I’d been at Oak Street the day before, to put a wreath on my daddy’s grave. He died a few years ago of a heart attack. And my sister-in-law Sheila was buried nearby, as well. Dix and the girls had covered her plot with flowers and candles and drawings, and I’d had a hard time finding room to place my own small offering.
I’d made a few other stops too, while I was there. Marquita Johnson’s grave was just fine; her husband and kids, along with her family, had made sure it was taken care of. And Elspeth Caulfield had specified cremation in her will, so she was tucked away in a vault in the town of Damascus, where she’d lived, twenty minutes or so from Sweetwater. (I felt guilty about Elspeth.) But Rafe was the last Collier, and I hadn’t wanted his family plot to look bare on Christmas. So I’d brought a couple extra candles and an evergreen wreath, and had put them on LaDonna’s grave. I hadn’t known Wanda, Rafe’s maternal grandmother, and Old Jim had died while I was just a little girl. I had a vague memory of a mean old coot in a rusty pickup truck, but that was as far as our relationship had extended. I’d heard a lot about him, though, none of it good. So I didn’t bother with his grave, or with Wanda’s, or for that matter with Bubba’s, their son. But I lit a couple of candles and laid the wreath on LaDonna’s grave, up against the headstone. Of course the candles had burned out by now, but the wreath was still there. And that’s what made Rafe stop a few feet away, to stare.
After a few seconds he turned to me, the question clear in his eyes. I shrugged.
“Why?”
I blinked. “Are you upset?”
He shook his head. “No, darlin’. Course not. Just... why? You didn’t know her.”
“She was your mother,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“I love you. So... your mother is sort of my mother.” Or would have become my mother. Maybe. At some point. If she’d still been alive. And if things didn’t change.
He didn’t answer. Just reached out and gathered me in his arms. And held me there a while. Just breathing into my hair. I don’t think he was crying, although his voice was a little uneven when he finally said, “Thank you.”
“It was my pleasure.” I said it again: “I love you.”
“I love you too.” But he didn’t let me go, just tightened his arms around my waist and held on. We had some time yet before we had to be at Catherine’s house, and since he seemed perfectly content to stand there, with the bright winter sun shining down at us through the bare branches of the trees, I settled in too, with my cheek against his shoulder and his nose buried in my hair.
Until a cough sounded a few feet away.
Chapter 4.
It’s in situations like this that I most notice the differences between us. I’m a nice Southern girl: I went to finishing school, and a good university, and I married—and divorced—a lawyer, and at the moment I’m making my living—what there is of it—as a real estate agent.
My boyfriend grew up in a doublewide trailer in the Bog, Sweetwater’s mobile home park. He went to prison at eighteen, for assault and battery, and he’s spent the past ten years—since he got out—deep undercover, crawling through the underbelly of the Southeast, sleeping with dogs and waking up with fleas.
When I heard the cough, my first instinct was to lift my head from Rafe’s shoulder, open my eyes, and smile at whichever old friend or acquaintance had come up the hill to greet us.
Rafe’s was to tense up like a piano wire, and to push me behind him with one hand while the other reached for the gun he no longer carried.
“Relax,” I said, “it’s the sheriff.”
Rafe dropped out of the defensive posture, but his body was still tense. Not surprisingly. He’d spent most of his life leery of law enforcement in general and Sheriff Satterfield in particular, since the Sweetwater sheriff has always been inclined to blame Rafe for anything that goes wrong in town. Add to that that Bob Satterfield is Todd’s daddy as well as my mother’s gentleman-friend, and we had a pretty kettle of fish.
I smiled at Bob Satterfield around Rafe’s shoulder. “Afternoon, sheriff.”
The sheriff nodded. “You two all right up here?”
“We’re fine,” I said. “Just laying down a wreath and some candles.”
The sheriff moved his attention to Rafe. “Afternoon, boy.”
