Chapter 50 Hope #2
I gingerly took the envelope. I almost didn’t expect it to feel solid, the moment seemed so surreal. “I—uh—this isn’t necessary,” I stuttered.
“Nonsense. Joe wanted you to have it. For what it’s worth, Hope, Joe kept tabs on you, too. We have one of your sketches hanging in our living room.”
Now I really felt as if I were having an out-of-body experience. “But . . . how? My art was never really for sale.” My ex-husband had refused to carry any of it in the gallery. He said it cheapened our collection.
“From a college exhibition your senior year.”
He’d bought my college art? “He—he knew where I went to college?”
“Oh, yes, honey. He flew in to see that exhibit.”
My heart felt strangely warm. A grandfather I’d never known had been watching out for me?
“It’s the pen-and-ink of a little wren in an azalea bush. I think it’s marvelous.”
I’d always loved drawing birds. I felt my face heat. “Thanks,” I mumbled.
Gran and Viola talked some more, but I had trouble following the conversation.
Hannah’s evening replacement arrived and she resisted leaving, but I wasn’t really jarred out of my dazed state until Viola stood, took both of Gran’s hands, and promised to stay in touch.
She kissed me on the cheek and told me the same. I walked with her to the foyer.
“Just one thing before you go.” Gran had risen and was scooting her walker forward. “However did you handle it? Weren’t you jealous?”
Viola paused. “Oh, I admit, it bothered me sometimes—especially when we learned Joe couldn’t father any more children.
But I knew what I was getting into when I married him.
I made a conscious decision that I’d rather have as much of Joe as I could than have none of him at all.
” She smiled. “You were the one woman he couldn’t have, so of course you were the one he always wanted.
” She walked out the door, toward a large town car waiting at the curb.
Matt went with her. A uniformed driver got out and opened the door, and Matt helped her in. I waved as the car pulled away from the curb.
Matt returned to the house, and we both went back in the parlor.
“Open the envelope, Hope!” Gran urged.
I realized I still held it in my hand. I walked over and passed it to her. “It belongs to you.”
“Oh heavens, no, dear! I promised Charlie I wouldn’t take a dime from Joe, and I’m not going to start now.
Besides, what does an old woman like me have to spend it on?
” She thrust the envelope at me. “That’s yours.
Joe intended it for Becky and her heirs—and that’s you, dear. I won’t hear another word about it.”
Matt sat beside me on the sofa. My hands shook.
I pulled at the flap, then extracted a document.
I scanned it. When I got to the part about what he bequeathed to Rebecca Elizabeth McCauley, the figure mentioned had more zeroes than I’d ever seen in one place.
I showed it to Matt. “Is this for real?”
Matt look it over. “Looks about as real as it gets.”
“What did he leave you?” Gran asked eagerly. I passed the document to her. Gran’s eyes widened. “Oh, my gracious!”
“I could buy a home!” I said, stunned.
“You could buy two houses and still have money left over to invest!” Gran clapped her hands together. “Oh, honey—I’m so happy for you!”
“Thanks.” I grinned, but the expression felt forced. Truth was, I didn’t feel happy so much as numb. I could buy a condo in Chicago. I could buy a gallery of my own. I could . . .
The evening aide came into the room. “Time for your evening medicines, Miss Adelaide.”
Gran nodded. “I think it’s time for bed, period. It’s been a long day. But you two young people should go out and celebrate.” She turned to Matt. “Matt, dear, I don’t know how you found Viola, but thank you. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”
“My pleasure, Miss Addie.” He kissed her cheek. I did the same, and we wished her good night.
“Want to go out for a drink?” Matt asked when we were alone in the room. “Peggy’s watching the girls.”
“I think I’d rather just go out on the porch.”
Matt refilled our juice glasses, and we moved to the front porch swing. The day had cooled and a pleasant breeze lifted my hair off my neck. “So how did you find Mrs. Madison?”
“Through a private detective.”
My feet dragged on the porch, stopping the swing. A hard, hot knot formed in my stomach. “I asked you not to hire one.”
“I know, I know. But I already had.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
Matt rested his juice glass on his thigh.
“After I learned how you felt about it, I called to pull him off the case. It turned out he’d already found Mrs. Madison and learned you had an inheritance coming.
He said Mrs. Madison insisted on meeting you and Addie and telling you in person.
She wanted it to be a surprise. So I decided to just let things play out. ”
I knew it was petty of me; I knew I should feel grateful, but the thought that I should feel grateful for him going against my wishes made the knot in my stomach smolder like a coal. “So you just kept me in the dark, because you figured you knew what was best.”
“No. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to blow a potential bonanza for you.”
The knot tightened and burned. “There’s no excuse for not telling me.”
Matt looked at me. “Whoa—what is this?”
“I want to make my own decisions about my life, that’s what this is.”
“I thought I was doing you a favor. I hope you’d do the same for me if anyone ever shows up out of the blue wanting to give me nearly a million dollars.”
“You should have told me,” I said stubbornly.
