The long, work-roughened hands didn’t stop until he was cradling my face with a tenderness that made my throat tight. His mouth sought mine, all hot silk and sweetness. But for all the gentleness of the kiss, there was something so raw about it that by the time he drew back, my nerves were pleasure-stung and unbearably alive. A whimper emerged from my throat, the sound embarrassing me, but there was no controlling it. No controlling anything.
I reached up to hold on to his heavy wrists, mostly to keep from toppling over. My knees were shot. I had never felt anything so explosive, or insidious. The world had shrunk to this small wine-scented room, two bodies in the darkness, the ache of desire for someone I could never have. He moved his mouth to my ear, and I felt the moist heat of his breath, and I leaned against him in a daze.
“Listen, honey,” he whispered. “There’ve only been a couple times in my life when something felt so good I didn’t give a damn about the consequences.” His lips slid over my forehead, my nose, my trembling eyelids. “Go tell Nick you’re not feeling well, and come away with me. Right now. There’s a strawberry moon out tonight. We’ll go somewhere and find a patch of soft grass, and share a bottle of champagne. And I’ll drive you to Galveston to watch the sun rise over the bay.”
I was amazed. Men never propositioned me like that. And I never would have thought to be so insanely tempted. “I can’t. That’s crazy.”
His lips caught at mine in a gently biting kiss. “Maybe it’s crazy not to.”
I squirmed and pushed back from him until I’d managed to put some distance between us. “I have a boyfriend,” I said shakily. “I don’t know why I just . . . I don’t know why I let that happen. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. At least, not for that.” His footsteps came closer, and I tensed. “What you should really be sorry for,” he continued, “is that for the rest of my life, I’ll have to avoid wine cellars to keep from thinking about you.”
“Why?” I asked, woeful and shamed. “Was kissing me that bad?”
A devil-soft whisper. “No, sweetheart. It was that good.”
And he left first, while I leaned against the tasting table with raggedy balance.
I WENT BACK out into the clamor and stole away to the grand staircase leading to the second-floor bedrooms. Liberty was waiting for me in the room Gage had occupied in childhood. I had barged in there a thousand times, wanting attention from the one person who always seemed to have time for me. I must have been a royal pain, chattering to him while he did his homework, dragging in my broken toys for him to fix. But Gage had tolerated it with what was, in retrospect, remarkable patience.
I remembered the time I’d been about Carrington’s age, maybe a little younger, when Jack and Joe had dropped my favorite doll out the window and Gage had rescued her. I had gone into Jack’s room, a chaos of toys and books and discarded clothes, and I’d seen him and Joe kneeling by the open window.
“Whatcha doing?” I had asked, venturing nearer. The two dark heads turned at the same time.
“Get outta here, Haven,” Jack had commanded.
“Daddy says you have to let me play with you.”
“Later. Get lost.”
“What are you holding?” I had gone closer, my heart clutching as I saw something in their hands, tied up with strings. “Is that . . . is that Bootsie?”
“We’re just borrowing her,” Joe had said, his hands busy with string and some kind of plasticky fabric.
“You can’t!” I had felt the panic of the thoroughly powerless, the outrage of the dispossessed. “You didn’t ask me. Give her back! Give her—” My voice shredded into a scream as I saw Bootsie being dangled over the windowsill, her naked pink body harnessed with a contraption of strings and tape and paper clips. My baby doll had been recruited on a mission as a parachute jumper. “Doooooooon’t!”
“For Pete’s sake,” Jack had said in a disgusted tone. “She’s just a hunk of plastic.” And, adding injury to insult, he’d given me a mean look and dropped her.
Bootsie had gone down like a stone. I couldn’t have been more upset if the boys had dropped a real baby out the window. Howls ripped from my throat as I’d raced from the room and down the big staircase. And I kept howling as I tore outside to the side of the house, paying no attention to the voices of my parents, the housekeeper, the gardener.