“Sheriff.” Rafe’s voice was calm and non-committal, but I could feel tension strumming through his body.
“Didn’t think we’d see you back in town.”
“I didn’t think you would, either,” Rafe answered. “Things changed.”
“So I see.” The sheriff’s lips twitched. “Nice sweater.”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just turned to me. “You two on your way to your sister’s house?”
I nodded.
“Tell your mama I’m sorry to miss it.”
I said I would, and added, “I guess someone has to hold down the fort on Christmas Day. It’s nice of you to let your deputies have the day off, sheriff.”
The sheriff didn’t answer, just nodded, and it wasn’t until he walked away that I realized he wasn’t in uniform, but was dressed in jeans and a parka.
“I don’t think he’s on duty,” Rafe said, echoing my thoughts.
I glanced up at him. “Why isn’t he going to Catherine’s for Christmas dinner? He and mother have been an item for months. Maybe longer. Surely Catherine would have invited him.”
“I imagine he don’t wanna spend any more time with me than he has to,” Rafe said calmly. “And it’s prob’ly best if Satterfield and I don’t spend time in the same room right now, either. Don’t want another incident like last time. Specially on Christmas.”
He was right about that. The last time the two of them met, in the hospital after my miscarriage, Todd said something to Rafe that made Rafe knock Todd to the floor. I still don’t know exactly what it was—everyone refuses to repeat it, including Dix—but I know Todd blamed Rafe for what had happened to me, and I figure the verbiage must have been pretty bad to garner that reaction. And there’s been bad blood between them a lot longer than that. Todd was suspicious of my feelings for Rafe long before there were any feelings to speak of.
Rafe nodded when I said as much. “Goes all the way back to that night in high school.”
“What night in high school?”
He glanced at me as he took my arm to escort me down the hill toward the Volvo. “You and Satterfield and your brother and that little girlfriend of yours, the snooty brunette—”
“Charlotte,” I said.
He nodded. “You were on a date. In Columbia. In Satterfield’s new car.”
“Of course.” I remembered. I just didn’t realize that he did.
It was the one and only time I’d had any interaction at all with Rafe during the one year we’d been in high school together. We didn’t exactly travel in the same circles, and other than an occasional brush up against each other in the hallway—which ended with him winking and saying something lewd and me recoiling in horror—we’d never spoken. Except for this one night.
Dix, Charlotte, Todd and I had been on our way back home from the movies. It had been the night of high school graduation, but not for any of us. Charlotte and I were fifteen and at the end of our junior year, while Dix and Todd were seventeen, with their senior year still ahead of them. Rafe, on the other hand, was a year older and had graduated that day. And to celebrate, I guess he’d gotten stinking drunk and into a fight. Not the fight that ended up putting him in prison for two years—that happened later in the summer—but some kind of fight with someone. We’d come across him sitting on the sidewalk outside the movie theatre in Columbia, bruised and bloody and looking like a prime candidate for getting scooped up by the local police and stuck in the drunk tank overnight to sober up.
The others had wanted to cross the street and move past him without getting involved. I’d put my foot down. We were a twenty minute drive from Sweetwater, and he was in no condition to get there on his own. It is the duty
of every well-brought-up Southern Belle to help those less fortunate, and Rafe was clearly less fortunate.
So I’d insisted on dragging him to his feet and bringing him with us, stumbling and swearing. I’d crowded into the back seat of Todd’s brand new sports car with Dix and Charlotte—who had probably planned to spend the drive home necking, a plan I inadvertently ruined—and Todd drove the entire way back to Sweetwater with one eye on the road and one on Rafe, who looked like he was about to hurl all over Todd’s brand new leather upholstery.
“That was a long time ago,” I said.
He nodded. “Lifetime or so.”
“I had no idea that bothered Todd. He never brought it up again.”
Rafe shrugged.
I glanced up at him. “You never brought it up again either.” And he’d been pretty out of it that night. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he woke up the next morning with no idea how he got home.
