Читать книгу A Wedding To Remember - Joanna Sims - Страница 11

Chapter Three

“Well, where the hell is she?” Jock Brand demanded. “Why the hell didn’t you bring her with you?”

Bruce arrived at Sugar Creek’s traditional Sunday brunch without Savannah, much to the unabashed displeasure of his father.

As Jock’s eldest of eight children from two marriages, Bruce had learned to ignore most of his father’s bluster and salty language long ago. He leaned down to kiss his stepmother, Lilly, on her soft, light brown cheek, before taking his seat at the long formal dining table.

“I let her sleep in,” Bruce told his father. “She needs the rest.”

He didn’t add that he didn’t want Savannah to feel overwhelmed by his family right off the bat; Sunday brunch was the one time when they converged on the ranch. And when the talk turned to politics, as it often did, yelling and fist-banging on the table were as common a fare as eggs and bacon.

“A hearty breakfast and hard work,” Jock countered loudly. “That’s what she needs.”

Jock never used an “indoor voice,” and his answer for all things was a good breakfast followed by hard work. And Bruce had to acknowledge that his father led by that example. Jock wasn’t a man known for his kindness or his forgiving nature, but he was known for throwing his back into every aspect of his life. Years of working in the harsh elements of Montana were carved into his narrow face by deep wrinkles fanning out from his eyes and crisscrossing his broad forehead. His nose was prominent, strong and slightly crooked, with a hump in the middle from a break that hadn’t been set properly. His hair, thin and receding at the temples, had long since turned white, as had the bushy, unruly eyebrows framing the deeply set, sapphire-blue eyes. At one time, Jock’s skin had been fair, but decades of work in the sun without any sun protection had given his leathery skin a brownish-ruddy hue.

“She needs her rest,” Lilly said in her soft, steady voice as she poured coffee into the cup at Bruce’s place setting.

Lilly was Jock’s second wife, and the entire family still marveled at the match. Jock was loud and abrasive; Lilly was quiet and sweet. Jock believed in “spare the rod, spoil the child;” Lilly believed in the power of kind words and affection. Jock was a sworn atheist; Lilly, on the other hand, was a very spiritual woman with a deep connection to the land. A full-blooded Chippewa-Cree Native American raised on the Rocky Boy reservation, Lilly Hanging Cloud was an undeniable beauty—kind brown-black eyes, balanced, even features and prominent cheekbones. Her hair, always worn long and straight, was coal black with silver laced throughout. Yes, Lilly was his stepmother, but his memory of his own mother was so faint that Lilly was truly the only mother he’d ever known.

“Morning!” Jessie, Jock’s only daughter and the youngest of the bunch, breezed into the dining room, her waist-length, pin-straight raven hair fluttering behind her. Their baby sister was sweet, but had been spoiled by all of them, including him. She had always been too adorable to scold, with her mother’s striking features and her father’s shocking blue eyes.

Now that Jessie was here, Jock’s attention would turn to his favored child, and Bruce would be able to eat in peace for a moment or two.

“Hi, Daddy.” Jessie leaned down and kissed their father’s cheek; she was the only one of his eight children who got away with calling him “Daddy.” All of the siblings, including him, called the patriarch of their family “Jock” or “sir.”

Jessie then kissed her mother “good morning,” plopped down in the chair next to him and bumped her shoulder into his. “Hi, dork.”

Bruce wrapped his arm around his sister’s shoulder, pulled her close for a moment and kissed the side of her head. “Mornin’, brat.”

A steady trickle of Brand siblings filled the empty seats at the enormous dining table. One of his full brothers, Liam, was the first to arrive, followed by their half brothers Colton and Hunter. Shane and Gabe, his other two full-blooded brothers, were missing from breakfast, as was his youngest half brother, Noah. Gabe, a long-distance trucker, was out of town, and no one expected Shane to show. Shane was honorably discharged from the army; diagnosed with PTSD, he was often missing from family events. Noah, a private first class in the Marine Corps, had been recently deployed to South Korea.

