Invitation To A Wedding, page 12
He was just getting established in a new town. If Josie had ruined that for him, she was going to die.
Inside, she shrank to the size of a peanut.
“What are they saying, Mother?”
“They’re saying the two of you never go anywhere together.”
“That’s true, but you have to realize that he’s very busy with his practice, and I’m very busy at school.”
“Still, Josie, he does the grocery shopping alone.”
“Well, I know how that looks.”
“They say you spend all your time at the school with the band director.”
“That’s an outrageous lie, Mother. We’re on a committee together, that’s all.”
“He’s not married.”
“A lot of male teachers at the school aren’t married. That doesn’t mean I’m having affairs with them.”
“That word hasn’t been used yet, but it’s just a matter of time.” Her mother fell silent, and Josie tightened her hand on the receiver. “What’s going on between you two, Josie?”
Josie was torn between confessing the whole truth, which would put an end to the miserable charade, and protecting her privacy as well as her freedom. When she remembered that Betty Anne Pickens had never really been concerned about what was going on in her daughter’s life, the decision was made.
All her mother really wanted to know was how she should respond to the gossip.
“Every newlywed couple has a period of adjustment, Mother. That’s what you should tell everybody. Tell Aunt Tess to spread the word. She’s good at that.”
“She’s still talking about selling her house.”
“That means she’d move in with you. Permanently. How do you feel about that, Mother?”
“Well, I guess I’m undecided. What do you think your father would say?”
Josie was all set to step into her daddy’s shoes one more time when alarm bells went off in her head. She might not always be around for her mother. It was high time Betty Anne started standing on her own two feet.
“Daddy’s been dead a long time, Mother. It doesn’t matter what he would advise. You’re the one who will have to live with the consequences. It’s up to you to decide whether you want Aunt Tess as a permanent guest.”
“What do you think about it, Josie?”
“What I think doesn’t matter, Mother. I don’t live there anymore.”
She gripped the phone and listened to the sound of her mother’s breathing.
“Well, I’ll think about it, darlin’. ’Bye.”
It wasn’t until after she’d hung up the phone that Josie realized how tense she was, nor how relieved that Betty Anne hadn’t burst into tears. Not over any of it. The gossip or Aunt Tess.
“Maybe there’s hope for us all.”
She glanced at the clock. The library would be closing in thirty minutes, and Ben would be home.
What if she did something nice to make up for all the ugly gossip? What if she planned a nice surprise to show that she was the same woman she’d always been and that they could still be friends in spite of the marriage? What if she made cookies to show she was sorry? For everything.
One of the things Ben loved about living in a small town was that he could walk almost anywhere he wanted to go. He made his walk home from the library a leisurely one, giving himself enough time to enjoy the sights, giving Josie enough time to be settled at the corner desk in his bedroom grading papers or reading a book or whatever else she did in there all by herself.
Ben passed an elderly couple walking toward the town square holding hands. He’d never felt lonelier.
When he got home he’d take Bruiser for a late-night jog. At least he’d have company.
When he entered his apartment building he smelled something burning. Somebody was going to be ordering take-out food for dinner. He whistled a tuneless song as he went up the stairs. When he got to the top of the landing the smell became stronger. As he approached his door it got even worse.
Ben froze, then he was off and running. He fumbled with the lock and smoke billowed around him as he opened the door.
“Josie!” She didn’t answer, and he died a thousand deaths. Suddenly he felt a wet tongue licking his hands, and there was Bruiser, and right behind him Josie.
“Oh, Ben.” She threw herself against him, crying.
“Josie, what’s happened here?”
With her face buried against his chest, she said, “Warra oooie waa.”
He couldn’t take the time to decipher. If he did they’d quite likely both die in a flaming inferno. Bruiser, too.
With Josie clinging to him like a potato vine he went through his apartment flinging open windows. When he got to the kitchen he discovered the root of the problem. The garbage can stood in the middle of the floor overflowing with burned food that looked like charcoal briquettes, and another pan full of charred nuggets stood on the stovetop, still smoking.
Holding Josie with one arm, he satisfied himself that the oven was off and there were no smoking pieces of dough inside waiting to burst into flames, then he turned on the exhaust fan and flung open the kitchen windows while Josie hung on like an appendage, crying her eyes out.
Ben melted. He turned inside out. His heart grew two sizes. He developed selective amnesia. Everything she’d said on that fateful day they went househunting was forgotten. Every evening he’d spent alone vanished. Every solitary trip he’d made, every innuendo he’d endured, every ruined night’s sleep tossing on the sofa while she lay curled in his bed faded to oblivion.
She was soft and feminine and hurting, and he cared. He cared so deeply it scared him. He cared so very much that he couldn’t bear to think about it.
Instead he picked her up and carried her to the living room where the smoke had drifted out the window. Then he sat down with her in the rocking chair. The sofa would have been more comfortable, but here he could hold her like a baby and rock her with a steady soothing rhythm.
