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  “Okay,” David said, “that’s getting up there, but I have heard a few worse.”

  “When he was sixteen, my mother arranged for her beloved son to go to a dance with a very nice young girl. He was to pick her up at six P.M. At six-thirty Bertrand was sitting in the living room and my father asked him why he hadn’t gone on his date. My brother said, ‘Because she hasn’t come to get me yet.’”

  David laughed. “All this is a lie, isn’t it?”

  “Not a word.”

  “But how did he survive? What does he do with himself? How’d he get through school?”

  “My brother is a brilliant young man. In school he’d get someone to tell him what a book was about, and five minutes later he could discuss it. Debate it. He loves to sit and talk.” Edi wrung out a piece of cloth. “And gossip. He knows everyone in town, and they all tell him their secrets.”

  “I guess he didn’t go to war.”

  “Four-F. Flat feet.” When Edi gently pushed at another piece of cloth, David gave a little groan of pain. “Want to hear more?”

  “Yes,” he said through clenched teeth. “Got any about Austin? Something mean and juicy?”

  “No, just Bertrand stories. Want to hear why he didn’t go to his own wedding?”

  David opened his eyes wide and looked at her. “Tell me.”

  “My mother arranged everything. Bertrand saw the girl, said she was suitable, and that was enough for both my mother and the girl.”

  “Marrying money and an old name, right?”

  “I already told you there was no money. But, yes, there was the name,” Edi said. “My mother was thrilled and spent months planning the most elaborate wedding the town had ever seen. My father had to mortgage our old house. The evening before the wedding, my father went into his son’s room to have a talk with him about the wedding night.”

  “The wedding night,” David whispered. “I like this story the best of any you’ve told. Maybe of any I’ve ever heard in my whole life.”

  “No one knows exactly what was said by my father, but everyone heard Bertrand shout for the one and only time in his life. He yelled, ‘I have to do what?’”

  David started laughing. “Now you have me. That is the worst story I’ve ever heard. What happened?”

  “Bertrand stayed home the next day and nothing anyone said or did could get him to move.”

  “And his bride?”

  “She showed up for the wedding that never happened. Poor dear. Her family was so humiliated, six months later they moved to Atlanta.”

  “What did your brother say to explain?”

  “Nothing. To my knowledge he’s never mentioned that day. The work other people do has never concerned him.”

  “And your mother?”

  “After that, she stopped trying to manage her son’s life, and my father said that that was almost worth the expense of the wedding.”

  David was really laughing now, and Edi had finished with the bandages. She could tell by his eyes that he was at last comfortable enough to sleep. She pulled a quilt over him, then went to her own bed.

  When he whispered, “Good night,” she smiled and went back to sleep.

  20

  JOCELYN WAS LAUGHING when Luke finished reading. “I’ve heard so much about Bertrand that I wish I’d met him.”

  “He would have loved you.”

  “Really?” she asked, feeling flattered.

  “You leave your door open and people walk in and out all day. You feed anybody who stops by, and you always have time to listen to anyone. Yeah, I think you and Bertrand would have made great housemates.”

  “I’m not like that,” Jocelyn said. “I’m…”

  “You’re what? More like Miss Edi? Like the way that nurse described her, as cold and heartless?”

  “I ought to send that woman a copy of this story and see if she still thinks Edi is without a heart.” For a moment Joce was quiet as she sat up and looked at the water, hugging her knees to her chest. “To think that Miss Edi lost him. There she was in the war, surrounded by men who were making fools of themselves over her, but she saved herself for True Love, but when she found it…”

  “He was killed,” Luke said softly. “And later Miss Edi was injured severely. I wonder if that accident is why she didn’t marry and have children.”

  “You mean you think she couldn’t have children?”

  “I don’t know. How bad were her burns?”

  “Toward the end, I helped her dress, and the scars were from her knees down. I don’t think the fire went higher. She told me it was very cold that day, so everyone was bundled up, and two soldiers threw themselves on her with their heavy coats on. If they hadn’t done that, the fire would have spread, because she had gasoline all over her.”

  “Threw themselves on her,” Luke said, shaking his head. “And David was dead by then.”

  “Yes. She said that she called out for him in the hospital. They kept moving her from one hospital to another while they waited for her to die.”

  “They didn’t expect her to live?”

  “No,” Joce said. “The gasoline and the fire and even the wool of the men’s burned coats all caused her to develop a serious infection. She ran a high fever for weeks. I think General Austin stepped in and had her sent back to the States, even though she wasn’t working for him then.”

  “Did she quit him? Do you think she told him she couldn’t take his bad temper anymore?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask because she never even hinted that he was a difficult man. She just said that when she was burned she was still in England, but she was no longer working for General Austin. I don’t know what she was doing. I assume she was still in the military or she would have gone home to Edilean.”

  “Would she?” Luke asked.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Why would she go home to Edilean? What was waiting for her? An old house that costs a lot to keep in repair and a brother who set standards for laziness?”

  “And your very happy grandfather,” Joce said.

  “Yes, my happy grandfather, who had broken up with Edi the day after Pearl Harbor was hit.”

  “Did your grandfather ever tell you why they broke off their engagement?”

  “Yes. When we went to Richmond he told me that it was because they realized that there was nothing to find out about each other,” Luke said. “Gramps said that when he and Edi saw that they were excited to go off to war, they knew that their perfect lives weren’t so perfect after all. Miss Edi told Gramps that they should have been devastated that the future they’d always looked forward to was going to be changed, but they weren’t. Gramps said she gave back his ring, they shook hands, and laughed together, both of them quite happy for the engagement to be over.”

  “But they never told anyone.”

  “The whole town would have been sad. War was enough, but it was far away. Edi and David had been together all their lives.”

  Joce turned to look at him, stretched out on the blanket they’d brought, his head on his hands. “I’m glad I haven’t known you all my life.”

  He moved as though he were going to take her hand in his, but he didn’t. “Jocelyn, I think…,” he began, but cut himself off, then lay back on the blanket. “You still think I’m like your father?”

  “Why has that statement bothered you so much?”

  “Who wants to be like his girl’s father?”

  The old-fashioned term “his girl” made a little shiver run through her body. “The more I hear of Miss Edi’s story, the more I think she and I are alike. And like my mother. We seem to like only men who…” She didn’t know what else to say.

  “Who aren’t lawyers?” Luke said. “Your mother fell for a handyman and Miss Edi loved a car mechanic, and now you like the gardener.”

  She could feel the anger under his voice. “Luke, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “You ready to leave?” he said as he got up.

  She st