“It doesn’t get easier when you get older?” Leon asked.
“Some things just get more difficult, but hopefully by then you have the strength to do what’s right.” Sam put his arm around Leon’s shoulders and pulled him toward the church. “Come on and help me pop some corn and pour some cider. Then I’ll take you home.”
“If you do, you’d better just drop me off at the gate.”
“One morning next week I’m going to have another talk with your father and tell him what a good job he’s doing with you.”
“I don’t think he listens much to anybody these days.”
Sam knew when silence was better than false reassurances. He just clapped the boy on the back, then they started toward the church together.
A
tlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport was as busy as Sam had expected it to be. He had claimed his suitcase by the time Christine made it through the crowd at baggage claim to slip her arms around his waist and rise on tiptoe for a quick kiss.
“The traffic gets worse every single day,” she drawled. “If I didn’t love you so much, I would have turned around and gone home for iced tea and a dip in the pool.”
He hugged her back and felt the welcome softness of her body against his. Fall had not worked its cooler magic today, and Christine was dressed for summer weather in white Capri pants and a coral-colored T-shirt that left just enough of a gap above her waist to tantalize any man with a libido.
“I’m glad you made it.” He released her. “Can I buy you lunch to make up for the traffic?”
“Mother and Daddy are expecting us.” Christine made a face, although in no way did it detract from her flamboyant beauty. “Mother’s gone all out. She’s on a nouveau southern kick, so expect something like chicken gizzards in pesto cream sauce, or pecan and pine nut pie.”
“Can we tell them we were in a wreck?”
“Don’t say that too loudly. We have a long drive home.”
They wound their way to the hourly lot where Christine had parked, and in minutes they were heading north.
Christine drove a silver Audi TT convertible, sporty, classic and perfectly suited to her. She wasn’t precisely a menace behind the wheel, but she definitely took no prisoners. Where he was more apt to give his fellow drivers the benefit of the doubt, Christine saw every gap in the adjacent lanes as a challenge.
“You look good, Sam.” She looked over her shoulder and squeezed between two semis to make a little extra headway. “Do you realize it’s been more than a month since I’ve seen you?”
He did realize it. Even more, he realized he hadn’t thought about her often enough during those weeks. “I’m glad we could work this out.”
“Torey is just thrilled you’re going to take part in the service tonight. She could hardly say enough good things about you.”
He had returned to Atlanta not only to see his fiancée and spend some much-needed time with her, but to do the opening prayer and benediction at the wedding of one of Christine’s oldest friends at The Savior’s Church. Torey Scoppito had insisted that Sam share honors with Savior’s senior pastor, Nigel Fairlington. Sam guessed that between the Fletchers and Scoppitos, enough pressure had been applied that Nigel hadn’t been courageous—or foolish—enough to refuse.
Sam knew he should not have come, and he definitely should not have agreed to help with the ceremony. Once again he had put Nigel in an awkward position, and Nigel was not a man who turned the other cheek. In addition to possible career repercussions, Sam would simply have preferred never to darken Savior’s door again.
“I’m surprised you had time to pick me up,” he said. “No pre-wedding festivities?”
“I’m out of most of them. I’ll go over to the church about four to dress and help, but Torey’s got a bevy of Scoppito aunts and cousins in addition to her mom and sister, so she already has more women than she needs.”
He listened as Christine described Torey’s gown, the frou frou dresses originally chosen for the bridesmaids by Torey’s mother, and the Vera Wang replacements Christine had tactfully engineered. He watched the familiar scenery race by and felt nostalgia scratching at his defenses.
Christine’s account of the trials and tribulations of the Scoppito-Malvern wedding took them nearly to Roswell. The Fletchers lived in North Fulton County, known locally as Atlanta’s Golden Corridor. The town was picturesque, wealthy and, for the most part, white. After Hiram’s term as governor, the Fletchers had razed the smaller home they’d owned here to build one more suitable for Georgia royalty.
