Last-Minute Marriage

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“SHE’S GOING to be staying in the boathouse,” Caleb told Sam as they were setting the table for supper. He stopped putting down forks and spoons so that Sam could watch his lips. “She’s going to work at the hardware for a couple of weeks.”

“To help you and Dad.”

“That’s the idea.” His great-grandfather’s lips were pulled into a tight line. That meant he wasn’t happy.

“It’s hard working at the store,” Sam said. “She’s going to have a baby. Should she be doing that work?” He’d noticed she was pregnant right away. It was pretty hard to miss.

“Having a baby is a natural thing. As long as we don’t let her lift anything too heavy, she’ll be okay.”

“Where’s her husband?” Sam set a glass of water by Caleb’s plate. He didn’t sign much with his great-grandfather. Caleb’s arthritis was too bad.

“I don’t know she has one.”

“Why not?” The pregnant ladies he knew in Riverbend had husbands.

“Haven’t got the foggiest notion why not.” The old man shook his head and frowned. “The world’s changing fast. In my day a pregnant woman didn’t go gallivanting around the country by herself. She stayed home and let her husband take care of her. Women don’t think they need husbands to raise kids these days, more’s the pity.”

Sam couldn’t catch all the words. Caleb liked to ramble on to himself, and he didn’t always remember to look at Sam while he did it. Granddad Caleb was losing his hearing, too. Pretty soon, he said, he and Sam would be in the same boat.

Except Granddad Caleb had been able to hear things all his life. He didn’t have to guess what a bird singing sounded like. He didn’t have to wear a hearing aid and use an augmenter in class and feel like a geek.

“She’s pretty,” Sam said. “Her hair’s the same color as Mom’s.”

“She doesn’t look anything like your mother.” Caleb rounded on him with narrowed eyes. With his big nose and white hair, he looked just like an eagle when he did that.

“I know. Mom’s shorter than her. And skinnier.”

“Yeah, I guess she does have the same color hair now that I think on it. But that’s all they’ve got in common, I hope.” Caleb turned away as he said the last words so that Sam wouldn’t see him. But he was too slow. Granddad Caleb didn’t like Sam’s mom. He’d never said so out loud, but Sam knew. He couldn’t hear everything people said, but he was pretty good at figuring out what they didn’t say.

“I hope she stays awhile. If she helps out at the store, maybe you and Dad won’t be so busy all the time.” He was worried that if he made the basketball team this year, his dad would always be working and never be able to get to the after-school games.

“It would be nice to slow down a bit. But your dad up and hiring a woman practically off the street isn’t my idea of the way to go about it. I don’t see any good coming of this.” Caleb saw him watching his lips and abruptly stopped talking. He motioned to the refrigerator. Sam took his cue and went to get the sliced ham and homemade baked beans that Granddad Caleb’s friends Ruth and Rachel Steele had brought over for them two days ago. They’d also brought an apple pie. But that hadn’t lasted long.

“Do you suppose she knows how to bake apple pies?”

Caleb shrugged, looking at the clock. “Danged if I know. Probably not. Women these days don’t like to cook no better’n men.”

“Dad’s a good cook.”

“By necessity, not temperament.”

Sam wasn’t sure what his great-grandfather was talking about. “What’s temperament mean?” He tried hard, but he knew he didn’t get it right. Sam sighed. Another word to add to his practice list with his therapist.

“I’ll explain later. Let’s eat. It’s been a long time since I had my lunch.”

“Do you suppose the lady in the boathouse has anything to eat for supper?” He’d seen her red car drive in a little while ago. He could see lights in the boathouse from the kitchen window.

“I reckon she got herself all this way from California, she can find her way to the grocery and buy some food.”

“And milk for her baby. I know that women who are going to have babies are supposed to drink a lot of milk so their babies are big and strong.”

“Who told you that?”

“Tara Webber’s stepmom had a baby last spring, remember? She told me.”

A lot of his friends’ moms were having babies. He wouldn’t mind a baby brother or sister himself. Except his mom didn’t live with them anymore. He could hardly remember when she had. She’d moved to Chicago so long ago. Chicago wasn’t all that far away. He’d looked it up on the map once. But she hadn’t been back to Riverbend since a year ago last Fourth of July. She hadn’t even called him on the phone for weeks and weeks. Not even since he’d got his own phone. The one with the special earphones so that he could really hear her voice.

