by Marie Force
The funeral was a blur of people and emotions. Theo asked Chip, Parker, and Smitty to serve as pallbearers along with Tish’s husband Steven and two of Lillian’s nephews. Caroline watched the three of them, handsome and somber in dark suits, as they went through the motions of ceremony in honor of a woman they had loved. Except for the ten minutes when he was at the microphone sharing eloquent and humorous memories of his grandmother, Ted kept a tight grip on Caroline’s hand and on his emotions. Even though their shoulders were touching and their hands were intertwined, Caroline was aware of the gaping distance between them and found it hard to concentrate on anything else.
The long funeral procession to the cemetery shut down traffic between the cathedral in downtown Boston and Weston, the suburb twelve miles west of the city where the Duffys lived. After the burial, Ed and Mitzi invited everyone to their home for lunch. As the limousine from the funeral home delivered the family to the house, Caroline had to work at not being intimidated by the gated driveway, the rolling lawn, and the imposing two-story stone house where Ted had grown up.
He was a gracious host to his parents’ guests and stayed close to Caroline. He introduced her as his wife and deftly answered the inevitable questions with his usual mix of charm and grace, which he turned off as soon as they were alone again.
“Do you want something to eat?” Ted asked as he sought out his friends, who were congregated on the other side of the huge living room.
“No, I’m not hungry. How about you?”
“I’m not either.”
“Do you want to go talk to them? I’ll stay here if it would make it easier.”
“They don’t want to talk to me.”
“They’re here, Ted. That counts for something, doesn’t it?”
“They’re here out of respect for my parents and grandparents. It has nothing to do with me.”
“That’s not true.”
“Leave it alone, Caroline,” he snapped.
Ted’s boss, Martin Nickerson, and his wife, Jenny, approached them, oblivious to their tension.
“Ted, honey, you’ve been keeping secrets from us.” Jenny kissed his cheek. “Are you going to introduce us to your lovely wife?”
“Yes, of course.” The charm was back as he put his arm around Caroline.
She played the part of the doting wife even though she was dying inside as she accepted the very real possibility that she might have made a terrible mistake.
By four o’clock the house had begun to clear out, leaving only family and close friends sprinkled in groups throughout the rambling first floor.
“I suppose I should thank the guys for being pallbearers,” Ted said, looking around for them.
Caroline pointed to closed double doors. “I saw them go in there a little while ago.”
Ted opened the door to his father’s study where Smitty was sprawled in a leather chair, Chip and Elise were on the love seat, and Parker stood at the window.
“You have to talk about this, Smitty,” Chip was saying. “You can’t act like nothing’s happened and expect us to go along with that bullshit.”
“Hey! It’s the happy couple!” Smitty said with a big smile. His eyes were slightly glazed, probably due to the tall glass of whiskey he held in his hand. “Come in, come in. Join the party.”
“Just remember where you are and why,” Ted said in a low tone as he ushered Caroline into the room and closed the door.
“Oh, so, we’re going to talk about decorum, are we?” Smitty asked with a chuckle.
“No, we’re not,” Ted said, pouring a glass of whiskey.
Caroline shook her head at his offer of a drink.
“Yeah, it is kind of late for decorum, isn’t it?” Smitty said. “By the way, I haven’t had a chance to congratulate you on your wedding.” He made a big show of pulling himself out of the chair so he could kiss Caroline’s cheek. “I’m sure you were a lovely bride.”
“Thank you,” Caroline said in barely more than whisper.
Returning to her side with his drink, Ted’s closed his hand around hers as his jaw clenched with tension.
Smitty went to the bar to refill his glass, keeping his back to them. “There’s one thing I want to know more than anything else, sweetheart. Were you doing him at the same time you were doing me?” He turned around. “Because, you know, that would be kind of unseemly, wouldn’t you say? I mean with us being best friends and all that.”
Shocked, Caroline stared at Smitty.
“That’s enough,” Ted said through gritted teeth.
Elise sobbed softly behind him.
“You’re not going to speak to her like that,” Ted said.
“Oh, right,” Smitty said with a dramatic nod. “Right. I forgot. We’re operating under rules of decorum. Now. I guess all bets were off a week ago.”
“We never meant to hurt you—”
“Speaking of hurt,” Smitty said. “I’ll bet it hurt like the devil when you fell off that golden boy pedestal you’d been sitting on all your life.”
“There was no pedestal,” Ted said quietly.
Smitty laughed harshly. “Like hell.” His eyes narrowed as he addressed Ted. “In my whole miserable, stinking, shithole of a life, there’s only been one thing I always knew I could count on. You.” With a gesture to encompass the others, he added, “This. You have no idea what you’ve done to me.”
“Nothing happened between us until you two were over,” Ted said. “You can believe that or not, but it’s the truth.”
“The truth,” Smitty said. “And I should believe you why exactly?”
“Smitty . . .” Caroline said.
