The Year of Luminous Love

  She obeyed meekly, still so shaken that she could hardly think straight. Inside the elegant and expensively decorated condo, she crossed to the balcony doors, opened them, and took deep ragged breaths. What was she going to do? How was she going to get away from this horror called her life and this demon of a man?

  The old woman dreamed.

  She stood on the veranda of a grand Victorian looking down a long tree-lined driveway that stretched to a dirt road fronting the property.

  October had begun to edge the leaves with the colors of autumn. The woman felt featherlight. No aching bones. No throbbing muscles. Her mind was as clear as a bell … no muddled thoughts. She turned to the window behind her and saw her reflection in the old-time glass. Why, she was so young! Just a girl. Her long blond hair was tied with a length of blue satin ribbon and her dress was a Sunday best, white linen edged with eyelet lace. Why was she dressed so finely?

  She pinched her cheeks to make them glow, nibbled on her bottom lip to redden it. Growing anticipation filled every cell in her body. Turning back toward the lawn, she saw a rider on horseback turn into the property from the road. A man sat ramrod straight in the saddle. The horse, dark as sooty wood, stepped high, approaching in a fluid graceful motion that defined it as a Tennessee walking horse, bred and trained to perform this perfect gait.

  She squinted, unable to see the man’s face, partially covered by a fedora low on his forehead. Her heartbeat accelerated, knowing the man was coming to meet her. She stepped down off the porch, onto the ground in anticipation. Then they were towering over her. “May I help you?” she asked.

  The rider said nothing but lowered a saddlebag into her arms. It was heavy, and when she rested it on the step, bright red apples rolled from the overstuffed pouch. “Oh!” she cried, delighted. “For me?”

  The horse stood absolutely statue still. The man reached down his hand, inviting her to join him on the horse. She hesitated. What if Papa saw her with a stranger? Still, the man’s offer was irresistible. She smiled, placing her youthful palm into his. In one smooth and impossible motion, she floated onto the horse’s rounded rump behind the man. Only in a dreamscape could she have moved so effortlessly. The horse snorted. She settled her arms around the man’s waist. This felt so right. She tightened her grip and rested her cheek against the man’s broad, well-muscled and absolutely familiar back. She sighed with contentment.

  “I love you,” she whispered into the rough fabric of his shirt, which caught her warm breath. “With all my heart, I love you.”

  Arie punched in Jon’s cell number with shaking fingers.

  “Hey,” he answered.

  Arie’s voice clogged with tears, and for a moment, she couldn’t speak.

  “Arie? Is that you? What’s wrong?”

  She cleared her throat. “I won’t be coming this morning. Ciana’s grandmother died in the night, and I have to be with my friend today.”

  Jon was quiet. “Ciana was real attached to her, wasn’t she?”

  Arie wasn’t sure how he knew this, but she said, “Yes. Olivia was more a mother to her than her own.”

  “Look, don’t worry about training until you feel like it. We’ll start again when the timing’s right.”

  “I have to go.”

  Just before she punched off, Jon said, “Wait! Tell Ciana how sorry I am, okay?”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  For Ciana, the best thing about having good long-term friends was the sense of history they brought with them. She thought back to the first time Arie came to spend the day with her when they’d been kids. Ciana had been nervous—friends never came to Bellmeade on the outskirts of town. She wondered what Arie really thought of her. Did she think Ciana was stuck-up because she was a Beauchamp? Her concerns had been ungrounded. No one could be a better friend to her than Arie.

  Ciana hadn’t wanted to include Eden in their twosome friendship until Arie had insisted, recognizing quickly that Eden was “a fellow wounded soul.” But once Ciana learned about Eden’s life with a mental-case mother, Ciana’s defenses buckled. She knew what it was like to live with a broken mother. Eden brought a sense of adventure to her and Arie’s mix of personalities. She was daring, a risk taker, and fun to be around. Now these two sat with Ciana and cried with her over losing her beloved grandmother.