As the long dining table filled with his children, Jock presided over Sunday breakfast like a king over his court. Bruce was happy to drift into the background while his siblings dominated the conversation, each one louder than the other, trying as they always did to get the loudest and the last word on all subjects. They were a competitive bunch—but tight as family could be when push came to shove. When the conversation, as it often did, turned to politics, Bruce found his thoughts returning to his wife. The shock of her coming back to Sugar Creek Ranch hadn’t worn off; he knew that she must feel the distance between them. He could read the pain in her eyes when he avoided touching her or stiffened when she innocently placed her hand over his. He wanted to open his heart to her again, but he couldn’t. Not yet. The first time she’d walked out of his life and into the arms of another man, it had left him feeling like an empty eggshell—cracked, fragile and good for nothing. He had to protect his heart. What other choice did he have?

“Savannah!” his sister screamed over the din of voices.

Everyone at the table stopped talking and turned their attention to the entrance to the dining room.

Bruce had caught the expression on his sister’s face, lit up with happy surprise, before he turned his head to look at the doorway to the dining room. Savannah, her slender body engulfed in one of his denim button-down shirts, was standing in the doorway appearing peaked and frail. She had an uncertainty in her body language, a nervousness in her half smile and forward-slumped shoulders that Bruce read right away. Savannah knew in her mind that she had been absent from Sunday breakfast for a long time; it would be normal to wonder about how the family would receive her. And she had some reason to be concerned—several of his siblings were still raw with Savannah and her lawyer, so they weren’t ready to welcome her back to the fold with open arms. Their father had no such reservations.

“Daughter!” Jock bellowed as he thrust his seat back and out of his way so he could wrap a possessive, welcoming arm around Savannah’s shoulders. Sugar Creek was Jock’s ranch—if he said Savannah was welcome, she was welcome.

“Good morning, everyone,” Savannah said with an unusually shy smile and a quieter than normal voice. She leaned into her father-in-law’s embrace, but her eyes had sought out his.

Bruce had stood up at the same time as his father; it was instinctive, natural, to protect his wife—to stand between her and her critics in the room. Even if those critics were his own kin.

“You need something to eat,” Lilly observed.

Before his wife could respond, Jock waved his hand over the table. “Everyone move. Move! I want Savannah to sit down right here next to me.”

“No, don’t do that...” Savannah tried to intervene, but Jock’s will was the will of the family.

Everyone on the right side of the table, including him, moved one seat down to make room for their father’s most-favored daughter-in-law.

Bruce had gathered up his dishes, swapped them for a clean set and held the chair for his wife to sit down.

“Sorry.” Savannah apologized to the table at large.

“Don’t you go apologizing for nothing,” Jock ordered gruffly. “It’s been far too long since we’ve had you at this table.”

The mood at the table changed; the conversation seemed stilted and stiff to Bruce, with his siblings focusing more on their food than talking. Savannah, who used to be a ray of sun shining on Sunday breakfast, had now become a bit of a spoiler. One by one, his brothers finished their meals and dispersed. Liam, his junior by only one year and always the peacemaker, made sure to say a kind word to Savannah, wishing her a speedy recovery, before he left. Jessie was the only sibling who seemed to have made a seamless pivot now that the divorce was on hold; she talked in a stream of consciousness, bouncing from one topic to another, seeming to want to catch Savannah up on the missing years in one sitting.

“Come up for air,” Bruce told his sister. “She’s not going anywhere.”

Had he just spoken the truth? The truth from somewhere deep inside? Or was that hopeful thinking?

Instead of making a quick appearance at breakfast as he had planned, Bruce sat beside his wife while she ate two full helpings of scrambled eggs, a heaping scoop of cheese grits, a biscuit slathered with butter and honey, and drank a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. He’d never known her to be much of a breakfast person.

“I’m stuffed.” Savannah groaned, her hands on her stomach.

“You sure you can’t eat a few more spoonfuls of grits?” Bruce teased her. “I’d hate for those couple of bites to go to waste.”

Savannah pushed her plate away and scrunched up her face distastefully. “I may not eat for the rest of the day.”

“I haven’t seen you eat that much in a day before,” Bruce mused.

“A hearty breakfast is exactly what you needed.” Jock gave a nod of approval.

Rosario, the house manager for years, and one of her subordinates, Donna, came into the dining room to begin clearing the table.

