One More Summer

by Liz Flaherty

  “Deac can talk, but not for long. And you can get up there and tell some wicked lie about me that will leave people laughing. I don’t want it to be mawkish at my funeral. I’ve had such a splendid time, and I want that to be what people know. What they remember.”

  “Okay.” Grace breathed the word past a small mountain that was growing in her throat. “Is that all?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  But it wasn’t. Promise had more to say, and Grace knew it. There had been no conviction in the soft syllables.

  “Are you scared, Prom?” I can’t stand it if you are.

  “Not really, and I’m not even mad about it anymore.” Promise pushed her cup aside and took Grace’s hands in hers. “I’m ready. I know you’re not and Steven’s not, but neither of you can call the shots on this one. And don’t play games with it, Grace.”

  “Games?”

  “Don’t do the ‘if I just do this right, Promise will live’ thing. It doesn’t work. Don’t bargain with God. He’s already made His plans for me. And don’t ever, ever, ever think you should have been able to save me. You shouldn’t have.”

  The tears spurted then, so quick and hot they felt as though they scalded Grace’s face where they fell. She rubbed her cheeks with the heel of one hand. “Fine, we’ll do it your way this time. I wonder if God realizes just how much of a spoiled brat he’s getting. Your mama and mine will put a stop to it, that’s for sure.”

  “Hey, woman—” it was Dillon’s voice, “—how about a couple of brewskis out here for the working men?”

  The end came, as Promise whispered to Faith, “on little cat feet.” It had been a good day. She’d eaten a little and laughed a great deal and told Dillon to title his next book for her.

  “You can call it Temptress at Twilight and it can be about this gorgeous woman who charms the socks off everyone and then goes off into the sunset with her flaming tresses flying.”

  “‘Flaming tresses’?” He hiked an eyebrow at her. “Getting a little purple, are we?”

  She moved her head on her pillow, the gesture a mere suggestion of a toss of her own “flaming tresses.”

  “Dillon, take care of her for me.”

  “Always.” He shaped her face with his hand. “Rest, you temptress.”

  “No time. Not today.” She smiled at him. “Love her the way she deserves.”

  “I can’t do anything else.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise, Promise.”

  He sat near the door so he would be out of the way but close by if anyone needed anything. He had his omnipresent notebook, but after the first note he made—I never knew before that a day could ache—he set it aside.

  He watched as Grace flitted in and out of the room. She brought flowers from the garden. A planter from students. Coffee for Steven to drink as he sat quiet vigil.

  On one of her trips, Dillon followed her from the room and stopped her in the kitchen, pulling her into his arms and just holding her. Only the dampness on his shirt told him she cried, though her tears were no less devastating in their silence.

  In the afternoon, at Promise’s request, Grace sat on the end of the bed and read the last chapters of Anne of The Island. Faith and Maxie shared the settee, Jonah sat in a chair and Dillon rested on the floor, his spine against the wall. Steven sat in the chair beside Promise.

  A sense of déjà vu filled the room. It had been only months ago when they’d sat like this with Maxie. This time, Grace finished a different book.

  And this time, there would be no miracles.

  They left the room one by one, whispering goodbyes to Promise, touching Steven’s arm. Dillon waited with his hand on Steven’s shoulder while Grace sat gingerly at Promise’s side.

  The sparkle was mostly gone from the blue gaze, but she held Grace’s hand. “Dillon and Grace,” she whispered. “As it should be. My beloved kindred spirit.” A smile came to her face. “Be happy.”

  Grace smiled back. “I will. I love you, Prom.”

  Promise’s hand, nearly translucent in its thinness, lifted with effort and touched Grace’s face. “Same goes.” The smile flickered again. “See you in a few.”

  The funeral was held in the high school gymnasium, the only place in Peacock big enough to hold all the mourners. Even then, people lined the pennant-covered walls and sat on the hard floor. The air was redolent with the scent of flowers, its heaviness combining with the sultriness of a coming storm. Deac spoke briefly, then others took his place. Former students told how Miss Promise had changed their lives. Kenny G songs played softly in the background.

