A Change of Heart (4 page)

“Would you look at that sunset,” Miriam said. “What a beautiful day this has been.”

Ellis didn’t comment. He just drew Amanda closer and looked west.

“Red sky at night, sailors’ delight,” Amanda said. “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.”

There’s a red morning coming, Ellis thought to himself. A blood-red morning.

S
am Gardner’s alarm jangled him awake at six o’clock. He groaned, rolled over, and flailed at the clock to silence it.

“Time to wake up,” Barbara said cheerfully, raising the blinds high enough for the sun to shine directly in Sam’s face.

“Go away and don’t come back,” Sam grumbled, burrowing under the blankets.

“I bet Dr. Pierce would never talk that way to Deena.”

“Leave me alone,” Sam muttered.

“It’s time to get up. The wedding’s today and there’s lots to do. Besides,” Barbara reminded him, “you told me to wake you up at six.”

She pulled the blankets off Sam with a mighty tug, then yanked the pillow from underneath his head, taking off the pillowcase. “Hop up, Sam. It’s laundry day and I’ve got to wash these sheets.” She grabbed the fitted sheet, loosened it at the corners, and with a quick pull rolled Sam off the bed onto the floor.

He lay next to the nightstand, contemplating the ceiling. “I must warn Dr. Pierce what he’s getting himself into.”

Barbara gathered the sheets to her chest and sighed contentedly. “Don’t you just love weddings? Two people starting a life together. Isn’t it just wonderful?”

“Simply precious.”

Barbara dumped the bundle of bedding on Sam. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and start these sheets in the washer? Then maybe I’ll fix you a little breakfast.”

“Pancakes and sausage?” Sam asked hopefully.

“Nope, cereal.”

“I bet Deena would fix her man pancakes and sausage for breakfast.”

“Not after fourteen years of marriage and two children, she wouldn’t.”

Sam eased himself up off the floor, stretched, scratched his belly, then went downstairs to the kitchen and began rummaging through the cabinet where they kept the cereal. “Where’s the Cap’n Crunch?”

“The boys finished it off yesterday. You’ll have to have some of my Special K.”

“How about I go to the Coffee Cup?” Sam asked.

“Fine with me. Just don’t be late for the wedding. And don’t forget you promised to weed the flowerbeds today.”

He showered, combed his hair, sniffed the clothes he’d worn the day before, and then pulled them on. It was a radiant morning, sunny and seventy degrees, so Sam walked the three blocks to the Coffee Cup.

Heather Darnell was waiting tables, her hair pulled back in a French braid. She looked positively exquisite, and Sam was briefly tongue-tied.

“I’ll have French braid,” he said.

Heather looked at him, confused. “Pardon me?”

“I mean French bread, uh, French toast. With sausage, and a glass of orange juice.”

“Coming right up, Sam.”

He glanced around the restaurant. Though it was only seven o’clock, the place was full of refugees—men whose wives had driven them from their homes with talk of weddings and threats of chores.

Asa Peacock walked past and clapped him on the back. “You ready for the big show?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Sam said.

“Boy, you couldn’t pay me to do a wedding. I’d be afraid I’d screw up. Three hundred people staring at you, just waiting for you to make a hash of things. I don’t know how you do it, Sam.”

“Lots of practice, I suppose,” Sam said. A pang of anxiety rolled through him, making his stomach churn.

“Yessiree, I’d worry about leaving somethin’ out and ruinin’ the whole shebang.”

“I was at my nephew’s wedding last year,” Kyle Weathers said, “and the minister got so nervous, his voice box locked up tighter than a drum. Then he started hyperventilating and the next thing you know he was fainted dead away on the floor.”

“Weddings didn’t use to be that big a deal,” Asa said. “Then they got to spending all that money and blew the whole thing out of proportion and now it’s a big production and nobody better dare mess up.”

By the time Heather came with his French toast, Sam had lost his appetite and asked if she had any Tums.

After breakfast, he stopped by the church to read through the wedding ceremony one more time to ease his mind. He usually did fine at weddings, unless the bride and groom deviated from the norm. He typically didn’t preach at weddings and with good luck could conclude a wedding within fifteen minutes of starting.

Thankfully, Deena’s wedding promised to be brief. There was no special music, unity candle, or readings from Kahlil Gibran about how if you love someone, let them go and if they return to you they are yours, but if they don’t, they’re with someone else, or words to that effect.