Bootsie had fallen into the middle of a massive ligustrum bush. The only thing visible had been the crumpled parachute caught on a top branch, my doll hanging unseen in the green and white thicket. Since I was too short and small to reach into the branches, I could only stand there crying, while the heat from the Texas sun had settled on me with the weight of a wool blanket.
Alerted by the racket, Gage had come and rummaged through the ligustrum until he found Bootsie. He had dusted away the powdering of scurf from ligustrum leaves, and held me against him until my tears were blotted against his T-shirt.
“I love you more than anybody,” I had whispered to him.
“I love you too,” Gage had whispered back, and I could feel him smiling against my hair. “More than anybody.”
As I entered Gage’s room now, I saw Liberty sitting on the bed in a heap of shimmering organza, her shoes on the floor, her veil a rich froth floating on the mattress. It seemed impossible that she could have been any more stunning than she had been earlier at the church. But she looked even better this way, glowing and smudged. She was half Mexican with a butter-smooth complexion and big green eyes, and a figure that made you think of the old-fashioned word “bombshell.” She was also shy. Cautious. You got the sense that things hadn’t come easy for her, that she’d had close acquaintance with hardship.
Liberty made a comical face as she saw me. “My rescuer. You’ll have to help me out of this dress—it has a thousand buttons and they’re all in the back.”
“No problem.” I sat on the bed next to her, and she turned her back to make it easier for me. I felt awkward, struggling with unspoken tensions that no amount of niceness on her part would dispel.
I tried to think of something gracious to say. “I think today was the best day of Gage’s life. You make him really happy.”
“He makes me happy too,” Liberty said. “More than happy. He’s the most incredible man, the most . . .” She paused and lifted her shoulders in a little shrug, as if it were impossible to put her feelings into words.
“We’re not the easiest family to marry into. A lot of strong personalities.”
“I love the Travises,” she said without hesitation. “All of you. I always wanted a big family. It was just Carrington and me after Mama died.”
I’d never reflected on the fact that both of us had lost a mother while we were in our teens. Except it must have been much scarier for Liberty, because there’d been no rich father, no family, no nice house and cushy life. And she’d raised her little sister all by herself, which I had to admire.
“Did your mother get sick?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Car wreck.”
I went to the closet and took down the white pantsuit hanging over the back of the door. I brought it to Liberty, who shimmied out of her wedding dress. She was a vision of sumptuous curves contained in white lace, the swell of her pregnancy more developed than I would have expected.
Liberty dressed in white pants and matching blazer, and low-heeled beige pumps. Going to the dresser, she leaned close to the mirror and neatened her smudged eyeliner with a tissue. “Well,” she said, “this is as good as it’s going to get.”
“You look gorgeous,” I said.
“Droopy.”
“In a gorgeous way.”
She looked over her shoulder with a dazzling grin. “All your lipstick’s gone, Haven.” She motioned me to the mirror beside her. “Nick caught you alone in a corner, didn’t he?” She handed me a tube of something shimmery and pale. Mercifully, before I had to answer, there was a knock at the door.
Liberty went to open it, and Carrington came in, accompanie
d by my aunt Gretchen.
Aunt Gretchen, my father’s older sister and only sibling, was hands down my favorite relative from either side of the family. She had never been elegant like my mother. Gretchen was country born and as tough as any pioneer woman who ever crossed the Red River on the Cherokee Trace. Back then Texas women had learned to take care of themselves because the men were always gone when you needed them. The modern versions were still like that, iron-willed beneath their coating of Mary Kay cosmetics.
By all rights Aunt Gretchen should have been a tragic figure. She’d been engaged three times, and had lost all three fiancés, the first in the Korean War, the second in a car accident, and the third to an undiagnosed heart ailment. Each time Aunt Gretchen had confronted the loss, grieved, and accepted. She said she would never consider marriage again—it was clear she wasn’t meant to have a husband.
But Aunt Gretchen found all the fun she could out of life. She wore bright shades of coral and red, and always matched her lipstick to her clothes, and she wore jewelry on every appendage. Her hair was always teased and ratted into a puffy silver-white ball. When I was little, she had traveled a lot and nearly always brought presents for us.
