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His eyes had shut again, his breath evening out. She didn’t want to go there in her head, but it came to her anyway. “So, Les, what are you doing with your life? Why do you deserve to be with our son?”
Stop it.
Brick’s arm tightened around her. He started stroking her again, down her sensitive back, over her hip and rise of her buttock. Back up the valley of her spine to her nape. The curve of her shoulder. It never stopped amazing her, how her body responded to his touch, as if his fingers awakened reactions in her that had waited just for him.
“‘It is very hard here. There are times the only joy in my day comes from thoughts of you and our young son. Does William play in the vegetable garden while you tend it? Does he exasperate his mother with mischief, the way his father does?’”
He hadn’t forgotten her request. And he’d felt her tension. Even without knowing the exact cause, he found a way to pull her back from that edge.
His voice was like the trundling of a wagon over a dirt road, evoking the movement of troops, a soldier grabbing a few minutes to write a letter home. It made it easy to hear the words as they might have been felt by the original author. It was the way he recited poetry as well.
“‘Do not misunderstand me when I say this, but the relief I feel that you are not here, dear Constance, could fill all the space in Heaven. I would suffer through this a hundred times to spare you the sights I have seen. When, God willing, we see one another again, I will look to see the things in your beautiful eyes that this war has hidden from my heart.’”
Brick paused. “From there, he went on to talk about mundane things. Instructions on what price she should pay for seed, messages she should convey to his father and mother, either because they couldn’t read, or because his correspondence time was limited.”
“Who was he?”
“A corporal from Kentucky. He fought for the Confederacy. His older brother was a lieutenant with the Union army. Unmarried. I’ve never located a letter from him, but I expect they both wrote home. I wondered, if his parents didn’t read well, if they both sent their letters to Constance. I thought about his mom and dad, worrying that their two boys would face one another on a battlefield. In the same letter, at the end, the corporal—his name was Samuel—says, ‘I often think of Matthew, and the path we followed to reach such an impasse.’”
His hand’s movement across her back had become a slow, meditative fan, the sensation like ripples in a pond. “They’re buried on the family farm in Kentucky, side by side. Supposedly. Samuel died at Gettysburg, and Matthew died in the prison camp at Andersonville. Most of the dead at Andersonville never left, so it’s possible there’s no body in Matthew’s grave, just a headstone and the wish that he could have been buried there. A stone between their graves says ‘Together agin, a-g-i-n.’ I expect one of his parents put it there.”
“Yet Samuel wrote so well.”
“The parents’ lack of literacy likely drove their resolve to see their sons well-educated. My maternal great-grandparents had four years of schooling between them, but my grandfather and his brother both graduated from the University of Virginia with business degrees.”
“Parents want more for their kids.”
“Yeah.”
She thought about that, feeling sorrow for people she’d never met. “Where is Constance buried?”
“She’s right beside her corporal. She lived to be an old woman. Never married again. Their son, William, had ten kids, though. The land still belongs to his descendants. They run a B&B on it. They claim that sometimes you’ll see Samuel and Constance strolling together in the gardens. We can go visit sometime. Stay for a weekend, if you’d like.”
She would. She gazed at the still lit candle, flickering and reflecting in the glass fireplace screen. Parents want more for their kids. She swallowed. Brick’s arm tightened.
“I know you’re worried about facing your family,” he said, “but that’s part of why I want to take you home for Easter.”
She braced herself on her elbow again to gaze down at him. Brick threaded a hand through her hair, letting it fall back on his chest. “That letter, it shows how love and family help you deal with stuff. Because of what happened, maybe you think you don’t deserve to lean on their support and the strength that connection gives you.”
“Samuel lived in a simpler time.”
He pressed a hand against her back, holding her to him. “Bullshit. You and I can relate to that letter because he was struggling with the same shit we all do. The paths we take, the mistakes, the things we learn, the losses we experience. That never changes.”
He stroked her face, fingertips light against her cheek and jaw. “The other thing that doesn’t change is what gets us through. Love. It finds the way through all of the things we fuck up and can’t understand.”
She wanted it to be true, but it didn’t change what she’d done. It could never change what she’d done. And yet…
She lay back down, pressing her face against his throat, his heart under her hand. She had her leg over his thigh, her knee close to his groin, his replete cock. While the intimacy gave her a lingering twinge in the same region of her own body, her mind and heart turned over things just as intimate and vulnerable.
“I miss them,” she said, her voice tight.
“I know you do.”
“I wonder…”
“What?” he asked when she couldn’t immediately go on.
“You know the marry-a-lawyer thing from my mom? I think I transformed the lack of high expectations from her and others into the belief that they didn’t think I was up to the task of meeting them. I’ve been trying to prove them wrong, while believing they might be right. Which in turn makes me way more anxious with the clinical part, and high-pressure decision situations like the ER.”