The only thing that gave Sam pause was Deena and Dr. Pierce’s asking Dale to give the closing prayer in gratitude for his loaning them his Mighty Men of God ring for their engagement. Though they’d asked him to keep the prayer brief and cheery, Sam feared Dale would get the cheery part out of the way as quickly as he could, then harangue people about living in sin. At the last wedding Dale had attended, he’d stood during the Quaker silence and spoken at length about not having to buy the cow if the milk was free.

Sam gathered up his Bible and his wedding book, then headed for home to dress for the wedding. Barbara was upstairs getting ready, and Sam’s father, who had promised to babysit their sons, was in the backyard playing pitch and catch with them. Sam’s mom was sitting on the couch, thumbing through a magazine.

It took Sam five minutes to pull on his suit. He ran a comb through his hair, smoothed his cowlick, then buffed his shoes with a sock. He drank a capful of Pepto-Bismol to guard against diarrhea, knotted his tie with a Windsor knot, tucked a handkerchief in his pocket, and gargled with Listerine.

They arrived at the wedding at ten-thirty, an hour early. Miriam Hodge was arranging flowers around the trellis Ellis Hodge had built for the occasion. The ice swan, despite being shaded by the tent, was sweating profusely. It looked like a duck with bladder-control issues. Kyle Weathers was standing next to it, peering at his watch and smiling gleefully. “Don’t think she’s gonna make it. Got another hour and a half to go, and she’s leaking like the
Titanic.
Looks like Clevis owes me five dollars.”

Clevis sat in the front row, a glum expression on his face. Dale was seated next to him, looking pale and worn; his tie was loosened and the top button of his shirt undone. Dolores was fanning him with the wedding announcement.

Miss Rudy was guarding the door of the farmhouse, ready in the event roving marauders happened by to molest the bride. Bob Miles was circulating among the guests and wedding party snapping pictures. It was his present to the couple, one they’d wanted to decline, but couldn’t, and so were stuck with him.

Deena’s parents were standing with Dr. Pierce’s parents off to the side. They were discussing that day’s weather, which was ideal. When they’d exhausted that topic, they moved on to discuss the weather in general—floods, blizzards, heat spells, and the like—trying to exhaust the topic so their conversation wouldn’t drift toward their jobs. Like his son, Dr. Pierce’s father was a doctor, and Deena’s father made his living suing physicians. Kyle Weathers had bet Harvey Muldock ten dollars the day would end in blows. Between that and the melting duck, it promised to be a profitable day for Kyle.

By eleven o’clock, there was a stream of cars on the road from town, turning up the Hodges’ driveway, past the barn, and into the pasture where the Odd Fellows were directing them into neat rows. The chairs began to fill from the front to the back. Deena sat in the farmhouse, awaiting the grand moment when Harvey Muldock and his 1951 Plymouth Cranbrook convertible would deliver her to her betrothed.

At precisely eleven-thirty, Harvey rose out of the Cranbrook, the Hodges’ front door eased open, and Deena’s father escorted her to her chariot. Harvey stood at attention and held the passenger door open. As Deena settled in her rightful place with her father beside her, his cold lawyer’s heart began to thaw.

Harvey slid behind the wheel, managing somehow to look polished even in his green plaid sport coat, dark brown pants, and white shoes. The Cranbrook rolled forward, up the driveway, past the barn, and into the pasture, gliding slowly by the neat rows of cars.

For over forty years Harvey Muldock and his Cranbrook have squired scores of beautiful Sausage Queens around town, but Deena Morrison in her bridal gown made them look like common washerwomen. She wore a simple ivory dress. Kathy at the Kut ’n’ Kurl had outdone herself, braiding a strand of pearls into Deena’s hair.

Opal Majors leaned into Bea. “I saw a dress just like that in
People
magazine.”

“A little too much cleavage, if you ask me,” Bea sniffed.

The string quartet began playing Pachelbel’s
Canon
as Sam, Dr. Pierce, and his brother rose from their seats in the first row and walked to the head of the tent, next to the trellis of flowers. Miss Rudy proceeded down the aisle, her eyes straight ahead, pausing for a moment next to Kyle Weathers, whose name had appeared in the
Herald
the past six weeks for overdue books. It took all her restraint not to stop and slap him. Five yards before the trellis, with a librarian’s precision, she turned sharply to the left, took two steps, then turned and faced the back of the tent, where Deena stood with her father.

