“Yes. Cal and I met during our undergrad days, and we were friends for a long time before we started dating. Like you, I thought we made sense. It just seemed right, you know? We had a love of words in common. We could spend hours talking about books and history and things that bored most of our friends silly. He was easy to be around.”
I knew exactly what she meant. I’d had almost the same thoughts about Noah.
“I could see our future. I knew we’d live in academia, maybe with both of us being professors. I’d publish here and there, and we’d have a couple of kids, and it would be a comfortable, predictable life.” She flashed me a glance with a smile that was almost guilty. “And then I met your father.”
“At a train station, right?” I had heard the essential elements of this story before, but I hadn’t known that my mother had been dating another man when it happened.
“Yes. I’d been in Boston to visit one of my high school friends who’d gone to college up there. I was boarding the train to go back to Virginia—I was in my senior year at UVa—and just before I stepped onto the car, I felt a hand on my shoulder. This super cute and totally sexy guy was standing behind me, holding my glasses case. It had fallen out of my bag onto the bench in the waiting area, and he’d picked it up and followed me. He got on the train, too, and he sat down next to me . . . I remember there was a problem with his ticket, but they straightened it out.” She gave a happy little sigh. “He introduced himself after that—he said, ‘I’m Frazier Baldwin, and you are the most beautiful, exciting woman I’ve ever seen.’ I was . . . stunned. That was a ten-hour train trip, and for the first eight hours, we never stopped talking. I nodded off at one point, and when I woke up, my head was on his shoulder. He was holding my hand, and it all felt so . . .rightin a way that things had never quite felt with Cal.”
I grinned, remembering the rest of the story. “And he rode with you all the way to Charlottesville. You didn’t find out until later that he lived in Philadelphia, and he was supposed to have gotten off there, but he’d boarded the wrong train and went hours past his stop to spend more time with you.”
Mom laughed softly. “All true. Frazier had—well, still has—this incredible passion and sense of . . . oh, I don’t know. He doesn’t let anything stand in the way of what he wants. Or who.” Her cheeks were pink. “Did I ever tell you what really happened with my glasses?”
Mystified, I shook my head.
“A few months later, when he came down to see me again—we’d been talking on the phone and writing letters, because, you know, we didn’t have email or texts or vid chats in those days—we were fighting. I told him I didn’t know if I could hurt Cal by ending our relationship. I asked Frazier how I could be sure I wasn’t just some passing fancy to him. I wasn’t sure if the chase was more exciting to him, and if he’d walk away once he had me. Your father told me then that the day we’d met, he’d been watching me the whole time we were sitting in the waiting room, trying to work up enough nerve to say something, and when I got up to get on the train, he panicked. He followed me and reached into my bag, taking my glasses so he’d have an excuse to talk to me.”
“No way!” I laughed. “Daddy was a pickpocket?”
“In that instance, yes.” Mom sighed happily. “And he said, ‘Candace, you don’t need those glasses to see that I’m going to love you for the rest of your life with the kind of reckless abandon that turns a man into a criminal in order to get the attention of the woman he loves.’” She tossed up her hands. “I mean, how are you going to argue with that? I left your dad’s hotel room, went back to Cal, and told him I was sorry, but we weren’t going to work. Then I went back to Frazier, and for the first time, I let him kiss me.”
“Oh, my God, Mom, you hadn’t even kissed him yet?” I was astounded. “I can’t believe that.”
“I was committed to Cal,” my mother said primly. “I wasn’t that kind of woman.”
“That’s just . . .” I let my head fall back against the chair. “I never knew any of that. It’s crazy romantic.”
“Ah, well.” Mom shrugged. “It was a long time ago. Your father went to see Cal not long after that. He apologized for stealing me away, but he said someday, Cal would see that he’d done all of us a favor. And since Cal found his Nancy eventually, I think he agreed. They’re perfect for each other, too.”
“And you never regretted it?” My father was an amazing man. I loved him to pieces, as my dad, but I wasn’t sure I could have lived with him as a husband in my mother’s place. He was intense about his work, and he could be volatile. Mild and easy were not words that would ever be used to describe Daddy.
“Not for even a second.” Mom’s tone left no room for doubt. “I’ve always only been grateful that I made that trip up to Boston because if I hadn’t, I might have ended up married to Cal, happy in a vague sort of way, never knowing the incredible life I might have had otherwise.”
The lightning bugs were beginning to come out. In the house behind us, I could hear my dad’s voice as he spoke to my grandmother. Moments later, the door opened, and he stepped onto the deck.
“How’re my two favorite women?” He patted my head affectionately as he passed behind me, stopping to drop to his haunches next to my mother. Taking her hand, he brought it to his lips. “Are you being eaten alive out here?”
“Not too bad yet,” Mom answered. “Emma and I have been sitting out here discussing the secrets of life.”
“If anyone could find them, it would be you.” He smiled at her, and in his eyes, I saw the echo of the younger man he must have been the day he’d stolen glasses from her bag. “But now you should come inside. I’ve made ice cream, and we have to eat it before it melts.”
My mother smiled at him. “All right. Dip us a couple of bowls, and we’ll be along.”
When Daddy had gone back inside, Mom stood up, stretching.
“Emma, sweetheart, I don’t have any answers for you. I don’t even have any advice, really. All I can say is . . . sometimes the safe choice isn’t the right one. Sometimes the path that seems obvious isn’t the one that leads to true happiness.” As she turned to go inside, she turned to add a final word.
“And if you can do it, get yourself a man who, after thirty-five years, still makes your knees go weak when he kisses your hand.”
3
Deacon
“Gram, that was the best fried chicken you’ve ever made. I don’t know how you manage to top yourself week after week.”
My grandmother shot me a skeptical glance as I passed by her, clearing the table after dinner. At the sink, Pop snickered.
“The both of you are full of blarney.” Gram eased back her chair slightly and folded her arms over her chest. “One of you is worse than the other.”
