A Bride at Last (2 page)

“Sabrina was doing just fine and didn’t really need my help with the baby,” Grandma explained, “so I thought I would come back here.”

Nadine’s heart sank as her silent questions were answered. She felt frustrated with her sister’s recuperative ability.

“From the look of the place, I’m not a moment too soon.” Grandma shook her head.

Nadine ignored the reprimand in her voice and
glanced around the kitchen for any changes her grandmother might have wrought. Sure enough. She had moved the kitchen table into the corner again. She claimed it made the kitchen roomier. But Nadine liked it directly under the chandelier. It shed a better light, with no shadows.

The timer rang out and Grandma went back to her cookies. She pulled open the oven door to take out the next batch. “When I saw all those piled-up cereal bowls in the sink, I knew I shouldn’t have left.”

“Cold cereal is a well-balanced meal,” huffed Nadine, shoving the high-backed wooden chairs back under the table with one knee. “It says so on all the commercials.”

Danielle rolled the cookie balls vigorously. “Tonight it’s just good, warm food for you. So go wash up. I’ll have supper on the table in a few winks.”

“You’re only staying for a while longer, right?” Nadine asked, remembering past promises blithely broken by her grandma.

Grandma threw an innocent look over her shoulder. “I’ll stay as long as you need me.”

Nadine held that guileless stare a moment as if to decipher what that meant, but Grandma only winked at her. Nadine straightened the last chair and headed down the hall to the bathroom.

She glanced around the bathroom and wrinkled her nose. This morning she had been rushed and had dropped her clothes and towels on the floor. Now the bathroom taps sparkled and clean peach-colored towels hung on the towel bar, with a gray facecloth
the same shade as the walls lying in a perfect triangle across them. The bathtub shone and a clean rug lay in front of both the sink and the tub.

As she tugged a brush through her thick hair she thought about her dear, sweet, interfering grandma.

When Nadine’s mother had been in the first stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease, Danielle Laidlaw had moved in to help Nadine and her sisters take care of Brenda and the housekeeping. When Brenda was transferred to the hospital, Grandma stayed on. Sabrina and Leslie, Nadine’s sisters, got married and moved out. Grandma didn’t. Danielle was perfectly capable of living on her own, but preferred to rent her house out and stay to help Nadine.

Grandma “helped” Nadine by cleaning, baking, organizing and inviting “suitable” men over for supper. She thought it was better for Nadine to be involved in church, and regularly volunteered Nadine’s services.

Nadine got a break from Grandma only when an anxiously placed call to one of her sympathetic sisters would result in a sham mission for Grandma Laidlaw. From time to time, Grandma would promise Nadine that someday soon she would move back home.

But that day never came, Grandma always insisting that poor Naddy still needed her.

The biggest problem was that poor Naddy was still single.

Not that poor Naddy didn’t have a chance. She’d dated Jack for slightly more than a year when they
got engaged. Then Nadine’s mother got sick and Nadine wanted to move back to Derwin, but Jack didn’t Nadine knew she had to come home. When Jack failed to understand, she knew she had to break up with him.

Nadine pulled a face at herself in the mirror. Maybe if she’d been an alluring blonde, he might have waited, he might even have come to Derwin to be with her.

As always, she was critical of the upward tilt of her own brown eyes, the heaviness of her hair, the fullness of her jaw. It was, as her grandma was wont to say when trying to console her, an interesting face.

Nadine ran the tap and washed her interesting face and hands.

She opened the door to the room that doubled as bedroom and office and breathed a sigh of relief. The old rolltop desk still overflowed with papers, magazines still lay in various piles around it. Grandma hadn’t invaded her domain. So far.

After changing, she stepped out of the room and with a furtive glance down the short hall, opened the door to the spare bedroom across from hers. In “Grandma’s room” the suitcases were put away and the Bible lay on the bedside table. Framed family pictures marched across the dresser.

It looked as if Grandma never planned to go.

Nadine squared her shoulders and walked determinedly down the hallway. She would step into the kitchen, take a deep breath and say…

“Sugar or honey in your tea?” Grandma set a steaming mug on the table just as Nadine marched into the kitchen. Her determined step faltered as Grandma caught her by the arm and led her toward a chair. “Supper’s ready.”

Nadine opened her mouth to speak, but Grandma had already turned her back and begun putting the food on the plates. Nadine sighed as Grandma set them down on the ironed tablecloth, then settled into a chair and beamed at her granddaughter. “It’s nice to be back again. I missed you, Naddy.” She held out her hand. “Do you want to pray, or shall I?”

