Small Town Cinderella. Caron Todd
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their grandmother’s place. It was the house their great-great-grandparents had built, where she and Jack had met, and where she had finally made peace with the ghosts of her first, short marriage.
When they came back in the fall, Jack would move in with Liz and Eleanor. They had already started working on the house, replacing windows, reshingling the roof and repainting inside and out. With so much work taken off her hands and someone to talk to whenever she wanted company, Eleanor had begun to look healthier and more rested.
It had been a hectic week, though, and today her fatigue was apparent. Emily found her at the kitchen table, shelling peas. The dogs, Bella and Dora, watched intently, as if every hard green kernel hitting the bowl was a slice of roast beef.
“On your own today?” Emily took a handful of pods and began to snap them open. The rest of the family had gone to the lake, a half-hour’s drive away.
“A cool kitchen sounded better to me than a hot beach.”
“To Mom, too.”
“And you?”
“I don’t mind a chance to catch my breath.” Since the beginning of June she’d been going full tilt, helping with wedding plans at home, Field Day and Awards Day at school and doing inventory for the library. She’d closed it the previous week, around the time dress fittings and dainty making had mutated from cousinly togetherness to near panic.
She reached for more pea pods and began to tell her grandmother about her concern for Daniel.
“There couldn’t have been anyone missing,” Eleanor said at first. “The church was bursting.” She looked out the window as if trying to visualize the crowd of guests. “Come to think of it, I didn’t speak to Daniel at all yesterday. He must have been here. He left a gift.”
Emily had seen the package on the gift table, too. Even without his signature on the card she would have recognized the sometimes ornate, always measured letters that reminded her of his age when nothing else did. “Maybe someone dropped it off for him.”
“Wouldn’t that suggest he made plans to be away?”
“I suppose it would. Am I fussing?”
“You?”
Emily laughed. “That’s the thing about worrying. It’s hard to know when it’s reasonable.”
“I do understand. What woman wouldn’t? Learned or instinct, we tend to take care of people. School’s out, my dear. We’ve finally got Elizabeth and Jack married and on their way. Isn’t it time to relax and enjoy the summer?”
“Mrs. Bowen mentioned a hammock.”
“What a good idea. Get yourself a hammock and a pile of books and don’t budge for a month. Who knows, maybe your mother will notice the dust and take care of it herself!”
Emily couldn’t help smiling at the thought of her mother minding dust that settled anywhere but on her books.
“Don’t forget,” Eleanor went on, “tea tomorrow afternoon.” Because of the reception and a barbecue planned for later in the week the family wasn’t getting together for the usual Sunday dinner.
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“It’s only you and your mother, and Susannah and Edith and me. I’ve already told Julia that, but remind her, won’t you, Emily?”
“I don’t think she’ll come, Grandma.”
“No, I don’t suppose she will.”
THE COOKBOOKS WERE put away. Julia sat at the kitchen table, this time bent over one of her book catalogs. Emily could see she wasn’t reading it. Her neck and shoulders looked tight and her arms were pressed to her sides, elbows digging in.
“You said you wouldn’t be long.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.” She put the bananas in the fruit basket, the hydro bill on the hutch and the new catalog on the table.
Her mother ignored it. “If you don’t mean ‘not long’ you shouldn’t say ‘not long.’”
“I meant it at the time. Did you worry?”
“I didn’t know I’d have to make lunch. I waited.”
Emily went to the fridge and took out jars of mayonnaise, mustard and pickles, a tomato and their share of the leftover wedding ham.
“Then you still didn’t come. So I had a sandwich.”
“You did?” She put everything but the ham back. “You’re ahead of the game. I haven’t eaten yet.”
“I don’t know why you call it a game.”
“Come on, Mom. You do so. It’s an expression.”
“An odd one.”
Emily cut a slice of ham, then leaned against the counter while she ate it. “Daniel wasn’t home.”
“You see?”
“I sure do. You said he didn’t fall.”
“And he didn’t.”
“Nobody knows where he is, though. Everybody says he likes to follow his inclinations, and if that means a missed wedding or a dried-up garden, so be it.”
Julia looked at Emily’s feet. “His garden dried up?”
That small reaction was more effective than all the reassurance from Daniel’s friends. “It’s strange, isn’t it? And his house plants are half dead. Mrs. Bowen said that’s not like him.”
Julia picked up a pencil and leaned closer to her catalog, her brief interest withdrawn. Emily watched her drift further away, pencil eraser to her lip, finger following the text. Every now and then she marked a title with a star. That meant interested, but not sure. Her library was huge and always growing. Fiction and nonfiction, painstakingly organized, filled floor-to-ceiling shelves on every wall of the living room.
When her mother began circling titles—the next step toward a decision—with the air of someone who was alone in the room, Emily put away the meat and washed the knife, then went outside again. This time the cat followed.
They crossed the crisp, brown lawn and the road, went down one side of the ditch, then up the other and through a narrow band of trees to the creek.
It was low this year. If the heat continued it might dry up completely. The water still bubbled along, though, over smooth, round stones. Emily took off her sandals and waded in, the warm water ankle-deep and cool against her skin.
The cat was still with her. It trotted along the bank, pouncing at rustling sounds, then rushing to catch up. Ahead of it, a red-winged blackbird flitted from grass tip to grass tip. Emily listened to the bird’s piping song and wished for a breeze to cool her head, hot under heavy hair.
“The thing is,” she said to the cat, “not turning up at the wedding, without a word, is odd.”
She had run into Daniel at the post office the day she’d closed the library for the summer, around the time Mrs. Bowen had said he’d left. He’d told her then that he had a speech prepared for the reception. “A few impromptu words,” he’d said, and his eye had flickered in what would have been a wink if he was the kind of person who winked.
At his house she had only looked for him, not for explanations. Now she remembered the coffee cup on the counter, half full with a swirl of murky cream on top, and the sour milk and moldy bread Mrs. Bowen found. Daniel wouldn’t go on an impulsive holiday leaving unwashed dishes and food to spoil.
It hurt a bit that everyone had dismissed her uneasiness about Daniel’s welfare. She had seen that happen to other women—legitimate concerns waved away because they’d reached a certain age without marrying, unspoken needs and fluctuating hormones blamed for their apparent fussing. She was only thirty-two, though, and half the time her relatives