“It’s all right, Josie. No harm’s done except a few black smudges on the wallpaper and I’ll clean that off. The main thing is that you and Bruiser are all right.” She didn’t say anything, but she wasn’t crying as hard as she had been.
“You are all right, aren’t you, Josie?”
“Hmm.”
“You didn’t burn yourself, did you?”
She didn’t move, didn’t lift her head off his chest. He could barely make out her muffled “No.”
“That’s good, then.” He rocked a while in silence, then remembering how Josie loved music he tried to sing “Amazed.” He botched it so badly that he should have been embarrassed. The funny thing was, he wasn’t.
So Ben just kept on singing. Singing and rocking and holding on to his Josie.
Josie had never felt more cherished. She could stay right where she was for the next million years or so. Ben’s singing was so far off tune even Bruiser left the room, but to Josie it was the most beautiful sound in the world. If it wasn’t the sound of love, it was surely the sound of a deep and abiding friendship.
Ben knew all the words to the song, which amazed her but shouldn’t have. He excelled at everything he did, even rocking, especially rocking. She began to swing her foot to the rhythm of the rocking chair and to hum along and pretty soon she realized that Ben had stopped singing and was listening to her.
When the song ended she stayed where she was. Maybe it was selfish of her, considering the way she’d treated him, but what the heck, she was only human. She could be selfish sometimes and the world wouldn’t come to an end.
“I love it when you sing that song, Josie, or even just hum it. You have a really great voice.”
“Thank you.”
“Sometimes when I’m getting ready for bed I hear you in the bedroom singing snatches of the songs from the musical you’re directing, and I just stand outside the door and listen.”
Josie’s heart hurt to think of Ben standing outside a closed door. Any closed door. Especially hers.
Oh, Ben, what have I done to you? What have I done to us?
If she didn’t change the subject she was going to start crying again. Maybe she should get off his lap. Or would that look like another cold shoulder? She decided to stay, and it was nice that she could use kindness as her motive. It kept her from thinking about the hard questions, such as What is being in love and am I in it?
“I didn’t mean to almost burn the apartment down, Ben. I’m sorry I scared you.”
“You had me worried there for a while, Josie.”
“I was trying to make cookies.”
“That’s what those blackened objects were?”
“Yes. I was making them for you.” The rocking chair was still going and it never lost its rhythm, but Ben’s arms tightened around her ever so slightly. She wanted to see his face, but she didn’t want to make a big to-do of it, so she just stayed right where she was, curled comfortably over his heart.
“That was sweet of you. You’ll never know how much that means to me.”
His voice had dropped an octave the way men’s voices do when they’ve done some wonderfully romantic thing like hugging you and rocking you in a rocking chair, and all of a sudden they’re beginning to turn their thoughts toward heavier matters, like desire.
Josie had better set the record straight at once or she was going to end up in that four-poster bed with Ben, without a single protest on her part. How could she protest something she wanted to happen?
That just goes to show the state a woman’s mind gets in when she’s narrowly escaped some disaster, especially one of her own making.
“I wanted to make up for all the trouble I’ve caused you,” she said.
He didn’t say anything, but he did stop rocking. What did that mean? Was he upset? Relieved? Disappointed? She wasn’t fixing to find out. Nosirree, Bob, she was going to stay right where she was, curled up to him like a bunny in a burrow.
“And all the gossip,” she added. “And all the loneliness.”
“Are you lonely, Josie?”
“Well, I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about you.”
“How do you know I’m lonely?”
This time she did look at him. There was something in his voice that was impossible to ignore, something she recognized and understood.
Sitting up in his lap, she cupped his face and pressed her nose against his the way the old Josie would have done with her best friend Ben.
“Because,” she whispered, “I know how lonely it is to be living in the house with somebody who barely acknowledges that you exist. I know the terrible isolation of sleeping in a bed all by yourself and feeling as if you’re the sole survivor of a spaceship wreck on Mars even when there is another person in the next room. I know how it is to go to bed at night and wrap your own arms around yourself because there’s no one to do it for you. I know, Ben, and I understand.”
Electric with emotion, they sat in stunned silence while Josie’s revelations echoed around the room. What had started out as a friendly chat had turned into an airing-out session. Josie had just ripped her heart out and laid it bleeding at Ben’s feet.
Years of feeling like an outsider in her own home; years of feeling as if she were viewing her parents with her face pressed against a windowpane suddenly coalesced, and her repressed emotions tumbled free.
That’s how wonderful hugs can be…and how dangerous. They make you feel safe. They make you feel loved. They make you believe you can tell the truth without fear of reprisal.
Josie sat very still in Ben’s lap, waiting for the world to come to an end.
Instead he stood up and carried her to the bedroom and lay down beside her.
“Lean on me, Josie,” he said.
He held her as tenderly as a baby, held her that way all night long, and in the morning when she woke up, Josie discovered a smooth clean place in her heart where the cracks had been.
Chapter Twelve
Ben was whistling when he walked through the doors of his clinic—ten minutes late according to the clock. Although he usually didn’t tolerate tardiness, especially in himself, he decided that this morning had been worth it.
