The Way Home (30 page)

So the argument went, need battling conscience, hunger fighting decency. And then Meg turned away, going back into the bedroom, leaving him to stare at the city lights and wonder just what he’d done to deserve such punishment.

The newlyweds breakfasted in their room the following morning. They’d shared other meals and always had plenty to discuss, whether it was a movie they’d just seen or whether or not Thelma Nathan was going to let her husband move back into the house or make him stay in the bam where he’d been ever since coming home roaring drunk one night and breaking all the china dogs she’d inherited from her mother. But this time conversation seemed difficult to come by. Once Meg had commented on the bright sunshine outside and how it was hard to believe that it was nearly October, and Ty had agreed that the weather was certainly different from Iowa and would she mind passing the marmalade, they seemed to run out of conversational gambits.

“Did you sleep well?” Ty asked, aware that he sounded like a host rather than a husband.

“Yes. The bed is very comfortable.”

Ty bit into his toast and tried not to picture her in that comfortable bed. What was it about getting married that had made him so suddenly aware of her as a woman? But it wasn’t just the marriage, he thought, remembering the delicious softness of her mouth under his, the feel of her in his arms. He’d wanted her long before he married her.

“How did you sleep?” Meg inquired politely.

“Like a baby,” he lied without hesitation. The truth was, he felt as if Bill Robinson had spent the night tap-dancing up and down his body. Muscles he hadn’t even known he possessed were aching and he doubted his spine would ever completely straighten.

“The room is lovely,” Meg said, giving him a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

“Great hotel,” Ty said heartily. He already hated the place.

“Yes. Great.” She dabbled her fork in her scrambled eggs for a moment.

Another long silence while they both devoted their attention to their food. Ty chewed a slice of perfectly cooked bacon, which could have been shoe leather for all he tasted of it. He’d never realized how difficult marriage would be, he thought sourly. Were they go to stare at each other over the breakfast table like this for the next fifty years?

“Who’s Dickey?”

Ty has just picked up his coffee cup. The unexpected question made him take too large a mouthful of the hot liquid, scalding his tongue.

“Dickey?” The cup hit the saucer with a distinct
click
and he stared at her.

“Your mother mentioned him,” she said, looking as if she regretted the question already. “I don’t remember what she said.”

“Probably something about how he’d never cause her the sort of anguish I always do,” Ty said, and then was surprised to hear the bitter edge to the words. “He was my brother.”

“I knew you had a sister but I didn’t know you had a brother,” she said, surprised.

“He was killed in the Great War. In France.”

“Oh, Ty. I’m sorry.” She reached across the small table and touched the back of his hand, making him realize that his fingers were clenched. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s all right.” He turned his hand, catching her fingers in his. “It was a long time ago. I was only ten when he died.”

“You must miss him a great deal,” Meg said, her eyes smoky blue with sympathy.

“I did. But like I said, it was so long ago.” He stared at their joined hands, searching for the words to express what he was thinking. “Sometimes I wonder what he’d be like, if he were still alive. I wonder if we’d be close. If my mother would see him as a real person instead of as a model of perfection.”

“It must have been very hard on her,” Meg said with compassion, apparently able to overlook Helen McKendrick’s cruelty toward her.

“It was hard on all of us. But she didn’t get out of bed for over a week after we got the news,” Ty said slowly. He remembered how frightened he’d been. His beloved older brother was gone, never to come home again. His mother seemed to have vanished almost as completely, staying in her bedroom with the blinds drawn, out of reach. His sister, Louise, had cried for days, great noisy sobs that had echoed through the unnatural quiet of the house. Only his father had continued to go about his business, but his face had been gray and drawn, all the life gone out of his eyes.

“It must be terrible to lose a child,” Meg said.

“She didn’t lose him. She keeps him very much alive so she can hold him up in front of me as a never-to-be-achieved ideal.” His mouth twisted with half-angry, half-rueful humor as he met Meg’s eyes across the table. “Anytime I disappoint her, she always tells me that Dickey would never have done such a thing. I guess one advantage of dying young is that you don’t have time to be less than perfect.”

“I’m sure she knows he wasn’t perfect,” Meg said, looking distressed for him.

“Does she?” Ty doubted that. After eighteen years of hearing his mother refer to Dickey as having been an angel, he doubted she could separate reality from her fantasy anymore. Dickey was, and would remain, her perfect son.

Before either of them could say anything more, there was a knock on the door. Ty hesitated a moment, reluctant to break the moment. It was the first time since their marriage that they’d managed to recapture something of the comfortable relationship that had grown over the summer.

The knock came again and Meg gave him a quick smile — the first he’d seen in days that didn’t seem to hide any shadows — and pulled her hand away from his.

“You’d better see who it is,” she murmured.

With a mental curse, Ty got up and went to the door. A young woman in a crisp blue maid’s uniform stood on the other side of the door, her arms full of pillows and blankets.

“I have the extra linens you requested, Mr. McKendrick.” When Ty gave her a blank stare, she smiled uncertainly. “You
did
order extra linens, didn’t you?”

“Yes, of course.” After spending the night on the sofa, he’d decided the floor couldn’t be any worse and had called down to the desk to request pillows and blankets.

“Shall I put them in the bedroom, for you?”

“Sure.” He stepped back so that she could enter the room, and his eyes sought out Meg. She was looking at the maid. He saw color come up in her cheeks when she saw what the girl carried. She dropped her eyes to her half-eaten breakfast, not lifting them again until the maid had deposited her burden in the bedroom and left the suite.

Ty shut the door behind the girl and came back to the table. Just as he’d suspected, the ease that had been between them while they talked about his brother was gone.