“Breakfast was good?” Rosario asked, her hand affectionately on Jock’s shoulder, while Donna began to clear. Rosario had been with the family for decades, and the house manager had long since become more family than employee.

“It was damn good.” Jock tossed his crumpled napkin onto his plate.

“I’m glad.” The house manager’s eyes crinkled deeply at the corner when she smiled. “It’s good to see you at the table again, Miss Savannah.”

Savannah placed her neatly folded napkin on top of her empty plate. “It’s good to be seen, Rosario.”

“We all missed you,” Donna said as she reached around in front of Savannah to get her plate.

“Oh...” his wife said, and he could tell by the confused look in her eyes that the memory of Donna had been ripped away, like so many others, by the crash. “Thank you.”

“I think I’d like to go home and rest now.” Savannah put her hand on his arm.

Bruce gave her a nod of understanding; he said, as he pushed back his chair, “You outdid yourselves as usual, ladies.”

Savannah gave Jock a hug and a kiss, said goodbye to everyone in the room, and then, arms crossed in front of her body, she walked into the grand, circular, three-story foyer.

“Hold up.” Jock stood up so he could say what he intended to say in a lowered voice.

Bruce waited for his father’s next words; the patriarch made a little motion near his mouth. “She sounds kinda funny when she talks. You gonna get that fixed?”

“It’s in the works. We’re just waiting for insurance to shuffle things around. I’m hoping to get her to therapy starting next week.”

Jock gave a nod of understanding accompanied by a single pat on the shoulder.

Savannah was waiting for him on the wide porch that ran the length of the expansive main house. She was sitting on the top step of the wood stairs with their three canines gathered around her; she was staring out at the fields in the distance with the slow-moving herd of cows as they grazed in the early-afternoon sun.

Bruce knelt down so he could greet the dogs. “You all right?”

It took her a couple of seconds to nod “yes,” but he didn’t believe it. The breakfast had rattled her; being with his family had rattled her.

Her body was curled forward like a turtle shell; it seemed to him like she was trying to disappear into his shirt. Acting, not thinking, Bruce held out his hand to his wife.

“Come on,” he said gently. “Let’s get you back to bed.”

Savannah had turned her head away from him; when she turned it back, there were tears clinging to her eyelashes. She lowered her head and wiped the tears on the sleeve of her borrowed shirt.

“I don’t want to go back to bed,” she finally said.

Bruce looked down into her face—a face he had both loved and resented. “What do you want to do, then?”

“I don’t know.” Savannah’s eyes returned to the horizon, her arms locked around Hound Dog’s thick neck for comfort. “Sunday was always our day.”

Bruce stood up to full height and slid his hands into his front pockets. Sunday had always been their day—a day they reserved for their relationship. But that had been a long time ago.

“When’s the last time we spent a Sunday together?” she asked him without looking at him.

With a frown, Bruce answered her honestly. “I can’t remember the last time.”

Savannah gave a little sad shake of her head. “For me, it was just last week.”

* * *

Her husband had offered to stay with her—to reboot their Sunday tradition. But it felt forced to her, so she declined. Bruce had a list of chores he had planned for his Sunday, and she didn’t want to keep him from his work. Murphy and Buckley followed behind her husband; Hound Dog stayed with her. Perhaps he sensed that she was new to the dog pack, like he was. She was grateful for the company, now that she was feeling, for the first time, like a stranger in her own home.

Her sisters had always been her solace, so she called her youngest sister, Joy, who had returned to Nashville, Tennessee where she was attending graduate school at Vanderbilt University.

“It was terrible,” she recounted for her sister. “Everyone stopped talking when I walked in, half of his brothers looked at me like I’d grown devil horns and a tail—they hate me now—and I didn’t recognize this lady, Donna, who works there who obviously knows me. I felt so nervous that I ate enough food to feed a small army...”

“I’m sorry, Savannah.” Her sister, Joy, said in a sympathetic tone. “It’s like a bad dream.”

Savannah was standing by the picture window, watching Bruce unload wood from the back of his truck and carry it to his workshop.

“It was like a bad dream,” she said of the breakfast. “Like that dream when you wake up late and you rush to work and everyone is staring at you like you’re a freak, and then you realize that you’re naked.”