“Feeling better?” he’d asked Josie when she sat up in bed this morning.
“Hmm, yes, thanks to you.” Tousled and appealing, she’d bent down and kissed him lightly on the lips.
He bounded out of the covers like he’d been shot. “What do you say to breakfast together, then? We haven’t done that in a long time.”
“Too long,” she said.
Perched on the their balcony like two birds, they’d shared orange juice and small tidbits of their day while Ben had pondered the wistful quality of Josie’s voice when she’d said to him, too long. Soon he was going to have to do some serious thinking about Josie, but not this morning. Right now the order of the day was greeting his receptionist.
“Good morning, Nettie Jean,” he said.
She tapped her watch as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeking. “Will wonders never cease? You’re late, Doc.”
“It looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“You’re gonna tell me the clock is wrong?”
“No, I’m going to tell you I’ve joined the human race. Maybe.”
“Let me bid you welcome.” Laughing, Nettie Jean bustled off to the coffee machine and served him a steaming cup.
“What time’s my first appointment?”
“Not till nine-thirty. Oscar Levitts.”
He checked his desk for the lab report on work he’d ordered on Oscar, then remembered that it wasn’t going to be ready until this morning. Ben decided to save his lab technicians a few steps by going across the hall to get it.
He opened the lab door just in time to hear the tail end of gossip about his wife.
“…and they say she’s down at the school all hours of the night rehearsing for that musical she’s doing. Without the doc.”
Ben froze in his tracks. The bearer of those bad tidings was none other than Marilyn Jones, thirty-five, mother of four, pillar of the community and darned good lab technician.
“Well, I hear she’s been squiring around all over town without him, and leaving poor Doc, bless his naive soul, to do all the shopping and all the cooking.” This from Charlene Rasberry, her assistant, who brought her yarn to work every day in case she had a minute to crochet booties for their pregnant patients.
Ben hated gossip above all things, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave. This was Josie they were maligning. He needed to know what was being said about his wife.
“What did he expect when he married her? That’s what I want to know. She’s always had a reputation for trouble.”
“He didn’t expect anything, is my guess. They say he married her out of pity. Clytee Crawford told Aunt Martha she’d never been so relieved over anything in all her life as she was the day Josie Belle walked down the aisle with somebody besides Jerry Bob.”
“Well, all I can say is, poor Doc.”
For a moment Ben was paralyzed by anger. He thought about going back into his office and quietly shutting the door. Instead he strode into the lab. Both women looked as guilty as if they’d been caught stealing eggs.
“I need the lab reports on Oscar Levitts…unless you’re busy with other things.”
Marilyn outran her shoes to get the report, and bumped smack into Charlene. If he hadn’t been so mad, Ben would have laughed. As it was, he took the report back to his office and shut the door. He still had nearly an hour before his first patient, an hour to think of a solution.
In the end, he knew there was only one: rescue Josie one more time, and then set her free. It was a good plan that would have only one casualty. Him.
Josie was surprised to find Ben at the apartment when she got home from school.
“You’re home early.”
“Yes. Slow day at the office.”
She smiled. “Is that bad or good?”
“Both.” Something was up. She could tell by the way he looked at her.
Josie felt as if she were drowning in quicksand. He was going to ask for an immediate annulment. He was going to say, look, let’s just get this over with, then shake hands and wish her well.
She could postpone the inevitable by diverting his attention with a funny story. Or maybe she could get him laughing about Aunt Tess’s impromptu visit to the school.
That’s what she would do. After all, nobody would be hurt if she postponed the bad news for a little while.
“Aunt Tess dropped by to see me today.”
“Any reason?”
“She said she was just checking to see how I was doing. Then she nosed through everything in my room, including the closets. She even looked behind the window shades.”
“She’s about as subtle as a Sherman tank.”
“When I asked her what she was looking for, she said, ‘Nothing,’ then she proceeded to ask me when I’d last seen the band director.”
Josie started laughing, then realized Ben wasn’t even smiling. Her plan had backfired.
“Ben, what’s wrong?”
“Gossip. That’s what’s wrong, Josie.”
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” The rhyme had been Josie’s main-stay when she was growing up. Somehow it didn’t do much to soothe her now.
“Yes, they can, Josie. Sometimes words are more dangerous than blows because their cruelty is insidious.”
“People will always talk. There’s no way to stop them. The best thing to do is just settle in till it blows over.”
“I won’t have people talking about my wife.”
“Thank you for the thought, but there’s nothing you can do.”
“Yes, there is.”
There was fire in his eyes and the sound of drumbeats in his voice. Delicious shivers ran through Josie, and unconsciously she shifted away. Ben Standing Bear on the warpath was far too dangerous for comfort…and far too sexy.
“Do I want to know what?” she asked.
“I think you should since you’re central to the success of the plan.” The way he smiled made her think of a panther that had cornered his prey. “We’re going to fight fire with fire, Josie.”