“I forgot to tell you that I’d called housekeeping this morning,” he said as he sat down again.

“The service is certainly prompt,” she said, giving him a quick, meaningless smile.

“Yes.” Ty took a swallow of his coffee, which was now lukewarm and held a bitter edge.

Meg’s eyes skimmed over his face, settled on the sofa for a moment, and then returned to her plate. She took a small bite of her scrambled eggs and chewed without enthusiasm. “How long will we be staying here?”

“Until I can find us a place to live, I guess. I thought I’d see about finding a bungalow, maybe. The rents are reasonable and I thought you might like that more than an apartment.”

“Whatever you like,” she said, giving him that meaningless smile again.

Ty could read nothing from her face but he could sense her discomfort, feel her unhappiness. That was the last thing he wanted. She’d known enough unhappiness in her life, enough pain. She had a right to a little peace and happiness for a change. “Look, Meg, maybe we should have talked about this before we got married.” Ty put down his fork and looked across the table at her.

“About renting a bungalow or an apartment?” She looked surprised.

“No. About us. About this marriage.” He hadn’t thought it was necessary to put it into words, thinking that she’d know that she had nothing to fear from him, but perhaps it was better to say it, to remove any doubts that might linger in her mind.

She seemed to pale a little. Her fork settled against her plate without the slightest sound and then she dropped her hands into her lap. The eyes she lifted to his face were guarded and Ty found himself wondering if she’d ever be able to look at him — or at any man — with the same openness and trust she once had. Or had Harlan Davis managed to kill that trust forever?

“Meg, you don’t have to worry about anything. I mean, about us being married.”

“Why would I worry?”

“Well, about … about me being your husband or anything.” She stared at him blankly and Ty drew a deep breath. “You don’t have to worry about me wanting to make this a real marriage. I don’t expect us to share a room,” he said bluntly.

He’d expected her to look embarrassed or relieved or grateful, maybe some combination of the three. But there was not so much as a flicker of expression in those wide blue eyes. No embarrassment at his blunt announcement, no relief that she wouldn’t be asked to share her bed. Nothing he could read at all.

“I know,” she said calmly. Her eyes shifted to her plate as she picked up her fork again. Ty wondered if it was his imagination that put a barely visible tremor in her fingers. She began to eat again, her attention apparently all for her breakfast.

I know?
That was all she was going to say?
I know?
Shouldn’t there be more to it than that? Ty picked up his own fork but his appetite had deserted him.

They ate in silence for a few minutes. Meg pushed her plate away first, and Ty was perversely annoyed to see that she’d eaten everything on it. There was no logical reason for his annoyance. Unless he’d been hoping she’d protest, say she wanted their marriage to be real? He stared down at the eggs congealing on his plate, wondering just how long it would be before she was ready to be a wife. A month? Three months? A year? Just how many cold showers could a man take and survive?

Not a real marriage.
Meg sipped at the glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice that had come with the breakfast — an unthinkable luxury back home, now no more appealing than a cup of cold coffee.
Not a real marriage.
It was no more than she’d expected.

A little over two months until her birthday — two months to be a wife without ever really being a wife. Two months to store up memories to last the rest of her life. She set the glass down abruptly and looked across the table to give Ty a smile dazzling in its bright insincerity.

“So, what are we going to do today?”

Ty seemed startled by her bright tone and then almost relieved, and Meg knew she’d made the right choice. Not for anything in the world would she have him know just how much she would have given for their marriage to be real.

“I thought you might want to do a little sightseeing. Then, in a couple of days, we could start looking for a place to live,” Ty said.

“Why don’t we find a place to live first? I’m sure you’ve seen all the usual tourist spots and don’t particularly want to see them again. There’ll be plenty of time for me to be a tourist later.”

“Are you sure? Wouldn’t you like to look around a bit first? Get your bearings?”

“I can get my bearings later,” she said, giving him another bright smile. “I’m sure you want to get me settled so you can get back to work. I heard Jack tell you that he had a couple of job possibilities lined up. Maybe we can be settled in by the time he gets here with your car.”

Ty hesitated and then shrugged. “If it’s what you want.”

“It is.” What she didn’t want was for him to feel as if he had to baby-sit her. He might be stuck with her for a while, but she didn’t want him to feel tied down.

It took them a week to find a place to rent. It was one unit in a small bungalow court settled snugly in the hills above Hollywood. The rent seemed appalling to Meg but Ty insisted that thirty-five dollars a month was not unreasonable for four furnished rooms and a fireplace. There was even a garage for the Chrysler.

She hadn’t given any thought to finances, but she’d assumed that they’d be on a very tight budget until Ty could find some work flying. But he explained that he had a small trust fund left to him by his maternal grandfather. It wasn’t a lot of money, but the investments had weathered the crash fairly well and the income was enough so that she didn’t ever have to worry about finding herself in a bread line.

Meg was less concerned with finding herself in a bread line than she was with the fact that he was spending money because of her. If this had been a real marriage, rather than a temporary arrangement, she might not have minded so much. A smaller place in a cheaper neighborhood would have suited her just fine. But Ty refused to consider it.

“I want to know you’re safe when I’m not here,” he told her. “This is a good neighborhood. I won’t have to worry about you here.”

And since she felt she’d been far too much of a worry to him already, Meg bit her tongue to hold back more arguments and agreed that it would be nice to have a tiny patio all their own and that the view really was lovely. It was nothing more than the truth. The bungalow was charming and she could hardly imagine a more wonderful place for any couple to begin their married life. If they’d been beginning something rather than just marking time, she’d have been thrilled with her new home.