We passed the sign alerting us to reduce our speed and Terrance let up on the accelerator. The road became two lanes, bordered on both sides by Japanese honeysuckles. The sweet scent of the flowers greeted us as we passed the “Welcome to Garrison” sign at the city’s entrance.
Garrison was a small, quaint, town forty minutes outside of Atlanta. The downtown area was a roundabout filled with the city municipal buildings, shops, restaurants and a small cinema that played old movies that were on their last big screen before being packaged on DVD and placed in the Red Box. There were a few homes and rooming houses in town, but the majority of residents lived outside of the circle in the houses and subdivisions that encompassed an eighteen square mile area. Like the rest of Georgia, it was segregated, the whites living on the west half of the circle, blacks living on the east and the growing Latino population fitting in wherever they could. Like many small towns across the United States, it had taken a hit during the recession. A few storefronts were boarded up and some of the buildings needed a fresh coat of paint, including the city municipal building.
“Can you believe they’re holding a fundraiser to buy paint and bricks to resurface the court house?” Terrance asked like he’d been reading my mind. “The city is just that broke.” Those were the first words he’d said since he’d spoken at the airport. I almost welcomed the sound of his voice, because Janette hadn’t stopped yakking since we’d piled into Terrance’s truck.
I was seated in the rear of course, and listened while my sister rattled on and on about what she really wanted to get off her wedding registry and how she hoped her friends would still have money to buy a gift off her baby registry. She also talked about all the things she wanted in the wedding. As far as I could tell, she didn’t have the money or the time for most of it. From the side view, I could see Terrance grimacing every time she mentioned something that sounded the least bit expensive. I wondered if he had funds to help pull this event off or if I was expected to not only suffer through the planning and execution, but also finance it. I sighed. I knew my sister was broke. I sent her money every month.
Terrance stopped the truck in front of our family home. Like many of the houses it had been built to accommodate the warm, humid climate and included a large wrap-around porch that provided shade during the heat of the day. The roof was pitched with dormers and it was white wood that appeared to have recently been painted. I couldn’t help but think of my parents every time I saw it, especially my father. He took such pride in owning this house and was meticulous about its upkeep.
“I put a coat of paint on it back in the spring. I know how your Dad was about touching it up, even when it wasn’t quite necessary,” Terrance said as if he’d been reading my mind again. I didn’t respond. Although I appreciated it, I figured paint was the least Terrance could do for my father, after-all, he’d knocked up his baby daughter.
The door opened to my right and Terrance extended a hand to help me climb down. I felt a jolt of electricity ignite and race through my body when he touched me. He fought to look anywhere but at me and then finally did when both my feet were on the ground.
“This is wrong,” I said. “I shouldn’t be here.”
Terrance swallowed and turned my hand loose. “I’ll get your bags.” He made his escape.
“Niecy, what do you think of my flowers?” Janette had her back to us. She had already traveled along the walkway a bit. She stood there with her hands on her hips. From the rear you couldn’t even tell she was pregnant. Her video girl booty was still sitting just as high as it always had. As I closed the space between us, my thoughts flashed back in time to a memory of my mother sitting on that porch. I had only been five when she was killed in a car accident. I didn’t remember much about her, but I remember her sitting on the porch in a rocking chair braiding my hair and humming hymns from church.
The scent of sweet olive flowers drifted to my nose from the planters on both sides of the porch. This house was my parent’s legacy. It made me remember why I was actually here. Family. Promises. I was here to be a sister even if I’d been betrayed by my own.
“It’s beautiful,” I replied.
Janette wrapped her arm around mine and leaned her head onto my shoulder like she’d always done when we were kids. “I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad I’m not alone in the world,” she said and I thought she had read my mind.
“I’ll stick your luggage on the porch and be going.” Terrance passed us and put my suitcases at the top of the steps. He walked back toward us and leaned in to give Janette a quick peck on the cheek. “Call me later,” was all he said and within moments the truck he’d never turned off was in gear and moving down the road.
