“I imagine she is,” Patterson said as Dexter slapped him on his shoulder as if to congratulate him for marrying a girl such as Mary Helen. The way his father had after securing the bow tie too tight. And, for a moment, the picture of Dani rushed over him again, the feel of her in his arms almost tangible until he shook it away.
“Well, then,” Reverend Pinkerton repeated. “Let’s go get you two married, shall we?”
“Yes, sir,” Patterson said. He followed the old cleric through long hallways filled with reflective color from stained glass windows, then down two sets of narrow staircases that led to the door where countless grooms before him had entered the opulent glory of the sanctuary. Where they’d stood at the altar, hands clasped low and in front, waiting … ticking away the minutes until the ringbearer and the flower girl and the long parade of bridesmaids escorted by groomsmen came to their stations … until Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” swelled from the organ’s pipes and, finally, a man caught sight of the woman who walked in his fiancée but would walk out his wife.
One hour, Patterson told himself as Reverend Pinkerton jerked the old door open. Less than one hour, really. In a short while, Mary Helen and he would walk up the aisle she’d walked down, this time to the pulse of Felix Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” He would endure the reception and the cutting of the cake and the first dance and the photographs and the well-wishes of every friend and family member Mary Helen ever thought to know or have. And then, they’d be off … off to their honeymoon and their first night as man and wife. Off to a new life.
A good life where he’d provide for her on a college professor’s salary and she’d rear their children to be among Atlanta’s finest.
Yes. Finally. Mary Helen Robinson would be his and life would be the proverbial piece of cake.
Chapter One
Allison
October 1977
When I think back on it, I realize I never received a formal proposal of marriage. Not really, anyway. He never got down on one knee, never presented me with a diamond ring sparkling above a blanket of black velvet, prisms shooting out in the moonlight. There was no sweet scent of honeysuckle wafting from my mother’s garden. No violins playing in a quiet Italian restaurant while candles flickered atop checkered tablecloths. He never said the words women—especially those reared in the South—dream of. Never said, “Will you marry” or “Will you make me the happiest man in the world and be my bride” or “my wife” or any of the phrases that accompany dreams.
He never promised me a perfect life. He never promised me forever.
What he said—if I remember the words clearly after all these years—was, “Well, that sounds good.”
And, I suppose, it was.
We had been alone in his parents’ home that afternoon in 1977, the two of us, neither one having to go to work that day. I don’t remember why. Maybe it was a holiday—Columbus Day, perhaps, what with it being the middle of October. His parents had gone to the grocery store—fabulous cooks that they were. Gone to pick up necessary items for the dinner they’d whip up in the oversized farmhouse-style kitchen where miles of Formica countertops stretched over and under tall white cabinets.
I’d been invited to stay.
I may have driven out there earlier in my ’65 Mustang (already a classic) or Westley may have made the forty-five-minute drive in his ’74 Pinto to pick me up. Again, these are the things I cannot remember. Not that it made any difference to the end results.
The day was warm, and Westley had gone outside to pull a few weeds from his mother’s flower garden while I stayed indoors to watch Match Game ’77. I’d always been a sucker for television game shows. My youth had been spent watching Password and Concentration. Let’s Make a Deal (with the lovely Carol Merrill). General Hospital and Peyton Place. The latter two, of course, not being game shows but television dramas my mother didn’t mind me watching.
For the life of me, as I write this, I don’t know why not. Her sole goal in life when it came to me, I often thought, was to protect me. To save me from any form of scandal, whether real or perceived.
So, there I sat, watching Gene Rayburn in the comfortable but overly decorated home of my boyfriend while he worked outside on a day I cannot recall, and while his parents shopped at the local A&P for a meal I cannot remember. At some point, during commercials, I took my own break and wandered around the rambling house, which I found as easy to do as wearing a pair of old house slippers. I had no fear of being “found out,” although I should have. I’d only been dating Westley six months and was hardly a member of the family.
But I’d imagined it. The first time I came to his home for dinner and saw the long formal dining room table draped in linen and adorned in crystal and silver and the most stunning pattern of Noritake china I’d ever seen, I knew this was the family for me. This was the family my father and especially my mother would happily approve their youngest daughter leaving their fold for. Not going to college for. In fact, my mother would be downright giddy at the prospect, especially considering the bum—and a religious one at that—my sister had married.
I walked to the front of the house where the formal living room—Victorian and polished—sat dark and lonely, drapes pulled to keep the sunlight from fading the velvet. I ventured to guess that—other than me and the weekly maid—people rarely came into this room with its low ceiling and thickly carpeted floor. A baby grand piano sat in the far-left corner, draped with a fringed silk scarf and topped by