“You can.” Nadine was afraid that she would voice aloud her own questions to God about her grandmother’s presence in her home.

Danielle asked for peace and protection and a blessing on the food. When she was finished she began eating with a vigor that never ceased to surprise Nadine. “So, what happened while I was gone?” Danielle asked.

“Not much,” Nadine replied, thinking back over the quiet of the past few days.

As they ate, Nadine told her grandmother about the articles she was working on.

“I thought maybe that nice young man David might have called,” Danielle said with a lilt on her tone. “I can’t remember his last name. We met him at the grocery store.”

“David Branscome is unemployed by choice and lives at home. Hardly dating material.”

Danielle appeared unfazed. “A good woman can make a huge difference to a man.”

“David already has a good woman. His mother.” Nadine finished off the food on her plate and laid her utensils on it. “That was delicious, Grandma. Mind if I pass on dessert? I’ve got some work to do.”

“You work all day—surely you don’t have to work all night?” Danielle asked.

“It’s nothing really important I just want to get it done before tomorrow,” Nadine said vaguely. She rose and picked up her dishes.

Nadine was hesitant to mention the letter she had received. Jake was also Danielle’s son, and she was loath to raise any false hope that they might finally solve the mystery surrounding his death.

“I need to look over some information about Skyline,” she added carefully.

Danielle turned to Nadine, her expression sorrowful. “Oh, honey, that always makes you so angry. Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“They just received some government grants that are questionable,” she said, keeping her tone light. Nadine took her dishes to the counter and set them down. “It won’t take long.”

She left the room before guilt over her evasive answers overwhelmed her. I could never fib well, she thought as she walked down the hall.

N
adine closed the door to her bedroom and leaned against it, thinking of the mysterious letter and all it portended.

She had a letter that promised some answers and possibly hard proof she could bring to Skyline. Once again Nadine wondered at God’s will in all of this. Why had the letter come now, after all this time?

With a short sigh, she walked over to her desk and switched on the computer. While it was booting up, she pulled the envelope out of her knapsack and reread the letter.

Dear Ms. Laidlaw,

I’ve read your pieces about Skyline in the paper. I know you don’t have any love for Skyline. Neither do I. You are right. I need to talk to you about your father. In person. I have
some information that I think you can use against Skyline. I’ll call.

It wasn’t signed, and there was no return address. It had been dropped off at the office while Nadine was out and, according to Sharlene, their receptionist, it was lying on her desk when she returned from lunch.

Nadine refolded the letter and pulled out the other one that Clint had given her just before she left the office.

She skimmed it quickly. An official-looking letter announced the opening of a new farm equipment dealership in Derwin. The cover letter was addressed to her personally, and Nadine glanced over it, as well. It asked about advertising rates and the writer wondered if the newspaper would be willing to give him some coverage on opening day. Nadine glanced at the return address, but didn’t recognize the name. She would have Donna contact the business and give them the information they needed.

For now she had work to do.

Nadine turned back to her computer and called up Skyline’s file, where she kept copies of all the letters she had written to the company’s management, as well as various government departments dealing with industrial safety. The correspondence had netted her a few polite responses couched in the vague language of bureaucrats. These replies had been scanned back into the computer and saved on file.

Nadine opened them all up and read each one in chronological order to refresh her memory. Rereading
the letters reminded her once again of what she and her family had lost. A loving, hardworking father whose sincere faith in a loving Savior had tempered their mother’s harsher view of God. A father who listened with a sympathetic ear, who fixed temperamental bicycles and vehicles for daughters too busy to realize how fortunate they were to have been raised by such a man.

Nadine leaned her elbow on her desk, recalling pictures of Jake Laidlaw striding up the walk in the late evening smelling of diesel and sawdust, swinging up each of his daughters in his strong arms and laughing at their squeals, pulling Brenda away from the stove, spinning her around and enveloping her in a tight, warm hug. Her father whistling as he organized his tools, readying them for the next day’s work. Her parents had never made a lot of money, but they had achieved a measure of contentment that often eluded people with much more. Jake was convinced of God’s ability to care for them. Unfortunately that conviction created a measure of lassezfaire over his personal dealings with banks and insurance companies, who were less forgiving.

Because her father was considered a contract worker, he’d had no company pension plan and no private life insurance. Neither was the loan against the house insured. The pittance paid out by Worker’s Compensation had barely paid expenses. Brenda Laidlaw had worked for barely a year as a cashier in the local grocery store before her illness made her housebound. The house was sold and the
family moved into an apartment in the same building where Nadine now lived.

