The Wedding Tree

Book 1: Wedding Tree

by Robin Wells

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

National bestselling author Robin Wells weaves a moving epic that stretches from modern-day Louisiana to World War II-era New Orleans and back again in this multigenerational tale of love, loss and redemption.

Hope Stevens thinks Wedding Tree, Louisiana, will be the perfect place to sort out her life and all the mistakes she’s made. Plus, it will give her the chance to help her free-spirited grandmother, Adelaide, sort through her things before moving into assisted living.

Spending the summer in the quaint town, Hope begins to discover that Adelaide has made some mistakes of her own. And as they go through her belongings, her grandmother recalls the wartime romance that left her torn between two men and haunted by a bone-chilling secret. Now she wants Hope’s help in uncovering the truth before it’s too late.

Filled with colorful characters, The Wedding Tree is an emotionally riveting story about passion, shattered dreams, unexpected renewal and forgiveness—not only for others, but for ourselves.

Release date: December 1, 2015

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 432

Sample

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

raves for the novels of robin wells

title page

copyright

dedication

acknowledgments

1: adelaide

2: hope

3: hope

4: matt

5: adelaide

6: hope

7: adelaide

8: adelaide

9: adelaide

10: hope

11: matt

12: hope

13: adelaide

14: hope

15: adelaide

16: hope

17: adelaide

18: matt

19: hope

20: adelaide

21: matt

22: adelaide

23: adelaide

24: hope

25: adelaide

26: adelaide

27: matt

28: adelaide

29: matt

30: hope

31: matt

32: adelaide

33: adelaide

34: matt

35: hope

36: adelaide

37: hope

38: hope

39: matt

40: hope

41: adelaide

42: hope

43: adelaide

44: matt

45: adelaide

46: matt

47: hope

48: matt

49: matt

50: hope

51: hope

52: hope

53: adelaide

54: hope

55: hope

56: hope

57: matt

58: hope

59: adelaide

readers guide

1

adelaide

Funny, how you keep telling yourself, someday. Someday I’ll get organized. Someday I’ll get everything sorted out. Someday I’ll tackle the tasks I’ve been dreading all these years.

I kept waiting until I had a big block of time. A few free days, I thought. And, of course, they never came. No day is ever really free. And the truth is, if I’m entirely honest—and I haven’t been on this topic, I admit it now—I didn’t want to sort through my belongings. Sorting through meant looking back, and looking back meant confronting things I’d spent most of my life trying to avoid.

So I put it off and put it off, and then, just when I worked up my resolve and finally got started, this happened.

I’m foggy on what exactly it was this is—I can’t remember how I ended up here—but here I am all the same, hovering over my own body in a hospital room. I’m pretty sure it’s the hospital in my hometown of Wedding Tree, Louisiana, because I’ve visited lots of friends over the years and I recognize that awful gray linoleum flooring. When you’re visiting someone who’s really bad off, you spend a lot of time gazing down so you don’t have to look at their pain.

Anyway, here I am, floating against the ugly acoustical tile ceiling, looking down at an old woman with tubes snaking out of her nose and her arm veins. Apparently I’m not dead yet, because the old woman’s chest is falling and rising, and a machine wired up to her is steadily beeping—so hard to believe that ghastly-looking old gal is me! But if I’m up here watching the goings-on, I must be on the way out.

Which means it’s too late to make good on my intentions to sort everything out and do what I should have done sixty-something years ago.

“Never put off till tomorrow what you should do today.”

I turn my head at the familiar voice. “Mother?”

She’s floating beside me. At least, her head is—and her shoulders, too. The rest of her seems to trail off into vapor, but maybe my soul has poor eyesight. Mother’s hair is pinned up prim and proper, with neat waves on the sides, just the way she always kept it, and she’s wearing the dress with the starched lace collar that she was buried in forty-something years ago.

“Did I—did I just die?” I ask.

