The big man’s face was filled with emotion that he obviously revealed to few people. Tate felt humbled.
He also thought about how still waters hid surprising matters. And about how for some reason people had always confided in him the deeply private details of their lives. Even as a teenager, other boys and girls would seek him out and confess all this stuff that he would rather they had kept to themselves. Back in his hometown he had known whose parents beat who, who was pregnant and unmarried, who was cheating whom out of what. His mother had said it was his demeanor and that he was meant to be a preacher; his brother had said he was perfect for journalism, that all the stories would seek him out.
He recalled overhearing the women gossiping yesterday at the grocery store.
Neville jerked him out of his wandering thoughts by saying, “My relationship with Fayrene was never anything like how I love my wife, and all of it was years ago, anyway. The only way it pertains to today is my friendship for her. A man doesn’t leave his friends just because he gets married.”
“No, can’t do that.”
“My wife can’t seem to see it any other way than that I’m strayin’, though.” Back and forth again went the toothpick. “Ever since she found out about Fayrene and me, she’s been jealous, even though it happened years before she and I ever met. I’ve explained my head off, but nothin’ I say can seem to change how she takes it.” He shook his head. “I tell you, women can make a mountain out of a molehill.”
Tate figured that each person viewed a molehill from a different perspective. If said molehill was in a neighbor’s backyard, it was never so important as when it was popping up in your own backyard. Mighty hard to be unconcerned with your own backyard torn to pieces.
He had just seen the sheriff out the door when Charlotte came blowing in, and she looked madder than a wet hen.
Without a word, she slammed her purse on her desk and, still standing, proceeded to sort through the stack of mail she had brought with her.
Tate debated whether or not to ask her what was wrong. He did not feel up to handling another confidence or problem. He did, however, want his coffee, and he did not see that Charlotte had brought a can.
“Where’s the coffee?” he asked.
“What?” She paused in her mail sorting to frown at him. “Oh, shoot. I went to the post office to get the mail first, and I got to talkin’ to Julia and clean forgot I had gone out for coffee.”
She had spoken to Julia Jenkins-Tinsley. He wasn’t going to question that.
“I’ll go get the coffee,” he said and walked out the door.
He wondered if the main secret to life might be minding one’s own business, and if this might not be the hardest thing in the world for a human being to do.
That evening Marilee experienced certainty in her decision to marry Parker. She was, in fact, finding her effort to love him worthwhile, because he was responding with equal effort to be agreeable. He got them both Coca-Colas, pouring hers into a glass, and brought the drinks to the dining room table, where together they discussed wedding plans.
Actually, it was not a discussion. Parker asked Marilee what she wanted to do about getting married. Marilee, wondering at the expression, cocked her head.
“Do you mean what to do about the wedding?”
“Yes,” he said, and she noted the positive yes.
She wanted a small church wedding, with Pastor Smith officiating, and the children and her Aunt Vella present, and her mother would want to be included, of course. She got carried away with hopeful thoughts that maybe Anita would come up for the ceremony. And she would like enough time to get a new dress for herself, and new clothes for the children. And flowers.
“Whatever you want,” Parker said.
“Well…I think it will take a couple weeks, at least, to get it together. We’ll have to work around Pastor Smith’s availability.” She began a list, putting contacting the pastor first.
Then there was the question of a honeymoon. Marilee thought it would be a good idea for them to get away, and Parker exhibited more eagerness for this idea than for the wedding. The first question was where to go.
“Wherever you want,” Parker said.
She wasn’t certain where she wanted to go. “Charlene and Mason went to Cancun. They liked it.” However, the prospect of distance and time between her and the children unnerved her. She did not say this, however.
“If that’s where you want to go, that’s where we’ll go,” Parker said. Then he added, “I’ll have to see if Morris can come down from Lawton, or maybe get Dr. Swisher to come out of retirement. I’ll let you know what week one of them can stand in for me, and we’ll go anywhere you want. Your call.”