  Finally, when she could delay it no longer, Grace left her seat between Dillon and Steven and walked to the pulpit that had been brought from the church. She stood for a moment with her back to the mourners, her hands gripping the rails of Promise’s casket.

  When she turned, her gaze went to Dillon. He nodded.

  She could do this.

  “Mr. Larkin,” she addressed the man who had been the principal when she and Promise had been in high school, “Promise made me swear I’d confess to you that the cigarettes in her purse were mine. Well, actually they were Steven’s, but I stole them. There, I’ve admitted it.”

  Laughter rippled softly through the gym, and she closed her eyes. Is this right, Prom? “But about the frogs in the biology room? I released them, all right, but it was all her idea. Promise only looked like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth…”

  At the end, she said, “Life will never be the same without her, there’s just no getting around it. But life is so much richer because we had her as long as we did, so I’m giving you the granddaddy of all clichés and asking that you join her family in celebration of her life.” She drew a deep breath and spoke only to her brother. “Steven, this is for you, from Promise.”

  With the accompaniment of her nephews’ acoustic guitars, Grace began to sing “Desperado.”

  She had worried that her voice would fail, and it did, but not before it was drowned out by the swelling voice of the crowd. She moved blindly toward her seat, where Dillon drew her close and held her. On her other side, Steven took her hand.

  When they stood at the cemetery, with Steven flanked by Grace and Dillon and Faith and Grant, the storm broke through the clouds with a rumble of thunder. They all looked up and stepped as one from under the cover of the mourners’ tent to receive the benediction of the rain on their faces.

  Promise was home, and she was laughing.

  Chapter 31

  Steven shook Jonah’s hand and kissed Maxie. “Call me when you’re ready to run away with me, my love,” he said. “Jonah’s got the hots for the guy with the towel on his head.”

  She smiled sadly at him, her face aged by the grief of the last few weeks. “I wish it had been me instead.”

  He hugged her. “Don’t, Max,” he said. “Don’t.”

  Dillon waited, leaning against the fender of the truck, until Steven came to where he stood. “Call or fax when you get to Knoxville,” Dillon directed. He cleared his throat. “Grace worries.”

  “I will.” Steven nodded, not meeting his eyes. “I’ll be all right, Dill.”

  “Don’t let it—” Dillon hesitated, looking past his friend toward the window at the top of the house. “Knowing Promise is the best thing that ever happened to you,” he said finally. “Don’t let losing her take that away. It would be a disservice to her and to the rest of us.” He pushed himself away from the truck, leading the way around to the driver’s side. “On that little bit of male bonding, I’ll let you go without the traditional air kiss.”

  “That’s good.” Steven’s gaze lifted to the basketball goal. “I’ll still be able to kick your ass next time I’m back.”

  “You just keep right on thinking that.”

  But Steven didn’t get into the truck and Dillon didn’t step away. Finally, awkwardly, with neither knowing who moved first, they exchanged a hard hug.

  “Don’t let her stay up there,” Steven
said. He got behind the wheel and started the truck, pulling his seat belt into place. “If you have to, you can always follow your own advice. Seems to me you might be doing a disservice yourself.”

  “Do you really think Grace needs any more heartache right now?”

  “Maybe. If it’s yours.”

  Grace watched Dillon through the attic window after her brother’s truck pulled out of the driveway. She wondered if her husband’s Mazda would be the next vehicle to leave Elliot House. Steven had had Grace’s car towed away a few days earlier.

  “You gave me ‘Desperado,’” he told her dispassionately, ignoring her rage. “I’m giving you these.” He handed her the keys to Promise’s car. “She wanted you to have the Mustang, but knew you’d throw a hissy fit if she gave it to you herself.”

  She hadn’t driven the little red car yet. She’d opened the driver’s door, but Promise’s scent had emanated immediately from the interior, and Grace had closed the door quickly and leaned against it with her hands covering her face.

