort of reaction, but she sat perfectly still and stared straight ahead at the tree.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” Nancy answered with a quick smile but without looking at me. “Who’s that singing on this record?”

  “Willie Nelson,” I replied uneasily.

  “He’s good. I like him.”

  “I thought you would. That’s why I put him on.”

  Nancy continued to stare at the tree.

  “Are you sure you’re okay? Because you don’t seem like you are.”

  “How do I seem?” she asked, finally facing me.

  “I don’t know. Aloof. Tense. Worried. Unhappy.”

  “Tense, worried, unhappy and…what was the other thing?”

  “Aloof.”

  “Right. Why would I be tense, worried, unhappy and aloof?”

  “I don’t have a clue. We had a wonderful Christmas Eve together and a wonderful Christmas morning together. As far as I know, you had a good Christmas day with your folks and a good day today. So I have no idea why you seem the way you do, but you do.”

  The expression on her face was one of pain and sadness. I thought I detected a little anger too, muted but there nevertheless. We looked at one another, each of us trying to take a reading of the other, neither of us finding any answers.

  A barely audible hiss of the phonograph needle sliding across a soundless track signaled the next song. A few seconds later, the sound of an acoustic guitar being finger-picked filled the living room, followed by Willie’s one-in-a-million voice singing “Someone to Watch over Me.”

  “I love that song,” I said when the track was over. “I don’t know if you were listening to the words, but…they really sum up how I feel.”

  Nancy gave no indication she heard me. She was clearly distressed over something.

  “Well, I don’t know why you’re not feeling happy,” I said, “but hopefully I can change that.”

  I leaned forward and reached under the sofa. When my fingers found what I was looking for, I straightened up and handed Nancy a small box wrapped in gold embossed paper and dwarfed by a large silk silver bow. She looked at the box, expressionless for several seconds before taking it, and when she did, she did so reluctantly, almost as if she were afraid to.

  “I thought you already gave me my Christmas present,” Nancy said, her voice low and rough as if her throat had closed mid-sentence.

  “I did.”

  “Then…what’s this?”

  “Open it,” I said softly.

  With trembling fingers, she carefully undid the bow loop by loop, and then she undid each of the folds of the paper. When the box was finally unwrapped, she looked at it for a long time. Then she started to cry.

  Blinking back tears, she opened the lid and saw the round top of a black velvet ring box. She lifted the velvet box from the outer cardboard box, tears streaming down her cheeks onto her hands, her jeans and the sofa. When the little velvet box was finally in her hand, she gently raised its round top and saw a brilliantly sparkling diamond, its facets catching the light from the Christmas tree and reflecting that light into her eyes from a hundred different angles.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered, looking first at the ring, then at me, then back at the ring. “It’s absolutely beautiful.”

  “Will you marry me, Nancy?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” she gasped, and she threw herself forward and covered my face with kisses.

  When she finally stopped, she took several deep breaths in an attempt to calm herself and wiped the tears from her eyes. As she did, I took the ring box from her hand, lifted the ring from it and slipped it onto her finger. She turned her hand first in one direction, then in the other, and started to cry again.

  “I just realized it’s a perfect fit,” she exclaimed in surprise a moment later, “and so was the peridot.”

  “Of course.”

  “How did you know my ring size?”

  “I slid your opal onto my pinkie one night a couple of months ago when you weren’t looking and made note of how far up my finger it went. Not that tough,” I added teasingly.

  “A couple of months ago?”

  I nodded.

  Nancy looked at me, bewildered. “Why did you wait until tonight to give me this?” she asked. “And why did you give me the peridot on Christmas Eve?”

  “Did you think I’d propose to you Christmas Eve?”

  “Not really, but when I saw the ring box…” Nancy swallowed hard, “I thought an engagement ring was inside.”

  “Well, there’s your answer.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  I looked into those deep green eyes. “So many people get engaged on Christmas Eve. I thought I should ask you on a night that would be unique to us. That would be ours alone.”

  “But then why the peridot Christmas Eve? Why two rings?”

  “Well…to be honest, the peridot was an afterthought. I saw it while I was looking for your engagement ring. I knew that was your birthstone, I hadn’t gotten your Christmas present yet, and the peridot was beautiful. So I decided to buy it for you for Christmas.”

  “But didn’t you realize what I would think when I saw a ring box on Christmas Eve? And then what I would think when it wasn’t an engagement ring?” Nancy asked incredulously.