  During the visitation at the funeral home, it seemed as if the whole town turned out to pay respects to Miz Olivia, matriarch of the Beauchamp family. Especially when the town had not been able to pay respects after Ciana’s grandfather and father had perished in the plane wreckage, leaving nothing of themselves to bury.

  Ciana recognized most of the mourners, farmers in their best jeans, their faces sun weathered and worn by years of outdoor work, and tradesmen who sold goods and products, often on unconditional credit, in a town down on its luck. She greeted them, thanked them for coming. What she couldn’t do was bring herself to view Olivia’s body lying in the satin-lined casket surrounded by flowers, plants, and numberless baskets at the front of the funeral parlor.

  “You may regret not saying goodbye,” Alice Faye told her. The visitors were gone. Only Ciana, her friends, and her mother remained.

  “I don’t think I can.” Ciana had held herself together all evening.

  “Funeral’s tomorrow and the casket will be closed. This is your last chance to see her. She looks wonderful,” Alice Faye said, encouraging Ciana.

  “Your mama’s right. Say goodbye proper. We’ll go with you,” Arie offered.

  Eden nodded, although she also looked reluctant.

  “This is about you, not her,” Alice Faye added, squeezing Ciana’s hand. “Go on.”

  And so, banked on either side by her two friends, Ciana walked to the casket and looked down on Olivia Beauchamp. She lay in a royal blue dress and wore her favorite pearl necklace, looking serene, better in death than she had in the last year of her life. Ciana felt numb. As a farm girl, she’d come to see death early with animals, but when she had realized that one day Olivia would die, she’d panicked. Grandmother knew all things and told wonderful stories. How was it possible that she, too, would die?

  Olivia had wiped Ciana’s cheeks, saying, “Death will come one day, but that means I’ll see Charles once again. We’ll be so happy together.”

  “She looks asleep,” Arie whispered in Ciana’s ear, dragging her into the present.

  “And pretty,” Eden said.

  “And gone forever,” Ciana added before turning and walking away.

  Rain fell on the August afternoon Ciana and her mother went to the attorney’s office to review Olivia’s will. Barry Boatwright practiced law a block off Main Street, in a stately refurbished Victorian painted yellow with dark brown trim. His front office assistant, one of Arie’s aunts, greeted them warmly. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you,” Alice Faye said.

  The woman ushered them into Boatwright’s office, which had once served as the home’s dining room. Boatwright’s desk faced a worn leather sofa nestled under a bay window. Large purple-headed hydrangea bushes drooped outside the window, shielding the room from passersby.

  “Welcome,” Boatwright said. He kissed Alice Faye’s cheeks and clasped Ciana’s hand warmly. “Do sit,” he said, motioning to the sofa, issuing condolences and praising Olivia’s life. “Sweet tea?” he asked as they settled in.

  “No thank you,” Alice Faye and Ciana said.

  He lowered himself into his squeaky desk chair and picked up a large file. “The terms of the will are mostly unchanged from your great-grandfather Jacob’s. The land is always passed to the family first.” He peered over the tops of his glasses. “You are joint heirs and required to pass it along to your heirs. It cannot be sold without each other’s express consent.”

  Ciana grimaced, knowing that supplying future heirs was her responsibility and knowing that while the will may be simple, the “if/whens” and “wherefores” of no additional heirs filled most of the file Boatwrig
ht was holding. But Ciana silently swore that as long as she lived, Bellmeade would not be sold, even if she died a dried-up old prune without heirs.

  “Miz Olivia did make one change, however,” the attorney said, rustling pieces of paper.

  Beside her, Ciana felt her mother sit straighter.

  “A change?” Alice Faye asked. “What kind of change?”

  “A thoughtful change,” Boatwright said with a smile. “She set up a savings account for you, Ciana. Money for you to attend a college or university of your choice. Although she underestimated the cost of attending college, it’s a nice amount of money, enough that if you’re prudent, you can stretch it to cover tuition and books at a good institution.”

  Ciana simply stared at him, stunned by his news.

  “And,” Boatwright continued, “you have total control and discretion over it. She wanted you to have it because she said you were a girl of extraordinary good sense and therefore should never be dependent on the whim of any other person to choose your way in life.”

