Tempting Fate

“I have to know the truth, Zeke.”

He remained silent and still, hot liquid pain coursing through him. He had to repress his physical reaction and concentrate on the situation at hand. He had to be the cool, distanced professional. He had to ask himself the tough questions. Not just about his brother, but about Naomi herself. She was a woman he’d known and trusted all his life, but he forced himself to ask if the years of loneliness and abuse had finally driven her over the edge and he was being sucked along with her, just by being back in Cedar Springs, back under Jackson Witt’s roof.

But there were never any saner eyes than the ones that held him to his seat.

There was more. He could tell. But he didn’t prod her. Experience had taught him patience. Rush people and they could panic and make up things. Let them think. Choose their words. Hide what they wanted to hide. Sometimes it worked better if they had control. He could learn more about what was really at stake and what wasn’t.

Naomi withdrew another envelope from her Bible, handed it to Zeke. “Joe sent this to me with the picture. He asked me to hang on to it and not open it.” She smoothed her skirt with her unnaturally bent fingers. “I didn’t, until I saw the picture of Dani Pembroke wearing that gold key.”

Her eyes were lowered, and Zeke pulled a yellowed sheet of typing paper from the envelope and unfolded it. There were four lines of type:

Don’t underestimate me. The whole world will know Lilli Chandler Pembroke isn’t the perfect heiress she pretends to be. But your secret is safe with me if you pay up tonight.

Zeke didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to.

“I’m not asking you to be a hero,” Naomi Witt Hazen said softly. “All I’m asking is for you to be that brave, levelheaded young man I once knew who so badly wanted to do some good in the world.”

As if it were so easy. As if the kid Zeke Cutler had been—so filled with energy and optimism and determination—mattered anymore. He’d failed and changed in ways he didn’t want to examine and maybe didn’t want Naomi to know, although he could see she did.

She collapsed back against the soft cushion of her chair. In her look of fatigue and near despair was the impact of the years, of the losses she’d endured and the choices she’d made. “I believe in you, Ezekiel Cutler.” She sounded worn down, as if that was the last belief she held and now even it was being challenged. “I believe in you even if you don’t believe in yourself.”

He couldn’t meet her eye. He’d faced death as recently as six weeks ago and now couldn’t look at the old woman who’d always been there for him.

“Will you go?” she asked.

Before he’d opened her letter in San Diego, he’d have said he’d put the past behind him. Now, sitting in the dark Old South parlor, Zeke knew he’d only been sidestepping the past, one land mine at a time in a field of hundreds, always aware, somewhere in the recesses of his mind, that his next step could blow him and those around him—anyone left he cared about—to pieces.

He jumped up, unable to sit another second.

As he started across the threadbare Oriental rug, he saw in Naomi’s face the fear that Zeke Cutler would fail her as so many others before him had.

“I need to think,” he said.

And he walked into the entry and out the front door, onto the porch and into the heat and glare of a Tennessee summer afternoon.

In the shade of the oak trees Jackson Witt had planted almost a century ago, Zeke walked down West Main, where the memories were as pervasive and unavoidable as the summer heat. He could see himself and Joe, shirtless and barefoot, on their way home from swimming in the creek. As a boy, Zeke had never even noticed the heat. Now he could feel the humidity settling over him, could smell the exhaust that hung heavy in the oppressive air. He was aware of the constant hum of traffic on a street where dogs used to lie in the sun on warm mornings.

The memory came at him sideways, fast and silent, catching him defenseless.

It was a hot, still afternoon, like this one, twenty-five years ago.

Naomi’s husband, Wesley Hazen, had dropped dead of a heart attack at his office at the woolen mill, on the same day his estranged wife had finally talked to her father—who for the previous ten years had maintained he had no daughters—into seeing the doctor about his stomach trouble. Doc Hiram referred him to a cancer specialist in Nashville. The old man refused to make an appointment. His father had been born in Cedar Springs and died there, and that was good enough for Jackson Witt. How long was a man supposed to live? Joe Cutler had driven him to Doc Hiram’s office on account of Jackson Witt’s being too sick to drive himself and too stubborn to ride in a car with Naomi.

When he got back home, Joe told Zeke what had happened. Zeke was thirteen and knew that Jackson Witt wasn’t the benevolent old man most people in Cedar Springs pretended he was. He had started Cedar Springs Woolen Mill to provide jobs for the impoverished people of his town, a market for its farmers’ wool, opportunities for its children. Back then it was the biggest employer in town.

“So Mr. Witt’s going to die?” Zeke asked.

“Not right away.”

“What’ll happen to Mrs. Hazen?”

“I expect she’ll go on pretty much the way she’s been going. Truth is, she’ll be better off with him gone.”

