by Peggy Webb
“I’ve brought the preacher some scones, fresh from the oven. Why don’t you come over and join us?”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” Paul agreed enthusiastically. “Just scoot up the tree, Martie, and I’ll help you down on this side.”
Miss Beulah’s eyebrows shot up into the air at that scandalous suggestion, and all attempts at subtlety vanished.
“Reverend Donovan! I should think that conduct is highly unseemly for a minister. What if somebody sees? Word would get all over town before the day was out.”
A small muscle twitched in Paul’s jaw, the only sign of his inward struggle. “I think you’ve underestimated the good people of this town, Miss Beulah.”
Martie was furious and immediately charged full tilt into battle.
“I don’t believe the Reverend Donovan’s reputation needs any defense, Miss Beulah,” she declared loudly, “but I’m going to put your mind and your tongue at ease. I have no designs, either scandalous or otherwise, on the minister. The only thing we have in common is a fence. And now, if you two will excuse me, I’m going to clean my honky tonk.”
She whirled away from the peephole without waiting to see Paul’s face. Covering her ears with her hands, she ran into her house. Don’t look back, she told herself. She had burned her bridges, and everybody was better off.
She didn’t stop running until she was upstairs. Furiously she ransacked her closet, looking for a box. The only thing she could find was a heart-shaped one that had once held candy. Grabbing the mended shorts from the wicker rocker, she stuffed them into the box and slammed the lid shut.
“I’m not going to cry,” she said to the small wren sitting on her windowsill. Two fat tears rolled down her cheeks, under her chin, and into the neck of her scarlet sweater. She sniffed as two more followed. “I never cry,” she informed the wrens.
o0o
On Tuesday Paul went to Baptist Hospital in Memphis to be with a parishioner who was having open-heart surgery, and Martie organized her first Jazzercise class.
If thoughts had been birds, a whole flock of them would have been winging their way between Pontotoc and Memphis. While Martie was talking to Jolene about the class, she had a sudden vision of Paul shaking hands with Aristocat, and she burst out laughing. And once when Paul went to the coffee machine, he put his money in and stood for five minutes thinking about Martie’s hair in the moonlight before he remembered to punch the button.
o0o
It was after midnight when Paul returned to Pontotoc, but even then he could hear music coming from Martie’s house. It wrapped itself around his heart and squeezed as he was getting ready for bed. He stood at the window for a long time, smoking his pipe and watching the moon create changing patterns of shadow and light on the backyard fence. After the music stopped he went into his study to record a tape. At three o’clock, satisfied with his labors, he finally went to bed.
o0o
The heart-shaped box lay open on Paul’s kitchen table. He alternately sipped coffee and picked up the mended shorts for another look. But mostly he smiled. Martie’s sewing was about on par with her golfing, but it didn’t matter a whit. The bright red thread, jumbled into knots and crisscrossing the faded blue shorts, was just like the woman who jitterbugged in the park and slid down the banister.
He put his coffee cup in the dishwasher, lifted the shorts from the box, and carried them to his bedroom. His jeans slid down his muscled thighs and landed in a heap on the polished wooden floor as he solemnly tried on the mended shorts. With their new proportions they had the fit and comfort of a cross-cut saw. Paul looked down at himself and laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. After the laughter had subsided and he was back in his jeans, he folded the shorts into the box and put them on the top shelf of his closet.
“I guess I can scratch handmade gifts for Christmas,” he said aloud. His smile lasted the rest of the day.
o0o
Martie listened to the tape for the umpteenth time. Paul’s rich voice filled the room as he read the poetry. She sat in the middle of her bed and hugged her knees to her chest. She wanted to laugh and cry and dance and sing. She wanted to run down the street and kiss the postman who had delivered the tape. But most of all she wanted to be in the arms of the man who had recorded the love poems.
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” His deep voice vibrated through her, and she knew that he was sharing an intimate part of himself. Through the tape she was seeing a sensitive man who recognized the beauty and music of poetry and had the ability to translate it into magic. As the tape ended, she pressed the stop button and lay back on her pillows. She closed her eyes and pretended that Paul was lying beside her, speaking the words of love as if they had been written especially for her.
o0o
On Thursday morning when Martie awakened and looked out her window, she was greeted by a most unexpected sight. The smile that started in her eyes spread to her lips, then widened until it swelled into laughter.
Her fence was festooned with marigolds. Peeping through every crack and crevice was a bright golden flower.
Still laughing, Martie ran toward the door, remembered that she wasn’t wearing any clothes, scooted back for a robe, and flew down the stairs.
“Marigolds!” she shouted with glee. “That crazy, wonderful man has decorated my fence with marigolds!”
She tugged at one of the flowers, pulling it through the fence. Masking tape dangled from the stem. Martie tucked the flower behind her ear, tape and all, and wondered how long it had taken Paul to create such an elaborate surprise.
“Paul Donovan, you idiot,” she whispered. “I think I’m falling in love.” With light, jaunty steps, she walked back to her house. “I really must remember to patch those holes,” she told herself. “This just won’t do. It won’t do at all.”