Later, with the children in bed, they sat on the couch. Parker kissed her deeply and suggested that he stay the night.
Marilee pushed his hands from her breasts and told him gently, “I would rather we not go sleeping together until we are married. I think this is best for the children. We need to take one step at a time, Parker. I want to present the children with a secure environment.”
Parker was quiet, and then he said, “All right.”
Having focused on the children, which was easiest, Marilee said she was concerned about having to leave their garden behind. They all enjoyed it so much. It was too late to plant an entire garden in Parker’s yard now, but she and the children could plant flower beds. Then there was the combining of their households to be considered.
“It’ll take me time to sort through all our stuff. We can move over to your house gradually. Okay?” She was suddenly struck by a great reluctance to leave her cottage, no matter how small and cramped.
Parker said, “Sounds good.”
“I’d like to buy Corrine a four-poster bed and make her room up really pretty.”
Parker nodded and said, “Fine.”
He kissed her and pushed her down upon the couch and began slipping his hands up beneath her shirt. Marilee felt the great confusion of desire and restraint. She wished she could explain to him how she felt about her position as a mother of small children. She could not speak to other times of her life, neither years before nor years ahead, but only to that particular time right then, when her choice was to wait. When, in fact, she felt a panic at the thought of sex. She fairly pushed him on the floor.
He did his little-boy frown, and she stroked his temple hair back around his ear with her fingernail. “I’m tired, anyway…and you said you were, too.”
“Yep. Got a dog I need to check when I get back.” He got to his feet.
She closed the door after him and went to clear away their coffee cups and clean up the sink. She paused, staring at her reflection in the night-black windows.
Parker had been most agreeable all evening. Why, then, did she feel such dissatisfaction?
She wished he wouldn’t keep going after her body like a wildcatter determined to bore for oil. And that he would have been more forthcoming in making mutual decisions. He seemed unwilling to take part in planning, content to leave it all to her.
She sighed deeply, feeling as if she were a very hard woman to please.
Maybe that was the correct answer to a woman like her.
Marilee was just slipping into bed—and almost guiltily glad of having it all to herself again—when the telephone rang.
It was Belinda, who said, “Well, you are gonna have to do somethin’ about Mama and Daddy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Now I have got Daddy up here in my apartment, in front of my television, sleepin’ on my sofa, and strewin’ his stuff all over my bathroom. This is just not gonna work. You are gonna have to do somethin’. You have got to talk to Mama and get her to take Daddy back home.”
Marilee said she had talked to Aunt Vella and had gotten nowhere. “I talked to your daddy earlier, too, and didn’t get anywhere. I’m sorry, Belinda, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do.” Marilee was also thinking that Belinda should have been more co
ncerned before everything had gotten to this point.
“Well, somebody is gonna have to do somethin’. I can’t stand this,” said Belinda, as distraught as Marilee had ever heard her. Then the line clicked dead.
With thinking up things to do to get her aunt and uncle back together, worrying over how the upheaval of moving from their house to Parker’s would affect the children, and trying to work up enthusiasm for leaving the children to go on a honeymoon, Marilee lay awake a long time.
Nineteen
The Engagement
“Well, congratulations.” It was Charlene, telephoning just before nine. “Parker was just here to worm Leanne’s horses, and he told us about giving you a ring. So it is finally going to happen—you and Parker are going to get married.”
“Yes.”
She really could not postpone another day telling people of the news. The first one she needed to tell was her mother, and she had better catch her before she got off to Las Vegas. Right there, with her hand still on the receiver after hanging up from Charlene, Marilee dialed her mother’s number.
