by Rachel Hauck
“It’s just a flat tire.”
She glared at him, a pink hue rimming her flooded blue eyes. “We were supposed to be forever, you know? Twelve years …
Who waits twelve years for a guy if it’s not for forever?”
“Ah, lover’s quarrel.”
“Quarrel? No. Complete breakdown of what we thought we wanted in life, in our relationship.” The first splash of tears hit her high, smooth cheeks. She brushed them away with the back of her hand, kicked the tire one last time, and passed behind Nathaniel toward the tree. “I don’t know why I came here. I just got in the car and drove.” She glanced back at the motor, making a face. “And I find myself here, at good ol’ Lover’s Oak.”
“So this tree has a name and a tale?” Nathaniel came around the car, surveying the thick, curvy, Medusa-like limbs of the expansive oak.
“The tree is legend. Fabled to be nine hundred years old, a place where native braves met their maidens.” She smoothed her hand along the curve of the lowest limb as if she might feel the tree’s pulse, as if she might discern the stories of days gone by.
“Do you suppose it’s true?” Nathaniel was acquainted with legends and fables, long tales of bravery, love, and courage. They were a part of Brighton. A part of his five-hundred-year-old family tree.
She peered over at him. “I wanted to get engaged under this tree. Soft white lights swinging from the branches. Maybe a string quartet playing over there.” She pointed to the edge of the median. “Something special, romantic.”
“But your lad had other intentions.”
Tears filled the corners of her eyes. “I–I just … wanted …” She shook her head as she lowered her gaze. “I’ve been such a fool.”
“I don’t think anyone who freely gives her heart is a fool.”
She sat down on the stump creasing the middle of the wide tree’s base, face in her hands, weeping softly.
What was he to do? He didn’t know the woman. And tears? He’d never been much good with tears.
“It’s quite courageous. To give one’s heart.” What did he know? He’d failed at love once and never attempted it again.
She dried her face on the sleeve of her shirt. “I never expected much. Just love and devotion, you know? That he would do what he said he’d do … marry me. I lived my childhood not knowing what my parents were doing from one moment to the next. Kiss and make up or fire the dinner dishes at each other. I was fine with simple and slow, taking our time. We both went to college, started our careers.” She inhaled a long, shaky breath. “He did four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“A soldier.”
“Marine. Captain.”
“I served in the navy myself. Four years.”
“Were you deployed?” She stood straighter.
How could he tell her? His birth status kept him from being deployed. That he presented more of a danger to his countrymen than the enemy. “I never shipped out to conflict zones.”
“Are you from England?”
“Brighton Kingdom.”
“Brighton. Beautiful gardens in Brighton.”
“You know of our gardens?”
“Studied your Lecharran Garden in college. I’m a landscape architect—well, when I’m not serving up barbecue at the Rib Shack.” Her eyes were clear, her gaze a strong blue when she looked at him. “I thought he was going to propose on the beach. Forget the tree, the twinkling lights, the quartet. We were finally moving forward.” She smashed her fist against her palm, almost laughing.
“You are a beautiful woman. I’m sure there are a number of men?”
“Number of men? No, no … no. Look … What’s your name?” Whatever process she was going through, it seemed to rebuke her sobs and energize her.
“Nate.” He offered his hand. “Nate Kenneth.” Parts of his name anyway. His traveling name.
“Susanna Truitt.” She shook his hand, and he loved the feel of her grip.
“You were saying?”
“What? Yeah, you said …” Her eyes lingered on his face. Her hand remained in his. “Men. A number of men, right?” She slipped from his grasp.
His instinct was to reach for her again, but he curled his fingers into his palm instead.
“I don’t want men. I want one man.” She held up her finger. “One true love.”
“There’s only one?”
“Yes.”
“How can you be so sure?”
She pressed her hand over her heart. “My heart tells me. There is one for me. Only one.”
Her words vibrated through him—hot, exploding, bringing to life his own thoughts on love. “You almost convince me.”
“Then you’re as foolish as I am.” She broke a dead twig from the tree and crumbled the leaves in her hand. “I thought I’d found him.” Bits and pieces of dried brown leaves fluttered to the ground. “But I didn’t.” She breathed in a slow, quivering breath.
“Maybe he’ll come ’round.” If the man had half a wit. How could he walk away from her? From Susanna?
“He’s met someone else.” Her eyes glistened again, and the tip of her perfect nose reddened. “He said he found the right ring but not the right girl.”
“Oh, he said that? He’s an honest chap if not a bit brutal.”
She shook her head, tapping her chest with her fingers. “The worst part of this is realizing I was so focused on him proposing one day I never imagined my answer. When he so honestly said he’d found the right ring but not the right girl, I was mad. Hoo boy, was I mad. But the more we talked, the more I realized … we were a high school romance plan gone wrong. Now all I can think is if he’d proposed”—she snapped another thin, dead twig from the tree—“I’m not sure I’d have said yes.”
“You’re not sure?” Nathaniel swallowed the hurrah pressing on his tongue. What right did the man have to this beauty if he’d break her heart with such a harsh confession?