“Not yet, although if I were you, I’d die of shame, looking like that in a public place.” She looks down at the woman on the bed and clucks her tongue. Mother always had the highest standards for appearance and comportment, and clearly the woman on the bed was violating all of them. Her—no, my—hair is an unruly tangle of gray, far too long to be age appropriate. My skin is a blotchy testament to the fact I hadn’t stayed out of the sun as Mother had warned, and my mouth gapes open in a most undignified fashion.

Still, a hospital room isn’t exactly a public place, and—

“Don’t you sass me, young lady.”

I was hardly young—on what planet was ninety-one young? Besides, I didn’t think I’d spoken aloud.

“Thoughts, words—they’re all the same,” Mother says. “It’s all energy. There are no barriers on this side.”

Oh my.

“Oh my, indeed.”

“What happened?”

“You fell and hit your head. You’re unconscious, and you’re having an out-of-body experience.”

“So I can’t possibly help how I look.”

“A lady always manages to look her best for visitors.”

Oh—I had visitors! My view widens, like a zoom lens being reversed, to see three people gathered around my bed. I can only view the tops of their heads, but I’m sure the stocky man with the bald patch standing at the foot of the bed is my son, Eddie, and I think the tall, auburn-haired man beside him is his partner, Ralph.

I’ve always known Eddie is the way he is—they call it gay now, although in my day, that meant happy, and Eddie was always a sad, tentative, nervous boy. The word for Eddie’s kind, a word I only heard whispered when I was young, was queer. I never thought badly of him for it. The way I figured it, Eddie liked men, just like I did, and he can’t help it any more than I could. If someone told me to start liking women that way, I don’t reckon I could, so it stands to reason that Eddie couldn’t, either.

I tried to explain that to Eddie’s father, but he wasn’t having any of it. Charlie thought it was a character flaw and a choice. He took it personally, as if it were something Eddie was doing to annoy him—which couldn’t be further from the truth, because all poor Eddie ever wanted was to please his daddy.

But he couldn’t, and he couldn’t change the narrow minds of other townsfolk, and in a town as small as Wedding Tree, where everybody knew everybody else’s business, well, it was no wonder Eddie went to college in California and never moved back. How old is he now? Fifty- or sixty-something? So odd to think that my baby is that old. The top of his head, all bald like that, looks a lot like it did the day he was born. The sight makes me want to cry. Oh, how I wish I could see Eddie’s face!

Click.

All of a sudden, Eddie is framed in a portrait lens.

Oh, my—my soul is a camera! Well, that makes sense. It’s been an extension of my body throughout my life. I’ve been taking pictures for so long that I tend to frame things, to look at them and move my right finger, as if I’m pressing the shutter. This moment—freeze it, capture it, make it live forever. And this moment. And this one. And this one here.

“She pressed my hand,” a young woman says.

My view twirls as if my head were on a swivel mount. Click. Oh, there’s my granddaughter, Hope, sitting on my right, holding my hand. Such a lovely girl . . . So beautiful, with her wavy light brown hair and eyes the color of iced tea—so much like my late daughter, Rebecca.

The thought sends a stab of pain through me. “Is Becky with you?” I ask Mother.

“She’s on this side, but they wouldn’t let her come with me. Said you don’t get to see her until you clean up the mess you’ve made down there.”

“You mean . . . I’m going to get well?”

“Well, now, Adelaide, that’s like everything else in life. It’s entirely up to you.”

Was it? Was it really? I wasn’t sure that anything in my life had really been my doing—except for the mistakes, of course.

Mother levels me with a steely frown. “If you know what’s good for you, missy, you’ll get back down there and unleash the truth.”

Unleash—as if it were a dangerous animal. Well, that is about right. “I was trying to when I ended up here.”

“You were going about it all wrong. You need Hope’s help.”

I look back at my granddaughter. She looks so sad—sadder than she should look at the prospect of an old woman passing. She’d been sad when I’d last seen her, too—which was when? I was fuzzy about the recent past. All I knew was that when that cad of her ex-husband cheated on her, he’d stolen something from her—something more than her inheritance and her art gallery and her home, all of which he’d purloined right out from under her. That lowlife had robbed her of her view of herself as lovely and lovable.

