Inside the hospital, Peyton walked as fast as he could in hopes of escaping the required stop at the front desk. Luckily, the receptionist was away from her post.
Knocking softly on his dad’s door, he could hear a man’s voice on the other side and didn’t have to think twice to know who was in there. As he slowly opened the door, his mother gave him a tired smile from her chair beside his father’s bed.
Uncle Julian crossed the room and laid a hand on his shoulder. “It’s good that you came, Peyton, but you’ll need to leave now.”
Peyton saw his mother rub her forehead as if she had a bad headache. “Marshall’s his father, Julian.”
“It’s for his own good, Kate. You’ll need to listen to me from now on.”
Just as Peyton was about to protest, Nurse Buck came into the room. With her crisp uniform and stern demeanor, Peyton imagined she could put General MacArthur in his place.
“Only two visitors at a time and only during visiting hours, which will be ending in thirty minutes,” she said firmly.
Uncle Julian turned to Peyton’s mother. “There now. We all agree.”
Peyton doubted that his uncle was aware enough of other people to see the subtle change in his mother’s expression—the tightening of her jaw, the way she balled one hand into a fist as she slowly stood from her chair.
“You’ve been here for an hour, Julian,” she said. “And now it’s Peyton’s turn. Goodbye.”
Uncle Julian gave her a patronizing smile, part sneer, part smirk. “Kate, I’m trying to be patient with you, but you’re tired and you aren’t thinking straight. Just do as I say.”
“I’m very tired, but I’m thinking very straight,” she said. “Peyton needs some time with his father, and he’s going to have it.”
Faced with defiance, Peyton’s uncle was unable to fake civility. He glared at them as the corner of his mouth twitched.
“If you’re thinking of raising your voice, think again,” Nurse Buck said as she opened the door and held it open for him. “Remember to sign out as you leave.”
Uncle Julian tried to give the nurse a condescending smile, but he had to look up to do it, which rendered the effect more comical than threatening.
Nurse Buck rolled her eyes as he left. “You all keep it quiet, and I’ll see if I can give you an extra hour,” she said, winking at Peyton’s mother. She looked Peyton up and down. “You’re wet.”
“She’s right—you are wet,” his mother said, finally able to focus on something besides battling his uncle.
“Yes, ma’am. I was on a fishing trip when I just felt like I needed to get back here. I kinda jumped in the river.”
The nurse raised an eyebrow. “You kinda jumped in the river?”
“I definitely jumped in the river.”
Nurse Buck reached into a drawer and pulled out a hospital gown. “Put this on and leave your clothes outside the door. I’ll get them dried.”
“Bless you, Ida,” his mother said. “You’re an angel in uniform.”
“Wish I could talk you back into one.”
“Maybe one day.”
The nurse checked his father’s temperature and pulse. “About the same.”
“We’ll be grateful for that much,” Peyton’s mother said.
Nurse Buck was about to leave the room when she stopped in the doorway, turned, and said, “You stay strong now, Katydid, and let me know if you need anything.”
As the nurse closed the door, Peyton stepped into the bathroom and changed, then stacked his wet clothes outside in the hallway and pulled up a chair. “Why does she call you Katydid?”
“Didn’t you know your mama’s a spy? That’s my secret code name when I parachute behind enemy lines.”
“I’m trying to picture you in combat boots, jumping out of a plane,” he said with a frown.
“You don’t think I could pull it off?”
Peyton reached over and gently tugged at the string of pearls around his mother’s neck. “You’re way too girly to be a spy. And way too honest.”
She brushed at his hair with her fingertips. “You need a haircut.”
“You always think I need a haircut.”
“Do I? I’m sorry. I never wanted to be one o’ those naggin’ mamas.”
“Don’t worry. You’re not. I just like to give you a hard time so you’ll have to earn that Mother’s Day corsage every year.”
She held his chin in her hand and sighed. “I see so much of him in you—your daddy, I mean. You’re tall like him. Same broad shoulders. Same high cheekbones and strong jawline. Same silky hair.”
“Different color though.”
“True. I guess you reached way back yonder to some ancestor with dark hair and eyes. My whole family’s fair. Marshall’s hair used to turn nearly blond in the summertime, back when we lived on Tybee and spent so much time at the beach. You can still see little flecks of gold in it.”
“Lisa thinks he looks like Gary Cooper.”
Peyton’s mother winked at him. “Gary Cooper should be so lucky.” She looked at his father with such a lonely expression that Peyton tried to distract her.
“Tell me about Katydid.”
She attempted a smile but appeared too exhausted to manage it. “That was my nickname when I worked here. Ida called me Katydid one day in the cafeteria and it stuck.”
Peyton couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You worked with Nurse Drill Sergeant?”
“Sure did.”
“How long were you a nurse?”
“Four or five years, I guess, counting my student nursing.”
“How come I never knew that before?”
She squeezed his hand. “Because that part of my life was over by the time you came along, and a boy has more important things to do than pry into his mama’s sordid past.”
