Page 169 of The Wedding Tree

And I had another bit of special knowledge that I’d imparted to Hope: don’t let fear dictate your decisions. When things don’t go as you think they should, it’s because God has something better for you down the road.

Take Charlie’s accident, for example. I’ve never told anyone this because it just doesn’t sound right, but those were some of the most contented years of my life. Charlie and I got along just fine as companions—we were easy and comfortable with each other, able to make each other laugh, and we loved each other’s families. We might not have had the right chemistry as lovers, but when all that man-woman stuff was removed from the equation, well, we were as contented as most long-married couples I’ve known. Truth is, Charlie was basically a homebody at heart, and I was a people person, better suited for a career. When we more or less switched roles, married life got a whole heck of a lot easier.

When Charlie had opened his bruised eyes in the hospital afterthat awful attempt to take his own life, I finally saw his bruised soul. I realized then that he was broken, and he’d been broken for a long time. Part of that was my fault, I know, but mostly, it was his parents’. They’d never allowed him to think beyond the narrow script they’d written for his life, and he’d always viewed any deviation as a miserable failure. More than anything, Charlie didn’t want to let them down.

I’d leaned close to his ear. “I promise I’ll never leave you,” I whispered, “but don’t you dare ever try to leave me like that again. From this moment forward, we’ll put everything behind us and never speak about the past again.”

He’d smiled a faint smile and given a nod that must have pained him something terrible.

And we never did. We never discussed Joe or the baby or the suitcase he’d buried. Truth is, I was always afraid that bringing it up would make him try to take his life again. We lived life one day at a time. We raised our children. We cared for, then buried, our grandmothers and our parents.

Through it all, I helped Charlie with basic living tasks and acted as if there was nothing unusual about it. Truth be told, it gave me a sense of purpose I’d never had.

The only real bone of contention between us was Charlie’s way with the children. Becky and Eddie both felt that Charlie was awfully critical of them. I tried to make up for his gruffness with tenderness and unconditional acceptance. Charlie was definitely stuck in his ways, unwilling and unable to see the way the world was shifting, stubbornly insistent that women should be soft and pretty and men should be tough and unemotional. Funny how both Becky and Eddie ended up standing those roles on their ear.

Our plane dove under the clouds, and all of a sudden, I could see the giant curve of the Mississippi River that gives New Orleans its nickname “the Crescent City.” I remembered the first time I’d seen that from the air, nearly seventy years ago.

Parts of that river were hundreds of feet deep. Sunken boats andpeople and trees and God-only-knew-what all lay at the bottom. Jagged, horrible, ghastly things—all covered with water.

Love was like that, I thought. Soft enough to dive headfirst into, yet mighty enough to move the earth. Essential to all life, and in some ways, alive itself. Love and water were both always moving—pouring, pooling, changing form, flooding, flowing, wearing down the hardest substances on earth with time and sheer persistence. Both were there even when you thought they weren’t—flowing in underground aquifers, moving through pipes, wafting in molecules of air, pumping through hearts. What was that word from the Bible? Omnipresent. Yes, both love and water were like that.

And love, like water, was a great leveler. No matter how jagged and ragged and deep the valleys and scars, love, like water, covered it all, making it beautiful and even and shiny.

Love was like water in another way, too. When it spills into your life, it always splashes into unexpected areas. I grinned as I remembered water tumbling from a vase of tulips onto a certain officer’s jacket.

Eddie took my hand. “Why are you thinking about, Mom?”

We were lower now, approaching the runway. I could see puddles of water on the ground, reflecting like mirrors.

“How love is like water,” I said.

“Very romantic sentiment,” Ralph said, “but I still hope it doesn’t rain on Hope’s wedding day.”

“Actually, I kind of hope it does,” I said.

Both Eddie and Ralph gaped at me. “Why on earth would you hope a thing like that?” Eddie asked.

“Because,” I said with an air of mystery—an air I could only now carry off, and only because everyone thought I might be half senile, “life’s not about being perfect. It’s about getting wet.”

I closed my eyes as the engine grew louder and the wheels bumped the runway, and remembered the way I’d feared another plane, seventy years ago, had been about to run into the lake—how I’d worried that I’d gone flying only to end up drowning.

As it turns out, I actually had.