In the front row, Deena’s mother stood. With the snap and pop of crackling joints, the wedding guests likewise rose to their feet. Sam nodded his head. Deena’s father reached over and laid his hand upon Deena’s, looked down, and smiled at his only daughter. They began walking toward the front. Her father looked stoic, trying not to cry, while Deena beamed with joy.

They came to stop in front of Sam, who opened his wedding book and began to read the Quaker wedding vows. “Marriage, in its deepest reading, is an inward experience—the voluntary union of personalities effected in the mutual self-giving of hearts that truly love, implicitly trust, and courageously accept each other in good faith.”

He continued, wending his way through the giving of the bride, the exchange of rings, the vows, the announcement of husband and wife, and the kiss, which was just long enough to express passion but not so long that people blushed.

The moment arrived for the closing prayer. The night before, during the rehearsal, Sam had gone over it with Dale, explaining how he was to come forward after the kiss, stand in front of the blissful couple, and invite God’s blessing on their marriage.

Dale squeezed past Miss Rudy. Sam stepped aside, bowed his head, and closed his eyes, looking properly reverential. Dale cleared his throat, then paused for what Sam supposed was dramatic effect. Leave it to Dale to turn the spotlight on himself, Sam thought.

Five seconds passed, then ten. Sam edged closer to Dale to nudge him just as Dale pitched forward, knocking Deena to the ground and ending up on top of her.

That’s what comes from suppressing your natural urges all your life, Sam thought. Put a beautiful woman in front of Dale and he’d go crazy with lust and assault her. He and Dr. Pierce reached down to pull him to his feet. Dale’s body felt lifeless; his complexion was a waxy white.

“My Lord, I think he’s fainted,” Dr. Pierce said.

Dolores Hinshaw screamed, while Miss Rudy helped Deena to her feet. All across the tent, people rose to their feet, straining for a better view. The men in the tent perked up considerably. Having to attend a wedding on a perfect summer day was intolerable, but this had redeemed their day considerably.

“Somebody phone Johnny Mackey to come with the ambulance,” Ellis Hodge yelled, assuming the mantle of leadership since it was, after all, his pasture in which Dale had fainted.

“Here I am, right here,” Johnny said, squeezing through the onlookers to crouch at Dale’s side. “Is he dead?”

“I don’t think so,” Dr. Pierce said. He frowned. “His pulse is weak. We need to get him to the hospital.” He stood, as if searching for someone, and then spied Harvey Muldock. “Get your car ready.” He turned toward Sam and Ellis. “Help me lift him.”

Sam grabbed Dale under his armpits while Ellis hoisted his legs. They arranged him in the backseat of the Cranbrook, elevating Dale’s legs over the side of the car. Dr. Pierce squeezed in beside him. Harvey leapt in the front seat, dropped the gearshift down three notches, and gassed his car. His tires bit into the ground and then found purchase, and the Cranbrook rocketed forward across the pasture.

Sam turned and saw Dolores Hinshaw, ashen-faced and numb with fear. Deena was standing beside her with her arm around Dolores’s shoulder.

“How dreadful for you,” Miriam Hodge said, taking Deena’s hand. “On your wedding day of all days.”

“Let’s not give it a second thought,” Deena said. “I just hope Dale’s all right.”

Sam turned to Deena, “I hate to abandon you at your wedding, but I think I should take Dolores to the hospital to be with Dale.”

“Of course you should,” Deena said.

“Folks are getting kind of restless. Why don’t we go ahead and serve the cake,” Ellis suggested. He’d been eyeing the cake for the past several hours. It was his favorite—chocolate with white icing.

The last guest left around two o’clock. Jessie and Asa Peacock stayed another hour to help Ellis and Miriam gather up the trash and fold the chairs. The phone rang just as Ellis, Miriam, and Amanda walked through their kitchen door.

“Get that, could you please, honey?” Ellis asked.

Miriam picked up the phone. “Hello.”

It was Sam. “It’s not looking good. They’re saying he won’t make it,” he said, his voice catching. Miriam heard a loud sob in the background.

“I’ve got to go. Dolores needs me. Can you get word out to folks?” he asked, then hung up before Miriam could answer.

She stood at the phone, dazed.

Ellis walked into the kitchen. “Who was that on the phone?”

“Sam. Dale’s dying. I’ve got to call people and go be with Dolores.”

She made her way to the kitchen table, sat down heavily, thought of Dale Hinshaw, and then, to her utter surprise, began to cry.