I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(2)
“You and I have seen too much these past few years, Edie. You with losing your dad; me with the war and the tidying up afterward. We need fresh air, open water, sun rising out of the ocean every morning. We need the ocean, Edie. Can you imagine it?”
She just about could, but she had to ask, “I can see being there most of the year, but what about winter? A beach town might be especially dreary in winter, with freezing wind coming off the water and gray, gray skies. What will we do then?”
Edith shut her eyes, dropped backward onto the bed, and remembered Joseph’s face when she’d asked that question, surprised and bemused, his brow furrowed, as if the answer were obvious.
“Why, I’ll be your blue sky,” he’d said.
What could she do, what could anyone do with a man like that but marry him and live in his house near the ocean?
For a moment, her eyes still shut, Edith lay on her back in the center of her marriage bed inside the house that was Joseph—down to the banisters and the light switches and the fat stove and the writing desk slender legged as a cat—listening to the house, breathing in the clean perfume of it, and then she opened her eyes and, for the first time, saw that the ceiling was painted sky blue with here and there a wisp of white cloud, and she was certain that there had never been so much gratitude in the history of the world.
From down below, she heard a faint whine, which she knew must be the back door opening, so she jumped up off the bed to look out the center window. Joseph stood on the back lawn at the edge of the canal, his hands in his pockets, his wedding jacket slung over one arm. Edith tugged open the window and called out, “Joseph!”
He spun around and stared up at her, his face breaking into a broad smile.
“Hey!” he shouted.
“Oh, my darling Joseph. Thank you.” It came out hoarse, too hushed for him to hear, so she cleared her throat and sang it, “Thank you!”
He opened out his arms and said, “Look at all this. Ours. Can you believe it?”
“Yes,” she said, laughing. “Yes, I can!”
“Come down, Edie. Come down and see the rest!”
“Oh, my darling,” she whispered once more before she wiped her eyes, kicked off her shoes, shimmied out of her stockings, and ran down to where he waited.
Chapter Two
Clare
Until Cornelia piped up with, “You know what? I never liked that iris, either. I mean, it was pretty enough—but bad, a truly bad, bad, low-down, dirty, and despicable iris,” I was so busy composing a mental list of ten reasons to marry Zach that I hadn’t even noticed I was shredding the poor thing to bits. Shredding the iris, I mean, not Zach, although I suppose you could argue that while frantically racking my brain for reasons to marry a man I was promised and slated to marry within thirty hours wasn’t exactly ripping him to pieces, it wasn’t exactly nice, either. In fact, I was fairly positive that it would break his heart if he knew. Especially since I got stuck after reason nine.
We—my mother, Viviana; my almost-mother, Cornelia Brown; and I—were making centerpieces at an outdoor table at the resort Zach had found for our wedding, a pearly, columned, historic dreamboat of a hotel sailing atop an oak-and-pine-studded crest of Blue Ridge. Purple mophead hydrangeas and lithe white irises listed in buckets at our feet. A swimming pool stretched out graciously before us—a fountain like a great hibiscus blossom sprouting from its center—and a swimming-pool-colored sky smiled dotingly down.
Zach had texted the weather forecast to me the night before: three straight days of seventy-two-degree highs, cloudless skies, and zero humidity. Nice weather by any standard; by June in southwestern Virginia standards, a minor meteorological miracle. Perfect wedding weather, which should have made me perfectly giddy. Instead, I found it unsettling, even creepy.
“What is this? Stepford, Connecticut? Brigadoon? Camazotz?” I’d grumbled to myself during my postbreakfast (French toast decorated with edible flowers) walk around the grounds. “Where’s the humidity? Where are the damned mosquitoes?”
I dropped the rags of iris onto the tabletop, stared down at my hands, which were sticky as a murderer’s, and sighed. It wasn’t that it was hard to think up reasons why anyone would want to marry Zach. He was so generally, generically marriageable it was almost funny. Handsome, smart, hardworking. A law school star from a wealthy family. No criminal record. Good manners. Naturally curly hair. A golden boy if ever I’d seen one: wheat-colored curls, tawny brows and lashes, eyes the color of India pale ale. Even his car was gold. The man was a bona fide catch. Give him a chaise and four, an estate, and ten thousand pounds a year, and any Austen heroine would go stumbling over the countryside in her Regency heels to get to him.
No, if my task had been to list reasons why anyone should marry Zach, I could have reeled them off, lickety-split, and mangled no flowers in the process. But here at what was surely the eleventh hour—God, eleventh and a half—I was hell-bent on coming up with reasons why I should, a different matter entirely.
My mother dunked a paper towel into one of the flower buckets and handed it to me. I scrubbed zealously at my palms, as Cornelia and my mother looked on.
“Something on your mind, Lady Macbeth?” Cornelia said. She reached out and tugged on the paper towel until I relinquished it.
I shrugged. “Guess I’m just a little nervous.”