As an image of the library kiss drifted back into his mind, Peyton suddenly had all sorts of questions that had never occurred to him before. “Where’d you meet Daddy?”
She didn’t take her eyes off his father, lying unconscious and still.
“Mama?” He reached over and touched her arm, knowing that he really should tell her what Uncle Julian was up to. But she looked so forlorn right now that he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “Why don’t you tell me the happy part?”
She turned to face him, absently running a finger over the pearls around her neck. “Okay, honey. I’ll tell you the happy part.” They settled back into their chairs as she began. “I met your father when we were teenagers—on the beach in St. Augustine, when he was just beginning his famous bike ride to Key West.”
“You gotta be kidding me!”
She laughed and held up her right hand. “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“Wait a minute—what were you doing in St. Augustine?”
“You’ve always heard me talk about Aunt Gert, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, honey, Aunt Gert raised me from the time I was about nine years old. Daddy died from a heart attack when I was eight. And remember, I was the baby of ten children.”
“I can’t even imagine a house with that many kids.”
She opened her purse, pulled out a couple of lemon drops, and gave one to Peyton. “People in the country had big families back then so all the kids could help work the farm. Still do, I guess. You were just never around mine because my brothers and sisters all scattered. Most of us didn’t grow up together.”
Peyton bit down on the tart candy and squinted at its sour punch. “Was that because your daddy died?”
She crunched on the candy, apparently unfazed by the sharp burst of lemon. “Back then, if the man of the house passed, it could break up a family. Five of my brothers and sisters had already married and left home, but that still left five more for my mother to try and feed—with no education and no assistance from anybody but her older children, who had their own financial struggles. She knew I loved Aunt Gert and asked her to take me in. My two sisters who were still at home went to live with another aunt and uncle who didn’t have any children, and the boys stayed with Mama to help on the farm. By the time you were born, she had died of the flu. The boys sold the farm and moved as far away from it as they could get. I guess they’d had their fill of the mules and the plows.”
“How did you even know Aunt Gert,” he asked, “with y’all in Mississippi and her down in Florida?”
“My folks never had enough money for vacations, but Aunt Gert would always invite us down there to spend a couple of weeks with her every summer. If Daddy could scrape together gas money once the cotton was planted, we’d go—all of us kids riding in the back of his old farm truck. He would pitch us a big tent by the river in Aunt Gert’s backyard, where the breezes were cool. Can you even imagine doing that now? People think they can’t go anywhere without a hotel room, but we sure did.”
His mother ran her fingers through her hair, as if she were remembering the riverfront winds of St. Augustine. “Anyway, Aunt Gert and I took a quick shine to each other. We were always close.”
“So you were actually living in St. Augustine when Daddy came through on his bike?”
She brushed a piece of lint from her skirt. “His Aunt Lily—she’s your granddaddy’s sister—lives down there, so he stopped to rest and wash his clothes before he set off again.”
“Where were you when the two of you met?”
“On Anastasia Island, near the lighthouse. You could bike there from Aunt Gert’s—it was just over the old wooden bridge that was there before they built the one with the lion statues. She’d let me go by myself as long as I promised not to wade out too far.” She closed her eyes and leaned her head back for just a moment. “Oh, it was wonderful—that first taste of freedom for a teenage girl.”
“That’s where you met Daddy?”
She laughed as she held her hands over her heart and made a fluttering motion like a dove flapping its wings. “Yes, that’s where I met my sweetheart.”
“How?”
“I had walked out onto a sandbar to gather seashells, and I wasn’t paying attention when high tide started coming in. The next thing I knew, my sandbar was going under, and the surf between me and the shore was probably four feet deep. I was starting to panic when I looked up and saw this tall, tan boy waving at me from the beach. He called out to see if I needed help and then ran into the waves like he was born in the ocean. By the time he climbed onto the sliver of sand that was left, I was so scared that I was crying.” She stopped and stared out the window, as if she were hoping to see the image of that boy and girl, alone on their tiny island in the Atlantic Ocean.
“He looked down at me and smiled,” she said, turning back to Peyton. “Then he took me by the hand and said, ‘It’s just a little water.’ Right away I trusted him, even as young as he was. He picked me up and carried me to the shore. We sat together on my beach quilt—it was an old one Aunt Gert had given me—and we just talked and talked for the longest time . . .”
“And?”
“And . . . we both had it bad. Don’t ever let anybody tell you there’s no such thing as love at first sight—or that puppy love can’t be the real thing. Aunt Gert could see it right away.”
“You took Daddy to meet her?”
“Yes, stupid me!” His mother rolled her eyes and laughed. “I could’ve spent a lot more time alone with him if I’d had sense enough to keep my mouth shut, but I never could keep a secret from Aunt Gert, so I invited him to supper that night. I can still see it to this day: Aunt Gert, a force of nature—lots of drama—and your pensive father together at the supper table, along with smitten little me who couldn’t eat a bite, I was so in love with Marshall.”
Peyton frowned. “But how could you be sure? You were just kids.”