“So you could do what? Contact her on your own? I was afraid that if Mrs. Madison didn’t get to handle it the way she wanted, she might decide to wait until Adelaide was dead to give you the money. It would have been entirely within her rights. I was trying to look out for your best interests.”
His logic was sound, but my feelings weren’t responding to logic. “You have no right to presume that you know my best interests better than I do.”
He held up his hand. “Wait a minute. You’re actually mad at me for bringing in a woman who just handed you an enormous check?”
“No. I’m mad at the way you did it.” He was just like my ex—making high-handed decisions about my future without consulting me, acting as if I were somehow incompetent.
It punched my buttons—and not just because of my ex, I realized. It was how I’d often felt around my incredibly accomplished, brilliant, glass-ceiling-crashing mother.
“Know what, Hope? ‘My way or the highway’ isn’t usually the best strategy. Sometimes things work out best when you trust other people.”
“I tried that once, and it didn’t work out so well.”
He looked at me, a look that lasered right through me. “So that’s what’s really going on here, huh? You’re done with trust because of your ex? You’ve got such big control issues that you can’t deal with any deviation from a plan?”
“Of course not.”
“You sure? Because that’s how it looks from here.
” He set his glass down on the porch railing with a final-sounding thump.
“Well, I promise you this: the next time someone wants to give you a bank vault of money, I’ll keep in mind that you don’t want my ‘interference.’” He rose. “I think I should say good night.”
The thud of his footsteps on the porch echoed in a hollow part of my chest. I knew I was being unreasonable. I knew I should admit it, that I should apologize, that I should thank him, but some stubborn, unreasonable, angry part of me resisted.
We were going to be over in just a couple of weeks anyway. All that would happen in two more weeks was that I would grow to love him more, and it would hurt that much more when I left.
Love. Oh God. Was that what I felt for him? Despite my best intentions, had I fallen in love with Matt?
I knew the answer even as my mind formed the question. I loved him, and here he was walking away from me. I put a hand to my mouth, but it didn’t stop the word from coming out. “Wait!”
He stopped, but didn’t turn around.
“I—I know I’m being unreasonable.”
He slowly turned toward me.
“I’m sorry.” I rushed down the steps and into his arms. The solidness of his chest, the strength of his arms around me—it felt so good, so comforting, so terribly, awfully . . . temporary. Tears welled in my eyes.
His hand tangled in my hair. “It’s okay.”
I nodded against his chest.
He pulled back and looked down at me. “You’re crying. Are you still angry at me?”
“I don’t know what I am,” I confessed. “Confused, I guess. This is a lot to process.”
He smoothed my hair back from my face. “Yeah, it must be.”
“Part of me wants to stay mad at you.”
“Why?”
“It’ll make it easier to leave.”
“So don’t.”
Fresh frustration welled up in me. “Matt, art majors wait their entire lives for something like this to open up. This inheritance is a lot of money, yes, but it’s not enough to live on the rest of my life.”
He blew out a sigh. “Yeah, I know.”
“Besides, you and me—this is just temporary. Our way of getting over the hump and back into dating.”
“I kind of thought we’d moved beyond that.”
My heart gave an irrational jump of joy, only to feel like it had plunged off a cliff.
“Matt—we both know a long-distance relationship isn’t going to work.
Your schedule is so packed you can barely carve out a full evening for a date, much less weekends away.
And my new job is going to be really time intensive. ”
A nerve worked in his jaw. “Let’s talk about this later. I don’t want to spoil the time we have left.”
I didn’t, either. I reached up, looped my arms around his neck, and pulled him down for a kiss, only to see a figure standing behind an open curtain next door.
“We’re being watched,” I whispered.
He turned and waved to Mrs. Ivy. The curtain immediately dropped back into place.
Our laughter broke the tension. He kept his arm around me. “Listen—Peggy and Griff want to take the girls to the beach as a beginning-of-summer treat. They’re planning on leaving the morning after Miss Addie’s going-away party.”
Leaving. Going away. Each phrase cut me like a razor. “Sounds nice.”
“So I was wondering if you’d go away with me for a long weekend in New Orleans.”
“That’s the weekend I’m leaving.”
He lifted his shoulders. “It can be a send-off celebration. We’ll get a room in the French Quarter and spend Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night.”
Three days of bliss in his arms. “Oh, that sounds wonderful!” I murmured before I had a chance to censor myself.
“Okay, then. We have something to look forward to.”
I immediately had second thoughts. Oh, God, what was I doing? A weekend of splendor, and then what? I’d be more in love with him than ever. It would make the inevitable good-bye all the harder. Tears trembled on the edge of my lashes.
“Hey—are you still crying?”
“No.” It was a ridiculous thing to lie about, since my cheeks were wet and my vision was fuzzy. “Not sad crying anyway. This is emotional, overwhelmed crying.” I looked up at him in the deepening twilight. “Know what would help?”
“What?”
“A visit to the potting shed.”
“You shameless hussy.”
“You’ve turned me into one.”
“Is that so?” His arm tightened around me, and he angled down a sexy grin. “In that case, I’d better check out just how good of a job I did.”