He looked down at me. “Not like I’d forget, is it? You were nice to me. First time that’d ever happened. Usually you just tilted your nose up and pretended I was invisible when I spoke to you.”
“Sorry.”
He grinned. “No worries. That night made up for it. They all wanted to leave me there. And you refused.”
I nodded. For a second I was back on that hot and dirty sidewalk, looking down at him, much younger than he was now: dirty, drunk, and bleeding. I could hear my own voice in my head. “Fine. Go home. But I’m not leaving him here like this. If you won’t help me get him back to Sweetwater, I’ll do it by myself. I’m sure I can find a cab.”
He’d looked at me, I remembered. From my shoes to the top of my head and back. And then he’d told me he’d go wherever I wanted him to go. Todd had growled and stepped forward, his fists clenched, and I’d told him to back off, that Rafe was drunk and had no idea what he was saying. Todd had done it, albeit reluctantly, and Rafe had kept quiet on the way back to Sweetwater. But now, looking back on it, I could see why that encounter may have sowed a seed of doubt in Todd’s mind. I had gone out of my way to help Rafe. I had interrupted my date with Todd to do it. By the time Rafe showed up in my life again, Todd was predisposed to seeing him as an interloper, someone who’d stand firmly in the middle of our relationship.
And he’d been right. Which made me wonder just what he’d picked up on back then, that I hadn’t noticed myself. Maybe I’d been attracted to Rafe already, just unaware or too afraid to admit it, even to myself.
“I love you,” I said.
He grinned. “I know.”
“I like saying it.”
“I like hearing it.” He opened the car door for me and helped me in. I waited until he’d walked around and had gotten behind the wheel before I continued the conversation.
“Do you suppose Sheriff Satterfield helped my mother pick out the sweater you’re wearing? He complimented you on it.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Rafe said.
I watched as he put the key in the ignition and cranked it over. “Are you worried?”
He glanced at me. “What’s to worry about?”
“Dinner. Meeting my family. Facing my mother over the Christmas goose.”
“There’s gonna be a goose?” He put the car in reverse
“Probably not,” I admitted. “My sister usually makes ham.”
“Ham’s good. Are you worried?”
I shrugged. Maybe a little.
“Don’t be. I’ve been practicing. I know which fork to use. And if there’s beer, I’ll make sure to use a glass.” He grinned.
“I don’t care how you drink the beer. Or which fork you use. You can use any fork you want. Just don’t stab my mother with it. I know you’ll be tempted, but please don’t. I want her to like you.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Rafe said.
“Because every woman likes you?”
He glanced at me. “Most women like me. Though I think your mother’s prob’ly an exception. I was thinking that it won’t matter what I do, cause there ain’t nothing in the world will make that woman like me.”
He had a point. “Just do your best to keep a good attitude,” I said.
“Sure.”
“If my mother needs stabbing, let me do it.”
He nodded.
“And keep your mind on the important thing.”
“What’s that?”
“That I love you. No matter which fork you use. And that we have a pair of fur-lined handcuffs and 365 condoms for later.”
Rafe grinned. “Now you’re talking.”
Chapter 5.
My sister and brother-in-law live in one of the new developments that have cropped up on the outskirts of Sweetwater over the past couple of years. Subdivisions with names like Copper Creek, Devon Highlands, and Summer Pointe, home to row upon row of cookie-cutter McMansions.
I hate them. As a real estate agent I probably shouldn’t admit that, but give me a rundown Victorian or Craftsman in a real neighborhood any day. I’d go crazy living in the Stepford of my sister and brother-in-law, and for that matter of my brother and his late wife.
I know why they choose to live there, of course. Those subdivisions are magnets for young, upwardly mobile families with children, and since Catherine and Jonathan have three, they’ve chosen to live in a place where little Robert, Annie, and Cole can be surrounded by friends. Dix and Sheila had the same reason for buying a house in Copper Creek. The streets are safe, there’s very little traffic, and everyone knows everyone else. A lot like the way small towns used to be.