He liked Hiram and Nola Fletcher. There was nothing not to like except, perhaps, a certain casual disregard for people who weren’t exactly like them. But he was never comfortable in Christine’s family home. Mentally he compared it to the tiny aluminum-sided colonial he had shared with his own parents and siblings. Throughout his childhood, he and Mark had huddled together in an attic room, steaming in the summer, freezing in the winter. Rachel had been forced to cut through the family’s only bathroom to reach her closet-sized bedroom. Now Rachel claimed that waiting endlessly to enter or leave her room while people showered or used the toilet had scarred her for life.
He was definitely not ashamed of his roots or his up-bringing. But the contrast with Christine’s pointed out the problems between them. She believed Sam was upwardly mobile, desirous of all the benefits and blessings she had been born to. She saw her own background as a gift to bestow on him. All too often Sam saw it as a barrier, an outward symbol of their differing values.
Christine turned on to the road running above the scenic Chattahoochee River, and, after several twists and turns, she slowed. The Fletchers’ Georgian home came into view. The house was not quite a mansion, and the eight live-oak-shaded, horse-dotted acres surrounded by white paddock fencing were not quite an estate. But the property bordered on both. The house was cherry brick and just one room deep, angling back toward an awe-inspiring bluestone verandah overlooking the river. A wisteria-draped pergola framed the view and offered shade. The verandah and house could easily contain a crowd of hundreds, and Christine had planned to have their wedding reception here.
In the days when there had been a wedding on the horizon.
Christine slowed to turn into the magnolia-lined drive. “Mother will be serving lunch on the verandah since it’s so warm. You know her, she doesn’t want to give up a minute of that view.”
“I can’t blame her. I love it, too.”
“Do you?”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“Because I was thinking we might get married here.”
He let that settle a moment. Then he kept his tone light. “Married? That’s a word I don’t hear very often in reference to us.”
“We’re engaged, Sam. Or aren’t we?”
He wondered. Exactly what did “engaged” mean except a ring on Christine’s finger and occasional chaste forays into each other’s lives?
“I assume you don’t want to get married at Savior’s?” she continued. “I’m willing to forget that, even if they do employ me. If we have the wedding here, no one will think twice about it. They’ll simply think I want to take advantage of the setting. And if we have bad weather, we could still do the ceremony indoors. I could come down the staircase.”
The staircase in question was a masterpiece, spiral and stone. The Fletchers had purchased it prior to the demolition of a plantation house in southern Georgia and built the house around it. Sam could well imagine Christine slowly walking down the stairs to the requisite oohs and ahs.
“It’s a wonderful place for a wedding.” He realized how noncommittal that sounded, but he wasn’t sure what Christine wanted. She was the one who had backed away from their original wedding date.
“Then you’d agree to it?”
He tried to imagine marrying Christine
here
instead of imagining himself marrying her at all. “I know it’s the bride’s prerogative to choose a place, but I’m the minister of a church in Virginia. I’m just trying to predict how my congregation would feel if I got married anywhere else.”
She pulled into a parking area surrounded on three sides by dogwoods and rows of azaleas so that the cars couldn’t be seen from the house. Water droplets clung to leaves, doubtless from a hidden sprinkler system, and they glistened in the morning sunlight.
Christine turned off the engine and faced him. “You don’t really expect me to invite my friends and my parents’ friends to a wedding at Community Church, do you?”
“Because it’s so far away? Or because they’ll see how far the mighty has fallen?”
Anger sparkled in her eyes. “That’s unfair.”
“I don’t think so.”
She stared at him a moment. “Okay. If we’re being honest, I’m hoping you won’t even be in Virginia.”
“What, you’re hoping Nigel will embrace me tonight and beg me to come back as his successor?”
“No! You burned that bridge and blew up the riverbanks while you were at it, didn’t you? But there are other churches where the history isn’t so painful. Important churches in cities I’d be willing to live in.”
He knew it wasn’t fair to ask Christine to live just anywhere. The day when the minister’s partner simply gave up his or her own career and life and meekly followed a spouse to the next assignment was on the wane. But there was more here than Christine’s dislike of rural Virginia. And both of them knew it.
“Mother’s going to wonder what we’re doing,” Christine said at last. “We need to talk this through, but not now, and certainly not here, like this.”
“I’m not sure talking will change the basics. I’m not sure I can be who you want me to be.”
