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A trio of joggers passed them, feet thumping in rhythm on the boards. When they swung wide to bypass two women with strollers, Brick drew her closer to his side so Les wasn’t in their path. The joggers went past.
“It’s hard for oncoming traffic to miss you,” she observed. “I’m a moped and you’re a cement truck.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “Mopeds are cute. And sexy,” he added, at her censorious look. “Incredibly sexy. So what was your dad doing?”
It had been a Sunday afternoon, she and Rory on the steps, Thomas sitting on the rail. Her mother had been snapping peas in a metal bowl while sitting next to her father on the swing. Before he’d gotten up, he’d had his long legs stretched out, his arm on the top of the swing behind her.
“Suddenly, Dad brought his hands together, like he’d caught something. When he came back up on the porch, we wanted to crowd around and see, but he told us this was for Mom, and he’d show us in a minute. When he spoke in that voice, we knew to listen.”
“I remember. Rory could be a real smartass, too, but he never acted that way around your dad. Or your mom.”
“Especially Mom. Dad would have taken a belt to either Thomas or Rory for talking back to her. I never saw him do it, but according to them, once was enough for them to treat the rule as unbreakable as one of the Commandments.”
“Did he ever take a belt to you?”
His look took her thoughts in a very non-paternal direction. She cleared her throat, ignoring his grin at her telltale discomfiture. “Dad didn’t believe in overkill. I was less hard-headed. All he had to do was speak sharply to me and I’d feel skewered.”
“Hmm.” Brick moved them to the railing and stopped so they were leaning against it, standing side by side. They watched a skilled kayaker navigate the churning waters below. “So what had he caught?”
“He said, ‘Honey, your mama thought you needed a ray of sunshine, and asked the sun to give me one.’” He opened his sun-warmed hands and put them on her face. She gave him this smile like she didn’t know what to do with him, but loved him to pieces for it.”
As Les turned and laid her hands on Brick’s face in illustration, Brick’s arm slid around her again, letting her lean into his side, his head bent over hers as she dropped her hands to his chest. “God, I still miss him so much. I can’t imagine what it’s like for her. But she said she feels him every day. Sometimes, when she’s out in her garden, I’ve seen her take off her gloves, hold them up to the sun and put them on her face. I know she’s imagining him doing it.”
“So why did he want to name you Celestial Joy?”
She gave a half laugh. “It’s so easy to get off topic with you, to talk about everything and anything.”
His arm tightened. “You couldn’t have given me a better compliment, doc. But you’re not being entirely honest. There’s something you’re avoiding. I don’t mind the route you’re taking, but if you don’t eventually answer the question, I may threaten to take a belt to you, just to see you get all flustered again.”
“I never wanted my father to, I mean I never felt…”
“The same act can provoke two very different reactions. Like your father kissing you, a gentle, paternal brush against your cheek, the corner of your mouth,” he leaned in and put his lips in those two places, lingering, moist, “and me doing it.”
She closed her eyes, feeling his impact in all her senses. “I was early. Way early. The pregnancy didn’t go as well as it had for Thomas and Rory. I…I almost didn’t make it. I was in the NICU for a month. Paying my hospital bills was when my dad took a job outside the farm, plus doing odd jobs where he could.”
Brick drew back to stare at her. “I didn’t know any of that. Rory never mentioned it.”
“Yeah. He was little when it happened, and by the time you came into our lives, it was long in the past. Things were better, and they’d shifted our primary income source from a working farm to the farm supply store. Plus, you know we’re old school South. We don’t talk about our own tough times. We help others with theirs and get on with life.”
She offered a faint smile. “After I got up to the right weight and everything proved normal, no physical or mental adverse effects, they tried not to let it impact the way they parented me, compared to Thomas and Rory. But I still had a bigger dose of protectiveness, even for being the only girl and the youngest.”
“Understandably.” He gazed at her. “I could have lost you before I ever had the chance to read poetry to you.”
“You really are making it difficult to finish this story.” She didn’t mind that at all. But he lifted an expectant brow, so she reluctantly continued.
“During my first forty-eight hours, things looked pretty bad. Mom told my dad, ‘If she goes back to God, she’ll be our eternal celestial joy, even if we only had a few earthly moments with her.’”
She offered a wobbly smile. “They’d intended to name me after my grandmother, but when the nurse needed to fill out the birth certificate, my father told her to put down Celestial Joy Wilder. My mother was still out of it, so the nurse wisely waited to check with her before finalizing it.”
Les watched a blue heron land on a cluster of rocks, his feathered crest fluttering. “When she found out what Dad had told them to write, I’d started to improve. You know Mom’s pretty religious, so she says Dad’s willingness to list my name as Celestial Joy was a message that he’d accepted God’s will. And maybe as a gift for that faith, God let them keep me. She also said God expected her to be the sensible one who would give me a less fanciful name. They agreed on Celeste Joy.”
Brick’s expression was so unfathomable she had to ask the question, a little defensively. “What?”
“I could see you in the hallway mirror,” he told her. “Back in high school, when I was reading that poem. I still thought of you as a little kid. And I knew you had an obvious crush on me—"
He blocked her half-hearted punch, catching her fist in his hand. He opened hers back up, stroking her fingers. It took her back to how she’d felt about him then, so beyond her reach, but so deeply wanted and desired.
“When I read those lines to Rory and Todd, I saw the look in your eyes.” He shook his head. “It was sort of timeless. As if the woman you’d be was there, and the man I was going to be recognized it. Just a flash, and we were back to being kids again.”