  As the rumble of Steven’s truck faded away, she returned to the rocking chair and pushed off with one bare foot, listening for the sound of the basketball bouncing against the hard surface of the driveway.

  The basketball goal was a two-edged sword. While it had, as Dillon intended, given Steven an avenue toward which to direct his anger, it had also allowed Dillon’s slow withdrawal from her. He was still there physically, doing and saying all the right things, but his mind and his heart seemed to be elsewhere. Sometimes when she spoke to him, he started, as though a stranger had begun an unexpected conversation.

  When she woke to an empty bed, she wouldn’t find him at his computer. Instead, he’d be shooting baskets, sometimes with Steven and sometimes alone.

  “Men have to grieve, too, you know,” Maxie told her. “They do it differently from us, is all.”

  But it was more than that. She didn’t know how, only that there was more.

  She didn’t even look up when he came into the attic. She’d felt his presence before the sound of his approach reached her ears.

  He scooped her out of the chair and sat down with her in his lap, and she relaxed. Even if he was thinking of someone else, she liked being in his arms.

  “They buried them in pieces and parts,” he said without preamble, his voice sounding guttural, as though it came from a place deep inside. “No matter where I was afterward, I kept visualizing that. It haunted me whether I was awake or asleep. It was like some macabre dance of the sugar plums.”

  She waited.

  “I met Michelle at a news conference in Paris. She had an Iraqi father and a French mother and she fascinated me,” he said quietly. “I met Little John—his name was really Jean-Pierre, but I called him Little John—the Iraqi baby she’d adopted, that same night. And I never left them again.

  “When the wire service sent me to Iraq, she wanted to go along, wanted to show John’s birth-grandparents that he was doing well. He walked and was even starting to talk, though doctors had told Michelle he never would because of brain damage he’d suffered at birth. I didn’t want her to go, but I didn’t stop her. We lived in a hotel and drove a rental car everywhere.

  “We’d been there a few weeks when Little John got an ear infection. I got the name of a doctor and was going to take them, but she insisted she could just go on the bus. I hadn’t had much sleep and wasn’t feeling all that grand myself. But I didn’t want John riding the bus when he felt so bad, so I told her to take the car even though she was the worst driver on two continents.”

  He stopped talking, swallowing convulsively. Grace touched a hand to his face, offering wordless comfort.

  “I went outside to watch for them to return. I needed the car and I wanted to get them inside before I took off. Michelle felt safe there, but I never did. I saw the car coming and lifted my arm to wave.” Tears streamed down his face, tumbling over her fingers where they rested on his cheek, and he made no attempt to stop them. “Michelle waved back and Little John grinned ear-to-ear at me from his car seat. And then the car exploded.”

  He stopped and sat silent for a few minutes, breathing hard as though he’d been running. She wanted to tell him to stop, that there’d been enough hurting over the past weeks and she couldn’t bear to see him suffer more. But she knew better than anyone that internalizing pain didn’t mean it no longer existed.

  She waited.

  “I did all right making the arrangements. I resigned from the wire service— I knew I couldn’t do that anymore—and went back to our apartment in Paris. I got Michelle and John’s things to her family, was even outlining a new novel and making plans to move back to the States. Then one day I was coming home from somewhere— I don’t even remember where I’d been—and I heard Paul McCartney’s voice on the radio, singing ‘Michelle.’ It sent me on the short road to hell and beyond. I don’t remember a lot after that, until Steven came.” He smiled without humor, though there was a lessening of the pain that filled his eyes. “That’s something to come back to life to, a tall guy in a ponytail yelling, ‘Get off your ass, Campbell. I don’t have time for this.’”

  She caressed his face. “What was she like?”

  He had to think. Michelle’s image had been long buried in the part of his heart he was careful never to open.