“About like you and Lisa?” she answered, eyebrows raised.
“No fair changing the subject. What did you and Daddy do about it?”
“Got married.”
Peyton’s jaw dropped. “Then?”
“Not right then, but pretty soon. Marshall wanted to cancel his bike ride and stay in St. Augustine with me, but Aunt Gert put her foot down. She told him a boy who couldn’t finish what he started would grow up to be a man who never finished anything. He biked down to Key West and pedaled back as far as Miami, but then he got impatient and caught the train to St. Augustine. He tried to get Aunt Gert to take us to the courthouse when we picked him up at the train station. You can imagine how that went over. She told him if he was too young to drive to the courthouse, he was too young to get married there. But she promised us both that Marshall could visit as often as he wanted, and as long as we both finished high school and behaved ourselves, we would have her blessing.”
“So that’s what you did?”
“That’s what we did. We both turned sixteen that fall. Marshall got his driver’s license and came down literally every single weekend our junior and senior years of high school. He graduated first, then came to St. Augustine for my ceremony—Aunt Gert said she wouldn’t hear of a wedding till we both had diplomas. But once we did, she signed her permission for the judge.”
“Who signed Daddy’s?”
“That’s a whole other story. But the short answer is a fisherman named Finn, who pretended to be your daddy’s guardian. And then Aunt Gert took us to her church and had her preacher marry us again, ‘just to make sure it took,’ as she put it. Once Marshall carried me home to meet his family, your granddaddy was worried I might not be legally protected, so he took us to the courthouse and signed your daddy’s permission, and we got married again. Bet you never suspected your daddy was my third husband—and my first and my second.”
Peyton tried to picture his parents as a teenage bride and groom. “Where did the rest o’ the Cabots figure into all of this?”
“For a long time, they didn’t,” his mother said with a sigh. “Your granddaddy always supported us, and I don’t have to tell you that what he said was the law of the land, as far as the Cabots were concerned. The rest of the clan didn’t really care where your daddy was or what he did as long as he was right there with the money when they needed it.” She paused and looked at Peyton. “I’m sorry, son. They’re your family, and I shouldn’t talk about them like that.”
“It’s weird. Except for Winston and Prentiss, they don’t feel like family right now.”
“I know how confusing all of this is,” his mother said as she reached over and squeezed his hand lightly, “and I’m so sorry to put you through it.”
“It’s not your fault.” Still, he had more questions. “So you and Daddy married right outta high school and then you went to UGA with him?”
“I did. At first, I got a job as a receptionist at the local hospital, but once I made friends with some of the nurses there, I started to think about becoming one. Your daddy always encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to. Thanks to the Cabot money, neither of us really had to work, but we both wanted to do something with our lives—something meaningful. I got accepted into the hospital’s nursing school, and by the time Marshall was in law school in Athens, I was a travel nurse, going out into all these little rural communities to help families that didn’t have a doctor. He talked about becoming a public defender for a while. But in the end . . . well . . .”
“In the end?” Peyton prompted.
“In the end . . . his family overwhelmed him,” she said in a voice filled with sadness and regret. “Once Marshall finished his law degree, we moved to Tybee. Over time, though, his work for the estate pulled us off our little island and into the Cabot fray. I got a job at this hospital, working with Ida—Nurse Drill Sergeant, as you so affectionately call her—and stayed till I found out I was expecting you.”
They sat watching Peyton’s father breathe in and out, praying he didn’t stop.
His mother put her arm around his shoulders. “I know his drinking has been hard on you, Peyton. But you have to believe me—he loves you very much. I know it doesn’t make sense, but in his way, your daddy’s trying to protect you by keeping his distance.”
“Protect me from what?”
“From himself. From whatever followed him home from the war.”
They were quiet again before Peyton said, “He used to come to all o’ my games.”
“He still does.”
“Ma’am?”
“It’s true—he comes to every single one.”
“I never see him there.”
“I know. I’ve done all I can to talk him into showing himself. But he says a boy ought to be able to play ball for the sheer fun of it and not spend his time on the field wondering when his father might show up drunk. So he always comes—completely sober. He makes sure he gets there after the game starts, and he watches from someplace where nobody will notice him. Your daddy’s always cheering for you, honey. Just not out loud.”
Peyton leaned back and rested his head against the wall. “I feel like such a dope.”
“What on earth for?”
“Because I couldn’t see what I couldn’t see, if that makes any sense.”
His mother leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, giving Peyton the courage to broach the difficult subject he dreaded most of all.
“Mama, there’s something I need to—”
Interrupted by a knock on the door, he looked up to see a doctor with curly salt-and-pepper hair and wire-rimmed glasses step into the room.
His mother gasped and stood up. “Eli? I can’t believe it’s you!” They hugged like old friends.
“It’s mighty good to see you, Katie,” he said with a smile. “Sure wish the circumstances were different.”
“What are you doing here?” his mother asked.
The doctor closed the door and motioned for her to sit down. Then he said, “Ida called me.”