He stood and Polly rose to put her arms around him and lay her head on his chest. They stayed like that without speaking until the bedroom door flew open and Emma, dressed again in shorts and a T-shirt, exploded from the room and launched herself in Marshall ’s general direction.
“You passed!” she shouted as he caught her. “You aced it!”
Gracie followed her sister. She’d changed out of her tribunal clothes as well and wore blue cropped pants and a matching tank top with a giant pink paw print in glitter on the front.
“Does this mean you’ll marry me?” Marshall asked her. Had Polly not been seated, her knees would have buckled. Marriage had not yet been discussed.
“No,” Gracie replied. “It means we won’t not marry you.”
Polly smiled at the memory. “Yes, you did ace the interview,” she admitted and took a sip of champagne, giving herself time to settle.
“I love you,” he said simply. “Finding you was like finding I was not deaf, dumb, and blind, though I had learned to live that way. I wish you’d been in the square when I was thirty, but you weren’t. Now my biggest concern is that, even if we both live to a hundred, we won’t have enough time together.”
Polly arched an eyebrow. “I do not have one foot in the grave. The women in my family live to a great old age. Well, our bodies do; it’s our minds that tend to go when we’re in our seventies,” she teased. All of it was a tease. Polly had no idea how long the women in her family lived. Her mother had died at forty-three. According to the neighbors Hilda passed out drunk and fell face down outside. It rained heavily that night and Hilda, like the apocryphal turkey, drowned in two inches of water.
Marshall pushed the hair back from his forehead. His fingers didn’t merely comb through the hair, they raked.
Removing a crown of thorns was the image that flashed in Polly’s mind, and for a heartbeat, she waited for the drops of blood to seep from his flesh. The thought was sacrilegious. Though she no longer believed in heaven, the concept of hell had never truly left her.
He reached across the table and rested his hand over hers on the white cloth. “I suppose, if it weren’t for the girls, we could just move in together, but even that wouldn’t be enough for me. It wouldn’t pay you the honor you deserve, and it wouldn’t honor the love I have for you.” He smiled. “Quite a speech. Believe it or not, before I met you, I was the strong silent type.”
Proposals of marriage were not alien to Polly. Something about her put men in a marrying frame of mind. There were a couple of reasons that prevented her from indulging in gestures of mad passion: Emma and Gracie. No less carefully than Marshall built his houses had Polly built hers: her daughters and her teaching, friends, quiet moments with a book, ballet lessons, soccer, the theater, flower-arranging classes, evenings with Martha. She owned her own home and did as she pleased.
American mythology would have it that divorced or widowed women in their middle years were desperate to remarry. That had not been Polly’s experience. Most had made lives they enjoyed and would only compromise for a very shiny white knight with a particularly breathtaking steed.
And a very long lance, Polly thought, and smiled at the turn her thoughts took.
“A smile. Is that a yes?” Marshall was trying for lightness and failing. The shadows in his eyes suggested her answer was a matter of life or death.
Both flattering and unsettling.
“We have known one another for four weeks,” she reminded him gently.
“The time doesn’t mean anything,” Marshall insisted. “You can live with someone for years and have the marriage fall apart two weeks after the wedding. You know that’s true. Polly, since the night we had tea, I have never had a second thought. Never. About the logistics, sure. But not about how I feel about you.”
Polly had been carried away on the same whirlwind. On their third date-the night following their second, two nights after their first, she’d brought Marshall home to meet the girls. Very few of the men she had dated had been privileged to meet Emma and Gracie. Because they were good girls, they had been polite but maintained a sense of reserve. Not with Marshall. He fit into the family as if there had always been a place waiting for him.
His quiet gravity, the way he addressed them as adults and listened with genuine interest to what they had to say, the easy concern he showed when they were worried, the kindness when they were peevish or tired had won them over with a stunning rapidity. Another reason to proceed with caution: should she and Marshall separate, hers would not be the only heart broken. She pushed the glittering diamond back toward him. “Much as I would like to, I cannot,” she said simply. “This is too much, too soon.”
“Keep the ring. Think about it. Please. These chances don’t come often. For most people they never come.”
His urgency had the quality of a man who knows he’s dying-and wants to collect the brass ring before the Grim Reaper collects him.
“Maybe we should take a breather,” she said. “Take a little time apart. I need to collect my thoughts.” He looked so devastated, she softened her decision by saying, “A girl cannot think clearly around you, my darling.”
“Don’t reject it.” He nudged the ring back toward her. “Think about it.”
“Despite the wisdom of song and tradition, diamonds are not a girl’s best friend. Though I must admit, most women take better care of their diamonds than men do of their dogs.” Polly was trying to lighten a mood that had suddenly become fraught with storms she couldn’t see but only feel as a pressure behind her eyes.
“I will think about it,” she promised.
“Don’t think too long.”
18
The phone had been ringing for some time before the sound worked its way through Polly’s dreams and dragged her into the waking world. “Yes?” she said into the receiver as she felt around for her glasses.
“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”
Marshall. They’d not spoken in the week since he’d proposed. She switched on the bedside lamp and squinted at the clock. One-fifteen a.m. His intensity had scared her. The girls asked after him. She enjoyed her freedom. Her thoughts were only of him. Emotions hard to quantify during the day batted inside her head like birds in a chimney. “It’s late,” was all she could manage.
“I’m sorry. I woke up. I guess I heard a noise or something and… and I needed to hear your voice.” He sounded like a man who had awakened from a nightmare of hell fire and brimstone. He laughed ironically. “If you can’t stay awake, just put the phone on the pillow and let me listen to you breathing.”
A nightmare of fire and brimstone.
Polly smelled smoke. Gray-white tentacles were reaching under her bedroom door, curling up the dark wood of the door.