Carolina Moon

appreciate the help. I really do.” Whether it was impulse or annoyance, she followed it and wrapped her fingers around his arm until he stopped and glanced down.
    “Well then, you just think of me when you’re sliding off to dreamland tonight.”
    “I know it cost you some time. Oh, you said something about lunch?”
    Baffled, he shook his head. “Lunch?”
    It was just enough. “Yes, your lunch today. Half a ham sandwich with Swiss and brown mustard. You gave the other half to that skinny black dog who comes begging in the fields when he sees you.” She smiled now, stepped away. “You ought to be ready for supper soon.”
    He pondered a minute, then decided to go with instinct. “Tory, why don’t you come back here and tell me what I’m thinking now.”
    She felt something like a laugh rumble in her chest. “I believe I’ll just let you keep that to yourself.”
    She let the screen door slam behind her.

7
    I t was the flowers, Margaret always thought, that kept her sane. When she tended her flowers, they never talked back, never told her she didn’t understand, never yanked up their roots and stalked away in a huff.
    She could prune away the wild parts, those sudden growth sprigs that thought they could go their own way, until the plant was shaped as she intended for it to be shaped.
    She’d have been much better off, she imagined, if she’d stayed a spinster and had raised peonies instead of children.
    Children broke hearts just by being children.
    But marriage had been expected of her. She had done, for as long as she could remember, what had been expected of her. Occasionally she did a little more, but rarely, very rarely did she do less.
    And she had loved her husband, for surely that had been expected as well. Jasper Lavelle had been a handsome young man when he’d come courting her. Oh, and he’d had charm as well, the same slow, sly grin she sometimes saw cruise across the face of the son they’d made together. He’d had a temper, but that had been exciting when she’d been young enough to find such things exciting. She recognized that same temper, the quick flash of it, in her daughter. The daughter who’d lived.
    He’d been big and strong, a dramatic kind of man with a loud laugh and hard hands. Perhaps that was why she saw so much of him, and so little of herself, in the children who had been left to them.
    It angered her, when she took stock, how vague and blurred her imprint was on the clay of those lives she’d helped create. She had opted, sensibly she was sure, to concentrate on leaving her mark on Beaux Reves instead. There her touch, her vision, ran deep as the roots of the old oaks that lined the drive.
    And that, more than son or daughter, had become her pride.
    If Hope had lived, it would have been different. She snipped off the faded head of a dianthus without sentiment or regret for the loss of the once fragrant bloom. If Hope had lived, she would have reflected, and realized, all the hopes and dreams a mother instilled in a daughter. She would have given a new luster to the polish of the Lavelle name.
    Jasper would have stayed strong and stayed steady and never have disgraced himself with loose women and casual scandal. He would never have strayed from the path they had both started on and left his wife to rub the smudges from the name they shared.
    But in the end, Jasper had been a storm, and when he hadn’t been crashing, he’d been brewing. Life with him had been a series of events, she supposed. His last had been the poor taste to suffer a fatal heart attack in the bed of his mistress. The fact that the woman had had the sense and the dignity to step back while the incident was hushed up sat in Margaret’s craw like a jagged bone.
    Still, all said and done, it was so much easier to be his widow than it had been to be his wife.
    She couldn’t say why he was so much on her mind just now, on this blissfully cool morning when the dew lay wet kisses on her blossoms and the sky was the soft and gentle blue of spring.
    He’d been a good husband. For the first stage of their marriage, he’d been a strong and solid provider, a man who’d made the decisions so she didn’t have to mind the details. He’d been an attentive father, if perhaps a mite too indulgent.
    The passion between them had quieted by the first anniversary of their wedding night. But passion was a difficult and distracting element in a life, such a demanding and unstable emotion. Not that she’d