Janette released my arm. “Come on. Let’s go in. We have a lot to talk about, but your nephew is sitting on my bladder. I’ve got to pee.”
***
By seven p.m. that evening the living room was filled with women that Janette and I had grown up with. Terrance’s mother, whom I’d affectionately always known as Mother Wright and his sister, Pamela, a girl I’d never liked and now a woman I couldn’t stand, were also present for the planning of the whirlwind nuptials. I didn’t need this many hands. In fact, I didn’t need any of them except on the day of the reception to decorate, but this party had been set prior to my arrival. The good news was it was a potluck meeting so the table was covered with enough casseroles, meat dishes and desserts to keep Janette and I fed until we sat down for the rehearsal dinner.
A few big things had already been done. The wedding invitations had gone out weeks ago. The location of the ceremony was easy…Terrance’s father’s church. Mount Moriah Christian Church had beautiful grounds and a gorgeous gazebo and pond behind it. It was the perfect backdrop for a country wedding and the pictures. If it had been spring or summer, I’d have planned an outside event. But it was mid October and the weather, although arid today, could be unpredictably chilly for outdoors. We decided to have the festivities inside. Gayle reserved a local banquet hall for the reception.
“How many people are in the wedding party?” I asked. Janette had originally selected twelve women but I’d told her it was way too many. They were only expecting a hundred or so guests. My sister didn’t understand wedding etiquette. You couldn’t have twelve attendants when you only had a hundred people. If I was planning this wedding, she wasn’t going to mess with my sensibilities and break all the wedding rules.
Four women and Pamela raised their hands.
“And then there’s you,” Janette added.
“Janette, I’ve already told you it wasn’t a good idea for me to be in the wedding. I’m coordinating the event.”
“No need for that.” Mother Wright stood to her feet. “We have a coordinator. Sister Marie does it all the time and she’s really very good at it.”
Good compared to whom, I thought, but I merely nodded. The look in Mother Wright’s eyes was one that chastised me. She shook her head as if to say, “You are not going to get out of standing up for your sister.” I got the message.
“Mother is right. Sister Marie can direct everyone in,” Janette said. “You must be my maid of honor. You’re my sister after all. You can’t not be in my wedding.”
A loud harrumph came from Janette’s right. “She can pass if she wants to. I wouldn’t be in no wedding if my sister was marrying my ex-boyfriend,” Pamela said. “As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t even be in town that day.”
The room fell silent. All eyes were on me including Mother Wright’s. They were waiting for what I’d have to say about that.
Janette stood to her feet, supported her weight by placing her hand near the small of her back and wobbled her way toward me. I noticed she wobbled a whole lot more since Terrance was gone. She moaned and groaned a bit too. She’d been working hard to look cute in front of her fiancé, which was so typical of my sister. Never let a man see you sweat. That was her motto.
“Now, we’re not going to talk about Niecy’s old relationsh
ip with Terrance. That’s been over. They are both over each other. My sister loves me. We have her blessing to get married. Don’t we Niece?”
I swallowed hard and lifted my glass of ice tea and took a sip. I nodded and repeated the lines I could completely agree with. “Terrance and I have been over. I love my sister.”
I wasn’t as convincing as I’d hoped I’d be. A few eyes rolled and some heads shook. You could hear a pin drop until Mother Wright clapped her hands and said, “Let’s get back to what we came here for. Next on the list is the food for the rehearsal dinner, right?” She encouraged me with a close-lipped smile and a nod of her head. I had never been really close to Mother Wright, but I knew the kind of woman she was. She cared about family. It meant everything to her. She was probably the only person in the room who really knew why I was here. No matter what I felt about it all, Janette was my sister. I had to get over the betrayal of the marriage and fight for the relationship that our deceased parents would want us to have, no matter what my sister had chosen to do to splinter it.
“Yes,” I fought to grit my teeth. “Let’s talk about the menu.”