  “It was a smack at me,” Alice Faye said, fuming, as Ciana drove her mother’s old Lincoln Town Car home through the rain.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “I wanted to attend college, but Old Man Jacob thought spending money on educating a woman was foolish, a waste. What was left for me? Nothing. I was trapped. So when Jackson came along, I married him.” Alice Faye offered a derisive laugh. “Neither Olivia nor your great-grandfather cared much for Jackson. Thought he was more attracted to my family name and money than to me. Jackson discovered afterward there was no vast fortune. But he stayed. They were surprised—as though no man could care for me for myself.”

  Alice Faye grabbed a tissue, swiped her eyes.

  “How about your daddy, Charles? Didn’t he have any say-so about his daughter going to college?”

  “He stood up for me, but trust me when I say that Jacob and Olivia were formidable forces. Daddy gave up quickly.”

  Did Ciana want to hear this? “I don’t remember Granddad or Daddy very much.”

  “My grandfather scared the starch out of me, but your granddad, my daddy, was my guardian angel. He loved me and was good to me,” Alice Faye said. “But Olivia made me feel like I never measured up to my dead brother. Charles Junior was perfect. I was not.”

  Ciana didn’t interrupt, keeping her eyes on the road through the downpour. She hadn’t heard this story before, not from Grandmother, not from her mother.

  “Anyway, after Jackson and I were married, Daddy took Jackson into the business, even though he was never into farming like Daddy and Jacob. After Jacob died, Jackson seemed less pressured and more at ease in the business. Daddy loved to fly that plane of his. He and Jackson went all over the country selling our farm goods to small grocers. When supermarkets began to change the grocer business, they went after contracts with them. According to Mother, when Charles Junior died, it took four days for Charles to get home because of bad weather. Mother Nature played a mean trick on Olivia when she got pregnant with me,” Alice Faye muttered, sighing heavily. “Years later, he was piloting the plane when it went down forever with him and my dear Jackson.”

  The catch in her mother’s voice left no doubt in Ciana’s mind about that crash being the worst day in her mother’s life. The day was stamped in her memory because the sight and sound of her mother and grandmother crying uncontrollably had terrified her. And at age six, the idea that her father and grandfather were never coming home didn’t make sense. They went away lots of times, but they always came home.

  Alice Faye gazed out the car window. “I redeemed us both when I had you,” she said softly, moving back in time to before her husband and father had died. “You were my saving grace, even though you became more hers than mine.”

  Ciana glanced over at her mother’s somber profile, cast in gray by the rain against the windshield. “I … I don’t think—”

  “She named you, you know.” Alice Faye was tuning Ciana out, lost now in memories. “I wanted to call you Sara Elizabeth. A pretty name. But I didn’t get a choice about your name.”

  Ciana hadn’t known this. She tried on Sara in her head, but it didn’t feel right. “I like Ciana.”

  Alice Faye didn’t seem to hear her. “She came into my hospital room, lifted you up, saw your full head of reddish hair, and said, ‘Look, Charles. She looks like a sweet little cinnamon bun.’ And so she christened you Ciana.”

  Ciana wondered if she was supposed to feel guilty about the way she looked.

  “You were so much like her as you grew up. A take-charge personality. Loved hard work. Loved the land, the horses, the garden. You were all the things I wasn’t and never would be.” The car’s wipers and pounding rain almost drowned out Alice Faye’s softly spoken words. “Then the plane crashed and we both lost our men. And you became even more important. I had no other children, but then neither did she. Yet here she is, reaching up from the grave to control our lives once again.” Her last words sounded peckish.

  “Are you saying you don’t want me to have the college-fund money?” Ciana didn’t see the savings account as vengeful. Did her mother?

  Her mother scoffed. “Don’t be foolish. Of course I do. You’re my daughter, and I love you. Truth is, the money’s your ticket out, Ciana. You have a door open for you I never had.”

  Ciana blinked in amazement. “You would have left Bellmeade?”

  “Far away. But where would I have gone, Ciana? Where does a woman go when she has no education, no husband, no money of her own, and no real purpose in life?”