Nadine pulled herself back to the present and looked around the room. When her sisters had got married and moved out, she and Grandma and her mother had moved to this first-floor suite that was more easily accessible for Brenda, then confined to a wheelchair.

Now, with her mother gone, the apartment was too large for a single girl. She had her eye on a smaller, newer apartment complex. But moving away felt as if she was breaking the last tie with her mother.

And you’ve got Grandma, she reminded herself with a sigh. Moving to a smaller place would probably be the best way to get Grandma to go back to her own place but it seemed an unkind and disrespectful solution. When it came to facing down Danielle, too many memories intervened.

Echoes of her grandmother reading devotions to her mother, singing while she carefully gave Brenda a sponge bath and fed her, lovingly wiping her mother’s mouth as Brenda’s control decreased.

Grandma’s service to her and her mother had been a blessing at the time, but now it seemed to entwine itself around her. Nadine didn’t know how to shake free of Grandma’s gentle grip of generosity without feeling ungrateful and unloving.

Nadine rolled her shoulders, rubbed her eyes and turned back to the computer screen. Grandma and a new apartment would have to wait.

A gentle knock on the door interrupted her.

“What is it, Grandma?” she asked, frowning in concentration.

“We have company,” Danielle announced loudly.

Nadine glanced over her shoulder at her grandmother, who stood in the open doorway smiling at her. “Who is it?” she whispered.

“Don’t you want to do your hair?” Danielle whispered back.

“No,” Nadine replied irritably. She would have preferred to stay in her room, but it wasn’t in her to be so rude to their unnamed visitor.

Nadine followed Danielle down the short hall, through the kitchen into the living room. The pewter table lamps shed a soft light on the room. Nadine couldn’t help but feel a measure of pride in the fawn-colored leather couch with matching chair. Burnished pine-and-brass coffee table and end tables complemented the warm tones of the leather. She had made the plaid valances that hung by tabs from the pewter curtain rods and the matching throw pillows herself.

A man stood with his back to her. He turned as they came into the room and Nadine bit back a sigh.

“Nadine, I’m sure you remember Patrick Quinn. Didn’t he used to live four houses down from us when we lived on 55th?”

Nadine smiled at Patrick, praying the fake expression she pasted on masked her seething thoughts. She tried to suppress memories of Patrick
as a boy—selfish, overbearing and constantly teasing her.

Other than rudely turning around and returning to her office, which would be most un-Christlike and unforgiving, she had little choice but to sit down and try to make some kind of small talk.

The talk turned out to be
very
small, with Grandma and Nadine asking Patrick polite questions about where he worked and lived. Patrick had changed little, Nadine reflected, or possibly he had become even more boring.

After a while Nadine had to do something. Stretching her leg under the coffee table, she gave her grandmother a gentle nudge.

Danielle didn’t even flinch.

“Our Nadine is quite the little cook…” Grandma continued, ignoring Nadine’s next push, delivered with a little more force.

“I’m neither little nor a good cook,” interrupted Nadine. She gave her grandmother a warning look, then glanced back at Patrick. “Grandma would love me to be more domestic, but for me, gourmet cooking means putting brown instead of white sugar on my cereal.”

Grandma didn’t miss a beat. “She’s such a joker, our Nadine.”

Thankfully, at ten o’clock Patrick rose and excused himself. He thanked Danielle and Nadine for a lovely visit and, with a playful smile at Nadine, left.

Danielle turned to Nadine. “He’s such a nice boy. Don’t you think?”

“If you like that type,” Nadine said dryly.

“He wanted to see you again. I can tell.” Danielle bent over to put the mugs on the tray and then, as the clock struck, straightened. “Goodness, Nadine. You had better get to bed. I’ll clean up. You need your sleep.”

And with that, Danielle bustled off to the kitchen.

Nadine shook her head. She had to do something about Danielle, or her meddling grandmother was going to take over her life.

She yawned a jaw-cracking yawn and glanced at her watch. But not tonight.

It was still early morning when Clint Fletcher pulled open the door to his office. He smiled as he looked around the neat room. The sun had just come up, and lit the eastern sky outside his window, illuminating the space with a gentle light.

His office, he thought with a proprietary air. During the years he’d worked in the city for one of the large newspapers, he had been lucky to have his own desk in a large, crowded newsroom. Even then he would often come back from an assignment to find it appropriated by a colleague whose computer was down.