“Argh. I don’t know.” Her gentle words bent and swayed with her Georgia accent. “I just hung on so tight …” She fisted the air. “He said I loved the plan more than him. But who does that? I told him he was crazy. But, Nate, he might just be right. I put all of my eggs in the marry-Adam-Peters basket and that was that. End of story.”
“So you don’t love him either?”
“Yes … no … I don’t know.” She squinted at him. “You’re pushy for just having met me.” Her laugh-cry escaped into the air between them. “Except I feel”—she fell against the wide, split base of the ancient tree—”peace. Something I’ve not felt in a long time. You know how you can hold on to something so tight … you’re so close you can’t even really see what you’re clinging to anymore?”
Yes, he knew.
“Then you finally let go, only to see your hands are all rope burned and the pot of gold at the end of your rainbow turned out to be a pile of candy wrappers glinting in the sun.”
Nathaniel snorted a light laugh but pulled it in, not sure she intended to be funny. “But now the future is yours to own, to mold.”
She examined her palms as if she expected to find rope burns. “What a waste.” She snapped her attention to him. “And look at me, telling all my woes to a complete stranger.”
“Not so strange, I hope. Just new.” Nathaniel had liked her a minute ago. He’d moved on to adoring her. “You’ve a career?”
“Not much going on in the landscape-architecture business these days. People aren’t redoing their grounds. They’re saving money.” She peered at the twilight sky, then held out her hand for the wrench. “I’m sure you have other things to do than talk to me. I can change the tire.”
“It’s been a pleasure to talk with you.” Nathaniel walked to the flat and dropped to one knee. She’d kicked the old tire. He could kiss it. Because it had gone flat, he’d met the enchanting Susanna. “I envy you, Susanna. You have your life ahead of you, free to do whatever, start fresh, go wherever you want, do whatever you want.”
“Keep talking, bubba. I might st
art believing you.” She dropped the jack to the ground and shoved it under the car.
He loosened the lug nuts. “Consider some who have their lives planned for them from before they were born. No chance to make a change or go about as they please.”
“I don’t know anyone like that around here. Maybe Mose Watson, who’s set to inherit his daddy’s real estate business, but they’re millionaires, and I don’t hear Mose complaining.”
“But if Mose wanted to leave, could he?”
“Technically. Though his old man might have a conniption.”
She made him laugh. Inside and out. She made him forget the burden of having his future all planned, not just by his parents, but by five hundred years of history.
If he considered his destiny, in the deepest hours of night when he couldn’t sleep, the burden nearly stole his breath.
But for now, Brighton Kingdom and his very orchestrated future didn’t matter. Only the summer breeze slipping through Lover’s Oak and assisting Susanna mattered.
Nathaniel removed the lug nuts and then worked the flat tire from the axle. “My mates and I used to let off steam in our university years racing cars down country roads.” He let a memory rise in his soul and do the talking. “One of us always flattened a tire. But it was good to have a go at it with my mates.”
“Sounds like you miss it.” She peered at him through the golden wisps of her hair that had been freed from her ponytail.
“It was a different time. We were young and impetuous, thought we were invincible.”
“And now?”
“I’m respectable and not so impetuous nor invincible.”
“Is that bad?” She tugged the spare out of the trunk and dropped it next to Nathaniel.
“At the moment, not at all.” He paused. “Not at all.” For a sweet Southern moment, he let the light and life of Miss Susanna Truitt sink into the most secret place of his heart.
THREE
By Saturday afternoon when Susanna had driven to the garage to get a new tire, half the island had heard about Adam finding “the right ring but not the right girl.” By Monday morning, the whole island had heard. So it seemed.
Susanna half expected to see it on the front page of the paper. It would make the Glynn Academy alumni news for sure.
Adam and Susanna, the couple most likely to be, aren’t.
Driving to Gage Stone Associates, Susanna wished she’d said nothing more to her parents than “we broke up.”
But Mama … oh, Mama. She had her ways.
“What’s wrong? Mercy, Susanna. You look like who-shot-Liz.”
“Thank you, Mama. That’s what I was going for.”
Susanna had broken down this morning over a plate of scrambled eggs and toast, sitting in the Rib Shack’s kitchen. She’d cried and confessed every word, every wounding, piercing word in her conversation with Adam. She felt raw and real, holding nothing about their exchange as sacred.
But then she met Nate. That news she kept to herself. He’d been the silver lining on her dark Friday afternoon. Perhaps a little tap on her shoulder from God.
Don’t despair.
She’d skipped church Sunday. Adam’s parents attended services at Christ Church, and Susanna couldn’t bear the thought of running into them. Not this soon.
Sunday evening, the family dinner at the Rib Shack had taken place as usual, the restaurant brimming with laughter and music, with family, with warmth.
Susanna intended to hole up from that event too until baby sister Avery insisted she go. At seventeen, Avery was wise, young, and exuberant. And on occasion, a great persuader.
