We Hope for Better Things Page 11

  “They’re lovely. You’re very talented.”

  He smiled and sat back. “I knew you would like them. Those are yours to keep.”

  “Thank you. Though I’m not sure what to do with them. It would be strange to hang photos of myself in my apartment. You don’t want to keep them?”

  “I got the negatives. I can make more of you whenever I want.”

  “I’m pretty replaceable, then?” she said, raising her eyebrows.

  He tipped his head. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  Nora felt her stomach flutter at his intense gaze. There was something in his eyes she had never seen in any of the guys she’d dated. Like Michael Kresge, they had all been from wealthy families much like hers. Their eyes had appraised her like a new car, determining whether others would be jealous enough when they saw her on their arm.

  William’s eyes had seen past her brittle shell and were drawing out the carefree girl she wished she could be.

  And at that moment, on a nondescript tan couch in an impeccably clean living room at Twelfth and Seward, Nora fell in love with the wrong man.

  fifteen

  Lapeer County, January 1862

  Mary hung back in the sanctuary as the rest of the congregation filed out into the snow. Men and boys drove their horses and sleighs up to the shoveled path at the church door, tucked their women in under furs and blankets, and headed for home where the fires waited to be stoked. Each month it seemed another young man was missing from their midst, sucked into the growing maelstrom to the south. The joy of Christmas faded, and though it was the dawn of a new year, there was a palpable lack of cheer.

  Bridget handed Mary her cloak. “Are you ready, ma’am?”

  “Nearly. Fetch the sleigh. I’ll only be a moment.”

  Bridget shook the minister’s hand and disappeared through the door.

  Reverend Whittaker turned to Mary. “Well, Mrs. Balsam, it seems you are reluctant to leave. Is there something on your mind?”

  “Very perceptive, Reverend, as always. There is something about which I should like to speak with you—briefly. I won’t keep you from your Sunday dinner.”

  “Of course, my dear. What can I do for you?”

  Mary lowered her voice despite the empty room. “As you know, I am currently housing an escaped slave at my husband’s behest. He is an upright and God-fearing man, and you can’t imagine what a help he was to me during the harvest. Indeed, I find that he is indispensable.”

  The minister nodded in a noncommittal manner. Mary couldn’t tell if he was agreeing or if he simply wanted to get home to the hot meal Mrs. Whittaker was preparing.

  “George has been learning to read, which he had been forbidden to do by his former master, and he longs to come to church. He knows Bible stories that were passed down verbally, but now that he is reading the very Word of God, he’s encountering things he doesn’t understand, and I’m not so sure I’m the best person to interpret them. He’d so benefit from sitting under your preaching, and he is starved for Christian community.”

  Reverend Whittaker held up a hand, and Mary realized she had been rambling. “Mrs. Balsam, are you asking to bring him with you to church on Sundays?”

  “I guess I am. I know that not everyone here is for abolition, but I can’t imagine why anyone would deny a fellow human being the chance to worship.”

  “Indeed.” The minister appeared deep in thought, and Mary held her tongue to allow him to consider her appeal. “Mrs. Balsam, I believe your request comes from a kind and generous heart. I can’t say how he will be received by some, but I do believe it would be against Christian teaching and Christian charity to exclude someone from worship. Were there a Negro congregation close by, it wouldn’t be an issue, as he would just go there. But we cannot expect that out here in such wild country.”

  Mary allowed her hopes to rise. “Then I may bring him with us?”

  Reverend Whittaker smiled. “Yes, you may. And I will preach on Paul’s letter to the Galatian church in support.”

  “Oh, thank you, Reverend.” Mary grasped his hand. “George will be so thrilled.” She threw her cloak around her shoulders, and Reverend Whittaker walked her to the door. A sprinkling of snow peppered Bridget and the horses as they waited by the shoveled pathway. Mary turned back once more to her minister. “Thank you again.”

  Reverend Whittaker nodded. “Oh, Mrs. Balsam?”

  “Yes?”

  “It may be best if you came in rather late and sat in the back row.”

  Mary’s smile faltered. “Of course.”

  She felt like someone had offered her a slice of apple pie and then handed her nothing but burnt crust. But then, George could learn as easily from the back row as from the front row.

  The smile on George’s face when Mary relayed the news to him at dinner an hour later was the brightest she had yet seen. With each passing week since his arrival, Mary had detected changes in George. His external wounds had healed and faded. He had put on some much-needed extra weight. His subservient manner had changed so that he no longer seemed like a chastened dog but a partner in the work on the farm. And now, five months into his stay, he had truly smiled.

  In that moment, Mary realized that he was a handsome man. On the heels of that realization was another—that he was indeed a man. She counted up the months that Nathaniel had been gone and recognized with unsettling clarity that she did not simply miss her husband; she longed for a man’s touch.

  Mary, Bridget, and George had been eating at the same table without discomfort for months. But during Sunday dinner, as she caught herself staring at him, Mary wished he were eating in the kitchen. The meal could not end fast enough, and as soon as she could do so without seeming rude, Mary excused herself and fled to the library, leaving Bridget to clean up.