But she was smiling.
o0o
On Friday morning when Paul awakened and looked out his window, he, too, was greeted by a most unexpected sight. Grinning hugely, he erupted into a boom of laughter that bounced off the parsonage walls.
His fence looked as if it had sprouted roses. Bunches of bright red floribundas nodded in the cracks.
“My love is like a red, red rose,” he quoted. “Thank you, Martie, for ‘not speaking’ so eloquently.” Whistling he went outside and gathered the roses. One of the last flowers he plucked off the fence had a note attached:
This is positively my last communication with you, since I am still in the process of forgetting you forever and ever. Tomorrow I’m patching this fence.
He put the roses in a jelly glass and set them in the middle of his kitchen table, and then he got into his reliable brown Ford and drove to the hardware store.
o0o
Martie pounded the nail home and reached behind her back for another. Her hand came up empty. “Baby, you’re a big help,” she scolded her unpenitent pet. “This is the third time you’ve stolen my sack of nails. How do you expect me to ever finish patching this fence?” She found the sack under the rosebush and continued her lopsided carpentry.
The noonday sun beamed down, too hot for October, and a trickle of sweat ran down the side of her face. She pushed up her shirt sleeves and knotted her shirttail around her midriff.
“On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” she told her rambunctious puppy.
She put her hammer on the ground and sat down to rest, but her respite was soon interrupted by a thunderous banging on the other side of the fence. Jumping up, Martie put her eye to a large crack. She couldn’t see a thing except the empty parsonage yard.
“Paul, is that you?” she yelled, but the enthusiastic carpentry drowned out the sound of her voice.
“What is that man up to?” she muttered, and moved to another crack in the fence, but she still couldn’t see a thing.
Racing to the tree, she put her foot on the lowest limb and started to climb up. She had reached only the second branch when a section of the fence crashed into
her yard and the Reverend Paul Donovan strolled through the opening.
“What in the world are you doing?” she called from the tree.
“Building a gate.” He picked up the section of fence and propped it against the tree.
“Why?” She looked into his upturned face and had to clutch the branches to keep from falling. In the week since she’d seen him through the fence, she had almost forgotten how incredibly good-looking he was.
“So that I won’t have to walk around the block when I want to visit you.”
“You’re not supposed to visit me,” she reminded him. “We’re not speaking.”
“Those were your rules, not mine.” His smile made her want to wrap around him, Aristocat style, and purr. “I’m speaking and I’m visiting,” he continued, not altogether unaware of his effect on her. “Call it a pastoral call if you wish.”
“Oh, dear!”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Both I think.”
He chuckled. “Are you going to sit in the tree all day while you decide?”
“I don’t know.” She wondered how she could decide anything with him standing under her tree looking so impossibly sexy. His jeans clung to his muscular thighs, and she had a sudden vision of his shorts, Medium, 32-34. It was quite possible that the thundering of her heart could be heard all the way to Tupelo.
“If you do, you’ll miss the hamburger,” he told her.
She hesitated. “It’s cruel to tempt a starving woman.”
“And the banana split,” he continued blithely, “oozing with chocolate syrup and heaped with whipped cream.”
“Paul, that’s mean.” As she sprang lightly from the tree, he caught her against his chest. His face was so close she could see a tiny crescent-shaped scar in his beard shadow. “I still haven’t decided, you know. I’ll think about it some more over the whipped cream.”
His voice was husky as he pulled her closer. “I should have built that gate last Monday.”
“But then I would have missed the marigolds.”
“Did you like them, Martie?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“I’m glad.” He rubbed his cheek against her soft hair before he lowered her feet to the ground. “We’ll go in my car,” he said, surprised that his mouth could speak sane and sensible words while his heart was pounding and his mind was joyriding through fantasyland. He almost tripped over the sack of nails as one particular fantasy involving Martie in her hot pink leotard skittered through his brain.
o0o
They went to The Sledgehammer, and it was hard to tell whether the banana split or the minister claimed more of Martie’s attention. When she had finished eating she patted her mouth with a napkin. “This is bribery, you know,” she told him.
“Guilty.” He leaned across the table and brushed her mouth with the tip of his finger. “You missed a spot.”
“Yum. Good to the last drop.” Impulsively she grabbed his finger and kissed the whipped cream away.
Then, with his finger still in her mouth, she looked into his eyes. They were the turbulent gray of a storm-swept sea. The tightly controlled passions she saw mirrored there made Martie want to leap across the table and take him in her arms. She wanted to caress the tension out of his shoulders and croon soft love words in his ear. Reluctantly, she released his finger.
“I’m sorry, Paul.”
“Don’t be. It was my pleasure.” He wondered if The Sledgehammer had ever been the scene of a scandal. Even if it had, what he was thinking would be one for the records.
o0o
The drive back to Martie’s house was quiet as they struggled with their separate passions. She invented pressing business in the house while he finished building the gate. Every ten minutes her pressing business carried her past the kitchen window, where she could look out and observe Paul. More often than not she discovered him gazing toward the house with a heart-tugging, little-boy-lost expression on his face.