“I’ve never had that dream before.”

“Well, I have. It’s the worst.” She sat down on the couch with Hound Dog faithfully parked at her feet.

Savannah sighed, noticing that her head was throbbing again. “I don’t know, Joy. I didn’t know it was going to be this way. I don’t know what I was expecting...”

“For things to be normal.”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Yeah. I guess so.”

After a silent moment, her sister probed. “Do you still think you’re ready to find out why the marriage fell apart?”

Before she had left the hospital, she had argued with her family about just this topic. She had been so certain that she could handle anything that she found out about her marriage. But now? One awkward breakfast had made her feel so depressed, so disconnected from the Brand family. She used to be a favored sister to Bruce’s brothers. Now, the way Gabe and Hunter had looked at her...

Joy added when her sister didn’t respond right away, “If you want me to tell you what happened, Savannah, you know I will.”

“No,” Savannah said with a definitive shake of the head. “I’m not ready. Not yet.”

* * *

She had sulked for a while after she had placed calls to both sisters and her mother. But then Savannah decided that moping wasn’t her idea of making use of a beautiful Sunday. She found her way out to a patch of ground that was her kitchen garden; she loved to cook with fresh, homegrown vegetables picked right out of the garden. The garden was overgrown with layers of weeds; the pretty little white picket fence Bruce had built and painted as a surprise for her was dirty and unkempt. With her hands on her hips, Savannah shook her head. The fence, once her pride, was leaning in places; pickets were broken from animals and weather.

“What a mess.”

The garden seemed to be a metaphor for her marriage. Would she ever get used to seeing things so changed, when in her mind, it was just yesterday when her life was perfect? Her marriage had been full of laughter and romance and lovemaking; she’d been a beloved member of Sugar Creek Ranch and her garden had been teeming with fresh veggies, ripe for the picking.

“How do you eat an elephant, Hound Dog?” she asked her companion.

She was going to clean up this garden, one weed at a time. Savannah found her toolshed virtually untouched; she pulled on her gloves, and retrieved hand tools and a sturdy hoe. Armed with her weapons to beat back the weeds and decay, she stepped into the garden, reclaimed the ground as her own, dropped to her knees and began to yank out the weeds. A couple of weeds into the process, sweat began to form on her forehead and on her neck. It felt good to sweat; it felt good to take out her frustration on these stupid, creeping weeds that had ruined her beautiful garden.

“What are you doing?”

Savannah had been deep in thought, focused on ripping as many weeds from the ground as possible; she hadn’t heard her husband approach. She sat back on her heels and wiped the sweat from her brow before it rolled down into her eyes.

“Pulling weeds.”

Bruce—to her, the most handsome man in the world—had his shirt unbuttoned and his stomach, chest and neck were covered in sweat. Normally—at least the normal she remembered—she would have stood up and wiped that sweat from his neck and chest with her hands, stealing a kiss along the way. It hadn’t taken her long at all to figure out that this sexual flirtation wouldn’t be welcome. Not long at all.

“You have a concussion, Savannah,” he reminded her in a slightly condescending way.

She stared at him in response.

He added, a little less bossy, “The doctor said you needed to rest.”

“This is how I rest,” Savannah argued. She turned back to her weeds. “If I go to bed now, I’ll be awake all night. You know that’s true.”

Silence stretched out between them, and then she heard him walk away. She didn’t glance behind her to watch him; she focused on the blasted weeds instead. She hadn’t expected him to join her—they didn’t spend Sundays together anymore. And yet, he did return. Wordlessly, Bruce came back to the garden with Buckley and Murphy following at his heels. He knelt down in the dirt and began to pull out the weeds in the second row.

They worked like that silently, side by side, until they had completely cleared the first two rows of her garden of the layers of overgrowth. Bruce stood up and then offered his hand to her, which she accepted. Toward the end of the row, she was beginning to feel exhausted and woozy. But she was determined to finish at least one row before she gave in to her body.

“Well,” Savannah said, more to herself than to Bruce. “It’s a start.”

Bruce was staring at her face with an inscrutable expression in his slightly narrowed, bright blue eyes. “Yes,” he agreed after a moment. “I suppose it is.”