By ten p.m. the house was empty, the food put away and my sister was in bed sleeping with her mouth open like we’d all worn her out. She was still in the bedroom she’d grown up in, refusing to move into the master where my father had taken his last breath during hospice. I understood that. I couldn’t bring myself to sleep in the room either. It was a shrine to our parents and we wordlessly agreed to let it stay that way.
Unlike Janette, I wasn’t tired. Even after the flight and ride from the airport and the fight to keep my emotions in check, I was still a bit wired and unable to sleep. I’d forgotten how quiet it was here. The Upper West side of Manhattan had the undercurrent of city noise twenty-four hours a day. I wasn’t used to this silence. After an unsuccessful effort to watch television and read a novel, I grabbed my sister’s keys, locked the house up and climbed into her car. I didn’t drive very often. I didn’t have a car. I’d purposely chosen to live where I could use other means of transportation. Having a car in the city was a burden. I took taxicabs wherever I had to go from the upper west side to the lower east side. And if I was desperate, the subway system would do.
I took a deep breath to quell the nausea that always kind of engulfed me when I sat behind the wheel of a car, started it and pulled out of the driveway onto the main road. I turned on the radio and listened to music from the Quiet Storm croon through the speakers. This radio station probably wasn’t the right choice as the romantic love songs only served to remind me of what I’d been fighting to forget all day, really, all month…that no one loved me. I was thirty-five years old, hadn’t had a date in over six months and now the only man that had ever really wanted me was marrying my sister. I pulled the car over to the side of the road and burst into tears.
“Durn you, Janette, you could have had anyone. Why Terrance?” I cried and I cried and I cried. I was crying so hard that I hadn’t even noticed a car had stopped behind me until I heard the light rap on the passenger side window. My heart froze with fear. Had I checked all my city slickness with my bags at the airport? What was I doing sitting on the side of the road in a car at eleven p.m. in the country? Waiting for a serial killer? I took the car out of park. I let it leap forward a bit to signal him to get out of the way before he was in the ditch. The only reason I didn’t gun the engine was because I might have dragged him down the road.
“Nectar! Wait! It’s me.”
Nectar, nobody called me that but…I put my foot on the brake and leaned a bit to my right to get a better look at him. Well, there was one other person who called me by that silly nickname. I pushed the button to let the window down. “Ethan Wright?!!”
Chapter 3
Ethan was Terrance’s first cousin on his father’s side. He’d been abandoned by his mother when he was eight and had come to live with Pastor and Mother Wright. His mother was said to be a weed smokin’ hippie who had run off with a boyfriend to backpack her way across the country. She’d never come “right” back for Ethan as she’d promised. Sadly, she’d been brought back to Garrison in a casket when he was thirteen. The rumor was that she’d died from a drug overdose. Terrance had shared that his father was unknown. It was very sad.
However, early tragedy aside, Ethan was Garrison’s biggest success story. A star athlete who’d gone all the way from middle school soccer to play in college and then professionally for over five years in Europe until his knee was injured, at which point he retired. His career ended on a high. He banged up his knee earning the final winning point in a World Cup championship game.
“When I first saw the car on the side of the road, I thought you were Janette. I thought the car broken down and you were in trouble.” Ethan slid a glass of water across the granite countertop in his enormous, modern and breathtakingly beautiful kitchen.
“Well, I’m neither,” I replied, taking a sip from the glass. “I thought you were Ted Bundy or his twisted cousin.”
He smiled, shrugged and raised a glass to his lips and said, “I’m neither either.”
Good Lord, I thought. That was a nice smile. When we were growing up he had kinks and curls that would make most naturally curly girls green with envy, but for whatever reason he was sporting a shaved head. A five o’clock shadow framed his chin and tried as I might to ignore it, I could see a fine curly mass of hair twisting its way from under his shirt. His skin was sun-kissed a shade darker than its normal chocolate brown.