“Hello, dear. I’m packing…. I had to go out and get new luggage last night. Our other set was just so old, it looked tawdry. I didn’t think it would look good for Carl’s store for us to be lugging that stuff around. I still need to get Carl’s shirts from the cleaners…. He’s back at the store, and I’ll pick him up on the way to the airport. I’d just as soon he stayed at the store and out of the way. He just hates to travel…. He gets all wrought up, and there won’t be any food on the short flight down to Dallas. It’s that awful prop plane. I sure hope it isn’t rainin’ down in Dallas, when we have to change planes. I have the hotel number around here somewhere…we’re stayin’ at the Grand. Oh, you won’t need us anyway. It’s just the weekend.” Her mother finally paused.
“Mother, Parker and I are engaged.”
There was no answer. The line was silent.
“Here it is! Whew, what a relief. It is such a nice packet from the travel agency. The itinerary isn’t quite as detailed as usual. Dotty didn’t do it, she’s havin’ her gallbladder out, and this young girl did it. She doesn’t half know what she is doin’. Here’s the confirmation number for the hotel. We sure need to have that. Last time the hotel was way overbooked and they wanted to put us across town, but I had my confirmation number, and I just refused. That’s what you have to do, just refuse. I have the girl’s name from the travel agency, too, just in case. Now, I have to get off here, honey. I have to get this packin’ done. Carl doesn’t like me to keep him waiting.”
Marilee said quickly, “I wanted to tell you Parker and I are engaged.”
“You are? You and Parker?” She sounded as if it came as a complete surprise.
“Yes. He gave me an engagement ring. We haven’t set the date, but we plan sometime next month, as soon as Parker can get a fill-in vet, and I can schedule Pastor Smith.”
“Well, I’m glad you have come to your senses on this thing. You are darn lucky to get Parker. Have you called Anita to tell her?”
“No…not yet.”
“Well…oh, there’s another call…it may be Carl. You can tell me all about your plans when I get home. Goodbye, dear.”
Marilee hung up and breathed deeply. She thought Parker might be a little lucky to have her, too. Except that she felt so short of temper these days. She hoped she was not turning into a shrew.
She sat there for a full two minutes with her hand on the telephone, considering telephoning her sister. Anita would be at work, but maybe she had an answering machine hooked up now. Marilee thought she would just leave a message. That seemed the easiest.
In the end she decided to telephone her sister on Sunday and tell her everything. She was just too busy with doing Parker’s birthday and telling everyone in town about the engagement.
Charlotte’s reaction to Marilee’s news was curious. Granted, Charlotte was not an effusive woman at the best of times, but Marilee found her manner, when told of Marilee’s engagement, quite lacking.
Everyone at the newspaper was happy for her, of course. She made her announcement, and they all, except Charlotte, gathered round and repeatedly oohed and aahed at her ring. June began to cry, and Reggie went into that really annoying bit of making an announcement into a pen and then singing “There Is Love.” She tugged Leo to his feet and danced him around. They really were a handsome couple. Tammy poured canned cola into paper cups and proposed a toast. Imperia thought to go call Zona to come out to see Marilee’s ring and join them in celebration. The small accountant came forward and said, “I hope you two will be very happy, Marilee,” in her amazingly sweet voice, lifted a paper cup of soft drink in good wishes, and then turned around and slipped right back to her office.
Marilee kept glancing at Tate’s open office door. He was not at his desk, and she concluded he was not in at all. Disappointment swept over her, which was totally silly, of course. It was so much easier for her without him present.
Charlotte had quickly returned to her desk and focused on her computer screen. Marilee was a little taken aback by this distant behavior. Of everyone at the paper, Charlotte was her closest friend. She and Charlotte had worked there the longest, watching many others come and go. Both she and Charlotte knew the workings of the paper and could do everyone else’s job, too, and they had done it all on numerous occasions. This expertise gave them a certain camaraderie born of facing crises together. So many times getting the Voice out had hung by a thread that Marilee and Charlotte had knitted up together.