His steely stare bore down on her. “I want to go back in time to before I knew that people I cared so much about were capable of this. I want to go back to that tent and my cigar on the lawn. I want to go back to when Elise was offering to go find you for me.”
Caroline gasped and tried to take a step away from Ted, who tightened his grip on her hand.
“‘Will you wear this dress again sometime, just for me? Anything for you, Ted,’” Smitty mocked. “I was so touched.”
Caroline went pale as tears spilled down her face.
“So the next day, when you let her think you were going to rape her, who were you trying to punish?” Ted asked. “Her or me?”
A collective gasp went through the room.
If looks could kill, the one Smitty sent Caroline would have been the end of her.
“I’m sorry,” Caroline cried, pulling herself free from Ted so she could face off with Smitty. “I’m sorry we hurt you because you’re right, you didn’t deserve it, and I would give anything to have been able to spare you that pain. But I’m not going to say I wish I’d never gone to Newport with you and never met Ted, because I can’t say that. I love him.” She wiped at the tears on her face. “And he loves you—as much as he loves anyone in this world.”
Smitty snorted. “He’s got a strange way of showing it. I think I’ve heard enough—more than enough, in fact. I’m going back to Sydney. There’s nothing here for me anymore.” His glass landed on a table with a loud clunk.
“What about us?” Parker asked, throwing his hands into the air with dismay.
“You?” Smitty tilted his head to study his friend. “You knew something was going on between them, didn’t you? That night when you went home early, you interrupted something.”
“I only suspected,” Parker said. “I didn’t know for sure.”
“And you didn’t think I needed to know that?”
“I didn’t know what to do. Put yourself in my shoes. What would you have done?”
Smitty shrugged. “I would hope I’d be a better friend to you than you were to me.”
Astounded, Parker stared at him. “You can’t seriously be saying that to me.”
“Imagine my surprise when Mitzi mentioned who the best man was at this farce of a wedding,” Smitty said. “You’ve made your position perfectly clear, Parker.”
&nbs
p; “No, I haven’t!” Parker fumed. “I did that for Lillian more than anything.”
“Oh, that’s good to know,” Ted said, shaking his head with disbelief. “Thanks a lot.”
“What about me?” Chip demanded as he stood up to face Smitty. “I haven’t done anything to you.”
“Collateral damage,” Smitty said with a small, sad smile for Chip before he opened the double doors and left the room.
“Great,” Parker said with a furious glance at Ted as he followed Smitty. “This is just great. Thanks a lot, Duff. Really. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”
“Ditto,” Chip said with a stormy look at Ted as he led Elise from the room. “Nice job.”
Caroline fell into the chair Smitty had vacated and sobbed. When she looked up a few minutes later Ted was gone.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Ted’s alarm woke Caroline at five o’clock the next morning. She raised herself up on one elbow as he got out of bed. They had exchanged few words since he had come back for her two hours after he left her crying in his father’s study the day before. She had no idea where he had been for all that time. “What are you doing?” she asked, pushing the hair back from her face.
“Going to work.”
“Why?”
“Um, because I have to. I’ve taken way too much time off lately.”
“Ted, you just buried your grandmother yesterday and got married four days before that. I don’t think anyone expects you to go to work today.”
“Kids with cancer don’t really care too much about those things,” he said, opening his closet door.
“Does being crappy to me make you feel better? What happened to ‘we’re in this together’ and ‘we’re going to get through this’? What happened to ‘fight, Caroline’ and ‘step toward me, not away from me’?”
He came out of his closet, went into the bathroom, and shut the door.
Caroline fell back against the pillow and hurt when she remembered sitting on the counter to watch him shave just a week ago. Was that all they were ever going to have? One beautiful, magical week?
He emerged from the bathroom showered, shaved, and dressed twenty minutes later.
“How long is this going to go on, Ted?”
He looped his hospital ID around his neck. “Well, let’s see, I’ve lost my grandmother and my three best friends in the last few days. You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t have a timetable for how long it’s going to take me to get over that.”
Caroline winced. “I sure do wish I’d seen this side of you before I said ‘I do.’”
“Too bad it’s legal, huh?” he asked, tossing clothes into a duffel bag.
“Are you trying to hurt me? Is that your goal? Because if it is, it’s working.”
“No.” He stopped moving all of a sudden, as if she had finally managed to penetrate the wall he had erected between them. “No, it’s not.”
She flew out of bed and went to him. “Ted, honey, please. Let’s not self-destruct in the midst of all of this. Please. I want my husband back.”
A look of utter despondency crossed his handsome face. “I have no idea where he is right now.”
With her hands on his face she forced him to look at her. “He can have all the time he needs to get through this as long as he isn’t shitty to me in the meantime. I put up with that once before, Ted, and I won’t do it again. Not even for you.”
His arms encircled her as he finally broke down.
She eased him onto the bed and held him close.
“I thought I’d be able to handle it. I really did,” he said between gut-wrenching sobs. “I think I could’ve handled their anger and their disapproval, but I never imagined it would mess things up between the three of them, too. I never saw that coming.”