We females are so vulnerable to that. Most of the women I’d photographed over the years didn’t have a clue how lovely they really were. They’d look in the mirror and just see flaws—then, years later, when they looked back through their old pictures, they always exclaimed, “I was so thin back then!” or “I had such nice skin!” In the present moment, so many beautiful things go unseen, eclipsed by some over-imagined imperfection.

Men don’t have that problem with their physical appearance—at least, not the straight ones. They all think they’re irresistible just the way they are. Most of them, of course, are completely deluded. But other men, like Joe . . .

Oh, why was I thinking of Joe now? I did not—not—want him to be my dying thought, not after spending so much of my life trying to forget about him.

“You get back down there and tell Hope everything,” Mother says.

Everything?

“Yes, everything.”

My soul flushes scarlet. Oh Lord—was this a foretaste of hell, having my mother read my thoughts? Mother shot me her most reproving look.

“I—I don’t see how that will make a difference,” I mentally stammer.

“Yours is not to wonder why; yours is but to do or die. Now get to it, and no dillydallying.” Mother turns her neat bun toward me, as if she were about to leave, then whips back around. “And be sure to dig up what Charlie buried.”

The beeping machine attached to the old woman in the bed stops for a moment, then rat-a-tat-tats like a high-speed shutter. “What? What did he bury?”

She lifts her eyebrows in that I’ll-brook-no-nonsense way of hers. “That’s what you need to find out, isn’t it?”

My soul flutters. “Do you know? My memory isn’t very . . .”

“You didn’t forget.” Mother’s voice is cold steel. “You never had the nerve to find out, and this is your last chance to rectify the situation.”

“But . . .”

But Mother is gone. Not so much as a vapor trail remains.

Click.

A feeling of suction, as if I were being vacuumed downward from the ceiling, followed by heaviness, and then . . . Oh, my head! Oh, how it hurt. And my chest! Heavens to Betsy! Mother hadn’t said anything about my chest.

“She’s awake!” my granddaughter says. “Gran’s eyes are open.”

I stare at her. She looks a little like Becky, but she isn’t. Becky is gone. Hope is alive.

And apparently, so am I. Although I have to say, it doesn’t seem to have much to recommend it.

2

hope

Do you know what day it is, Mrs. McCauley?” Dr. Warren leaned over Gran and shined a penlight in her eyes.

Gran scowled. “Of course I do.”

I wasn’t so sure. Gran had seemed to recognize me when she first opened her eyes, but then she’d closed them again, and when she reopened them a moment later, she called me by my mother’s name. I’d hated to correct her, because her eyes had held such a blue sky full of happy that I didn’t want to disappoint her.

Eddie had done it for me. “It’s Hope, Mom. Becky is gone, remember?”

“Gone where?”

Uh-oh. Uncle Eddie and I had exchanged a glance. Fortunately, that was the moment Dr. Warren—an angular, hawk-nosed man in a heavily starched white coat—had stepped into the room. I’d relinquished my bedside seat and stood with Eddie and Ralph as the doctor had asked Gran to move her arms and legs, to turn her head, to stick out her tongue, and to perform half a dozen other motor tasks. She’d passed each test with flying colors. Dr. Warren moved the light to Gran’s left eye. “So what day is it?”

“Friday,” Gran said.

The doctor moved the light to her right eye, then switched it off. “Actually, it’s Sunday, Mrs. McCauley.”

“Oops!” Gran gave a sheepish grin. “Guess I had one of those lost weekends I’ve always heard about.”

I laughed along with everyone else, but I was worried. Gran’s memory had always been encyclopedic. Facts, dates, numbers—she was more reliable than Wikipedia.

“Glad to see you still have your sense of humor,” Eddie said.

Gran squinted up at him. “Charlie?”

Eddie’s face fell. “No, Mom. It’s Eddie.”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course. Eddie, dear. And . . .” She frowned at Ralph.