  “What did you think?” I asked, beginning to feel less than sharp.

  “I thought you had decided not to marry me, and this was your way of telling me.”

  I shook my head in anger at myself for not realizing something so obvious. “Nan…for months I’ve had no doubt in my mind that I was going to ask you to marry me. The only question was when. And then I decided I’d ask you during the Christmas holidays. Remember, I’m the guy who believes dreams come true on Christmas. My dreams, that is. Anyway, I didn’t want to ask you on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, so I picked today. But if I had thought for one minute that you would think I wasn’t going to propose to you…I would’ve given you your ring the day I bought it.”

  Nancy looked at me for a long time before speaking. “You are so dumb,” she said finally. “So, so dumb.”

  “I know I am. But were you surprised?”

  “Totally.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “Happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

  Nancy wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me. “I love you,” she said. “I have from the moment I first saw you…”

  Ninety-Five

  The snow is falling heavily now, and it’s almost dark. Far across the open expanse of the cemetery, almost at the horizon, I can see a long line of cars, their headlights casting eerie beams through the falling snow as commuters slowly wend their way home. I’ve told Peg everything. Everything except the most important thing, which is really the reason I came here today. I shiver again and stamp my feet to get feeling back into my toes.

  “I’ve asked Nancy to marry me, Peg.” I pause, searching for the right words. “I feel unbelievably good about it, and I hope you will too.

&n
bsp; “I know by some people’s measure Nancy and I met too soon after you died, and now we’re getting married too soon, and I know in some people’s opinion she’s the wrong person; but in my heart, Peg, I know they’re wrong.

  “I hope you know my falling in love with Nancy doesn’t mean I didn’t love you. To the contrary, I need you to know my falling in love with Nancy was possible only because I discovered with you how beautiful love can be.

  “Marriage won’t be easy for us, Peg. For lots of reasons. For one, the folks don’t accept Nancy. You know how my father loved you; there’s no way Nancy will ever claim a piece of his heart. And as far as Mom’s concerned, her daughter’s dead. For another, your mother and I had some pretty harsh words the morning after Jennie’s birthday party, and we barely talk to one another now. Your sisters haven’t said anything to me about that morning, but I know they’re siding with your mother. All of which doesn’t bode particularly well for my relationship with your side of the family. And last, all of our friends have turned away from me. Not that I blame them, I guess. They couldn’t accept my getting involved with Nancy so soon after you died, so they moved on. Everyone except Dave.

  “But the good news is Jennie loves Nancy. The day after I asked Nancy to marry me, I told Jennie what I had done and told her she was going to have a new mommy. Well, she clasped her hands together in front of her chest, scrunched her shoulders and jumped up and down for what must have been twenty minutes, the happiest I’ve seen her in a long, long time. She even asked me if she could call Nancy ‘Mommy,’ and I told her she could. I hope you don’t mind.

  “Then she asked me if she could call Nancy on the phone, so I dialed Nancy’s number for her, and when Nancy answered, I told her Jennie wanted to talk to her. I gave Jennie the phone, and the first words out of her mouth were ‘Hello, Mommy.’ Can you believe that? She talked to Nancy for about fifteen minutes, and I think she used the word ‘Mommy’ at the beginning and end of every sentence. She was so happy to be able to, I guess.

  “John’s obviously too young to know what’s happening, but Nancy thinks he’s really special, so he’s going be okay too.

  “You never met Nancy, but I know you would have liked her. She’s different from you in a lot of ways, Peg, but she’s like you in that she’s honest right to the core; and she’s smart, and she knows what’s important and what isn’t.

  “And she loves me. Totally and without reservation. And I love her.

  “I’d be lying, Peg, if I said I didn’t miss you. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still love you. But I can’t live without the kind of love you and I once shared, Peg, and I think I’ve found that with Nancy. Who would have thought I’d be that lucky a second time?”

  I look at the frozen landscape around me. The wind rattles the bare branches of a nearby tree.

  “Well…I should start to think about going home. But like I said, there were so many things I’ve wanted to talk to you about, and of course I wanted to tell you about Nancy. And I feel you telling me it’s okay. Thanks, sweetheart. Watch over us.”

  Epilogue

  Ninety-Six

  I take a sip of my scotch and soda. My glass is almost empty, and the extra ice cubes I asked for have melted. I consider going out to the bar for a fresh drink, but I don’t. I’m comfortable where I am in that hard-to-find, harder-to-stay-in zone of having had just the right amount to drink when one is able to see—and appreciate—things normally taken for granted.