“I didn’t either.”
“I don’t know what to do, and I’m never in a situation where I don’t know what to do.”
“Do you want to know what I think?”
He nodded.
“It’s going to take some time. It might be a month. It might be six months. It might be a year. But you guys will find your way back to each other.”
Ted shook his head. “We’ve never had so much as an argument in all these years. I can’t see us getting past this.”
“Do you want me here, Ted? If it’s too much for you to deal with a new marriage on top of everything else, I can go back to New York until you feel better. I’d rather do that than stay here and watch something so beautiful turn to shit.”
“No, I don’t want you to go.” He combed his fingers through her hair. “I’m sorry for being such an asshole.”
“I’ve been having the most awful feeling that I might’ve made a huge mistake here.”
“You haven’t, baby,” he whispered as he kissed her. “You haven’t.”
Tears filled her eyes. “I love you so much. I can’t stand all this distance between us.”
“I love you, too.” He kissed her again, more seriously this time, and the heat between them resurfaced with a new intensity. “I’m on duty tonight, so I’m going to stay at the hospital. When I get home tomorrow afternoon, we can go to New York to see your parents, okay?”
She wiped her face and nodded. “Call me tonight?”
“I will. Are you going to be okay here by yourself?”
“Of course. Besides, I need to give Cameron some attention,” she said with a teasing smile.
He returned her smile with a weak one of his own.
“Are we going to be all right, Ted?”
“I’m going to try,” he said. “I’m going to try as hard as I can to give you what you need.”
“That’s all I can ask.”
And he tried. God bless him, he tried. He poured on the charm for her parents, who professed instant approval of Ted and Caroline’s marriage and got busy planning a small Labor Day weekend wedding at their country club in Saratoga Springs.
When Ted and Caroline returned home to Boston, Ted worked at being the best possible husband he could be to Caroline. They laughed and talked and made love. Every night he read what she had written that day and made astute, insightful comments that made the book better than it would have been otherwise. They went shopping for a car for her and decided on an SUV. “One of us should have a backseat for when we get to number seven on the list,” he had said with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes the way it used to.
She got her cast off the second week in August, attended physical therapy, and slowly began to run again—at first by herself and then with him as she was able to increase her pace.
They didn’t hear a word from Smitty, Parker, or Chip, and neither of them ever mentioned it.
As August faded into the first of September and they headed back to New York for their wedding, Caroline had to acknowledge that no matter how hard he tried, no matter how hard they both tried, the magic was gone and everyone was trying far too hard.
The night before the wedding, her parents had his family over to their home for dinner. Ted met Caroline’s best friend Tiffany and her family as well as Caroline’s brother and sister and their families. In town from California for the wedding, her towheaded nephews kept everyone laughing and helped to ease any remaining tension that might have existed between the two families.
After Ted’s family had returned to their hotel for the night, Caroline found him sitting by himself on her parents’ back deck. She slid onto his lap and put her arms around him. “Hi,” she said with a light kiss.
He curved a hand around her hip. “Hi, there.”
“What are you doing out here all by yourself?”
“Nothing special.”
After they had watched the stars in silence for several minutes, she turned to him. “May I say something?”
He nodded and seemed surprised when she welled up with tears. “Hey, what’s this? What’s wrong, hon?”
“I want you to listen and not say anything until I’m done, okay?”
&nb
sp; “Okay.”
“We don’t have to do this tomorrow.” When he started to protest, she stopped him with a kiss. “You’re listening, remember?” Once she had his attention again, she forced herself to continue. “I love you, Ted. I love everything about you. I love your smile.” She traced his lips with her finger. “I love talking to you about everything and nothing. I love that you’re the smartest person I’ve ever known. I love the way you feel and the way you look. I love making love with you, and I even love the way you’ve tried so hard to hide your pain from me.” She brushed another kiss across his lips. “In fact, I love you enough to let you go if you just don’t have it in you to do this tomorrow. I love you that much. So I’m giving you an out.” She rested her hand over his heart. “If you’re not feeling it anymore then let me go. I’d much prefer that to standing up there with you tomorrow and wondering if you’re doing it just because you’d never put me through another cancelled wedding.”
He rested his forehead against hers. “Am I allowed to talk now?”
She laughed through her tears and nodded.
“I never imagined I’d get so lucky to have someone who loves all those things about me. I love all the same things about you and so many others it would take me all night to list them for you. I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, honey, but I don’t want out. I want in. I want to be able to go home the day after tomorrow and check number two off our list. I know things have been off between us over the last month. I know that. And I’m working on it. I promise you I’m working on trying to get used to my life the way it is now.”
“That you traded them for me, you mean.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“But that’s what happened.”
“I don’t want to think about it that way.”
“You must be thinking about it some. You’re about to get married without them here with you. I can’t imagine how that must feel. I know how I’d feel if Tiffany wasn’t here.”