  “She was real big on privacy,” he said finally. “All the time we were together, she never barged into the bathroom when I was in there or even came into the bedroom if I had the door closed—that was where I worked. When I’d talk to Steven or my parents on the telephone, she’d leave the room and then never ask what they had to say. She’d just say ‘everything all right?’ and go about her business.”

  “You said you met her at a news conference. Was she a reporter too?”

  “Yeah, one whose parents owned the newspaper. She wrote well, but she wasn’t passionate about it. I could never understand that, and she could never see why I had to feel everything before I committed it to paper, so pretty soon we didn’t talk about that anymore.” He grinned with the memory, and Grace’s face softened into a smile.

  “Tell me more. What did she look like? What did she think about?”

  “She had her father’s coloring, but her mother’s blue eyes, and long legs. She thought about Little John and me. A quirk in her character that fascinated me was that she was like Faith—you know, all perfect and with every hair in place—but when she chose a child, she chose one who would never be even close to perfect.”

  “And a man who wouldn’t be, either.”

  He glared at her, though a lightness that he hadn’t felt in far too long danced under his ribs. “Who’s telling this story?”

  “So tell it. Did she proofread your work?”

  “Michelle never read anything I wrote until it was in its published form. No one did till you. I’d give her an autographed copy and she’d read it right away and tell me how good it was. She never would have told me I was going through the motions even if she thought I was, and she certainly wouldn’t have suggested I read fan mail.”

  Michelle had loved him. She’d loved him as fiercely as she had John, but she’d loved only the parts he offered and never asked for more. Dillon Campbell, the writer, was almost a stranger to her.

  And he had loved her.

  “Do you think about her when you’re with me?”

  He could tell Grace’s words came reluctantly, her voice small and uncertain, and what she said made no sense.

  “What?” He drew her up so that he could look into her face.

  “When we’re…together in bed, do you pretend I’m her?”

  “No!” The very idea horrified him. It had been hard enough accepting that he was in love with Steven’s sister. Inviting yet another relationship weirdness into the equation was beyond consideration. “Why would you even think such a thing?”

  “Because you go so far away sometimes, and when we went to New York, you stayed away unless we were making love. I just figured y
ou were with her in your mind. She would have fit in so much better, would have been willing and probably happy to live that kind of life. Not that there’s anything wrong with it,” she added quickly.

  He chuckled, leaning back. When the chair rocked, Grace fell back against him, and he held her there.

  “I was letting go of ‘that kind of life,’” he said. “I was cleaning things up, listing the condo in Boston, arranging to have my stuff shipped to Peacock.”

  Her nutmeg eyes were luminous when she pulled herself upright in his lap. “Really?”

  “Really.” He smiled, tracing the shape of her mouth with one finger. “But I had some dragons of my own left to slay. A lot of guilt to lay to rest. I never felt about Michelle the way I do you. I loved her, but I wouldn’t have lived permanently in Paris if she hadn’t had John. I couldn’t leave him. I guess I was playing a Grace game in my mind. You know, if I’d just loved her more, she wouldn’t have died.”

  She shook her head. “The game doesn’t work.”

  “I know, and I thought about that this morning when Maxie told Steven she wished it had been her instead of Promise. Maxie, Steven and you would have all cheerfully died in Promise’s place.” His voice cracked. “Just as I would have died in Little John’s. But none of you could have loved Promise more, I couldn’t have loved John more, and we still couldn’t save them.”

  Her arms came around him, and they sat in comfortable silence, their heartbeats mingling until Dillon could feel only one. It was his whole heart that kept time with hers, he realized, with no little pockets held back.

  The sense of freedom was enormous.

  “It’s funny,” he said, “that when we got married, I wished it was because you loved me too much to live without me instead of to give Promise peace of mind, but ours isn’t a love story of just two people, is it?”

  “No,” she said, after a moment’s thought. “It would all be easier, I suppose, if it was. If I wasn’t Promise’s best friend and Maxie’s daughter, if you weren’t Steven’s best friend and the man who loved Little John enough to die for him.”