  Today—Saturday, August 5th, 2006—is John’s wedding day. A little over three hours ago, he married Nikki Taich, the love of his life since his freshman year in college.

  Only fourteen of us are here. Nancy and I, of course; Jennie and her husband of six years, Nathan; Will, our nineteen year-old son, and Amanda, our fifteen year-old daughter; Nancy’s brother Don and his wife Mary; five close friends, two from Pennsylvania and three from Long Island; and Father Byrum, the rector of our church in Huntington.

  No one from my side of the family is here. They weren’t invited. The last time any of them spoke to Nancy or me was in 2002, at my father’s funeral, and the time before that was at my mother’s funeral in 1999. After twenty-four years of marriage, we think we’ve given them enough time to accept Nancy and have decided to move on without them.

  The Reillys aren’t here either, but that was John’s decision. Maureen Reilly died in 2001, and three birthdays and three Christmases have now come and gone without Jennie or John receiving either a phone call or a card from Erin, Megan or Kathleen. Strange given that Maureen Reilly sued us not once but twice to make certain that she and her daughters would always be able to have contact with Peg’s children.

  The music is pounding, and the dance floor is filled with wildly gyrating young men and women. Our table for the moment is empty except for Father Byrum and me.

  “You have much to be thankful for, John,” Father Byrum says, his soft voice breaking into my reverie. “You and Nancy have raised four beautiful, wonderful children.”

  “Thank you, Father,” I reply. “I don’t know how much we owe to luck as opposed to skill, but you’re right. We do have four wonderful kids.”

  I turn away from Father Byrum and scan the dance floor. One by one the kids come into view out of the writhing mass of bodies. First Jennie—still my little girl even though she turned twenty-nine this past Thursday—with her beautiful, lustrous, thick brown hair, her wonderfully warm and ready smile, and her seemingly endless capacity to love. Then John—good-looking, big, powerful, a rock, loyal to the core, and full of quiet, steadfast love for his family. Then Will—tall, handsome, sensitive, frighteningly intelligent, imbued with love for the beauty and power of words, and more like his dad than either of us care to admit. And last but not least, Amanda—tall, willowy and already stunning with her long flowing blond hair, sharp-tongued, quick-witted and still an unknown as to what she will become—but with such great promise.

  Father Byrum is right, I think, nodding in silent agreement. We have four wonderful children.

  A soft hand curves around the back of my neck. “Hey, good-lookin’.” Fingers glide through the hair that curls over my shirt collar. “Wanna dance?”

  A song by Norah Jones is playing now. My kind of music. I look up over my shoulder at Nancy standing next to me, looking very glamorous in her sleek, black strapless gown. I smile and look at our children out on the dance floor one more time before pushing back my chair.

  “I missed you,” I say as I take Nancy’s hand and lead her into the midst of swaying couples.

  She slides into my arms and rests her cheek against my neck. Her body melts into mine, and I close my eyes.

  God, she smells good.

  Acknowledgments

  First, I would like to thank longtime friends Mike and Monique Stief, who over dinner one night in Düsseldorf, Germany, led me to believe, first by their questions, then by their tears on hearing my answers, that maybe, just maybe, my story would be all I hoped.

  Second, sincere thanks to first reader Mickey Clement, author of The Irish Princess and Twelve Shades of Crimson, for her wonderfully encouraging comments after reading my story and for her valuable input on how to present my book to agents and publishers.

  Third, I would like to thank our eldest daughter, Jennie, for her help in putting the finished manuscript into the format demanded by agents and publishers. I can type, but computer-savvy I am not. Thanks to Jennie, no one ever knew.

  Fourth, I thank John Lewis, my publisher and president of Oakley Publishing, for seeing the beauty of my story and wanting to publish my book.

  Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank Nancy, my wife of twenty-six years. Nancy told me many times I had a way with words; then one night in Antigua she told me I should write a book. When I said I had nothing to write about, Nancy suggested I write about my life. When I said no one would want to read about a life as ordinary as mine, she suggested I write about Peg and us. Ever my most honest critic, Nancy said
my first draft was terrible; then she proceeded to tell me what it needed. She pored over the next draft and the next and the next, each time pushing me to write better—even when I wanted to stop. Good enough was never good enough; she wanted my best. Without her encouragement, patience, faith in me and unconditional love for me, Rules Get Broken would never have been written. Thank you, Nan, for all that you did and all that you are.