Whenever Aunt Gretchen dropped in to stay for a week or so, it had never been a convenient time for Mother. Putting two strong-minded women in the same house was like setting two trains on one track and waiting for the collision. Mother would have liked to limit Aunt Gretchen’s visits, but she hadn’t dared. One of the few times I ever heard my father speak sharply to my mother was when she was complaining about his meddlesome sister.
“I don’t give a damn if she turns the whole house upside down,” Dad said. “She saved my life.”
When Dad was still in grade school, his father, my Pappaw, had left the family for good, telling people his wife was the meanest woman who ever lived, and crazy too, and while he could have put up with a crazy woman, there was nothing worse than being married to a mean one. He disappeared from Conroe, where they had lived, and was never heard from again.
A person might have hoped Pappaw’s leaving would have given Mammaw cause for reflection, and maybe inspired her to be a little nicer. Instead Mammaw went the other way. She wore her arm out on her two children, Gretchen and Churchill, whenever she was provoked. And apparently just about everything provoked her. She’d reach for kitchen utensils, garden tools, anything she could get a hold of, and she’d beat her children half to death.
Back then people were more tolerant of such things, so there was no public interference in what was viewed as the family’s private business. Gretchen knew she and her little brother were in for certain death if she didn’t get them both out of there.
She saved up money from taking in extra washing and sewing, and just after her sixteenth birthday, she got Churchill up in the middle of the night, packed their clothes in a cardboard suitcase, and walked him to the end of the street, where her boyfriend met them with his car. The boyfriend drove them forty miles from Conroe to Houston and dropped them off with the promise he’d visit soon. He never did. That was fine with Gretchen—she hadn’t expected him to. She had supported herself and Churchill with a job at the telephone company. Mammaw never found them, and it was doubtful she had even looked.
Years later when they figured Mammaw was too old to do them any harm, Gretchen had someone check on her. They found out she was living in a pitiful mess, with piles of trash and varmints all in her house. So Gretchen and Churchill had her put in a nursing home, where she happily bullied the other residents and the staff for about ten years until she passed. Churchill never did go visit her, but Gretchen had from time to time. She would take Mammaw out to the local Luby’s, maybe off to Beall’s to buy some new housedresses, and return her to the nursing home.
“Was she nice to you when you took ’er places?” I once asked Aunt Gretchen.
The question had made her smile. “No, honey. She didn’t know how to be nice. Anything you did for her, she felt she was entitled and deserved even more.”
“Well, why’d you go take care of Mammaw and visit her, after all she’d done? I’d have just let ’er rot.”
“Well . . .” Gretchen had pursed her mouth thoughtfully. “I figured she couldn’t help the way she was. She was broke when I got her.”
The past few years had slowed Gretchen down quite a bit. She’d become a little forgetful, a little querulous. She moved as if her joints weren’t banded together as tight as they should have been. There was a new translucent quality to her thinned-out skin, blue veins showing underneath like a diagram sketch that hadn’t been fully erased. She had come to live with us since Mother had died, which pleased Dad since he wanted to keep an eye on her.
Bringing Carrington into the house seemed to have given Gretchen a much-needed jump start. No one could doubt the two of them adored each other.
Dressed in pink and purple, her pale golden hair caught in a high ponytail with a huge sparkly bow, Carrington was the picture of nine-year-old haute couture. She was carrying the bridal bouquet, the smaller version that had been made for Liberty to throw. “I’m gonna toss this,” Carrington announced. “Liberty can’t throw near as good as me.”
Gretchen came forward, beaming. “You were the prettiest bride I’ve ever seen,” she said, hugging Liberty. “What are you going to wear for your going-away outfit?”
“This is my going-away outfit,” Liberty replied.
“You’re wearing pants?”
“It’s an Escada suit, Aunt Gretchen,” I said. “Very stylish.”
“You need more jewelry,” Gretchen told Liberty. “That outfit’s too plain.”
“I don’t have much jewelry,” Liberty said, smiling.