  Echoes of Eden, Ciana thought. “You had Bellmeade,” she said. She’d never heard her mother express such deep regrets about her life. She’d figured every Beauchamp woman wanted to cling to the land, to hold on to her birthright and destiny.

  “I didn’t especially want the place.” Still deep in her own musings, Alice Faye smiled enigmatically. “But I guess I did leave in a manner of speaking. I have found both escape and great pleasure in sweet tea and gin.”

  After leaving Alice Faye at the doorstep, Ciana parked the car, slipped on a slicker, and ran to the stables, her mind reeling from her mother’s words. Olivia had always preached that being a Beauchamp was a gift from the Almighty, clearly a responsibility and duty that only a privileged few had been granted. There had been times when Ciana sometimes felt overwhelmed by it all, but never had she wanted to be someone other than who she was. Now she had learned that her mother had wanted to be anyone except who she was. Disturbing.

  Deep in thought, she entered the barn. Firecracker and Sonata whinnied. “I haven’t forgotten you,” she said, but then stopped, staring. Both horses were in their stalls, dry and eating a trough full of hay. She’d left them out before going into town. “How did you—”

  “I did it,” Jon Mercer said from behind her.

  Ciana whirled to see him leaning against the open doorway of the tack room and stamped her foot. “You scared me half to death.”

  He held up his hands in surrender. “Just wanted to help. Saw the horses out in the rain, so I brought them in and toweled them off, gave them something to munch.”

  “Just driving past?” His story wasn’t quite believable. She lived miles from Pickins’s ranch.

  “Okay. Driving by on purpose. I wanted to apologize for not coming to your grandmother’s funeral. I wanted to say I’m sorry she died because I know what she meant to you.”

  She had looked for him covertly in the crowd of mourners but didn’t want to admit it to his face. “Not a problem. No one likes to go to funerals.”

  “Plus, I wanted to surprise you.” He held out his hand. “Come inside.”

  The old desk had been pulled away from the wall and covered with a tablecloth. Cartons of fried chicken, potato salad, and baked beans along with paper plates and plastic forks sat on the checkered cloth.

  “Supper,” he said, pulling out a chair and guiding her into it. “Bought it at the Chicken Palace downtown.” H
e took a seat across from her on the other side of the narrow old desk. His knees hit the solid wood backside, so he twisted sideways.

  Caught off guard, thoroughly surprised, and touched by his effort, she confessed, “I don’t know what to say.”

  “No need to talk. Just eat.”

  She dug into the cardboard box until she found a crispy fried chicken leg. “What if I hadn’t come home?”

  “I figured you’d come back eventually for the sake of the horses. And if you hadn’t come home, the horses were dry and fed and I’d have a lot of leftover chicken.”

  She smiled. “I appreciate you caring for my horses. A little surprised, though, that Firecracker came to you. She can be ornery.”

  He found a crispy thigh and bit into it. “I specialize in ornery.”

  She blushed, knowing he was referring to her. After a few minutes of silence, she said, “Arie says you’re a good trainer. That you have a gift for connecting with horses.”

  “Don’t know about being gifted. Just know I like being around them. I train them gentle-like. No need to be mean to a horse. I’ve seen trainers who are. Takes them twice as long to gentle an animal with meanness. I don’t teach a horse anything. I just bring out the things that come natural to them.”

  Ciana watched his hands gesture expressively while he talked about horses. To her his hands were beautiful, squarish and capable, calloused and marked with faint white lines from old leather strap and rope burns, working hands that were as gentle as cotton on a woman’s skin. Remembering, she shivered. “Pickins must be happy with your work.”

  He grinned. “Bill thinks he’s a genius for bringing in the mustangs. The work’s gone fast because the horses are smart.”

  “How about your father? Wasn’t this supposed to be his job?” She remembered Jon telling her that.

  “It was, but his healing from the stroke isn’t going well. His fault, though. He won’t go to rehab like he’s supposed to. He still has paralysis on his left side. His arm’s useless, and his foot drags when he walks.”