“I think there’s a lot you’re not sure of. Don’t you think it’s a little late for who-do-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up and a little early for a midlife crisis?” She sounded matter-of-fact. Christine was not one for self-pity. She had rarely seen a loss she couldn’t change to a gain.
His temper flared. “It’s also a little late for using bribery to get what you want, Chrissy.”
“Bribery?”
“Your hand in marriage if I do what you want and go where you want me to. I got six months for one act of civil disobedience, but you’ve punished me ever since.”
“How fair is that? Everything changed. What was I supposed to do?”
“Not
everything
changed. I’m still the man I was when I was standing in Savior’s pulpit.”
“Well, apparently there was a lot of you that wasn’t visible. That robe covered more than a nice, solid masculine body. I thought you were logical and rational, that you wanted the things I did and were willing to make some compromises.”
“Then you weren’t listening to my sermons.”
Immediately he wished he hadn’t spoken. He had hurt her. Badly enough that he had pierced the brash facade to reveal a woman who saw her life changing and, for once, was powerless to stop it.
He covered her hand with his in apology. “I’m sorry, you’re right. This isn’t the time or place.”
“Maybe it’s past time.”
“Maybe so, but for the last three years, neither of us wanted to hear what the other had to say.”
Christine opened her door. “Sam, let’s enjoy the weekend. We need to have fun together and remember how good things can be. Then we can finish this.”
As emergency measures went, that wasn’t a bad one. He nodded. But were they simply delaying the inevitable?
And how much had his attraction to Elisa Martinez factored in his responses today? Because throughout the entire conversation, Elisa had hovered in the background, and he despised himself for that.
The Reverend Nigel Fairlington, hale and hearty, silver-haired and silver-tongued, was more welcoming than Sam had expected. He made sure their reunion was witnessed by sympathetic members, of course, and not by those who had signed the petition that had helped remove Sam as Savior’s associate pastor. But even this carefully orchestrated sleight of hand had not dimmed Sam’s pleasure at the lack of confrontation. In a brief private moment Nigel had thanked him for agreeing to help preside, admitting that appeasing the Scoppitos, who were the church’s largest givers, had taken precedence over any lingering resentments about Sam’s exit.
“You were young and idealistic,” Nigel said magnanimously. “We should have been more understanding.”
Sam knew there was no point in telling his former boss that under the same circumstances, he would probably do the same thing again, despite the consequences.
The wedding went off without a hitch, due largely to the team of wedding coordinators who oversaw everything from the number of pint-sized attendants who helped carry Torey’s train to the vanilla-hued candles on the altar that precisely matched Torey’s gown. The maids, in warm autumn colors, were a harvest cornucopia. Christine, in a mellow pumpkin hue, nearly outshone the bride.
Sam was greeted warmly and enthusiastically introduced to those in attendance who didn’t know him. When photos were finished he drove with Christine to the reception. Torey’s parents, like Christine’s, lived in North Fulton County, but in a country club community of luxury homes. He remembered from pastoral visits and social events that the Scoppito house had more bathrooms than an airport and cathedral ceilings that rivaled the Vatican’s.
The country club itself was modeled after a mountain lodge. Built of cedar and stone, and set in stands of all the desirable Georgia trees, it overlooked the eighteenth green of a Jack Nicklaus signature golf course. Sam had played here numerous times, even though his golf game was enthusiastically mediocre.
“Butlers” were passing trays of gourmet hors d’oeuvres by the time Christine tossed her keys to the valet. The bar was in full flourish, and one wine spritzer later, Sam stood at the huge windows overlooking the golf course and sipped, while Christine went to find her parents.
“We miss you terribly, Sam. I don’t think I’d feel my daughter was properly married if you hadn’t come today.”
He turned to smile at Rose Scoppito. She was a charming woman, dark-haired, brown-eyed, not one ounce overweight, due to a rigid schedule of aerobic exercise and weight training. He suspected she’d visited her plastic surgeon since last he’d seen her. He thought Rose herself would probably have preferred to age naturally, but her husband’s position as the CEO of a biotech corporation made that difficult. Rose’s contributions to his success were her beauty and skills as a hostess. And just in case, she wasn’t giving the charismatic and handsome Anthony Scoppito any excuse for a roving eye or a new trophy wife.