“Ralph,” the lanky man supplied, putting his hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “Eddie’s partner.”

“Yes, yes, so nice to see you. When did you two get in from Chicago?”

“We live in San Francisco, Mom. Becky and Hope lived in Chicago.”

“Oh right.” Her blue-veined hand went to her forehead. “Is Becky here?”

Eddie and I exchanged another look. “She died, Mom. Three years ago. Her car crashed, remember?”

“Oh no.” Gran’s hand drifted down her mouth. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “Oh, dear. I . . . I’d forgotten.”

My fingers tightened on the steel railing. In the first few weeks after Mom’s death, sometimes I’d awaken and have a pain-free moment. Then the memory would hit, and my heart would squeeze like a wrung-out dishrag, and I’d feel all tight and twisted and knotted up. I hoped Gran wasn’t going through that hard, searing, brand-new pain all over again.

“Loss of memory is typical of a head injury,” Dr. Warren said, adjusting his wire-rim glasses on his hooked nose. He was looking at Gran, but I’m pretty sure he was really speaking to Eddie and me. “So is emotional lability and confusion.”

Gran’s gaze landed on me. The lack of recognition in her eyes alarmed me.

“I’m Hope,” I volunteered. “Your granddaughter.”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course. Hope, honey! It’s so good to see you. My mind is all clouded up right now—you’ll have to excuse me. How long have you been here?”

“Since early this morning.” The clock on the wall said it was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon, which meant I’d been there for about twelve hours. “I came as soon as I heard.”

I’d gotten the call from Gran’s next-door neighbor, Mrs. Ivy, at eight thirty Saturday night. I’d been in my sublet apartment in Chicago, pulling on my pajama bottoms—the ones optimistically printed with sheep jumping over fences—and surfing the on-demand cable TV menu for a movie I could stand to watch.

Which isn’t as easy as it sounds, now that I’ve grown bored with revenge movies. I’ve been bloodthirsty for nearly twelve months, and I consider it a sign of progress that I’ve moved beyond wishing the horrible, painful, humiliating things portrayed on the screen would happen to my ex-husband.

Still, I can’t stomach romances. All those happily-ever-afters make me want to hurl. I can’t stand movies about friends, either, because the woman I’d caught in my bed with my husband had been my very best friend—my high school BFF, my college roommate, the maid of honor at my wedding, who’d helped me pick out the very linens she was lying under my husband on.

So anyway, I was surfing for a quirky independent film, or maybe an action/adventure movie, while tugging on my pajama bottoms at a ridiculously early hour in the evening—which I know is a pathetic thing for a thirty-one-year-old single woman to do alone on a Saturday night, but then, I’m apparently no better at being single than I was at being married—when the phone rang. I hopped over to the bedside table, one leg in my pj’s, one leg out. The area code was southern Louisiana, but I didn’t recognize the number.

“Hope?” said a wavering falsetto. “It’s Eunice Ivy—your grandmother’s neighbor.”

A cement block of alarm hit my chest, sinking me to the edge of the bed.

“I’ve already talked to your uncle Eddie, and he asked me to give you a call,” she said.

Heaviness pressed on my clavicle, constricting my airflow. I immediately feared the worst. “What happened?”

“Your grandmother fell.”

My free hand covered my mouth. “Oh no.”

“Yes, I’m afraid she did. Her new neighbor on the other side—he’s Griff and Peggy Armand’s widowed son-in-law; he moved to Wedding Tree a few months ago with his two children. He bought the old Henry place. He’s a very nice man, and—”

“My grandmother,” I interrupted. “What’s happened to my grandmother?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” she said, her southern accent maddeningly slow. “Matt Lyons—that’s his name, the name of the new neighbor—saw Adelaide’s shed door open, which was unusual—it wasn’t even the day that Mr. Pickens comes to mow her lawn, and anyway, he’s very conscientious and wouldn’t just leave the door ajar—so he went over to check. He knocked at the front door first—he’s very polite, this Matt Lyons—but Adelaide didn’t answer. So he went around back to the shed, and that’s when he found her.”

