"Jane?" I said.
"Mmm?" she answered automatically.
"I have an idea."
"About what?" She continued staring at the page.
"Where we should hold the wedding."
My words finally registered and she looked up.
"It might not be perfect, but I'm sure it would be available," I said. "It's outside and there's plenty of parking. And there're flowers, too. Thousands of flowers."
"Where?"
I hesitated.
"At Noah's house," I said. "Under the trellis by the roses."
Jane's mouth opened and closed; she blinked rapidly, as if clearing her sight. But then, ever so slowly, she began to smile.
Chapter Six
In the morning, I made arrangements for the tuxedos and began making calls to friends and neighbors on Anna's guest list, receiving mostly the answers I expected.
Of course we'll be there, one couple said. We wouldn't miss it for the world, said another. Though the calls were friendly, I didn't linger on the phone and was finished well before noon.
Jane and Anna had gone in search of flowers for the bouquets; later in the afternoon, they planned to swing by Noah's house. With hours to go until we were supposed to meet, I decided to drive to Creekside. On the way, I picked up three loaves of Wonder Bread from the grocery store.
As I drove, my thoughts drifted to Noah's house and my first visit there a long time ago.
Jane and I had been dating for six months before she brought me home to visit. She'd graduated from Meredith in June, and after the ceremony, she rode in my car as we followed her parents back to New Bern. Jane was the oldest of her siblings--only seven years separated the four of them--and I could tell from their faces when we arrived that they were still evaluating me. While I'd stood with Jane's family at her graduation and Allie had even looped her hand through my arm at one point, I couldn't help feeling self-conscious about the impression I'd made on them.
Sensing my anxiety, Jane immediately suggested that we take a walk when we reached the house. The seductive beauty of the low country had a soothing effect on my nerves; the sky was the color of robin's eggs, and the air held neither the briskness of spring nor the heat and humidity of summer. Noah had planted thousands of bulbs over the years, and lilies bloomed along the fence line in clusters of riotous color. A thousand shades of green graced the trees, and the air was filled with the trills of songbirds. But it was the rose garden, even from a distance, that caught my gaze. The five concentric hearts--the highest bushes in the middle, the lowest on the outside--were bursting in reds, pinks, oranges, whites, and yellows. There was an orchestrated randomness to the blooms, one that suggested a stalemate between man and nature that seemed almost out of place amid the wild beauty of the landscape.
In time, we ended up under the trellis adjacent to the garden. Obviously, I'd become quite fond of Jane by then, yet I still wasn't certain whether we would have a future together. As I've mentioned, I considered it a necessity to be gainfully employed before I became involved in a serious relationship. I was still a year away from my own graduation from law school, and it seemed unfair to ask her to wait for me. I didn't know then, of course, that I would eventually work in New Bern. Indeed, in the coming year, interviews were already set up with firms in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., while she had made plans to move back home.
Jane, however, had been making my plans difficult to keep. She seemed to enjoy my company. She listened with interest, teased me playfully, and always reached for my hand whenever we were together. The first time she did this, I remember thinking how right it felt. Though it sounds ridiculous, when a couple holds hands, it either feels right or it doesn't. I suppose this has to do with the intertwining of fingers and the proper placement of the thumb, though when I tried to explain my reasoning to her, Jane laughed and asked me why it was so important to analyze.
On that day, the day of her graduation, she took my hand again and for the first time told me the story of Allie and Noah. They'd met when they were teenagers and had fallen in love, but Allie had moved away and they didn't speak for the next fourteen years. While they were separated, Noah worked in New Jersey, headed off to war, and finally returned to New Bern. Allie, meanwhile, became engaged to someone else. On the verge of her wedding, however, she returned to visit Noah and realized it was he whom she'd always loved. In the end, Allie broke off her engagement and stayed in New Bern.
