Chapter Nine Forget-Me-Nots #2
"God's in his heaven," he finished, quieter now, looking directly at her, "all's right with the world." He held her gaze a moment. "It rather feels true this morning, doesn't it?"
Something flickered behind her blue eyes — a shadow he couldn't quite name.
"Almost," she said softly. "Perhaps."
He wanted badly to ask what stood behind that almost, and decided instead, with real effort, to let it go, and coax the smile back to her face some easier way.
They stopped to rest a while later beneath a willow trailing its branches into a narrow brook, and Graham climbed down to the water's edge and came back with both hands full of forget-me-nots, blue as her own eyes.
She looked at the small wild flowers with genuine wonder — she had only ever seen them potted and tamed in a florist's window — and touched them delicately, as though they might dissolve at a firmer grip, before tucking them into the front of her coat.
"They match your eyes exactly," Graham said, before he'd quite decided to say it, and regretted it instantly as color rose and fell across her face in quick succession.
He had never in his life been a man given to pretty compliments.
Something about this particular girl, on this particular morning, seemed to draw them out of him whether he willed it or not.
He sat, abashed, not knowing how to follow the silence that fell between them, while Calie's lashes swept low over her cheeks and her fingers found sudden fascination in the small blue flowers at her collar.
Her heart had leapt, unreasonably, at his words, and she was cross with herself for it.
A man who threatened my whole family for three months has no claim on any thrill of mine, however sweetly he speaks today.
He was pleasant when it suited him — she had always known that much.
There must be some further purpose behind all this gentleness, some fresh demand waiting just out of sight.
She turned her face toward the hills, willing herself to remember exactly who she'd married, and found the memory of his words rising up again anyway, warm and unwelcome, refusing to be reasoned away.
1 Corinthians 13:7 rose in her, unbidden, half-remembered from some childhood catechism: "Charity...
beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
" She pushed the thought aside almost angrily.
Not for him. Not after everything. And yet some small, stubborn hope in her would not entirely lie down.
A lark broke into song somewhere in the willow above them, and the strange, taut silence between them finally gave way.
"Have I offended you?" Graham asked, genuinely uneasy. "I didn't mean to speak out of turn. Will you forgive me?"
"There's nothing to forgive," she said, lifting eyes the exact color of the flowers at her throat. "It was — beautiful, actually."
His eyes said the compliment over again without a single word, and her cheeks warmed further under the weight of it, until she bent her face to the flowers to hide the color rising in them.
"It was entirely true," he said, low, and the words landed somewhere closer to a caress than he'd intended them to.
"Shouldn't we hurry, if we're to catch a train?" Calie said, springing suddenly to her feet, before whatever spell this quiet morning had cast over her could take any firmer hold. "I'm quite rested now."
Graham rose more slowly, a dull, sobering weight settling over him as he did. This is another man's promised wife, he reminded himself grimly, and I have been letting my whole heart walk straight toward her as though she were free to receive it.
Don't let anything hinder you. The little brook seemed almost to chatter it as they gathered their things and started on.
"I'll carry my own case," Calie announced, with sudden decision, reaching for the handle.
"You will do no such thing," Graham said, in a tone that closed the matter entirely.
"But they're too heavy for you, both of them, and the umbrella besides. Let me at least take the umbrella."
He would not surrender even the umbrella, taking a plain, uncomplicated pleasure in simply carrying her burdens for her.
Walking beside him, she found herself remembering, with a small, unwelcome jolt, a morning years ago when Gregory Hostetler had made her carry two heavy baskets so his own hands would stay free for his shotgun. Could this possibly be the same man?
It was, all told, a happier walk than either of them had expected, though Graham fretted over her endurance the whole way and kept urging her to rest, which she steadily refused.
The outskirts of the village charmed her entirely — white farmhouses with green shutters folded neat against the morning, placid cows, friendly dogs trotting out to inspect the strangers and trotting off again satisfied.
They walked up the single, maple-shaded main street, and if anyone had told Calie the night before that she would spend her wedding morning laughing easily beside this particular man, she would have called them a liar to their face.
And yet here she was, drifted somehow, without quite noticing the crossing, into something that felt uncomfortably, undeniably like friendship with the man she'd sworn to hate for the rest of her natural life.
The village offered no restaurant — the one inn had been sold off at auction the week before, they learned, following the owner's death — only a post office, two general stores, and a bakery, and a handful of early loungers who regarded the two well-dressed strangers and their suitcases with the frank, unhurried curiosity of men with nowhere else to be.
"Hed a breakdown?" one of them finally offered.
"No horses involved, I promise you," Graham said, smiling.
"Puncture, then," the man decided, shifting his weight philosophically.
"Wal, you're headed the wrong way fer that," put in another. "Ain't no garage in this town. Feller who ran it took off with Sam Galt's wife a month back. You'd oughta gone on to Ashville — good mechanic there."
"Is that so," Graham said, undiscouraged. "What's the next town up ahead, then, and how far?"
"Sugar Grove's two mile on. Milton's five — got a garage and a diner both, on account of the new rail junction."
"Would anyone here have a truck they'd hire out to run us to Milton?"
A lanky young man volunteered himself after a suitably unhurried pause, naming a price of five dollars that Graham accepted without argument, and went off to fetch his vehicle while an elderly woman across the street was persuaded — for a modest fee — to provide breakfast in her front parlor, a small, dim room heavy with lace doilies and the particular hush of a house that didn't often entertain.
They ate poached eggs and thick slices of fresh bread with butter and honeycomb, and found the whole odd little interlude, shared between two people with no earthly business enjoying each other's company, unaccountably delightful.
The truck, when it arrived, was an old flatbed with a bench seat up front and a second one welded in behind, the young driver lounging at the wheel with no apparent intention of assisting his passengers.
Graham swung the luggage up himself, then lifted Calie into the back seat and settled beside her, bracing one arm along the seatback for her steadiness against the rough country road ahead.
That ride, his arm a quiet, unclaimed support behind her, wove one more thread into whatever strange sympathy had been growing between them all morning. She found herself, gradually and without quite deciding to, leaning into it as the miles wore on and her strength began to flag.
"Lean on my arm," he said simply, when he noticed.
"It'll help with the jolting." He said it so plainly, so entirely without claim, that she found she could accept the small comfort without it costing her anything of the guard she'd meant to keep up.
Had he claimed it as any husband's right, she would have stiffened and refused it outright.
As it was offered — simple, unclaiming kindness — she let herself lean, grateful in a way she didn't examine too closely.
His arm, for all its steady stillness, trembled faintly under the weight of her, and he found himself wishing the five miles to Milton might stretch to fifty.
Once, when the truck jolted hard over a stone in the road, he caught her instinctively before she could be thrown, and she settled back against him with a small, unguarded sigh of safety that undid him rather more than he cared to admit.
She glanced up, caught the look in his eyes — something well past simple admiration — and felt the same strange thrill she'd felt over the forget-me-nots sweep through her all over again.
This feels almost like sin, she thought, remembering the letters even now, to feel this warm, this safe, beside the man who wrote them.
But the sweetness of the morning, and of a happiness she had gone so long without, was more than she had the strength left to refuse.
She let herself simply enjoy it, for this one bright hour, and left the reckoning for later.
So, like two children on an unplanned holiday, they passed through Sugar Grove and came at last to Milton, where they paid their driver his five dollars and sent him home with no clearer idea of who his remarkable passengers had been than when he'd picked them up — only a lingering, half-formed memory of forget-me-not eyes, and a story the whole village would still be telling, in one form or another, for years to come.