Joe was eighteen and worked the graveyard shift at the mill. He still lived at home, in their little one-bedroom, uninsulated house northeast of the square. He gave half his paycheck to their mother to help out, covered his own expenses and banked any left over. Someday, he’d told Zeke, he’d leave Cedar Springs, maybe go to California. He said he didn’t plan to work the graveyard shift at Cedar Springs Woolen Mill the rest of his life. But right now his mother and Zeke needed him, and he’d stick around.

After taking Jackson Witt to the doctor’s, Joe, who hadn’t been to bed since getting off work at seven that morning, turned on the baseball game and sacked out on the couch. When Emmy Cutler came home from her shift at the mill, she got him up and called Zeke in from playing ball and told them Wesley Hazen was dead.

“He had a heart attack right at his desk.” She looked tired, as she almost always did. She was a thin, dark-haired woman who’d once been pretty. “He went quick. Now, I want you boys to go into town and get a dress coat and tie. I’ll iron your good white shirts. There’ll be calling hours probably the day after tomorrow, and then the funeral. I want you both to go.”

“Mother,” Joe said, “we can’t afford new coats.”

“I’ve got some money put away. You take it and go on. Wes Hazen and Jackson Witt gave me a job when I needed one. I was a widow with two small boys, and I don’t know what I’d’ve done without the mill. Don’t matter what anybody else says about Mr. Hazen, we’re going to pay our respects.”

Joe was adamant. “If a clean shirt’s good enough for church, it’s good enough for Wes Hazen’s funeral.”

Emmy Cutler was equally adamant. “You listen to me, Joe Cutler. If I have to get in the car and drive to Nashville myself and buy you two coats, then that’s what I’ll do. By this time you boys ought to know when I mean business.”

Zeke hadn’t said anything, but he was used to their mother lumping him and Joe together. She went into her bedroom and came back with a bunch of twenties in a rubber band.

“I’ll bring back the change,” Joe said.

“There’d better not be much. I won’t have people in this town saying I wasn’t grateful for what Wesley Hazen did for me.”

Joe’s eyes darkened. “Like what? Work you half to death at sweatshop wages—”

“I won’t have that kind of talk in my house. There’s never been a Cutler too proud to work. Now, you take your brother and go. Zeke, make sure he goes to a decent store. I want you coming home with proper coats and ties.”

Zeke nodded but made no promises, not where his brother was concerned. Joe didn’t listen to him any more than he did anyone else. When it came to their mother’s sense of right and wrong, however, Joe usually relented. They went to Dillard’s, but Joe hunted up a couple of khaki coats on the clearance racks that looked good enough to him. Since they’d been instructed not to come back with much change, he bought their mother a bottle of perfume and a pretty scarf and took Zeke to the local diner for a piece of chess pie.

When they got back home, Joe gave their mother her change and her presents, then said he’d go to the bank in the morning and pay her back for his coat and tie. Emmy Cutler said he was impossible; then she hugged him.

Over five hundred people attended Wesley Hazen’s funeral, and Joe muttered to Zeke that he’d bet nobody would have noticed if they hadn’t worn a coat and tie. Their mother had on her new scarf. Zeke looked around and saw Naomi sitting in back with the lowest-paid workers from the mill. She had on a black suit and a black hat with a veil. Her face was very pale, and she looked tiny. She hadn’t lived with Wesley since she’d run off with Nick Pembroke ten years earlier.

Her father was up front with the Hazen family and the mill management. He never looked back at Naomi.

“I’m going back to sit with Mrs. Hazen,” Zeke whispered to his mother. Emmy Cutler looked pained; she didn’t tell him yes, but she didn’t tell him no, either. So Zeke sneaked to the back of the church. Naomi smiled at him. It was a sad, soft smile, but at that moment Zeke knew she didn’t mind being an outcast. It was the only way she had of being who she wanted to be.

That night Joe Cutler announced over supper that he was heading to New York to find Mattie Witt and tell her that her daddy was dying. Zeke expected his mother to argue with him. From the look on his brother’s face, he guessed Joe expected the same thing.

But Emmy Cutler surprised her two sons. Or maybe she just knew Joe. Dipping her spoon into a bowl of redeye gravy, she said, “You do what you think is right.”

“Can I go, too?” Zeke asked.

His mother put the spoon back into the bowl. She hadn’t gotten any gravy. Her eyes misted over. “That’s up to your brother,” she said.

“Won’t you need him here?” Joe asked.

“I reckon it’s time I started learning to do without you two boys. Now you go on and make up your own minds about what you need to do. I’ll be fine.” She folded her hands in front of her plate and looked at her sons. “I have just one request.”