My palm was so sweaty the phone started to slip. I tightened my fingers around it. “How is she?”

“Well, she fell. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Yes, but what . . . Was she . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to think, much less actually say, the words. It was a telephone call a lot like this one that had brought me the news about my mother. I shouldn’t have answered the phone, I thought wildly. If I hang up, maybe it won’t have happened. I wanted to hit the “End Call” button; I wanted it so badly I could practically hear the dial tone. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. “What happened?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Mrs. Ivy repeated.

So tell me already. For God’s sake, just tell me! But another part of me wanted her to continue her conversational meandering, to put off the facts as long as possible.

“He found her lying on the floor of the shed,” she continued. “Apparently she hit her head and fractured some ribs.”

A flashlight beam of hope gleamed through my fear. People don’t talk about fractured ribs if someone is dead—do they? “How—how is she?”

“Well, pretty bad.”

“But she’s alive?”

“Yes.”

I lay back on the bed, relief melting my bones.

“The ambulance came and took her to the hospital,” Mrs. Ivy continued. “I have the key to her house, so I went in and got her insurance card, then took it to the hospital. You know how hospitals are about getting the paperwork right. They don’t want to do anything unless they have the insurance information, so I found her purse—it was in the kitchen, by the—”

“Mrs. Ivy, I really appreciate all your help on this,” I broke in, “but please, just tell me . . . How bad is Gran? Can she talk?”

“Oh, no, dear. She hasn’t regained consciousness yet, which has the docs pretty worried. They fear she had a stroke. They’re running all kinds of tests, and Eddie is catching the first flight out. He asked me to call you so he could hurry up and make his travel arrangements. He said he’ll call you as soon as he’s en route to the airport.”

Gran and Uncle Eddie were the only close family I had left. My father had died when I was seven, and Mom was killed in a car crash three years ago—which was one of the reasons I think I married Kurt as quickly as I did; I wanted to feel like I belonged to someone.

“I’m coming, too. Can you . . .” I hated to ask, but I hated the idea of Gran being all alone at the hospital far more. “Can you or someone else in town stay with her at the hospital until Eddie or I get to Wedding Tree?”

“Oh, it’s already arranged, dear. Your grandmother’s women’s circle from church and her poker club and her Yahtzee group are taking shifts until Eddie or you arrive. And I’m pet-sitting Snowball—she’s right beside me, wagging her tail—so you don’t have to worry about her.”

Thank God for close-knit small towns. The very thing my mom had always hated about Wedding Tree—the way everyone was always up in everyone else’s business—was a blessing at a time like this.

As soon as I hung up, I flew into frantic action. I booked the first flight out, threw God-only-knew-what into a suitcase, and called my boss’s voice mail to explain I wouldn’t be at work on Monday—which wasn’t really a problem, because I didn’t really have a boss.

For that matter, I didn’t really have a job. I was working as a temp at a graphic design firm, where I mostly updated websites. I used to run the ridiculously upscale art gallery Kurt and I had bought with my mother’s inheritance, but we sold that—for a huge loss, I might add—as part of the divorce settlement. We also sold the extravagantly expensive home Kurt had insisted we buy—a house with a mortgage far greater than its value, thanks to the real estate market crash—and I currently would be homeless if a friend of a friend hadn’t sublet me her apartment while she spent a year in New Zealand. As a result of the divorce, I had no home, no job, and next to nothing left of the considerable amount of money I’d inherited.

Money that, in hindsight, was the real reason Kurt was so keen on marrying me in the first place. He’d burned through it at a rate that would have horrified me if I’d know the full extent of it—but I hadn’t, because I hadn’t wanted to see it. Like an ostrich, I’d kept my head in the sand. I still try very hard not to think about that, because it makes me feel like even more of an idiot than I already do.

Anyway, I landed at the New Orleans airport around three in the morning, then rented a car and made the hour-long drive to the Wedding Tree Parish General Hospital to find Eddie and Ralph already there. The three of us had been keeping a bedside vigil, taking turns dozing in the room’s two recliner chairs and talking with a constant stream of visitors, ever since.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Dr. Warren asked Gran.