  With the return of the weekly routine the next day, Mary felt back to normal. When George came in to breakfast after feeding the animals, he was once again just George. And when the two of them sat down in the library for his lessons, she was merely the teacher and he the student.

  “I’m quite happy with your progress reading,” Mary said after he had read aloud a passage from Acts. “And now I think we must focus on writing for a time. You’ve progressed as far as you can with the slate. We must get you to write your letters smaller and work on your script. If you are ever to have a business for yourself, you cannot write out orders or receipts with such a shaky hand. I’ve decided to let you try paper and ink.”

  Mary pulled some supplies together from the desktop and gave George a quick lesson in dipping the nib in the ink and applying the correct amount of pressure to create a bold line with no splotches. “It will take a good deal of practice, so please don’t get discouraged.”

  He stared at the paper. “What should I write?”

  Mary thought but a moment and then retrieved the Bible from the library table. She flipped to Philemon. “Copy this entire letter. You may only use one piece of paper.”

  George looked dubious. An hour later he stood up and brought the paper to where she sat reading. “I can’t get that whole letter on just one sheet of paper.”

  “Yet,” she corrected. “You can’t do it yet. Your letters are too large. You will have to write smaller. Try it again on the back.”

  By the end of the day, George had attempted the feat five times. Each time he could fit more words on the paper, until finally all he was missing were Paul’s greetings at the end.

  “Nicely done,” Mary said. “And now you have the back side of that paper to fill.”

  “Could I write a letter of my own?”

  “To whom?”

  “I have a sister.”

  Mary hesitated. She couldn’t allow George to write a letter to someone he knew in the South and risk alerting his former master to his whereabouts. Perhaps it was foolish to have taught him to write at all.

  “Can she read?”

  “No, but one of the girls she looks after does.”

&
nbsp; “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Wouldn’t that be dangerous for you both?”

  George’s face fell, but he nodded his understanding. After a moment’s thought he said, “Could I write a letter to you?”

  sixteen

  Lapeer County, September

  A downpour began Thursday night—a heavy, constant flow of water from sluggish clouds. The next morning it was still coming down at the same steady rate, now peppered with lightning and thunder. I couldn’t work outside in the garden, which was okay by me. Every muscle screamed for rest.

  Nora and I were playing gin at the kitchen table when a flash of light and a crack of thunder got me thinking of power outages and flashlights and flooded basements—all those things that were exciting as a child and irritating as an adult.

  “Do you lose power much out here?”

  “On occasion.”

  “Where do you keep a flashlight?”

  “I have one by my bed, and there are candles in the drawers above the table linens.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen those.”

  Nora looked up from her cards. “Been snooping around?”

  My breath stopped. “What?”

  She smiled. “I don’t mind. I’m not hiding anything.”

  I thought of the locked trunk and the locked room and had to stop myself from snickering out loud. “I was looking for matches,” I said, though I already knew where they were. “I thought I’d burn up that weed pile.”

  “You’ll find the matches in the kitchen, in the drawer by the phone. But I don’t think you’ll be burning anything out there anytime soon with all this rain.”

  The card game continued until I’d lost track of the number of times Nora had won. Finally she went to her sewing room and I tried to distract myself with reading. I was getting stir-crazy in this house in the middle of nowhere. Back in Detroit, I sometimes went a dozen places in a day. I didn’t have to think about how to fill downtime because there was no downtime. All I did was work.

  I felt more urgently than ever that I needed to bring up the camera and the photos, get the story, and get the heck out of here and back to Detroit. What was I waiting for anyway? Mr. Rich had probably blown the whole thing out of proportion. I should just call him and tell him I was ready for the photos.

  As I drifted off to sleep that night, I resolved to do just that.

  I woke Saturday morning to an emptiness. It took a moment for me to realize that it was the lack of the constant drum of rain on the roof. Outside the air was cool and wet and invigorating. The plants in the garden looked greener than they had two days ago and showed signs of new growth. A glance at the bare dirt I had left when I pulled out the weeds revealed a sprinkling of seedlings that I would need to eradicate.

  I retrieved my spade and turned the earth to smother this newest generation of weeds. Deprived of light, the unwanted growth would soon die off. That’s what the books said, anyway. But if I didn’t fill those spots in with good plants and some mulch, the weeds would take advantage of the empty space and fill it up themselves. A trip to the nearest garden center seemed in order. If nothing else, it would get me out of this house.

  “That would be lovely!” was Nora’s response to my suggested outing. “We’ll go grocery shopping as well. We’re starting to run low on most everything.”

  I hadn’t driven in a week, and I guess hadn’t really missed that aspect of Detroit life. No traffic jams. No long red lights. No angry honking. No near misses with jaywalkers and cyclists. And I was getting less twitchy about not having internet access. I didn’t exactly miss hearing the constant beeps notifying me of texts and tweets and status updates. Out here it was just the ambling, quiet life of the country. A comfortable obscurity.

  It wasn’t exactly thrilling—nothing like seeing my byline on the front page. But at least I felt needed. I was watching over someone. Someone who didn’t particularly want to be watched over. But still.

