Rock of Ages (32 page)

Authors: Howard Owen

“Well,” Wade Hairr said, “I think you ought to just go on and take it, don't you?”

It turned out that the pawn shop owner wasn't making any claim for a ring that had no receipt to go with it. He was more than happy to exchange a two-carat ring for what the sheriff called his “stay-out-of-jail card.”

“I don't reckon we'll ever know exactly what happened out there,” he went on, “although we can surely guess. To tell you the truth, Georgia, I just don't want to go into it, if you don't. If you could dig the bas â¦ if you could dig Pooh Blackwell up, I expect you could probably get him executed by about any jury you wanted in Scots County.”

The sheriff got up and paced around the room.

“But he's dead. And then I've got all these other loose ends. I've got some woman's shoe prints inside Pooh's house that night that I don't have any stomach for trying to match, plus Lord knows what kind of fingerprints.”

He came back and sat down.

“So,” he said, “I'm thinking that Pooh Blackwell took you out there to Maxwell's Millpond, and he, he did what he did, and then he saw how worthless and hopeless his life was, and he shot himself.”

Georgia restrained herself from asking, “In the back of the head?”

She nodded and said that seemed reasonable to her. She could feel Kenny squeezing her hand, trying to keep her on course.

Wade Hairr looked straight ahead, then at Georgia. He nodded.

“Sometimes,” he said, “things will just take care of themselves, without any intervention at all from trained law-enforcement experts.”

It was the closest thing to humor she had ever seen from the adult Wade Hairr.

“Yes,” Georgia said. “Sometimes they do.”

As she and Kenny waved at the departing lawmen, he whispered to her, “And sometimes, they need a little goosing from some nosey broad.”

Kenny and she talked about the notebooks.

“You shouldn't beat yourself up,” he told Georgia when she was moved to tears by the accumulated evidence of Jenny's loneliness and fear. “You can't be everywhere all the time.”

“You can be somewhere, some of the time,” she had responded, clearing her throat and wiping her eyes.

He was a fine one, she'd told him, to be preaching about self-flagellation. For the last 13 days, he had barely been able to meet her eyes. They had talked, without resolution, of what they might do about each other.

Finally, after Wade Hairr and his deputy left, they had “the talk.” Georgia tried to explain how much she had thought about it and how conflicted she was.

“I never thought,” she told Kenny, holding his hand and forcing him to make eye contact, “that I would have, you know, these kind of times again. You know, the sex and all.”

She felt like some teenager, struggling to make the words right.

“But I've got to go home. I don't even know if I have a home, to tell you the truth, but I think I do. And I do have what they call meaningful work, if I can ever get my ass back to it again.”

“You've got a home here,” Kenny told her, squeezing and then releasing her hand as she winced.

She said it was too much. It wasn't just what was calledâwhen it was called anythingâ“the attack.” She had come to the conclusion, she said, that she should not be living under the same roof with Justin and Leeza and the baby, at least not after she healed and then stayed long enough to give them a little help. It would suffocate everyone, she told Kenny. Justin needed some room, without a second-guessing, judgmental mother around.

“You don't have to live here, in this house,” he said, his eyes fixed on hers now, forcing her to look away.

“I know. I know. I want to. But I can't. Won't. Whatever. What â¦?”

“What would people say?” he finished the question.

Justin and Leeza knew already. Justin had uncomfortably broached the subject while she was still in the hospital. When she asked him why he hadn't said anything before, he told her it wasn't any of his business, and the way he said it was like another gift.

Still, she knew there was something there that she couldn't seem to escape. She had always prided herself in her ability to endure censure and guilt, but now she didn't know if she could.

She and Kenny didn't even mention Littlejohn McCain, or Kenny's father, although Georgia alluded to it.

“It's funny, the thing that brought you here, that secured you this farm, is one of the things that's keeping me from staying. Staying with you, I mean.”

“My great-grandparents were first cousins,” he told her. “They lived a long and happy life together, and almost none of their kids had six fingers or were congenital idiots.”

The part she could never tell even Kenny or Justin about was William Blackwell and Christmas Eve. She still couldn't believe he had told her, or that he had done what he did. Sometimes, she thought she must have dreamed it.

And so she told Kenny she would be leaving as soon as she was able, perhaps as early as the middle of February.

She promised to return for several weeks every summer, and he promised to visit her when cold weather gave him a chance to get away.

“I haven't given up,” he told her as he was leaving.

“I'm only going to get more wrinkles,” she told him. “The cellulite in my butt will just get worse.”

“I haven't given up,” he repeated.

She knew she didn't want him to.

And then, topping all that, there's the wedding today.

It was Leeza's idea. She told Justin, when they brought the baby home from the hospital, that she wanted to do it, that she was ready.

She told Georgia, when they talked about it, that she wasn't really sure Justin wouldn't run screaming in the other direction at some point in the pregnancy. She'd seen enough of that in her family. She said she thought, if he wants to leave, I'll be better off raising the baby by myself than with some of the male role models I've experienced.

“But I know he's here now,” Leeza told her. “He's going to be here for me and Georgia Noel. I couldn't trust my good luck, I guess.”

Georgia can't get used to the fact that the baby has her name. She is startled every time she hears it. She is inclined to believe Justin when he tells her that the name was Leeza's idea.

“She really does look up to you,” he told her. “God knows why.”

They go to church together, the five of them. It takes them half an hour to get everyone from the house to the car and then the mile to church. The older congregation acts as if they had descended straight from heaven. The old women make such a fuss over the baby that they finally succeed in waking her up. Everyone who isn't surrounding the infant is trying to talk to Georgia, all at the same time. She is still a little shaky and finally has to ask for a chair so that she can reluctantly hold court outside the sanctuary.

The Reverend Weeks gives a forgettable sermon but does take time to praise the generosity of Georgia McCain, in such a way that there is no doubt the church already has accepted her offer.

And then, before he goes into the sermon itself, he tells everyone they are invited to the wedding afterward.

It isn't a large event, befitting a bride and groom whose firstborn is being held by the groom's mother, sitting in the front pew. When Forsythia heard about it, she organized the same women who had fed the shut-ins on Thanksgiving to handle the reception in the fellowship hall. Someone came up with flowers.

“All I wanted,” Leeza whispers to Georgia between the services and the wedding, “was just to get married. I didn't want anybody to make a big deal about it.”

“It's their gift to you,” Georgia whispers back. “It's the gift of acceptance.”

“I know.”

Justin is going to buy her a ring, but for now, he has the one that was on Jenny McLaurin's finger three months ago. No one seems to think it's bad luck, and it appears to fit.

Georgia sits holding her granddaughter, praying that the baby won't wake up again until the wedding is over, looking down into her perfect face and thinking about how she has never in her whole life seen anything coming, never been able to figure out what was next.

It used to drive her crazy, when she labored under the illusion that she was in control.

Today, she finds that the unknown leaves her with an odd combination of peace and excitement, an unsubstantiated faith that everything will turn out well.

She looks at the little band gathered around the Reverend Weeks. There are four of themâthe bride and groom, a friend of Leeza's who came down to be maid of honor, and Kenny, the best man.

Georgia and Kenny make eye contact.

Solemn as a judge, he winks.

She smiles and wonders what comes next.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1207-2

The Permanent Press

4170 Noyac Road

Sag Harbor, NY 11963

www.thepermanentpress.com