She didn’t have a computer, so he couldn’t e-mail her. She said she’d get one if his dad sent her the money. She said she couldn’t afford to buy one on her own, and she wasn’t allowed to e-mail him from work. Sam wanted to believe her. But the truth was, his dad did send her money, and she always had something else to spend it on.

He was almost getting used to it—his mom not doing what she said she was going to do didn’t hurt so much anymore. Most of the time. But it would be nice to have a mom again. If he couldn’t have his own mom come back to live with them, maybe his dad could find another woman to be his mom.

Sam bent his head and pretended to study the piece of ham on his plate. Only he really wasn’t checking out the fat on the edge of his ham slice. He was thinking. Thinking real hard.

His dad must like the lady in the boathouse. If he liked her some, maybe he could learn to like her a lot. And if he liked her a lot…well, wasn’t that how grown-ups sometimes fell in love?

When Sam’s mom had first left, he hadn’t wanted his dad to have any girlfriends. He figured if his dad had a girlfriend, then his mom would never come back. But as a guy got older he saw things differently. In January he would be eleven. Practically a teenager. Almost a grown-up. He could share his dad now. With the right woman. Maybe Tessa was the right woman.

She didn’t have a husband, as far as Sam could tell.

And she was already going to have a baby.

That was good, too.

Once, just before his mom left, he’d come into the room while she was arguing with his dad. Her face was all red and scrunched up like it got when she was going to cry. His dad had seen him and tried to make her be quiet, but she wouldn’t. Sam was getting pretty good at reading lips by then, and he’d seen what she was saying before she figured out he was there. Sam had never forgotten that one sentence. She’d said, No more babies, Mitch. No more babies like Sam.

But Tessa’s baby wouldn’t be like him. Her baby would be able to hear.

Tessa didn’t have a husband. His dad didn’t have a wife. And Sam didn’t have a mom, or a baby brother or sister. If he could get his dad and Tessa together, he’d have everything he needed to make a family again.

CHAPTER FIVE

“I DON’T KNOW, Ruth. I can’t decide whether I want stripes or a floral pattern in the bathroom. I wish you’d tell me which you like best.”

“I don’t think stripes will work, Rachel,” said Rachel’s twin sister in a tone of long suffering. “The house is as old as we are and the walls aren’t all that straight.” The two women sat surrounded by sample books at the old-fashioned oak library table in the middle of the hardware store.

Rachel pursed her pink lips. “But this one is so pretty.”

Everything about the two old ladies, Tessa had noticed, was pink and white. From the tops of their curly white heads to the tips of their toes.

Rachel Steele—they’d introduced themselves the moment Tessa walked up to ask them if she could be of help—was dressed in a pink sweat suit, with colored bands of rose and mauve on the sleeves. Ruth wore a raspberry sweatshirt and matching sweatpants. Both were wearing identical pairs of pristine white tennis shoes. They were small and plump and looked like two pieces of candy that had somehow found their way out of their gilded box and into the wallpaper-and-paint department of Sterling Hardware and Building Supply.

“Rachel. Ruth.” Caleb looked over the waist-high wall that blocked off the view of the office on the upper floor. “Good morning, ladies.”

“Good morning, Caleb.” Rachel glanced up from the sample book, the frown that had marred her face disappearing in a smile that deepened myriad tiny wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. “The search goes on. I’m almost in despair of ever finding the right wallpaper pattern for my bathroom.”

“The paper on the walls now is just fine,” her sibling insisted. “We’ve got better things to do this morning.”

“You always say that. I’m determined this time to find just the right paper.”

“Perhaps a floral stripe?” Tessa suggested, pulling sample books from the shelves. She’d told Mitch the day he hired her that she didn’t intend to spend her time in paint-and-wallpaper, but that’s where she’d ended up.

Working for Mitch, she was finding, wasn’t the same as working at Home-Mart, because Mitch’s hardware store was different, and so were his customers. Some of them had been coming to Sterling’s since long before he was born, she suspected. Many of them were friends and contemporaries of Caleb’s, like the ladies she was helping at the moment, and probably of Mitch’s late parents’. The men smiled politely, tipped their feed-company hats and headed for Mitch or Caleb for their electrical and plumbing needs, or sought out Bill Webber in the lumberyard.

The women did the same if they were buying hardware. But if they were looking for paint or wallpaper, they brought their questions to her. Riverbend was a traditional place, she was coming to learn. And one of the traditional things about it was the unwritten rule that men didn’t like to look at wallpaper books or paint-chip cards. Even men whose business it was to know about such things.