Authors: Amy Stolls

The Ninth Wife (49 page)

“Good.” Rory takes a deep breath and looks out to the hills. “Bess, you must be wondering—” and then he stops.

Bess is crying. Hard. Big wet sobs she can’t control.

“Oh, Bess. Honey.” Rory wraps her in his arms.

She doesn’t even know why she’s crying. Her emotions have taken over like a big swirling hurricane and all she can do is let them come. It’s been such a long journey. “I’m sorry,” she gasps. “I love you. I shouldn’t have looked for your ex-wives. I should have talked to you. I should have trusted you. I do trust you.”

“No,” he says, kissing her cheek, her forehead, her lips. “It’s my fault. I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you everything the day we met.”

“Rory, ask me again,” she says.

“Are you sure? We don’t have to—”

“Ask me. Please. Won’t you? I mean, will you?”

He bends down to the bag at his feet and pulls from it a director’s clapboard he must have bought at a tourist shop. He steps back, holds it out, and says, “Bess and Rory, Marriage Proposal, Take Two,” then cracks the clapstick. He moves toward her, bends down on his knee, and opens a blue velvet box to present an elegant, modest silver ring with a tiny ruby, because he remembered from one of their conversations about marriage in general that she didn’t want a diamond. “Will you marry me, Bess Gray?”

What a sight she must be with bleary eyes and her nose running. But she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care that his clapping a clapstick and getting down on one knee might be corny. She doesn’t even care that he may have been that corny eight times before. She loves his corniness. He took a risk coming out to California. She can take a risk, too. “Yes. Yes, I will marry you, Rory McMillan.”

They kiss and she cries a little more and even he tears up and an older couple nearby claps for them, apologizing that they overheard but,
Oh
, they say,
how romantic
.

Down in the parking lot, after an hour of strolling and holding hands and catching up on the days they missed and talking about some of the hard secrets they’ve kept (promising never more to keep the important stuff from each other), and thinking about the future in giddy spurts of ideas (even the possibility of a family), they come to the van. While they wait for the air-conditioning to kick in, Bess looks out toward the Hollywood sign. “We’ll make it, right?” she says. “I mean, you think we have a good chance?”

He reaches out and brushes her cheek with his fingers. “I think we have a very good chance,” he says.

Chapter Thirty-nine

F
or God’s sake, woman, don’t keep me waiting . . . how is post-proposal bliss? How was L.A.? You haven’t called me in days.” In his voice mail from somewhere in Middle America, Cricket sounds like he’s yelling into his cell phone. Gabrielle’s message, the other reason Bess’s phone light is blinking, is of a similar urgency, only hers has a bonus threat. “I’m so excited I’m peeing. If you don’t call me the second you walk in that door, if you’re even listening to my message without having dialed my number I’m never going to speak to you again. I want details.”

Bess doesn’t need to be admonished. Now that she’s back home, she’s excited to call Millie and Irv and her friends and finds them all equally excited to hear her news. She is less eager to tell Gerald, knowing that will be a tough subject, but she nevertheless wants to see him, to see how he is doing without her grandparents and reassure him of her devotion. She speaks to Vivian and makes plans to visit them later in the week.

After several extraordinary days together tossing out ideas for a wedding and living arrangements and other logistics, Bess asks Rory for some time to herself and Rory thankfully understands. She wants to be in her apartment uninterrupted, to sit with her things and reacquaint herself with herself. And she wants to be in Washington, to know what it’s like without her grandparents nearby, to know it’ll be okay. She cleans the upper half of a closet, buys fresh goat cheese from a market, takes from her shelf a book on Mexican folklore that she’d begun but set aside and begins again. She makes notes about where she might start digging up information on Rose, should she feel like doing that, and as soon as she can she attends a Tae Kwon Do class at the dojo where her fellow students welcome her back, a nice reminder that she’s part of that community. She suspects she’ll be sore after the class, having been away from it for a couple of weeks, but even that will feel good.
Nice power, good eye contact
, her sensei says during one of the drills, and then compliments her again at the end of class on the confidence she projected during forms.

One afternoon, twirling her engagement ring and feeling like a fiancée, she walks down to the shops below Dupont Circle and tries on a new dress, thigh-length and off-the-shoulder. As she comes out of the dressing room, she looks up and sees her reflection in a round mirror, a distorted image showing her head much larger than the rest of her, her feet the smallest of all. It strikes her at first that maybe she is glimpsing who she really is inside. Journey or no journey, ring or no ring, she is someone who can’t get away from her big thinking, worrying head, too heavy for such little feet to get her anywhere.
Here
, says the saleswoman, pointing her to a full-length mirror on a far wall,
you can see yourself better
. This time, Bess looks at her reflection and sees herself proportioned and whole and imagines she is looking at a stranger in many ways, but someone she would like to get to know better, someone she could trust.
You like it?
asks the saleswoman.
I do
, says Bess.
I’ll take it
.