In an unaccustomed burst of domesticity, she made market basket soup, her specialty, which consisted of everything she could find in the kitchen cabinets. But the small task didn’t take her mind off the man in her yard. She stood at the window while the soup bubbled in the pot, filling the kitchen with an enticing aroma. She watched the way he moved, graceful for such a large man, and the way he stopped hammering every so often to bend down and chat with Baby.
“If I can’t have him, at least I can give him a sendoff that he’ll never forget.” Somewhere inside Martie banners unfurled and trumpet fanfares sounded, and she marched out the door to the tune of her own band.
Paul looked up from his work when he heard the screen door bang open. He started to say something, and then he saw Martie’s face. He couldn’t decide whether she was a David going after the giant with a stone or a Goliath laughing at the stones. Either way, he thought, she spelled excitement.
She marched straight up to him and took his hands. “Come with me,” she ordered, tugging him back across the yard.
“I enjoy your surprises,” he said as he followed her, “but I hope this one doesn’t involve another wild ride in your little red car.”
“It’s going to be a wild ride all right. But not in my car.” She shoved open the screen door and pulled the minister into her hallway. “This is soup and goodbye.”
For the first time since she had commandeered him, she looked into his face. Tipping her head back, she challenged him to deny the goodbye.
“I accept the soup.” His hands moved slowly up her arms, savoring the feel of her. “But not the goodbye.” He gripped her shoulders and gazed fiercely into her eyes. “Never the goodbye.”
“Yes, Paul,” she whispered. “But before I let you go, I want to be in your arms one last time.”
He pulled her hungrily to him and cradled her head against his shoulder. “Martie, Martie. How can you be so stubborn?” He caressed her hair as he talked. “For us, there is no last time.”
“Yes.” She rubbed her face against the soft cotton of his plaid shirt. Underneath the fabric she could feel the thundering of his heart. Her voice was muffled against his chest. “I want a kiss that will last a lifetime.”
He cupped her face and lowered his mouth to hers. The kiss was fierce, hungry, as all their pent-up passions rushed to the surface. She swayed against him and circled his waist with her arms. His hands left her face and roamed down her back, massaging with an urgency that demanded a response.
She molded her hips against his and began an erotic love dance, a tantalizing imitation of forbidden pleasures. Paul’s tongue plunged into her open mouth, tasting and probing in perfect rhythm with her thrusting hips.
A red blaze of heat fogged their brains, and the restraining clothes between them seemed to vaporize. Paul was vividly aware of her breasts, peaked and straining against his chest; of the sleek line of her hips and legs, soft and pliant against his. His hands slipped under her shirt, glorying in the silkiness of her bare skin, and his tongue began a slow, languid assault within the velvet depths of her willing mouth.
She was liquid fire in his arms, moving restlessly, fighting for a fulfillment she knew she couldn’t have. Her silver hair floated with the motions of her head, releasing the scent of summer flowers. Paul absorbed the fragrance of her, knowing that he would never again smell violets and roses without thinking of this moment.
They clung together, prolonging the exquisite torture until they were both limp with the effort of restraint. Martie leaned her damp forehead against his chest and closed her eyes.
“My mistake,” she whispered. “It only makes me want more.”
Paul rested his chin on top of her head and rocked her in his arms. “There will be more, Martie. I promise.”
On that particular Saturday, with the forgotten soup bubbling on the stove and the hall clock chiming six, he would have proposed if he’d thought there was the ghost of a chance that she would say yes. His lips caressed her hair and he sighed. Sometimes patience
was a crown of thorns.
She stood quietly in his arms, memorizing the feel of him, storing the information away for the lonely hours and days and years without him. She was almost tempted to deny their differences and plunge into a courtship with him. But for once in her impulsive life she held back, ruled by caution and self-restraint. She could accept responsibility for hurting herself, but she would not be responsible for hurting this marvelous man who was holding her so tenderly.
She lifted her head. “I’ve changed my mind about the soup,” she murmured.
“So have I.” Reluctantly, he released her. “If I don’t go now, I’m afraid that I never will.”
“Who would know if you stayed, Paul?” she asked softly.
“I would.” He caught her fiercely to his chest for one last embrace. “Good night, angel,” he said, and then he was gone.
The screen door vibrated with his leavetaking, and Martie stood in the vast emptiness of her hallway fighting a lump in her throat.
“I will not cry,” she said aloud, but she knew that she was fooling herself. Two glistening tears were already streaming down her cheeks. “What’s the matter with me?” she cried, dashing the tears away with the back of her hand. “First I tell myself that I don’t want to hurt him, and then I try to tempt him. On top of that, I’m talking to myself.” She picked up a pillow from the hall settee and flung it against the wall. “Why? Why does he have to be a minister?”
The only response was the soup boiling over in the kitchen.
After she had cleaned up the mess and fed the pets and taken her bath, she tried to lose herself in an Agatha Christie mystery, but it was useless. With a sigh she closed the book and walked to her bedroom window. Somewhere behind the darkened fence was the parsonage, and inside that parsonage was a man who had invaded her life. A man who wouldn’t go away. He clung to her thoughts as tenaciously as he clung to her life.
What was he doing? Was he wishing that he had stayed? She paced beside the window until the hall clock chimed midnight.