Now, not only did he have his own desk, he had his own phone, his own door and an element of privacy. He set his briefcase down on his desk and walked to the window. His uncle Dory had occupied
the office farther down the hall. It was larger, but when Clint had taken over the papers, he’d also moved to this office. He preferred the view. He liked to look up from his desk and see people in the park across the street or walking past the office busy with their town errands.

It had been Nadine’s office before he came, and he was sure there was a certain resentment over that, he thought as he idly watched the play of wind in the trees arching over the street. He still didn’t know what he had done to create Nadine’s guarded looks, the touchy attitude. Nor did he understand why she still called him Fletcher.

She had always called him that. His first memory of her was of brown eyes watching him warily from a porch swing as he came to their home to pick up her older sister. She had been reading a book, and when he came up the walk she put it down and demanded to know who he was. After that he was simply addressed as “Fletcher.” It became a challenge to coax a smile out of her, to get her to speak more than a few words.

He had gone to church with Sabrina as much to see how Nadine would react as to please his girlfriend. She wasn’t impressed. Nor was she impressed when he started showing up occasionally at the Bible studies on Wednesday nights. He had more reasons to attend than just to impress Nadine, but he hadn’t been ready to admit his seeking to anyone.

Nadine was indifferent and Clint’s ego was provoked. He wasn’t used to having girls indifferent to
him. Consequently he began to show up earlier for dates, seeking out Nadine, talking to her, drawing her out. He found he spent more time talking to Nadine about serious issues while he waited for her sister than he did with Sabrina. He enjoyed their time together and thought Nadine did, too. He knew it was time to break up with Sabrina when he found himself loath to leave Nadine when it was time to leave the house with her sister.

He had gone out with a number of girls when he left Derwin, but none of them challenged him intellectually the way Nadine had. None of them had her appeal. Nor did they ever keep him at arm’s length as she did.

Now she was working for him, and it seemed that the intervening years, with all the sadness they had brought to her life, had once again put a prickly shell of defensiveness around her. He had returned to Derwin with the hope of seeing her again, raising their relationship to another level, but each of his overtures had been rebuffed. After his first weeks here, he held back, sensing that Nadine was still dealing with the grief of her mother’s death.

Their relationship had become a cordial business one, but in the past few weeks he had begun to see glimpses of the Nadine he’d always loved.

Clint shook his head at his own thoughts. Regardless of his feelings for her, he had a job to do.

He walked back to his desk and, snapping open his briefcase, pulled out the letter he had received yesterday from Skyline Contractors. Correction, he
thought. Skyline Contractors’ lawyers. He didn’t look forward to discussing it with Nadine.

“I made pancakes, Nadine,” said Grandma as Nadine came into the kitchen.

“Pass, Grandma. I’m not in the mood for a big breakfast.”

“You never are,” complained Danielle, looking up from the newspaper.

Nadine tugged open the refrigerator door and pulled out a carton of yogurt, a container of milk and an apple. She juggled the three items, carefully set them on the table, then dropped into a chair. Last week’s newspaper was spread out on the table. Grandma was reading the first section, so Nadine grabbed the other.

She opened the pages, skimming over the stories that she knew almost by rote, stopping at her kindergarten feature.

She thought she had done some pretty effective work with the pictures she had taken. She had pasted them in a montage of children’s faces, eager, expectant and excited. The mix had energy and exuberance suited to the first day of a new venture. It was the kind of picture she knew parents cut out to put in their child’s scrapbook.

“Listen to this item from the ‘Court Docket,’” Grandma said, her voice scandalized. “Holly Maitfield fined for allowing her dog to roam the neighborhood unleashed. Again.” She clucked anxiously.
“They’re going to put that poor mutt in the pound one day.”

“They’ll have to catch him first,” murmured Nadine, skimming over the text opposite her feature. Halfway through she sighed in frustration. Another typing error. She had missed that one. Clint would be annoyed. Maybe that’s what he wanted to see her about this morning.

“That’s an amazing picture,” commented Grandma, leaning over to look at the paper.

Nadine couldn’t help but glow. In this line of work people commented more often on what the reporter had done wrong, rather than right. Her grandma’s compliment warmed her. “Thanks, Grandma. I had a lot of fun with this feature.” She smoothed the picture with a proprietary air and turned it so her grandma could see it better. Nadine was about to turn the page when her grandmother stilled her hand.

“Wait a minute, I want to read ‘About Town.’” Danielle held her hand on the paper while she read the bits of local gossip gleaned from a variety of sources for this regular feature. Nadine never read it. She couldn’t be bothered. But Grandma read it faithfully. If she read it in “About Town,” it had to be true.