That evening, she settles into her apartment with a mix CD she made for herself before her trip with some of her mellow favorites: Kate Rusby, the Decemberists, Nanci Griffith, Tom Waits. In her living room, she closes her curtains and something tickles her hand. On the window ledge she notices the fir tree Gaia had given her on the evening of her birthday.
It’s just a baby
, Gaia had said. And it is, its little branches only a foot high, its pine needles an inch long at most. But under Bess’s care, and Gabrielle’s care while she was away, it had grown. Or maybe it hadn’t grown so much as it filled out, its branches thicker, its needles greener, its stem sturdier and smooth.
When you’re ready, you can choose its home outside and plant it in the ground
, Gaia had said.

Bess steps outside and chooses a spot to plant the tree in front of her building, just below her window. She digs at the dirt with her hands, enjoying the feel of it on her palms. She’s hit with a warm memory of repotting plants with her mom when she was little: her mom explaining how she was giving each plant a new home to grow. It was then Bess’s job to nourish their transition with her water can and cooing assurances.

She hears a siren and looks for the source down Eighteenth Street. She notices the gay couple across the way are unlocking their door, having just come home from some activity that has them in a good mood. They wave to her, and then to another neighbor down the street, an older woman who waddles and carries her groceries home in a cart. The woman makes way for a Chinese food delivery man who has double-parked his vehicle, rings a bell, and transacts with a teenager who has run down to collect her dinner in her ballet outfit.

Is there anything more alive than a city at dusk?

Bess turns back to her baby fir, now planted in D.C.’s soil. There is an old, majestic oak on the other side of the building’s entrance that Bess imagines will watch over her little tree. Gaia once said that old trees have the best stories, we just have to learn how to listen. Bess touches the trunk of the old oak. It probably does know this city better than anyone, beyond its politics and museums, its crime rates and torchlike summers. It’s probably dropped leaves on all kinds of people, immigrants and soldiers and society wives alike. But it’s silent and still and that’s what Bess loves about trees, a reprieve from the world’s stories. Still, when she heads over to Rory’s tonight, relaxes into his embrace and eases into sleep, she might dream of her own stories she could tell an old tree, sweet ones and sad ones that she knows have never been told, and maybe even ones that have yet to be.

Acknowledgments

I owe a great deal of thanks to a great many people, many of whom I will thank here and some I won’t, because I’ll forget. I’ll forget because I feel much older than when I started this book a gazillion years ago and because I’m a mom to a two-year-old, which means these days I’m more likely to remember the name of Elmo’s goldfish than, say, where I parked my car. Please forgive me.

First off, thanks to my good friend and ghost-agent, Alex Glass, for accompanying me through the whole journey—for brainstorming ideas, reading a draft that was way too long, offering smart suggestions, and for his sound advice and encouragement on everything that has happened since. Thanks to Carolyn Parkhurst, Leslie Pietrzyk, C. M. Mayo, Kitty Davis, Ann McLaughlin, E. J. Levy, Susan Coll, Paula Whyman, Paulette Beete, Leslie Schwartz, and Keith Donohue for their support and thorough reading of chapters hot off the press or early full drafts. I can’t imagine the unwieldy beast this would have been without their red marks, question marks, and big Xs, kindly offered.

Thanks to my wonderful and attentive agent, Marly Rusoff, for making possible new beginnings and new endings. Thanks to my editor, Claire Wachtel, whose good counsel (I can finally admit) made this a much better book. Thanks to Richard Peabody for first publishing an excerpt from this novel in the anthology
Electric Grace
.

Thanks to my teachers and fellow students at the D.C. Self Defense Karate Association for their inspiration, to the gals who drove with me in a minivan to Fallingwater and Pittsburgh for research and homemade margaritas, and to the awesome folks who came to my singles’ party years ago and made me feel a little less lonely.

Thanks to my dear friend Jen Brickman who came in at the twenty-fifth hour and gave me a
schmeckle
. I am deeply grateful for her superb editing skills and words of encouragement when I needed them most. Thanks to the McNeels for giving me a place to think.

A loving thanks to my mom, who passed on to me her passion for reading and thirst for good books, and my dad, a talented banjo and hammered dulcimer player who introduced me to Irish music. Loving thanks, too, to my family—my husband, Alex, and son, Eli, for their hugs and laughter and for putting up with me yelling downstairs from my writing nook, “give me just five more minutes!” and then taking twenty.

Finally, thanks to the city of Washington, D.C., and all its interesting and friendly citizens. I’m proud to call it home.

About the Author

A
MY
S
TOLLS
’
S
young adult novel
Palms to the Ground
was published in 2005 to critical acclaim and was a Parents’ Choice Gold Award winner. A former environmental journalist who covered the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, she is currently a literature program officer for the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and son.

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Credits

Cover design Milan Bozic
Cover photograph by Grant Faint/Getty Images

The poems in the epigraph are by Ko Un from
Flowers of a Moment
, translated by Brother Anthology, Young-moo Kim, and Gary Gach. Translation copyright © 2006 by Brother Anthology, Young-moo Kim, and Gary Gach. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

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FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stolls, Amy.

The ninth wife : a novel / Amy Stolls. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-06-185189-6

1. Single women—Fiction. 2. Irish—United States—Fiction. 3. Divorced women—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3619.T65625N56 2011

813'.6—dc22

2010034617

11 12 13 14 15 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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