Grandparents, aunts and uncles, and all the cousins straight down the line to third cousin-once-removed showed up at the Shack the first Sunday of each month. Daddy closed down the restaurant for the family gathering. Wasn’t hardly a soul who missed the ritual. Not even the Camdens, who might not actually be blood relatives of the Truitt-Franklin-Vogt clans. But they’d been around so long no one could remember.
Susanna had tucked her emotions behind her heart and hid in the shadows of the Shack’s deck, letting the family flow of conversation, laughter, and music drown out her reality for a few barbecue sweetened hours.
Then Monday morning arrived with Susanna’s alarm jolting her out of the best fifteen minutes’ sleep she’d had all weekend. She’d stared at the clock’s red numbers, working up an excuse to call in sick and stay in bed another day.
But she was out of Häagen-Dazs. And she was hungry for Mama’s eggs and biscuits. So she let her heart wake up and face the day.
In the parking lot behind the Gage Stone offices, Susanna dropped her forehead to the steering wheel. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t get the tenor of Adam’s confession—“found the right ring but not the right girl”—out of her head.
Yes, she’d dialed him a dozen times, but she’d hung up before the call connected. What would she have said to him? “Take me back … Please change your mind, Adam.” Or better, “Wait, I want to break up with you first. Ask me to marry you, go ahead. I’ll say no.”
Neither would make her feel better. Then Sunday at midnight, she went on a binge and purged everything from Adam on her phone, computer, and that crazy digital picture frame he gave her for Christmas two years ago.
Now that made her feel better. Much better. And she could finally sleep.
But the whole ordeal had caused a disturbance deep in her soul. Not about Adam, but about herself. How could she have been so blind? So foolish? Clinging to a man she didn’t really love.
A soft rap against her car window caused her to look up. Aurora. “Suzy-Q, you all right?”
Susanna fumbled for the window’s power button. “Aurora … hey.”
“You good, girl?” The woman rested against the car door.
“Yeah, sure, I’m good.”
“I heard.” Deep creases marked the contours of her weathered but wise face. Her gray eyes, steady and clear, watched Susanna.
“Hasn’t the whole island?” Susanna grabbed her satchel, popped open her door, and started for the office.
“Word gets ‘round.” Aurora fell in step with Susanna, her bare feet curling against the sharp gravel-and-sand parking lot.
“Aurora, where are your shoes?” Susanna pointed at the old woman’s bright red toes.
“Gave them away.” She hopped to the grass with an exhale. “My feet just aren’t toughened up. I got soft wearing shoes. But I’ll get them in shape.” The homeless woman spoke with the cultured voice of one who had once lobbied Washington, DC, politicians. With great success. Brisk and to the point. “A gal came through the camp. She wasn’t right.” Aurora tapped her temple. “Didn’t have any wherewithal.”
Susanna paused on the sidewalk by Aurora. “So you gave her your shoes.”
“Well, I certainly couldn’t give her a pound of wherewithal.” The woman chuckled. “Though don’t think I didn’t try.”
“I have no doubt.” Of all the women on St. Simons Island, Susanna felt sure Aurora possessed more wherewithal than all of them combined. “You need money for more shoes?”
“Nope. Got all the money I need.”
The question was rhetorical. Susanna knew the woman had money. She just wanted her to spend a little to save her feet.
Aurora lived simply but wisely. Word was she’d amassed a small fortune before leaving DC to pitch a tent in the island woods.
“Woke up one day with the Lord tapping on my shoulder. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘This is what you want? To live with your boyfriend, drinking and drugging and lying?’ Girl, back then I could spin a lie to perm your hair. The trappings I thought I possessed actually possessed me. So I cracked … but in all the right places.”
“Get a new pair of shoes, Aurora.” Susanna smiled, swinging her black leather satchel at her feet. “You’re going to ruin your pedicure.”
“Don’t despise me my pedicure, Suzy-Q. You can take the girl out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of
the girl. It’s my one splurge. I don’t think the Lord minds.”
“I don’t think he minds at all. Hey, get two pairs of shoes this time. One to wear, one to give away.”
“Maybe.” Aurora wore her gray hair in a ponytail. Loose ringlets adorned her neck and forehead. Ten years of living in the woods could not mask her classic, refined beauty. “He didn’t break your heart, did he? That boy … I can see it in your eyes.”
A brisk chill skirted along Susanna’s scalp and down her back. “What are you doing nosing around in people’s eyes?” Though she long suspected Aurora spent long days in her tent on her knees, hearing from God in ways others only dreamed of.
“Not nosing. But definitely seeing.” She pointed from her eyes to Susanna’s. “Got the gift, you know. It’s why I had to leave Washington. God opened my eyes and I could see the lies, see the darkness. Not feel … but see. Couldn’t take it anymore.”
“You never saw the good?”
Aurora smiled. Her teeth were white and even, another remnant of her days in DC. “I’m looking at the good right now.”
“I mean in Washington.”
“I’m not in Washington. I’m in St. Simons looking at you.”
More chills. Yet the fire of Aurora’s intense gaze made Susanna’s soul burn. “Is there something you have to say? Say it.”