“Talking to Mother.”

Eddie pressed his lips together as if he were trying not to cry. I awkwardly patted his back. Even though he was my mother’s brother and a generation older than me, there was something boyish about him that brought out my maternal instincts. Maybe it was his babyish cheeks or his teddy bear build—but most likely, it was the way he wore his tender heart on his sleeve.

He squeezed Gran’s hand. “Mom, Grandmother’s been dead for more than forty years.”

“Oh, I wasn’t talking to her down here,” she said in a don’t-be-silly tone. “I was talking to her up on the ceiling.”

Eddie blinked, his eyes overbright and moist. “Do you remember falling?”

“No.”

“Do you remember going to the shed? That’s where your neighbor found you.”

“What on earth was I doing out in the shed?”

Eddie shrugged. “Beats me, but it looked like you’d taken a shovel off the hook on the wall.”

I saw a glimmer in Gran’s eyes. She remembers, I thought—but instead of explaining, she turned to Dr. Warren. “When am I getting out of here?”

“That depends on where you think you’re going.” His craggy face creased in a friendly smile.

“Home, of course.”

“Well, we’ll talk about that later. You’re here for a while, Mrs. McCauley. You sustained a serious head injury, and we need to keep an eye on you and make sure you don’t have any bleeding or swelling in your brain. You’ve also fractured some ribs. We’ll have to see how you do when we get you up and around.”

“But I’ll get to go home, won’t I?”

Dr. Warren patted her leg through the blanket. “We’ll talk about all your options later. Are you in any pain?”

“My head feels like it’s cracked open, and it hurts to breathe.”

“I’ll order something to make you more comfortable. Just relax and get some rest, and I’ll be back to check on you later.” He said something to the nurse. As she fiddled with the IV drip, he scribbled on the chart, then signaled for us to follow him into the hall.

“How is she?” Eddie asked as soon as the door closed behind us.

“I’d say she’s doing very well, considering her age. There are no signs of a stroke. But she’s had a severe brain injury.”

“She’s awfully confused.” Eddie folded his arms across his chest as if he were trying to hug himself.

Dr. Warren nodded. “That’s to be expected.”

“How long will it last?”

“She’s likely to improve, but at her age, and with this level of trauma . . .” He paused. His face got that apologetic-sympathetic-uncomfortable look people get when they have to deliver bad news. “I’m afraid this was a life-changing event.”

A life-changing event. A chill went down my arms. Such simple, everyday words, yet put together in that order, in this situation, they were catastrophic.

The doctor flipped through the chart. “She was living alone?”

Eddie and I both nodded.

“I’m afraid that’s no longer going to be possible. You’ll need to make other arrangements.”

“She’s very independent,” I said. “Can’t we wait and see how her recovery goes?”

The doctor shook his head. “The fact she fell indicates that living alone is no longer a safe option. When you add in the effects of severe brain trauma, well, it’s just not advisable.”

“What if she won’t agree?” Eddie asked.

“You’ll need to convince her.”

“What if we can’t?” I asked.

A tense pause stretched in the air. “If a person is deemed to be a danger to herself or others, Social Services will step in. It’s preferable, of course, for the family to reach a resolution.” He looked at Eddie, then at me, his eyes full of that apologetic-sympathetic-uncomfortableness again. “Does she have any family in town?”

Eddie shook his head.

“Well, then, I suggest you contact Pine Manor.”

“Gran hates Pine Manor,” I protested. I’d gone with her to visit some of her friends who lived there last Christmas.

On the way out the door, she’d grabbed my hand. “Promise you’ll give me cyanide before you let Eddie put me in this place,” she’d begged.

I can’t say that I blamed her; the place smelled like old carpet, canned peas, and pissed Depends.

“Well, it’s the only elder care facility in Wedding Tree,” Dr. Warren said. “But there are some fine nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Hammond and Covington.”

Eddie shook h