  We pulled up to Perkins Nursery not long after they opened and had the place practically to ourselves. Once we had come within range of a cell tower, my phone had begun to buzz with activity. When Nora wandered off to browse, I flipped through the texts, notifications, and emails until I saw one from Desiree.

  Before we’d been cut off by the sheer density of nothingness in the atmosphere of rural Lapeer County, she’d offered to follow up on a few leads I’d managed to scrounge up on Judge Sharpe. There was still a chance that I could salvage my reputation if I could prove he was hiding something nefarious about his service during the riots. Now my heart sank as I read the email she had sent a day earlier.

  I know I promised to come through for you on this, but I’m just not sure there’s a real story here. He seems clean. Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam, lots of service to the community, no one seems to have anything bad to say about him. And there’s just nothing out there about him in particular in connection to the riots. All we have is a little info on where his unit was, but with the chaos of that week, who knows if he was ever where you think he was. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to back out. Jack is getting suspicious. Good luck with your aunt. Catch a lightning bug for me!

  Desiree was a good researcher. Was it really possible that the reason we hadn’t found anything was that there wasn’t anything to find? But I was good too, and I had good instincts. The only reason I could think of for someone to avoid talking about a particular time in his life was that he was hiding something. There were a lot of people involved in those riots who did terrible things, assuming they wouldn’t have to answer to anyone for it. So far, most of them hadn’t.

  I grabbed an oversized metal cart and shuffled off to drown my frustrations in herbs. The plants looked unhappy to still be in their little plastic pots this late in the summer. I filled up my cart with end-of-season deals and pushed thoughts of Judge Sharpe out of my mind. Instead I focused on how pleased my new plants would be when I gave them room to breathe in the great wide open and found myself smiling in spite of everything.

  “Elizabeth, right?” said a voice from across the aisle.

  I looked up to see a man watching me. His khaki pants and green polo shirt were soiled, and each hand gripped the edge of a large pot of some sort of evergreen shrub. His eyes were hazel, almost green, striking against his dark skin.

  “Tyrese,” he said. “Remember? I met you at your aunt’s house.”

  “Of course. I didn’t recognize you without your hat and sunglasses.”

  He closed the space between us and looked at my cart. “Herb garden?”

  “Yes. My aunt has me revamping hers. It’s the little fenced-in area near that big tree. I guess it’s been around since the nineteenth century, but it’s been neglected for a long time.”

  He put down his pots and wiped his dirt-encrusted hands on his pants. “I never really took the time to look at it. What sort of plants are in there?”

  I searched my memory. “Mint, dill, some roses—”

  “What sort of roses?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea. There are no blooms on them now. And I guess I wouldn’t know even if there were.” I leaned in and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “I don’t actually know what I’m doing.”

  He laughed. “Would you mind if I took a look at them? I breed some of our roses here, and it’s always good to introduce heirloom stock into the mix, but it’s hard to find old varieties that are still viable. The roses you have may not be original to the garden, but I might get lucky and find something rare.”

  “What would you do with it?”

  “I could show you how to prune it and help it perform well—rejuvenate it a bit. Different types of roses require different care. And, if you were willing, I could take a few cuttings back with me. What do you think?”

  “You’d have to ask Nora. It’s not my garden.”

  I called Nora over and watched her closely as Tyrese explained his request. I was waiting for her to call him William so I could correct her. But she never called Ty
rese anything at all.

  “Certainly, you could come look at our roses. So long as it’s okay with Elizabeth. It’s her garden.”

  “She said it was your garden.” He smiled at me as he said it.

  “Oh, no. It’s Elizabeth’s garden.”

  We worked out the details as Tyrese followed us to the checkout. At the car, he opened the passenger door for Nora and loaded the plants. He shut the trunk and turned to me. “I’m looking forward to coming out tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” I said casually. “Should be fun.”

  We stood there a moment, both of us nodding slightly and looking for the conversation’s natural end, which you only ever do when you are hoping the other person will prolong it.

  “Okay, well . . . we’ll see you tomorrow then,” I finally said. I got in the car, wondering why Dana was so much better at these things than I was.

  Tyrese shut my door for me and waved. From the rearview mirror I could see that he was still watching us when I made the turn onto the road to head home.

  “He’s nice,” Nora said a little too innocently.

  I gave her a look.

  “What? He is.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. He was nice.

  Maybe I didn’t have to rush back to Detroit just yet.

  seventeen

  Detroit, May 1963

  “Let’s sit out on the porch.” William nodded toward the front windows where the evening flirted with twilight.

  “Go on,” came Mrs. Rich’s voice from the head of the table. “Bianca and I’ll wash up. J.J., don’t you slink off now. You know you need to clear this table first.”

  Nora had eaten dinner at William’s house five times in the past four weeks. William’s mother was a perfect hostess, and Nora could tell the older woman was trying to make her guest feel at home. Bianca had warmed to her a little but was still guarded. J.J. hadn’t said word one despite William’s efforts to get him to talk.