Though we'd talked about many things, she'd never told me this. At the time, the story was not as touching to me as it is now, but I suppose this was a function of my age and gender. Yet I could tell the story meant a lot to her, and I was touched by how much she cared for her parents. Soon after she began, her dark eyes were brimming with tears that spilled onto her cheeks. At first she dabbed at them, but then she stopped, as if deciding it didn't matter whether or not I saw her cry. This implied comfort affected me deeply, for I knew that she was entrusting me with something that she'd shared with few others. I myself have seldom cried at anything, and when she finished, she seemed to understand this about me.
"I'm sorry about getting so emotional," she said quietly. "But I've been waiting to tell you that story for a long time. I wanted it to be just the right moment, in just the right place."
Then she squeezed my hand as though she wanted to hold on to it forever.
I glanced away, feeling a tightness in my chest that I'd never before experienced. The scene around me was intensely vivid, every petal and blade of grass standing out in sharp relief. Behind her, I saw her family gathering on the porch. Prisms of sunlight cut patterns on the ground.
"Thank you for sharing this with me," I whispered, and when I turned to face her, I knew what it meant to finally fall in love.
I went to Creekside and found Noah seated at the pond.
"Hello, Noah," I said.
"Hello, Wilson." He continued staring out over the water. "Thanks for dropping by."
I set the bag of bread on the ground. "You doing okay?"
"Could be better. Could be worse, though, too."
I sat beside him on the bench. The swan in the pond had no fear of me and stayed in the shallows near us.
"Did you tell her," he asked, "about having the wedding at the house?"
I nodded. This had been the idea that I mentioned to Noah the day before.
"I think she was surprised she hadn't thought of it first."
"She's got a lot on her mind."
"Yes, she does. She and Anna left right after breakfast."
"Rarin' to go?"
"You could say that. Jane practically dragged Anna out the door. I haven't heard from her since."
"Allie was the same way with Kate's wedding."
He was speaking of Jane's younger sister. Like the wedding this weekend, Kate's had been held at Noah's house. Jane had been the matron of honor.
"I suppose she's already been looking at wedding gowns."
I glanced at him, surprised.
"That was the best part for Allie, I think," he went on. "She and Kate spent two days in Raleigh searching for the pe
rfect dress. Kate tried on over a hundred of them, and when Allie got home, she described every one of them to me. Lace here, sleeves there, silk and taffeta, cinched waistlines . . . she must have rambled on for hours, but she was so beautiful when she was excited that I barely heard what she was saying."
I brought my hands to my lap. "I don't think she and Anna will have the time for something like that."
"No, I don't suppose they will." He turned to me. "But she'll be beautiful no matter what she wears, you know."
I nodded.
These days, the children share in the upkeep of Noah's house.
We own it jointly; Noah and Allie had made those arrangements before they moved to Creekside. Because the house had meant so much to them, and to the children, they simply couldn't part with it. Nor could they have given it to only one of their children, since it is the site of countless shared memories for all of them.
As I said, I visited the house frequently, and as I walked the property after leaving Creekside, I made mental notes of all that had to be done. A caretaker kept the grass mowed and the fence in good condition, but a lot of work would be needed to get the property ready for visitors, and there was no way I could do it alone. The white house was coated with the gray dust of a thousand rainstorms, but it was nothing that a good power washing couldn't spruce up. Despite the caretaker's efforts, however, the grounds were in bad shape. Weeds were sprouting along the fence posts, hedges needed to be trimmed, and only dried stalks remained of the early-blooming lilies. Hibiscus, hydrangea, and geraniums added splashes of color but needed reshaping as well.
While all that could be taken care of relatively quickly, the rose garden worried me. It had grown wild in the years the house had been empty; each concentric heart was roughly the same height, and every bush seemed to grow into the last. Countless stems poked out at odd angles, and the leaves obscured much of the color. I had no idea whether the floodlights still worked. From where I stood, it seemed there was no way it could be salvaged except by pruning everything back and waiting another year for the blooms to return.
I hoped my landscaper would be able to work a miracle. If anyone could handle the project, he could. A quiet man with a passion for perfection, Nathan Little had worked on some of the most famous gardens in North Carolina--the Biltmore Estate, the Tryon Place, the Duke Botanical Gardens--and he knew more about plants than anyone I'd ever met.