I hadn’t seen Ethan since my father’s funeral. Although he’d been only about twenty-four at the time, I remembered thinking how incredibly handsome he’d grown to be, but now at twenty-nine leaning against the counter in his kitchen wearing a pair of low slung jeans and a muscle shirt he was down right FINE! Terrance’s younger cousin had definitely grown up. All the way up. He wasn’t looking like anybody’s younger anything. He was holding it down as his own man.
I cleared my throat to clear my head. “Thanks for stopping. That was considerate.”
“This is Garrison, Georgia. I don’t think anybody would have passed you by.”
I nodded. He was right. In small towns everyone was friendly and considerate about things like breakdowns, because everyone acknowledged that if you could give the time of day to a dog, you could certainly give it to your neighbor. That was so unlike New York. I’d have waited five hours for a tow truck and then the driver would have been rude.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I, uh, own this house,” the smart aleck replied, smiling again.
“I know that, but the wedding’s not for more than a week. You’re a bit early to be in town. I thought you were in Africa, or something, building wells or houses for Habitat for Humanity.”
“I was,” he replied. “But I’m kind of in the middle of some business I’ve invested in and it’s local, so I’ve been in Garrison for a while.”
I nodded. “Local business. I can’t imagine anything around here that would hold your interest.”
He took another sip of water. “You’d be surprised at what holds my interest.” The look in his eyes was salacious. He was flirting.
I let my mouth curve into a smile. I had not expected that, so it was time to move on to another topic. “I’ve never been in this house.” I stood and walked back into the living room. I could hear him follow.
“You want a tour? I completely remodeled it. It’s not the house my grandfather owned.”
I could see that. The floor to ceiling glass windows, marble floors and countertops were definitely not the materials any house in Garrison had when his grandfather was alive.
“Not tonight.” I stopped in front of his piano. It was a beautiful ebony wood with a glossy polish. “You play?”
He nodded and pushed himself off the wall he’d momentarily stopped to lean against. “You wanna hear?” He’d closed the distance between us. His closeness threw heat in my direction that the large, leaf sha
ped, ceiling fan couldn’t cool.
“It’s late. I should be getting back. Janette might wake up and find me gone. I walked out without my cell and I didn’t leave a note.” I was talking too quickly. I sounded like a schoolgirl instead of a mature woman.
“It’ll only take a minute for me to serenade you.” He took my hand and pulled me with him onto the seat. Then he pushed the lid up and began playing chopsticks.
I had been taut as a rubber band. Sitting next to all those manly biceps and triceps had unnerved me a bit. Plus, he smelled as sexy as the men’s cologne counter at Macys, but now I laughed and it was amazing how much tension I’d just released. “You’re silly.”
He chuckled and it was a deep sexy sound that reminded me how long it had been since I’d sat with a man that wasn’t somebody’s groom.
“No, for real, I wanted to make you laugh.” He turned his face toward me. I tried to look straight ahead, but I couldn’t. I knew he was waiting for me to meet his gaze. “You needed that laugh.”
Ethan returned his long, handsome fingers to the delicate ivory keys and after a few seconds I recognized the tune he was playing as “Ribbon in the Sky”. After he played a little of the song he began to sing. “Oh so long for this night I prayed.”
“Wow, Ethan. I didn’t know you —”
He raised a hand against my interruption and continued to sing for the next few minutes until he completed the song.
I was impressed and overcome with all kinds of emotion. I’d never had a man play the piano for me unless he was auditioning for a wedding and I definitely hadn’t had anyone sing in such a sexy timbre. I couldn’t believe he had such a beautiful voice and could play so perfectly. He took my hand and continued in acapella. “If allowed, may I touch your hand...”
I’d been staring straight ahead, but now I turned toward him and looked into those amazing limpid pools God had given him for eyes. He leaned forward and kissed me. It started off gentle and easy, just two people exploring the outside of each others lips with smooches, but then he raised his hand to my chin and whispered, “Open your mouth.”
Breaking All The Rules (Book 1 - Second Chances Series) Page 2