It struck Marilee that perhaps the woman was jealous. Marilee’s heart swelled with feeling. Charlotte was thirty-six and had never been married; she read scads of romance novels, saw every romance movie, and had displayed quiet crushes on a number of men passing through her life, Leo, Sr. being only the latest, yet as far as Marilee knew, Charlotte had not even had a date in ages. There were few single men in town who met with her approval, not to mention her height, which tended to scare men away.
Marilee sauntered over to Charlotte’s desk and said in a low voice, “We’re just going to have a tiny ceremony, no fancy dressing and not a lot of guests, just Mama and the children, but I was hoping you would stand up with me…be my matron of honor.”
Charlotte regarded her solemnly from behind her thick glasses. “Okay. What day? Don’t forget the grand opening of Green Acres on the first weekend of the month. We’ll have to cover that, and I have a dental appointment the next Friday—on the ninth.”
Marilee absorbed this rather halfhearted reply. “We haven’t set a day yet,” she said. “I’ll work around those dates.”
Across the street at the soda fountain of Blaine’s Drugstore, Deputy Lyle Midgett enjoyed a Coca-Cola and barbecue sandwich made by Nadine, the new girl Belinda had hired, and told Belinda all about the goings-on down at the police station, where the people from Tell-In had returned with a third person, a thin, silent man who was some sort of search expert. Armed with a court order that gave them access to the dead man’s effects, although not possession, they began an immediate and thorough search of Kaplan’s luggage, briefcase and car. Lori was given custody of the fifty thousand dollars, stuck in a paper sack that she put under her desk at her feet.
“Judge Watkins signed the court order. They can’t take nothin’, but they can search it right here, and they sure are doin’ it,” Lyle told Belinda, his voice muffled by a full bite of barbecue sandwich. “This is good.” He smiled at Nadine, and Belinda did not like that much. She shifted herself to be right in front of him.
“Have they said how big the chip is?” Belinda already knew all about Kaplan being the inventor of the chip and having stolen it, as she had gotten the full account out of Lyle days ago. “Do they need a magnifyin’ glass to see it?”
“Shush,” Lyle whispered. Glancing around furtively, he lowered his voice. “I heard them say it is about the size of a dime, I think. Or maybe it was a nickel. Somethin’ like that. I said he could have mailed
it to the Russians, since it wasn’t no bigger than that. I don’t know why he wouldn’t have done that.”
“Russians? What would they want with it?” Lyle did not keep up with commerce, whereas Belinda read a lot of magazines. She read Today’s Money just about every month. “Maybe you mean the Microsoft people.”
Lyle shook his head and said it was some foreign country, only he couldn’t remember which one. China, he finally decided, after thinking hard on the matter.
“I don’t think anyone ever sends stuff like that through the mail,” Belinda offered. “But I don’t know why not. Maybe they do, and they just don’t make movies about it, because that would be boring. I wonder where the dog fits into this.”
“I haven’t heard anything about any dog.” Lyle shook his head.
“I told you about the dog,” she reminded him, and he said he knew that. “You said there was a dog dish in Kaplan’s car.”
“Maybe it was a dog dish, but there wasn’t any dog food or anything. Might have just been some old dish.” And Lyle had not been about to ask the sheriff about the dog, either, because questions might reveal to the sheriff that he told Belinda a lot of stuff he wasn’t supposed to be telling her. He didn’t know why he told her. Somehow he just found himself doing it. She was the first woman to ever really listen to him, for one thing.
The bell over the door rang, and Marilee and her children came in. Marilee called over for the children to be given whatever they wanted. “I’ll be there in a minute. I’d like a chocolate shake.”
Belinda, watching Marilee disappear behind one of the shelves of the pharmacy, wondered how Marilee could keep drinking chocolate shakes like she did and not ever get any fatter. Probably it was that Marilee was too nervous most of the time. Marilee was always doing or planning something. Belinda had observed that having kids tended to do this to a woman, which was why she had no desire for any. People were all the time asking her when she and Lyle were going to get married and have children. She replied that she knew when she was well off and could read an entire magazine when she wanted.
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