“You’ve got a diamond ring the size of a doorknob,” I remarked. “That’s a great start.” I grinned at Liberty’s wince of embarrassment over the engagement ring she thought was too big. Naturally my brother Jack had compounded her discomfort by nicknaming the diamond the “pet rock.”
“You need a bracelet,” Gretchen said decisively, holding out something in a little velvet pouch. “Take this, Liberty. A little something jangly to let people know you’re in the neighborhood.”
Liberty opened the pouch carefully, and my heart contracted as I saw what it was: the gold charm bracelet Gretchen had worn forever, strung with charms from all the exotic places she had gone in her life.
She had promised it to me when I was five years old.
I remembered the exact day—she had brought me a junior tool kit complete with a leather belt with loops and pockets. They were real working tools, including a C-clamp, an awl, saw, pliers, level, hammer, eight wrenches, and a set of Phillips-head screwdrivers.
As soon as Mother had seen me strapping on the tool belt, she had gone bug-eyed. She had opened her mouth, and before a single syllable came out, I knew she was going to tell Aunt Gretchen to take the gift back. So I clutched a handful of tools and ran to Dad, who was just coming into the family room. “Look what Aunt Gretchen brung me!”
“Well, isn’t that nice,” Dad had said, smiling first at Gretchen, then at my mother. The smile had ossified as he saw her face.
“Gretchen,” Mother had said crisply, “I’d like to be asked the next time you buy a gift for my daughter. I’m not planning on raising a construction worker.”
My heels had stopped bouncing. “I’m not giving ’em back.”
“Don’t sass your mother,” Dad said.
“Land’s sake,” Gretchen had exclaimed. “They’re toys, Ava. Haven likes to make things. Nothing wrong with that.”
Mother’s voice had been full of prickly burrs. “I’m the one to decide what’s best for my own daughter, Gretchen. If you know so much about children, you should’ve had one of your own.” She had stalked from the room, past me and Dad, leaving a chill of silence in her wake.
Gretchen had sighed, shaking her head as she looked at Dad.
“Can I keep the tool kit?” I had asked.
Dad had thrown me an exasperated glance and gone after Mother.
I had gone to Gretchen slowly, my hands clenched tight in front of me. She was quiet, but I knew what I had to do. I unstrapped the tool belt and laid it carefully back into the box. “I guess you should have gotten me a tea set,” I said glumly. “Take it back, Aunt Gretchen. She’d never let me play with it anyway.”
Gretchen had patted her knee, and I crawled into her lap, snuggling into the scents of powder and hair spray and Rive Gauche perfume. Seeing how intrigued I was by her charm bracelet, she took it off and let me look at it. She’d bought herself a charm every time she went to a new place. I found a tiny Eiffel Tower, a pineapple from Hawaii, a Memphis bale of cotton, a matador with a little swirling cape, crossed snow skis from New Hampshire, and too many others to name.
“Someday,” Gretchen had said, “I’m going to give this bracelet to you. And you can add your own charms.”
“Will I go as many places as you, Aunt Gretchen?”
“You may not want to. People like me only travel because they don’t have enough reasons to stay put.”
“When I’m big,” I’d said, “I’ll never stay put.”
GRETCHEN HAD FORGOTTEN that promise, I thought. It wasn’t her fault. She’d forgotten a lot of things lately. It’s okay, I told myself. Let it go. But I knew the story behind every charm. And it seemed as if Gretchen were taking those handfuls of memories away from me and bestowing them on Liberty. Somehow I forced a smile and held it.
My aunt made a show of fastening the bracelet on Liberty’s wrist. Carrington danced around the two of them with excitement, demanding to see the charms. My smile didn’t feel like it was part of my face. It hung there like a picture on a wall, suspended by tacks and wires.
“I think I’m supposed to be doing something with this,” I said lightly, picking the veil up from the bed, draping it over my arm. “I’m a lousy maid of honor, Liberty. You should fire me.”
She threw me a quick glance. Despite my cheerful mask, she saw something that caused her to look troubled.