Dixie Browning - The Bride-In-Law

“Yeah, sure you are. If you can pry your cousin’s hooks out of his hip pocket, that’ll be favor enough to suit me.”

“Fine. I’ll tell your father’s wife you refuse to take him his blood pressure medicine. Do you know the name of his physician, just in case?”

“What blood pressure medicine?” He opened the door wider and muttered, “You might as well come inside.”

Annie did, but only because she wasn’t sure he wouldn’t grab her by the arm and yank her inside if she refused. He had that look about him.

The interior was no more inviting than the exterior. A stack of boxes in one corner. A dull green file cabinet, a gray metal desk, a scarred draftsman’s table and two tan metal chairs. If you didn’t count the red mud that had been tracked inside, the only bit of color to be found was in the row of hard hats that hung over a small rusty refrigerator—two white, a blue, an orange and a yellow—and a feed store calendar on the opposite wall.

“You might as well sit down.” He waved her to one of the two worn oak chairs. “I’ve got a few things to say to you.”

“The medicine.”

“In a minute.”

She took a deep breath and tried to remember the lessons of a lifetime, but nothing in all the years she’d spent among decent, civilized people had prepared her for dealing with a surly, motorcycle-riding construction worker in an ugly metal trailer out in the muddy middle of nowhere.

So she sat. Back straight, ankles crossed and hands resting one of top of the other on her lap. But no amount of outward composure could prevent the color from rising to stain her cheeks.

Tucker flexed his fingers, stiff from hours of clutching a pencil and years of working with his hands. Incipient arthritis. Wet weather didn’t help. He studied the woman seated across the desk from him, reluctantly revising his earlier opinion. She wasn’t as old as he’d thought yesterday, nor quite as plain. But her raincoat was every bit as ugly as he remembered it and so were her shoes. Nor had her disposition undergone any miraculous overnight transformation.

“So what is it you want me to do?”

“Go home and get your father’s medicine and take it to him. I suppose.”

“You suppose?”

“That’s the message I was given. You didn’t answer your home phone, and your father couldn’t remember your mobile, so Bernie called me to pass on the message.”

“Harold knows how to reach me here.”

She shrugged. “All I know is what I was told. If you’re too busy to be bothered, then I’ll call Bernie and tell her—”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, just hang on a minute will you?”

Annie hung on. Just barely. She was cold. Her head still ached, and there was something about the man that set her teeth on edge. As a rule, she reacted to people on an intellectual level. There was nothing faintly intellectual about her reaction to Tucker Dennis. She felt like grabbing him with both hands and shaking him!

“I can turn up the heat if you’re cold.”

“Thanks, but I won’t be here long enough.”

He shrugged. “Your call. I thought I saw you shiver.”

Outside, the rain began to drum down on the metal, making it impossible to carry on a normal conversation. Annie winced as her headache reacted to the noise.

Raising his voice over the roar, Tucker yelled, “Okay, I’ll go as soon as the rain slacks off.”

“What?” She took off her glasses and pressed the heels of her hand into her eyes, and he was struck all over again by how vulnerable she looked without them.

Yeah, sure she was. Vulnerable like a baby copperhead, which was about twice as lethal as an adult specimen.

“I said—” Instead of repeating himself, he stood, moved around behind her and nudged the controls of the gas heater. She wasn’t wearing her scarf today. With her head lowered, about four inches of bare neck showed between her collar and the wad of damp brown hair knotted at the back of her head. Her skin looked as if it had never seen the sun.

“Headache?” he asked, his voice sounding gruff even to his own ears.

The impression of vulnerability disappeared along with the sliver of bare nape as she raised her head and squared her shoulders. Tucker thought of the way his father used to massage his mother’s shoulders when she had one of her tension headaches. He wondered who massaged away this woman’s pain. Or if anyone did.

And then he wondered why the hell he was wondering.

By the time Annie drove off a few minutes later, the rain had let up. Even so, the going was treacherous. She slithered twice on the mud-slick road, telling herself she’d done all she could do. If Harold’s blood pressure shot sky-high, it was his son’s fault, not hers. She could hardly break into his house and get the stuff herself. Didn’t even know where he lived.

All the same, she was relieved when she slowed down to turn onto Highway 52 to see one of the trucks with the Dennis Construction logo on the door pull away from the construction site. Evidently the man possessed some vestigial sense of responsibility.

Ruffian was the term that came to mind. That had been one of her father’s favorite descriptions. He’d attached it to hardened criminals, aggressive drivers and the kids who trampeled the parsonage flowerbeds. She hadn’t heard anyone use it in years.

“Oh, God, Annie, you’re a walking anachronism,” she muttered.

The school secretary, all of twenty-two years old, would have said—had said, in fact on more than one occasion—“Get a life, Annie.”

Good advice. Annie had done her best, only her best didn’t seem to be good enough.

Three

The marriage was perfectly legal. The bride and groom were both of age and of sound mind, although there was some slight doubt about that last part, at least to Annie’s way of thinking.

Tucker’s, too. He left her in no doubt of his opinion when he showed up to collect Bernie’s spare reading glasses a day or so later.

“About time you got home,” he growled. He’d been waiting when she’d driven up, tired, hungry and burdened with a stack of books, two sacks of groceries and the dry cleaning she’d picked up on the way home.

She shot him a look that said it all. Her headache might be gone, but as usual the last day of the term had been utter chaos. And now, with Bernie’s situation, any hope of getting away for a few days was gone. “If your father thinks he’s landed in a bed of roses, he just might be in for a surprise. Bernie’s not the easiest person to live with.”

“That I can believe.” He looked as if he wanted to say more, but thought better of it. Instead, he took the dry cleaning from her, followed her inside and looked around for a place to deposit it. She indicated the coat tree that stood between the glass-paneled door and the entrance into the front parlor, never mind that no one had parlors these days. Her house did. Two of them, front and sun. One had leaky windows, the other a cracked ceiling.

Her toe struck one of Zen’s toys, a pair of small brass balls linked together by a dangling tab, and she kicked it aside, too tired even to pick it up and toss it into his basket. She liked animals, truly she did, but this particular creature took a diabolical delight in irritating her. “All right, what is it this time? Your father forgot his corn plasters?” she asked, resigned to having to wait a few more minutes before she could change into her robe and slippers, brew herself a cup of strawberry tea and zone out, as the schoolkids put it. Whatever it meant, it sounded like just what she needed. Nirvana.

“Your cousin needs her glasses.”

“The last time I saw her she was wearing her glasses.” Annie removed her own and closed her eyes momentarily. It didn’t help. When she opened them again, he was still there.