The McCall home is an overlarge brick pseudo-Tudor on a postage-stamp sized lot surrounded by other pseudo-Tudors, pseudo-Italian villas, and pseudo-French chateaux. The houses are so close together that you can stand in the living room of one and look right into the living room of the one next door, and perhaps borrow a cup of sugar without ever leaving your own kitchen. Rafe got out of the car and came around to my side and opened my door, an expression of mingled amusement and consternation on his face. “What did you say your brother-in-law does, again?”
“Lawyer,” I said. “My brother, my sister, her husband, my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather...”
“Right. You were supposed to marry a lawyer.”
“I did marry a lawyer. And then I divorced him. Why?”
“No reason.” He extended a hand and helped me to my feet. It wasn’t for the benefit of anyone watching from inside the house. He always does it. I think he likes to touch me. Although I did hope my mother was watching, since she’d approve.
She wouldn’t approve of the next thing that happened. I did, though. When I was standing in front of him, he stepped in closer, so we were just a deep breath away from touching, and then he put both hands on my cheeks, in a gesture as gentle as it was possessive, and proceeded to kiss me.
I melted, of course. I always do. My knees turned to water, my stomach liquefied, and all I could do was hang on to his shoulders until he lifted his head. “There.” His voice was thick with satisfaction and probably with a bit of something else, too. “That oughta do it.”
“Do what?” I had a hard time getting the words out, with the way I turn breathless every time he’s nearby. “Show them that I’m crazy enough about you to let you kiss me senseless in the middle of the afternoon on a public street?” In my hometown, where perfect Savannah Martin was supposed to know better.
He grinned. “Something like that.”
“Yes,” I said, “if that’s what you were trying to prove, you did it.”
“Or maybe I was just reminding you what it is you like about me.”
“That isn’t what I like about you.”
“It ain’t?”
“It isn’t the only thing I like about you.” But if it made him feel calm to remind himself—not me; himself—that he had this effect on me, who was I to deny him? Especially when it came with such benefits for me too. I smiled up at him. “Although as demonstrations go, it packs a
punch.”
He smiled back. “Glad to hear it.”
“Can we go inside now? And get this over with? So that we can be alone and you can do it again?”
He nodded. “Let’s.”
We turned toward the stairs and took a collective breath.
I have a pretty good relationship with both my siblings. My brother Dix and I are a little closer than my sister Catherine and I, just because were closer in age. Catherine was born first, and was named after mother’s mother, Catherine Calvert. Two and a half years later, Dix came along, and was christened Dixon Calvert Martin. And then, about a year and a half after Dix, I was born, and was named for mother’s hometown in Georgia. It could have been worse: I’m just grateful she wasn’t born in Augusta or Alma or Hortense.
It was Dix who opened the door and stepped aside so we could come in. “You’re just in time,” he informed me. “Any later, and mother would have marked you down for punctuality.”
I glanced at my watch. Precisely one minute to one. “We spent a minute or two outside.”
“Believe me,” Dix said, taking my coat to hang it in the closet, “we noticed.”
I blushed and tried to pretend I didn’t. “Let me guess. Mother was sitting by the window with one eye on the road and one on the clock in case we were late.”
“Something like that. And got an eyeful of the two of you instead.” My brother turned to Rafe, and there was a beat of silence while they looked at one another. “Jacket?” Dix said.
“Oh.” Rafe shrugged out of the black leather, a hint of color on his cheekbones.
“Nice sweater.” Dix’s lips twitched.
Rafe glanced down—maybe he had forgotten the Christmas monstrosity he was wearing—and up again. “Gift from your mother.”
“You get points for wearing it.” Dix turned away to hang the coats in the closet. “Maybe they’ll make up for the points you lost by kissing my sister in broad daylight in front of the house.”
5.5 Contingent on Approval Page 3